The vagaries of travel

I have spent much of the last year sitting in airports, on planes and in hotel rooms. When I mention it to friends and family, the first comment is nearly always along the lines of "oooh, how exciting". Well, newsflash, it's not. Travelling for business is tiring, boring and can seriously damage your longterm relationship. At one point I can safely say that I spent more time away than I did at home, and that includes weekends. Now my partner is incredibly supportive of my career and he did his best to be understanding when I left him at home alone for the majority of the time. However, I was the one who was less understanding. I felt disenfranchised. My home became a refuge that I longed for when I was away. The simple amenities that I take for granted became luxuries hovering just beyond my grasp.

When you travel a lot, you become adept at packing light or at least I have. That means relying on hotels for shampoo, conditioner and shower gel. I'm beginning to believe that shower gel is a European phenomenon. I've yet to find shower gel in an American hotel, even the ones that are owned by the French. Soap just isn't the same as a nice moisturising shower gel. Yet, Americans have flannels and I really like flannels. They scrub off the grime that feels like it is coating your skin after a long haul flight - sheer bliss. Flannels are a rarity in Europe. In Stockholm, at this one particular boutique hotel, they have the largest flannels I have ever seen and they are not made of flanneling. Instead they are like really posh serviettes. I feel like I should be draping it across my lap rather than rubbing it over my naked skin.

The other big think about travelling is planning for what you will do on the plane. There are 11 hours ahead of you, trapped in a very small space, unless you are lucky enough to be upgraded to business which doesn't happen as often you would like. There will be two meals, some of which will even be edible. But eating only takes up 30 minutes. So, 10 and a half hours to fill. Now that they have movies on demand on most flights, I can watch three films at 90-100 minutes each. Four films is really pushing it. Wow, only another 5 and half hours left. Having a laptop is a real life saver. I take DVDs or else pack my USB with television I've missed, what with all the travelling. One time, I watched 8 episodes of House, in a row, no breaks. Another time, it was 10 episodes of Heroes.

The two main items that have protected my sanity on planes are books and games. A good book can take up an entire flight. I'm a quick reader, always have been, and I like to stock up on scifi in the States where the catalogue is so huge compared to the UK. But, for me, the NDS and PSP are the best inventions of the last decade. This trip I took along Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga and whiled away a substantial proportion of the flight battling droids and collecting lots and lots and lots of bolts. Another time, I completed Puzzle Quest on the PSP - I love that game so much I've even bought it on XBLA, despite the fact it's exactly the same game. The NDS has great battery life and lasts for the entire 10 hours in the air. The PSP is less well endowed, but I have that cable that lets me plug it into my laptop. Once I connect that to the inchair power supply, I'm sorted.

The good news, for me if not for you gentle reader, is that I don't have to travel as much any more. I have spent the last three months resident in my beloved home and it's been terrific. My partner and I have reconnected, although I think he misses the cheap clothing I used to bring home.

Welcome to yet another attempt at a blog

I'm not sure exactly why I'm doing this. Perhaps because I am nearly always a couple of years behind everyone else. Perhaps I'm feeling left behind in the fad to expose my private self on the internet. I only managed to set up Facebook a couple of months ago, updated it obsessively for a week and now I keep forgetting to visit the page. I tried to maintain a website for a year or so - it became a huge task to maintain but I kept at it. About a year in, I realised that it was a slog, I wasn't enjoying it and I haven't added anything to it in nearly three years, although I've kept the URL just in case I get the urge to go back to it.

Basically, I find the act of creation very difficult. In my everyday life, the real world, I have to "create" "stuff" all the time, whether it's words, plans, budgets or messaging. I think the fact I spend all day trying to be creative, no matter how limited the fashion, makes it that much harder for me to want to even bother to try in my personal time.

I spend much of that personal time in supposedly wastrel pursuits: playing videogames, watching movies and reading books. All activities that engage my mind but nothing that involves me having to be productive. Slothful yes, but I've been content.

Now, however, I find myself worrying, perhaps needlessly, that I am wasting my time. Shouldn't I be penning that definitive novel, storyboarding the ultimate movie extravaganza, or, less ambitiously, starting a blog?

The big question when starting a blog is not why, or even how. The word I'm thinking about is who. Who is going to read this? I'm probably not going to tell my friends that I've started this in case I stop as abruptly as before. I'm not sure that I want my work colleagues to know. They are all incredibly bright people and beneath my confident exterior I am actually insecure. Will they criticise my thinking or mock my views? I'm not without my own intellectual resources but I have always been diffident about expressing my deeper thoughts and opinions. I am not an intellectual nor do I pretend to be on the level of A.N. Wilson. I enjoy reading certain blogs and I am intellectually provoked by people such as Keiron Gillen or Jim Rossignol but then they are professional writers. It is their business to entertain, provoke and stimulate discussion. I am not in their league.

This brings me to my last thought of the day. Why does anyone start a blog? Is there a level of self-awareness or pretentiousness to the process? So far, I have used "I" some 30 times. That's a lot of "I". I used to wonder about diaries. They purport to be personal musings but I believe that anyone who writes in a diary expects someone to read it at some point in the future. A diary is less about being truthful and more about presenting one's view of events as truth. Propoganda at its most basic level. They say history is rewritten by the winners, and sometimes history is created by the diarists. Most important to remember, nothing you read on the internet is absolute truth, it is merely one person's interpretation of events.