Landscapes Change

Landscapes change once we leave them; Sky-scrappers melt down their shapes and re-form; People grow into themselves or out of their own skins; Distance drives familiar geographies apart.

We return to places we thought we knew to realise that once stretched, our minds and selves can never return and those places were as much a part of our imaginations as our nightmares and our dreams.

I sat in a bar last week. I sat not just in any old bar, but in the colonial depths of the Strand, it is the hotel where Rudyard Kipling and George Orwell and other long dead British empire-ists once drank G and T's. It is near the docks in my all too poetic Yangon.

The air con sucked out the atmosphere and regurgitated clean, strict gasps of sterile dust.

I drank a drink that tasted of sherbet lemon and spoke to another aid worker. Fascinating, admirable, broken creatures that us humans are; Bars and aid workers seem to run together. In 5 star hotels in crumbling developing nations there is a search for humanity amongst strangers - because families and friends are far away - and because we need to try and make sense of it all.

This aid worker was telling me about Sudan. He told me that everyone has their own "Sudan" - it is a country or a time or a period by which we orientate our life. It's a different place and a different moment for everyone. For this man Sudan changed his life. And he will always consider and describe his life by before and after Sudan. He is a different person now to the one who first moved to Sudan. He is two men - split and fractured by a year long placement in a country in Africa.

I am not sure there is just one Sudan in our lives - though he seemed convinced that there was. Perhaps I have just not yet met my Sudan. But I do see that places change us - concretely, physically and lastingly.

We return and we are not the same and the landscape we look at on our return we can never see in the same way again. It is a different Bangkok I see now to the one I came to this time last year.