I thought I knew awkward. Then mum published her Swinging Sixties travel diary

June 4, 2026 — 9:40am

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One of my earliest forays into investigative journalism occurred when I was a schoolkid and found mum’s old travel diary on the bookshelf. The foray was very short-lived. Who wants to discover their parents had a past?

It was the 1980s. I leafed through a few pages of neat handwriting that spoke to me from across two decades. It was 1964. Mum was 24. She boarded a ship in Australia to take her to Swinging London. Why travel on a ship when you could fly, I wondered? That must have taken ages. And where was Dad?

The ship was called the MV Fairsky. Soon Mum met a familiar face onboard, Pamela, a teaching colleague. On our family holiday we had met Pamela, who lived in the middle of England in the grand Sundial House on a lake with her English husband and children. Obviously Mum came back to Australia, but perhaps Pam never had? It was just like that poem The Road Not Taken, beloved by English teachers everywhere (including mum and possibly Pam), but for real. Maybe that Robert Frost really had been onto something.

I closed the diary. The little I had read was enough. Need to know? More a case of Don’t Want To Know. Gwenda and John Brook need never be anything other than Straighty 180 in the eyes of their son, thank you very much.

And so it is with every generation. As youths, we convince ourselves we are the ones........

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