Spain Part 1: The Joy of Travelling
Last Monday, I flew back to Edinburgh from Barcelona. I’ve often found when travelling that on the return trip, I feel excited in anticipation of being home. Or perhaps the right word is ‘relieved’. After a week away from home—of living out of a suitcase, sleeping in strange beds, and shitting in even stranger toilets—how satisfying it is to return to the familiar!
And yet, after a comfortable night’s sleep in my own, much-missed bed, melancholy rises in my breast, every time. How I then yearn to be back in a foreign city full of foreign people and foreign food! And now, after a week of being back at home, both feelings have dissipated, flattened by the old habits and routines, dulled by the quotidian.
Perhaps this is no bad thing—having a pretty boring everyday life, I mean. There are people in Afghanistan and Ukraine right now who would kill for that. Still, the latter feeling, of melancholy, seems the truer of the two to me. For all the stresses and annoyances of travelling, from the lugging through vast airports and unfamiliar streets of overpacked suitcases to the gnawing fear that these foreign toilets might not take too kindly to toilet paper, it is worth it—every second.
The return trip is always laborious, tiring, a chore. But on the outward journey, I always feel thrilled. I love being in the airport, lounging around in bars, watching human beings going to and fro in transit, knowing that I am in transit myself. Any English literature graduate who paid even the slightest bit of attention knows the academese phrase ‘liminal space’. Well, airports are liminal spaces par excellence and knowing such jargon has not, thankfully, blunted my appreciation of such spaces. Airports are places of and on the edge, where borders become malleable and people from nearby towns and far-flung lands and everywhere in between and beyond pass by each other, their lives touching, just a little, and just very briefly, before flying apart across oft-vast distances once more. And maybe, just maybe, sometimes the crossings of these human wires lights a spark.
I know this is unusual. I know that most people find airports tedious and stressful. And I agree to some extent—the agony of going through security and thus leaving behind the last place for perhaps thousands of miles and many hours where one can smoke is an agony the likes of which Jesus on the cross could barely have comprehended but with which I am all too familiar. Despite that, airports are, for me, almost transformative places. They’re certainly romantic ones.
And then there is flight! It’s so easy to take it for granted, given the tiny seats, screaming kids, and overpriced snacks, but I try never to let go of just how astonishing being on a plane is. I absolutely love the take-off and landing, when others are indifferent or scared. The roar of the engines and the speed of the plane as it readies itself to take to the sky—I just love it. However much airlines try to make flight dreary and workaday and boring, it thrills me like little else.
Imagine—for hundreds of thousands of years, our ancestors dreamt of soaring like the little dinosaur remnants, or birds, that swooped over their heads every day, and now, barely a century after the first heavier-than-air flight, we do it all the time, and so (seemingly) easily.1 We can lift ourselves up above the clouds, beyond the most fevered dreams of the most imaginative (or crazed) of our ancestors, all thanks to some clever applications of Newtonian physics.2 It’s amazing. I’ll have none of that modern cynicism. If nothing else deserves unironic, childlike enthusiasm, it is flight. Don’t let the miserable, penny-pinching airlines suck the wonder out of you.
So, there it is: the joy of travelling. By which I mean the actual act of travelling itself, of being transported. Never mind the joy of being in an exciting new place! More on the actual holiday, and the ghost of George Orwell, in Part 2.
I have exciting news to share: You can now read Daniel's Den in the new Substack app for iPhone.
With the app, you’ll have a dedicated Inbox for my Substack and any others you subscribe to. New posts will never get lost in your email filters or stuck in spam. Longer posts will never be cut off by your email app. Comments and rich media will all work seamlessly. Overall, it’s a big upgrade to the reading experience.
The Substack app is currently available for iOS. If you don’t have an Apple device, you can join the Android waitlist here.
The Wright brothers’ flight was, more specifically, “the first controlled, sustained flight of a powered, heavier-than-air aircraft.” So Wikipedia tells me, anyway.
Okay, it’s a little more complicated than that, and far beyond my powers of description. See here for the science. I also recommend Richard Dawkins’ latest book, Flights of Fancy: Defying Gravity by Design and Evolution, for a lucid account of the science of all kinds of flight, with gorgeous illustrations by Jana Lenzová.