It’s quite risky jettisoning yourself sharply into a contrasting life to the one you’re in, but for me it usually works if I need a decent jolt-up.
I undertook one of my livelier pulling-the-carpet-from-under-my-feet schemes when I was 22, and searingly disappointed with my trainee journalist job on a newspaper in an ugly town in the north of England.
At that time, the kind of stop-gap thing that was fashionable was sleeping on the beaches on Greek islands in the sunshine drinking retsina for a few drachmas, or working as volunteers on a kibbutz in Israel/ Palestine ( you choose the name ).
I decided to resign from my dreary cub reporter job on the weekly paper, The Barrow News, and had a few months to kill til the Next Thing, so I wrote to various kibbutzim, was offered a post, and flew to Jerusalem.
I’m afraid my motives were not lofty or humanitarian, or even idealogical ( there was a lot of laudable utopianism involved in the kibbutz movement ). No, I went mainly because I knew that there’d be partying, socialising and fun with kindred spirits from all over the world – and it would be new and fresh and warm.
Jerusalem was like something out of the illustrated version of the Bible we had had as children. It was thrillingly, well, foreign too, made me feel alert, enthralled me with its meuzzin wailings, and intense sense of things going on.
I had a few adventures there and in Tel Aviv, then settled into Kibbutz Ma’anit, an hour’s drive south of Haifa, for three glittering months.
I shared a sprawling untidy room with a pukka and charismatic girl called Ginny, a classical pianist, and a tiny animated Berliner called Antje, who read out Rilke over a glass or two of wine every so often, and the Swedish girl next door used to smoke a pipe on her doorstep.
( next tale: An Intriguing Encounter in the Sinai Desert )
Out There & In Here 