Colin Thubron nearly there

The speaker talks about how his parents never talked about money when he was growing up, which made him feel that money was not important. He pursued a career in writing and travel, living frugally but happily. He discusses his travel experiences, including a trip to Damascus that inspired him to become a travel writer. He also talks about his views on politics, the future relationship between Russia and China, and the importance of travel and understanding different cultures. He mentions his late marriage and his preference for traveling without a mobile phone. Overall, he values human understanding and is interested in other people's faith. I'm always grateful for the fact that my parents never really talked about money. They were reasonably well off. They certainly weren't rich. My father was an army officer, senior army officer. They had a nice house. But I never felt that they were short of money, although they think they were, actually, from time to time, or at least thinking about it. But they never spoke about it in front of me. So I grew up feeling that money was of no particular account, which is a great privilege. I think other parents in the same financial position as my parents, in other words, sort of modestly well off, might have made them much more aware that money was important. But I grew up thinking it wasn't really an issue. I had to think about money myself thereafter, particularly at the beginning of my career when I wasn't making much money, and having to do some sort of what you might call hack work to get by. But it didn't often trouble me. I wanted to be close to books. That was my primary object. I wanted to be a writer from a very young age. I imagine myself being a poet, and I wrote reams of rather bad poetry, and I thought that I would become a writer by some magical process. I was just 19, didn't go to university, and I went into publishing because I thought, if I can't be a writer, at least I'll be close to books and to writing. It was very ill-paid, but somehow scrabbled by. So you were 19 years old and living in London, but you were earning money. I imagine that it was easier then to live comfortably on not too much money. Not very comfortably. I remember walking around London because I couldn't afford a cab, and doing sort of minimal things. If I went to the theatre, it would be cheap seats and so on. And I didn't eat very well at all. And I was living in accommodation in Gower Street, where there was an enormous number of cheap hotels. I think we paid 15 shillings for the week or something like that. Perhaps I got that wrong. So it was frugal living, but it was exciting. You lost your sister at around that age, I believe. Yes. And that propelled you into your career as a travel writer indirectly, because the holiday that you went on with your parents ended up with you going to Damascus for the first time. Is that true? That's right, yes. They took this really ambitious tour, as it was then, in a motorised caravan. And we went down to Egypt via Turkey and Lebanon and Syria. It seems incredible now, Jordan, the things you can't do. And on the way we went through Damascus, I didn't even know what a mosque was. I didn't know what Islam was. And I got fascinated by the inland cities of Syria, Aleppo, and Damascus in particular. They seemed sort of hidden. They were magic. I didn't understand them. You'd walk down these little alleys in the old quarter of Damascus, look through a window, and there'd be a marble and basalt-paved courtyard and fronting drippings somewhere, and some lemon trees, and ancient architecture, really. And I felt this is an extraordinary world. I felt very romantic about it. Then I knew that this was a natural place to return to, and eventually I could. Did you know you wanted to write specifically about travel then, or was that something that happened more gradually? It's interesting how that sort of thing develops. I first wanted to, yes, write travel, because that excited me, but also novels, and that came much later. So first it was Damascus when I eventually got out of publishing. And that was, as all one's first books are, a tremendous bit of delight, really. I loved the city. I went back only two or three years ago. I managed to get back momentarily and found it very much the same architecturally. The people quite different, changed, the hospitality gone. But that lovely city itself was still virtually intact. And it was once the book was published that you jumped tracks entirely, career-wise? It was before, really. I'd made the commitment. I went to live in Damascus with an Arab family on the street called Strait, where St Paul was supposedly cured of blindness. I paid a pittance. It was terribly cheap. You could live in Syria in those days for almost nothing. It was a high time for me. It was marvellous. And so you very quickly earned a living from your passion, which is a great privilege. Yes, only intermittently. I mean, my next book was on the Lebanon, which was published the year after Damascus and then Jerusalem. While I was publishing with that intensity, those first three books on the Middle East, it was OK financially. But later I wanted to start writing a novel, and I was doing other journeys in between on a shoestring, which crossed Asia in a way that I can't now by car, through Afghanistan, Iran, Kashmir and so on. So I was quite ambitiously travelling just for the delight of it. It's hard to tell, looking back, what my parents exactly thought of this activity. My mother, I think, was fine with it. Her ancestry, her maiden name was Dryden, and she was of the family of John Dryden, the first poet laureate. She exulted in this, thought I had the same talents, which is entirely different from John Dryden, actually, in my case. She, I think, was not worried financially for me, or particularly about the future at all. She was just delighted that there was quite an initial success with my books, the Damascus book in particular. When I look back at it, I was very lucky, it was very well-reviewed and prominently