Here and There

by A. A. Gill

  And I became immensely interested in other people’s kit – but not in a fashionista sense, not in a ‘Where did you get that bag?’ way, but in a nerdy, mechanical way like boys talk about carburettors and torque. I’d ask about wicking and wool and weight and whether your socks had been organically lanolin washed. There was a relief in all this jargon, this heavy-kit chat. It was nice to be released from the insecurity of style, of taste.

  I noticed something at the airport in Spitsbergen. The Norwegians are a remarkable weather-blasted, capable and bonetough people. You never see a fat one. I expect they leave them out on the glacier. They wear their skins tight-drawn over their angular bones like battened down, faded tarpaulin. They are admirable, attractive people who speak profoundly but seldom. To open your mouth unnecessarily is to waste hot air. And I also noticed that at the airport they were the best-dressed people in the world. In a postmodern Bauhaus-Corbusian sense, where form follows function, everything was carefully chosen for its practical application: the uniform of compatibility and outdoor competence. I realised that what they had was anti-fashion, given that the essence of fashionable style is to put on an attitude or an aspiration, to project a character, essentially to be someone you’re not. What the Norwegians dress as is themselves so they can continue being themselves. This season’s look is the same as last season’s look. It’s very, very damned cool. Freezing cool. I turned to Tom, my photographer, who occasionally works for Vogue, and I told him blonde is the new black.

  Luxe gone wild

  Glamour and camping have come together. They call it glamping, and the latest travel extravagance is a tent with a flushing bog.

  I went to lunch with a big travel company, a big, big international holiday firm. I don’t normally waste a lunch on business. It’s that horrible hybrid: work, wheedling, and pretending to be social and chummy. Anyway, the food’s invariably corporate-ghastly, and there’s a presentation of unreadable brochures and a pen that doesn’t work and a luggage label that I really don’t want. Anyway, this time I went because, you know, I’m feeling sort of sorry for the travel industry. They’re having a really horrid time. It’s the inexplicable but rather enjoyable truth about the travel business that it provides the nicest, most fun and exciting weeks of our lives, and is consequently the most consistently reviled, railed against, sued and detested business in the world. This particular company trawls the expensive end of the market and so has to deal with some of the most irrationally bad-tempered customers in the world.

  Now I expect you’ve noticed that the tempers in airports are short in exact relation to the shortness of the queues they’re standing in. Economy will have a snake of several hundred people patiently shuffling their regulation-size suitcases along, reading books, chatting, and giggling with holiday anticipation. Business class will have a queue of 20 irritated people hissing at children called Tamsin and Roland and trying to corral skittish herds of matched baggage. They are regular travellers and therefore hate travelling. In the queue for first class, where there is a vase of real flowers, and an attendant of cinematic beauty and unparalleled diplomacy, there will be one fat woman in a fur coat who is having a histrionic tantrum, swearing banishment and humiliation to all the staff in the airport and a slow death in particular to the baggage handler because she has lost her mink face mask and they don’t have her brand of moisturiser in the bathroom. As anyone in hospitality will tell you, other people’s happiness is a miserable career, and the more happy you strive to make them, the more miserable they’ll make you.

  So I went to lunch, and they gave us the good news, which was that the market was very fluid and contracting and that many companies were going to find things very difficult and would go for long holidays never to return, but for people who could move with the prevailing climate, adapt to the sudden change in commercial environment, then there were great advantages to be taken. There were vast opportunities for the plucking.

  My accountant has been saying much the same sort of thing: there are fortunes to be made in recessions, he says. And a banker I know mentioned darkly that some of his mates have never been richer. If this is all true, why don’t we have a depression every other month so we can all have a go at being carpet-bagging plutocrats? They all look at me with a bland pity when I say things like that.

  After the steamed sea bass and something chocolate over coffee, the travel bods got into their presentation and pointed out the bullet points on the screen. They came on like the mantras shouted by rugby teams in their dressing room before they go out and get flattened by the All Blacks. Luxury, apparently, is over. Conspicuous consumption is inconspicuous again. Gold bath taps, restaurants run by swanky chefs, are all over. Jewellery on the beach, rose petals in the bath, bikini bottoms floating in the Jacuzzi: that’s also utterly, utterly passé. Apparently the rich still left with money and time to enjoy it don’t want to look like the past-it rich, the over-rich or the idle rich with nothing but hedonism and hair extensions on their minds.

