Analogue traveller
A while ago an article I wrote for the Telegraph was teed up with a standfirst – written by some youthful editor on the desk – that described me pointedly as a “veteran travel writer”. I read this over breakfast. And after scooping the Gentlemen’s Relish back on to my toast I finally faced an uncomfortable truth.
I’m not quite old enough to be a prime target for Coronavirus. But I have certain Mesozoic qualities when it comes to travel writing. I’m not on Instagram, barely touch Twitter, and even in lockdown have avoided Zoom conferencing. While other writers happily adapt to being “travel influencers” and “content providers”, Pinterest is of zero interest to me. I do not photograph my food.
I can hear what you’re saying, you readers of this frisky, youth-facing travel section: “OK boomer!” It’s the millennials’ put-down to anybody of the so-called baby boomer generation (ie born in the postwar years) who now feels a fugitive in their “relatable”, algorithm-managed world. But my boomer status is not so easily shed.
At the risk of boomersplaining, so much has changed in the past half-century in the way people experience the world. We baby boomers grew up in the pre-internet age and were, by definition, analogue travellers. Sure, I now book all my travel online, but my fingers still have muscle memory for the landline keypad, my feet for the footfall through a bucket shop door (bucket shop? See below).
My earliest means of low-cost travel was not budget airlines but the thumb which, believe it or not, was once used for procuring free car rides from strangers. From the mid-70s to the mid-80s I hitchhiked in Britain and mainland Europe and across the American Southwest, lookin’ for adventure (as the Steppenwolf song goes).
Then I got a mortgage and a car – where I listened to Dire Straits CDs – but I paid back into the system by offering lifts when I could. A few years ago when I drove across Cuba the people who sat in the back of my hire car gave me a unique insight into that unique country. Since then the world has become a more dangerous place and people don’t seek or offer free lifts any more, in the developed world at least. But my default position on strangers and their willingness to help you out on the road remains essentially optimistic.
As for hotels, my slackening boomer body appreciates comfort as much as the next person’s but I can’t really get excited about Frette bed linen because I remain locked in an arrested state of wonderment at the mere existence of “en suite” bathrooms. Back in the day – a solid boomer phrase – a toilet/bathroom integrated with the bedroom was far from a given. Hotels that had them made a big deal of it (as they boasted of “Electric lighting throughout” in the 1920s).
This is why the first thing I do when I enter a hotel room for the first time is check the bathroom is indeed within shuffling distance of bare feet. Once this proximity has been confirmed, the room has delivered so far as I am concerned. All else – decanters of wakame gin, macrobiotic nose tweezers – is frippery.
I’m not making a boomerish case for “better in my day”. Food and service were far worse in the era before online reviews, when the balance of power was always with the hotelier or restaurateur. One that springs to mind is a b&b owner on the Isle of Mull in the mid-1990s who threatened to drop a plate of kippers on the head of a complaining guest. Pure joy to witness, not so much fun to be on the end of (or underneath).
No one wants to go back there but dinosaurs sometimes call it right. If we ever fly again I look forward to the moment when the plane touches down in a new destination and on cue a rustling sound starts up in the cabin – of people younger than me retrieving their smartphones– followed by the bleeps of devices downloading fresh communications from the world they’ve just left. Beyond the windows an unknown world beckons but they don’t see it for looking backwards. And at this point I shall mutter smugly to myself, “OK millennials! Get a life!”
I still feel born to be wild (in a masked and distanced way of course) and in a new monthly column in the Telegraph – “Reflections of an analogue traveller” – I shall not be hiding my boomerdom under a bushel. For this travel section is also read by people old enough to know what B.O.A.C. stood for; who camped in tents without groundsheets, booked budget flights in bucket shops and still satiate an undimmed curiosity about the world in a thousand boomerish ways. Stick your thumb out here and I’ll give you a ride.
Published in the Daily Telegraph on July 25, 2020
