If there’s one thing . . .

 . . . moving to Southern Europe has taught me, it’s that living in Northern Europe is garbage. Humans shouldn’t do it. They should just dig the whole dump up and let the beech etc forests take back over and figure out how to get the fuck along en masse down south. My first bit of eye contact with the Mediterranean, every time I come back, even if it’s a grey foggy mess like today, is like someone has just stopped punching me in the head. 

Anticipation

 As I age I wonder how the dementia is going to take me, if it does. The odds are there, if not terrific in either direction. When I get really tired my brain works less well, and that's how I imagine the dementia will be one day. The way my brain works less well is fairly specific; the past rises up and sort of fastens onto the present, and for a moment I wonder if I'm in one of the many, many, MANY places I've been or lived before. No - not even wonder if I'm there. Feel that I'm there in that moment. I wonder if this means I should be going to more places, or fewer. 

Lessons from the last few weeks

First. I'd forgotten how soul-destroying paying rent is. No - I'd *never understood* how soul-destroying paying rent is. Because up until those four years in the Big Wupp, I had always been paying either rent or a mortgage, and I suppose just accepted that as part of the unfortunate fabric of life, like menstruation and the need for an oral hygiene regime. But those four years not doing that - well, financially, they were wonderful. The freedom of it! We were never really profligate but during those four years I simply didn't have to think about money, I didn't have to think about distinctions between wants and needs, I felt rich. I remember enjoying it at the time, but now, locked into a three-year rental contract, I don't think I appreciated it enough. Those years and the cash we could accumulate are what gave us the freedom to do what we're doing now - we're using that freedom - but my heavens. We're in one of the bleaker-case financial scenarios we'd planned for at the moment. Nothing desperate but certainly counting the euros. And every one of them that goes to our perfectly reasonable landlord who's charging a perfectly reasonable amount of rent is one I deeply regret. 

Second. If you're in a rich country, the last bastion of really romantic or exciting travel is boats and ports. Rail has been tamed. Roads need someone to drive you on them. Air travel is half penitential, half existential crisis, all boring. But boats, well. The last time I literally jumped onto a departing mode of transport as it left was onto a boat. Try doing that with a train these days. And what can all the other modes offer as a thrill compared to seeing the pilot boat pull up alongside the big boat so it can be guided in and out of port? A cousin of mine changed my opinion on turbulence; he said he quite liked it because it was the one time he could actually appreciate that he was in an airplane, travelling through the air, rather than just sitting in a loud tube. Fair. But how does that compare to a big ship rolling queasily along for a few hours just to fall tranquil once Sardinia and Corsica are breaking the waves blowing in from the west, and then to start rolling queasily again once the islands are cleared? 

And ports - ports, even more than railway stations, are such a fulcrum, such a precious but limited urban space. They're a constant work in progress, a little bit going up at a time, a little being overhauled at a time. And always a mess. Always a mess of people and cars and containers and bad signposting. The mess makes it human; you can't go on autopilot in a port, you need other people, you need guidance and questions and answers. And the view of a city coming in or out . . . well. More of that sort of thing, I think. Maybe it's worth paying all that rent for the benefit of living in a port town. 

Tiger by the tail

 So if you just stay in one place long enough, you start seeing weird shit, right? Everything is Twin Peaks a few years under the surface. That's the thing that makes me most nervous about how much we've moved around - that I'm not preparing the children adequately for the fundamental weirdness of existence, the way the uncanny and unexpected ripple through the day-to-day like the fake-liquorice-goo through pseudo-orange-ice-cream in the great tiger tail of life. It's not just their family that makes me take them back to Canada every summer. They need to be able to watch a place change, and learn to see all the smoothed-over crooked shit, and with four-year tenures everywhere we've been more or less since they were born they haven't been able to do that where we live.

My work, however - I've been involved with this company for a kajillion years now and a kajillion years does give you the time to see weird shit evolve and some of the weirder shit I've seen has been there. I'm too old and indifferent and remote for workplace conflict, but if I had any, it would have been with this long-standing co-worker who, it came painfully clear this weekend, is many kilometres deep into some sort of rabbit hole, to the point of no-further-comment-from-the-hospital-but-they-won't-be-home-for-awhile. 

I'm spending some time now thanking God for my oldness/indifference/remoteness. There were a few points where this person was temporarily in a position of slight authority over me, and used it poorly, when I would have been rude if I was less indifferent. I considered being confrontational, needlessly confrontational considering the briefness of the position of slight authority. Pre-motherhood me would have had some choice words that would have felt good to say in that moment and that would have been hard to remember now, now that it's painfully clear any of the punctilious, superfluously demanding or otherwise shitty behaviour this co-worker was showing to me or their colleagues was probably only a dying echo of how shitty they were to themself. Themself is a word. I just made it up. It's all rather discombobulating frankly. 

Give me the shits

 As I reach an apex (I hope) in the amount of international travel I have to routinely do, I’ve realized a lot of my planning now orients around “will this itinerary allow me to take my normal morning shit without holding or hurrying it or having to pay to use a theoretically public toilet?” Which means trains. Lots of trains. Preferably train routes close to their point of origination so other train passengers haven’t yet had a chance to sully up the toilet too badly. 

There are a lot of reasons to prefer trains, but I feel like that one is really underrated. Budget airlines flying into dumps like Charleroi - those dumps have pay-per-use toilets (but here is a secret: small regional Italian airports are miracles of convenience and efficiency. Not just the bogs. They’re what all airports should be: a simple place that gets the job done fast, where you can get a brioche, a good coffee, and probably a fresh-squeezed orange juice). And whilst on the flight, I just can’t relax enough to shit; too busy imagining some hideously malfunctioning “Get Smart” scenario wherein I’m unwittingly doing a very exact sequence of actions that is going to lead to the floor collapsing and me tumbling into the void. 

And coaches - nothing to object to on their own. I rather like how they take you through a city. But they’re traffic and they’re driven by the hideously underpaid so appalling delays are routine; you can’t count on even a ballpark arrival time. And more than half the time, there’s no bog. And when there is, it doesn’t have good ventilation, so you make people smell your shit, and while like most people I *believe* my shit don’t stink, my common sense informs me that in fact, it certainly do.