I was having withdrawal symptoms—restlessness, irritability, cold shaky hands, relentless grinding of my teeth. I couldn’t concentrate. I would find myself picking up a book or logging into The Times online only to lose interest in a matter of minutes. My mind would race in such a way that it actually made me anxious, and somehow I was both full of nervous energy and lethargic as a parched houseplant.
If you read the title of this post, automatically assumed this was about drugs, and shook your head at my destructive ways, shame on you! Tainting my good name!
No, I’m talking about a different kind of withdrawal. As I woke up on the 23rd of October, I realised that it was the longest I hadn’t been on a plane in about four years. I had been on the island from June straight through until October, a full four months. No casual city breaks, no fleeing to the tropics to fend off the winter blues, no getting stranded in a tiny heat-blasted Gulf state, no brother’s university graduation that warranted hopping across the Atlantic, no long weekends in Beijing, no high-powered urgent business meetings requiring me to hop on a jumbo jet to the southern hemisphere ASAP! (They tell me that the last one is rather unlikely for a brand-new graduate at the bottom of the professional food chain.)
And so I found myself sat cross-legged on the floor of my aunt’s sitting room in Belgravia, left hand curled around a mug of green tea, right hand gesturing grandly as I tried to explain my painfully bourgeois variety of malaise. Most people would have given me a dry look and asked me to come back with a real problem, but I knew my aunt Louisa would empathise. You see, my dear auntie was a freelance travel writer for years, popping back and forth between the UK and Mauritius and Burma and Sri Lanka and Brazil and Indonesia on a weekly basis, and is still well-known amongst the luxury travel journo/PR set in London. She, too, has set a personal record for staying in one spot in the past few months, and fully understood the all-consuming desire to just get on a plane and fly.
So acute was my longing to travel that I tallied the hours I spent on planes in the 2010 calendar year. It came out to 140, or roughly nine days. We’re not talking getting to and from the airport or layovers or going through security, either, this is raw air-time. I had unwittingly trained my body to expect the packing of suitcases and the shedding of boots onto conveyor belts and the scanning of departure boards and that sweet hard rush of being launched into the sky. No wonder I felt weird. The highest I had been in the past four months was Hampstead Heath.
Dear God, I thought, I will do anything to get on a plane and go somewhere.
And just like that, thanks to a tatty old page buried in the middle of my passport, an excuse to travel fell into my lap.
Back in 2007, I was issued a British student visa (my passport arrived from the Los Angeles consulate quite literally the day before I was scheduled to depart for term at St Andrews—nerve-wracking, to say the least). The visa expired not at the end of June 2011, just after graduation, but the end of October, presumably given the bearer time to apply for a post-study work visa. I had meant to do this, but then realised that if I wasn’t working at a place that strictly required an £800 visa, then why buy one? I had until April to make my application, so why not wait a few months to spend that money and have the post-study visa expire in April 2014 rather than October 2013? It made a lot more sense, but it did make me wonder what would happen if I overstayed by 31 October 2011 expiry date. To the internet! After looking through various ‘ZOMGZ MY VISA EXPIRES N LIKE 5 MINS CAN ANY1 TELL ME WUT 2 DO KTHANX!!1!1!!’ forums, I was able to discern that overstaying a visa may not give you any trouble leaving Britain, but when it came time to applying for another visa, you could kiss your chances goodbye. That could only mean one thing.
I had to get out of Britain, and I had eight days to do it.
Had to! Literally! It was a bureaucratic necessity. Unless I wanted to seriously screw up my future, I had no choice. I nearly dropped to my knees and thanked the god I don’t believe in. My zeal renewed and kicked into high gear, I started the search for cheap last-minute flights. I had originally planned to spend the Halloween weekend at some St Andrews medic friends’ party in Manchester, so I figured I might as well fly out of there on the 31st. And as long as I was at it, why not just fly up into Edinburgh and pop up to St Andrews? Before I knew it, a simple weekend in Manchester turned into a ten-day three-legged journey where I zigzagged across Britain and the Netherlands in planes, trains and coaches. I could almost feel my muscles and my mind settle as the relief coursed through my veins. As I prepared to pack up my trusty royal blue suitcase with the feather-light frame, I fished my passport out of its designated nook. It was time for its little navy self to come out of hibernation and to gather some Dutch stamps.
Meanwhile, my aunt had arranged to meet a friend from California in Paris for the weekend, setting out on the Eurostar a few hours before I left for Manchester. When I came over to say goodbye, I found her packing, and she was utterly thrilled about it. ‘Look at this,’ she said. ‘I’m so excited—I get to pack! I can’t believe I ever complained about doing this!’ I told her to have a fabulous time in Paris and she me in Manchester and Amsterdam. ‘And we’ll see you when you’re back. When is that, exactly?’ she called as she plucked a top out of the closet.
‘Well, I’m taking a few days up in Scotland after Amsterdam, so around the 8th or the 9th,’ I told her. ‘It was all a bit…impromptu.’
‘That’s nearly two weeks! You’re going to be properly gone!’ she exclaimed. ‘You’ve been plotting to travel, haven’t you?’
‘Maybe,’ I admitted, a smile creeping into my face.
And now, on the second of November, I have woken up to a radiant sunny day in Amsterdam, where the leaves are a riot of reds and golds and everyone has just started to wrap themselves in woolly scarves. And in the eyes of Westminster, I am really and truly no longer a student. It’s bittersweet, and I can’t think of a better place to come to terms with it than Amsterdam, one of my favourite cities on the planet. And I figure that if a 55-minute flight across the Channel can make me feel so good, it can hardly be wrong.
