Travel and narrow minds

Of course, now we are leaving we are meeting nice people.

Recently, we got to know the parents of one of Alexander's friends, Luca. A big shame we didn't meet them before; she is Italian and he is English but they have spent most of the last ten years living in Africa. I would say that there is no doubt that travel broadens the mind but equally it might be that broad-minded people are the ones that travel in the first place.

What is for sure is that people have quite different sized comfort zones. There is Di in the village who has never been further than Orpington, and the various people who ask me if Spain has proper schools and generally have this feeling that outside the UK, it's a jungle.

(Though it can change. Take David, who used to work for me, and whose comfort zone was about one metre around his desk at work. He hadn't been abroad, and then suddenly he got a job working for a mining company whose operations were in the Congo. It was quite good fun reading him information about all the poisonous snakes, and telling him it wasn't like Islington, but weirdly he seemed to take it all in his stride and apparently has now been to the Congo without ill effects.)

For some people, the concept of moving somewhere easy like Spain is daunting. for others, travelling to Baghdad, or Sakhalin, is just all part of the day's work. You have to wonder why the human range is so huge. Look at soldiers, or journalists who go to war zones, and then look at our friend Tony, who has stopped taking the train from anywhere except Eynsford station.

Caterina has the most remarkable job, advising what is left of the British Empire - 14 territories, mostly remote, small islands like St Helena's or Pitcairn. It can take a week to sail to some of these places, where a handful of people, descendents of the original inhabitants, still live. The people on St Helena's put their foot down at the idea of opening the shop because a cruise ship has come in after 4 on a Wednesday, or something like that but soon there won't be anywhere like that left. Soon, maybe, people like Di and Tony will die out, and everyone will have a large, borderless comfort zone. Or maybe not.

What does strike you is that the idea that the UK is the centre of the world and still has a huge empire, is still part of our psychology. The fact that Britain is a small, eccentric island, where most systems and services have fallen behind, and which is viewed as a quaint tourist stop by large numbers of people, hasn't registered. In our minds, we are still ahead of the game.

"Oh, it's all mañana out there," said Barry from Crown Road who has the inevitable house near Marbella. The implication is that in the UK, builders are supremely efficient and turn up on time and get the work done to a high standard whereas in Spain they are semi-natives who loaf about lying under trees having a siesta. No, it is not, guys. Our builders in Spain have worked twice as hard and efficiently as anyone we have employed in the UK. Yes, they did lie down for an hour at lunchtime, but when the boss whistled an hour later they all sprang up and got back to it. They did not have any teas or the radio, they just worked, not least because they are mainly South American labourers being paid eight euros an hour. When they lay down, they just put their heads on the ground; one of them even had his head in the shower tray, so I had to go round and put cushions underneath them, which rather surprised them.

Yes, in the 1970s, Spain was well behind. It is now 2007, mañana has come, and most of us didn't even notice it. It is like being stuck liking Chris de Burgh or the Doors because that's what you listened to when you were young; our perceptions of the world are always out of date.

And it struck me, listening to Caterina, how very sheltered and narrow my life has been. There is a whole, huge world out there, and all I've done is work in one square Mile of it, absorbed in its local politics. I have been like a goldfish, thinking its bowl is the universe, or like a person who, owning a whole huge mansion, has only ever sat in one room and looked out of the window. Yes, I lived in Bangkok a bit as a child, and I travelled as a journalist, but I have hardly scratched the surface. Now, I think once you take the first step, maybe you can't stop. Maybe in a few years Spain will seem dull and familiar, and I'll have to go to the Congo. Maybe I'll be like the unsatisfied old woman in the story, whose husband catches the fish that grants wishes. She wishes for a bigger house, then a bigger one, then a bigger one, until the fish gets angry and the whole thing falls around her ears. Maybe that's how I'll be, only I'll be greedy for experience, wondering how to cram the whole lot in before I die, which can't, after all, be that far off.

Mind you, having said that, show me a delay to the baggage arriving off the carousel and my comfort zone is suddenly not that big after all.