Ziggy and I convened regularly in the greasy spoon café next door to nurse hangovers or refuel after frosty runs along the river. We spoke incessantly of travel and adventure ideas. Ziggy wanted to live in Africa. I wanted to hit the road. We were impatient for our course to end and the chance to charge across the start line into real life. Until then, I was burning off my energy with the university boxing club, muddy football matches and tomfoolery. It was fun, but what I really wanted was, once again, what Laurie Lee was doing.
Ziggy and I headed to the café with our small pile of books. I ordered mugs of tea while Ziggy found a table in the corner. He cleared a circle in the steamed-up window with his sleeve, then peered out. I took a slurp of tea and opened my new book. I have the same copy beside me today, faded and torn. It falls open to well-thumbed passages for I reread it almost every year.
Back then, I gorged on books about polar exploration and mountaineering. These tales on the margins of possibility – the best of the best doing the hardest of the hard – were exhilarating but unattainable to someone as callow as me. Laurie’s story was immediately different. It read like a poetic version of my own life. The cover showed a young man walking towards a red-roofed village under a clear blue sky. Bored with his claustrophobic life, Laurie dreamed of seeing the world. He didn’t have much cash. His mum waved goodbye from the garden gate. He felt more homesick than heroic. So far, so me.
I was disillusioned preparing for a career that did not excite me as much as I thought life ought to. I had gone to university only because all my friends were going. It was a privileged but naive decision, for it had literally not occurred to me that it was possible to do anything else. I was training to be a teacher, but dreaming of being an explorer. While my classmates sent their CVs out to schools, I researched joining the Foreign Legion, the SAS, or MI6. I wanted mayhem, not timetables. Today, it astonishes me how little I knew of life back then that I saw only binary options: the Legion, or lesson planning. Sensible and realistic, or thrilling but absurd.
‘How does anything exciting happen in a blasted office?’ Laurie exclaimed after taking a job with Messrs Randall & Payne, Chartered Accountants, when he left school. Laurie’s girlfriend urged, ‘If it isn’t impertinent to ask, why don’t you clear out of Stroud? You’re simply wasting your time, and you’ll never be content there. Even if you don’t find happiness you’ll at least be living.’
Soon after, Laurie wrote a brief resignation letter.
‘Dear Mr Payne, I am not suited to office work and resign from my job with your firm. Yours sincerely Laurie Lee.’
LAURIE LEFT HIS GIRLFRIEND and his home one midsummer morning and walked to London in search of fame and fortune. He had never seen a city before. He found work building ‘three unbeautiful blocks of flats’, pushing a wheelbarrow of cement through a tableau of Cockneys and con men whose priorities were petty theft, gambling and cheap cigarettes. A year later Laurie had ‘little to show for it except calloused hands and one printed poem’. But he was saving money, biding his time and summoning his nerve. ‘I never felt so beefily strong in my life,’ he recalled. ‘I remember standing one morning on the windy roof-top, and looking round at the racing sky, and suddenly realising that once the job was finished I could go anywhere I liked in the world. There was nothing to stop me, I would be penniless, free, and could just pack up and walk away.’
Laurie considered various foreign lands for his first adventure, ‘names with vaguely operatic flavours’. But a pretty Argentinian girl had taught him a single sentence of Spanish, ‘Deme un vaso de agua, por favor’.
And so Laurie chose Spain.
Fifteen years ago, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning sang me a siren song in that Oxford café. I have been smitten by Spain ever since. I love the evening light laden with citrus blossom and the rook-like chatter of old women, dark-eyed and kinder than they let on. I fell, too, for Laurie’s style of travel. He walked slowly and lived frugally (except after a windfall when he splurged extravagantly. Once he earned enough to buy ‘a few litres of wine’ and take a couple of girls up onto a roof terrace overlooking the city to share it). He camped on hilltops, bathed in rivers and enjoyed his encounters with the characters he met on the road.
Laurie shaped the way I came to approach my own travelling. Travel writers need not pretend to be infallible or invincible like the traditional stiff-upper-lip explorers. Journeys didn’t have to be sensational or competitive. Adventure was not only for self-anointed ‘Adventurers’. Laurie showed me a different outlook; that ordinary people could also see the world. I shouldn’t feel like an imposter. All I needed to do was go. I didn’t need experience or ability. Those I would earn along the way. This scrawny young poet gave me the guts and the permission to begin. Everything I hoped for in life was already out there, hiding in plain sight. I would only have myself to blame if I missed my chance at life. Enough then of the excuses!
I did not play the violin and so wouldn’t be able to busk across Spain, but surely I could do something? I was giddy with the excitement of youthful possibility. My student days were drawing to a close and it was time to decide my direction.
I sat down at my desk, shoved aside football boots and coffee mugs, and rummaged for a pen. I stared for a while at a blank sheet of paper, then began to write.
Oxford,
December 2000,
Dear Mr. Walker,
Thank you for offering me a teaching position at your school. I would definitely enjoy working here on a permanent basis. However there is so much to see and do in the world. If I was to settle into teaching now I am sure that I would enjoy it, but there would always be something gnawing at me. Therefore I have decided that I am going to go ahead with my original plan to take two or three years cycling around the globe. Deep down I know that [teaching is] probably the sensible option. However, even deeper down I know that if I have the chance to do something now and do not take it, I may always regret it.
Yours Sincerely,
Alastair Humphreys
Fri, 20 Nov 2015, 18:07
TO: Alastair Humphreys
FROM: Becks Violin
SUBJECT: Re: Can you teach me the violin really quickly?
Hi Alastair, Thanks for your email. Wow, what an exciting challenge! I’d love to help you out and am sure we could arm you with a few tunes (with some dedication!) for your adventure …
Becks
YOU CAN BE SURE that an adventure plan is good if the idea makes you simultaneously excited and scared, and you are unsure whether it is brilliant or stupid.