The works remain beautiful, of course, but I found myself wondering what makes them so stunning compared to other paintings that are technically just as accomplished but that no one ever sees. I suspect these artists were among the first to do something genuinely different. When you get close to many of the paintings, they often lack the definition we have become accustomed to in an age of photography. Perhaps our admiration is partly for their daring as much as their skill.

The Seurat exhibition itself was fascinating because of the uniqueness of his style. I came away reflecting that many great artists paint surprisingly ordinary subjects. That is not intended as criticism. Rather, they seem to paint the scenes, people and moments that matter to them rather than constantly searching for something exceptional.

By mid-afternoon I felt thoroughly “arted out”. There is only so much art one can absorb in a single day maybe. Tate Britain alone contains enough masterpieces to occupy weeks rather than hours and I still had that to do! I had already spent time with Seurat and others before making my way to the Constable and Turner exhibition- the main purpose of the trip. A café stop off was required….

A brief note on gallery economics: I stopped for cake in the Tate café. It cost £5.50. In fairness, it was large. But it still felt like a £2 cake masquerading as a £5.50 cake. I mean just writing a £5.50 cake makes me question many things about the world we live in! The quality was also poor I felt. But onto the paintings….

What struck me most in both Turner and Constable’s work was their handling of darkness and light. They somehow manage to render deep shadows without losing the integrity of the image. The dark areas never become empty space. Detail remains, even when it is barely perceptible.

In Constable’s work, tiny figures - almost indistinct within the scale of the painting – still manage to possess character and presence. Turner often pushes us even further. Entire scenes can appear indistinct even when viewed as a whole yet remain beautiful and awe-inspiring. Perhaps even more so because of their ambiguity. There’s maybe something in that for us to think about. Do we need to Google everything or can we be comfortable not knowing and living with that. Does it matter what a piece of art means or even who painted or is what matters what it does to you when you are confronted by it? In that vein, what interested me most across the day was not the famous paintings themselves, but my reaction to them.

The Impressionists occupy a curious position in modern culture. Their works are so familiar that they almost become invisible. We know them before we see them. Monet’s water lilies, Van Gogh’s brushwork, Degas’ dancers. They have been reproduced on calendars, mugs, postcards, tote bags and refrigerator magnets. Their originality has become commonplace. Standing in front of such, I found myself wondering why these paintings still possess such power because being in a room with them is different to having a print on your wall or having a mug with the image on. Part of the answer, I suspect, is historical. We are not simply looking at paintings. We are looking at moments when somebody maybe decided to paint differently from everyone else. Also, we are looking at the actual artefact they created not a representation. While the world becomes more fake the reality of original objects will only become more valuable. Not necessarily in financial terms but in cultural and emotional terms.

Getting close to the paintings revealed something else. Viewed from a distance, the image appears complete. Viewed from inches away, it often falls apart. Up close there are blocks, shapes and fragments of colour that seem barely connected. Yet step backwards and order emerges from apparent chaos.

It reminded me of many things beyond painting. Relationships. Careers. Families. Even lives. From too close a distance we often see only disconnected, isolated details, or maybe unimportant ones that seem significant at the time but fade with chronological passing. It is only when we step back that the larger picture begins to reveal itself.

In many of the paintings there is often no dramatic event taking place. No historical turning point. No grand revelation. Just simple life. The extraordinary thing maybe is that these artists teach us to look at ordinary things more carefully. Perhaps that is one of art’s greatest gifts. It does not necessarily show us something new. It teaches us how to see what was already there.

Standing there in the galleries, I found myself thinking that perhaps we spend too much of modern life demanding perfect definition. We want certainty. Clear answers. Sharp edges. Unambiguous conclusions. We don’t like the ending of The Italian Job! (Or maybe some of us do!) Yet some of the most moving works in the gallery derived their power precisely from what they left unresolved. The figures were indistinct. The boundaries uncertain. The meaning only partially revealed or, at the most extreme, left completely to the interpretation of the viewer.

And somehow that made them more beautiful, not less.

By the end of the day, I was exhausted, slightly overwhelmed, and £5.50 poorer thanks to a museum cake of distinctly average quality. But I left with a renewed appreciation for the ordinary. The great artists return again and again to the familiar world around them and invite us to look more carefully.

Perhaps that is the lesson.
The extraordinary is not hiding somewhere else.
It is already here, waiting for us to notice it.

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This is the sort of thing the reluctant tourist increasingly finds himself doing.

At Durham station I noticed the peculiar pleasure of early departures. The quiet platform. The sparse conversations. The half-awake clutching coffee cups to drink in the caffeine that fuels existential reassurance. You are alive! I had gone to bed ridiculously early the night before, partly from practicality and partly from excitement. Although excitement feels too enthusiastic a word for the reluctant tourist. Anticipatory curiosity perhaps.

The train rolled south towards London and I found myself thinking about routes. Where we begin quietly shapes where we arrive. Because I live in Durham, London means King’s Cross. Had I lived elsewhere it might have been some other station. The same is true of airports - whatever is local to you shapes where you can go - directly at least. Geography subtly dictates destiny. We like to imagine ourselves entirely self-determining creatures, but structures edit our possibilities.

Perhaps life is rather like that. We feel free to choose but what we can choose from is pre-selected by systems.

At some point during the journey I re-read a line from Orlando (the Virginia Woolf book I carried) that resonated:

“The philosopher is right who says that nothing thicker than a knife separates happiness from melancholy.”

Travel often feels like this to me. Excitement and discomfort exist side by side. Wonder and exhaustion. Connection and alienation. The reluctant tourist is never entirely one thing.

Arriving at King’s Cross Station I immediately had to descend back underground. “Going Underground” by The Jam started playing involuntarily in my head as I navigated escalators, signs and momentary confusion about eastbound and westbound lines. Modern transport systems seem designed around the assumption that human beings naturally understand diagrams. I do not.

I surfaced eventually at Covent Garden and wandered onto The Strand. Somewhere between the station and The Courtauld Gallery I stopped for breakfast at a café that looked as though it had been assembled accidentally from several different decades. Young American voices drifted from a nearby table. George Michael played softly overhead.

Avocado and eggs arrived on sourdough. The avocado was impossibly creamy with lemon running through it. The eggs were perfect. The coffee sublime. Only the toast slightly failed to live up to the moment. Not quite toasted enough. Even the reluctant tourist retains standards around the crunch.

My thoughts returned to the train journey. Or more specifically, a choreography of devices.

Almost everyone - the commuters at least - seemed to possess multiple screens - two phones and a laptop often appearing to form the minimum technological requirement for existence. The man beside me flicked endlessly between applications and screens with a kind of anxious urgency. Work merged seamlessly into life and life back into work. Emails. Messages. Spreadsheets. Shopping. News. Notifications. Small digital bursts demanding attention every few seconds.

What struck me was not simply the presence of technology but the inability to leave it alone.

Even when nothing had happened - no alerts - people prodded their phones awake as though checking for a pulse. Tiny gestures repeated endlessly. An entire carriage performing their existence. Earbuds sealed people into private worlds while any semblance of collective atmosphere became absent. Present physically. Elsewhere psychologically.

Reading Orlando in the middle of this felt oddly rebellious.

Perhaps this is why things like galleries matter now. Why books matter. Why slowness matters. Because they ask something increasingly difficult of us: sustained attention.

Byung-Chul Han writes in Nonthings that modern life is increasingly dominated by streams of information rather than tangible things. We no longer dwell with objects; we skim data. Paintings become images on phones. Journeys become content (like I’m doing writing this - the irony). Experiences become evidence that we did something or were there.

Standing in front of a painting in silence resists this.

You cannot scroll a Constable - not really. You cannot algorithmically consume a Turner. They require duration. Presence. Patience.

The reluctant tourist, increasingly, suspects that this may be the real reason to travel at all. To recover attention rather than accumulate destinations. To momentarily step outside the flickering velocity of modern life and become absorbed once more in something slower and more human.

