Here and There (17 page)

And when I returned home, the emotion and the feeling illuminated the picture of this latest experience. Coming back from Baghdad had an intensity that was reflected in walking in through my own front door and putting on the kettle, patting the dog, going to look at the garden. I finally learnt a lesson that had been slapping me in the face for ages. Our continual hunt for relaxation – de-stressing, chilling, hammock-swinging, pool-schmoozing – is all wrong. We think that we want to give ourselves a break, and there is a huge pampering industry geared to arranging this for us. It'll switch down the volume and remove the sharp edges, serve everything tepid and soft, take away the decisions and the cares.

And it's all the wrong way around.

What we need, what makes us excited and active and interesting, is the danger and the self-reliance. If things are getting on top of you, what you need is an unrest holiday. You need more and different stress, not less. Relaxation is breathing out. The good bit is taking a deep breath and jumping in. I've finally understood that getting chucked out of Eden is the best thing that ever happened to us. Without that, there would be no story, no adventure. And the sex is a bit of a bonus, too.

Glazed and confused

God gave his only son, England
gave tinsel and figgy pudding –
Christmas is a fine time to
skip town.

The English gave much to the world. Runny noses, sensible shoes, short vowels and baseless condescension. All these are known and loved around the globe, but perhaps England's greatest gift is unattributed and goes unthanked. It was England that gave you Christmas, with the recipe in the pocket and the strict caveat that if it didn't fit, you could always take it back for another festival. Before you put up your hand and swear that the vicar said God gave us Christmas, well, yes, technically. But he also gave us diphtheria, toe jam, easy-listening music and England.

Everything you know and associate with Christmas was actually an invention of the English. To be strictly fair, by two of them: Charles Dickens and Prince Albert. From them we get fir trees, holly, ivy, geese, turkeys, crackers, puddings, cards, families and guilt. Again, some of the more pedantic of you may be aching to point out that fir trees and carols and indeed Albert are German. And again, technically, you have a point. But the essence of Christmas, that peculiar paper-hatted, sated melancholy that descends in the afternoon of the 25th – that is peculiarly English. That and the deep, nameless feeling of disappointment and longing that wells up when you finally unwrap the last present. That's uniquely English.

As is the festive meal that involves a collection of ingredients no sane chef would ever construct, including three dishes – cake, pudding and pie – made with identical confections of dried fruit. As a young food writer, I was once asked by a magazine editor to come up with alternatives to turkey, figgy pudding and the rest. ‘Tell me about Christmas from other cultures,' she enthused. (I now know the hunt for the alternative Christmas feature is as traditional as Fair Isle sweaters.) Anyway, I dutifully wrote of oysters in France, pig's foot sausage in Italy, carp in Czechoslovakia, goose from the Carpathians, and the peculiar and weird, boiled, year-old skate from Iceland. I was called into the office.

‘This isn't good enough, is it? It's too predictable. What do they eat for Christmas in India, or Vietnam, or, I don't know, Saudi Arabia?' Inwardly I sneered at the parochial assumption that Christmas was international, and went away anyway and made up stuff about festive palm trees hung with sparkling sheep's eyeballs.

But then one year the person over the other side of the Christmas table said, ‘Why don't we go somewhere hot for Christmas?' You mean just after Christmas? ‘No, for Christmas.' Oh, I couldn't. It's not possible. I think there's a law – you have to stay at home over Christmas to do all that stuff. ‘What stuff?' Well, complain mostly, about the weather, and the amount of junk in the shops. About how the Christmas lights aren't what they used to be. About the amount of work for just one day. About the meanness of your family, and the appalling manners of mine. About the ghastly decorative pollution of Christmas cards, the vomitous kitsch of seasonal television, and mostly about how out of control the commercialism and feeding-frenzy greed of the whole damn down-the-chimney business has become.

‘Why don't we go somewhere else?' Well, I don't know, really. But I have a suspicion it would be like running away. ‘Exactly.' So we ran. To the Caribbean. I approached the beach on Christmas morning like a man who had just joined a weird and shameful sect: nudist cross-dressers, conversational Esperanto users. But there was also, buried in the naughtiness, a feeling of lightness, of a load lifted, as if I'd lost my parents' luggage accidentally on purpose. We sat on the beach, ate salad for lunch, feigned other-worldly indifference when thonged Germans muttered seasonal greetings.

