Saturday, September 10, 2011

Into the unknown


At the beginning of August my younger daughter arrived here with her three children.  Part of the way through her stay my two eldest grand-children arrived overlapping the arrival of their mother, her partner and their two young children; these last visitors left yesterday morning.  Through the course of these past weeks life as I know it, my quiet ‘normal life’, has been ‘on-hold’.  Instead of filling my days with reading, writing and generally pottering about, I have been commuting daily to one beach or another, one café or another, one ice-cream parlour or another, one bar or another or one taverna or another. I have been playing the role of a holiday-making grandfather.  It is not an easy role for me to play. 
At some time towards the end of my holiday-making a peculiar desire came upon me; a desire to get far away from here for a while.  I had a disturbing feeling that, if I stayed here for any length of time after my visitors had left I would slip back into the uncreative furrow of lethargy I had been ploughing through the months before they arrived.  I resolved to yield to this unsolicited escapist emotion and leave here as soon after my last visitors left as was reasonable.  On 25th August I booked myself a one-way ticket for 12th September on a ferry to Italy.  I leave here on Monday with a very loose itinerary - I shall be heading towards Ireland to look for what inspired Yeats and, perhaps, to look for something of myself.  I have no idea at present about when I shall be ready to return from wherever my journey will end.
Through the past several months this blog has, along with many other of my pursuits, suffered considerable neglect; neglect due to involuntary lassitude and, more recently, to shameless hedonism.  Through the weeks ahead I hope that my travels will terminate the lethargic stupor into which I have slipped and invigorate creativity sufficiently for me to resume regular, interesting and thought provoking, blog posts.

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