Mothers mantra

Mother always maintained you had to read, travel and learn and have something to talk about.
Seriously, she used to drag us off onto route marches of holidays.
We never appreciated it at the time .
In fact she once got me out of school by stating that I would learn more History, Geography and citizenship than I would at school.
It was a long holiday. Believe me it was long, I was a snotty teen.
And didn't appreciate that I'd been to Japan, Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Mexico, the states and other points in between.
When the minister asked us to have a wee ramble about her when she was ting to piece information for the funeral , we said, she had itchy feet syndrome, and we never appreciated where we were literally dragged on holiday, as well, we wouldn't , we didn't get this urge to see the world as she did. Later in life I understood why she had done it, the psychologist in me understood her need to be the Imelda Marcos of Scotland and have oodles of shoes, why she felt there where no boundaries to where one could go. Oh take it from me, she did find some out of the norm places, I give you Afghanistan, just before the Russians moved in. China, when they only started tourism and it was very limited to the west, or a route march round the Middle East or through eastern bloc Europe pre before Berlin Wall coming down, and Cuba in 1981. I add by then I'd started doing the same to my own off spring and the boys were cause celeb being blondes on a Cuban beach at the age of 4&1.
Her need to see the world would have started young, when she began to imagine escaping from the village she was born in, and then whilst in service seeing the gentry and wealthy moving about. My grandmother never left Scotland and I think the only foreign trips she went on, where ones paid for by mother, and I think that accounted for 2 in her life. She was the home bird and mother needed to explore.
Maybe she took pleasure in being able to travel,to the obscure and the not so normal holiday destinations. She once said she had always fancied being a missionary but, was forced to leave school to work. I know she never wanted to leave school and her teachers weren't happy, they wanted her to stay on and become a teacher, so maybe that's why we mantra was , read, travel, learn, so you have something to talk about , the world was her classroom, us her students.