Supermarkets

When I am in the US, I consistently can’t find things in supermarkets. I just can’t find them, no matter how hard I look. My eyes scan aisles and shelves and inevitably the thing I am looking for is nowhere to be found. More often than not, I ask for help.

This isn’t really a problem elsewhere – I mean, once, probably a week into my life in London, that I figured out that eggs were kept on shelves and not in refrigerators in UK supermarkets, I think I’ve very seldom had to ask a supermarket employee for anything. But this is an ongoing thing for me in the US.

Why? Is it that so many US supermarkets are jam-packed with food products, groaning and overstuffed, making things harder to find? Is it that I am American and feel that things in my home country should be self-evident and require no labour, no work to decipher?

When I am on the road, I almost never ask for assistance in a supermarket. Part of this is that I am often just excited to be in an unfamiliar commercial space, observing the items for sale. Part of if is that when i am travelling I am usually not cooking or looking for staples. But another part of it is that I am more self-reliant and alert – smarter in general, I think – when I am travelling.

I’m about to leave on a big round-the-world trip, the kind I tend to do every three to five years. My last trip of this type was in early 2020; completely accidentally, the trip concluded just before things went haywire. I spent most of 2020 and 2021 dreaming about the sort of an adventure I’m about to begin. This one is a doozy. It was unpredictable to map out, an itinerary forced to take some unexpected turns due to glitches that might not strictly speaking have anything to do with the pandemic but didn’t ever seem to happen before 2020. I dealt with these challenges on the fly: I approached things as if I were in a supermarket in an unfamiliar place, not the Portland New Seasons where I shop for meals on my frequent visits to Oregon, where things seem to never be in the right place.

In terms of travel, 2022 was about family visits, London, & Lisbon, and a few adventures. I walked through and literally around London. I visited Menton and Trieste for long weekends. I spent a week in Vienna and a few days in Innsbruck and Lugano. From Portland, I took my nephew to Vancouver and spent some time on Orcas Island with my mother, sister, and stepsisters. I had an exhilarating week in Fiji with an old friend. I coped with various unsatisfying corporate travel machinations, finally saying goodbye to Airbnb and shaming Delta on Twitter for trying to get out of a reimbursement I had been promised.

Sometimes it’s not about how you finesse the supermarket you’re currently in; rather, it’s about leaving the supermarket altogether to find another.

My travels in the second year of the pandemic

As soon as Pfizer announced the efficacy of their COVID vaccine in November 2020 I began to plan. The first objective was to get vaccinated; the second was to figure out a return to travel proper. More than anything else, I wanted to travel differently, to stop jumping around, to fly less, and to put more contemplation into my travels. I began to plan out longer journeys to unfamiliar places, sketched itineraries across the length of continental Portugal by train and bus, searched for studios in Vienna, dreaming about spending a few months there working in the mornings and exploring my childhood haunts in the afternoons. I developed my own ethical code for post-pandemic travels: no journeys to places where vaccination numbers were low; vigilance with masks; activities kept outdoors as completely as possible.

Those were my intentions. What 2021 actually wrung out of me, travel-wise, was something else.

In mid-February I returned to London after five months in Portugal, a time spent mostly in Lisbon with a few carefully conceived and executed journeys to the Algarve, the Alentejo, Setúbal, and Porto. My assumption had been that Portugal would be a good place to stay for whatever was coming next, and I think I was right. It was warm enough to eat outside through December, and nobody seemed to complain that their right to infect other people with COVID had been stymied by a requirement to wear masks. Still, it was a time of pretty deep isolation. I left the apartment for a long walk once a day, stopping at the supermarket on my return if necessary. Opportunities to converse in Portuguese were few and far between, increasing my sense of loneliness, even displacement. It was around this time that the slightly metallic audio hush of Zoom began to feel terrible. Then Matt got stranded in London and I spent Christmas and New Year’s Eve alone. It was terrible but it was fine.

About a week after I returned to London, somehow, miraculously, I received a text message from the NHS inviting me to schedule my first jab. I got my shot, waited one month to the day for my first vaccine to take effect, and then flew to Oregon to see my family at the end of March. When I arrived, it was winter; by the time I left, greys and browns had been replaced by new shoots. We travelled to the coast for a few nights; there, in a beautiful modernist prefab house rented on Vrbo we ate raw oysters and drank vinho verde. The day we arrived it was unusually hot – the Oregon coast is typically frigid in March and April – and we sat on the deck watching the sunset. It felt like a miracle. It was an emotionally rich and physically gorgeous few days, the constantly billowing air a balm. Normality, I sensed, was within our grasp.

Back in London in late April, I stayed in place for two months. I got my second jab and then, in mid-May, after having considered it for years, committed to completing the LOOP (London Outer Orbital Path) walk. This was possibly the best decision I made all year. It was great, all of it, even the bits that involved trudging on busy roads and alongside rubbish facilities, even the more humdrum legs. I wrote a gargantuan Twitter thread on my LOOP walk, with lots of photos. I loved so many elements of the LOOP: the parks, farms, and open spaces ringing London; the cute villages that resist homogenisation (Havering-atte-Bower; Monken Hadley); the hyperdiversity of places like Erith, which turn on its head the widely-held belief that the fringes of London are culturally monotonous places; the parts of the LOOP that felt jerry-rigged, like the narrow path between the River Colne and an industrial park protected by a tall, hostile fence and the narrow alleyway approaching Selsdon Wood; the places with fantastic names, like Threehalfpenny Wood; the places that felt incredibly far from London, like Farthing Street, a country lane in Orpington; the quiet high streets; the bakeries and cornershops and local travel agencies that persist, impervious to the chain monsters that have swallowed up entire high streets across the UK, impervious even to the commercial churn afflicting much of London. Walking the LOOP was a joy, a spiriting away into local yet unfamiliar terrains. For me it was travel at its most precious at a time when travel hadn’t yet stopped feeling risky.

I am an evangelist, truly. A single leg of the LOOP is a cheap day out, an effortless way to be overwhelmed by nature, a useful opportunity to understand geography as a pedestrian and not as a passenger or driver. I miss it and am searching for other paths to walk along the edges of London. (I’ve just started the Capital Ring walk, a sort of junior version of the LOOP. It is enjoyable but I doubt will quite do the trick.)

I also spent a night at Birch in Hertfordshire in early June, a present to myself at peak immunity following my second jab. It was disappointing. See the post below. I hope they’ve figured things out by now.

Later that month I returned to Oregon for three weeks. It was summer and it was glorious, well – except when it was way too hot. I happened to be in Portland on its hottest day ever: 47C/116F. Difficult. But it was a good, restful time. I went to the coast with my sister’s family and friends, staying at Nehalem Bay State Park.

I flew back to the UK via Iceland. This was my first non-family travel in 16 months, my re-introduction to normal travel. It was complicated. When I arrived I felt as if I had parachuted into a new world – a new world that felt almost exactly like the pre-COVID world. Nobody masked, anywhere, and it almost felt as if COVID was completely over.

Almost. The ongoing pandemic was ‘represented’ as it were by a pregnant friend who not yet been vaccinated, following the public health rules then in place in Iceland. She was continuing to live a very cautious life; interacting with her demanded the same.

For my first few days in Iceland I would dutifully don a mask to enter restaurants and shops and then I just stopped. Nobody was doing it and it felt strange to do so, and COVID numbers were so low it felt reasonable to forgo them. Here was yet another COVID lesson, at a time when I felt I didn’t need any additional lessons of this type: conventions and norms matter. It is very easy to get into the rhythm of masking if everyone is doing it. Conversely, it is also very easy to lapse when nobody around you is masking. Patterns of behaviour matter.

I mostly stayed in Reykjavík, with a few days at farmstay in Geysir, and, once Matt joined me, an overnight trip to Eastern Iceland’s Hallormssta∂ur forest. I spent two weeks in Iceland. By the final few days of the trip, everyone in Iceland was masking again. An outbreak linked to unvaccinated tourists and local teenagers rocketed numbers almost overnight and convinced the government to return to cautionary measures. The shift was enormous. Insouciance had been replaced by vigilance as if a switch had been flipped. When I went to a testing centre to get my pre-departure PCR test the queues were long.

My experience in Iceland was a reminder that COVID isn’t over simply because there are policies in place that suggest that it is. Friends started to report breakthrough infections with some regularity over the summer. Anecdotally, these were mostly mild. I didn’t have a single friend who had experienced severe COVID from a breakthrough infection. But I still didn’t want to catch COVID if I could possibly help it, and more than that I really didn’t want to pass COVID on to anyone else.

Despite all this, these were heady days. I had extensive plans for the rest of the year – two big road trips, one from El Paso to Tucson, another from Chicago to Omaha to St Louis, and who knows what else, as things became easier. (I found myself reviewing the vaccination rates in São Tomé & Príncipe on a weekly basis.) But then, in August, during a lovely warm stretch in London when I was finally back at the gym and finishing the last few legs of the LOOP – managing, deliciously, to be both athletic and lazy at the same time – there was a family emergency that upended my plans for the rest of the year.

Since then I have made four trips to Oregon. The emergency itself is being dealt with, slowly and methodically. It’s just a question of time and a matter of helping out, though it requires even greater vigilance than I had previously been practicing. I have (permanent?) ridges along the tops of my ears from wearing KN95s.

Other travel throughout the rest of the year was piecemeal, stolen days grabbed here and there when schedules and quarantine periods allowed – an abbreviated Southwest/Midwest visit, a return to Portugal (Lisbon, Viseu, and Portimão), a few nights in Marseille, a handful of nights in Copenhagen, a week over Thanksgiving in New York. Disarmingly, this pace resembled far too closely the way I had travelled prior to the pandemic, a pattern I had sought to change. But I had lots of great experiences. My time with family members has been wonderful. I was able to reconnect with some friends I had missed terribly. I was careful – dining almost exclusively outdoors, even in Minnesota in November, spending as much social time outdoors as possible – and to some degree I was lucky. I get PCR tests before I travel and I test at home almost every day. Not once have I tested postive for COVID.

But the care I had imagined I would take – the intentionality, the deliberativeness – has been impossible to implement. When I thought about how travel might go once things were back to normal, I hadn’t imagined that there would also be a family emergency to manage, and nor had I considered the potentially disruptive effects of a new hyper contagious COVID variant by the end of 2021. I’d allowed myself to drift into a fantasy future of calm, quiet, contemplative, slower travel. The reality is that many things are outside of our control and require ad hoc scrambling to manage. The pandemic makes every last thing just that much more complicated and fraught. This remains our reality.

Omicron appears to be pretty mild but it moves like wildfire and it is a danger especially for people already disproportionately ravaged by COVID. I am pretty confident that we will be in a better place in a few months, but I don’t foresee the imminent return of easier travel – nor, for that matter, can I imagine that I will be able to implement my post-pandemic resolve to travel more thoughtfully anytime soon.

Hotel of the year

Birch, a property perched just north of the M25 in Hertfordshire, opened in 2020. It bills itself as a festival, a riot, an irresistible escape. Last October the Sunday Times awarded it hotel of the year. An unusual year demanded an unusual pick: an affordable, aesthetically exciting hotel bursting with activities but without any sense of expectation or schedule, on the doorstep of the capital.

Birch isn’t just a hotel. It is also a members’ club with coworking spaces. If this sounds a lot like an Ace Hotel, you won’t be surprised to learn that the former managing director of the Ace Hotel London, Chris Penn, is a co-founder of Birch. A property that can legibly function in several different ways at the same time, make those different drives and needs productive rather than conflicted, is exciting.

