By the time I was driving down the M1 between Leeds and Nottingham, I was pretty comfortable driving on the left side of the road, and passing others on their right. Thatâs exactly what I was doing – driving on the farthest lane to the right – as we approached Nottingham, and I saw a brown sign by the side of the road.
It said, âSherwood Forestâ.
I looked at Wife (my co-pilot, to my left).
âWhat do you think? Shall we?â I asked her.
âI donât know. You?â
Often, when I see street artists, and every time I see artists that do things that completely surprise me, I try to think of how they get ready for another dayâs work.
How the large man in Cologne gets up, checks his water bottles, fills them up with fresh, clean, pure water, and then takes the bus to the shopping street next to the cathedral and entertains people by drinking up all the water, a few liters at a time, only to then somehow get it all up and become a human water fountain.
Travel does broaden the mind, and if broadening your mind is something for you, nothing works better than a road trip. One day, you may wake up in a container in Cornwall, then walk through a rain forest biome in the Eden Project, take a left turn and find a wonderful inn, visit King Arthurâs Tintangel, and end the day at Grittleton. Or, maybe you wake up in Grittleton, drive to see the Stonehenge in the morning, and then have lunch at Bath, and dinner at Grittletonâs Neeld Arms.
Basically, you just learn things.
I have made it. Or, this blog has hit the big time. I (It) now have (has) a parody account. Itâs called Son. Whenever something unexpected occurs â for example, when he eats a spoonful of ketchup at an inn, thinking itâs special Cornish sauce â he asks me if Iâm going to blog about it, and then launches into a parody narration: âWhen I was a kid back in FinlandâŠâ in a thick American accent.
The other day, as we were walking back from the Brighton Pier, he did that thing and then asked me if I was going to blog about it. When I said I might, he asked me what the blog would be about.
And I said, âWell, Son, itâd go something like this.â
Back when Wife and I had just met, and before we lived a walking distance from each other but in our own apartments, and before we had started to regularly spend the nights together in either one of them, it sometimes happened that Wife would leave my place in the evening and sleep at her sisterâs place two subway stops down the red line.
One such time, when Wife and I saw each other the next morning at the office, and as we recapped our evenings, she, for a reason I canât remember anymore, said casually that âshe only has hard breadâ. Meaning the Swedish knĂ€ckebröd, or crispbread, a flat and crisp rye bread.
âOh,â I said, while making a mental note to always have fresh bread at home when Wife would visit.
âBut I like crispbread,â she added, and I made a note of that, too.
I was definitely going to stock up on the knĂ€ckebröd as well. (But I was also going to make sure that as long as Wife was hanging out with me, sheâd always – always – have soft bread to eat).
Everybody wants to go to heaven but nobody wants to die, and in a similar fashion, I would love to look good but I hate shopping. Not with passion because I donât care enough, but still, enough to own several T-shirts from the previous century.
And thatâs why I am a lightning-fast shopper when I do hit the shops. I have an image in my head going in, and when I see the thing that matches that image, Iâll buy it.
Admittedly, it doesnât mean that I have style, or that Iâll look good (or at least as good as in the image in my head) but most of the times Iâll be pleased with what I see in the mirror.
âTricks are a curious thing. I remember when I was a little kid in Joensuu, Finland, I used to play basketball with my father at a nearby schoolyard, and while Iâm a man of the streets, Iâm the laaaaaaast personâŠâ
*Record Scratch*
*Freeze Frame*
Yup, that’s me. You’re probably wondering how I ended up in this situation⊠Well, it all began with reader interaction. In other words, I asked Son if he had read my previous blog entry, and whether he thought it was any good.
âYeah, it was good. Liked it,â he said.
âBut it didnât have enough of me in it,â he added.
Strength is a curious thing. Thereâs all kinds of it, but you never really know how strong you are until you need it. Thatâs not what the man said, but thatâs what he was telling me as he was packing his javelin into the 1998 Nissan that was parked next to our Volvo.
Iâm one of those Dads who like to tell stories about the tough times of their childhoods. Iâm the guy who tells his kids he didnât have any toys as a kid, and when they challenge me, I tell them to ask Grandma. And when she laughs and says that I most definitely had toys, I challenge her, and make her list all of my toys, and when she only remembers three of four, I say, âha!â
And when I then tell Son and Daughter how I had to make cows out of (used) matches and a pair of pine cones, they look at me like Iâm crazy and then we have to go on Wikipedia to see what a âcowâ is. (Iâm kidding, Son and Daughter have seen cows in the wild.)
Now, if I may say so myself, Im a pretty youthful guy. I have a long hair, and I wear the same clothes Iâve worn since my twenties, and I understand if that creeps you out, dear reader, but thatâs the way I am. At some point in my life, in my teens, I became a jeans and a T-shirt kind of guy, and thatâs just what Iâve been ever since. (With one minor but important change about 17 years ago when I stopped using socks).
