Once upon a time, about seven or eight years ago when I was living in Ireland, I went into town on a sunny day. As I was crossing the road, a rather scruffy man paused by me and said in a gruff but clear voice, “Well, do you want some lasagne?” I slowed down a bit but the question required some thought and before I could answer my feet had carried me away from him to the other side of the road, and then the traffic lights changed. His words had been clear and I was sure it was the word 'lasagne' I had heard and not something more nefarious. I wished that I had stopped, because I realised later that I had wanted some, and one should never turn down a lasagne.
On my twenty-first birthday I went to drink wine in the Hunter Valley, north of Sydney. I had planned to stay in Sydney for five more days, but having inadvertently checked into the worst hostel I could find, I awoke early on the morning of my birthday and decided that the world around me was far too interesting to spend a moment more of it in such a dive. I managed to wrangle a refund for all but one of the remaining nights by sweetly pulling the metaphorical birthday card, and jumped onto a train heading winewards. By lunchtime I was at McGuigan Wines, where I had a splendidly liquid birthday meal, which lengthened into the afternoon (I remain a big fan of McGuigan’s wines, by the way; I think they far surpass the usual New World supermarket blands.) As I wobblingly settled into the sunshine of my 22nd year, aided by a borrowed bicycle, countrywine lanes, and 11 hours of daylight, I met many fellow wine explorers at the YHA. One of them was another solo traveller; a tall Dutch woman whose hirecare one day suffered a flat tire. I think I must have naively asked her what she was going to do about it, because I remember her saying with some surprise, “Well, I’ll fix it, of course.” I asked if I could help her, and she replied, “No, but watch me and then you’ll know what to do. You ought to know these things, especially since you travel by yourself.” She hoisted up her long flowing dress, applied the wrench and jumped on it until it moved, jacked up the car, switched the wheels, lowered the car and tightened the nuts. It was fantastic. I’d had no idea it was so simple. She said matter-of-factly, as she washed her hands, “There. Now you don’t have to rely on anyone else when it happens to you.”
When I lived in Bristol somebody rapped at me. I was walking to work through the quiet Sunday streets, and as two girls approached me, one of them pushed her face into my face and rapped into it for what felt like a very long time. I was quite frightened, because she was very close to me and I was young in a new city, but also because her singing really was dreadful and I didn’t want her to ask me after she’d finished what I’d thought, because I might have got into some trouble involving more than just invasive face rapping. It wasn’t so much a naive melody sung into my mouth as a stream of verbal diarrhoea gushing in unasked. But thankfully she finished her song, and I looked at her and her friend looked at her too, and then they walked away, their shoulders thin and jaunty.
On my thirtieth birthday I went to the Royal Festival Hall on the Southbank to see a concert by the London Philharmonic Orchestra. Two rows in front of us there was an excitable man who silently but enthusiastically conducted the entire Dvořák Cello Concerto from his seat. Four empty chairs along from him was a stiff, elderly woman who was ostentatiously scowling at him over her severe spectacles. She seemed to be watching him more than the orchestra, but he appeared not to notice her, and was clearly having a jolly good time. Part-way through the Berlioz Symphonie Fantastique the woman leaned across, tapped him on the shoulder and loudly shushed him. He shrugged mildly, turned back to face the stage and was quiet for a moment. By this time we were all watching both of them, and sure enough he soon continued his conducting. This sent the woman into a still rage, and she leaned over again, and prodded him hard with a bony finger before putting it over her lips and frowning dramatically. He sat quietly for a second, and then turned to face her, made a ‘V’ sign with his fingers over his mouth and waggled his tongue grotesquely through them whilst rolling his eyes around madly. We burst out laughing behind her and she sat back primly in her seat and didn’t look at him again. At the end of the concert she stalked away coldly, but the man sat chatting to his fellow concert-goers around him, making them laugh, and telling them excitedly all about his first visit to London. It was clear which of the two had made the most of their time.
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| So long, my filthy travelling friend. You're a survivor. |
My little daysack, which had started travelling seriously when I did in 2004 on its first gap year and mine, finally packed up in November. It was a sweetly sad occasion, especially because I had only recently given it its first and last wash. It had faithfully accompanied me all over the world, and had absorbed more of my back sweat than perhaps any of my other belongings put together. By the time I checked in for my flight to Budapest last winter I knew the zips were too damaged to be useful, and I bought a fancy replacement from an airport shop with not a small amount of guilt. But I couldn’t bring myself to discard my original, even though the main compartment no longer stayed closed for long and it had been a liability in South Africa earlier that month, bursting open at random and discarding my belongings onto the street. I hugged it through the gate and onto the plane, and then it sat in the hotel room for three days, looking sad and crumpled. On the way home, I knew that I needed to let it go, and hugged it around the city all morning looking for the right resting place. It was a very cold day and I almost left it by a pile of street litter just so I could put my hands back in my pockets. And then I saw him: an old, wrinkled man who was probably half the age the stress on his face made him appear after years on the weathered streets. I didn’t speak Hungarian and he had no English but I offered him my little rucksack and his face lit up in a wide, toothless smile. He nodded eagerly and held out his arms like a delighted child, and thanked me. As I walked away, I turned to wave and saw he was hugging my little bag as tightly I had over the years.
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