Journeying....

This blog is mostly about travelling in its various forms, and so I have to say I was impressed by this chocolate London Transport symbol on my cup of coffee at the London Transport Museum. It's the best travel-related museum I know and we took S and Young A there for an outing the other day. They hadn't been there since Young A was four and got so fed up at hanging around Victorian omnibuses that he started sobbing and had to be taken home.   

It went much better this time.  Young A (now 11) agreed that the omnibuses were actually great - and don't you love the detail on this model bus, down to that moleskin jacket and the Scotsman's glowing pipe? 

He was particularly fascinated by the creepy dummies in the old-fashioned tube trains.  I didn't tell him that I remember going on trains a bit like that in real life (not in the Tube, though).  I suppose they were at the end of their life when I used them, and I don't remember my fellow passengers looking as elegant as these ladies. 

Nor, I'm glad to say, did I ever see men like the one below, another dummy in an old railway carriage.  Could it be Stan Laurel taking a ride to the West End in 1922? 

The museum is full of variety and very well designed, so there's something for everyone.  I specially liked looking at the design plans for how the new Crossrail trains will appear. That patterned moquette on London buses and trains always gives you something to stare at while you're travelling, and Crossrail is getting a very superior moquette.  I'm sure I'll spend many happy moments trying to work out how this design repeats, as I speed on my way.  

I also looked in their shop for ages, seeking gifts to take on my trip to Japan. I fell in love with this willow-pattern tube train design, but honestly, do I or any Japanese people I know really have a need for a three tier cake stand? Sigh.... 

I love it when people do variations on willow pattern. When I lived in the Potteries I bought a Potteries willow pattern plate, with bottle kiln, canal boat and steam train,  and it hangs on my wall to this day. 

...which reminds me, that later this year or early next,  I hope to visit some of the places in the Midlands that I haven't seen for ages or never knew at all. So if you have any suggestions of places roughly north of Oxford and south of Sheffield, please let me know!   (I've already found quite a few on Mike's excellent blog, A Bit About Britain - which I recommend if you like buildings with a bit of knowledgable and often quirky history attached.)

In general, I've mainly been staying home, and my writing has been Lewis Carroll-related. Most of my work ticks over steadily and I am usually busy.  Travel writing, though, has definitely been dwindling. The other day a friend's son asked me the best way to become a travel writer, and to be honest, I wasn't sure how to reply. 

And that got me thinking, because even in the few years I've been writing this blog, travel writing has changed. A lot.  Not that I'm complaining - travel was always time consuming compared with other writing. But now it's much more so, and the rewards are less.  Travel writers edit and write for print magazines, self-publish their work, review, blog and write for online magazines,(often for little pay, but it raises their profile). They do paid copywriting, write blogs for travel companies or get publishers to issue their books, and pop up everywhere on social media  - Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube.  They run events, give talks and teach. That's apart from the actual travelling.      

I don't want to be doing all that, I don't feel I have enough time to do everything as it is, so I have found other ways to get by. But I am impressed by folk who tackle all this stuff, so I think that in future I'll recommend would-be travel writers to look and learn from the websites of people like Andy Jarosz or my pal Mike Gerrard. Both are first rate writers and it's obvious from their sites (take a look) what the work they do is all about. 

I'll probably also point out that good travel writers also need to be accurate, yet have an eye for something unusual  .....

...not to mention an ability to get people to feel a bit curious...

.

And so, with this huge White Rabbit (yes, that's what it is) dominating the space ship, it's back to Lewis Carroll.  

"Alice in Wonderland" is popular in Japan, and I thought you might like to see one of my favourite Alice clips, which I'll be using as part of a lecture.  This is a little film by Pogo, a musician who uses fragments of soundtracks (often from Disney movies) as his raw material.  His short films also use scraps of imagery, and I think he's wonderful at extracting the underlying messages the original film maker was trying to give.   Walt Disney, like Carroll, was particularly good at combining sweetness with humour and menace, and I think Pogo has done a good job in conveying the charm,vulnerability and anxiety of Alice against the disturbing unpredictability of her journey through Wonderland.   

Do You Want to Be A Travel Writer?

This is Kingston Lacy, a National Trust house in Dorset. I was exploring it a couple of weeks ago (and yes, the sky really was that blue), when I saw a familiar face. A colleague was spending the morning there in preparation for a lecture he was due to give to an upscale tour group learning about English country houses. A nice job.  Two weeks of staying in fancy hotels, eating lovely dinners and giving lectures to very, very clever and knowledgable people.  He loved it, but said,  "it's not travel writing. That's the way of the world these days."

