19 May - Visas & Jabs

Forgot what it's like to plan trips and why many people (my father in his nearing dotage for example, but some younger specimen too) believe you save yourself an awful lot of hassle if you don't stray far from home. You start reading about jabs, visas and logistics and you think you haven't got time for all of that, and the order in which you have to do stuff and the sodding cost! I mean, what exactly do governments of third world countries do with my visa fee? Improve the state of their roads? I don't think so. Never mind donating to charity, my visa money goes to repaying their debts. What a pain.
With Toph busy during the day and barely functioning at night as result of exhausting day, and my well defined gap in which this trip has to take place, I can see the onus falling on me to do all necessary research. What a massive drag. To make it more galling Toph says that previously he was the organiser of his trips a' deux. Yeah, and he probably paid for them too to get busy/tired g/friend away from her desk. Sucker! Hats off to women like that though, they get them to run around and thent they dump them, how do they do it. Is there a course I can sign up for?
Anyway, the lovely folks at Trailfinders recommend Bali or Zanzibar for June sunshine. The start and the end of the alphabet but both on similar equatorial line no? A friend recommends Oman or some other place that Toph rules out on account of kidnapping of tourists and so on. No, it was not Rwanda or Somalia, and didn't have him down as a worrier to this kind of Foreign office warning. Turns out also he didn't know how militantly opposed to visiting Saudi Arabian states I am. I have a thing about Dubai for example, I just don't want to go there. The fact that it's some poor bastard from somewhere else who has to build six star hotels in a place where nothing existed before jars with something deep down. Then again, probably most of any city is built with the underpaid work of some immigrant, perhaps even the Four Seasons in Canary Wharf!
Ok, am turning into a bore. Let's talk about something else. Oh, there isn't. But let's leave this and think instead about Dear John's 40th bash in Co. Cork in a couple of weeks. Bash starts in London on a Friday, then we all decamp to Ireland. Yes, proof that some failed relationships don't hurt that much and that if you like his friends, you make an effort not to cut yourself off 'him'.