Colin Thubron zoom small

The speaker discusses their journey to becoming a writer and their early struggles with publishing. They then talk about their experience living in London, the loss of their sister, and their first trip to Damascus, which sparked their interest in travel writing. They mention their transition from publishing to writing full-time, the challenges of writing novels, and their financial situation. They also discuss their ability to travel on a shoestring budget and their precautions for keeping money safe while traveling. The conversation concludes with a discussion on the simplicity of their travel packing and their latest book about the Amur River. Sorry, we'll have to go back and do it on that. Don't worry, we'll go back. Yes, we were just talking about why you thought you couldn't be a writer. Yes, I was determined to be, I think, but the publishing world was mysterious to me and I thought I simply might not have the talent. I just couldn't tell, but I thought this is the stepping stone to being a writer. I think that's what I mainly felt about publishing. Obviously, at a very young age you have nothing to write about, so you need experience of some sort. And so I was a blank canvas, if you like, and I was new in London and in publishing and was still anxiously wanting to write. But finding that writing in the evening, which all I was able to do with a full-time job, didn't work at all. It was exhausting. I would simply cross out by the end of the week anything I'd written during the week and start again. It was hopeless. T.S. Eliot read your poetry, I believe. I believe so, too. I think he said something tactful about it, but I said no more. So you were 19 years old and living in London, but money wasn't... I mean, 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 wouldn'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 on 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. And 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 very ambitious tour, as it was then, in a caravan, a motorised caravan. And we went down to Egypt, Turkey, Lebanon, 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 those little alleys in the old quarter of Damascus and look through a window and there'd be a marble and basalt-paved courtyard and a fountain dripping somewhere and some lemon trees and ancient architecture, really. And I felt this is an extraordinary world. I felt very romantic about it. And then I knew that this was an actual 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. Good. That's nice to hear. And did you, going back to money, that's a huge decision to give up a career, which presumably you were making progress in, to start a new career which isn't famous for its financial return. No, I did. I was publishing in the States by that time because I thought perhaps it was sort of a cutting edge of publishing how the Americans sold books and marketed them and publicised them and so on. And even edited them. So I was sort of semi-serious. At the same time I realised that all the time I was working for about a year in this most modern of cities. I was researching the oldest city in the world, which was Damascus, in the New York Public Library. I was sort of obsessed by getting to this ancient city even when I was working in publishing in New York. 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 I found a very good publisher when I got back to England, a very sympathetic publisher, a man called Charles Pick who worked at Heinemann who was the managing director. And that was invaluable to have an important publisher who really put his faith in you and you felt there was somebody there who was going to want to publish your next books as well. Yes. And so you very quickly earned a living from your passion which is a great privilege. Yes. Only intermittent. 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, the first three books on the Middle East, it was okay 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. But the novel was harder. You get paid less. It's a novel that nobody's read I think called The God in the Mountain. Not particularly proud of it. And there was a very sparse time in my thirties where I worked for Time Life on some of their series of books. They paid very well. They paid a dollar a word I remember which seemed to me at that time fantastic and not too bad now. And they had these series going called The Great Cities or The Peoples of the Sea on the maritime nations. And I did two or three books for them and four books in the end. And that kept me afloat. And at no point it sounds were your decisions affected by what so many peoples are which is, you know, I must earn my fortune as it were. No pressure from your parents, no expectation and also I suppose crucially no dependence. 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 are entirely different from John Dryden actually in my case. He had a very acute critical mind above all which I don't have. But 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. And 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 literary 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. Imagine you used to travel with travellers cheques did you? 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. And I've always kept the cash in different parts of my rucksack or my body. So if one lot gets pinched you'll have something to fall back on. I'm rather good at putting rilled up dollar bills in very forbidding 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 mean I could easily have fallen foul of a bad mugging. But you never have? I never have. I've never been bad at mugging. 