  They, and by implication the aspirational bits of you, want an adventure. You want to learn something. You want to come home with more than pictures of a sunlounger and an abused lobster. You want to boast about something that isn’t a tan-line, and who you saw at the next table. You want to come back with a traveller’s tale, a saga, not a holiday drink-alogue. You want to get out into the corners of the world that room service won’t reach. The future of travel, I was told, is going to be [drum-roll; keen young executive flicks the button on his remote; and the screen flashes up, ta-ra … a tent. A tent. That’s it, a tent. The future of top-of-the-range holidays is a tent. What’s the mass-market version going to be – a refugee camp? Oh no, no, you see I’m not looking closely enough. The images flicker across the screen. This is no ordinary tent: this is a tent you can stand up in, with a bed you can lie down on, with sheets that you could glide across, with a carpet, with mirrors and windows and a mosquito net that looks like interior design. This tent is to other tents what Ava Gardner is to other gardeners.

  What we are about to yearn for is Scouting for liberals. And there’s a name for it. It’s called glamping. (That’s glamorous camping for those of you who are slow at word and concept combining.) Never before have camping and glamour come together. Indeed, they’ve never been in the same sentence before. Camping is almost by definition the absence of glamour. But here we are, in the bush, in some distant savannah, on a river bank. There is a crackling fire on which a clever native bakes brioche and ciabatta in an old tin trunk. The Chablis is chilling, a camp table is set with napkins and a storm lantern. The only glitzy thing here is the Milky Way, and in the distance some questing creature calls. And sat next to you is a guide who has a degree in biology, astronomy, geology and anthropology, and a chest you could tee golf balls off.

  And tomorrow it will all be gone, as if it had never happened. You will leave nothing behind; the whole lot will be packed away into a discreet 10-tonne truck and whisked off to another virgin caravanserai. You have the enormous smug satisfaction of owning not only a singular experience but an unimpeachably organic and green one.

  This is a fantasy of ruggedness, a nursery play version of the wild. It is Marie Antoinette’s weekend picnic farm, which is fine by me: given the choice between Marie’s and a real farm, I’m with the French queen every time. What I mind about this is that however risible and embarrassing and tasteless big, expensive honeymoon holidays are, they do exist in real places and employ real indigenous people, and pay for somebody’s economy, putting real kids through school so that they can grow up and be businessmen and come and have holidays with us. This Peter Pan camping adventure slips through the beautiful bits of the world leaving not a trace and very little cash.

  I asked the man who was selling glamping to me what the most important thing about this new moveable feast was. He thought for a moment, and smiled, and said: ‘Dimmer switches. And proper lavatories.’ So there you have it. The latest must-have extravagance, the chic one-upman
ship, is a flushing bog in the outback. We live in momentous times.

  Cashmere if you can

  Italians may lack a sense of humour, but Rome is still the ultimate holiday destination.

  Someone once said that to be born Italian and male was to have won first prize in the lottery of life. I think it was me. I seem to remember that I added a caveat to the encomium – that to be born Italian and a woman was to have pulled a position between a fish and a dog from life’s tombola. Italian men have gilded existences in direct proportion to their women’s sullied ones. One of the reasons women have such a dowdy time in Italy is because Italian men are so much better at being women than they are. There is, beyond the Alps, that magical formula for being a properly masculine big girl.

  Italian men shop better than most women. They care more about their appearance, their hair, their nails and the thread-count of sheets. Italian men have an unnatural affinity with cashmere. They’re the only subspecies of bipedal hominid who can wear a pale pink v-neck sweater draped over their shoulders and go out in public, without it being part of some cruel dare or bet. They have apparently cracked the great mating conundrum, the design fault of mankind: how on earth do you have all the fun of being a bloke, with all the emotional range of being a bird? Italian men are able to talk on mobile phones for up to an hour. Not only is that way longer than any other style of man on the planet, it’s longer than penguins can hold their breath underwater. Not only that, but they can do it while talking to other men.

