"the purpose of history," said the cynical plasticman, "is to show us that we keep on making the same bloody mistakes."

(Apologies to A for this one - it's cut & pasted from an email I sent her the other day. This is the story of my decision to go to Spain, which subsequently led me to come to South America to improve my Spanish...)

A few months before I left England, I caught the train north one day and walked a twenty kilometre section of Hadrian's Wall, the English equivalent of the Great Wall of China. Having said that it's the English equivalent of the Great Wall of China, though, I should hasten to add that it's equivalent in the same sort of way that a Mini is the English version of a Hummer... So you need to think of the Great Wall of China and then shrink it down. A lot.

I walked along this windswept wall, high on the cliffs overlooking the rolling, treeless Northumberland plains, thinking about my future and where I would be in several months' time. At that point, I hadn't yet decided that I would be going to South America. To be frank, the only thing that I was concerned with then was writing up my dissertation, which I'd been procrastinating about for months. Hence the reason why I was in the arse end of nowhere on a Thursday afternoon - given the choice between either sitting in front of a hot computer writing about why blind people find reading web pages difficult or going for a bracing walk amidst beautiful countryside, I choose the latter any day of the week...

So I walked. And walked. For hours. Thinking. Clambering up the steep slopes and down the near-vertical troughs. Sloshing through the mud at the bottom of each saddle and losing all sensation in my face as the wind hit me as I crested the brow of each hill. My head was full of uncertainty. And then it hit me. Epiphany. I would go to Spain. And if I liked it, I'd go and live there.

This thought, this realisation - this decision - made me feel very cheerful. I smiled to myself as I struggled against the biting, chill winds of England's North. I may - I dare say - even have whistled a little to myself, though the wind did its best to blow the tune back where it came from. A feeling of peacefulness, of certainty, descended on me and, for the first time in a long, long while, my brow cleared and I felt as if a great weight had been taken from my shoulders. I
felt like I had some kind of plan. A purpose, where previously there had only been swirling doubt...

I was so cheered by this newfound sense of calm that I tried calling my friend, Doddsy, from clifftops high above a rippled lake. Of course, being in the middle of nowhere with nary a mobile phone mast in sight meant that I could not reach my friend. So, by way of celebration, I sat on the cliff edge and ate some oranges, bunging the peel onto the heads of the unsuspecting ducks swimming peacefully hundreds of feet below. Then I stood up, stretched, and took a pee off the edge of the cliff.

And then I went home.