Here and There Read online

  Italy has made itself into a looking-glass world, where none of the normal worldly rules apply. Take scooters. Only in Italy does a scooter look sexy and chic. And organised crime – everywhere else crime is a reason not to go; in Sicily, the mafia is an attraction.

  Corruption. Everywhere else we call in the IMF; in Italy they call it family values. And northern Europeans, whose countries don’t allow politicians to accept a doughnut, happily pay endless bribes to get electricity put into their holiday homes in Tuscany. And what’s more, they feel happy and privileged to be allowed to join in the rustic corruption of Italian politics and pay the mayor.

  Italy is a trough of special interests, fixing, foul play, pay-offs and excommunications. Italians wave their hands in mock exasperation, and the rest of the world smiles benignly, and goes, aww, those Italian scallywags. If Italy happened to be in the Middle East, there’d be a Yankee aircraft carrier in the Venice lagoon and sanctions. But Italians get away with it simply by being Italians, and we all know what they’re like – and they know we know.

  Every other nation in the world tries to make life be as it should be; the Italians make the most of how it is. We all say corruption is a bad thing; we must stop it. The Italians say we are all fallible; to pretend otherwise is arrogance. Everywhere else has crime, but in Italy, it’s organised by professionals. All men are lecherous bastards who only want one thing; surely, say the Italians, it’s better to be seduced by Casanova than Attila the Drunk. Instead of pitting virtue against vice in an eternal war of abstinence, failure and guilt like the rest of us, Italy has made the vices virtues, and vice versa.

  If you come from a prescriptive, prudent, parsimonious society, this seems hypnotically attractive, and I am as mesmerised and seduced as any gap-year convent girl. Most years I try to find myself in Siena for the Palio. The Palio is a horserace held twice a year. But forget everything you know about horseracing. This isn’t remotely like that. The Palio is unique to Siena, but it is symbolic of Italy. In the rest of the world, horseracing is organised along English lines. It is scrupulous, from the weight of jockeys to the piss of geldings; it is checked and fenced with rules. This, everyone agrees, is the only way to make racing fair.

  The Sienese see things differently. Each area of the city, or contrada, has a horse, which they are given by lot. After that, anything goes. The horses are drugged, the jockeys are bribed and then rebribed and threatened. The horses gather behind a rope, except for one: they can only start running when he begins, and he will only start when he’s been bribed by the other jockeys. This can take hours.

  It’s completely out in the open. The corruption is part of the event. Before the race, there is a splendid procession of contradas dressed in Renaissance costumes, throwing banners, marching in armour, and the great white Tuscan oxen pulling a cart bearing a banner of painted silk, known as the palio. Picasso made one; so did Matisse. Most of the great artists of the last 500 years have painted palios. This is all the winning contrada gets.

  The preparations, parties, pageants, singing and arguments take a week. The race takes two minutes. The victorious horse is carried to Siena’s cathedral, where it’s taken to the altar and a mass is said in its honour. Winning is the greatest moment in any contrada’s life. The streets are full of weeping men; losing jockeys are beaten to within an inch of their lives. One, who fell off his horse in a suspect manner, had to be taken away in an ambulance. But the ambulance was stopped so they could get in and beat him up properly.

  It all looks like a tourist spectacle, but it is ferociously local. No outsider can really understand the passion and the commitment of the Palio. This is a Siena thing. The most beautiful gothic city in existence is a series of dark circles that lead you to the heart of the greatest square in all Italy, which is to say in all the world. Walled in by Renaissance palaces, it hosts the race that is as corrupt and violent and hysterical and purposeless as it is searingly beautiful. Even to an outsider, it’s poundingly exciting; but it is wholly and utterly woven into Siena and being Sienese. It is not like English horseracing or football or poker or basketball – a game that can be globalised. The Palio can only happen here, for people born in this dark, labyrinthine, ancient city. And in its bribery, doping, cruelty and violence, there is a pristine honesty. It is a race that is run not for highfalutin Olympian principles, but for the glory of the butcher, the baker and your neighbour.