I don't usually write much here about the business of being a travel writer, although I see so many adverts for courses that promise to train people to be one.   Well, I am a travel writer, and I will explain part of the reason why I have been travelling less this summer, and will be travelling rather less in future, too.  I will be  It is not all bad news, but the business is changing.

I am lucky that editors want to use me and I am getting press trip invites  (lately to Sardinia, Northern Ireland, Turkey and Eastern Germany, though none of them hit the spot with me so I haven't accepted any.). And I have a couple of trips pencilled in for next year (notably Japan, with the book's new publication date)

Can't wait!  These pictures were taken in the depths of winter - bright, cold and beautiful.

But the hard fact is that even though we can still travel cheap or free and write about it, it has become difficult to make the same sort of money out of it as we once could. And making money - for everyone in business - is crucial.   As a kid, I used to wonder why Mum and Dad complained of being hard up when all they had to do was ask people in the bank for money.. And so it is with the freebies; they are not really free. Someone has to make money.

In the past, PRs could assess which publications got their clients the best ooverage and hence the most money. But blogging has confused the issue. These days, I sometimes feel that PRs and travel companies find blogs hard to evaluate.Some, of course are totally fabulous, but also utterly uncommercial, with hardly any readers.  Others, though full of sponsored trips, restaurant meals and overnight stays, are boring, and even if they have lots of page views, they lack reader reaction and involvement.    Neither type is an obvious winner from the travel company's point of view.

The most successful blogs either provide loads of useful information with a personal touch (like The Man In Seat 61) or very varied and personal, with polls, photos, trip descriptions and travel related issues all presented in a carefully structured magazine-like way. (see Andy Jarosz's fab "501 Places".)  But, even with an ideal blog, making money is not necessarily a piece of cake.

As Andy Jarosz says "No ads, no sponsored posts, no guest posts, no paid links."     . Hm.  So now you know, PRs....

Even if you own a great blog, making money from it can be hard work. Delightful though it may be to spend a week in Jordan or Portugal handed to you by a hopeful PR, it is not an automatic way to make money.   In fact, it's likely to cost you money - getting to the airport, buying yourself a coffee or a meal or two.   Really successful blog owners don't spend their whole lives travelling on freebies. They pop up all over the place too,  tweeting, pinteresting, facebooking.  They go on the radio and TV, they talk at conferences, libraries, women's institutes, community centres. They teach other people how to write about travel, and promote any other skills they might have - copywriting, teaching, lecturing..

On the other hand, though, they needn't work their way into that little closed world of editors and freelances in the way that used to be essential.   They can be their own people, do their own thing - and this is a big bonus.

So, you up and coming travel writers, the world is open to you. If I was starting out, I'd now be exploring all avenues for trips and sponsorship.  There are not many rules, nobody is entirely sure where they're headed, there are risks aplenty - but if you play it right, you could get to see places, meet people, build up your own networks, and maybe one day give up the day job - for a night and day job. :)

To get back to Kington Lacy.  My friend and I agreed that it is one of the nicest houses we know. Its main rooms all have very different atmospheres, and the attendants have many interesting stories to tell.  For instance, why are the enormous keys hung over the fireplace in the library (below)?    (Answer here)

The pink room below was charming.  Yes, it is cluttered, but the fashion a hundred years ago was for as many  tables, ornaments and plants as you could fit in.  I wonder how the ladies with their huge skirts managed to avoid demolishing the place. I am notoriously clumsy and tend to cannon into anything fragile within twenty feet.

I hope I would have managed not to destroy this beautiful table setting! . 

One huge and magnificent room was designed entirely to display Spanish paintings, with walls covered with tooled leather of the highest quality.

The kids were kept in the attics, as they so often were, along with the servants and mad relatives, I suppose. But these are very nice attic rooms, with sloping ceilings designed like a tent, with windows cunningly concealed behind the drapery.   

Outside, there are grounds and gardens, and some unusual oddities, like shepherd's huts and some adorable kune-kune piglets. 

The National Trust hasn't asked me to write this - in fact, they probably don't even know I visited, although  I have a NT press card which offers free entry to all their properties. It comes in so useful when you are looking for a nice tearoom, quite apart from the actual properties themselves.  

Netherlands, Schiermonnikoog and Thoughts on Travel Writing

I'll be writing my latest Dutch trip up for a newspaper, so I can't blog about it till after the piece has appeared.  As it is about taking kids to Holland, a lot of it was like this  ......

(One of the "Six Servants" at Efteling Park's Fairy Tale Land)

Or this..........

