Noctes Ambrosianae (5).

Last night James, Tori, Olaf and myself were smoking outside the Standing Order on George Street.

James: Oh if only we were dead. How pleasant it would be, lying snugly together in the graveyard, fast asleep…

Tori: Why are you so gloomy this evening? Is it perhaps because somebody special is leaving?

Olaf: You’re leaving?

Tychy: She’s going to her husband’s farm in Portugal for the summer, to help him supervise the harvest. You’ll remember that idiot who was following her about – the one who couldn’t speak any English?

Tori: He can articulate his feelings when he wants to. I gather that he was rather unhappy about our last credit card bill.

Tychy: Well! She thinks that she’ll be sunbathing all day, but he’s of the alternative opinion that she’ll be tearing about in a combine harvester. It will all end in disaster. I hope that when they get divorced, Tori ends up with the farm.

James: Oh Victoria, please don’t go to Portugal. I can instinctively sense that you won’t enjoy it.

Tori: Why don’t you leave Edinburgh for a bit? When was the last time that you had a holiday?

James: I never go on holiday. I’m too delicate to travel and it jangles my nerves. Besides, everybody is here. Edinburgh is such a progressive cosmopolitan city – or at least it is for anyone under thirty, or for anyone who lives hand to mouth. Nationalism has never seemed so obsolete. Italians, Poles, Basques, Chinese, Brazilians, Australians – they’re just cards which the city endlessly shuffles. And if the city deals so many exciting and challenging hands – and it offers so many adventures – then why bother to relocate to another city? It’s just a different coloured pack of cards.

Tori: But that’s a terrible attitude. If all of these people were just as lazy – sorry, as “delicate” – as yourself, then nobody would travel and there would be no cosmopolitanism.

James: Well I don’t so much admire cosmopolitanism as hate nationalism. Paradoxically, in a world in which cheap air travel allows tourist-migration and travel becomes an unremarkable commodity, the incentive to travel accordingly declines, because everywhere is the same, with the same commodities, services, educational resources and black market drugs, and the traveller needs to work harder and harder in order to glimpse something truly challenging and authentic.

Tori: But you can glimpse new things, or at least you can if you do some work. You once told me that you were a Surrealist, and that the whole point of that was to provoke all sorts of new, authentic reactions from a world of boring conformity. Surely travel can be part of that?

James: I guess so. But I recently wrote a piece for the website about Herman Melville’s novella “Benito Cereno” [“On Babo and Black Leadership”], and part of my research involved using GoogleEarth to find Santa Maria, the island featured in the story. And I swooped down on to the west coast of South America, I poured over the beaches and islands, I zoomed in and shot out and dipped back down again, when I found the island I circumnavigated it, I measured it and calculated the time it would take to row around the harbour, and I studied a dozen or so photographs of its beaches and hills. GoogleEarth is only in its infancy, but it’s already an incredible educational resource. And, of course, people mechanically resort to cynicism and small-mindedness…

Tori: It’s often said that when somebody installs GoogleEarth, the first thing that they do is look at their own house.

Tychy: I look in my neighbours’ gardens…

James: You prove my point. There is an instinctive miserablism and churlishness to most people, and they seem simply unable to say, “wow, what a fantastic invention! Just think of all the opportunities which this provides! Thank heaven for progress!” As the technology elaborates, GoogleEarth will resemble a sort of universe in your pocket, an encyclopaedic dimension, a flying carpet which will deliver you to anywhere in the world. And the individual will be reduced to a blob plugged into a hyperreality, his consciousness swooping and diving around the world, all obstacles to human travel emphatically defeated.

Olaf: Thank heaven for progress.

Tori: On the subject of the website, which of you was responsible for the article about the Maltese basketball player? [“On Samuel Deguara”]

James: I would never write about anything as vulgar as competitive sport.

Tychy: He did write that one. I certainly didn’t.

Olaf: That pissed off quite a few people, didn’t it?

James: It was a good article. When I briefly met Samuel Deguara, who was competing in the championships at the Pleasance, I was reminded of a nightmare about a giant which I had experienced when I was a child. The article was about a small man’s terror of a giant, it was not about Deguara himself. But I was naïve, and I didn’t think that any Maltese basketball fans would notice our little website. When it comes to information about Samuel Deguara, there is a shortfall between supply and demand. That article is the most popular on the website – it attracts a good quarter of the visitors to Tychy – and I only wish that Deguara’s fans would set up their own websites, so that we would not get quite so much of his Google traffic.

Tychy: I often think that there should be a gentlemanly agreement between those over six foot not to play basketball. Their participation is unsporting. They have a very unfair advantage…

James: The solution would be to erect a special hoop for the tall at a greater distance from the ground.

Tori: But you would get anarchy. Somebody would insist upon another hoop for those under five foot, and then another would be installed for children, and then another for people in wheelchairs…

Tychy: The game would become far more complex and strategic.

Tori: Did you see that Rafael Nadal won Wimbledon yesterday? He is such a gorgeous guy. I cannot believe that a single woman in the world supported Federer in that match. Even his own girlfriend.

James: Nadal looks a pleasant chap, but I’m a little afraid that he is not quite compos mentis enough to appreciate his victory. He spends his entire life playing tennis. He must have a very stunted appreciation of reality. If I won Wimbledon, I’d be driven around for a month in a limousine full of champaign and prostitutes and heroin, shouting “I am invincible!” at people in the street. But one suspects that this sort of thing is beyond Nadal…

Tychy: I think that the more you play tennis, the more the mind is erased. Rubbed out by the sheer boredom of it all!

James: Look at Tim Henman! The great comedienne Linda Smith once remarked that he was the human personification of the colour beige.

Tori: Enough of this! Nadal is a superman and, significantly, he’s also Spanish. That country has won both Euro 2008 and Wimbledon, and their entry to Eurovision was the best in the contest this year. Let us drink to Nadal’s health.

Omnes: Cheers!

Tags: Basketball, Cosmopolitanism, Edinburgh, GoogleEarth, Herman Melville, Linda Smith, Rafael Nadal, Samuel Deguara, Tennis, Tim Henman