The Return of Travellin Bob

If there is anyone reading this – hello! Welcome to Around the World In 80 Expense Claims.

I’ve been writing this Blog for just over 7 years now, increasingly sporadically. Looking at the Archive figures, it all started in a burst of creativity with 20 essays in 2010 (in just under 4 months), then followed a peak of 38 the following year, before gradually tailing off year-on-year until last year’s nadir of a mere 2 pieces. Nothing at all since the end of February 2017.

It’s not as if I’ve been really busy the last few fallow years (2015 and 2016 were not much better than last year) with my day job preventing me from writing anything. Ever since I’ve been writing it, my work elsewhere has been pretty steady, some years better than others, but I always found time to knock something out. Truth be told, I’ve been suffering from Writer’s Block I think……

I’m approaching the age when I can retire and follow my dream (not too strong a word) of writing full time – or at least those hours when I’m not reading from my extensive and back-logged library, lazing around doing not very much, or riding my bike in an effort to keep fit and healthy. But with no salary coming in, just a probably meagre pension, and no need to get up at Stupid O’Clock to catch a flight somewhere every Monday morning to return home Depressingly Late on the Friday, there will be no excuse really NOT to write.

My equally neglected novel will be finished (I wrote it over 20 years ago, and I’ve been re-drafting it on and off the last couple of years) and published somehow. I’ll probably go for doing it myself as an e-book, given the apparently closed and locked doors to mainstream publishing. I can finish too my memoirs (started a couple of years ago, and proving harder to write than I expected) even though I imagine its audience will probably be restricted to my immediate family. I might even try to re-mould the pieces here into a more substantial and expanded volume of travel writing.

So it’s really crucial that I get the creative juices flowing again, more reliably than they have done lately.

So it’s time for a re-boot of this Blog.

It started as something to keep me occupied during slow workdays while in Trinidad on a long-term project (that was annoyingly truncated a third of the way through by my then employer without warning…..but that’s another story). I had read a lot of travel pieces in magazines and on web-sites, plus some of Michael Palin’s books - amongst others - and thought, I can do that. Having spent, at that time, 11 years criss-crossing the planet for work purposes I had been to a lot of places, experienced a lot of different cultures, eaten some great (and a lot of disgusting) food, and had a lot of laughs. And the odd tear. So there was plenty of subject material. A travel blog seemed the obvious outlet.

As these things do, it morphed as I went along, and a mix of essays on other subjects started creeping in…….an obituary for Steve Jobs. Book and record reviews. Some political op-eds. Family stuff. An article about goalkeeping, for God’s sake! In short, somewhere along the line it lost focus. Perhaps that led to this Writer’s Block, I don’t know – it certainly was one factor in that creative constipation, I think.

I also changed work, of necessity: at the end of 2013 I was made redundant, and at the ripe old age of 60 was faced with early (forced) retirement, trying to find a new employer, or starting my own company and trying to carry on what I had been doing since 1999. For purely pragmatic reasons (for which read “financial”) I took the third option, and spent most of 2014 starting my business. It was hard work, took a lot of time, created a huge amount of stress – but in that year my Blog output was still a respectable 19 essays. The following year, spent pretty much fully employed on a couple of projects, I managed just 6 – and the die was cast. Since then, I’ve spent a lot of time travelling and working, and an equal amount of time benched and at home with my family – precious times, those, and spending time trying to write seemed less important. It still does…..but I need to do it.

During this period, too, the world began to change in ways no-one seemed to have foreseen. Refugee crises all over the world, but particularly in Europe that ultimately led to Britain’s referendum vote to leave the EU; the rise and rise (and hopefully retreat now?) of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism; war in Ukraine prompted by Russian aggression in annexing Crimea. The rise of alt-right politics that led to Trump’s election and the Twitter fest of his Presidency, the rise and fall of UKIP and other far-right political parties on the near-Continent, all of them seemingly based on racism and anti-Islamic sentiment, and the continuing financial crisis, 10 years after Lehman’s collapse. These changes are still going on, and I don’t think anyone can accurately predict where it will all lead. I certainly can’t.

As a serial optimist, I found it all very depressing – and I still do. And that sense of anger and depression triggered first a collection of essays that did not find their way onto this Blog but found a home on LinkedIn, where my manic political ranting seemed more at home (and indeed was reasonably well received). And second, it exacerbated that damned Writer’s Block. I couldn’t see the point – if I could find nothing happy and cheerful to write about, then why bother? So I didn’t.

So the Blog ground to a halt. I tried to keep my hand in by working on my books, but that too has suffered. I had really expected to be in a position to launch The Match (that’s the neglected novel I mentioned earlier) on an unsuspecting world in mid 2017, but I’m stuck on the second (or third? Fourth??) revision still. I even launched a website, called optimistically Books by Robert Cooper, as a vehicle for sales and distribution, and somewhere to bring all my writing together in one place. It’s equally becalmed.

But the optimist in me is waking up again, I think. I’m seriously convinced that writing, still very much a hobby, is something I can do and do pretty well. Whether well enough to support me in the future I have no idea (just a sneaking suspicion it might, given the additional time to hone it) but I enjoy it so what the hell…...I’ll continue to do it.

Around The World…. Mark II starts with this little round up. The aim is to publish at least one essay a week, It will remain, primarily, travel related, and I will try to keep the other stuff on the website, together with the progress reports on the books. There are some essays on there, too, so feel free to take a look: you’ll find it at http://bobwritesbook.com/. There’s an associated e-mail account so I would welcome your comments, both on the website and this Blog.

So, again, welcome to my world – or at least, my take on Our World.