by A. A. Gill
The reason I like beaches, and the reason travel writers don’t, is that they have no narrative. They don’t tell stories. They are atonal song cycles, mood without plot. And if you spend your life dissecting and reconstructing things into sentences and paragraphs, beginnings, middles and endings, then a beach, with its sighs and hisses, its slow breath, is a wonderful poultice. It makes no inquiries, demands no reactions. It fills your head with space and sounds and feelings. The sensations of an empty hot beach are as soulful as you can find this side of a grave. There is no end to this peace, just as Blake said, to see the world in a grain of sand, to pick up shells and see an infinity in your hand.
Nothing to do
It’s about more than just time off; we think of ourselves as being at our most pure and best on holidays, and we strive for them to be of a different calibre to real life.
I just had lunch with a man who said he hated holidays. They fill him with dread. It’s one of those things you really have to love. You can’t say: I don’t want my holiday, could I go back to work instead? It’s somehow offensive, like saying you don’t like sex or breakfast in bed. Actually, it’s more acceptable to have gone off sex and eating breakfast in a prone position than to not take your holidays. Holidays are one of the few universal indefatigable human traits. Opposable thumbs, tears and looking forward to a fortnight away are what make us human. So when you say you don’t like holidays, people ask to move their desks, don’t let their children come over on play-dates and start divorce proceedings.
When did you first start having this irrational and antisocial loathing of recreational downtime, I asked. Right from the start, he said. I hated the first holiday I ever went on. The family took us away for a weekend at the seaside when I was seven. I was really looking forward to it. My mum told me how wonderful it would be and how much I’d love it, and what a good time we’d all have, and that there’d be ice-cream and fairy floss and sandcastles and donkeys and Punch and Judy and a pier and fish and chips. So what happened – it rained? No, the weather was fine, there was the ice-cream, fairy floss, sandcastles, donkeys, Punch and Judy, the pier, and there was fish and chips. They were dreadful. Horrible. It was such a disappointment. Why? Well, fairy floss is a filthy pink unpleasant cocoon, cheap ice-cream is like white pig fat (in fact, it is bleached pig fat), sandcastles are a silly bore, donkeys smell and have huge yellow teeth, Punch and Judy are sociopathic and if piers were streets on land you’d never go near them. I quite liked the fish and chips.
I see. So you were born a cynic, even at the age of seven. No, I was just born a realist. I’ve tried to go on holiday many, many times. Over the years I’ve been on at least 40 holidays and the best I’ve experienced is disappointment. Where was that? A weekend in Venice. That was very disappointing. But not as terribly disappointing as Istanbul. It is, he said, the expectation that sinks the holiday.
As well as being a realist, I am also an optimist, which combines to make me a fatalist. Whoever said it’s better to travel hopefully than to arrive never went on holiday.
I have a feeling that quite a lot of people find holidays a bit of a strain, although of course they couldn’t possibly admit it. The planning, the expense, the competitive photography. The obligation to have an experience that is of a different calibre to real life. Two weeks every summer that are a window into a higher existence. The holiday is your reward for work. More than that, our holidays are the definition of who we really might be if somehow we stepped up and had a more angelic existence. We like to think of ourselves as being at our most pure and best on holidays. This is all a modern construct. The very idea of a holiday is barely a century old in the sense of secular time spent doing nothing but indulging and pandering to pleasure. A holy day was conceived, as the name suggests, to be exactly the opposite – a religious moment of mortification, fasting and righteous self-analysis and purging. Work was what made you who you are. Toil was physically, intellectually and spiritually the purpose and obligation of existence. Not to work was mildly sinful. Travel outside business wasn’t a pleasure; it was either an education or a cure. Restorative relaxing was what you had a garden and a rocking chair for.
