Dispatches from the Pavement Podcast

<p>I don’t travel light, I travel dense.</p><p>I have been known to travel for over three weeks to Southern Africa for a holiday of a lifetime with hand luggage. This has included extensive camera equipment and technology to allow some form of photography processing, suitable footwear to allow for exercise (which I subsequently don’t really bother doing much of), battery packs to charge phones, tablets, cameras, and so on, and then the usual things expected if there’s space: toiletries and clothing. I fit all of this in two bags.</p><p><p>Thanks for reading Dispatches from the Pavement! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.</p></p><p>I then pack this onto myself and become a mule.</p><p>I wander around the airport and notice the novices who have with them a smallish, misshapen rucksack (due to lack of content), and a book in their hands. They only have a rucksack with them because they have packed inefficiently and trusted that their luggage would follow them to their final destination. This is often not the case. Mistake #1.</p><p>I do not understand the obsession with ‘taking a book’ on any kind of trip, holiday or otherwise. I betray this criticism in my home life, because I have books. Many books. “Too many books. You don’t even read them.” I have read them. I used to read physical books. But I have a proclivity to not want to destroy the physical medium. If there is a good or amusing phrase, like “He had the attitude of a preoccupied chicken,” I will inevitably want to note that somewhere. But a book with scribbles in is, in my view, soiled. It draws your eyes to the markings which means you cannot take in other aspects of the book. And it’s personal. If someone grabbed <em>Thud!</em> off my shelf and got to that page, they may not appreciate my enjoyment of preoccupied chickens. I do need to get some shelves.</p><p>I wonder what these travellers do when they finish the book on day 2 of their 2 week holiday. It would have lasted them longer, but they broke the promise to themselves not to read it until they got to Greece and then the plane was delayed and they’d done all the terminal shops too quickly. It is now a useless deadweight to have to fit into your luggage for the journey back home. Do these people just leave them as gifts for the hotel/Airbnb staff?</p><p>There are others, reading slim magazines with of-the-moment treatments of economic trends, who have failed to realise that these, too, are available electronically. And their disposable nature is equivalent to them disintegrating in your hands. They don’t read them properly anyway. This lightweight item is not engaging enough to prevent you from reaching for your phone to check notifications. It’s also too bewildering to avoid needing to look up cultural references or current events so you can make sense of the writing. And because you do it with your phone, you can engage and multitask with this content so much easier, while also getting those useful notifications that mean you instantly forget what you were reading about the Economist’s editorial on the budget, get distracted, and resume the doomscroll. Mistake #2.</p><p>One key element is that, as a technologist, I have a Kindle that ensures I can take reading material with me to not read because I’m going to watch stuff on my iPad anyway. But it’s there, for the few minutes when it feels like that would be more appropriate while we wait for the plane to taxi, for example.</p><p>At the other end, when the destination is reached, we are ready to get going. All of my stuff is with me and we head straight to the first thing on the agenda; usually an <a target="_blank" href="https://tobyisaacscomedy.substack.com/p/stockholm-syndrome-by-appointment?r=1njx7f">Airbnb</a>. These amateurs who picked up a book at WHSmiths because it was there and the voice of reason had left them at the check-in desk, where they had trusted all of their required luggage with an airline, are now also at this destination. But their luggage isn’t, and they’ve turned the luggage trolleys into a library cart. Mistake #1 again.</p><p>All of this is to say, please can I have a separate queue for travel Pros. Some people will consider themselves travel pros because they may, for example, have lounge access. On a work trip, once, other colleagues were pretending like they knew what they were doing. And then they let themselves down by evidently checking in their luggage and deciding a paper-based item was a great decision. That item is supposed to entertain you for a 10–12 hour long-haul flight, when we are now so used to never properly concentrating for more than 15 minutes it will prove useless before the plane has reached the runway.</p><p>Even if you are in the Gold lounge at Heathrow with a flute of champagne in front of you, this doesn’t make you a Pro. It makes you a problem. Only if your pockets and spare luggage space are full of miniature drinks, bags of crisps, and pastries wrapped in serviettes from said lounge, do you get to consider yourself a Pro.</p><p>I have accepted my place; I have enough content downloaded and battery packs to last me a four-week stint on a remote island that we may well crash land onto. What have you got? Fuel for a fire. Kindling, rather than a Kindle, with a glossy cover with a gripping title like, <strong>THE MAN WHO FOUGHT TOMORROW</strong>.</p><p>You will get us through the cold evenings and I will dominate the inevitable nights of terror providing escape to our newfound community with my outstanding reading voice.</p> <br/><br/>This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://tobyisaacscomedy.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&#38;utm_campaign=CTA_1">tobyisaacscomedy.substack.com</a>