Spectator Life

All my life I’ve wanted to take a narrow boat holiday down one of Britain’s canals but have never got round to it. There’s always been something easier and more pressing, perhaps even a touch more glamorous than a week spent floating around Britain – a trip to Andalusia, a city break, a train-ride round Siberia – but this year, in my mid-fifties, I’m finally making it happen. With my cousin and both our young daughters as crew members, I’ve shelled out on the rental of a four-berth narrow boat – painted a resplendent red and racing green, a bit like a Hornby train.

I am Cornish. Indeed I am so Cornish my sister lives about three miles from where my echt Cornish ancestors lived in the 13th century (near Falmouth), and my mum makes working-class Cornish recipes so obscurely Cornish most of the Cornish have barely heard of them (‘date and lemon pie’). As such, I am pretty fond of the place, and I like to go back as much as I can. Except in summer, when it’s crowded. And increasingly May. Or September. Or October. Or the rest of autumn. And Christmas, And Easter. And New Year. And any weekend at any time, ever.

I travel to the African bush frequently, at least once a year. It takes my mind of British politics. The trips often involves watching predators hunting down their prey and then tearing the poor animals limb from limb. Red in tooth and claw, the African bushveld reminds me of the fragility and brevity of life and the ever-presence of death. My insignificant place on the planet was thus confirmed A week ago I was in the Botswana’s Okavango Delta, at the safari operator Natural Selection’s new North Island camp, when I suddenly found myself confronting my own mortality. I had gone to bed early after a pleasant meal in the camp’s mess with several fellow guests, including two eminent Americans, a wealthy New York investment banker and a prominent Miami medical professor.

Cowboy boots are ubiquitous in Nashville – although not hats. ‘That’s Texas,’ one woman told us earnestly. Locals say, ‘y’all,’ ‘yes, ma’am,’ and make eye contact when they speak to you. Despite the lack of cowboy hats, this is still the South. Welcome to Music City, the capital of country and the gleaming buckle of the Bible Belt. Nashville is home to over 700 churches and numerous evangelical choirs. The Union Gospel Tabernacle, built in the 1890s by a Tennessee businessman, was once the largest church in the city. Now its simply the Ryman Auditorium. After the first world war, the owners found they made more cash booking secular performers.

To nearly any English tourist, the small southern Italian town I’m currently living in, half an hour from my daughter’s school, would seem idyllic. It has an old castle, a monastery and olive groves in all directions, but in Puglian guidebooks it barely rates a mention. It’s the scruffy, down-to-earth cousin of richer or bigger towns nearby, places like Monopoli or Bari, but has nearly everything I could want. There are arches and stone stairways, pot-plants everywhere (80 in my alleyway alone), and that delicious, ivory-coloured stone which paves the streets in Puglia and which long use has polished to a shine. At night the street-lanterns turn the white buildings orange, and the sky above is inky blue with stars.

Some time in the Noughties I sat next to a guy at work who told me he’d just had a holiday in a village on the outskirts of Amalfi. The village was called Atrani – quite unknown then, but now swooned over as the setting for the ominous but dreamy black-and-white Netflix adaptation Ripley. That year, I had no plans for the summer and decided to replicate his trip, with my two daughters, aged 13 and 10. There was no hotel in the village, rather a series of rooms rented out by a lawyer called Filippo. I contacted him to book and he replied: ‘I’m sure it will be fine, just turn up.’ This didn’t over-fill me with confidence but I went ahead. We flew into in Naples late one evening and got to the hotel I’d found in the Rough Guide.

As George Orwell astutely observed, England is a nation of hobbyists – and their sometimes eccentric private pursuits are one of the reasons that this country did not follow the rest of Europe into totalitarian dictatorship during the 20th century. A people bent on taking a fishing rod to stream or canal every weekend, or hanging around railway platforms to note the numbers of passing trains, or laboriously sticking stamps into albums, are unlikely to have the time or temptation to fall for political extremes. The English devoted their leisure time to hobbies, though it should also be noted that such peaceable pastimes are mostly the preserve of men.

Tokyo, Japan ‘Shhh! Now on face to respectable great eels life’. How’s that for the first line of an article? I spotted this gem written on a sign in the window of a seafood restaurant in the Hibiya Midtown shopping centre in Tokyo recently. I was delighted. I’ve spent 25 years in Japan and have always enjoyed a good bit of mangled Japanese English. I had been dismayed of late by an apparent improvement in the quality of English on signs and noticeboards around Tokyo. But this was the old stuff. This was ‘Engrish’. Why would a people usually so meticulous about every aspect of life be so seemingly careless about the correct use of a foreign language?

