Things Are Against Us

by Lucy Ellmann

  Aviation accounts for 3.5% of global warming.12 The effects of cement production are far worse, I’m told. Yes, okay, there’s too much cement. But 3.5% is not nothing. And cement is probably more lastingly useful to people than the obligatory Mediterranean swim, New Zealand cider tasting, or yet another Thanksgiving with the aged p’s. But we continue to prioritise human mobility and interaction over all other considerations, even despite the current plague. Meanwhile, the Great Barrier Reef dies for us. It’s lost half its corals in the last twenty-five years and is eighty per cent bleached already, cooked alive.

  Birds are allowed to migrate without too much human interference and their flights don’t cause global warming. Officially though, only people are now free to dart all over the place. We let passengers with Covid cross borders all the time, but the Australian government got all worked up about the arrival in Melbourne of a racing pigeon who seemed ‘foreign’. Joe the Pigeon (named by the man who first spotted him) was considered a potential biohazard because he might have been carrying an American pigeon disease. Joe was therefore in imminent danger of being euthanised or deported. But later it was decided he was Australian after all.13 It’s people who should undergo this sort of rigmarole – not euthanised perhaps, but banned from travel.

  Animals bear the brunt of our allegiance to travel, and not just in the effects of global warming on wildlife. We now inflict travel on animals themselves, from the meat industry’s horrific live animal transport operation to the way day-old chicks and exotic pets are mailed around the world. Then there are the doomed personal encounters with animals when on holiday. Ever tried to save a stray cat or a mistreated dog in some foreign country? It’s not easy – they don’t have passports. No, your trip is much more likely to damage a local animal. A young sniffer dog was shot dead at Auckland airport in New Zealand in 2017, just for capering around loose at the airport and delaying a few flights. He wasn’t even on the tarmac, but in some outer perimeter area. Birds, being a danger to airplane engines, are routinely shot or poisoned in the vicinity of airports. All for ‘your travelling comfort’. This is what you unwittingly commit to when boarding a plane, the possibility that animals will be executed in honour of your pointless itinerary – and not just the ones they make into ‘selected medallions of beef’.

  Donkeys get the worst of it, but they’re getting wise to us. According to Olga Tokarczuk, Jordanian donkeys now baulk at having to carry American tourists around. They don’t want to be ridden by Americans, Americans are too obese.

  The donkey is an intelligent animal, it can evaluate weight right away, and it will often start to get upset just seeing them come off their tour bus, all overheated, big sweat stains on their shirts, and those trousers they wear that only reach their knees.14

  In Santorini, waves of Americans pour off cruise ships in hopes of finding a horse or donkey to take them up the hill. Many animals have been injured coping with this onslaught.15 No wonder donkeys start to bray and buck when they see Americans closing in on them. (Don’t we all?) One of the better things about Covid has been the thought of Paris free of American tourists: their weirdly compulsive descent on that city has been briefly halted.

  There are Americans who will not visit anywhere in Europe that doesn’t have a Holiday Inn. There are Americans who spend their whole time in England disputing the British pronunciation of Birmingham. There are Americans who refuse to enter Ely Cathedral on the grounds that Britain has not yet sufficiently recognised America’s part in winning the Second World War. (Actually, America had a lot of help.) And there are American children who can detect insurmountable differences between Scottish McDonald’s and New Jersey McDonald’s. There is an American blind spot to other cultures that really gets in the way of their deriving any discernible benefit from travel. So why go? Be content to stay in Birmingham, Michigan, gobbling your Happy Meals.

  Americans scour Bulgaria for a whisky sour. They freak out if their credit cards don’t work, or the plumbing’s weak, the bandwidth too narrow. They fall in the lousy limey hotel shower, break some bone, and to their utter disbelief get X-rayed and bandaged at the hospital for free. (Yes, it’s called socialism.) Everywhere they go, they assume and insist that everything is or should be done the American way; otherwise it’s weird. They assume everybody knows English – if they don’t, they’re weird. Everything amazes them, everything comes as a great big shock. You mean this was built before the American Revolution? Gee. You mean I have to put some of these crazy coins into this slot and then the bus will take me where I want to go? Weird. And, having almost single-handedly caused global warming, the way Americans freak out about rain seems rather overplayed.

