Better days

When you are traveling nothing is quite as tempting as home. When you are home the life style sometimes feels like a straight jacket and you wonder where the next bit of travel will take you. Its a conundrum that continues I guess until you give up the travel. Which is worse, sitting in a foreign room by yourself when the day has been rough and you really just want to talk to someone but the call home will make you feel worse and if you go out you will;
1 Get drunk and feel even worse tomorrow,
2 Finish up talking inane ideas with some hooker or kindred sole, sometimes it is hard to sort the two out, and feeling bad the next morning.

Travel is not for the weak willed, those who cannot take the pressure end up on drugs of some kind, usually as alcoholics.

This is not meant to scare people, those for whom travel is the annual vacation, but to point out that the world is a big place and it can be fun but it can also hurt. This whole thing today is meandering out of control, I meant to write a few lines about something else and ended up here.

I love the concept of traveling, you cannot do it for all these years and not love it, I remember early on sitting with a bunch of guys and one of the older ones said, "if you have not stopped traveling after 3 years you never will" and how right he was. There was one other mantra that I think I came up with and that is "you are a virgin in every new country that you go to" that was when sex basically was my reason for existing.

Travel has been good to me. I was lucky to start out at a time when it was becoming easier but not common. I have been privileged to go to places and see things that you simple cannot do now, climbing the hill of the Acropolis, driving to Persepolis, climbing the cave temples in Ipoh, sleeping on the beach in Penang, getting riotously drunk in villages in Greece, meeting matadors in Madrid, and Bilbao and Valencia, Walking into villages in Burma that had not seen a white man since the second world war, walking along paths in Papua New Guinea and knowing that you are the first white man to go there, sleeping out on the shores of Lake Titicaca, partying till there was no tomorrow in Calli and then starting again.

I have seen brutal military regimes from Argentina, watched an attempted coup in Bolivia, seen the dreadful effects of the American colour wars, seen and listen to a thermal inversion crystallize the water vapor directly to ice, its like thousands of little wind chimes, I have urinated into both the Pacific and Atlantic oceans at the same time, its a little brook near Bampf that divides and flows to both.

I have drunk with fishermen from Indonesia to Peru from Australia to Norway. I have seen the pack ice at the northern extremity of the earth and the bergs off the coast of Antartica.

If there has been a problem it is that it has all gone past so quickly and no one told me that what I was doing, the life I was leading, was unusual. I never thought how lucky I was, I really thought that there were lots of us who did this. The result is a million memories cleansed by the brains filters and very few other images. One day I must sit down and write about it.

Back to the talking heads

I always thought that one talking head was about the same as another but I am starting to have second thoughts. The talking heads in Australia spout a line of inanity that is in inverse proportion squared to their knowledge of the subject but directly proportional to the existing populist view. Talking heads in the UK have a subtle variation in that the square is replaced by a .0000001 divisor on their knowledge but instead of populist they use the government view, which is a filtered version of the populist view. In the USA there is another change. Most of them have so little knowledge of what they are talking about and the second filter reflects the political views of the media they are talking through that they simple rely on words of more than two syllable's to confuse the issue further. More than two syllable's being beyond the comprehension of the average listener or viewer.

What bought this on. I was just watching Fox News, a misnomer if there ever was one, and I am a conservative, when they had a general talking head, military that is, who started on his little spin and was interrupted by the host and then came back with the opposite view to his original. Does left spin and right spin applied to the same subject by the same person produce wrist or finger spin?? That's a slightly smutty cricket allusion.

I remain concerned over Lebanon, who does not, but more that the media is starting to move its bias, at least here in the UK back to the Arabist line that the Foreign office always produces.

Hezbollah hides amongst the population and sends indiscriminate rockets onto civilian centers in Israel and the Israelis take the heat for over reacting.

Does anyone get the point that by allowing the fighting to go on in the middle east we are keeping our patch relatively calm. Thats very NIMBY I know but having lived with and talked to some of the crazy people I prefer it that way.

Traveling home

Spent the last two days in what must be one of the least enjoyable pursuits there is. Sitting in a thin aluminum and composite tube flying from one end of the earth to the other. I used to get excited about flying but been there done that, read the book got the T-Shirt and probable appeared in the film.

About 18 hours in the air broken by a couple of hours changing flights. One of the greater mysteries in life is how airlines know where we are sitting and seek to deliver our baggage in the most irritating manner they can.

Earlier this month I flew home for the first time in about six months. I upgraded to Club so that I could get through as fast as possible. One bag, my golf clubs, was delayed, the other bags with their priority stickers proudly intact were amongst the last moved. This time I was economy and was prepared to wait and what happens, the bags are in the hall before I can get there, and I was not delayed in immigration.

Travelling these periods, when you do three or four long hauls has un unexpected side effect. I after 30 plus years of flying cannot sleep on the big jets, put me on a helicopter or a light aircraft, even a small jet and I sleep very well. but not on the big boys, so I sit there and watch the inflight entertainment but that only updates monthly so if you use the same airline then after two long hauls you have seen pretty much all of it. I have done seven long hauls, flights over 6 hours, this month and there is nothing apart from a few bad films that I have not seen. Result, terminal boredom.