I do have a great sympathy for all this. I rarely go on holiday; though I travel constantly, it’s almost always work. And while it’s almost invariably exciting, interesting and entertaining, it’s rarely relaxing. And it’s always fully engaging. But just a couple of weeks ago, the person whom I share a home and a family with said, that’s it. That’s it. Utterly, utterly it. I need a holiday and I need it now, and I need you to come with me. Well, of course. I’ve arranged, she said, for us to go to the Hotel Splendido in Portofino, on the Italian Riviera. We will do nothing. We will do nothing in elegant poses. We will do nothing covered in oil. And silk. And linen. We will do nothing in scented pools. We will do nothing under the stars, nothing under the sun.
I like a hotel that doesn’t hedge its self-regard. If you call yourself the Splendido, then you’d jolly well better be splendido. And it is. It’s indubitably the most splendido hotel I’ve been in. It was small without being bijou, smart without being chic, comfortable without being suffocating, and expensive without … well, without embarrassment. The food is perfect: Ligurian. It’s served as if service were a calling. Things that should be hot came hot and things that should be chilled came cold. Peaches were ripe, coffee intense and the pesto the best in Italy. And the other guests were so like the collected suspects from an Agatha Christie novel that you really didn’t need to take a book to the pool, which was saltwater and hangs over a view that was everything your grandmother wanted Italy to be like.
A series of stepped gardens down to the tiny port where there are a couple of decent restaurants where you can eat baby squid and drink absurd cocktails made out of mutilated strawberries and watch the passeggiata. And reflect that, as holidays go, the Italians probably produce the best in the world. They invented the idea and have worked very, very hard indeed at apparently not working at all.
After four days, we went home. She was restored, refreshed and relaxed, and I must admit that I was perplexed. I had done nothing under the sun and it didn’t bother me one bit. Which rather bothered me. So I wrote this, which made it work. And now I can relax.
The middle distance
Middle America may be universally canned, but there is still something charming about the land of the free and the people who inhabit it. Oh, and the blueberry pie is pretty good too.
Cortez is a town in the south-west of Colorado. It sprawls in an unconcerned just-got-up kind of manner between the Navajo and Ute Indian reservations and the high Pine Mountains and the aspen-fringed meadows of the San Juan. Colorado is a square box that contains some of the most good golly gosh astonishing scenery in the world. If you think of Europe as being classically nature, Asia impressionist, Africa expressionist, Australia naïve, then America is nature’s great big romantic period. America is all strings and trumpet. It has the soaring emotion of high romance and also moments of visual diabetes – just too much syrupy brilliance.
All students of international politics should come and see the great American interior. Most of us are people who made their countries, but Americans are people who are made by their country. If you go out west you begin to understand what makes Americans the way they are. I’ve always had an unfashionable and unironic respect and fondness for what is universally and dismissively known as Middle America. It contains a lot of immensely admirable people. Self-reliant, optimistic, determined, stoical, hardworking, rigorously honest, in fact, rigorously everything. And most of all, they’re the kindest, most helpful folk I’ve ever come across. They are, it must also be said, prone to depression, possess a dull single-mindedness and a willful uninquisitiveness about anything they can’t touch, smell, eat or tinker with. They’re people whose horizons are broad but fixed, whose questions are few and answers simple. I like them. Clemenceau, the French politician, famously said that America went from barbarism to degene
ration without an interval of civilisation. I bet he said it all the time. It has that smooth feel of a fond Gallic rudery. I bet he got a knowing laugh in all the Old World salons after dinner with that one. As with most glib French things – it’s just plain wrong.
American civilisation is the cocktail of barbarism and decadence. This has been the look, sound and feel of our culture for the past 100 years. What is more true about America is that it went from austere hardship to immense comfort without an intervening thought for good taste. Comfort and ease, softness, smoothness, warmth, wrinkle-free, cosy, huggable things are what Americans like to surround themselves with. Relaxed is the aesthetic choice. The idea that you should suffer some inconvenience or mild discomfort for the sake of a look or an effect is an incomprehensible anathema. In this wide open space the elasticated lifestyle is all.