  Italy is complicated. It can only exist as long as the rest of us try to rise above our base natures. A world full of Italys would be a Dante-esque hell, but one Italy is a fabulous treat. As Orson Welles’s Harry Lime in The Third Man famously pointed out: in 30 years of war, corruption and inhumanity under the Borgias, Italy came up with Leonardo, Michelangelo and the High Renaissance; in 500 years of peace, Switzerland produced the cuckoo clock. (And even that wasn’t true; it was invented in Germany.) And remember where he said it: in Austria.

  Burn for you

  The world is divided into those in the sun, and those out of it, and people in the shade will do anything to capture that little ray of sunshine.

  There was something I was supposed to be writing about. A theme, some subject, that an editor somewhere distant told me would fit neatly, possibly elegantly, into this month’s sybaritic world view. And I can’t for the life of me remember what it was. That’s not like me. Normally I’m diligent and industrious, acquiescent and compliant. But today isn’t normal. Today is different. I can’t remember, and what’s more, I don’t care. Whatever it was is a distant murmur, a carping echo. Today is different, and the main difference today is that I am hot.

  Not that sort of hot. Not Californian-teenage-exclamatory hot. I’m sedately heated. The sun is on my back and for the first time in months I can feel myself pinkly burning. And it’s so delicious, so radiant, it has driven all other thoughts from my head and I’m just enjoying the pearls of perspiration running down my back.

  Have you noticed that hot and cold are both amnesiac? They have no memory. You can’t conjure up the remembrance of temperatures past. The sun always comes as a blissful surprise, the cold a shivering shock. I’ve never had a first day in the heat when I haven’t got sunburnt. All these years I should’ve learned. I have learned. I know that my pale, grey skin will blister and peel. I know about carcinomas and freckles and moles on stalks. But still, that first radiating burst is so joyous. I can’t tear myself away. The pain of tomorrow is sufficient unto itself. This moment, I just want to point my marmoreally adipose flesh at the sky for a taste.

  You can cut the world across many different lines, between haves and nots, first and third, buyers and sellers, blondes and brunettes, tit-men and leg-men. But sometimes I think the most fundamental division is between those in the sun and those in the shade. If you come from the dark, damp north, then the sun is always joyous. A treat. Those who live in hot-and-bright all their lives never really understand what fools the sun makes of the rest of us.

  The sad thing is that the favour doesn’t work the other way around. Going warm to chilly isn’t an invigorating pleasure. It’s no accident that the lion’s share of humanity’s innovations have come from places where you want to spend as little time outside as possible. It’s not that cold, wet people are any cleverer than warm, dry ones, it’s that people with chilblains have the greatest incentive to change things. We have to keep active to keep the blood flowing. We have to invent to keep our minds off the sleet and fog. A place in the sun, a retirement somewhere with long blue shadows and breakfast outside in a courtyard is the abiding spur and dream of the north world. And much as we envy you, you who wake up to gay Phoebus running his bright fingers over your perspiring naked bodies, still also we pity you a little. You are blasé with overexposure. Hot is the norm, cold the shocking exception.

  Where do people in hot countries go for a holiday? That’s not a facetious question. We often think about it up here in February. Do you choose a different type of heat? Do you go from dry to humid? Do you count deg
rees? What’s it like when all your holiday clothes are the same as your home clothes? You can never know the twinge of joy at meeting your favourite shorts once again after a year apart. The grains of last summer’s sand in the pocket, the frisson of devil-may-care that a pair of sandals brings with them. Because, for us shadow people, the sun doesn’t just turn us red and peeling, it is a licence. It brings out our other selves. Anyone who has had the misfortune of being around a breeding colony of young Brits on holidays will undoubtedly think that it’s a side best left in the fridge.

