Many years ago I purchased a copy of Some Sort of Genius by Paul O’Keeffe, a biography of the writer, artist and Vorticist, Wyndham Lewis. I have always been fascinated by Lewis, partly because of his association with Ezra Pound and connection to other artists like Gaudier Brzeska. Having started reading the book, I abandoned it part-way through, where I stopped marked by a piece of paper.
Thinking I might start reading it again (from the beginning!), I pulled out the bookmark only to discover it was an itinerary for a visit to the United States made in May, 2008:
Monday:
Fly Leeds-Bradford to Heathrow
Fly Heathrow to Washington
Drive Washington to Newport News
Tuesday:
Meetings p.m.
Dinner: Berret’s Taphouse (in Williamsburg)
Wednesday:
Meetings all day
Dinner: Hayashi Sushi and Grill (in Newport News)
Thursday:
Meetings most of the day
Drive Newport News to Washington
Fly Washington to Heathrow
Friday:
Arrive Heathrow
Fly Heathrow to Leeds-Bradford
A blast from the past indeed!
Jet-setting lifestyle? Maybe — though from this particular trip I remember the dinners more than anything else! But now, some seventeen years on, what do I think about the life I was leading back then? If you include other roles with other companies, international travel was something of a norm from 1998 to 2014. In addition to the US (I went to Newport News a lot!), I visited Australia, Belgium, China, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Singapore, Spain, Sweden & Switzerland. [And I lived for a while in both Singapore and Switzerland.]
Given I left that professional world behind some four years ago — and that I now consider myself ‘a writer’ (the career I always wished I’d had) — weighing up an emotional response to my prior work-related lifestyle is…complicated.
There are things for which I’m massively grateful. Primarily these boil down to the opportunity to visit the places listed above, to see all the things I saw whilst there, and to experience a vast range of other cultures. Sadly, I must also confess that part of me enjoyed the travel too: plains, trains, and automobiles! And maybe wrapped around the whole lot was the comfort of being ‘busy’, having such variety in my life — and yes, perhaps a sense that I was ‘someone’…
But I also look at that May 2008 itinerary and think “why the hell did I put myself through all that?!” My most extreme trip was in 1999:
Thursday: fly London to Tokyo
Friday: fly Tokyo to Sydney
Sunday: fly Sydney to Melbourne
Tuesday: fly Melbourne to London
Bonkers! And working away so much meant I missed too great a proportion of my children’s growing-up. Priorities askew perhaps.
Given what I do now and where my focus and ambitions are, there is a part of me which can’t help but see all this gallivanting about as a misjudgement, a colossal waste of time — even allowing for the spin-off benefits, many of which I continue to mine today in terms of characters and locations for my stories.
And yet…
Let’s face it, to write is to pursue a largely dull and solitary life. Of course, you don’t think that when you’re in the throes of it, immersed in your characters, crafting the next line or sentence or chapter; but what wraps around those rewarding moments can be much less ‘romantic’ i.e. the spaces ‘in between’. I work in bursts, usually of up to an hour, and then take a break. Then at some point I go back to work. I recognise it’s a routine I’m fortunate to be able to follow — partly enabled by the funds generated from the work associated with all those foreign trips! But there is no longer any ‘fly to Washington’ on my agenda; tomorrow will be much like today, variations on a smaller and much more mundane scale than international travel.
Increasingly I fear this is becoming an issue (not the lack of travel, but the paucity of variation). Maybe that’s why so many people struggle with retirement: remove the scaffolding provided by work and everything collapses.
Variety was one of the reasons I was looking forward to going to Scotland in early March — only to be thwarted by ill health. The trip represented adventure, difference. And maybe ‘difference’ is the key thing. I have a writing retreat to look forward to in May, a short family break in June, but after that..? I need to re-book my Scotland trip (now probably in late September) — and I need to land on some other events, opportunities to provide variety. The latter may well involve taking a risk of sorts, of doing something different like a ‘road trip’ or a spur-of-the-moment ad hoc break. It may also be important that some of these — whatever they are — are things I do on my own. There’s even a small part of me that would like to undertake a ‘reading tour’, perhaps with the odd performance of Crash — but that’s probably a pipe-dream.
Is it odd that small scale instances of what I used to take for granted should now seem so perilous?
Everything will depend on the health update I get from my cardiologist next Wednesday. One more week of limbo and then maybe I can start planning… Fingers crossed.
Fingers very crossed for you! Forgot to say that your article on the vagaries of publication, workshops, different opinions etc. was great. Good luck for Weds!
Hope the appointment on Wednesday goes well Ian .