Our purpose? An Outdoor First Aid course.

Over rising four years of travel, we’ve had our fair share of mishaps. I’d say “more than our fair share”, but then I know people who are fundamentally stationary who are regulars at the local ER, lining up broken limbs like shots in a biker bar.

There was the car crash in Egypt, the rock fall in the Himalayas and that thing with the machete in Halmahera, not to mention a number of funny motorbike stories.

But it was Mongolia that really did it. There’s nothing quite like a horse riding accident in the middle of fucking nowhere, outer Mongolia, to bring home to one how much one does (or rather doesn’t) know about First Aid.

Had Zac had head or spinal injuries there was not one person in the group who would have known how to move him safely.

Or, as another “little” cousin, now mysteriously grown up and an expedition caver – I do find it discombobulating when people you remember chewing on your upper arm as infants suddenly turn into full-blown adults with proper jobs — put it over beers. “What you need is a Wilderness First Aid course. A standard first aid course will teach you stuff like never to use a tourniquet, but a Wilderness First Aid course might teach you to use one, because you’ll lose the limb but save the life.”

And so, we are off to High Peak First Aid, who train expedition leaders, inter alia, in the fine art of Outdoor (Wilderness) First Aid. They don’t normally take under-16s, but Nicola, who runs the show, has decided that between Everest Base Camp and being medevaced out of Mongolia, he’s probably got some useful experience to bring to the table.

Further, he’s not remotely enthusiastic about doing school stuff with me. If we continue this much longer, I think, he’s going to need tutors. And that would require getting organised. And that would suck.

It’s a two-day course, the first day covering the basics of workplace First Aid in an outdoor environment, and the second moving onto outdoor first aid specifics. I figure it’ll be educational for both of us, and brilliant for Zac’s science.

Science, like maths, is not a strength of mine. And, while three months in Chinese school has covered maths he wouldn’t touch until optional 16+ in the UK, I’m more than a little concerned about his science.

Frankly, it’s easy enough to cover off the UK primary curriculum and more en passant while travelling. To world school at high school level, where subjects are taught by specialists with degrees, and content becomes significantly more advanced, is very considerably more difficult.

Unless, I guess, you’re a two-parent family with one science grad and one arts grad. Or, of course, if your child isn’t interested in university, or you’re philosophically opposed to schools and what’s taught in them.

I’m not a philosophical unschooler. I did an academic degree. I wish I’d done more science. I think it’s good for kids to know stuff, even if they don’t consciously use said knowledge and associated skills in adult life, and I wish I knew more “stuff”. Further, Zac is an academically able child who wants to go to a good university.

Honestly, since China, the whole world schooling thing has become rather difficult. Zac is, obviously, still learning from what’s around him, picking up bits of Italian, acquiring history and art history and food history and ancient history, and architecture, and religion and the rest.

On many levels, he’s still learning much more than he would in school. On other levels, there are… well, gaps. Notably in science.

Further, he’s not remotely enthusiastic about doing school stuff with me. If we continue this much longer, I think, he’s going to need tutors.

And that would require getting organised. And that would suck. We’re keeping up the Chinese, and he’s doing the odd bit of writing, but I’m not at all sure either of us are committed enough to the education thing for it to work.

Here, by contrast, is a terrifyingly organised mama who’s making academic world schooling work for multiple offspring: by focused attention four hours a day, four mornings a week, plus constructive projects in the pm. It’s possibly not coincidental that she’s a professional educator and they spend long periods in one place.

By the end of the day, my brain is aching. I’ve killed one patient by failing to check their airway, while trying to stop an imaginary catastrophic bleed when what they actually have is a spinal injury. Sigh.

Back in the Peaks, some of our group, who are attending the first day as a routine First Aid qualification for the workplace, seem a little mystified by the presence of a long-haired, feral hippie child who should oh-so-obviously be in school. Others, who work with young people, find Zac’s introduction of bearsharks as an environmental hazard vaguely amusing.

And, boy, do we learn! How the heart works and why CPR and defibrillators work; why the Golden Hour is so-called; symptoms of shock; how to treat burns; how to manage bleeding; how to assess a casualty; scary stuff about sucking chest wounds and C-spine injuries. We practice using a defibrillator, and perform CPR on dummies.

And then we go out into the cold, damp, muddy woods to practice real-life scenarios, working in groups. Because, to state the blindingly obvious, it’s rather easier to keep someone warm if they’ve had an accident in the office than to keep someone warm if they’re lying in the mud in a chilly British winter, hours from help.

By the end of the day, my brain is aching. I’ve killed one patient by failing to check their airway, while trying to stop an imaginary catastrophic bleed when the fundamental problem is they, umm, can’t breathe because they’re unconscious in a bad position. Sigh.

Zac and I retreat to a quiet, country pub for proper fish and chips and a debrief. We go through our notes and consolidate what we’ve learned. That’s a tonne of bloody science, right there! Physiology, anatomy, you name it… LOADS more than he’d learn in school! World schooling rocks! Especially when it’s someone else doing it (thanks, Nicola!).

Someone has to explain to me that the reason he’s screaming while I’m bandaging him is that I’m strapping the wrong part of his arm. I think I may lack the caring gene.

Day 2 is tougher on some levels, easier on others. We’re separated into groups – Nicola places me and Zac in different groups to… well, to keep me out of his face and leave him space to be himself, although she puts it a little more diplomatically than that – and head out into the slippery, slidy woodland.

We take it in turns to act as casualties and to treat casualties. The acting part is most excellent fun. I have to appear confused, with a broken ankle, limping, sit down on a log and then pass out. I’m very pleased with my fall off the log.

Treating casualties? Well, we do terribly well at keeping one chap warm with body heat. But we’ve sadly failed to miss the fact that he’s diabetic, due to not searching his pockets well enough. Another one bites the dust. Bugger.

The less said about my map-reading, I feel, the better.

Our final exercise is to rescue a chap from a tree, on a steep and slippery slope, where he’s fallen, under time pressure because bandits enter the ravine at sunset, which isn’t far away. It’s surprisingly difficult, even with four of us and a tarpaulin, to get him down the slope with both him and us in one piece, and Nicola has to explain to me that the reason he’s screaming while I’m bandaging him is that I’m strapping the wrong part of his arm. I think I may lack the caring gene.

By the end, though, we’re not only qualified Outdoor First Aiders but, I figure optimistically, fully equipped for our planned adventure down the Blue Nile.

Push comes to shove, after months in Europe plus chowing our way through Eataly, I seem to be mysteriously short of cash. It’s probably, I figure, time I put my head down for a bit somewhere you don’t spend twenty bloody quid every time you go out to eat, and made some money.

First, though, a little stop in Dahab. We love Dahab. We have friends there. I have diving withdrawal. And, after months in Europe plus chowing our way through Eataly, I seem to be mysteriously short of cash.

It’s probably, I figure, time I put my head down for a bit somewhere you don’t spend twenty bloody quid every time you go out to eat, and made some money. Particularly given there are no ATMs or credit cards in Sudan, and, I’d imagine, buggerall internet as well.

Heyho. We make our farewells to friends and family. And, as I stumble drunkenly from Dalston Superstore to collect Zac and our packs from Caro and Freddo’s house – no point in going to bed before a 5.30am flight with a 2-hour checkin, right? — I’m super-excited about seeing Ethiopia.

Zac is less so. “You know, whenever I think about Africa, I just think about stomach bugs. What’s Ethiopia GOT, anyway?”

