Always on my mind

The Facebook status box asks, rather intrusively if I stop and ponder it, what is on my mind. 

I don't really know where to start. 

Firstly, and probably most importantly, I've had a pretty successful day. I arrived in Edinburgh fresh as an ever so slightly wilted daisy, navigated my way around a largely unfamiliar station, net up with a colleague, chaired a consultation event, facilitated a break out group, found my way from a random bus stop to a never before visited hotel despite the best efforts of the local planners, and capped it all off with a pleasant dinner in a little place overlooking the water. 

All pretty good, you might think, and with good reason. Travelling alone can be stressful and challenging, until a year or so ago the thought of speaking at an event, let alone leading it, would have terrified me, and if there is one thing I really hate it is eating alone in a restaurant. So, on the basis of that I have really had a pretty good tiime. 

But then theirs the fact of where I am right now, enjoying the springyness of a Premier Inn bed beneath my body whilst penning this post rather than making the most of a night in Edinburgh during the Festival Fringe. Despite all that I have achieved today I have failed. I have failed because I have succumbed to the tidal wave of anxiety and fear that frequently threatens to overtake me when anticipating doing something challenging from a visual perspective, but which I mostly manage to hold back just long enough to do the things I want to. Right now, where I want to be is inside the Merchant Hall enjoying the Blues and Soul Review rather than hiding away in a nondescript hotel room miles from the city center, but the thought of navigating thronging crowds alone on dark, unfamiliar streets, first to find the box office, and then the venue itself, is just too much to contemplate.

The feeling won't last forever, I know. Indeed, from past experience I know that it will last just long enough to make me miss the event before subsiding sufficiently to allow me to rue my decision for the rest of the night, before the next wave of concern begins to build up. 

Tomorrow is a new day with new challenges. It has things I will enjoy, like travelling further north on the UK rail network than I have so far been to date. It will have things that will be enjoyable and worthwhile at the time, but which I will worry about beforehand, such as meeting stakeholders new to me.  And I dare say it will have challenges, as yet unforseen, which will test my resolve to keep going. I only hope I can push through this time around. 

A knotty problem

I've got a knot in my stomach. It has been there for several days and is showing little sign of going anywhere. Truth is, I wasn't especially surprised by its arrival and rather expect it to stick around in one form or another for about the next seven days. 

You see, this always happens when the date of my next big adventure transforms from a grey smudge on the horizon into a wall of rock and ice to be surmounted imminently. On this occasion it is a week away, a bit of work, a bit of play, with a couple of sleeper trains and five different hotels thrown in for good measure, all things, quite frankly, which one would be forgiven for thinking that a Robert would be entirely comfortable with, if not relishing actively. 

If my pre trip anxiety seems rather contradictory to you then I can assure you that it is downright baffling to me. As any reader of this blog will have realized, I really love to travel. Indeed, I love to dream, and scheme, to anticipate and dream some more, before departing on a new adventure, to visit unfamiliar places, meet new people, eat and drink and even learn a new thing or to. It is the thing that keeps me going in the long days of winter or on late nights in the office, yet it frequently renders me frozen with fear, overcome by the enormity of what is to come. Of course, I could just stay at home and spare myself the stress, but then that travel bug would start nibbling at me anew and the whole cycle would start once more. 

So, here I I am, stuffing the kitchen sink into my holdall, worrying that my luggage is suitable neither for a business trip to the Scottish capital, nor a jaunt through the highlands, but somehow having to make it work for both. 

BearingAway Live: Japan - Sticks and Fire

BearingAway Live: The Beginning

A video of our journey from London to Japan. 

https://youtu.be/4fEJUZffNzA 

First steps in Japan

One's first day in a new city or country is always rather tricky.  First there is the physical grime of travel to wash away, the tiredness to banish and one's packing - once so familiar, now seemingly incredibly alien - to explore, but then there is the small matter of a different language and culture to get used to.  In some ways Japan feels to be in a league of its own in this regard, and so far we have barely dipped our little toes in.

Yesterday was all about getting here - the eleven. Hour flight to Seoul and the hour long connection to Fukuoka, the latter spent predominantly completing the lengthy immigration and customs declarations to enter Japan.  The journey itself wasn't bad as long-haul flying goes.  Asiana hadn't been the easiest of airlines to deal with electronically, but once on board the seats were relatively comfortable, the crew unfailingly friendly, and the food remarkably good for aviation fare. Wehad expected formalities on arrival to take a while, but save for a little disagreement over how best to represent the seven hotels we will be staying at in a single box on the form, we were allowed in without too much trouble.  Goodness knows if they will be able to make sense of Mark's cribblings, or indeed whether they would have been just as happy with something a little less comprehensive, so long as pen had been commited to paper in roughly the right places.

And now it is morning on our first day. The free hotel rahmen last night had been a nice welcome, saving us from exploring the city in our rather fatigued state, and the cans of lager from the very Japanese vending machine were truly welcome.  The main objectives for the hours ahead are simply (I use the term cautiously) to become acquainted with Japan, to pick up our oh-so-precious JR rail passes, to book seats on around ten different trains, and to find lunch in what is regarded by some as the culinary capital of Kyushu.  I can't wait to get going.

  

Different this time

Goodness me, it's that time again - that point in the year when I promise myself, not to mention my faithful and very patient readers, that this time will be different.  I really do mean it each time I write a post such as this, even if deep down I have a sneaky suspicion that this holiday will be just like all the others, and that once I'm off the first train or plane I'll forget all about writing, or simply find something more enjoyable to do, like eating or drinking, or generally anything other than sitting in front of a computer keyboard.

