On being a tourist

Is a change as good as a rest?

Scroll to the bottom for: US (Chautauqua) speaking dates • July’s True Stories Book Club

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I’m back! Looks like I only missed a handful of seismic news events while I was away… Huge thanks to my brilliant guest posters Katy Wheatley, Keris Stainton, Amanda Leduc and Freya Rohn - and thank you to all of you for giving them such a warm welcome. 

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I am an opportunistic tourist. Most of my holidays are built around research trips, public appearances or - in the case of last week’s holiday - visits to my mother. She moved to Spain about 15 years ago, which means that I regularly find myself in the kind of holiday environment that I wouldn’t normally choose for myself. This is the land of swimming pools, sangria and endless sunshine. I like it more than I let on. 

When we collected our hire car at Valencia airport, H asked if I’d like to be registered as a driver too. I was sitting on the porch of the rental office, drinking my first, blissful, vending-machine can of Spanish Fanta Limón. ‘No,’ I said, ‘Of course I don’t want to drive while I’m here. I never want to drive.’ I sighed and handed over my licence anyway. ‘I suppose I should, just in case.’

The car in our allotted space was not the people carrier we’d requested, but a Jeep Renegade which H immediately hated. The antipathy was mutual; it took five increasingly bewildered minutes to get the thing to start, and even then it pinged at him for the entire two-hour journey down the coast to my mother’s village. The Renegade was an extremely communicative car, constantly flashing instructions onto the dashboard. Unfortunately, the messages were both in Spanish and appeared only in fleeting bursts, so it took us a long time to understand all the various infractions it was admonishing: creeping over the speed limit (ping!); off-centre road positioning (ping!); a lack of seatbelt for the ghost person it believed was sitting in the middle back seat (ping! ping! ping!). When we stopped for petrol, we couldn’t persuade it to let go of the key. On attempting to re-start the engine, it just looked at us blankly, as if it couldn’t imagine why we’d do such a thing. 

‘I hate this car,’ said H. 

Eventually - and only after trying out many random sequences of seemingly inconsequential actions until the car started again - we arrived at our destination. A mere four hours later, H slipped on the wet tiles by the pool, and fell heavily on his shoulder. 

‘It’s lucky we registered you on the Jeep,’ he said. ‘I don’t think I can drive.’

While I was away, I read Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage, an account of his attempt to write a biography of D. H Lawrence. Supposedly researching, he really travels, drifting between Paris, Rome, Sicily, Algiers, Oxford and Oaxaca, pretty much hating all of them. He gets drunk; he gets stoned; he gets sick; he spends time trying to feel at home on a nudist beach. It seems that he’s willing to try anything except actually writing. 

I’d heard Out of Sheer Rage described as a book about procrastination, but I actually think it’s the opposite, a book that describes a writer’s complete commitment to the creative process. I think this is the best thing I’ve read on creativity as an ecosystem, as a broad spectrum of experiences that need to be tended and fulfilled, an enactment of obligations towards a capricious and painfully uncommunicative god. Done right, creativity does not involve too much focused work, in the sense that we know from offices and classrooms. Instead, it entails a great deal of diversion, a studied commitment to distraction and irrelevance. That is, after all, how leaps are made: not by joining together two connected thoughts, but by flitting between a sequence of unfamiliar objects, and showing how they speak to each other, despite their differences. 

Creativity is an act of tourism, a practice of making oneself a stranger in a land that’s perfectly familiar to others, even mundane. It has little to do with uncovering new lands and decoding new cultures. It’s more about a change of scenery, a new slant of light, just for a while.

At this time of year, there are plenty of tourists in my own home town. The shops and cafés are suddenly bustling, and the beach is full of paddling children and dawdling adults. Those of us who live near the harbour spend an inordinate amount of time weaving our way around the narrow Victorian streets, trying to find a parking space. This is made all the more frustrating by the number of people who choose to walk in the middle of the roads instead of sticking to the pavements. They’re on holiday; the town doesn’t seem quite real to them. Those of us still wedded to the mundane duties of school runs and supermarket trips are rendered invisible by the fantasy of quayside life.

While we were in Spain, there were protests in major tourist spots against the impact of mass tourism on real life. In Barcelona, diners were squirted with water pistols and their hotel doors were sealed with tape; some were even pelted with eggs. The issues are the same in my own town: AirBnBs and second homes are pricing out locals. Meanwhile, there’s litter on the beach, the stench of urine in the alleyways, and obnoxious drunks in our quiet pubs. Something has to give. 

And yet, at the same time, tourists make this town. They bring money into the local economy, and fill its summer months with straw hats and bright dresses. They encourage the ice-cream parlours and fancy restaurants that we love to have around. They present a set of problems that must urgently be solved, but the answer is not to expel them altogether. We need to learn to become better tourists - to bring our local manners with us on holiday - but we should  not abandon being tourists at all. Travel is a good and necessary diversion from the fixed patterns of every day.

The Jeep started the first time for me. I turned the key, the engine purred into being, and I made my way along the right hand side of the road without feeling too upset about the whole thing. There was, I noted, a distinct absence of pings. It found no fault with the position of my hands on the steering wheel, nor with my place on the road. I drive a lot slower than H, so I did not receive too many speed alerts. Moreover, after years of driving a manual, I rather liked the experience of an automatic. It was easy, a mere matter of stop and go. I trusted the car, and it trusted me. The Jeep and I were simpatico.

Usually, I hate driving, and complain noisily whenever I have to get behind a wheel. But here, in Spain, normal life was suspended anyway, so the experience felt new. I could drive an entirely silly car (a ‘Renegade’ it was not) to one of the glorious local supermarkets, and come home with a boot full of unserious food to graze on while reading a book about not working. There was nothing to get upset about. 

Driving was no easier for me in Spain; but it was no harder, either. H is usually able to drive on autopilot, so the necessity to think about the processes it entailed caused him pain. For me, it was just the same level of intense concentration that I always have to apply to driving. At home, I begin each journey by reminding myself of the words that my supernaturally patient driving instructor often had to repeat: ‘In England, we drive on the left hand side of the road,’ and in Spain, it was not much different. It has never felt instinctive to me to drive on either side of the road in the first place. I barely noticed the difference. 

A change is as good as a rest. Well, sometimes. It depends very much on the nature of the change, I find. I am willing to drive for a few days in service of indolence, of directionlessness, of meandering. But I was the first to notice when H’s shoulder eased up, so that he could take the wheel again. 

Take care,

Katherine

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Katherine’s next live appearance:

USA: Friday 9th August: Chautauqua Institution, NY, speaking as part of the Interfaith Lecture Series. Details here.

Your next live event:

Tuesday 23rd July: True Stories Book Club with Daniel Tammet, author of Nine Minds: Inner Lives on the Spectrum. The Book Club will be at 6pm UK/1pm ET/10am PT. There’s a reading guide here.

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