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? Yes, virtually. In a way the excitement around you makes you not worry about these 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. And 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. So when you fall off a horse and could be dragged, your cheap trainer pops off and you don't get dragged along with it. Well, my feet were mud clogged in the stirrup and it was so about ill-fitting my trainer that 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 and rolled. 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 have 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 took 5,000 miles, 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 Mongolian capital but the rangers just thought they would be 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 a good copy. 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. And because it's perhaps part of the personality 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. And you've seen in these more remoter places that you've visited the ends of the earth in the way that you've dived into, you've come across people who live very differently to the way we live in the West, who don't necessarily, obviously money motivates people on different levels, but 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. 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. And so that transition is something more of accommodating yourself to a world that is where financial needs are so different from our own. And 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 I travel amongst have to endure, then money matters. Is it hard for you to resist the urge to help people if you see them in dire straits? Is it hard? Sometimes, yes. You know they'll be insulted if you were to give them something. And so it's always a problem travelling is how you reward or repay those that have helped and given you hospitality. I usually find that having children's toys is a big thing because you're not paying your host in giving something to the child. So I sometimes take with me small, little, I mean silly sort of London bus key ring or something like that just to show some sort of appreciation and give a child or family something different from what they would normally have. It sounds rather pathetic but I've never known how to repay people in any serious fashion. I remember travelling in Sri Lanka with my husband and school pens were real currency. We were told to travel with a lot of pens because all the children wanted school pens. School pens, that's what they wanted. It's terrible that that is a real need and a scarcity. It would be a pen. It seems so crucial. But I've had that too. And is re-entry difficult when you come back to your life here? How hard is the adjustment to the very different way of life? The adjustment hasn't usually been that hard. I'm almost ashamed of the speed with which I change and accommodate. And then you look back on your journey and you fear that it's slipping away from you once again. Once more become part of your ordinary life in England. And that's the time when I get down in something of a panic to writing and recovering the journey. Once or twice I have come back and had real difficulty returning in my head. For a long journey in China once I came back and I simply, it took me weeks. And I don't know why it was that particular journey that did it. But mentally I couldn't readjust to being here. It wasn't a conscious thing. It didn't seem to be an intellectual thing. It was sort of psychic. I couldn't do it. And it took me two or three weeks before I felt comfortable at all in London. And that's the only time that's happened? Yes. It's the only time it's happened so severely. How long had you been away when that happened? Not long. Maybe four months. Something like that. So no longer than usual? No. Gosh. It was a great immersion because I virtually never met another Westerner there. So it was a total immersion in China. Speaking very bad Mandarin. But often in fairly, at that time, difficult or inaccessible parts of China. Because it was shortly after the Cultural Revolution had ended. That was your trip for Behind the Wall? Yes. What year was that in? Oh. Must have been... Mid 80s? Yes. Mid 80s. Because Jean Chopin, I think, had just become premier. I think. We'll move on, if it's okay, on that note, to politics. Because you have written extensively about Russia and China. I'd like to go into that a little bit, if I could. In writing about these two superpowers in The Amur River, you have written a perhaps more political book than you have written before. And there are moments where the confrontation of the two is quite apparent. Is politics something that you try to avoid when you're writing? I tend to treat politics as something that's kind of more contextual to people's lives than to be actually writing specifically myself about politics. It's how politics affect ordinary people that is reflected in their conversation or their way of thinking. I haven't felt comfortable writing about politics. For one thing, it's very changeable. And in a short while it will be outdated. What is less likely to be outdated is the lives of ordinary people. And it's those that I tend to concentrate on. Because you have access to them and can converse with them to a point and find out about their lives a little in a way that is not directly reflected from politics. But particularly in a place like China and even Russia, is surrounded by some sort of political world that's unfamiliar to me but is probably more impingent on them than, say, politics in England. Then 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. You get these two wildly different cultures meeting, supposedly, and, on the whole, not getting on too well. 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. And in business, certainly, the Chinese have proved themselves more canny than the Russians. And the Russians find them hard-headed. There's not much communication, linguistically. And very little intermarriage, really. There's some, but not much. 