Only a month. In normal times a month takes no time; It's from one payday to the next. It's how we live - our absolute existence reliant upon the regularity. No sooner are we paid than we look forward to the next time, and so we dash time before our very eyes, wishing it away into nothingness with barely a thought for the meaning each moment means to someone, somewhere. And, as we wish more and more of the months away, so we need each one all the more and have fewer and fewer remaining.
But January always seem such a long month. And there are many reasons for this. For a start so much and yet so little happens. From payday in December until the same in January one has such excitements as Christmas, New Year and - if they so tickle you - the January sales. And then? Nothing. And entire absence of excitement, daylight and probably resources, eeking out the days to payday on the barest of existence with not a glimmer of hope until, quite probably, Easter.
In fact it will get worse - much worse - before it gets better, because although the shortest day will have passed and the days are getting longer, still practically every hour of daylight is spent in the office (assuming you are office-based) and the temperature actually continues with its downward plummet and will deteriorate further for a couple of months.
But yes, a month. And I've been trying to get around to blogging about my international getaway for a while. It seems an odd thing, but though I am off work with an injury which restricts my movements, and yet I have struggled to find the moments to tap out these missives.
So, what was my great adventure? And why?
Well, my birthday falls very shortly before Christmas.
It is a rubbish time to have a birthday. My parents now apologise to me for having me when they did. If you ever have the choice, do not have a child in either December or January. The reasons are thus:
December
- Parties are impossible as everywhere is booked up with Christmas parties.
- Even if they are available, they are expensive.
- Friends are busy because they are at Christmas parties
- Or they are busy because they are doing things with various elements of family that they only see once a year and cannot do closer to Christmas because they - or their partners - have other family that thye are having to spend more of their time doing things with
- In the very VERY rare occasion that they are actually available when you try to do something; they have no money with which to do so.
- People have no money
- People have taken up some ridiculous New Year resolution of not drinking for January so are reluctant to put themselves out.
Well, last year was my thirtieth birthday. The big 30. And people started asking early on what I was to do. They said that I had to do something big, something spectacular. Well, it is the big three-oh. Regardless of the fact that it is merely the passing of a number, a different day in the calendar, in essense the closest thing that we get to celebrating the fact we have not died over the preceding year, I was to have some fantasitical event. I have, obviously, previously waxed about our celebrations of trivialities but there was an expectation on me to do something.
And it started early on - one of my friends has her brithday in January, and she mentioned to me at her celebration that I needed to organise something very early on because of the timing and the risk that everywhere would get booked up quickly. So at that point I made a decision: I would do nothing. Well, not that I would do nothing, but more that I would do nothing that inconvenienced others. I would celebrate, but in my own way, in a way which involved me and me alone. And so I made a plan.
NEW YORK.
Around Easter my mother suggested that I needed to start organising things as well. By that point a very sketchy plan was already forming in my head and I made a very brief mention of my intention to get away. Within a matter of moments I had a text off of my sister to say that if I did go anywhere I was to let her know and she would come with me. A similar thing occurred with another friend - I suggested my intention was just to run away from it all and she said she would follow. Well, that was too much. Already people were inviting themselves along on something which I had specifically designed to involve as little external involvement as possible.
And so it was that an absolute veil came down over any plans - I would have my moment but I would have so in absolute secrecy. In fact it became a challenge. I had to do as much as I absolutely could do - every single moment planned as comfortably as possible; yet with absolutely no-one else knowing a single thing that was happening.
I am a very organised person. I may have mentioned this before, but I am not one of those people that can just 'go' somewhere with no idea what I want to see. But I am organised in my way - I have to research. I don't just buy the Lonely Planet guide and tick the bits off. I'm on the web (because it is free) searching hundreds, thousands of sites to make sure that I don't miss anything - those special, hidden, unknown 'local-only' experiences. And I need to know where they are. So I plot them - I get a map of the area, and I work out where all of the various locations are. And they all get marked down, using a very careful alpha-numeric key and legend. And then they get colour-coded depending on what 'day' they fall into. Because I plan the route-of-best-fit to all the places. And then the bars that I want to go to get plotted out on an identical, though separate map. Obviously just in case I get drunk and leave the map behind somewhere.
