Visions of nappies and backpacks

This afternoon I was going through a bit of a spell of procrastination and decided to plan out some of my upcoming trip to southern Laos. I’m hoping to co-ordinate a portion of the trip with my mate A from Phnom Penh so we’re both ostensibly putting together plans to see where our paths will cross… probably worth noting that A is arguably the world’s greatest procrastinator, so I’m not expecting his plan anytime soon…you reading this A?

Anyways, as I’m putting together my trip (on which I’d been advised by the powers that be that I had a maximum of two weeks) I came to realise that my days of long, slow rambling trips have gone the way of backpacks with external frames. No more will I have the time to waste half a day sitting in a Lao bus station waiting for a bus to leave that never actually will — now it is bang bang bang — short sharp trips before running back to measure and rub S’s belly.

Oh boy… not good news.

So I got in a bit of a funk about it, but then later on, while watching Brazil beat Ghana, I had a revelation — I know, as soon as the bub is a couple of years old, I’ll go travelling baby on board and take him/her with me! That way S will be able to have a break from babydom and I can start working the need to travel into the baby’s genes…

Perhaps it was the beer or mixed drinks blurring my good sense, but I never even considered the downside of such a plan until my subconscious decided to beat me around the head with it at about 03:00, leaving me bolt upright, crazed and in a pool of sweat.

Warning: dream sequence:

I was sitting in a bus station in Laos (ie a dirt clearing with lots of urchins, dogs, chickens and dirty bamboo baskets) waiting for a bus, sitting on a wooden bench with a steaming hot Lao coffee with a good inch of condensed milk at the base sitting in front of me. There was a tv set blaring Thai karaoke off to my right and to my left our child was sitting next to me, and the damdest thing, I can’t recall if twas a boy or girl.

In the dream I was struck by a need to get something from my backpack — a festy pink number which no thief would ever dare touch for fear of contracting cholera — and I reached over to open it.

When I flipped the top, it was ful of these plastic baggies and I started pulling them out.

There were hundreds of them.

I pulled them out at an increasingly crazed rate, till I started the scream.

They were nappies.