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 present-day Jakarta megacity, a vast low sprawl under a soft haze with modern towers, the National Monument needle rising from its green square - never been abroad

    Jakarta

    Jakarta is a sinking megacity its own country is abandoning — thirty million people running out of time, and I keep assuming I can go later.

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  • Charcoal sketch of Galle Face Green in Colombo, kites over the sea wall and the city behind - never been abroad

    Colombo

    The tea in my cup has come from the island behind Colombo all my life — the abroad I taste every morning and have still never once been to see.

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  • Charcoal sketch of the Giza pyramids and Sphinx at the edge of modern Cairo, the city pressing to the desert - never been abroad

    Cairo

    I have wanted to stand at the foot of Cairo’s pyramids and feel how small a life is beside a thing that has outlasted every empire that came to gawp.

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  • Charcoal sketch of a Buenos Aires avenue of balconied buildings at dusk - never been abroad

    Buenos Aires

    I have wanted to fly the whole length of the earth to Buenos Aires for years — the far city I suspect I would understand before I left the airport.

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  • Charcoal sketch of a wide changeable sky over the low Melbourne city, half bright and half storm, tram wires across the foreground and a thin line of the bay - never been abroad

    Melbourne

    Melbourne is the city I have built almost entirely out of weather and side streets — a place that changes its mind four times before lunch.

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  • Charcoal sketch of Montreal under snow seen from the mountain, grey rooftops running down to the wide frozen river, the great dome of the oratory faint on the high ground - never been abroad

    Montreal

    Montreal is the city I think of as a clerical error — a piece of Europe entered, somehow, in the wrong column of the atlas.

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  • Charcoal sketch of the Danube dividing hilly Buda from flat Pest at dusk, the river wide and pale between them, a bridge low across it - never been abroad

    Budapest

    Budapest is two cities that married late and kept separate beds — a flat one and a hilly one, with a grey river running down the gap between them.

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  • Charcoal sketch of a glass skyline along the shore of a vast flat frozen lake, a tall needle among the towers, cold clear light - never been abroad

    Toronto

    Toronto is a flat, orderly city on the shore of an inland sea — the whole world resettled politely along a frozen lake, the New-World city so many like me went to.

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  • Charcoal sketch of a dense low city along a wide brown river, scooters and markets below, a colonial spire, heat-haze - never been abroad

    Ho Chi Minh City

    Ho Chi Minh City — the old Saigon — a hot riverine city of a million scooters and French-colonial bones, shadowed by a war I grew up watching on the news.

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  • Charcoal sketch of a grand columned gate at the head of a wide boulevard, the low city beyond in grey light - never been abroad

    Berlin

    Berlin is a city cut in half and stitched back together within living memory — its hardest history left out in the streets rather than shut in a museum.

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