On a recent visit to my parents’ house, my father impressed upon me the urgency of sorting out (removing) some of my old things. He needs more space for his tools and golf clubs I suppose. In reality it was only two boxes, and most of it went in the bin. Amongst some of the treasures that I decided to keep however were 10 albums of photos (after some serious editing), my diaries, hard copies of all the emails exchanged between myself and my parents, and some letters from friends that I received whilst travelling around Australia for a year, beginning in November of 1998. The famous ‘gap year’ between secondary school and university. A voyage of self-discovery as you leave behind your adolescence, and return as a fully-fledged adult, having accumulated enough ‘real world’ experience to continue on the path to further education, and eventually the world of paid employment.
Well, it wasn’t quite like that. I haven’t yet (re)read the diaries, emails or letters, but as I remember it, the biggest thing that trip did for me, was to whet my appetite for more exploration. Another three years passed before I tried university, which was a failed experiment, and I never did enter any formal career path. I’ve spent far more time living abroad than in my country of birth since I finished school, and I think it highly likely that I will continue to do so. It’s a funny idea perhaps that I have consistently felt more at home in ‘alien’ environments than in the one I grew up in. That’s not to say I didn’t feel at home in my youth. Quite the contrary, I had a great and very safe childhood, but by my mid-teens, I knew I wanted to experience more. Family holidays certainly planted the seeds of wanderlust, and as I set out on my own for the first time, I would never feel quite the same about returning to my comfortable but all-too-familiar surroundings.
Did I find myself? No. Did I feel ready to further my formal education or start climbing some career ladder? No. Did I have any idea what to do next? No. I think if anything, I felt, if not more so, at least as clueless about my next plans as I was a year before. I left home, rather naively, and a little nervously with two extremely overloaded rucksacks and the idea that this would be the adventure of a lifetime and that I’d have it all figured out, whatever it was, by the time I came back. But that was a long way in to the future. I remember a conversation with my dad after I’d told him that I was planning to disappear off to the other side of the world for a year, during which he reluctantly accepted my decision, but not before asking me to promise that afterwards I’d come back, and go to university. I told him that I couldn´t make that promise, and that a lot could happen in a year. Who knows what or where I’d be by then. He appreciated the honest answer, but I know he was more saddened by the idea of me being so far away, than he was concerned about my lack of career focus. As a father myself now, I can finally sympathise.
I’ll be reliving that trip over the next few weeks and months as I re-read my diaries and correspondence, and I look forward to sharing some of it with you, here.
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Stuart Westwood 