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. If it wasn't for that, there's no particular glue for these two empires to be together. The Chinese extract Russian raw materials, of course, timber, gas, oil, and so on. The Russians can't afford to buy Chinese goods anymore, certainly not in the Amur River area. And so there's a sort of standoff. And less, I think, communication on the ground than there was ten years ago, when there was more parity between the two powers. 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. It always seems hugely more important than anything that's happening here. 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. Well, I think it may be in the Financial Times there was something that said I was not very happy with the West, and I can't remember what the context was. But 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. No, well, not to so many people. You said once, a wonderful quote, I often think that if only the denizens of the White House and Number 10 were to have spent a few weeks in Kabul or Herat, they would think twice about so blithely thinking they can carve up countries or simply invade them and help change their culture. Yes, I do think that. The larger the country, the more provincial it is, as far as I can see. And in the case of the United States, it's extraordinary cultural blindness or numbness, I think, in the American government that assumes certain things can be expedited simply by looking at a map, like the old-fashioned British colonialism, that you can do this and do that. And if they were 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 can alter them fundamentally by the imposition of some government that's not going to last anyway. You see, of course, in the people you meet the human consequence of political action. Yes, yes. And your interest primarily is in those people. It comes across in your books that really the voices at the heart of your books are the everyday people that you meet. Yes, I tend not to arrange interviews with people. I mean, they might in some ways be very interesting, but I don't do it. I'm much more reliant on people I happen to meet by chance. And then you get a more balanced spectrum, I think, if you chose, from London where I live, selected or found people who you would interview or talk to in a more formal way. And I haven't done it particularly with government ministers and so on. I find it's a pretty good waste of time. So the truth lies somewhere in the heart of every country, and this one too, any country. Is that what you feel, that the true nature of a country is in the people who are living in it? Yes, it's cultural. It's not political. No. The world is changing hugely in lots of ways. What would you say, what would your reply be to someone that might say that travel writing is a sort of 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 are necessarily, that you're in some way imposing yourself, because of the inequality, if you like, the imbalance between our country and say a poor Asian or African country, that that imbalance must prevent you from travelling at all, seems badly mistaken. That therefore, if you regard all human contact as being a matter of a power balance, then any human relationship that sends 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, the 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. It's not a big, a monstrous greenhouse gas explosion. Of course you have to take an aeroplane probably to your initial destination, but after that you may be a very long time, as I was on the Amur River, hitchhiking, taking the old boat, going by horse for a long time. I think in the end, if we are to say that human understanding is of real importance, then nobody should be inhibited from that sort of serious travel. Nor do I actually think that my books, I suppose I might be accused of encouraging people to travel, I don't think they do on the whole. I think people sink into the armchairs at the sigh of relief when reading my books because they don't have to travel there. I've done it for them. They're not the sort of journeys that are inviting people to follow you. So they are, in a way, instead of traveling. They are beautiful, your books. And they are, they do take you with them. And they do make you realize that one can't possibly experience the real world in a little bubble as we live in here in this very small island. 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. Yes, 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. How important, as an aside, how important is being vulnerable to really experiencing life, do you think? I think it is important. If you go on guarding yourself against hurt, then there's no openness of mind or heart. That sounds all highfalutin. But 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, you 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. What's the most physically vulnerable you've ever felt? What have you ever felt close to your own mortality on one of your trips? No, not really. I've had unpleasant moments, who hasn't? But I've never felt I was about to be killed by anybody or any situation. I've sometimes not known how I'm going to get out of some situation, I suppose, or fear that maybe I might be in political trouble, perhaps put in jail. But I've never felt that this is it and this is the end. That's good. It moves us on when you talk about travelling alone. I have the topic labelled as sex, but it's not the act of sex necessarily, it's just one of the four verboten, apparently verboten, subjects. And you have... You got married at 71, I believe, 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 a venture? I wonder when I said that. That was on Desert Island Disc, so quite a long time ago. 