The Orange Gold Light of Sunset on the Mountains

There was a moment, in that backpacking summer five years ago, when all of the planning and worries about missed connections and hostels and excitement drained away. It left the core of romanticism and child-like glee of travel and I remembered for the first time the theme tune to Michael Palin's TV show, Around The World in Eighty Days, which is part of what whet my appetite for that sort of thing in the first place.

I was sitting on a lurid orange plastic liferaft box on the top deck of a Greek ferry, thickly painted yet still rusting brown around the blue and white edges. We were pulling out of Iraklion harbour at sunset. The waves inside the harbour walls were docile, flat and oily, but outside a cool strong breeze exaggerated a hefty swell. Above the grey stepped and scattered buildings of the town rose sienna hills specked with rich olive green, and steep faces of scored rock, which caught the light of the setting sun after the town had descended into twilight and the street lights had come on.

As the ferry began to pitch in the waters outside the harbour, we were setting off. It felt more of a beginning than leaving England two and a half months before.

When I was a child in this town, I used to daydream about just leaving everything behind and starting again. There were relationships which could have run better courses, frustratingly there were things which hadn't worked out, people who had the wrong of impression of me, things I wanted to do but couldn't...to that little me, running around the playground, starting completely afresh seemed a great idea.

Maybe that dissatisfaction with the lack of perfection in personal relationships and personal situation also manifest itself in part in the desire to travel; I don't know. I can't remember a time when I wasn't excited by the prospect of travel. According to my Mother I used to love the bus even as a baby and toddler, straining from her lap to see out of the window.

Standard middle-England reading fare and the awesome literary legacy of my Dad: a near-full set of Eagle Annuals, Boy's Own Annuals and exciting 1960s books with titles like, 'The Wonder Book Of Daring Deeds' only exacerbated my enthusiasm for distant climes. Before family holidays as a child I would get so excited that my immune system would shut down completely and we would leave the country with me sickening for something which would sadly put me out of action for the first week.

So when we left England for that European trip five years ago, I was excited as all hell, but at the same time there was an element of escape, of freeing myself from the daily round of imperfect relationships and personal circumstances which is conventional modern life.

The beginning of that ferry journey was something else. We were setting off, and it felt like an epic beginning, worthy, in a media-twisted romantic way, of that Eighty Days soundtrack. It was the first time in two and a half months, that we were turning towards home, and it didn't feel like returning, of being forced back from escape. Gemma and I were heading home, to our loved ones, to our lives which were starting in earnest with university a few months away. It felt as though I had to be away from it a while to realise that that frustration at imperfection or misconstrued impressions dragging out to form day-to-day relationships was a motivation towards improvement, that life wasn't something to escape from but something to work at, that life wasn't there to be escaped from, but that life was there for the taking.

So now my eight-year-old self has his completely fresh start, but he's standing there looking around him with his mouth open (as he is apt to do) realising that escape isn't the order of the day.

I am leaving Britain tomorrow, for love and New York. Family members are still squabbling lightheartedly over who actually gets to take me to the Catamaran terminal at the end of Ryde pier, but other than that everything is organised and set. Nothing about these past few days has been anything like that one orange-golden moment on the deck of a ferry in the Aegean, but this morning, when I was up to my ears in old photographs and books and coffee, and my Mum was petitioning me for the right to take me tomorrow, I remembered what it felt like.

The beginning of a journey towards life, with a different, stronger and happier set of heart and mind.

I love you, Krissa. I'm coming.