Kraków hasn’t really offered me a single definitive revelation. It has not unfolded like a story with a clear arc. Instead, it has been a series of moments. I find myself thinking less about the grand spaces - the vastness of Auschwitz, the cavernous depths of the salt mine, the spectacle of the old town square – inspiring as they were - and more about people. The family we travelled to Auschwitz with, the waiter who served us breakfast, the humorous guide at the salt mines.

Then there was Jonathan, in conversation with the Italian women. There was something in it - something unforced. There was no performance and no agenda. Just people, briefly intersecting, sharing a moment. It struck me at the time how rare that can feel, even though it should be ordinary. In a world that often feels accelerated, transactional, and slightly guarded, the simplicity of that exchange felt a little radical. I go to the gym at home and people barely speak to each other. I walk past someone while I’m out walking the dog and they stare dead-eyed ahead without as much as an acknowledgment even though we pass within a metre of each other. We’re losing something. Or maybe we’ve already lost it.

And then Luke, on the plane to Amsterdam – our first flight ‘hop’, helping a woman who was struggling - a baby, a pushchair, bags - amidst the chaos of travelling alone with a child. He didn’t hesitate. There was no calculation in it, no sense of “should I?” It was simply obvious to him that he would help. A small act. Almost invisible to everyone else immersed in the wider logistics of boarding a plane.

Those acts of helping from Luke and Jonathan stayed with me.

I often think and speak about the world in abstract terms. Systems. Structures. Politics. Culture. I talk about change as if it always happens at scale, as if it requires something dramatic, something visible. And of course, sometimes it does. But there is another level at which the world is made. It is made in small, almost imperceptible moments. In the decision to speak to someone rather than to remain silent. In the instinct to help rather than look away. In a willingness to be open to another person.

Perhaps this is what I have been circling around, without quite naming it, throughout this journey. The reluctant tourist moves through spaces with a degree of suspicion of curated experiences and of the idea that meaning can be packaged and consumed. What if the real experience is in fleeting human exchanges?

There is something in this that resonates with Martin Buber’s idea of the I–Thou relationship. That moment when we encounter another person not as an object but as a presence. Such encounters change the quality of the moment. Perhaps this is where the reluctant tourist finds something worth holding onto. No checklist of sights, or photographs (well very few) taken as proof of presence, but in the recognition that the world isn’t simply something we move through. It is something we are constantly participating in and therefore shaping in small ways.

There is a line of thought in Hannah Arendt’s work about the “space between” people - the idea that the world is not just made of objects and structures, but of the relationships and interactions that exist between us. That the “in-between” space is where meaning resides.

A conversation on the train platform.

A moment of helping on the plane.

The unremarkable decisions that people make to be in relation to one another.

But actually, maybe those decisions are remarkable. Because they happen less and less as we stare into our mobile phones rather than into each other’s faces.

The world, it turns out, is not just built by governments or institutions or grand historical forces - though they matter. It is also built by small acts of recognition of the other. Maybe a simple word or a small gesture. A moment of paying attention to someone else rather than too ourselves.

Although we travel and we witness places meaning does not always reside in the destination. Sometimes, it is visible in the way one person simply acknowledges another.

I find myself asking a question that feels practical and existential: why am I doing this when I could simply go in the car? The car would deliver me there efficiently, comfortably, and predictably. It would truncate the journey into something manageable. Frictionless. And yet, there is something about friction that seems to matter. I’ve mentioned this before.

The evening before, I always seem to feel a kind of reluctance. It’s not fear exactly, but I sense in my head and in my heart some resistance. Me, having a low-level negotiation, an internal dialogue, with myself. My body anticipating the effort, the hard work. My mind offering me alternatives. It’s in those moments that I half-imagine David Goggins, somewhere in the background, offering his uncompromising refrain - that doing hard things is precisely the point. “You don’t want to go for the bike ride!? Go for the bike ride!” Comfort is not the goal.

But I am not, by nature, drawn to difficulty for its own sake.

I turn, perhaps unexpectedly, to Jules Verne as I’m currently reading Journey to the Centre of the Earth. There is a passage where the travellers on horseback make ‘only’ thirty miles a day. Thirty. By contemporary standards, it feels almost comically slow. But reading it, I find myself thinking - yes. Slowly is the fastest way to get to where you want to go! Journeys aren’t about speed they are about, well… journeys! The delight of having the opportunity to cycle from Alnwick to Durham when many, for all manner of reasons, can’t. So why not.

Something happens once the journey actually begins. The reluctance dissipates replaced by a kind of immersion. The rhythm of the pedals. The shifting of the light across fields and the sea. Your body settles into its work, and the mind, freed, because there’s nothing to do but peddle, begins to attend inward.

That’s where the journey is. A process to be inhabited. When it’s about speed and miles covered the question keeps beings how do I get there? How long is it going to take? When it becomes about the journey it turns to what is happening now? The scenery is no longer something just passed at speed, glimpsed in passing, it becomes something encountered.

And time, interestingly, begins to stretch.

Verne’s thirty miles a day begins to feel less like a limitation and more like a philosophy. A recalibration of pace. A badly needed recalibration of pace. A refusal to turn an experience into simple efficiency. In a world that, as Hartmut Rosa suggests, is defined by acceleration, there is something a bit radical about choosing the slow option. Allowing the journey to unfold at a human speed rather than just getting it done as quick as possible.

Cycling seventy miles is, in one sense, unnecessary. It is a self-imposed difficulty. A complication where none is required. But perhaps that is precisely why it matters. Because in choosing the hard thing, something is returned to us. A sense of scale. Of effort. Of presence. The body becomes involved again. The journey reclaims its depth. We all have different journeys. They are not all the physical journeys of the bike ride. But endure our journeys we must. Do the hard thing we must. [Sounds like I’m channelling Yoda!)

By the time I near Durham, the question that felt so pressing the day before, why am I going to do this, has all but disappeared. It no longer makes sense to ask ‘why didn’t I take the car’. The car would have taken me to the destination. But it would not have given me a journey in the same sense. And somewhere between Alnwick and Durham, between my reluctance and the rhythm of the bike, between effort and immersion, I begin to understand something quite simple:

Sometimes, we do the hard thing not because we have to but because it allows us, finally, to arrive.

Note: If you’ve not come across David Goggins before (he’s an endurance athlete, a motivational speaker, and an ex-Navy Seal) you might like his book Can’t Hurt Me. It’s excellent. I listened to the audiobook where he’s interviewed between chapters. His story is powerful.

• At Luke’s in Alnwick – Abbeylands.

• Raining. 9 a.m.

• Trip with Christine and Carly.

When is a tourist a tourist and when a traveller, and when have you simply gone somewhere? When I go out on a day long bike ride am I a tourist? I’m certainly a traveller on two wheels. I’m not merely going somewhere like you’d just go to the shops. What about a longer cycling trip? Does it depend whether the territory is new to me. So my trip to Luke's and back a few weeks ago – tourist? traveller? or just going somewhere? I think tourist maybe – definitely traveller. I had ice cream at Amble – surely that makes me a tourist?

When I go on my 3 day ride with Jamie in a few weeks across terrain not yet traversed – tourist surely.

Words mean things. They define how we approach situations. To me ‘travelling’ could easily become functional – “I need to get from A to B” - but tourist – at least when ‘reluctant’ suggests slowing down, absorbing, engaging in a way beyond travel.

Perhaps the real distinction is not distance or novelty. But approach.

You can travel without noticing. You can cover ground without ever really arriving. Equally, you can be a tourist five miles from home, if you allow yourself to engage differently.

To slow down.

To take something in.

To allow the journey to be more than its endpoint.

Enjoy the journey not the destination the Stoics would suggest.

The reluctant tourist, then, is not defined by where they go. But by how they move ‘through’.

I was reading Erich Fromm (To Have or To Be) in between flights – that in-between space where movement gets suspended momentarily - and I found myself caught by a small metaphor. A blue glass, Fromm writes, does not contain blue. It absorbs everything else in the light spectrum and lets blue pass through. What we see is not something that is ‘there’, but what remains, what is left behind. It’s an interesting observation – so much so it sent me off down an internet rabbit-hole – you know like it does! What appears present is, in fact, the residue of what has been refused to pass.

