Percy Bysshe Shelley - Jeff Booth - Aristophanes - Horace - The Genius of Invention TV - Lucian Freud - Fanny Burney - William Wordsworth - George Moore - Walter de la Mare - Kenneth Grahame - Robert Louis Stevenson - Samuel Johnson - Lin Yutang - E B White - Patric Leigh Fermor - Numbers Game: What Drives You Crazy TV - Lao Tzu - The Story of British Pathé TV - II Corinthians 11:26 - Mark Twain - Jack Kerouac - Gustave Flaubert - Hans Christian Andersen - John Steinbeck - Miriam Beard - Thomas Jefferson - Lord Byron - George Eliot - Homer - Hilaire Belloc - Thomas Hardy - Ian Mortimer TV - Tonight TV - When Cruises Go Horribly Wrong & Other Travel Nightmares TV - The World’s Most Expensive Cruise Ship TV - Werner Herzog TV - Rob Bell TV - Jimi Hendrix - J G Ballard - Hotel Coolgardie 2016 - Ash Cloud: The Week the World Stopped TV - Queen of the World TV - What We Do in the Shadows TV - Alexei Sayle TV - The Corbett Report -
A traveller from the cradle to the grave
Through the dim night of this immoral day. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Prometheus Unbound
According to the World Travel and Tourism Council, in 2018, travel contributed $8.8 trillion and 319 million jobs to the global economy. Entire local economies have become reliant on tourist dollars. What will they do if travelling slows? Jeff Booth, The Price of Tomorrow: Why Deflation is the Key to an Abundant Future
Why, I’d like nothing better than to achieve some bold adventure, worthy of our trip. Aristophanes
Not bound to swear allegiance to any master,
Wherever the wind takes me I travel as a visitor. Horace, Epistles
The unimaginable shock of speed and the ability to travel anywhere in the world. The Genius of Invention II: Speed, BBC 2013
The Steam Locomotive: Richard Trevithick, 1804. ibid.
The Jet Engine: Sir Frank Whittle, 1941. ibid.
Trevithick had shown how to use high-powered steam. ibid.
In 1930 he [Whittle] patented his design for the world’s first jet engine. ibid.
Suck – Squeeze – Bang – Blow = thrust out the back. ibid.
The modern jet engine contains thousands of parts. ibid.
The incredible gift of locomotion. ibid.
My idea of travel is downward travel really. Getting to know where you are better and exploring feelings that you know more deeply. Lucian Freud
Travelling is the ruin of all happiness! There’s no looking at a building here after seeing Italy. Fanny Burney, English novelist & diarist
I travelled among unknown men,
In lands beyond the sea;
Nor England! did I know till then
What love I bore to thee. William Wordsworth, 1807
A man travels the world in search of what he needs and returns home to find it. George Moore, The Brook Kerith, 1916
‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence champed the grasses
Of the forest’s ferny floor. Walter de la Mare, The Listeners, 1912
Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
And the sound of iron on stone,
And how the silence surged softly backward,
When the plunging hoofs were gone. ibid.
Villages skipped, towns and cities jumped – always somebody else’s horizon! Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows
Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose. Walt Whitman, Song of the Open Road, 1871
For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move. Robert Louis Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey, 1879
To travel hopefully is a better thing that to arrive, and the true success is to labour. Robert Louis Stevenson, Virginibus Puerisque, 1881
So it is in travelling; a man must carry knowledge with him, if he would bring home knowledge. Samuel Johnson
Giant’s Causeway: worth seeing, but not worth going to see. Samuel Johnson
The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are. Samuel Johnson
Must I serve a long apprenticehood
To foreign passages, and in the end,
Having my freedom, boast of nothing else
But that I was a journeyman to grief? William Shakespeare, Richard II I iii 271
A good traveller is one who does not know where he is going to, and a perfect traveller does not know where he came from. Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living 1938
The traveller ... [can] get the greatest joy of travel even without going to the mountains, by staying at home and watching and going about the field to watch a smiling cloud, or a dog, or a hedge, or a lonely tree. ibid.
Commuter – one who spends his life
In riding to and from his wife;
A man who shaves and takes a train,
And then rides back to shave again. E B White, The Commuter, 1982
‘A splendid afternoon to set out!’ said one of the friends who was seeing me off, peering at the rain and rolling up the window. Patrick Leigh Fermor, Loose as the Wind
It was still a couple of hours till dawn when we dropped anchor in the Hook of Holland. Snow covered everything and the flakes blew in a slant across the cones of the lamps and confused the glowing discs that spaced out the untrodden quay. I hadn’t known that Rotterdam was a few miles inland. I was still the only passenger on the train and this solitary entry, under cover of night and hushed by snow, completed the illusion that I was slipping into Rotterdam, and into Europe, through a secret door. ibid.
58% of commuting workers experience road rage. Numbers Game: What Drives You Crazy? National Geographic 2013
One may know the world without going out of doors.
One may see the Way of Heaven without looking through windows.
The further one goes, the less one knows. Lao Tzu, Tao-te Ching
For more than sixty years the newsreel company Pathé captivated British cinema-goers by distributing film travel-logs that featured ravishing images from all over the world. At the heart of Pathé’s output was their portrait of the British empire. The Story of British Pathé IV: Around The World, BBC 2011
Early cinema audiences were fascinated to see images of far-away lands. ibid.
By 1933 Pathé had established a global network of distribution agencies. ibid.
Associated British-Pathé presents the Royal Tour: Round the World with Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth and His Royal Highness The Duke of Edinburgh. ibid.
This outstanding footage is believed to be the earliest surviving colour film of the marsh Arabs. ibid.
The 90,000 films in British Pathé’s archive give us an important and enduring record of life in the twentieth century. ibid.
I have been in travels often, perils of rivers, perils of robbers, perils from my countrymen, perils from the Gentiles, perils in the city, perils in the wilderness, perils in the sea, perils among false brothers. II Corinthians 11:26
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime. Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad/Roughing It
I have found out that there ain’t no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them. Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer Abroad
What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? – it’s the too-huge world vaulting us, and it’s good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies. Jack Kerouac, On the Road
Because he had no place he could stay in without getting tired of it and because there was nowhere to go but everywhere, keep rolling under the stars. ibid.