by A. A. Gill
Boats are not about seeing the world anymore, not about adventure or being sporty and wearing an oily jersey. They’re about control. The one thing all the rich men I’ve ever met have had in common was a pathological desire to organise the chaos of the world. A boat is a complete world on its own; you can micro-manage everything. A plutocrat can be Gulliver on his own Lilliput. In fact, if I ever get a yacht, I’m going to call it Lilliput. (By the way, boats’ names are the novels that the super-rich and unimaginative have inside them.)
The one thing no one can command is the weather. Unless you have a boat. And then if the sun won’t come to Ivan, Ivan can go to the sun. A yacht doesn’t actually have to go anywhere, because it has already arrived.
Peak condition
If you need to reconnect with something wild, head to the Scottish Highlands, where the landscape has no concern for your golf handicap, your bank balance or how many friends you have on Facebook.
There is one fixed point in my year. Actually there are dozens of fixed points: Christmas, birthdays, Easter, school terms, anniversaries, the office party, deadlines. My whole life turns out to be fixed points and deadlines, a slalom of imperatives. What I mean is there is one week that isn’t fixed by other people, or the kids, or bosses, or God. What I mean is there is one week without noise. It’s more a hole in the year, a blank in the diary, unsullied by asterisks and exclamations, scribbled phone numbers and restaurant names, an escape hatch in the space-time continuum. It’s the week I spend in the Highlands of Scotland where I stagger and slip up and down the hills, gasping like a spilt carp, cold, wet, grazed, twisted, strained, agued and palsied. Every day of it, there is a moment where I swear, swear on my shuddering aorta, my turned ankle and my barbied lungs, that I will never, ever do this again. And then the minute I leave, I am yearning to get back, to dig this hole into next year’s diary.
The purpose of being here is ostensibly to kill things. We go out accoutred for murder in camouflage with binoculars and guns and knives and sandwiches. But the pursuit of death is really only a ruse, a cover. As often as not the deer elude us. The point is really not death but the pursuit of life by life. To get out and discover quite how alive I still am. And the hills grow taller and my feet heavier, but still I’m bound to the wild pursuit in this quite literally breathtaking place. It is a validation that I still have a place in the landscape.
In this rough world there is a pleasure that is difficult to explain. This isn’t about aesthetics or health or achievement or any of the urban unwinding, de-stressing, getting your head together stuff. It’s something more basic, colder and ancient. It’s being part of it, part of something bigger. The belonging not to a list of accrued things – the urban civilised litany of stuff that our credit companies and our censuses know about us – but to a species, to be Darwinian. To fit into a world that isn’t already man-ordained or man-ordered.
There is a growing trend, particularly among middle-aged blokes, to choose holidays for their primordial discomfort. I’m noticing that a lot of chaps are packing rucksacks and heading out into the high country – up a river, over tundra. I know that holiday companies have noticed this too. There’s a new market of sedentary men with families and white-collar jobs who don’t want to exchange the vanilla comfort and safety of their homes for the fuchsia comfort and safety of some packaged and predictable resort. One tour operator who makes bespoke adventures for groups of men told me, ‘These are people who want to come back with a story, not a tan.’ Who want to have memories more than they want to have a set of photographs just like the photographs they had last year and the year before. How boring are most holiday snaps, how passive.
Women tend to dismiss this as a midlife crisis thing – possibly preferable to a Harley, a ponytail and a mail-order mistress, but still essentially risible, a foolish-man fantasy game, an attempt to ignore the truth and put off the responsibilities of life. But in fairness that’s not it. ‘Midlife crisis’ is such a dismissive, glib little put-down. It’s more complicated and more poignant than that, than just wanting to feel 18 again.