From the first moment I saw Birch’s ads online – long before a single review had been penned – I yearned to visit. It wasn’t even clear to me from those adverts what Birch was about, just that it was interesting. I was instantly curious.

After a tumultuous stop-and-start pandemic year-plus, Birch reopened on 17 May of this year, as it turns out right about a week after I was fully vaccinated and able to contemplate lots of things I’d kept away from for ages – public transit, the gym, physical therapy, a professional haircut. Two nights at Birch, which I booked for £120 per night back in mid-March, eyeing my COVID vaccination/immunity timeline, would feel symbolic – a tiny, personal victory.

It did, and I’m glad I went. But unfortunately it has to be said that currently at any rate Birch is a mess. The two big issues are understaffing and lack of organization­, or, perhaps more precisely, lack of coordination. This is an understaffed, uncoordinated property, and although it is tempting to discount these problems because the place is otherwise so exciting, the sheer on-the-ground hassles these deficits engender make it impossible to do so.

•••

On the highly anticipated day, I took an Overground train from Liverpool Street station up through northeast London to Theobald’s Grove, just barely beyond the Greater London boundary. I arrived in late afternoon, in a great mood; it was warm and I decided to walk. (Note: Don’t walk to Birch. I had to clomp through grasses and weeds along the very busy A10 to get to Birch.)

After this mildly stressful journey, the last bit of the walk was lovely – long tunnels of trees, a quiet road, and beyond it: the property itself, a listed brick country house that dates to the 18th century. I began to breathe more deeply.

My check-in was full of stops and starts. Three employees were required to figure it out. But I got my room, in an ancillary building. A receptionist – called a ‘placemaker’ – led me through a busy co-working space, alongside an elegant bar, to a lift. One floor up I found my room – minimalist, a carpet solid to the step, deserty early 1990s tones, and plenty of space. I washed my hands, drank a cup of tap water, and lay down on the bed. This, I thought, will do.

Not five minutes later my mobile rang. It was the reception. I had been given the wrong room. They wanted to give me a VIP room and a free cocktail as compensation. No problem. Someone came to fetch me and we walked back to the main house. I proceeded up a boldly painted staircase to my bedroom. It was fine, but I immediately missed the previous room – this one had wonderfully high ceilings but the bathroom felt cheap and barely refurbished; its odd pink walls failing to give the dated finishings a boost of any kind.

The design of the main house is wild, and, it has to be said, extremely appealing – some walls left in a patchy state; other bits painted brightly; décor consists of tapestries, framed drawings, and vases of dried flowers. If you had very quirky, very rich friends whose lives were about large-scale conceptual projects, this is what their house might look like. The style imprint is sophisticated and fun, allowing the building to stand as an imperfect and patchworked entity, the physical building itself retained and upcycled in different ways. If I had to guess I’d say that this mix-and-match style, maximalism interspersed with sparseness, ornamentation interwoven with raw, distressed structure, is something we will be seeing a lot of over the next few years. (For those tracking these things, Red Deer are responsible for Birch’s interiors.)

Indoors, people type away on laptops and drink wine at lunch. Outside, there’s a lot of play. The massive lawn in the back lawn is dotted with chairs and tables and little fire pits and people run around with their dogs. The lido has vibrant murals and fun tiling. There are hipster parents with their babies and older couples, too. It’s informal, stylish. The property spills in every direction. It was exciting, frankly, all this activity, all this buzz. Who was a hotel guest? Who was a member, using the space to work? No idea. I liked that. As far as I can tell, this sort of liminal play is precisely the atmosphere Birch are after. They produce it successfully.

Dinner at Birch’s signature restaurant, the Zebra Riding Club was very good, though it was a little bit annoying that outdoor dining was not an option, especially in light of the explicit billing of the restaurant as an ‘indoor/outdoor’ space on the Birch website. I had to remind myself that I’ve been fully vaccinated – the past 15 months have made the prospect of sitting indoors at a restaurant seem extraordinarily risky and important to avoid. I sat down at the bar, next to an open door, the best available option.

The butter came in a little dish with a spread of miso made from old bread – salty, comforting umami I would have spooned directly into my mouth without even the slightest encouragement; the standard starter, a spicy little soup of grains and peas, was moreish; my lobster course was delightful. It’s a set menu, so the following night I had the vegetarian version, which was also very good. The pacing was slow on the first night but I was having a lovely meal and didn’t mind; by the second night, however, the 30-minute breaks between courses felt slightly annoying.

At night I went back to my room and watched the light sky slowly fade. It was just a few weeks from the solstice. This is a magical time to be in this part of the world, and the occasional soft ripple of laughter or conversation from the lawn below gave me the delicious sensation of being connected yet alone.

I awoke just past four in the morning, the sky already light, the hum of the M25 – a ten-minute walk from the property in a direct line – electric. Why is it that we hear busy motorways especially clearly in the middle of the night? I fell back asleep, spent an hour trying to get myself breakfast – about which more, in a minute – and then took a nap. The bed was extraordinarily comfortable. Later that afternoon, after a walk along the New River path, I took yet another nap, waking up only after the dj below started to play some slow r&b. I can’t remember the last time I took two naps in a single day. That bed was a dream.

•••

Breakfast both mornings was at Valeries, an all-day restaurant. It was unclear where guests should wait for a table. Were we in the way? Waitstaff zip around, overworked. I finally got someone’s attention and asked for a table outside and had to wait a while. I was asked if I wanted to come back in an hour, which of course I did not want to do. It was morning and I was starving. It was 45 minutes before I was seated and another 15 before my breakfast arrived. At the next table, a father with three kids complained to a waiter; he understood the staffing issue but it had been an hour since he had ordered. On the other side of me, a mother with two daughters was given somebody else’s order. Behind me a woman working away on her laptop reminded a waiter that it had been 45 minutes since she had ordered her flat white. My breakfast came relatively quickly, comparatively. It was comped, with effusive apologies.

The next morning at Valeries was even worse; the ordering tablet malfunctioned and ate up my coffee order, which arrived after I had finished my breakfast. It took 90 minutes to get breakfast, which meant that I checked out late and ended up getting to my Golders Green lunch appointment 20 minutes late.

Even ordering an afternoon beer to enjoy in the garden the previous afternoon took 15 minutes; there was a problem with the draught but this wasn’t communicated, so I just stood there, limply, wondering why nobody was cluing me in, along with five or six other people, all of whom had already paid for their drinks and snacks, everyone waiting.

It was clear that there simply are not enough people working at Birch. I spoke to several staff members and they all confirmed this as the main issue. All were apologetic, personable, and overworked.

I am quite sure that the problems at Birch are not just about wait times, that they go deeper than understaffing. I have stayed in enough hotels at a range of price points to recognise structural problems. There is zero coordination where there should be. Here’s one example. At the moment the Wellness Centre has nobody to give massages or other treatments on Tuesdays or Wednesdays – those staffing issues, again – yet, clearly not knowing this, one placemaker told me I should stop by on a Wednesday to see if there had been a cancellation. In a well-run hotel, there should be daily briefings. If there is nobody working at the wellness centre two days of the week, everyone at the hotel should know this. Here are some other issues that go beyond staffing, to recap – ill-thought out spaces (waiter inattention; a lack of places to wait to be seated at the Valeries restaurant; lack of knowledge shared between staff members), poorly functioning software (the tablets used for ordering at Valeries seem to crash a lot); even the absence of a dedicated cab service for people arriving by train.

I haven’t mentioned a bunch of other glitches because I don’t want to get individual Birch employees in trouble for things that were clearly beyond their control.

•••

If I want to be fully uncharitable about it, Birch is comparable to Boris Johnson – the man/hotel full of bluster, bang, pop, flash – he with words and rhetorical machinations; Birch with stylish objects. The comparison only goes so far – if Birch is anything, it is cool; Johnson is not. Birch, like the post-Brexit Britain for which Johnson should be forced to take responsibility, is plagued with staffing issues. Plainly, the EU labour pool this country was able to count on for 15+ years is no longer available. The double-whammy of Brexit and the pandemic explain Birch’s staffing deficit.

I am sympathetic to Birch and its employees. Brexit is a disaster for hospitality and the stops and starts of openings have surely been murder for planning. But the upshot is that the fun chaos of Birch is crowded out by the unfun chaos of its execution. Said a different way, style is never enough.

I want Birch to get it together. I want to like it, to return, to rely on it as an easy escape, to share it with friends. But in its current state I can’t do any of those things.

There are rumours that there are more Birches in the works. I hope the owners will deal with these fundamental issues now, before expansion. Hire more staff, hire an old school hotel manager who knows how to establish structure, and give staff better direction. This place should shine.

We wanted a repudiation, or: Eight weeks down, three to go

First of all, we won.

But. But but but but.

Instead of a repudiation we got a base election. Rachel Bitecofer was right about the basic dynamics.

That we did not get a clear repudiation is a source of serious concern. There is no good reason why a President who was underwater in polling for the entirety of his four years, who mismanaged a pandemic that killed at least 231,000 people in the United States by election day, and who regularly insults the majority of the citizens it is his job to serve should have been within four and a half points of winning the popular vote. And yet he was. This is an indictment of how partisan the United States has become as well as a stunning confirmation of Trump’s normalization. For Trump’s transgressions and cruelties and dishonorable actions were given, over and over, a veneer of acceptability. His destruction of norms was given room – by journalists, by elected officials, by the Republican Party, over and over and over again.

There are many hasty takes on what the election meant, some data-driven, others opinion-fuelled. I think, eight weeks on, it continues to remain too early to properly gauge the election and what it means, but I still have some things to say.

 1. It turned out that it was enough to be the anti-Trump. After every election involving right-wing populists for the last five years at least we have been told: if you don’t stand for a specific program – as opposed to simply against right-wing populism – you will lose to the right-wing populist. Not so. This was a referendum on Trump and Trump lost. Of course Biden had ideas – plenty of them, many of them good – but they simply didn’t make it out of the gate. Trump sucked all the oxygen out of every room, day in day out. This was a referendum on Trump, and American voters, by a margin of over seven million, decided that they did not want more of Trump’s toxic nonsense.

And, to turn to the UK for a minute, don’t forget we have at least one proper example of a left-wing counterprogram that failed. Corbyn had two opportunities to beat a Conservative government that made clear its intention to hobble the UK for at least a generation in the name of amorphous, emotionally-charged “sovereignty” – and he failed. How might those elections have gone had the leader of the Labour Party acknowledged the horrors of Brexit to come, pointed out the fact that the referendum was explicitly non-binding, stressed the slippery dishonesty of its proponents in the lead-up to the referendum, and fought the nightmarish slide on the part of the Tories and their cheering Telegraph columnist boosters toward enforced chaos and poverty? To do so would have meant to commit, in concert with the Liberal Democrats, the Greens, Plaid Cymru, the SNP, and Alliance, toward either an anti-Brexit coalition or a very soft Brexit, which ran contrary to his revolutionary plans for I don’t know water rights or railway renationalization or something. We’ll never know, though it might have been enough for Labour to have credibly said: we stand practically against this right-wing populism – join us.  

2. This was a much bigger win, historically, than it appeared at first glance. Trump becomes one of four Presidents in the last century (the others are George HW Bush in 1992, Jimmy Carter in 1980, and Herbert Hoover in 1932) to lose a re-election bid. Biden has ended up with 51.3 percent of the vote; according to the New York Times election tracker, this is a margin of 4.5 percentage points, which can be rounded up to a five point win. The last time a challenger to an elected President broke 50% was 1932, when Roosevelt beat Hoover. In 43 states there was movement toward Biden; only six states moved toward Trump between 2016 and 2020. (Nevada showed no change at all.) Yet the overwhelming coverage of the outliers to this trend ended up implying that much of the country turned toward Trump.

