Today I met a young man who I assumed had travelled. He looked the type – a man who knew himself. He was relaxed, neither rich nor poor, and clearly happy in the company of others whoever they were.
We got talking. Our starting point was who was from where, and what what. He was a Londoner. Born in London. Schooled in London. Living in London. Working in London. Never going to leave London. It sounded as though his family had been stitched to the city for generations, and he loved it with a passion.
The conversation made me wonder – if you live in a big city full of the world, is there any need to travel? He seemed so rooted and at ease, and, as he said himself, one of the lucky ones because he fell out of school into a job he loved and hasn’t wanted to go anywhere since. So why travel? I looked at him and couldn’t think of a reason.
It was only right at the end of our chat that he told me he was about to go to the Far East for a holiday.
I was glad to hear he’d have that experience, but as I walked away into the strangely warm October day I wondered if his trip would unsettle him. I hoped it wouldn’t. Or, if it did, only in a good way.
Copyright Georgie Knaggs & The Phraser 2023
The Phraser 
Living in a big city and one that is as multicultural as Toronto is has not stopped me from wanting to see different places, either in Canada or in other parts of the world. Travelling helps me appreciate what I have here for as much as I enjoy visiting other places and living there for a period of time, I love coming home. So, my guess is that the young man will return to London having had a wonderful adventure but happy to be back where he feels he belongs.
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Yes, I agree. We are so lucky to feel happy to be home, and even luckier to have the chance, or at least to have had the chance, to journey away from home every so often.
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Such an interesting perspective, Georgie.
Living in Australia, where pretty much everyone travels, I wonder at the definition of “travel”. I have met many Aussies who fervently believe they understand geopolitics as “they have travelled”, usually to Asia or Europe, maybe even New York (which should be a country on its own). Yet while hanging out on the beaches of Bali, tubing in Laos, or seeing the Eiffel Tower are travel, do they really give you an understanding of foreign cultures and lives? Are the wonderful french cafes around the Eiffel Tower representative of what goes on in the banlieus of Paris, or are the beaches of Bali (with cheap food and massages) representative of life for most of the Balinese? Do MOMA and those famous delis teach you anything about the reality of living in Manhattan? Do we even care when we are on holiday? There’s travelling and living.
I think that your young man will come back having had a wonderful holiday, and not unsettled at all 🙂
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Hi Gillian – “…There’s travelling and living…” What a great way of putting it. I think you’re so right about travel meaning different things to different groups of people, and pointing out how so many of us are after holidays, not really an in-depth experience of other cultures. I think other countries are also quite happy to direct their visitors to particular parts. Perhaps ‘travel’ in the old-fashioned sense, ‘slow travel’, is a category of its own, and ‘holidays’ something else. There’s also the possibility that we’ll all be staying put a lot more in the future, and doing our travel online.
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