Moments. Every word is true.

When I was a child we lived in a little village called Union Hall, in West Cork, Ireland. It was the back of beyond, home to a few fishermen and our house looked over the small harbour, with a curved quay to protect the smacks. We shopped at a small grocery shop and all I remember is the slicing machine that cut huge discs of unnaturally pink spam.

I started school at four years old, no place for fancy kindergartens in the countryside. We walked to school, it seemed a very long way for a short fellow and we passed a small stream at the edge of the road where wtaercress grew, flat, succulent leaves. It was a three-room affair, and the classes were divided into batches of different age groups, from four to fourteen. I learnt some Gaelic. The teacher used a trestle blackboard with nylon stockings stretched over it and hung tired cardboard cut-outs of animals upon it by the magic of Velcro.

The teacher a vicious woman, hit me over the knuckles with a ruler if I got my sums wrong. At the time I thought it odd and unfair. I still do.

Nominally protestant, the plan for me was to sit in the corridor during prayers, but thankfully this was immediately ignored and I was crash-coursed in crossing my chest and saying “I nomine patris, et filii et spiritus sancti, amen”. For the longest time I thought “etspiritussancti” was just one word.

The greatest excitement we had was in wintertime. We all brought cold cocoa to class, in small glass bottles with lids on. We placed them on the peat-fired, black-belly stove and they stood on top, warming themselves for the first break time. Some of them would invariably explode and we followed the progress from our wooden benches in anticipation. The teachers never changed the routine, I suppose the loss of a bottle or two each day was acceptable.

It was the early eighties and I was living in a squat in Brixton on the south side of the Thames. I had fallen in with a bunch of anarchists and I liked they way they thought. I had come from Toronto with no money in my pocket and had taken up squatting on the suggestion from a penniless friend. I went native pretty quickly, helping out with the local anarchist bookshop, making communal meals, writing lists of empty properties, editing the local squatter’s newspaper, and teaching people the rudiments of housebreaking, lock-changing and dodgy gas hook-ups.

I worked a couple of days a week at a radical print-shop in Aldgate. I learned to make negatives in the darkroom, how to expose plates and to use the offset presses. I was stuck on a little Ryobi A4 machine and I was not particularly good at it. I often came unstuck when it came to guillotine the finished pages, terrified of the large, chubby blade that could take your fingers off. The shop had a big A2 Heidelberg press, hugely superior to my little Ryobi, all cast iron parts, black paint and precision German engineering. I had no chance to manage the large sheets of paper that needed to be shuffled in order to flow freely and evenly through the thousand rollers and cogs, perfectly registered for four different layers of colours.

Frank from New Zealand worked the Heidelberg. He was a lovely bloke, down to earth in manner and stature. He was married to fellow Kiwi Mary, just as short as him and the both were anarchists as well.

We hung around a bit in our free time and one evening they introduced me to a some friends of theirs, a couple visiting from New Zealand. Skinheads. He was gruff, she was even gruffer, wearing bleached jeans with turn-ups, a Fred Perry shirt, red braces and oxblood Doctor Martens with 14 hole lace-ups. Her face was covered in small scars and her close cropped hair was dyed blonde. We didn’t talk much.

Late in the evening we all went out to a disco in the crypt of a church in Brixton. We danced to reggae. Suddenly and out of nowhere, skinhead woman started to hit me. Unsure of how to react I reversed into a brick column, my back to the wall. As she continued to try and hit me, I blocked the blows with my arms. I had been practicing a little bit of Tae Kwondo at the time and had learned just about enough to be useful.

She eventually gave up and stomped off. I was left feeling confused. Had I done anything to provoke her? Not as far as I could think. I shrugged it off, no big deal. But some hours later the thought came to me that at no point had I been scared of her. No rush of adrenaline, no fight or flight, just puzzlement. Had it been a man, even the smallest, scrappiest specimen, I would have been terrified. But this woman, even in the most aggressive and masculine of costumes, didn’t frighten me. I was 25, skinny, no big threat to anyone, but just the fortune of being male gave me a huge advantage over half of the population.

I never saw her again.

Photo: Agnethe Brun.

In Norwegian folklore there is this phenomenon called the “Vardøger”. It is a spirit animal of sorts, that hangs around and looks after you. Different people have different animals and they are generally invisible. They walk ahead of you to make sure the coast is clear. A typical example would be that you’re in the kitchen making supper and you hear a key in the front door lock, the opening and closing of said door, shoes being scraped off, a coat slung over the stair railings and your better half sitting down in the living room.

Only there is no one there when you go to check.

Ten minutes later you hear the key in the door and your better half walks in, slings their coat over the banisters and takes a seat in the living room. In real life this time.

This is a typical “vardøger” story and many tell it. My version of these strange occurrences is a little different: sometimes I’ll be in a crowd or sitting at a café and I’ll see an old friend, someone I haven’t seen for years. But when I look closer, it’s not Peter after all. Almost invariably, a few minutes later, the real Peter will show up.

Now, I am not a superstitious, religious or in-any-way spiritual person so I find it hard to explain these things when the happen. All I know is that they do happen.

I experienced he oddest example of this about twenty years ago in Grünerløkka, Oslo. I was pretty broke, working part-time as a waiter and living in a rented room. One morning I woke up and walked out into the sunny, summer morning. I had to be at work and feeling in my pocket, I came across some banknotes. I must have been on my best behaviour on the shift the evening before and done well on tips. I usually did not end up with so much loose cash, especially after visiting the bars after work.

But here I was, flush with money and I decided for once to take a taxi, something I hadn’t been able to afford for years. “What kind of taxi would I take, if I could choose?” I thought. I remembered seeing a single green and white Citröen DS taxi intermittently of the streets. Not hard to spot as it had to be the only one of it’s kind, all the others in town were big Mercedes.

A minute later, the green and white taxi appeared from around a corner. It came closer and I stuck my arm out. To my surprise it stopped and picked me up.

A cassette was playing French accordion music and on the dashboard was a small, silver vase with a spray of plastic flowers. The seats where slick, white and green Naugahyde.

I leaned over the banquette seat and talked to the driver. Was he French? No, he just liked the culture. I tried to dig some more but he was not the most talkative. Although when I asked about the gilt ashtray in front he got very lively. He hated smokers and wouldn’t even share the same taxi rank if other drivers were smoking.

He delivered me to my workplace and I paid him with the cash from my pocket.

That was the last time I saw that car, but I heard from others that it did still exist and the driver could be visited at his workshop, just as long as you didn’t smoke in his presence.