As we reach the new year I have looked back at our blogs from this year and reflect on what's happened. The ultimate pot boiler.
As readers will know, my blog is intended to document our lives as we move from busy full time NHS health professionals to less pressurised semi retirement and eventually (I imagine) to a blog wholly sponsored by adult incontinence trousers.
So what have been the main points of interest during 2024?
In February 24 we had five weeks in southern India. Our overwhelming sense of culture shock was captured in the early post from that trip 'Southern India - what's not to like?' In that blog I compared our arrival in Tamil Nadu to an 'open shit sandwich':
What strikes you almost immediately about this sandwich, is the shit. There is no escaping the fact that it's often human shit. And that it's actually either just under the pavement, which is the more pleasant version, or it's visible in the open sewer.
A close second is the raw poverty. A man asleep, or we wondered, actually dead, on the edge of a major road crossing, with legs hanging on the road, traffic swerving to avoid the legs. Another man, barely four foot tall, awake, with skeletally thin hands outstretched begging on the pavement outside a fine hotel. "Make no mistake, he's not poor this fellow, he has a prime spot here! They don't come cheap" Intones a passing Indian tour guide. Oh let me tell you, he's poor, and any thinner and he would stop being thin and swell up. Sack covered city slums with children sorting rubbish, right next to a gleaming 5GVodaphone shop, neighboured by a multimillion pound development . Poverty smacks you in the face and the hot stench takes your breath away.
The salad in this particular sandwich is the litter. Bags ripped open, food waste strewn around the bin in the hot sun. A cow tethered to the bin, because that is a good source of food for the cow. A cow eating discarded human food starts doing human style poo's. Next to its bin. Then lies in it.
The sandwich is as mentioned, toasted of course, by the 30*c heat.
Under this stinking top layer lies the delicious breads. Maybe Paratha or roti would be the better description. This is the wonderful part of the sandwich. India IS the food, the colour, the vibrancy, the noise and the smiling happy positive people.
But make no mistake what you first see is the top layer of the sandwich. We are here for five weeks, and have very little in the way of fixed plan. Our aim is to settle somewhere and see life here as best we can without the daily compulsion to move on to the next city or beach. To get accustomed to the top layer of the sandwich, and to find the very best bits of the paratha underneath.
And we did just that, moving on to Pondicherry and putting down tiny roots that will remain forever one of our standout experiences. By the time, one month later, that we were moving on, it's hard not to see in my blog that we were completely smitten by the place, the experience and the people, I reflected in my final blog from Pondi on the importance of Mr Kumar, a tuktuk driver, who on our final night picked us up, and brought his wife along too:
'We collected their shopping and he deposited her home. Their home is in the warren of streets behind our beach.
They invited us in and to join them for a meal. She's a very very good cook we were told. We genuinely can't make it, but this hospitality is so typical of the local generous good nature. Â So far we've declined three meals and a wedding due to prior engagements in the month we have been here. We were nonetheless introduced to his second mother who lives with them, (his late father had two wives). His 16 year old son and 19 year old daughter were woken up to say hello to us.
On the final leg of the journey, he explained how blessed he was to have met us. How grateful he was for our custom and friendship.
He won't drive us today because the unwritten driver code states that our trade is to be shared amongst all the drivers. Louise gave him 2000 rupees in payment for a 500 rupee journey, and said that when his children have finished education, if they are coming to England, and want to stay with us for a while, they are very welcome, he has our WhatsApp.
The poor man. He tried so hard to hide his tears. But then they came. He was in floods.
I did not get a photograph of Mr Kumar. We didn't realise how important he was until after he had pulled away.
The sole aim of his life, to provide. Life is hard. He is as close to a hunter gatherer as it's possible to be in a fully civilised society. His singular aim is to see his children achieve more than he. Perhaps it is with us too, but we have the luck and privilege not to see it so clearly.
We travelled on to Kerala and I remember documenting as I sat on the train to Maduri, a scene that in retrospect is another analogy for transitional India. Now the most populous country in the world and the most hi-tec, but still apparently wedded to old habits that seem to hark back to the darker days of the British Empire:
'The studious looking lady opposite me on seat 27 wears her wire framed specs as she meticulously copies invoice after invoice onto the pages of her ledger. Between each sheet of the ledger she places and smoothes a thin blue sheet. I recognised it of course. But it took me a full minute to recall the name, carbon copy paper. Those of you who know me well, may again suspect early onset alcohol related memory loss. No, actually fuck off, it's just an item of stationary lost deep inside perfectly functioning neurones. Thank you. It's been a very long time. I remember with surprise that infact CC (Carbon Copy) remains in daily use on email.
