I - Anxiety

Leaving the Vicarage. Puck is hiding from the camera which is a sign of things to come.

Certain sensations have the power to emancipate series of chained memories. Picking up a ninety-litre rucksack to step down from our house in Putney to the street to begin our journey through India, I was rushed by a thousand memories of my time in the army; not by way of specific narratives or frozen moments, but by the gut feeling associated with difficult or trepidation times: setting out on exercise, knowing there would be cold, little sleep and terrible food, nervous weighing and shouldering fifteen kilograms ready to kick off a 10 mile runs across Yorkshire hills, the discomfort of packing on kit equal to my own weight before the nauseating turbulence of parachuting. Ordinary life creates shame and worry incrementally and subjectively. Failure and humiliation in the army are often direct and public. My anxiety dreams still take me back to the Parachute Regiment, with uncomfortable feelings drifting like loose plates just beneath the surface. 

Anxiety with travelling increases with age. And while travelling on your own, on your own terms, is very manageable, travelling with a three and six-year-old, not to mention a partner who is also quite anxious, but, unhappily, about very different things to you, is less manageable. Being more capable certainly helps, but there is that wonderful freedom of being twenty where you're simply not aware of your weaknesses, how badly things can go wrong, and you have a lot less to lose. Losing a three year old - probably our biggest current worry - would be pretty catastrophic and is highly imaginable. Under normal conditions I would happily disinvent the internet and mobile phones, but for the next three months I expect I will be fairly glad of them. Staying in touch is as easy here as in Putney. The last time I took that particular rucksack away for a time was in 2001, without a mobile phone and with only sporadic adventures to an "internet cafe". Communication was mostly by postcard.

Leaving your life behind for long periods has a feeling of unreality. Part of the problem is that it feels like everything needs to happen on the last morning before you go. On this trip, despite being talked about for a year, events conspired to make everything seem incredibly unlikely, and who can bear to prepare for a trip that might well never happen? Having considered frequently cancelling altogether, and, up to a week before leaving, trying to delay the date of departure, a final visa problem worrying until the last days that we still might be thwarted (and did I want it to be thwarted?); the growing lethargic inertia made practical planning and preparing unbearably burdensome. And packing, while cleaning, with six adults and two children in the house, taking into account our flat in Sussex which has a knack of erupting in unexpected problems, a dog to rehome for three months, the ghastly feeling of having to put-upon family and friends and ask favours, all while trying the annual miracle of carrying off Christmas for a community and Christmas for a family – how to begin?

In 2002 I had a hiatus in a year travelling working in Sydney for three months on cruise ships. The night before leaving to continue travels up the East coast, I went out with colleagues ending in some club in King’s Cross and returning at home at 4am. I had a bus to catch at 6:30am and hadn’t packed, but, mightily tired, I closed my eyes for a minute before the boring job of clearing out our room in a shared house, packing and leaving. I woke at 6:10am and in an explosion of fear, mentally screaming at my idiocy, threw the bare essentials in the same rucksack now packed for India, leaving a mess and a deposit to scamper onto the bus by a whisker. That is the advantage of travelling, young and alone.

It's very tempting to look back on the freedom of earlier days, the hairsbreadth encounters, the slim responsibility and think how much happier that must be than the herding and fuming and corralling needed for travelling with a family. It’s all just immeasurably different though. Travelling alone or with a friend was frequently boring or lonely. Returning from a year’s travelling in America, Australasia and Africa I vowed not to leave Europe for the next decade. I look back on most of my twenties and early thirties with a strong sense of an absence of peace of mind fuelling an energetic restlessness. Having children – despite the snail’s pace of getting things done, the halt that grinds into all other areas of your life – has the existential impact of moving fast and breaking stuff – and the rearrangement of priorities can solve some of our angst over direction and meaning.

