The Sunday Times. 8th April 2007
Dan Kieran, author of Crap Towns, is so fed up with the loss of traditional British freedoms that he turned criminal to shake us out of our apathy
These days it’s not enough to talk or write about something. People don’t notice. They haven’t got time. You’ve got to do something visual: You’ve got to make a statement by proving you can be stupid on a scale never seen before.
We’ve seen many types of desperate behaviour to which people will lower themselves for celebrity status, but we’ve never seen anyone deliberately attempt to become a criminal to point out how far from real-life experience and how authoritarian our “democracy” has become. Well, not for a while anyway. So there was nothing for it. I would have to turn my back on the law. In the interests of the greater good, of course.
My descent into this new shady criminal underworld began when I arranged to meet a man called Neil Goodwin one bright morning in Parliament Square. Protest and the right to free speech have always seemed to me to be part of our national DNA. It’s perhaps not surprising then that another of this nation’s great traditions, the tendency towards eccentricity, was soon being employed to fight the government’s exclusion zone that has banned spontaneous protest for a radius of one kilometre outside the seat of our democracy, the Houses of Parliament.
I arrived on time and found Neil dressed, flawlessly, as Charlie Chaplin’s tramp. He whispered: “I’m not supposed to talk, and my girlfriend says she’ll leave me if I get arrested many more times, but do you fancy going up to Downing Street?” He’d actually been in the cells the day before for holding up a sign by the Cenotaph that said: “You have the right to remain silent.”
Crowds of tourists seemed to think that he was some kind of official attraction and began to ask for photos as he hobbled up Whitehall with me in tow. Neil duly obliged. A few tried to give him money afterwards but he motioned them away. As we got nearer Downing Street he leant over to me and said: “Chaplin was the man, you know.” A few minutes later I began to understand exactly what he meant.
The tramp is not one of the most widely loved icons of cinema for nothing. Despite many of Chaplin’s films being over 70 years old and having had no major cinema release in generations, everyone still knows and loves his character. The tourists by the entrance to Downing Street laughed and clapped as Neil took up his spot outside the gates. They queued to have their photograph taken with him, but the police were not amused because he soon produced a sign from his rucksack that said “NOT ALOUD”, which because of the ludicrous nature of the government’s new Serious and Organised Crime and Police Act’s exclusion zone meant that he was breaking the law.
Within minutes an armed officer called over to him.
“You can’t stand there, mate. It’s illegal.” Neil shrugged as though he didn’t understand. The policeman tried again. “You can’t demonstrate.
Move along or you’ll get arrested.” The crowd of people began to boo at the policeman. “Doesn’t he have the right to remain silent?” I offered. The crowd laughed. The officer angrily looked at me.
“Are you trying to be funny, mate? Who are you? Are you with him?” I shook my head and he turned back to Neil, who was doing his best to look scared, which was drawing sympathetic noises from the crowd. One called out: “Leave him alone, he’s only standing there!” Someone else put in: “It’s a free country, isn’t it?” Neil shook his head with a rueful smile and the crowd began to applaud and cheer.
The policeman spoke into his radio. I decided to explain to everyone that because he hadn’t got permission from the police “Charlie” was breaking the law for holding an illegal demonstration. A man behind me laughed. “You’re joking, aren’t you, mate?” Others seemed astounded. One woman looked at me as though I was deranged. “You can’t be serious?” she said. “Protest can’t just be made illegal!”
The policeman rounded on me: “Look, who are you? Can you just move along?” I refused and pointed out that I wasn’t breaking the law. He became contrite and lowered his voice. “No, you’re not breaking the law, I’m just asking you out of courtesy if you’d move along because you’re adding to this disturbance.” I refused again and he said into his radio: “There are two of them holding an illegal demonstration. Can I have back-up?”
At this point, again to a vast array of boos from the crowd, another armed policeman emerged and asked Charlie his name and if he had any ID. A group of lads who looked like builders began to laugh, and one called out: “What’s his name? His name’s Charlie, you muppet!”
Again the swelling audience fell about. The policeman pleaded with Neil to move a few yards away to stop the crowd blocking the entrance to No 10. Charlie shuffled along, only for another two officers to approach him and ask again if he had any ID. Neil let go of his sign, revealing that it was chained to his wrist (so it wouldn’t get confiscated like the last one) — cue more laughter from the crowd — and began theatrically to look through his pockets. Eventually he found a scrap of paper which he unfolded as if he had all the time in the world and turned it's contents towards the crowd. “NO COMMENT” was written on it in large black letters.
There must have been 50 people at this point and they all began to cheer. Even the armed policeman laughed. “Well, he is funny, I’ll give him that.”
Two officers then ushered him a few yards down the street. Neil was given a piece of paper that outlined the exclusion zone and explained about section 132 of the Serious and Organised Crime and Police Act, which solicited a huge guffaw from sections of the crowd. The policemen told Neil that if he was still there in half an hour they would arrest him. Neil shrugged his shoulders.
Part of the crowd began to disperse. More tourists emerged and had their pictures taken, but none could believe that he was about to be arrested. One came over and chatted to me to learn what was going on. I explained that in a few minutes’ time Charlie was going to be taken to Charing Cross police station for holding his sign. The man was incredulous. “They can’t arrest you for just standing there, can they? What about our rights?”
He was about to see exactly what had happened to our rights. A police van pulled up, the two uniformed officers emerged, and Charlie Chaplin was read his rights and manhandled into the back of the van.
As he was carted off in a police wagon the funny side of Section 132 of SOCPA seemed to go with him. The crowds seemed unsettled, too. Their laughter gave way to bewilderment and shock. If only the architects of SOCPA and all the MPs who voted for it in parliament had been on hand to explain to us all why there was nothing sinister about a man dressed as Charlie Chaplin being arrested outside Downing Street for carrying a sign that said “NOT ALOUD”.
I’d had enough. It was time to get off the fence and put something on the line myself.
