The Backpacking Housewife: The Next Adventure

Realising I was quite alone and that the room was chilly and dark, I quickly grasped the reality of my new situation. My mind flitted over all that had happened over the last forty-eight hours. The island. Ethan’s brother. The news. The panic. The flight. Being back home.

I snuggled back under the duvet and sank into the warm comfortable mattress and let my head lay heavy on the soft pillow. A feeling of peace and relaxation and acceptance washed over me. I heaved a great sigh of relief that my mother’s heart attack had been a false alarm.

I found myself smiling until my smile became a ridiculously happy grin in knowing that my mum was perfectly all right and it was just a few weeks until Christmas and I was back here with my family. Just like I’d wanted. After all the pining and moping, and all the missing and the wishing that I’d done over the past few months, I really should be making the most of every precious minute with my family. I really should be making up for all the time I’d been away.

So, with a lightness of heart, I grabbed my phone from its charger on the bedside table to find that because I’d turned the sound down to sleep blissfully uninterrupted, I’d missed four calls from Ethan. On the last attempt, he’d left me a voice message, saying how relieved he was to hear that my mum was okay. He’d also said that he was missing me and that he still regretted not travelling back with me to the UK. I played the message twice over to listen to his deep and smooth and oh so sexy voice with his gorgeous Scottish lilt. I knew I could listen to him talk forever because his voice melted my heart and soothed my soul.

And I was missing him too. I was missing him so much that it hurt.

So much that my heart was heavy again and my thoughts conflicted and confused.

Arrrgghhhh! Was it even possible for me to ever feel completely contented with life?

What did Buddha say about contentment? That it is the ‘greatest wealth’.

I tried to call Ethan back but to my disappointment I got his automated answer again.

And that was the problem in having an entire ocean between us and being on two different time zones. I left him another message saying I’d just slept off my jet lag. That I was fine and I was looking forward to spending the day with my family. That I would try to call him again later if he didn’t call me first. And that I loved him.

Then I realised I could smell cooked bacon wafting upstairs from the kitchen.

Oh my goodness – I smell British bacon! Big fat rashers of lean and meaty goodness.

For a while now, I’ve been a vegetarian. It’s a personal choice but it’s one that fits in with my new beliefs and my life as a conservationist. I do feel passionately about animal welfare and greenhouse gas emissions and global warming and so not eating meat seems ethical to me.

In joining The Freedom of the Ocean, I had been correct in assuming that everyone else onboard would also be vegetarian. What I hadn’t expected, however, was that marine biologists generally don’t eat fish either and so are mostly vegan. I had happily and perhaps naively considered that living on ship, surrounded by water and therefore a bounty of seafood, would have meant me having to find a zillion different ways to serve fish for dinner.

It makes perfect sense to me now of course that people who protect and study fish don’t actually eat them. But I must admit (although certainly not publicly) that I love eating seafood.

So, I was quite gutted – pun intended – by the dietary restrictions and also in having to find a zillion different ways to serve tofu. Ethan, who like most men will happily eat anything he’s given on a plate, would if pressed always describe himself as a ‘flexitarian.’ In that he takes a more environmentally sustainable approach to the source of his food in occasionally eating meat and fish and other animal products. I’d always thought this was cheating and like having your beef cake and eating it. So, I did now feel terribly guilty, as I leapt out of bed and into the slippers and dressing gown that mum had kindly loaned me and padded down the stairs following the scent of cooked bacon into the kitchen.

My mum was at the stove waving a spatula at me. ‘Good morning, Lorraine!’

I was so overjoyed to see her, alive and well and real, that I rushed across the kitchen to put my arms around her and squeeze her tightly. ‘Good morning. I love you, mum!’

She laughed and kissed my forehead and ruffled my bed head hair, saying I should pour us both a cup of tea. Then we sat at the kitchen table eating good old British bacon sandwiches with HP sauce squidging out of them and drinking our strong tea and putting the world to rights.

