Time travel

Have you met the Queen, tremulous Americans would ask us during our summer sojourns in Chicago in the sixties. We are more worldly now and if we wonder whether our willowy Italian neighbours have consorted with Berlusconi we don't speculate out loud.  Travellers' experience is primed by well-nourished prejudices and fuelled by preconceptions peddled in brochures. Breathless postings on websites amplify the expectations of the credulous. The past is a foreign country, according to the opening lines of The Go-Between, but hunting the evanescent past courts disappointment; lacking lurid Dickensian fog, London falls short of expectations.

There is a deep disjunction between the interests of tourists and the preoccupations of local inhabitants. In London, visitors gasp at Cutty Sark while I am obsessed with congestion on the DLR. They compare the curated presentation of the past to their cherished images but, like creatures lacking a cerebellum, they don't contemplate the future. Why should they; glorious history is their quarry and while they have to contend with the present day vicissitudes of an unfamiliar country, their future lies at home. In contrast, my preoccupation with the DLR concerns how overcrowding will be exacerbated by the next efflorescence of buy-to-leave apartment blocks. This divergence exacerbates locals' resentment of tourists, and is heightened by the recognition that tourist dollars are necessary to lubricate a stagnant economy.

In Bologna we are not interested in the drab commercial centre, local political machinations or even the proposed trolley buses (incidentally already five years overdue).  Wild cat strikes on the trains are merely an annoyance, disrupting our out of town excursions, not rooted in a cause we support or even comprehend.  We seek the antiquities, the mythic Mediterranean lifestyle.  Reversing LP Hartley's aphorism, the purpose of travel is to access the past: time travel masquerading as tourism.  How apposite it was to see lines from The Great Gatsby emblazoned on a T-shirt in Bologna: so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

© David Thompson 2015