Sean Thomas

Have you ever heard of Duddies’ Branch? Chances are, you haven’t – because, firstly, its brief moment of fame came many years ago and, secondly, Duddies’ Branch does not actually exist. To explain: ‘Duddies’ Branch’ is the politely fake name given by an American anthropologist, Rena Gazaway, to a real and isolated settlement in a hollow of the Appalachian mountains (almost certainly in Kentucky). Herself born into ‘hillbilly’ culture, Gazaway spent many months of the 1960s living with the people of Duddies’ Branch. She later published her findings in a shocking 1969 book called The Longest Mile. What Gazaway encountered in that lost wooded ‘holler’ reads like dystopian fiction, even at a distance of decades. Most of the residents were functionally illiterate.

Tashkent, Uzbekistan I am in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan. I am standing in a historic complex of madrasas and mosques, courtyards and dusty roses, and I am staring at the ‘oldest Quran in the world’. It is a strange and enormous thing: written in bold Kufic script on deerskin parchment; it was supposedly compiled by Uthman ibn Affan, the third Caliph of Islam, who was murdered while reading it. And so it is, as I linger here and reverently regard the Book, while scrolling my phone for more fascinating info, that I discover the world’s oldest Quran is actually in Birmingham. Yes, that’s right, Birmingham, England. It’s probably in some obscure library, lodged between a dissertation on post-colonial emojis and a flyer for Falafel Night.

In the middle of Cairo there’s a place called the City of the Dead. It is a dusty sprawl of mausoleums, sepulchres and crumbling Mameluke tombs, that has housed the corpses of the city for over a thousand years. On a dank winter’s dusk, it feels especially lifeless – deformed dogs vanish into shadows, random fires burn vile rubbish. But that’s when you notice children’s toys. Cheap clothes drying outside a tomb. And you realise, with a shudder: my God, some poor people live here. That, roughly, is the vibe on Bluesky today. Ironically, Bluesky is now much nastier than Twitter In case you’ve forgotten, Bluesky is the social media platform once seen as the great Twitter replacement.

I am in the most EU-ish bedroom in the EU. That is to say, I am lying in a refurbished room in the handsome 14th-century Chateau de Schengen, in the little village of Schengen, Luxembourg. From my casements, opened wide onto the sunny Saarland afternoon, I can see the exact stretch of the river Moselle where, on a boat floating between Germany, France and Luxembourg, the Schengen Agreement was signed in 1985. This was the agreement that sealed Free Movement as Europe’s defining ideal – one whose consequences are still unfolding. I’ve been in Luxembourg for a week, on assignment, and this week has given me an insight into why the nations of the EU undertook their bold, remarkable experiment of no more borders. The first and obvious motivator was war.

There’s a strange, near-psychedelic effect that hits you when you travel from an ageing country to a young one. It’s not in the buildings – although the buildings may be new and hastily tiled – and it’s not necessarily in the politics, culture or economic vibe. No, the shock is more human, and intimate. It is in the faces. And the noise. And the nappies. I’ve just returned from a few weeks in Central Asia: Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan. And while these nations differ in history, ethnicity and landscapes, two things bind them all. First, they all have an inexplicable penchant for a stodgy rice dish called plov (in Samarkand I bought a T-shirt bearing the slogan ‘All You Need is Plov’). The second is that they are all young. Wildly, exuberantly young.

There are many reasons to like Kyrgyzstan. It has extraordinarily lovely women: some mad collision of Persian, Turkish, Russian, Mongol and Chinese genes makes for supermodels at every bus stop. It is safe, friendly, cheap. Its cities are commonly free of rubbish and graffiti (how does Central Asia do this, yet we cannot?). Despite these charms, it has few tourists. However, I can’t say anything positive about the cheese – because the cheese is dreck. Last night I went to the Globus supermarket here in downtown Bishkek and bought a sample of the local fromage. When I got it home, it was like chewing a rubber toy: tasteless, over-firm, banal. In the end I was reduced to smothering it in Sriracha to make it vaguely flavoursome.