(a pirate ship playground marooned on a huge sandy beach in Scheveningen.)
 
But I've been remembering other trips to Holland, starting when I was a child.  Then, there was the exciting night ferry ride, getting-on the train in your pyjamas and waking joyfully to a land where people ate chocolate vermicelli sandwiches for breakfast -.

(and they still do!)

And at Christtmas time, you might see Sint Nicolaas with his elfish assistant, Black Peter, handing out marzipan to good children.

 (photo from Bloglandlane, which has more about the Sint Nicolaas tradition)

After I grew up, I returned to Holland occasionally to write articles. And in looking through my cuttings file,  I've noticed something. Nearly all the travel articles I've written in the last few years are descriptions of outings, attractions and hotels.   But until a few years ago, my articles were about real life in the countries I visited - and I have to say they were far more interesting to write.

One of these old Dutch articles was on "green" and eco aspects, travelling by bke and visiting hippies, visionaries, eco gardens, and all kinds of wind powered places, including a sawmill.

And I learned quite a lot about all kinds of windmills.  This thatched one (can you see?) was quite an experience with its narrow stairs and ladders, as the sails creaked round and it puffed out dust.

The Dutch article I  most enjoyed writing was a magazine feature about the northern province of Friesland.  This focused on traditional foods and cooking (yes, there is some).   I searched around today and found some of the background notes I made for this story, and have put them at the end of this post.

Reading these notes through really brought it home to me why I wanted to do travel writing in the first place. I wanted to learn how people live and think in other countries, how their lives are different, what they do, what their grandparents did and how they think about life.

Sadly, very few editors now commission articles that deal with things like this.  It was only a few years ago that top-range publications would hire writers and photographers to produce several pages on an unusual destination, its life, history, art and culture. But it hardly happens now - have you noticed?  Perhaps people no longer want to read thousands of words evoking a place, specially when they can pay a virtual visit via YouTube or read someone's blog much more quickly.  Do you agree?

(Credit)

But actually I think it's mainly because print media (magazines, newspapers and books) are in big trouble. Circulations have plummeted by 50 or 75 percent over the last decade, advertising revenues have dropped through the floor and as yet, nobody can think of a way to deal with it, except by cutting staff, cutting fees cutting expenses and, in many cases, cutting quality.

For instance, one extremely famous international publication now pays precisely NOTHING to contributors to its online travel pages.  It is relying on its reputation - and the online editor says that the "travel writers" are happy not to be paid because they can enjoy freebies from commercial partners, and also get "exposure" for their work.

Well, that's true. Trouble is, the "exposure" isn't worth much, if nobody's prepared to pay a fee. .  Meanwhile, staffers or regulars fill up space by compiling lists of places they may or may not have visited themselves - top ten country walks, top ten waterside hotels, etc. It's cheap copy, and advertisers like it. Perhaps it is also what readers actually want from travel pages these days, too. 

Anyway, times change. But I liked reading through my half-forgotten notes which were made on the Frisian island of Schiermonnikoog.    Since they're notes, they don't link up into a complete narrative, but you can take my word for it that it was interesting to do the research. 

Notes on Schiermonnikoog
 
At about ten o'clock, the sun breaks through the hazy cloud like a big silver ball, and an ear-shattering boom shakes the ground. The birds are shocked into silence, but after a while, they gradually resume their singing. The sea continues to pound quietly at the edge of the beach, a long, long way away.


Schiermonnikoog island is only ten miles long, but the wrecker's wind sweeps the sand towards the East, adding thirty metres a year to the coast.  If it was only in the South Pacific, say its residents, it would be called Treasure Island, for there is plenty of gold and silver lying beneath the fierce North Sea that lashes its shores.

The map in Hendrik's lighthouse is dotted with wreck symbols. That blast at ten o'clock was the controlled detonation of a 50-year-old mine,, he says, and he shows me the entry in that morning's log. You often find the detritus of long-fought battles and tragedies in these rough grey waters, and Hendrik knows a good deal about the dead ships. He puts his finger on the chart at the spot where the "Lutine" went down with thousands of silver coins in 1799. Since then, her treasure has stayed where it is. Only her bell was ever retrieved, and it this bell which is tolled at Lloyds of London every time a ship is lost at sea.

 I descend the spiral stairs of the lighthouse, and then cycle down one of the many tracks to the beach. The few roads are more like lanes, for visitors don't have cars. Only the island's 900 residents are allowed to drive here, and mostly they don't. The tide seems to be out, or perhaps it is  just the sheer size of the beach that makes it seem so.


