Here and There

by A. A. Gill

  Algerian conversation seems to be mostly threats and insults. The threats are vicious, the insults brilliant. You spend your time gasping, and laughing. For more than 15 years, Algeria has been impaled on one of the most terrifying civil wars of the last century and this is barely reported because few journalists want to take the risk. The fight was between a military-backed residually centralist communist government and a radical fundamental Islamic movement that was imported by Algerians who had gone to fight with the Mujaheddin in Afghanistan.

  The terror that has stalked the streets of Algiers and the villages of the interior is of a nightmarish intensity. The army and the fundamentalists raised each other in a pitiless game of revenge and monstrous example. Until now, they’ve slaughtered and tortured, threatened, blackmailed and terrified themselves into a state of shivering inertia. It’s not peace, it’s a breathless, crouched horror. People talk of the war in the hushed tones that gothic fairytales use to describe the monsters in the night. The war is the hideous, flesh-eating, throat-slitting prayer-mumbling orc. It’s not over, it’s just a war that’s consumed all its own oxygen and is gasping in shock.

  As I write this, a busload of soldiers have been ambushed in the night. The war, the curfews, the fear, have wiped all the public fun off the face of Algiers. People talk of the night-life that once was, the sophistication of the bars and the cafés, the beauty of the women, the little pastries, the cocktails, the glamour. This was a great city with wit, poise, élan and passion. It had a Mediterranean culture, with writers and poets and musicians and sentimental torch singers crooning love and betrayal. They’re all gone. There are cafés, there are restaurants, but as the sun sets the city is given over to roadblocks, and police checks, and men with judicious machine guns.

  Along the coast, there are seaside resorts with bars where men go to drink and take chubby, busty girls with vicious blonde hair and faces of brazen shame. And the singers still croon their warbling yearning over Hammond organ backbeats. The drinks are ridiculously expensive. Men become ostentatious and they hand fistfuls of notes to the singers who in turn mention their names with praise. These nightclub acts become the amplified praisers and everybody else listens with the casual good humour that you would use for listening to the stewardess’s safety instructions. They drink and they cheer and they blow a month’s wages to hear themselves proclaimed rich, attractive and happy by a sequined lounge act. It’s an act of extraordinary catharsis, both pathetic and touching.

  The food here is good and simple and generous – lots and lots of sardines and mint tea. The sun warms, the breeze from the sea is welcome. But you probably won’t be visiting Algiers. It’s not a holiday destination. It doesn’t yet offer those things that holidays demand. But it is nonetheless memorable. Sometimes the places that stay with you the longest are the awkward, demanding and frightening ones.

  At twilight, before the fist of the sun fries in the sea, the golden hour bathes the white stucco and families collect on the promenade at the very edge of the city around a small fair with roundabouts and rides for toddlers and coloured lights and tinny music, clowns’ faces, livid sweets and balloons. It’s like the desperate carnival at the end of a bad dream. Boys play football and army conscripts shadow-box.

  The holiday pitch

  Another golf course and swaying palm tree. Why are countries so bad at revealing what is beguiling and unique about themselves in tourism ads?

  Up here in the old hemisphere, this is the dream season, the time of reverie, of trance travel. This is when we all imagine what it would be like to be hot, to walk without rubber soles. It’s the holiday tease-time, when the brochures land with the thud of a ripe mango on the carpet and TV is sultry and juicy with advertisements for countries flashing their take-me-I’m-yours sides.

  I’m constantly amazed at how un-self-aware travel ads are. They are presumably made by bright men in coloured spectacles with comedy face-hair and chubby girls with sagging cleavages and champagne breath who collectively call themselves creatives and have spent a year hock-deep in the freebie trough thoroughly raping and pillaging the mini-bars of the poor developing nations they’ve been employed to project and sell like a willing tart in the slave market. Their creative impressions of the country will have been rigorously scrutinised by a boardroom full of suited and aspirational indigenous civil servants, keen that the world see them in their best light. So how on earth do they arrive at so many golf courses?