  But drinking, howling and ugly humping in the sun isn’t all we do. It also inspires us to a sort of lyricism. A quiet, intellectual hedonism, a warm, grateful creativity that comes from our moments in the heat. How many great novels, films, songs, sonatas, paintings and poems are written by cold people who have found the light on their upturned faces? One of the most quixotic questions of global civilisation is, why did the cold world discover, conquer and colonise the hot one? Why didn’t the Aztecs go and live in Germany? What was it that stopped the Thais from raiding Scandinavia? Why didn’t the Mongols live in mortal fear of Egyptians? It is probably down to all sorts of things, technical, philosophical, capricious, but over all of them, there’s the sun. Mad dogs and Englishmen are drawn to other people’s middays.

  Here’s a statistic that will make you laugh: the incidences of skin cancer are almost exactly the same per capita in Britain as they are in Australia. I don’t need to tell you that down in the southern hemisphere they’ve left the blinds open and all their exposed bits are being microwaved to a Chernobyl crispness. Whereas in Britain, the atmosphere is so opaquely thick, you often can’t find the third floor, let alone the ozone layer. The sad, hopeless, touching reason for our high melanoma is that we’ve done it on purpose. We pay. In every poor, gritty, grey northern town in the country, in every parade of windblown shivering shops, there is a tanning parlour. A little place where, for a few quid, you can get radiated and come out looking like a posh spicy mandarin. And that’s how much the sun means to us. We’ll risk our lives just to have a brief memory, a warm reminder of holidays. Tanning beds are to the sun what pornography is to sex.

  And that reminds me – what it was I was supposed to be writing about. Excellence. The best, the very finest, the thing that is without peer. Well, there you are: the sun. The greatest ever thing in the world. The best reason for travelling, the best reason for getting out of the house, out of your clothes and out of yourself. But if you wanted to say what was the very best way of serving yourself up to the sun, then that would be what I’m doing at the moment. I’m thinking of you whilst lying on the fantail of a perfect yacht that is slowly cruising down the Windward Isles and the Grenadines. As I speak, we’re anchored off a deserted beach in front of a rainforest under a mountain in St Vincent. Exotic shoals of garfish are milling in the waters below. Above, frigate birds scissor the thermals and boobys dive elegantly for dinner. The sun is taking its bow, like a diva’s gaudy encore, and it would all be utterly, utterly perfect if I wasn’t the colour and texture of a flayed tomato, and stinging like a jellyfish massage. Out on the darkling shore, I can hear a mad dog somewhere laughing its head off.

  Till death us do part

  In Ghana, sending off a loved one in a personalised coffin is the last word in conspicuous consumption.

  Before me as I write I have on my left a cup of congealing coffee and on my right the dog watching my grammar from her blanket in the soft chair. I press the random mix-it-up arrows on the iTunes and let the music go where it will, like some cheesy late-night DJ. I have the tonic breadth and the rhythmic girth of a man who really does know next to nothing about music. What that means is that, like a drunk on a street full of brothels, I’ll jig about with pretty much anything. Which is why the first thing that’s come on, just now, is Chopin’s ‘Sonata No. 2 in B-flat minor’. Only someone with musical taste so broad that it no longer counts as taste, but as more of a musical refugee, would have this on their work computer.

  It’s the one that starts with the piano – dum, dum, da dum – very slowly. It’s actually the funeral march. The walk of black horses with plumes and men in top hats and bright carnations on, the coffin spelling out ‘Monty, gone but not forgotten’. The tune that is to death what Mendelssohn is to brides. It’s beautiful and lyrical, but also lachrymose, in a romantic sort of way. But like Christmas singles and summer novelty dance records, it’s so branded by its associations you really can’t listen to it just as music.

  The reason I’m writing about it now rather than just listening to it out of the corner of my ear is because I was just about to write about the very thing it reminded me of. I was going to write about death. Actually, about coffins. And here, synchronously, like a premonition, I’ve got Chopin.

  I’ve just come back from Ghana, which is celebrating 50 years of independence, the first colonial African country to be granted it. Today it’s a very jolly place: 90-degree heat, 90-degree humidity. Everything grows here – plantains, cassavas, oranges, corn, malaria, elephantiasis, river blindness. Fence posts and wooden legs sprout. And there’s cacao, Ghana’s second largest export after gold. There’s industrial diamonds. There’s a toddler democracy and a hysterical press, and a lot of very scary, impressive women.

