Bookpacking’s Blog

In ultra-runner Haruki Murakami’s book What I Think About When I’m Running, the author makes a clear connection with running and writing. Running can be a meditation, and while we might switch off on the surface, the subconscious is often whirring away underneath.

Like a diligent PA, while we take 40 winks on our office sofa, it’s busily sorting things and putting together internal presentations to impress us when we wake up. Running can be something to write about itself but it can also be a way to facilitate creativity and to establish the routine that can make the difference between just coming up with an idea, and actually executing it.

As running becomes more and more popular, so we can expect more books on the subject. Tonight at (London) Victoria’s Run and Become, writer Chris McDougall gave us a little insight into a book which is another variation on the ‘quest’ theme. In Born to Run, this injury-prone author was trying to find a way to stay out of the doctor’s surgery. His search brought him into contact with an obscure tribe of Indians in Mexico who run miles and miles every day, never giving it a second thought, yet are party-hard beer monsters.

And did he find what he was looking for? Bookpacking was sorely tempted during the Q&A to ask him to read out the last page. But wisely, he left us wanting more. Hitting the park the next evening for a run, Bookpacking’s own subconscious put a busy week’s input in the mix. Some 40 minutes later, the results spewed forth. And – taking our inspiration from one of those Indian runners we’d heard so much about – we concluded that when we got back home, we too would chug a beer in record time.

This is not the fate that awaits London’s banking fraternity should the economy worsen (is it?) but a super spot on the Thames to watch the river flow and remember that we are but a blip in the grand scheme of things. Historic boozer the Prospect of Whitby takes its name from a ship that used to moor nearby, and had a famous – or rather infamous – clientele. The Hanging Judge George Jeffreys was a regular; it’s sometimes said that cops and villains have more in common than either would like to admit.

The guest ales reflected the fast approaching St George’s Day, and supping a pint of England’s Glory, our thoughts turned to a North Yorkshire lad who would have known the river well. One of Britain’s premier navigators came from a humble background on the colliers that shuttled up and down the east coast bringing coal from the North East to London: the legendary Captain James Cook (BTW, anyone ever made the connection with Star Trek? For “USS Enterprise” read “HMS Endeavour”; for James Kirk read James Cook).

Author Herman Hesse uses a river as a metaphor of timelessness in the cult work Siddhartha. And there’s something very soothing about being near water. Looking at the Thames and remembering that some 2,000 years ago people were going about their business in more or less the same spot, it’s a great way to eat a little humble pie and get back a little perspective in this hectic city of inflated salaries and egos.

The warehouses along here may now be tiny overpriced flats – supply and demand will get you every time in London town – but it’s not hard to imagine trading ships from all over the world tied up; many of them coming from lands where the sun never set, that pink third of the mapped world that denoted the British Empire.

One can picture Conrad watching a mysterious vessel bob gently, and a little light bulb going off as he tried to figure out which obscure and exotic location it had come from. Or Dickens, on one of his many perambulations, surveying the comings and goings like some sort of self-appointed overseer.

And the river is still busy today. Catamaran clippers to and fro at a heady rate of knots, passing the slower sightseeing boats, as commuters escape to Greenwich. But even these sleek new machines are humbled as tourists bounce past them in a RIB (rigid inflatable boat), slewing across their bows: hard a-port in a G-force inducing semi-circle. We come and go; but like Hesse said, the river flows on.

Every cloud has a silver lining, and for the ever-frugal Bookpacking that means that there are some cracking deals to be found as the overextended find themselves making new holes in those ever-tightening belts, and even the well-placed cut their outgoings as they monitor the uncertain economy.

Sipping a delicious 80p cup of “Flat Broke” (8 oz. of filter topped with hot milk, doncha know) in Brick Lane Coffee, we might use that caffeine to suppress our appetite for a few hours. But even then, Marks and Spencer are at hand to offer the £2 meal deal (sandwich, drink, crisps).

And falling upon a couple of hidden-gem hostelries amongst the mews of Marylebone, we were reminded that Samuel Smith’s pubs are more common than you might think in central London. They are uniformly cheap; £1.88 for a delicious pint of bitter? Now that’s t’ good Yorkshire thrift lad.

AKA Leffe-Lovers’ Left Bank Lunacy

Bookpacking had the good fortune to find ourselves at a loose end in Paris this Monday evening with a partner in crime; having serendipitously bumped into a fellow vagabond, from the same part of the globe as ourselves, that we see every year or so in France through work. After a suitably literary event at Shakespeare & Co, we hit the bars of Rue Descartes where the lure of Leffe at only €4 per pint was to prove our undoing. We made our way unceremoniously up Rue Mouffetard to savour the Kwak in The Mayflower, as the full force of Belgian brewing was unleashed on our unsuspecting British bodies.

We were following in the footsteps of some of the biggest names in western literature; such as Papa Hemingway himself. The big man was scathing of F Scott Fitzgerald’s lack of drinking prowess, shamelessly shaming him in his famous Lost Generation memoirs A Moveable Feast. Despite writing the classic ‘Gatsby’, for anyone who’s done a bit of digging, Fitzgerald is publicly pilloried for eternity – thanks to the jugular-targeting judgments found in his competitive ‘friend’s’ diary. We can only be glad that the sole epistolary witness to Monday’s over-hydration is a little more discreet.