A Guest Visual Diary: London and Cork (a self-reflection)

I am but a humble associate of the esteemed Carlo, here to make your acquaintance as I share some old content rattling around in the ol’ brainpan.

I don’t want to retread on already-well-worn paths to make a pithy statement about how COVID-19 affected travel around the world, and will no doubt affect travel for years to come. It’s simply the new reality we find ourselves in. I just want to be generous in stating simply that I miss the excitement of visiting new places - the rush of new air, the feel of the light on your face, the fresh sounds and textures all grounding you in unfamiliar lands. A work trip to Europe in 2018 was possibly the greatest example of that experience - a 12 hour layover in London, followed by a week in Cork, Ireland. As this was my first time in Europe, needless to say, I was pretty excited.

There’s something that’s stuck with me from the beginning of Larry Niven’s seminal 1970 book Ringworld - in the far future, a man spends New Years skipping from city to city around Earth using public teleporter pads, ensuring he’s always enjoying midnight celebrations for the entire day. He remarks about how everything on Earth has become the same, how all the cities he’s traveling through have congealed into the same bland mass, and how boring it was for him. This was a result of technological innovation, as well as the inexorable march of history.

As much as I enjoyed this book for it’s importance in the science fiction canon and the stories it’s inspired since, I felt that, like other science fiction written in this time, this had a typically reductive feel - a useful element to set the stage for the grand adventure to come. At the same time, for a story set centuries ahead, there is some remarkable prescience for how current society is, even now, working towards bulldozing the past to make way for the future.

I think this is why I enjoyed this trip so much - apart from being able to travel to a place I’d never been and only dreamed about, it was clear that, even for a city a thousand years old (London), and a country that was slowly moving their meter forward on social policy (Ireland), there was so much to see and discover. I strongly suspect this will remain the same well into the future. It was not so much that the entire world becomes an unexciting, boring place - more that places will continue to adapt and evolve as time presses on. That’s what keeps a place so fresh and interesting. It was a joy to experience this in my furiously fast-paced walk through London from St. Pancras to the Tate, and then on the hectic taxi ride back. It was even more intriguing to see this in Cork, a city without the cosmopolitan feel of London, but definitely a modern place set amidst ancient buildings.

I feel there’s something unique about Americans visiting the rest of the world, since nothing in this country is more than a few centuries old, and I’d argue that everywhere else has millennia of layered, rich, deep history. It was a pleasure and privilege to be able to experience and enjoy all these things. I look forward to the day we can do so again.

-Phillip