A mistimed side-step and I was in amongst the cagoules,
clipboards and backpacks, too late to back-track,
too hubristic to hack my way through the touristic horde

which tsunamies me around two Oxford colleges,
the Bodleian and the Radcliffe Camera, pitches me
in and out the Pitt-Rivers before we wattle and daub

our way to Stratford-upon-Avon for much ado about
bardic-related birthplaces and Monday-matinéed monologues,
striking north to viking lands of here be minsters and

castles and dungeons and museums and botanical
gardens and monuments and Edinburgh cobbled passageways
and walking tours and bus tours and ghost tours and

coach rides and airports and aeroplanes and twelve-hour
flights and unfamiliar landscapes and customs and I end up
spending the next twenty years of my life as a rice farmer

in the Ishikari Subprefecture of Hokkaido in Japan.