I'm hoping that, like a cat, I have nine lives, because I'm already on life number five.
In life number one I was normal enough, though my mother once told me I was the ugliest baby she'd ever seen with a head that looked like it had been painted orange. I don't remember much at all from that life; hazy stills from a Famous Five existence in a Beatrix Potter setting, that's about all. It ended when I was fourteen years old.
That's when life number two began - the onset of puberty catapulted me into the stratosphere where I floated on clouds as Daryl the Hippie, even though the year was 1976 with Glam Rock in full sparkle. I married at 18 in the trance of the excessively romantic and naive then floated through another hazy period, though this time the haze was largely drug induced and, happily, relatively short.
Life number three came about at the age of 22 when the tenuous substance of my existence evaporated, and I found myself free-falling into the deep ocean of my next. I floated, swam and nearly drowned until I surfaced in Holland, where I married again and had my first child, a boy. Having time on my hands to contemplate life, its meaning and my navel, I did everything from tree hugging to dream workshops to jumping around in naked 'meditation' with a bunch of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh disciples. I worked as an Astrologer. I became Daryl the Mystic. For six years life was strange, but interesting.
I'm no longer sure why this life ended, it just did. I felt the compelling need to return to the safe dry land of my birth where the long and sometimes arduous life number four began. I did all the solid, sensible, earthy things that you are supposed to do when you grow up; I got a degree, a driving license, a good job, a mortgage, another husband, a daughter. In short, I became Daryl the Sensible. This life crumbled when husband No. 3 ran off with The Younger Woman.
And so, in October 2005 - a few days after my 44th birthday, life number five began with both passion for life and passport renewed. I set off with a burning mission to experience life in all its blazing glory. First stop was Prague, where I've lived for the last two years. However, this is about to change as I'm about to embark on stage two of my quest in a location as yet unknown. It will be this, and the recollections of my time in Prague, that will be recorded in my blog.
