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Leaving Home
Well, I had made my bed so I had damn well better lie in it.
I had, in essence, told my boss at work to go and copulate with the nearest available baboon (I did this by turning up late for a golfing afternoon with a hip flask in one hand and my notice in the other, wearing a T-shirt and jeans that were covered in beans and vomit), so it would be fair to say that my bridges had not only been burnt, they were in smouldering heaps.
Free from work and all its irksome constraints I had turned my attention to more pressing matters. I arranged for a friend to stay in my house for the next four months, plonked my seven stone Rottweiler upon the lap of my parents (I thought he’d make excellent company for their comedy duo of toy poodles), freed all my available cash (a surprisingly large amount, f**k, how much had these fools at the museum been paying me?), grabbed my passport and my vast assortment of driving permits and other related documents of brain-bubbling bureaucracy, chucked some bugs in the iguana tank, packed some clothes, had a shave and steadied myself for the beginning of the rest of my new life. As a last act, I contacted my friends to finally cement the details regarding their joining up with their dear deluded friend upon his epic voyage.
‘Technology Chris’, so named because of his love of anything even remotely related to his search for the ultimate tele-visual/audio experience (an obsession which ensured that his living room looked not unlike NASA headquarters on mission launch day) would fly out, with his girlfriend, Kelly, to meet me in Paris.
My dearest friend ‘Wool’, a constant attributing factor to the craziness of my youth, would join up with me in Rome if he could rid himself of his screaming child and psychotic ex-fiancee for a week or so.
‘Tim-Tim’, who was taking a sabbatical from his high pressure job as a department manager at a multi-national engineering company, was entrenched in the party culture of Faliraki (Rhodes) and had invited me to join him any time I saw fit.
Andreas Dounias, my Greek friend whose insanity level was only topped by the amount of noughts at the end of his bank balance, was awaiting my arrival in Athens, should I make it there alive.
Another old University chum, a French ex-model, had made arrangements for me to join him for a little alpine mayhem in the Tyrol.
My final pre-arranged encounter was with Johannes Zieger in Cologne where he had promised to take me to a beer-fest.
Once these had been reaffirmed, I bundled my shit into the back of my mother’s trusty Citroen AX (I had a brand new Renault Laguna and I didn’t want to risk it on such a journey as this) and, in the cover of darkness made my way to Dover.
All I had was a starting point (Calais) and a rough idea of where I was going next. It was enough for the time being.
For the moment though, I was on my own. A lone gunman armed with a sheaf of maps large enough to comfortably club a seal to death with, a wallet full of travellers’ cheques, a credit card, a pair of old jeans and a desire to see the back of every f**king thing that had made up my present regime of work, work and, oh yes, work. I had a mind which needed to be set at ease. I needed to free the real ‘me’ again, the dormant ‘me’ that had been pushing up the daisies of deadlines, meetings and office scandal for far too long. Who I really was I had no f**king idea.
How would this wound up, career driven, conscientious, hard working and almost clinically composed man react to suddenly being untethered from the real world? How would I react to a world of open and almost endless possibility?
I had no idea but I was as sure as shit going to find out.
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