Dan in Transit

I am near single-handedly fulfilling London's daily carbon emissions limit. With infuriatingly frequent assistance from the Blackwall and Rotherhithe tunnels - in the form of their almost daily closure - I am regularly making like Tiger Woods at the tee, and driving a long way.

But that's not the only way that I find myself in motion; I have a temporary place to live and a temporary job, and even the car that I use to choke Mother Earth to within an inch of her government-authorised carbon limitations is borrowed. I haven't lived in one place for more than a year since I left Loughton for University in 2002 (and there's a clue in there, incidentally, about whether or not I stayed the course of higher education).

And I love my life of transience. I'm sure there will come a time when I'll feel the gravitational pull of one particular place, and then I'll know to settle down - there's no point trying to fight gravity, after all. But right now, I love meeting new people, finding myself in foreign surroundings, and doing things that I've never done before.

I like Jack Kerouac's description of Mississippi Gene's life in On the Road; it speaks to me:

'...crossing and recrossing the country every year, south in the winter and north in the summer, and only because he had no place he could stay in without getting tired of it and because there was nowhere to go but everywhere, keep rolling under the stars, generally the Western stars.'