Here and There (10 page)

Boats have gone from being the means of exploring places to the places in their own right. They're not for holidays, they're floating memorials to your acumen. And what you sail to see is not interesting little islands or remarkable reefs or unspoilt, inaccessible beaches – what you go to see are other boats. The point of having that much money-haemorrhaging aspiration under your feet is to show it off to other billionaires who have opened up the money vein.

Super-boats have helicopters and their own motorcars, and now they're coming with submarines. I've been on one that had its own boardroom and office suite. Why would you want to have a perfectly drab, perfectly functional office with whiteboard and overhead-projectors on your dream yacht? Well, if you were part of the geeky pizza-and-brainstorms-in-the-shed internet plutocracy, then work was fun. In fact, work was probably the only fun you ever had.

The decorating of yachts is a small mystery. Why do they all have pictures of other boats in them, and then photographs of boats from the outside? And bars. A bar at home is the first word in grating naff hideousity. But on a boat, it's desperately chic, and Onassis had barstools covered in whale foreskins. That really impressed Jackie. On land she'd have made a face like a salted lime and remembered she'd left the gas on.

And then there's the staff. Obviously all billionaires have staff. You couldn't be a billionaire and do your own hoovering. But what is it about ozone that makes relatively rational landlubber plutocrats who are happy to hang out with yes-men in regular suits on land feel the need for a squad of gay sauna attendants and the cast of
The Pirates
of Penzance
at sea?

You eat things on boats you'd never do on land, play games and wear clothes you'd never usually wear. Little things with shells and fish and nautical motifs, and men wear hello-sailor hats which they wouldn't put on for a bet on the pavement. Seawater does odd things when added to money. Boat owners outdo each other in all the childishly excessive ways that the rich have for outdoing each other. Better-looking staff, fancier cooks, more toys; bigger, faster, rarer. Last week I spoke to a breathless awestruck interior designer who'd been employed to do just the soft furnishings on a super-yacht. They were insisting on 1000 thread-count cotton sheets. If that means nothing to you, let me tell you it makes crêpe de chine feel like George Michael's chin, and one bed's worth will cost more than you spent on decorating your whole house. Of course, this isn't the point. If you've got a couple of billion, then the difference between goose and duck down doesn't really register. You could see boats as being a symptom and a palliative of an uncomfortable neurosis, of course. You could see it like that if it makes you feel better.

Boats are not about seeing the world anymore, not about adventure or being sporty and wearing an oily jersey. They're about control. The one thing all the rich men I've ever met have had in common was a pathological desire to organise the chaos of the world. A boat is a complete world on its own; you can micro-manage everything. A plutocrat can be Gulliver on his own Lilliput. In fact, if I ever get a yacht, I'm going to call it
Lilliput
. (By the way, boats' names are the novels that the super-rich and unimaginative have inside them.)

The one thing no one can command is the weather. Unless you have a boat. And then if the sun won't come to Ivan, Ivan can go to the sun. A yacht doesn't actually have to go anywhere, because it has already arrived.

Peak condition

If you need to reconnect with
something wild, head to the
Scottish Highlands, where the
landscape has no concern for
your golf handicap, your bank
balance or how many friends
you have on Facebook.

There is one fixed point in my year. Actually there are dozens of fixed points: Christmas, birthdays, Easter, school terms, anniversaries, the office party, deadlines. My whole life turns out to be fixed points and deadlines, a slalom of imperatives. What I mean is there is one week that isn't fixed by other people, or the kids, or bosses, or God. What I mean is there is one week without noise. It's more a hole in the year, a blank in the diary, unsullied by asterisks and exclamations, scribbled phone numbers and restaurant names, an escape hatch in the space-time continuum. It's the week I spend in the Highlands of Scotland where I stagger and slip up and down the hills, gasping like a spilt carp, cold, wet, grazed, twisted, strained, agued and palsied. Every day of it, there is a moment where I swear, swear on my shuddering aorta, my turned ankle and my barbied lungs, that I will never, ever do this again. And then the minute I leave, I am yearning to get back, to dig this hole into next year's diary.