  This is one of the best places in Africa, because its people are famously nice. Nice, funny, argumentative, loud, generous, inclusive and exceedingly competitive. Ghana has done well by African standards because Ghanaians care a lot about doing well, about getting on. They have a commercial streak you can skateboard over, and they like conspicuous consumption. They like the signs of wealth and success and education and state.

  Ghanaians don’t just wear their hearts on their sleeves but in repeat patterns all over their bodies. Clothes are made of bright fabrics that advertise everything from the national flag to a football team to your job. There’s one that reads, ‘I’ll never get over a close family member who’s just died’, complete with skulls and coffins. You can have an insistent, jolly, anti-AIDS, safe-sex message on your new jacket involving broken hearts, kissing couples and ethereal haloed condoms. When someone dies, families take out exuberant, tearful death announcements in the newspapers. They also have T-shirts printed with ‘Jojo, we’ll never forget him; in our hearts forever’, with a fetching picture of a beaming boy, himself in a T-shirt that says, ‘You’re beautiful and I’ve got the munchies’.

  Nowhere are earthly status, achievement and dreams more vaingloriously celebrated than in death. Ghana is a very religious country going through an exclamatory low-church renewal. Good, godly people get on. God looks after those who love him. Poverty has no part in piousness here. Being poor in Africa isn’t a sign of anything except that you’re a poor African. Poverty is the default setting. So when you die, to show how well you did, how much God loved you by piling his bounty into your pockets, you throw a big funeral party with a lot of stew, chips and plenty of beer and a band, and everybody gets well and truly overindulged and remembers what a wonderful, kind, generous person you were – or, usually, what wonderful, kind, generous people your kids are for forking out for the funeral. Which is much the same as everywhere else in the world. What isn’t the same is how you actually depart. Most of us can expect, at best, a box that looks like the top of a Victorian sideboard, lined with ruched silk underwear, going out dressed in a suit we resented like hell for having to put on when we were living.

  But Ghana’s developed the aspirational coffin. If you spent your life working in an office, they can bury you in a six-foot, smart black brogue painted to a shiny polish. Or you could have a sportier Nike trainer. You could get interred in a mobile phone, a lion, a spaceship. A castle. There’s a spiny lobster, a Coca-Cola bottle. A snail. An anti-aircraft gun.

  The showroom looks like a carousel ride of death, the coffins so beautifully made, Western interior decorators collect them as furniture. A gallery in California is putting on an exhibition. Which all seems a little d
isrespectful of the dead. A Ghanaian coffin has its origins in West African tribal masks, the animism of inanimate objects. It also has a touching and profound amusement, a thumbing of the nose at the ravages of mortality.

  I almost ordered one for myself. They’re all bespoke, unless you’ve always wanted to go as a Coke bottle or a Holy Bible. But what would I want to go in? What are my aspirations to eternity? I’m not as comfortable with my consumerism as most Ghanaians. I’ve grown up with it, not grown into it, so I’m not proud of my desire for a new ice-cream maker or a microwave. Certainly not proud enough to be buried in one. I don’t want my family and friends’ last sight of me to be a giant wooden Rolex or an Alessi teapot. I thought my coffin ought to be something related to what I’ve done in life. I work on a laptop, but I don’t want to go in a Mac with broadband, or a big biro.

  Then I thought, I write about travel for a living, and death is the last great eternal journey, so why not go in a suitcase with a label addressed to heaven and my name and dates stencilled on the top? And I was about to ask the undertaker how much it would cost to make me a carved wooden suitcase, and then I thought, actually, why not just use a suitcase as a suitcase? I’ll be buried in a steamer trunk, like the one I took to boarding school. It’s solid, it’s green, it doesn’t plagiarise someone else’s culture, and it’s appropriate. In the end, if I do feel a bit aspirationally Ghanaian about it, well, I can always go out in a Louis Vuitton one.

  The anti-travel awards

  The secret to a memorable life is judicious editing, and it’s the same with travelling. Sometimes it’s more important to know where not to go and what not to do.