As I walked away down Whitehall in disgust an idea began to amble around inside my head. This law, to steal an old-fashioned English phrase, simply “wasn’t cricket”. So it was surely time for an illegal cricket match to take place in Parliament Square. A cricket match for the “Ashes” of the Magna Carta on St George’s Day perhaps. Oh yes. I liked the sound of that . . . and what about a teddy bear’s picnic in Parliament Square, too.
Voltaire once quipped: “I disapprove of what you say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.” The use of a quotation from a Frenchman to define what it means to be British may offend some, but then that neatly sums up the contradictory nature of the British people. Sadly, today no one can claim that Voltaire’s words speak for this country any more.
On August 1, 2005, to the widespread shrugging of shoulders across the land, it became illegal to hold a spontaneous political demonstration outside the House of Commons — as what happened to Neil demonstrates. The nation’s apathy towards losing the right to free speech at the seat of its government, something supposedly as intrinsic to this “green and pleasant land” as warm beer and Freddie Flintoff, posed the question of what, if anything, does Britain actually stand for today?
Twenty miles from London, along the Thames, you will find a field opposite an island in the river. The field contains a monument erected by the American Bar Association. In the field next to it there is a memorial garden to John F Kennedy commemorating his role in the civil rights movement. Why on earth, you may imagine, are there American monuments in fields by the Thames? There are no other monuments. There is nothing to commemorate anything British.
Perhaps an important figure in American history was born there? Nope. The site is far more important to the American people than that. On that unmarked island in 1215 something was written down that more than 500 years later became the fifth amendment of the American Bill of Rights. “No freeman shall be taken, imprisoned . . . or in any other way destroyed . . . except by the lawful judgment of his peers, or by the law of the land. To no one will we sell, to none will we deny or delay, right or justice.”
For Americans this became: “No person shall . . . be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” The original document was, of course, the Magna Carta.
Nearly 800 years ago King John was held to account by a group of rebel barons who demanded a charter of liberties to protect England from his unfair and erratic behaviour. That was when the principle of a power higher than the sovereign was established. That higher power was the rule of law.
The Magna Carta has since been described as the most potent symbol of freedom under law in western civilisation. It is something, you would imagine, that even our embarrassed nation would manage to be proud of. At the very least you’d think we might have one of those blue plaques down there somewhere. “Liberty under law started here” perhaps, nailed to a nearby tree. It would be nice to have something to commemorate the birth of British freedom, but there is nothing.
So I thought I’d better go out and find the Britain of our dreams, sometimes known as Albion.
My original idea was to write a guide to some of the most absurd ancient legislation still on the statute book. I’d had this great idea to go round the country on a crime spree, breaking as many silly old laws as I could find: imagine if Fred Dibnah met Bonnie and Clyde.
There are hundreds of these ridiculous laws still in force in Britain. For example, to this day it is illegal to flag down a London taxi if you have the plague. In Chester you can’t shoot a Welshman with a bow and arrow before midnight, but you can after midnight. It’s also against the law to beat a carpet in the Metropolitan police district. Neither can you carry a sack of soot along a path in a place called Congleton, and it is still unlawful to get within a few hundred yards of the Queen without wearing socks.
However, in the process of researching these laws I couldn’t help noticing another glut of legislation that seemed even more ludicrous. Most of our silly laws have trickled onto the statute book over centuries, but this particular set had all come from our current government. And when you meet a man who got arrested after eating a cake with “Freedom of speech” written on it in icing, and someone else who has a criminal record for holding a banner made of fridge packing in Parliament Square that had “Freedom of speech” written on it in Biro, the idea of breaking the Adulteration of Tea Act of 1776 starts to seem a little frivolous.
Of course, once I started lifting up this legal concrete slab in the garden of England all sorts of other creepy crawlies emerged that cast doubt on the health of the nation. Of course, on paper Britain is doing rather well for itself. There are more billionaires in the UK today than ever before, there are more shiny things to spend our money on than you could possibly imagine, and we do appear to have some standing in the world at large. But who else lives in Britain apart from all the high-flyers, overachievers and entrepreneurs who help us stay members of G8, the club for the most economically powerful nations on earth? How does Britain seem to everybody else who lives here?
You know, the other ones. You and me. Those of us floundering in the highest levels of debt in Europe; the ones afraid of poverty in retirement; the ones being forced to work 40-plus hours a week with only four weeks off a year; the ones terrified of violent crime, of their children being adversely affected by the MMR jab; the ones suffering from depression because they can’t handle the stress of their jobs; the ones Carol Vorderman is hoping will consolidate their debt so she can keep her no doubt lucrative advertising contract.
To find out, I went on a journey around Britain to meet some of the people still fighting for Albion among the uniform high streets, no-go estates, monochrome offices and shopping malls of Britain.
I found an unlikely selection of eccentrics to guide me on my journey. People like the pensioners who let off stink bombs to force an extension to a public inquiry. The hairy history expert who got paid to have custard pies thrown at his beard by Ant and Dec. The world-famous fisherman with a penchant for firing homemade rockets into space. The man who enjoys howling like a wolf in his back garden. The Robin Hood of the squatting world who gets into empty buildings and hands the keys over to homeless people who can’t afford anywhere to live. The woman living on the roof of a bus station in Derby. An activist who organises picketing campaigns outside the homes of drug dealers. The former MI5 agent reduced to peddling conspiracy theories to complete strangers about 9/11.
Now I don’t usually go round practising criminal behaviour. Although that’s not to say I wasn’t outgoing and interesting when I was younger. I drank alcohol before I was 18. I stole a rubber once when I was 12. I’ve taken illegal drugs, broken the speed limit while driving, been drunk (although not while driving), ridden my bike on the pavement, and skateboarded where signs strictly prohibited me from doing so.
But the protest exclusion zone outside the House of Commons was different. This was one of those laws you could actually get a criminal record for breaking. Up to that point in my life I had also managed to exploit the middle-class force field that put the police off the scent if I was ever up to no good.
