Send more medicine. The maps are wrong.

I do odd things when there's no one else at home. I read books in the bath and leave the bathroom door open so I can listen to Mahler or Ella Fitzgerald. I adopt habits from movies - such as drinking milk out of wine glasses, actually that's the only one I can think of at the moment - and I stay up until four so I can finish the book I'm reading.

I don't think these things make for a healthy and sustainable lifestyle.

Good job then that I'm not left alone too often.

Anyway, the book I was reading was Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood. There's this particularly marvelous bit when one of the main characters is writing to friends and family, not having anything positive to write to them. He thinks,

"He has been traveling blindly, whether forward he cannot say, without learning anything except that he has not yet learned anything, unless he counts the extent of his own ignorance; like those who have searched fruitlessly for the Nile. Like them, he must take into account the possibility of defeat. Hopeless dispatches, scrawled on pieces of bark, sent out in cleft sticks from the swallowing jungle. Suffering from malaria. Bitten by snake. Send more medicine. The maps are wrong."

Meanwhile, I laughed and thought that all anyone has told me of where they've been and travelled to has either been in celebratory approval or dismal failure. (Except of course for my parents - "So how was England, dad?" "Oh, you know, ok. I nearly got arrested in the Tower of London. Nothing much happened.") There's not much middle ground, you can't really spend the huge amounts of money that it takes to go overseas and then not be so very excited about it. And while I hope not to be lost in the wilds, prayer for no hopeless dispatches would be nice.

Family

Some bits of Scone

Now this is elsewhere from where I am now, and for those more inclined to romanticism it's perhaps the more pure of places I've been to. I just think it looks nice. And while it doesn't make it closer having the photos up here, it does make it easier to show others about it I suppose. That particular sunset doesn't really need much justification for it's existence. It just did, and was. One like it may well be seen again.

From the back of my parent's house, during the day and towards the evening, on different days.

Some bits of Sydney

Decidedly here rather than elsewhere at the moment. For your viewing pleasure - images of the vicinity of where I live, of things more interesting to me than otherwise.

Meanwhile, Megan

... realised that I might well lose everything I go overseas with, not an unusual eventuality for me. So the journal, which is intended to be chockers full of thoughts and experiences, ticket stubs and napkins, will have this photo in it, probably also with another detailing more of what I actually look like. That would be a little fitting - I picture the finder of the book in question holding it in his or her hands, looking at this photo pasted on the inside cover and thinking "Yeah, doesn't help me getting this back to whoever this belongs to" and then seeing the portrait proper and thinking "oh, right, sure. Now that I've seen what they actually look like I can in all conscience return the book. Makes sense."

It does.

And I will.

Post the First

I intend for this to be helpful in letting others know what I'm getting up to overseas, though I'll probably end up spending way to much time here when I come back in March.

Still, helpful is the key and pragmatism is a philosophy. I'm not going to start re-cataloguing the books in my local library but I will blather on here.