Hello, It's me again...

Something made me stop writing this a while back. After a hastier departure than I'd have liked from Afghanistan, things got a little sad in Chad, though I'm glad now for having had the experience, and we were lucky that we got close enough to warm our hands on the fire in Afghanistan, and not be burned by it, as so many others have been.

So after a solo six month trip to Niger and Chad, accompanied by someone who I now know was the Lozenge, I returned to London, a bit worried the adventure had ended at the edge of the Sahara; determined that motherhood was not going to change me; and that Cath Kidson and Emma Bridgewater would not get a look in, in our kitchen. I wondered how we would manage to avoid the suffocating Western vibe towards creating an image of something known as perfection. In my eyes back then, children seemed to bring on anarchy (I was right) so why not become more anarchic than try to perfectionize? Camden helped. Not much perfection here I thought as I wheeled a diminutive Lozenge along the towpath and watched a valiant goose negotiate between a shopping trolley and empty bottles and cans floating on a Sunday morning canal. Our playmates were initially the drunks on the towpath and the lights out the back of our house at 3am were certainly more Rear Window than Mary Poppins. The imperfections and quirks saved us from feeling our lives had been tamed and claimed by the forces of grown-up-dom.

And in all its dirty beauty and complexity, Camden has chipped a place in our hearts, so I can only imagine that other places might do the same. Perhaps that's why I want to keep this blog going. Not least for ourselves because we are leaving our row of neighbours who would be the ones to say: 'I remember the time when you...'. But also for our tiny travel companions to be able to read back when they are bigger, and perhaps understand why we made these strange life decisions on their behalf. Thirdly, because I feel the need to build and create some kind of permanence in an itinerant life.

My above-brow-niggle is that our energies enthusiastically expend; the words we hear and use puff into the air; experiences we share alone and with others fade as a Polaroid picture and things we learn are used and then replaced with more topical knowledge as the years go by.

For those of you we love and will miss immeasurably, we hope this blog might be a way of following a life that isn't your own, and because of distance may become disconnected with your own. We'd rather be sharing it with you in a real sense. But this might at least keep us in tune as we squeak and hoot away on our individual instruments in this hotch-potch orchestra of life.

Please feel free to post comments. We like to know you're still there even if we're not. And most of all, please come and visit for real (although the caveat remains, that I have no idea where we will end up or how many times we'll be forced to move on before we're ready.)


Below is what I wrote before J and I started out in Afghanistan in 2007. I think it still holds its values for this next chapter. But this time, the people reading to the end might also be our 2 little travel companions, who might ask themselves one day why they never had one place called, Home. Here is why.

And of course, this is still for you, Mum. Just because we chose to live far away, doesn't mean we don't dream of chatting to you every morning over the garden fence at some point in our lives.

The small print

It could be because an adventure isn't an adventure until you've had it. Or maybe it is because relating your experiences many times over can run the risk of remembering the stories you tell and not the truth.

This is not a literary masterpiece. It probably won't make you cry and might not make you laugh. It may not give you any more of a picture than you had already imagined.
But I have been given the opportunity to live in a foreign country because of someone else. It feels like a clean sheet of paper that I can put anything down on. I'll have enough regrets when I'm 80 without wishing that I'd written a few notes on our time in unusual places, and since I can barely write anymore after typing for all these years, and Wifi is often easier to find than a pen these days, my solution was an online diary.


My journalism tutor once said, 'Make sure you get all the important bits in the introduction - as the only person that will read to the end is your Mum.'

So this is for you Mum.