Once more in transit

The first step in any journey is often taken long before it formally begins.   For me it usually starts with memories of past journeys---the time in England when I got lost on the morning of my son's wedding, the panic I experienced in Paris, when I nearly missed meeting up with a school-friend, because of misunderstood French instructions, the day all planes in London were grounded by a terrorist threat and I was stranded in Crete with my English grand-children, those happy days in Pakistan, before it descended into its current fragile state and all those moments in far-off parts of the northern hemisphere that have given me a sense of home-away-from-home.   

Tomorrow I am off again on a journey to see my grandchildren in England.  Which means, of course, a long flight.

Suspended here in coma land

so far above all friends and home

that life itself seems left behind

time has me trapped, inert, confused

in dimmed half light in shadow land
                                 

and all around the strangers flit                                 

they come and go, unknown, unreal

they make me eat, they do their rounds

a kind of hour glass they become 

they mark the time like silent sand.

For here time’s dressed in strange new garb

which does not fit its normal frame
it is not day, it is not night
not what’s below, not what’s behind, 
not yet the time of when we land.

So far above each travelled land
time cannot be the way it was
before my zones of numbed existence
were crossed to meet my children’s children.

           The price I pay to hold their hand.

Holidaying

Around this time last year I was in Cornwall holidaying with my grandchildren.  Come to think of it the weather then (mid Summer) wasn't very different from what we've been experiencing here lately in Winter. What I remember most from this trip, however, was how I came  to appreciate the joys of parenthood more keenly.

Observe a father taking his near-teen daughters on a half-term holiday.  See how number 1 daughter strides confidently off 50 yards in the lead with a number 2 daughter in rapid pursuit, while father valiantly struggles to steer the small procession from behind: establishing destination, setting direction, purchasing tickets, managing mountains of luggage and carefully supervising your global grandparent, who is always to be found a considerable distance to the rear.  Along footpaths and platforms, over footbridges and steps, along tunnels and corridors, down escalators and up stairways, in and out of trains see them go.

Travel advice

For an aging grandparent travelling alone to visit offspring on the other side of the world, there is only one piece of advice worth heeding (and it isn’t to be found on the official travel advisory sites). That advice is that:

whatever happens, you are never to panic.

Don’t panic, even if, on emerging from the stifling 2 hour torture of immigration processing in the Heathrow cattle-pens, you don’t recognise the long-haired, part-bearded Rasputin-look–alike, who says he’s your son.

He will be.

Don’t panic, even if, having successfully negotiated the train trip from Euston to the correct Birmingham station, you cannot find your daughter-in-law and grandchildren at the designated meeting-point and you cannot find a public phone and when you do, you cannot get it to work, and when it does, you find that your family are only a few metres away, but you still can’t find them.

Eventually you will.