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The meaning of travel and adventure

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“She travelled on the edge of the edge itself.” Ethel Crowley about Dervla Murphy

Today I heard a mountaineer and expedition leader being asked if travel and adventure were still possible. He replied that they were, and the interviewer then went into detail about the adventurer’s various trips. I was impressed, but not in the way I am when I read of Dervla Murphy’s exploits.

Ethel Crowley is the editor of the recently published book Life at Full Tilt – The Selected Writings of Dervla Murphy. I have almost finished the book and my mind is out on stalks. How did Dervla Murphy survive her travels?

This is not to say that travel has to involve terrifying ascents, or being mugged by children in Albania, but it does seem to be part of what extreme travellers do, and Dervla Murphy was one of those. Truly extraordinary resilience, as well as such good ‘being there in the moment’ and ‘looking at others’ skills. She did the extraoardinary and the ordinary, from Bradford to faraway Siberia, and met the locals wherever she could, showing us herself and others, so we could think about ourselves.

That to me is real travel. It doesn’t have to be Everest. All you have to do is step outside your front door and start really looking. Life is the big adventure.

(The photograph above is of part of the press release that Eland Publishing sent me with the copy of Life at Full Tilt.)

Copyright Georgie Knaggs & The Phraser 2023

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The daunting process of finding an agent

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This is the time of year when family used to wearily supply me with another copy of the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook, which I would then hunt through looking for likely targets. I’d read up on each agent’s specific requirements, and then measure out the ingredients to send to them. Sadly for me nothing baked into anything. So I gave up.

Then today I listened once more to writers discussing submissions, and I saw suddenly that the clue is in the word ‘submission’. That’s what it feels like after aching hours of drafting and tweaking, and rearranging according to each agent’s rules, especially if there’s not even a peep in response.

Anyway, while I sit here bleating like a sheep stuck on the wrong side of a fence, I think sometimes of J K Rowling. She created a whole world, then submitted it again and again, until finally ‘kapow‘! She succeeded because she did not give up. So, even if I can’t create a world as magnificent as hers, I can at least work on the not giving up … for now.

Copyright Georgie Knaggs & The Phraser 2023

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The pleasure of a visitors’ book

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“Sometimes you will never know the value of a moment, until it becomes a memory.” Dr Seuss

Visitors’ books – we love the raggedy copies we have. The smallest has travelled from home to home with us, occasionally lost for the length of a new home at the bottom of an unpacked packing box, but then found again in time for the next home. It has served us well, and now it has a new companion to take on the day to day duties.

This newcomer is filling up and growing a wisdom of its own, but it knows, and we know, that it will never be able to replicate the knowledge sheltered by its older companion. By ‘knowledge’ I suppose I mean gossip – a listing of relationships often detailed in little more than the word count of a tweet, but written long before that little blue bird, or its black X of a successor came to be. Some pages just have names and dates, but those alone can bring back a whole shelf of memories, especially if connected to the names and dates surrounding them. It’s even better if the visitors have taken the time to write a little more than just the basics, for then their own immediate impression of their time adds even more to the knowing that they were there.

So, if you’ve never had a visitors’ book, I recommend it. It needn’t be fancy, and it soon becomes a habit and then a treasure, the kind of treasure that will link many more than you will probably ever remember, or know, back to a place and a time.

Copyright Georgie Knaggs & The Phraser 2023