Travels with Margaret

One of the first social commentaries I ever read was recommended to me by my Mother - Travels with Charlie by John Steinbeck. I still love it and am about to download it to my kindle! It certainly influenced me in doing my greyhounding and travels round Australia.

There is one person that more than anyone else will ever do that influenced my wonderlust and shared so many of my travels and that is my Mother - Margaret.

I understand that we clocked up our first major expedition on the way to live in New York for a couple of years and stopped off in the Caribean. I, as a baby, famously wouldn't be soothed on our final day. Nappy was fine, temperature was fine, had been fed. Just didn't want to leave. That set a precedent. Many years later Margaret and I visited Hyde Park, home of the Roosevelts, and we were asked if we had been before. I said no but Margaret said "yes, when you were a baby." back came the rejoinder, said directly to me. "you remember it well then." That said a lot about our trips together, historical, cultural and fun. We combined things that were new with things that either one or other of us had done before. These trips often included a pack of cards and competitive games of 'Hunt the Ten."

I had an exotic childhood. We lived for 5 years in Sao Paulo,  Brasil and then another 5 years when my father worked out there and my Mother comuted between London & Sao Paulo for a few months at a time. Looking back, I know I was happy at the time but now I realise that in many ways it was an isolated childhood but enough of that.

It was a special time for travelling. Margaret and I did things my Father didn't want to or couldn't. We also had some fabulous family holidays on the beach. Some worked and some didn't. Memo to other parents - taking an 8 year old to Mexico City was not the best idea in the world but taking an impressionable 12 year old to Machu Pichu before it became accessible was. Margaret and I combined trips home with other places. Jamaica for her & Disneyworld for me. Vancouver & Beautiful British Columbia (BBC) for both of us. Tango in Buenos Aires for her, Tom & Jerry film festival for me. I don't think I was supposed to laugh when she walked into a lamp post immediately afterwards. Sometimes we travelled first class. A highlight for me - making bacon sandwiches for the British Caledonian Captain, a highlight for her sharing the top deck of a Boeing 747 with Tom Watson.  It was during one of these trips that she made a tactical mistake in allowing me to rad an imigration form. I discoverd her date of birth did not coincide with how old she claiimed to be. But we had fun and we learned and grew together.

There was of course a pause in our travelling but in the last 15 years it began again. A trip to New York. One amazing and the other when she ended up being stuck there due to the volcano. She did end up with an encyclopeadic knowledge of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. That trip we discovered Brooklyn but were astonished to find that the Frick had an exhibition of the works from Dulwich Art Gallery. We hadn't gone all that way to see our local paintings. Together we explored Kykuit, first the house and then the grounds. We postponed a trip due to 9/11. I had to drag her to the Air & Space Museum only to have to drag her out at closing time.

Her Euopean trips were mainly shared with her closest friend Janice but we fitted in a few and more in the last few years. I had wanted to taker her to Nice knowing that she would love it. She resisted having gone off the South of France when she became seriously ill with food-poisoning from unwashed grapes. We went and together visited Vence for the first time. We did manage to find a yarn shop and she bought a bag and I her Chrismas present - well, she chose the wool & I knitted it. The Chapel overshadowed all of that. It was an artistic highlight of both of our lives and the Cut OUt exhibition at Tate Modern that followed, a bonus. We both came to learn and love Matisse together. Another French highlight - a day at Giverny and a country restaurant. I could and will go on.

I didn't always get it right. Knowing she would love Aix and Arles I took her there. Only for her to comment that the Aix Hotel was not as grand as she was used to and that the bathroom was too small. The view from the balcony did however compensate and we loved the open-air opera even if the production of Don Giovanni was dire. Zerlina sings her great aria clutching Don Giovanni's coat?! How does that work? As for Arles, it had Romans, Van Gogh and sun. Fortunately the hotel although small was perfectly formed! By the time it got to Nice I'd upgraded ...

And so to Rio 2016. She's been so supportive of my trip coming back, excited by the Olympics and London Brazilian celebrations. There was never an idea that she would come to but I have a suspicion that she wanted to. I will not be able to share this one with her but I am glad I'm here even if the area isn't the glamorous Copacabana she loved and the Bed & Breakfast isn't very grand.

Dedicated to my mother Margaret R 22.11.193? - 3 July 2016.