One for the Road: All things must pass

After getting off a plane earlier today without my laptop, which had this week’s fully-crafted column on it, ready and waiting for one final read over before sending, I’m going to have to type a new one up from my phone.

I am such an anachronist that I refuse to read books on a Kindle, even though that has meant lugging a veritable library around with me for the last few months, so the idea of writing something more than 30 words long on my mobile phone seems not only unprofessional but sacrilegious.

But needs must, so here we go.

When you lose your work, you are faced with a choice. Either (a) try to reproduce from memory what you had already written. Or (b) start afresh.

Do the first one and you are left wondering whether the original version was better than the replacement, a thought which, no matter how good the copy that actually makes it to the paper, never fails to haunt you like a ghost for the rest of the week.

Did I get from my intro to my main point more succinctly first time around? Definitely.

Did I previously phrase those two sentences in a way that made that joke funnier? Probably.

And the big one: How many times do I have to lose a full day’s work before I decide to stop being so tight, bite the bullet and just pay the couple of pounds per month necessary to back everything up on the cloud so that this nightmare stops recurring? Dunno. Maybe I’ll do it next time?

After trying to rewrite something using my all-too-imperfect power of recall, these are questions that eat away at me at night.

If Stephen King rewrote ‘The Shining’ for a modern audience, it would be some version of this scenario that would cause Jack Nicholson’s character to suddenly snap, go all wild-eyed and start swinging the axe about.

Anyway, that is enough of the meta-talk. I cannot expect you to read a whole column about the woes of a columnist who, after losing his column, decides to write another column about writing another column.

You are the paying public and you deserve better.

So, time to stop digressing, deflecting, obfuscating and prevaricating. Time to get to the meat, the bones, to eventually arrive at the point worth making, the secret worth sharing.

You ready? Alright, here comes the substance, the revelation, the action, the big announcement.

All our travelling has come to an end and we are currently sitting on a flight home. Just cruising over Budapest now, in fact. By the time this is ink on the page, I will be sitting in Omagh, drinking tea and playing the guitar, paradoxically glad to be home but sad to be back.

Niamh and I had been thinking of coming back for a while, slowly arriving at a consensus that the money/fun curve was beginning to slowly fall off.

You might not think it, but this travelling carry on is not one big holiday. Well, technically, that is exactly what it is. But, as well as being all the wonderful sights, surreal places, strange people, exotic cusines and different worlds you experience, it is also lots of planning (little of which fell to me, in fairness), buses that reek of urine, cramped trains, damp rooms, food poisoning, bug bites and nonstop sweating.

But, here, I am not complaining. I would not have had it any other way. The plan was to rough it as much as we could, and rough it we did – by Irish standards, at least.

We saw the temples in Thailand, vast mountain ranges in Vietnam, the killing fields in Cambodia and the volcanoes of Indonesia.

It has been fun, strange, surreal, eye-opening, draining, at times confusing, at others clarifying, heart-rending, life-affirming, mighty craic and a thousand other things.

But, as the man says, all good things must come to an end.

And why stay with the ship until it eventually starts to sink when you could pull her into harbour just as the sun is setting?

For the last few weeks, the call of home, which once sounded like a faint foghorn on the horizon, has been getting closer, more resounding.

This time tomorrow, we will have answered it.

I have no doubt that in a few weeks we will be kicking ourselves that we came home a bit early, but if we had stayed we would have been berating ourselves for clinging on in spite of what we really wanted. And ain’t that life.

But before you start blubbering all over your paper, know this: In order to reintroduce ourselves to reality, we are looking to rent a camper to do a tour around Ireland before the return to porridge is complete.

Anybody fancy making me an offer, email me on ‘emcelhatton03@qub.ac.uk’. No messers, bluffers or chancers.

See you all soon!