Her smart phone rang. Silpa answered it and then popped on her bluetooth headphones. I could only hear one side of the conversation, it was in Tamil. But there are so many English words in every sentence that I now knew her name, that she was speaking with her boss, and that she had nearly finished her bookkeeping.
It occurred to me that her phone contained more than enough computing power to safely land an Apollo mission on the moon. A mystery I'll probably never fully understand, except of course it's the way her boss wants it, and without the carbon copy paper she doesn't have a job. Under the circumstances she is unlikely to extol the virtues of the computerised Excel spread sheet already available on her android phone.
Despite regular foreign travel, and relative internet savvy, we have failed to book our own rail tickets. The process of registering with the Indian Railway board, the complexity of the timetabling, plus the fact that it was only possible to place ourselves on the train waiting list, made it almost impossibly stressful.
We asked a local Pondicherrian travel agent to do it for us. He appeared to take two days to arrange it, which made me feel better. Several conversations, copies of visas and passports and physically signed declarations were required. Printed provisional tickets were delivered by bike. Despite planning this journey ten days ago we only received confirmation of seats yesterday. It cost an extra fifty rupees (50p) to the travel agent, but was money well spent. Frequent tiny amounts of income seem the life blood of the economy.
Contrast this with how simple booking an Indian internal flight was for us. No more tricky than booking from London to Manchester, and very significantly cheaper. Perhaps it's the same issue as the carbon copy paper? My guess is that both the Indian Railway Board and the bookkeepers boss, are still using systems introduced by the British. It really is time to shake off those and many other latent residual colonial bonds.'
And again as we climbed the mountain road by taxi, headed over the Western Ghats towards Kerala I reflected:
'Goodbye Tamil Nadu. Genuinely enthralled by your beauty, disturbed by your poverty, terrified by your drivers, fascinated by your glaring contrasts, and bowled over by your kind and generous people.'
Our Indian adventure moved on to a wonderful week revisiting Kerala. We loved it but the experience of going somewhere and staying there, as we had in Pondi, was so much more powerful. We would highly recommend this type of experience anywhere in the world, in India it was magical.
Back to Datchet Health Centre for work in March proved to me I'm not yet ready to retire. I love the team and the work. Our next blog covered mainly a mid year two week driving trip around some of Portugal. We loved it starting in Lisbon, travelling up into the Druoro valley, on to Porto, and then taking a different route back down to Comporta. Along the way we ate and drank so well that I wrote
'But the variety, the consistency, the price, the incredible cataplana, begs the statement previously reserved for Italy. In Portugal it's not possible to have a bad meal.'
Our final stop in Portugal was Comporta, which was interesting and very different with its sand dunes and enclaves of the super wealthy. Having found that Portugal was generally significantly cheaper than the rest of Europe, this area certainly was not. I wrote:
'Be warned that the excellent value of Portugal applies everywhere, except, as far as we could see, the Comporta area where we ended our trip. There, celebs from The Beckhams, Clooneys, Sharon Stone, Ronaldo and multiple other A listers congregate to successfully push the price of a plot of land up so high that locals are now unable to stay. ....It seems the only people still truely local are very wealthy builders while others have cashed in or are waiting to do so. One expat we met whose wife is Portuguese spent 160,000€ on their modest place and reckons it's now worth 2million. Plots of land with sea view now change hands for 5-10 million euro. I see the attraction with a 60 km beach, wonderful dunes, and chilled Lisbon fashion shops where you can spend hundreds of euros on a woven beach bag or drift wood lamp. Nestled next door is the virtually empty working men's club where a 300ml glass of Vihno Verde still costs 1.80€ unless you are a member when it's 1.60€ and a coffee is 75cents. We watched the football here and enjoyed the company of the few remaining locals. Comporta has fabulous beach clubs and exceptional restaurants, but if you want an Ibiza vibe, I'd definitely tell you to go to Ibiza. Seems a shame to be ethnically cleansing an area that only escaped from fascism 50 years ago.'
This year also marked the moment when our trusty Campervan Nessa finally reached the end of the journey with us. The end of an era. I wrote:
'My experience of buying and selling camper vans is tremendously limited. Bought one, sold one. But our experience is worth adding to the pantheon of guff about van life up here on the web.