Part of the problem in the past however, has been over-ambition.  That, and a healthy dose of perfectionism, combining to mean that I spend so long takig photographs, video and audio that I have scant time left to pen carefully worded prose - and frankly I'd rather write nothing than utter rubbish (though will let you be the judge of how well I succeed in this).

Now I know about bad workmen and all that, but the other problem in recent times has been a frankly awful bluetooth keyboard, which somehow managed simultaneously to omit characters that I had typed whilst adding in plenty that I hadn't.  It meant that a post of roughly this length might have taken me several hours, all the while picking about in each sentence to correct the nonsense that I had inadvertently drafted.  The good news is that my new Griffin Lightening keyboard is making very snappy work of this post.  The downside is that any nonsense present on the page is well and truly down to me!

So, I've spent too much of your precious time telling you what's going to be different this time, and not nearly enough saying where I will be going, and what I'll be doing when there.

Well, suffice to say that this is a big one.  Last year I travelled no further east than the Franco-German border, and as far west only as Madrid.  This year the journey will be of a similar length to the first leg of that trip to Spain, albeit with the twelve or so hours spent in planes rather than trains.  I'm heading somewhere that's been on my bucket list for years but somehow never reached the top, a place whose culture is both all around us and yet in many ways quite foreign.  It is said to be one of the only truly modern non-Western countries and its impact is felt globally.  This year I'm heading to Japan.

Battle for the written word

I've been re-reading a few of my blog posts. It may seem a rather self centred, introspective thing to do, but it was prompted by a comment being left on a long forgotten post and my wish to rediscover it.

The commentor in question said something nice about my style of writing, and looking back through the various articles, I had to agree. Whilst it must be the very epitome of immodesty to praise one's own pros I can't help feeling that some of the text, written months and years ago, still achieves The effect I originally sought to create. Often, at the time of writing, I find myself publishing pieces without reviewing and re-writing them as much as I ought, for fear of never actually pressing "send". It isn't that I don't care about what I write, as I have commented on in the past, it is simply that I would likely never be happy with the words used or the flow of sentences and paragraphs. It was therefore a pleasant surprise to find that, in many cases, those words fitted together quite fine and conveyed the meaning in an interesting and engaging way.
What I was less happy to discover however, was my almost faultless trait of beginning interesting sounding series, only to never continue them. At the beginning of so many holidays, it seems, I have begun with the intention of writing each day, chronicling journeys and experiences, only to run out of steam before I've left the starting station. Take, for instance, my recent trip with Mark to Sicily, all the way from London by train. It had the makings of a gripping story, with significant challenges to overcome on the way to a Mediterranean idyll - save for the fact that, in writing it, I got no further than the French Alps.

Another example was my independent trip to Amsterdam with my (now previous) guide dog Vance. Typographically the starting post left a little to be desired, penned as it was on my normal dodgy Bluetooth keyboard, but the tale was truly sunk by my Phalia to write another word after my overnight ferry left Harwich.

So, whilst I can see some merit in the sense of some of my articles, I am left deeply frustrated by my apparent inability to finish what I have begun. It isn't as if there wasn't anything worthy of being written about on these trips. Had I spent the time and effort doing it I am sure I could have conveyed fear and exhilaration which seem to fill most journeys in equal measure - yes, I love travelling, but that doesn't mean it is always plain sailing. I could have happily talked about the contradiction of pleasant monotony on a long distance sleeper train to Palermo, or the frenzied swarms of bicycling locals which infect Dutch streets and make independent mobility a frankly frightening affair. I might have written of walking the circular promenade of Altigia, as if I was experiencing it live, or brought to life the cacophony of a Munich beer Hall. I didn't do any of that however, I was too busy taking photographs and audio recordings, too preoccupied with capturing the "now" to really sit back and think about it.

The tension between keyboard and camera began early on the Sicily trip. My original, indeed only, article from that journey took over three hours to write because I was so distracted with taking pictures every few miles, or recording thoughts live on video or audio. Yes, the writing was certainly hard going with a phone and keyboard combination which wrote the wrong character more often than the right, but The products of combining observation and imagination on paper are often so much more gratifying than the simple electronic capturing of a moment.

Reading those initial chapters pre-seeding empty books it seemed as though I did not, could not, trust myself to recall and relay events without those pictures and sounds of actuality to back up the memories. It was, I think, a strong desire to convey the experience to a wider audience in a way which could be digested, understood easily, and a belief that in order to do so properly one needs to film and photograph as much as possible. In my head, I could see the cut-away shots that would be needed to make my video flow, or the photographs which would help me and others to understand or appreciate a location long after it had passed. If I couldn't see the detail of a landscape or building the photographs and video would help me to review it later, and somehow this seemed more important than the feelings and thoughts triggered by the experience itself.

So, five months after Sicily I have over 4000 photographs still waiting to be organised, two hour long videos produced but plenty more footage to edit, hours of audio uploaded to the Internet and a solitary blog post which says more in its few paragraphs than most of the other electronic memories put together.

I may yet manage to write a little more about some of my most recent trips, dredging up memories from the depths of my brain, but what I would really like to do is find The inclination to take a few less photographs, video shots and audio recordings and focus a bit more on the written word. Perhaps by standing back and thinking that every picture counts, as we all did before digital photography, and not feeling that I have to chart every single second live, I can create the space to achieve this.