Tag Archives: vagabonding

Coconut Conspiracies

Posted on November 21, 2011 | 1 Comment

It feels like we are just cycling North. North north north. Does this island ever end? I thought it was only 3km long but it feels more like 30km in this intense heat with the bicycle wheels burying themselves every five metres into Saharan sized sand dunes.

And then somehow we are back where we started.

Circles.

Amazing.

Islands are round it turns out.

My sense of direction is bad it turns out.

By the time we stagger senseless from the bicycle seats (there had been a looooong stop at a bar shack on the way) and find our way into the sea we find we cannot find our way out of the sea. I wish we could order cake and coconuts. Maybe they could bring them to us right here. Where we float like star fish near the shore.

But this it turns out is just a daydream.

On shore we ask if there are coconuts.

No coconuts we are informed.

We’re on a desert island coated in palm trees and there are no coconuts. We ponder the strangeness of this. Maybe it is a coconut conspiracy. Lindsay tries to get the waiter to find us a coconut and bring it to us.

I think to myself Lindsay was clearly a queen or a pharoah’s wife in a past life. Or else she’s seen that scene from Withnail and I too many times – the one in the cake shop – WE DEMAND CAKE!

We demand coconuts. And despite the fact Lindsay is so effortlessly beautiful and gracious and doesn’t really demand but asks so sweetly that I’m surprised all the men on the island aren’t slathering to find the nearest tree and shimmy up it to sate her demand for coconuts – tidak ada. There are no coconuts.

It’s Monday, I say to Lindsay. M-ON-D-AY – I roll the word around as though it is foreign on my tongue. Once upon a time Mondays heralded commuter hell and the start of the working week. Now they herald leaving the kids with the husbands whilst we hop a boat to the gilis, hire bicycles, eat croissants with our feet dipped in the sand and get baked in the sun.

Ahahahahahaha.

 

 

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Shit we’re actually emigrating? Why did no one tell me?

Posted on October 6, 2010 | 3 Comments

I don’t think I’ve ever been so scared. And that’s nothing to do with reading the Air Asia inflight magazine in which they discuss what happens when planes crash into the sea and try to comfort you with all the rescue paraphanelia that would ditch into the watery abyss with you. It’s ok, you’ll plummet 37,000 feet but you’ll have a whistle.

And seasickness tablets.

So what’s the big fuss?

I’m sacred because I think we are mad. And it’s only suddenly occurred to me, 37,000 feet in the air and over water, that we’re emigrating. I swallow hard. And then clutch John and demand to know what we were thinking.

(I’m also unnaturally afraid because, even though I’m not trafficking drugs of any description, entering Indonesia freaks me out every time. Just the sign declaring death to anyone with so much as a pipe on their person makes me nervous.)

Our previous wanderings seem suddenly like a 2 week Thompson holiday in Spain compared to this. This is monumental. And a part of me longs for the crazy, lazy days of mooching around the planet with just a 60ltr rucksack, a bank account aslosh with money for the ahum bathroom and a round the world ticket in my hand. I miss the lightness of that, the vagueness, the freedom, the possibilities.

Now I will be a stayer putter. I will be chair of the parent board at Alula’s school – volunteered in my absence and crap if that’s not a slap around my vague face and a reminder of responsibilities rather than possibilities. Am I ready to have a home again? A routine? Won’t that feel like prison?

For the whole 14 hour Air Asia flight to KL, when not trying to stave off hypothermia by clutching Alula in the throes of sleep (Air Asia that’ll be 50 quid for a comfort blanket please) I kept thinking ‘what have we done? what have we done?’ There were no films to choose from either to distract me (normally I’ll take a three hour shot of Jakey boy running around in a skirt to distract me from the 37,000 feet and the whistle) but no on Air Asia you have to pay Odeon west end prices for a movie. And though I like Jake, particularly his chest, I have to say I don’t like him enough to fork out 8 quid. For that I’d expect something a lot more personal than can be achieved through a plasma screen.

And then something weird happens, we arrive home. Our gorgeous house in Penestanan. And within seconds it is home (especially once I’ve stashed the Absolut in the freezer). Our pembantu Kadek arrives all smiles and with sweets for Alula. The car gets dropped. Tea gets made (albeit Bali style – black lipton with 8 tablespoons of sugar), the restaurant next door russles up a pancake for Alula. I do a supermarket sweep and bump into 3 people I know.

Oooh I think, I can do this. This is actually rather wonderful. All we need is a dog.