“Loadza sshtuff,” I slur. “Oh my god! I’ve lossht our ticketsssh!”

“You’re drunk,” my spawn says, accusingly, as I fumble, squinting, through my bag, wondering whether that third bottle of red in Dalston Superstore was REALLY a good idea, though I guess at least it enabled me to sleep on the train to the airport. “You’re drunk, and you’re obnoxious.”

He has a point. “I’m not sure about Ethiopia,” he adds. “I think I wanna hang out in Dahab.”

“I’VE LOSSSHHHHT OUR TICKETSSSSHHHH,” I wail. “They’re NEVER going to let usssh on the plane. And zhey’ll charge us HUNDREDS OF EUROS FOR NOT HAVING ZHEM. It COSSHTSSSHHH SHHHOOOO MUDGE MONEY, SHOOO MUDGE MONEY! YOU DON’T UNDERSSHSTAND!”

Not only do the EasyJet crew let us on the plane, never a given with a blood-alcohol level like mine, but they don’t charge us for the lost boarding passes. I can only imagine they feel sorry for poor Zac, trailing behind me in a puddle of tween embarrassment.

Egypt, here we come! (Via Geneva, cos I’m cheap.)

The post Science, World Schooling and, Ya Know, Stuff appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

Things to do are easy enough. But the people take some wrangling, not least…

Well… In a way, I want it to be like it was when we lived in London, where you all hook up in a big gang, pop round each other’s houses, and catch up on each other’s news.

And, between not knowing when we’re going to arrive because of the whole broken arm debacle and the general easy-come easy-go approach that sets in after more than three years travelling – “Oh, ya know, we think we’ll be there next week. Just don’t have tickets yet…” – this proves harder to arrange than anticipated.

I’m just so used to the whole nomad thing that I’m out of the zone of people who keep plans, and diaries, and have regular jobs, and school commitments, and book flights aeons ahead of time that, by normal standards, I’m so annoyingly vague it’s close to sociopathic.

Or, as my dear friend Sarah says, after putting on an enormous and fabulous barbecue for us and a bunch of friends at buggerall notice, “What you need to do is just pick a day, and a pub, and tell everyone you’ll be in it, then whoever wants to come comes. That’s what J does.”

I could have people round my house and cook gigantic, catastrophically organised dinners where the food arrived so late my dear friend Tony had to be scraped off the ceiling after drinking practically his entire bodyweight in red wine.

But I don’t WANT that. I’m not READY for full expat.

I want it to be like it was when we still lived there, where we all popped round each other’s houses and caught up on gossip, where I was naturally on the invitation list to these sorts of things instead of having to have them put on for me, where I could have people round my house and cook gigantic, catastrophically organised dinners where the food arrived so late my dear friend Tony had to be scraped off the ceiling after drinking practically his entire bodyweight in red wine, and where I knew where the cool bars were and had Moses power on the door instead of being asked to pay at Dalston Superstore – I tell you, Dalston fucking Superstore! You have to PAY for Dalston fucking Superstore! – like a tourist and relying on my friends to leverage me in.

Further, I want other people’s babies to still be the same size they were when I last saw them, rather than so inconsiderately growing, and, given they have grown, I’d like them to recognise me, thank you very much, despite the fact that last time I saw them they weren’t really recognising much but boob and biscuits.

I rather suspect that Zac would have liked to know everyone at Fred’s 13th birthday party, too, rather than just a couple of the lads.

This general phenomenon is, I believe, caught under the catchall “Wants to have her cake and eat it too.”

I content myself with the notion that, after we’ve had a little gallivant around Europe, we can come back to Blighty and do some more catching up. Cos I’ll totally get it organised next time, right?

Temperatures approach the deadly heat of 30°C and we all stop complaining about it being cold and wet and start complaining about it being too fucking hot, and strip off our clothes with gay abandon and burn our wobbly bits to blisteredness, and sit outside the pubs chugging pints and wondering why our heads hurt.

Which isn’t to say that London isn’t fun. There are few places more fun, in fact, than London in one of its rare bright summers – where temperatures approach the deadly heat of 30°C and we all stop complaining about it being cold and wet and start complaining about it being too fucking hot, and strip off our clothes with gay abandon and burn our wobbly bits to blisteredness, and sit outside the pubs chugging pints and wondering why our heads hurt – even if the city has, as I remarked, had the temerity to change.

I mean, seriously. Between the Olympics and the Jubilee, Soho looks positively sanitised. And Soho is not supposed to be clean and freshly painted. Soho is supposed to look as grimy as you do when you stumble out of Dirtbox – yes, I’m sorry, I’m going back a bit here – in the wee hours of the day on an ecstasy and cider comedown looking almost, but not quite, as bad, as you do when you exit Trade (like I say, I’m going back a bit) at 3 in the afternoon, because after Dirtbox you just look a bit grimy and wide-eyed, and after Trade you look like someone just cheese-grated your face.

Anywise…. Everywhere in central London has been painted. There are enormous bloody great monstrous buildings where there used to be harmless old kiosks, and hoardings hide yet more shiny carbuncles that are changing the shape of my ugly but much adored metropolis.

I realise, in fact, how long we’ve been away when Zac’s Australian grandmother wants to take him to the cinema, and I go to buy a copy of Time Out, and the man at the newsstand takes pity on me and gives me his copy, because it’s a freesheet nowadays, and has been for donkey’s years.

And, further, when Zac can’t even see the film he wants because, despite having his mother – and his sodding grandmother — with him, it turns out The World’s End is rated 15 and therefore he can’t see it in the cinemas so should stick to illegally downloading it.

The Hunterian Museum is fab, by the way. You should visit. As is Hampton Court, and those riverside pubs.

And if you’re one of the many people I vaguely Facebooked and then failed to make a concrete arrangement with, I am very sorry, I hope we’re still friends, and I promise I’ll do it better next time.

The post I Haven’t Got This Coming Home Lark Right appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

The cousins practiced their best gurns and zombie faces in front of Hardwick New Hall, the monogrammed monument that Bess of Hardwick built as a huge F.U. to her fourth and richest husband.

Not that cousin Evie gurns. My, cousin Becky, you make beautiful children!

In the Hall, there’s a historical detective zone, complete with costumes.

Below it, there are fields of wildflowers that lead you down to an old mill, with a stream, and flour, and all.

There is also the ruined old hall, Bess’ father’s pride and joy, in front of which one can refuse to pose for photos.

There are fields to run through, with adoring grandparents to watch.

And stables to visit, and tip-and-run cricket, with proper cricketers, and Twister, and Monopoly — just like we played as children — and even the rare non-gurning photo.

The adults? We mainly cooked. And drank wine. And went to the pub. And sat in the sun.

Isn’t that how it’s always been? Well, in my family, anyway.

I can’t recommend National Trust Cottages highly enough. The National Trust is a charity that looks after historic buildings and gardens in the UK, and the cottages are typically on their grounds. We stayed at 6 High Hazels and 4 Stable Yard.

If you’re looking to stay somewhere even more historic, the Landmark Trust rents out historic, quirky buildings, from forts to follies to railway carriages.

The post In an English Country Garden appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

Still infused with the rationality of Mongolian and Chinese rail systems, I signally fail to negotiate the complexity that is buying train tickets in the UK. Like a tourist, I head to the machine, buy the cheapest return I can see, then (switching to native mode) realise it’s a cheap day return, AKA I need to go there and back in the same day.

Bugger.

