What’s the most spontaneous thing you’ve ever done?

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I don’t really do spontaneous, not any more. Looking back, I was never particularly spontaneous. I always liked to plan things, to a certain extent. Planning was how I made my living, after all, it was something I considered fun in any case, so it’s not surprising it’s a pretty ingrained characteristic.

And that got worse, after my stroke. You hear of people getting to a point where they tend not to travel any more, and that’s pretty much me. There’s just too much anxiety. What if you forget something important, for example? Your passport? Your meds? Sure, many of these things are recoverable, but isn’t it easier just to avoid the hassle altogether and stay home? At least then you know it’s all there, and where everything is…

I went over to France for a short holiday, it would have been 2023. It was a big deal for me. The first time I’d travelled any significant distance alone since the stroke. My anxieties included:

• I was going to get the ferry across to France, so first and foremost, how would I get to the ferry port?
• The obvious answer was by train. So that would mean getting into my local city, Salisbury, where there is a train station.
• What time train should I get? Trains in the UK are famously unreliable, so I’d better set off at least one train too early.
• What about when I had to change trains? With mobility issues? With a suitcase in tow?

The upshot of these issues meant that I set off early, but on this occasion, things ran to time. I ended up in a coffee shop in the ferry port, with something like five hours to kill. (When I drove, that same ferry port was a 45-minute drive from my front door.)

So do you see how any spontanaety is already out of the window?

Then, when I arrived in France, there were more anxieties. Bearing in mind that this was a place I had been to many times before in the car, my gateway to many destinations in France. But this time, I was a foot passenger.

• When leaving the ferry terminal, I would be in the middle of the port area, in the early morning. So how would I get myself somewhere useful? In this respect, I’d done my homework. I was staying in the old town of the port city itself, about 1km from where I docked. I even looked up the route on Google. 1km is about as far as I am able to walk, anyway, and even that includes many rest stops. So what would it be like pulling a suitcase?

Anyway, I won’t go on. Suffice it to say, I got to the hotel, exhausted. Thankfully, the room was ready so they let me check in, where I immediately lay down for a few hours to sleep off the walk.

Then five days later, I did the same trip in reverse.

I’m not saying that this trip wasn’t worth it – far from it – but do you see how planned everything was? Welcome to my world!