Later, back at home, I looked at the walls of the living room. A light green. Calming. But of course, the physics is doing something quite active. The paint is not “green” in itself. It is absorbing most of the light that reaches it and reflecting back only a narrow band - those wavelengths we happen to perceive as green. Change the shade slightly and the balance shifts. More blue allowed through, perhaps. Or more yellow. A different remainder. I had to look this up in several places as it was messing with my head a little to be honest!

We live, it seems, in a world of filters.

And then there is the chaise longue (I know I know we’re a bit posh lol). Black leather, or so I would have said without thinking. In the folds, it turns grey. Flatten it out and it returns to black, as if nothing had happened. But something has happened. The leather has not changed. What has changed is the relationship - the angle of light, the curve of the surface, the direction of reflection. In the folds, more light finds its way back to the eye. What should be absorbed is returned. The object reveals itself not to be a fixed colour. It seems to be negotiating with light.

Fromm’s distinction between having and being begins to feel less abstract in this light. To “have” suggests accumulation, possession, acquisition. But the blue glass ‘has’ nothing. It owns no colour. It is defined instead by a process - by what it does, by what it allows, by what it does not take in. It ‘is’, rather than ‘has’. In Fromm’s terms, this is the difference between passive reception and active existence - between taking in the world as something to possess or meeting it as something to participate in.

And perhaps this is not confined to objects.

I found myself thinking about quiz shows (I know a strange brain in my head!) I began wondering why I enjoy Mastermind or University Challenge but can’t abide Michael McIntyre’s The Wheel. The fundamental underpinning of them all is the answering of questions. The former are exclusively that while the latter is wrapped up in entertainment.

There is a particular kind of engagement these shows produce. In the case of University Challenge and Mastermind, even when you are sitting on a sofa, you are not entirely passive. A question is asked and something in you leans forward. You search, you anticipate, you answer - sometimes aloud, sometimes internally (you have to answer out loud or you can’t claim the point is mine and Christine’s rule – “I was going to say that”, doesn’t count.) There is a sense of participation. You are, in a modest way, involved.

Compare this to something like The Wheel or more tellingly a soap opera. You watch, you follow, and you absorb, in my view, mostly the emotion. So, you may feel something - amusement, irritation, or recognition - but the structure of the experience is different. It does not ask you to do very much. It happens in front of you, rather than through you.

In Fromm’s terms, this begins to look like the difference between ‘alienated’ and ‘non-alienated’ activity. In one, we are present as active subjects (non-alienated). In the other, we are positioned as consumers of an experience already formed (alienated).

And, like colour, the difference is not always obvious at first glance. Both are “entertainment” of a sort in the same way that both walls and glass are “coloured.” But the underlying process differs.

A good quiz show allows something to pass through you. It calls on your memory, your attention, and your curiosity. You are not simply having the experience - you are, in some small sense, being within it. But as quiz shows drift toward spectacle - towards personality, celebrity (in the case of The Wheel), narrative (the heart-warming story of the contestant), and performance – your participation narrows. The questions become secondary. The gap between actual questions lengthens. And gradually, almost imperceptibly, the experience shifts. What in one guise is something you ‘did’ in another becomes something you watch.

And there is something in this that connects to the reluctant tourist.

As you know, I have never been entirely comfortable with the idea of collecting places for the sake of it. The language of travel leans toward possession I have been here. I have seen this. But what if travel, like colour is less about what is gathered and more about what is allowed through? To move through a place without trying to hold it. To let certain impressions pass through you while others fall away. To resist the urge to accumulate experience as evidence. The reluctant tourist does not return home carrying the world in their pocket or smartphone. They return altered in ways that are difficult to name - defined, perhaps, by the particular ways in which they have been engaged. In this sense, travel becomes less about having experiences and more about being in relation to them.

Like the wall, quietly reflecting its narrow band of light.
Like the chaise, shifting between black and grey depending on how it ‘meets’ the world.
Like the quiz show, at its best, calling something forth from within rather than simply filling the space.

And perhaps like us, at our best, not full of the world - possessing it and its things, it’s objects of want - but shaped by the ways in which we participate in it. Not ‘having’ but ‘being’.

Some people might say my life is in a rut.

I don’t necessarily feel this lyric wholeheartedly, but it is a line that lands somewhere between an accusation and some form of self-awareness. Not entirely serious. But not entirely dismissible either. Because from the outside, a life can look settled in a way that is easily misread as static. A place called home. A profession that also feels like ‘home’. A set of routines that repeat with sufficient regularity to appear fixed. The Northeast. The lecture theatre. The familiar rhythms of teaching, writing, and thinking. None of this feels like a rut from within. It feels, if anything, like depth. Like a life that has been worked at rather than skimmed across. And yet there is a rut like yearning. There is, undeniably, a pull.

Not the novelty of travel for its own sake you understand – I am ‘reluctant’ - that much remains unchanged. I am still suspicious of the curated experience, the “must-see,” the performative photograph. The reluctant tourist has not suddenly become enthusiastic for the selfie. But there is a growing sense that movement itself might be a method towards something. That leaving, even temporarily, creates a kind of productive disturbance. That stepping outside of the familiar allows something to loosen.

There is something here that echoes the work of Carl Rogers who understood the self not as something fixed, but as something in process, something actualising. For Rogers, psychological growth required a loosening of rigid structures – a loosening, or maybe a retelling, of the stories we tell ourselves about who we are, what we do, and how we are expected to be. Under the right conditions, the ‘self’ becomes less defended, less certain, and, crucially, more open. Our guard drops and we become more than we were – or different to how we were at least. Travel, at its best, creates something like those conditions and creates the change through subtle dislocation. The routines that hold identity in place become interrupted. And in that gap, something happens. Maybe nothing is replaced or reinvented but maybe something is loosened.

What is interesting when being a tourist, reluctant or otherwise, is not the place, necessarily, but what happens to the self in relation to it. This was always, in truth, the point for me of wanting to travel. What would I discover about myself just as much, if not more than, what will I discover about a place.

From the beginning, The Reluctant Tourist was not conceived as a guide to destinations but as a way of thinking through them. A way of resisting what Rosa calls the acceleration of experience - the tendency to move quickly, consume efficiently, and return unchanged. Nor was it ever intended to participate in what Han describes as the logic of the “achievement subject,” by optimising leisure as if it were another domain of productivity.

If anything, it began from the opposite premise. That travel might be something closer to interruption than accumulation. That it might expand the self through unsettling it. And perhaps this is where we return to Weller’s lyric. Because to “be in a rut” implies repetition without reflection and movement without change. A kind of circling. But maybe the circling is the point? What if depth requires repetition? What if understanding is not found in constant forward motion, but in returning - to places, to ideas, to questions - with a slightly altered perception each time?

In that sense, the reluctant tourist is not escaping a rut but is, perhaps, deepening it.

There is something about a final day in a place that carries a different weight. In some ways even though there are still things to do the urgency has gone. The checklist has loosened its grip.

Our final excursion in Kraków took us underground. To the Wieliczka Salt Mine.

It is, the internet tells me, one of the oldest operating salt mines in the world. Mining began in the 13th century and continued, in various forms, until commercial extraction finally ceased in 1996. For centuries, it was not something luxurious like mined gold that sustained this region, but mined salt - the necessary mundane mineral that preserves food, sustains life, and underpinned the local economy. Essential rather than decorative.

Getting there, of course, presented its own mini drama.

In travel it seems there are moments where the unfamiliar system presents itself as a kind of test! My greatest tourist fear! The ticket machine. The timetable. The platform. All no doubt in Polish! I mean you’d think we were in Poland or something. The unmistakable feeling that everyone else understands something and that you do not. Welcome to my life!

We approached the ticket machine with the usual British combination of quiet panic and polite determination. And then - a button.

