by A. A. Gill
But I think space has missed the boat, or perhaps the rocket. Nothing has been as downgraded in the collective imagination as astronauts. In the ’60s, they were the apogee of human achievement. Spacemen embodied everything we aspired to as a species. If you viewed natural selection as a pyramid with the Welsh at the bottom, the pointy stone at the top was a man wearing a fish tank on his head. Today an astronaut is a Russian plumber who’s gone into orbit to mend the air-conditioning or to unblock the gravity-dunny. When was the last time you knew the name of a spaceman? (And we’re not counting Buzz Lightyear.)
The space station looks like a postgraduate student hostel. Now that NASA has been told it’s not going anywhere and its role will be to train pilots to give tours around guided-launch sites to a diminishing band of science-fiction nerds, space has become the great disappointment of our time. It embodied so much; it was all so rich in metaphor.
I went to the Museum of Cosmonautics in Moscow once. It was virtually empty except for a few dissolute schoolkids being prodded around by physics teachers. It’s not popular in Russia now; too redolent of old redfaced communists. The rockets and the silver suits look like bad props from cheap movies. The one thing that grabbed my attention was a tiny Sputnik that had taken Laika the dog into space. It wasn’t the original, of course. That, unlike Lassie, never came home. There was a stuffed dog strapped into the replica, and I wondered at the very Dostoevskian irony of one dog being condemned to death by being sent into the great never-never, and another one murdered to represent the first one when it was alive.
The problem with space was that the trinity of places didn’t obey the terrestrial rules. The imagined place was so grand, so replete with expectation and fiction that the real place couldn’t compete. Indeed, the real place turned out to be no place at all. And the memories that came back from it were so mundane, so weird, so middle American, so earthbound that before we ever took off it became dull and suburban, full of second-hand satellites and GPS signals, a junk-lot of ugly bits of silver stuff. We ruined it without ever having gone there. The abiding memory of space may be of old Buzz gliding along on one arthritic leg, arms outstretched, to the sound of ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’, to obscurity and beyond.
The fall of summer
It’s always summer that gets the girl and has the time of its life. But autumn, especially in the beautiful countryside of northern England, has charms of its own.
One of the rarely mentioned but horribly inequitable truths of life is that the rich not only live longer than the rest of us, but they get more summers. For you and I, summers come but once a year, and often, up here in Blighty, it doesn’t even come then. But for the leisured and sybaritic, they can have as many as two or three summers in a year. I’ve known men whose entire lives have been one long summer. They savour bits of their own and then take bits of other people’s around the world. It should be possible to work out a global itinerary where you can keep travelling elliptically north-west to south-east forever running between the solstices. Solsterie. Solstercii.
Most people who travel occasionally only know the world in brightness and warmth. Of all the seasons, summer has the best PR, gets all the glossy spreads and the lounging bikini shots. It’s always summer that gets the girl and has the time of its life. Summer is the Marilyn Monroe of the seasons. The hot good time that is had by all and ends in tears.
But if you travel in the heat and the bright, you miss a lot of the subtlety of the world.
Northern Europe is marvellous in the winter. The smell of cloves and hot wine, cinnamon and chocolate, the glow of candles, the ancient festivals and feasts, velvet and fur. And everyone should experience one monsoon in their lives. The heavy, hot, humid expectation of rain, the teasing dry thunder, the clouds gathering and then the downpour, the refreshing, rehydrating release of it. And you should see the desert after it rains to realise the tenacity and patience of nature’s optimism.
Here, at home in England, my favourite season isn’t summer, which is mostly a chilly drizzling disappointment, a test of the water-resistance of platitudes, cream teas and the transparency of soaked summer frocks. Summer in England, with all its mythologised bee-humming somnambulant village-cricket-on-the-green resonances is mostly a creation of nostalgia. Stories that start, ‘It was one of those glorious summer days …’ Glorious summer days are miraculous things, and memories are often transported to them retrospectively to add lustre.