  I once wrote an article pointing out that the reason Northern European women loved Italian men was because it was like having a girlfriend with a willy. Which, incidentally, is why Italian women get such a hard time from them. It was a light-hearted, affectionate article, but it was noticed by the Italian press, who paraphrased it with infuriated exclamation marks, and a TV chat show called me and said they would fly me to Rome for the weekend and pay me a few hundred million lire if they could interview me. Fine. So I went.

  The Maurizio Costanzo Show is a bit of an Italian institution and it’s recorded in front of a large audience in a theatre. So, Maurizio asked, what did I mean by impugning the masculinity of Italian men? I smiled – a winningly Stilton grin, because obviously this was light-hearted joshing – and told him that, as we spoke, the European soccer cup was being played in England, and that the only national team that had made an official complaint were the Italians, who had wailed that there weren’t hair dryers in their dressing rooms. I looked at the audience and waited for the chuckles of recognition and the guffaws of self-deprecation. Silence. And 2000 people stared back at me with a collective ‘and your point is?’ expression.

  Naturally the Italian men would complain that there were no hair dryers. Look at their hair. They had beautiful hair. It was a national treasure. And it was typical that the English, a cold philistine nation that fried fish in pastry and cut their hair with breadknives because the bread was already sliced, were too uncivilised to put hair dryers in dressing rooms. And what about the foot spas and manicure sets? It was at this moment, wallowing in the hostile Latin embrace, that I realised another great truth about Italians of all genders. They have absolutely no sense of humour.

  After the show, we went and had dinner and I walked through the city. It was summer, and it was warm and clear. I’d never really been to Rome before. I’d been to Italy dozens of times, flown into Rome and driven out. I’d been saving the Eternal City for a special occasion. We walked through a series of opera sets. One square led into another like scene changes. We went to a party in a palazzo that had been built by Michelangelo. They all spoke Italian and wore cashmere sweaters over their shoulders, so I stared out the window at the frieze of black cypresses, cupolas, domes and columns silhouetted against the navy blue sky, and I smelled the evening pines, wine and the dust of ages, and listened to the mopeds and the tinny hee-haw of Fiat police cars and the incessant babble of Italians talking on mobile phones.

  I knew in that moment two things: one, that the reason Italians don’t have a sense of humour is because they don’t need one. The point of jokes and having a laugh is to cheer yourself up, to make a miserable life a little better. If you live in Wigan, you need a sense of humour. Italian men don’t need to swap jokes because they are already quite happy being Italian men. What Italians have instead of jokes is a boundless, inexhaustible sense of fun. All the things that made you chuckle before you could walk continue to make an Italian laugh until he dies. Italians love to tickle each other. You’ll see middle-aged men in business suits tickling each other in the street and squirming happily. They also pinch, slap, ruffle, chuck and talk in falsetto voices. It makes them happy.

  The second thing I realised was that, from now on, every year that I didn’t spend some time in Rome would be wasted, and if I were allowed only one more trip to one more place in my life, it would be here, without a second thought. All the other options – the magic places, beaches, cities, mountains, deserts, rivers, cottages, palaces and sandcastles – faded in comparison to Rome. It isn’t just the beauty and the grandeur; it’s the depth, the great experience of it. Rome knows more than any other place on earth. The word ‘civilisation’ shares a latin root with ‘civic’ – meaning city. This is the city that invented, grew and exported Western civilisation. And 2500 years later, it’s still effortlessly the best at it. And thank God (who also lives here) it’s looked after by the Italians. Imagine if Rome were a German city, or Hungarian, French, or Austrian? It nearly happened.

  The next morning, standing in the Piazza Navona with a Roman friend, I asked dreamily: Why doesn’t everyone live here? A millennium ago, the whole Western world dreamed of living in Rome. We could do it now. Why don’t we all move here? Why don’t we all have our offices in Rome?