My friend Greg took this idea one stage further. If the police ever paid him any attention while he was driving to a rave in the possession of illegal powders he would simply turn on Radio 4 before they asked him to wind his window down, “because it formed an impenetrable bourgeois sphere that the police simply couldn’t penetrate”. But as it was, I didn’t mind being arrested. You see, it was all part of my plan.
Cecil Rhodes once wrote that being born an Englishman was like winning first prize in the lottery of life. Now clearly sentiments like that are rooted in the British Empire, which it has become rather politically incorrect to admire today, but there is still an element of that quotation that has always made me feel a certain sense of pride.
Whenever I heard it the empire was certainly not what dominated my thoughts, just the simple idea that the things in life that mattered were still valued here. Looking around the nation in the 21st century, however, Rhodes’s words seem hollow and out of date.
When my girlfriend Rachel and I started a family the future into which our country was heading began to preoccupy our minds.
It wasn’t just the question of civil liberties being eroded, although that weighed heavily enough, it was the maternity ward with invisible midwives where our son was born; the grotty, leaking community centre down the road where the government’s Sure Start initiative was being implemented; our badly lit and nerve-racking local train station; the grimy local swimming pool threatened with closure; and the community police officers taking a breather in our local park instead of proper old fashioned bobbies walking the streets.
If you have the good fortune to be alive, you’ll certainly have spotted the huge disparity between the way we are told things are and the way your experience proves them to be, whether it’s the difference between what the brochure said about your holiday and the holiday you experience when you get there; the pert, tight, 17-year-old bottom enclosed by that pair of size 6 jeans on the billboard by the bus stop as opposed to the way your 30-year-old size 14 bum looks in them when you get home; or the politician who tells you what you want to hear then mocks your naivety as soon as your back is turned.
Rachel and I were becoming terrified that our son would grow up in a country stripped of its values and sense of place. I was determined to do what I could to preserve what I felt this country stood for so that my son could experience it and enjoy living in Britain too.
You may not think the idea of my deliberately becoming a criminal went down well at home, but Rachel was rather pleased by the change of direction my journey had taken. Breaking new laws rather than old ones meant that, among other things, I would no longer have to contract bubonic plague before attempting to hail a London cab.
In fact, the enthusiasm that seemed to fill her at the prospect of my being given a lengthy jail term made me think that she was quite keen to get away from me for a while. Despite such misgivings I took her enthusiasm as nothing more than simple, unconditional support. And then my criminal life began. With a teddy bear’s picnic. In Parliament Square.
© Dan Kieran 2007
Extracted from I Fought the Law, to be published by Bantam Press on May 7 at £9.99. Copies can be ordered for £9.49 including delivery from The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585
The Seven Steps to the Idle Life
The Idler, Issue 35, Spring 2005
As a dedicated man of the sloth I am always promoting the merits of an Idler life to anyone who will listen. But whether it’s in the pub, on late-night radio phone-ins or on dodgy cable TV shows, the response is always the same: ‘Well, it’s all right for you to be an Idler, but the rest of us can’t afford it. Some of us have to work for a living.’ This argument will resonate with some, but it’s important to point out that the Idler magazine isn’t a network of smug, independently wealthy parasites. There’s nothing unusual about any of us, but we all do have one thing in common: at some time or other, we’ve all taken a leap into the unknown to pursue a different kind of life. So if you can’t face spending another day doing a pointless job you hate; if you loathe the fact that you only get four weeks a year actually to ‘live’ and spend the other forty-eight staring at a clock wishing your life away; if you want a different, more idle life and you don’t know how to get one, or don’t think you can afford one, here’s a seven-step guide.
Step One – Give Up Ever Wanting To Be Rich
In the words of that apostle of the amateur creed, poet/painter/musician Billy Childish, ‘If they’ve got what you want then they’ve got you.’ So if you can stop wanting what they’ve got then you’ve cracked the hardest part of becoming an Idler and a life of freedom is yours for the taking. Not wanting to be rich is the single most immediate and liberating act you will ever make in your life. Of course, some Idlers become rich accidentally as a result of following their natural instincts, but being rich is never their goal, just a stone that gets into their shoe somewhere along the journey.
Step Two – Rid Yourself Of Debt
Mortgage, literally translated, means ‘death grip’ – such is the patronizing and bloated nature of the lender/borrower relationship. But western society is built on foundations of overwork and over-consumption so a life without debt is becoming increasingly difficult to attain. The mortgage is probably the only kind of debt we can no longer live without and still remain self-sufficient, but all other kinds of debt are completely avoidable.
The cycle of debt is what traps most people in a job and a life they hate. The harder they work the more miserable and stressed they become.
So they go to the shops at the weekend and buy themselves something nice because they’ve had a tough week. Even if they don’t have enough money they can still buy whatever they want with a criminally usurious credit or store card. But when their statement appears they get that gnawing feeling of dread in the middle of their stomachs as they realize the mountain their debt has become. So they work even harder. They take all the overtime they can get to pay for everything they’ve bought to make them feel less stressed, which makes them more miserable. They work so hard, in fact, that the rest of the time they’re totally exhausted. They’re either arguing with the person they love, becoming strangers to their children or drowning their sorrows in the pub. And by this point, because they’re in so much debt, they couldn’t live a different life even if they wanted to. Those spiralling monthly payments have trapped them in a crap job and they have a house that’s full of crap they don’t need.
Ridding yourself of debt will give you the opportunity to live a different kind of life, but it can take time, years even, to clear. Bear in mind, though, that even if it takes you ten years it’s a much more sensible thing to pursue than a career.
Step Three – Don’t Buy Useless Crap That You Don’t Need
Everyone buys useless crap they don’t need and won’t use to compensate for the misery of their forty-eight-week-a-year job that destroys their soul and dignity. Take responsibility for your own happiness and stop trying to fill the hole in your life with grot. This doesn’t entail wearing rags, growing a beard and patronizing anyone who wears Nike trainers. Just bear in mind that the more you buy, the more you’ll have to work to pay for it. Remember, the rule is, no credit. If you can’t afford it, you can’t have it.
