There is a model of the old person I don’t want to become.
He lurks somewhere in a damp pool of intolerance in a members-only golf club, and every part of his tidy life is minutely planned. You know him, I know him, and we all avoid him, even though we know deep down that a tiny bit of him lives in all of us.
In a sub-conscious attempt to avoid this, I have recently drifted into a progressively more liberal view on life, and a rather unserious one about my own role in it. I like that, particularly as many of the world’s biggest problems are caused by middle-aged men taking themselves too seriously. They have an ugly habit of being called Vladimir, Nigel or Jeremy and screwing the rest of us over. And Paul, for some reason.
But on the other hand, a slightly pathetic undertone of anxiety has crept in which, were it one of my friends, I would mock them for unceasingly. Just at the point in my life when I have found a measure of real freedom, I have become paradoxically worried that it will come back and bite me in the backside if I bravely exploit it.
This has come to a head in my preparations for my research trip to Patagonia next week to find and observe Manx shearwaters in their winter grounds. The trip started life as no more than a £369 return air ticket to Buenos Aires with ten days in between the two. From that blank canvas, I thought, I would make my way down the Atlantic littoral and find deep sea fishermen, almost certainly called Pedro, and would persuade them to let me join the crew for a day or two. I would carry minimal kit, eat razor clams and grow a monumentally masculine beard. People would quietly mutter ‘Hemingway’ about me, and it would all be alright.
My footprint on the fragile earth, the odd long haul flight excepted, would be so slight as to have Greta purring in admiration, rather than giving me one of her ‘you’ve ruined my life’ speeches.
It hasn’t quite worked out that way.
For a start, I found that the blank canvas of ten days to fill in a continent that I had never been to rather terrifying. The idea of not having any architecture to my days worried rather than liberated me, so I started organizing things. Lots of things. Things every day, just in case.
Then I found the idea of not knowing where I was going to stay each night, and leaving it all to chance, a bit daunting. The thought of not having a bed, a bedside light or, damn it, a bathroom with a loo in it appalled me, so I started booking things. Like, for just about every night. I mean, what if, and all that? And it meant that I could leave the tent behind, which absence of weight would save fuel on the flight out.
Then I got the yips about using buses and hitching lifts; someone told me the buses were dangerous, and you never knew who was going to pick you up when you hitched. So I booked a couple of flights, and hired a 4x 4 car. Then I booked a couple more flights as well. Just in case. After all, they are scheduled flights, I thought, and me not being on them isn’t going to stop them flying.
‘It’s fine,’ I said to Caroline. ‘I’m only booked on to four flights, if you don’t count the long-haul ones’.
‘And why wouldn’t you count those?’ she asked sweetly.
Then the idea of living out of a small back pack with just the one change of clothes, one of the great delights of the anticipation of the trip, started to bother me. What if? So the pile of tee shirts and shorts and books and jerseys grew until I needed a bigger and bigger backpack until it became a suitcase, and then quite a big one.
But for now, what was a bohemian ramble down the Patagonian coast has become something altogether more structured, only as cheaply as I can possibly do it. Right now, I’ve started panicking that I don’t have enough to read.
Pedro, it turns out, has dodged a bullet. Greta will be after me.
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