Having a bit of a “should I stay or should I go” moment in my stand-up comedy career I decided a walking holiday would be just the treat, clear the head, read, walk, think and catch up with some sleep (Stand-up comedy is a great sleep deprivation technique).
Wales! The Pemprokeshire coast to be more exact, the village (tho’ they call it a town) of St Davids to be even more exact. We rented a cottage a few miles out of ‘town’ on a pretty busy road,we only noticed the traffic after a week, before that we were still getting over the ‘real traffic’ back home. By saying a busy road I mean Fridays and Saturdays when tourists like ourselves are coming and going. The rest of the time it’s a one car every five minutes sort of busy.
I took a risk hoping the weather would be kind, Welsh kind, meaning only the occasional storm and maybe further just drizzle mixed with coastal mist. How wrong could I be! I came with anoraks waterproof leg gear, headgear and walking gear, the temperatures soared to about 30° C turning the coast into a sort of ‘Costa Dai Cymru’.
So the walks turned out more strenuous than I was anticipating, and much more strenuous than my new prosthetic knee had signed up for.
The weird thing about being on Holiday more than a week in the same place I start to get all anti tourist after the first 5 days, the more I feel at home where I’m staying the more I shy away from tourists.How dare they! leaving their dog shit behind in little plastic bags all along the coastal route, it’s nature, let the dog shit in open air, it will rot away.If it’s put in a plastic bag it takes ages plus the plastic bag is an eyesore. I see locals laughing at the tourists taking the wrong trail to get to the coastal path and I wink and laugh along with them as if I was a local and in on the joke, still laughing I turn a corner and realize I too am on the wrong trail and have to re track and face the smiles of the locals, I just act like it was meant to happen that way.
Coastal walking is my kind of walking, reason being it’s almost impossible to get lost, if the sea is on your left hand side when you leave on your walk, make sure it’s on your right hand side on the way back, no compasses needed or satellite guided intricate gps systems (like the one I bought specially for this trip!.
Every day, get up eat a healthy breakfast, out of the door by 10 pm back by 4 or 5 pm, tea + treat read or write then make food, read some more sleep and start the whole zen fest again.Oh yes , after the first week I’m feeling all ‘back to nature’ and part of the big picture, and there is nothing to get stressed out about, no internet connection and a mobile phone connection that makes the postal service look like high speed broadband , what more don’t you need? In fact it gets me so stress free I start to have fantasies of me being a local, I start buying local property magazines looking for something affordable to buy. I imagine myself becoming a local, living here , how I would financially survive is a mystery but I can still dream.
So I read ,every day I read and I write and try to get my head around planning, what do I want to do with the remaining 20 or so years I have to go on this stone in the sky of ours?
The more I read and walk the more I think, the more I think the more choices there seem open to me, the more I think of that the more tired I become and the more tired I become the less I give a shit about all the plans.
The head is cleared, through not deciding, just going with the flow, a waiting and see attitude. Then I find a café ,there is one in the Village/town that has wifi , and I open my e-mails after two weeks of being the zen comedian or coastal path Kung Fu I see mails offering me gigs , even one from Sweden and I realise that stand-up comedy will probably be my ‘aggro-zen’ for the foreseeable future, the coastal path is just ‘my bit on the side’ .
But in my heart I know I have what it takes, I could have been a local I have the skills.
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