Wafflings of a Wanderer Volume 1 - Recollections & Ruminations of a Gallivanting Scouser

Once

Everybody's got a story. Most never get heard or told. As someone who's set foot in over 30% of the world's countries, I've thought about getting mine down several times. The first time the idea surfaced was enjoyable. I woke in my friend Luca's apartment, in the heart of Stockholm, still a wee bit drunk from the night before. As I lay sprawled on a sofa bed, savouring the waking afterglow, my mind lucid and cruising through memories, swoosh! In it swirled from Neuralford's downtown area, Nowherestad.

... WRITE A BOOK ...

For the next few hours, I revelled in a bout of pure nostalgia and mental scribing, a literary love child of Hemingway and Woolf. The drunk over state I was in, more likely Barbara Cartland and Dr Seuss. Without warning, the fog of a hangover rolled in and poisoned the party.

On my return to Norway, where I worked in the fishing industry, the intention to write stayed with me for months. The plan had been to take a laptop (now called a notebook) to India and get cracking, once I'd escaped a frozen Norwegian winter. But that idea melted. And here I am in 2015, twelve years later, sat in my apartment in the toasty south of subtropical Taiwan, where I've been for close on a decade, teaching English.

A few days ago, I returned to work after a three-week vacation. It's something I've been dreading. The main reason for the trip was to surprise my friend, Ryan, in Melbourne, on his birthday. All the while I was away, my inner thoughts battled with the urge to not take the return flight. It was close, but chivalric common sense triumphed over raging recklessness. I did, however, email the boss of the school with the required two-month notice to quit. I've only been working there four months and have yet to sign a contract. Not having one leaves me obligated to nothing and doesn't complicate matters. Shoot! I wrote vacation. I don't do vacations.

For legal reasons, increasing numbers of cram schools here have cameras installed to protect themselves. It also allows them the opportunity to track your every move and word if they so wish. The week before I left to see Ryan, the school manager summoned me to his classroom. He wanted to have a word about a low-level class of mine he'd observed in secret, Big Brother-Style, a day earlier. Only four, nine-year-old students had turned up. I'd spent 40 seconds marking their test papers during class time, a heinous offence he deemed worthy of a reprimand. The disdainful dressing-down continued with him declaring my lesson had bored him to tears. His delivery and objectionable demeanour were excessive and left me stunned. I can handle negative feedback when it's justified, but such an overblown made no sense. It pissed me off, how pissed off he was.

I'd taken over classes from a Canadian guy who'd done me no favours. He'd left them in a mess and fuck knows what he'd been doing with the students for the past year because far too many were disobedient, didn't listen or follow instructions. But within weeks, I'd gotten them into shape and received positive feedback from parents. The manager's undue displeasure and cutting words were a kick in the balls, provoking serious consideration to prolong my upcoming trip and stirring up feelings of, 'FUCK IT!' I smirked to myself, imagining his face if I didn't come back. Alas, I relented and returned to keep everything tidy and cordial like a good, little boy. But the English teaching scene has bored me shitless for over a year. This was the catalyst.

My current school differed from the previous one I'd taught at for years. The owner of that one had only one agenda, making money. He did this by keeping the kids happy, no matter what, and put them before the staff. Learning was secondary. Many private English schools here offer nothing more than glorified babysitting. The new school was a complete departure. It took the student's language tuition seriously and had a solid, structured curriculum in place. The higher standards required more prep work, increased the workload and demanded a focused and conscientious attitude. I had to pass two grammar tests and learned more in the short time there than in the preceding years instructing Taiwanese youngsters in my native tongue. When regular school finishes here each day, most children spend their afternoons and evenings at buxibans (cram schools) for more study. Parents pay for these extra classes in English, Chinese, math and other subjects. It's the same in Japan, South Korea and China, and this Far East mentality has provided me with an income.

