My time in Zambia has been world-changing, but is sadly coming to its end. People have been asking if I miss the UK at all, but I never get homesick when I’m away. I enjoy the opportunity to explore new places and live a different life for a while – I love my life as it is, but travelling is an easy way of forcing you to experience new things. I think there are a lot of lessons that you can take from travel and apply back home, the main one being to make every day count. If I was only in London for a week or two, and then I went somewhere else, I definitely wouldn’t spend all day checking emails and reading Wikipedia, I’d be out exploring the world. So I want to do more of that.
My Zambian experience has felt like a self-contained story. The peripheral characters in our lives these two weeks have slowly become more meaningful. We noticed a tall guy who sat near us at breakfast at one morning, and he turned out to be Ignacio, the guy with dual citizenship from the cocktail party. There’s a blonde woman staying here who we keep seeing around, and last night she was having dinner with Ignacio, so we wondered if they had come here together or if he was trying to score. We also ate dinner at a rival hotel one night, and saw the blonde woman there too, concluding that she was a spy.
The staff are great here, too – you’ve already heard about Adrian, but there’s also a waiter called Kelvin who started working here just over two weeks ago, so for as long as he’s been at the Southern Sun he’s seen us twice a day for meals. He said he’d got used to having us around and would be sad to see us go. Another waitress, Tracy, came over ‘just to say hi’ because she recognised us this morning during breakfast.
I read a book while I was out here called A Million Miles In A Thousand Years by Don Miller; it’s a real perspective-changer and my favourite book now. It puts forth the idea that a good story is just life with the meaningless scenes removed, and that if you can understand the principles of what makes a good story, there is something to be said for removing the meaningless scenes from your own life to make everything you do more meaningful, more memorable and generally enabling you to live a great tale. Being someone who already documents his life on video, this really struck with me. I really like the more documented videos I’ve made while I’ve been in Zambia and I’d like to continue that style, upoading a video maybe every Monday to talk about what I’ve been up to, and leaving time later in the week to do a Twilight reading or a song or whatever else I feel like. Anyway, once you finish Mockingjay, I’d definitely recommend you read A Million Miles In A Thousand Years – here’s an Amazon link.
So my Zambian story is over, and the Sons Of Admirals story is waiting for me back home. We’re taking this re-release really seriously and aiming Baby at press and radio, so I’m really excited to see what we can do :)
To the next story!
x