No-one seems to like tourists any more. This week Venice introduced its €5 entry charge – which merely buys you the right to go into the city and be ripped off by cafes and restaurants. On Tenerife, residents have been marching and daubing slogans on the walls ‘tourist – go home’. So much for free movement. Meanwhile, in Japan, a village near Mount Fuji is so fed up with Instagrammers that it is erecting a giant screen to hide the mountain. Happy holidays! It was a trudge over ash and glacial gravels – which make for surprisingly easy walking Not to worry. If you want to go somewhere where you won’t bother the locals you could always do as I did last summer and walk across Iceland. That is a 200 mile trek without a single local to offend.

To understand Sadiq Khan’s tenure as Mayor of London, you need only ride one of his buses. Eight years of repeating that he is the ‘proud son of a bus driver’ have not yielded a single improvement to the experience of travelling by the famous red bus. In fact, many things are worse.  she suggested I couldn’t have lived in London for very long and then burst into tears Tap your card and find your way to one of few seats unsullied by chicken bones, unfinished soft drinks and disposed of vapes. Sit down and endure the tinny sounds your fellow passengers deem acceptable to broadcast from their handheld portals to hell. Request that they use headphones and risk being stabbed. Even if you can avoid all this, you can’t escape being infantilised by the recorded announcements.

California was once home to a certain vision of the American dream; Mamas & the Papas records, grinning surfers, chrome bumpers. Now LA and San Francisco are full of glass and steel and petty criminals. Escape their sketchy downtowns and you’ll find huge copy-and-paste estates of identical homes. Urban sprawl has choked off California’s charm in everywhere but Palm Springs, a desert valley city to the east of Los Angeles.  Kirk Douglas lived here, alongside Rock Hudson, Janet Gaynor and Frank Sinatra. Elvis and Priscilla Presley honeymooned in the city for the whole of 1967. Producers would often oblige their stars to remain within a two-hours drive of their LA studios. Meanwhile, paparazzi were only reimbursed for travel within 100 miles of LA.

The greatest movie ever made celebrates its 75th anniversary this year and I’ll be watching it – for the umpteenth time – with appropriately fine fizz at hand. Sorry, what? Oh, come on, I’m talking about The Third Man. There’s no finer film. I thought everyone knew that. You know, written by Graham Greene, directed by Carol Reed and set in a battered, broken, postwar Vienna. It stars Joseph Cotten as Holly Martins and Orson Welles as Harry Lime and there’s sterling support from Alida Valli, Trevor Howard, Bernard Lee and Wilfrid Hyde-White, whose comic cameo almost steals the show.

As locations go, they don’t get more humdrum than the address ‘Carrera 79B, #45D/94’. It is so anonymous it sounds encrypted. Nor, in reality, does it look like anything special: a flat roof, next to a shuttered language school, above a wall of graffiti, in a lower middle-class suburb of another Spanish speaking city. But then you notice the razorwire surrounding the nearby boutique. The armed guard outside the local bank. And you remember why this address, in the inner suburbs of Medellin Colombia, is notorious: this is where fugitive cocaine warlord Pablo Escobar was finally shot by cops in 1993 as he tried to flee across that roof.  Native American empires were bizarrely cruel – even before the Europeans arrived Knowing that, everything looks different.

I suppose there are people who stay in four or five-star hotels all their lives and become a kind of expert in them, turning their noses up at rooms I would regard as the acme of comfort, but since my parents stopped paying, I never have. In adulthood my standards have plummeted and, as a traveller, I’ve stayed in any number of grotty places. I’m not complaining either – you have much more fun in life when there’s nothing to protect you from what Maxim Gorky, in a lyrical moment, called the ‘lower depths.’  None of this was erotic in any way but had a kind of anthropological edge to it My real travels started when I moved to Estonia at 26.

When trying to imagine what it would be like to ski in Japan, I pictured a minimalist ski resort. I saw chic local skiers in monochrome outfits elegantly swishing down the slopes, before stopping for sushi and ramen. I assumed revellers would drink whisky, sake and beer in the evenings, although perhaps not to quite the same level of excess as in Europe. Skiing in Japan seemed exotic. Did I know the Japanese ski uphill, joked one wag before I left.

It’s hard to resist a bit of amateur sleuthing when you’re on a Nile cruise. As my boyfriend and I boarded the luxury liner Oberoi Zahra, we scrutinised the other passengers like Hercule Poirot might. Was the elegant Chinese-American businesswoman’s young companion her son or her lover? What resentments lay behind the silent mealtimes of the elderly British couple? Were the group of three young couples, who always had their meals together, really just friends? And who was staying in the best suite on the ship, equipped (we spied over the top deck) with a private hot tub? Is booze less haram than pork?