£65 poorer (that’s over $100, American readers, for a train journey that takes under two hours), I reroute to the ticket office, leaving Zac choosing between Beano and The Simpsons and poring over a range of packet sandwiches (another snack food in which, like fish and chips, we lead the world) while I negotiate the queue.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I don’t think I bought the right ticket. I do want a return to London, but I bought a same day return by mistake.”

The guy takes my old tickets, clears the card payment, hands me a receipt and sets me up with the correct tickets. At a little over half the price, provided I’m travelling with the child on the child ticket, we can go and come back on different days, but we’ll need to travel after 9.30am, which I was going to do anyway, since the next train to our destination is at 9.45.

And, yes, that is cheaper than the only one-way ticket available at the machines. Go figure.

It doesn’t get more ageing than a hearing aid, does it, really? Unless it’s a walking stick, or a zimmer frame, I guess. It does make conversation a hell of a lot easier, though.

King’s Lynn, unlike London, doesn’t look any cleaner. It’s a curious place, King’s Lynn, a mix of a prettily historic medieval centre, lovely low-rise flint cottages, cobbled streets, gothic churches, even the odd half-timbered building, with some absolutely abysmal concrete flung up in the same 1960s modernist shitfest that buggered up all of Oxford town centre but the bits the colleges own.

I can’t quite work out whether King’s Lynn doesn’t look clean because I’ve already adapted to being in the first world, or whether it’s that London underwent a massive makeover for the Olympics and the Jubilee and no one got around to tidying up the rest of the country (although I understand that Birmingham, the UK’s second city, and a place we southerners have historically avoided like herpes, is now a tourist destination for its Christmas Market, so, go figure).

My dad picks us up from the station. He’s a) lost weight and b) finally acquired an invisible hearing aid, an indicator of advanced age that, like any robust chap in his 60s – my father hikes at the same pace I do, and could therefore nail Everest Base Camp as easily as we did – he’s been as keen to avoid as, well, anyone would be, really, right? Because it doesn’t get more ageing than a hearing aid, does it? Unless it’s a walking stick, or a zimmer frame, I guess.

It does make conversation a hell of a lot easier, though.

Most of which conversation, as Zac zooms back into the mode of hanging out with Grandpa as though he’s never been away, is on the topic of Sid Meier’s Civilization, with only a token inspection of Zac’s arm, which, but for a scar, looks quite phenomenally undamaged.

My father, like most folk of his generation, has been expecting a cast. Or at least a sling.

Why doesn’t the NHS have enough space to do the surgery? Because they’ve been closing hospitals to cut costs. I may have over-simplified this a little, but, however you cut it, there is absolutely no way it makes sense.

My ma, like Zac, has also had a piece of metal put into her. In this instance, it’s half a knee. Yes, half a knee. Not a whole knee. Half a knee.

According to my aunts, this will come to me too around the age of 60, which is a bit annoying since my mother hasn’t really gone grey yet — I have (horrifically) been mistaken for her sister on occasion — and therefore I was really hoping to delay the more unseemly parts of ageing.

In the absolute insanity that is British medical care, my mother has had the surgery free on the NHS. However, because the NHS doesn’t have space to do it in the NHS hospitals, it has been done in a private hospital, so the NHS is paying the private hospital for the bed space, plus profit margin. The surgeon, who works for the NHS some of the time and the private hospital some of the time, is doing this job for the private hospital, so the NHS is paying a) his private rate and b) the hospital’s margin on said rate.

And why doesn’t the NHS have enough space to do the surgery? Because they’ve been closing hospitals to cut costs.

I may have over-simplified this a little, but, however you angle it, there is absolutely no way it makes sense.

The medical care, it should be emphasised, was excellent, if a little on the brusque side, what with it being shift-change on a Sunday morning and me, in hindsight at least, having one of the easier labours on record.

“Isn’t it nice?” my mother says. “I’ve never been in such a nice hospital. And the food’s brilliant!”

Compared to the splendours of our private room with floor-to-ceiling windows, wood floors, white leather sofas and private bathroom with complimentary Kiehl’s products that we had in Hong Kong on the travel insurance, not to mention the myriad restaurant options available on room service, this carpet-tiled room in an underwhelming red-brick bungalow seems a little, well, small and shabby.

Her bed, for example, doesn’t have nearly enough buttons.

But it’s definitely preferable to the space where I had Zac on the NHS, where broken internal windows had been replaced with binbags due to an absence of funds. (The medical care, it should be emphasised, was excellent, if a little on the brusque side, what with it being shift-change on a Sunday morning and me, with hindsight, having one of the easier labours on record.)

Anywise, soon Zac and Granny are comparing injuries and surgery stories very much like a couple of old ladies, I’m being scolded by nurses for doing things like sitting on the bed, my aunt’s popping in to say hello to us, and it’s all perfectly jolly.

Thanks to the miracle that is being happily married to the same woman for over 40 years and counting, my father’s culinary range does not extend significantly beyond bacon and eggs.

My father and I slip into our typical ritual of too much red wine with dinner, followed by a classic movie with Zac and too much red wine. Zac slips into his typical ritual, which is briefly refamiliarising himself with the toys and books in “his” little galleried attic bedroom, then running round to the neighbours, announcing his arrival to his friend Archie, and hitting the X-Box like a small tornado.

Archie, I am amused to notice, at the ripe old age of 14, is already over six feet tall, which gives him pretty much a foot in height on Zac, who’s not exactly shrimpy but has yet to hit his adolescent growth spurt. As with Fred and Aslan in London, neither age nor distance seems to have withered this friendship.

Thanks to the miracle that is being happily married to the same woman for over 40 years and counting, my father’s culinary range does not extend significantly beyond bacon and eggs. (He cleans and tidies, my ma does the washing, the cooking and the shopping.)

So, I cook. And mess the place up by emptying stuff out of my bag and leaving it on tables. And then we settle on the Coen Brothers for the evening. My father’s rather horrified that neither of us have seen Fargo, so we watch that, and find it absolutely bloody brilliant.

Physio is, various travelling friends have told me with varying levels of diplomacy, the sort of thing that’s best done with continuity of care unless (and I expand the subtext here) you want your child to be damaged for life, you selfish fucking cow.

Friday dawns. My father pops to the hospital to collect my ma, dropping Zac and me in town at the physio, with whom, in a fit of organisation, I made an appointment, thanks to the wonders of Google and Skype calling, from Hong Kong.

Many forms of medical follow-up can be done remotely, or with local medical teams. Physio, on the other hand, requires a physical presence to feel what’s happening with the muscles, and is, various travelling friends have told me with varying levels of diplomacy over Facebook, the sort of thing that’s best done with continuity of care unless (and I expand the subtext here) you want your child to be damaged for life, you selfish fucking cow.

The physio’s a nice, no-messing South African lady, with a background in treating rugby players, who appears mildly horrified by Zac’s general lack of flesh – as I have explained to curious onlookers the world over, he’s naturally thin, and gets it from his dad – but pleased with his progress.

“It’s good that they get them using the arm straight away in Hong Kong,” she says. “In England, they keep them in a sling for weeks, and you can imagine the level of work we have to do to get things moving after that.”

“Can you reach your arm up behind your back?” she asks.

Zac extends his bad arm behind his back and reaches his hair. She double-takes. “He’s very supple,” I say. “He can cross his legs behind his head. Show her the good arm.”

Zac reaches his good arm up behind his back and touches the middle of his skull. “Ah,” she says. “You have lost a little rotation there.”

