Today – laundry. Tomorrow – Nepal

Sara Wheeler has trekked Peru and the Antarctic, but there’s one place she’s afraid to go: John Lewis

GLOWING STILL by Sara Wheeler

368pp, Abacus, T £19.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP£22, ebook £12.99

The travel writer Sara Wheeler prefers to travel alone. If she didn’t, you’d instantly volunteer to be her travelling companion. She’s an absolute hoot. But also deadly serious, fabulously well-read, thoughtful, selfdeprecating – everything you’d want while slowly crossing some vast continent by bus or by train.

Glowing Still: A Woman’s Life on the Road is the next best thing to hopping on board with her. An ingenious piece of work, it’s a set of re-readings of her innumerable journeys over almost half a century, rethinking what she wrote in previous books on Chile, Russia, Antarctica and elsewhere. In an unsentimental yet deliciously Proustian moment, she describes pulling down some old notebooks in her office with the names of various destinations Tippexed on their spines. “Sensations rose like milk to the boil when I re-read the tattered notebooks, and I found it tender to be in the company of my younger self… In some ways, as I started to write, I met myself coming back.” The book, she says, is a record of the “waystations on the female travel writer’s journey, launching at Nubility and voyaging, via children, to the welcoming port of Invisibility”.

Invisible she most certainly is not; intrepid she is. (While she admits to being entirely unafraid during her lifetime’s travels, “the John Lewis curtain department terrifies me most.”) The book begins with a bit of family history – she grew up in Bristol in a workingclass, blue-collar Tory family, with most of her family working in the Wills tobacco factories. She inherited a general suspicion of “Abroad”: “There was no unconscious bias. It was all conscious. We didn’t like anyone who wasn’t like us.” Is this what made her a travel writer? Maybe, and maybe also her severely disabled brother: “Perhaps the fact that he cannot read his own name made me a reader later.”

Whatever it was that got her going, once she was going, she was off: first to Paris, and then to Oxford, to study ancient and modern Greek and then “Feminist Theory night classes in Camden Town at the Working Men’s College” (“In the end I pursued feminist theory so far on the motherhood topic that I wanted to shoot myself”). Then there’s a year in Athens, time spent on a kibbutz, some writing for newspapers and magazines, and before you know it there are the books and the children and a house in Mornington Crescent, editing for Norma Major (and living at

Chequers in order to do so). It all seems terribly glamorous – even the Norma Major stuff. And yet on the other hand – and this is her great gift – she also makes it all sound utterly ordinary and achievable. We get glimpses of her throughout the book doing things like “arranging laundry on the radiator having returned from a newspaper assignment in Nepal” – but of course. We all have to rearrange our laundry on the radiator: maybe we too could take off to Nepal? She travelled the world with her children, for goodness’ sake.

There are dozens of intriguing insights and remarks about the life of the travel writer throughout, all with a charming twist – “perhaps one wishes to leave the Fairy Liquid more urgently than anything”. And she’s particularly good on the unacknowledged pressures that come with the job, the guilt while staying in a hotel, for example, and “not pounding the streets to gather material so that I could write better and have more insight”.

There’s also quite a lot of anger and frustration – the book is, after all, part of “the long story of women on the road, itself part of the longer story of women parked in the sidings, which is the one of all women, in all times, everywhere”. Her great role models – whom she carries with her “like the toothbrush in the sponge bag” – are women who were definitely not parked in the sidings, people like Beryl Bainbridge,

Dervla Murphy, Maeve Brennan, Rebecca West and a host of others I have now resolved to read, including Ismat Chughtai (“People have called Chughtai India’s Simone de Beauvoir. I see de Beauvoir as France’s Ismat Chughtai”).

And then there are all the strange episodes and encounters she revisits, perhaps most notably her revised account of the time she spent at an Antarctic base camp, where she now reveals the appalling behaviour of the men towards her: seven months of being ignored, abused, the butt of hateful jokes and generally subject to “a misogynistic culture [that] had set as solid as the bergs in the bay”. (British men are the worst misogynists in the world, according to Wheeler, with white South Africans coming close behind.)

As she says, it’s the “emotional residue” that really sticks. In a chapter recalling her travels in Latin America she writes about her relationship with a young environmentalist, José Gomez, years ago, who was “keen on the tantric”. “If I could find one person, I mean out of everyone I’ve ever met, it would be José.” In the acknowledgements at the end of the book there’s a plaintive plea: “And hey, José – get in touch, man. I’ve changed my mind. About everything.” Surely someone reading The Telegraph knows a José Gomez in Chile? Sara’s changed her mind. About everything. José, get in touch, man!