I was applying for a job the other day, and the application form asked me the question ‘What inspires you?’. And after I thought about it for a while, this is what I wrote.
People inspire me.
I’ve done quite a bit of travelling in my life, and although I like to go to new places and see new things, I’m usually interested not so much in where I’m going, as in who I’m going with.
When I was 15 I went to Neuschwannstein, the fairy tale castle from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, but I can’t remember the first thing about it and I don’t have any pictures of it either. What I do have pictures of are the people I went with (especially the girls), stood outside the castle, as I was generally more interested in them than I was in a building.
I also got to hang around Munich and the English Garden quite a bit on that trip, but I haven’t got any pictures of that either. I do have some more pictures of girls though (I was 15, who wouldn‘t?, I tastefully decided not to photograph all the topless women I saw or the naked man who kept trying to get us to play badminton with him though, so I did operate with some semblance of decorum).
Similarly, when I went to India in January this year, although I went there partly to see the Taj Mahal (which included a 12 hour trip in a taxi there and back where someone tried to get me to pay money to look at a monkey and another man with a sword opened a car door for me at the services, and we had to fire our tour guide because we just wanted to enjoy it without words), I went there mainly to hang out with Dean (and briefly with Elsa), and while I was there I was more inspired by the people I met than the places I went to.
If I’d met Shah Jahan himself, and he’d told me all about his wife and what he loved about her, I probably would have understood the Taj Mahal more, but in the end for me, it was just a building, and not even an easy one to get to at that (and I had my polos confiscated by the Army).
On reflection that day I went to the Taj Mahal I probably should have stayed in the Hotel Ajanta all day. I could have spent those 15 hours having a leisurely breakfast, lunch and dinner in the hotel, striving and failing to get the things I’d ordered but being brought other stuff instead, in that marvellously random way they used to feed me over there in Upsidedownland.
Sometimes I felt more like a friend or a member of the family than a paying customer at the Ajanta. And not always in a good way. Sometimes I got the distinct impression that I was getting on their nerves asking them stuff all the time, and they wished I’d go away, and conversely I sometimes found their behaviour completely incomprehensible and sometimes I didn’t have a bloody clue what was going on. Like I said, it was just like a family.
Also better than the Taj Mahal was the goofy waiter in the orange hoodie from the Hotel Godawari who brought me my Paneer Butter Massala, He was running around delivering dishes of food while a man was hammering a door frame and the restaurant seemed to be still being built around us. It was so the opposite of corporate, and I really liked that about it.
I liked it more because it was such a contrast from the faux corporateness of the Big Bite in Meerut the day before, which was like Fawlty Towers, only with a much more rude man in charge. I’m sure I’ll always remember the face of the waiter at the Big Bite who was so disinterested and surly, until we gave him a big tip that is (we were being ironic) and he suddenly turned into Mr Smiley Shakey Hands Man.
And I’ll certainly always remember the quizzical looks I saw on the faces of the local residents as Dean and I got ourselves funnelled by Google maps down the ever narrower back alleys of Delhi until we were virtually riding through people’s back gardens.
It was only when we got trapped with our fully laden bikes between a man pushing a cart full of bricks and an old lady in a chair that we realised we had our map set to walking directions rather than road directions. Thankfully the old lady, politely and without any fuss, lifted her chair over her head to let us through, or we’d still be there now.
And that bloody rickshaw driver who tried to take us down the Spice Marrrket, and who told us ’You happy, I’m happy’ but then managed to disprove this by leaving everyone unhappy. And the little leathery tuk tuk driver with the bad teeth who followed us round for fucking hours near India Gate (it was like being tracked by Tommy Lee Jones US Marshall character in the Fugitive) until he got moved on by the Army. And the other much nicer tuktuk driver who told us to catch the number 11 bus, and made sure we didn‘t forget the number by tapping us on both knees and saying one and one equals eleven (I thought it equalled two, but this is India)..
I do sometimes feel awed by buildings and other things made out of bricks and other construction materials, and although I was pretty knocked out by seeing the Berlin Wall in 1985 the reality of that divide came home to me much more powerfully two years later when I met a retired lady from Leipzig on a train who was going to meet her sister in the West.
She hadn’t seen her sister for 22 years because they were living on opposite sides of the wall when Germany was turned from one country into two. The matter of fact way she told her story made the Wall more real to me than seeing watchtowers and guards and the Wall itself.
And I went to Venice once, but the thing I remember most isn’t the Bridge of Sighs or St Mark’s Square but running around with water pistols shooting at my friends and being shot at, and if ever there was a city suited to the use of water pistols, Venice is it. And the lady who ran the ice cream parlour in Padua that was the first place I’d ever been that had 30 flavours of ice cream, and hanging out in the café over the road from the hotel with my friends, playing King of Boxer, where I kept getting knocked out by a little computer man called Brown Pants. The people and the emotions I still remember, but the buildings I don’t.
The fact that people mean more to me than places is the very reason I can do a 100 mile bike ride and remember no scenery whatsoever but I can remember the cantankerous woman in the Ford Fiesta van who was driving round on a beautiful summer’s day in a car full of urinal cubes and toilet rolls, and who not only beeped at me, but stopped to make lots of negative comments about cyclists.