He shouldn’t need more than a couple of follow-up appointments. Two, possibly, three. Excellent, I think. This little broken arm isn’t going to impact our travel plans at all. Not that we really have travel plans.

It emerges, alarmingly, that the solid lump in his arm both Zac and I thought was the metal plate is actually muscles gone solid after almost a week of immobility followed by surgery that, I believe, involved prising them apart and clamping them in position to get at the broken bone below.

The physio gives him a range of exercises to do, twice daily, using a stick, and instructs him to massage the scar and the area with Bio-Oil twice daily to loosen up his muscles.

He shouldn’t need more than a couple of follow-up appointments. Two, possibly, three.

Excellent, I think. This little broken arm isn’t going to impact our travel plans at all. Not that we really have travel plans, apart from eating Italian food in Italy and steak frites in Paris, visiting the Van Gogh museum and an astrophysics lab in Amsterdam, getting a proper week in in a proper flat in London to catch up with friends, doing an Outdoor First Aid course, and probably Barcelona, too.

We might need to stay in England a bit longer than planned. But in this lovely sunny weather – rural England, like much of rural Northern Europe, looks dazzling in the summer sun, not least because it comes so rarely – that’s honestly no hardship.

The post To Physio and Beyond appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

Once we’re past the usual long, ugly, angry queues at immigration, I notice, bleakly, how very unaesthetic my countryfolk are as a nation compared to, say, the Swedes or the Thais – Americans, insert your own “teeth” joke here — although, at least, since it’s sunny, folk seem less collectively miserable than usual.

This, of course, is the point at which the conventional narrative of longterm travel dictates that we experience “reverse culture shock”, with a particular focus on the price of the basic necessities of life and perhaps some horror at consumerism.

We don’t. I know London’s expensive. I’m braced for that. And Zac, who’s a sunny little soul even when laid up in a rural Mongolian clinic with an untreated broken arm, shrugs off a long flight like nothing, and anyway, he isn’t paying.

In the run-up to our last visit, I felt conflicted, stranded, like a homeless person coming back to what was once home, torn between the sense of return and the desire to escape, desperate to enjoy and yet oddly out of place. This time – well, this time, I’m pretty sure we know where we’ll settle once Zac’s had enough of being a nomad, and so, we’re quite close to bogstandard expats on a jolly, back in the old country to catch up with friends and family.

Except whenever anyone asks where we’re living, I say, “Well, we’re here at the moment…”

I extract my Hong Kong SIM and rifle through the little camera bag pocket where I keep my SIM cards. Australia? Nope. Timor Leste? Nope. Nepal? Nope. Indonesia? Nope. God, I don’t even know which country some of these are from….

Our first stop at Gatwick is WHSmith, where I load up on English language print media at – oh joy! — non-import prices.

The bits of it that aren’t obsessed with celebrities seem to be majoring on the catalogue of death and destruction that will undoubtedly result from daytime temperatures possibly soaring to the dizzy heights of 30°C (86°F). This is a theme that I find pleasingly familiar, in line with our quasi-annual parade of snowstorm horrors, when schools shut and trains stop for the type of weather that Canadians count as a mild autumn day.

Also, junk food, yay! Salt & vinegar crisps! And Pickled Onion Monster Munch, an infantile taste which I have yet to grow out of, especially since my spawn adores them too.

I extract my Hong Kong SIM and rifle through the camera bag pocket where I keep my SIM cards. Australia? Nope. Timor Leste? Nope. Nepal? Nope. Indonesia? Nope. Mongolia? Nah. God, I don’t even know which country some of these are from….

SIM swapped in, I text my ma and Caro to confirm we’ve made it safely, and double-check Caro’s address (she has, most inconsiderately, moved since we were last here).

Then there’s currency to address. I go through my purse (bought in Lijiang, China), shift the stray Hong Kong dollars, Mongolian togrog and Dubai dirham into the cards section, and put my British pounds into the body of the purse.

In the very special clusterfuck that is British rail transportation in the free market era, there’s about 17 different cheap trains leaving, all of them on different operators with different route restrictions.

All organised, I head off in search of the trains, which, thanks to the bastard reorganisation of Gatwick, aren’t where I remember them being.

It’s most discombobulating.

And, further, in the very special clusterfuck that is British rail transportation in the free market era, there’s about 17 different cheap trains leaving, all of them on different operators with different route restrictions, which means – for those of you who haven’t had the pleasure of travelling in Blighty — that if you buy the wrong ticket you’ll be charged a penalty fare for having the temerity to take the wrong company’s train.

I join the queue to find a man who can advise me which is the cheapest ticket to buy to get us into London Bridge – it could be a return, two singles, or some insane combination of the two.

By now starting to feel the time-change (it’s nine in the evening Hong Kong time, and, despite sterling work with the gin and tonics and vin rouge, I haven’t slept as much as I’d like in transit, thanks to that bastard latte in Dubai), we head back into London Town.

I don’t know how foreigners do it, honestly, I don’t. Well, actually, I do. They front up stupid dinero for the Gatwick Express because they can’t work out why any sane country would have one expensive airport train taking 30 minutes and 17 cheap trains taking — well, frankly, not much longer — to get into the same bloody city, and it all becomes just too confusing for words.

There used to be a grimy old bus garage out the back, where a super-long, single-decker “bendy bus”, the 149, transported me to the myriad delights of Shoreditch (in the 90s), Dalston (in the noughties) and now, for age comes to us all, Stokey.

I defy anyone not to get a buzz of excitement when crossing the Thames on a sunny, summer day, looking down the river at Tower Bridge and the London Eye, police boats and freighters all lined up, the Thames’ murky waters glistening in the sunlight, the waterfront that architectural hodgepodge that speaks of a millennium of heritage.

It’s one of those things – like taking a taxi through Beijing late at night, whooshing on an expressway past the Forbidden City all lit up, or looking up at the Eiffel Tower from the Seine – that’s just iconic.

I’m pleased to be back in London. I’m looking forward to revisiting old favourite places, and getting out to some of the spots I never got around to before, and doing some of our favourite things to do again.

But London Bridge itself is oddly, bastardly different. Gah.

In the finest tradition of British customer service, the lady seems more than a little irritated to be bothered with such trivia as directions when she has a job to do, while oblivious to the fact that said job consists, in its entirety, of giving information to tourists.

There used to be a grimy old bus garage out the back, where a super-long, single-decker “bendy bus”, the 149, transported me to the myriad delights of Shoreditch (in the 90s), Dalston (in the noughties) and now, for age comes to us all, Stokey.

Now there isn’t.

It’s all shiny! And new! It looks like a bloody shopping centre, in Milton Keynes, or possibly Slough, except no one’s put the shops in. And there’s a bloody great glass thing on the plaza, and nary a bus to be seen.

“What IS that glass thing?” I ask my spawn, accusingly. (I have, I notice, gone “full expat”, which is to say I resent my city for having the temerity to change in my absence, and thereby completely bugger up my mental map of it. Watch me. I’ll be whining about immigrants, next.)

“THAT, Mum,” he says, dripping sarcasm from every single word. “Is The Shard.”

“Oh,” I say, and head towards the information desk. In the finest tradition of British customer service, the lady seems more than a little irritated to be bothered with such trivia as directions when she has a job to do, while oblivious to the fact that said job consists, in its entirety, of giving information to tourists, into which stratum of society we, thanks to the backpacks, inevitably fall.

