Status Updates From Amazonian: The Penguin Book...

...how can she state with such limited insight - she didn't even speak with them! - that their lives are "lonely and uncertain"? "The more a building had cost, the more hideous it looked." Her contempt throughout this piece is palpable & I ended this otherwise excellent collection with a bad taste in my mouth.

Sarah Wheeler's essay was everything I thought this collection would be about. Thankfully, I was wrong. Wheeler comes across as patronising & pompous during her time in Bangladesh, a place she doesn't even want to be. "None of the others spoke a single word of English," she says. That's b/c the first language of the country isn't English. Describing the local fishermen: "They lived their lonely & uncertain lives..."

"Thus the Cala...had been taken over by retired English people on deck chairs, mostly from the north of England, reading the latest Jeffrey Archer"

ELISA SEGRAVE: YOU INSUFFERABLE SNOB

While there's a conversation to be had about Brits & Germans abroad moving to Spain & failing to integrate or show respect to the locals, this is just unadulterated snobbery. Northerners! Whatever next?

Discussing the similarity between prison & Oxford colleges: "the overwhelming masculinity...the mysterious rituals, the secret clubs, the inexplicably rigid hierarchies, the unwritten rules...the continuous jostling for power...the casual racism. The similarities were most disconcerting. Except, of course, in the end the prison was a lot more friendly." The Good Ferry by Kate Pullinger

Suzanne Moore's story (Miami Vice) strikes me as a work of such transparent fiction. Which is OK, I guess...

CTD... longer, all would have been well. This struck me as ironic, considering that mere pages previously, she had been worried about her daughter becoming 'subservient' simply b/c she was in Pakistan. I really enjoyed this essay, but this ending seemed really unnecessary."

This is the last sentence in this essay: "As we drove through the hinterland of Surrey we overtook a middle-aged woman stumping along the pavement on pale sausage legs under a short black skirt; she was a walking argument for the dignified shalwar kameez."

Would it have been better if the woman had not been middle-aged & had "sauntered", rather than stumped? The author seems to imply that had the skirt been...

"At home we make the assumption that ours is the real world & other cultures are deviations from the norm."

"I have always loathed haggling & hate tourists who boast of getting the better of, so they think, shopkeepers in poor countries." Same, love😒

"I have always loathed haggling & hate tourists who boast of getting the better of, so they think, shopkeepers in poor countries."

'Folkestone: A Love Story' by Dea Birkett is so brilliant...how it switches from infatuation to disgust, the small-town anecdotes that you can equally love & loathe, her shame...superb.

"Many writers celebrate the transforming power of travel. After all, on the road we can shed our own selves, try out new identities, often literally dress up. Crossing geographical boundaries allows us also to trespass into the possibility of having other lives away from that place called home. To a certain extent, it is the oldest story. Fairytales & children's stories are about transformation."

"As Robyn Davidson wrote, 'The writers of travel books reimagine what happened. They turn real people into characters... it's not that they make it up, it's that they *make* it.' Travel writers have become more literary & less literal.

"In this new writing, it is the psychological journey that is paramount."

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"There are no longer any empty spaces on the map"

"The writers inner journey is the most important part - & certainly the most interesting part - of any travel book. It doesn't matter where you go; it's your interpretation of it that matters. Apsley Cherry-Garrard, who wrote a classic book about an Antarctic journey, said that the important thing was 'the response of the spirit'."