The Truth About Travel: time spent in a tube of farts.

Criminal barristers travel to where their trials take place. Sometimes that's a city, sometimes a town, sometimes it's a whistle stop with nothing but bad coffee and dust to recommend it. Nothing to be jealous about there, right? Wrong. Travel, even travel for work fires jealously in the inexperienced. Tell them you’re flying and staying at a 4-star and they’ll call it a junket quicker than you can gag them and twist their ear.

A tired travelling waiting to board a tube of farts.

         In truth travel for work is nothing like travel for pleasure. Obviously one reason for that is the work itself. Unless you are one of those lucky individuals who are passionate about what they do, then working away from home is just work with a higher degree of difficulty.

        Then there is the sheer disruption and dislocation of travel. Time away from family, friends and the familiar.

In hotel rooms the artwork always disappoints.

What about the glamour of travel,  the unbelievers ask. What about the flights, the hotels, the food they insist. Such folk are either misinformed or mad; for the glamour has gone. Journey enough and you realise that airports are mostly half-finished food courts and flights are an uncomfortable drag. Let's face it, flights in anything other than business class are little more then time spent cramped in a metal tube with other people’sfarts. Yes, the cynical say, but upon arrival you stay in luxury; a home away from home. Some home, is all I can say. Hotel rooms are impersonal, sterile and diminishing places with art work that always disappoints.

And eating out, rather than being a celebration of food, wine and company, becomes a palate-numbing, waist-increasing, hangover hazard.

A toilet, like a town hall, waiting to be opened. 

Today, even the simple pleasures of travel are lost or corrupted. The ritual is gone from it. No longer do you even get the chance to ceremonially tear the sanitised ribbon from the toilet bowel and christen the porcelain with imagined fanfare. Now it's just lid up, piss, thanks for coming. No speech. No applause. Nothing.

         The little miracles are gone too. Once I looked forward to places with quality soap and shampoo. I’d wonder at the tiny tubes of magic and the soap cakes so perfectly crafted they could be made for your hand, and no one else’s. It was such a pleasure to steal them.

         What about now? Well, the little miracles are become dangerous or farcical. In some cheap and nasty joints you’re lucky the products don’t kill you. While in other establishments the cosmetic puff is just ridiculous, the claims unbelievable.

Today you find hand lotion with olive extracts that sooth sensitive skin, and  pomelo conditioner that nourishes and revitalizes hair leaving it soft and light, or green tea hydrating shampoo with anti-oxidants that protects hair while nourishing the scalp. Not to mention aloe, coconut and miraculous oatmeal. Crikey, if only you could eat the stuff; then at least we could give the crappy airport foot court a miss.

Yep, work travel, it’s a bloody junket alright.