On Travel

A long but gentle journey to Italy

[ Trigger warning: wars and terrorism are mentioned herein ]

Last summer I bought a car.

I have had only one before. I had a lease on a VW T-ROC for a few years when I was at the Bar, and I loved it. I only learned to drive at 28 (London born and raised) and even getting a car at 30 the freedom was mind boggling. Everything everyone had said about having a car was true. The opportunities were endless. The potential for adventure infinite. There it sat, immediately outside my front door, broadening horizons. Poised. Empowering escape.

I needed it only once for that purpose. When one night a while after separating from my husband, he turned up at what had been our home when I had begged him not to, and I fled in my car, with him chasing me down the street as I went.

When I left the Bar, the car lease was the first thing to go, taking with it the cost of insurance, permits, parking, petrol. It was financially necessary, but the timing couldn’t have been worse. I suddenly (for the first time ever) had the time to explore, but not the means or method.

And then - after a complex series of deaths and decisions made over 25 years, two countries, and a bunch of people I’ve never met that I cannot possibly explain because I don’t actually know - I inherited some money. About enough to buy a car.

I knew there were other things I could do with the money. Probably more sensible things. I knew the cost of the insurance, permits, parking and petrol would - again - stretch me to the limit. But once I owned it, I thought, I’ll have it forever. I’ll run it into the ground. I’ll drive it until the wheels fall off.

After months of spreadsheets, research, and consideration, I bought… a second-hand VW T-ROC. Quite simply, there was nothing better. It is a perfect car. Big enough to fill with bags of compost, plants and dogs, but small enough to not be considered a London tractor (most of these streets were built before even horses and carts were common, they certainly were not built for two vast Range Rovers to pass ways without collision).

I had spent the months of research thinking longingly about a European road trip. Throw the dogs in the back, heavily medicate Bella who hates the car, and take off on an adventure to see the great gardens of Europe. Giverny to Alhambra, and back via the Alps and the best castles and palaces of Scandinavia.

Needless to say it did not come off. First of all, post-Brexit it is a huge headache to take dogs into Europe. Long gone are the days of throwing the dogs in the car with a pet passport and taking off on a whim. And then, of course, there was the lack of funds which last summer reached absolute rock bottom when the couple renting our one-time family home (which we kept after Dad died and have rented out since as a much-needed source of income) stopped paying their rent, sending me (at one point) begging for £50 from my little brother - a real low point (it is incredibly difficult to get rid of tenants even when they are a wealthy couple living in a large, five-bedroom family house and refusing to pay for it).

This spring, finances having largely recovered, I decided to rent a barn in the Cotswolds without first installing a lodger in my London home to pay for it. That was incredibly, incredibly financially stupid. And then I spent a lot of money on plants. I am not good with money.

The European gardens grand tour is therefore on the back burner for the foreseeable. But on Saturday, my best friend and love of my life, Emma, is getting married. Her family live on a hillside in Tuscany in what has long been my favourite place in the whole world (not least because of the proprietors, her wonderful parents, whom I adore).

[ That Tuscan hilltop, taken 16 years ago ]

Because my mind is ADD-led, I only finally booked my travel two days ago. I know this gives many of you sweaty palms, but it is largely how I operate. I was hovering over the box on the EasyJet website where the final three numbers on the back of my bank card would secure my flights to and from Pisa, and felt no desire to hit ‘buy now’.

I hate flying. I’m told it used to be fun and glamorous. I find that difficult to imagine. Absolutely no part of (a) Stansted airpot (b) in the summer (c) a budget airline makes me feel good about spending the £500 on an ecologically disastrous flight. So I didn’t.

Yes, I am also cripplingly afraid of flying. It doesn’t help that in the last few months planes have been falling out of the sky, wiping out the passenger manifest, with unusual frequency. I think it is the life-long consequence of having watched planes across the skies of America being used as devastating weapons, killing thousands and shattering the psychology of whole continents.

I thought my dad might have been on one of the planes. He spent half his time flying to New York and back for work in between 2000 and 2002. I was at boarding school in 2001. I was 11. Mum had died two years before. There was no way of keeping us from seeing the footage on TV. We were gathered in the school chapel and one of the grown ups said something about what had happened, the padre I think. And while I remember sitting in the pews, I remember nothing of what was said. There were no words that could comfort or console.

Everyone, it seemed, knew someone who knew someone who had been killed. A godparent, or a friend’s parent. Even in that sleepy Oxfordshire village, the violence was felt.

My father was fine, of course.

[ Emma giving a speech at my 21st birthday party, 2009 ]

Then, a while later, I remember where I was standing listening to the radio and hearing that ‘we’ had entered the war in Iraq.