I can charge my Oyster card in a shop back that way. Our bus leaves from the bridge, apparently. And, further, it’s a double-decker, a peculiarly pointless recreation of a Routemaster on which, I dimly recall from tutting over it online, our mayor has spent something like a million quid apiece, largely because he liked them.

I manage to miss our stop completely, and end up in the Orthodox Jewish neighbourhood of Stamford Hill, a navigational error I’m alerted to by the bewigged, bestockinged lady and sidelocked, frockcoated gentleman who are waiting at the bus stop, minding a three-wheeler Bugaboo.

Embarrassingly, given I’ve ridden this bus many hundreds of times, I manage to miss our stop completely, and end up in the Orthodox Jewish neighbourhood of Stamford Hill, a navigational error I’m alerted to by the bewigged, bestockinged lady and sidelocked, frockcoated gentleman who are waiting at the bus stop, minding a three-wheeler Bugaboo.

Back we go, to the bus stop on the other side of the road.

“Can’t we just get a taxi, Mum?” asks Zac, whose pack is weighing him down.

I can’t blame him. I always feel like a twat carrying a backpack in London, too.

“No,” I say. “We’re in London. Taxis are REALLY expensive.”

“What, like a fiver?” he says.

“God, no,” I say. “More. The minimum fare was over a fiver last time I was there. And anyway, there aren’t any up here.”

I ring Caro, and try and explain that I’ve failed to find Stoke Newington Church Street, a street with which I am, in theory, more than familiar, wishing, not for the first time, that I could trust myself with 24/7 internet access enough to run a smartphone with a map on it, or that I’d just got a SIM for Zac’s iPhone at the airport.

Caro will come and rescue us, she says, and we hop on a bus back in the opposite direction. And – yay! – there she is! Within seconds we’re sitting outside her flat in that rare and blissful thing, a sunny London summer, and yakking away.

They don’t talk about travel. They don’t talk about school. Within a few minutes they’re out in the streets playing – sorry, boys – one of the most execrable games of “baseball” I’ve seen outside a YouTube fail video, then breaking the X-Box out for Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, with zombies.

There are, I find, some noticeable differences in the way that adults and children, especially boy children, pick up after they haven’t seen each other for a while. We’ve saved the unveiling of Zac’s impressive scar for Fred and Caro, but beside that there’s little talk of travel.

Caro and I catch up on what’s happened in our lives, and friends’ lives, to date, since we last saw each other a year and a half ago – in the way of people of our advancing ages, there’s not the flurry of news there might have been a decade before, when either lives changed more, or changes seemed more dramatic, or perhaps some combination of the two.

I don’t inflict travel tales on her. I figure, that if friends or family are particularly interested in our travels, they can ask about them, read about them, or both.

Zac, meanwhile, hooks up with Fred, who he calls his “brother from another mother”, and who he’s hung out with in Brisbane, Cairns and London since he left the UK for good, and Aslan, the third of the dynamic duo.

They don’t talk about travel. They don’t talk about school. Within a few minutes they’re out in the streets playing – sorry, boys – one of the most execrable games of “baseball” I’ve seen outside a YouTube fail video, then breaking the X-Box out for Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, with zombies.

We crash around 10pm UK time, or 6am Hong Kong, and wake at 7.30am UK, fully rested and without, as far as I can see, a hint of jetlag.

Around 2am Hong Kong time we decamp for pizza, with Aslan’s ma, Hatice. Prosecco is caned. Pasta is consumed. Fun is had. And – I’m already starting to think of Italy, where we’re headed in the aim of fulfilling Zac’s number one travel dream, to eat Italian food in Italy.

We crash around 10pm UK time, or 6am Hong Kong, and wake at 7.30am UK, fully rested and without, as far as I can see, a hint of jetlag. (The art of conquering jetlag, for what it’s worth, is to stay up till a sensible time at night and get up at a sensible time in the morning, and avoid naps – I find it a lot easier to cope with than, say, waking up at 5.30am five days a week.)

I wouldn’t say it feels as if we’d never been away, but, as I catch yet another familiar bus towards Kings Cross for that familiar train to my parents’ house in Norfolk, I feel at least as at home as I have in Harbin, Ubud or Dahab, and we are, both of us, very much looking forward to an enormous and long pre-arranged family gathering.

It’s in the Peak District, of all places, a famously scenic part of England which, in the way of a local, rather than a tourist, I’ve actually never visited. We’re looking forward muchly.

Astute readers will observe that I’m months behind on my life. This is because I didn’t want to segue from disaster to disaster and miss the good bits in between, which is what I’ve historically done. Also, the pic at the top of this post is by Caro, not me.

The post Cities Change, But Some Things Stay the Same appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

Oysters in Thailand. Ceviche in Kenya. Mysterious stews in Guatemalan eateries with pigs foraging in the mud around the tables, rare beef pho in fly-filled noodle joints — bring it on!

“Swine flu?” I’d say, dismissively. “Had that when it first came to the UK. Bit of a sore throat, went to bed, right as rain 24 hours later…”

“Street food?” I’d begin. “I don’t know why people whinge on about eating street food. I’ve NEVER got sick from street food. Comes from eating dirt as a baby and not being hung up on hygiene…”

But, I hate to say it (and, yes, I know whining about minor ailments has been bit of a theme lately, and all I can say in mitigation is that you’re lucky you haven’t had to spend time with me IRL and I PROMISE this will be the last one), this is no longer the case.

My immune system has gone sub-tropical. My leukocytes are, basically, knackered. They’ve been so busy chasing after potential tummy bugs in Asia that they’re crashing like flies before even the weediest cold bug.

And I’ve had a truly international selection of those lately…

EXHIBIT 1: THE BEIJING COLD (NOVEMBER)

Go to Beijing in winter, and you’re going to get a cold (unless you’re my spawn, of course, who has the constitution of an ox). There’s world class smog, temperatures below zero, and 25 million people in the city, most of them, often, fighting to get on the same bus as you. And, while the whole snotting and spitting thing in China can be overplayed — it’s not like the 70s, when buses were routinely ankle-deep in mucus during winter — colds do the rounds. Big time.

Now, when I get a cold, I don’t really tend to do anything about it, an attitude that I occasionally conflate with stoicism. I mean, I whine, obviously. I whine A LOT. I wallow in bed and self pity reading books. But I don’t do any of that crap like, umm, taking medicine, or seeing a doctor — well, except with this one I couldn’t really breathe properly, so I went to a pharmacist. A CHINESE pharmacist. The prescription of earthworm, human placenta and deactivated bacteria, remarkably, worked.

EXHIBIT 2: THE AUSTRALIAN COLD (DECEMBER)

Our last stop in Asia was with lovely friends in Singapore. One of whom brought back a particularly unlovely cold from Australia, which I developed pretty much on arrival in the UK.

It wasn’t an epic cold. Just one of those snotty ones that — and I blame diving for this — rapidly migrated to my sinuses. If you haven’t had a sinus headache, I must congratulate you. They’re up there with migraines on the horror show factor, and the only thing that really works is codeine. Lots of it. Codeine, unfortunately, is the sort of fun drug that you can’t really get in the UK without seeing a doctor, so I suffered in — well, not exactly silence — until it stopped.

EXHIBIT 3: THE BRITISH COLD (DECEMBER-JANUARY)

Now, I’m not sure who I got this one from. But it settled in right after Christmas, generating some absolutely delightful phlegm, a hawking cough that woke the entire house up, a general feeling of malaise and the sort of sinus headaches that make it feel like there’s an elephant in your head trying to break its way out.