Most of us reach a point where we’ve already hacked the big stuff. We’ve had kids and wives, we’ve had careers or had them thrust upon us, we’ve taken on mortgages and debt. And we’ve handled it. We’ve been okay at the grown-up stuff. We really don’t want to be teenagers again, or wear leather, or go to nightclubs. We know what’s ridiculous. And if we’re not actually proud of our lives, then we’re pleased with them; what we’ve made, the things we’ve achieved. But there is also a nagging sense that we’ve become janitors in our own lives. We turn up and maintain stuff – paint a wall, unblock a drain, shout at the kids, put out the rubbish – and with care and luck we can go on doing this forever.
But we didn’t set out to be curators to our own families and offices. There is a disconnect with something wild, something out there. So we get on a horse, or into a canoe, or onto skis; we pack a sleeping bag, a wet-suit, goggles and a mosquito net and take a week to face the weather. It’s not escapism, or fantasy, or role play, or showing off; it’s being a bloke who hasn’t hyphenated himself with father, or husband, or neighbour, investor, accountant, teacher, plumber, journalist. Because out here in the Highlands, with the heather and the gorse, the ravens and the stags, they don’t care. The landscape has no concern for your golf handicap, your bank balance, how many friends you have on Facebook.
I’m from Scotland and this is also a week of home-coming. Like most of us I have contradictory feelings about all that root stuff, but I do have an emotional commitment to this place that has grown fond through absence. I only went 500 miles away down the road, but still this is the Other Country, and I suspect the adventures men take on are often bound up in the business of their childhoods. We think it’s serendipity or an empirical choice, but to walk or cycle or run in deserts, or hack through jungle will have had its origin in a bedtime book, a moment with your dad, the first time you realised the world went on beyond the bottom of the garden. It belongs to a bit of your brain and memory that is not rational or explainable. This week in the hills chasing the deer isn’t really a hole in the diary; it’s not an escape. It’s the ridge pole of the rest of the year. It takes a load for all of the other stuff.
I don’t want to live up there. I have no intention of chucking the solid bit of my life away. I come back to it with greater gusto and gratitude knowing that I’m not just the sum of my achievements, my habits and my acquisitions. When I’m stuck in traffic or a tedious meeting, when the computer crashes and the deadlines pile up, I can close my eyes and be back on the hill, saw-breathed, sodden with the wind, wiping the curses from my mouth.
The pretenders
‘Paree’ or ‘Paris’? It’s all well and good to round out your vowels, but conspicuous affectation when pronouncing foreign words is unforgivable.
I’ve just been in Kenya for a day. Flew there Monday, visited Tuesday, came home Wednesday. Even with my truncated attention span, I think this is pretty much my record. I was doing a story with a ferocious deadline. And here’s the thing: although I spent more time travelling than being and doing, I have a voluminous collection of memories, insights, thoughts and experiences. Far more than a day’s worth, like Mary Poppins’s carpet bag, the trip doesn’t seem to be able to fit into the time that was allotted to it. The intensity of the concentration needed to get everything seen and heard and committed to memory has made it high-definition.
I’ve always liked doing speed-tourism. Almost all travel-writing and foreign-correspondenting is about slow immersion, wallowing in your subject. It doesn’t suit me. My senses grow soggy; I lose concentration, and the whole experience becomes panoramic, but with a softer focus. Arnold Bennett, the critic, was arguing about writing with someone who claimed superior knowledge because of 20 years’ experience. No, replied Bennett, you have one year’s experience repeated 19 times. Time on its own doesn’t necessarily give you a concomitant increase in insight.
Anywa
y, that’s not what I was going to talk about. I went to Kenya, the first syllable sounding like the thing that opens locks. My children, and everyone else, say Kenya, with the first syllable sounding like the Spanish word for ‘what’, which is probably technically politely correct. My way sounds colonial, but it’s out of my mouth before I remember to flatten it; I don’t say ‘Injah’ or ‘Himaleeyas’ with the last two syllables truncated into an English-swallowed abbreviation.