 3. Trump did better than the polls suggested. Why? Why did a dozen-odd House seats go Republican? How did Democratic Senate candidates in Maine, Iowa, and North Carolina, apparently favored for most of the year, vastly underperform? I suspect that Trump activated two reservoirs of voters: his supporters, who don’t usually vote and who were somehow beyond the reach of polls, and Republicans who voted for Biden and then voted for Republican candidates down-ballot.

Whatever the explanation, and their various justifications to the contrary, US polling is not living up to expectations. Pollsters need to figure out how to model turnout better. Until they do, it will be difficult for laypeople to view polls as useful.

4. We still have a stunted grasp of Trump’s arc of the electorate. The Los Angeles Times turned its opinion page over to pro-Trump letters on 14 November. I read each one of those letters and learned nothing. It is tiring, how often and thoroughgoingly we have been compelled to listen to these voices. We have heard them for years. They consist of the following:

– Trump is a businessman and is good for the economy.

– Liberals are destroying America with their misguided approach to political correctness and Trump is the remedy.

– Abortion is bad and Trump opposes it.

– Negative partisanship is one hell of a drug. The more that people oppose Trump the greater the groundswell of support for him.

– Racism, coded racism, barely coded racism, bald racism, and more racism.

For the millionth time, we have been asked to understand the motivations of people voting for a dangerous demagogue, a racist huckster, a corrupt business failure with good marketing savvy, an illiberal risk. And yet in the above explanations there is not a lot to work with. Trump disparaged just about every good thing the US stands for. He was openly racist. He coddled authoritarians. He made money off his Presidency. He put children in cages. He is a sadistic crook. All of these things were acceptable for 74+ million Americans. I want to understand support for Trump in that I want people to vote differently, and the explanations above aren’t very helpful in getting us there.  

Tim Alberta’s round-up of voters and their motivations in Politico was more helpful, and also more depressing – here we see the degree to which the conviction that the election was fraudulent, a conviction without evidence, refuted by everyone who has investigated them, has spread.

5. Emotions are running high.

On the other side of the ledger, Trumpists got a lot of attention for how they felt.

It's dispiriting to come across an analysis like this one by Batya Ungar-Sargon, which implies that none of this true panic that I know we felt terrorized by, authentically, matters. All that matters is taste.

Trump made four or five racist statements throughout his presidency, and about the same number of antisemitic ones. The rest of the opposition to him wasn’t about values at all. It was about taste. Trump is gross. That spray tan, that hair, the golden toilet, the vainglorious pettiness: He didn’t fit with the vision upper class people have of a leader. But we in the media clothed our taste-based objection to Trump, which is of course a stand in for class, in terms of values: He’s anti-truth; he’s racist; he’s a Nazi. (“What does Liberalism Even Mean Anymore?” in The Dandy)

Because I for one don’t give a toss about golden toilets. Sure, it’s interesting that Trump’s aesthetic sort of rhymes with the aesthetics of dictators and autocrats in the Ashgabat-Moscow-Dubai triangle. But who actually cares about it?

Ironic, too, that again it would be this accusation of aesthetic disdain from liberals when it was Trump who connected the final dot in the merging of politics and aesthetics, a process that has been underway for at least 20 years. In his remarkable piece on Trump and camp, Matthew Walther writes:

But Trump was still the culmination of a long process on the American right, the rejection of tedious dogma in favor of a general aestheticized disdain.

Where is the sustained attempt to understand us? The absolute emptiness, the consuming fear, the sleepless nights, the cold-sweat panic that many Americans have authentically felt for the past four years – and longer, for those of us who became concerned about Trump’s potential to win the White House from the summer of 2015 onwards. Our pain was real. Our fears are real. And while there was a lot of time devoted by the mainstream media to the dangers of Trump, there was relatively little devoted to the sheer panic and pain we were feeling – to our emotions.

6. We won decisively but on an authoritarian-time clock we barely made it out. One of the sages of this era is authoritarianism scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat, who points out somewhere (can’t find it just now) that only one in five autocratic takeovers is turned back. Normalization turns autocrats into palatable leaders.

On the topic of normalization, one of the stories about the 2020 election that needs to be told in depth is the story of Trump and the Mormons. I am partially of LDS stock, though I was not raised within the church and know little about its doctrines. But I have loads of Mormon relatives. They actively disliked Trump in 2016; they physically recoiled from him. And they simply got more comfortable over the past four years. There are certainly a few things going on here, but one thing that is going on is that autocracy-minded leaders over time become normalized. In 2016, Mormon women in particular felt disproportionately offended by Trump; by 2020, his transgressions and perceived immorality had become baked in, excused, simply part of the package in the war against socialism, violence in the streets, Hollywood, whatever. In 2016 they had Evan McMullin to vote for. Though I haven’t seen any solid data confirming this, it appears that over half of those votes went to Trump this year. McMullin got 21.54% of the Utah vote in 2016; adding to this figure the share of lost support for the Libertarian and Green candidates in 2020 and you get 22.95%, almost identical to the boost Biden received compared to Hillary Clinton (10.19%) combined with Trump’s (12.59%) rise in support against 2016.

It would be fascinating to see if this shift is present in other states where Mormons are particularly numerous. What happened in Mormon strongholds in Idaho, Wyoming, Arizona, and Nevada? Does this shift explain the drift toward Trump in strongly Democratic Hawaii, where Mormons are a relatively significant 5+ percent of the population?

This drift has to be placed in the context of Biden’s relatively very good performance in Utah, by the way. But it also shows the effects of normalization and implies that vast numbers of Mormons became ok with Trump over the course of his Presidency.

7. Bernie Sanders would have gotten destroyed. The Trump campaign essentially ran the anti-Bernie playbook all year long, and it worked pretty well even in the absence of Bernie. It convinced just enough people in North Carolina and Texas that Biden was some sort of socialist, and it galvanized South Florida – Cuban-Americans and Venezuelan-Americans, among others – to oppose the Democrats as if they are some sort of pernicious Communist force.

Also, the smartest progressives on Twitter are usually – as in almost always – not good at understanding why people vote the way they do. Biden ended up being a very good candidate, despite the near-universal inability of this group of people to grasp that.

By the by, though I’m not sure this observation belongs under Bernie-would-have-lost heading: Liberals assume that we are right and that most people will agree with us if they have the right information. Sometimes this is correct; other times it is not. Liberals also often assume that everyone has the information that we do. But most people do not breathe politics. Most Americans continue to think that Trump is a successful businessman, not a blowhard idiot who has gone bankrupt multiples times and is good only at licensing his name and branding some abstract sense of success.

8. The end of the campaign was chaotic and very, very emotional. Trump caught COVID-19 and survived and then went full-tilt on the campaign trail. Prior to that, Republicans amassed a huge advantage in new voter registrations over the summer. Biden and the Democrats did what was responsible in both instances, but this turned out to be risky. By appearing at rallies, Trump activated some sort of twisted mass response: he almost died and he’s here for us. By registering voters all summer long, the Trump campaign built an advantage that was not picked up by polls.

9. Microtargeting remains the name of the game, and Democrats need to get much better at it. Why were some Asian-Americans lured by the Trump campaign? What was happening in Chinese-language social media? Vietnamese voters in Orange County reversed long-term voter realignment patterns and voted for Republicans. Why?

What is the shape of the Spanish-language disinfo media landscape? Why wasn’t it better understood by Democrats?

It can’t be beneath Democrats to investigate this stuff. We need to understand it much better and be able to contest it, because it is not going to go away anytime soon.

All this said, the narrative of Latinos suddenly being Republican is weird and incorrect. If white Americans voted the way Latinos did, the US would be in a much better place. In 1984, 37% of Latinos voted for Reagan. In 2004, 40% of Latinos voted for Bush. This year, by at least one estimation, 66% of Latinos voted for Biden versus the 65% who voted for Clinton in 2016. Even if this estimate is off by a bit, certainly Trump did nowhere near as well as Bush in 2004.

Outreach has to be better, and it has to be 24/7.

Interlude. The most difficult thing for me personally these past few years was the utter conviction with which friends, American and not, would tell me that Trump was destined for a second term. It didn’t matter that he was an historically unpopular President. It didn’t matter that 2018 was a dramatic Blue Wave mid-term election. It didn’t matter that by the close of 2019 every single leading Democratic candidate lead Trump in the polls. Perhaps as a reaction to trauma, the prevailing idea was that there was nothing we could do to stop Trump. This is, not to put too fine a point on it, precisely how authoritarianism roots itself – in the idea of inevitability. People convince themselves early on that a wannabe-autocratic ruler is unstoppable long before he actually is. The justifications might go like this: he won by a much bigger margin than we’d thought imaginable, thus he is likely unbeatable; he has friends in the media to help him finesse his message; he has violated norms and gotten away with it so nothing can stop him. All those reactions come before the actual clampdowns. They ease people into a servile position until all they can do is leave or retreat into private lives. And once that sense of agency has evaporated, it becomes vastly easier for an authoritarian to demolish democratic institutions and exercise power.

Make no mistake: American authoritarianism was very, very close. And it may return. We are on notice. But we had the power to beat Trump and I felt very sure, looking at the evidence, that we would.

To everyone who told me with utter conviction, against all available evidence, that Trump would definitely win: Think about what you signed off on with that conviction. The implications of inevitability and the irrelevance of engagement or voter agency, the sense that our own actions are destined to be meaningless, are both extremely corrosive and part of a larger narrative of authoritarian creep. Be mindful of revering authoritarianism over the evidence.

10. Resisting right-wing populism is important in every instance, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Trump backed down on a number of things when the response was fierce enough; courts turned him back; the mid-term blue surge that took back the House held him back; at other junctures he misjudged what he was up against and reacted poorly, endangering his own position. The fact is that we cannot afford right-wing populism in any instance. Fight its normalization wherever you are. It doesn’t matter that Chega here in Portugal – where I have been since September – is “only” polling at between 5 & 8 percent. That’s too high for a dangerous right-wing demagogue who attacks Joacine Katar Moreira – one of just three Black members of the Portuguese parliament – and scapegoats the Roma. Challenge people who tell you that he’s just voicing something that other politicians are afraid to voice. Give right-wing populism no quarter, for it is always destined to be first authoritarian and later genocidal.

11. Trump Derangement Syndrome is real. Credit to Virginia Heffernan.

Those of us who oppose Trump probably do have something called Trump Derangement Syndrome. Trump after all has been an unprecedented threat. But his supporters are also afflicted by this disorder, in ways that reconfigure their personalities entirely. I just came across a minor celebrity I hadn’t previously heard of whose entire social media universe is Trump triumphalism, QAnon memes, and nonsense hashtags. She appears to be utterly and completely taken over by a virus. Prior to 2016, she seemed pretty sane, all things considered, lucid and cogent. Once Trump was injected into her life, she became nearly unrecognizable.

I watch Trump’s rallies and I see madness, the eclipse of what Joseph Roth called the regulating consciousness. What happens when an advisor to the President suggests on air that Anthony Fauci should be beheaded or a lawyer allied with the President discusses shooting an elections integrity chief, or literally millions of Trump’s supporters argue with zero evidence that the election was rigged? Separately but not unrelatedly: What happens when information has become so siloed that we cannot speak of shared facts?

