Sunday e-mail 1st September

Riots, two-tier policing, feather-bedding. Better things to worry about

And just like that, here I am. Back. ‘Jason,’ you’ll be saying, ‘we did not know you were away. What mighty business has attracted your attention? What Herculean tasks have you been busy accomplishing in your unannounced absence?’

The answer, it may not surprise you to learn, is backpacking. Long-term readers may recall my passion for the railway schedule, the Lonely Planet Guide, the bottled water… This summer my beautiful wife and I took the long trip from Strasbourg to Corfu, via Naples and Athens. We had a lovely time. But don’t worry, I shan’t tell you about it. In fact, I mention it only to explain why, despite the notorious events in the UK over the last several weeks, I have remained silent on the topic of the Southport stabbings, riots, two-tier policing, and the like. They are worthy topics all, for a Substack about Crime & Psychology. We take address them in the weeks ahead. So much for content. What about form?

A strange, distanced feeling comes over a person who is eating a Greek salad in his sandals (the person, not the sandals) while contemplating riots and imprisonments back in his home country. The experience seems like a paradigm of postmodernity. It as if the crimes and riots themselves were somehow a secondary phenomenon, necessary only in so far as they were able to generate news reports, social-media memes, topics for podcasts. Is this how we consume news now? The raw experience of being in the world – the quiddity - counts for little or nothing until it is packaged or mediated and we are told what to think about it.

Here is the great writer, Robert Louis Stevenson:

“For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilisation, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints.”

Stevenson might be horrified to walk down any road in the western world today. You could imagine him, lithely dodging the pedestrians who shambled past, staring phonewards, eyes unblinking, earphones jammed home, feather-bedding all tucked in. Every opinion encountered one that we agree with already; every streetcorner the site of yet another frothy-coffee outlet.

The needs and hitches that Stevenson wrote about – they are inconvenient and troublesome. No one today has time or headspace enough to venture into an environment in which to find dinner or drinkable water or walk up a hill in 38-degree temperatures are the order of the day…yet those are precisely the challenges their brains are designed and evolved to deal with. Such, after all, is life. These are the materials of which it is made. We need those needs (we need those hitches, too). The best and only cure for not wanting to go backpacking is to go backpacking.

A new academic year is about to start. Like every other academic, I dread not so much the raw experience of teaching but the packaging, the mediation, everything the Human Resources department requires. There will be forms to complete, bureaucrats to appease, admin to be set on fire and thrown out of the window. All of it is feather-bedding. Robert Louis Stevenson would have had none of it.

‘What,’ I’m sure you are asking, ‘about this week’s bullet list, Jason? What do you have in store for us?’

Under the circumstances, this week’s bullet list could concern nothing but travel, of course. You may have read my list, published earlier this year, of the best backpacking destinations on Earth (if you didn’t, you can catch it here). As a companion piece, let me proudly present five destinations to avoid. I have a sixth but let me keep that one quiet for now. There may be a whole update on it soon.

Anyway, if you are planning, like Robert Louis Stevenson, to travel for travel’s sake, I urge you to avoid the five places below. First, let me ask you to bash one of these bright blue buttons. It costs you nothing but really does keep the newsletter going. Thank you!

Just one man’s opinion:

JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA: Well, you’ve probably heard all about it, and probably wouldn’t go there anyway, so let me just tell you that my wife and I spent the single most terrifying night of our lives lost in the middle of Johannesburg. ‘It’s rough and violent,’ people kept warning us. I tended to reply with a nonchalant shrug. ‘You can’t scare me,’ I thought. ‘I’ve seen rough places.’ Well, I had…but bot was I naïve. Rough for Europe is a different, softer, matter than rough for Africa. I witnessed things in Johannesburg at two in the morning that I shall never forget.

BEIRA, MOZAMBIQUE: It is perfectly easy, take it from me, to spend an entire day in Beira trying to find out whether the town has a bus station. Turns out, it doesn’t. That’s odd, because everyone is there only by accident and surely wants to get away. Oh, and I realise that I forgot to do the one thing every backpacker knows you ought to do before travelling: check whether or not there’s a civil war going on. Turns out there was, who knew? You’d think someone would have mentioned it. Beira was one of just two places in which I’ve had an automatic rifle pointed at my head. (Once we finally escaped, we met two Americans who worked in Mozambique. Each reacted to our story in the exact same way. ‘You went where?’ they demanded, all goggle-eyed. Western companies don’t – or didn’t – permit their employees to venture that far north.)

AMRITSAR, INDIA: Nothing against the Golden Temple, of course, which is beautiful and truly deserves to be listed as a Great World Sight…but the town of Amritsar itself is a hot and baffling maze in which one simply cannot fail to get lost and in which something as simple as finding a cup of tea defeated two fairly-experienced world-travellers. And there was blood in our hotel room.

COLOMBO, SRI LANKA: There was nothing to do, nothing! A whole city and not one thing to do! Perhaps I exaggerate. Allow me to rephrase that: there were things to do, but we couldn’t get to them. Every time we tried to walk down a street, a chap in army fatigues would stop us (not the same chap of course – different chaps). As for their automatic rifles, see Beira, above. We simply couldn’t get anywhere without threat of perishing in a swift hail of gunfire. (Civil wars just seem to follow us around.) Eventually we had to give up and spent two days drinking cocktails in the only bar we could find.

FEZ, MOROCCO: Lots of backpackers go to Fez, and the city has a pretty good reputation among the cognoscenti. But from the Crime & Psychology newsletter, I know you have learnt to expect nothing but the unvarnished truth. Whisper it: Fez is awfully dull. Once you’ve explored the medina, and maybe found your way back out again, there isn’t much to do apart from sweat. Even that palls after a while. Hop on a train and go to Marrakech, that’s my advice. Besides, I lost my beloved sandals in Fez. It was a heart-breaking event, about which I wrote two poems. Here is one of them. If you promise to be good, I won’t publish the second.

FEZ

I wish I’d never gone to Fez

It’s where my sandals died.

They said the streets were flat in Fez:

They said that but they lied.

I found out that the streets of Fez

Are made from shale and scree,

Both my favourite shoes in Fez

Exploded hastily.

I counted very fast in Fez

As things abandoned me.

I lost both my straps in Fez,

Buckles, too, insoles three.

The meanings are all clear in Fez,

The shop-signs justified:

The cobblers were just that in Fez,

Don’t think they even tried.

I have one thing to say to Fez,

Where sandals fall apart:

I may have left my soles in Fez,

But didn’t leave my heart.