As a general rule of epiglottis, I think people have a perfect right to choose how they’re known. If Bombay wants to be Mumbai, well and good. If Calcutta feels that the natty chic K of Kolkata suits its self-confidence, then it would be rude to cavil. I don’t mind that they still sell Peking duck in Beijing or that Mumbai has Bombay University. I know that the capital of Greenland is Nuuk, not Godthab, and I wouldn’t dream of calling Dunedin Edinburgh. I will make the best mouth I can out of the names people want to call themselves, though for liberal reasons I’m going to stick with Burma rather than Myanmar.
Winston Churchill made a feature of pronouncing foreign names with a pedantically English accent. Lyons was ‘Lions’, and Marseilles sounded like his mother was in a dinghy. I think this was done primarily to provoke the irascibly thin-skinned de Gaulle and appeal to Americans, many of whom think that foreign languages are the noise the devil makes. What I mind, and this may be ungracious and verbalist of me, is the other extreme, where names come with a boil-in-the-bag pronunciation. Or rather, I mind it inordinately, inappropriately, when people decide to pronounce somewhere with a flavour of the accent of the inhabitants, a lilting moue of polyglot garnish: an Italian spin to San Gimignano, a curt German emphasis to Bremerhaven, a Spanish lisp to Cadiz.
I don’t just mind – it drives me to paroxysms of murderous fury, which is made worse by the knowledge that it’s such a piddling small thing. It shouldn’t really bother me at all. It’s so obviously an arrant little affectation, like keeping first-class luggage tags on your briefcase, or eating a banana with a knife and fork. But despite myself, I wish nothing but foul and pestilentially slow death on the loved ones of the offenders, and then I want them in turn to be falsely accused of hideous crimes of a disgusting nature involving farm animals, and then be forced to live a life of mock-shame before going sadly mad in great squalor and poverty.
I don’t want to be irrational about this. What I mind is the silly snobbery of those who add the inverted commas and italics of a warmer tongue to their conversation to imply some extra association or intellectual ownership with the place. If I say Italian words with an Italian accent they will correctly infer that I am no stranger to southern climes. That I own a beret and can walk through peasant markets squeezing produce with the insouciance of a native. That I have canvas slip-ons with the heels trodden down and can order from a simple bourgeois menu without having to mime. This small inflection of mouthy one-upmanship is meant to tell the rest of us of a whole world of genteel, cosmopolitan, comfortably travelled sophistication, when in fact it does just the opposite. It reveals a cultural and intellectual insecurity and a brittle narrowing of world views. It is only certain countries that get the award of a music-hall accent. No one says Karachi with the exaggerated Punjabi accent, or Ulaanbaatar in the manner of the Mongol. You don’t catch the verbal tourist talking with a Yoruba accent. In fact, if they did, they’d be open to accusations of racist mimicry.
And that’s the point. There is, in the pronunciation game, an implied league table of cultures, some of whom are worth imitating, and some who frankly aren’t. So the old European countries get the nod of acceptance, and the developing world gets the mispronunciation of a purposeful snub. The kernel of what bothers me about this is that I suspect it’s a peculiarly Anglo-Saxon affliction. Although I don’t speak any other language well enough to know, I suspect that the French don’t talk of Londres with a cockney twang, and Italians aren’t referring to Birmingham by talking down their noses.
This geopolitical snobbery is just ours alone, and I’m collectively embarrassed. I expect Australians might wonder if they’ve made it into the English first division of Pommy mispronunciation. Well, funnily enough, I’ve recently noticed that both ‘Sydney’ and ‘Melbourne’ are being pronounced with a touch of open Aussie argot, but it’s done with a sort of knowing ironic comedy, in the way people sometimes refer to ‘Noo Yawk’ and ‘El Ay’. Americans, of course, are immune to all this because they pronounce everything wrong with gusto and utter certainty, and they should never ever be corrected. Imagining that Wooster sauce is actually pronounced ‘Worcestershire’ because that’s what’s written on the label is their prerogative. Far better and more honest to pronounce things in a way that suits your tongue than to pretend you have someone else’s.