Three months later, in June 20023, my father was dead. Not by violence, nor by war, but by a vicious brain tumour that killed him three weeks after his diagnosis (and three days after he had told me of it).

Two years later, in 2005, the means of transport that I had taken daily without concern became a lethal weapon. Ordinary Londoners were killed and maimed when bombs were set off on tubes and buses. The facade of the British Medical Association on Tavistock Square was splattered with blood and shrapnel. Even 6 years later, as I walked past the building each day on my way to my first graduate job, I thought of it. Always glancing at the plaque remembering the 13 people killed there and taking half a second to remember them.

I had said goodbye to my older brother that morning thinking nothing of it. We were staying with his best friend’s family in Fulham so that I could go to a party and he and his friend could go to the Russian Embassy to get visas for a trip that summer. For hours that day I watched the news and waited to hear from him. He was out there somewhere but phone signal was largely jammed.

As it happened, he and his friend had decided to walk the 3+ miles to the Embassy that morning (probably, I realised now, so he could smoke). At some point, hours later, they walked back through the door unscathed. Not so for the 52 others who died, nor for the almost 800 who were injured. Not for their families and friends waiting at home to hear.

I flew perfectly happily (if a little worriedly) for years after that. I travelled all over the world, blessed to have been affluent and able. I never loved flying, but I wasn’t afraid of it.

Then, in 2014, I flew back from New York through turbulence. It wasn’t anything life-threatening, of course, but that is not how it felt. It felt like the last moments of a life that had barely begun. I sobbed and clung to one of my oldest friends, who slept through the whole thing. And having felt the vulnerability of being at 30,000ft, falling (even if just for a moment), I have never quite been able to feel confident in a plane again.

I have flown since, but I have also gone out of my way to avoid it.

[ Emma giving a speech at my wedding, 2016 ]

It isn’t rational. My rational mind knows that (and I live under the Heathrow flight path, so I really do know how many planes are safely flying all the time). But fear largely isn’t. I know the statistics. I know that as a person with ADHD and a car I am statistically all but guaranteed to be in a car accident at some point.

But hovering over the ‘buy now’ button, I wondered whether perhaps there was another way. Not by car, which would take too long and would guzzle fuel. But perhaps by train.

This was, in hindsight, probably in no small part because the news had broken a few hours before that President Trump had decided unilaterally, almost certainly in breach of both the US Constitution and international law, to bomb Iran. ‘US ENTERS WAR WITH IRAN’ was the New York Times’ all-caps headline that alerted me to this breaking news.

US intelligence said there was no evidence that an Iranian nuclear bomb was either immediate nor imminent. It all feels so awfully and sickeningly familiar.

So tomorrow I will set off from London, and slowly wend my way across Europe. Via Paris, and through the alps. I will pick up a car nearby Milan train station and drive as safely as I possibly can up into the hills of Tuscany.

I will arrive a few hours later than is ideal (both to the wedding and back in London, where my incredible neighbour Alex will be looking after the pups) and the journey will be long. But it will be an adventure. I have never been to Milan. And it allows for the possibility of pausing (though not stopping) along the way to photograph the gardens of Paris and of tiny Italian hilltop towns.

It feels not only a gentler way to get from A to B for my soul, but also for the planet. A journey more in keeping with my goal of treading lightly upon this beautiful earth.

Simultaneously, I am on a different journey. I recently discussed with my psychiatrist whether I could start tapering off the SSRI I have been taking since 2022. Not for any reason other than I ultimately would like to be medication-free. She set out a very gradual tapering off, to half my dose over six months. It is very gradual. Gentle.

I took the first of a very, very slightly lower dose of Sertraline a few days ago. A tiny change. But after a few days, the withdrawal has been huge and savage. To the point where yesterday afternoon I felt as though I was clinging on to the edge of sanity by just my finger tips.

It is terrifying to feel that vulnerable. To feel like you’re close to falling, even if just for a moment.

Well, sod that. Here is one small readjustment that will steady the ship, the plane, the train, the brain.

I tell you this because going into withdrawal from an SSRI is no joke. Missing even one dose can cause severe withdrawal. This certainly is not a reason not to take it, the opposite. It is a reason not be cavalier about stopping taking it. There are people I know well who have decided one day simply to stop. Do not do this. I beg you. It is the psychopharmaceutical equivalent of driving at 150mph and then making a handbrake turn on the edge of a cliff.

Anyway. This morning I have returned to my previous dose, and by the time I arrive on that Tuscan hilltop my mind should be back to its usual, sane self. And I will watch my best friend begin her new journey, hand in hand with her love.

[ Emma and me at my wedding, 2016 ]