Of course it was a blur; a pulped mash of memory and muse; of sights and sounds filtered through the skin of travel, osmotic sensations rippling. In the blink of an eye we came back; a red eye journey that was longer than just miles. It seemed to us, this journey, to stretch beyond continent and ocean; city and country. We have become more elasticated, as though we were both ready to be propelled back into the culture we had come from and probably never really left. We had arrived on the oft-kissed tarmac of Heathrow. Just as we knelt down to thank our lucky stars, someone sang a torch song and set themselves alight in Glasgow and the rolling, breaking, repeating news of CNN flashed in the arrivals hall unlikely pictures of fundamentalists being hooked by neds in a familiar location.
Of course it was a welcome blur. A year spent away from friends and family often felt like a long time. But I could never have allowed myself to feel too cut off as email, letters, blogs and texts saw to distance being shrunk to a matter of seconds. The cliche is that when you come back everything seems as though you never left, the status quo prevailing. I'm not sure that's true. People change and lives continue, hopefully happily perhaps even dramatically, but there is an inexorable sense of movement to coming back. Just as there can be to staying.
When I left I felt as though I was being ripped out of the familiar, torn from roots deeply embedded, a life impacted yet fortunate and I even imagined that it might be strange or awkward or even difficult to reinsert myself upon my return as though I might have gone native in the expat compound or become so jungled on deserrt islands that I could no longer see the vines for the leaves. Of course I learnt that people are strangely the same in either place. Sure there are ticks of culture that gob-smack; there are the layers of power and corruption that defy all optimism in the progression of humanity, there are displays of human love and kindness that bedevil definition and trite summation. If I have learnt anything this past year then I have understood that these ticks,layers and displays can be applied to either country.
And now posting from Mui Ne, the beach completely lashed by whipped up waves, their squall sounding menace and nearly drowning the sound of the dodgy ceiling fan rattling its noise, threatening to come loose and cut through the humid air of our bungalow. I have returned just as I know truly, deeply that I have left.
Click on the link called ' Sid and Lucas in the Borders' for the latest quicktime movie.