My favourite season is autumn. This century is being blessed with exceptional autumns. It may be a dividend of global warming. Country men, those perennial weatherbores, stand on gates and say, ‘The hornbeam has never been this late, we haven’t had a decent frost yet, the chaffinches are still in the ash.’ There are still unicorns in the top pasture and the mute swans are talking gibberish. And it’s already November. Country lore is all about things going wrong or being dead or barren. But the trees have grown New World-gaudy. The hedgerows are heavy with rowans and sloes. The mildness of the season means that some of the greenery hangs on to the very last. A rose in my garden bursts a final bloom of white, like the ultimate shot of summer’s ack-ack.
Autumn’s the time I like to go to the countryside. In fact, it’s the only time I can abide the countryside. It smells differently now, ripe and juicy, the scent of fresh rot and leaf mulch, fox piss and wood smoke. There are mushrooms in the oak woods, chanterelles and cepes pushing through the mould. The mornings are hooded in mists that make the coppices and woods look like green islands in a white sea. Sodden straggling sheep chew over harvested fields. The scent of turned earth and straw. The light slants at you sideways, shredded into filigree patterns by the branches of beeches and chestnuts. The air is the colour of weak tea. Autumn is particularly good because not only is the country dressed for the weather, but so can you be. Summer is so unflattering for men over 30. Far better to wear tweed and corduroy, leather and stout boots.
I’ve just come back from Northumberland, the most northerly and one of the least-visited counties in England. And possibly my favourite. Its next-door neighbour, Cumbria, gets all the plaudits and poems, containing as it does the Lake District, with its maudlin doggerel and obsessive-depressive hikers. Cumbria is a steady stream of Bri-Nylon hill-walkers, cloudy-breathed and bandy-legged, looking for tea shops run by lost hippies.
Northumberland has none of that. It’s a tightly inverted place with few tourist attractions. There’s the scar of Hadrian’s Wall, a few squat market towns like Hexham, the border city of Berwick-upon-Tweed that used to be the second most populous in Scotland before it was annexed by Edward I as a staging post for his invasions (although technically it’s English, its football team is in the Scottish league). It has a feeling of a place apart, sitting behind Tudor battlements waiting for the worst. There is the great spine of the Cheviot Hills that marks the border with Scotland, bruised with heather and green granite, dusted with snow before the rest of the country has picked its last apples or put on its central heating.
And there is the coast that only a drunk teenager, a seal or a labrador would swim in, that is one of the most searingly beautiful stretches of shore in Europe. Ruffled and salt-scarred, it has the great castles of Bamburgh and Alnwick and the magic, holy island Lindisfarne, where Christianity clung to northern Europe during the Dark Ages, a little glinting gleam that sheltered Bede and the Pentecostally inspired illuminators of gospels. This was the coast that the Viking longships most commonly raided, and Northumberland became the heart of a Viking kingdom. The people here still talk with a rolling semi-Scandinavian lilt and have the look of rape and pillage about them.
This was always a hard place. After the Vikings, it had three centuries of border wars. Northumberland was constantly at feud with its neighbours in the lowlands. The battles were vicious, the memories long and the mutual impoverishment of the border debilitating, even to this day. Northumberland lacks the manor houses and rich farms that spread through the rest of England after the Tudors. Here, there are
the stumpy remains of peel towers, plain defensive forts. It has a broad, hard, rolling landscape that’s the perfect evocation of its mystical and murderous history. People here don’t move around much – they stick close to the land, and they treat it and curse it with a tough love for a small living. Autumn is a perfect time to see Northumberland. And last weekend was one of those glorious autumn days.
Extreme of consciousness
One day a refugee camp, the next a South-of-France soiree … true extreme travel is not remote and dangerous places, but the juxtaposition of opposites.
Chad, a land where the sun doesn’t just shine, it polishes and scrubs until you feel like a gay gardener’s fly button. Chad, where a thin stick’s shadow counts as airconditioning, where you can fry an egg on the Land Rover bonnet – in the middle of the night. Chad, where you don’t sweat and you don’t pee, you just evaporate. I’ve been to some hot places, and in general I don’t mind. It’s certainly preferable to the alternative. But the heat in Chad is something else: 34ºC in the shade at 6am.