When I was packing I found myself hiding books in different bags. I have two books for which I should have written reviews months ago. For Christmas I was given a large hardback book on the history of India – If I don’t read it now then when? There’s a(nother larger) book on narrative and suffering by an American philosopher Elenor Stump I’ve been reading sporadically for years and have just wanted some time to finish. Plus, several short books I would actually succeed in reading quite quickly. My mother-in-law had given me a kindle for Christmas though and so the practical thing was no books. I had to remind myself that having books with me is a way I manage anxiety and the fear of wasting time. It’s also a way in which I tell myself who I am. But these are bad reasons. I took the books out. 

Anxiety is the thing that builds. We all have a certain tolerance but like a glass, which works perfectly well until the beer reaches the top, anxiety breaks out not necessarily in a crisis but under a deluge and especially when there is no end point in sight. When I was first ordained I worked in a parish in Paddington which, as churches go, operated at pressure. Most people expect that working for a church is lovely and relaxed; a counter-cultural environment that embodies well-being and a harmonious still environment. The reality is that churches operate under considerable pressure. My first church had an annual budget in 2009 of over half a million pounds, and within two years was carrying out a re-ordering costing over a million. I was told that at a PCC meeting it was questioned whether my predecessor was good value for money – not what you expect coming from the more ethereal atmosphere of theological college. When I began ministry in Putney (employed) there was just myself, a 0.6 administrator (who worked double that) and a cleaner who came in each week. Running a place of worship that is generally open to the public, that is also a community centre, a concert-hall, hosting playgroups, lunches, meetings, music and classes requires a level of organisation that exceeds the infrastructure most people have in mind for a parish church with its bumbling vicar. 

In that first parish in Paddington at the end of my first year my feet started cracking and I got odd patches of irritated skin on my feet, like an allergic reaction. It turned out it was a physical reaction to stress. This Autumn, Rhiannon had a breakdown, at exactly the point we should have been planning in greater depth the sabbatical. Pressure increased as, with her mother, we tried to make sure her work commitments were covered, in addition to the parish, children, and everything else. First of all, the rotator cuff in my shoulder went wrong, which was very painful and stopped me sleeping. Then two weeks later I had a spasm in my back and was in agony for days and discomfort for weeks. With years playing sport daily at a high level, years in the army carrying all that weight, I’d managed to get two of the worst injuries in my life in the space of two weeks by nothing more than leaning forward. The glass had started to crack, and the pressure seemed to be manifesting itself on my body. As the weeks moved on the uncertainty of whether we could go, whether we should go became more acute. Was this an additional anxiety better deferred to a more stable time or was this the solution – a chance to step back and reset some bad life habits which had brought us to this sticky wicket?

Travelling itself is full of utopias (meaning literally ‘no-place’). Airports are utopias – safe, clinical, universal. The big hotels – where we spent our first night in Dehli, reassuringly cosmopolitan, in the sense that while inside you could be anywhere in the world, with the help, the wifi, the English-speaking, the familiar devices and services you require. The hotel we find ourselves in, the gift of a wonderful very-much-appeciated well-wisher, is the nicest hotel I’ve ever been in. We luxuriate in a suite – which means that I can read and write while the rest of the family rests. Everyone smiles and when we return from lunch/dinner a room is full of balloons for the children. The sense of unreality is underlined by time inversion. We land at 2am, having not slept, but it’s 8am. The children look even pastier than usual, but everyone thinks Oberon looks just like Harry Potter and even before we’ve got out of the airport someone wants a photo with Apollo’s red curls and plump cheeks. We end up sleeping through the afternoon guiltily feeling like we’re wasting our first day in India, while I continually remind myself we have three months. To paraphrase Jesus, India we will always have with us (or at least three months), but we will not always have this smart hotel. This, again, is one of the reasons for this sabbatical. This persistent nagging need to fill every minute, to make the most of everything, to rush, to fit in a job that quietly presses upon your every minute, two beautiful children who rightly deserve your every minute and, little remembered, the cooling needs of you and your partner. To paraphrase Meatloaf, Delhi can wait. At least until tomorrow.