I think adoration of Trump is a virus but I also imagine it to be emotionally comforting, an identification with being disdained. The moment that scared me most in the 2016 campaign was when Trump said that he loved the poorly educated. Can you imagine a “responsible” mainstream Republican saying those words? That was a moment of entry for many people, a moment of feeling seen. Trump rallies look to be carnivalesque events, emotionally laden. People are there because they want to be, and Trump opens up a space – as Obama did – for people to choose how they belong. The crowd roars, laughs, erupts – the din is loud enough to chew on or to set your own melodies to.

Lies themselves are a bond. Lies connect. Lies provide an ideal way to reject, in the most dramatic manner possible. How better to demonstrate loyalty and belonging than to sign on to a shared lie, an open lie? How better to demonstrate that you are a true American than to sign on to a shared assassination of an ethnicity, a religion, “shithole countries,” or people who (you imagine or are told) think they are better than you?

I wonder also how “lies” register in the first place within certain life philosophies: what is a mere lie from Trump’s lips – whether viewed as a performance or not – if your values are such that there is a larger urgency that transcends and justifies lies of the present?

12. What did we ignore? In 2016 I volunteered for the Clinton campaign in Cincinnati. For the first several days of volunteering, before the voter registration deadline passed, I stood outside various Krogers asking people if they were registered to vote. It was slow going. One group of young people laughed: “Are you kidding? It’s a mess. I don’t want anything to do with that.” Men in their 20s, mostly Black, made it clear that they thought that the political system was too messed up for them to want to vote. It became clear that a civic grasp had broken, or had been rebroken, or was stillborn all along and only now somehow visible as such. Lack of participation was seen as agency, as separation from the zoo of politics. There were also the canvassing moments that should have rung alarm bells but didn’t: An older Asian woman with an accent telling me she just hadn’t made up her mind yet; a level of detachment throughout; the repeated refrain “I liked Bernie” cited not as a piece of the puzzle but as a block to enthusiasm. I hadn’t glimpsed any of this ambivalence in 2008 when I canvassed for Obama, also in Cincinnati. A sense of hope had been replaced by detachment, rejection, as if abstention would make a change.

In the retelling prior to Election Day I focussed on the encounters that lifted my spirits, the moments that told me that people shared with me the deep sense that Trumpism was a virus that had to be stopped: a young bouncy white couple in their 30s who had just purchased their house and were getting ready to go on a run; the dour upper-middle-class white woman who told me that she loved John Kasich but of course would be voting for Hillary; the white guy with a moustache wearing a tank top with a drawl born well south of Cincinnati who said “Trump is crazy. We have to stop him from becoming President” and registered to vote on the spot; the Black man who stopped to sit with me for a moment and said “I pay my taxes. I’m not voting for anyone who doesn’t pay his.”

I also think about my visit to south Florida in April 2019, striking up a conversation at Miami International Airport with two women, one in her 20s and the other in her 40s, both Latina. “Oh you’re going to Palm Beach. We love it,” said the younger. “Yes, it’s nice up there. Mar-a-Lago, Trump,” said the older, with a pump of her fist. “We really like him.” It’s easy to write things off, but this was a weird moment that stuck with me, that I had a hard time fully ignoring. (Someday someone will have to explain Florida to me.)

13. What should Biden do? Remain decent. Speak as if he wants to unify and never waver in this regard. Get as many Americans as possible vaccinated in the shortest amount of time. Be obvious about taking credit: Drawing attention to changes made by his administration should not be beneath him. Biden’s name should be on stimulus checks. Overturn every pernicious executive order he can. Reshape foreign policy away from lowest-common-denominator transactionalism; honor commitments and relationships. Do whatever he can with Congress. Remind the press often and loudly that the Trump administration has done untold damage and the clean-up is going to take time.

And take one page out of Trump’s book: Blitz. Overwhelm. Don’t pause for a second. Don’t wait for reactions. Just go. Every day.

Fuck them up, Uncle Joe.

Rethinking travel, or: Travel media's two missed opportunities in 2020

In early July, The Telegraph sent a bunch of travel writers out to write post-lockdown travel stories, many around the UK, a few abroad. The commissioned writers inundated social media with the hashtag #GreatEscape. There was something undeniably exciting about it. A dip in COVID-19 numbers afforded us the cautious journeys of this #GreatEscape: a return to pubs; hotel check-ins over plexiglass barriers; lazing about on quiet Mediterranean beaches.

None of it had real legs, as we now know, and the legacies of that burst of summer travel have been mostly negative. European summer holidays were partially responsible for a boom in infections in the late summer and autumn in many European countries. But even at the time, it didn’t quite feel right. The initiative was a response to what was allowed, not what was smart or cautious in terms of COVID-19 risk. I skimmed those tweets, watched those videos, and read the resulting articles with a sense of dread.

***

On the one hand, there should have been greater emphasis over these last few months not on what lies in wait for us once things are back to normal but rather on two different but related subjects: [1] How to travel during COVID-19 with as little risk as possible to oneself and others; and [2] how to reconceptualise travel altogether, to make living through the pandemic easier and more joyful.

In the first category, we needed more stories about RV and campervan holidays, camping, properly sanitised rentals, and hotel accommodations – suites, cottages, whatever – with private entrances. We needed more pieces like this one by Stuart Emmrich, which really commits to masks and outdoor dining throughout, and discusses how travel has changed in detail. Less fantasy, more nitty-gritty, more attention to navigating life and travel responsibly. Leading travel sections might have highlighted staycation pieces that were actually about staying in place, or very nearby, avoiding public transportation and travelling by private auto, bicycle, or foot, and emphasising new ways to remain outdoors. We might also have spent less time freaking out about people on beaches or in forests and more time steering people away from indoor dining and boozing. Instead, in the Anglophone travel media at least, the predominant emotional undercurrents have been impatience and expectation. And this makes sense – I breathe impatience myself these days. Avid and occasional travellers alike are ready to travel. But it turns out that what we want and what we can responsibly have are not the same thing.

Adjacent to this, some travels are unavoidable, and people need to know how to make these journeys in as safe a manner as possible. Exposure mitigation stories like this one and this other one on flying are helpful. We need similar stories about travelling on buses and in taxis, both of which are very likely considerably riskier in COVID-19 terms than sitting on a short-haul flight.

The second category: how do we reconceptualise travel for the moment? Are there ways to recapture the excitement, the novelty, the sensory pleasures of travel at home – or close to home?

I came across this extraordinary article published in November in Die Tageszeitung the other day, written by Christel Berghoff and Edith Kresta, titled Tourismus neu denken: Reisen als sinnliche Erfahrung (Rethinking tourism: Travel as a sensual experience). Berghhoff and Kresta, influenced in part by political economist Maja Göpel, look at tourism as a form of identity creation: the travel experience has become about who we are as people – both an extension of the self and the construction of it. As here:

Vielleicht ist reisen wertvoller, als man gemeinhin denkt. Nicht als Konsumprodukt und Lifestyle, sondern als sinnliche Erfahrung, als Empfindung von intensiver Körperlichkeit, Lebendigkeit und Erotik. … Das Reisen hat uns substanzielle Selbsterfahrungen ermöglicht, an unterschiedlichen Orten, die auf uns zurückgewirkt haben und sich in unsere Wahrnehmungsweisen und unser Selbstsein eingeschrieben und ungemein bereichert haben.

My translation, which might leave something to be desired:

Perhaps travelling is more valuable than is commonly thought. Not as a consumer product and lifestyle, but as a sensual experience, as a sensation of intense physicality, vitality, and eroticism. … Travelling has made it possible for us to be aware of ourselves in a range of places; these places in turn impact us and inscribe – and immensely enrich – our ways of perceiving ourselves and being who we are.

In the years leading up to the pandemic, the authors write, travel gradually became more and more about immediate gratification, about straight-up consumption and ticking off expectations, all while the climate emergency surged. They ask: what if we rethink travel culture to focus on the senses? They point to the beach as a site where all our senses are activated, where there is freedom of movement, where time can only be wasted. There are good, self-evident reasons why people love beaches – these sensations are gifts. Where else might these sensations be located? The article leaves readers by suggesting travel of longer duration, and of access to local nature via forests, hiking trails, and cycling paths.

Berlin-based LOST iN city guides put out four issues this year, but instead of their traditional focus on individual cities and the creatives inhabiting them they shifted gears to embrace different topics: cooks, vegetables, and exercise & well being. They also released a notebook (issue 0), urging readers to “get lost in a world you can create”. What’s so interesting about these issues in the context of Berghoff and Kresta’s article is that they relocate novel experiences and enjoyment associated with travelling to other places and drop them into our more limited, homebound lives. The sensuality – honestly, I’d prefer a different word – associated with travel is given a new lease on life in a very local, even strictly domestic, context.

What is important about all of this, as the end of the pandemic is on the horizon? Right now, we don’t know and are not fully able to grasp how climate change will alter our travels in the coming decades and beyond. Nor do we know what sorts of limitations around travel we might encounter in the coming years – beyond geopolitics and climate, there is the natural limitation of old age. It might well be a good idea to develop our ability to achieve certain forms of personal satisfaction – cultural shifts, novel sensations, new experiences – at home as well as on the road. (I might mostly be talking to myself here, admittedly.)

Here are some ways to rethink travel:

– Exploring pockets close to home: the places we ignored or didn’t ever properly notice.

– Developing the ability to be excited about familiar things and places that are not, on the surface, extraordinary.

– Learning to find novelty and the unexpected in familiar places.

– Embarking on very detailed, careful wanderings.

– Recognising that even homogeneous places have their own, local forms of diversity, and seeking them out.

– Trying to recreate the sensations of travel at home.

– Building on initiatives like the Bureau of Unknown Destinations and Latourex, which launched the Lonely Planet Guide to Experimental Travel.

***

The great news is that this pandemic will come to an end, and sooner than it now feels it will. We already have three very good vaccines and a fourth, Novavax, has just entered stage 3 clinical trials. The world will make it out of this terrible time, even if many of us individually will not. But we are changed people. It remains to be seen how we will return to travel – let alone how the travel industry will be re-established.

Years ago someone I care about told me that he had once been deeply anxious and asked for and was prescribed anti-anxiety medication. He took the medication for a while and then stopped. The medication didn’t nullify his anxieties but it did give him, just briefly, the realisation that he could choose to think about his life in a different way, that his particular constellation of anxiety-producing thoughts, his anxious internal realities, could be considered from other angles.

I wonder if the COVID-19 pandemic might end up functioning a bit like this, as a mechanism for sensing that we can travel differently, that we can look for different experiences and encounters when we travel, and that we might dig just a tiny bit deeper to understand which needs we are trying to fulfill by travelling.

***

But wait! There’s more. In 2018 I launched a magazine called Fields & Stations. It spent 2020 on temporary hiatus and will resurface in early 2021. The issue after the just-completed one will be devoted to some of these questions, and I’m still looking for contributors. Feel free to get in touch: fieldsandstations@gmail.com

And Happy New Year!

A solo Christmas, or: The limits of ingenuity

The last time I spent Christmas by myself it was 1999 and I lived in San Francisco. I can’t remember why I made the decision to skip Christmas with my family that year. I do remember that I had New Year’s Eve plans with friends the following week so it didn’t seem like a big deal.

Oh but it ended up being just that – a big deal. I tried, all day long, to ignore that it was Christmas. This was an abject failure. One corner market and the coffeehouse that served bad coffee were both open but otherwise the streets were leaden, closed, cold, and bright. There was virtually nobody around. The entire day felt like a long, extended groan. Most of all, I felt alone. The grey walls of my decrepit apartment didn’t nestle me; they confined me. I made a little pact with myself to never spend Christmas alone again.

