You are currently browsing the category archive for the 'England' category.
I was packing long into the wee hours of the night before, and surfaced what-felt-like minutes later, dashing out in the pre-dawn silence to hasten across the traffic-less suburbs. Tiredness, it seemed, was already in the process of absorbing my enthusiasm, and all I could do once on board was to slink back into my smooth leathered airline seat and long for my eventual destination: Tokyo.
As my plane climbed out over continental America and headed for the open ocean of the Atlantic, a certain phrase bounced around my mind, in the gap between every moment of somnolence. It was simple but poignant: “We’ve seen the world”. 9 hours later I had completed the full circumnavigation of the globe.
It’s the 1st of August. This is the day I leave to go around the world. I peer into my Brother’s bedroom to see he’s still a blob underneath a wrinkle of covers. I tell him: “I’m away. See you in India“. In the fog of hypnagogia, he probably thinks I’m uttering nonsense. But it’s true – the plan is to meet 4 weeks from now in New Delhi.
From the moment I disappear through Departures at Hong Kong International Airport, to the second I rest my head on my old familiar pillow back home in Northern Ireland, I am on dazed autopilot. Everything around me is a dream. But then, was it a dream I just came from, or is it one now? It is hard to decide.
Travelling is like picking up a book you’ve neglected – it a continues on from where you last left off, how you last felt. Plenty has happened in between, but in the world I’m about to enter – where lucidity augments (and simultaneously muddles) – it’s just a moment ago that I stepped off the plane from Amsterdam, or more aptly, Glasgow.