English.

Pressed once, and the entire interface reorganised itself. Chaos was averted and order restored with the emergence on the screen of the mother tongue! Tickets purchased the train journey progressed and we arrived at our destination.

The salt mine itself requires descent. Hundreds of steps, downward into the bowels of the earth. And as you go deeper the ambience shifts with the cooling of the air. You are, quite clearly, entering a different realm. Here, beneath Kraków, what sustained what life was salt, in the ground and in the sweat of the workforce.

We tend to imagine that what is valuable in life is what is visible, celebrated, and adorned. The gold of other lands, lauded on the surface, mined, in a not to dissimilar fashion to the salt, symbolises more than its worth because it has been curated as such. But the mine suggests something else. That what is most necessary is often found in the depths and often isn’t glamorous but is sustaining and useful.

There is something here that resonates with Martin Heidegger and his notion of readiness-to-hand - that the most meaningful things in our lives are not necessarily those we stand back and admire – all surface - but those we use, rely upon, and integrate into our being - depth.

Salt is not usually ornately displayed (although I do have quite a fancy salt mill). It is absorbed.

And then there are the below ground chapels. Carved entirely from salt. Chandeliers, altars, all hewn from the very substance being extracted. Faith embedded in labour. Miners, descending daily into darkness, brought with them tools and faith. A recognition, perhaps, of their felt, and real, vulnerability. Maybe we build shrines where life feels most uncertain. Maybe in the depths - literal and metaphorical - we are more inclined toward reflection, to give things meaning, and to move toward the sacred.

The return train journey offered one final vignette. Three Italian women stood at the ticket machine, engaged in a kind of animated negotiation with technology that was failing to yield to their desire to purchase travel tickets. Animated in a way richly Italian. Buttons were being pressed in what we might call a choreography of confusion.

Jonathan stepped in.

What followed was a collaboration of gestures, fragments of language, and shared intent. No common tongue, but a common goal. These women must get to the airport! Fresh from success at the start of our journey Jonathan diligently pressed buttons, pondered, gesticulated and tickets were secured. Meanwhile, I found myself next to someone who looked every inch like a local. She had abandoned the queue entirely.

I smiled and offered with a smile: “Bloody tourists.”

She laughed.

And then she said: “You can just get on the train and buy a ticket from the conductor.”

All that effort. All that uncertainty. Entirely unnecessary. Still the Italian women were overjoyed!

There is, I think, something important in this. To know how something works - how a system operates, where the shortcuts are, what is required and what is not – helps us to move through the world with a certain lightness. Without it, everything feels heavier and more uncertain. With it, the world opens its doors. Preparation is everything, or it helps at least.

This is true of ticket machines, trains, cities and, perhaps, of life.

The salt mine felt like an appropriate ending to our trip although we still needed to travel home the next day. It was a reminder that what sustains us is often deep within us. That beneath the surface of places, people, and our obsession with things there are resources that are easily overlooked precisely because they are so fundamental. Travel is not always about the accumulation of sights, experiences, and photographs. Sometimes it is about subtraction of the obvious so that you can descend into your inner world to discover that what matters most was never on the surface to begin with.

Another splendid church and what a spectacle the light show and music created - skilful use of the architecture to tell the story of creation. There are times like that when in such a deeply spiritual place, surrounded by centuries of amazing religious iconography, that I wish I could bring myself back to faith - my (in my view!) enlightened mind won’t allow me to suspend my judgement on it - but in such moments as just experienced the impact of what I’ve just witnessed would have been so much enriched by being a believer.

Tonight’s Bond film “For Your Eyes Only”.

The concept of a large coffee seems to be missed in Vienna. While larger than an espresso the large coffee is… well… small! You’d be insulted by such a small large coffee in the UK. And maybe that’s the problem – are we a nation of quantity over quality. Maybe we are as I judged by the wry smiling look of indignation on the barista’s face when I ordered two croissants. The look said “why would you want two croissants when these croissants are so good”. And she’d be right. But she’ll be thinking “well he didn’t get to be a big lad by eating just one croissant.” And she’d be right! Quantity over quality.

Back to the coffee. I haven’t had a bad cup yet despite the size!

The man beside me, clearly local, orders espresso, no topping it up with half a litre of hot water, making it watery shit, for him!

(Transposed directly from hand written notes with little editing)

Vienna - Apartment - 8 a.m. - Snowing

I went to sleep last night dreaming of how wonderful it would be to wake up in Vienna to snowfall. And you’ll never guess! Just a slight but persistent flurry that I am sure will influence the day, hopefully in a positive way.

I’ve just sat on my little balcony to drink coffee and eat my croissant, and while it is cold, it isn’t freezing cold. Well not Krakow cold anyway.

While I’m not going to do this - as it would be a waste, I feel - I do ponder if you could visit a city, barely leave the apartment, but still experience its essence.

Having spent from about 4 p.m. yesterday until now just in the apartment - I suspect you can. That would be full-scale “reluctant tourist”, would it not?

“Yes, I went to Vienna and just stayed in. It was a wonderful city.”

(Unedited almost just as they were written in my note book)

I find myself in Café Hummel in the heart of Josefstadt. Their moto ‘your city your Viennese coffee house,’ dates back to 1935. I’ve ordered the Viennese schnitzel (veal - I know but sometimes you’ve got to know - despite your ethics) with parsley potatoes. It has a somewhat glamorous, authentic feel - the cafe not the food - although lovely - a place to meet.

The drive into the city from the airport had the feel of most such drives. You leave the airport and drive through industrial complexes then out of city suburbs and retail parks. I’m sure we drove past the Arnison Centre! And then you start to hit the heart of the city. The roads and streets narrow and footfall increases and the architecture deepens and oozes into the historic.

I wandered out and found what is clearly the main thoroughfare of the area im in – lots of shops and restaurants. I have found the SPAR and bought provisions including filter coffee. Thank you to my hosts for the coffee machine in the apartment! The apartment has a little treat. It has a balcony. I may have to sit on it and write poetry!

It is part of my family’s story. Familiar. Repeated. Slightly altered each time, but essentially the same.

As a child, you don’t think of place as something abstract. You experience it through the accumulation of the senses, of sensations, repetitions, small events, and unremarkable moments that, somehow, stay with you. The smell of salt and vinegar. The sticky feel of sun cream. The distant mechanical whirr of amusement arcades. That hole in one on the putting green in Peasholm Park. These things embed themselves quietly over years and maybe decades.

And then, years later, you return. Christine and I stayed in a little village nearby and drove in to the town each day. Sometimes we walked from Scalby Mills and round the bay and other times we parked centrally and walked the clifftops and into the bustle of the shops. What strikes me is not how much has changed, but how much hasn’t. The curve of the bay remains the same. The harbour seems suspended in time, along with the tree walk, the Cliff Lift, and the amusement arcades. And the wind still arrives with the same insistence, as if it has somewhere more important to be but has paused briefly to remind you of itself out of habit.

Meanwhile, I have changed entirely. It is a strange experience to stand in a place that feels almost constant while recognising that you are not. That the child who once ran along this beach exists now only as memory and in photographs. You know the ones where you sent the film cartridge away in the Truprint envelop to be developed, that arrived back a week or so later with a thud on the porch floor. Oh, the excitement to flick through the printed images and remember. We’ve lost something along the way with the digital, I fear.

Certain places anchor us.

Martin Heidegger wrote that to be human is not simply to exist in the world, but to dwell in it and to inhabit places in such a way that they gather meaning around us. A place, in this sense, is never just a physical location. It is something lived into. Something that holds our past, even when we are no longer there, no longer aware of it.

Scarborough, then, is not just Scarborough. It is a place in which I have dwelt. And yet, as I write and contemplate it, another thought arrives. I have recently been reading Orlando, and there is a moment where Virginia Woolf lingers, beautifully and indulgently, over the passage of time. She writes that season’s shift, light changes and nature unfold in quiet detail. And then, almost mischievously, she steps back and admits that she could have simply written: “time passed.” It is such a disarming moment because she has just spent pages doing what that single phrase could have done in three words. I could just say I go to Scarborough, but I don’t.

