blog voyage!

There are different kinds of travel writers. I know the kind I am. The whingeing kind.

So there is a good chance that I am about to experience every kind of pleasure and serendipity on this, my first trip to the UK, only to complain about every delightful little thing. The unbearableness of Covent Garden. The drabness of Westminster. The vicissitudes of Vauxhall.

And should adversity strike, I will probably bloom like a cactus flower and claim to have struck upon the meaning of life in some Tesco carpark on the outskirts of Bristol.

I just want you to recalibrate your expectations. And frankly I wouldn't mind recalibrating my own - I've just thought of my first thing to whinge about: I'm too negative. Lighten up, sheesh.

And I will lighten up, too, once I've discharged my own compulsion to grungy authenticity.

It has been a tough year and my mental health episodes have been especially volatile and intense. For whatever reason, I haven't been looking forward to this trip as much as the seasoned travellers have been. This has made listening to recommendations a strangely numb affair. Fortunately, 99% of the recommendations I've received for this four week trip have only applied to the first week, in cosmopolitan London.

Stuart has been a sunbeam through all the preparations and all the planning: warm and strong. I'm more excited for him than I am for myself, although I expect this to change.

This morning, once I'd finished all the preparations and packed up my life into three bags, standing tidily in the hallway like a tangram made of luggage, I was suddenly swamped with emotion and burst into tears. For some reason I have secretly believed all year, deep in my subconscious, that I wasn't going to travel anywhere at all, and this was all just another hoax, like the moon landings being faked, Hillary's emails being interesting, or 2 minute noodles being food. But once I was packed and ready to close the door behind me for a month, I was just a mess.

It's hard to blow your nose when you have a moustache. I can do it hygienically, but it's a contortionist act, I tell you.

Speaking of blowing noses, Stuart's cold has peaked this morning, and mine peaked two days ago. We are both a little bit sick, but I'm secretly jubilant about this (you're starting to get the picture about me) because it means that our holiday cold can be out of the way and cured *before* the ticketed events. How cool would that be?!

Mum and Dad have arrived in London ahead of us. Seeing them in another country is a real dream of mine, something I've wanted to do in my lifespan. I'm more excited to see them than I am to see any bit of London Architecture: the gherkin, the walkie talkie, the cheese grater, the pepper shaker, the cosh, the snout, the plug. (I don't know London buildings, I just guessed those last ones).

Now Stuart and I are at the airport hotel bar, the very definition of a liminal space. Well, it's not as liminal as the McDonalds in the empty quiet polished wasteland that is the Arrivals Terminal, still depopulated after the pandemic. The Maccas didn't even have somewhere to sit. You don't get much more liminal than that "keep it moving" aesthetic.

I'll write more when something happens. Or when I get nervous. (The latter will happen first, you watch.)

Cheerfully, ChrisRead more