Friday 24 March 2017

A place of which we had no memories

Back to Alain de Botton and The Art of Travel: the allure of the idea that a plane might take you to a place where no one knew you and no one cared i.e. the chance to live a different way.
De Botton says he often goes to Heathrow when feeling sad to find solace in the sights of travel.
"The constant calls of the screens, some accompanied by the impatient pulsing of a cursor, suggest with what ease our seemingly entrenched lives  might be altered, were we to walk down a corridor and on to a craft that in a few hours would land us in a place of which we had no memories and where no one knew our names."
The false promises of travel.
You could do the same thing of course by jumping on an unfamiliar bus route and staying until the end. That's enough to jolt you out of the ordinary. (In Iris, John Bayley describes how he and his wife Iris Murdoch used to do this.)
In the 20 odd years,  I lived in Shepherds Bush, I never took the 260 to Golders Green...Ridiculous.



Reading and watching

  • Foot by Foot to Santiago de Compostela/Judy Foot
  • The Testament of Mary with Fiona Shaw at the Barbican
  • The Testament of Mary/Colm Toibin
  • Schwanengesang/Schubert - Tony Spence
  • Journals/Robert Falcon Scott
  • Fugitive Pieces/Ann Michaels
  • Unless/Carol Shields
  • Faust/Royal Opera House
  • The Art of Travel/Alain de Botton
  • Mad Men Series 6
  • A Week at The Airport/Alain de Botton
  • The Railway Man/Eric Lomax
  • Bright Lights, Big City/Jay McInerney
  • Stones of Venice/John Ruskin
  • The Sea, the Sea/Iris Murdoch
  • Childe Harold/Lord Byron
  • All The Pretty Horses/Cormac McCarthy
  • Extreme Rambling/Mark Thomas
  • Story of my Life/Jay McInerney
  • Venice Observed/Mary McCarthy