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. And I think for a long time, I felt I couldn't afford to marry, have children. It's a difficult profession. I certainly wouldn't have welcomed it in my twenties, and even perhaps in my early thirties, because I would feel that 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. I think I felt that 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 eventually anybody else, and that took a long time to get over. 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 fill a loneliness, the need for companionship. So there were quite a lot of potentially negative things, I'd say, that I did not feel, which might have impelled or do impel people into marriage. And I never felt very conventional about it. I realised I was different from almost everyone else, all my friends all getting married. But it didn't particularly impinge on me. And you never, and I'm not suggesting that you should, but you never felt a sense of otherness or alienation from the rest of the conventional world? It's rather surprising. I didn't really, not very much. It seemed to become 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. So, no, I didn't, it didn't worry me that I was different from so many of my friends. 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 the Americans 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, like to intervene 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, to have a 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 I've, 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 now. It's a great act of love and trust, that, isn't it? It's how every relationship should be. You should allow the other to do what they love. Yes. It also means, I think, that if it's an understanding, it enables you yourself to stop worrying too much. She's not expecting me to telephone, she's not thinking, why haven't I telephoned? She would be worried if I hadn't, at some vaguely specified time, been in touch. But in general, she can accept that arrangement. And as a writer herself, you both speak the same language in that way. Yes. I mean, her writing is very different from mine, but she understands the concentration it needs and the dedication and the immersion. And she's a working woman, and a lot of the places that you travel, you experience the female sex not living in as progressive a society as we live. Yes. Is a person's sex still a determining factor? Do you think, in how their life ends up? Oh yes, absolutely. In these societies, Islamic or otherwise, it is. In a country, say, like China, they've tried to liberate women, and still there's a feeling that, as it were, post-love, that women are the equal of men, and so on and so forth. But even there, to be a woman is a disadvantage, in many ways, on all sorts of levels. And my own problem as a travel writer is being able to talk to women, because it's always in the company of men. Women will tend to be silent, not in Russia, but in many countries. And you don't. They're not used to opening up to men. It's only when you can bump into a woman in some sort of privacy that you'll get a real story. And so I'm conscious that my books are poor in comparison with the conversations with men that happen. I think there are two women, or two stand-out women, you've had conversation with in the book, and they're both teachers. Yes, this is different. In Russia, it does tend to be different. There are two very different teachers. One, a very provincial teacher, teaching in a poor school, who is sort of almost despairing of her pupils. One of these sort of heroic people who are working and better qualified than the job they're doing would need, but who still have a devotion to their students. And the other woman, a much less attractive personality, an old-style Soviet, Howard didn't really, preaching propaganda to the students who were bored stiff with her and wanted to get out and go to America. So yes, these two women, they were not so difficult. They certainly weren't difficult to talk to in isolation. So that's Russia, and is mainly much, much easier. So it's not necessarily particularly sexist or misogynist in Russia? It is, yes. It is. You'd say it is everywhere. I don't know a country that's not, in some way, misogynistic. Yeah, including our own, and the Russians, yes. Isn't that interesting? I think you're right, from all the progress we think that we've seen, we are still the inferior sex, I suppose. Well, you're not, of course. We're not. No, we're not. There are things that many women would complain quite bitterly about. I'd love to actually ask you briefly about your own mother, who sounded like an extraordinary woman, but presumably didn't have a career of her own. No, I think had she been born in my generation, she'd have gone to university and would have been expected to have some sort of career. As women do now, there's not the idea that you're just going to mark time until you're married. My mother, yes, she didn't have what you might call a disciplined mind. She certainly wasn't academic, but she was very sensitive and a good sort of emotional touch on things. She enjoyed reading, but not anything very demanding by today's standards. And my father didn't really, certainly wouldn't read fiction. So I didn't grow up in a family that was, you'd say, a real intellectual or reading family. But my mother had that, her values were, I think that was important really, her values for those that esteemed culture and writing. And she had an adventurous spirit too, has that? Yes, yes she did. Did you travel together ever? We did once. We did with my father on this long and influential journey that passed through Damascus, tellingly. But I took a journey once into the Atlas Mountains with my mother. A friend I was going with dropped out at the last moment and my mother said, I'll come. And I was making a film in those days, which is another stage odd thing I did when I was very young for the BBC, on a tribe in the high Atlas Mountains. And my mother just came and said, I'll come along. And she didn't mind hardship. She put up with anything. That sounds great. We're moving on to our final topic, which is religion. 