Read the Review. I am sitting slightly off-centre on the long back seat of a modern coach crossing Europe. And this in itself is extraordinary. For I hate coaches, I have always hated coaches, and above all I hate modern coaches, not just because of the strong and nauseating smell of plastics and synthetic upholstery, but because of the way the supposed desires of the majority are now foisted upon everybody -- I mean myself -- in the form of videoscreens projecting from beneath the luggage rack every six seats or so, and of course piped music oozing from concealed loudspeakers.
So that even as we pull out of Piazza dell'Universita into the morning traffic on Corso Vercelli in this strange city I have lived in for so long of stone and trams and noble facades and Moroccans selling boxes of contraband cigarettes laid out on the pavements under propped-up umbrellas -- because it's raining, as it will in Milan in May -- even now, before the long trip has hardly started, we are having to listen to a smug male voice singing with fake and complacent hoarseness about un amore passionale , which he cannot, he claims, forget, and which has destroyed his life forever , a theme, I suspect, that may be the very last thing one needs to be subjected to at only shortly after eight on a Monday morning, and not long after one's forty-fifth birthday.
Though many of the younger travellers are singing along the way fresh recruits, I believe, will sing along on their way to war. Yes, that it was a mistake, I reflect, sitting slightly right of centre on the long back seat of this modern coach setting out across Europe, that it was a big mistake to have come on this trip, I have never doubted from the moment I agreed to it, and perhaps even before, if such a thing is possible.
Or let's say that the very instant I took this decision was also the instant I recognized, and recognized that I had always recognized, that coming on this trip was one of those mistakes I was made to make. You were made to make this mistake, I thought.
By which I don't mean of course to put it on a par with the grander and more spectacular mistakes that have given shape and structure to what one can only refer to as one's life, just that, upon having agreed, in answer to a request from a colleague, to sign my name at the bottom of a list of other signatures of other colleagues, I immediately appreciated that this was precisely the kind of squalid, absurd and wilful mistake that somebody like myself would make.
