It’s 7.18am and already the heat feels like a small, lazy dog has curled up on the back of my neck. Not a menacing heat—not yet—but one that suggests London has skipped breakfast and gone straight to being irritable.
I’m sitting in a battered wicker chair in the postage-stamp backyard of a friend’s Notting Hill terrace, sipping coffee from a plunger that may or may not have been cleaned since the last heatwave. The sky is a pale, baked porcelain. Magpies argue and flap in the plane tree overhead, while a jet engine rumbles eastwards out of Heathrow: a reminder that other people are going somewhere cooler, or, poor bastards, somewhere hotter.
The irrigation system starts with a small hiss. Then a thin, calculated mist creeps out from a row of discreet black tubing beneath the hydrangeas. App-controlled. A precise digital strike against the forces of evapo-transpiration. It’s 7.18am and even the shrubbery has a strategy for surviving today.
My iPad is open on the table in front of me. There’s a photo of a church spire in Andalusia on the screen. I could write something, but I don’t know if I can be bothered just yet. My Apple watch went flat sometime yesterday afternoon. It’s sitting dead and dark on top of my diary.
And I’m thinking about quantum mechanics—as you do, before caffeine properly hits—specifically that quote from a professor who said: “Right now I’m the only one in the room who doesn’t understand quantum mechanics. In about four months everyone here will also not understand quantum mechanics.”
It feels remarkably similar to how I approach travel.
Three months ago, I was the only one who didn’t know where I was going. Now that I’ve arrived, no one seems to know what they are doing. There is a schedule somewhere, possibly in an email, possibly in a note on my phone that’s disappeared behind six tabs of Tube maps and unread texts from 3. But the plan, if it ever existed, has been overtaken by the slow collapse of meaning under summer heat and bus delays.
I exist in multiple states simultaneously. I am the seasoned traveller, the bewildered pedestrian, the caffeinated observer, and the unwilling participant in a 33-degree forecast. Schrödinger’s Tourist: both perfectly composed in the quiet of the morning and also vibrating with the knowledge that the Central Line will soon resemble a sealed kiln.
Somewhere between the first and second cup, I experience what might be called a moment of transcendental uncertainty. Maybe it’s the caffeine. Maybe it’s the fact I haven’t moved in twenty minutes. Maybe it’s the soft, whispering optimism of the irrigation system doing its silent duty beneath the box hedge. But I start to wonder: what if all travel is quantum?
We seek both adventure and punctuality. We want to be lost and still have lunch at exactly 1PM. We carry digital guidebooks and ignore them. We hop on trains and buses for no good reason, just to feel like we’re in motion, like we’re participating in the Great Project of Going Somewhere Else.
Another jet roars overhead. The magpies squawk in protest. Somewhere, a bin is wheeled across a cobbled laneway with the sound of small, domestic thunder.
I lift my mug. The coffee is strong, full of grit and promise. I am ready; not for anything specific, but for the idea of it. I may explore, or I may wait until the pavement stops shimmering. Either way, I am travelling. Which is to say: existing, bravely, in a state of quantum confusion.
Somewhere in universes 1.1, 1.11, or 1.111 I will sit here all day. But in this universe—the one approaching 3,000-degrees Kelvin—I will collapse the wave function and go out to observe London.
TravelWriterLife 