I leave the bike where the sand gets deep, and walk towards the sea until it is hard and smooth and dappled underfoot, with odd, branchlike patterns from algae, and long, thin shells half buried. Birds wheel and swoop and cry overhead or feed at the water's edge - oystercatchers, plovers, sanderlings, dunlins, shrike, silver and black-backed gulls.  


Schiermonnikoog is a national park, a place where the boundaries between sea and land blur.   Most of the island is wild: tidal mud flats, dunes,, some windbeaten woodland and scrub, countless rabbits and hares.  Several times a year the sea engulfs large parts of the island. People know when it's going to happen, because the hares and rabbits make for the dunes, impelled by a kind of sixth sense. 

The island does have visitors - many visitors - about ten thousand a year.  They somehow manage to lose themselves and have a quiet time in their holiday homes,  or in the white, angular Hotel Van Der Werff in the centre of the town.  Dutch and Belgian Flemish are mostly spoken, although many islanders know English too, and some still speak Schiermonnikoogs, the island's own language, an ancient mixture of Saxon and Scandinavian tongues. It is incomprehensible to mainland Dutch people, so it is dying fast.


"We're all Europeans now" shrugs restauranteur Jan Berend Bazuin, but Hendrik is sad, looking back at the generations who have spoken the language and realising he is one of the last.  Until this century, the island's men would go away to sea, sometimes for years at a time, and they would only get to speak their own language when they got home.  It wasn't only the men who travelled - their wives did too, and their families. A hundred years ago, Hendrik's great-grandma went overland by train and coach to St. Petersburg and then Marseilles with her three little daughters to visit her husband when he was in port. 


The island's one town - or village, really, is a relaxed place with wide verges and trees, and trim, low Dutch houses. I stayed in an 18th century house, now a youth hostel, where ducks and horses peer in through the windows.  Almost opposite is a large field in which the islanders keep their pets.

The Frisians seem rather fond of fancy livestock, in particular little brown goats, but the people of Schiermonnikoog have branched out into peacocks, donkeys, deer, Shetland ponies, pouter pigeons and extraordinary fancy hens like walking feather dusters.





They all live together like animals in a children's story, rushing periodically up to the end of the field where people came to feed them with household scraps.


 Down a path in the middle of the scrub is a little war cemetery for airmen or sailors shot down or claimed by the sea.  Several times a week Jan Groendijk cycles along in the early morning to tend its flowerbeds and trim its shrubs. A quiet man, he first did the job because he was asked to, but then, he says, "I was caring for their graves and I began to wonder who they had been. It didn't seem right not to know."


Knowing that most came from England, Jan wrote in fractured English at his own expense to local papers in the mens' home towns, asking for information. Gradually, relatives and friends came forward, and now only about six men are still unknown. There were letters, visits, eventually group reunions, Now Jan has a file for each man, with momentoes, old school reports, letters, photos.


"We can think of these people, here", he says, as he plants out the spring bulbs.  "We think of them all. It is sad, but at least the sea which killed them, has brought them to a good final home."


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Good Old Bill Bryson

Just read Bill Bryson's African Diary. Bryson recently something stupid about Lewis Carroll, and I'm writing a biography about Carroll and thought Bryson had got him all wrong, nyah nyah nyah.

But that's no reason not to read the man's travel books, and galloping through this little volume I remembered again what a good writer he is.

He writes just as if he's talking directly to you. His descriptions of places are never overwritten, but he brings them wittily to life. He puts himself very much in the centre of things, but he is never the pub bore.

He also made me want to contribute to the charity CARE, for whose benefit this book is written. That's because I felt guilty reading the stuff about how enormously my kind purchase of the book was going to help CARE. I only paid 10p for it in a jumble sale, you see.

Press Trips

Anyone who works in the travel business will know about press trips, or "fam trips" as they're known in the travel trade. The idea is to get journalists out to a destination, be it Spain or Stow-on-the-Wold, and show them what that destination wants them to see.

So are they a good thing?

Some travel editors, specially in the US, are so against press trips that they won't take pieces based upon them. They say that being wined and dined by tourist boards is so far from the average punter's experience that it gives an unfair picture of the destination.

There's some truth in this, although in my experience it doesn't make as much difference as you'd think. Nine times out of ten a bad hotel or a lousy destination gives everyone (including journalists) a rotten time because it just doesn't know how to be good.

I'll be writing about particular press trips in future posts. But I'll end this post with a link to my other blog, which is about a book I'm writing on Lewis Carroll). On it, I posted a picture of a magical garden which I saw on a press trip the Portuguese Alentejo. It was like entering another world, and I'd never have discovered it for myself.