And thinking about standing in Scarborough, I contemplate that while nothing seems to have changed - the sea, the curve of the bay, the pull of the tide - everything has changed. Not dramatically. But relentlessly. People replaced. Shops altered. Faces gone. Generations folded into one another. Time has passed. And yet here I am, trying to write it. Trying to hold it, somehow, in sentences. I could just say I go to Scarborough, but I don’t.

In a world that feels increasingly fast - what Hartmut Rosa would call socially accelerated - where everything moves, updates, refreshes, and disappears, we seem to respond by documenting, writing, posting, and recording. As if, by doing so, we might slow something down. Or at least mark that it was here. That I was there. That we were there. But what ‘is’ is in the place not in the artefact surely. Not in the words or the photograph. But left in the place to be returned to?

Woolf’s words linger with me. I could have just written “time passed.” Why, then, do we not?

Why the paragraphs, the blogs, the photographs, the descriptions of places that, in truth, will continue without me? Perhaps because to just say time passed is to accept indifference. Whereas to write, to describe, to dwell by returning in words, is to push back against indifference. To insist that the place, the moment, the version of myself matters enough to be noticed.

Not everything changes at the same speed. Some things endure long enough for us to recognise ourselves against them. Amidst the changing facades, there are still fixed points. But thinking of the world as it is right now for some, I am aware, that this is a kind of privilege. Because not all places are allowed to remain. For many people, the places that once anchored them are altered beyond recognition, not slowly, through time, but suddenly, through conflict, displacement, or disaster. Streets get erased. Buildings get reduced to a memory. The geography of people replaced by absence not by nostalgia. For the fortunate, to speak or write of returning comes from a position of relative stability, luxury even.

A place like Scarborough becomes more than a seaside town. It becomes evidence that continuity is still possible. That some parts of the world are permitted to unfold slowly, rather than rupture. That saddens me though for the bruised and battered places but still gives me hope that all may experience continuity in some way.

And perhaps this is what I have been returning to all along. Not just the beach. Not just the harbour. But the slow unfolding of time itself. My continuity. Places hold more than moments, they hold versions of us that refuse to disappear. And in returning to them, or writing them back into existence, we are not stopping time, but we are, perhaps, asking it, however briefly, to be felt.

5 a.m. the alarm sounds in our Krakow apartment. We rise at this unearthly hour because our taxi is arriving at 6 a.m. to take us to today’s destination. We’re first in the taxi – a large 10-seater – joined by a couple and their child and then a solo traveller (“maybe he’s a reluctant tourist”, I ponder). We detect a Northern Irish accent from the mother and an English accent from the father. We are in familiar territory what with Jonathan being married to Kathryn in the same geographic configuration!

After an hour and a half of hushed chat the taxi pulls up at our destination. We disembark. Our tickets are checked and we are labelled with a coloured sticker to denote our group. We pass into the visitors’ centre and have our bags checked airport style. Audio guides distributed. Our groups gather each checking out the colour of each other’s sticker. We are with the right group. Labelled. There is a rhythm to this that feels familiar. The choreography of the visitor economy. “Just feels like going to Beamish” one of us comments with slight bewilderment.

And so it was when we arrived at Auschwitz.

It’s certainly not that the place has been trivialised by the routine admissions process. Far from it. The staff are careful, respectful, almost solemn in tone. But still the mechanics of arrival resemble those of any other site - a car park, a visitor centre, the murmur of languages from around the world. People adjusting scarves against the cold.

Still, the day itself seemed to carry an appropriate gravity. The sort of Polish winter cold that I can tell you seeps through gloves and coats. The kind of cold that settles into the bones. Maybe it’s the cold or maybe it’s knowing the place that is to come?

We walked through the concrete underpass from the visitor centre, bleak and foreboding. From the speakers embedded in the walls the names of the people murdered are read out slowly and methodically. At first the ‘tone’ of the place felt strangely abstract but the naming of the victims of this horror roots you in the events that took place. Name after name after name. The rhythm of the list did something that statistics never can. Such huge numbers are in many ways too abstract, but each individual name carries a life. A family. A childhood somewhere in Europe. A kitchen table. A street corner. A voice.

By the time we emerged into Auschwitz itself, the lump in my throat was palpable. And there above the gate, in its chilling bureaucratic irony, was the phrase, Arbeit macht frei. Work sets you free. The words still suspended there in metal. One of the most grotesque sentences ever engineered by a modern state.

Inside the camp the structures feel rational, somehow normal. Rows of brick buildings organised in straight lines. The architecture of administration.

It was in one of these buildings that I saw the shoes. A huge display of them. Hundreds maybe even thousands upon thousands. Darkened by time and warped by age. A vista of leather and cloth and rubber. Shoes of children. Shoes of men. Shoes worn thin by walking. The shoes of those who perished.

And then, almost absurdly, there was a pair that seemed to belong somewhere else entirely. Elegant. Narrow. High-heeled. A hint of the extravagant, unmistakably dress shoes. The sort a woman might wear to a wedding. Or a dance. I stood there looking at them for a long time. Because those shoes suggested something about the woman who packed them. She did not bring them to die. She brought them because she expected to need them again.

Let us call her Rivka. We cannot know her name but someone like her certainly existed. Rivka might have been thirty-two. Perhaps from Kraków itself, or from somewhere nearby. She had dark hair that she kept carefully pinned when she left the house. Her hands had the faint roughness of someone accustomed to practical work, but she still took care in how she dressed when the occasion demanded.

The shoes had been bought a few years earlier for a cousin’s wedding. She had saved a little money from her job in the shop where she worked. They were not luxurious, but they were good shoes – for best. Shoes for an evening when the world felt at her feet.

When the orders came - the relocation, the resettlement, whatever bureaucratic phrase had been used - she packed a suitcase. She couldn’t take much. She took a coat, some photographs, a few pieces of clothing. And the shoes. Because she assumed there would be a future moment when they might be needed again.

I imagine her hesitating before placing them in the case. They take up space, these shoes. But perhaps there will be music somewhere in the future. Perhaps there will be a hall. Perhaps life will resume. Hope often hides in small practical decisions.

The train that brought Rivka east would eventually arrive at Birkenau. Birkenau feels infinite and vast, compared to the enclosed feeling of Auschwitz. The rail tracks run straight into the camp itself, cutting through the vastness like a deep gash. The famous gatehouse looms ahead. This is a place that photographs cannot quite capture properly.

Standing on that platform beyond the gatehouse, you become aware of stillness, silence. The cold wind moves across the flat ground with nothing to stop it. This was the place where the trains arrived. Where the doors were opened. Where people stepped down onto the platform with their suitcases and bundles. Where Rivka might have stepped down too. The instructions were clear. Luggage was to be placed in a pile. It would be taken to the accommodation blocks. The lie was simple and effective. People obeyed because obedience made sense.

Rivka would have placed her suitcase among the others. A small label attached. Carefully closed. Inside it were the shoes. She and the shoes would never meet again. They were separated within minutes of arrival.

The shoes eventually found their way to the warehouse buildings where the possessions of the murdered were sorted and redistributed across the Reich. What could be used was used. What could be sold was sold. And what could not be used was discarded. Somehow this pair of shoes survived. Rivka did not.

And so decades later they sit behind glass in a room full of thousands of others. A testimony to death, but maybe also to expectation, and to hope.

Because what those shoes reveal is this. The woman who packed them believed there would still be dancing. Hope.

What strikes me most is Phileas Fogg himself.

He is not the typical adventurer. He does not appear to desire travel in the romantic sense. He doesn’t seem to yearn for the distant mountain or the exotic landscape. He is, in many ways, a reluctant tourist! A man propelled into motion almost accidentally by a wager made in the Reform Club. The world becomes a route rather than a destination.