And then I unpack the mugs, the magnets and the marmite. Oh, and the PG tips and the percy pigs. I sit back on the balcony admiring the view. And then, then I really do feel at home.

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Ancestors and Roots

Posted on September 14, 2010 | Leave a comment

It’s not so easy to get nostalgic when your grandfather grew up on the Old Kent Road. And generally speaking I don’t hold with anywhere north (of the equator that is). Certainly I only like the M6 tollroad because it circumvents Birmingham. But visiting Cumbria with John, land of his forbears, I find myself getting all family minded and feeling all misty eyed about the UK.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not about to ditch Bali for Cumbria. The rain is giving the windows a good whipping, the stonework is about six foot deep and even that’s not enough to stop me from sitting on top of the rayburn drinking in the heat, and once more I find my driving skills unsuited to one lane winding country roads (maybe slow down a bit John says, with one hand wavering over the handbrake) but there’s something rather lovely about a churchyard full of Aldersons.

There’s even a John and Sarah Alderson, our ancestors (well John’s – there I am again claiming them as my own, but Sarah Alderson from 1732 wasn’t born one either and there she is in the graveyard laying claim to six feet of Cumbrian soil).

And the old Alderson farmhouse, standing bluntly over the stunning Eden Valley, is now no longer a rambling stone shell but the place of the world’s most incredible shower (a shower so good I contemplated actually sleeping in it rather than in my bed).

It feels good to connect Alula with her roots, she’s been so rootless for so long.  And even though she’s oblivious to the sense of history (she still thinks she’s going to live to be a billion and a hundred) I’d like to think it will give her some grounding in the future. Then I’ll take her to the Old Kent Road and let my dad take her to Millwall football ground so she can connect with her other roots and learn some proper hooligan behaviour. She is after all half south londoner.

But there I am happy to vagabond my whole life, with no desire for one home and no calling to set down roots in one particular place and here I am confronted with centuries of one family living in one place. It’s kind of mind-blowing. And I think I need to think about it for a few days before I figure out what family and place means to the sense we create of self. Is there more to it than just being sagittarius?

And, you know, I think I might spend that time thinking in the shower.

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I am a sagittarius you know – that sort of explains it.

Posted on September 1, 2010 | 7 Comments

I’m not ready to hang up my travelling boots.

I have started discussing with John a plan I am hatching for some time in the mid 2020s when Alula no longer needs stationary parents  (or nearby parents for that matter) when we will buy an old airstream and drive across and around the Americas for say, maybe, ten years.

We will own a husky dog which I think we will call Lobo and a gazebo we can put up outside for evening dining possibly draped with fairy lights, and by then everything will be electronicafied so I’ll have an ipad for books and I won’t need to yell at John for navigating us to Canada instead of Mexico because the GPS will be driving the car for us and we’ll have Netflix set up too that we can watch movies from our fold-down double bed with Egyptian cotton sheets and an antique quilt (cos you need some luxuries on the road). I even started looking at posh plastic melamine plates and wondering about things like authentic matching salt and pepper shakers for the era airstream we’d own and how we could place a white sheet off the end of the airstream and rig up a projector for on the road entertainment with the cool people we’d park up next to in the RV park when I realized I was perhaps planning ahead too far. And really I should re-engage my planning brain on trying to pack half a thriftstore into one suitcase and re-focus my imagination on my third book (going well thanks for asking).

So am I ready to return to London? What do you think? Does it sound like it?Would I ever be though?

No. I have tasted sunshine and ecstatic dancing and canoed with dolphins and eaten grapes off the vines in the Napa valley and faced down a bear and written two books and found that there is a whole world of amazing opportunity and potential and incredible adventures out there so no, there’s frankly no going back. Especially not to a Tory run country in the midst of a recession. Plus I’d have to get a job because being a writer only pays well enough if you live somewhere like Indonesia or you’re Stephanie Meyer (working on that plan). And then there’s the little issue of laundry too.

So I have an idea, why don’t you come join us out here instead? You could be the cool people in the airstream next door.

Oh come on, you know you want to. Or maybe you don’t. Maybe it’s just me. I’m sagittarius and I don’t like doing laundry.

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Top 10 things to do on a round the world trip: part 1

Posted on August 26, 2010 | Leave a comment

We have seven days before we head back to London. I can’t believe we’ve been away 7 months. It’s been easily the best 7 months of my life so I’m kind of reeling with premature holiday blues whilst also enjoying the best time of the trip so far. Not that it’s over. On the one hand it feels like London will be a brief hiatus before our return to Bali in October when the next chapter of the adventure begins. As in ‘no, really, can we actually live here? (aren’t we broke?)’

