Goodbye shorts and teeshirt

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about my idea of heaven on earth; the place that, if I could or can, I would want to spend a bundle of my days later in life, a 'later in life' that feels closer now than I expected.

In my youth, I was a devotee of the shorts-and-teeshirt dream — a beach, sand, sun, heat and the ocean. The occasional splash of late-afternoon rain, monsoon-style, but not much more than the occasional bit with a couple-times-a-year downpour, just for variety. The dream really boiled down to ‘better too hot than too cold’.

That's all changed in the last few years.

The dream has turned and, now, my ideal is, I realised, cold, and stormy, a bit remote. Grey skies, and green slopes.

It’s a strange thing to realise this given how, last time I really thought about it, it was the complete opposite.

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I can trace some of this change back to simply having become tired — as in sick and tired — of being too damn hot when I lived in George Town in Penang, Malaysia, through 2015. The humidity was crushing for my mid-to-late-40s temperament, and it was also unceasing, unrelenting, a constant weight. A cool day in local terms was still like having a hot, wet blanket over your head; a hot day was like trying to carry a wet mattress around, dawn to dusk. It was just too much, and for too long every day.

And, after Malaysia, I stopped in Vietnam, in Ho Chi Minh City, for a few months, knowing that I’d soon be heading back to Australia but not quite willing to accept that the dream had changed. Whilst the climate there is noticeably different — with city breezes down surprisingly green avenues at times — it was still just that bit too much. The humidity, again, tipped the balance; 24 hours a day, every day, with the only feeling of momentary relief coming from sitting in air conditioning. Which, obviously, defeated the purpose of being there.

So, then a return from those places — lows (so-called) of 27 degrees — to regional Tasmania, and a town that in winter reaches zero fairly often, with average temperatures of around 12 degrees. Sounds fine, right? The thing is that, when I lived there 12ish years ago, I couldn’t stand it because I was in grip of the shorts-and-teeshirt dream. I wanted blinding days, and long, late nights.

Now?

Now I dream of twilight, and long, distant sunsets that shed light but not so much heat; of a green piece of land, not concrete; and the sound of trees in cold winds, not the sound of a city’s busy industry.

It’s changed an entire lifetime’s view of, well, the future.

And, importantly, in that is the knowledge that I’ve moved from a dream state to a real-world condition, from an idea to a goal, a static image to a sequence of steps that should be taken.

To go from a dream of sand and heat to one of windswept moors is something unexpected and, truthfully, strange. The dream is of a library, wood-fire warm, and with rugs on the floor, rather than bare feet and tiles. And much of that, yes, springs from a distantly-remembered youth in Scotland, near the coast, and the feeling that those years left, which I discover resonate now, and increasingly, and louder as age brings its weight to bear a little more each year.

Like I said, it’s been a strange thing to realise all this and, in part at least, because it feels like the beginning of a process of 'coming home'.