I've fallen behind a little with my round-ups, but I still follow travel stories with interest.

Right up there in both the "domestic travel" and "way to go" categories is Su Min. This 56-year-old grandmother from China, fed up with always having to put others first, has embarked on a single-handed road-trip, which she is live-streaming to great acclaim:

"Su's unhappy marriage and the obligation she felt to support her children and grandchildren had made her depressed, but she said the trip has cured her. Soon after leaving home, she stopped taking medicine for her depression...

"Asked when she will go back [home], she says: 'I dont really know. Not in the next couple of years. I want to travel all over China.'"


All the photos for this post come from our trip to Timor Leste in 2014, because -- well, why not?



And, in the "covid kills travel" category, all those in mourning will find themselves nodding along with Pico Iyer... He sounds so like me. He knows he's absurdly privileged in the covid stakes, and yet he's struggling to adjust to a life not on the road (or, for him, more accurately, a life not in the air). He, too, is wondering how to use the compensation vouchers he's been given by various travel companies before their validity lapses... Yet he, too, is very clear: "Everywhere is transporting, if only you can see it in the right light."





Those of us who feel guilty about missing our travel will find comfort in what Eric Weiner has to say:

"It is not natural for us to be this sedentary. Travel is in our genes... We are an adaptive species. We can tolerate brief periods of forced sedentariness. A dash of self-delusion helps. Were not grounded, we tell ourselves. Were merely between trips... We pass the days thumbing though old travel journals and Instagram feeds. We gaze at souvenirs. All this helps. For a while. We put on brave faces...

"I'd argue travel is an essential industry, an essential activity. Its not essential the way hospitals and grocery stores are essential. Travel is essential the way books and hugs are essential. Food for the soul..."

And again he puts forward this thought, which I've seen reiterated so many times, and have tried so often to use as consolation over the last year:

"Travel is not about the destination, or the journey. It is about stumbling across 'a new way of looking at things,' as writer Henry Miller observed. We need not travel far to gain a fresh perspective."

And he's certainly right here: "Many of us... have taken travel for granted. We grew lazy and entitled, and that is never good. Tom Swick, a friend and travel writer, tells me he used to view travel as a given. Now, he says, 'I look forward to experiencing it as a gift.'"

Over the last couple of weeks I was roped into a Facebook challenge that involved posting travel photos for 10 days. It reminded me very forcefully how incredibly lucky I have been...

Initially I found myself dismissing his argument that we can do ourselves a lot of good by getting on and designing our next trip, on the grounds that planning a trip "is nearly as enjoyable as actually taking one". No, I wanted to respond. NO, it's not. Absolutely, it's not. I get no enjoyment whatsoever out of planning something that has a good chance of never happening, and given the covid state of play at this moment, I have really no clue when we'll be travelling internationally again.





But Catherine Nixey adds a bit more to this train of thought. She pinpoints one of the true tragedies of covid: "Many moments of happiness are about anticipation, the joy of the imagined future -- and distracting ourselves from the tedious, exhausting or difficult present. Yet even our small consumer choices or our musings about what to do this weekend now bring us back to the big, overpowering reality of the pandemic. We cannot escape it. Our daydreams have come crashing back to earth: 2020 is the year that the future was cancelled."

Oh, yes...

She argues that -- despite the contemporary emphasis on mindfulness (the ability to focus your mind and senses on the present moment) -- all animals are actually tuned to the future. Expectation, prediction, and planning are essential survival mechanisms, and they are vital for our emotional wellbeing. So she, too, maintains that the planning of an event gives us as much joy and satisfaction as the event itself. But in the covid era, she says, this happy anticipation has disappeared along with so much else.

Her advice? Ditch the mindfulness, with its focus on the (currently humdrum) present, and allow your imagination to offer you an escape. Hmmm, well, as I said, that works for me only if I think there's the ghost of a chance I can one day do what I'm imagining. Otherwise, it's just tantalizing. Maybe I need to imagine more road trips in Sarawak...

Anyway, whatever shape our managing strategy takes, we need to get on and employ it, because this shit is not getting better, right? This week has brought discouraging news about vaccine availability, more infectious new strains, resurgences where we thought we'd got on top of this menace, and the ever-receding horizon for the return of travel...

Pam Mandel, whose writing I've admired for a long time now, sums up the building stresses -- "the nonstop low level despair" -- very appositely. (She has recently published a book, by the way, called The Same River Twice, which I have put on my "when I can afford it" list. Stuart McDonald talks about it here as he muses about why people love to travel -- and miss it so much when they can't.)





Anyway, on to non-Spikes stuff...

Coincidentally, the day I wrote about Edmund Hillary was the day that saw the passing, at the grand age of 94, of Jan Morris -- who, as James Morris, was the journalist "embedded" by The Times in the 1953 Everest expedition, and the first to report the successful ascent.

I've really enjoyed reading about her. This account includes some great photos, and an interview recorded in 2013 (60 years after the Everest expedition, when she was already 87). She's an exemplary octogenarian: vivacious, funny, self-effacing, at ease. She believes in kindness. She's right. The simple practice of kindness would change so much...

Her account of Venice, as experienced at different periods of her life, is an example of how to write not only beautifully but also kindly. She's definitely worth adding to my ever-growing reading list.