Jason Goodwin on how seeing the world through the eyes of others makes him wonder why he spent years pretending not to be impressed.
Last week, I showed South African friends around London. Tim and David, father and son, had come to celebrate David’s 18th birthday by watching Liverpool play Man City at Anfield. It was the first time either of them had been to Europe and David had never been out of Africa at all.
I remember a dinner, thrown for the Dragoman Society, at which lecturers and tour guides came together to swap hair raising stories of desert storms, sweeping norovirus attacks, jungle banditry and, in one case, the horror of leaving a slow-moving American tourist locked alone, in the dark, in a tomb at the Valley of the Kings. The assembled company had dealt, inter alia, with heart attacks, feuds and a large helping of pride, sloth, gluttony and envy, with eruptions of lust, wrath and greed.
When the dinner had been cleared away, the Chief Dragoman rose to his feet, to offer a toast to the most appreciative and easy going travellers in the world. ‘To the Aussies and the Kiwis!’ Everyone cheered and clinked glasses. I’m adding my South Africans. It might be something in the water below the Equator, old-fashioned schooling, fresh air or simply the result of years of colonial make-do-and-mend at the far ends of the earth, but these are the sort of people you want around you in a crisis and the sort of people to whom you want to show off your capital city.
For sheer fun and ease of getting around, we grabbed electric bikes and whizzed through the Piccadilly traffic to the London Library, which my friends thought was absolutely insane — in a very good way. We watched the Changing of the Guard on Horseguards Parade, admiring the guardsmen’s helmets and their horses and, on the way to the Cabinet War Rooms, we spotted the Prime Minister emerging from Downing Street. The choreography was perfect.
“‘This,’ said Tim, ‘is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.’”
Pizza in Covent Garden; a fast rib down the Thames. From Westminster Bridge, I saw the Houses of Parliament with fresh eyes. It really is, as they said, an astonishing building for any legislature. At Evensong in the Abbey (celestial, free) we sat in the quire and afterwards had a drink with a friend who lives nearby. ‘The street,’ she explained, was built in 1722.’ Tim’s jaw dropped. He said: ‘I have never sat in a house as old as this in my life.’
A thousand years ago, when ambassadors from the Viking Rus first made their way down the rivers to Constantinople, the Byzantines made arrangements to take them into Hagia Sophia at the right moment, when the sun sparkled and the marbles shone. ‘We did not know,’ the Rus reported, ‘if we were in Heaven or on Earth.’ When we reached St Paul’s the following afternoon, I knew how the Byzantines felt. ‘This,’ said Tim, ‘is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.’ My friends’ exuberance and innocent delight proved infectious. All around town people smiled at us and winked and came over merry; three days later, Liverpool won two-nil at Anfield for David.
When I was David’s age, I tried playing it cool. I believed next to nothing. I rolled my eyes at solemnity and ceremony. The business of shedding my cool has been years in the making; I have found disbelief a hard road and ennui an unrewarding one. Now, I try, instead, to believe almost everything and to fan the flames of admiration and enthusiasm. Christmas is upon us, once again. I am ready for miracles.
Jason Goodwin: ‘Ahead of the Japanese invasion of Borneo, I was told, she had memorised all the top-secret embassy codes to prevent them falling into enemy hands’
The cooing of wood pigeons in autumn reminds our columnist of his grandmother and her sisters, one of which was
Jason Goodwin: ‘I slung my boots around my neck and squeezed the mud between my toes. Touching the earth with my feet — puddles, grass, leafmould — was curiously liberating’
Our Spectator columnist sheds his shoes and earths himself.
Jason Goodwin: I always give the snails a flying chance at new life — but with slugs, I am merciless
It's all very well being At One with Nature, but when they start feasting on your pelargoniums, they've crossed a
Jason Goodwin: When gaucho chic in Dorset becomes something ‘between instrument of torture and decommissioned nuclear reactor’
An attempt to bring a touch of gaucho chic to Dorset doesn't go well for our columnist.
Jason Goodwin: ‘In the garden I see myself as a god, quite Old Testament, full of wrath and vengeance’
'Bonfires spring up in my wake,' says Jason Goodwin. 'Brambles part before me like the Red Sea.'