reviewed. My father, he was a military man, he wasn't literally, and I sometimes wonder what he privately thought. He adored my mother and went along with her feelings, I'm sure. But he must have worried a bit, and wondered when I was going to settle down and be responsible and get married and so on. But he didn't say so. He never made me feel that I was, in some way, on the wrong track. And you mentioned your ability to, when you were travelling, to travel on a shoestring, which is something that you do to this day, presumably. Yes, it's always cheaper travelling, at least travelling abroad where I travel, than it is living an ordinary life in London, of no particular luxury. And so you can last a very long time in a Syrian city, or an Indian one for that matter, or an Iranian one, or a village. You can exist on nothing almost forever. What do you take with you as currency when you do travel? I've always taken dollar bills. With travellers' cheques you might not be able to cash, because I'm in some difficult and obscure places often. But dollar bills are sort of a common currency, even now, I think. Does it make you more vulnerable, travelling with cash? Yes, it does. I've always kept the cash in different parts of my rucksack or my body. So if one lock gets pinched, you'll have something to fall back on. I'm rather good at putting rilled-up dollar bills in very forbidden-looking medicine bottles, emptying the medicine out, so that it's the last thing anybody's going to want to steal. But I've been lucky that way. I could easily have fallen far with a bad mug, you could say. But you never have. I never have. I've never been bad enough. You can live in what might seem like almost deprivation to other people when you're travelling. I mean, it really is the bare basics. Can you tell me what you take? The clothes you're standing up in? In a way, the excitement around you makes you not worry about those things much. Before I go, I lay out everything I'm going to need. And I say, do I really want this? Do I really want that? The answer is almost always no. Maybe one change of clothes and I guess a sort of layering, so that you're able to put on three pullovers if you have to. And that's about it. I don't take books. They weigh too much. I take language manuals because I'm usually trying to improve Russian or Mandarin or whatever. I'm trying to talk where I am. And that's really it. There's a point in the Amur River, your latest book, which is extraordinary, in which you travel along the little known to lots of people Amur River, the thousand mile river between Russia and China. And at a point at the beginning of the book, your life is almost saved by the fact that you're wearing a very cheap pair, you said, of trainers. Yes. Well, my feet were mud clogged in the stirrup. It was so about ill-fitting, my foot slipped quite easily out of it. The horse went off on its own. Otherwise, I would have been in worse trouble than I was. Although you did break your ankle. Yes, and a couple of ribs because the horse fell several times. They weren't used to this marshland. They were Mongolian horses, used to the hard step. But in this area of Mongolia, which is the source land of the Amur River, there had been heavy monsoons and it was very treacherous and they panicked. And you were advised before you set off that seasonally and conditionally it wasn't optimal. Right. We were almost forbidden to go by the rangers at the mouth of this reserve. It's a 5,000 mile forbidden area by the Russian border, 5,000 square miles. And the rangers said we absolve ourselves of any responsibility for this. Got us to sign documents which made them blameless. And went in with a couple of horsemen and a guide. I had got permission in the Mongolian capital. But the rangers just thought they were going to be in trouble if anything happened to us. Which in a way it nearly did and the ground, the land was awful. It was deep swamp. And of course there was, I imagine, always a part of you that the more awful it is, the better the story. Yes, there's always that. It's as if there are two of you going. There's the one who's having an awful time and the one who's sitting on his shoulder that's going to write about it. And just as you're being mugged or falling into a swamp and having a lousy moment, the one who's writing about it is jumping up and down with excitement saying, I'm going to write about it, this is good coffee. So it's true. It makes you travel in a very different way. It is as if you're a little bit dissociated from yourself in a way. You're watching yourself going. You're seeing what's going to happen. And it makes you do things that you'd never normally do for pleasure or for interest even. You do it because you're going to write about it. Because it's perhaps part of the personality of the country that you're in, of the country that you're in. And so to refuse to go, say, to that dicey village or this difficult terrain, seems to be a sort of betrayal of your subject rather. You've got to do it in order to give what seems momentarily to be a balanced picture of where you are. We live in such a commercialised world here in the West. How do you mentally make the leap from a man who lives in Holland Park when he's here to a man who lives free of financial concerns when he's there? I never think about it very much. What you have to do is make the leap to understanding what the people you're travelling amongst are feeling and suffering. To realise what their lives are like, even as they're being hospitable to you probably, putting you up for the night, giving you a meal. You have to realise what their condition is. They don't know about you, of course. How could they? And they probably think that if you're travelling poorly that you're not rich at all. And by their standards I am. And so they would be surprised if they were to come back to my flat in Holland Park and find it to be rather comfortable. Does one conclude that money matters or not at all? Money matters. It does matter. It's no good saying that to a Pakistani villager that it doesn't