In my adolescence and throughout my twenties I had come to really dislike Christmas – the totality of it, the commercial crush, the absence of a meaning beyond present exchange, and of course there was my project of embracing marginal left-wing political positions that increased my alienation from the world. I think it was this solo Christmas that made me realise the holiday could also be a time to regroup and recharge with family. I missed what I didn’t have, was able to yearn for it, appreciate it, calibrate it differently. Still, I wasn’t crazy about Christmas. When I was 31 I fell in love with someone who felt profoundly culturally alienated by the holiday, and I integrated that distance into my own emotional Christmas calculus.

But again, it’s withdrawal that prompts reconsideration: In 2008 it was difficult to make Christmas happen. There were snowstorms on the east and west coasts that December. My partner’s stepfather had died the previous month, and I was with him and his family in Buffalo for a memorial service for a week. Snow drifted down, day in and day out. Flights were cancelled left and right – as was mine. Orbitz told me to speak to the airline; the airline rejected this interpretation; this lead me back to a desperate 45 minutes on the phone with Orbitz. “I’m just trying to see my mother for Christmas. Have you ever been away from your family for the holidays?” I asked the woman in the call centre in the Philippines and immediately regretted my insensitivity, recognising quickly that there was a very good chance that her answer to that question would have been yes.

I somehow got a flight from Buffalo to O’Hare, stood in an interminable line there, and was told that the nearest United could get me to Seattle was Los Angeles. What about Vancouver, I asked? Not possible, the agent told me – I’d need a passport. I have my passport with me, I responded. (It would never occur to me to travel anywhere without my passport.) The agent mouthed an O. I got one of the last seats on the plane, booked a cheap airport motel, bought a bus ticket for Seattle the next morning, and by noon was reunited with my mother.

Incidentally that was the last time I bought anything from Orbitz or another US travel fare aggregator – that marked the end of chasing cheap fares that absolved all the concerned parties from basic responsibility to their customers.

But the real lesson of that experience is that I was able to get by on my own determination and knowledge. For the agent at O’Hare, the flight to Vancouver didn’t even come up as an option. I knew I could make my way from Vancouver to Seattle with a minimum of fuss. Of course I had my passport with me. I knew I could find a cheap hotel and figure out a bus link.

Which brings me, circuitously, to this year, the year when determination and knowledge are not enough. I had a plan to fly to Portland in late November, isolate for ten days with COVID-19 tests, and then join my mother and sister and her family’s bubble. I’d stay until the end of December. But I just couldn’t pull the trigger on it.

After long and serious consideration, I spent six weeks in the US last summer. It had been difficult – the isolation in stages, the multiple COVID-19 tests, refraining from hugging anyone for two weeks – but I did it as responsibly as I reasonably could do. And in Portland there was warm weather and sunny skies. I could take lots of long walks in t-shirts, pick up breakfast to go at Fried Egg I’m in Love or sit outside at a picnic table at Kachka eating my fill of pickled vegetables. But now COVID-19 was spiking yet again and I’d have nowhere to go when it rained incessantly. How responsible would it be to fly across the Atlantic with COVID-19 surging? My summer journey had been easy – one fight, direct, fast; this itinerary was complicated, involving multiple airports. I decided, painfully, to reschedule it.

So no Christmas with my mother, sister, brother-in-law, and nephew. That was indeed sad. But I would have my Christmas-diffident love with me. We’d go on a long walk, maybe order Chinese delivery for dinner, watch some bad television.

You probably know where this is heading. Since September Matt and I have been camped out in Lisbon. A few weeks ago he returned to London for work. His plan had been to fly back to Lisbon earlier this week and stay until mid-January, when we’d return to London until at least one of us (hopefully both of us) got vaccinated. But then the new COVID-19 variation emerged, and very quickly flights from the UK to the rest of Europe were cancelled. He can’t get here. So there are no Tejo-side walks together, no live gift exchange, no subpar Chinese dinner. In their place there would be Zoom and FaceTime chats.

Weirdly, it's been surprisingly ok. It’s bright and windy outside. Obviously, this was not how I wanted to spend the day. But there is no alternative. This is temporary. The sun came up this morning and will set in a few hours, as it apparently has a habit of doing. This is life right now.

For many people – shall we say, for people able to plan and execute a long-distance Christmas that requires travel – this is the first year when determination and ingenuity can’t, by themselves, to the trick. The virus simply is. We can ignore it at considerable risk to ourselves and those we care about or we can take it seriously. Not all travel is wrong, but all travel is complicated and requires careful consideration of all sorts of things we previously wouldn’t have given a moment’s consideration. We have hit some unbudgeable limits.

Happy limited holidays. I mean it!

An Oxbridge party in nine stages (plus an interlude)

It could have happened in any number of ways or places, but most likely you live in the UK and work with someone who went to Oxford or possibly do yoga with someone who went to Cambridge. You’re in your forties now, so your budding friendship was probably slow to bloom, the product of months or even years of rubbing up against one another socially or professionally, gradually yielding to affectionate familiarity. Either that or it accelerated quickly, likely due to the sort of drinking that in most places would count as heavy but in the UK is seen as social maintenance. 

The chances are you are funny and smart or that you know how to make conversation, know how to piece together amusing observations from bits of low and high culture alike. It is your conversational fluidity that has earned an introduction to your friend’s friendship circle. Your new friend has possibly been sizing you up for an invite to a party with his or her old cohort for some time.

Warning! Things will nosedive at the party. After this you will probably lose your new friend – not entirely, but there will be a deintensification, a lessening of the connection. This sounds dire because it sort of is, but you will survive. If nothing else, you will emerge with an unusual degree of anthropological familiarity with a relatively rare yet very influential tribe.

There is a ringleader of the group, though this is usually unacknowledged. The ringleader is usually the liveliest person, not the person who organises things, though this is variable.

Last note: After nine years in the UK, I have observed every single one of the events mentioned here. This, however, is a aggregation, the details obscured or remixed.

Stage One

The setting is likely someone’s house for a dinner, and most of the gang will be there – six to eight people, all of whom went to university together, barring maybe one other outsider. They will start out in a jocular vein, possibly even deferentially. If you are American, there will be discussions of long road trips across Montana, of happening to be in New York City the night Barack Obama won, of someone’s sincerely deep love of the blues. If you are French nobody will attempt conversation in your native tongue unless they are uncommonly good at it. Pretty much wherever you are from, someone will have something to say about it, and not necessarily the most obvious thing.

Stage Two

Things begin to go downhill the moment you observe something that nobody else in the group has considered. Perhaps this will be a cultural observation, of something odd about Britain, but more likely it will just be a comment, even a throwaway one, about something in the news. At first you will have no clue that you have committed an infraction. A frown will do the rounds. If your contribution was really smart, the de facto ringleader of the group will say “I didn’t realise we were having a serious night” and there will be a gentle ripple of laughter.

Stage Three

You misjudged, you think. Just relax and talk about fun things, you think to yourself. It’s been a long week. Maybe serious observations about current events aren’t appropriate. You try another tack. When music comes up you mention your guilty pleasure of the moment. Maybe it’s Ava Max. This is met by silence. When somebody finally speaks, they mention that their nine-year old daughter is a fan. You try again, with a pop culture reference that’s fun, maybe marginally racy. This time the reaction isn’t quite as cold, though it is followed by somebody forcibly picking the conversation up and moving it elsewhere. (You don’t yet understand.)

Interlude

You realise that one of the friendship circle is a former MP, and more to the point, they’ve realised that you’ve realised this. You have a few options – to freak out, to ask detailed questions, to play dumb, or just to continue on as if nothing unusual were afoot. Even though it’s early in the evening, you recognise that this final course of action is the wisest.

Stage Four

The ringleader’s body has gotten ever so slightly tense. You notice it the way you notice a mosquito across the room at dusk – it’s a warning, though it’s difficult at this point to say how troubling it will end up being. Somebody thinks to ask you a little bit about what you do, and you assume the question is sincere, so you answer in depth. Expertise (yours; not theirs) is dangerous, and the knives of contradiction will come out at this point. If contradiction is not in their wheelhouse, you will face confusion. Confusion is a weapon. “But why would that job be found in London and not Frankfurt or New York?” or “I had no idea it was possible to make a living as a travel writer” or “Honestly I had no idea people still got hired for those sorts of academic jobs, good for you.”

Stage Five

This continues, and you are asked to provide an expert opinion about something you know well. The question is cloaked in conversational lightness but it feels more like a demand than anything else. If you answer definitively there will be a very quiet argument during which you will notice that somebody’s teeth are gritted; if you answer in a more open-ended fashion people will seem frustrated or bored. Whatever your answer, this is the moment when you notice that the friends are looking at each other pseudo-surreptitiously, maybe with faint smiles.

Stage Six

“Right, more wine.” Suddenly there is a bolt of liveliness. It feels strangely theatrical, as if dictated by a script commanding everyone to emerge abruptly from pitch blackness into the middle of a conversation. None of the subject matter of the volleys back and forth at this stage will be accessible to you. They will refer to things shared by the group, possibly years ago. There will be no in-jokes at this point, but references to people, places, and experiences that you cannot comment on. This is also the stage at which people stop looking at you directly.

Stage Seven

The friend who invited you is suddenly scarce. After 15 minutes or so you begin to recognise your own deep annoyance. You feel the normal sheaths of social propriety fall, and when someone comments on something you believe to be utterly wrong, you express yourself. This is the most perilous moment yet, and there will be no return from it. The ringleader is upset, yet his defense of his position is empty; you make the probably unwise decision to simply say “that seems wrong to me” and if you really want to turn the knife, you will quickly and deftly demonstrate why.

Stage Eight

There might be a long, difficult silence; the conversation might also snap back as if nothing at all had happened, with more false joviality. But as soon as the emotional smoke has cleared the in-jokes will be brandished like weapons. Dinner has concluded at this point, and the friends will position themselves in physical arcs. Your friend’s back faces you. Should there be an outsider spouse present, your conversational options will be restricted to him or her. If not, your will find yourself in conversation with the antsy children who for some reason have not been put to bed, or, in the most pathetic scenario of all, a diffident, droopy Basset mix.

Stage Nine

As you leave, thanking your hosts, the conversation is about an upcoming holiday in France or Spain or Portugal, at an incredible villa with eight bedrooms. They have six filled and they are thinking aloud about who else might be appropriate to add to the mix. The ringleader, who officially hates you, has to be jostled by his wife to say goodbye to you. “Hope to see you again, yeah, goodnight,” he says. There is no longer even a shadow of sincerity in his tone, but he is smiling.

Spring, more or less, or: 94 days at home

By the time the Prime Minister finally changed policy course and announced his bumbling version of lockdown on 23 March, it had been long overdue. We had been essentially locked down for eight days before it was announced, following a return from a glorious birthday trip, now difficult to remember in detail, reduced to blurry bursts.

The first month of lockdown was characterised by dejection, which took different forms – eating bread slathered in butter, drinking wine, fearing the virus, reading about it constantly, committing to the first jigsaw puzzle of adulthood, slowly sorting through papers, letting the apartment get dirty and then half-assedly cleaning it, moving very little, listening to sirens, staring at the empty busses going by, cursing the capsulitis in my right shoulder that was steadily getting worse and worse.

Two ideas, at war with one another, ruled my life:

 I am responsible to myself & others and can do this for as long as it takes

&

This is unnatural and claustrophobic and I am ill-equipped to deal with most aspects of it.

***

Across March, April, and May, friends came down with the virus; a friend of friends died; an acquaintance, a very sweet man, died, too. I have spoken to my mother and my sister and her family every day since the start of March, with just one exception. Politics continued to proceed detached from science and sense in both the place I come from and the one I live in. It became clear to me in a new way that neither Boris Johnson nor Donald Trump cared if I lived or died.

