Alone, or Different?

Over the last couple of years I have gone through the family albums, scanning pictures and uploading them for this blog, but this one sticks in my mind. I used it in a post about Fatuma, our ayah in Dar-es-Salaam - here - and under it I wrote, "This is the Crole Rees' birthday party on the beach. I am at right, separate from the other children. There are several later photos of me slightly to one side of everyone. At that stage I don't think I wanted to be antisocial, I just felt.... shy."

I don't think I was shy. Had I been, I would have been hanging off my mother's skirts - she's visible amongst the adults in the middle of the picture - but I'm out front, looking at whoever is taking the photo. I'm not shy, I'm asserting that I'm not one of the crowd. I'm different. I'm not necessarily going to do what everyone else is doing. In fact, I'm going to relish being different.

So in due course I'm going to hang my thumb out on the side of a road and hitch thousands of miles across Africa. I'm going to marry an adventurous girl and together we're going to work in a school in the middle of the African bush. When others are settling down to their first child and a mortgage, we're going to uproot our family and take it to a tropical island. When other teachers are working out their last years towards a secure pension, we're going to pack up teaching and a lovely Victorian family home to buy a shop in a distant corner of Scotland. And now, in our mid-seventies, we're selling a nice bungalow in a nice English seaside resort, a house which we've spent months altering so it's perfect for our declining years, and going to live in NE Scotland, almost as far north as John o' Groats.

I'm glad that small boy decided to squat on the sand of that East African beach away from all the others.