In just over 5 weeks time I am giving up my job in the UK for a year (I am taking a year of unpaid leave) to begin a period of nomadic wandering that will lead eventually to San Francisco.

Earlier in the year my wife Siobhan became employed by a company that enabled her to work online full-time, and pretty much from anywhere in the world with a wireless internet connection. I had already been considering asking for a period of leave from my job as a Senior Lecturer at Canterbury Christ Church University to complete two books (one on Gilles Deleuze/Francis Bacon, the other on Art and Affectivity), so this seemed the perfect opportunity to take the time and use it to travel and write. After much head scratching we decided to take a full year away and to take to the road for an adventure.

Our itinerary is somewhat flexible, sometimes being determined by work events which Siobhan has to attend around the world. So, I finish work at the end of September and at the beginning of October we are heading to Leiden in Holland for a week, before flying to Lisbon where we will be staying for six weeks. We’ll be back in London for a week at the end of November, before then flying to Thailand for at least two months. We may stay longer, but it depends on my wife’s work schedule. The only other certainty is that we will be ending up in San Francisco next Summer. For a lot of the year we will be both working and adventuring outside our regular comfort zone, in strange and unfamiliar places, coping with the unexpected and the unusual. There will be islands, deserts, mountains, caves, and new people.

Planning this trip has involved downscaling our life, giving up the tenancy on our house, selling or giving away many of our possessions, giving up our cats (they are going to be looked after by a close friend), saying goodbye to friends and family. Five weeks from giving it all up and we are currently surrounded by storage boxes and bin liners. I have never spent a year trying to live out of one rucksack with so few possessions. It is unsettling, disruptive but very exciting. As part of my own efforts at radically simplifying many aspects of my life, I plan to severely limit my time on social media whilst I am away, concentrating my online efforts on maintaining this blog as a travel diary, where I can post photographs, bits of writing, etc. I will also be editing a series of radical film reviews for the New Left Project blog whilst I am away. Hopefully the year will result in two books being written (and hopefully published!) that might otherwise have taken another five to get done, and would have probably been done with a good deal less inspiration.

Thinking about our travels in the next year San Francisco suddenly feels like a very long way away.