More on journeys

Reflecting on Guy Thatcher's journeys got me thinking again about my journeys. I've talked about these journeys in previous posts, probably too much, surely enough to be boring. Collectively they are to some extent the story of my life. My life has been a journey which has included several actual life-altering journeys, migrations from one country and culture to another. Those journeys were educationally and culturally enriching, sometimes almost as enriching as immersion in a new and different milieu, which happened before or after a journey that was a self-contained chapter in the story of my life. Several journeys have been unforgettable in and of themselves - long ocean voyages, long train journeys, long car trips, that I've described in previous posts and illustrated with photos I took at the time. (I've woven memories from several long car journeys in Australia into the fabric of Gloriana, my story for children).  Several journeys were enriching on a scale that exceeds all other experiences in my life by some orders of magnitude. My only regret is that I didn't keep a journal of those journeys, in which I could have set down my sensory impressions and emotions at the time, rather than recollecting them later, sometimes years or decades later.

In the 1960s when I carried out several research projects for the UK Royal Commission on Medical Education from my base in the Usher Institute at the University of Edinburgh, I worked with a  distinguished sociologist, Fred Martin. Fred identified two diametrically opposite kinds of medical students and young doctors. Of course there were several intermediate varieties. The two extremes are the one with unbreakable ties to a family and a community, who will stay in that community and adhere to family there no matter what; and the opposite extreme, one to whom 'profession' or career is paramount, 'profession' meaning specialty, opportunity and facilities to do research, potential for career advancement, promotion etc. Fred Martin coined the term 'spiralist' to describe this type - someone who is willing to go around and around in order to go up, to advance his career (it is his career: we didn't have large enough numbers for reliable or valid generalizations; but we were both quite sure spiralists were much more often male than female, at any rate in the medical profession at that time). 

Fred Martin has been dead for many years, but I know he would agree with me that I am the ultimate spiralist. I've moved around and around to the extent of migrating between continents 5 or 6 times - more than any of my academic peers - as well as making so many journeys  across and between continents and countries and cultures that I lost count long ago. This has given me a rather unique perspective, another of the collateral benefits of my peripatetic professional life. It's also carried a few costs. Apart from books, without which I could no more live than I could without oxygen, I haven't accumulated much in the way of possessions. And a reason for sadness: I haven't had a dog in my life since we left Edinburgh 46 years ago. To a dog-lover like me, that's a serious deprivation. Fortunately this is a dog-friendly condo, so I have doggy friends in several apartments, but it's not the same as having a canine partner of my own. After all these years, I still miss my faithful dachshund bitch Helen who looked after me, then Wendy and me, then Wendy and me and our kids, and who had several lucrative litters that paid for our first fridge and washing machine; and Boomer, our gallumptuous perpetually adolescent Labrador, who matured into a placid adult only after we gave him away and left Edinburgh.