I am in my virtual bar, surrounded by writers, photographers and travellers. There are barmen inventing wonderful virtual cocktails and music that simply surfs the background to the chatter. One minute I am chatting to a couple who live and work in Croatia, travelling with their young family. The next I'm sharing a bright green drink with an eco-warrior who writes for various blogs. Then I'm contemplating the use of the hyphen with a mother who has a penchant for steamy online fiction. After that, I'm discussing tapering with a runner from the west coast of the USA. After another couple of drinks I'm surrounded by teachers from around the world and it turns out students from Korea, France, Brazil, Malaysia all have the same problems learning English. Towards the end of the evening, I'm in a corner with a quiet, unassuming man who takes incredible photos - close ups of things which distort them so they look like abstract art. He needs persuading to show me. We end up closing the bar marvelling at his creativity.
I can't remember all these people's names, although they tell me. We share snippets and stories, we compliment and appreciate each other, we laugh nervous laughter because we don't know each other. We are not friends or colleagues. We are far apart and yet, here in this bar we are brought together by that magic something the virtual world provides: a beautiful, invisible thread. Be it poetry, parenthood, food, running; from the general to the very specific, there is something that draws these people to my virtual bar. There is a reason they are on my guest list, a reason they can be one click away, no matter the miles as the crow flies. They interest me, they entertain me, they teach me.
Sometimes, their thought and kindness reaches through the screen and touches me back in my real world. Their words go beyond the shining screen and enter my heart. The beautiful, invisible thread pulls my real, beating heart. That can be a very powerful thing. These people, merely visitors to my virtual bar, become more than a like or comment. By opening themselves up, they prise me open too. They are the people, who were it not for those miles, I would like to stand next to in a real bar and buy a real cocktail and have a real conversation.
But that's not possible. And so I just thank them for being able to pop into my virtual bar when they can and making it a better place. In this blinking online world where so much idiocy and awfulness reign, they are real beacons of light.
- This post was inspired by Tom MacInnes from Cobbie's World.
- It also links up with the writer folks over at Studio 30 Plus and their prompt of the week.
There are people who come back from a long weekend in, for example, Madrid, and say, "We've done Madrid."
Really? How? Oh, that museum and that famous tapas place and coffee in that square and that park and that fountain and that palace. No, you haven't done Madrid. You haven't tried to pay your phone bill in Madrid. You haven't protested there. You haven't wondered how you're going to get back with all those bags from the supermarket. You haven't got on a bus and realised you don't have enough fare. You haven't read the local paper from cover to cover. You haven't looked churlishly at someone because they come from a certain neighbourhood in the city. You have visited. You've had the pleasure of stopping by.
Because that's inevitably what we have to do when we travel. Glimpses and mouthfuls, dances and strolls. One croissant, one ruin, one hike, one painting, one smell, one song, one bite, one look. We want everything, instantly, all of the time, it's so easy to live without smelling the flowers when we travel. Then again, that's why it's called travelling places and not living in them. You've got to grasp as much as you can. You've never "done it".
That's why books written by brilliant writers are so fabulous. You can travel to places and live there, side by side with the inhabitants. You smell their smells, you breathe their air. The rusting cars, the torrential rain, the annoying neighbours, the slow post, the trees that grow by rules of their own: they are all yours as well. You wander their dusty streets, you taste their golden chickens, you are afraid of their brutal policemen, you sleep with their smell of jasmine.
Right now, I am travelling in Columbia with doctors and photographers and women with broken hearts in García Márquez's Love in the Time of Cholera. It is a place you read about and feel on your skin. I was there the moment early in the book that I read this:
In summer an invisible dust as harsh as red-hot chalk was blown into even the best protected corners of the imagination by mad winds that took the roofs off the houses and carried away children through the air.
Who wouldn't want to live in a place like this? Who wouldn't want their imagination opened by that dust and watch children flying past as their window as they make lemonade? It's a place where the tinkling of the piano reaches your ears between the turning of the pages; a place where in your own siesta you dream of swimming in its rain. There is time for you to be awakened by sadness too.
I would like to stumble sweaty out of an Egyptian pyramid, to pull faces at the pong of geysers in Iceland, to drink tea listening to the quarks of parrots in Costa Rica and to follow a shark-shaped shadow under the waters around Australia. Maybe one day I will do those things and maybe I won't. But I am comforted by the fact that someone who loves words, somewhere, has written about those places and I can live there too by opening their book.
