Still Here

It seems extraordinary that it's 20 years since I started this blog. Where did the time go? 

I have now reached my 60s and seem to be retired. I didn't plan it that way, but when, 10 years ago, I had to close my book business down and become a full-time carer for two sons with health problems, what seemed like a temporary measure turned out to be permanent. My oldest son is now 26, but still lives at home and needs a lot of practical and emotional support. 

Writing a blog used to be a cathartic experience and I also enjoyed sharing the interesting and sometimes absurd things I came across when I ran my business, selling antiquarian books from a cowshed in the Sussex countryside. However, when I stopped working, it was no longer feasible to maintain a blog. Writing about life with my sons would, I thought, be an invasion of their privacy. How would they feel if they stumbled across this blog?

I soon settled into a routined existence of driving my sons to their schools and looking after the house, while my wife began a new career in publishing, where she thrived. It was an interesting role reversal and I saw how energised she became by the job and her daily contact with young people, while my range of daily anecdotes increasingly revolved around minor household triumphs and frustrations: "I tried that new cleaner, but the grout still has mould on it,"

I didn't mind my new life. My wife and I have always been pretty good at swapping roles according to circumstances. But I was aware that I was becoming a little stale and dull. I needed to shake myself up a bit, so one weekend in 2018, I flew to Berlin. It was meant to be a one-off, but turned out to be the beginning of something. 

Over the next seven years, the list of cities grew longer. First Berlin, then Dublin, Copenhagen, Aarhus, Malmö, Krakow, Amsterdam, Hamburg, Oslo, Bergen, Tirana, Lisbon, Strasbourg, Basel, Stockholm, Riga, Sofia, Bucharest, Helsinki, Tallin, Seville, Sarajevo, Munich, Salzburg, Nuremburg, Warsaw, Kaunas, Budapest, Marrakech... I couldn't stop.

Friends wondered how I could afford all of these trips, but I had mastered the art of frugal travel and living near an airport that served several budget airlines, it was possible to travel as far away as Morocco for £30. If my wife was with me, the main expenses were meals and accommodation. However, if I travelled alone, I would save money by staying in a ropey hotel (where I would gourge myself on the free breakfast) and eating at places like McDonald's. I could sometimes have a whole trip for less than the price of a train ticket from London to Manchester.

Each two or three-day trip usually involved a hectic itinerary, where I'd walk miles, visit several museums and galleries and, sometimes, visit a nearby city. My wife sometimes commented that I was trying to squeeze a week's holiday into 48 hours and I suppose she was right. I like to get value for money. 

After seven years of exploring European cities, they have slightly blended into a montage of modern art galleries, tramlines, cathedrals and museums. I've been to so many museums of communist oppression, I can no longer tell one torture chamber from another. 

I think this cartoon perfectly sums it up:

One thing I learned is that a trip is far better if you know someone there. Not only do you have the advantage of their local knowledge, but you also have fun - far more fun than travelling alone ever brings. Visits to Strasbourg, Helsinki, Morocco and Budapest were made doubly enjoyable by the company I had.

Now that I'm entering the winter of my life (at this point my wife rolls her eyes at my maudlin expression), I can't help asking myself how many 'good years' I have left. My parents looked forward to travelling when they retired, but ill health rendered them virtually housebound. I'm determined to make hay while the sun shines. 

My Instagram account shows a life of travel, concert-going and seeing friends, but of course the reality is that 90 percent of my time is spent at home, shopping at Tesco, cooking meals, loading the dishwasher, unloading the dishwasher and putting the bins out. I spend too long on my phone and watch far too many YouTube videos. I do read as much as I can, but my inclusion on lists of book bloggers always felt vaguely fraudulent. 

I used to enjoy blogging, but being fundamentally lazy, it was much easier to write posts when I had an endeless source of amusing book covers, disgarded photo albums and strange ephemera. I could intend to write a post about 1950s children's adventure books, only to find myself going on a tangent about something I did seven years ago. Sometimes the posts seemed to amuse a few people and that was very gratifying. 

This post isn't amusing, but I hope it's been vaguely interesting to anyone who followed the blog in the past. 

And that's all I have to say really. Thank you for reading this far.