I had forgotten this word -- travel mania -- until I came across it in an old diary. At the time, I was rapt to discover it, and found it quite cool to think I was a dromomaniac. (And the diary certainly attests to an obsession with travel that has never really left me.)

In many ways, it's not a great thing to have. According to an online medical dictionary (already not good that something you think you have is in any sort of "medical dictionary"), this is "an uncontrollable impulse or desire to wander or travel". It's a psychological condition, right up there with dipsomania and clinomania (what?). At least one blog has adopted this identity, and this article puts a fairly positive spin on it, but a "mania" is an illness, at the end of the day...

But then again, as the article points out, who defines what's an illness? A whole body of social sciences literature is dedicated to the idea of "mobilities", and points out that we are often far too ready to assume that sedentary is the human "normal", while movement is just an aberration. Considered from one point of view, the whole world is in flux, with the fixed acting simply as a counterpoint or complement to the mobile, rather than as something that is a gold standard in its own right.

As a species, after all, we did an awful lot of wandering before we got to that settling-down-to-look-after-the-crops phase.

Mobility is never easy. (I'm in the midst of a vast digitization project at the moment, for example, to try to reduce bulk for greater ease of movement; and governments are pathologically against mobility, it seems, and delight in making it harder and harder for us.)

But, at the end of the day, it's a human inheritance. We came down from the trees, and we travelled...