I spent last weekend in Hay-on-Wye, town of books and home to the renowned literary festival. Sadly, the only local culture I consumed was several pints of Wye valley beer which, as it happens, is very easy to drink. Whether you can class pub-hopping around Wales as an example of ‘travel’ I cannot say, although I’d like to think that Dylan Thomas would have approved.
On the other hand, Jan Morris, iconic travel writer and Observer journalist, would probably not agree. In this week’s archive magazine from 1977, she makes an impassioned case for the importance of overseas travel. ‘It can still broaden the mind, as well as (indisputably) the buttocks,’ she writes. ‘Some people maintain that for all of us travel has lost its meaning. The world is so shrunken by jets and electronics, by education and ideology, that everywhere is much the same as everywhere else,’ she adds.
And this was before the age of Instagram, where after 10 minutes of scrolling you’ve vicariously jetsetted around the world with a selection of bikini-clad ‘influencers’. I can almost taste their filtered Aperol spritzes now.
Morris recalls an intractable peer posing the question: ‘Why go to Majorca for your fish and chips?’ Because what is a holiday without battered cod and pulverised peas? We all know this person, don’t we: the mate at uni who only ate Pot Noodles for three years but drank five Appletisers at lunch because it says on the can they’re one of your five a day?
Morris would surely not approve. ‘The jets have not made the globe suburban, as the sophists say, they have made it common land,’ she writes. ‘Today, if we wish to live in a paradigm we must always be travelling. Restlessly, rootlessly we look for answers and even a week on the Costa Brava, even a seasick day trip to Boulogne, is a contribution to the quest.’
I wonder if she’d include a night out on the Malia strip. I think she would.
