Never Been Abroad

Category: Dreamt

The Dreamt room holds the foreign places I have never been to — cities and far landscapes built from films, photographs, documentaries and other people’s memories rather than from any visit of my own. It is a standing record of armchair travel and Fernweh: the abroad longed for from a desk and drawn in charcoal, because I have never been abroad and have no photograph of my own to show. These are the places I keep meaning to go to, and somehow never do. Start with Zürich, Venice or New York.

  • Charcoal sketch of the Phuket coast of limestone karst islands in the Andaman Sea - never been abroad

    Phuket

    Phuket is the abroad other people bring back — a coast of drowned mountains standing straight up out of the sea, a short crossing I never made.

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  • Charcoal sketch of a French Quarter street of iron-lace balconies in New Orleans - never been abroad

    New Orleans

    New Orleans is a city built below the water it lives beside, holding a party over its own graveyards, in a heat I would recognise anywhere.

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  • Charcoal sketch of the lakeside town of Queenstown below the snow-capped Remarkables - never been abroad

    Queenstown

    Queenstown is the town they built for people who cannot sit still, dropped between a long cold lake and a wall of bare snow mountains.

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  • Charcoal sketch of the flat Canterbury plains running away to the snow line of the Southern Alps under a wide pale sky - never been abroad

    Christchurch

    Christchurch reached me as a copy of England sent to the far side of the world — and then I learned the ground had shrugged and broken it.

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  • Charcoal sketch of the flat sunset over Manila Bay, the sun low on the wide pale water with silhouetted palms along the seawall - never been abroad

    Manila

    Manila reached me the way weather reaches you through a shut window — a pressure, a colour of light, a sea at the end of every imagined street.

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  • Charcoal sketch of the wide Neva at a pale white-night dusk, a long low palace facade running along the embankment and a thin gold spire across the water - never been abroad

    St. Petersburg

    St. Petersburg is a city someone willed up out of a swamp and a sentence, and I have been living in the sentence for years without ever buying the ticket.

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  • Charcoal sketch of the single Gothic spire of St Stephen's rising over the old roofs of Vienna at first light, the great Ferris wheel faint in the distance - never been abroad

    Vienna

    Vienna is a capital built for an empire that no longer exists, and I have furnished a whole one of my own without ever buying the ticket.

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  • Charcoal sketch of the Tokyo skyline at dusk, Mount Fuji faint beyond the towers - never been abroad

    Tokyo

    The largest crowd on earth moves through Tokyo in silence, without touching — a strange marvel for a man raised in crowds that press, lean and talk.

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  • Charcoal sketch of Rio de Janeiro's mountains and bay at dusk, the city crammed between them - never been abroad

    Rio de Janeiro

    I have wanted to stand in Rio de Janeiro during Carnival and see what a city looks like when it hides nothing — I, who hide almost everything.

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  • Charcoal sketch of Marrakech at dusk, the Koutoubia tower over the low city, snow-capped mountains beyond - never been abroad

    Marrakech

    I have wanted to walk into the great square at Marrakech at dusk and learn how much of a city a photograph leaves out — its smoke, drums and heat.

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