I am writing this sitting at the table in the picture. I would LOVE you to think I am having a Chatwin type adventure in the middle of nowhere. In many ways it is the middle of nowhere, but it is somewhere – somewhere just half an hour train ride from the centre of Buenos Aries. You can only get here by boat, at night there is the buzzing of nature and when you wake up at three o’clock in the morning you are scared because it is SO quiet. As I get older I think more and more about Wordsworth when I am somewhere like this, while I often resented writing essays about his work at university I was always intrigued by his ‘spots of time’ where two events in our life would make a connecting in a moment and this was more likely to happen in nature than in a city. Tigre is my favorite place in Argentina, it is not my home but it is my home, I get some kind of deep stillness when I am here in Tigre, particularly at the Delta Unplugged HQ that our friends run. I suppose it is a halfway house between the mad Chatwin adventure I crave and the “city safety” I have conditioned myself to over the course of my life. As much as I love being with people I could easily disappear here and never come out again. Last night there was a storm which resulted in a power cut for the whole of the first quarter of the delta in stark contrast to my attitude at the beginning of this trip where I had been pulling out the little hair I have as every possible computer, domain and internet tragedy that could happen to me was happening today I was ok with the lack of connectivity. There is an unnatural urgency that either the city or modern living cripples us with, Wordsworth would say it is cities and I would tend to agree. However, there is an electric allure to the energy of a city and I happy to continue to surrender to it for now even though deep down I know it is places like this that hold the real charm and tables like this when the really great connections and moments are made.
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