Wednesday, June 28, 2006

Wednesday - phew!

Today, as I rode around on the bus, I continued to contemplate the concept of journeys and their allure for me. I came to the conclusion that I love travelling about the countryside in cars, buses and trains. The more I thought about it, the more I realised why I hate flying. If you are lucky enough to have a window seat in an aircraft, you basically see clouds and sea, or at least you do on the transatlantic flights that I take. You don't see brief snapshots of other people's lives as you creep/whiz by, and the atmosphere on a plane is quite different to that on a bus, or train. Far more muted and considered. There's less space and people are grumpy and uncomfortable for most of the time. By the way, I suspect this only applies in Economy. People in First and Business have absolutely no cause to complain, their knees don't need to be removed from their ears with the help of an osteopath at the end of a flight. Their food doesn't taste like reconsituted plastic. Oh the envy!

Travelling on the ground, your journey becomes a series of snapshots. It then occurred to me that most forms of narrative are in effect, journeys. We travel with the main characters as they journey through their story. We are with them as they cope with, and are changed by conflict. How many slushy e-mails tell you that life is journey, and friends your companions, and that it's not the ending that's important? Very Zen. But I suspect there's a truth in there somewhere. Actually, that's at the heart of this blog: it's an electronic record of my journey through the final year of my Creative Writing degree.

It may be possible for me to borrow a digital camera, and I wonder if I will be able to capture these moments visually? I've got the summer to experiment and then my pass runs out in September (boo hiss), and it's not going to be possible for me to renew it. But it's an idea worth running with in the meantime. It might be something I could film. Don't know. I'll talk to my CP tutor, see what he says. He is, as they say, the man.

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