Back in the Saddle: Six Years in Four Paragraphs

6 Oct

Hello Friend(s). It’s been 6 years, almost to the day, since the urge to blog was last upon me. The original narrative–my over-land adventure from Devon to Korea, where I would become a teacher and possibly start a K-pop empire–abruptly lost its momentum, you may recall, due largely to my realisation that teaching was well-difficult and stressful. This realisation lead to visa-retractions and necessitated my beating a hasty retreat back to the UK, flying in one day the same distance it had taken me 3 months and many memorable mishaps to cover on my outward journey.

Back home, with all my carefully laid plans unravelled around me, I found myself at the loosest of loose ends. Happily, this was the moment fate chose to introduce me to my future wife, Jess. She was, and still is, Australian, and was living in London on borrowed visa-time. I was, and still am, impulsive and in love. These factors, combined with my being entirely rudderless, directionless and impressionable, meant that it was probably no surprise to anyone, except perhaps Jess, that 3 months later I was living with her and her parents in the Eastern suburbs of Melbourne.

Since then we’ve been married -twice, for good measure. Jess is now–having completed a gruelling Masters program–a graduate architect and I, after a couple of false starts, think I might also have found my thing (for the time being, anyway): I am on the very verge of being unleashed upon the unsuspecting Australian public, as a registered nurse.

So here we are. I’m not sure where this will go, but the need to write things down has been simmering for a while now. In two day’s time I head to Nepal, where I have my final nursing placement, so the next couple of weeks will no doubt contain some noteworthy happenings and after that, who knows? Jess and I are off on some adventures next month, taking in Sri Lanka and Kerala on our way home to a Devon Christmas. I’ve also been making the odd bit of music over the years (odd, meaning both infrequent and weird). So maybe this will become an adventuring blog, maybe a music-ing blog, maybe a gory nursing blog…or maybe it will, after some initial promise, fizzle out like a disappointing indoor firework, leaving nothing but ash in the shape of a turd and some acrid smoke.

It’s too close to call…

With warm regards,

Henry