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. But not thereafter, I think. By the time I was 22, I was, I'd say I was agnostic. And this was not necessarily a response to my sister's death, who was killed when I was 19. Although that certainly had an influence, it was more, I suppose, I regarded it, at least in retrospect, as a sort of intellectual awakening. And the journey to the Middle East didn't help restore Christianity at all. It was a recognisable world in some ways. But it wasn't one that was likely to restore faith that had been lost several years before. And is it something that tugs at your sleeve ever? I know you embarked on a, for your book, A Mountain in Tibet, you embarked on a pilgrimage around the holy mountain Mount, how do I pronounce it? Kailash. Right, Kailash. 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 traveller. Like if I find somebody is a fervent, say, orthodox Christian, as in some parts of Syria, or Muslim or Hindu. For myself, it doesn't change my own attitudes to religion or to faith. I think it's part of a fascination. It's hard to say why it doesn't why it wouldn't move me a bit. I'm attracted to, or was certainly attracted to, mysticism quite strongly at one time. But again, it wasn't really personal. It was more of a preference among the great religions for those that are less dogmatic, I suppose. Almost anybody might say this. But the sort of Sunday Christianity that's hypnotised me or attracted me, no, I feel quite alien from. As a travel writer, inevitably you contemplate the horizon, I suppose. You're looking at the edge of the world, or the world beyond, somehow. Are you ever struck by spiritual moments, not religious moments necessarily, but spiritual moments? The boring answer is no. I think not. Not really. Moments that give great latitude for thinking places a great beauty. But it's hard to say they're exactly spiritual. Travelling the mountain, again I selected a mountain, Mount Kailash in Tibet, that is multi-denominational if you like. It's Hindu and Buddhist and Jain. And it seemed to me just to be an object in the landscape that was beautiful and remarkable and a natural object for the pilgrimage of faithful people. And it's never been climbed. It's one of the few mountains in the world that's never been climbed, because it's too sacred. And so people walk around it at a high altitude, up to 19,000 feet. So it's arduous. But I think I wanted, after my mother's death, to put some space between that and the next part of my life, as if there was something wrong about just carrying on in the ordinary way. I wanted to sort of mark it in myself. It's an instinct that's difficult to precisely rationalize. But it was that desire to break away completely from anything previously done and from any contact, from life back to home. So it was a period of isolation. But not religious inspiration particularly? Not really. One thing in general about my sort of traveling 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. And that, of course, only makes you feel it's all relative. Does it make you, because you are getting older, does it make you feel more that how one is in this life? Or that this life is the only life and that one needs to live it to the full? You were 80 when you were... Did you have your 80th birthday on your Hamur trip? Just after. I'd just come back. I mean, it is a remarkable age to be doing what you're doing, but 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 be very much changed and maybe contemplating your end and so on. You're not. I mean, I'm not. I'm always thinking about the next thing, what's ahead, the next project. And I was certainly like that after 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. You realise you're in mortality. 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 thawed twice. But it seemed a perfectly feasible journey to me. Physically quite gruelling it turned out. Yes, and politically a bit dicey. I didn't know what would happen on the Chinese side of the river and the Russian is heavily guarded. So I wasn't sure how I was going to fare. That was my main concern rather than a physical hardship. And as I think you've said before, if the spirit is willing then the body follows. Yes, it drags the body along a bit. Yes, I think that's true. You tend to minimise your own 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 and what you're doing. You can minimise it really by paying attention to other things which of course in travel you do. You're not so set on getting somewhere or so interested by where you are that the pain, I think, probably if they did monitor your brain they could find that the pain receptors that they have all muted or changed. I remember being told with my very young son who had a little operation when he was younger, very young, that pain is learnt. So a child who hasn't learnt to associate a feeling with pain will experience pain fleetingly because their mind hasn't learnt to dwell on it. How interesting. It's fascinating. I think it's true that certainly certain kinds of patients in hospital their pain level or how they experience pain can be changed by all sorts of things including a doctor's manner. There have been numerous tests on this sort of thing which have proven that pain is variable depending on all sorts of outside influences. It appears to come inside your body. And pain, of course, might be seen as your friend sending signals to you that something's wrong and that something can go on long after or appears to go on long after the physical signs of the pain have vanished. I did a very early basic course in philosophy when I was at university. I did English at university but I did a little side course in philosophy and was learning about Buddhism