I've alluded before to the viscerally emotional experience of buying Nessa. Due diligence and logical process went out the window to be replaced by rose tinted hippy spectacles and a gnawing need to have her. Negotiations then, were perfunctory and I am sure we exuded such an air of desperation to buy that the seller gave us £500 off just to get two doe eyed loons off his drive in Bridlington.
Fast forward three years and now we are selling. Despite a wealth of CVW experience (campervan wanker), we found the sales process equally emotionally triggering. One might have expected better of us. But despite ourselves we wanted to find an emotional purchaser, someone who just couldn't help themselves. A psychologist coined the term limerance to describe the feeling you get when in the first flush of falling in love. When one can completely overlook someone's worst characteristics and see them instead as quirky but entirely loveable part of that person. Only months later noticing their foul breath, body odour, excessive wind and coercive behaviour for what it is. That's the person we wanted to have her, for better or worse.
We would have sold her to Jeffery Dahmer himself if he had turned up with the right cash, but ideally you want your baby to be loved not bagged up and put in the bin.
So imagine our joy when the first person to view her turned out to be the final purchaser. We will call him N because that's his initial. A man so besotted that I'm certain her imposing physical size, her body rattles, her home made carpentry, and her multiple imperfections just stood out as lovable cute little dimples on the face of his new love. Just like us. Contrast this with other viewers, who did things like question her carpentry, ask probing questions about the body work, go over the electrics tutting and lifting the bonnet sucking air through their teeth.
We were so delighted. And even better N and his wife HS (genuinely her initials) are planning to live in her! Perhaps they will start a blog entitled N&HS on the run, so we can all enjoy her ongoing trials and tribulations?
Goodbye Nessa it's been a blast. '
So out with the campervan. I have not been as sad as I thought I might be. Life evolves.
We even managed to get to a Festival despite the sale of Nessa.:
'It turns out that there are no festival rules. No absolute need for a campervan. No obligatory boggy fields to wade through. No gag inducingly hideous toilet cubicle to negotiate. In fact, Montreux is a festival you are more likely to go to by Bentley than Ford Transit'.
We were at the Montreux Jazz Festival for a short but extremely memorable stay:
'We've bitten the bullet for your enrichment once again. The Swiss riviera on Lake Geneva shore line. 2024, the weather perfect, not a whiff of burning Casino, and the line up was irresistible. Since Amy, we've craved for a female British icon to knock our socks off. And Raye has popped up to do exactly that. With her 'me too' approach to the music business, her body confidence, her vocal range, genre defying music and her stunning girl next door stage presence. She is the star we've been waiting for. Couple her up with Rag n Bone man and it's getting better. But then load this delicious offering with a mod god in the form of Gordon Sumner and you've got us hooked. Sting, Raye, and the big man, all within 24 hours.'
Although a camping foray to the New Forest did suggest there are downsides to no longer having a campervan:
'The partially deflated softness of the mattress was gradually worsened by a slow puncture. By midnight we were suffocatingly pressed together in the centre of the collapsing mattress with Reggie (the dog) on top of us. Thank the lord for anaesthetic quantities of red wine and Sleepeaze tablets. We woke at 7am and by 9am we were back home in Datchet having a fry up.
Tonight we have resolved never to go camping again.'
Towards the end of the year we headed to the Maldives:
'Last time we came to the Maldives was 1989. Back then, we started three months of travelling, in between jobs, and on our honeymoon, here in the Maldives.
But after 2 days of eye wateringly expensive drinks and food we took an early flight back to Sri Lanka and started the real adventure of our lifetime. That was 35 years ago.
Now, years later we had wanted to return and enjoy the reported comforts and delights of the full luxury Maldivian experience.'
By September I had fully left Datchet Health Centre. I found myself deeply affected by the change of role. I've analysed the effect it had on me in a couple of blogs and it's been clear to me I'm not yet ready to stop practicing as a doctor quite yet. This is quite a surprise and I wrote a couple of final blogs of the year, which are linked below. They herald fresh next steps in 2025, which I look forward to enormously. The travel blog remains alive and well nonetheless. Our next posts will come in February when we are, purely for your enrichment of course, planning a four week backpacking trip to the Philippines. So another tough year looms ahead!
Wishing everyone a fabulous 2025 from NHSontheRun. Go do something surprising.
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