Craving the crumbling

With the onset of spring, I have had quite a constructive period: didactic and rejuvenating. As I think I have already mentioned, the last week (away from Kingston, in the city) has acted as a restorative for my flagging sense of self-worth, devoid of the sickly-sweet sentimentalising such a state of affairs would normally entail. I was adjusting the figurative television, only not fiddling with the colour this time but with the definition...

The one area where a little of my characteristic over-romanticising has been allowed to slip back in have been my plans for the summer. Continuing the pretence of being 'a little more than your-run-of-the-mill-twenty-something'- living with unfamiliar old ladies or in a converted Irish mansion, taking trains across continents and the like (or maybe this is your run-of-the-mill-twenty-something, I don't know)- I've decided that, this summer, I either want to visit the Falkland islands or St. Helena, where the British Navy, famously and finally, deposited Napoleon.

There's no real reason, although conceptions of the last crumbling bits of old imperialist acquisition have inspired a daydream or two of late. If anything, I guess I think a jaunt to one of these far flung demi-colonies out in the middle of the South Atlantic is probably more fitting for someone of my background than some kind of egalitarian mercy mission to Guadalupe, Timbuktu or Kazakhstan; I am not Che Guevara, much as might I want to be- I'm a kid from south-west Surrey. Plus, it is only a £932 round-trip flight out to the Falklands, where they promise a 'friendly welcome' and 'big skies' (but as to whether or not the horizon is actually demonstrably bigger out there, I must confess I don't know).

We will have to see anyway, my thoughts on such matters fluctuate daily. Still, one thing I do know is that such a venture could only help my portfolio. Just imagine: pale but promising kid from the suburbs, formerly resident in Ireland and once published in the Daily Mirror, pays a visit to St. Helena and vows to lobby Parliament to build them an airport once he returns to Britain to take up his position at the London School of Economics, reading Policy. A few years later, he goes back to the island triumphant (and knighted) and is quickly made the feudal lord of all he surveys, only to be assassinated by someone jealous of how rapidly he had turned his mundane life into motion picture material...

...We all have to dream...