Towns like Cortez always look temporary, as if they’re still auditioning for a place in the landscape. One morning you might drive past and find it’s all gone, been blown away or swallowed up in the night, and it wouldn’t be that surprising. All over Colorado there are remnants of communities that didn’t quite make it, the ghost towns of defunct businesses and mines. The Pueblo Indian remains perched high up in the cliffs from tribes that were extinct even before the Navajo and the Apache got here. For the most powerful nation on earth there is a distinct sense of impermanence about life on the land, as if it were all on probation. And coming from the Old World where the market towns and villages, the churches, manors and castles all seem as immutable and resolute as the hills and rivers, I find this exciting and refreshing. Because if a mining or cattle town can spring up and die in the architectural blink of an eye then, also overnight, the prairie can sprout a Kansas or Chicago, the desert can suddenly grow Las Vegas.
All over the US west there are communities made up entirely of trailer caravans set in neat rows on tree-shaded culs-de-sac plugged into the umbilical comfort of utility, but they look like pieces on a Monopoly board, waiting to be moved on, swept up by the story of the nation. These trailers, so easily dismissed as white trash, as the burrows of enigma and underclass, can also be seen as the descendants of the covered wagon that first came and prised open this vast nation, adding states a piece at a time. America was only finished as a geographical entity in my lifetime. It’s been like some kind of gigantic jigsaw puzzle waiting to fall into place. The drama of America can never compete with its own set. It is dwarfed by the land, the jagged height of the mountain, the heat of the desert, the ferocity of the thunder. Why try to build a house as beautiful as the prairie or as permanent as a canyon? There’s no beauty that can compare with the beauty of nature. You can see how easy it is for this land to become a fundamental cathedral, a huge amphitheatre parable of the might of an elemental heaven and the minute insignificance of individual humans. I think this is one of the reasons that Middle America has such an oddly resistant view of global warming and environmental crisis; it’s because it’s so difficult to see it making a difference on this scale. The forces of nature are so unarguable compared to all human vanity and hubris.
And the nation itself was built on overcoming nature. Americans don’t live in their country, they live despite it or perhaps with its benign disregard. The west is full of tourists trundling around in caravans imitating wagon trains, again, settling down in defensive circles in laybys and almost all of them are American. They never cease to be awestruck tourists in their own country. It’s a much-bandied truism that only less than 20 per cent of Americans have passports. The assumption from outside is that this is because they’re frightened or ignorant or too lazy to care how the rest of us live. But that’s not the truth. Well, it’s not all the truth. They’re still getting to know their own backyard. In three generations America has quadrupled in size. It’s still fresh from the oven. I travelled through a little town with one street of clapboard houses, a café, a liquor store, a petrol station, a few trailers. We stopped to eat cheeseburgers, they recommended the blueberry pie. This is where they once mined plutonium for the nuclear deterrent. This tiny blink of a place was the well for the Cold War, the arms race, the great game of global politics for 50 years. Now the holes in the rock are filled in, the spoil bulldozed over, the river runs muddy, boiling yellow alongside the road, the red earth canyons blister in the sun. It’s as if it all meant less than nothing. The pie was surprisingly good.
Empty vessels
Once the epitome of moneyed gaucheness, the super-yacht is now a law unto itself, taking luxury to absurd new heights.
There are many bizarre sensations available to the connoisseur of contextual and tactile oddity. Flinging yourself down a spiral staircase bandaged in bubble-wrap. Running through wet sand in cashmere socks. Eviscerating a chicken blindfolded, using just your feet (only attempt this with a previously dead chicken). I’m having a sensation experience as we speak. I’m writing this in a bath at sea. Well, I’m composing this in a bath at sea. Actually I’m writing this on a plane 3000 feet above Turin. (You, I picture reading this lying in bed eating biscuits.)
The contextual tactile conundrum that always strikes me as odd is the bath-at-sea bit. It’s watching the waves out of the porthole whilst inside I make ripples. The two expanses of water, separated by one thin hull: one warm, one cold; one salt, one soap. The sea is elemental, a metaphor for all emotion, sensuality and power and women. The bath is benign, thoughtless, bubbly and a bit of a soak. No one else I’ve ever mentioned this to finds the bath-at-sea contradiction weird or noteworthy.