  The Accidental Tourist,16 the most biting of Anne Tyler’s customarily timid and meandering novels, hits the nail on the head regarding the insistence of many American travellers on remaining completely unaffected by the places they visit. ‘Other travellers hoped to discover distinctive local wines; Macon’s readers searched for pasteurized and homogenized milk.’ Trump’s a good example of this type of tourist, taking his own steak and golf clubs with him everywhere he goes. He takes his whole dull family too! Or the ones he acknowledges as family.

  In the seemingly endless American TV series Away, a recent Covid binge-watch from Netflix,17 five supposedly multinational astronauts (the Commander’s American, the other four are foreign but act American) head off for Mars together in what must be the worst-made space rocket of all time. Something is always going wrong with that ship! But there’s really very little about space travel or astronomy or even about Mars in the show. Instead, the drama is entirely taken up with crying and trembling, the exchange of potent glances amongst the crew, and messages of love with people on earth – people whom, let’s face it, the crew has just determinedly left behind. But boy do they love and love and LOVE them. It’s exhausting. The humourless commander (Hilary Swank) is an emotional wreck throughout the trip. I wouldn’t let her drive a little red wagon. Yet here she is, steering her own space capsule towards Mars along with her four homesick minions, each of them an anxious, emaciated pin cushion of platitudes.

  Their bodies are spontaneously decomposing before their eyes because of weightlessness, there’s a big water shortage due to the ship’s lousy plumbing, and there’s the constant danger of death from all those pesky unforeseen consequences that tend to crop up when one’s a million miles from home (and oxygen). But still, like American travellers everywhere, they all remain absolutely unchanged and untouched by anything that happens to them. Even a year-long trip into outer space leaves them cold. What is the point of Americans going anywhere? Especially Mars, of all places – that’s a lot of love miles, and an expensive traipse through the solar system, so far from hot dogs and the Super Bowl, while again and again and AGAIN, they phone and email and record declarations of devotion for their boring families in case they die. How they cry. (Wasting water!) Someone in the script department failed to heed Frank Capra’s advice, that it’s the audience who should cry, not the actors.

  Travel is colonialism. Travel is WAR. Religion travels fast, as does ideology. Tourists, missionaries and our roving billionaires pretend they mean well but they don’t. They haven’t come to help, they’ve come to take advantage. The Romans really got around too. You’d think taking hot then tepid then cold baths, eating dormice with fellow aristos in Rome, and running around on pretty mosaic floors to the chimes of your tintinnabuli, with the occasional outing to Pompeii for an orgy, would be enough for anyone. But no, Roman generals were always on the move, subduing, crucifying, enslaving and decimating people, paying centurions in salt, importing wheat, papyrus, grapes and gossip, and building walls to make Rome great again. The trouble is, when you’re away from home too much, things go to pot and, if you’re not careful, you come back to find it’s not only your colosseum that’s cracking but your whole civilisation.

  The movement of people and ideas, grandly called globalisation and exemplified by the Columbian exchange,18
is not just an innocent sharing of cultures and silk trading. Columbus, along with his overt sadism, managed inadvertently to transport to the ‘New World’ worms, rats, smallpox, chickenpox, typhus, scarlet fever, leprosy, malaria, whooping cough, gonorrhoea, TB, and the bubonic plague. He picked up potatoes, tobacco, and syphilis on his way out. A real import-export kind of guy, he unified the world with mutual catastrophes. Thanks a bunch. Since then, international interaction has led to industrial horror, wars, slave labour, the spread of kudzu and Dutch elm disease, pandemics, a regrettable cultural homogeneity and oceans full of plastic. The pretence that going global might spread wealth and strengthen ties has proven hard to buttress, with trade wars and people starving just outside the five-star resort precincts to which wealthy travellers dumbly flock.

