Travel unravel : ::

Part 1
The cracks in the pavement are spaced differently here. The paving slabs are different, so they must make a different kind of dust. The food they eat here is different, so are the stains on the pavement. So is the background smell. The lampposts are different. So are the spaces in-between.
Eventually, there is a café, and the same old questions chip away at the surfaces. Which kids chewed which types of gum and stuck it underneath tabletops of which pattern of Formica? Are the ashtrays made of chunky glass or pressed aluminium? Is a fan needed in the summer? Is there a logo behind the bar, dimly remembered from some TV footage of a cycling team?
Sometimes the dark wood evokes the memory of touching wood as a child. Or a child’s fascination at a man’s forearm – huge, veiny, full of ropes and knots, covered in hair. Boys and girls can’t believe that their bodies could ever look like that.
Everywhere has its variety of pressed wooden chairs for diners and unpaid pianists. Often, there are patterns stamped on the seat. There are varied designs of seat back, with differently curved arches uncomfortably supporting the area just below the shoulder blades.
Left alone with the dark wood panels around me, I am free to fold back time. Memories are mine to land in, like a hundred different airports in a revisited country. Back then, I was a passenger, but now I am the pilot. No memory is free of the taint of needing it remembered a certain way – to suit an occasion or a mood. Everything is half fabricated – served to order. Memories are just the backdrop to the nothingness that I call substance.


Part 2
I am not forging a path from place to place. Instead, places are beating a path through me. The effort of acclimatising makes each city seem less unique – more an easily accommodated variation on some global notion of cities. I constantly readjust my self-presentation. Constantly re-spin my stories about home. Maybe this makes me adaptable, maybe insincere.
Perhaps travel adds to my store of memory and my ability to accommodate other people. Perhaps it depletes my individuality as I find a self that is universally presentable. Maybe meeting new people increases my versatility. Maybe it just entrenches me further in some bland, globally acceptable personality. I can either localise the brand or present a consistent front.
To some extent, I am not a person who travels, but a place that keeps popping up elsewhere. I am a tiny patch of London in Atlanta – a tiny sample of Englishness in America.
The constant tease in America is to be truthfully disparaging about its brashness, greed, self-centredness and selfishness without causing offence. And there’s the fun of teasing out local dissenters from the woodwork. This works just as well in reverse of course. Just about any country is Third World compared with the US, and it definitely does me good to have my own chauvinism pushed in my face. The arrogance of the classical European is a perfect match for the cultural complacency of overfed and under-stimulated Yanks.
Memory is always an interesting angle. When new experiences have resonance, it is because of their difference to the everyday and the pre-existing. My only perspective on the new is its difference from what went before. But the senses are unreliable, perception is selective, and memories are even more so. Do I ever have a valid grasp on what I’m seeing? And am I comparing it with memories that are accurate, or just with memories that I conjure a certain way for effect?

None of that matters, of course. Travel matters because it helps to broaden our span of misconception. And misconception is the first step to actually learning something about the world.