There are some who would love to spend an eternity by a pool in Spain dancing the ‘Cha Cha Slide’ until they pass out on a sun lounger. There are others who would prefer to spend the afterlife with bifid-tongued demons than wait in line for a subpar continental buffet. I fall into the second camp. It’s not that I think all-inclusive holidays are without purpose, it’s just that I think all-inclusives have passed their sell-by date. I’m sure that Gérard Blitz’s initial idea for an all-inclusive came from a good place: his desire to entertain the masses. But these resorts are a far stretch from the original straw huts and bartering beads of Club Med’s 1950s design.

Yeah, I know, ridiculous. Cambodia? How can that be the best country in the entire world? For a start, most people can’t place it on a map. This includes close relatives of mine who are studying geography at A Level. They know all about the Marxist topography of urbanism, but Cambodia, err, um, is that near Africa? Also, Cambodia?? Isn’t that the country that suffered a fearsome Maoist genocide within living memory, with a quarter of its population dying by execution, torture, famine and disease, and the rest left so hungry they resorted to eating giant spiders roasted in tomato powder? The landscape is agreeably green, the jungles are often untouched, the islands can be Edenic (but primitive) Well yes, it is.

It’s 7 in the morning, I’ve got to Milan Linate airport two hours before my plane to Bari, and already things are going horribly wrong. The airline aren’t letting my cats fly with me. I’ve got documents to show they’re microchipped and all their vaccines are in order, but two uniformed men, straight out of Mussolini central casting, are telling me the carry-cage is all wrong. Perhaps I should resent these animals and all the hassle they’ve brought me ‘It should have metal sides,’ they snap. ‘You cannot fly with this cage.’ I tell them honestly that I flew with it from Britain the day before – the very same airline to this very airport – that I always fly with it, but they’re having none of it.

For the first time in its 1,250 year history, Japan’s Naked Man Festival is to admit women to its sacred rites and rituals – well, one sacred ritual anyway. Later this month, a cohort of 40 women, clothed, will be allowed to participate in the naoizasa ritual where they will carry bamboo grass wrapped in cloth into the local shrine. While hardly a stunning breakthrough for women’s liberation, the decision is nonetheless revealing. Sanitising rather bizarre local events is unlikely to make much difference It is less a reflection of changing opinions than shifting demographics, with Japan’s vast underpopulated rural areas having to be more flexible with their ancient customs in order to keep them alive.

Having breakfast at a hotel in the chouette Eighth Arrondisement of Paris last weekend, and employing what I imagine to be my faultless French, I asked for a boiled egg, ‘un oeuf à la coque.’ The waitress asked, did I want glaçons (ice) with that? Err, no, I replied, bemused. The waitress then brought me a bottle of Coca-Cola. Perhaps this is not a propitious anecdote with which to begin today’s assignment, ‘How I learned to master French.’ Perhaps it casts doubt on my claim to speak French. Or perhaps it was merely a reminder to be humble.  I had a little chat in French with Karine Jean-Pierre, President Biden’s spokeswoman with the wacky hair. We joked about Macron I am sometimes asked how I have cracked it but the truth is it can’t be done.

So, what are you up to this summer? Going to Germany, right? I mean, with both England and Scotland having qualified for the Uefa 2024 Euros (and with Wales still in with a chance via the play-offs) 14 June to 14 July is surely blocked off in your diary? It certainly is in mine. And with four matches being played in Munich, I know exactly where I plan to be when it comes to kick-off: in Italy’s northernmost city.  I did have something of a Where Eagles Dare moment, trying to blend in as I drank my fill and listened to the oompah band Oh, do keep up! That’s what locals and regular visitors call Munich. It’s a fabulous city and, yes, rather Italianate with its cafes, bars, parks and open spaces for promenading.

I can’t stop thinking about Pierre. I first met him at the end of December in a Finisterre bar much favoured by the hippy types drawn to the strange energies of the western coast of Galicia. With his sunned and bearded swarthy face, solid build and tattoos, I initially thought he was a Galician fisherman. But when I dropped a napkin on the floor and he swooped to pick it up for me, I was struck by this conscientious and unexpected behaviour. I’ve noticed a correlation between missing the odd tooth, having a weathered face and being open and warm-hearted The next day I ran into him at a bar beside the small harbour.

As we celebrate 120 years of aviation with a plug door and several iPhones tumbling from an in-flight spanking-new Boeing 737 Max, and a new Airbus A350 burning to a cinder in Tokyo, it is fair to note that not a single passenger was killed in either incident (although four Japanese coast guards perished on the ground). When I started flying it was glamourous, exciting and genuinely dangerous. An actual pilot. Some kind of God. I stood there hypnotised by the illuminated dials and the throbbing turboprops Not so long ago in the annals of human civilisation, on 13 December, 1903, in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Orville Wright, a bicycle mechanic from Dayton, Ohio, piloted the Wright Flyer he’d built with his brother Wilbur.