on madrid

Madrid is growing on me. Until this year, it wasn’t a city I had much experience in, it was mainly just a stopping off point to change planes on my way to South America. I suppose Madrid isn’t the first, or second, place in Spain foreigners would head to. It doesn’t have the striking architecture and excitement of Barcelona, or the beaches offered by more southern destinations. At first glance, it is not even that pretty, and lacks the impressive monuments of even many provincial Spanish towns. Yet, it is somehow an extremely pleasant business destination. It has well developed infrastructure: the airport is extremely well connected to the centre by an excellent metro system, cabs are readily available and not ridiculously overpriced. The hotels and restaurants are equally of good value, so I can stay in a top hotel in the centre and eat in top restaurants without giving my company card abuse. Of course, that technically doesn’t matter- I could eat or sleep wherever I wanted in any city on company expense, but I still like the fact that a good meal in Madrid costs me €40, instead of €150 in Moscow. Actually, it is not even the meal itself, what I particularly like here is that it is somehow comfortable. Unlike in Moscow, there is no pretension and people are laid back and cool; unlike in Rome, things here actually work. In meetings in various companies it is the same: the people are polite, honest and friendly. They don’t spend ages attempting to calculate the cost of your suit (as in Moscow), pretend to be happy and friendly when they are not (Houston) or leave you with the feeling that you are attempting to keep a litter of cats in a basket (Rome, Milan). So, all in all, there is absolutely nothing extraordinary about Madrid, it is just a pleasant place.

on travel, again

When I was about 7 or 8, I sat down very seriously and composed a list of the places I wanted to visit. After some hours of concentration and a few consultations of my father’s massive atlas, I came up with about 200 spots around the globe, mainly cities. Over the next several years, I seriously ticked off places on the list as I got to them. Alas, the list came to a fitting end- disappearing along with the rest of my luggage on a Delta flight- but I remember the top 5 destinations being Hong Kong, Buenos Aires, Moscow, Mexico City and Bombay. I don’t remember the other 195 or so, but I think it was a relatively complete list.
I have now managed to make it to all those places that captured my 7 year old imagination, and yet there are still so many undiscovered places out there, which makes me think that, 25 years on, it is time to come up with a new version, albeit in a much abbreviated form…so here it goes:

1. Tokyo
2. Machiu picchu (Peru)
3. Seoul
4. Victoria Falls (Zim/Zam)
5. Shanghai
6. Iguazu Falls (Brazil, Argentina)
7. Addis Ababa
8. Beirut
9. Rajasthan
10. Cartegena de Indias

Lets see how long it takes me to get there….

aberdeen

The moment the taxi pulled up to the building, something felt familiar, but I figured it just had to do with being back in Aberdeen, which is indeed a familiar place. But inside my nose told me it was more than that. I find my sense of smell is greater than my other senses. Last February I found myself in a temple in China, where I had certainly never been before, but my nose was telling me I had. A wall plaque explained to me why- the temple’s refurbishing had been funded by Chinese in Canada, and the whole structure had been built in one particular type of Canadian Cedar from Algonquin, the same kind of Cedar as had been used to built the camp lodge I had spent four summers living in as a child, in Algonquin park. I knew that smell. The same weird feeling hit me in this lodge in Scotland, but it took my mother to explain it this time: I had stayed at that particular hotel as a child. After she pointed it out, it all fell into place and I could vaguely remember it all, but of course my memories are the fragmented memories of a child- I remember the big fat ginger cat I played with in the garden and skipping stones into the Dee…but I have no recollections at all of the building or surroundings. I stayed in so many places regularly as a child that now I can only just recall. I think it is the result of a highly mobile life that sees me in a different country nearly every week. I think this is why, even as a child I became obsessed with photography. When we were living in Cambridge (when I was about 8), my parents tried to get me to keep a diary, which I resented and hated, not least as every entry had to be written separately on notepaper and then submitted for their approval before being written in The Book. I quickly managed to get out of that duty, reassigning myself as chief family photographer. I have never managed to describe in words the sights and smells around me, and I am constantly terrified of loosing memory of places I have lived in or worked in. I photograph everything- flats, cities, people- as part of a desperate effort not to forget them. In the book The Beach, the main character goes on holiday deliberately without his camera, arguing that the obsession of some people with photography prevents them from living and thus remembering the actual experience in the moment. Maybe that fictional character has a point, and in many ways I agree with the theory. In university, I rarely took notes in class, because I felt I understood things better listening attentively without the additional distraction of writing everything down. Yet, especially on a geographic and visual level, I fear my memory is too fragile and abused to contain the amount thrown at it, so I try to capture everything on camera, hoping that when I look at it some years later, it will at least remind me of some earlier moment of my life.