I have never been someone who believes that travel or a holiday in an exotic location is the best way to spend my leisure-time.  Indeed, I will refuse to holiday with certain people because they are on a mission, requiring a lot of effort to be put in; whereas the only incentive and reason for me to go on an overseas excursion is to find a nicer setting to relax in.

My limited interest in travelling to foreign shores is frequently criticised as unadventurous or sedentary behaviour.  However, my critics are usually rehearsing a platitude, and a common error: that is, that travel is a good thing per se.  Of course, there are advantages to current forms of transport, which connect the world in a myriad of positive ways; yet the same transport can bring negatives too, such as pollution.

Travel can narrow the mind as easily as broaden it (the latter assumption being the trite popular maxim).  Regular travellers, particularly holiday-makers who are looking for a bit of ‘sun and fun’, too often have an undue superior estimation of their own worth.  In visiting a country with a living standard below that of (let us say, decadent) western society, a visitor may be immersed in the local culture and have their eyes opened; but it is just as likely that they will view the local inhabitants as ‘backwards’ in their ways, through a lack of understanding due to coming from a solipsistic cultural perspective.  Or there is the eco-tourist who visits remote places to see endangered or rare species, and so contributes to the destruction or extinction of the thing they claim to wish to protect by trampling over it.

Some visitors could be done without.

But I have deeper reasons for not travelling; and the above thoughts are merely window dressing that I sometimes use to hide behind, thus avoiding the always frustrating task of trying to explain a complex situation to people who will either misunderstand or not understand.  However, unlike in conversation, by writing this I can take my time.  So, let me explain.

Firstly, to properly understand a culture you need to live in it for a sustained period of time.

Travel gives short, cursory glimpses – seeing sights, in a very literal and shallow sense – that lead to misperceptions, narrow impressions of the most lurid aspects of a society which stick in the mind because they are different to bred-in expectations or are conspicuously not the norm.  A person would learn more about the day-to-day life of an area by reading a good book by a local inhabitant than from a quick visit.  A certain nation eats frogs and snails (tee hee) is not an adequate summation of a culture, and it is a juvenile way to view it.

Secondly, travel is a desire to know the unknown or to experience what we have not come across before; and desire is a part of the human psyche.  But desire is not possible to fulfil.  Desire is defined by absence, or not having; and, although burning desire can be replaced by a feeling of satisfaction or completion when the object is attained, there is much more often a deflation as actual possession does not map against the fantasy that the imagination has conceived.  Travel is a constant quest for something or somewhere else: a desire, a dream, non-reality.  Delusional.  The grass is always greener.

Attention should be given to the immediate environment, the world in which your life passes each day.  Most people do not understand their own culture, let alone others; and they should spend more time looking under their noses rather than fantasising about elsewhere.

Our focus should be on what is accessible and can be studied over long periods, so real depths can be penetrated and revealed.  Such a focus gives up to sight the minutiae of life, the subtle signs which only the locals know; the places that visitors do not see, or, if they did see, they would not comprehend without detailed explanatory notes.  It is impossible to open up such secrets on a short trip.  To use a basic metaphor, travel is like an easy-to-read airport novel whereas getting to grips with a lived-in culture requires the close textual reading of a book of philosophy.  And the nearby has a wealth of new and exciting experiences to offer.

Thirdly, an imperfect understanding of theories of relativity is required.

The space of an environment will change around a person if they stay still, where they are; and they will be taken on a journey of experiences.  Time is all it takes.  And relativity.  This can be seen most visibly in a town centre, where simply sitting on a bench can afford a view of the busy activity of life rushing about and constantly shifting.  Should someone choose to stay in the same spot in a town centre for long enough, they would see as much as they would on foreign travel; and they would understand the detail of the activity better, and be able to interact with the people and the environment, if they were local and understood the codes in use.

Personally, I prefer the morphing complexity of this close-by experience to the peripheral pleasures of travel.  In a large majority of ways, it is more real as it is closer to me in an existential way as part of my hitherto everyday existence and, therefore, I can project into it all the better.

So, I feel no need to travel as I can simply watch and learn from the world changing around me as other bodies and forces of nature impact on my relative position, or I can read books about other countries that will likely give me greater insight to the other places than cursory visits that can only, by their nature, skim the surface.

Do not misunderstand me: I am an internationalist.

Borders and ‘breeding’ make no logical sense to me; and in no way does this condone a message of insular nationalism, even though I advocate local involvement and knowledge.  To me, whoever says they are a nationalist is also saying they are slightly racist; but travelling to foreign shores can be seen as slightly racist as well, as the traveller is implicitly going to look at the foreigners, the alien ‘others’.

I am here.  And my attention is on the detail of where I am, not wandering to distant shores.  I currently live in a different town to the one I grew up in, and I have known both places properly and differently.  I have always thought that, if I move again, I would not be a salmon heading back upstream to the place of my birth, but I would make for the wide open ocean of another culture and submerge myself in another land.

Live there, not visit.

However, there are two pure reasons to travel.

There is an imperative in a small world for cultural exchange, to improve communication between peoples and thus head off things like war, environmental disaster, etc.

It is also acceptable to travel to find something you cannot find locally, which I have always found to be sunshine (this is a miserably wet country).