Here and There by A. A. Gill Read Free Book Online

our lives. That we live more like fruit-flies than our fathers and that they lived shorter times than our great-grandfathers. The horse was replaced by the car, then the plane, then the internet, so the music of time has gone from a waltz to a jive, to a body-popping breakbeat. There is an uncomfortable feeling that every new invention that cuts time’s corner to make time slip more sympathetically in fact forces us to run ever faster. The convenience is only ever an assistance to some previous machine, so that live music gives way to wind-up gramophones and then the wireless and CDs and iTunes. Each one benefits the technology, not the violinist, nor indeed the audience.
    This is an old man’s gripe, the feeling that I’m becoming Schrödinger’s cat. You will all remember that Schrödinger’s cat is trapped in a box with a particle of decaying atomic matter, and it may be both dead and alive simultaneously, and it’ll only become one or the other when the box is opened. I don’t understand it either. But I know that we often feel like cats in a box, both running and stationary, fixtures of a mad German-scientist thought-experiment. Schrödinger also invented a new word to go with his morbid-vital moggy: verschränkung . I think it means messed-up, confused and complicated. I don’t know. But it sounds like the way I sometimes feel.
    I travel because when you move at a different pace from your own environment you can be very speedy in slow towns and you can put your feet up in hectic ones. You dance to an internal beat that is not yet synchronised to the place you’re in. One of the greatest pleasures is to eat fast food at your leisure. To queue up with the clock-watching locals as they shuffle for their slice of pizza, or click their fingers for their tortilla. To sip a second cup of coffee in the early morning commuter-rush to offices, eating other people’s time. It’s like picking the minutes out of their pockets.
    And, cantankerously, I always keep my watch on the time of the place I’ve just come from. It denies the imperative of the local, remains aloof and above the herd. It doesn’t need to speed. It’s like Schrödinger’s watch – one time caught in a locked canister in another time, both alive, both ticking away, together but separate.
    Here in England, sales of oranges have plummeted. It’s not that people don’t like oranges – they drink gallons of orange juice – it’s just that they can’t find the time to peel one any more. Or rather, the thought of the time it would take to peel an orange seems excessive or extravagant. So they will forgo the pleasure of a well-peeled orange. I remember my grandfather used to peel one every Sunday after his nap. He carried a small silver knife for the purpose. It was as much craftsman’s pride as anything. It was a prophetic Slow movement and he did it not so much for the orange, but because he’d been in the trenches, spent four years without fresh fruit. He took the time to peel it and give a perfect segment to his grandson as an act of atonement and remembrance for the blokes who never would.

Ancient isle
    Where in the world could you literally be anywhere on earth? Mad, mad Madagascar of course.
    â€˜Where are we?’ asked Tom the photographer. It’s somewhere with an unpronounceable name. Obviously not unpronounceable for the inhabitants of wherever we are, just us visitors. ‘No,’ he said, ‘what country are we in?’ We arrived together. You had the tickets. There’s a stamp in your passport. You know which country we’re in. ‘No,’ he said again, forcibly, ‘what I mean is, if you didn’t know what country we were in, where would you think we were, and would you think that perhaps we might be where we are?’ Right, let’s have a look.
    Where we precisely are is in a small restaurant eating meat and rice