What are we doing here?

Ruth, in one of her posts, has questioned why she and I, jointly and severally, are making this trip. Not, I hope, a trip in the sense of an unexpected fall resulting from not looking where you are going. Strangely, but also typically, this is not a question I have explicitly asked myself, despite having planned, in a sense, this journey for a number of years. I suppose it is partly a rounding up of some of the things I have been meaning to do at some point in my life but have never got around to. With the onset of retirement it becomes clear that some of the things you would do, when you have a bit of spare time, when you could afford it, when more important matters have been attended to, etc. will never actually be achieved since you’re too unfit, too hard up, running out of time, etc. In part this journey is a sweeping up of countries that I have always intended to visit but never have done. Semi-consciously, I have been undertaking other experiences in the same way over the last few years, parachute jumping, SCUBA diving, marathon running, the degrees and the rest.
So there are, I think, some similarities between my life history (so far) and this journey (so far). In the first place, and in many others, I did not plan my life. I would and should have done if I had known what it was that I wanted to do. I remember at the age of 20 standing in Durham Market Place saying to a friend I’m sure I could be damn good at something, if only I knew what it was. I never found that vision and, as a result, I don’t think I have been as damn good as I might have been. Learn from this, friends, and especially younger ones, the reasonably intelligent, reasonably hard-working person who has a strategy will be will be more successful – whatever he or she means by that – than the reasonably intelligent, reasonably hard-working person who hasn’t. John Lennon sang that Life was what happened to you when you were busy planning other things. I never was, but it did, all the same. Ruth has written that she is anxious that we may be carrying out our travels superficially, not taking enough time to learn and savour. Again, typically, I am not that anxious, but I think it is true of my life and, possibly, of everyone’s. Looking back I know that there are people I would have liked to have spent more time with or of whom I didn’t ask that question that I had always meant to but would perhaps do it later. And later never came because one of us moved on or died, as is increasingly the case now and will be even more in the future.

Hosting Unwelcome Guests

When we were in Shanghai last year, we attended a number of elaborate banquets. Sumptuous as these were, I can, without undue modesty, say that they were as nothing compared to the feasts that I have provided for the mosquitoes of the lakes around Trakai, in Lithuania.