Up, up and no way

Andrew Leci discovers that the grass is always greener on the other side and is keen to start making tracks once again.

I ESTIMATE THAT, between 2015 and 2018, I packed and unpacked a suitcase no less than 200 times. I was travelling a lot in those days, mostly for work, and when that particular stint ended, I was determined to retire my luggage and stay on terra firma for the foreseeable future, if not longer.

My undertaking worked reasonably well for a couple of years – although I did manage a couple of trips: visiting family, eating Italian food, scratching ‘drink a pint of Guinness in Dublin’ off my bucket list – but I can honestly say that I didn’t miss the rigmarole of travel. While I have always quite enjoyed airport lounges and the seemingly endless stories and vignettes within them – from the nervous, soon-to-be passenger to the frustrated business executive whose flight has been delayed – there is always so much to watch and plenty to listen to when you’re killing time awaiting a flight and have access to limitless amounts of alcohol and stale sandwiches. I became so familiar with one lounge at Changi Airport that I think there’s a chair somewhere that still bears my buttock indentations.

Like most things in life, when you do something so often, it becomes tawdry and all too familiar. But after more than a year of pretty much not being able to go anywhere, I have to admit that I miss the entire process terribly and simply cannot wait to sit in a lounge, get frisked at security and wait in line to take my seat on a large metal tube, seven and a half miles above the terra firma I profess to love. Imagine what the Wright brothers would be thinking, were they alive.

I’d even get on a water vessel if I thought it was going anywhere interesting, and I have never been one for cruises. I don’t think that this is because I am currently experiencing the re-emergence of the wanderlust I suffered from as a younger person, but I am feeling a desperate need to go… somewhere. And soon. Before, preferably, my frequent flyer programme demotes me to a level that doesn’t even exist.

I won’t have seen what little remains of my family in more than two years. They’re in London and negotiating their third extended lockdown in the space of 12 months, but hey, that’s what you get for being rugged individualists rather than doing what you’re told by a government that

you trust and behaving accordingly. The whole ‘social and civic responsibility’ debate doesn’t go down well with my sister, for example, who hasn’t been able to go to a restaurant or a cinema in more months than she cares to remember.

She is anxious to be able to travel again, and I am now experiencing similar emotions and feelings of helplessness, despite fully accepting that during a global pandemic, there is no better place to be in the world than Singapore. I hope I am still saying this when the next one comes along.

This doesn’t mean, however, that I now cannot wait to get away. By plane, boat, train (destined for failure) or even a carrier pigeon if I could find one strong enough and sufficiently resolute to carry the load.

Like most of us, I have been a landlubber for too long and need to spread my wings. A two-night stay on Sentosa looking out to sea counting empty container ships isn’t going to cut it for very much longer. I even find myself envying those on board, despite the fact that it can’t be much fun being stuck on a boat, also going nowhere, with nothing to do all day but swab decks and look at people staycationing on Sentosa through binoculars.

Envying them, no doubt.

In a nutshell then, this is the human condition. We don’t know what we have until it’s gone and we take for granted the things that we are able to do during ‘normal’ times. I had had enough of travelling and now I am desperate to peregrinate, but if I started to travel again regularly, in due course, I am sure that I would revert to being a slug-a-house.

Right now, however, all I can do is dream about foreign climates, the smell of hotel corridors and the sound of frustrated concert pianists filling atria with their renditions of Clayderman classics, while waiting for someone to stab me in the arm with a syringe and try to convince me that everything’s going to be all right in our brave new world. Travelling will probably never be the same again, but I still want to do it and my suitcase now faces the prospect of being exhumed from what was intended to be its final resting place in the garden.

Like most of us, I have been a landlubber for too long and need to spread my wings. Travelling will probably never be the same again, but I still want to do it.