Where would you go?
I have long cherished a near-obsessive desire to see Petra, the rose-red city half as old as time. Last month, I am happy to say, I achieved this, along with my wife Emma, and a group of mainly Americans, all of whom were nice, and we duly assembled to be taken into the hidden stronghold. I don’t think I had understood, before then, that the city was built at the end of a long ravine, to make it easier to defend, I assume, so we travelled down the narrow, stone-lined crev-asse, until it suddenly opened out into a sort of wide square backed by the miracle of the building, in actual fact a tomb, but called the Treasury, which is the image we are all fam-iliar with. From then on, I was in a sort of trance as we swept by more tombs and rock dwellings and a Roman theatre (the Romans came later), culminating in a spectacular Roman road, lined with dazzlingly magnificent ruins of palaces and monasteries and such. This one day was worth the journey. It haunts me now.
Would you make any special stops?
Quite deliberately, we combined this visit with a trip to Israel, after being allowed a day in the Wadi Rum Desert, where Lawrence of Arabia spent a good deal of time, finishing with a late lunch in a Bedouin tent, with Bedouin cooking: much the best food we would enjoy before we returned to England. We then moved onwards in our pilgrimage to the Holy Land, much of which – the Garden of Gethsemane, the cave where Christ told Peter that he was the rock on which the Church would be built, Mary’s home in Nazareth, and of course the Church of the Holy Sepulchre – moved me to tears, or nearly, proving that I am probably more Catholic than I think. But we also saw the Western Wall of prayer, the Temple Mount itself, a first century synagogue, recently discovered in Magdala, where Jesus would almost certainly have preached. All of these constituted special stops and live with me still.
Who would be your travelling companion or companions?
My long-suffering wife of 32 years is my travelling companion of choice. Emma always knows what I will enjoy and how to manage whatever obstacles are thrown in our path. If anything, she is the traveller in our family, rather than me. She has a curiosity to see everything, which is inspirational.
You can transplant your favourite pub, bar or restaurant onto the route. What is it?
I have a few favourites. Perhaps Wilton’s in Jermyn Street would be my winner, but I cannot quite see myself looking out over the sands of Wadi Rum or the stones of the Via Dolorosa from its windows. I’m not sure restaurants travel in that way, as one’s favourites are usually determined by the nature of the place they occupy, a bustling, western city or a sleepy seaside village on Mykonos. Really I suspect that, to be a good traveller, one must avoid hankering for things to taste or to be served or to look the way they do back home.
Camp under the stars, or find a church hall to sleep in?
The art of enjoying travel is surely to make the best of whatever life throws at you. I remember once driving around the fighting zone in Nicaragua with the New Zealand actor Sam Neill. The civil war was raging, and somehow we had fallen in with quite a left-wing group from America, called Ventana. It so happened that we were deep in the coffee-growing area of the country when night fell, and the only shelter we could find were two rather run-down public lavatories. All the Americans were women except for one young chap and he, Sam and I retreated to the rather dismal Gents’ with its concrete floor, where we spread our blankets by the side of a very ancient and smelly urinal. We lay there for a bit with the American grumbling and turning and wriggling and complaining about the discomfort, until finally Sam spoke out of the darkness. “It is obvious to me,” he said, “that you have never spent any time at an English public school.”
Which books would you take with you?
On that latest trip I took a rather interesting account of the Russian Revolution, written by Edith Sollohub and entitled The Russian Countess. It is astonishing, to me, anyway, as she carefully relates the life she and her family had lived for years, for centuries, until the whole civilisation disintegrated in a matter of months. She managed to escape, but taking nothing and condemned to be a wandering stranger in a foreign land from then on. I also had another, more modern memoir, Kiss Myself Goodbye: The Many Lives of Aunt Munca, by Ferdinand Mount, an extraordinary examination of a life entirely constructed of lies.
What Bible or religious verse would you ponder as you walked?
I don’t really understand poetry. I do not speak its language. I must be the only human being alive who thinks that Dorothy Wordsworth’s description of the daffodils in a letter is much more moving than her brother’s poem. But I suppose I am always quite happy to read a bit of the Bible.
What’s your go-to prayer?
I like to use the “Our Father” as a kind of talisman to get me through sticky situations, but in general I feel prayer is more of a convers-ation, albeit a one-sided one. I will have to be content to wait to find out if anyone was listening.
What’s the singalong to keep everyone’s spirits up?
This doesn’t sound like my kind of thing at all. If I wanted to lift everyone’s spirits, I’d find a bottle of Château d’Yquem to share and enjoy a good gossip at the end of dinner.
You’re allowed one luxuryin your bag. What is it?
A large bottle of Famous Grouse.
What would you most miss about ordinary life?
Other people, I suppose. Not very original, I’m afraid, but true.
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