Dear D

Today I wanted to tell you about wappy wheel dwellers aka crusties aka van life consumers. I can hear you groan, I will be more explicit and illuminate your rusty knowledge about this age…although in your era people on wheels were roaming about too. You even gave them a place in your voyage and used the dialect derived from Gypsies, at least that is what the scholars interpret. Anyhow back to my point, in 2011 a guy called Foster Huntington made the hashtag vanlife popular on Instagram since then this has become a real social phenomenon.

A social phenomenon not just on the net but reflecting rebellion against the prescribed normal way to live. It reflects a change in how to spend natures and ones resources. That these people have nothing to do with the Romani or the Irish travellers is clear. Where the Gypsies started their exodus of the Punjab region of India because of an Afghan general intruding land and stealing livelihood. The Irish more or less left for the same sort of reason…the conqueror in need of more land. Their warlord came from the British crown named Cromwell I believe and it happened 200 years before the great famine.

The famous famine and the church (witch hunt and Presbyterian made illegals) made a lot of people leave for the new lands called America. New for the European continental not for the natives of the land obviously. Anyhow that is how Irish travellers or Shelta and Roma gipsies came to the lands of the Hopis. Their songs from as far as the sixth century like Dame Lombarde, la Nourice du Roi, Renaud and Germine reaching up to French Canada. Mostly sang and made famous by the travelling folk still are well-known tunes.

The Scottish travellers have a legend called Bella Stewart and she although from this last century had inlaws hanged for the crime of travelling!…not to mention she was refused a funeral service in church for the fact embracing and transmitting the tales referring to the supernatural.

Embracing the supernatural and turning it into a movie is the speciality of cinema enfant terrible Emir Kusturica. He made the movie called Dom za vesanje or in English, Home for hanging. Though better known as Time of the Gypsies, Emir has made a magnificent movie version of the magic realism eponymous German painting style underlined with your kind of comedy…the dark but ending well.

Afraid my rambling has turned into yapping, do profusely apologize. Am desperately looking for the hitch between brain and fingers, meanwhile, I will do my best to clarify the upsumming of the above. People have been travelling since the dawn of humanity, looking for other climates, more fertility, animals to hunt, wood to use or a place to be in peace…travel and roam we carry in our genes. One way or another, adding and sharing culture, that is the backbone in the twenty-first century for a change into living truly beyond and above invention and intervention.

May harmony find you,

Irena Phaedra