Planes, trains and automobiles
Image: Joshua Woroniecki from Pixabay
To write a book is a very private, mostly sedentary activity. It takes hours of repetitive work, sitting quietly at a desk, seemingly drinking the same cup of tea over and over. To publicise and tour a book, however, is a merry-go-round of smiling faces, delayed flights, ubers and bad coffee. The following is a meditation on planes, trains and automobiles, which I hope can serve as an entrée to the moveable feast many of us will embark upon over the holiday period.
A bus is a bad place to try and read a book, and an even worse place to do some work, but the best place to watch other people. By constantly stopping and letting passengers off and on, a bus – like a train – reminds you that you are passing through real places where real people live. By comparison, a plane sometimes feels abstracted, like the graphic you see on your screen of the plane icon moving over a map of the world below.
When I work at my desk, I often play some white noise to quieten the sound of my fingers typing on the keyboard. On a train, the gentle sound of the carriage moving on the tracks provides the same ambience. If trying to work ‘on the move’, a train on an express line is far better than a café, especially if you can manage to find a ‘quiet’ carriage.
When flying at night, no matter whether I'm tired or not, my eyelids grow heavy as soon as the crew dim the cabin lights for take-off. Like children at kinder, the dimming of the cabin prompts the heads around me to slouch forward as we are all carried briefly into sleep.
Flying into Queenstown a few years ago, I absentmindedly left my notebook in the seat pocket of a plane. Having, in a rare moment of foresight, put my details on the inside cover, I received an email from airport services to notify me that I could pick up my book when I came back for my return flight. Some of the writing contained in that notebook made it into the book that I'm now touring.
I try calculating how many books I will have to sell to make this trip financially viable and realise even if that many people come to the events, I'll never have enough checked baggage for that number of books. This is to say nothing of the egg and lettuce sandwiches, the burnt cappuccinos, the bottles of water or the amount of time I've spent putting my belt back on, my laptop, iPad and deodorant back in my bag after passing through security.
On the night of the first event in Canberra, I see a man holding my book behind his back as he talks to someone. It dangles from his wrist, just another thing to be held. I can't hear what their conversation is about, but it’s the first time I see the book as an object, not just a file on my computer or one book among many in a pile in my study.
Perhaps that one small moment makes everything worthwhile.