  All anyone gets out of this passing acquaintance with foreign lands is a crushing conformism, an expensive revitalisation of arrogance, and the obtusest form of worldliness, wherein they blindly experience the same banalities the world over: the same slang, same pop music, same video games, same crummy hotel decor, same fast food, same views of Notre Dame, same big wheels, same terrorist atrocities, same jogging trails. Travel kills as much knowledge, taste, and culture as it purportedly spreads. The compulsion for sameness has an insidious effect: languages, costume, dialects, and accents start to die out as soon as the Coke and jeans and T-shirts arrive. To ensure uniformity and reduce the chance that the traveller will actually experience something new, major cities now offer exactly the same chain hotels, restaurants, and designer stores – ideal receptacles for morons on the move. But if Prada, Superdry, and H&M are everywhere, what’s the point of city-hopping shopping?

  Cuisines travel invisibly between countries, and English cooking was radically improved by French influences (even in the midst of the Napoleonic wars), and later by Indian flavours and recipes. It’s arguable that the shameless British takeover of India is all that’s made it possible for today’s British foodies to survive (chicken tikka masala is now the UK’s national dish). But is it really necessary for rivalrous marmaladers to circumnavigate the planet, flying all the way from Australia to Lake Windermere to show off their marmalade at a marmalade festival? Marmalade. Yes, it’s hard to make a good one. But must we burn the last of the fossil fuels just to prove it can be done in Australia? (Which I still doubt.) Funny kind of conserve-ation that is, and a world away from Elizabeth Bennet’s hopes for her planned trip to the Lakes:

  Oh! What hours of transport we shall spend! And when we do return, it shall not be like other travellers, without being able to give one accurate idea of anything. We will know where we have gone – we will recollect what we have seen. Lakes, mountains, and rivers, shall not be jumbled together in our imaginations; nor, when we attempt to describe any particular scene, will we begin quarrelling about its relative situation. Let our first effusions be less insupportable than those of the generality of travellers.19

  Woody Allen’s best work is long past,20 but his film-making in his dotage slid even further downhill once he started setting his bottom-drawer scenarios in Destination Cities. Most European capitals now exist merely as theme parks for this kind of cinematic abuse (Jason Bourne leaves them in ruins), along with their function as bachelorette party, beer binge, and corny lover hotspots. Prague, Dublin, London, and Barcelona have been drained of meaning and individuality, and are now completely interchangeable.

  Edinburgh, where I live, used to be a fine old mirthless town, grim, austere, dirty, and dignified. Twenty-first-century marketers have turned it into a fairground. Whenever possible, the city’s few green spaces get trashed by amusement arcades, glühwein, vomit, festivals, fringe festivals, markets, fringe markets, outdoor exhibitions and exhibitionists, coffee bars, beer tents, merry-go-rounds, tat stalls and ice-skating rinks. The pavements are falling to pieces, the parks and trees are in a state of collapse, the trash is never collected, and the lockdown puppy poop is never scooped. The homeless used to die on the streets while the Edinburgh International Festival conducted its annual month-long experiment in overpopulation and over-pricing. The fireworks displays alone used to be relentless, daily in August. Occasionally there were wee calls from residents for silent fireworks, but their requests couldn’t be heard over the din.

  This historic city, once home to the Scottish Enlightenment, has been intentionally emptied of thought and refilled with fake fun. Edinburgh has reinvented itself by obliterating its own inventiveness. Writers get short shrift: Burns, Boswell, Henry Cockburn, David Hume, James Hogg, Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson, Conan Doyle, Muriel Spark, and even Irvine Welsh wouldn’t know the place. All we’ve got now is J. K. Rowling and Alexander McCall Smith, the Betty Boop and Mickey Mouse of Scottish letters.

  But you simply must see the Taj Mahal, pussycat, or Machu Picchu, or Outer Mongolia, before you peg out, we’re told again and again and again. All exotic places must be trampled. Immediately. It torments people to think of leaving a single foreign banquette unwarmed. Just mention the Galapagos or the Faroe Islands and watch them jump – because they’ve got to get there before everyone else. Before it’s ruined. The seagrass meadows of the oceans are disappearing at the rate of two football fields an hour just so people can boast about having bothered a turtle in some unfortunate clime.

