Is this the end of travel writing?

Thirty years ago, in the days when friendships were sustained not by email but by air mail, a friend of mine was spending time in some exotic faraway place. He would send me beautiful, florid accounts of his travels and I would read out the most hilarious passages to the flatmates I was living with at the time. When I next replied to him, I sent him their regards and let him know how much they had enjoyed hearing about his adventures. The next letter was angry. Although part of me understood why (I suppose I had rather naively and stupidly shared something that was supposed to be private), another part of me struggled with an expression that was new to me. I had apparently committed what he called an act of ‘cultural appropriation’.

I didn’t hear that phrase anywhere else for a long time. But from that moment on, I realised it was only a matter of time before any recounting of anything that happened anywhere, whether real or imagined, directly experienced or told secondhand, could be judged by someone somewhere to be a betrayal of trust, and a form of stealing: ‘This is not your story to tell.’