Routine's not for me. Well, it wasn't until I came to Taiwan. To have stayed focused and disciplined for eight years in the same job, saving for a rainy day, is a big achievement. I'm now prepared for heavy showers, but they remain a dim dot on future's horizon as I bask in bright, razor-sharp sunlight. It's gone well, considering I'd never held any job for longer than 12 months. But I've become jaded by chasing money and a castle built on eggshells. I've fallen into tedium and the trap known as the rat race, which I avoided for years. Way back when Kajagoogoo inflicted their second album, Islands, on humanity, I itched to escape the mundane monotony of everyday life and leave the isles I called home behind. Travel, adventure and exploring the amazing diversity on our planet seemed the logical thing to do. It's time to revisit that mindset, methinks.

Work to live, not live to work, is a principal I've tried to adhere to most of my life. I'm ever mindful of how fortunate I am having the luxury of this way of thinking. A job can reward on personal and emotional levels. But for the vast majority of us, it's a means to an end, a mechanism to earn enough cash to sustain life. Work is often shit, a pain in the arse, a fucking cunt of a four-letter word, up there with the best of them. We have to work, but it doesn't have to consume our existence. My mind's drawn to Jack Nicholson in The Shining. Not the axe-wielding psychotic, more the deranged writer repeatedly typing the proverb, 'all work and no play...' on each page of his manuscript.

A perfect moment of musical coincidence just occurred while making breakfast. Of the 6,500-odd songs on my computer playing on a random shuffle, up first came Once, a Roy Harper song. Kate Bush's haunting harmonies and Dave Gilmour's deft intro and solo enhance Roy's guitar and deep, poetic words, which move me every time. The main theme of the song is how each and everyone one of us gets only one chance, one dance, one life. That's it. Once. They sum up how I've felt these last few months. And I still haven't had breakfast because David Gray's This Year's Love followed and enticed me to play along on my Taylor GS Mini acoustic. OK, time to eat.

Breakfast was a raw egg, a large banana, passion fruit and plums blended with organic flax seeds, oats, organic coconut oil and a cup of low-fat milk. I try to eat real food, but it's difficult when modern farming and food companies don't make it easy.

I left my guitar upright against the wall in the bedroom and not a good idea. It now lays flat on the bed, snug and safe in its case. You never know, an earthquake might strike. Positioned on the Ring of Fire, Taiwan gets them often. My apartment's on the tenth floor and the taller the building, the more it sways. It must terrify, living much higher when a big one hits.

I've almost finished Neil Young's book, Waging Heavy Peace, which Ryan gave me a week ago, in Melbourne. The plan to pop up and surprise him on his birthday, spawned last November between me and his wife, Portia. Born in Paris, she has Aussie and Spanish passports. Her dad, Félix, left Spain in the 1960s and immigrated to the state of Victoria as part of the 'Come to Work in Australia' campaign. The story of her mother, Esther, is more complex. She and her twin brother came into the world in Egypt, offspring of Italian migrants. Their Catholic father and Jewish mother couldn't wed as Papà was already entwined in the sanctity of matrimony. His wife had run off and disappeared, leaving him two sons to look after and little chance of an annulment or ab initio. Religious denominations and their severe rigid codes must have been a heavy burden back then. The forced abdication of Egypt's King Farouk in 1952 left the country in turmoil, and the British no longer holding power and control over the Egyptian monarchy. Portia's grandparents gathered their four children and fled to Italy. After a long-drawn-out saga to immigrate, Esther made it to Australia with her mother and two half-brothers. Her twin stayed behind to take care of their ill papa, who died two years later. Esther and Félix met working at the Holden Car Plant in Port Melbourne when she injured herself on the production line. He was the designated driver and drove her to hospital. I'll leave it there, but see what I mean about people having stories? Don't get me started on King Farouk.

Ryan's birthday surprise went well. He came home one evening to find me sat on the arm of his sofa in the living room wearing a black mullet wig. Strumming his guitar, I sang the Christy Moore song, Don't Forget Your Shovel (I changed shovel to scissors, seeing as he's a hairdresser). He didn't have a clue it was me until I took the wig off, which left him gobsmacked. We'd last seen each other a decade earlier, when he came to Taiwan for six weeks while his Australian residency was getting processed.

Lea, my Taiwanese girlfriend, travelled with me for those three weeks away. It was a big deal for her as she'd never set foot out of Taiwan or seen inside an aeroplane. We flew to Singapore from Taipei and onto Langkawi, a...