matter. They know it matters quite profoundly. It may matter less than we think in terms of our happiness. I think we all know people who are rich are miserable and people who are poor are unhappy. But for people in the sort of streets that so many of those out-traveller monks have to endure, then money matters. We'll move on, if it's OK, on that note, to politics. Because you have written extensively about Russia and China. Is politics something that you try to avoid when you're writing? I haven't felt comfortable writing about politics. For one thing, it's very changeable. And in a short while it can be outdated. What is less likely to be outdated is the lives of ordinary people. That's the value, I think, of what I do, if it has value. It's more that, not specifically politics. With the Amur River, of course, you get Chinese and Russians meeting one another on the ground. And this is the only place where it happens. Beijing and Moscow may talk to one another in one way, but actual Russians and actual Chinese, when they encounter one another, is a different story. And that, of course, is intensely interesting. It's a relationship, certainly in the book, of mutual distrust. Yes, particularly on the Russian side. The Russians feel, of course, threatened by the Chinese. Not in any immediate way. Most of them don't feel that the Chinese come marching over and subsume them tomorrow. But there's a general feeling that they can't be trusted, and that they have, as the Russians say, closed hearts. How do you view the future relationship between these two superpowers? I suppose it's impossible to predict, isn't it? It's impossible to predict. I can only say that if they have a unifying motive, it's antagonism to the West. Are you politically engaged as a person? Is politics something that enters your everyday world? I'm ashamed to say not domestic politics. It's always foreign affairs that have seemed more important, as indeed they do now with the Ukrainian war. However depressed our economy may be, in whatever states the NHS is and so on, all these things come up against a background of disasters in many other parts of the world which far outstrip anything that we're suffering. I read you saying quite recently that you're increasingly despairing of the West. I hate Brexit. I hate what's happened with the general hardening of borders, which seems to be happening, and the rise of autocrats in the West. The way things are going is not appealing to me. The larger the country, the more provincial it is, as far as I can see. And in the case of the States, the United States, and its extraordinary cultural blindness or numbness, I think. Even more culturally aware, I do genuinely think that even a short immersion, say in the Arab world, let alone the Afghan one, would make people think much more circumspectly about invading countries like this and imagining that you could alter them fundamentally by the imposition of some government that's not going to last anyway. What would you say, what would your reply be to someone that might say that travel writing is a neo-colonial act? I can sympathise with the point of view, and I can see it, and it's certainly arisen quite forcibly in academia, largely. But I think the idea that as a single white male from a privileged country that you're in some way imposing yourself seems badly mistaken. If you regard all human contact as being a matter of a power balance, then any human relationship descends into paranoia. You can't do it. In our world in particular, it's important that people travel and understand one another. I'm not talking about the package holiday, let alone a business trip. I'm certainly not about the internet, which is the illusion of travel sometimes. I'm talking about serious encounters with another culture or country, which may take months. I think in the end that if we are to say that human understanding is of real importance, then nobody should be inhibited from that sort of serious travel. I think lots of people, because of the internet, you're right, a lot of people think they can journey when actually they're going nowhere. You're not exposed, you're not vulnerable, you don't get the real smell and feel of a place by looking at a screen. If you go on guarding yourself against hurt, then there's no openness of mind or heart. I always travel alone. I think if you travel with somebody from your own culture, you create a kind of bubble of westernness together and validate your own ideas and values together in that sort of safety bubble. If you're alone, you're the one that is at risk, if you like, or feel that you're more vulnerable. And you probably are, as a single person. But you're much more likely to come to an understanding of the people around you because you don't have that safety and that sort of mental safety of constantly referring things back to a so-called normality, which is yourself and your western world. So this sort of travel does make you vulnerable and it should. You got married at 71, I believe. Yes. Which is pretty late in life. Was that because I've heard you describe previously thinking of marriage as a sort of cul-de-sac, the end of adventure? These things are complicated, you know, and seem to depend so much on who you happen to have met, who you've fallen in love with. I think for a long time I felt I couldn't afford to marry, have children. It was a difficult profession. It takes a long time to write a book, particularly a travel book, and to be not earning for say three years in the course of writing a travel book might be disastrous. So that was an element. I wouldn't say it was the primary reason for my not marrying. That was not so conscious. It was who I met up to a point. I fell very much in love with a woman that did not want to marry me or venture to anybody else. I think I felt very secure in myself. I never felt that I needed anybody in the way that so many people do. There wasn't that active need to feel a loneliness. And I never felt very conventional about it. I realised I was different from almost everyone else. All my