IN 1790 A young Frenchman named Xavier de Maistre published a travel journal entitled: A journey around my bedroom.
Like me, he was missing travel - although in his case it was because he had been wounded in a duel, and was confined to his bedroom while he recovered.
De Maistre was actually quite well travelled by the standards of the 1790s, and his book was intended as a bit of a joke. Nevertheless - without having to lug baggage anywhere - he sat on his sofa and set about scrutinising his own bedroom through traveller’s eyes.
I was reading about de Maistre in The Art of Travel by the popular British philosopher Alain de Botton, and the line about seeing the same familiar old places through somebody else’s eyes struck a chord with me.
I guess we’ve all experienced it. You know, you get a call from an old friend who wants to come and see you, and instantly you begin looking at your home with fresh eyes. When were those sofa covers last cleaned? It’s a pity you didn’t actually get around to redecorating the spare bedroom, isn’t it? And when did that coffee stain appear on the stair carpet?
During lockdown lots of us were doing the fresh eyes thing, although in a more positive and revelationary way than that suggested above. Initially, unable to drive for exercise, we had to walk from our own front doors into territory that was at once familiar, and also surprisingly fresh.
To own the observation, I looked at where I lived with travellers’ eyes because, to be honest, I don’t often go there - I just pass through it on the way to somewhere else. And what I found, in true de Maistrean style, was that there was much to treasure within walking distance of home.
The flip side of this particular coin, is that whenever we travel we take ourselves with us; we take our genetics, our experiences, our fears, our values and our hopes and we observe the world through our own perceptual filters.
And so, on an absolutely life-changing trip to St Helena in the middle of the Atlantic, said to be the most remote island in the world, I remember looking across the green hills of the district the Saints call “Fairyland” and thinking: “It looks a little like the Yorkshire Dales.” (See what you think; it’s the big picture at the top of the page.)
I don’t think that thought was intended to diminish Fairyland, which was very beautiful, it was just an attempt to more readily capture my experience of it by comparing it to something I was familiar with - to create a ‘set’. But rather than looking with fresh eyes, I looked at it through the tired old lenses of my own experience.
To be honest, when I do travel, I like to think of myself as a traveller rather than as a tourist or a holidaymaker. I’m not travelling to rest or to lie on a sun bed; I’m going to see new things and meet new people. I am exploring, rather than relaxing. It’s the change of scenery that’s important.
And that’s what I’m missing right now - the exploration, the simple adventure of travel. So, for the time being, I’m learning a lesson from de Maistre and I’m going to have a crack at observing the familiar through fresh eyes.
On Sunday, I’m off into London to take photographs of iconic office buildings in the City of London for a learned friend’s book on the office economy - and I’m going to do it as a writer, a photographer … and as a traveller.
The City of London will be my version of de Maistre’s room. Let’s see if I can pull it off.
Postscript: actually I had a wonderful trip to the City, and it did feel like being ‘elsewhere’. It’s a very long time since I was considered an expert in the City office market - decades, in fact - and it was a joy to walk seven miles inside the Square Mile, looking at the changes. Here are a few of the photographs I took, just scroll down to see more.
