I’m Leaving on a Jet Plane

The past two weeks have been busy in a way I didn’t anticipate. There is a category of task that becomes urgent only in the period immediately before a long departure: the university assignments I had been quietly deferring, the injections for hepatitis A and B and typhoid and Japanese encephalitis and a few others that the nurse delivered with the cheerful efficiency of someone who does this forty times a week, the people I needed to see before leaving, the parties that needed organising. The parties were good. A big thank you to everyone who came.

The house has been sold to Kate, who has the keys and the cats. Chief, who is the complicated one, disappears when I work away. He has done it for years, staying out until I return, operating on whatever internal calendar he uses to measure absence. What his internal calendar will make of two years is not something I want to think about too carefully. Tigger will be fine. Tigger is motivated entirely by food and would be content in a nuclear bunker provided someone opened a tin at the right time.

The bag is packed. Fourteen kilograms, which is either reassuringly light or evidence that I have forgotten something significant. I have spent two weeks reading contradictory advice about what to bring and have arrived at a list that feels right for me specifically, accepting that I will buy things I forgot and abandon things I brought within the first three months. The bag is a sixty-five litre Osprey with a detachable day pack. It contains everything I will own for the next two years, which is a sentence that sounds more profound than the experience of looking at the bag requires.

Lee Fisher is collecting me at noon to drive me to Wakefield station. Lee is one of my best friends, a man of considerable patience who offered to drive me rather than let me negotiate trains with a large backpack and the fragmented concentration that comes from not having slept properly in a week. From Wakefield the train goes to London, then a cab or the Underground to Heathrow, where the seven o’clock flight to Tokyo Narita departs on All Nippon Airways. ANA was founded in 1952, seven years after the Allied occupation of Japan ended and the country began the extraordinary reconstruction that would turn it from the most devastated industrial economy in the world in 1945 into the second-largest economy in the world by 1968. The airline, like most of postwar Japan, moved fast. The flight number is NH202. It takes approximately twelve hours and flies over Siberia, which at night, somewhere above the very northern reaches of Russia, offers a view of the aurora borealis to anyone not asleep on the port side. I intend to be awake.

The internet has been cut off this morning, which is practical and oddly symbolic. The house is no longer mine. The cats are temporarily someone else’s responsibility. The life I have been living in Barnsley, the office job, the routine, the familiar geography of the same streets and the same people, has been closed down or handed over or put in storage. What remains fits in a bag I can carry on my back.

The plan for managing jet lag is to stay awake until it is dark in Tokyo, which is nine hours ahead of the UK, and to resist the bed until a reasonable local time. The plan will probably not survive contact with a bed. Most plans don’t, which is either a flaw in planning or the correct relationship between plans and reality. I leave for Wakefield at noon. Tokyo is after that. Everything else is after Tokyo.