Last year I did quite a bit of ‘exploring’. I’d saved up so that I could go away a few times during the summer and they were great experiences. This summer though I’m too poor! I guess there are no excuses, if you want to travel then you should travel because otherwise, slap one day, you’ll be in a messy house with kids on your lap, a mortgage to pay and a job to kill yourself over.

I don’t want to be that old man from Pixar’s ‘Up’ who always talked about seeing the world and then never did. I don’t think its possible to tie a few helium balloons to carry my student house to somewhere new (neither do I think its possible for me to be an old man). But I really do have the greatest respect for people who really do just jump on a plane when they feel like it, who live with their passports in their pockets, are fluent in several languages and are brave enough to sofa surf in foreign towns and villages by themselves, who camp on Spanish beaches and have tasted everything there is to know about Italian cuisine.

Italy is the top of my list. I need to go to Barbados in the west Indies to get friendly with my roots. Egypt. Greece. Thailand. Russia. The Netherlands. New York. California.. The list is endless. The world should be our oyster. It shouldn’t be hard. No more excuses, or I really will have to rope balloons to my rocking chair one day!