Wednesday, 4 May 2005

Mark Twain once wrote, "that there ain't no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them." On a small ship it was difficult to avoid some of the members of the 'Whenwe Tribe', so called because most of their sentences began with 'When we were in Hawaii last year', 'When we were in London', 'When we holidayed in the Maldives', 'When we were in ...' One particular lady was easy to spot: she constantly engaged in the 1980s practice, since fallen out of favour, of miming 'in quotes', by raising both hands and imitating the death throes of a cockroach.

The passenger accommodation was directly above the engine room and, although we had been issued with earplugs, it wasn't always easy to fall asleep which gave me a welcome excuse to relax topside and look at the tropical night sky as I alternated between a hard wooden bunk on the aftdeck or my hammock strung between the wheelhouse and the ships funnel!

I read somewhere that journeys are the midwives of thoughts as few places are more conducive to internal conversations than a moving plane, train or ship. And this trip had giving me much to think about because it is not necessarily at home that we best encounter our true self. The furniture insist that we cannot change because it does not; the domestic setting keeps us tethered to the person we are in ordinary life, but who may not be who we essentially are. Of course, I had travelled before but even though I had already seen many different things, I had seen them at the wrong time, before I had had a chance to build up the necessary receptivities. The sights - and insights - I had encountered on this trip would no doubt become to me what Wordsworth termed 'spots of time':

There are in our existence spots of time, That with distinct pre-eminence retain A renovating virtue ... That penetrates, enables us to mount, When high, more high, and lifts us up when fallen.