You get the feeling that Chad is only a country because cartographers, like quilt makers, can’t abide gaps. It’s essentially somewhere to put the right-hand corner of the Sahara, and to stop Libya slipping into Nigeria. The capital, N’Djamena, has an airport. It has an airport to make itself feel like a destination. For some fathomless reason, aeroplanes seem to think it’s a destination, too. It’s a two-storey place of whitewashed breeze-block, barbed-wire, filigreed shade trees and dusty dogs who are all cousins.
It’s tough travelling in Chad. You either drive in the bucking, tyre-sucking mine-strewn roads in a bread-oven Toyota or you fly. To fly, you have to beg a ride from the United Nations or a charity. Getting charity from a charity is tough. You get bumped off. And that means you can get left for a week in some place so bereft it doesn’t even have flies.
I was here to cover a story about refugees from a nasty genocidal war being waged across the border in Sudan. You don’t feel like eating much in a refugee camp, even when there is something to eat. But after 10 days of tepid, sulky water and melted chewing gum, you begin to feel like you’re self-ingesting.
I was lying one sweltering night under a mosquito net up against a mud wall watching the shooting stars spin past a minaret of a distant mosque. We were right on the border with Sudan, over a dry stream. The other half of the town lay deserted, pockmarked in the silver light.
‘If you could eat anything, what would it be right now?’ asked the photographer. Oh, don’t start with the last-orders desert-island stuff. It just makes you miserable and ravenous. I haven’t thought about food for days. ‘Yeah, but what would it be?’ I closed my eyes and saw, smelt, touched and tasted two soft-boiled eggs in a blue-and-white eggcup. A baguette with pale white, sweet, cool butter and runny wild-strawberry jam. A bowl of coffee with just a touch of chicory. A jug of hot milk. I could feel the thick napkin and smell the early-morning lavender.
Now, I’ve often played ‘My Favourite Meal’, and over the years it’s evolved into quite an elaborate repast, demanding a number of chefs, an epicurean treasure-trove of ingredients and a platoon of staff to prepare and serve. I never imagined that when the chips were down, so to speak, I’d conjure up a continental breakfast. ‘What would you have?’ I asked the snapper. ‘Oh, I’ll have what you’re having. Order two. Tell room service to mind the goats. And to bring some ice – I’d like some ice.’
We did the story. We toured the camps and the therapeutic feeding centres for the tiny children that lie, listless with wide eyes, too exhausted to cry, and we started to make the long trip back to N’Djamena, getting to a French Foreign Legion airbase to catch a UN flight.
Nervously, I waited for the fixer to allot our seats. Just as we were about to get on, a Jeep spun up with an immaculate government minister in it. He stepped out with a French paratrooper escort. He’s going to nick my seat. Then behind him a pick-up arrived, and in the back of the pick-up was a crate, and in the crate, nearly head high, was a lady ostrich.
The captain, a Dane in Ray-Bans, took one chilly Nordic look and said, ‘The ostrich is a flightless bird.’ I bounded up the steps and strapped myself in. The minister bumped out a relief nurse who’d just spent three months in an emergency hospital and had a weekend’s leave, and we taxied off. I watched the paratrooper, eyes slitted against the prop dust, standing beside the ostrich in a box. They both looked mightily pissed off.
That night I sat drinking warm Coke in the blacked-out international airport, crossing and uncrossing my fingers for the flight to Paris. In Paris, I ran through terminals to jump a flight to Nice. In Nice, I was picked up by a limo and driven to a villa on the tip of St Tropez. In the villa was my girlfriend. ‘Sit here in the garden,’ she said. ‘You must be hungry.’
I sat and looked out over the chickens and the orchard and the vineyard and the great, cantilevered parapluie pines, down across the fields full of wildflowers and out to sea. I was still in the clothes I’d travelled in. My bush jacket stiff with Africa. My hair thick with Africa. My new beard smelling of Africa. And there were two soft-boiled eggs – and you know the rest.
It was all exactly as I’d imagined it, right down to the whisper of chicory in the coffee. It was one of those small moments of connectedness that have a monumental significance. It’s difficult to explain, but I felt like time had been threaded through the eye of a needle. It was a moment when the fact lived up to the expectation.
