In the words of Karen Blixen, I am a mental traveller. I have recently taken to cutting wistful pictures out of my Lonely Planet magazines and – when the pritt stick I ordered on Amazon Prime finally arrives – there will be a collage of a trip stretching from Malaga to Athens. I’m calling it The Flaneuse’s Great Depression Tour and, because the continent of Europe is so wide Mein Herr, I’m thinking six weeks, two carbon-busting flights and the rest navigated hobo-style by boat, road and rail.
The last time I attempted anything like this I was a scatty 19 year old. It was during the Kosovo War so the only direction you could go from Italy was west. The ensuing tour of Mitteleuropa wasn’t my dream itinerary, but I made the best of things, lurching from one interrailing nightmare to the next, attaching (and later freeing myself from) a conveyor belt of gap year Americans enroute to South East Asia.
One night I took a sleeper train from Vienna and woke up alone with no people, no buildings and not a scooby doo where in the world I was. The night before I’d been at an open air film festival near the Ringstrasse with a born again Christian from Illinois. Now I was trapped in an abandoned rail carriage, hyperventilating and looking like a refugee because twelve hours can be a long time in travel. I’d booted down the only unlocked door I could find and staggered down the tracks, frantically drawing on a Gauloise Blonde and crying like a silent screen ingénue. After an embarrassingly short amount of time I was rescued by a German train driver who shunted me back to civilisation on something that wouldn’t have looked out of place on Ivor the Engine. In his own Teutonic way, he’d found the whole caper hilarious and kept miming the international hand gesture for ‘schlafen’. It turned out I was in a siding 10 minutes outside of Munich.
Next time will be different. I have a bigger budget and I’m slightly less of a moron when it comes to planning. As the UK congas their way BEYOND THE THUNDERDOME, I predict the motivation to be elsewhere will become overwhelming. The question is will anyone want us? With my trip to ‘relatively unscathed’ Greece next month now in the can, the irony that it is we who are the most diseased country in Europe is not lost. After our visit to Palermo in early March, my friend and I sailed effortlessly through Gatwick without so much as a sighting of a poster about a public health emergency of international concern. Today we’re told in garish colours to ‘stay alert’ as if Covid-19 is a pervert loitering outside the school playground with a bag of lemon sherbets and the offer of a ride in a Datsun Cherry. I thought ‘stay safe’ was getting on my tits. The new government advice is the ministerial equivalent of Alan Partridge flicking two L-shaped fingers at you and saying ‘Be Lucky’.
With this in mind, I think 2021 is going to be magnificent for the British. Watch us as we catapult ourselves out of a V Shaped recovery like Roger Moore transcending the skies in a Union Jack parachute. Up we’ll sail, high above the wafting scent of fruit and veg rotting in the fields. I was thinking a move to New Zealand might be good, but it probably wouldn’t be quite far enough.
Being alone in my flat for nearly 9 weeks has certainly changed my attitude to solo travel. Before, my threshold to solitude would have been about 5 days and that’s with the company of obliging waiters. Now I could circumnavigate the globe without a companion, providing I wasn’t travelling in steerage and had an internet connection.
I won’t pretend I’m not disappointed about my trip to Greece. My happy place is sitting on the deck of a Blue Star Ferry, sipping a beer and listening to Bob Dylan as the islands rise up around me like ancient spirits. The plan – in the halcyon days of plans – was a week in Syros with a friend, followed by five nights channelling the 1960s bohemians on Hydra. It was going to be elegantly rounded off with a weekend in an artist’s apartment with an Acropolis view where I would blast the bejesus out of Maria Callas.
My last two week holiday was Santorini in 2011. I’d been fantasising about this island on the edge of Europe since I was a teenager and wrote in my journal about the headlong instincts of its residents, accustomed to living on the edge of a volcano. I wrote about the nightly applause for the sunset on the caldera and the man who rode his motorbike bareheaded, smoking a cigarette, with a white poodle under his arm. The resinous taste of retsina made me shudder, but I noted this was the only place I’d ever been where I could order a pina colada without embarrassment. Ultimately, it is our senses we appeal to and the snapshots of our travels we remember and store in our bank of memories.
The word is that domestic travel is going to boom later in the year. Sadly, it will be all the wrong people who will travel. Another excellent reason for the right people to stay at home and make a collage of better times.
Next Up: Memories of Andalucia.