Travel moments

I've just finished reading two books on the theme of travel and how you write about places you have visited and people you have met or seen: Paul Theroux's Tao of Travel and Jan Morris's Contact.

Both are full of short scenes from long travelling lives, particularly Jan Morris (some of which are also on this tumblr account).

Each scene or moment feels like it could be saying something profound, some kind of a metaphor for the city, country or people. But sometimes it just describes a moment or place in time, something random that happened, a one-off chance encounter.

I write about these sometimes (like in Istanbul, Monaco and Gibraltar - my favourite being my 'what I saw in New York' blog post) - and I'm going to share more.

Britain from above

The first book I have read from my New Year reading list is Never Eat Shredded Wheat, which is all about the geography of the UK.

As the author described various features, like oxbow lakes, moraines, cliffs and so on, I looked them up on Google Maps (because aerial photography is great).

So here are some screenshots of fantastic British landscapes from Google Maps - I didn't keep a record of where these all are, but if you want to guess, leave a comment.

Finnish song from Ursula Under

I recently finished reading Ursula Under, a swirling novel which delves deep into the ancestry of a little girl trapped in a well. It's very fanciful, with stories about ancient China, a Swedish Queen and more. Most interesting are the episodes about Finnish migration to Michigan.

A short Finnish song sung by one character caught my eye...

"Life is as hard as the icy rock under the turf, and we slip on it sometimes, and then we get up to find life is as hard as the icy rock under the turf, and we slip on it sometimes, and then we get up..." and she sings it until she is laughing right through her tears."

Walking through Holland

I've just finishing reading A Long Walk South by Sean Rothery. It's all about Rothery's walk from Holland to the south of France. It should be fascinating, but it's all a bit dull. Rothery is obsessed with his feet and the surfaces he walks on. Understandable, I guess, but I tend to read travel books to learn about other places.

Two observations stand out - on seeing the tightly packed little weekend retreat bungalows in Holland, he muses that the Dutch are so used to living in densely populated cities and in tall apartment blocks that just being at ground level at weekends, close to their vegetables and flowers, must be their way of connecting with the earth.

Later he encounters a group of people at a hotel - mainly retired - who are taken on coach trips into the countryside where they were given basic meals and then a sales talk for all sorts of household goods.

Overall, though, it all seems quite pedestrian. Certainly, Holland seems nothing like it does in this great video.

Transport

Commuting by public transport is not an exciting way to spend your time, so people read, listen to music and do things to keep their minds occupied. At times commuting can feel mind-numbing, as you sit not thinking about anything in particular. To keep my mind agile, I've started to do a game in which I notice the names of books that people are reading and try to remember them. I then write them down when I get to work. So, yesterday and this morning, people were reading:

Labyrinthe - Kate Mosse
The Right Nation - John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge
A Farewell to Arms - Ernest Hemingway
The Consolations of Philosophy - Alain de Botton
Beyond Black - Hilary Mantel
Angels & Demons - Dan Brown
A Pimlico Military Classic by John Keegan
Tourism - Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal
The Adventure of Augie Marsh - Saul Bellow
A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian - Marina Lewycka
Difficult Conversations - Roger Fiske
The Alchemist - Paolo Coelho
L'ecume des jours - Boris Vian

As for me, I was reading Wrong About Japan by Peter Carey, which I'm reading to learn about Japan in advance of my trip there. Tomorrow I fly to Tokyo, and spend two nights in Hokota, a small city north of there. This coming weekend is spent in Tokyo, and we fly on Monday morning to Fukuoka to spend 2-3 days there. We then get the Shinkansen bullet train to Hiroshima, and spend 2-3 days there and then fly back to Tokyo for another 2 nights.

Sayonara!

Let's not go to...

I recently picked up 101 Places not to Visit, a guide to the world's most depressing, ugly, boring and dangerous destinations.

The book's premise is that you're better off staying at home. Adam Russ' list of 101 cities tells us why we really should just stay away. All in the tradition of Great British xenophobia, the reviews are not to be taken seriously, very tongue-in-cheek and quite funny.

Some of the worst destinations are: Mogadishu, Astana, San Salvador, Murmansk and Atlantic City. Ulaanbaatar is described as the ultimate destination for those wanting to get away from everyone and everything. Western cities do not escape criticism, with Copenhagen (amongst others) labelled boring. The Little Mermaid statue, he claims, looks mournfully at the water, wishing she could swim away.

In the spirit of fairness, I'm going to test the accuracy of his criticisms for places I have been to.

London, he claims, is full of angry commuters and workers who must get their drinking in before everything shuts at 11pm.	TRUE
Barcelona is full of street entertainment - only mildly entertaining unless you like pickpockets, political rallies and fires.	FALSE-ISH
Norwegians in Oslo are "most unbearably smug people that you'll meet in Scandinavia".	TRUE-ISH
Riga's red-brick cathedral is like any old library or STD clinic in Britain.	FALSE

So, only about half right, then. I finished the book and found myself really wanting to go to all the places he'd listed, just to see them!

Words in motion

I love to travel and love reading travel literature. The first travel literature book I read was Dervla Murphy's In Ethiopia with a mule.

Since then, I have read about numerous regions, countries and cities, each book illuminating the subject. The key to travel literature is personality: you have to want to go on the journey with the author as they are your guides. I'm going to write more about my favourite travel books in due course; today I'm focusing on Yoga for People... who can't be bothered to do it.

Lured by the title, I hoped that this was a travelogue about self-help and the many ways that people around the world try to find calm and relaxation in their lives. Indeed, the blurb on the jacket gave this impression. Instead, we're offered Geoff Dyer's own self-indulgent whining. He speaks about drifting and his feelings of nothingness and... well, that's it. I gave up after about 5 chapters, realising that I didn't have the time to waste on this man and his non-journeys. Dyer continuously asserts that's he's not bothered about what he's doing.

So, really, the question is: why should we be?

Adrian meets Lots Of Celebrities

Last night, I went to the British Book Awards (the company I work for are owned by the organising company). When we arrived, we were whisked away to be given jobs - we didn't know this beforehand.

So the PR people started issuing duties - I ended up helping the celebrity photographer for OK! magazine!

I met: lot of authors who aren't properly famous, Gloria Hunniford, J K Rowling, Alan Titchmarsh, Liz Smith, Mark Gatiss, Vic Reeves, Jilly Cooper, Rupert Everett, Chantelle, and the piece-de-resistance Kerry Katona!

Kerry Katona told Gloria Hunniford to close her legs!

Rupert Everett was gossiping about Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes - and he is absolutely
gorgeous.

It was fantastic fun!