Step Four – Ditch Your Pension
The pension is one of society’s safety nets that doesn’t actually make anyone feel safe. ‘Work hard, be miserable now and save just enough money so you can stay alive in penury when you’re old and grey,’ say those who advocate pensions. Er, no thanks. But this is the fate that awaits those of us who’ve helped make the UK the fourth largest economy in the world. Pensions aren’t safe. Invest your money in yourself and your own happiness now instead of in a pension plan that will probably vanish some time in the future.
Pensions are also the justification for corporate greed. Chief executives bleat about ‘the needs of shareholders’ to warrant their savage pursuit of a rising share value. Nothing is allowed to get in the way of increasing a company’s share price, even at the cost of decimating any sense of community in our towns and villages across the country. Gross, unnecessary warehouse-style shopping malls are built, village banks are closed and arms are sold to dictators. So if you want to do your bit for the planet, remove any money you have in the stock exchange. This simple act will improve your life and, indirectly, the lives of other Idlers all over the world.
Step Five – Work Part-time
Once you’ve given up wanting to be rich, you’ve got yourself out of debt and you’ve stopped buying useless crap you don’t need, you’ll need much less money to live on than before. So now you can quit your full-time job and get a part-time one instead.
Part-time jobs are becoming more and more popular with businesses because they remove a company’s legal obligation to give you the benefits associated with full-time work – sick pay and so on. But that’s OK because the happier you are the healthier you are, and the less you work the happier you will become, so you won’t need these so-called benefits.
If going part-time is a daunting prospect then work four days a week to start with and gradually wean yourself off your addiction to work. A three day-a-week job is popular with many Idlers now; four days off, three days on is a far more civilized way of living than the criminal two days off, five days on that our greedy western world depends on.
Step Six – Do That Thing You’ve Always Dreamt Of Doing
Once you’ve worked through the guilt of no longer being ‘a productive member of society’ (i.e. you’ve stopped working and consuming more than you need in order to be happy), you’ll find time on your hands to pursue the things you’ve always wanted to do. Far from being an unrealistic goal, this is precisely where your future security lies.
The Idler’s ultimate goal is to earn a living doing something so enjoyable that it can scarcely be called work at all. And when the way you earn a living is something you love doing, the idea of retirement becomes ludicrous, so you won’t need a pension either. It will take time, but eventually you will work out how to earn money doing whatever it is you want to do with your life. Later, you will earn enough to cut down the hours of your part-time job until eventually you’ll be able to quit the world of the crap job completely.
This is the Idler’s life, seeking happiness, not success, and wisdom rather than cleverness. As Idler subscriber and TV supremo John Lloyd put it, ‘People are obsessed with cleverness when it is wisdom that counts, and anyone can be wise.’ With wisdom comes the acceptance of truth, personal happiness and the creative, self-directed life so many of us crave.
Step Seven – Take The Test
Read this passage from Wind, Sand and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. If you can read it without shuddering then you’ve made it. If you can’t, there’s still time. There’s always time.
Old bureaucrat, my companion here present, no man ever opened an escape route for you, and you are not to blame. You built peace for yourself by blocking up every chink of light, as termites do. You rolled yourself into your ball of bourgeois security, your routines, the stifling rituals of your provincial existence; you built your humble rampart against winds, tides and stars. You have no wish to ponder great questions; you had enough trouble suppressing awareness of your human condition. You do not dwell on a wandering planet, you ask yourself no unanswerable questions…
No man ever grasped you by the shoulder while there was still time. Now the clay that formed you has dried and hardened, and no man could now awaken in you the dormant musician, the poet or the astronomer who perhaps once dwelt within you.
The Telegraph, Friday April 13th, 2007
By Dan Kieran
“Time is money,” as the saying goes. So it would never occur to most business travellers to do anything other than fly when heading abroad.
But while it is clearly ridiculous to advocate spending six days on the Tran Siberian express through Russia and Mongolia to get to a meeting in Beijing, there are positive reasons for taking to the train when it comes to destinations closer to home.
In fact, 2007 is set to herald a whole new era of European high-speed rail travel. The Railteam project, where train operators from all across Europe have come together for the first time to give travellers the chance to buy a single ticket for journeys right across the continent, begins later this year.
Then there’s the new Eurostar terminal that will open in November allowing you to travel from London to Paris in a mere 2 hours 15 minutes, along with the new rail link between Amsterdam and Brussels opening in December that will slash journey times by a third, and the TGV Est from Paris that opens in June, cutting journey times from London to Strasbourg to just six hours.
Happily for rail operators, and those concerned about climate change, all this is happening at a time when air travel is becoming a less and less enjoyable experience. With the, now ubiquitous, two-hour airport check in and the budget airlines pride in depositing you miles from where you actually want to be, taking the train is becoming a more and more realistic option.
And if you’re prepared to ‘think outside the fuselage’ then night trains can be an alternative too. For example, take a ten am meeting in Berlin: Option one involves getting to the airport well before the crack of dawn, which will either put you at the mercy of our public transportation system or mean paying through the nose to park your car. Then you’ll have to wait around in the airport for hours, suffer the indignity of being strip searched and interrogated about the contents of your briefcase before being packed into the plane like a sardine.
After spending a few hours up in the sky you get delivered back down to earth before you set off through the obstacle course of baggage and passport control. Somewhat strained and dishevelled you dive into a taxi and arrive for your meeting with your stomach rumbling and curses spilling out of your mouth, with only minutes to spare.
Option 2 involves taking the effortless Eurostar to Brussels at 6 pm the night before. There’s time for a spot of dinner and the chance to polish off a bottle of Burgundy as you speed through the Belgian countryside. With a nice glass of wine, a full stomach and the world flitting past your eyes you have the time to stop and think about the events of the day ahead.
Two hours later you glide into the station, disembark, walk ten yards across the platform and settle yourself into your luxuriously appointed cabin. You will be sleeping in a train so the more wine you drink in the bistro-restaurant car the better, which is a price I’ve always been prepared to pay to do my bit for planet earth. You can then snore away to your heart’s content for a full eight hours before a polite knock on your cabin door half an hour from Berlin. Just giving you time for a shower in your en-suite compartment and a light breakfast before your arrival at 8.20am.
