In a much more exciting note, the old knee is on the mend – I’m now walking with no crutch (though not very far – and this usually entails me walking to the spot where I last left my crutch…or walking around cursing like an 80 year old searching blindly for his dentures first thing in the mornings) – and have just been invited on a press trip to Cartagena in the last week of June thanks to Duncan at www.theurbantravelblog.com.

Ah, I hear you all sigh with relief, we’ll finally get to the bottom of the secret service prostitute scandal.  There is more action an adventure to come, so stay tuned for the Folicular Chronicles, live from Cartagena…coming soon!

No, but seriously, it is awfully nice to be offered the spot, given the promises I made to deliver material to him in early February only to have everything of value, including the notes and preparation I had made to send him…stolen by those ghastly sewer rats who moved into our apartment the week before my birthday.

It is true, though, that in times like this you can’t help but feeling like you’ve bloody well deserved a fucking good old fashioned (free) holiday.

What is your mum doing today? Are you in a place where you can call her? See her? Pop over for a cuppa? And tell her you love her?  Is she going to be able to look back at you and hold that conversation and tell you she loves you too?

If so, you ought to act on that, because not everyone is in your position.

As the city wakes this morning there is a very anxious lady getting ready for something that she’s not so confident about.  Something the doctors tell her is going to work, something she once told her doctor she wanted.  A thought process she can’t quite take herself through just one more time, so she can remind herself….why?  Because she can’t remember all the little things from the last 6 or 8 months, that have led her to the room she wakes in today.

It’s one thing to know that you won’t see your family for several years – often that’s a decision you have to make in order to really experience the breadth of life and wonders of the living.  It’s another thing when you know the people you love are making very tough decisions, and living through the consequences.  Somewhere, at some point in the day – not just in another postcode, but in another country.  In another language.

Walking away from the family you know will have to make those decisions in your absence: That is one of the hardest things I have ever had to do.  And now I sit, so far away that I’m in a country that doesn’t even have postcodes.  Thinking.  Wondering. Knowing.

ECT has its stigmas.  There are people who don’t know, nor understand what or why. Or how.  So maybe this will help.

To put this in perspective answer me this.  How many times have you walked into the room and had to remind your mum you’d already popped in and seen her earlier in the day?  How often do you have to offer your reassurance that that word…the word she can’t quite find, but searches for intensely and with a grimace…that word…is Wednesday?

So, knowing that your mum is waking up to put herself through this all once more, knowing that she chose to take herself in, because she wants to get better. Knowing that it was her choice, a choice that she doesn’t quite understand, knowing that thousands of miles away, she is sitting there thinking through what is about to happen to her, and how it might change her, but that at the end of the day it’s all in an effort, which is for the first time in 20 years within the realm of her control, to find the peace she is starting to believe she can find…

This is the definition of courage.

What’s your mum up to today?

Now while it is true, and always will be, that practice makes progress – the day progress finally arrives, in whatever form, is an experience everyone is entitled to have: it´s a basic human right.

Just up the road from our apartment, I crossed the road tenderly this morning, feeling a little shaky on my leg, when I felt something particularly strange.  On any other day it could have been mistaken for a twitch, or a jerk.  The kind of flash that runs through you, reminding you that you have muscles you may have neglected from your attention.

It´s amazing to go through the process of forgetting, and then remembering things, movements, memories, whatever.  And the moment those wires flicker and spark, and the current runs, not so smoothly, but runs nonetheless…that is the moment you remember that you never really forgot what it was like.

I remember trying to explain to friends that in all honesty, if I were to drop my crutches and try to walk free of support that I have no idea if I would be able to…and at that moment in my imagination, everything stops, because I have no concept of what that loss of control would feel like.

I learnt to walk again today.  And that is something I can’t explain.  Something for which any explanation I offer would undermine the reality of those recollections that came shooting up my leg.  But that is just the kind of progress that everyone of you deserves to experience, at some point in your lives.

And how fitting that it would be on a day like today.

Shit, you really are on crutches!

He exclaimed as I arrived, which left me wondering what other subtle meanings one might construe from someone telling you they are on crutches.

