some time
It’s awkward to reconcile with an inanimate blog. How do you kiss and make up with lipless bytes? You lipless bastard, blog. First you delete my pre-travelling entry in June, then you have the nerve to give me the cold shoulder when I try to give you a forgiving hug. You don’t even have a shoulder to give me either, let alone a cold one! I am not best impressed. Perhaps I was naive to expect love from you. You’re unfriendly, lipless and shoulderless.
Aww, let’s not fight like this. Let’s let bygones be just that, hey? Just don’t delete my draft entries again and I won’t point out your lack of limbs or erogenous zones – that’s a sweet deal.
A lot has been going on since I last had a reliable internet connection to dare writing about it online. Exams, for one, have been conquered, and by conquered, I mean failed. I was that person who gets up and leaves the exam hall after half an hour, making you wonder why for a second, before you remember that you still have an exam to do, while I smugly strut out, cigarette at the ready – lucky, an arsehole. Not that I didn’t give it a punt. I did nibble at revision, reaping twiglet dividends: I passed the advanced Java module – the only module I did pass. Strange, considering I failed its smaller brother, the basic Java module. Well, I suppose it’s a suitable note for me to leave computer science on – a sense of vague comprehension in an ocean of high-voltage confusion. I poured water on the motherboard, but the RAM still works.
A week after my last exam, Lucy and I were in Cardiff Airport. Destination: multiple. ETA: a month. Inter-buttock area: moist. We had no specific plans for any of the places we were going to, aside from spending a week in a villa up a mountain near Malaga, the inevitable exploitation of Amsterdam’s legalities (spoiler: no prostitutes) and attending an Irish-Finnish wedding in Helsinki, the journey’s non-violent coup de grâce. Everything in between was slapdash and haphazard – maybe out of stubborn idleness, but stubborn idleness which was justified by the desire for spontaneity, the rawness of unanticipated experience, and just to see where caution landed when you threw it into the wind. Even if caution did fly back and hit us in the face like a wayward square of soiled toilet paper. It never did do that, though. We were bricking it on many an occasion, but the end result was always most pleasing. Conveying the multiple-rainbow array of felt emotions associated with travelling when someone asks me “how was it?” is next to impossible.
More comprehensive writing on these travels will emerge sometime; I’m yet to decide what form it should take. Doing a travel blog at the time wasn’t reconcilable with the aforementioned urge to experience things at a foundational level, without this kind of scenario running through my mind, and the lack of real downtime to do it in properly made it impractical anyway. I have a wealth of sources to draw from: scribbled notes, unusual souvenirs, photos, videos – all in plethoric amounts. Going gonzo and retelling it semi-fictionally is always an appealing option. Time will tell. Or: I will tell, in time.