I once saw a chap sing the famous Fred Astaire song, ‘Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off’. He’d never heard anyone else sing it, so he read the words from the sheet music, and falteringly started, ‘You say tomato, I say tomato. You say potato, I say potato. Tomato, tomato. Potato, potato’ – I’m sorry, but what are you all laughing at? I don’t think this is funny at all.
Big, bold Budapest
This Hungarian city has historically played second fiddle to Vienna, but Budapest has survived the misbegotten adventure of empire, and several wars, in better shape.
There is a rough old hitchhikers’ rule of hitchhikers’ thumb that if you want to get a really authentic feel for a country, go to the second city. I call it the Avis equation: they try harder. Second cities are always a bit chippy. Quick to take offence, bigger show-offs, faster to adopt new things, exploit the moment. Think Glasgow and Edinburgh, Milan and Rome, Siena and Florence, Bombay and New Delhi, Melbourne and Sydney, San Francisco and Los Angeles, Rio and São Paulo. It doesn’t work everywhere. Birmingham is not the funky boutique alternative to London. There is no French city that comes close to Paris as a destination.
I just got back from a metropolis that has the biggest and most engaging case of Avis-itis in the world, Budapest. It started off as two cities separated by one-upmanship and the Danube. Buda is quiet, residential and ornamental. Pest is paprika, musical and monumental. You’re probably trying to think what Hungary’s first city is if Budapest is the second. Well, stop. Budapest is the only city in Hungary. There is another one called Szeged down on the Serbian border, but by all accounts it’s not worth the bus fare. Budapest was the second city not of a country but of an empire. The Habsburg Empire. They called it the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but that was a bit like Pooh and Piglet. The Hungarians got a severe dose of sibling rivalry. Of all the people in the world, the ones you really don’t want to be patronised by in a confined space are the Austrians. The Austrians themselves suffered from being thought of as second-rate Germans and third-rate Italians.
Budapest did the thing that insecure siblings do to draw attention to themselves. They built bigger and bolder, dressed up brighter and fancier and played longer and louder. The first thing you notice about Budapest is the parliament. It is vast, and built in the Neo-Gothic style. The architect went to London to look at the Houses of Parliament for inspiration, and then thought, yes, they’re a start. We can do all of that, and add a dome. If this is the mother of parliaments, then we’ll build the daddy. It is particularly impressive considering Hungary hadn’t governed itself for 400 years. Chucking up a great Gothic pile like this is an act of stirring optimism or ridiculous play-acting. The city boasts some of the most attractive Baroque and Neo-Classical streets dotted with Art Nouveau exhibitionism.
And now that all the bombast and bluster and vanity and hubris of empire is gone, and Austria and Hungary have both been shorn and stripped by two hot wars and a cold one, they have both emerged straightened and convoluted, obtuse leftover nations that seem to have come through a long course of therapy. Austria is now non-aligned but seems more neutered than neutral. It’s Hungary that has come through the misbegotten adventure of empire in better shape. Smaller and poorer, but there’s a clas
sy feel of hip cynicism and sophisticated expectation here. Vienna lives on nostalgia, politeness and mad dreams, but Budapest has that second-city ability to adapt, to exploit the new. It wears the past, which is almost all bloody bad, with an elegant, rueful grace. Vienna wears it like a shroud.
I wasn’t expecting much from Budapest. Most people I asked said it was grey, cold, miserable and to eat before I went. Admittedly most of the people I asked were Viennese. I was lucky with the weather. It was bright and chilly, perfect for walking city streets. The cafés offer blankets so that you can sit outside till the last possible moment. I found excellent food. There is a beautiful central market inspired by Eiffel’s engineers, a warehouse of glass and girders. Inside there is a nostril-humping collation of pickles, preserves, paprika and pastries. Hungary is a long way from any coast, and it’s mostly a blasted steppe, so it’s free from fish or green vegetables, which is such a relief. You can concentrate on the veal stew, the sour cream, the dumplings, the plums and cinnamon.
