Two days and still counting.
Packing.
Bollocks! It’s driving me nuts. Nuts!
Not that you would know it. I’m going nuts very quietly because outwardly, I’m a civilised man. But inside, in those big noisy spaces that no-one can hear (but me) it’s pandemonium. There’s a battle going on of Biblical proportions. There’s shrieking and wailing and gnashing of teeth. There’s smiting and vengeance too. Inside my head, it’s not at all civilised. It’s ‘Last man standing;’ it’s ‘Robocop III.’ It’s the last scene of ‘Hamlet.’
I’m fine. I can bear it. It’s only chaos, and I can bear a fair bit of chaos.
No, I can’t!!! At least not for five bloody days. My house looks as though a pack of students have been living here for a month. It’s a mess and I don’t know where to start. There’s ‘stuff’ everywhere – a great pile of it which has to fit into that increasingly titchy-looking suitcase over there. All this stuff is resolutely refusing to shrink down to the airline’s 23kg max baggage limit. It's the stuff I’ve been buying for the trip over the last couple of weeks. My house is littered with stuff. And it is driving me nuts!
First attempt at using my new camera. A portrait of ‘stuff’
OK. Calm! calm! calm!
Back to yesterday morning.
Sunday
The morning task was to wake up bright and early and then wash my cordura motorcycle suit by hand. I prefer leathers, but it can be very wet up there in the mountains. Well, OK – the morning task? I managed to achieve half of it. By two o’clock in the afternoon, the suit way drying on the clothes horse in the kitchen, but it was drying slowly. Outside it was raining. I stuck the fan in front of it, turned it on and hoped for the best.
I don’t like washing the suit in the machine, so I did it by hand in the bath, the way my aunts used to do their washing back in the 1960s before running water came to their village in Ireland. Giving it a good wash helps keep it breathable - I'm told. As I’m going to have to cut back ruthlessly on the number of clean changes of clothing I take with me, I want to make sure my gear is as comfortable as possible.
The afternoon task was to ride over to the Hein Gericke shop in Luton and buy some of their soft Hiprotec armour. I use it in my leathers. It's much more comfortable for daily wear than the hard stuff I’ve still got in the cordura suit and it did me good service when I came off the bike a couple of years ago. The thing I like about it is that it's compressible, and the theory is that it helps you bounce a little easier. Bouncing sounds a little less painful than just hitting the deck. (Saying that makes me feel just a little bit protective thinking about my shoulder which I’ve bashed up just too often recently).
But how the hell do you fit a lid, a tank bag, a sleeping bag a pair of moto-cross boots, and a riding suit into a suitcase, together with all the other stuff like clothes and rain wear and external armour? How do you fit it in - big awkward stuff like that, let alone make room for everything else? It can't be done. And how do you manage it when you have a hold allowance of 23 kg and a cabin allowance of 6kg? I've tried all sorts of configurations, but have to admit defeat. There is only one solution, I'll have to wear my winter riding gear on the plane. What a pain! - especially the boots!
The evening task is to forget all about the morning and afternoon tasks and ride over to meet with Chris at Offley for a Chinese meal. On the ride over, a thin drizzle starts to get serious. The rain suddenly pelts down and within seconds the road is awash. Ooops! Coming out of a tight corner I discover too late that the drainage here is poor and I’ve run into a pool of standing water. Both tyres aquaplane and start to slide out from under me. OMG! For one terrible moment I think that this is going to be the end of my trip to India, and quite possibly the end of other things besides - like me. But the pool is finite and somehow the tyres manage to find some grip again without high-siding me off on the other direction. My lucky day!
I meet with my mate, Chris at 6.00 up at our favourite Chinese restaurant, me on the Daytona, he, rather more sensibly in his car (he’s far too sensible, in some ways). We usually eat here once a month but this was to be the first time since June. I’m not sure why we let our routine slip because the food here is really very special. Instead of that one-size-fits-all kind of taste that you get in most Chinese restaurants, every ingredient that is served here has been cooked to retain its own flavour. How can anyone make beancurd taste quite so delicious? Well, I’ll tell you: these people can. The food is subtle and delicious - best Chinese I’ve ever tasted.
As we came through the door into the restaurant, dripping (me) and grinning (Chris), the owner startled us by bounding across the room in our direction. She seemed excessively overjoyed to see us after our three months absence. Then came the news. It turned out that she had overcharged us by £37 last time we were here and was afraid we were staying away in a huff!
Overcharged us? Did she? It was the first either of us had realised it! She explained - instead of splitting the bill between the two of us she’d charged each of us the full amount We assured her that if we’d been aware that she was rinsing our credit cards, we would have been back a lot sooner.
With an unexpected £37 credit on our bill, there was only one possible thing to do. We would celebrate my impending trip to India by turning the meal into a feast. We ordered everything on the menu. And for the next three-and-a-half hours we talked and ate and ate and talked, and I forgot all about my chaos problems and everything else besides.
One of the interesting discoveries of the evening was a variation on “Chinese greens”. the owner was keen for us to try something different from the usual plate of pak choy. We said, OK, surprise us. Ten minutes later, a plate of deep green, erm… stalks arrived at our table, swimming liberally in garlic sauce.
‘Morning glory,’ the waitress proudly announced. We looked at each other and smirked.
I don’t know about you, but I have a very clear recollection that back in the 70s Morning Glory was harvested by the bearded and bangled youth of Great Britain in large quantities. It was widely regarded as the poor man’s LSD. It became so popular that, in its enthusiasm for banning everything, the UK government made Morning Glory briefly illegal. As a result, tens of thousands of middle-aged housewives with gardens full of large overhanging vines were suddenly in danger of acquiring a criminal record.
It’s the seeds that are supposed to do the business for you, not the stalks. But I have to say that ever since the meal… How shall I put this? Ever since the meal I’ve been feeling exceptionally mellow. Y’know I don’t think we shouldn't leave it so long before we go back again.
Back home, I did some more packing. I pulled my best winter sleeping bag off the shelves and started stuffing it into its carry sack – one of those little jobbies that insists you can squeeeeeeeze something the size of a fully padded sleeping bag into sack the size of a jam roly-poly. I'd got it half way into the sack using both hands, one foot and, finally, the top of my head when suddenly something hit me at the back of my nose. It was the olfactory equivalent of a ton of rubble landing on your head. Phwoarrr! What was that? I hadn’t smelled anything so bad for years. My sleeping bag had become a Disney land for a huge colony of bacteria! How the hell could my best sleeping bag have got that way?
Then the horrible truth dawned. The DB had recently stayed at the house during his latest period of homelessness. I’d been away and he'd probably been using the bag. I know he prefers to use this one - and who can blame him. It is super-comfy.
The little toe-rag might have told me though! At least then I could have washed it. But the thought probably never even occurred to him - thoughts don't. The DB has absolutely no awareness that this universe is ruled by laws of causality: do something and consequences follow. Six months ago he got nicked for riding his brother’s scooter without insurance. He regarded it as just one of those unfortunate things that seemed to happen to him with some regularity. He lives in randomly directed universe where anything can happen, usually does, and there is no point attempting to do anything about it. In the 1960s thousands of Brits trekked over to India and paid some guru a fortune to acquire a consciousness like that. Maybe the DB has missed a trick here, somewhere.
For the rest of the evening, I tried not to think what I might have been snuggling down into in India had my nose not reacted.
The upshot of all this is that at one o'clock this morning, I was back at the bath busily pummelling away at my sleeping bag like my Aunt Tessie used to do with her washing.
Twenty-two hours and forty-eight minutes to go. 
It's hard to signal irony on the web. Believe me, my comments were laden with it. 