Europeans are rightly proud of their high speed trains and even more concerned about climate change than your average British, lentil-eating eco-warrior. The anecdotes of your journey will certainly have a more positive impact on your German counterparts than the frustrated mutterings of airport delays and stagnant departure lounges pouring from your more conventionally minded companions.
It might take a little more effort but rail travel certainly can be a viable alternative for business travellers when it comes to our closer European neighbours. All it takes is a bit of courage and vision. Qualities that even the highest fliers couldn’t help but admire.
The Guardian, Saturday February 10, 2007
When Dan Kieran stopped flying 15 years ago, organising his travel through Europe was a headache. Now, at long last, the rail companies are hitting back at the budget airlines, introducing faster, smarter trains - and a greener way to go
The waiter in the dining car leant over our table and enquired whether we'd care for another bottle of complimentary sancerre or perhaps some champagne before the main course arrived. The concierge, meanwhile, was preparing our cabin, with its own ensuite toilet and shower, for a tipsy reunion a few hours later.
I surveyed our fellow travellers and felt a twinge of surprise as we glided through the French countryside. In the 15 years I'd shunned aeroplanes for long distance trains, I had become used to being the youngest passenger in the dining car by at least 30 years. But not this time. My partner Rachel, our son Wilf and I weren't even the only young family. Only one couple could actually pass as retired. The rest of the relaxed, smiling faces belonged to adults of all ages who were thoroughly enjoying the journey to Madrid and all that free wine. It was then that I realised that our secret was out. Trains are back in fashion.
In recent years, rail companies may have been slow on the uptake when it comes to fighting back against the budget airlines, but with carbon emissions now so high up on the political agenda it's safe to say that the time of the train has come. Indeed by the end of 2007 the infrastructure will be in place for a whole new era of international rail travel.
Eurostar's new terminal at St Pancras, and the UK's first high-speed line, set to open in November this year, will cut journey times from London to Paris to 2¼ hours. Once it's up and running, there are plans to introduce tickets from the north of England and Scotland to destinations right across Europe. Manchester to Marseille, for example, or one day even Edinburgh to Istanbul. In June SNCF launches its high-speed TGV Est service, allowing passengers to travel from London to Strasbourg in a mere six hours. A new high-speed rail link between Brussels and Amsterdam is also opening in December cutting journey times by a third.
A fully integrated network will soon be in place offering an alternative to the environmentally damaging pursuit of no-frills flying with its emotionally draining two-hour check-ins and habit of dumping you miles from where you want to go. However, once you've tried international rail travel, you'll find it's not just a question of assuaging your environmental guilt. Those who are prepared to take a bit more time when going abroad have discovered something else, too. They've realised that the very fact that it takes a little longer means you genuinely get to "travel".
Before I stumbled upon European Rail, the company that organised our family package deal to southern Spain with a Grand Class overnight cabin that includes dinner and wine, I arranged my own rail trips abroad. And, if I'm honest, organising them was always a nightmare. I had some interesting experiences though, including one memorable 24-hour trip to Warsaw via Brussels to be the best man at a friend's wedding. Despite various mishaps, it gave me a taste for a new kind of "slow" travel. I got my timings wrong, missed all of my connections and ended up in Cologne station at midnight reading The Day of the Jackal while being stalked by the world's worst pickpocket.
I managed to talk myself on a train to Berlin via Hamburg before getting a connection to Warsaw. I awoke at dawn in Berlin, a horizon peppered with dozing cranes beneath an orange glow. Into Poland and we passed through fields where stout men were dragging their heels behind horse-drawn ploughs. On route, I chatted to a soldier on the run from Germany before giving an impromptu English lesson to a mother and her 10-year-old son. I'd also read that this stretch of the line formed part of Jonathan Harker's journey into Transylvania in Bram Stoker's Dracula, something that gave the thick dense woodland an air of fascinating menace.
My expedition was certainly altering my state of mind - the relative slowness of rail travel gave me time to absorb and acclimatise myself to my surroundings.
I arrived in Warsaw somewhat bleary eyed, six hours later than planned. The station was the kind of brutal concrete communist Lubyanka that awoke suspicion and fear in my middle-class eyes, despite the smiles and friendliness around me. I hailed a taxi and found myself once again in the umbilical cord of western life as we drove through the new developments of Warsaw with their lurid Coca-Cola and McDonalds branding jostling for position with Sony and a Holiday Inn.
I soon arrived in my luxury hotel filled with western businessmen and immediately bumped into a friend who had also come out for the wedding. He'd been in London only five hours earlier having, more sensibly in his eyes, chosen to fly. He laughed at my dishevelled appearance and told me how eccentric I had become.
But standing in the lobby of that hotel I realised that he wasn't really in Poland. Not really. He was in a building of the kind he saw every day at home. He had travelled through a wormhole that began in a taxi outside his flat that took him to an aeroplane that entertained him with his favourite television shows and delivered him to a taxi, which had brought him to this western hotel. He had no conception of the country he had entered. Neither, perhaps, did I, but at least I had the grace to be aware of that fact. I had, at any rate, seen the land and the people of the countries I had travelled through. I would suggest I was also unknowingly more respectful because of that fact.
The journey home a few days later was far less eventful but no less enjoyable, and when I got back to London I felt like I had actually travelled somewhere for the first time in my life. I felt like a pioneer. I was hooked and I have never flown since.
At the moment I'm reading English Journey by JB Priestley to prepare for a travel book I'm writing with my friend Ian called Three Men In A Float. We're taking this idea of slow travel one stage further and applying it to our own country this summer by driving across England in a milk float with our friend Prasanth. I discovered that Priestley predicted this phenomenon, the downside of excessive speed for anyone hoping to experience what it actually means to travel, while journeying around Britain in the autumn of 1933.
