Travelling Broadens the Mind but Narrows the Space

I have just got back from a week in wonderful Barcelona. Two weeks before I was in Munich, and I've managed to get to Amsterdam, Brussels, London (twice), Milan and Bordeaux since the start of September, all with work. Its been hectic, hard work, effective, fun, exhausting... and I find myself contemplating "how can I live here?" "should I learn French/Spanish/Catalan?" and "lets come back on holiday next time" and again, and again.

It's why I like returning to places I've been before at least - that they are not just one off memories - sometimes reduced from a sense of place to a series of interchangeable images of airports, conference centres and hotels. "The Grand Tour" that you find in "Portrait of a Lady", "Daniel Deronda", "Tender is the Night", "The Good Soldier"  - even "Mr. Norris Changes Trains" - makes me equate this European movement with literature, with art, and rightly so - and even if I know little about a history of the place I might know something of its literature. Outside of the "Airport novel" (a genre that doesn't seem to exist anymore - perhaps the cheap flights of Ryanair and Easyjet have killed it off) you don't seem to get that much of this sense of (European) place in contemporary fiction. One of the reasons is that contemporary characters rarely have the predefined roles that previous characters do. There's an even more overt internationalisation as well where hyphenate authors see themselves jetsetting between place - Seoul to New York, rather than Paris to Brussels.

So though I'm writing something about place and movement - after all, the last few years have given be plenty of places to set my work, I've come back from this latest stint puzzled and bemused - I think the space I've allowed myself to write has narrowed a little too much. Its become the "airport lounge" itself. Its what I wrote about in my poem "Impressions between Places" in Bare Fiction magazine, and its the world described in the very funny Venice part of Geoff Dyer's "Jeff In Venice, Death in Varanesi" where, with the crowds at the Venice bienalle, him and others move this way and that on a rumour of risotto being served to offset all the booze.

I'm surprised someone hasn't written more about this - a kind of "literature for airports" to steal from Brian Eno - its our postmodern place after all; the mega-airport as the one late 20th century building style of note: yet such is the nature of these places, these Schiphols, these Charles de Gaulles, that they will never be preserved like old railway stations, but ever shifting spaces, like something out of Minecraft. They are Ballardian of course, and yet we lack a Ballard now to describe the post 9/11 version with our shoes being removed, our disorientating funnelling through security with transparent bags with lotions and medicines on show, our printed boarding passes and digital check ins.

So, with the Autumn tour completed successfully, I look forward to a month of other chimeras - the cheery facade of contemporary Christmas capitalism which is surely as relentless as thing as the airport flow.