I didn't mention the golf before because I was saving it. I hate it so much. Ocean City has nine kids' golf courses. Families come and play them like the majors, all in one weekend. They start with the pirates and go through the sci-fi monsters, then they do the dinosaurs and the cowboys. They can't get enough of putting around corners. And then they go and eat crab cakes and go back to their hotel rooms and watch exactly the same television they get back at home. And know that their towels won't be stolen from the balcony railings. And I know what they're doing, what America's doing. It's turning its back â turning its back on everything.
They're coming here to play novelty golf and eat crab cakes and stay in these hokey, tacky low-rent, low-crime resorts because it reminds them of somewhere else. Some place past. Some safe past place that you see in pictures or glimpse in the afternoons on cable TV. There are teenagers here, tough hip-hop, baggy, gangbanging teenagers, queuing up for their putters and a ball because everyone needs a weekend away from orange alerts and politics and being frightened, even crack dealers and car thieves. And if you can't laugh, at least you can get nostalgic and buy a T-shirt with a flag on it.
When they asked the readers which comic strips they should get rid of, they all chose the modern ones â the sharp, sarky, ethnic, smart-arse ones. They wanted to keep the strips they'd read all their lives â the old hokey familiar ones. The ones that aren't funny.
Mapmakers speak a language
of contours and borders, but
this lexicon says nothing of the
relationship between geography
and people. And they've missed
Greenland completely.
What's the biggest island in the world? If you answered, Australia, you effete pommy know-all, well I'm sorry â go and face the wall by the nature table. If you said Tasmania, go and sit on the nature table. Australia is a continent and therefore doesn't count as an island, and if continents were eligible as islands, then America would be the biggest. The biggest island in the world is Greenland, which makes Denmark the biggest country in Europe, because Denmark owns Greenland. Except that it isn't, because geographically Greenland is part of North America. It's separated from Canada by about as far as an angry girlfriend can throw your copy of
Call of
the Wild
.
I've just returned from East Greenland, and there's not a lot of people for whom that proximity is a reality. Even for most of the people in West Greenland it is cheaper to fly from East Greenland to Reykjavik and then on to New York than to fly across the country. It's that big. It's four time zones, without a single clock in two of them. Greenland is twice the size of the next biggest island, which is either Borneo, Madagascar or New Guinea. Well done those of you who said New Guinea.
It makes you think a lot about whether size matters. Despite its massive size, Greenland barely registers a blip on the world political, economic or social consciousness. In fact, none of the top four big islands are exactly what you'd call movers or shakers. On most maps, Greenland is shoved to one side or cut in half, effectively squeezed to the edge of the world. Indeed, being up there in the permanent daylight it feels like the edge of the world.
Geography is all about size. Kids who like geography in school are the ones who like lists, like to know the heft and the girth of things. I liked geography. The hottest place in the world? The record temperature is in the Libyan desert, though it might be Ethiopia. The coldest? Lived-in or uninhabited? Uninhabited, the South Pole. Inhabited, Greenland, where there is a dry wind that comes off the ice cap and blows harder than a hurricane. God knows what its wind-chill factor is. The wettest place, the driest, the highest capital? That would be Lima, wouldn't it, or perhaps La Paz? Capital furthest north? That's Reykjavik. Rivers, mountains, basins, plains, plateaux, distances. We keep on and on trying to understand the globe by its statistics, by its facts, but really it's like trying to know a stranger by his laundry list.
Size has another effect on people. In Greenland, the Inuit only live at the very edge of the country. In 4000 years, they've ebbed and flowed up and down its vastness, but haven't ever really got off the beach. You feel all this great empty howling, keening space stretching away behind you, the infeasible, unimaginable pristine freezing whiteness. There's a similar sense in Brazil. Again, almost everyone lives on the coast; behind them the steaming, dripping green and fetid dense land, lurking with not entirely loving attention.