  Egypt advertises itself with the music of an Italian – Verdi’s Aida. Which, while being essentially a story of ancient pharaoh-folk, is a bit like Japan advertising itself with the soundtrack from The Mikado. And to the rising arias, there’s film of someone playing golf and galloping on a horse. If you’ve been to Egypt, you’ll know that golf and horses are not the lasting memories. Where is the shot of the tourist with his head in the toilet? Where is the man in a nightie flogging a donkey to death? Where are the charming and ornamental military policemen, the attendant urchins chanting ‘Manchester United, jingle bells, jingle bells, give me a dollar?’ And where is the soundtrack of omnipresent Egyptian pop music, the frantic tinny twank of unrequited love and chicken slaughter?

  Last night I saw an ad that looked like a modernist Finland in the sun, with a lot of people dancing around in a ’70s-hippie California-esque encounter-group sort of way. Then someone played golf, and a girl in a bikini swam, and there was a close-up of an eye with gold makeup. Where were we supposed to be? Where was it that I wanted to be? Not only couldn’t I tell the country, I had no idea which continent I was supposed to be hankering after. It turned out to be somebody’s approximation of Greece. Greece? Where was the cloud of smog? Where was the fat bloke with hairy shoulders in the wife-beater selling bellybutton rings and ouzo bottles in the shape of a penis? Where were the queues of coaches on the terrifying road up the mountain? The plastic menus with pictures of livid puce kebabs? Where was the inexplicable bloody theme tune from Zorba?

  Playing beat-the-intro on tourist ads is a great indoor sport. The American one playing here at the moment features the titles for films with states in the title, and invites you to visit the sets. Understandably most people would be attracted to America by what they’ve seen on the big screen, but it’s a hostage to sequels. They don’t, for instance, include Mississippi Burning or Paris, Texas, or even Birth of a Nation. There are far more movies that would terrify you into never wanting to go anywhere near America. Oklahoma, for instance: aggressive baritone cowboys line-dancing in gingham. What they don’t advertise, of course, is the fact that most people aren’t even invited to America. I know for a fact that they don’t make a Spanish version of this commercial.

  Australia’s ad isn’t much better. Australia is advertised with the usual golfing, galloping and carefree swimming. No sign of the flotsam of bluebottles or the miasma of flies. The tagline is ‘Where the Bloody Hell Are You?’ Which was supposed to sound both authentically ocker and Pom-friendly, which is obviously oxymoronic. There’s an old subeditors’ rule that says never write a headline that’s a question: it instantly invites the wrong answer. So in reply to where the bloody hell are you, most of us think, we know where we are, where the bloody hell are you? You’re 24 hours in a limb-numbing farrowing cage away, watching Friends and Crocodile Dundee on a screen made out of melted plastic bags next to a Hasidic rabbi who’s memorising the Torah out loud, and an infant with a mouth the size of a great white and a bladder the size of a condom nipple, breathing the communal pint of air a thousand recycled times. Have you ever thought that flying from London to Sydney is probably as ethereally intimate as having carnal relations with every person on the plane? That’s where the bloody hell you are: the other side of a group heavy-breathing cluster-frot.

  Why are countries so bad at knowing what it is about themselves that charms and beguiles? Why are they so unaware of their real talents and assets, so keen to propagate the pat clichés of themselves, the postcard trite, and the vanity? The nations east o
f Rangoon bid for our holiday money by looking identical. Bring on the clones of salaaming women in hobbling silk, some sort of hotel foyer folk-dance that’s only bearable for a couple of seconds, a beach, a high-rise, neon and moonlight. A bright market with a smiley wrinkle-faced old woman, then a beautiful hostess. And, of course, golf.

  From Malaya to Indonesia, they’re all the same, and imply that perhaps what holiday-makers want is not an authentic experience, but a predictable generic one. Last week I watched an ad for a beach. It was so ubiquitous it could’ve been anywhere on the globe between Capricorn and Cancer. It was a primary snap of ‘holiday’: bendy palms, white sand, pale-blue sea, and I sneered and thought, who’d fall for that? And then came the punchline. With a start, I realised I’d just got back. I still had the sand in my bag and the peeling nose. It was the Seychelles, a place with a simple, binary CV: sun and sand.

