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Ingvar Loco Nordin Chapter 1  Zoë near her home in Stonehaven, Nut Tree, Haselbury Plucknett, Crewkerne, Somerset on one of the claustrophobic roads
As I descended from my mountain hike in Swedish Lapland back in July 2008, which can be studied elsewhere at www.sonoloco.com, (The Reindeer Non-Locality Hike) I sensed a nagging feeling that I hadn’t really completed my urge for ice, snow, mountains and exhaustion, to a degree that would leave me with peace of mind and the kind of fatalism that makes negotiating a path through autumn conceivable. Therefore I prepared a second hike, already before I left for a visit in Somerset, England, with my good friend Zoë Smith, whom I’d met on an earlier Lapland hike in 2004. Zoë had departed for New Zealand by way of Tibet and India in late 2004, and then taken up her trade as an arborist in New Zealand, until finally returning to the United Kingdom in late summer 2007, continuing her arborism in the vicinity of Crewkerne and Yeovil.
I made an early morning bike ride on 30th July the few kilometers from my home to the airport of Skavsta, Sweden, where my Ryanair Boeing was being prepared for the 06.40 AM takeoff into summery skies. Ryanair has completely taken over this old military airfield, which used to be called F11 (Wing 11), turning it into the third biggest airport in Sweden in just a decade, passenger wise.
The plane descended into Stansted airport outside London just about two hours later, making an early landing. I’d bought my over-land tickets via an agency on the Internet, arriving with just a code to Britain. That code, presented to a lady at a counter, produced a set of tickets allowing me a roundtrip from Stansted to Crewkerne, so I just hopped the earliest train I found, and arrived in Tottenham Hale half an hour later. It was easy enough to find my next connection from there, to Vauxhall through the Underground. That took me slightly more than another half hour, and from there I rode a South West train the few minutes to Clapham Junction. There I had to wait a couple of hours, spent mostly in a coffee shop, until my next South West train would take me clear across the South West of England to Crewkerne; a ride of slightly more than two hours. I hoisted my backpack and strode off the train, and sure enough, this beautiful red-haired lady waited on the platform. It felt very comfortable, though we’d not met since October, and before that not since November 2004, but that’s how it works with a few chosen ones.
After shopping some food we took a bus to where Zoë lived, on top of a garage on a real estate owned by a family who imports tea from a place in Africa. The family has refurnished the top of the garage into a nice apartment of two rooms and a small cocking area. This property sits right by the road between Haselbury Plucknett and North Perrott, a few miles outside Crewkerne in Somerset.
During the days I spent at Stonehaven, Nut Tree – which is the actual name of the property on which Zoë’s residential garage was placed – we made some outings, and Zoë also spent a couple of days away at a festival, where she had the opportunity to hear, among others, more modern artists, the aged Leonard Cohen perform. I stayed at Zoë’s place, where I instead heard Cohen talk about his cravings for sex, interviewed by the BBC – but it was a rather aged interview as well!
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