The Improvised Adventures of Rebel Without a Coat, 2013

---

Episode 1 – Travel preparations

"A good traveller has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving"

- Lao Tzu

On Monday the twenty-fifth of March, 2013, I'm standing in front of the bathroom mirror in my parents' house in Manchester, peeling acryllic paint off my face. I was with my friends from the Cosmic Junk Band last night, celebrating my penultimate night in Manchester with food, drink, face painting and intermittent jam sessions of which I think there are now some beautiful and funny recordings lying around somewhere (I say funny because there are a few less serious moments, including me having the great impulse to emit a wonderfully timed "sheeeeiiiit..." amidst a myriad of experimental noises). Anyhow, I'm picking around in my sort of quiff-cum-mohican that is due to be sacrificed tomorrow to the sound of Scroobius Pip's "Distraction Pieces" in a ritualistic shaving away of any harboured negative energy, looking for stray bits of paint, when I notice something shiny. I fold away as much hair as possible and grab hold of a spindly white hair. I pluck it out and hold it up to the light in slight disbelief. It almost looks a bit like an old woman's pube. There's a few of these hairs knocking about in that particular front right-hand corner of my head. I'm twenty-four years old. I guess it's been a long winter.

I've been dreaming of traveling the world since the travel bug wormed its way inside me about five years ago. I'd moved away from home for the very first time to go volunteering overseas, done a month of training on a farm in Uganda and then spent six months teaching about sustaining better livelihoods, living in a tiny beautiful village in the Mayuge district, with a week-and-a-half's holiday time in the middle in which I went to explore some lake islands, nearly got arrested in Kampala, missed the boat and had to stay in Kampala for a night where I met a man with crazy eyes who bought me a cup of ginger tea and some bread, then sold me some very expensive spices, met a man who had kids in Bradford who bought me breakfast, got the boat to the Ssesse Islands where I checked into a shithole of a hotel in which I lay awake thinking the building was falling down before realizing it was rats running around inside the roof, hired a bike that broke down, once shortly before I reached a bike mechanic, and once afterwards, got taken for a ride in a tractor in which we picked up a couple of bloody injured motorcyclists along the way, discovered the place I was looking for didn't exist, had to cycle back with the broken bike, stopped for a banana, found bananas squashed all over my bag, carried on, crashed in a bush, slept in the shithole, checked into a bloody nice hotel the next day that I managed to bargain down to about a fiver, and continued to enjoy this holiday time until I reached Kisoro in the very South-West corner of Uganda with the intention of maybe climbing my first moutain, and got ill with diahorea. Yeah, I think the seed was probably planted some time around then. Ever since then I had ants in my pants and couldn't settle down for more than an average of four months.

This was probably why I dropped out of Leeds College of Music before the first year was up, wound up at Mum and Dad's in Manchester for another ten months working in a pub to get some savings, and went to work a couple of hours a day for a free place to stay in a fishing village on a wee Scottish island. Thank fuck for that. My life would never be the same.

Three years later I'm standing in front of the bathroom mirror in my parents' house in Manchester, having accidentally moved back in for about the fifth time, and spent way longer there than I meant to, going nowhere in particular, for about the fifth time. I've now also lived in Edinburgh, Dar Es Salaam and London as well as bumming around aimlessly with a tent and sleeping on friends' couches at certain intervals. Two of the several intensely magical people from all around the world who I met on Skye have gone back to their home in Australia, moved back to Scotland for a while, gone back again, and had a baby together. I found out about the impending small new person, the first to my knowledge to be created by any of my friends, whilst living in London, at which point I stopped dreamily looking at maps at started looking at them with purpose, deciding that if I didn't know where I wanted to go then everywhere from here to Australia was as good a place as any, and better if there was a shiny new baby at the end of the rainbow. I've started thinking about how to do the trip, got sick of London, gone back to Manchester to experiment with different forms of busking until I could find the best combination of instruments and musical styles to allow me to have fun and make money whilst traveling, bummed around a bit in Birmingham and Ireland, gone back to Manchester and decided I needed to settle down somewhere for a while and save some money, started looking online from Manchester for a live-in job in Scotland, got sick of thinking about the future and decided to stay in Manchester and write music and not think about it, gone to Edinburgh for the duration of the Fringe festival with the intention of saving money by busking, somehow spent all the money I saved busking but had a bloody good time while doing it, gone back to Manchester and decided it was about time I started planning this trip whilst saving money from busking, had a great week of busking and then suddenly lost all motivation - cue bitterly cold weather to make things twice as difficult - got distracted from planning my travels by the sudden urge to record an album all about the number one most intensely magical person who I met on Skye who later very inadvertently broke my heart, somehow gone uncontrollably nocturnal on and off for several weeks which made recording an album in a terraced house slightly impossible, got more and more frustrated with the ins and outs of planning a year long round-the-world trip and finally decided not to plan anything and just visit a few friends around Western Europe and then see what happens after that - which is what I think the universe was telling me to do - finally finished the album and slowly got my shit together, and now I'm standing in front of the bathroom mirror at my parents' house in Manchester, pulling white hairs off my head.

I've finally booked a coach ticket for tomorrow, all set to whisk me off to the exciting new horizons of...my auntie's house in Leeds. Yeah, well, I'm starting off slow. Since I decided not to plan anything, a vague route to get me from here to Switzerland seems to have planned itself. It just involves joining the dots between people I want to visit before I get crazy far away, starting with my auntie (who funnily enough is actually a Dot), and should take me through Scotland, Ireland, Jersey, England, Belgium, maybe Holland, Germany and Switzerland, with possible detours, via the magic of busking, hitchhiking and couchsurfing (see www.couchsurfing.org). I could end up in Fiji. Or I could end up back here, in front of the bathroom mirror in my parents' house in Manchester, in a couple of months' time. Either way, here's to some travel-blog-worthy adventures. Hope you enjoy reading about them.

😉

---