Anyway, on one of our endless and endlessly beautiful car journeys through California, John and I debated the highlights of the trip. So herewith a list, for any of you out there following in our footsteps, of things not be missed on a round the world journey.

1. Californian Hot Springs

Only I’m not telling you where these are because they are too, too special. The most exquisite shrangri-la on the West Coast of America. Buried in a delve of a river canyon, bubbling from beneath the earth, slanting sunshine, cool river flowing by. Utter heaven. Maybe if you email me and ask – nay beg –nicely I’ll let you in on the secret.

I like this picture, because it looks like I have abs.

2. Thrifting

Starting Lula early. The girl has an eye for a bargain.

The unsung joy of our American trip has been the thrifting. Like shopping at Ikea it allows you to think you’re not spending anything and then your card gets declined. At a Thrift store. That’s embarrassing. Best thrifting – Mission Beach San Diego, Monterey & Santa Barbara (rich pickings).

3. Sideways wine country.



take a picnic. Don’t take a child.

4. Chai & Samosas in Patnem Beach, Goa.

Life was perfect in India. My day consisted of tripping out of our pink house, taking Alula to school via the cows munching up the rubbish dump, stopping by for 4p samosas and then heading to the beach to sip chai as the sun warmed my face. Then some writing, some swimming, some eating. BLISS.

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A strategy for life: vagabonding

Posted on August 18, 2010 | 1 Comment

We did a 5 day roadtrip. We drove 1500 miles. Half of which were unnecessary and ending in three point turns. Having said that we saw most of southern California. We headed East first to Big Bear Lake through the Mojave. We kept Lula from going car crazy by telling her to look for Bears. She spent an hour with her face pressed to the glass in the growing dusk asking ever more desparately ‘where are the bears? I don’t see the bears.’

Cabins for less - a discount for the bedbugs. And having to make your own bed.

We stayed in a place called Cabins for Less and ate at a place called the Teddy Bear. I was so ready to leave. After that we did Palm Springs, Joshua Tree, San Diego, Oceanside (location for my book) and Disneyland before heading back to Montecito where we’ve been hanging out ever since doing precisely nothing but drinking Californian wine and eating. (Oh, and I started my third book which is why I’ve been quieter than normal. sorry) Oprah is our neighbour. And Michael Jackson. Or his ghost anyway, hanging out at his Neverland ranch up the road.

I spent about 1000 of the roadtrip miles contemplating whether we could live here in California. Most of the other towns we passed through, I would gape at and turn to John saying ‘Crap, who the hell lives here? I mean, what do they do? It’s the middle of the desert.’

But then you get to San Diego and the coast and suddenly it all makes sense.  Plus they have Yogurtland here. Why have we not thought of that in Europe? It’s the future. And it’s year round 72 degrees with a lovely sea breeze.

San Diego...

Do you want to live here instead? John asks looking at me with his eyebrows raised.

I grimace and squirm. I know, I know we’ve just laid down a stonking amount of money for a house in Bali. But they have wine here, and cool breezes, and Yogurtland. And fashion.

Yes, yes of course I want to live here, I say. But we can’t afford it. And we’re moving to Bali anyway. And in Bali we get a full time nanny. And I don’t have to do my own laundry.

And then Johnny Depp comes to me. Unfortunately not literally. I remember reading an article in an in-flight magazine where he raved about his vagabond lifestyle and how wonderful it is for him and his family. And I realised that whilst I don’t own a Caribbean island nor a chateau in the south of France, that was always the life I was after. Ideally shoving Vanessa out the way and marrying Johnny to get there. But when life doesn’t take you down that path then you gotta create your own.

So here I am doing that.  I’m going to vagabond for the rest of my life as Johnny advocates. Five years in Bali. Then five years somewhere else – maybe California. Then five years maybe somewhere else. Ad infinitum until I drive that RV off a cliff when I’m 62 (it’s been prophesied).  It was an amazing realisation (the vagabonding one – not the dying one) because this whole time I was looking for somewhere we could stay forever and it was giving me silent panic attacks. But what about saying that’s not how I want to live my life? What if I want to live in many places and spend my life being a vagabond? What if home doesn’t have to be one place forever but wherever John and Lula are (and newsflash they’re coming with me).

Vagabonding: It’s the future. That and Yogurtland.

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