  It’s barely been inhabited for a geological blink. It is a country blissfully unencumbered by history, plague, natural disaster, pogrom, invasion or religious fervour. It has no man-made thing that’s worth crossing a street to view. It has precious little in-your-face or up-your-nose culture. It is just a collection of the most perfect icing-sugar beaches that regularly win best beach awards. But, actually, when you’re there, that all comes as a blessed, remarkable relief. There isn’t even a souvenir; you’d be pressed to buy a coconut letter-rack. Still, this is a place of subtle and profound thoughts which hiss out of the surf and rustle in the damp broad-leaf forest.

  Here are a couple of holiday facts that they won’t put in the ad: the Seychelles immigration stamp is a line drawing of the indigenous coco de mer, the largest seed in the world, famous for being a representation of a lady’s pudendum with a Brazilian. Therefore, the only way you can get a picture of a lady’s front-bottom officially printed in your passport is to go to the Seychelles. You can also get locked up for 10 years for stealing a coconut. They are fearsomely protected; this may be the most draconian punishment in all the world. The national dish is fruit bat curry. If you ask, they’ll say, as people always do, that it tastes a bit like chicken. It doesn’t taste remotely like chicken. It tastes like muscly liver and has bones like snapped darning needles, but it is exceptionally good. The fairy terns are so numerous that islanders used to break the eggs into oil drums and sell the yolks to house-paint manufacturers. The Seychelles is the world’s largest exporter of sea cucumbers. And there is a golf course.

  Down at heel

  Avert your eyes from Puglia’s poverty and corruption and it’s easy to lapse into the notion of idyllic Italy.

  The more you travel, the more you resent expectations. If you go on holiday once a year, then the expectation is all part of it – perhaps the biggest part of it. The planning, the shopping, the brochure worship, the web’s hol-porn.

  But expectation is essentially wishful preparation, either for a repeat of the experience you had last year or for one that someone else has told you about. Expectations pre-suppose and pre-design what you’re going to see, but they don’t pre-destine. More often than not, expectations pre-order disappointment. But still they are what the travel business is based on, all that wishful photography, the mahogany prose written in coconut oil. If you travel not to rest but to be excited, not to unwind but to be wound, if you want uncomfortable in new ways rather than comfortable in the same old ways, then expectations are like safety rails or wheelchair access. Expectations are nature trail arrows in the forest, and expectations are all factor 40.

  Ideally, you want to travel in neutral, without the hindrance of preconceptions. It is the great truism of abroad that the best places are the most unexpected, and they’re rarely the most pampering. But it’s almost impossible to travel in a state of balanced innocence. Sit and play geographical tennis with the person opposite you in the office. You just say a place name and they say the first thing that comes to mind. You’ll be amazed at the depth of prejudice and preconception you hold for the world. It was ever thus. Herodotus started it. He populated the globe with dogfaced men, people who used their feet as sun shades, and women with breasts large enough to incubate chickens. We laugh, knowing that in fact that’s only true about Armenia.

  Nowhere in the world is as thickly swagged and laden with expectations, wishful thinking and preconceptions as Italy. It’s difficult to know if Italy actually exists under the weight of holiday romance that is laid on top of it. In Italy only the most sensitive traveller could get bruised by the pea of reality hidden under all the mattresses of wishful thinking.

  Italy is most painstakingly defined by northern Europe, and in particular by the English. The English are like Italy’s plastic surgeons. Every year, thousands of them arrive wearing Panama hats and stupid lovelorn grins, and lift away the wrinkles, shove ever-larger inserts into its sagging cleavage and declare that if heaven is as good as Tuscany then God’s doing okay. The adoration is pretty indiscriminate. From the ruins and empty motorways of Sicily to the industry and damp fogs of the Po Valley, the latest part, the most recent part, to be massaged with the purple prose of votive Englishmen is Puglia. It is the most fashionable place to be this summer. There is plenty of scope for virgin preconception (though that sounds like an oxymoron).

