Yaller Dog

There’s a nice moment in E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View (well, there are countless, but only one that I want to write about today). A group of genteel English tourists are being driven out into the Tuscan countryside to see a view, and are joined by the English vicar, who tells a story about an American tourist’s account of his travels. “Rome? I guess Rome was the place where we saw the yaller dog…” Forster wrote the novel in the first decade of the 20th century, at a time when travel was morphing from the historical trope of the romantic wanderer into a more popular and accessible pursuit, democratised and popularised by Thomas Cook amongst others. The advent into arcadia of the great unwashed was a great source of anxiety to the chattering classes, who considered that only people of breeding and education knew how to be travel intelligently. Forster refused to align himself with so exclusive a view, gloriously satirising  it through his hilarious absurd portrait of Miss Lavish, who talks colonially of “my Italy” and of setting an examination paper at Dover to prevent the uneducated from aspiring to adventure.

Anyway, I was reminded of Forster recently. I had just settled into the train which was to whisk me with a speed and at a price unknown in the UK, from Barcelona to Paris, when a sturdily built man and his anxious looking wife began to hoist their luggage onto the rack over our heads. Having recovered from the exertion, the man announced to the world in a sort of is-anyone-else-on-this-train-an-English-speaker tone of voice, that they’d nearly missed the train. Having politely responded by expressed my relief that they hadn’t, there was no concealing my Englishness, and we inevitably fell into conversation. Well, it would be more accurate to say that he fell into relating his life story- colonialism takes many forms- whilst I listened. Aged 70, he was nearing the end of his first visit to Yoo-rope, Paris being his final destination before flying back to Oregon. Where had he been, I enquired, with a feeble attempt to pretend that the answer might prove surprising. Familiar names gushed forth like so many items on a shopping list- Venice, Florence, Rome (!), Nice, laundry tablets…and he confessed that he couldn’t remember them all. Hence my memory of the yaller dog, and the dawning realisation that we were forced to be neighbours for a full five hours.

In an attempt to lure him away from his travels, I cautiously raised the topic of Trump, aware that his response might well colour the next few hours of my life, and determine how much of the journey I would spend in the train’s bar. “Well, I didn’t vote for anyone”, he declared, and I suddenly found the prospect of a coffee escape extremely appealing. And before I knew it he was away, unleashed, onto the threat to the US of “wokery” and what he disturbingly termed “illegal aliens”. Anxious to avoid a fight, I fled to the bar.

As the French countryside blurred past the window, I found myself pondering not this perfectly pleasant man’s disturbingly predictable views, but travel itself.

I’d just spent a week in one of the world’s most heavily visited cities, and one which is increasingly the focus of anti-tourist demonstrations. I wasn’t attacked either verbally or by water cannon, but did mentally collect a little anthology of Tourist-go-home graffiti, which by the end of the week was quite impressive. This did make me wonder; living as I do in a small Cornish town which itself depends on tourism, it’s impossible not to sympathise, or inevitably recall the old Jewish joke about the guy who doesn’t report the brother-in-law who thinks he’s a hen (we need the eggs).

So I tried to reason it out.  On arrival I’d paid the tourist tax, and I stayed in a hotel, ate out in local independent restaurants, paid some quite unsubsidised prices to visit the wonderful Casa Vicens and therefore, I thought, made my contribution to the local economy. I’d also braved the terrifying complexity of Barcelona Sants to use and pay into RENFE. So, on balance, I didn’t feel guilty, even when the lady from Barcelona’s tourist board came to me with a questionnaire about my stay. And isn’t there something fundamentally unpleasant in the idea that tourists are all like and fundamentally unworthy of respect? In an age of increasing intolerance, where racism and all kinds of despicable prejudice are on the rise, isn’t this just another example of refusing to accept the other’s humanity? And I bet Barcelonans go on holiday too, and don’t expect to be greeted by protest graffiti.

Yet of course it’s hard to deny that however one might defend the human freedom to move and explore the world beyond where they happened to live, there’s something oddly depressing about the spectacle of mass tourism. I’d arrived in Barcelona the week before Easter, and the biggest group of visitors seemed to be from Dortmund, their yellow and black replica shirts a reminder that they were there to drink beer in front of the cathedral and see their team lose at the Nou Camp. However, Easter week was quite different, the streets filling with tourists, marching along in squadrons, battalions, regiments.

To anyone of a romantic temperament, the traveller is like Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer, a lone figure resolutely turning away from the public gaze towards the majesty of the scenery. Yet the notion of the traveller has been steadily transmuted into the idea of the tourist, the individual experience replaced by the curated, the consumable, and the laws of supply and demand have decreed that some places are deemed more visit-worthy than others; so, bad luck Barcelona, with your beaches, radical architecture and tapas. Sustainable tourism should surely be our aim- why not spread the attractions round a little more equitably?

But it isn’t easy. My home city of Sheffield optimistically celebrated the millennium by building the National Centre for Popular Music, in the intriguing architectural form of four giant stainless-steel drums. After a year of almost no visitors, the realisation dawned that perhaps a Jarvis Cocker lyric scribbled on an envelope had a limited excitement even to the keenest Pulp fan, and that there’s even an inherent disjunct between pop music and the concept of the museum. So, after an inglorious twelve months, it closed, now houses the students’ union, and is set for demolition.

So, can we be romantic and realistic in our wanderings? Can we be travellers first and tourists second? The publishers of the wonderfully named Lonely Planet tour guides clearly think so, but the reality is that as we expand demographically, and the world becomes more congested, there will still be money to be made out of packaging people up and despatching them to places that someone has decided are worthy of being visited.

Armed with these thoughts, and concluding that a fourth coffee was not in my best interests, I wandered back to my seat, to find the man from Oregon asleep, head tilted back at a Picasso-esque angle, his snores reverberating gloriously through the carriage, thundering  down the aisles, the aural equivalents of legions of tourists.

And I returned to my crossword.