Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Some time before coming south I had done a long line of radio interviews to talk about the pub-
lication of my topic on Chile. At the first one, in Manchester, the interviewer asked me a specific
question about the nature of fear. She was interested in how I could trek around alone in the high
Andes, hopping in and out of antediluvian Bolivian lorries freighted with smuggled drugs. I was
flummoxed by the probing nature of her enquiry, as she seemed convinced that I had some secret
to impart which would empower all the women of the world, enabling them to fling down their ap-
rons and run off to South America. I muddled through the interview, and the women of Manchester
did not subsequently stampede to the airport, clogging the concourse in their frenzy to cross the
Atlantic.
Over the next weeks I was repeatedly asked, 'Weren't you afraid, alone over there?', and I was
embarrassed to admit that I had never been frightened, not even at the worst moments. As a result,
journalists suspected I was a freak - not a troublesome freak, but a benign, barking-mad free spirit,
like the tweed-skirted Victorian 'lady' travellers who rampaged across Africa with a fly-swat in
their hand and three hundred heavily laden 'natives' behind them.
What I could never quite tell anyone was that I was afraid of other things - so afraid that nothing
that could happen to me up a Chilean mountain could possibly worry me. All my life, or at least
since a long journey returning from a holiday in Cornwall on a green leather bench seat in the front
of my father's first car when I was eight, the thoughts trailing nomadically round inside my head
have intermittently staged a rebellion, coalesced into a mass of far-reaching grief and paralysing
fear, caused my mouth to go dry, my hands to shake and all the colour to be blanched from the sky.
It would have been hard to explain this on a 'talk' show. 'Um, what are these thoughts actually
rebelling about?' the interviewers would understandably have asked, riffling through their papers
to find the next item.
The misery of the human condition is popular with the Nomadic Thoughts. The catalyst might
be an old man replacing a box of teabags on the supermarket shelf, having held it up to his pebble
glasses and peered at the price; or a young woman with Down's Syndrome staring out of the
smeared window of the day centre around the corner from my home because there was nothing
else to do, on that day or any other day; or another visit to another friend in another AIDS ward,
watching young men shrivel up until they were replaced by new ones, and the supply never ran
out.
Like many people, I was depressed and upset about these things. They made it hard to find the
energy to go on - going on seemed pointless. The setting for my anguish was not a long-forgotten
byway far from home but the nearby grubby corner of a London street where someone was eating,
or opening a window, or just walking dully away. Faced with incontrovertible evidence of the in-
escapable misery of most people's lives, and the ultimate tragedy of all of them, it was hard not
to be a pessimist. Sometimes I saw my own life stretching ahead of me blighted by depression,
the asphyxiating kind of depression that felt as if a hod of bricks had been deposited on my chest.
I was never going to find peace of mind (I would think at these times), I was never going to be
usefully creative, and, like many people I knew or heard about, I would probably end up with a
nervous breakdown. Just as you suck all the way down a stick of Brighton Rock and still find the
