Bookpacking’s Blog

As someone who often meets people at London’s Heathrow, Bookpacking can testify that it’s often a long wait. From plane to door, an hour is a typical time. 90 mins is not unusual. Often, if your guests are in the non-EU queue at the UK border, it’s passport control where a lot of time is lost.

But luggage can be slow too. As the BBC News reported this lunchtime, a new tunnel being built at Heathrow aims to cut intra-terminal delivery time. Hopefully it’ll be ready – along with a whole lot of creaking London infrastructure – for 2012.
And, again hopefully, it won’t open with the same debacle as T5 when the national carrier was left with egg on its flag.

What this actually means for customers is hard to say, because the practical implications weren’t actually spelled out. Given that you collect your bags in the same terminal you arrive in, surely it only affects those who are transferring flights? Presumably, if bags can take an hour at the moment to cross between terminals, then some of the millions of bags which are “lost”every year must be not lost but late – missing their connection and failing to follow their owners.

The end result is the same, but this is vague reporting inspired by a press release; it fails to anticipate an obvious viewer question. It follows on from yesterday’s report on the same programme that London buses are failing mothers with pushchairs. There was no mention of the size increases which see some buggies resemble quad bikes, or of the fact that in the capital nobody has any space on London’s packed-out transport. As a regular bus user, Bookpacking boggles at where this extra pram capacity might come from? Less seats for the elderly & disabled maybe?

Of course, baggage is a thankless task. And, like the mail, the general public has no interest in vast logistics operations or the small daily successes that go unreported. So the PR at LHR should be careful not to promise too much. Because when the new tunnel opens, an impatient world will be watching.

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.

Yesterday evening found Bookpacking playing with a new toy in the woodland of Wimbledon Common. Sometimes the simplest of things can bring hours of enjoyment, and for £4 or so, we bought a sturdy looking compass from the local Aladaddin’s Cave that is Lidl, and headed off into the bush. The little boy inside takes very little prompting to appear, and with our new low-tech gadget, childhood memories came rushing back of family camping holidays with mysterious forests that had to be explored and hills that had to be conquered.

As people look for cheaper leisure activities – eg not buying a few rounds in a pub and waving goodbye to £50 in a couple of happily hazy hours – Bookpacking is predicting an upswing in activities like hiking and camping. Already surfing a festival wave, more and more people are discovering the joys of life under canvas. There’s nothing like that first cup of tea (remember the slogan: “Tea; best drink of the day”?). Especially when you’ve faffed on for a half-hour to make it – this the very definition of deferred gratification.

And the great outdoors is, well, great. Last night, surrounded by birdsong and devoid of people, it was hard to believe this was Zone 3, well inside the M25. If travel is often about escape, maybe we don’t always need to spend a  huge amount on airfares to find such solicitous solitude if we look harder at home.

And best of all, some sharp compass work brought us right to the final waypoint of the evening, the Fox & Grapes. A cute pint (served only a few degrees below room temperature), we aren’t being obtuse when we say this angle is our favourite segment of the hiking experience; the very apex of this little Boys Own adventure.*

Hi-Tec walking boots from £40; Karrimor boots similar at Field & Trek sale; compass £4 Lidl; OS map typically £7; Berghaus waterproof from £50 online, or c. £150 for Gore-Tex lined; walking trousers c. £30 from Blacks.

* apologies, but what’s the point in having your own blog if you can’t insert the occasional awful pun?

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.

Strolling through cosy Clerkenwell with its publishing operations and media village vibe, Bookpacking found ourselves in The City where there was an air of excitement as the suited and booted around the Barbican sensed spring in the air. Jackets were slung over shoulders, and outside tables filled up as the light at the end of the winter tunnel finally became visible.

But there was only one place to be tonight, and that was Brick Lane. Over at Rough Trade*, the legendary (and bilingual Francophile) Marianne Faithful played a free instore gig to mark her new album launch. Further down the lane at Eastside Books a group of budding authors gathered to critique each others’ work, and a few doors up the Brick Lane Gallery was hosting an opening for the Art in Mind show, including contributions from the amusingly-monickered Art Tart.

Title of the night went to an artist called Loz, for his funkily minimalist piece “Man Ray Stops Bullets”. Sometimes artists are loathe to deconstruct their work; because it takes away from the subjective element where we create our own meanings. Or because they just can’t be bothered. Or, for the extremely cynical, because it’d reveal how superficial the ‘concept’ was.

Not Loz though, who happily explained the fairly elementary symbolism, and seemed pleased that someone had shown an interest. Art, like it or not, is a business and a highly competitive one at that; there’s absolutely no getting around it. And in business, marketing is key. So a title that sticks in the mind is a shrewd move on the part of the artist. Like writing, talent is nothing without application. No marketing means no sales and in 2009 the notion of noble poverty ain’t what it used to be.

* if you don’t know the derivation of this name, a quick bit o’ Googling may amuse…

But you can judge a potential lover by their choice of reading, according to tonight’s whimsical lurv article in the London Paper. Using years of research by leading sociologists – or maybe just having a bit of fun drafting a press release – Penguin’s dating site has come up with a few general book genres and some ideas about the sort of people you’d find reading them.

