Travel Tales of Mind and Body

I travel a lot for work and for pleasure. I enjoy it. It's part of me.

My parents, particularly my dad, were adventurers, and we spent four years of my childhood travelling together across the UK and abroad, before settling in Cornwall, quite a way away from Liverpool, the place of all our births.

My dad got the taste for travel during World War Two. Conscripted towards the end of the war he was stationed in Singapore and Indian. I have several albums of his full of photographs, poems and thoughts of his time in Asia and several more recording the annual holidays he took during the rest of the 1940s and into the 1950s. For their honeymoon trip in 1957 my dad suggested a trip abroad but my mum was anxious about flying so instead they travelled to Ilfracombe. A few years later though she was persuaded and as well as living in various towns and cities in England, Scotland and Wales as a family we lived in the Bahamas for a memorable nine months, travelling also to Bermuda and Miami whilst we were there. Travel broadens the mind we are told and I can concur with this statement. Previously a shy child I became, during our travels, more confident and able to challenge those who teased me because of my flat vowels and tourist type behavior in the places we lived in meant that I was top of Scottish history in my Edinburgh classroom and able to talk about North American flora and fauna from first-hand experience. My first memories of observing racism and experiencing sexism (my mum and I, both dressed in pretty summer dresses, were made to sit in the back row of Flamingo Park because our knees were showing) also appened whilst abroad. The food was a revelation too: haggis, Welsh cakes, peanut butter, tuna, fried plantain and banana pie were all new tastes for me. Our adventures were funded by the sale of our small house and once the money ran out my parents took whatever work was on offer. There were lean times and my food memories of my teenage years in Cornwall include bean stew before it became fashionable, mackerel twice a week, donated by the fisherman my mum served in the newsagents where she worked, and in deference to our roots ‘blind’ (no meat) scouse.  

Between leaving Cornwall in 1979 and returning full time to Falmouth (the town where I spent most of my teenage years) in 2014 I lived in south and north London, Cheshire, Staffordshire and Warwickshire. Having trained and practiced as a nursery nurse for 10 years I returned to education aged 28 in the last 1980s and following undergraduate and postgraduate study worked full time in various universities for nearly 22 years. Some of the research, examining and other roles I took on involved travel, including some trips to Europe, Canada, America and Australia. Add to this some holidays abroad and the travels and the new experiences continued.

Two years ago I felt my full-time position and I now work freelance. Living as I do not 40 miles away from Lands End even UK journeys often take quite a while. In the last month I have travelled for work related trips to and from Aberdeen, Coventry, Bath, Belfast, Plymouth and Greenwich.  As I write this piece I am in Vancouver, sadly, unexpectedly, following the sudden death of a family member. Unable to sleep hardly at all for quite a few days I have been thinking about the embodied experience of travel. Eating, as already highlighted, is part of the adventure, but sleep, or rather the lack of it, is less fun. It’s not just different time zones that upset my usual patterns (which I admit are less regular in mid-life than they were previously) but the firmness of the mattress (I prefer harder to soft), the quality of the bedding (cotton please) and the pillows. I am very fussy indeed about pillows and like soft and malleable ones that once squashed into the shape required stay that way rather than bounce back to their original form, or worse still are hard and impossible to manipulate at all.

My current sleeping arrangements are just how I like them with the additional comfort of a sleeping cat for company. My voyager blood denies me the delight of such a companion permanently and I enjoy the novelty of sharing my bed with a small creature who seems to need three quarters of the available space.