"Our new, rapid, closed-in sort of travel has its sinister aspects," he wrote, "and here is one of them. When people moved slowly in their travel, there was time to establish proper communications with what was strange, to absorb, to adjust oneself. Now that we are whizzed about the world, there is no time for absorbing and adjusting. Perhaps it is for this reason that the world that the traveller knows is beginning to show less and less variety. By the time we can travel at 400 miles an hour we shall probably move over a dead uniformity, so that the bit of reality we left at one end of the journey is twin to the bit of reality we step into at the other end. Indeed, by that time there will be movement, but strictly speaking, no more travel."
Thankfully, since my trip to Poland I've found rail package deals that offer the sense of perspective and adventure of that journey with all the luxuries and certainties you want when holidaying abroad. And the Railteam project will soon prevent fearful midnight conversations with surly guards if you do happen to miss any of your connections.
So if we are serious about tackling climate change, then the culture of short-haul travel will have to change and we will have to start turning our backs on the budget airlines. Not only do we now have a genuine alternative, you never know, it could even give you an addiction to a far nobler form of travel.
Robert Dean Frisbie
The Idler, Issue 32, Winter 2003
In 1924, Robert Dean Frisbie, a disillusioned twentysomething, abandoned worldly duty and moved to a South Seas island, whose natives were a byword for indolence. By Dan Kieran
I was sitting in a pub a few months ago talking to an old friend I hadn’t seen in years about the Idler. In the middle of the conversation he drew his head back as if something grand had suddenly entered his head. He smiled broadly and said, “Oh my God. You’ve got to read Frisbie.”
I can’t remember much of what he said about the man who I immediately assumed was the inventor of the flat, circular object you throw around in the park. And as always happens when you’re in a pub and someone suggests an author you would like, I forgot about it as soon as I walked out the door and got on with my life.
A few weeks later the postman buzzed and handed me a box from Amazon. It was odd. I hadn’t ordered anything, it wasn’t my birthday, I racked my brain incase I’d got drunk and bought a book I’d forgotten about. Nope. It was a complete puzzler. So I tore open the box and out fell a green book with an American dollar price tag on the spine, “$5.95”. I picked it up and read The Book of Puka Puka – A Lone Trader On A South Sea Atoll. Beneath the title there was a painting of a man walking with his arm around a beautiful island maiden in foaming white surf on a tropical beach. Under that it said simply, “Robert Dean Frisbie”. I looked at the invoice in the box and read the short message, “I’m assuming you never got round to getting this – Love Brian.”
It was an amazing feeling and a wonderful thing to do if you want to cheer someone up out of the blue. I felt slightly ashamed that I hadn’t got round to getting it. God knows I’d remembered enough boring crap in the weeks that had followed, like changing my mobile phone tariff and paying my credit card bills, so I sat down and started reading it immediately. I read it cover to cover in one sitting. It was brilliant. So now I’m telling you, you’ve got to read Frisbie.
The following passage is from the opening chapter of The Book of Puka Puka - Frisbie’s autobiographical account of his years on the island in the South Pacific. It’s 1924, Frisbie is twenty-eight and, inspired by his hero Robert Louis Stevenson, is on his way to open a copra trading station on the island of Puka Puka. There he hopes to live out the rest of his days and write his Moby Dick. He and the boat’s captain, Viggo, have spent three months sailing across the Pacific Ocean to reach the island. As soon as they set eyes on Puka Puka, Viggo attempts, one final time, to persuade his companion not to leave the boat and go ashore:
Now there’s Puka Puka for you,” said Viggo, pointing towards the canoes. There was a slight tone of resentment in his tone. “Everything is asleep here... The people see no reason at all for getting up in the morning and most of ‘em don’t: they sleep all day, but at night they wake up and you see them fishing by torchlight off the reef – eating, dancing, love-making on shore... You’ll be very lonesome, and you know white men often go insane under such conditions as you find here. I’ll leave you, if you’re sure you want to stay: but if you’ve changed your mind, speak out now. I’ll take you back with me and there’ll be no harm done.
Frisbie mulls it over:
“... I thought of my long search in the Pacific for an island where I would be a law to myself and beyond the reach of even the faintest echo from the noisy clamour of the civilised world. I thought of my library of five or six hundred books boxed up in the hold, and of my half dozen kegs of fine old liquor smuggled from Tahiti. Then I visualised myself in a cool thatched hut, my brow fanned by the trade wind... Contentment’s motherly hand already seemed to rest on me soothingly. Here no officious relatives or friends would cry: “Young man, you are wasting your life! Here you are, nearing thirty, with nothing accomplished, with no plans for the future, with no bank account! You must reform! It is your duty to keep the wheels of industry moving! Be efficient! Abstain from alcohol and tobacco! Join the church! Study Pelmanism!” I squeezed Viggo’s arm. “No I want to stay.” I said. “Can I take my things ashore now?”
Career Break
The Sunday Times Travel Magazine, November, 2005
We’re so busy working - and worrying about it - that we’ve forgotten how to holiday, writes Dan Kieran. From the beach.
The last time I really needed a holiday I was working as a weedsprayer in Slough. Unsurprisingly, it had turned out to be a rather tedious way to earn a living. It paid badly, was dangerous (due to my rather lacklustre adherence to the safety regulations) and had pushed me to the precipice of long-term psychological damage. So, after six months trudging the streets looking like a try-hard Ghostbuster, I had scraped together just enough money to book myself a fortnight in the sun.
A month later I was reclining on a sun-dappled beach, about to open my Raymond Chandler paperback, when my mobile phone started chirruping. ‘HELLO? DAN?’ I recognised the vacuous drone of my boss’s voice. ‘WHERE ARE THE SPARE KEYS TO THE VAN? I CAN’T FIND MINE.’ A few hours later, The Lady In The Lake had me perched on the edge of my towel when my phone went off again. ‘DAN, JUST A QUICK ONE: THERE’S A LADY HERE WHO SAYS YOU SPRAYED HER GERANIUMS WITH WEEDKILLER. THEY’RE ALL DEAD. SHE’S NOT HAPPY. I SAID YOU WOULDN’T MIND TALKING TO HER...’ And so it went on.