The purpose of being here is ostensibly to kill things. We go out accoutred for murder in camouflage with binoculars and guns and knives and sandwiches. But the pursuit of death is really only a ruse, a cover. As often as not the deer elude us. The point is really not death but the pursuit of life by life. To get out and discover quite how alive I still am. And the hills grow taller and my feet heavier, but still I'm bound to the wild pursuit in this quite literally breathtaking place. It is a validation that I still have a place in the landscape.

In this rough world there is a pleasure that is difficult to explain. This isn't about aesthetics or health or achievement or any of the urban unwinding, de-stressing, getting your head together stuff. It's something more basic, colder and ancient. It's being part of it, part of something bigger. The belonging not to a list of accrued things – the urban civilised litany of stuff that our credit companies and our censuses know about us – but to a species, to be Darwinian. To fit into a world that isn't already man-ordained or man-ordered.

There is a growing trend, particularly among middle-aged blokes, to choose holidays for their primordial discomfort. I'm noticing that a lot of chaps are packing rucksacks and heading out into the high country – up a river, over tundra. I know that holiday companies have noticed this too. There's a new market of sedentary men with families and white-collar jobs who don't want to exchange the vanilla comfort and safety of their homes for the fuchsia comfort and safety of some packaged and predictable resort. One tour operator who makes bespoke adventures for groups of men told me, ‘These are people who want to come back with a story, not a tan.' Who want to have memories more than they want to have a set of photographs just like the photographs they had last year and the year before. How boring are most holiday snaps, how passive.

Women tend to dismiss this as a midlife crisis thing – possibly preferable to a Harley, a ponytail and a mail-order mistress, but still essentially risible, a foolish-man fantasy game, an attempt to ignore the truth and put off the responsibilities of life. But in fairness that's not it. ‘Midlife crisis' is such a dismissive, glib little put-down. It's more complicated and more poignant than that, than just wanting to feel 18 again.

Most of us reach a point where we've already hacked the big stuff. We've had kids and wives, we've had careers or had them thrust upon us, we've taken on mortgages and debt. And we've handled it. We've been okay at the grown-up stuff. We really don't want to be teenagers again, or wear leather, or go to nightclubs. We know what's ridiculous. And if we're not actually proud of our lives, then we're pleased with them; what we've made, the things we've achieved. But there is also a nagging sense that we've become janitors in our own lives. We turn up and maintain stuff – paint a wall, unblock a drain, shout at the kids, put out the rubbish – and with care and luck we can go on doing this forever.

But we didn't set out to be curators to our own families and offices. There is a disconnect with something wild, something out there. So we get on a horse, or into a canoe, or onto skis; we pack a sleeping bag, a wet-suit, goggles and a mosquito net and take a week to face the weather. It's not escapism, or fantasy, or role play, or showing off; it's being a bloke who hasn't hyphenated himself with father, or husband, or neighbour, investor, accountant, teacher, plumber, journalist. Because out here in the Highlands, with the heather and the gorse, the ravens and the stags, they don't care. The landscape has no concern for your golf handicap, your bank balance, how many friends you have on Facebook.

I'm from Scotland and this is also a week of home-coming. Like most of us I have contradictory feelings about all that root stuff, but I do have an emotional commitment to this place that has grown fond through absence. I only went 500 miles away down the road, but still this is the Other Country, and I suspect the adventures men take on are often bound up in the business of their childhoods. We think it's serendipity or an empirical choice, but to walk or cycle or run in deserts, or hack through jungle will have had its origin in a bedtime book, a moment with your dad, the first time you realised the world went on beyond the bottom of the garden. It belongs to a bit of your brain and memory that is not rational or explainable. This week in the hills chasing the deer isn't really a hole in the diary; it's not an escape. It's the ridge pole of the rest of the year. It takes a load for all of the other stuff.

I don't want to live up there. I have no intention of chucking the solid bit of my life away. I come back to it with greater gusto and gratitude knowing that I'm not just the sum of my achievements, my habits and my acquisitions. When I'm stuck in traffic or a tedious meeting, when the computer crashes and the deadlines pile up, I can close my eyes and be back on the hill, saw-breathed, sodden with the wind, wiping the curses from my mouth.

The pretenders

‘Paree' or ‘Paris'? It's all
well and good to round out
your vowels, but conspicuous
affectation when pronouncing
foreign words is unforgivable.