Eric lives up on the hill, which means that his apartment isn’t necessarily in the heaving throng of Bogota.  It sits halfway up the mountains that run along the eastern edge of the city.  It’s a little quieter and they tend to be slightly more self-sufficient in terms of living space and comfort.

Shit this sure is a step up from the living conditions of an EFL teacher in the Candelaria. I said as I hopped through the door, eyes rolling from floor, to the ceiling and back to the floor again.

Eric goes on to tell me that the bilingual high school they work for organised the house for them before they arrived.  So, when they rocked up at 3am, the beds were made and the pantry was full.

A slightly different experience to the one you guys have had since your arrival then?

Was my mum’s reflection on my comments later that evening.

I remember, when we were in Brazil, looking through the requirements and application procedures for some International Schools, thinking to myself, shit that would be an interesting job.  I do feel somewhat justified in those assertions as much as I do humbly unqualified for any position that I might be interested in.

So all this got me thinking about how it was that I got to be where I am.  I ventured back to a conversation I had with my grandfather when I was 17 and looking through university courses.  At the time, he was an English teacher for one of the other private boys’ schools in Perth, and I remember very very clearly him saying to me

…You don’t have to make a decision now.  The choices you make about what to study now, they’ll be flexible, they’ll be changeable.  There’s no need to convince yourself that you’re going to be choosing your career when you enrol at uni next year because  the world today is one of infinite careers and opportunities.  There are many paths to the same destination.

Ok, so maybe he wasn’t quite a poetic as I make him out to be – that is to say that he was of no relation to Bilbo Baggins  and I have no intention of likening him to J.R.R. Tolkein – but sometimes I find myself wondering where I would be today if I hadn’t taken his advice to heart.

I think that conversation may just have been one of the most influential pieces of advice anyone gave me in my teens, and it is largely because of what he said that  I can feel dignified in my curiosity, chasing opportunities and opening doors that flow across countries and connecting worlds I’d have never otherwise have dared walk into.

We were treated to the delights of Colombian steakhouses yesterday as it was a public holiday.  And while I have only but confirmed my suspicions that commercial kitchens are hellish places to work, especially ones with 4 active grills with the equivalent of 5 whole cows on them, they sure are awesome places to test the limits of your appetite (or lack there of it).

Having been strongly advised not to order the normal sized, 600g steak, we submitted and ordered the media porcion. Which turned out to be about the size of my foot, covered and cheese and capsicum and significantly more protein in one dish than I’ve eaten in the last 8 months of travel. But was it worth it?  Hell yes it was.

Steakhouses, the best and most famous of which, sit in a small town, Chia, about an hour to the north of Bogota and are somewhat of a pilgrimage on Sundays and Public Holidays for the Bogotano population seeking a relaxing getaway in the countryside with what invariably ends up being the entire population of the city, crammed into two small roadways leading to and from Chia.

We were lucky to arrive early and were finishing our mains as throngs of people and families were only beginning to arrive.  Sitting at a table in Colombian, as hundreds of people walk past and line up to wait for a free spot, really brings home one reality of the meat industry in South America.  Paying for enhanced meat does not necessarily mean you are paying for a fillet of beef.

While waiting for everyone at our table to finish their slice of dead cow, we were privilege enough to spot what we unanimously consider to be both winner of a) the most rediculous fake arse and b) the most incredible fake arse.  I suppose the irony of this particular occasion was cemented even further by the fact that we were sitting in a steakhouse chowing down on meat, but further to this is the fact that all fake enhancements on this particular lady (and they sure has hell didn’t stop with her bum) were wrapped in leather.  As if you’d package your tripple quarter pounder with double cheese and magic mayo in a diamond studded bun.

It was, to be fair, as much a feast for all the senses as it was reassuring to know that we wouldn’t be protein deficient for a good 3 or 4 months to come.  It is also cynically saddening to know that slices of meat like that don’t exist in Australia because people have better things to spend their money on (fast cars and crystal meth, for example).  But the smell of our bedroom 4 hours later was yet one more reason why we are proud and mightily self-assured when we tell Colombians they are freaks for exercising such distaste for fresh vegetables.