Size intimidates, and it informs the national character. Though Inuits and Brazilians couldn't be more unalike, they're both people who are made by their landscapes. Now coming from a relatively small island such as Britain or Japan, or indeed Iceland, gives you a very different sense of who you are. We make the landscape in our own image. It's a tame and malleable place. Our geography is raw material; it's a stroll, a hike, a summer holiday. We think of the world as being an eventually manageable benign place. We come from humanised, human-sized countries.
There are people who are inspired by the size of their countries, like Americans. That ability to pick up sticks and start all over is central to Americans' idea of themselves. The open road, the new horizon, the ripe and unending bounty of the country. Then there are people who are confined by their geography, who will feel crowded and claustrophobic. The Swiss, the Cubans. Always looking over the fence. King Leopold bought the Congo specifically because he despised the small-town, little-nation bourgeois beer-and-chocolate mentality of his Belgian subjects. He felt that they could do with getting out a bit more. The Russians all need to get out a bit more, and then when they do, you wish they'd all go back.
Maps don't tell you the things that would be really useful to know about the world. The most boring place, for instance â East Germany. The rudest? Israel. The best-looking men? Cuba. And women? Somalia and Uzbekistan. The best breakfast? Paris and Hanoi. The best lunch? Sicily and Belgium. The best dinner? Bombay and Singapore. Maps should also tell you the most optimistic landscapes, and the most depressing. More of the world is on the move now than in any time since the fall of the Roman Empire. Millions and millions of slow unromantic odysseys, looking for something, for safety, for opportunity, a wife, a tan, a thrill, a chance, a decent night's sleep. How we see a journey is not measured by where we think we'll end up, but from where we start off.
Maps are static things. Greenland is the only place in the world that is uncharted. Look at it: it's an outline with a blank white interior. No one has ever made a map of it, no one's been to mark its contours and ravines, its plains or its peaks. It is the most spectacular landscape I've seen for a long time. The air is so clear you can see for hundreds of kilometres, and it's not mapped because there's no point to mapping it. Nothing lives in the middle. Nothing survives there. A map is a diagram of interest and expectation. And there is none in Greenland, and that makes it extraordinary.
The anonymous white, the enormous white is the world's largest lump of ice, the world's biggest, greatest reserve of water. And it's melting. Last year the pack-ice wasn't thick enough to take the weight of the sleds and the Inuits' dogs starved. When the ice all melts, it will re-draw the map of the world. Countries will vanish, cities drown, borders will be meaningless. Every atlas and globe that has been settled for a thousand years will be obsolete. And a country that no one ever thinks of, that barely makes it to the back of the picture, will have redrawn the world.
The world we imagine is almost
always different to the reality,
and our grand imaginings of
destinations inevitably affect
the experience.
Every place is three places. A trinity, separate but indivisible. A place is first the place you imagine, then the place you see, and then finally the place you remember. They are all distinct, they're related, all different, though none of them remain the same. The place you imagined is changed by the place you see, and that in turn changes as everywhere does. And memory is as ethereal as a performance that alters with every retelling. This all may seem a little esoteric, a little French-drawing-room, but I've been thinking about it because I'm going back to Haiti.
The world we imagine, we remember, is seen in a circus mirror. Whole continents shrink to mere specks. Some places are just blurred outlines, others grow disproportionately large. The centre of the universe may be a random but memorable city: the place of your birth, somewhere you were happy, where your family emigrated from, like those Dark Ages maps where the world revolves around Jerusalem. And there are fanciful lands full of monsters and misbegotten beasts. And that's what I feel about Haiti. In my personal topography, it's vast, a huge place inhabited by mythological creatures and fierce folk. When I finally walked across the tarmac to leave Port-au-Prince, I realised I'd spent a week with hunched shoulders expecting a blow. I have never before or since had the physical experience of a weight being lifted from my shoulders, and as I stepped onto the plane, I said, âThank God, I'll never have to come back here again.' You should not only be careful what you pray for, but about what you're thankful for.