Now, it is not (to put it mildly) unusual for one to acquire a cold in Britain in the winter, when the native population tends to wander around hunched, miserable and mainlining pseudo-ephedrine with an enthusiasm normally devoted to tea or tap lager, and folk from overseas make resolutions never to return again.

But it was at this point, gentle reader, that I realised my immune system was not what it used to be. And began, perhaps belatedly (and, yes, I am a fan of vaccines), to wonder whether one of the reasons I rarely got sick before was because I had a flu jab every year.

EXHIBIT 4: BULGARIAN FLU (JANUARY-FEBRUARY)

How was I to know that Sofia was in the grip of a flu epidemic when we visited Bulgaria? Well, when I got it of course — doh!

Bulgarian flu, I can safely say (and my poor dad can confirm) is a bitch. A real, bona fide flu of the sort that, before paracetamol, killed a lot of people. Aches. Shivers. Hideous semi-waking fever dreams. 39.5° temperature (that’s over 103° for Fahrenheit folk).

Oh, and then it went to the lungs. Where it settled so savagely that I was (and had I not invested in shedloads of cheap Bulgarian cigarettes, this could have been an amazing turning point for me) for THREE WHOLE DAYS incapable of smoking.

I tried, mark you. I tried, despite realising, each time I took a tentative drag and my lungs exploded in rivers of liquid pain, that if I don’t stop some time, one day my lungs will feel like this all the time…

But I digress. (And, please, please don’t ask me when I plan to give up smoking.) I was out for four days and not good for a few days after that. My poor dad was in bed for the big end of a week and has only just gone back to normal. And even Z was a bit croaky with a slight fever for, ooh, about three hours…

My mum? Well SHE had had the flu jab…

EXHIBIT 5: THE SPANISH COLD (FEBRUARY)

It was really lovely to see my gorgeous cousin and her spawn, Z’s gorgeous little cousins, the other weekend. Bit of a shame she had a stinking cold, mind you. Not just for her. But — because, frankly, this is ALL ABOUT ME — for me.

“Don’t hug me!” I said hysterically. “I’ll get it! I’ve had four colds since November and this is beyond a joke!”

“Oh, you’ve probably got immunity to this one, then,” she said, caringly.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve been out of the country for two years.”

“Well, this one’s from Spain,” she said.

This one? Well, it’s not actually that bad. Bit of a cough. Bit shaky. Sucking back snot. Spitting gunk like, well, like a Chinese person, really. But, y’know, I haven’t needed to go to bed. Or a doctors. Or anything…

ANYWISE… NEXT TIME I’M GETTING A FLU SHOT

So… next time I travel in winter, particularly in Northern Europe, I’m getting a flu shot.

Getting sick is a pain in the butt when you’re freelance (or digital nomading) — it hits your income, generates a logjam of back work and leaves you constantly chasing your tail.

More importantly, though, I feel like I’ve hardly had any quality time with friends and family, I’ve seen almost nothing of the country that I wanted to see, there are people I’ve hardly caught up with and some I haven’t seen at all.

And that sucks. Badly.

We are off to Egypt in two sleeps. Where it will be — yay! — warm! Although they have flu there, too. Bird flu. I will be steering well clear of poultry farms.

The post Next Time I’m Getting A Flu Shot appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

You might not have heard of the London Pass — I certainly hadn’t. But it’s a smart card that lets you in free without queuing to a bunch of London attractions — from big ticket stuff like the Tower of London and London Zoo through to cinemas, exhibitions and ice rinks.

So as in Singapore, I let my spawn take the lead and see how much of London we could see in one day.

9.50am: The Tower of London

Built originally by William the Conqueror in the eleventh century, used as a prison for many centuries, and home to royal bling including the Koh-i-Noor diamond, the Tower of London is one of those places that Londoners rarely visit because it’s, frankly, too darn expensive (over £30 for one adult and one child).

Having signally failed to get off to an early start, we arrive almost an hour later than planned and join a tour with a Beefeater, one of those curiously clad ex-soldiers who live in the Tower. Our guy, a former sergeant-major with vocal chords to match, takes us on a merry and extremely gory wander through the history of the Tower: beheaded queens, religious renegades tortured on the rack, little princes murdered, revolutionaries disembowelled and, of course, the duke who drowned in a vat of wine.

Tour complete, we admire some weaponry, whizz through the Crown Jewels, complete with Koh-i-Noor, inspect an exhibition on torture, and head towards London Bridge for our next stop.

12.30pm: The London Tombs (and London Bridge Experience)

“Ooh,” exclaims my son as we spy a car driven by a skeleton on Tooley Street, London Bridge. “Voted The UK’s Scariest Attraction!”

After a quick chat with the skeleton, we’re sold, and follow the footsteps round the corner to an attraction I’d never heard of. “Do you think it will be really scary?” asks my spawn with that salacious blend of excitement and anxiety that’s peculiar to the young. “Not too scary! I mean, I hope I won’t be TOO scared…”

As we enter the London Bridge Experience, a highly entertaining immersive romp where actors walk you through the story of the bridge from Roman times to the present, we witness a small child leaving the next section with his grandmother at some speed.

And, I have to say, in my capacity as a complete wuss, the London Tombs, part two of the tour, are terrifying. We eschew the offer of a “Guardian Angel”, available to people with anxious children, and embark on an underground adventure complete with insanely convincing live actors.

Ever forced your way between walls barely a foot apart from each other to be greeted by a zombie snapping at your neck? Stumbled through severed heads into a meat locker complete with chainsaw-wielding maniac? My heart-rate is at rollercoaster levels all the way through, although I can’t help but notice that more screams come from the adults in the party than the children…

“Well,” says Z, in a satisfied tone. “That’s DEFINITELY much scarier than the London Dungeon.”

2.00pm: Winston Churchill’s Britain At War Experience

Now, even if your only experience of British culture is watching Doctor Who, you will have noticed that we’re a little bit obsessed with Winston Churchill and the Blitz. And the Britain At War Experience was where we were actually headed when the skeleton distracted us.

Another attraction I’d never heard of until my son picked it out of the London Pass book, it is very charming in a sort of homespun, small museum way. I get rather teary at the film, with its homesick letters from a miserable teenage sailor to his mother (he never made it home), hearing Churchill’s “Fight Them On The Beaches” speech outside its traditional context of the pub before an England-Germany football match (and the Germans say we haven’t moved on from World War II!), and reading the wartime letters on display. I’m also amused to find, in a mockup of a wartime pub, that beer and tobacco were pretty much the only things in Britain that were never rationed during the war (and, yes, they even rationed tea!).

Z enjoys the movie, trying on gas masks and WWII uniforms, filling out a quiz, posing in an Anderson shelter, the mock-up of a bomb shelter in the Tube, and a walk through a devastated London.

4.10pm: The London Brass Rubbing Centre

I was chuffed that Z picked brass rubbing as something to do, given I had fond memories of brass rubbing as a child in this very same place — underneath St. Martin-in-the-Field church on Trafalgar Square.

I am also pleased to notice that techniques seem to have moved on a little, and that the crypt is noticeably posher than it was when I was a kid.

If you haven’t done it, brass rubbing is excellent fun. You rub coloured wax sticks on black paper over replica medieval brass engravings until the pattern emerges. No talent required. Just serious concentration.

We leave, happily, with brass rubbings complete: a dragon for me and a shield (with griffin) for Z.

4.55pm: National Portrait Gallery

“I want to go to NAMCO now,” says Z.

