Ruins

I once heard it said you grow up the day you realise you wont live forever. I don't know why this is something we aim for. The growing up. But the realisation of our own mortality can surely only be a good thing. It motivates.


I am a nomad. I like the sea. I like places, and I want to see as many of them as I can before I am faced with my sell-by-date. Although what you see in these places is the same; it's people and their home, and the symbols that embody them. It's the feel of it you go for.

I especially like ancient civilisations, and I shall start with the feeling of them. There is a lot of comfort in standing next to ruins of unfathomable genius; people understood their world and left a mark on it. They became great. They fell. They made a circle, and though there is an innate feeling about our civilisation that it wont follow their example, we are just continuing what they started. They tell us endings are fine; they have loads of them. But never an end.

In a few days I am venturing to Cairo with Mr. Blue. I have always wanted to go, for as long as I can remember. And not just because a psychic once said I was an Egyptian Queen reincarnate, with an old soul and a thousand lines on each palm to tell my stories. I have always wanted to go because it was truly the greatest of societies, well the Old Kingdom anyway. You have to respect their ability to wow a world where people have learned to fly and make machines to build wonders for them, c. 2000 years after their decline.


Knowledge is an amazing thing. It's also slightly addictive; the more of it you have the more you are made aware of how little you really own. I always found it strange that we need to pick up newspapers and know the details of tragedies that happened when there is nothing we could possibly do to help.

I happen to really like knowing things, even though most of the time I get what I know wrong or forget it again, or am confronted with the question whether it is ever truly possible to know anything at all, and if so how. With all the sceptics and the hard determinists. Between them there really is nothing left apart from standing next to something ancient and great, to touch it and be close to the million others who were there and came before without knowing. Without any controlled choice about your having come there or leaving; but just a feeling about it all. Maybe that should be all we take from experiences and knowledge. From every film we see and every book we read, and every person, and place and day.

In the end we are all just explorers though, with our helmets on and our fixed opinions and changing minds. Discovering everything, for the last time, for ourselves.