When it’s easy to phone and write home, we are more keenly aware of ourselves as foreign correspondents writing about the country we are in, and about the kind of nationality/nationalities we are representing to that country. Gallipoli is the birthplace of the nation, it’s often said; but the nation is constantly being born in fragmented digital format a million times a second as each photo and story comes back from overseas.
Our family and friends imagine the place we travel to, and they imagine us. We are re-imagined. We become this airy, mercurial, imagined creature in the minds of others. It is one of the reasons we go elsewhere.
Because I will be blogging about their bicycle trip, kind of like I am there. Though I won’t be there, and what I write will be based on the others’ facts and figures and photos. So there will be this little interplay, like there has been sometimes above, between me and the peloton. There will be this little voltage difference. We will all be airy spirits. Somehow this will work.
Three words you associate with Europe.
‘Languages, culture, food,’ Jemma says.
I push for some detail.
‘My mental picture is of him biking along the coast, talking to local people. I can see villages, and him camping on the side of the road, going to the toilet in the bush.’
She pauses as though to study the mental picture. ‘Don’t look too closely.’
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