friends were getting married. But it didn't particularly impinge on me. It became part of one's identity almost, that you're a single travel writer. And the travel writer and the singleness seemed to be quite a natural combination. And then what changed? What changed was really, it was meeting my wife really. Although we were only married in 1971, we'd been an item, as I think they can say, for over 25 years. We'd been together. She was working in the States. She's a professor of English literature. And so there's a lot of commuting going on. And that's fundamentally what changed. And when you go away on your trips, you don't even take a mobile phone. There are very romantic moments in the book where you snatch a brief conversation. Yes. I don't like the idea of the mobile being there, likely to ring at any moment. It would all be turned off if I had one. And I'd never travelled with any sort of contact with the world back in London. And that's a definite decision. The feeling that you've cut yourself loose entirely, that you're no longer tethered. And the more you love somebody, the more that would be likely to impinge on your journey. And even this last journey, I borrowed a mobile phone once or twice to reassure my wife that I was still alive. But really, at about three-week intervals, perhaps, I was able to talk to her. And it was a bit rough on her, but she understands that need. And she says, think about the journey. Don't think about me, think about the journey. So I have full backing there. I don't think, correct me if I'm wrong, that you've ever had a strict faith as such. I did in my teens. I was quite strongly and rather tiresomely Christian. By the time I was 22, I was served as agnostic. And this was not necessarily a response to my sister's death. She was killed when I was 19. Although that certainly had an influence, it was more, I suppose, I regarded it, at least, due in retrospect as a sort of intellectual awakening. When you contemplate the spiritual, which you must do inevitably in your work and in the people you meet, how do you work it in your mind? I'm always interested in other people's faith. I think that has been left to me. It always has engaged me as a travel writer. If I find somebody is a fervent, say, Orthodox Christian, as in some parts of Syria, or a Muslim, I want to know. For myself, it doesn't change my own attitudes to religion or to faith. I think it's part of a fascination. One thing in general about my sort of travelling is you meet so many people of so many different faiths, whether it's Islamic, or in this instance Hindu and Buddhist, and various denominations of Christian in the Middle East. And it certainly doesn't help you select one above the other. You simply find that people are maybe fervent in their belief that one is right and the others are wrong. You were 80 when you were... Did you have your 80th birthday on your Amur trip? Just after. I'd just come back. I mean, it is a remarkable age to be doing what you're doing, and I'm aware that you don't necessarily think that. No, it didn't particularly occur to me. I think younger people look at old people like me thinking how extraordinary, and that you must in a way be very much changed, and maybe contemplating your end and so on. You're not. I mean, I'm not. One's always thinking about the next thing, what's ahead of the next project. And I was certainly like that up to the age of 80, that where am I going next was certainly a question. I had some health problems as people do in their early ages, which have given me pause when I show immortality. But I've not felt that it was any particular big deal going along the Amur River. It turned out to be tougher than I thought. I didn't know horses were going to throw me into the mud all the time. Otherwise I might have thought twice. But it seemed a perfectly feasible agenda to me. And as I think you've said before, if the spirit is willing, then the body follows. Yes, it drags the body along with it. Yes, I think that's true. You tend to minimize your pain if you're having it, because of the fascination of where you are, and where you're going, and what you're going to do. The brain is very funny with aches and pains. As somebody said, pain is an opinion. And it can change very much depending on where you are, what you're doing. You can minimize it really by paying attention to other things. So do you think the brain can be persuaded to decide not to be impeded by old age? Yes, I think it can. Up to a point. It's not to say that pain is not real. One begins to think it's all in the mind. Of course it's not. It can help a great deal. Just your attitude, honestly. If you succumb to all the aches and pains, the flesh is there to think any of them, and don't have anything else much to consume your day, then I think the pain will be much worse. And your attitude is very much to keep going. Yes. My mother used to say, you must always have a project. She died at the age of 97, and she still had projects in her mind, even if she couldn't quite fulfill them. And may I ask what your next project is? Well, it's a novel. Actually, there are two. The novel is just a glimmer in my head, which is how novels begin, but which I'm hoping to be able to get to fairly soon. The other thing is that I think that one has to think about what happens after one's death, what people have to cope with in the way of what you've accumulated, in my case, an awful lot of correspondence and manuscripts. I've even got my parents' letters to one another from India in the 1930s. And what is my poor wife going to do with all this stuff after you're gone? It's going to be an unhappy time, and people get stuck with all this, having to make decisions. And I'd rather sort of economize my archive, shrivel it down, throw out an awful lot of junk, and try to find somewhere that would be interested in receiving the archive, such as it would be. I would like to be able to package up at least my manuscripts and some relevant correspondence on those, saying that they've found a home before I've dropped off my perch.