Interestingly, while the narrative rushes forward with timetables, trains and steamships, Fogg himself rarely seems hurried. His composure is present to the point of almost being absurd. Delays occur. Boats get missed. Railways end abruptly. But he maintains a calm dignity, as though the act of travelling itself is primary and what underpins the urgency of the timetable. The timetable is secondary. He is racing around the globe, yet he remains strangely unaccelerated.

Reading the novel alongside Stefan Zweig’s memoir The World of Yesterday adds an interesting insight. Zweig recalls that before the First World War one could travel across much of the world without passports, visas, or bureaucratic controls. Borders existed, of course, but they were not the administrative fortresses they would later become. A traveller could board trains, cross frontiers, and move through continents with a degree of ease that now feels almost unimaginable.

The modern passport regime is so normal to us that it rarely provokes us to reflect. We assume that identity documents, visas, border queues and biometric gates are simply the natural order of things. But historically they aren’t. They are relatively recent inventions.

In the late nineteenth century, the world through which Verne’s Fogg travels was already being reshaped by industrial capitalism. Railways, steamships and telegraphs were shrinking distances and synchronising time across continents. Marx and Engels observed this process with insightful clarity in The Communist Manifesto, writing that capitalism has an almost inevitable tendency to expand across the globe, dissolving local boundaries and drawing the entire world into a single system of exchange.

Yet this globalising force carried a paradox. While capitalism required the rapid circulation of goods, labour and capital, the modern nation-state simultaneously developed new mechanisms for controlling populations. The same period that gave us global railway networks also produced increasingly sophisticated systems of identification, documentation and border management. Movement expanded - but it was catalogued. Freedom widened - but it was administered.

By the twentieth century the passport had become one of the defining technologies of modern sovereignty. The small booklet we carry imposes the position that the world is divided into territories and that individuals belong to one of them rather than to the whole - the whole of humanity. Michel Foucault, the French philosopher, might suggest that modern power does not forbid movement but it records, categorises and manages it. The traveller becomes a subject of documentation within wider systems of knowledge and control.

Another way of understanding the modern travelling world is to notice three technologies that structure it.

The first is the clock. Industrial modernity required time to become precise, standardised and synchronised. The spread of railways made this necessity obvious. A train cannot run according to dozens of local times. Time had to be unified. By the late nineteenth century the world was organised into time zones anchored to Greenwich, producing what historian Ian Bartky calls a campaign for global temporal uniformity. The world had, quite literally, been placed on the clock.

The second technology is the timetable. Once time is standardised, movement itself becomes programmable. Railways, steamships and later airlines operate according to precise schedules. Phileas Fogg is perhaps the perfect fictional embodiment of this system. His entire journey is organised through timetables. Each connection must be made. Each delay threatens the wager. Yet, curiously, he never seems dominated by the schedule. He inhabits the timetable without becoming enslaved to it. We can learn something from that.

The third technology is the passport. Clocks regulate time, timetables regulate movement, and passports regulate identity. They link the travelling body to the sovereign authority of a nation-state – something which, like Fogg, is a complete ‘fiction’. Where earlier travellers often moved with relative freedom, the twentieth century increasingly required individuals to carry documents proving who they were and where they belonged. Together these three devices - clock, timetable and passport - form part of the hidden infrastructure of modern mobility.

They are so familiar that we rarely notice them (except when something goes wrong). Yet they organise the experience of travelling through the world. Seen in this context, Around the World in Eighty Days is not just a travel story but a product of a newly synchronised world. Fogg’s wager depends on a planet that has been disciplined by clocks, timetables and telegraphs.

Time, in and of itself, is another element that sits beneath the entire story.

Michel Foucault might describe this as another form of modern power. The organisation of life through precise temporal structures. Industrial societies do not just regulate space, they regulate time. And Verne plays with this system. The famous twist at the end of the novel - where Fogg unknowingly gains a day by travelling eastward - reveals that even the most carefully measured global timetable contains its own paradoxes. In other words, the world may be organised by clocks, but the earth itself refuses to behave entirely according to them. It just keeps going round and round!

Byung-Chul Han explains some of the above by saying that in the contemporary world we often experience mobility as freedom, yet it increasingly occurs within invisible systems of monitoring, optimisation and performance. We move faster than ever, but within structures that shape and track our behaviour.

Then there’s Hartmut Rosa who describes modernity as characterised by social acceleration - the speeding up of technological processes, social change and the pace of everyday life. Travel is perhaps one of the most visible examples of this. Where Fogg requires eighty days to circle the globe, we can now do it in less than forty-eight hours. Rosa argues that speed does not necessarily produce meaningful experience. In fact, the faster the world becomes, the harder it can be to establish what he calls resonance with it - those moments when we genuinely encounter places, people and landscapes rather than simply passing through them.

This is what makes Fogg so interesting. He is participating in one of the great acceleration projects of the nineteenth century - the attempt to compress global space into a period of measurable time. His entire journey is structured around the timetable. Yet he never seems psychologically at the mercy of it. He doesn’t rush through places in a frenzy of consumption. He remains oddly composed, attentive to honour, to fairness, and to the dignity of others. When he rescues Aouda in India, it is not part of the wager and jeopardises it. When he helps Passepartout, it is not strategic. These actions occur as though his moral compass operates independently of the race around the globe.

In this sense, Fogg might be the first reluctant tourist of the industrial age. He is travelling at extraordinary speed, but he refuses to allow speed to define him. For me this was the magic contained in Verne’s story as I read it. The wager is about time. But the real narrative is about character.

A Reluctant Tourist Reflection

Reading Verne and Zweig together makes me wonder whether travel has subtly changed its meaning. In Fogg’s era the world was just opening up through railways and steamships. Today it feels, despite these structures that we are both more connected and more divided. Flights span continents in hours, yet we move through airports, visas, border gates and digital checkpoints that remind us that the world has been partitioned into administratively managed spaces.

Perhaps this is why slow travel appeals to me so much. Somewhere between the timetable and the passport control there is still the possibility of something else. The simple act of being present in a place. Experiencing the place to absorb it rather than experiencing the place to record your experiencing of it in the selfie. Or, turning the lens on the reluctant tourist, recording it in a substack article!

Fogg races around the world in eighty days. Yet somehow he never seems in a hurry. Perhaps that is the real lesson for the reluctant tourist. He wants to move through the world without allowing the world’s speed to move through him.

Book list

Bartky, I. R. (2007) One Time Fits All: The Campaigns for Global Uniformity.
Foucault, M. (1977) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison.
Han, B.-C. (2017) Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power.
Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1848) The Communist Manifesto.
Rosa, H. (2013) Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity.
Torpey, J. (2000) The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State.
Verne, J. (1873) Around the World in Eighty Days. London: Penguin.
Zweig, S. (1942) The World of Yesterday. London: Pushkin Press.

We leave the building wrapped up like Arctic explorers - channelling Ernest Shackleton - to brave the now balmy minus eleven degrees centigrade. “Aye, but it’s a different sort of cold,” we say, channelling a slightly altered familiar British refrain. You know the people who, when in Spain and searching for a Full English or a Sunday roast, insist that over there it’s “a different type of heat.”

It isn’t.
It’s heat.
And here in Kraków it’s cold.

We head towards the delightful Market Square - Rynek Główny - and settle on a place called Gehanowska Pod Słońcem. Google Translate informs me that the name means something along the lines of The Ciechanów Girl Under the Sun. Ciechanów, it turns out after a quick bit of phone-based scholarship, is a small Polish town about a hundred kilometres north of Warsaw, complete with its own medieval castle and brewing tradition. Quite why a girl from there should be under the sun in Kraków remains unclear.

Gehanowska occupies a handsome fifteenth-century building that once belonged to the Gehans, a family of goldsmiths. Inside, the thick stone walls and deep-set windows quietly inform us of the building’s age. The interior is warm and timbered, aged with centuries of smoke and polish, and the tables sit beneath soft yellow light that seems designed more for lingering conversation than efficient turnover.

