I’m a cowardly traveller. I’m not afraid of trains, planes, cars — just of change, and of elsewhere. Months ago I agreed to go with my colleagues from Bath Spa University to a conference of creative writing programmes in Chicago. As the time approaches, I resent that past self who said yes: foolishly enthusiastic, deluded about my own character. The prospect of travel makes the days leading up to it feel insubstantial, as if they are only a preparation. I have no interest in Chicago, where I’ve never been. There’s a metaphysical puzzle about time which has gripped me since I was a child — faced, say, with a school morning of maths and double Latin. Why does this moment I’m in have to be now? Why can’t it be then, when the trip is over?
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When we emerge from the tunnel of unreality that is air travel, Chicago is overwhelming, beautiful. Its boldly cut-out shapes against the sky are satisfying as a city built in children’s blocks; the skyscrapers’ sumptuous lobbies are secular temples, unaristocratic palaces. We have pancakes for breakfast in a café where policemen really do sit in shirtsleeves bantering with talky waitresses topping up their coffee. The city seems saturated with its blue-collar past, stockyards and grain and steel. Perhaps American visitors to London or Cardiff intuit an old-fashioned substratum which the natives can’t feel. (Or perhaps it’s my nostalgic illusion.) In the Art Institute my husband and I seek out American paintings: Elizabeth Sparhawk-Jones’s women trying on shoes in a shop, in a brilliant fuss of vivid brushstrokes; Eldzier Cortor’s angular black sleepers on the floor of a boarding house room. My past self (the self before the one who wished I wasn’t coming) was right after all: travel is good for me, elsewhere is a revelation.
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