Over the summer, I went away to the south to do some work and visit friends. When I got back my soon-to-be-leaving-home son, asked when I was going away again as he had liked having the house to himself.

Kind of hurt, but also kind of getting it, I booked a foot-passenger ticket on a ferry over to Ireland to visit friends there.

I travelled over by catamaran which was OK, but was cancelled on the return due to storm Floris, so I got bumped onto a later ferry.

As it turned out the storm didn’t hit Ireland as expected so the crossing was sunny, the sun was hot and deck was relatively empty.

I have travelled by ferry before. The last time was with the boys to Holland, but in my life BC (before children) I inter-railed and caught a ferry between Greece and Italy where we slept overnight on the deck. I was in my early twenties.

Since then I have travelled in dug out canoes in Thailand, motor boats in Indonesia, river boats in India as well as cross channel ferries, but the crossing from Ireland stirred the Greece/Italy feeling in me.

That inter-rail trip was the first long independent trip I had done. Fresh out of uni, with my then boyfriend, we went off for a month in the days where we had a paper train timetable and just arrived in a port and found somewhere to stay because there were no phones or AirBnb (I can’t actually believe that we and so many others, did it!).

35+ years on, I stayed with friends who collected me in their cars and dropped me back. I wasn’t as skint as I was when inter-railing and I was alone at a time when my youngest is the one who is off to uni, rather than me.

But I got onto the deck as the boat pulled off, laid down my rain coat, put my head on my backpack and read my book before dozing off to the sway of the waves. When I woke we were in the middle of sea, just sea and sun and a few other people dozing and reading.

And I had the feeling that I used to get when I was back packing, a feeling of freedom. A sense that everything that I needed was with me in my back pack (or at that time, my money belt).

I remember being in Northern India by a river in the Himalayas thinking how little I needed to be happy.  Then I got a house and kids and so I have stuff, so much stuff and travelling since they were born has been with them. 3 times the cost. 3 times the packing. 3 times the amount of needs to be met.

This time it was me, just me, alone on the sea and I could do anything; snooze, read, walk, hang onto the rail, do yoga, chat to people or just gaze.

I felt a tiny tingle or exhilaration, of potential, of excitement, of freedom.

A budding sense of what life could hold after the kids leave home, and that maybe my backpack is part of that.

 

Ps…don’t forget to look here if you are interested in learning about permaculture

 

 

Farmotherlands is my award winning collection of poems about nature, farming, community and family. You can buy a copy here.

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Thanks for being here.
Julie

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