Wait, did we just say Penguin’s dating site? Brand extension has a lot to answer for, Mr Branson. Or does it; because for flirting booklovers the most exciting flashes of electricity can come when we find an interesting other who loves the same literature as us.

If an art gallery is supposedly a great place to meet potential partners (choose your exhibition very carefully we say), then why shouldn’t a mutual appreciation of the same piece of print be the spark that spurs an epic love story?

TNT Magazine had its latest travel show this weekend and a high calibre of guest speaker contributed to a full house. Bookpacking was unable to get in to hear Paul Kilduff telling the tall tales behind Ruinair - How to be treated like Sh*** in 15 Different Countries and Still Quite Like It – a rant-turned-book, as Times Online called it.

After kicking our heels in a coffee bar for an hour, we eventually got in and heard Mitch from Eastern Trekker extolling the delights of Eastern Europe. Having just returned ourselves, we can confirm that it’s a fascinating region and well worth a visit. Credit to Mitch, he talked about the region with a real passion and love, but he didn’t push his own product once.

But they saved the best till last. A lot of the younger crowd had gone home, but there was still a good turnout to hear modern day tales of derring-do from Lonely Planet author Frances Linzee Gordon. From Ethiopian war zones, to aborted helicopter rescues and covert exploration of Saudi Arabia in disguise – this young lady has already lived quite a life.

Her inspirational talk about going off the beaten track touched on travel principles that aren’t a million miles away from the ones we listed here last week, but this woman is hard core. Sometimes you can feel that travelling is a self-indulgent frippery for the decadent dilettante; but on the road Frances has clearly gained a lot of sociological and psychological insights into the people and places she’s explored/logged/photographed. When she checks the FCO website prior to her trips, she probably knows more than the people writing the advice.

With a useful mixture of common sense, a veteran’s insight and some life-coaching pep, it wasn’t hard to see why she’s on the LP roll of travelwriting honour. We like it when the good people give of themselves for free, and Bookpacking will definitely be incorporating her tips into our next travel plan.

A plague of locusts buzzed hungrily from one shelf to the next, sucking each space dry, then moving on to see what other pickings could be greedily gobbled up. In stark stationary contrast, tired parents stood in a huge resigned line; supervising a choir of misery, their hungry babies protested their hunger and boredom as they queued for tills empty of change. On one hand Woolworths felt like a refugee camp, except it was excess that was the issue here.

In a photo negative of the darkest days of Communist Europe - when the hapless proletariat queued for hours to get into empty shops - here they queued to get out, weighed down by cut-price Christmas booty as store chain and high street institution Woolworths started its closing down sale. To the consumer victor, the spoils of retail war. The collateral damage: 30,000 shopworkers put out of work at Christmas.

You have to pity staff who have nothing to look forward to in January but job-hunting in a recession. Those under 30 may have no concept of what a recession is like, and they’re in for a shock. At least in the South East they’ll have a fighting chance to find another job, but it’ll be an anxious wait for the guys at Sunderland’s Nissan plant as the company reconsiders its viability.

The 80s were brutal in NE England. Despite TV documentaries’ 80s-shorthand consisting of 5-second clips of red-brace wearing Yuppies chugging champers under Canary Wharf, it was a grim time in many parts of the country. Recession, riots, wide-scale industrial unrest, weekly factory closures and the ever-present background threat of all-out nuclear war. By all means wear the legwarmers, but please leave the rest behind.

And yet we endure. Like the Buddhists say: “Everything arises, everything falls away.”

One thing was very clear tonight: Winston Churchill drank an inordinate amount of  booze. Whisky in the morning, champagne in the afternoon and evening, and a little brandy to top it off. Carrying on the best traditions of the eccentric upper classes, he is supposed to have supped his way through 42,000 bottles of champers. Never in the field of human boozing had so much been drunk by so few.

At Notting Hill pub The Churchill Arms they were celebrating the big man’s birthday, complete with wartime uniforms and memorabilia. An impersonator with an uncanny resemblance gave one of the speeches that Churchill delivered so effectively. The right man at the time for the job of leading Britain against the Nazis, he was actually loathed in some parts of the UK.

Bookpacking mentioned his name to an elderly relative who remembered the Depression and the General Strike of 1926. She remembered her husband walking for an hour in the dark to get to a job he hated – crawling underground in precarious 18-inch high tunnels, with the constant threat of accident or explosion.

And when Churchill ordered the troops in, to deal with Welsh miners in 1926, she remembered his instructions to send “the rats back down their holes”. He also advocated the use of poison gas against Kurds and other troublesome ‘colonials’ around 1917. So while Bookpacking enjoyed the bonhomie tonight, we were understandably reluctant to carried away toasting the man himself, rather than his (WW2) achievements.

What really stuck in our mind tonight was a minor detail: a song playing in the background. A song ignored in the hubbub of beer-fuelled banter, as khaki-clad barmen with Sam Browne belts squeezed through the throng collecting glasses; young lads who’d have been called up in 1940. A song that – despite its cheery tone – was laden with pathos. A song that might be the last one you ever heard: “Wish me luck as you wave me goodbye…not a tear but a cheer…goodbye everybody, I’ll do my best for ye.”