Getting Dressed
Travel writer Colin Thubron puts practicality first – and still looks great
What does the renowned travel writer and novelist Colin Thubron have in common with Keith Richards, David Hockney and Bill Nighy? They all feature on the Times Grey Best-dressed List of 2014. I think it is a bit mean to call it ‘grey’ – some of the handsomest men on earth, including Thubron, are on it.
It’s ironic that he should have been listed because he probably cares less about clothes than almost anyone. But he will certainly be thinking about what to wear in July, when he sets off on yet another of his extraordinary journeys – following the Amur River from where it rises in the Mongolian highlands to its exit in the Sea of Japan. That’s more than 1,800 miles of hitching lifts, train rides and slogging along on foot. It will probably take three months – and he has to carry everything he needs in a light backpack.
Thubron caught the travel bug as child. In 1947, when he was eight, his soldier father was posted to Ottawa and to Washington. For four wonderful years, Thubron travelled from his Surrey prep school, by Stratocruiser, to spend holidays with his parents and sister abroad.
‘England was so drab then, just after the war – but over there, there were vast rivers and lakes and North American Indians… We’d spend Christmas in Florida and I remember alligator farms and small things that are so ordinary now, like self-service restaurants where you pushed a tray along and could help yourself to whatever you wanted. It was unimaginably wonderful to a child then.’ Thubron went on to Eton. He didn’t go to university – partly, he says, because he’d spent too much time gazing at the map of the world on the classroom wall and not enough on maths. He became an apprentice with the publisher Hutchinson. And then, at 26, he set off for Syria and wrote the first (and my favourite) of his wonderful books, Mirror to Damascus. Fifty years on, this was recently reissued, with a new preface written since a return to the city last year. Thubron’s father was handsome and tall – six foot five inches (Thubron is six foot and says he felt like a dwarf.) ‘He came home from the war in 1946 and almost my first memory is of this big man in military uniform walking down the station platform – every boy’s idea of the father.’ Thubron envied his thick hair – ‘I had my mother’s thin hair which blew around all over the place, but at least I have kept most of it.’ As a small boy, Thubron thought his mother was the most beautiful woman on earth, and, at nineteen, he remembers becoming very proud of his adored 21-year-old sister who’d been a debutante. ‘She’d suddenly become a woman and wore these elaborate dresses, beautifully made by a dressmaker’. Unspeakable tragedy struck the family when she was killed in an avalanche on a skiing holiday that year. Thubron’s own interest in clothes was zero. ‘I never had any sense of style, unlike, say, Bruce Chatwin. I didn’t have any beautiful clothes; in fact, it is typical that I have holes in all my jumpers and cardigans. My wife has tried to smarten me up a bit; she doesn’t like me looking scruffy.’ Thubron married his long-time partner, Margreta de Grazia,
an American academic, seven years ago.
He has timed his departure to Mongolia for July so that he will not have to cope with extremes of weather. He takes a sleeping bag, never a tent because it is too heavy – as well as flagging up to the locals where you are.
He lays out all his kit. ‘And then, with each item, I ask myself, “Do you really need this?” It ends up very minimal – really just one change of everything and a waterproof top and over-trousers that roll up into something quite small.’ He wears Gore-tex trainers these days instead of boots and takes a bare minimum of toiletries. He always shaves, even in cold water. ‘I’ve thought of growing a beard but I am from that generation where the interim stage doesn’t seem like designer stubble but a bit scruffy– you imagine your father looking at your face and saying, “What’s that?”’
On the road, his hair grows ‘a bit wild and Mongolian’ and he goes to local barber’s shops – not least because they are a good source of information.
Thubron had a knee replacement two years ago, but more concerning to him is his need to find a way of communicating with his wife over the weeks of the journey. ‘Carrying a satellite phone just arouses suspicions everywhere.’
What advice does he have for aspiring travel writers. ‘Don’t expect to be rich,’ he laughs.