And I remember less about the views I saw on Saturday climbing Hartside than I do about the incredulous cyclist who was doing his best to smash up his carbon fibre bike at the café at the top by repeatedly dropping it on the floor.
And it’s probably why I like cycle touring with Ruth, rather than on my own, because it’s not what I’ve seen that counts, but who I saw it with. Without someone to say ‘Do you remember that time that we….?’ to, I don’t think I’d want to go.
Yes, buildings are all very nice, and they’re quite useful for keeping the rain off, but in the end they’re just buildings. And they don’t really inspire me. But people do….
Anyway, that’s what I wrote, so that’s probably another employer I won’t hear back from……
People inspire me.
I’ve done quite a bit of travelling in my life, and although I like to go to new places and see new things, I’m usually interested not so much in where I’m going, as in who I’m going with.When I was 15 I went to Neuschwannstein, the fairy tale castle from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, but I can’t remember the first thing about it and I don’t have any pictures of it either. What I do have pictures of are the people I went with (especially the girls), stood outside the castle, as I was generally more interested in them than I was in a building.
I also got to hang around Munich and the English Garden quite a bit on that trip, but I haven’t got any pictures of that either. I do have some more pictures of girls though (I was 15, who wouldn‘t?, I tastefully decided not to photograph all the topless women I saw or the naked man who kept trying to get us to play badminton with him though, so I did operate with some semblance of decorum).
If I’d met Shah Jahan himself, and he’d told me all about his wife and what he loved about her, I probably would have understood the Taj Mahal more, but in the end for me, it was just a building, and not even an easy one to get to at that (and I had my polos confiscated by the Army).
On reflection that day I went to the Taj Mahal I probably should have stayed in the Hotel Ajanta all day. I could have spent those 15 hours having a leisurely breakfast, lunch and dinner in the hotel, striving and failing to get the things I’d ordered but being brought other stuff instead, in that marvellously random way they used to feed me over there in Upsidedownland.
Also better than the Taj Mahal was the goofy waiter in the orange hoodie from the Hotel Godawari who brought me my Paneer Butter Massala, He was running around delivering dishes of food while a man was hammering a door frame and the restaurant seemed to be still being built around us. It was so the opposite of corporate, and I really liked that about it.
I liked it more because it was such a contrast from the faux corporateness of the Big Bite in Meerut the day before, which was like Fawlty Towers, only with a much more rude man in charge. I’m sure I’ll always remember the face of the waiter at the Big Bite who was so disinterested and surly, until we gave him a big tip that is (we were being ironic) and he suddenly turned into Mr Smiley Shakey Hands Man.
And I’ll certainly always remember the quizzical looks I saw on the faces of the local residents as Dean and I got ourselves funnelled by Google maps down the ever narrower back alleys of Delhi until we were virtually riding through people’s back gardens.
It was only when we got trapped with our fully laden bikes between a man pushing a cart full of bricks and an old lady in a chair that we realised we had our map set to walking directions rather than road directions. Thankfully the old lady, politely and without any fuss, lifted her chair over her head to let us through, or we’d still be there now.
And that bloody rickshaw driver who tried to take us down the Spice Marrrket, and who told us ’You happy, I’m happy’ but then managed to disprove this by leaving everyone unhappy. And the little leathery tuk tuk driver with the bad teeth who followed us round for fucking hours near India Gate (it was like being tracked by Tommy Lee Jones US Marshall character in the Fugitive) until he got moved on by the Army. And the other much nicer tuktuk driver who told us to catch the number 11 bus, and made sure we didn‘t forget the number by tapping us on both knees and saying one and one equals eleven (I thought it equalled two, but this is India)..
She hadn’t seen her sister for 22 years because they were living on opposite sides of the wall when Germany was turned from one country into two. The matter of fact way she told her story made the Wall more real to me than seeing watchtowers and guards and the Wall itself.
And I went to Venice once, but the thing I remember most isn’t the Bridge of Sighs or St Mark’s Square but running around with water pistols shooting at my friends and being shot at, and if ever there was a city suited to the use of water pistols, Venice is it. And the lady who ran the ice cream parlour in Padua that was the first place I’d ever been that had 30 flavours of ice cream, and hanging out in the café over the road from the hotel with my friends, playing King of Boxer, where I kept getting knocked out by a little computer man called Brown Pants. The people and the emotions I still remember, but the buildings I don’t.
The fact that people mean more to me than places is the very reason I can do a 100 mile bike ride and remember no scenery whatsoever but I can remember the cantankerous woman in the Ford Fiesta van who was driving round on a beautiful summer’s day in a car full of urinal cubes and toilet rolls, and who not only beeped at me, but stopped to make lots of negative comments about cyclists.And I remember less about the views I saw on Saturday climbing Hartside than I do about the incredulous cyclist who was doing his best to smash up his carbon fibre bike at the café at the top by repeatedly dropping it on the floor.
And it’s probably why I like cycle touring with Ruth, rather than on my own, because it’s not what I’ve seen that counts, but who I saw it with. Without someone to say ‘Do you remember that time that we….?’ to, I don’t think I’d want to go.
Yes, buildings are all very nice, and they’re quite useful for keeping the rain off, but in the end they’re just buildings. And they don’t really inspire me. But people do….
Anyway, that’s what I wrote, so that’s probably another employer I won’t hear back from……
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