Open Writing

Mind-blowing is one of those terms that rightly or wrongly takes you straight back to the late 60s, early 70s. It conjures up warm summer evenings under the stars and rambling conversations about peace, love and harmony to the accompaniment of music that our parents found unfathomable. It also conjures up a vision of possibility, a time when we thought we could charge the world, and to some extent, we did.

Strictly speaking the definition of mind-blowing, apart from ‘having a hallucinatory affect’ - which may also relate to the 60s and 70s - is ‘intensely affecting the mind or emotions’. This latter definition, by its very nature, has to be a personal experience and one that probably only happens a limited number of times in anyone’s life.

To parents perhaps it’s that miraculous moment of birth, that first time they hold their own child; and to grandparents, possibly the first occasion when they realise they have moved on a generation, joy and sadness intertwined.

Personally I can imagine those who flee persecution and make it to the Promised Land – whatever that represents – must feel it, and those who witness great natural phenomena such as volcanic eruptions, although ‘awesome’ is the word that springs most readily to the lips.

Mind-blowing can also be a combination of things that come together to produce a perfect experience. For each and every one of us mind-blowing will have a different meaning but for me there is one trigger that hits the mark every time. It’s not music, not words of love or the closeness of someone special, it’s a view, rather like Wordsworth must have known when he saw his ‘host of golden daffodils’.

The first time it happened I couldn’t believe it; now every year I go back for another fix. Maybe that definition of ‘having a hallucinatory affect’ isn’t so far off the mark after all. My mind-blowing experience is to wake up in one continent and look out at another.

When I learnt geography as a child I was made to recite the five continents, to place them on the map and colour them in. Europe was always blue, Asia red, Australia yellow, America green and Africa mauve. Apart from Europe running into Asia around the border with Turkey, the other three continents were indeed, a world apart. My chances of visiting them seemed remote. Yet half a century later the distances have shrunk on my mental map and none more obviously than where the blue of Europe looks out to the mauve of Africa.

To wake up on a clear, bright morning in the wonderfully art deco Rock Hotel, Gibraltar and look out across the Straits to Ceuto and just beyond, Morocco is like being given a taste of what Alice must have felt like when faced with the door to Wonderland.

The view is unbelievably amazing. Separated by just a few miles, The Rock of Gibraltar’s granite solidarity and Morocco’s Jebel Musa, the two Pillars of Hercules, front each other across one of the narrowest and busiest stretches of water in the world, where the Mediterranean meets the Atlantic Ocean. Blue sky, blue sea, bright sun, snow on the Africa peak and over it all a special light, a fusion of blue merging into mauve that immediately says, pure magic.

I take my morning cup of coffee out onto the balcony but I drink in the view. There is nowhere else on earth that has the same affect, time and time again. Goodness knows the little girl who coloured in her geography book has seen many a spectacular sight over the years. The changing colour of the water inside the reef around Mauritius, turquoise, light and dark blue fading to green. I have watched an electric storm light up the mountains in the former Yugoslavia, turning night to day and back again in a blinding flash and held my breath as a million fire flies danced in the blackness of a Allegheny valley. I have flown over the Sahara Desert when the sand has taken on the appearance of a mountainous sea and watched with a mixture of fear and excitement as a volcano sent a smoke signal of its intentions. None of these can ever compare with the inexplicable, perhaps to you, incomprehensible reason why I am completely hooked on the view from Rock Hotel, Gibraltar.

I have had my fix this year; I can hardly wait for the next.

Simply mind-blowing.