Writing in Bodo where i couldnt get on the internet...

5 days away in the beautiful North of Nowhere, and the mind turns to home. Travelling has been my blood for nearly 20 years now - hard to believe that next summer will be the 20th anniversary of that first Inter-Rail trip. Memories and people pass and fade, places merge from one to the next and parks and hostels and bus stations have turned to 5 star hotels, taxis and work work work... Travelling for me is watching and listening, moving and waiting... absorb understand, compare and relate... move and absorb some more... to travel is more important than being somewhere, and sitting still becomes addictive in the middle of this constant airport flow of people on deadlines and holiday dreams... and now a new angle to travelling that i havent really had before - the going home. More specifically going home to someone. Going home to someone who makes it a pleasure to stop moving, to stop sitting still, and to be back amongst the familiar and the mundane. For the first time in life i am anchored. "No man is an island of himself" said John Donne, everyone knows that line but then he carried on to say something like "one foot fixed he returns..." and now for the first time in life i finally understand the feeling. The temptation to descend into saccharine is there, but if there is one thing the Metformin does it stops that coming out in print. But to have that solid base, that one foot planted so firmly - life has changed and developped and i am no longer looking in the mirror and seeing the 23 year old just moving and running and looking for a home, somehwere, anywhere, nowhere... home is found, and it is with my wife. Its not the building, its not the walls, not the fields and fences - it is with her that i am home. It is with her that i belong. And it is too her that i am now travelling, and that feeling is the most wonderful feeling. Travel remains exciting, the experience of the new, the mysterious and the far away... learning words and phrases, listening to stories, forcing down a beer for the boys - all remain wonderful - but now the best travelling is back to her, back into my baby's arms. On the road home, i now have a home to go to. So much more makes sense than it did before, so much has changed, and so much better... so much more meaningful. To move.. to travel... to be somewhere.... Now i know where i am going, and peace and happiness descends... Ok, enough of this poor reader, lets return to slagging off politicians :)