13 July

What I say about travel even the travel industry says itself. It knows there’s a crisis. It has no idea what to do about it. Travel is Tinder, for locations. Momentary flings, wham bam, thank you…next. If you think your travel is different, that you’re more interested in getting in touch with the ‘local culture’, or with ‘treading lightly on the landscape’, wake up. If 4 million other people did the same as you, and they will, we’re right back at travel destroying the places it goes to see. Should we all just stay home? Actually, mostly yes. That’s what most people have done, for most of history. The reason that doesn’t appeal to us is that our homes are mostly dull and boring. Because we don’t occupy the landscape, enrich it. The places we go to see look amazing because those people DID inhabit that landscape, for generations, enriching it constantly. We go looking for what we lost in our own homes. I won’t give up trying to convince people that by ‘being there’, you’re actually more distant from what you’ve gone to see. You are unavoidably a stranger, at a distance from the people and location. You will appreciate it much more, from afar. You don’t get to root every person you like the look of, or stalk them in their homes. The same applies to locations. It’s time for a lot more spatial monogamy.