I lived in Emsworth for 5 months while I prepared to row the Atlantic. I loved it. But it seems to have shrunk while I've been away. Or maybe my world has got bigger.
The wine bar has closed. The local boat heritage project has finished. The Emsworth Food Festival has been and gone. But not much has changed.
In a way, this is reassuring. There will always be an Emsworth, and I suspect it will always be a remarkably unchanged one. But if I lived here full-time I think it would drive me crazy.
[Photo: Emsworth swans]
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Looking around at my college reunion last night, there were a few surprises. 20 years after we first arrived as freshers in Oxford, rebels have become establishment, and free spirits have become responsible parents. Most were slightly greyer, balder, fatter or wrinklier, but some had barely aged at all, or even improved with age.
If we had, 20 years ago, written our notions of what other people would be doing in 2006, I doubt if there would have been many right answers. If I'd had to write a prediction about my own life, I would certainly have been way off the mark. I'd have guessed I'd be a wife and mother, living in the Home Counties in a nice house, rather than a nomad wandering the world and rowing across oceans.
But I wouldn't change my life for a moment. It's unpredictable and insecure, but I love it. It feels like I'm really living.
[Photo: me between Jon Taylor and Robert 'Spike' Milligan - fellow law students at Univ, and now a successful sports lawyer and barrister respectively. And respectably.]
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The Adventurers' Club of Los Angeles gave me a warm welcome last night. I was there to talk about my Atlantic adventure. The theme of my talk was my new pet theory: that the gap between your plan and reality is the gap where you learn.
If adventures went completely, utterly, perfectly according to plan, there wouldn't be any point in leaving your desk. You'd already have lived your adventure in your imagination, and the experience itself would add nothing. It's the surprises, random events and muck-ups that give you an opportunity to learn. They are what makes it an adventure.
By that definition, my Atlantic experience was a very big adventure indeed.
[Photo: me with Dr Steve Bein, who arranged my speaking engagement in LA]
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Apologies for blogless day yesterday. Internet wouldn't work, car wouldn't work. Just one of those days. All resolved now.
But having finally got back online and cleared backlog of emails, now have no time to blog as busy packing for departure early tomorrow morning - speech at Adventurers' Club in Los Angeles tomorrow night, then off back to UK on Friday.
It will be fun to see friends and family back in England, but I haven't even left the West Coast, and I'm missing it already.
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