Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
I met a man who had been assessing the long-term build-up of global pollutants in the atmosphere.
He was trying to get home for Christmas, but the incoming plane from McMurdo had been
delayed, one painful hour at a time, for the past two days, and all he could do was hover close to
his suitcases like a wasp around a jamjar. He had been travelling for thirty years.
'I want to sit at home and think about it now,' he said. 'I want to ask myself why I went to all
those places.'
I, too, often ask myself why. A small, white worm of doubt wriggled away in the dungeons of
consciousness, fidgeting over the unanswerable question about escape or pursuit. Travel represen-
ted either a journey of discovery concerned with pushing forward all kinds of boundaries, or an
easy-access escape hatch to a primrose path. It was a treacherously familiar stretch of the psychic
landscape.
I had never understood the appeal of remaining within earshot of the tinkling bells of the parish
church - campanilismo , they call it in Italy. Travelling gave me and all the other compulsive trav-
ellers a new identity away from that place called home; at least, ostensibly it did. As everyone who
has done it has discovered, and as many writers have written since Horace (though no one has ever
done it better than him), Caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt - You can run away
as far as you like but you'll never get away from yourself. Knowing that was no reason to stop,
even if it could be a little disappointing to find oneself lurking in the corner of the Taklamakan
Desert after all the effort it took to get there. For me, it meant I was still trying. That was how I
saw it.
Somehow, somewhere in a dark, voiceless place in my heart, I sensed that one day I would find
something more important than myself lying in wait - something that would put all those other
places I had tramped through in perspective. It was not that the other places had disappointed me.
I had fallen passionately in love with many landscapes. If you don't know what you're looking for,
it's difficult to be disappointed.
I began travelling at the age of sixteen when I took a train to Paris with a friend. I had just sat for
my O-Levels, and had been working in a clothes shop to raise the cash for the trip. My friend had
been an usherette in a cinema. We camped for a week at a site in the Bois de Boulogne, strolled
aimlessly along Hausmann's wide boulevards, discovered Impressionism, Livre de Poche existen-
tial novels and pains au chocolat , met some Finns and drank a lot of vodka. Before that, holidays
had been taken in Cornwall, Devon or south Wales with my brother, mother, father and sometimes
a pair of grandparents bringing up the rear. Two features of these holidays have taken up residence
in my memory. First of all, the sun was always shining, a phenomenon I can only explain as a trick
played by my retrospective imagination. Second, I clearly recall that our daily collective aim was
always to get away from everyone else . We were, at that stage, a reasonably happy family; or so
I remember it. My brother, eighteen months younger than I am and similar in temperament and
looks (though thinner, damn him), has been brain-damaged since before his first birthday, prob-
ably as the result of a vaccination against whooping cough. We spent most of the time steering
him away from other children's elaborate sandcastles, upon which he enjoyed descending in an
impressive flying leap, or from the pointed mountains of buns on café counters which tended to
come crashing to the floor when he appeared in front of them.
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