So, recently I caught the tube home with Robin Hood.

When I wandered into the tube station at Mornington Crescent, in north London after a nice boozy dinner with my friends I noticed him standing outside. I hardly batted an eyelid, as this is London. Every one in London is used to everything, so cosmopolitan are we.

Old aged pensioners quite often wander past nuevo trance punks, with twenty piercings in each cheek and comment little more than, “pie for supper then love or shall we just go past the chip shop?”.

So Robin ran into the lift I was in, which lowered the two of us down to the platforms, and as we were now at closer quarters I pointed out to him that he was leaving himself wide open to sarcasm, wandering around the tube at midnight dressed as Robin Hood (complete with Bow and Arrow).

Robin thoroughly agreed. In a kind of reverse damsel in distress scenario, we decided he had better pretend that he was with me, as although Londoners will not be very surprised to see Robin Hood on the tube at midnight, that doesn’t mean that they won’t completely take the piss, (and completely taking the piss in London does sometimes involve grievous bodily harm). Anyway Robin, who declined to give his real name, (I told him I had a blog), and I, mulled over life on the way home. As well as being a medieval celebrity he was also some kind of TV producer, I think, something in TV or films anyway. He is English but lives in Sydney Australia, and travels to various other places quite a lot by the sound of things, was jet lagged and had about 20 hours earlier arrived at Heathrow, to be dragged off, hooked up with friends, be inserted in a pair of knee length pixie boots, have a rather fetching dash of eyeliner applied, be furnished with a bow and arrow, and taken out to a party.

Something is going on in this town at the moment. EVERYTHING is fancy dress.

So Robin was basically wasted. Very very very tired. He felt quite bad about bailing out on his friends and ending up on the last tube home with me, but needs be.

It gets me thinking. Right now I have got the travel bug. Big Time. Right now I wish I was standing on a roof top in India, sweating with the heat, sniffing the warm air over the city with a glass of something alcoholic in my hand. By this time I would very probably be hooked up with someone like Belinda, who mails me from Cape Town this Christmas, or Ori who mails me from Israel, Or Ali, who was last heard of getting on a boat to Columbia.

The question is does travel make us happy? Sometimes. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it scares the shit out of me, but often it makes me happy. It’s true that adventure is sometimes much more fun after it’s finished. Take for example the one about the policeman with the automatic gun in Malawi. However it’s often just as good while it’s happening, particularly the party nights out in Antigua, Guatemala.

Travel is more than that though. For some it’s a yearning, for some an addiction. Wanderlust. For me, right now, to an extent, a stubborn habit. An overkeen interest in the horizon.

So Robin and me found common ground quite quickly. Travellers don’t take long to work each other out.

Most of us know another thing though, besides the Wanderlust. Like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz who clicks her heels three times and says “there’s no place like home”, sometimes there isn’t.

Sometimes you drink so much and party so hard you wondered how you stayed vertical.