Joe Bennett: Birthday sparks memories of travels gone by

Going away to celebrate his 66th brought back memories - good and bad - from previous trips away for Joe Bennett.

We’re going away for a few days to celebrate - if that’s the word - my birthday. It’s my 66th. If I concentrate really hard, I find that of the previous 65, I can remember precisely none. And birthdays are meant to be the special days, the unforgettables.

Truly, our days are like waves on the beach. They wash in and wash out again, leaving perfectly ironed sand, and there is nothing distinctive or remarkable about any of them. What are they for? “They are to be happy in”, wrote Larkin, though he didn’t actually manage much of that himself.

But oh, going away. It fills me with a sense of unease. Rented mattresses, strange toilets, bookings, timetables, waiting, the inconvenience, the bother of it all. Why bother with the bother of it all?

It wasn’t always thus, of course. Time was when I yearned to go places. The imminence of travel would still set my nerves a-jangle, but it was a thrilled nervousness. I liked to go alone, and I liked to head for somewhere that I knew the name of but had yet to see. The name was everything. A good name, a name with romance, could liquefy the bowel.

“When I was but thirteen or so

I went into a golden land

Chimborazo, Cotopaxi

Took me by the hand.”

That was it exactly. Even now, I can remember reading that poem and feeling as the poet felt, enchanted by nomenclature. He knew nothing of Chimborazo or Cotopaxi, but they embodied the wonder of elsewhere.

I had my own names: Aleppo, Samarkand, Caracas, Acapulco. Of these, I’ve only ever made it to Acapulco. And that was fatal, of course.

Acapulco was an exquisite natural bay with all the best land devoted to hotels for fat, rich Americans. The beach was raked clean each morning for the benefit of those same fat, rich Americans. Poor skinny Mexicans did the raking, and other poor skinny Mexicans walked the beach all day trying to sell things to the Americans - sunglasses, watermelon slices, lousy jewellery.

Behind the hotels there rose a steep hill, with the real estate prices shrinking as the contours climbed to a ridge. Beyond the ridge, cascading down the other side, was a shanty town, all poverty and corrugated iron. And every morning, like something on an Attenborough documentary, a mass of human beings emerged from the shanty town where they had spent the night unairconditioned, and set out over the ridge to try to make a dollar - cooking, cleaning, serving, selling, robbing. In other words, Acapulco was ordinary and unfair, same as everywhere. Romance is the first casualty of travel.

It’s like the old sailor in a poem by Robert Graves who has “seen whales and flying fishes”, who has “sailed as far as Demerara”. When the children flock to hear his tales, he tells them only “every ocean smells alike of tar”.

And the second casualty of going anywhere is self-delusion. Part of the excitement of travel is the hope that novel things will happen in a novel place, that we will have the sort of adventures we don’t normally have, the sort of sex we don’t normally have. Of course, the reason we don’t have sex or adventures in everyday life is our own nature, our timidity and reticence. And when we arrive in the distant hotel room and open the suitcase, what are the first items we come across? They are the ones we never meant to pack: timidity and reticence.

Self is half of what we seek to escape. The other half is home. Home is self extended. Home is what we’ve chosen. Every molecule of it is us, and it isn’t always a pretty sight. “Home is so sad” - Larkin again. “A joyous shot at how things ought to be, long fallen wide.”

We can’t blame anyone else for home. We chose it and made it. It is us.

And so to go away, even if only for a few days, even in one’s 60s, is, in a tiny way, to start again, to shed a skin, to try once more to live a bit. It’s a faint echo of Tennyson’s Ulysses, whose:

“… purpose holds

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

Of all the western stars, until I die.”

Nonsense, of course, but seductive nonsense. And so it is that despite myself, despite the years, despite the cynicism of experience and despite the bother of it, I am actually looking forward to going away.