I've just been in Kenya for a day. Flew there Monday, visited Tuesday, came home Wednesday. Even with my truncated attention span, I think this is pretty much my record. I was doing a story with a ferocious deadline. And here's the thing: although I spent more time travelling than being and doing, I have a voluminous collection of memories, insights, thoughts and experiences. Far more than a day's worth, like Mary Poppins's carpet bag, the trip doesn't seem to be able to fit into the time that was allotted to it. The intensity of the concentration needed to get everything seen and heard and committed to memory has made it high-definition.

I've always liked doing speed-tourism. Almost all travel-writing and foreign-correspondenting is about slow immersion, wallowing in your subject. It doesn't suit me. My senses grow soggy; I lose concentration, and the whole experience becomes panoramic, but with a softer focus. Arnold Bennett, the critic, was arguing about writing with someone who claimed superior knowledge because of 20 years' experience. No, replied Bennett, you have one year's experience repeated 19 times. Time on its own doesn't necessarily give you a concomitant increase in insight.

Anyway, that's not what I was going to talk about. I went to Kenya, the first syllable sounding like the thing that opens locks. My children, and everyone else, say Kenya, with the first syllable sounding like the Spanish word for ‘what', which is probably technically politely correct. My way sounds colonial, but it's out of my mouth before I remember to flatten it; I don't say ‘Injah' or ‘Himaleeyas' with the last two syllables truncated into an English-swallowed abbreviation.

As a general rule of epiglottis, I think people have a perfect right to choose how they're known. If Bombay wants to be Mumbai, well and good. If Calcutta feels that the natty chic K of Kolkata suits its self-confidence, then it would be rude to cavil. I don't mind that they still sell Peking duck in Beijing or that Mumbai has Bombay University. I know that the capital of Greenland is Nuuk, not Godthab, and I wouldn't dream of calling Dunedin Edinburgh. I will make the best mouth I can out of the names people want to call themselves, though for liberal reasons I'm going to stick with Burma rather than Myanmar.

Winston Churchill made a feature of pronouncing foreign names with a pedantically English accent. Lyons was ‘Lions', and Marseilles sounded like his mother was in a dinghy. I think this was done primarily to provoke the irascibly thin-skinned de Gaulle and appeal to Americans, many of whom think that foreign languages are the noise the devil makes. What I mind, and this may be ungracious and verbalist of me, is the other extreme, where names come with a boil-in-the-bag pronunciation. Or rather, I mind it inordinately, inappropriately, when people decide to pronounce somewhere with a flavour of the accent of the inhabitants, a lilting moue of polyglot garnish: an Italian spin to San Gimignano, a curt German emphasis to Bremerhaven, a Spanish lisp to Cadiz.

I don't just mind – it drives me to paroxysms of murderous fury, which is made worse by the knowledge that it's such a piddling small thing. It shouldn't really bother me at all. It's so obviously an arrant little affectation, like keeping first-class luggage tags on your briefcase, or eating a banana with a knife and fork. But despite myself, I wish nothing but foul and pestilentially slow death on the loved ones of the offenders, and then I want them in turn to be falsely accused of hideous crimes of a disgusting nature involving farm animals, and then be forced to live a life of mock-shame before going sadly mad in great squalor and poverty.

I don't want to be irrational about this. What I mind is the silly snobbery of those who add the inverted commas and italics of a warmer tongue to their conversation to imply some extra association or intellectual ownership with the place. If I say Italian words with an Italian accent they will correctly infer that I am no stranger to southern climes. That I own a beret and can walk through peasant markets squeezing produce with the insouciance of a native. That I have canvas slip-ons with the heels trodden down and can order from a simple bourgeois menu without having to mime. This small inflection of mouthy one-upmanship is meant to tell the rest of us of a whole world of genteel, cosmopolitan, comfortably travelled sophistication, when in fact it does just the opposite. It reveals a cultural and intellectual insecurity and a brittle narrowing of world views. It is only certain countries that get the award of a music-hall accent. No one says Karachi with the exaggerated Punjabi accent, or Ulaanbaatar in the manner of the Mongol. You don't catch the verbal tourist talking with a Yoruba accent. In fact, if they did, they'd be open to accusations of racist mimicry.