“I want to see the Lucian Freud exhibition,” I say. “He was our greatest living painter until last year. And he’s just across the road…”

Rather sulkily, Z proceeds across the road to the National Portrait Gallery. The gallery itself, like most London museums, is free, but the Lucian Freud exhibition would cost the two of us £26 without the London Pass.

I am, however, out of luck. Half of London seems to have had the same idea as us, and the exhibition is firmly sold out.

“Bugger!” I say.

“Can we go to NAMCO now?” asks my son.

6.15pm: NAMCO Station

NAMCO Station is not an attraction that will figure on most people’s London itineraries. Set in County Hall, behind the London Eye, it’s a blaring amusement arcade complete with dodgems, where I find myself comparing the prices and crowds most unfavourably to China.

On the other hand, it does have a bar, and, after criss-crossing London for over 8 hours, I could do with a drink.

“Actually, Mum,” says my son. “I’d like you to come and play with me.”

We spend our six quid of free tokens on a two-person zombie shooter. Z, at least, thinks it vaut le voyage from Trafalgar Square.

7.30pm: Queens Ice and Bowl

According to Z’s cunning plan, we were going to conclude our day with ice skating. According to my cunning plan, we were going to follow up ice skating with a trip to the cinema to see The Artist (notwithstanding the fact that Z, who watched Battleship Potemkin when he was far too young, now considers all silent films a byword for tedium).

Neither of our plans quite come off. We arrive at Queens Ice and Bowl, on Queensway, West London, in the gap between their daytime and evening skating sessions, having already eaten dinner.

“I don’t think we need to hang around Queensway for another half hour,” I say. “Let’s do bowling instead.”

Z rather sulkily agrees. And then bowls strike, after strike, after strike. It is most excellent fun.

“Well,” he says at the end of it, glowing with pride and exhilaration. “That’s one sport I’m not totally crap at.”

I decide not to push the cinema and we head back to base after, at least by our slothful standards, a phenomenally busy day.

Looking for more things to do in London? You might enjoy 5 Things to Do with Kids in London or, for something completely different, why not discover Halloween in China.

The post A Big Day Out appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

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Take the National Museum of China. When it closed for refurbishment a couple of years ago, exhibits were arranged according to the Marxist theory of history: Primitive Communism, Slave Society, Feudalism, Capitalism, etc. Soon after reopening last year it hosted an exhibition sponsored by the luxury brandmeister BVLGARI.

We were, in fact, en route to the National Archaeological Museum in Sofia, Bulgaria, when I so carelessly lost my child. It’s a splendid building — the biggest and best of the Ottoman mosques in the city, now home to collections of, well, Christian art, inter alia.

We were there, largely, to find out about Thracia. For, despite a degree in Latin and Greek, all I knew about the ancient province of Thracia was that it was famous for wine. (I once also knew that it was famous for gladiators, and that the poet Ovid was exiled there by the Roman emperor Augustus for reasons he described as “a poem and a mistake”.)

But I’ve never been much cop at geography, so, unlike my son I had no idea that much of old Thracia is now Bulgaria. Further, had anyone pushed me as to the national grouping of the Thracians, I’d have said they were Greek.

I would, however, have been wrong.

And, if you look at the title of this book from the National Archaeological Museum bookshop, I would also have been in trouble.

Now, it’s easy to overstate how much Bulgarians and Greeks dislike each other. What with the euro crisis and everything, Greek-bashing is a popular sport all over Europe, not just in Bulgaria.

However… “Bulgaria — Cradle of the European Civilisation” is what you’d call a statement book title. I am vastly regretting not buying it.

You see, like almost everyone outside the Balkans, I’d credit Greece as the cradle of European civilisation. Democracy, philosophy, theatre, sculpture, rhetoric, science — all that jazz, y’know? (And, yes, it’s a shame about the slavery.)

Inside the museum, the initial impact was a little underwhelming. Or, as my son put it, “Well, this is a bit rubbish.”

Pretty much the entire ground floor of the museum, you see, is taken up with Roman stuff. Not, it has to be said, especially good Roman stuff. Mediocre stelae and indifferent sculptures that would be relegated to the archives of most national museums are displayed in full and, frankly, fairly tedious glory.

Come on, cradle of the European civilisation, I thought to myself. You can do better than this!

Z, whose natural cynicism is enhanced by his experiences of Malaysian science museums, every single one of them sponsored by an oil company and with entire sections devoted to the environmental, social and economic benefits of hydrocarbons, was underwhelmed by the display on early gold mining sponsored by — yes!!! — a mining company.

“Do you think they’ve completely destroyed the archaeological site by mining it?” he asks.

“I’m not sure,” I say. “I’d guess UNESCO stopped them. Which is why they’re sponsoring this, maybe?”

We progress, rather sullenly (we hadn’t had the best start to Sofia, and losing Z didn’t help), upstairs to a display of religious frescoes.

And then, off to one side, unconfidently hidden, we found it. An absolute treasury of Thracian metalwork, pre-Thracian fragments, and the history of very early Bulgaria.

They are not Greek, in the slightest, these lovely pieces of silver and gold, these homages to the great goddess. (The museum goes to pains to point out that the Thracians fought with the Trojans in Homer’s Iliad.)

They are wonderful, though. And deserve, to be honest, a far greater billing than they get. They should be out front, on the ground floor, in pride of place and historical sequence.

Some of the items, curiously, were found not in Bulgaria but in the country that is generally known as Macedonia or the Republic of Macedonia, but, due to an epically savage naming dispute with Greece, is officially known as Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM)…

The M-word, in fact, comes up a lot in this museum (like “Tibet”, the word “Macedonia” tends to spark passions online).

What never does is the G-word. The early peoples of what is now Greece are described as Achaeans, Aegeans, Myceneans — never Greeks, let alone Hellenes. It is, to be honest, as if Greece has been airbrushed from the history of the region…

Earlier this week, we were wandering around the British Museum, trying to get a head start on the next leg of our journey, to Egypt and across (some of) the Middle East to Greece.

Marvelling at vast pieces from Assyria (in today’s Iraq, where coalition forces used pieces of ancient Babylon to fill sandbags), sculptures, mummies, sarcophagi and grave goods from Egypt, and an entire Lycian monument shipped wholesale from Turkey in the mid-nineteenth century, it was hard not to notice how very little of what is on display was actually British…

And then we came to the Elgin Marbles. Or, as the museum calls them, the Parthenon Sculptures, housed in rooms endowed and built specifically for them.

These are friezes and fragmentary sculptures taken from the Parthenon, most of them by Lord Elgin when he was British Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, which at that time ruled Athens (his son would go on to burn the Summer Palace in Beijing).

The Greeks want them back — although so far Heidelberg University seems pretty much the only European institution to have given back “their” bit of the Parthenon.

Now, the British Museum, like other museums around the world, has returned the remains of aboriginal people to Australia on request. The sculptures, however, are not people, and the Museum argues that they are so significant a part of the world’s cultural heritage that they belong, in effect, to the world, not only Greece.

The Museum does not claim that Elgin had the right to take the Marbles — the paperwork by which he took them is still debated, and, even at the time, folk including Lord Byron were pretty cross. It refrains from the inflammatory argument that, at the time, the local population was mining the Parthenon for building blocks and even cement.

But it does stand absolutely firm that it will not return them.

And on many levels, it is easy to see why. The sculptures, 2500 years old and broken as they are, have an extraordinary sense of movement — one figure just beginning to rise from sitting, another reaching out to a third… For solid stone, they have incredible grace and life.

