On their way. Leaving Roissy.
The news that our daughter Louise and her companion arrived safely in Australia yesterday after a twenty-four hour flight won’t affect you as much as it did us. All the same, travel, its pleasures and difficulties, is among the most absorbing of human experiences, and journey’s end has inspired some memorable passages in art and literature. Louise’s first impressions of Sydney, “It’s pitch black but smells lovely,” may not attain the level of The Great Gatsby’s "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past," but easily beats Tolkien’s prosaic conclusion to The Lord of the Rings - “He drew a deep breath. 'Well, I'm back,' he said” – (if not my own favourite conclusion, from Samuel Beckett’s The Unanameable: “…you must go on, I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”)
They’re part of the common human experience, those feelings of trepidation and curiosity and fatigue but above all of expectation. “To awaken quite alone in a strange town,” the traveler Freya Stark wrote, “is one of the most pleasant sensations in the world. You are surrounded by adventure.”
That’s certainly how I remember my first night on British soil; the smoky chill of a country that still warmed itself with coal and wood; the feeling of cold seeping up through soles too thin for this climate; the genially incurious atmosphere of my first British pub and the taste of my first British drink, a mixture of peaty scotch and sweet, pungent ginger cordial, the Whisky Mac.
Maybe it’s me, but food has always played an important part in adjusting to somewhere new. To taste a country’s bread and drink its wine is a kind of sacrament. I felt that nowhere more than on a visit to New York some years ago.
An old friend had offered us his Manhattan apartment. But Marie-Dominique, who makes documentaries, got an unexpected commission, and Louise preferred to host a two-week round-the-clock beach party for her friends in our summer place – which we were forbidden to visit during that time, on risk of instant excommunication. So I ended up on West 28th Street alone.
Alone – but not lonely. Am I the only person who finds a special satisfaction in anonymity? That sense of a neutral space which you are free to fill as you please? For the period of your sequestration, you are whoever you choose to be. Leonard Cohen wrote of “laying low, and letting the hunt go by.” Something of that sense was the first pleasure of my visit.
The second was filling the refrigerator. My hosts had left a selection of nutritious, healthy but unimaginably dull foods, the culinary equivalent of a hair shirt. Within an hour, I was running amok in one of those vast supermarkets that seem to occupy every second corner in American cities.
Freeways of food.
European markets have aisles; these have avenues. Boulevards. Freeways of food. Fifty kinds of bread. Twenty kinds of muffins. Ten kinds of butter. Thirty varieties of milk. Fruits and vegetables the tastes of which one can only imagine – and therefore, of course, must buy, just to find out. And the meats; not just pork and beef but buffalo, ostrich, elk… I staggered out, loaded with enough provisions to feed Napoleon’s entire army on the retreat from Moscow.
I’d just packed them into the refrigerator when jet lag struck, and I fell into bed. It was only about 8pm local time, which meant I woke, refreshed and invigorated, at 3am. There’s no point in fighting it, so I brewed a pot of Outer Mongolian coffee, toasted a Transylvanian whole-grain muffin with Circassian date flakes, and settled down in front of the TV. After a few minutes staring in disbelief at ranting evangelists and beaming speakerines demonstrating exercise equipment, I took refuge in the all-movie channels. We all love doing something we know is not good for us, but it’s wonderful to have no choice. Watching Down Argentina Way with Betty Grable, Don Ameche and Carmen Miranda in that vivid 1940s colour gave the same guilty pleasure as eating peaches right out of the can.
By now, Louise and her friend will have woken from their first night in Australia. They’ll have made a breakfast that has nothing to do with croissants and confiture and coffee (at least as the French understand coffee) and will be thinking of how to spend the day, the week, the year.
I envy them. Again to quote Freya Stark, “This is a great moment, when you see, however distant, the goal of your wandering. The thing which has been living in your imagination suddenly becomes part of the tangible world. It matters not how many ranges, rivers or parching dusty ways may lie between you; it is yours now for ever.”