That night I ate in one of my favourite restaurants in the world, the Auberge de la Mole in the hills above St Tropez. Rillettes and pâté, intense little cornichons. Delectable frogs’ legs kicking in butter and garlic. A tournedos Rossini with a duvet of thick foie gras. Finely sliced waxy potatoes baked duck fat-crisp in a timbale. Perfect roquefort and a sweet French snog of a dribbling crème brûlée. That’s an almost perfect menu.
The next day we went along the coast to the Cap d’Antibes and a yacht moored off the Eden-Roc Hotel for Vanity Fair’s Cannes film festival party. It was extreme. The distance between Chad and Antibes is about as radical as you could arrange in this world, and actually the combination was immensely invigorating. I rather thought that I’d suffer from whingeing culture shock and get all sulky about the conspicuous consumption and the vanity of Vanity Fair and Hollywood sur-la-mer. But, actually, I really adored it.
In previous years I’ve affected a blasé ennui, but a week in a desert refugee camp makes you realise nothing can be taken for granted, and the sin of luxury is not in the thing itself but in failing to appreciate it. That’s not trite – well, it is trite, but it doesn’t stop it being true. True extreme travel is not remote and dangerous places, but the juxtaposition of opposites.
I’m going to start doing binary shock holidays. Havana, then Reykjavik. Cairo, then South Georgia. The Vatican, then Easter Island. It doesn’t even have to be expensive or difficult. You could work out an extreme binary day break, such as a lap-dancing lunch and then your mother-in-law’s for dinner.
Terminal love
In the arrivals hall, it’s hard not to be moved by the great black lake of tears that immigration leaves behind.
Airports. You’ve got to love them. No, really. You have got to love them. At least, you must learn to appreciate them. If you don’t, life will be a constant dung sarnie of places you want to be sandwiched between termini of frustration and worry, boredom and fury.
I get on with airports. I like the way they look. I appreciate their ergonomics, their thousands of moving parts, the ant-hill logistics of getting everything in and out. You couldn’t have come up with something more complicated, thousands of people separated from thousands of pieces of luggage, having to be in a certain seat at a precise time to go up to hundreds of destinations. Add thousands of bits of separated luggage and their people coming the other way, all speaking different languages, some travelling for the first time, some for the umpteenth. And just to make it all more exciting, you have to assume that any one of th
em might be a self-martyring mass murderer and that they will all want to spend 10 pounds on something they didn’t know they needed, and a penny, which they probably suspected they would need.
My love of airports is based on going somewhere, or coming back from somewhere. I’m rarely in airports for any other reason. But last week, I went to Gatwick to meet my daughter. I can’t remember the last time I met someone at an airport or indeed was met by anyone who wasn’t a driver. But part of the drama of an airport is walking through the exit at the arrivals lounge, the anxiety of luggage and passports and customs behind you, and that audience expectant and attentive. You move through the door, humping your rucksack, rumpled from the flight, still smelling of air freshener and with bits of exploding bread rolls collected in the folds of your sticky shirt and suddenly you’re on stage. For a fleeting moment, you think that maybe, just perhaps, there will be someone here for you.
This is an intense and fraught stage, live with expectation, and among the lounging, bored drivers with their scrawled cardboard signs of misspelt names and company logos, there are also the worried faces of family, friends. And as you slide past them, you can see little narratives: a woman waiting for a man she fell in love with over the internet and has never met, an immigrant’s child finally given a visa, the divorced parent coming for a brief summer holiday – all the gossamer loose ends of human relationships waiting to be tied up in this concourse.
It’s the constant darning of the oldest plot in the world: departures and arrivals, the most ancient saga of travelling and returning. You realise that leaving your clan, your protective family group, is fraught. Our natural genetic impulse is to stay close: our history, our tribal instinct, pulls us back together. Our emotions twist the pressure with homesickness and longing, missing the taste of familiar food, the smell of childhood. All that nostalgia, that awkward nag of belonging, the tug of home, all tell us where we should be.