Things looked up when I started walking, at first from home to a park in the Docklands called Russia Dock Woodland, which takes two to three hours there and back, depending on my route; then farther afield. A few weeks into my new walking programme I began to embark on a six-hour journey to various far-flung bits of south London once or twice a week. 16,000 steps became normal; then 25,000 steps; then 29,000 steps; then 35,000.

The thing about a long walk is that you have nobody but yourself and possibly your phone, which can provide fairly good company. You can stay furious on Twitter or delighted on Instagram or consternated over an email. Or you can take long breaks from these distractions, breathe in different air, track the season by the degree to which your eyes are made itchy by pollen, and gaze at different things.

This has been the most satisfying yield – the opportunity to see different bits of London. Brexit has slowly and steadily corroded my love of London. This is an intimate tragedy, for there is no other city where I have felt more at home as an adult than this one. This is the city where I have felt free, unconstrained, able to be whoever I am without the impositions of social expectation. I know it’s not like this for most Londoners, but it has been for me. The feeling of the city along with the country slipping away from me over these last four years into a stupid future has been very painful.

These walks provide reminders every day of how lovely London is to me – the enormous parks, teeming with people as soon as the sun shows itself; the whirl of languages; the utter satisfaction of imagining that the smaller streets in between the enormous thoroughfares will be charming and then finding that to be true; the beautiful, to me at least, housing estates strewn across south London, some modernist architectural tours-de-force, others workaday; the posh streets with named houses, the hard-up streets, and the trees lining both; the pockets of distinct communities; the scripts; the hubbub; the overheard conversations.

These walks also feel like the best approximation of travel I can come up with, though a particular version of it. All along the pandemic has felt like a preview of old age. I recall when my father moved into a retirement complex there were regular postings of miniature adventures, like an afternoon in a rose garden. I have long been obsessed with the coach day and overnight trips operated by travel agencies in the UK: bluebells in season; Margate; spring garden tours. I like that they say: I might not be up for a long-haul flight but I’m not down for the count. My daily walks transport me to my future.

The past three weeks have been different, of course, watching the Black Lives Matter protests actually transform mainstream thinking in the US, with ripple effects in the UK, Belgium, and elsewhere, watching Trump not just fail to respond adequately – as expected – but also to be so out of touch with the country he has no interest in actually leading. I know we are in a lot of trouble, in a lot of ways, but I am full of hope again.

***

This has been my very long and very quick spring, with walks around London, trying to make the everyday extraordinary, getting lost on occasion in a good book. (Jane Kramer’s Europeans wracked me with envy, even the bits that felt imprecise; Eva Holland’s Nerve, which arrived last week, is my model for a particular type of storytelling.)

Every day I think about the things I long to do once this virus is better controlled.

Five days in early June

St Pierre and Miquelon is a tiny French territory (a “territorial collectivity” in administrative parlance) located rather improbably off the southeastern coast of Newfoundland, where Fortune Bay meets the wider Atlantic. France’s Caribbean territories are better known than St. Pierre and Miquelon; few seem to have heard of the archipelago. And because it sits off Canada, people often assume that the islands’ Frenchness is linguistic, not territorial; that the islands are a francophone bit of Canada and not a constituent part of the French state.

I have wanted to visit St. Pierre and Miquelon for as long as I can remember. Each time I tried to put together an itinerary I was scared off by exorbitant airfares. This is in large part due to the transportation monopoly imposed by Air Saint-Pierre, the only airline flying to the territory. When I lived in New York it was cheap to get to Montréal but then super expensive to fly from there to St. Pierre. It was only from St. John’s that flights to St. Pierre were reasonable, yet it was typically very expensive to get to St. John’s from New York. The same dynamic materialised after I moved to London, just with dramatically more expensive flights.

And then in 2016, the Canadian no-frills low-cost airline WestJet began to fly between various Canadian cities and London, and suddenly everything fell into place. My transatlantic ticket set me back £392 and my Air Saint-Pierre ticket cost €246, which by my estimate is a savings of around €900 (or £820 or so) from what it would have cost before WestJet entered the market. Here I have to pause to recognise that this is, in fact, how I often end up visiting places I have long pined after – once the low-cost airlines move in.

On the Air Saint-Pierre plane from St. John’s I meet a woman from Strasbourg whose father was born on St Pierre. She’s come for three weeks to spend time with her grandmother. “Are you going to Miquelon as well?” she asks. I tell her that I am. “Good. St Pierre can be hard to penetrate. Miquelon will feel more open.” As we talk the plane lowers its landing gear and she twitches, looking panicked. Outside the fog is thick. Two peaks rise from the fog, disarmingly close. We talk for another few seconds and then I see the ground, more or less precisely at the moment we land. Her name is Lize. I knew I would see her again – on an island of 6000, visitors tend to find each other. After passing through immigration I watch her bound toward a circle of people, all bundled up. It may be June but it is cold: 4 degrees, according to the posted temperature, and fogged in.

St Pierre and Miquelon is France. Its currency is the euro. A member of the National Assembly for St Pierre and Miquelon sits in Paris; there is also a single Senator for the territory. France imposes a grid of standardization on its overseas territories that makes them immediately recognizable as France. In most of overseas France, you can’t ever forget that you are in France – the bakeries produce exceptional croissants, the street signage is uniform, the supermarkets are full of French products, the attitudes, with local adjustments, are French. I have now traveled to all of the French Caribbean, to French Guiana, to Réunion, Mayotte, and New Caledonia. It’s hard to find a bit of these places that is not recognizably France.

There are exceptions. There are some towns in French Guiana rubbing up against the Amazon that feel less obviously like France. (French Guiana itself has such a hostile, unforgiving geography that its territory often feels remaindered, forgotten.) Another is Mayotte, where a widely practiced syncretic Islam sets its islands apart from mainland France – and whose poverty reflects historical neglect at the hands of the metropole. But by and large these territories truly feel like France. This is why, for example, Canadian and American travel writers will laud the boulangeries of St Pierre, and celebrate their baked goods with a kind of dumbstruck joy: France in North America!

Yet I discover that St Pierre is actually at deep odds with its Frenchness. People are sturdy, mostly descendants of fishermen from Brittany, Normandy, and the Basque Country, the flags of which regions appear on the unofficial St Pierre and Miquelon flag. Their culinary tastes are solid, not trendy. “Somebody opened a pintxos restaurant,” offered the waitress at a crêperie. “But it wasn’t popular. It just wasn’t part of the local culture.” She herself hails from Bayonne in France’s tiny Basque triangle, and she always seems to have a faint, bemused smile on her face, as if she hasn’t quite managed to figure out why she is living here.

Since the 1870s the population of St Pierre and Miquelon has ranged between 4000 and 7000. For long stretches of its history, the fishing industry – since a 1992 court decision all but wiped out – and alcohol smuggling during the US Prohibition years, lifted the economy. Today government jobs provide the most stable incomes; many of these jobs are contract-based, employing workers on temporary assignments from the metropole. Visiting police live in a shiny modern building at odds with the rest of the town of St Pierre. The population doesn’t rise because most young people leave, and the absence of a dynamic industry has left the population frustrated and instinctually left-wing. This is Mélenchon country. The far-left, anti-EU firebrand came in first in the first round of the presidential election in May.

But it’s also, in slightly greater numbers than the French average, Le Pen country. Marine Le Pen visited St Pierre in March 2016, tacking on a quick visit to the territory to an official EU trade visit to Quebec, which she fulfilled as an MEP. The reception she received – in distinction to her experience in Quebec, where the establishment shunned her – was not altogether bad, and it has allowed her to occupy in the minds of locals a more important structural position in French politics than she actually has. One local, recounting the various politicians who have visited St Pierre, said “Le Pen came, you know, the lady,” before complaining that Macron had never visited – Macron, who had just won the presidency a few weeks prior. Perhaps it is fair to say that St Pierre is not the sort of place that instinctively warms to a precocious, super talented banker turned president.

“We are like the French Newfies,” a young hotel receptionist tells me. I recoil; France is France. But clearly there is something to his self-assessment. Much of the food comes from Canada; the huge supermarket, an all-purpose megastore that sells a massive range of consumer goods, is supplied in large part by Sobey's, a Canadian supermarket chain. Most of its goods are North American, not French. It is reminiscent of similar stores in remote, northern places. Houses smell like North American houses, people – especially the men – dress like North American men, and even the cigarette smoke smells like North American cigarette smoke. People drive North American cars – pick-up trucks and SUVs – and they drive them quickly and loudly down the narrow streets. Many of these have been purchased in Canada and brought over. (This is an expensive operation, but it is much cheaper than buying a car within the territory.)

For three days the fog remains low. I cannot see the peaks above the town; I can barely see to the end of the town’s streets, or far above the low buildings. The streets of St Pierre are on an incline; in the cold, low fog, the wind piercing in early June, the sky feels compressed. The doors of the wooden houses, most in dramatic, splashy colours, are closed. The owner of my gîte is helpful if taciturn. Breakfast sits on her kitchen table in a basket: one croissant, two slices of baguette, one pain au chocolat. Butter and confiture in glasses. American drip coffee in a thermos. There’s not an egg or a slice of smoked salmon in sight. She scrolls Facebook on her tablet. The television is on but we sit mostly in silence, breaking for conversations in a warped, pidgin English-French.

The tiny Cessnas that fly between St Pierre and Miquelon do not take off in the fog, so I cancel my reservation and book a ferry to Langlade. The tourist office takes care of this for me. The staff are efficient and good at English. They also book a gîte for me. The ferry motors near the island and then we are all don safety vests and are helped into a Zodiac and brought to the beach. We stumble ashore, some more gracefully than others. The owners come and pick me up in Langlade, driving me 25 kilometers from wet Langlade to their little house in the village of Miquelon. This road is unpaved in places; in others it follows the beach itself. A big friendly dog prods my hand from the back seat. I sleep in the basement. My room has an enormous yin-yang symbol on the wall. They built this house thirty years ago. They tell me that land is cheap in Miquelon but pretty much everything else is expensive – house construction materials, food. They watch Quebecois and French television.

Miquelon resonates more deeply with me. It is a desolate, quiet town consisting more or less of two roads. It is lonely and it never allows you to forget this, but the skies are big and claustrophobia is the last thing on your mind. The island’s little village also boasts the technologically up-to-date Maison de Nature, a beautiful multi-media museum devoted to the natural environment of the territory. It just opened this year, and it is truly grand – projections on maps in relief, a section devoted to the smells of the archipelago, a long video with locals talking about the fragility of the local nature.

On Miquelon I hike around the northern cape of the island. The land is lying in wait for summer, marshy, not yet fulsome. It is magical, like other places I've been in the north that are anticipating summer – its wooded areas, its scrub, the clean air, almost painful to breathe. When the gîte owners drive me back to Langlade I see stickers for Marine Le Pen on the back of street signs.

Back on St Pierre I take a gregarious tour guide up on his offer of a tour. He introduces me to the traditional food of St Pierre. We eat tuna pâté (canned tuna with boiled potatoes, mayonnaise, ketchup, and shallots), duck pâté, foie gras and bean pâté, dried fish, and a super rich île flotante, merengue laced with hard caramel, bobbing in cream. We drink a fine red wine and a sweet local birch beer. Everything is hearty and delicious. He shows me the port, various coves, and much of the island. His English is great – he lived in Canada for many years – and I ask many questions. It is, I realise, the first time I've talked with anyone in any depth in five days.

I board the plane the next day, realizing slowly the oddest thing. I have not once seen Lize. The island really does keep itself indoors. It is, as she said, hard to penetrate.