at a very basic level and about how the Buddhists watch their own pain. So they will externalise the pain and watch it as if it were an object, objectify it somehow. And that makes it more manageable to take it out of the subjective. That's interesting. I know, I've certainly read that people who have amputated hands, arms, legs can go on feeling pain in the leg that is no longer there or the hand that is no longer there. So it is as if the brain has not coped with the fact that this has now stopped. And there was an interesting experiment in which a man, a doctor simply created a box with two holes in it and the patient put his two arms through. One had no hand and the other had a hand. And this was really healing apparently that he was able by looking away to imagine that his hand was back there. And with that imagination he was able to reconcile himself to the pain. Or the pain disappeared. Actually it wasn't there anymore. It was as if the brain was saying something. It was saying that it's all okay, the hand's back. A very strange experiment. 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. But it can help a great deal. Just your attitude, honestly. If you succumb to all the aches and pains that the flesh is there to and think only of them and don't have anything else much to consume your day then I think the pain would 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 fulfil 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 I think that one has to think about what happens after one's death and 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 economise 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 mean there are some obvious letters. I've got letters from Paddy Lee Furman and Bruce Chaplin which are obviously of some interest. They're not major letters. But other things, I don't know how to deal with yet. I would like to be able to package up at least my manuscripts and some relevant correspondence on those so that they're found a home before I've dropped off my perch. Do you take photographs when you're travelling? Yes I do, and that's another thing. There are an awful lot of those. And I took an awful lot of cine films at one time which I should digitalise. They're all ridiculous. Eight millimetre, with a synchronised soundtrack which I used to make on an old Grundig tape recorder. So here are these old films. They're not mostly of much interest at all. But at least I should digitalise them and get them into some order that doesn't require the setting up of a rickety old projector. I suspect they would be of interest too because the world has changed immeasurably since you started travelling it. Yes it has, but it sounds rather hyperlutent to talk about them because a lot of them are really like snapshots of different places. They're not well edited or very well shot or anything. I did make a couple of films for the BBC when I was very young which were just fun. David Attenborough sponsored a programme in which young guys going off on some trip to the cine camera and I'd take the recorder with them and came back with an interesting enough story to make a half hour documentary. Those would go out on primetime television. They were called Adventure I think, and Traveller's Tales. And I did a couple of those which were tremendous fun and you felt very important. But it wasn't a career for me. Where did you do them? One in the high atlas and one in Japan, oddly enough, on parts of Japan which had survived modernity. The hermit kingdom, I think it was the Tokugawa era in Japanese history where there are all sorts of leftover practices and buildings. Do you have a favourite place on earth? Oh, not really, no. I do have still a great affection for Syria, sadly. Your heart must break. I think there's always something about the place you first go to to celebrate what is special to you. I think your achievements are remarkable, they really do. I suppose David Attenborough is a good example, isn't he, of somebody whose passions have kept him young. Astonishing, it's wonderful. Absolutely amazing. He really is amazing. And you probably knew him as a young man, didn't you? I hardly knew him. I met him once or twice during the course of this filming and I've known him ever since. And he's delightful and modest in exactly what you'd expect him to be. And I was always grateful to him that he started these programmes which enabled him to travel and film and so on. But it was a profession, a cul-de-sac to me, making documentary films. I've always really liked the written word. You're such a beautiful writer, really. I was very struck by it. I might actually ask you to sign my book. Would you be able to do that? Yes. Colin, thank you so much. I was warned that you might want to talk about death. Oh no. I don't mind. No, we've talked about mortality. We have. I hope this has been alright. No, it's been wonderful. Perfect. Thank you. You don't know how interesting you are, probably. I've realised that with all of my subjects. Because what they're doing is perfectly normal to them, or what they've done, they don't necessarily realise how remarkable they are. Do you know what I mean? Yes. Sort of. I hope your letters from Bruce Chatwin and Paddy Lee Farmer are letters of admiration. You know what they are? Yes, Paddy's a bit. Bruce, they're mainly about some fascination, that is. They're very few, other than a tiny handful. And Jan Morris, do you have something from her? No, I don't think I do have anything from Jan, although she was a friend. I don't think I've got anything. We should have talked about her, because that's relevant to sex, isn't it? Yes, indeed. What an amazing story. Yes, extraordinary. I didn't know until I read about it when I was researching for our interview, I didn't know that she remarried her wife. On the other side, as it were. Yes. Amazing. Yes. She thought she'd make an honest... Thank you.