31 August

It’s a wonder of the modern world, flying. But a disaster at the same time. Flying consumes more than 5 MILLION barrels of oil per day. And it’s growing fast. I don’t think this will change unless we really examine our lust for travel, as I always bang on about. There is no ‘authentic’ tourism, I think we have to accept that our seeing is destroying things at the same time. And understand why, emotionally and psychologically, we can’t be happy where we are, we always need to be somewhere else. Travel is another sugar rush, a contrast experience, other places seem ‘amazing’ because they’re not our places. We use up the contrast quickly, trashing the place, and go looking for new contrasts. If you wear your shoes on the wrong feet you’ll get a contrast experience. We’ve forgotten how to make our own places amazing, and we forget that amazing is only a brief contrast. We don’t occupy space, enrich it, we still have the conquering DNA of our imperial past, we accumulate new places and ‘experiences’. We become parasites on everybody else’s homes.