A New Chapter

I said to a friend a few months ago that I find it perfectly possible to fall head over heels in love ten times a day. The guy who sits down at a table nearby and runs his fingers through his hair just so; the man who looks across from a train carriage that is temporarily adjacent in a station before you are both whisked to opposing places; the one who brushes past you in a packed bar and, for the briefest moment, there is a shared understanding of what might have been.

When you travel, life becomes an endless series of departures and separations. However brief the encounter it always lingers somewhere in the back of your mind – and occasionally, as I did just a few days ago, you'll stumble across something tangible to remind you of that moment (in this instance, a photograph of a sunset and 'without words' scrawled across the back). The thing with these moments is that you can be everything you ever thought you wanted to be: it is a meeting defined by its transience, by the sure knowledge of its imminent ending. It's an addictive feeling, everything being charged with passion and promise and the certainty of the exquisite agony of heartbreak.

Which of you readers hasn't forged your own conclusions as to why I've travelled? The Armchair Critic: everyone's favourite role to play, with lines of the likes of 'Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus' playing a starring role in the analysis. I've concluded there's little point trying to explain, since most of you won't believe it over your own versions anyway.

But I can tell you why I pulled the plug on yet another supposed 'trip of a lifetime' a few days ago. (And for the record, I don't define anything I've done in that way and I never have. It's been my whole life, not an add-on that has appeared temporarily.) Honestly, I'm just tired. I have exhausted an entire gamut of emotions by forcing upon myself a 'series of little deaths'. When you find yourself in a beautiful place and you are actively looking for a flaw, you realise it is time to stop for a while. And hey, I ended on a high: thanks to years of air miles I came back from New York into London on a business class flight, complete with a massage and a champagne cocktail to wind down and celebrate the last thirteen years of my life.

I bumped into a box of old photographs a few evenings ago and I re-lived moments from Australia to Zambia. Nobody can ever take away those memories that have defined and refined me, and no one other person will ever know everything I've seen and felt and loved.

It's time to find work that I care about and believe in, and to find peace in familiarity. The 'what ifs' I've created over the years need acknowledging. Most folks, said Abraham Lincoln, are about as happy as they have made up their minds to be – and I've a hell of a lot to be happy about over the coming weeks. There are Christmas trees and heartfelt hugs and laughter and wine and windswept cliffs, all providing the perfect backdrop to my new determination to forge a niche that takes the impact of over a decade of truly global experiences and transforms it into something extraordinary.

“I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos. The pictures they paint, the music they compose, the books they write, and the lives they lead. Of all these the richest in beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art.”  ['The Painted Veil', Somerset Maugham.]