I thought I'd got away with it, until Father Christmas turned up on a jet ski, an absurd puce Englishman in a woollen cape, wellington boots and a stick-on beard, being driven by a semi-naked Rastafarian who couldn't contain his howls of derisive laughter. Santa stumbled ashore and handed out plastic hairclips and water pistols. It was then I realised the full impact of the global ho-ho-ho warming that is the English Christmas. It was a cathartic moment.

Since then, I have never spent a Christmas in England. I have gone to further and greater lengths to avoid any festive hint or tinsel. Not because I mind terribly, but because I want to know if there's a single corner of the globe that's Dickensless or Albert-free. So far, I've failed. In Goa, blaring Hindi renditions of ‘Jingle Bells' over loudspeakers. In Thailand, plastic holly in cocktails, Santa on a gold-painted elephant, and mince-pie pancakes.

I actually thought I'd cracked it in the Kalahari. This is the least commercial place on earth. If Mary had sprogged in the open here, Christianity would have bought the farm before it was two days old. But I came back to my flycamp to find an acacia tree covered in candles, put up by a cook called Adolph who thought I might feel homesick. He also turned out to be born-again, and rather movingly shared his Bible and prayers with me.

Oddly perhaps, the place I've found with the least Christmas is actually the neighbours upstairs, Scotland. We don't go in for it up north. It's England's thing. We save ourselves for the grander, more ancient festival of Hogmanay. New Year is pretty much universal, except for those odd places that still cling to sundial- and hourglass-time and roman-numeral calendars. At midnight, on the last day of December, everywhere people kiss and hope for better or less of whatever fed or tormented them for the last 12 months. And they sing ‘Auld Lang Syne'. Now, if you're handing out smacked wrists for cultural hegemony, how cruel is ‘Auld Lang Syne'? What does it mean? I'm Scots, and I've no idea. What is it that old acquaintances aren't supposed to forget? But still, the whole world sings it, and for a moment the world becomes Scots. Incoherent, lachrymose, amorous, clumsy and fond. I'd never spend New Year in Scotland, either.

I suppose what I was frightened of most in not spending December at home was the loneliness. The deep sadness of the uncoupled. The longing of the expatriate. But I never have. I'm fonder of the old island when I'm away from it. The irritations and the embarrassment are ironed away by distance.

I think the best Christmas was in Bali. We roasted a suckling pig and in the middle of the hot night, jumped into the swimming pool. And instantly it began to rain: curtains of steaming tropical rain. A gift from home, a little touch of festive England.

A sense of loss

Smell is powerfully evocative but
sadly we've become a planet of
nasal wimps. From Asian fish
markets to black Africa, now's
the time to follow your nose.

Paris used to smell of bakers, pissoirs, pastis and dark tobacco. It was as alluring and decadent a scent as a city could wear. It was a nasal, atonal clarion; all the right notes – greed, taste, appetite, abandon, sex, philosophy and decay. If they made scented candles out of the air de Paris 1968, I'd burn them. It's the tobacco that was the unique addition. Lots of places have got piss-and-booze, but nowhere else has that absolutely distinctive smell of French cigarettes. You'd get off the train at the Gare du Nord and walk through the station and there it would be, snaking through the concourse. Eddies of it would catch the back of your throat; one of the most alluring and evocative smells ever invented, like wood and burnt nuts and spice, a sweet-sour smell. Just gorgeous.

I smoked for 30 years, and for most of them I smoked untipped Gitanes or Gauloises or froggies. Smoking them was like inhaling bottlebrushes, but the smell never stopped being nasal foreplay. Clothes and hair that smell of old blonde Marlboro are disgusting. The smell of morning-after Gitanes is a pheromone, an aphrodisiac that makes you want to nuzzle. Every subliminal-wannabe-implied-sophisticated lie that the advertising industry tried to roll into a fag paper was actually true about froggies. They really were the essence of existentialism and beatniks and tousled beds and the four-o'clock philosophy that ends in tears and kisses. It was the smell of a shrug and the atmosphere of the greatest street-side catwalk in the world.

I couch all this in the past tense because the last factory making dark tobacco cigarettes in France has just closed down. This isn't just the end of an era, it's the end of a whole slice of human possibility, a whole gossamer tear of existence wiped away. It's an extinction that's to be mourned far more than some sweaty rainforest, frightening oversized cat or wrinkly big pig with a horn in its nose. The death of froggies is heartbreaking, and I'm responsible. I used to do it and now I don't. I stopped French-kissing French fags and I don't care how that sounds.