The next person that tells you they got through this much or that much work on a flight, please feel free to shoot them as they are officially out of control. I treat the time on a flight as downtime as no one can contact me unless I want. That bit of provacy is just so hard to achoeve these days.

Another day moving forward

One of those days when life throws you all sorts of curves to deal with. We had been worrying about the amount of money we would need to place as a bond for my mothers nursing home, figures as high as 400,000 dollars were quoted. The decision was limited either selling the family home or mortgaging it to the hilt.

The news was initially good in that it would only be 125,000 dollars but the sting was in the reasoning. Its not going to be long before she is almost permanently bed ridden and then the pension covers the costs.

You know that your parents are going to get old and die but getting to the reality is a lot harder to face up to. Dad died just over a year ago and I still have not fully accepted that now its my mother.

I think the fact that I have spent most of my life away from home and a good period of that out of contact with my parents, means that I deal with it and see it from a different point of view. It tends to be more abstract from my perspective I can deal with the hurt of losing them by pushing it beck to a time and a feeling when I was out of contact.

But life does catch up with you and eventually you have to deal with these feelings. I had always hoped that Mum would go first as Dad would have not lingered on but would have gone from a broken heart. Mum is much more the fighter. Being told by one of the support staff that her short term memory was going did not help.

Is this the Parkinsons taking its course or simple old age we are not sure. I pray that it is the latter as the former would be to cruel.

Tough personal day

Its a year since my father died, while I was on the other side of the world. There was so much I wanted to say and never did, in common with a lot of people I suppose, the issues yesterday were with my mother. I hate that I am getting into the same position with her. She has Parkinsons, not the type that dulls the mind the type that attacks the body. We had to move her from her home of 58 years to a hospital, after she had a fall, for 9 weeks and now into a nursing home. As a result she is losing control over her life and gets frustrated and I got the frustration on Sunday. Its so hard she wants me to come home and look after her, that's the way it was when she grew up, and I now have my own family half the world away and so cannot. It hurts when she lashes out and the day being the anniversary of dads death made it harder but being a son is like being a husband is like being a father. You have to take it and stand up.

Its kind of like the golf day when things take your mind off the rest of the world. Then back to the hotel and the rest of the world crashes back in.

Am I the only person in the world who understands that Hezbollah are the bad guys, hiding amongst the population and launching strikes on civilians but the UN obviously sees it through the same old corrupt lens. Corrupt in thought as well as morally and physically. I see Kofi Annan as a greedy man grasping at the last vestige's of influence has he no shame at all.

And so it goes on

Went and played golf yesterday, it never ceases to amaze me that doing something that simple can crystalize where you are. I guess, in common with other activities, concentrating on one thing helps put the rest into perspective. In the case of golf having your life dominated by a little white ball for a few hours makes other things fall into perspective.

In this case the middle east, my cash flow problems and life generally went sharply out of focus. Wandering around the golf course, a beautiful location if ever there was one, took me back quite a bit.

Let me explain. When I was very young my parents would, on occasion, take us into the hills behind town for a barbeque. We would gather wood and build a fire pit from some stones. We would capture or try to capture fresh water crayfish from the streams. We could pick wild flowers, life was so good and they were very happy days.

The golf course is built where we used to go. Its hard to realize that your children cannot do the same because there are just to many of us now. We cannot pick the wildflowers because we would wipe them out, we cannot build our own fire pits because there just is not the space.

Arriving back to the hotel that I am staying in brings the world crashing back in. People killing each other, I guess they were doing this when I was growing up we just did not have the immediacy that todays media has. We had time to digest, and I guess we were, to degree, subjected to censorship, in that the people who wrote the newspaper stories most probable had their bias. Today we see the bias in all of its ugly forms. Rolling news means that the same story gets drilled into us hourly and so a reporters bias gets thrust at us hourly and so the truth becomes a difficult commodity.

I do not want to rant about the middle east today and as there are a lack of talking heads the blood pressure is down. Its just that I wonder if the constant exposure to close to real time information dulls the senses and leaves us lacking time to develop our own opinions. It can be easier at times to take the view being thrust at us rather than think up our own.

I do not know how we change this but I worry that we sometimes have so many problems in our lives that objectively reviewing an information from outside our daily existence is to much to do.

Starting out

I suppose I am not alone in thinking the way I do, we all have a different slant on where life has taken and will take us. There are times when I find myself, as this morning, screaming at some moronic idiot talking head on TV or radio, its not that I am right and he is wrong its just I have been where he is talking about and he has not.

The theme this morning was the nasty Israeli over reactions in the middle east. There is this talking head taking sides and pontificating from the safety of his studio in Australia. I do not come down on any side, although I have been much more sympathetic to the Palestinians of late, until they kidnapped the soldier and murdered the settler they were holding, its called losing the bad news. I do understand that you cannot view life in the middle east with the same eye's as you do life in Australia. These groups all want to wipe each other out to the arab terrorist the only good Israeli is a dead one and vice versa. These are not gangs in Cronulla or what ever the beach was, these are serious people whose life is mayhem and murder. Who started it many years ago is not the point any more.

We either let them fight it out or we give up any middle east influence for the next two or three generations by retreating.

Its a mess but what is not needed are the talking heads.