Visual Podcast-Biography of Tobias
Tobias is a world traveller: not only to visit or briefly experience the human condition in far-away lands, but also to live, work, and share life with people whose experience seemed so foreign to his own. Having realized a career which took him to a dozen or so countries, Tobias has much to share about his experience as a global nomad of the modern world.
Noteworthy to mention is that having been born into a family of uppermiddle-class professionals, who suffered economic hardships when Tobias was 7, he underwent fundamental shifts in his lifestyle as a child. For the first half a decade of his life, Tobias lived in an environment which could be described as cosmopolitan in the standards of the London of the 1960s.
Being born into a sexual minority, Tobias is gay, his early schooling was one where a child who did not fit into the regular standards of educational preferences was significantly broader than the one he transferred to when the family moved to a farming lifestyle in a village located in rural Cornwall in the southwest of England.
Perhaps growing up in a relatively secular and worldly family, combined with the contrast he experienced as a child between life in London and life in Cornwall, played a role in his decision as a late-teenager to expand the geographical and cultural radius of his life.
Decades later, the year now is 2020. Tobias resides in a calm suburb of a university town located in the Randstad metropolitan of the Netherlands.
He lives with his partner, Mustafa, whom he met during his time in Oman: the last of the long list of countries in which he has lived. Over the course of their now 8-year relationship, they’ve picked up two cute furry additions to the family. Their cat ‘fifi’, with her tranquil energy, they adopted out of a cruel animal trading entity, and their energetic, always excited, dog ‘stitch’ is a rescue whose owner passed away after a battle with MS. Mustafa insists on identifying their names in small letters so as to typify their adorable allure.
What follows is an account of Tobias’s travels and experiences over the years, between the late 1970s and into the second decade of the 21st century, as he meandered his way living and working in diverse countries. This is revealed through a conversation with his partner Mustafa.
The purpose of this conversation is to demonstrate Amyoku’s acquaintance, and therefore experience, with the lives of internationally-oriented people. This underlines a flexibility and a desire to overcome differences in identity, religion, language, and borders.
The following interview between Tobias and Mustafa highlights how the life of a modern nomad can be equally rewarding as challenging.