We talked about all the things I’d missed as well as my family – TV soaps, British magazines, proper tea, fish and chips with mushy peas, Yorkshire pudding, proper gravy, Victoria sponge cakes and steamed pudding with thick creamy custard. Until we realised that we’d chatted half way through the morning and, as Lucas and Josh and Zoey where coming over for lunch, it was now time to start preparing the main meal. I was so excited.

This was going to be the kind of family day that I’d dreamed about for so long.

One that I’d dreamed of while standing onboard ship, looking across an endless ocean.

While sitting on hot sand with my toes in the tideline, gazing at an unbroken horizon.

Walking through a tropical forest, staring up through palm fronds into a cloudless blue sky.

Thinking about my precious and beautiful family so many thousands of miles away.

So, while I was helping mum and peeling vegetables and setting the table with a pristine white cloth and her best china, I happily continued to listen to her chatting away and telling me all about her social clubs and the pensioner trips she’d taken over the summer, all about her friends and what they were doing, and how busy she’s been with her church activities all year.

She told me how she’d recently started helping out at a homeless charity. That she still volunteered at the hospice and the local hospital and the food bank. This was all on top of the reams of stuff she did through her church. My mum is a kind and generous woman. She seems to have boundless energy and keeps her days incredibly full and active. I’ve noticed that some of the people she helps and refers to as the ‘older ones’ or ‘the elders’ are actually a lot younger than she is and I find myself wondering how she even has the time to sit here chatting with me.

‘Oh, don’t worry!’ she assures me when I ask if she’s going to miss church today. ‘Joan’s handing out the bibles today. As I’ve just come out of the hospital, John, that’s our Minister, has insisted I take this Sunday off. But maybe you and I can do it together next week, Lorraine?’

‘I’d really love that—’ I said, deciding that rather like my vegetarianism, I might be best to keep my new belief in Buddhism to myself.

Mum asked about my travels again. She wanted to hear more about places I’d seen.

So I regaled her with my adventures in Thailand at the turtle sanctuary and in Borneo learning about the Orangutans. How I’d learned to be a scuba diver and how amazing it was to be underwater and helping to restore coral reefs that had been damaged by either man or nature and about the lovely people I’d met and the incredible experiences I’d had along the way.

But I also continued to stress how I’d really missed her and the boys the whole time.

How I was really and truly happy to be home.

In turn, she confessed how worried she’d been about me.

‘I want you to know that every Sunday in church, I prayed to The Lord to protect you.’

Then she put down her teacloth and I saw she was trembling and had become a little tearful.

‘Mum, are you okay? What is it? What’s the matter?’

‘Lorraine, I do understand about you going off to Thailand. I understand why you felt the need to run away from that bloody no-good husband of yours after what he did with that no-good woman who’d called herself your friend. But all this time you’ve been away, a whole year, I’ve been hardly able to bear the thought of you out there all alone and so far away from us. And, for the life of me, I just don’t understand how you ended up running away to sea on that damned ship and going all the way around the whole world on it!’

I took a deep breath and decided this was exactly the right time to tell her about Ethan.

‘Look, mum, if we are being honest with each other then I have something to tell you too. I wasn’t all alone out there. I have someone. I’ve met someone quite wonderful and that’s why I went on the ship. I wanted to be with him and it was the only way for us to be together.’

‘He’s a sailor?’ she gasped in horror, as if sailors were the absolute depths.

‘No. He’s not a sailor. His name is Sir Ethan Goldman and he’s a famous explorer.’

Mum’s eyes practically popped right out of her head and into her tea cup.

‘He’s a philanthropist, which means he does amazing things all over the world to help people and animals and to save the planet, and that’s why he was knighted by Her Majesty the Queen.’

Mum, who was a big fan of The Queen, was immediately smitten.

‘Oh, go on, Lorraine. Tell me some more about Sir Ethan and your trip around the world?’

As she took a seat and dunked another shortbread into yet another cup of tea, I obliged.

I explained how after first meeting Ethan in Asia, and after a month or so of us living in the Caribbean together, he had been called to an important meeting in Grand Cayman. ‘It was to discuss a high-profile project to do with climate change with the world organisations. Naturally, they all wanted Ethan heading up the team. I knew at once when he returned to me that he’d already agreed to go. And, why wouldn’t he?’

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