SIMPLY BEING
So we did it. We packed our lives into boxes, took everything we thought we might need, including the dog, and off we went. We stayed 15 months. And we might’ve stayed longer still, but the money ran out, the credit dried up, and anyway, another winter was approaching, and one of those had been enough. And how was it, you ask.
It was glorious. It was magical. It was beautiful. It wasn’t always easy, but it was always good. We lived from day to day. We never knew what the time was, we didn’t know what day of the week it was, we lost track of the date, barely knew what month it was. We went to bed with the sun, got up with the sun – during winter, we slept 10 hours or more. It’s most therapeutic. We hardly looked a day or two ahead – we just did what needed to be done each day. We lived without knowing what was happening over the hills on the other side of the harbour, let alone what was happening on the other side of the world, and it didn’t seem to matter much. We listened intently to the silence – except it was never entirely silent, because we could always hear the murmur of the sea and the chatter of the birds. We grew our vegetables, we read our books, we took photographs, we walked along the coast and around the bays and coves of the harbour, we stared into the distance with minds gloriously vacant. We did a thousand other things.
Does it sound idyllic? Well, it was.
But then it wasn’t all idyllic, because life never is, is it? During the coldest months, apart from the two rooms we could heat, the temperature in the house