29th July 2022 London
At night I hallucinate and shudder in fear. I wake after a nightmare while I walk at night across a bridge without an exit. The only bus is not going my way. I am still overwhelmed by worry over some unresovable problem that I cannot formulate but it is eating into my soul.
In the day I grapple with a grim reality of frustration so much is unresolves while I feel less and les competent to solve it.
Ahead of me, Albina and I face wanting to celebrate our fiftieth anniversary with friends, but Albina still feels too weak to celebrate following her fourth (double) kidney operation as well as the covid that followed that caught us both in the 40 degree heat haze that laid us both low.
I wait too for half a year now for the result of my Wikipedia application as I shudder to think how my biography will be shredded, or perhaps not even appear at all. The history of my career and my life's work lies buried while the researchers grapple with numerous references to me in books whci they consider unreliable records. How can I show my sceptical son and younger people that I know who or what I was.
But most of all I fear the Round the World Trip from February next year, to which we foolishly signed up last year at the height of pandemic, and to which we have paid a substantial deposit. It is now only 207 days away. I have little sense of the positive anticipation we both felt when we first booked it in early 2021. It followed repeated cancellations of planned trips to Poland, to Mauritius, wherever. With this horrendous commitment to a journey of 80 days, I fear for the survival of our relationship, as are expectations are so different. For me it is an opportunity to lead an active social life and record my experiences for posterity. Fo Albina it is an opportunity for rest and for anonymity. Even more, I fear for my sanity, living in a cramped cabin, with all sense of responsibility gone, other than than our survival and our sustaining the discipline of our daily medicine intake. We will feel uprooted not only geographically, but also because our sense of time will be in flux, as we systemically cross longitude after longitude and time zone after time zone, constantly adjusting the timeclock on our phones, and losing hours from our day.
What can keep me sane? Writing a journal and contact with friends. Only they can save us. But will Albina tolerate my writing? Will I have the strength of purpose to continue it? Yet without that journal I feel that the whole journey would be just an empty vacuum in a hitherto busy life, a journey without a compass, without an end destination, other to return again to the beginning.