Now, not everyone on holiday will have been screamed at by an old lady from Slough, but most people will know how it feels to be pestered by the office while they’re away. According to research by the Chartered Management Institute and the Daily Mail, sixty-eight per cent of those questioned said they would respond to a boss’s request while on holiday. Forty-eight per cent admitted checking work-related e-mails and forty-three percent said they checked their voicemail. Given the West’s obsession with over-work and over-consumption, it’s not surprising we’re finding it harder than ever to ‘get away from it all’.
In Britain we work the longest hours in Europe. The TUC estimates that UK businesses get £23 billion of unpaid overtime out of employees every year, and a recent survey showed the average American works harder than a medieval peasant. We’re turning into such workaholics that the holiday industry can’t help but cotton on: this year, an Hawaiian cruise ship became the first to install Wifi access - by the side of the swimming pool. There’s no doubt we’re losing the ability to switch off.
And that’s assuming we bother to go on holiday in the first place. Another survey, carried out by Reed Employment, is even more terrifying. It found that sixty percent of UK workers fail to take their full holiday entitlement every year (full-time employees are allowed four weeks’ annual paid holiday by law). Fifty percent said they worried about work while on holiday, twenty per cent confirmed being stressed because of all the extra work they had to do before going, and ten per cent feared being sacked when they returned. If this is the reality of a holiday, it’s no surprise that fewer of us bother.
My friend Jake, an IT consultant, thinks there’s hope. He’s just got back from a month in Hawaii. I was impressed he’d managed to be away for so long. ‘It’s easy,’ he said. ‘As soon as I arrived I found a web café so I could check my work email. One of the greatest things about the internet is it means you can work anywhere. I moved my office to the beach. Isn’t that cool?’ I looked at him in amazement. ‘No, that’s the most depressing thing I’ve ever heard.’
At least there’s one place where you’re office can’t get hold of you - even mobile phones can’t work on aeroplanes. RIght? Wrong. Now, even this heavenly sanctuary is under threat. In-flight mobile phone company, OnAir, has just signed a deal with Siemens to provide a mobile telephone service on European short-haul flights. British Airways has found it’s passengers less than enthusiastic, but the will of business will no doubt get it’s way. So. unfortunately. it’s only a matter of time before your boss starts pestering you about lost paperclips at 35,000ft.
The Telegraph, Sunday September 17, 2006
On the track, Italian style
OVERNIGHT TRAINS are usually associated with people who can't handle the modern world, or spy thrillers set during the Cold War. Anyone who has been on one recently will tell you how out of place those opinions are: a fact borne out by the rise in people holidaying by rail, mainly thanks to the current problems with air travel.
Being unwilling to take to the skies, I was hoping to whisk my fiancée Rachel away for a romantic city break by train. So when an advert for European Rail's nine-day Italian Grand Tour dropped in my inbox, we didn't take much persuading.
The trip included a first-class Eurostar to Paris, including a light dinner and champagne; a quick Metro ride from Gare du Nord to Paris Bercy, where we would get comfy in our sleeper cabin before a proper evening meal in the restaurant car; and then a pleasant night's sleep speeding through the French and Italian countryside before arriving, to breakfast in bed, in Rome.
We would stay in a luxury hotel that overlooked the Trevi fountain, before moving on to a two-night stay in Florence; then it would be on to Venice where we were booked in for a weekend at the Hungaria Palace Hotel on the Lido, a favourite haunt of the well-heeled pleasure seekers of the 1930s.
So far, so romantic. The only question that remained was whether Wilf, our 18-month-old son, would find all this luxury and tenderness to his liking.
A romantic holiday with toddler may sound like an oxymoron, but we were determined to give it a try. After all, my short experience as a father has taught me that despite the numerous changes a baby brings to your life, you still have to make the effort to get out and enjoy yourselves.
Tired but outgoing parents are always better than tired and downtrodden ones. Nevertheless, those around us were far from convinced that our holiday would be a success.
"You're bloody mad," a fellow young father told me one night in the pub.
"You'll have to dope Wilf up with Calpol on the overnight train. It's your only hope," said another, fruitlessly scraping away at the bags seemingly tattooed under his eyes.
Any kind of holiday with a toddler certainly requires extensive planning. We booked our outgoing Eurostar to coincide with Wilf's afternoon nap, and took as many books and toys as we could carry to keep him entertained.
We limited ourselves to just a couple of bags so that we would be as manoeuvrable as possible, and we decided not to give ourselves any kind of itinerary once we had arrived.
This had a surprisingly relaxing effect on us throughout the trip. Apart from pre-booking tickets for the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, we made no attempt to tick the tourist boxes that always seem to lead to disagreements, but chose to spend our time wandering about and nibbling in cafés instead. Having a baby with you on a long journey doesn't have to be stressful, providing you are in your own self-contained space. Even if I were prepared to fly, I would never sit in an aeroplane for hours on end with a toddler squirming in my lap.
In our train cabin, Wilf had all the room he needed to toddle about in, and to draw his interpretation of passing cows with fluorescent pens. When it came to bedtime, I read Mr Lazy while we sat by the window and he gradually nodded off to the repetitive clunk of the high-speed train and the diminishing light of the setting sun.
Once he was tucked safely at one end of the bottom bunk, I nipped out to the restaurant car and bought beer and chocolate while Rachel tucked herself, chuckling, into the pages of a new book.
In Rome we clambered up the Spanish steps (not as high as I thought) carrying the buggy between us, and walked through a park overlooking the city before stumbling upon Rome's zoo.
While queuing for tickets, we began to feel rather self-conscious. Saturday morning at the zoo in the Italian capital was clearly a time to flaunt matching family designer labels. Still, it was the first time Wilf would see a tiger, giraffe, monkey and all kinds of other animals in the fur, so parental humiliation was a price we were prepared to pay.
