I knew it wouldn’t be the last time I went on a journey as special as this one but maybe this would be the longest. 

I sat on the bed in our hotel room in Hong Kong counting the hours before I would be back in England. Natalie was fast asleep but I was restless and not out of excitement but more a dull dread. 

I spent that last night of the journey running around the room trying to upload a video I had made in Hong Kong and Macau but the hotel WiFi just wasn’t having it. The upload would have to be sacrificed, ‘Fuck it’ I thought. 

I had been attempting this video making thing throughout the journey and now here I was still trying. In each city and each country there would be some reason not to go ahead. 

Here I was on the last day of the journey still doing it, editing and uploading then cancelling the whole thing. 

This could have been a story told as it unfolded. 

‘It will be special as a beginning of something else and a backstory told through retrospection.’ I reassured myself, a mantra I had been repeating for months already. 

As the early morning sunshine cut through the skyscrapers of Hong Kong, the journey entered its last page. This was it, some trains and planes and then it would all be over. 

I felt like my life was ending. A life of mine anyway… 

I didn’t want to grow up or get some fucking job, this journey wasn’t about growing up or becoming a man or some noble thing. No fuck all of that. I’m a six year old, like we all are, we’re all six year olds, I just never hide it. 

I stared at Natalie sleeping on the bed. She was dreaming what looked like a calm dream. 

I looked out the window at Hong Kong, the island was still. 

I looked at the four walls. 

I got up from the bed, took a piss and looked in the mirror. I had a long day ahead of me. Three long years behind me. 

How many miles before I would be on English soil? 6000? 

How many hours? 26, 27? 

I was already bone-tired. 

My mind was a mess of things. 

I had so many thoughts. 

I was at war with myself. 

. 

A lot had changed within me over the last three years and I was hesitant for the journey to end. 

And England, I wasn’t excited to go back. It was as if England and the rest of the world were two very different dimensions. 

I would be losing something in returning, a big part of my identity. I was the guy who had travelled the longest of anyone I ever met on the road, it was a fulfilling identity to have for that time. It would be gone once I landed at Heathrow. 

I wouldn’t be able to give my favourite line anymore, “I’ve been travelling for three years now.” 

An updated version to acknowledge the tense would be needed, “I travelled for three years…” it would soon all be in the past, I would have to move on. 

I was looking forward to seeing my family again but other than that there wasn’t much else to look forward to. 

I lived there for the beginning stages of my life but I wasn’t sure England was my home, it was my country for now, but home? 

I spent significant periods of my childhood and adolescence dreaming and scheming how to leave it and then I did. 

All of these contradictions weren’t helped by the streets around me, that for the last week had been offering up all of that emotional fog. 

How had it all gone so wrong with the UK? 

Hong Kong was now Chinese, on course to become nothing more than another city under the faux communists authoritarian thumb. 

Britain was more about the past than the future. 

There was no great hope for any grand or inspiring future from the Oxbridge factory produced politicians. I saw no national ambition left, just a conservative, class structured society. It didn’t suit me and it bored me to my core. 

There was a part of me that felt like I should dedicate my life to changing that. Becoming the leader Britain needed. Recreating the country into a Switzerland with Nukes or a Japan without the peace-bound passive military. A true great elder statesman of the world. Putting its finger on the scale and deciding the direction of world affairs. 

But there was always the rest of me that always wanted to get far away from it. 

One of the reasons I stayed away for so long was the feeling of suffocation there. 

Those empire days must have been something, but the show is over now. 

It’s hard being British in the 21st century. 

My time in Hong Kong – the last real piece of the British Empire done away with – was a mixture of pride, annoyance, despair and even some strange sense of hope? 

My childish soul and I mean that in a very positive way, was thrashing wildly…

My Empire! You gave away MY EMPIRE! You fucking idiots! 

I was having plenty, ‘For fucksake, I would have handled all of that empire dissolving so much better!’ kind of thoughts. 

*Long sigh* England, fucking England.  

I really did want to see my family again though, who were now living in a new house in a different city with a new car and a new dog. 

That reunion could have happened months earlier. 

We had thought about going straight to England after Canada and skipping another Asian leg but that would have meant my goal of three years was missed and I couldn’t have that. The Two Year MEGA Journey just didn’t have the same ring to it. I needed three years, I needed that victory. 

I had accomplished what I wanted to. When I left in January 2013 I didn’t know exactly how long I would be gone but somewhere along the way three years had become a goal and I’d crossed that line. 

The achievement hadn’t quieted all of the questions and thoughts inside though. 

As I paced around the still dark hotel room I tried my best to keep all the emotions in check. 

What was this place I had always referred to very casually as home anyway? 

Many countries had now become my lovers but who was my wife? 

What was this England place to me? 

England was my family, my preference of a bath over a shower, my great annoyance at anyone cutting in line, the ability to walk stoically through heavy rain, but it always felt like an awkward marriage. 

I didn’t hate or dislike England, I admired her in many ways. I loved a lot of her past. 

As I said, it’s hard being British in the 21st century, even harder to travel the world and be reminded of all the past glories of empire knowing you missed the party by a century. 

The feeling was always a bit like that, missing the greatest party on earth, the biggest party there has ever been. 

I may have been British but I didn’t really belong anywhere. 

My sense of belonging was to myself and to all of those park benches, dive bars, rooftops, back alleys and all of that backcountry, I belonged to them and they to me. 

I was my own nationality in my mind, one that spread throughout those moments in time. A country in itself, ready to expand and get serious. 

What was travel? Travel was just a big, grand, incredible waste of time, like life. 

Let’s jump outside the bubble of this universe or 

multiverse or 

multiuniMEGAverse and look at us all, all us atom thieves just fucking around. 

Whether you’re President of the United States or some bacteria on a hotdog bun. It’s all a waste of time. 

So. Why not travel? Why not jump from one spot to another, wasting your time. It’s not the worst way to waste that time. 

                           .

Anyway… 

These were just some of the things I was feeling and dealing with my own contradictions and tangled up pathways in my brain as the last hours ticked away in that Hong Kong hotel room. 

It’s hard to go home when so much of your heart is scattered around the world. 

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