The Happy Wanderer

During my travelling the world phase, I found that I needed to e-mail people about where I was and what I was doing. Initially this was tiresome as I rarely had the energy to write or type anything close to a narrative, or even a series of connected clauses making any kind of sense. This chore became less tiring and more engaging as I felt the necessity to actually share experiences and communicate with people. Sending casual e-mails to friends was very time-consuming so I took the often soul-destroying step of composing group e-mails. These are the impersonal, tar everyone with the same brush, one way kind of things that make me cringe. However, I tried to make them entertaining and at the very least educational. As most of my travelogue e-mails were written on an Internet time limit they were hastily composed and lacked careful structure and grammar. There is no false modesty on my part when I say, they were,… poor. I couldn’t even be bothered to write a title for most of the e-mails so I simply used on… and then typed in whatever the main feature was. Main features usually involved a metamorphosis from the subject heading to the eventual literary output, sometimes with almost no relevance to the title. In my head I like to think that I was approaching a kind of Kerouac automatic writing, the kind of writing that makes no sense for the first few pages but eventually feels like you are riding along. Unfortunately my e-mails were too brief to build up any kind of style. The rewarding aspect of writing changed into a therapeutic pursuit for me. This was particularly true as I was a solo traveller and had countless opportunities for my daydreams to end up on an e-mail. Many of these previous e-mails and their stylistic (or lack of) character have contributed to this blog. The spirit of writing really quickly in an emotionally charged way will sometimes weave its way into this blog. The spirit and style of original travelogue e-mailing is the genesis of this blog. This quirk means that there will inevitably be continuity problems and mixed up tenses, the reveries from long ago may seem more real or relevent than the excerpt they are contained in. This fact is because they are lifted from one of my many folders in my e-mail account. Although I intend this blog to be more considered and reflective than my original form of writing, I am trying to retain the exciting spirit and home-made seat of the pants feel. For this reason I want to continue using ‘on…’ for every new post. I like the ‘on…’ thing because it sounds pretentious and philosophical and it reminds me of the archaic travel books I used to read. These tomes always had exciting headings starting with ‘On…’ or ‘In which…’ followed by any number of colourful descriptions of eccentric travellers blacking up to visit Central Asian Mosques or accounts of turning Turk or bartering for carpets in some Oriental Suk. I don’t apologise for my fondness of the exotic, archaic or the pretentious. These adjectives and the things they conjure up are my inspiration for wandering and writing. This has been a long-winded introduction, I should have just written ‘Hello World!!!” as suggested by this very website, but then I am often a cretin so on… will have to do. Oh, by the way… I live in Korea and enjoy travelling etc. I think that’s the point I was trying to make.