With a toddler, you can still do everything that you hope to do on a romantic holiday; you just have to be prepared to do things in a different order. Rather than fight against Wilf's routine, we decided to adopt it ourselves and we rose early every day to explore each city, and enjoy a fresh breakfast whenever we chanced upon a suitable café or bakery.
Romantic dinners are not that realistic with a baby, either, so we went for romantic lunches instead. Drinking in the middle of the day is far more exciting and effective anyway, giving a giggling air of fun to every afternoon.
It also made us more sleepy by about eight o'clock when the effects of those 7am rises began to kick in. And you can't get much more romantic than having an early night.
Florence passed by in a tranquil haze, and the Hungaria Palace Hotel in Venice was simply sublime. Our room was equipped with a sweet little cot, made up with satin sheets, and a window with a view out across the lagoon.
After a few languid strolls along the canals in the sunshine, and a short-lived but memorable relationship between Wilf and a little Italian girl that involved holding hands in a small playground in the park, it was time to think about home.
The final overnight leg from Venice to Paris is quicker than the initial one from Paris to Rome, and before we knew it we were staring out of the Eurostar once again as it slipped quietly away from the French capital - and this time we were toasting our romantic break with glasses of champagne.
The Observer, Sunday January 29, 2006
Concerned about climate change, an increasing number of travellers are turning their backs on low-cost flights and rediscovering the joys of overland travel. Dan Kieran explains why he and his family became air travel refuseniks
As far as I can see, there are only three reasons why any sane person would refuse to get on an aeroplane.
1. Principle: you are passionate about the environment and refer any inquiry about your lack of air miles to the ecological impact flying has on the planet.
2. Cost: you are extraordinarily fat and since airlines began charging you for two seats instead of trying to shoehorn your ample bottom into one, you've found flying a bit expensive.
3. Fear: you are too much of a wimp.
Much as I might like to claim my objection to flying was born of my love for the furry creatures and ice caps of planet Earth, or because I was unable to walk past a cake shop without ingesting 13 mille feuilles, I have to admit it started because I was just plain scared.
But in the 17 years since I last got on a plane I have realised there's a lot more to it than that. And I'm not the only one questioning the role of air travel in my life. One major problem with not flying used to be putting up with the same old conversation whenever you met anyone new. 'Oh, you don't fly? Do you realise air travel is by far the safest mode of transport? Getting in a car is practically suicide in comparison ...' Or the classic: 'Have you tried beta-blockers? They did wonders for my mum/aunt/sister/dog' (delete as appropriate).
In the last 12 months, however, I've noticed a change. Now it's far more likely for someone to say: 'Oh, you don't fly? Well done. I'm trying to cut down. It's irresponsible to fly too much these days, what with the ecological impact of air pollution ...' and so on. My friend Jamie limits himself to one return flight a year on principle. I met a musician recently who cancelled a US tour because the record company said there wasn't time for him to go from city to city by bus or train. Then there's Michael. I met him last summer and he, his wife and two children shun air travel. 'Planes are boring,' he says. 'It's much more exciting going overland. You're really travelling.'
My fiancée Rachel, however, isn't convinced. So in an attempt to prove to her that it is possible to have an exotic, sun-drenched family holiday without getting on an aeroplane, we booked 10 days in Nice for the two of us and our nine-month-old son, Wilf.
A flight would have taken us just over an hour - plus time for check-in and going to and from the airports - but by train, it would be more like eight. Before you scoff, we quickly found a clutch of silver linings without venturing anywhere near a cloud.
To break up the journey, we decided to stop off in Paris on the way there and back - two city breaks on either side of our week on the beach. You can't do that by jet without extra hassle and cost. One-nil to not flying.
I discovered that going first class by rail only cost £5 more than flying with British Airways. It turned out that if I'd rung a few weeks earlier it would have been £75 cheaper. Two-nil to not flying.
The prospect of eight hours on a train with a baby may sound potentially stressful and I'd be lying if I said we weren't nervous beforehand. In fact, it was a breeze. We went in early September (when Nice would be quieter but still warm) so the trains were practically empty on each leg of the journey. On Eurostar we were moved to a more spacious part of the train and given wonderful service from the attentive (perhaps slightly broody) staff as soon as they clocked Wilf's baby-blue eyes. On the second leg, from Paris to Nice, we discovered that no one under 60 ever travels first class on French trains. Imagine a carriage full of sweet smelling, Chanel-clad grandmothers fighting each other to entertain your little bundle of joy. They were all disappointed because the motion of the train soon put Wilf to sleep anyway. Three-nil to not flying.
Taking our bags from the station to where we were staying was simple, too. Stations, unlike airports, are in city centres. So we didn't have to face pricey taxi fares or a cramped coach trip from the airport to our apartment by the beach.
All in all, then, it was a great success, reinforcing my belief that flying is simply not sensible. Being plucked from one place and dumped in another doesn't give you the chance to acclimatise to your destination. You have no sense of where you are, which is probably why so many holidaymakers shy away from dipping their toes in another culture and simply take Britain away with them.
Then there's jet lag, which in my view has nothing to do with lack of sleep. It's your brain screaming for you to slow down. Proper travel, by boat and by train, is different. Your mind can catch up and relish the new experiences around you. But the greatest prize is the enforced idleness it provides. There's none of this multi-channel entertainment nonsense you get in aeroplanes. You have time to reflect while you stare out at the world drifting peacefully past your window.
Of course, in the end, it all comes down to time. We work such absurd hours that we have to squeeze everything possible from our two weeks in the sun. No one would gladly swap a couple of days on the beach for 16 hours in a railway carriage. Life is too much of a rush. Until that balance is sorted out there's little hope that more civilised methods of travel will reclaim our affections.
I'm also aware that my argument is not exactly foolproof. I've yet to work out how we can visit my uncle in Bermuda without flying. Persuading Rachel to go first class on high-speed trains through Europe is one thing; asking her to slop out the toilets on a cargo ship through the Bermuda Triangle is quite another.
· Dan Kieran is deputy editor of the Idler magazine
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