Through the windows you can see Rynek Główny, the great medieval market square that forms the heart of Kraków - one of the largest in Europe - opening out like a stage where the everyday theatre of the city quietly goes about its business. The windows frame the morning, and we can observe the scarves and hats of the determined Kraków pedestrians negotiating the cold.

Jonathan and Luke both order a Full English - see previous comment about British people abroad – I sometimes despair! [smiley face, lol] I opt for something rather more geographically adventurous: shakshuka. The word literally means “mixture”, and the dish originates somewhere in the culinary overlap between the Middle East and North Africa - Tunisia if you want to anchor it somewhere specific. Tomatoes, peppers and onions simmered with cumin, eggs cooked gently in the pan, finished with fresh coriander.

Delightful.

The clientele was a mixture of young women gathered around a large table and a scattering of couples. Interestingly, everyone seemed to be speaking English, though with accents that suggested they were from somewhere in Eastern Europe. Perhaps, I wondered, they were a group of friends who had all studied together at university and were now meeting again for a reunion somewhere roughly in the middle of their respective lives and geographies. You can imagine the sort of thing.

A couple sat in the window seat which, I had read somewhere, was supposedly ideal for early morning sunshine and the quiet pleasure of newspaper reading - perhaps in some rather delightful bygone era. The fella in the Leeds United scarf wasn’t reading a newspaper – he was on his phone so maybe reading the news – but also maybe not. Just saying. I know, I know - judgmental. But there you are.

Day one was always going to be exploration day.

The whole reason we had come to Kraków - at the boys’ request - was to visit Auschwitz, but we had decided to leave that for Day Two so we could acclimatise first. It felt right somehow to arrive in the city cautiously before confronting the weight of that history. We left the square and headed through the cobbled streets towards Wawel Royal Castle, which has its own link to the Second World War.

Wawel Royal Castle sits above Kraków, a statement of grandeur rather than just a building. Perched on its limestone hill overlooking the Vistula, Krakow’s river, it has been the symbolic heart of Polish statehood for centuries. Polish kings lived here, were crowned here, and in many cases were buried beneath it in the cathedral next door. As a single place it carries Polish history for this royal connection and a more sinister one. Power has run through this place, and it contains that sense well.

Buildings and fortifications have been there since the 11th century, but much of what we saw was developed between the 14th and 16th centuries, particularly under the Jagiellonian dynasty. In that period Wawel became one of the most impressive royal residences in Central Europe. Italian architects were brought in during the Renaissance, which explains the striking courtyard arcades that feel almost Florentine rather than northern European. It is one of those places where the architecture tells you that Poland was once deeply connected to the cultural currents of the wider continent.

I’m reading Stefan Zweig’s ‘The World of Yesterday’ at the moment. He was an Austrian writer, a man of words, who in this book charts his life before and through the First World War, his life in Vienna, his travels, the emergence of Hitler and the coming of the Second World War. He posted the manuscript for the book to his publisher the day before he and his wife committed suicide out of despair over the rise of Nazism and the decimation of European culture – both things that had led to his exhaustion and no doubt exasperation. As we stand in Wawel Castel in Krakow the spectre of those days are brought to mind. And, perhaps uncomfortably, the parallels with our own unsettled times are not difficult to see.

When Nazi Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Wawel was transformed from a symbol of Polish sovereignty into something much darker. The castle became the headquarters of Hans Frank, the Nazi Governor-General of occupied Poland. Frank turned the royal residence into his personal seat of power. Where Polish kings had once ruled, Nazi administrators now issued orders that governed one of the most brutal occupation regimes in Europe.

As we stood in the courtyard, Jonathan showed us photographs of German soldiers stationed at Wawel during the occupation. The building had barely changed. In my mind’s eye the soldiers could have emerged from one of the archways at any moment and would likely have recognised some of the sentiments now being voiced across parts of the world as I write this. The scapegoats may change; the message rarely does.

The atmosphere, having seen the photographs, was unsettling. The courtyard that tourists, ourselves included, now stroll through, cameras in hand, was once filled with SS officials, and the machinery of occupation and fascism. Hans Frank even used the castle as a venue for receptions and ceremonies, attempting to cloak Nazi authority in the prestige of Polish royal architecture. It was a symbolic act of domination - occupying not just the country, but its historical centre.

Today the castle has been restored as a museum and national monument, filled once again with tapestries, armour, paintings and royal regalia. We walked through the Renaissance courtyard, climbed the cathedral steps, and looked out over the river, pondering history as though it were a sequence of chapters - the earlier ones neatly closed and consigned to the past. But it is never quite like that. History should teach us, yet what it often teaches is that it teaches some of us nothing at all. The lesson is there; we simply choose not to see it.

And perhaps that is part of the experience of travelling through Central Europe. The buildings do not simply show you history in the way an exhibition might. They are the history. The buildings have lived it, and they reveal it to those prepared to look. Looking, though, and peeling back the layers is not always comfortable. It becomes clear how power moves through places, leaving traces long after the uniforms have disappeared.

Perhaps more people should travel to places like this. Places show you things.

“Oh no, hang on.
That will only mean more people in these places.”
The reluctant tourist reminds himself.

I’m reminded of the Stoic philosophy idea that you must enjoy the journey as well as the destination – it is all part and parcel of the adventure. But what I observe is rush. I observe people desperately trying to hustle onto the train – as soon as it pulls up at the station they are at the door before the people inside have even begun to disembark then a shuffle ensues where people who should have waited have to wriggle themselves to the side or back to let people off the train. On an aeroplane the ‘unfasten seat belts’ sign has only just been turned off and within milliseconds people are out of their seats jostling to get bags out of the overheads only to then stand for ten minutes in the aisle waiting for disembarking to commence and then find themselves in the queue at border control only feet in front of those of us who wait until last to exit in a relaxed fashion (the reluctant tourist types). People you see are rushing about, as though rushing is going to make any difference. Slowly is the fastest way to get to where you want to be as Andre de Shields said.

We landed in Krakow with the useful kafuffle outlined above and found ourselves at border control. And while I appreciate that we are in a sterile airport environment what struck me, and continued to strike me across our stay, was the things that are the same rather than the things that are different. The language of the signs was different - although the arrogance of the English-speaking nations demands that they are also in English – I mean as a nation we wouldn’t want things to be too hard for us would we. But, even without the signs and the language we could have figured our way through based on the ‘symbols’ that were present and the gesticulations of border guards and officials.

Get a look at this – Jonathan nods discreetly to one of our fellow queuers – dry robe on and not a body of water for 400 miles. I’m sure you are aware of the dry robe. A dry robe is, in essence, a portable changing room for people who wish to look as though they’ve just conquered the North Atlantic, even if they’ve merely paddled apologetically in the sea at Whitley Bay. Or been on a flight to Krakow….. Heroically oversized. You don’t wear a dry robe so much as inhabit it. It swallows you whole in a fleece-lined cocoon, like a high-visibility sleeping bag that has developed strong opinions about wind chill. It announces I have done something outdoorsy. Except you haven’t have you – you’re standing in a queue at Krakow airport rocking the aerodynamic profile of a small marquee. Resembling a penguin who has discovered the latest must have accessory via retail therapy.

I laugh – Look at her fella ‘n’ all! Shinner! Jonathan looks slightly baffled with a wry smile on his face wondering what is coming next. Shinner? he says. Aye I respond shins up lampposts and hangs Temu Union flags and St. George crosses [see footnote] He laughs a controlled laugh. How many of these voted leave I say quietly – and then louder I voted remain - the queues not my fault – but are we bitter – no (we are a bit) – I’ll queue without complaint so the good people of Krakow can let me in. ‘Shinner’ spotting becomes our new sporting pursuit.

Our taxi driver Lucas is waiting for us on the other side near the doors to the airport as planned. The ‘shinner’ is bellowing down his phone you’d better get back here quick smart I’m not standing in the airport like an idiot (it looks like you are mate – I think) cos you couldn’t be bothered to wait for me. I suspect he stops just short of I’m British you know – we used to rule the world! His wife’s dry robe billows in the chill wind coming through the doors to the airport as they open and close for people whose taxis are available to them. Karma.

