Sometimes you just have to be brave and do the adventurous thing. It's different for every person, but for me travelling is the most startlingly traumatic thing. That sudden shift in location is shocking, and applies to repeated trips as well as exploration and visiting places you haven't been. It's exciting and strange and scary and taxing. 'Taxing?', you might think. 'Taxing'? Travelling is taxing if you're a picky person. You don't get to eat your own cooking, there's a change of locale, it can be a very isolating experience, and the travelling itself can be very wearing indeed. So why do it?
I choose to travel to pay homage, and there is usually a reason to every trip. When last I went on holiday, it was to Orkney, and that was part of my Alan Plater homage, specifically to his fittingly named television mini-series 'Oliver's Travels'. And that homage was what really made the experience worthwhile, for there were Italian chapels and magnificent cathedrals and runic inscriptions and stone rings and more... My next journey is also a homage, both to my lovely leaf-daughter in Nottingham and to the historic city of Edinburgh. Now Edinburgh has two points of homage, one again to Alan Plater and his 'The Beiderbecke Tapes' and to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. That makes a more than worthwhile trip. And it's all happening at incredibly short notice which is wonderful!
My most successful trip without a homage aspect was my first venture outside of Britain - it was to Barcelona - for which I had no reason except that there was a 'Font Magica' and a seaside. Barcelona in Autumn was lovely, and of course they serve ice cream on Las Ramblas up until midnight so it's always worthwhile! Places that do that get special points on the Oliver scale of places to visit. Ultimately, though, the Barcelona trip did acquire a sense of homage in the Gaudi-ness of it all. Gaudi built things, including the iconic never-completed cathedral Sagrada Familia. A sense of history and homage seems to be an essential part of going anywhere in my personal sense of being, even to the point of ritually paying homage to the sea here in Aberystwyth every week I come up. How can everyone not go and stand on the beach at some point each week, and smile?
So where does that leave the sense of fun and adventure implied in travelling and exploration? It's hard to say, really, as it seems like those are things that have really fallen prey to the way travelling doesn't happen spontaneously any more. Everything gets planned weeks or even months ahead, because it's too scary to just hope that there will be a room at the other end, or that there will be trains. I can only organise a trip to Edinburgh with less than two weeks warning because travelling singly is simple. Spontaneity for the most part seems to be something associated with a sense of individuality. Is that a wrong thing to think in general? Is it a personal prejudice on past events? Or is it just an axiomatic generality? Surely there are matched couples out in the world who can be just as free and spontaneous? Two halves of the same whole being able to act spontaneously? Is that maybe a myth too?
If we travel to make homage does that mean we have neglected something? What about the future? All exploration is homage to the future, for it is the true physical parallel to what we do everyday. We're travellers in time, exploring a new world every instant, and one that can be appreciated at every instant if we might only remember.
O.
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