Please stay

It’s terrible to have such strong feelings about an upcoming referendum but not to be able to vote in it. When this referendum was announced I thought that only nativists and unreconstructed Marxists would vote to leave – the first for the glory of nostalgia and the second for the incitement to revolution.

Yet here we are, the polls tight and variable and apparently moving toward Leave, anti-immigrant sentiment more common than at any point in my five and a half years in the UK. (It’s another terrible feeling to watch social fractures previously barely visible to me become more pronounced.)

The risks are huge. Yet somehow, despite the absolutely overwhelming evidence from economists – notably from Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of England – despite the near-certainty that Scotland will vote to leave the UK in the event of a Leave vote, despite the massive uncertainty that will descend upon Northern Ireland’s economy and its borders, despite a report by the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics predicting annual household real income losses post-Brexit of between 5.7% and 13.5%, the polls are seesawing and the mood on the street is terribly conflicted. The Leave campaign has done a great job of muddying the waters, making it look as if leaving the EU will not have terrible economic and social effects on life here. It will. (And we are right to pose a million logistical questions: How would we deal with the agony of extraction? Is separation even possible? Is this country really going to leave the single market? What kind of economic suicide would that be? And if not, is belonging to the EEA and adopting almost all EU law as it relates to the single market without being able to vote on it really the answer?)

The far right across Europe will be deeply encouraged by a Leave vote. Austria just came within a hairsbreadth of electing as their President a man from one of Europe's most successful far-right political parties, a man who co-authored his party’s platform in support of pan-Germanism, a party that is trying to open linguistic wounds in South Tyrol. France's Marine Le Pen – who herself wondered aloud not too long ago if the French-speaking part of Belgium might be absorbed by France – does well in presidential polls. The question of absorption of neighbouring countries along linguistic lines is no longer such an absurd prospect in Europe; in Crimea in 2014, we saw the seizure of territory by a neighbouring county in the name of linguistic and cultural unity. (Austria's FPÖ and France's Front National are both huge supporters of Putin. Imagine that.) The governments of Poland and Hungary are in the hands of populist right-wing parties. These are Leave's bedfellows across Europe. These forces have succeeding in convincing many that refugees, immigrants, ethnic and religious minorities, and various others are the enemy. Leaving the EU empowers them.

This is what I want to say, as an immigrant who came to London because he had a dream – a European dream – to live and work in what just may well be the world’s best city. This is your Trump moment. It may not seem like it – there are few public figures in the UK who are as hateful as Donald Trump, after all – but the choice to vote Leave is about ignoring the sober predictions of apolitical economists and experts and rejecting the impulse toward solidarity in favour of chaos. It is a choice to jump off into space with no sense of when or how you will land, encouraged by the most amorphous of objectives.

The European Union is boring, tedious, and plodding. It needs reform. It should be less opaque and more nimble. At the same time, the EU is remarkable. It makes our lives better and it makes this country better.

Please, let's stay.

The meaning of one discarded photograph

For Christmas my sister gave me The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Japanese cleaning consultant Marie Kondo. The book intrigued me from the moment I unwrapped it – and this despite having spent the entirety of my adult life recoiling from self-help books.

It is indeed a remarkable book. It does what it says on the tin. It is in fact life-changing. My distillation of the argument, which the author calls the KonMari Method, is this: we in the (post-)industrialised world have too much stuff. This stuff drags us down and imprisons us. We accumulate and possess blindly, without understanding our motivations.

The antidote is to tidy up seriously, and to retain only those items that spark joy.

Kondo leads us through her method: her order of discarding by category (clothes, then books, then papers, then komono [miscellany], and finally mementos); her imperatives (among others – don't share process with family members; touch every object before making a decision); and the results she expects from readers (more beautiful living spaces; happier and more responsible clients).

In January I began the process seriously. I tore through my possessions. I made a slight adjustment to Kondo's method in that I discarded miscellaneous items before papers and books. Given all the paper (newspapers, brochures, and my own writing and notes) and books (guidebooks, travelogues, fiction, and so on) in my living space, I knew that the miscellaneous objects in my life would be easier to tame. Aside from that, I committed to the book's method as fully as possible. I even began to fold my clothes along KonMari Method lines.

The process was pretty easy. It felt good and right from the beginning. At the start I discarded so many of my clothes that I began to wonder what I would be left with at the end. I wondered why so few of my clothes sparked any joy at all. What was wrong with me? But I was ruthless. I continued. An old winter jacket, an expensive gift, no longer fit me. Why was I holding on to it? And what about my maternal grandfather's bathrobe? My grandfather died in 1995. I'd held onto his bathrobe for almost twenty years and not once had I worn it. Its emotional weight was a great distraction. I'd felt that allowing it to find another home was a type of disloyalty. No longer.

By the end of the process I recycled volumes of paper and electronics, gave away 50 bags of books, households items, and clothes to Oxfam, and threw away those objects that were neither recyclable nor of potential use to anybody else. The upshot: I now live in a space that engages me. Objects have breathing room. All my papers, books, notebooks, and files are well-ordered. There is a place for everything, and nothing is crammed or cramped. It is a deep pleasure to spend time at home.

There were other benefits to the effort. As my discarding process continued, psychological value often trumped spatial benefit. I had great insights about various familial models for storing objects – how, for example, the retention of well over a ton of paper (interoffice memoranda, multiple copies of articles, letters from students, handbooks, manuals, multiple paper drafts of articles) represented a version of security to my father, a safe-guarding of his ego in the form of his life's work; or how another relative effortlessly casts off objects she doesn't need – healthy, right? – by giving them to people – oops! – who often neither want nor appreciate them.

As I expected, mementos were the hardest things to sort through. Old photographs were particularly difficult, even given the family tradition of taking seven bad photos of the same thing – a chicken, a lake, a monument, a cross child. One night, exhausted but determined, I threw away a photograph of my father posing in front of his old workplace in Vienna in the mid-2000s, a good two decades after he last lived in the city. It wasn't a very good photo; he'd obviously asked a passer-by to take it. The next day I tried to reconstruct the photo – the faint smile on my father's face, his raincoat, the pedestrians in the background. I deeply lamented having thrown it away. How could I have tossed this thing away, this pure sign of the way my father treasured Vienna and his time there? A few weeks passed. The pain didn't disappear. It hit me that the depth of my regret was an important reminder of how much I miss my father, a reminder also of our shared affection for that complicated, strange, and atavistic city. After it was discarded – and in fact, because it was discarded – the photograph gained another life.

Across Belgium in three hours

One train journey traverses more or less the entirety of Belgium. It travels from Ostend to Eupen by way of Bruges, Ghent, Brussels, Leuven, Liège, Verviers, and Welkenraedt. It passes through Flanders, Brussels, Wallonia, and the German-speaking part of Belgium, linking the country's three language communities. It is a properly federal institution, and as such, it is notable. Belgium is famously fractured, with six parliaments – seven if the EU’s parliament is included in the count. The train makes its way across the country in just over three hours, the first train leaving Ostend at 04:40 and the last at 18:40, running every hour in between at 40 minutes past the hour.

Ostend is the towering hub of Belgian coastal tourism, sitting almost directly at the midpoint of Belgium's coastline. There are signs for rent and sale throughout: flats and houses alike. It is windy – when is it not? – with seagull histrionics piercing the air. The Sint-Petrus-en-Paulus Church anchors the town's core. It is Neo-Gothic and of a suitably grand scale, with an enormous square in front of it. It is cold at 5C, but somehow more refreshing than bracing. With fancy bakeries, well-loved cafés, and fastidiously maintained flats, Ostend is bourgeois. It is not, however, without its oddball elements, which include a dusty little shop selling seashells and other treasures of the sea. The very wide sweep of the promenade along the beach is chilly in early March; still, one can easily project the warm weather appeal of Ostend.

The train station is grandiose, with an enormous bicycle park to match. The station itself is in the midst of a massive renovation. (In this it is not alone; many train stations across Belgium are being spruced up.) Passengers walk out from the ticket hall toward the tracks through an open area, a disassembled wall on one side. The roof has been removed and the windows are missing their glass. A long, unused red walkway connects the train station to the port. There may no longer be any regularly scheduled ferry services to or from Ostend, but the infrastructure remains.

The platforms are long and curve gently. The Ostend-Eupen train consists of twelve cars and I board the final of these – the first car, that is – barely accessible from the tapering platform. The car is empty, and I remain the sole passenger until Bruges.

It is flat and industrial heading out of Ostend. The train moves slowly away from the coast, almost precisely due east. The fields look marshy, waterlogged. About four kilometers outside of Ostend the train begins to speed up. There are canals everywhere – between fields and alongside the train tracks. The fields themselves are quite muddy, with little mounds of dirt and tall dried blond grasses along their edges.

Approaching Bruges, a striking brick mansion appears beyond a tree-lined driveway; shortly thereafter, there are light industrial buildings and the E403 motorway, and then, quite quickly, the town itself: the towers of Sint-Salvator Cathedral and the Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekerk, prim brick rowhouses, modern duplexes, and the greenswards of the Koning Albert I park. At Bruges, five people enter the car and settle down to sleep or work.

Following Bruges the train arcs slowly toward the south and then picks up speed. Very quickly the landscape starts to look rural again. By Oostkamp it is wooded; open fields follow. There are tree-lined single-lane roads. Beernem appears in clusters, with one notably modern house, grey and angular. Sound barriers appear, followed by wooded areas, trees insubstantial and diminished in late winter. After Aalter, proper farmland resumes for a bit. At Bellem, Mariahove, a manor house graced by a pond, peeks out between trees. (Once a family estate, it is now a Christian retreat centre.) Hansbeke catches the eye with a neo-Baroque steeple at odds with the plain neo-classisist church beneath that justifies its existence.

At Landegem the train crosses over a wide canal that flows on to Zeebrugge. And then Ghent announces itself with huge tower blocks, the first sign since Ostend of a real city. The railway yard is huge. It feels as if the European rail network begins in earnest here. On the far side of the railyard is old Ghent, but the train station itself is more immediately impressive: a gleaming platform with pink signage and lots of steel and light. (The rest of the station, currently under construction, is dire and dark, delivering a strictly and not particularly engaging utility.) After departing Ghent, the train glides through the city at about a third-story level along a graceful stretch of rowhouses. The outer reaches of Ghent consist of some factories, a house with a large covered swimming pool, modern villas, new unfinished brick houses, empty and devoid of doors and windows. Across the Ringvaart canal, the villas thin out and anonymous suburban developments predominate.

And then suddenly we’re back among fields and gargantuan wind power turbines. For the first time the track bed dips, almost hiding a town’s steeple. We stay in this little ravine for some time. When the train comes up for air, around the village of Mere, before Aalst, we see the journey’s first piece of rolling landscape.

The outskirts of Aalst are indistinct: warehouses; big trucks; a building with solar panel slapped on it like thick stickers. The train skirts the town to the south, revealing houses with vegetable plots, duck ponds, and farming equipment. The conductors finally materialise to check tickets, then sit down to converse and sip soft drinks. In Sint-Katherina-Lombeek there are glowing greenhouses and one spectacularly collapsing farmhouse, with open agricultural fields and wind turbines on the far horizon. There is farmland here again, and hills – not really hills; rolling land. Platforms and cement blocks running alongside the tracks are covered with graffiti.

Brussels is visible from around Schepdaal, though the surrounding area continues to feel rural. Just before the train runs alongside a golf club with the fancy name of the Royal Amicale Anderlecht we enter Brussels Capital Region proper, and it quickly begins to feel as if we are in a big city. In no time we are buried in graffitied concrete. The destination board turns bilingual. There are massive train yards, light industry plants, and empty office parks. The train slows.