There is something fascinating about how we travel. The performance of identity doesn’t pause at passport control. We carry it with us – the coats, the accents, the volume settings, the indignation at inconvenience. Airports may be globalised spaces of sameness, but we bring our small unique national habits along for the ride.

The taxi ride is uneventful and, as with the airport, as we travel through the outskirts of the city, it is the familiarity not the difference that strikes me. The only visible signs of being in a different country is the language of the signs – or the fact that it’s -14 centigrade.

The buildings change as we enter the old town. The first thing I notice is the sound of the car tyres on cobbles - a low percussion beneath us. The car seemed suddenly inappropriate, like a laptop opened in a cathedral. The streets narrowed and the buildings rose with a kind of quiet authority practiced across time. Faded apricot, chalky cream, a green that had once been vibrant. Then lintels, carved stone, arched windows set deep into thick walls. Nothing flashy. Just age, worn thoughtfully.

Driving through it felt a little like an imposition, as though we were passing through someone else’s memory. You could feel time. And in that first five minutes, before we had parked or unpacked, I felt a recalibration begin. We’d left the airport behind; we’d left the contemporary city behind; and the pace slowed. We didn’t slow it, the place slowed it.

Once our accommodation was located, we decided to go off into the night and seek out provisions for the morning – maybe some eggs, some coffee, bread, snacks. Our mobile devices found us a convenience store that was still open and we headed into the night. Well, I say ‘into the night’, it was a three-minute walk away. We found what we needed, paid the delightful shopkeeper whose English was very good – much better than my non-existent Polish (must try harder for future trips) – the only problem was acquiring a lighter for Luke (they had none) but we spotted matches on the counter – but our use of the word matches resulted in no recognition at all – so pointing ensued – and worked a treat. We headed back to the accommodation.

Enroute a man approached us with a clipboard with photographs of scantily clad woman to show us. You like big titties he said. No, no we all responded jovially. Ah you like little titties. We insisted emphatically No no! No titties thank you.

Welcome to Krakow!

Footnotes:

· shin up phrasal verb - To climb quickly and awkwardly up a vertical object, especially by gripping it with the hands and pressing or hooking the shins against it for leverage. e.g. He shinned up the lamppost to hang the flags because he loves his country. Origin: From shin (noun), referring to the front part of the lower leg, indicating the use of the shins in climbing. Usage note: Often implies an improvised or slightly undignified ascent, typically without proper climbing equipment.

· Krakow Old Town Apartments – Swietego, Jana 13 – highly recommended

I have never particularly wanted to be a tourist. That maybe feels like a strange sentence to write at the beginning of what will, ostensibly, be a travel ‘newsletter’. But it is true. I am wary of airports (or anywhere) filled with identical coffee chains. I distrust the word authentic. I am suspicious of my own motives when I take photographs especially the ubiquitous selfie. And then there are people – who, to almost quote Oliver Burkeman (in Four Thousand Weeks) – you may have noticed are a perpetual irritating phenomenon who are always impinging on you in countless frustrating ways. They are on the aeroplanes, on the trains and buses, and in their role as touristy tourists are likely to be in some of the places I’d want to be.

I do not feel the pull of novelty for its own sake. I am not drawn to curated experiences, ranking lists – “top 10 places to visit in Paris” type things - or the curated Instagram performance of “having been somewhere.” In parallel I’d be a huge fan of a Netflix category – ‘things on Netflix that no one else is watching’. I’d watch all of those shows! So, I’d be drawn to ‘10 places in Paris no one ever goes to’! Except if there was such a list then people would start going there. I mean what use would that be to me! Pretentious – undoubtedly. The reluctant tourist does not excuse his foibles – he documents them.

And yet, I want to travel, and have travelled, though not extensively to be honest. But intend to remedy this and as is my way, I want to write about the places I visit. I’m a fan of journalling you see. I want to move through places and see things in order to think not just to have visited.

So, The Reluctant Tourist is not a guide to destinations. It is not a list of recommendations. It is not a catalogue of “must-sees.” It is an attempt to understand what happens to the self when it leaves the familiar and passes, slowly, through other systems of history, power, architecture, language and memory. I am interested in what geography does to thought. The best way to understand the world is to experience it while thinking about it.

Why “Reluctant”?

There’s a more fundamental reason I’m ‘reluctant’. Because tourism, in its contemporary form, as with many other things, is inseparable from acceleration. We move quickly. We consume efficiently. We extract experience risking returning home unchanged. We have become ‘experience collectors’ rather than ‘experience experiencers’. The modern traveller risks becoming what the philosopher Byung-Chul Han calls the “achievement subject” - optimising leisure in the same way we optimise work. We measure value by density - counting experiences rather than inhabiting them.

We do not dwell.

Hartmut Rosa argues that modern life is marked by social acceleration - faster communication, faster transport, faster decision-making. Travel, paradoxically, has become part of that acceleration. Weekends are scheduled with military precision. Cities are “done,” ticked off a list of “must-sees.” “Have you not been to [insert current essential destination]?” The faint hum of FOMO follows close behind. But what if travel were something else? What if it were a method?

Travel as Inquiry

I am interested in the way power becomes visible through landscape. In some cities, authority is baroque and monumental. In others, it is administrative and discreet. In some places, history lingers in facades and café rituals. Michel Foucault reminds us that power is not merely something possessed by institutions; it circulates. It is embedded in architecture, in norms, in the ordinary choreography of daily life. You can feel this in certain railway stations. In the layout of a square. In the way people queue - or do not. What amazed me during a recent trip was how similar things were rather than how different. To move across places attentively is to notice these patterns, to sit with them, watch them, feel them, emerge through them.

Leaving as an Act of Reflection

There is something psychologically unsettling about departure that also makes me ‘reluctant’. To leave the Northeast of England – my home - with its post-industrial solidity, its history of physical labour and community - is not just about a change of scenery. The intention is to feel my assumptions loosen. Every place has its invisible grammar, its own ‘iron cage’ that we only notice when it disappears. Travel, then, becomes more about contrast than arrival somewhere. Less about novelty, more about perspective. In many ways I’m not interested in becoming “a citizen of the world.” I am interested in understanding more clearly the place I already inhabit.

The Risk of Romanticism

There is also a danger in travel writing I feel, and also in the performative society we now inhabit. It is easy to exoticise, to render travel seductive in a way that flattens complexity. Easy too to aestheticise - to convert geography into aesthetic experience and forget that every square, station and skyline is shaped by power and history. To admire the surface without asking what forces made it possible is a missed opportunity. It’s easy to turn complex societies into mood boards. The reluctant tourist must resist this temptation. This space will not offer sweeping conclusions about cultures or confident declarations about “what this city means.” It will offer fragments. Impressions. Questions. It will assume that every place is internally contradictory. It will assume that I am, too.

What This Substack Will Be

I hope The Reluctant Tourist will engage in a series of essays written from, and about, movement. Some will emerge from recent journeys. Others from shorter crossings - a train south, a day in a gallery, an afternoon in a café. Some will not leave the UK at all.

Each piece will circle around a handful of interests. What does history feel like when it hardens into architecture? How does power disclose itself in the choreography of public space? Can travel resist acceleration, or does it simply participate in it? Does distance clarify identity - or destabilise it? Is movement a form of escape, or a more demanding encounter?

There will be trains and planes. Cities. Museums and cafés. There will also be reflections on the possibility of retirement, on time, and on the quiet shifting of professional - and, I hope, personal - identity. This is not a departure from the questions I explore in my day job - power, communication, change and slowness - but an extension of them, refracted through geography rather than practice.

A Slower Way of Moving

If there is a desire here, it is a modest one. Travel more slowly. Read before departing. Listen to the background hum. Allow the place to act upon the soul. The reluctant tourist does not collect experiences. He allows them to accumulate. He travels carefully. He thinks as he moves. (He also writes about himself in the third person, this will not become a habit, probably!)

If this resonates with you - then welcome.