  Ah, he said, arranging his powder-pink cashmere sweater and regarding his reflection in a shop window, we thought of this. It is impossible. For starters, you need a miracle to get a phone connected here. To get a fax, you need to be the Pope, and even God can’t get broadband. Nobody could do business in Rome. Scuzi … and he answered his mobile.

  Shore thing

  Most travel writers can’t stand them, but beaches provide the most soulful experience you can find this side of the grave.

  One of the very few things that all travel writers hold in common is an effete disdain of beaches. We don’t do seaside, unless it’s ironic or nostalgic. Beaches are for holidays, and travel writers don’t do holidays. Holidays are for amateurs, pedestrians. A beach is a sandpit for grown-ups. It’s an infantilising experience where the crowds regress through a childish, supine idiocy. On sand a man will wear toddler clothes in colours and patterns that he wouldn’t dream of sporting on tarmac or carpet. You eat and drink stuff that would be disgusting under a roof. You play semi-skilled games, paddle geriatrically and get sunburnt. You stare toothlessly at bosoms and horizons. And all beaches are extensions of the same beach; they have a repetitive primary simplicity. We want them to do the same thing, which is essentially to regress us back to the holidays we remember with the romance of greening home movies.

  Beaches dictate a certain sort of personality, a particular world view. It is, for instance, impossible to be sophisticated on a beach. And as I am prone to fits of meritless sophistication, I’m drawn to the antidote of beaches. Despite the travel writing, I do rather love them.

  My childhood memories of them are invigorating but not particularly more-ish. North Berwick, outside Edinburgh, splashing in the North Sea: it was so cold it was like being punched in the kidneys. I’d lose all sensation below the waist. And I can still see the huddles of spindly post-war children with concave chests and sagging woollen trunks draped in balding cotton towels looking like forlorn schools of forgotten penguins, teeth chattering, eyes bright with hypothermia. Happy days. In Britain, beaches are more endurance than entertainment. I still have the niggling sense that there is something wasteful about a hot beach. It seems a profligate waste of the sun, being squand
ered just on sand.

  I’ve just come back from Mozambique. I’d never been before. It’s not on many people’s country wish-list, this huge country sprawled on the east coast of Africa. It was a collection of Swahili–Arab trading posts, slave ports and smuggling, and then a Portuguese colony that continued to trade slaves long after it was illegal, and smuggle ivory and gold. The Portuguese were very bad at giving their nicked bits of the globe back. They had to be terrorised out of Mozambique and there was none of the polite handover ceremony, the promises to keep in touch and exchange students, which may be why Mozambique joined the Commonwealth – just to spite Lisbon. Or perhaps they fancied the Commonwealth Games and a Christmas card from the Queen. (I’ve never really seen the point of the Commonwealth; it’s like having to have dinner with your ex-wives.) Mozambique is a bit confused. It’s doing its best, but it has issues, resentments. It’s the only country I can think of that has a Kalashnikov on its flag.

  In the north of the country, up by the Tanzanian border, there is a long archipelago of coral islands. One of these is Vamizi, and it has a resort with what they call oxymoronically in the travel business ‘barefoot luxury’. That means handmade huts on a beach, comfortable and charming, but without a telly or a telephone, without WiFi or room service, just the sand and the sea and the weaver birds in the rafters.

  The African coast of the Indian Ocean must be one of the least utilised tourist possibilities on the planet. There are barely a handful of African beach resorts. The coast is of a miraculously enchanting beauty. The sea is pale and warm; the diving, they say, is world-class; the sport fishing is spectacular. Nicola, my partner, caught a near-record giant trevally, and she’s still beaming. It’s supplanted our twins as her screen-saver. But what I particularly love is a beach with shells. I don’t quite know why the combing meander of picking up shells should be so blissfully satisfying, or why its attraction and joy never seems to pall. There is something about shells that is so very precious and yet plainly free, so beautifully crafted, yet ubiquitous. And every morning, more of them are dumped on the strand, a tide line of miraculous carving, impossible intricacy; sea jewellery that comes with its own echo of the waves still inside it. This is the imitation of the shopping along with the antidote to consuming. They are infinitely precious and virtually valueless. They are pleasing to hold and Zenishly fascinating to peruse.