Life offline

I feel that I must explain my lack of postings for this week. I am in the south of France, which is terribly nice for me, but I am staying in the hills where there is no internet connection and until this morning I was unable to get online.

My nerves are in tatters - anything might have happened and I would not have known. Would a few hours or days of not knowing that this thing had happened change how I would have felt about whatever this thing could have been? and if something momentuos had happened and I had been unaware, what would this have meant for me - would I have felt a tremour deep in my soul? It is unlikely that I would have felt anything other than I did.

Modern communications are wonderful, but when one begins to feel that they are necessary for peaceful living they give no peace at all. When staying connected becomes such a part of one's life that not being able to get online leads to mild panic, modern conveniences can become anything but convenient, and dependence upon them, unhealthy.

It is always good to get away from one's ordinary life, if only so that one appreciates it when one returns. In the case of this week away, I am delighted to wake every morning and to see out my window a scene that is quite different from the apartment block that I look into from my home in Dublin. Yes, I may be missing important events in the lives of the neighbours that I overlook (they too appear to be unemployed and I am sure that they have now witnessed as many happy times, evenings in front of the TV and arguments that have happened in my apartment as I have watched occur in theirs') but apart from that, I expect little to have changed when I return home tomorrow. However, even after spending just a few days in a different house, in a different country, my little apartment will feel different when I slouch into the couch tomorrow night and curl up next to my boyfriend - because I will be that little bit altered, that little bit changed.

My mother suggests that we should always embrace small changes and encourages us to swop places at the table rather than to establish fixed territories where we each eat when we eat together. I agree that change is a vital aspect of successful living. Not only do small changes keep us alive by ensuring that we do not loose completely the capacity to adapt that we have in childhood, also, by embracing small changes we may discover things that we enjoy that we may never otherwise have discovered.

Holidays are good opportunities to taste change because they allow us to immerse ourselves in a new place, full of different ways and mores, and then to jump right back out of that lifestyle, sometimes taking with us a flavour of this different land or different version of ourselves.

Being out of communication is one change that can at first seem difficult, or even stressful, but once we recognise that the world goes on without us and us without news from it, our lives are often more rich and our appreciation of what happens day to day around us, more real. At least, this is how I often feel after an extended break from the New York Times online and Guardian Unlimited, not to mention my beloved email.

Next week I'll be back to my daily blog (still searching for a way to return to the daily slog) but I will do so with the influence of a week away, a week that is sadly rain-soaked, but wonderfully relaxing, if only because for a few days I gave up the stresses of my 'normal' life and took on new ones!

My battery is about to die and as I am sitting in a busy area, using the free wifi in the supermarket, I will go and return to the hills, where I cannot get online and I am much the better for it - briefly.

A visual interlude

My recent postings have all been very (adopt dreary tone) serious and (continue in the same tone) depressing. So, in an effort to intersperse this journey with a few sun-soaked stop-overs, I've decided to make today's post a little more visual and hopefully, a lot more inspiring. These photos were taken on various trips that I made last year and I hope that they brighten up your winter afternoon as much as they do mine.

For those who might be planning a holiday, or just looking for a good book about pulling rabbits from hats, here's where I took each image:

In the top spot is a photo that always makes me smile, it was taken in Sydney Aquarium - I've been twice and if it was not for the distance between me and it and the crowds that throng to this fish-filled kaleidoscope of colour, I'd be there right now.

I captured the next mountain-scape from the balcony of one of the worst hotel rooms that I've ever had the displeasure to stay in. It was an awful room but it very almost made up for that by offering this fantastic view of the Himalayas, as seen from Darjeeling, India. (Did I mention that both myself and my boyfriend had food poisoning while we were trapped in this dark and damp room - at least we had this view to wake up to - thank you Brian for waking me up to see it).

Next in line is a frog in the wishing well in Pokhara, Nepal.

The following two are also taken in Pokhara, Nepal, both by the lakeside.

Then it's the turn of lovely, lazy Laos (oh and yes, those are my feet), where one goes to chill out or to float down the river in an inner tube, as these novice monks have been doing.

The next is of 'confused faces' at the tourist market in Luang Prabang, Laos - they look more like happy faces to me.

This is followed by a picture that I sneaked while perusing a second hand book shop in Wellington, New Zealand. Nowhere else have I seen a section within a book shop dedicated to magic and circuses and it always makes me grin to imagine suited-up ring masters and limber acrobats running their fingers over the spines of the books and murmuring to themselves as they choose between the titles.

From there we go on an African adventure - spying on elephants from the window of a very tiny light aircraft over the Okavango Delta and then poling through the reeds of the Delta.

The elephants below strutted their stuff on the banks of the Chobe River, also in Botswana.

This posting doesn't really fit within the 'search for meaning of life' genre, but it's a dark day here and I've just found out that my fridge is broken and needs to be replaced (at great expense) so I'm feeling in need of a boost. It seems to me that someone out there may also be in need of a little lift. Thus, this reminder of exotic places and warmer weather is dedicated to anyone who is made blue by grey skies and/or shoddy kitchen appliances.