  Puglia is the heel of the boot of Italy, a long, thin strip that stretches down the Adriatic coast. It is principally famous for its trulli houses, small, stone, round hovels with pointy black roofs. It looks as if Italy were once inhabited by a race of Arts and Crafts hobbits. It is rustic and hot and out of the way, unless you’re an Albanian or a West African refugee, in which case it is in the way just in time.

  Puglia has had the sort of history you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy, unless your worst enemies were Italian peasants. They were originally colonised by the Greeks, and then the Romans, the Normans, the Saracens, the Kingdom of the two Sicilies. Most of their landlords were absent and careless and greedy. Puglia doesn’t have anything worth having except for figs and olives and some fish and a lot of time. It is a very poor place, and it has been for longer than anyone has spoken their particular variation of Italian. A unified state didn’t improve much or serve them any better. It’s a long way from Rome down here, and the power has slipped easily into the hard hands of a particularly relentless version of the mafia. There is endemic corruption, protection, and quite a lot of kidnapping. The local government is communist. Communists like big capital projects. They like to build things. Building things is a way to a better future. Socialism has meant making this bit of Italy very built. Being poor, they receive lots of grants from the EU and the central government, so the communists build roads and business parks and spaghetti factories and high-rise housing for Albanian refugees. Except they don’t build them, of course. The mafia does the building, with substandard material and poor-quality finishing. And sometimes they don’t even bother finishing at all. The hulks of central planning graft litter Puglia.

  But if you’re English, it doesn’t matter, because you won’t see any of that. When you drive to Lecce, you simply won’t see the miles of stained semi-slum, or the permanent roadworks, or the boarded-up petrol stations, or the blocks of apartments strung with the faded sports clothes and nylon sheets of immigrants. You won’t see any of that, because your eye is refined enough to filter it all out and bask in the marvel of the finest baroque city in southern Europe.

  There is no denying that Lecce is spectacular. It’s baroque, but not in the way the Romans would know baroque, or the southern Germans, or the Austrians. It’s not baroque like St Paul’s Cathedral. It’s baroque that has been learnt by correspondence school by people who don’t read too well. It is a style imposed on Puglia by its absent landlords and the fourth great power in the land: the church. Have you noticed that the poorest places have the grandest churches? It’s no accident. It’s far easier to get money out of the destitute than the filthy rich. The poor want to go to a better place. The rich know there isn’t going to be a better place.

  Puglia�
��s baroque has a folk art vitality. It’s an exclamation of lust and humour and anger and the sly revenge of peasants, because in the end the peasants always get you. They outlast money, titles, power, fear and even God. All the great buildings – the cathedrals, the churches, the palaces – vibrate with an earthy mockery. It’s baroque that’s been applied by teams of pâtissiers. They call Lecce the Florence of the south. It couldn’t be less like Florence. Florence was built from banking and insurance and monopolies and dirty politics. Lecce rises out of oppression, comes despite the servitude.

  But you don’t need to worry about all that. Raise your eyes above it. Only the tasteless and the ethically bovine notice the plumbing when there’s a west front to marvel at. Practise and you’ll be able to wipe out the rubbish, the cracked concrete, the water-stained office blocks. They just disappear. The West African immigrants selling knock-off Ray-Bans and Prada for mafia gangs will begin to look like colourful Othellos. The Gypsy children will be bucolic urchins. The girls will only be beautiful bodies pacing the middle distance. Everything can be brushed and burnished into a classic once-a-year idyll if you sit in the shade of a vineyard’s awning and feel the cold beads of condensation on your glass, smell the cypresses and the verbena heavy in the air, listen to the chatter of sparrows and the thrum of crickets, smell the tomato and the garlic stewing in the kitchen, read a couple of lines of Henry James and think that there is nowhere quite like Italy. Oblivious of the truth. And in many ways you’re right. There is nowhere like Italy.

  The shock factor

  The nastiest culinary surprises are those encountered close to home.