  The truth is you don’t personally have to survey every square inch on earth, no matter what your so-called friends tell you or what you read in all that newspaper and magazine travel porn. After all, the only really interesting thing about travel is seeing new flora and fauna, and we’ve killed off most of that. What is more important in the end than listening to Bach or reading Dickens? Humankind should be your business, not this hypnotic holidaying. Locusts are big adherents of bucket lists too; they too strive to get out and about before they die.

  But no, we must endorse every work break, school break, birthday, death, divorce, bicycle accident, cancer remission, basketball game and gender reveal party with a long, hazardous flight or drive to somewhere or other. There are a million family occasions that require your presence (we act like we still live in villages and the bris or grindingly dull graduation ceremony is only a block away!), a million new reasons to travel are manufactured every moment. Grief, joy, honour, guilt, humility, curiosity, habit, tradition – all can be met by a remote pageant, banquet, fair, hot tub orgy, or jamboree.

  Courses for this, courses for that. You can, you must, attend a week of weaving, and probably weeping, in Wales; a five-day workshop making doll’s-house furniture in Cumbria; a backgammon cruise through the Norwegian fjords; courses in hillwalking, pottery, juggling, watercolour, yoga, I Ching, karate, quinoa cookery, or the arrangement of spit curls, in a compound situated anywhere from Padstow to Phuket. How does a crash course in straw-hat manufacture, drystane walling or Orkney laddering grab you? Or why not discover lost tribes in the Amazon, then lose them again; or learn sock-knitting in the Arran Isles, croissant-twirling in Dieppe, asparagus farming, wildflower and mushroom differentiation, or even scything. Yes, there are classes in scything. What they need is a creative writhing course.

  You can do a restaurant crawl through sub-Saharan Africa, or put a poor old pony through its paces all over Iceland. Almost simultaneously, if you must. Tired of London and Londoners? You can solve this by flying all the way to Montana on an unsuccessful ‘man-hunt’ and write an article about it for the Spectator, turning innocent strangers into props for your fantasy life. Sex and travel often merge this way: it’s not called a ‘drive’ for nothing. Many travellers hope a change of latitude will cure their sexual lassitude. Can’t they just put on a French accent and pretend? No. Passion requires the sacrifice of fossil fuel.

  The more blatant sex tourists, the ones with nothing to declare but their criminality, incessantly cross the globe, sharing their diseases and disillusionment with the young and desperate of other countries. The Grand Tours of Europe – nicely encapsulated by Laurence Sterne, who liked to be ‘incontestably in Fran
ce’21 – were open excuses for debauchery. Sterne may well be the only novelist who should ever have been allowed to travel. Apart from Joyce and Wilde, that is – it’s essential for Irish writers to leave Ireland.

  Gun shows, pedigree cockapoo summits, koan contests, horse races, guru reunions, nirvana attempts, stag shooting, Bayreuth pilgrimages, and gangster get-togethers where they plot assassinations, offload stolen jewellery, and swap nuclear materials, are further great reasons to travel. Spark up your plastic surgery experience by getting it done in Mexico, Moscow, Bulgaria, Beijing. Lipo on the lido! Visit chateaux, Chartres, shacks, shepherd huts; wineries, cattle farms, tobacco plantations, roller coasters, and wildlife refuges. Gaze on every sort of bull torture. Climb various famous groups of mountain peaks. Tour Cézanne’s studio. (If you’d turned up when he was alive he’d have killed you.)

  How about a nice artist residency? All artists now have to travel. They’d probably rather be paid to stay home, where they’re already set up with a studio, assistants, and paint-bomb machines. But no, the whole world’s watching and it’s hard to resist the pressure, the prizes, the prestige. You’re nothing as an artist these days unless you’ve spent a month in New Mexico, the Arctic, Trinidad, Tibet, and Sumatra, and regularly attend the Venice Biennale. People forget that reality is wherever you are. It’s what you’re thinking about that matters, but nobody cares about that. Anyway, everybody’s thoughts are so scattered now – because of the jet lag.