2015: My Year on the Move

Two-thousand-and-fifteen was the year when I picked up my bags and got travelling once again, although in fact it is truer to say that it was the year when a strange, familiar current picked me up and carried me, not unwillingly and yet not exactly intentionally, around the world.

I had a first sense of the force of that current at the end of 2014. Twelve months ago I spent Christmas away from my family for the first time, in Northern Ireland. That year had been an eventful one, in which I had extricated myself from Chambers & Partners (a company which serves a double purpose as both a legal directory and an oubliette for untapped or troubled talent), to embark on a career in financial journalism. I had also moved from Earlsfield to Elephant & Castle. But it was a static year, my third in London.

Now that I am in a reflective mood, certain signs leap out at me, foretelling that 2015 would be a year of motion. On the ferry to Belfast, what should I have been reading but Italo Calvino’s If On A Winter’s Night a Traveller, a book which not only takes escapism and adventure among its themes, but also serves as a connection, through the language it is written in, to the year I spent living in Italy, from 2006 to 2007.

It may seem unlikely, but visiting Antrim, Belfast, Loch Neagh and the Giants’ Causeway in the wintery drizzle rekindled in me the excitement of earlier travels to places like Berlin, Rome and Naples. I was looking forward to another adventure.

Often, I find that the best way to achieve something is to commit to it officially or publicly, well in advance. This can be a very small action initially, such as sending an e-mail, filling in a form, or putting your hand up (this is how I wound up in the position of treasurer of Tooting Labour Party), but once it is done, it becomes almost inevitable. The current builds up and then carries me away. This is likewise how I ended up spending a year studying abroad: I only applied to degree courses where it was compulsory.

Similarly, in 2014 I had impulsively signed up to climb Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania with a group of colleagues from Euromoney in London. And so it was that I forced myself to make arrangements to walk up the tallest free-standing mountain in the world to reach the highest peak in Africa: Buying new walking boots, ensuring I had all the relevant vaccinations, getting a Tanzanian visa, and undertaking almost no physical training whatsoever.

At the same time, I was preparing to visit Stockholm and Bristol for two weddings, journeys not so much chosen by me as demanded by the circumstances.

It was amid this build-up of activity that the opportunity suddenly presented itself to me to take a job in New York. Like climbing Kilimanjaro, living in New York was not something I had ever particularly wanted to do, but it was not a possibility I felt I should dismiss. It is after all the financial capital of the most advanced nation on earth, the beating heart of global capitalism, and I have it on good authority that the best way to bring a system down is from within (note to the National Security Agency: this is a joke.)

With my acceptance of the position in New York, the current fastened its grip and bore me between London, New York, Stockholm and Kilimanjaro International Airport over the summer. I eventually settled in a beautiful apartment in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, and within a few months I had begun visiting such great American metropoles as Philadelphia and Morristown, NJ.

It was fitting, therefore, that I should spend the eve of 2016 restlessly, having made a last minute decision to take a trip to Atlantic City. I have never been to Las Vegas or Reno, so I had not seen anything like the hotel casinos along the boardwalk, a chain of amusement parks for grown up children, a fusion of various periods where historical accuracy, sense and good taste are shunned in favour of dubious opulence, gigantism and garish carpets. Psychedelic slot machines with attention deficit disorder stretch cacophonously forever in all directions. At the entrance to the Taj Mahal, Donald Trump’s name burns acid yellow in compensatory six-foot-high letters under oversized, culturally insensitive, onion-shaped domes. In Caesar’s a giant statue of Augustus Caesar looks down over a Gordon Ramsey restaurant and bar.

And so it was that on a pallid new year’s morning, while waiting for the bus back to New York, I took off my shoes and socks and walked across the beach into the shallow surf of the Atlantic Ocean. It was the first time I had entered it from this direction, on the wrong side of the pond.

Like ascending Mount Kilimanjaro and living in New York, visiting Atlantic City was not something I had ever particularly wanted to do until shortly before I did it. On reflection, it seems to me that never having wanted to do something is no reason not to do it, if you are lucky enough to get the chance. Therefore, I look forward to doing many more exciting things this year that I have never had any burning desire to do.

Atlantic City (Photo: Flickr/Luisa)