My Midsummer Morning. Alastair Humphreys

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СКАЧАТЬ It’s only a bloody violin. Lo siento, España. I am so sorry, Spain. I lifted my face to the sun, smiled, took a deep breath, and began to play.

      

       Imagine

      SOMETIMES, WHEN I READ travel books, I say to myself, ‘You could put this book down right now, step outside, and just go. The sunlit road calling you. Nowhere to be but there. The freedom all yours to choose.’

      Imagine.

      If I could go, would I?

      A dusty white road winding through orange groves. Summer heat and the tang of citrus. Cicadas shrill the still silence. A silver ribbon of river threads the green valley below. A cluster of stone cottages and the dull clang of a church bell. The blue smudge of distant mountains. The day long and open and waiting for me.

      As I hike, I cradle an imaginary violin, snug under my chin, fingers dancing on the strings. My right hand plays the pretend bow and I whistle the tune as I walk. One of the songs of my life, soaked deep into my marrow, personal and precious. I break from a whistled verse to yell the chorus. Stamping the beat with my battered boots interrupts the rhythm of walking, but helps the exuberance bust out of my body. A song, a dance, a journey, all of my own.

      The sun pounds and burns my back. But I relish it as a burnished medal for 20 miles earned each day beneath it. I have become lean but strong, stripped back. My pack contains the bare minimum, and that is enough. A blanket, bread, half a bottle of water. Strapped to the outside is my fiddle, the real one. It is fragile, smooth maple, and the magic key to this journey. Without it, I am ordinary – just another man tramping through Spain across the ages. But with this violin, I become a music maker and a dreamer of dreams. Tonight, beneath the stars in that village across the valley, I will bring music and laughter. My hat upturned upon the ground, dancers tossing coins as I play. They shine bright as they spin in the moonlight.

      Wherever I walk, I sow happiness in my wake, and the world lies all before me. The weary satisfaction of physical effort beneath a summer sky. The focused simplicity of creating a living from the art you love. Carefree independence and the enticing spontaneity of the open road.

      Just imagine.

      If you could go, would you?

      

       Life

      I LOOKED UP. LET out a sigh. I was not in Spain, but somewhere near Slough, on a slow train bound for nowhere. I closed my book, a tale of sunshine, music and adventure. Monday morning trundled past, laden with drizzle and gloom. Flat-roofed pubs, warehouses, muddy park pitches. This was where I lived. This was my life.

      Books carry me far away. I enjoy that, for I am cursed with fernweh, a yearning for distant places. Throughout my adult life I have either been wandering the world, preparing to, or wishing that I was. I grow excited every time I pack a bag and slip my passport into my pocket, but despondent when I arrive back home and put the passport away in a drawer. Returning inevitably disappoints, pricking my hope that going away might somehow have fixed my problems.

      I first read As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning when I was a student, dreaming of travel and getting ready to live. Laurie Lee had never left England before he docked in Spain in 1935. He hadn’t given much thought to ‘what would happen then, for already I saw myself there, brown as an apostle, walking the white dust roads through the orange groves’.

      Laurie’s hazy plan was to walk south from Vigo, exploring a new country and playing the violin to pay his way. He had no schedule or deadline. He slept under the stars, lived on bread and cheap wine, and flirted happily. Laurie’s book is a paean to pure adventure, free from responsibility, made possible by the music from his violin. Reading it whisked me away to sunlit hills and villages, and I dreamed of one day following Laurie to Galicia. I wanted the same uncertainty, freedom and excitement in my own predictable, routine-dominated life.

      But there was one fundamental problem. I could not play the violin, nor any other musical instrument. I had learned the piano for about a year when I was 10, until my mum yielded to the tedium of getting a reluctant, talentless boy to practise and allowed me to quit. I remember the music teacher at school – a bully later outed as a paedophile – mocking my timid and tuneless singing in front of a laughing class. I burned with shame and fought back tears. Forever after, I dreaded music lessons. Today, merely the thought of having to sing in public makes me prickle with nerves. I hate karaoke or dancing. My heart sinks whenever I hear the line, ‘introduce yourself to the group and tell us a bit about yourself’.

      Realistically, then, I could never busk through Spain. I had neither the skill nor the personality. Yet following Laurie’s route with a wallet rather than a violin would be merely a walking holiday. That was missing the point. So, for 15 years, I shelved the idea. Instead, I looked elsewhere for adventure. I cycled round the world. I walked across southern India and the Empty Quarter desert. I crossed Iceland by packraft. I rowed the Atlantic, spent time in Greenland and on the frozen Arctic Ocean near the North Pole. I was ridiculously fit. I hung out with intelligent, daredevil, ambitious misfits. Each expedition gave me ideas and skills for new journeys. They were miraculous days of joy and wonder. I even managed to turn these escapades into my career. I gave talks and wrote articles and books. I was the luckiest man in town.

      But then, in life’s musical chairs, the music stopped. And I realised I had been sitting in this threadbare seat for years now, staring out of commuter train windows. I called myself an Adventurer, but I was not living adventurously anymore. I was no longer proud of the story I was writing. The woman next to me, late for work and furious, tapped her displeasure in a series of to-and-fro text messages at my shoulder, clammy in her perfumed blouse. Tap-tap-tap. Pause. Beep-beep. Tap-tap-tap.

      I shifted my focus to my reflection in the dirty, rain-spattered window. I didn’t like what I saw. I was bored with myself. I had grown up and settled down. For most people this is the conventional, accepted route in life. I envy them. But it was not working for me.

      I wanted uncertainty and doubt in my life, and the courage, energy and spirit to face them. I needed to move in order to breathe. I craved being on the road again, inhaling the heady air of places new with just one difficult but simple goal to chase. Instead, I was trundling round and round telling old tales to pay the bills. I had given up.

      

       One Moment

      I GLANCED DOWN AT the book in my lap, closed my eyes, and sighed. Then, without thinking, I pulled my phone from the pocket of my jeans, contorting myself on the cramped seat to do so. But instead of the artificial escape of social media, today I opened Google.

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