Hannah BETTS
We all know what the perfect holiday entails: long, dream-like days filled with gazing and reading, wandering and flopping, thinking and not thinking, dissolving into that expansive state of consciousness one only acquires when released from the daily grind. Foreign-ness is key. This can, of course, be had in Carlisle as much as Capri. But how much more so when one is immersed in a different language, a different culture, generating a heady defamiliarisation: a seeing – and being – anew.
It feels unseemly to admit this, but three weeks ago I returned from the holiday of my not-so-young life. Unseemly, because this is August 2020, the summer in which we are told we will be going nowhere; unless one counts a strained staycation in which locals assail us with pitchforks.
Politicos are queuing up to virtuesignal that they are Blighty-bound. Rishi Sunak, Matt Hancock and Sir Keir Starmer have all promised to stay put. Meanwhile, the PM is off to Scotland, wagging a choppy finger and declaring that there is “no risk-free way of travelling overseas”.
How much more edgy, then, that my trip was abroad! By plane! Not only that, but it involved a jaunt to Venice, that ultimate tourist destination, flooded by 25 million visitors a year and, last month, gloriously empty. La Serenissima’s permanent population is 53,000. Many left during lockdown, while tourists had not yet returned, meaning that the city would not have been as deserted in more than a thousand years, given that its population was already 60,000 by 1000AD. Cue middle-class screaming noises!
As relatively fit fortysomethings without children to educate or elderly to endanger, and with jobs that allow us to isolate on return, my beloved and I reckoned we could travel responsibly. Indeed, we were no more likely to contract Covid in Venice than at home; less likely, given the city had shut itself off during the pandemic.
We booked two days before compulsory quarantine-on-return was lifted, resolving that – if the worst did come to the worst – The Daily Telegraph could avail itself of the headline “Death in Venice”. Willing to take on our own degree of risk, our concern was not to inflict corona upon others. Accordingly, we masked up and constantly sanitised, maintaining a couple of weeks’ voluntary isolation on reaching home.
I’ve never been a great droner-on about travel broadening the mind. I didn’t leave the country until the age of 20 (an NHS doctor’s daughter, from a big family, pre-bucket flights, holidays were to Devon and Scotland). I couldn’t afford a gap year, went for years without taking a holiday, and roll my eyes over bourgeois fixations with Provence and Tuscany. However, after four months’ confinement, the opportunity to look at art, sit in a café and be with people again marked an utter opening up of life.
My partner and I had been privileged to enjoy a “good” lockdown, just as we were privileged to escape it. However, the weeks of constricted living – physical and mental – had taken their toll.
As a depressive, I know how vital stimulation is to my brain. However, sensory deprivation had prevailed
– no art galleries, no theatre, scant talk. The cerebral jolt yielded by new sights, scents, tastes, sounds and opportunities to touch proved seismic. Mesmerised by Veronese one moment, basking in cafés over thick, dark cioccolata calda the next, I felt alive as I haven’t for months.
Obviously, some things had changed: monks in masks, sanitiser rather than holy water in fonts, water so clear that an octopus in the market made a leap for freedom. The canals were festooned with retired gondolas, gondoliers chanting “special price” at every bridge. One had to leave one’s email for tracing purposes to view Carpaccio’s St Georges. The city of masks had made a fashion item of its mascherine, the Venetian lion being the modish choice, dangling from the left elbow when not in use. Other aspects remained obnoxiously the same: notably, the squalor of a patently uncleaned Ryanair plane. But then, what price for being the sole occupants of St Mark’s Square?
When I say it proved unforgettable, I hope I don’t sound smug. A friend who joined us confessed that he wept on the boat back to the airport. I’m crying now. Never before have I appreciated the sheer joy of travel. Moreover, we were wanted – needed – in a city in which tourism contributes €2 billion a year in gross revenue. The challenge will be to use lockdown to reset the ravages this produces in a city more usually sinking under visitors’ weight.
Risk is part of life; proof of life, even. We have to risk our lives in order to live them – a bit, within reason. This pandemic won’t be passing, it is the air we now breathe. We’re in the Covid crisis for the long haul and will have to make decisions around it. I made mine. And if I am obliged to shuffle off this mortal coil come autumn, then at least I will go out on a high.
We have to risk our lives in order to live them – a bit, within reason