Flights of fancy...

The unexpected power of a temporary bookmark.

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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.

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