today

I arrived in Glasgow a few days after the close of the Glasgow International. Which is a festival of contemporary art. There are still things to see, although everyone tells me that "I've come at a bit of a bad time".

What is on view is the Becks' Futures exhibition, and the Ross Sinclaire show at the Centre for Contemporary Art...

Glasgow. I’m sitting in my hotel room, and there is a tree in bloom outside my window. I’m drinking organic cider and eating blue cheese on oatcakes. Two more things to like about the U.K. The wind blows the white petals from the cherry tree through the window & I’m listening to the not-quite-perfect compilation that I made in Rotterdam …

Tugboat Galaxie 500
Birds Electrelane
Loch Raven Animal Collective
One That Got Away Minimum Chips
Avenue Au OOIOO
Strange Fruit Robert Wyatt
She Is Not David Sylvian
Test Pattern Minimum Chips
Formant Pluramon
Weight of Water Low
Transit Fennesz/ David Sylvian
Visionary Road Maps Stereolab
Furniture Minimum Chips

… for some days I have been thinking how great it would be to have a travel guide for the single traveller. It would list the hotels and B&B’s that welcome single people, the restaurants that have delightful tables for one, and handy suggestions for people like me who enjoy being by themselves but who probably don’t talk to the requisite 3 or 5 people per day (I forget what the number is) that one must in order to fend off madness.

This travel guide would not emphasise danger, but adventure. My Lonely Planet guide has a sections on each city for the Gay or Lesbian traveller but never mentions the single traveller – unless it is by inference, that some places are not good to walk alone at night, and so on. Now that I’m in Glasgow, I’m thinking longingly of the three days that I spent walking in the hills near the town of Larach, County Wicklow, in Ireland. Which was a tame kind of adventure, but never-the-less it was exactly the type of thing that gives you a kind of confidence. Are there great cities to be alone in?

perhaps travelling alone is a skill that needs to be perfected, rather than one that needs to be written about.

Eavesdropping becomes an unavoidable pastime in restaurants. Seated at a table for one in a restaurant in Edinburgh, I listened to the conversation between four back-packers – an Australian, two South Africans, and a New Zealander - at the table next to mine. The conversation began with a comparison of the colonial history of each person’s respective country; [I wonder if it’s actually true that the Maori peoples ate the original inhabitants of New Zealand? I’ll have to check …] and progressed to comparisons of cities that all of them had travelled to – for safety, friendliness and fun; and then to countries that each one had visited. Comparisons of dangerous situations and observations about sensible travel followed.

I have said the same things to much the same people myself. So I learnt nothing new, but was reminded that most of the time conversation isn’t about learning or exchanging ideas so much as it is about securing oneself, re-enforcing a position, making sure that the ideas and assumptions that constitute our individual worlds are still in place. It’s a type of security.

Something else I thought about was whether one person’s plan to work in a foreign city or another’s plan to travel to a third world country in order to work as a volunteer in an orphanage would constitute an experience in its own right, or whether it would only take on a solidity and meaning once it was discussed in a café or a restaurant in such a place as Edinburgh with fellow travellers … like my fellow travellers, I’m hoping for something authentic, but I’m in a situation in which authenticity is impossible – what experience of authenticity do you have to compare your travel experience with?

When the conversation turned to “what should be done” about the large number of people begging on the streets in the UK, I tried to concentrate on my book …

I have just finished reading Colm Tobin’s fictional portrait of Henry James – which deals with the subject of solitude very often, particularly the solitude of the foreigner in Europe. On the back of this, I’ve started to read James’ Roderick Hudson, which is already yielding ideas around another favourite topic -

The book begins in America, -

Rowland invites Roderick for a walk and, affected by the beauty of the Connecticut Valley, reflects on ‘this virtual quarrel of ours with our own country’. Roderick is inspired to advocate the practice of ‘American art’. We should ‘fling Imitation overboard’ he says, and ‘fix our eyes upon our National Individuality.’ Although James is poking fun at an idea so gauchely presented, he is also broaching a subject that was to occupy him for much of his writing life: the International theme.

from: Geoffrey Moore’s introduction to Roderick Hudson, by Henry James, this version published by Penguin Classics, 1986.

I’m looking forward to seeing what happens to Roderick when he visits Rome as the result of Rowland's philanthropic impulse.