Brixton to Maldon
August 20th 1995
The time was coming to start thinking about heading for the mainland. I hadn't heard anything from a couple of australian friends, who were still in Africa as far as i knew and i didn't know if they'd be back in Europe in September, like they'd said they would. I was hoping i could go to Basque Country and Catalonia and then on to Italy to coincide with when they got back from Africa. But it would be pure luck if we managed to be in the same place at the same time. I'd see what happened, i supposed.
I still wasn't really that keen on getting back on the road again, even though it was only around Europe, which was almost like home really. Or it should have been, anyway, but i wasn't so sure.
Anyway, as i was going to leave the country soon, i thought i'd go back to Maldon for a while and get a bit more time in by the river. It was time to get the boat sailing again, as we'd been trying to finish fixing it up for nearly two months now. Surely we could get it together to get the bloody thing sailing!
Of course, it's never a simple matter. Nothing ever seems to be a simple matter when it comes to boats!
I went back to Maldon with the intention of finishing the job on the boat very soon, but of course, there were plenty of other things to take my mind of it. Plenty of excuses not to do it and plenty of opportunities to do something else when the tides were right to do that work.
I don't really know what i did do during the last ten days of August. Mind you, i'm writing this two months later, so it's not really surprising! I know i still wasn't fully well again, although i was much, much better than i had been when i'd arrived in Britain nearly two months before. But i still didn't feel fully fit and healthy. I still had an intermittent low fever and my guts were still a bit on the dodgy side, but the illness was passing. Gradually.
I was enjoying being at home - having a home. And i wasn't really going out very much. One thing i'd noticed about myself more and more over the previous few years was that i moved around over long distances a lot, but when i wasn't doing that i found it very hard to get around the local area very much. I tended to travel a long way and often by a very weird and roundabout route, and then stay put, not even moving a few hundred yards a lot of the time - except to go to the shops and things. It was a real schizophrenic sort of lifestyle. A kind of claustrophobia combined with a kind of agoraphobia. One seems to spark the other one off.
I seemed to have a lot of extremes in my life. And i somehow had to find a balance between them. Most of them seemed to be geographical extremes too. Britain and Australia, Melbourne and Cairns, here and bloody there, all over the place. I could always keep a sort of balance in my life, by hopping from one extreme to another. But like a pendulum, i never seemed to be able to stop in the middle, which often seemed to be where i was really trying to get to.