At Brussel Zuid/Midi four people get off and two board: a young guy with big eyes and a tall angular man, who removes his jacket and stacks his bags neatly. The conductors leave, walking in collegial unison. Several tracks away, the Eurostar tracks are protected by tall fences. As the train moves on sex shops and a big boulevard are visible. The track runs through the city, along the unkempt backsides of residential buildings. In contrast to the fastidious museum piece perfection of Ghent and Bruges, Brussels appears as a raw urban cross-section, with nothing on intentional display. And then we are plunged into darkness, long neon tubes providing an almost nightclublike atmosphere. Centraal/Central station is underground. Unlike Zuid/Midi, this station is in good condition.

A new arrival speaks in French to a man on her mobile. Lots of mmms. We emerge into very bright light reflecting off huge glass towers.

Noord/Nord has an art deco charm, with well-designed benches. More new passengers filter in. Next we speed by Schaerbeek's beautiful old station. This is a very industrial stretch, full of abandoned buildings. We leave Brussels and cross back into Flanders, skirting the airport. As if on cue, a LOT Polish Airlines plane ascends steeply on the left. The suburbs are dense. Zaventem has a small, modern station; airport ground lighting systems follow, and then the suburbs gradually taper off. A huge lot of new cars appears at Kortenberg. Agricultural fields return. A horse rubs up against a green building, unaware of her symbolic role in signifying the return of the countryside.

The landscape is quite anonymous for some time. Stations are empty, suburban, new. Some beat-up greenhouses in back gardens provide a measure of grit. In Herent, close to Leuven, there are shiny, stylish apartment blocks. And then on arrival in Leuven the landscape boasts ridges – another break in the flatness of the landscape, this one predictive.

Leuven casts very different impressions than Brussels. There are few signs of industrial heritage along the track leading into town. At Leuven the conductor asks a passenger to modulate his speaking voice. The destination board lists the next stop, the francophone Walloon city of Liège, by its Dutch name: Luik. (Following the bilingualism that prevailed in Brussels, the destination board has reverted to unilingual Flemish.) A row of trees along a ridge suggests the changing landscape to come. There is no mistaking that, topographically at least, we are leaving the Lowlands. Leuven may sit just 28 meters above sea-level but the terrain is shifting quickly. For the first time my mobile phone loses its signal.

Rather unfortunately, it is at this point that it becomes difficult to track the landscape, between tunnels and the partially submerged track. When we reemerge around Boutersem the main feature is the major European route, the E40, which shadows the train. The E40 extends well into Central Asia, covering almost 5000 miles in total. The next town, Tienen, is hard to see over the E40. This is, it must be said, a fairly unappealing vista. To the south is Hoegaarden, though it’s impossible to see it, as the track dips again. When the train resurfaces the highway is predominant.

We will soon be saying goodbye to Flanders, though it will not go without a fight. The track dips into Wallonia, then back into Flanders again, then into Wallonia, then Flanders for a last time, and then, just before the village of Berloz, into Wallonia for good. (Technically, for a few meters, the track pierces Flanders twice during its first passage through Wallonia, but them’s the stuff of pettifogging jurisdictionality.) Once we’ve crossed into Wallonia for good, announcements begin in French and are followed in Flemish. We’re still following the E40, which continues to be the primary feature of the line of sight. The train passes a rest stop, with signs for a Total petrol station and a Lunch Garden restaurant. It remains difficult to track the countryside. Here and there the track arches somewhat to permit views of muddy fields and glimpses of small-scale agriculture, villages, and squat houses.

And then, mercifully, we lose the E40. The landscape alternates between monotony – a rubbish/recycling facility – and treats – Awans, a gently sloping village. According to the map on my mobile phone, just beyond Awans, invisible from the train, is an IKEA. The train approaches Liège on what feels like a steep downward incline, an urban valley crowded with houses, many streets facing the train track on a diagonal. The cross-section is attractive: a sharp grassy gore; backs of bricked buildings, some nicely renovated; a residential roof teeming with greenery. We descend into the extraordinary Liège-Guillemins station, designed by Santiago Calatrava. It’s a monument to modernism, soaring and bold. Leaving, we cross the Meuse, first alongside a very modern bridge, then adjacent to a cement bridge in poor condition. The superficial impression is of a city caught between showpieces and neglect.

After Liège the train really begins to climb. The terrain opens up to reveal modest river basins. In Trooz a lone factory stack rises over uniform roofs. Worn plastic bags cluster along the banks of the Vesdre, or Weser. There is evidence of mining further on, with stone bluffs appearing as if they have been sliced vertically. The train sails past a village called Basse Fraipont, just its roofs visible. At the edge of Nessonvaux a beautiful mansion is visible. At its helm is a widow’s walk guarded by a wrought-iron fence. The landscape gets increasingly dramatic. We are climbing from Liège, at 65-odd meters above sea level, to Verviers, which sits 200 meters above sea level.

The railway skirts the Vesdre and passes through several hillside tunnels. The river is hugged by buildings in a consistent if not unbroken type of ribbon development. At Verviers, the rest of my fellow passengers alight. It’s just me now, along with a single conductor. Verviers' ornate neo-classical building, the city’s Grand Theatre, is the most interesting structure in spitting distance.

From Verviers on to the town of Limbourg is an uninterrupted stretch of developed territory; north of Limbourg this changes: hillsides, the occasional farmhouse, and an overpass. Then a slow arrival, on a tilted track, to Welkenraedt, another train station midway through renovation. An austere church keeps watch over three teenaged boys playfully kicking one another.

The final stretch has come. The train continues to climb to Eupen. Dramatic riverine valleys have yielded to a plateau of undramatic moorland, a smattering of industrial facilities in between. The stretch from Verviers on to Welkenraedt and Eupen is undersubscribed. Welkenraedt offers a service across the border to Aachen, but Eupen is a cul-de-sac as far as the train network is concerned. (Anyone wanting to travel quickly between Brussels and Aachen would probably hop aboard the Paris-Cologne Thalys, in any case.)

By the train station, Eupen is unassuming. Just beyond it however there are narrow hillside streets that lead down to a cobblestone square. I stop in a bakery and order a coffee, in German, which I drink under a portrait of Belgium’s Queen Paola. I have a conversation with a man that follows a very familiar organizational logic. In no time we are deep in the minutiae of consumer goods pricing – washing powder singled out in particular detail – with a digression devoted to Sunday shopping hours on both sides of the border. We may be in Belgium, but the mode of approach is German.

Eupen is the seat of Belgium's 75,000-odd strong German-speaking community. The community’s parliament is housed in a new, grey building on a hill at the outskirts of town, adjacent to the headquarters of Belgischer Rundfunk (BRF), Belgium’s German-language public broadcaster. In the lower town there are two Fritüren, or frites shops. This spelling is a direct Germanification of the Dutch Frituur and the French Friture and, as far as I can tell, is unique to German Belgian. Online research turns up a clutch of Fritüren across German-speaking Belgium and none in Germany, and German dictionaries refer to this spelling as obsolete. (I have never seen a Fritüre in Germany, though I realize that I’ve never really been on the lookout for them.)

All the while I'd thought of Ostend as the major artery and Eupen as the cul-de-sac, but Ostend has become a cul-de-sac as well. Not a single passenger ferry sails between England and Ostend these days. The city sits against the channel, the sea a wall. Belgium's federal train travels from cul-de-sac to cul-de-sac. In its steady doggedness it is a form of persistence.

Four years in London

“As foreigners we can ignore all those implicit obligations which are not in the law but in the general way of behaving.” Michel Foucault, “An Ethics of Pleasure,” in Foucault Live (372).

The freedom I felt when I first moved to London was the freedom of not being known, the freedom of not being understood – either in clumsy schematic terms (the way people think they can read people they don’t know) or with laser-sharp acuity (class, region, town, origin, accent, slang, education). I floated around London those first few weeks, in love with where I was and how I could interact with people. Nobody knew who I was, culturally speaking, and it felt outstanding.

It retrospect, though, that time was full of painful moments. I remember inviting people I’d just met to a housewarming party. One couple in particular made such able, gentle conversation that I wanted them at our housewarming party more than any others. One was an artist and the other was an academic. How nice, I thought. This is like the West Coast, not New York. (I’d just moved from New York, where bursts of kindness are common but friendliness is typically seen an alien.) People are far friendlier than their reputations in London, I thought.

But then none of them came to our housewarming party, and in time it became clear that nobody invites people they’ve just met to their housewarming parties. Inevitably, I feel some shame now when I think about that encounter and a few others like it. I was not behaving like a Londoner.

What happens when we stop being fully foreign? The freedom to ignore implicit obligations – or the freedom to not even know that they exist – disappears when people decide to stay for a while, or for good, in a new place. When people stop being foreigners and become immigrants or expats – the choice between the two determined by what is legally and culturally possible as well as personality among a host of other things – implicit obligations can no longer be ignored.

And by the point at which they can't be ignored, the vexed, bruised foreigner-turned-resident will probably have developed a different mindset. She will have learned to avoid the gaze of their next-door neighbour in the morning; he will have felt, authentically felt, the horrors of queue-barging. The resident will have become, possibly without perceiving it, a different person.

Recently I ran into the artist-academic couple in the very same pub where we’d first met, at a get-together hosted by the same mutual friend who first brought us together. It took me a few minutes to recognize them. A flash of annoyance, a memory of rejection passed through me – nothing big enough to spoil a nice evening of conversation. And then, as the evening went on, that feeling dissipated without me even realizing it. Later, after I’d made it home, I understood why. With the advantage of four years of living in London, with the benefit of cultural context,  I was able to come to the conclusion that they weren’t my kind of people at all.

This is my new blog.

I started a blog back in 2007. As the years have gathered, I've contributed to it with less and less enthusiasm.

Work got in the way. Twitter got in the way, too. I discovered that Twitter was better than my blog at lots of things: finding good people, having interesting conversations, bringing attention to things I find noteworthy, and promoting my own work. But really what got in the way was me. I never settled on what it was that my blog was supposed to do. This troubled and constrained me.

First it was a budget travel blog. It had a name: Spendthrift Shoestring, which cemented my foolhardy philosophy of spending money I barely had on the most budget-minded travel imaginable. It was a budget travel blog because all my life I’d travelled on a budget. It was what I knew and what I was good at doing. Plus I was finishing up a long stint working at EuroCheapo, where we spent most of our time thinking and writing about ways to travel places cheaply.

But then I discovered other ways to travel, and I liked them. More disposable income opened up horizons that hadn’t previously existed. I liked indulgent lunches that lasted for four hours. I liked learning about food and wine and gradations in business class service. I liked knowing about trends in travel – budget, sure, but also luxury – or at least knowing which trends I liked and which I did not. I came to appreciate truly fine hotels and understand the difference between luxury and excess, between good hotel design and cookie-cutter opulence. In my budget travel blog, such diversions would often be prefaced with an apology.

And then came other types of drift. I wrote about lots of things that didn’t fall under the purview of travel per se. I liked popular culture, and Eurovision, and other forms of pop music. Sometimes I found myself reflecting on how countries and cultures might change over the course of a decade. I reviewed magazines and products and occasionally attacked editorial policies. Because the blog was purportedly about travel, these subjects didn’t seem to fit exactly. More than once I changed my blog’s tagline to compensate. But nothing really held.

Sometimes it’s best to start anew.

What I really needed all along was to write a public notebook, something I could shape without fearing mistakes and contradiction. So here it is. Welcome to my notebook. I’ll be writing about travel. And ideas, cultural objects, and other stuff.