I have a friend who writes for the newspapers. He is a journalist and gets commissions to go to places. He is a travel writer. In the last interregnum – the space between lockdown number 2 and lockdown number 3 – he got commissioned to fly to locations which had just been opened up once Covid-19 was felt to have been put back in its box. Dubai. Madeira. Piza. Norway. Lucky bastard. Using planes. Going places. Staying in hotels. Eating exotic cuisine. Seeing interesting things. Feeling normal.
For the rest of us, there are maps, reruns of travel programmes and armchair fantasies fuelled by photographs. I miss travel. It has been such a normal part of our lives. We thought nothing of going abroad. In 2019, we spent almost as much time overseas as we did at home. Every year we had scaled new heights of adventure. Since I kissed Tanya by the river Tees in 2015 that fateful day in August, we have travelled the globe with our little troupe. A six week road trip around New Zealand. A three quarter circumnavigation of Sicily. Paris. Rome. Marrakesh. Another six weeks driving the Atlantic coast down France, Portugal and Spain to Morocco. Prague. Budapest. Munich. Moscow. Kiev. Yaroslavl. Singapore. Sailing the Greek Islands. Skiing in the French Alps. Trips to see Josh in Shanghai and Barcelona. Vietnam for my sister’s sixtieth. St. Petersburg.
The last plane we caught was to Budapest in September 2019. That’s eighteen months without a single trip abroad. Tanya is deprived of her family and her parents and brother are deprived of contact with their grandchildren. The Earth has stood still. Holidays last summer, in the brief excitement of thinking all this virus stuff had gone away, were British affairs: Bath, the Cotswolds, Suffolk, Yorkshire. Wales and Scotland had to be abandoned because no one wants to go camping in the Western Isles when the weather forecast predicts rain for three weeks. And everyone wanted to go to Wales so there wasn’t even a spare tent pitch to be had in any campsite throughout the Principality. Yes, we discovered Sussex. And she is very beautiful.
But.
But, I hanker for foreign affairs. I feel like a diplomat put under house arrest. The world is tantalisingly near but we are all prisoners in our little house boxes and our only connection to the outside world is through another little box of electrical tricks called a computer. Everything else is banned. “Stay home, save lives” is now the mantra, and has been for damn near a year. So any travel has to be travel of the mind. Books, ballet, film, concerts, documentaries, plays, audio, BBC Sounds, podcasts, papers. Our entertainment is merged with our work. Seemingly, the only people excused this confinement are the TV presenters and journalists, who roam at will all over the globe to cover the US election, coups in Myanmar, fires in California and write unnecessary pieces about hotels we cannot visit in countries we cannot get to. Our travel, for now, is piloted from our armchairs. It is a poor substitute. If travel broadens the mind, then lack of travel narrows it. All our minds feel narrower. More petty, less tolerant. Irascible. Cantankerous. Super sensitive. Unstable. On a knife edge. This confinement is getting awfully tedious. The papers say that lockdown fatigue has kicked in. Anxiety levels are up. Tanya’s blood pressure is high. We go out less and less. When we do, the only question is left or right?
Modern day travel is claustrophobic. We are prisoners. And I, for one, need to break out.