a travelogue in the time of the information superhighway

1994

My story starts in drizzly, dreary, grey England. I worked as a nurse in a specialist cancer hospital in Manchester. One day, I suddenly entered her world, there she was. At once beautiful, but decaying visibly. Eyes that melt you, fumbled for reasons. High on morphine, she slumped on the chair. Her legs, previously long and graceful, were now fat and full of fluid. She was loosing her hair, something that upset her most. We all witnessed her struggling with the remains of her dignity and modesty, but she carried on fighting. Her mother applied facial cream like a corner man at ringside, her father just looked lost. She was a twenty seven year old woman, right before us, dying in her prime. She seemed to hold up a mirror to the thoughts sailing across my mind, a metaphor for what we've all become and what will become of us. So much potential, so much waste. It is at moments like this that we can take the looking glass to our own fragile existence, and ask questions of it. Cancer had infiltrated her womb, the very giver of life. I became aware of a feeling that her death had released something else, a thirst for living itself. She haunted me. Four months later, I set out on an adventure to view the world that she would no longer see.

Posted by don quixote

Monday 5 February 2007

My travels have taken me through southern europe, india, thailand, united states and central america. I first took off just over 20 years ago and now again the world bekons and opens its arms to embrace me. South america awaits, and maybe, a new life in argentina. Who knows? a friend is setting up a business and there maybe room for my girlfriend and I to join in. No eggs all in one baskett, if it doesn't work out, we're off somewhere else to give it a go.

We should be there now but the house sale fell through right at the last minute. I can't tell you how dissapointed I am, work is sucking the blood from my body, I pace the corridors like a coiled spring just keeping myself from exploding. The pleasure it will give me to tell them to shove the job as far up their rectums as is scientifically possible, infact lets not stop at the rectum, lets carry on up through the sigmoid and as far as the descending colon! And when I say 'them' I also include the top dog, the top 'them' of them all, Patricia f***** hewitt!!!!

The freedom I will feel, the exquisit feeling of no mortgage, no carreer, no children, none of the miriad of ties that they like you to be bound to, reasons for not choosing another way of life, reasons to plod on and on like a Lowry painting.