Life Learning

We’ve only just returned to our sanctuary from the craziness. Jet lag still sends us to bed early and wakes us up while the sky is still inky; we’ve yet to re-synchronize our body clocks with the daily cycle here in southern British Columbia. Our trip to England – with one small sojourn into North Wales – proved to be exhausting. The positives – family celebrations, friends being visited after many years, trips to some of the most iconic places in the country – outweighed the negatives. Even so, the hectic pace of life, the overall expense and sheer fullness of that relatively tiny country left us breathless and stressed, and by the last day of our vacation, longing to return home to where we both have found peace.

However, it was worth it. I learned more things about other people and myself. They include:

• I really don’t enjoy being in a metal tube for hours at a time, no matter how much legroom I have.
• Sausages never tasted so good as they do in the land of my birth.
• The country seems to be shrinking.
• I’m completely unsuited to living in the modern world.
• I’m out of practice with regard to being social, even with people I know.
• It’s ridiculously easy to find excellent food in my home country. By ‘excellent’, I mean tasty, unhealthy and high-carbohydrate savoury stuff; exactly the food I shouldn’t be eating…
• Even in the culture of my upbringing, there are not a great many people with whom I feel an affinity.
• I’m a great deal fatter than I was the last time I was there.

This is not an exhaustive list, but I reckon that deep and meaningful insights into my emotional state can remain less public (unless, of course, the nation’s clamouring for such becomes too loud). Worthy of distinct mention, however, is the startling discovery that I used to be a bow tie-wearing eejit (see photograph above). Now you may think that I’m being unduly harsh about the four year old boy in the picture, but I’ve been an eejit my entire life. The bow tie is a suppressed memory, and as you can see for yourself, with good reason.

The tie was on elastic of course, as were my shorts. Uncomfortable to recall as it may be, the truth is that my body is pushing me inexorably towards another, rather distressing phase of elasticated waists. What goes around comes around, they say. I just have more circumference to fit things around these days.