Further, were we to return everything in the British Museum to the countries from which it was bought (or looted…), one of the world’s great museums would be no more.

And, surely, that’s the point of museums? To bring together much of the world’s history in one place? And, at the British Museum, millions of people every year can trace that history, and marvel and study the sculptures too.

And yet… and yet… if I were Greek, I’d want the sculptures back. And I wouldn’t be surprised if the Egyptians and Iraqis will want some of their things back, as well, one day.

And one day, further, I think we’ll need to give them to them. Which will be, I think, a shame.

The post On the Politics of Museums appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

By approximately, umm, now, Z and I would have completed a whirlwind tour of the UK, caught up with scores of friends and relatives, and done all the tourist stuff you’re supposed to do in London that you never actually do when you’re actually living there.

I would also have finished two big projects (more details on these, umm, later…), sorted out and sold or given away the possessions that are clogging my parents’ attic (and quite possibly the ones still clogging our old house in London), billed a couple of large jobs, been paid for a couple more and not dropped the ball on learning Chinese.

Would you like to guess how much of this I’ve achieved? Or would that make you dissolve into a ball of crystal tears?

CLUE: I’ve spent more time than is conceivably possible stabbing at the reload button on my eBay sales page like a starving lab rat. £15.63! £15.85! Seriously, it’s worse than the horses…

CLUE 2: My parents are semi-retired. This is a lifestyle that suits me rather well. In between binge eating and trips to the pub, I took a whole two quid off my brother playing bridge this weekend. At 5p for 100 points, that’s a lot of cards…

Anywise, at least I didn’t make any New Year’s resolutions.

Because if I had a quid for every New Year I’ve given up smoking, I’d have the money for a packet of fags — in AUSTRALIA!

Now, I know that if there’s one thing worse than hearing about other people’s minor ailments, it’s reading about them in a long whiny blog post.

So let’s just say I’ve spent the last four weeks dribbling self-pity and mucus all over my parents’ house, and leave it at that, eh?

Because that’s what every parent wants, when their theoretically adult child returns from two years overseas, isn’t it? A trail of snotty tissues, intermittent low-level whining about sinus headaches and waking the whole house up around dawn with a bout of the sort of coughing normally accompanied by Tennants Extra, a dog on a string, a smelly Army-issue blanket and a rasped iteration of “spare any change please?”

Bonus points to both my parents for not once having suggested I give up smoking…

Still, at least my Christmas pyjamas have been getting good use! (And, frankly, parents, it could be worse. )

Z, meanwhile, who has not only the family gut of iron but also an irritating immunity to colds, has been toddling off to the village school every day, rather in the manner of someone who’s been going there all his life.

Highlights? Playing Vampire in the playground, popping round to his mate’s next door after school, hanging off his grandparents like a rather scruffy puppy and, umm, generally being a small boy.

Low points? Getting up on Asia time twice a week to carry on learning Chinese and doing his maths and science without being late for the social thing that is school.

“But it’s DARK, Mum!”

“I know, sweetheart. It’s ENGLAND. And it’s January…”

Anywise… The good news is that we now have a semi-coherent travel plan for the next few months. (Z is cool with the life nomadic until he’s 13, then basing ourselves in Bali, which gives me a couple more years to change the name of this site. And, yes, since you ask, that *was* also on my to do list for January. And, while you’re asking, he is now actually 11.)

And, in other great news, my cold is *much better*! Thank you so much for asking.

Oh wait. You didn’t…

Never mind.

To our travel plans…

One notable omission to an otherwise thoroughly excellent (almost) two years of world travel has been skiing. Z loves snow. And, while we’ve had a bit of that in China, we’ve both been jonesing for skiing.

So we will be rectifying that — this week! — in Bulgaria, a country I have never visited and am so far signally failing to research. (Although I can tell you the elevation and lift count of the country’s major ski resorts off the top of my head…)

Frankly, research is an unrewarding task, in a household comprising two highly-educated 60-somethings (with a library, no less!) and a small boy with more book learnin’ than is, frankly, good for me.

Y’know.

Me (looking at Times Atlas of World History): “Oooh! Did you know what Bulgaria used to be called in classical times?”

Z (playing Minecraft): “Thracia.”

Me: “How the F*CK did you know that?”

My dad: “Well, it’s rather general knowledge, isn’t it? [to Z] Let me tell you about Basil the Bulgar-Slayer…”

Me: “That’s why Thracia was famous for wine!”

My mum: “Yes, Bulgarian red isn’t bad.”

LATER…

Me: “Oooh! They have some lovely Roman remains at Plovdiv!”

My dad: “Ah. That would be Philippopolis.”

My mum: “Oh, yes, Philippopolis.”

Z: “As in Philip of Macedon?”

LATER…

Me: “Do you have any books on Bulgaria?”

My dad: “Yes, we have one on the medieval Balkans.”

My mum: “That’s unreadable.”

Me: “So what exactly does medieval mean in that context?”

My dad: “Before the Turkish invasion, roughly…”

Me: “Ummm…. When was that?”

EVEN LATER…

Me (applying remnants of high school Russian to the Bulgarian state railway website): Did you know they use Cyrillic script in Bulgaria?

My mum: Yes. We drove through it on the way to Romania.

My dad: There’s only one famous Bulgarian. Bogomil. Of the Bogomilian heresy.

Me: Pray continue…

My dad: It’s a version of the Manichaean heresy…

Anywise…

We’ll head back from Bulgaria to Blighty for a couple of weeks of finishing off projects (or procrastinating, of course), then spend the British half term catching up with friends and family and hopefully doing some tourist stuff too.

Then we’ll be off through North Africa. Plans are to visit Egypt, Jordan, Israel, where we have friends, probably Lebanon, and then Turkey, working our way through to Greece, where my folks have a house, for early summer, and getting in some diving, some religious and cultural unschooling, and a few more wonders of the world.

Which we will, both of us, hopefully have researched rather better than I’m doing with Bulgaria.

As far as I can tell from my decoding of the travel advisories (for a good perspective on the worthwhileness of any system that rates Turkey, a popular package tour destination in these climes, at the same level of risk as Iraq check Travelfish’s blog), these bits of the Middle East should be sunny, educational and, provided we don’t hang out in Tahrir Square, get too close to the Syrian border or start exploring refugee camps solo, not significantly more dangerous than a couple of years ago.

If not as safe as Z would like to think.

“Does Gaddafi going mean we can go to Libya now, Mum?”

“Umm, no… As with most Western wars in the Middle East, quite the reverse…”

The rest of the year?

Well, that’s a little in flux. Z has agreed to spend six months in a Chinese school to consolidate his Chinese, and I’d like to be in northern China in time for the ice festival in Harbin next year. Z also wants to take the Trans-Siberian into China, see Moscow and is keen for some Bali time too, while I’m developing a minor obsession with Mongolia.

On the other hand, his dad, who was due to visit this hemisphere in February but now can’t, is now planning to move back to the UK in the middle of the year.

Which means, given we didn’t get it together for Z to fly to Oz before we left Asia, and he’s long overdue some dad time, he’ll be headed to either Brisbane (flying unaccompanied minor) or Western Europe (probably with me and overland) around the middle of the year.

So, after a slow and (sorry!) rather snotty start, 2012 is looking pretty good so far. How’s yours shaping up?

The post Travel Planning 2012 — Or, Getting My Sh*t Together, Sort Of appeared first on EscapeArtistes.