Introduction

​INTRODUCTION
‘It is far better to do something and find it empty than to do nothing and leave life blank’ – Emily Bronte.

(Seen on a postcard in a caravan two days before I suddenly and unexpectedly decide to leave England.)
Sometimes – actually make that frequently – I get stuck. Besieged with lifestyle possibilities I have a habit of ending up getting in such a jam that it all amounts to nothing.

When that happens I sometimes imagine myself as an old man. He cajoles me, usually telling me to stop being such a twit and he sometimes succeeds in getting me off my backside. He will frown and sometimes help out when I have to figure which of the three hundred undone fantasies are actually worth bothering with.
TV is largely life-rotting blah-blah-blah, fooling our brains into thinking that something interesting is really happening in our lives, when actually it isn’t. Okay perhaps if you need a moment of distraction; but soul-destroying as a lifestyle choice. 

I wonder how much human potential to create, interact, achieve and learn stuff is lost because of TV.

How many inventions get left unmade? How many bands go unformed? Classic new songs pass through heads never to get composed?, how many challenges go unmet, characters untested, people ungrown and left sucking on the tit of TV for all their adult lives?
 

I’ve always liked films though. The best kind of films, for me, are usually the ones that draw you into some heroic narrative and then spit you out the door at the other end with a renewed sense of ‘Go on then… do something wonderful!’
A time came when so many things in my life seemed to grind to a halt. It was one of those moments where everything falls apart at once. Home, girlfriend, direction. All gone. 

It happens to everyone at some point or another. If I’d had a career and a big pile of stocks and shares, I would have lost them too. 

If I’d gone to a wise old tarot reader she would have pulled up all the dramatic cards; Death, The Queen of Murkiness, The King of Cock-ups, sucked through her teeth and diplomatically told me she only likes to read their positive aspects.
At the end of summer 1999, behind a friend’s house, I sat under a huge old oak in Somerset, pondering my existence.

Me and my long-term girlfriend had just split up. My mother had just recently died. When that happened someone opened the family cupboard, and a whole pile of rotting skeletons fell out. My ‘home’ was a clapped-out Ford Transit van nowhere in particular. I had no career, save a few sporadic sculptures I’d made for a bit of cash. I was on the dole. What had I got to show for myself? Diddly squit.
Fortunately, something clicked.
I had to get my act together, shake off my Mogadon mindset and actually do that heroic thing the films kept telling me about. Not just feel a warm buzz for half an hour after walking out of the cinema, but actually live it out. Be my own film star.

 

I slept. I dreamed I was hurtling across a vast yellow African plain under a vivid blue sky standing in a pick up truck behind the cab, hot air rushing round my face, specks of sand smarting high speed and unseen on my skin.

When I woke up I was in my van next to a park in Swindon, not staying at my ex-girlfriend’s house. A seed was sown. 
Now, to do something about that dream…
Ever since I was small I had been fascinated by maps of the world. Places with exotic and fantastic names, joined together by thinly meandering black lines, through vast rivers and mountain ranges, many of them in places populated by people just going about their ordinary everyday lives. Something to be seen. Something else.
In my adolescence I would ponder sex, making music and art, the demise of modern capitalist society, sex, and what it would be like to follow some of those tantalising black lines on the maps. How far could you go? How unlike my dreary life could I actually get? And then I’d think about sex again. 
I decided at that point under the oak tree that I wanted to go to Africa and plant trees. Two weeks later I was on a mission to Africa (via Norway… but that’s another story). On the return journey a year later and much turbulent water having passed under the bridge, I somehow ended up in exotic Norwich England. I was doing the proverbial ‘dead parrot’; I was pining for the fjords. Flat suburban Norwich was a hell of a comedown.
I saved some cash specifically for going to New Zealand. Why New Zealand? Because when I was thirteen, my favourite band ‘The Beat’ did a song called ‘Dream Home in New Zealand’ about having somewhere safe to be in the event of a nuclear war. Now we’re past the scary times of the Thatcher/Reagan years of my youth but some things stick. The important factors about all this that I had stacked away in the back of my head were; 

1) to be as far away from England as I could get, 

2) to go somewhere exotic, 

3) probably where there are palm trees and 

4) that it will therefore be nice. 
Anyway… I made all my travel preparations, and then did that classic ‘Likes-the-idea-but-doesn’t-actually-have-the-balls’ thing of not actually going anywhere. Later on over the course of my eventual road trip, I was going to encounter many people who had unintentionally ended up travelling alone because their best mate had bailed out on them at the last minute; Either out of anxiety or they couldn’t get the money together or they suddenly thought getting married would be much more exciting, or because their legs had suddenly and unexpectedly fallen off.
It was a couple of years of farting about in Norfolk before the electrical signals would eventually make their way from some obscure part of my brain all the way down to my generally immobile backside. That was my friend Helen’s doing largely. You can think of her as being a kind of female Dr. Frankenstein if you like. It has usually seemed to require a woman to short circuit me in some way or another in order to make anything  interesting happen; but that, I’ll tell you about later…
Writing this book was my on-the-road security blanket.

It evolved from firstly being email missives to friends and then it became a diary, and now it’s a fully-fledged book. Primarily, it was an attempt to empty my head of far too many cluttered memories picked up en route.

I figured at the time that writing it all down would serve to free me of events as they happened so that I could enjoy the present by letting go of the past. All that has actually happened is that they would all jostle with each other on the stage in my head, have punch ups with my present, pick fights with my future and cause general chaos much of the time. 

I have since taken up meditation. This works much better.
Secondly, writing helped me to maintain a certain kind of perspective. Perspective is somewhat of a comfort to an unsure person where every day is different and you never quite know who or what is coming next. When the shit hits the fan, writing at least takes on the guise of something a bit like a movie narrative. (Traveller’s truism; when you’re on the road somewhere exotic and shit happens, at least it’s exotic shit.) 

 There; that’s the ‘warts and all’ version of getting ‘the travel bug’.

Memories mellow and ripen with time like fine wine and old cheese.