A Change Of Clothes Is As Good As A Holiday

Next week I'm going to Thailand.

Not actual Thailand, the Thailand that involves airfares, accommodation, visas and suitcases.

No, the Thailand that is chai tea and yoga and fisherman's pants. Deep breaths and leisurely dinners. And humidity. I might use the heater for that. Then put the fan on, to get a nice imitation tropical breeze. I won't get much sleep, tossing and turning in the heat, but hey, that's the authentic Thailand experience. I'll be sweaty and awake in the wee small hours planning adventures and hoping that lizards don't crawl over my feet when I'm not looking.

I'll eat pad Thai and meat on a stick and drink coconut juice through a straw stuck in a plastic bag.

Out and about I'll meet all sorts of wonderful, interesting, adventurous types. We'll scheme over tall glasses of fresh juice and lament the price of wine. Then get buckets of some beverage that smells like lighter fluid, which we knock back then we'll pull out the most inappropriate dance moves in the middle of the street, which we'll have forgotten by the morning, and never see the photos, because so-and-so lost their camera in all the excitement and such and such was all fingers and thumbs and couldn't get a clear shot on his iPhone.

Should we bump into each other while I'm on holiday we'll laugh at the coincidence of this chance meeting, against the odds, all this way from our regular, routine lives. We'll laugh, then sit under a palm tree on black sand or yellow sand or white sand that's hot underfoot or cooled from the shade of a cliff face, rough from pieces of broken shell or sand that runs smoothly between your toes as if through an hourglass - you decide, this is all in your head, after all.

A change of clothes is as good as a holiday. A change of pace, a cup of chai tea. A few deep breaths.

Can you smell the street vendors fare? See orange robes out of the corner of your eye? Feel the rush of the unfamiliar, what's around the corner, over this bridge, beyond the walls of that temple?

I'm about to get up now, away from this mesmerising screen. Close the door behind me. Step out into what is known and not known, both imagined and real. Any second now I'm going.

I'm not going to look back.