Shut up.
I know it is sad.
But this did enable me to cover over 30 different places (we got past EE on the legend to the map) over the course of 5 days, whilst spending one day recovering from my actual birthday, in New York. And I cheated a bit. I did some of the pink events on a blue day.
But, so it was that I had my full plan of events laid out to me and me alone. Everyone was expecting me to do something (yet distinctly not committing to attending anyting that I had organised) most particularly because my birthday fell on a Saturday. And so I started conjuring my illusion. I told all my family that I was spending the weekend with various groups of friends, and therefore had to have the family meal on the Wednesday before; whilst for my friends I told them I has having various family-related events with it being the hugely massive three-oh that they had 'bigged-it' up to be.
I went for the family meal on the Wednesday night, and then on the Thursday I fled the country, after the most inconvenient morning ever. My father turned up at my house for some reason. Picking up many of his tools or something. I had to explain that I had taken the morning off for some reason - using up holiday; expected hangover or such like. I had to leave for my bus to the airport whilst he was still in the house - smuggling out my suitcase which was clearly non-work related; whilst he was suggesting that due to the inclement weather (it had started bucketing it down with rain outside) he should give me a lift to the train station to get the train to work. I somehow managed to decline, and got to the bus depot and then the airport with no further incident.
And ended up in New York for my thirtieth birthday.
And it was the best thing I could have done for it. It was the absolute perfect solution to an otherwise impossible problem. I had the single most phenomenal time I could have hoped for, and anything small, local, domestic-and-distinctly-non-international could only have been a disappointment. And that's even if people had turned up.
But it set a seed.
This was the seed to get away, spend my birthday doing 'me' things, but mostly doing 'me' things where I know absolutely no-one else.
And so the plan started for this year. It was the bigger-in-number-yet-strangely-less-celebratory three-one. And New York had been done. So something closer, more accessible and (after the various credit card statements) considerably cheaper. And so I decided upon Paris.
Only this time I did it differently. For a start I told my parents. I got such an ear-bashing (via voicemail) from me mother when I was in New York about not telling them I was absconding that I decided it would be easier to tell them this time. And it destroyed the secrecy, the mystery, and my private build-up to the event. I know with New York I didn't - I couldn't - get excited about it beforehand so it all hit me the moment I got to the airport. But it was more that I was doing so knowing that nobody else in the entire world knew what I was up to - that mystique was gone, that cheeky schoolboy knowing that he's planning something that he's not supposed to be.
And then there was the timing - whilst the previous year my birthday had fallen on the Saturday, because of the way the years work it was on a Sunday this year. Not a great day; and were I to do similar to New York, I'd have to celebrate more on the Saturday which wasn't my birthday. Add to this that I have somehow acquired a tradition of a pre-Christmas trip down to London to see friends; and unfortunately the only opportunity that we were all suitably able to come to was my birthday weekend. Now, it was a mixed blessing: I needed to be in London for the (rather suitably reduced price) Eurostar train I needed to get over to Paris; but it also meant that I spent my actual birthday in, and between, cities: as the clock turned midnight I was in a London nightclub, and by the time the clock turned midnight again I would be in a Parisien Jazz club. I'd organised everything exactly the same; there were just three differences: location, timing and disclosure.
But it didn't realistically affect the weekend. I still had a most marvellous time in a city I haven't visited since I was young teenager. And it was a lovely getaway for someone who rarely getsaway properly. And I knackered myself out in doing so, walking a hundred million miles and sleeping little in a hostel dorm of over a dozen.
And if you are wondering as to my style of writing today, I am watching The Mystery of Edwin Drood and have taken on some of the Dickensian language for some reason as yet unknown.
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