In fact, they think I’m a bit weird for mentioning it at all, or for even noticing. The truth is I find almost everything about boats weird. I’ve never felt at home with boats, even though I come from an island and seawater is supposed to flow in our veins. I feel as homely on a boat as a haddock does in a cinema. But boats have grown to become a larger and larger part of travel. Ocean-going, opulently appointed boats are the divide between the them, which for the moment includes me, and the you, which includes you.
Forty years ago, pleasure boats were sporty and adventurous and a touch nerdy. They were owned by ex-naval men, men who wore nautical work clothes and were paint speckled and mildly whiffy. Boats were the aquatic version of caravans. Occasional Greeks had large pleasure ones dismissed as gin palaces, but altogether, boats were for fun, the damp equivalent of camping. Now boats are country houses, they’re mansions, they’re four-star hotels.
A contemporary of mine pointed out that when he was a lad he bought sweaty soft-porn mags. When he got his first job, he swapped them for car mags, and when he got to be more successful, aviation magazines. Now that he runs an international company he devours super-yacht periodicals. We always lust after the thing we just can’t afford, and now super-yachts are the pinnacle of consumer aspiration.
The biggest private pleasure boat 10 years ago wouldn’t be in the top 200 today. The Russian conspicuous-consumption fleet is almost as large as the military one. And the new super-yachts built for Californian internet cash and Russian utility bribes are so big that many of them can’t get into holiday ports.
Boats have gone from being the means of exploring places to the places in their own right. They’re not for holidays, they’re floating memorials to your acumen. And what you sail to see is not interesting little islands or remarkable reefs or unspoilt, inaccessible beaches – what you go to see are other boats. The point of having that much money-haemorrhaging aspiration under your feet is to show it off to other billionaires who have opened up the money vein.
Super-boats have helicopters and their own motorcars, and now they’re coming with submarines. I’ve been on one that had its own boardroom and office suite. Why would you want to have a perfectly drab, perfectly functional office with whiteboard and overhead-projectors on your dream yacht? Well, if you were part of the geeky pizza-and-brainstorms-in-the-shed internet plutocracy, then work was fun. In fact, work was probably the only fun you ever had.
The decorating of yachts is a smal
l mystery. Why do they all have pictures of other boats in them, and then photographs of boats from the outside? And bars. A bar at home is the first word in grating naff hideousity. But on a boat, it’s desperately chic, and Onassis had barstools covered in whale foreskins. That really impressed Jackie. On land she’d have made a face like a salted lime and remembered she’d left the gas on.
And then there’s the staff. Obviously all billionaires have staff. You couldn’t be a billionaire and do your own hoovering. But what is it about ozone that makes relatively rational landlubber plutocrats who are happy to hang out with yes-men in regular suits on land feel the need for a squad of gay sauna attendants and the cast of The Pirates of Penzance at sea?
You eat things on boats you’d never do on land, play games and wear clothes you’d never usually wear. Little things with shells and fish and nautical motifs, and men wear hello-sailor hats which they wouldn’t put on for a bet on the pavement. Seawater does odd things when added to money. Boat owners outdo each other in all the childishly excessive ways that the rich have for outdoing each other. Better-looking staff, fancier cooks, more toys; bigger, faster, rarer. Last week I spoke to a breathless awestruck interior designer who’d been employed to do just the soft furnishings on a super-yacht. They were insisting on 1000 thread-count cotton sheets. If that means nothing to you, let me tell you it makes crêpe de chine feel like George Michael’s chin, and one bed’s worth will cost more than you spent on decorating your whole house. Of course, this isn’t the point. If you’ve got a couple of billion, then the difference between goose and duck down doesn’t really register. You could see boats as being a symptom and a palliative of an uncomfortable neurosis, of course. You could see it like that if it makes you feel better.