I imagined Haiti as a darker Caribbean island, a mixture of James Bond and Graham Greene. It was so much more compellingly grim than that, more frightening, an example of what destitution, despair and hysterical imaginations can conjure up. Imagine John the Divine crossed with Keyser Söze crossed with the man pushing the shopping trolley who shouts at the traffic, and that's how I remember Haiti. Now, of course, the reality has been severely challenged by tectonic plates. Although I found the time I spent in Port-au-Prince testing and mostly terrifying, it's remained with me, loomed large in the reverie of my bespoke world. I can conjure up the smells, the men with yellow eyes, the hymn-singing from high windows, the shrieks that came out of the dark. It proves a glib travellers' rule that the places that stay with you, that are the most memorable, are rarely the most pleasant.
This brings me to space. Because whilst I was having my anxiety attack about going back to Haiti, I also considered going to the moon because someone had just told me that Buzz Aldrin â the Buzz Aldrin â is going to be doing a reality show on TV about dancing. It doesn't matter whether this is a real show or if it's the real Buzz Aldrin â the point is it could be; I believe it is. You could believe that Buzz Aldrin was going to do a reality show about dancing and then fall on his arse in a flamenco shirt. This is how we will remember the second man who ever stepped onto the moon.
Space travel has been promised as a tourist destination for about 20 years, but apart from a couple of American millionaires, it hasn't happened. Virgin Galactic is still taking bookings for passengers for the destination with less atmosphere than Starbucks. Soon, they'll be asking journalists to go on freebies, and I'm thinking, would I rather go to Haiti or into orbit with five American millionaires whose favourite film is
The Right Stuff
and who all want to be Chuck Yeager?
But I think space has missed the boat, or perhaps the rocket. Nothing has been as downgraded in the collective imagination as astronauts. In the '60s, they were the apogee of human achievement. Spacemen embodied everything we aspired to as a species. If you viewed natural selection as a pyramid with the Welsh at the bottom, the pointy stone at the top was a man wearing a fish tank on his head. Today an astronaut is a Russian plumber who's gone into orbit to mend the air-conditioning or to unblock the gravity-dunny. When was the last time you knew the name of a spaceman? (And we're not counting Buzz Lightyear.)
The space station looks like a postgraduate student hostel. Now that NASA has been told it's not going anywhere and its role will be to train pilots to give tours around guided-launch sites to a diminishing band of science-fiction nerds, space has become the great disappointment of our time. It embodied so much; it was all so rich in metaphor.
I went to the Museum of Cosmonautics in Moscow once. It was virtually empty except for a few dissolute schoolkids being prodded around by physics teachers. It's not popular in Russia now; too redolent of old redfaced communists. The rockets and the silver suits look like bad props from cheap movies. The one thing that grabbed my attention was a tiny Sputnik that had taken Laika the dog into space. It wasn't the original, of course. That, unlike Lassie, never came home. There was a stuffed dog strapped into the replica, and I wondered at the very Dostoevskian irony of one dog being condemned to death by being sent into the great never-never, and another one murdered to represent the first one when it was alive.
The problem with space was that the trinity of places didn't obey the terrestrial rules. The imagined place was so grand, so replete with expectation and fiction that the real place couldn't compete. Indeed, the real place turned out to be no place at all. And the memories that came back from it were so mundane, so weird, so middle American, so earthbound that before we ever took off it became dull and suburban, full of second-hand satellites and GPS signals, a junk-lot of ugly bits of silver stuff. We ruined it without ever having gone there. The abiding memory of space may be of old Buzz gliding along on one arthritic leg, arms outstretched, to the sound of âThus Spoke Zarathustra', to obscurity and beyond.
It's always summer that gets the
girl and has the time of its life.
But autumn, especially in the
beautiful countryside of northern
England, has charms of its own.
One of the rarely mentioned but horribly inequitable truths of life is that the rich not only live longer than the rest of us, but they get more summers. For you and I, summers come but once a year, and often, up here in Blighty, it doesn't even come then. But for the leisured and sybaritic, they can have as many as two or three summers in a year. I've known men whose entire lives have been one long summer. They savour bits of their own and then take bits of other people's around the world. It should be possible to work out a global itinerary where you can keep travelling elliptically north-west to south-east forever running between the solstices. Solsterie. Solstercii.