Edward made his decision on January 6th,
a belated New Year’s resolution. Although it was sudden, he had been building up to it for months, years even. It would take several more months, too, to tailor and refine the decision before putting it into action.
Edward’s decision was, for the rest of his life, never to spend more than one night in any given place. Each morning he would move somewhere else to sleep. He was, of course, sufficiently pragmatic to accept that it would not always be possible to abide by his resolution. Illness, terrible weather or transport problems might occasionally force him to spend more than one night somewhere.
He was more worried by the somewhat philosophical question of what counted as another place. Clearly it would be unfaithful to his decision to sleep on one side of a field the first night and the other side on the second night. Edward eventually adopted the following rule-of-thumb: always move at least three miles from one place to a second. If, under certain circumstances, that proved impossible, so be it: it was the intention that mattered.
This was a lesson he had learned from Buddhism – as, indeed, were the reasons behind his decision. Two of the Buddha’s main teachings were that everything is impermanent and that the cause of suffering is attachment to things. After pondering these truths, Edward concluded that they could only be properly honoured through a life of wandering. To be perpetually on the move would be a symbol both of transience and of detachment from everything, from home, belongings, family, friends and whatever else people become attached to.
There were, in fact, some attachments from which Edward admitted he would not be liberated in the foreseeable future. The primary ones were women and alcohol. But he hoped that, once he’d become a wanderer, these desires too would subside and eventually fade away.
It was not only the words of the Buddha that inspired Edward’s decision. He had long been attracted, without understanding quite why, to accounts of wanderers and hermits. The Tang poets of China, for instance, or the Japanese poet Bashō, whose haiku verses were mostly written as he travelled from one inn or hut to another. And he’d always enjoyed the songs of German Romantic composers that celebrated the wanderings of young men averse to a settled, bourgeois existence.
Not that Edward himself, at the age of fifty, was any longer young. He was, however, lean, fit and wealthy enough to embark on his new life. He was well accustomed, from many hiking trips, to sleeping under the stars or in mountain huts. And occasional stays in luxury hotels, in between nights of sleeping rough, posed no financial problem. Thirty years earlier he had inherited a large amount of money after his parents’ Bentley plunged down a cliff on the Amalfi …
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