As humans, we have a curious ability to trick our minds into thinking that, this time, it will be different…but it rarely is.  My mother calls this the ‘gin & tonic enigma’ from when she would be driving home after a hot day at work and imagine the perfect drink she would mix and sit in the garden sipping.

But the dream was rarely realized as perfectly as she had imagined. Something would get in the way or it simply wouldn’t taste as she had told herself it would. Alexander Pope has something to say on this:

Hope springs eternal in the human breast
Man never Is, but always To be blest:
The soul, uneasy and confin’d from home,
Rests and expatiates in a life to come.

(An Essay on Man, Epistle I, 1733)

This, I feel, is a suitable place to start this blog and I plan to ‘expatiate’ to a greater or lesser degree on the next and imminent scheme.

On 16 February I shall be boarding a flight to Kigali, Rwanda to work as a VSO volunteer for a year or two and this blog will be about this experience and whether or not it is anything like I have imagined it to be.  Mostly.