All the smells of old Paris have gone now. No one drinks pastis, the bakeries are all out-of-town conglomerates, the pissoirs went years ago. And it's not just Paris that smells of bland-city. All over the world, the urban scent has been wiped off the olfactory map. Nothing smells of anything anymore. It's not just bad smells, but all smells. Restaurants don't smell of food. Look at the extractor fans in a modern kitchen: they look like the warp drive of the Starship
Enterprise
. We are beginning to associate natural random free-floating scent with dirt and disease and an uncontrolled atmosphere. It's the control and manipulation of our environment that's eradicating a whole sense; for us, perhaps, the most important sense, certainly our most vulnerable one.

Our sense of smell, which is closely aligned to taste, is lodged in the oldest bit of our brains. It's older than language, older than opposable thumbs. It's older than standing on two feet. It's the bit of our head we share with the dinosaurs. Consequently, smell is the most evocative of our senses. It can spring surges of déjà vu on us, resurrect affairs and Christmases past, and make dead people rise again. Smell is as close as we can get to living on our instincts. It makes you feel without an intervening thought. And we're rubbing them all out as fast as we can, and replacing them with a sort of man-made easy-smell compilation odour.

We cover ourselves with chemical imitations of safe musk and plastic flowers, the air is filled with the toilet-wipe scent of pine and lemon and the childish reassurance of cinnamon and cedar. We have had a whole invisible environment stripped away and polluted with the smell of the suburbs. This is most serious with food. Smell has become less and less an element of taste. There are things that Western children now believe have no natural odour at all: milk, eggs, chicken, potatoes, carrots, beef. They don't trust the real smell of citrus or strawberries, cheese, mushrooms; they prefer the chemically processed ones. The world can be split into all sorts of halves, haves and have-nots. But here is a new source of division: smell. And we in the rich half are the ones who are the have-nots. A fifth of our physical world is being atomised. We are becoming nasal wimps. All new or strong smells seem bad or unpleasant. We've forgotten how to be adventurous and brave with our noses; we no longer follow them. Smell is now the most striking difference between them and us.

I think you should start getting your hooter into shape. You should factor smell into your travel plans. You should seek out freshness and decay, the ancient and the freshly laid. Here are four grand smells everyone should get up their noses before they die: a North African souk; an Asian fish market at dawn; durian fruit; an Ethiopian church. The best and most evocative of all smells is of black Africa. Sweat, goat fat, charcoal smoke and red dust. It's the finest smell in the world: take a deep breath, jump in.

New New York

The skyline is more or less the same,
but the mean streets are no longer
mean. They're just irritable. And
a bit dull. But you've still gotta
love the Big Apple.

Previously I wrote about the singular fascination of islands and the odd micro-cultures they cultivate. I made a list of the sea-surrounded specks that I particularly liked, but I had the nagging sense I'd missed somewhere, that one of my islands had gone missing. And then, as is the nature of these things, it crashed into me in the middle of the night. Of course. The most cussedly singular of all the self-defining islands is Manhattan. Barely an island at all, cut off by only a mere moat, spanned by great girder bridges, just semi-detached enough for an odd individuality, New York, New York. The only other city apart from Edinburgh and London that I've ever lived in.

For one amazingly happy and self-destructive year, it was my city and I was its citizen. Manhattan is the 19th-century model of how all cities were supposed to look. It was a robber baron's vision of the future. But nothing dates as fast as predictions and futurology. They fix a look that is forever the moment they were conceived in. By the time I got to live there in the '70s, New York had developed the famous look of a stalled archaic thudding grandeur. The emphatic gestures of the skyline were contradicted by the angry filth of the streets. New York was acned with graffiti and rubbish, the roads were potholed and riven with seeping oil and infernal steam. New York was murky. The mafia ran utilities, City Hall was partisan and biddable and the police were notoriously open-handed. It was the time of the great corruption, when Nixon was being dragged, inch by inch, down the long road to impeachment. The stink and guilt and loss of Vietnam hung in the air and, most devastating and depressing of all, disco was at its most noisomely idiotic. The city had gone from being a vision of the future to being a dire dystopian warning. Delegations from European cities gingerly came to see what lay ahead for them – and if they could avoid it.