THEY say time is the real currency of travel.
When you’re young, you chase destinations with a rucksack and a plane ticket, ticking off countries like a shopping list. But when you’ve had the good fortune to see eight decades of sunrises – some over the mountains of Scotland, some over the Sahara Desert – you begin to understand that a lifetime of travelling isn’t measured in miles. It’s measured in memories and the photographs you cherish.
Every now and then I get the urge to travel but, these days, I can only look back at trips taken and the memories they provoke. During the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, holidays abroad were not advisable with many opting to stay at home, prompting the use of the word “staycation”. It isn’t a new word and was used in an advert in the Cincinnati Enquirer in 1944, urging readers to take a staycation instead of a vacation as part of a wartime appeal. Its popularity went up in 2020 as, during the pandemic and subsequent recessions, people looked to more affordable holidays at home. Self-isolation for some is not an option as the elderly struggle to keep warm and put food on the table but it does nothing to improve your mental health. Get up, get ready and get out into the big wide world and stop staring at the same four walls.
This series, Around the World in 80 Years, isn’t a guidebook. It’s a ramble through a lifetime of departures. Let us begin where most of my trips started – right here in the British Isles. It began in England in 1958 with a trip to our nation’s capital. Although I have visited London many times, it is not my most favourite destination. I went in 1958, as a member of the National Youth Choir singing in the Royal Albert Hall, but it would be 20 years later before I went back after receiving an invitation from Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II to attend a garden party.
Overseas visitors make for the historic landmarks Big Ben, the Tower of London, Royal palaces, the London Eye and the West End Theatres – and I have done them all plus Madame Tussauds, the waxwork museum which opened in 1835 with one of the main displays being the “Chamber of Horrors”. Kids of all ages will love it!
Although going to Buckingham Palace was memorable, for a football enthusiast it was not as exciting as going to Tottenham Hotspur to see Pools take on Gazza and his team mates, on 26th September 1990 in the first leg of a Second Round tie in the League Cup. Around 20,000 fans watched as Gazza took to the pitch with the Hartlepool United fans singing “Gazza is a Geordie” but, by the end of the game, their tune had changed to “You fat person” after the enigmatic lad from Newcastle had popped in FOUR goals – with a certain Gary Lineker adding the extra one in a 5-0 drubbing
Taking off the rose coloured specs, in truth Pools were fortunate to get nil. The return leg at Victoria Park is a story for others to tell. I was on one of my overseas adventures in the Balearic Islands but that’s a story for another day.
Wrapping up London, I still have to visit Wembley Stadium, the Mecca for all English football fans, but it’s on my bucket list, to add to my visit to Highbury, when I requested a song on the stadium radio, chosen by the Gooner DJ, for all Hartlepool fans – “The Only Way is Up”. Written by George Jackson and Johnny Henderson, it was released in 1980 as a single by American soul artist Otis Clay. On this side of the pond, it was a chart topper for Yazz and the Plastic Population. The lyrics of the song are optimism and resilience – rising above the hard times which we are all going through at this time – but believing that things can only get better.
Join me again soon as I travel south to Devon and Cornwall and enjoy warmer rain than at home in a beautiful part of England.
