Off Again

Just prior to setting off  to England and Ireland a friend sent this article from the June 24th edition of New Yorker Magazine. It starts off in the first couple of paragraphs with this:

What is the most uninformative statement that people are inclined to
make? My nominee would be “I love to travel.” This tells you very
little about a person, because nearly everyone likes to travel; and yet people
say it, because, for some reason, they pride themselves both on having
travelled and on the fact that they look forward to doing so.
The opposition team is small but articulate.
“travel narrows the mind.”
G. K. Chesterton wrote that
Ralph Waldo Emerson called travel “a fool’s
paradise.” Socrates and Immanuel Kant—arguably the two greatest
philosophers of all time—voted with their feet, rarely leaving their respective
home towns of Athens and Königsberg. But the greatest hater of travel, ever,
was the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa, whose wonderful “
Book of Disquiet” crackles with outrage:
I abhor new ways of life and unfamiliar places. . . . The idea of travelling nauseates
me. . . . Ah, let those who don’t exist travel! . . . Travel is for those who cannot feel. . . .
Only extreme poverty of the imagination justifies having to move around to feel.
If you are inclined to dismiss this as contrarian posturing, try shifting the
object of your thought from your own travel to that of others. At home or
abroad, one tends to avoid “touristy” activities. “Tourism” is what we call
travelling when other people are doing it. And, although people like to talk
about their travels, few of us like to listen to them. Such talk resembles
academic writing and reports of dreams: forms of communication driven
more by the needs of the producer than the consumer.

Regardless of what the above says we’re heading off again knowing that none of you want to hear about our meanderings, and certainly won’t listen to us when we talk about them if we get to see you.

So, we are off to England and Ireland on another camping trip. A 9 day stay in London followed by a few visits to relatives and then to Ireland for a month.

Starting off though, we have taken a house sit in Islington and are currently figuring out how to get around London. Our first stop on the list of things to do was to set a target for the Tate Modern and to view a new exhibit on Frida Kahlo

I hadn’t been to London in many years, and it’s not only the skyline that has changed. We took the 341 bus from Islington into the centre of the city and there was no-one. Granted, it was 0830hrs on a Sunday morning, but still, it wasn’t the London I knew. Not a car on the street, and very few pedestrians. Obviously, by the time we exited the Frida Kahlo exhibit, there were a lot more pedestrians but still a lack of traffic, which was really relaxing.

Tomorrow Kew Gardens for the day