MAGAN'S WORLD: Manchán Maganon family journeys
THE PAST TWO decades of my life have been scarred by a journey I made through Africa with 20 people in 1990. So it was with fascination that I learned that Brendan Lawlor, from Cork, was planning to provide his family with the experience of a lifetime by taking them on an eight-month journey around the world. Hmm, I thought. I wonder how that will go?
They're two months into it now, and their blog is oddly addictive, informing us why they don't smell worse than they do, how to pick tentacles off one's daughter's skin and how to differentiate between vicious saltwater crocs and friendly freshwater ones.
The jaundiced part of me is just waiting for the rot to set in. I've seen it too often before, husbands and wives on holiday piling into each other like pit bulls, sinking their nails into each other and tearing skin, the children spewing bile of such acidity that the wounds never heal. I haven't dared travel in a group since Africa, but I've been around the world with my brother, making TV programmes, and, God, have we had some fights.
Even before setting out, Lawlor wrote that he wanted the trip to be a way of "getting uncomfortable, challenged and exposed to aspects of myself, good and bad".
So how is he getting on?
"I've learned a lot about my wife and daughters" - Nina, aged eight, and Sara, aged six - "in these weeks. They are quite an amazing band of fellow travellers: flexible, positive, patient and funny. We drive each other daft regularly, and there is a lot being asked of the kids in terms of endless walking, eating and uprooting.
"But they seem genuinely happy and at ease within the newly mobile family unit. They're wide awake, taking it all in and wondering what's for dessert. They still bicker, and then, eventually, hug, and then go back to Bickersville."
Lawlor and his family are still in the honeymoon period, of course. Keep an eye on www.whilestockslast.blogspot.comfor the meltdown. Or, if you want the really gruesome, uncensored stuff, check out his wife's website - or, even better, his eight-year-old daughter's.
Even if I'm proved wrong, and it all goes brilliantly, you won't be disappointed. It's an inspiring journey, starting in China and travelling from there to Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Chile, Peru, Bolivia and Argentina. Letizia, his wife, is a great photographer, and Lawlor writes well.
He says the purpose of the trip isn't just to gather "a collection of sights; travel is supposed to be about who you are and how you relate to what you find on the way. Because we are living in such close quarters ('Daddy, what did I tell you about snoring?' - Sara, 3am) and doing everything together, then the good and the bad get magnified. There's nowhere to hide. If there's something we're doing wrong, then we'll simply have to fix it. And when something good happens, like an unsolicited confidence from Nina - a very private young lady - then it's harder to take for granted."
I wonder what the children will make of the trip in 10 years' time. I look back on my Africa trip with a shudder, yet I know it defined who I am today. Lawlor writes of his daughters coming to terms with China, seeing it as not just an exotic abstraction but a real place of kindly, smiling old women patting them on the head and dumpling cooks shouting greetings through the steamy veils of their cauldrons.
The hope is that they remember the snowball fight at night on a ship on the Yangtze River while moving through the largest dam in the world, and not being horribly stung by bluebottle jellyfish in Australia.
It's an admirable, adventurous journey, and I wish them continued good luck.