I was feverish, coughing and feeling sorry for myself; in no shape to go anywhere, but badly in need of an escape. No — this was well before we’d been introduced to Covid. It was coming up to Christmas 1986, and I was back in my parents’ house in Portstewart on the Causeway Coast in Northern Ireland. Teri and I had gone over from London with our first child, Laura, to celebrate Christmas with the Kerr family, and somewhere along the way I had caught flu.

I was under the sloping roof of what we called The Big Front Attic. We had a Wee Front Attic, too (which had been my room when I was a teenager), and a Back Attic, and what we called The Back Return, whose door opened at the fourth and final turn of the stairs. From time to time I’d hear Teri’s feet on those stairs, as she came up with a cup of tea or a bite to eat, or my mother’s, as she offered a cure-all I’d had to swallow as a child but could now gently turn down: hot milk with ginger.

Had it been warm enough, I could have opened the window and looked out and left towards the Atlantic. “You know,” we used to say to guests in the house in summer when we were kids and our home was a boarding house, “you can see Scotland from here on a clear day.” Pause. Grin. “But we don’t get many of those.” We said it, anyway, when there were guests, though the start of the Troubles in 1969 was about as helpful for tourism as a pandemic.

In December, it was far from warm at the top of 4 Victoria Terrace, so I stayed cocooned in blankets. At the same time, I was nearly 4,000 miles away, sitting in a boat, a 16-foot aluminium skiff with outboard motor, in the company of Jonathan Raban. As a boy, in thrall to Huckleberry Finn, Raban had turned the brook at the bottom of his road in Norfolk into “the lonely, enchanted monotony” of the Mississippi. Now, in Old Glory, he was out on the real river, heading from Minneapolis to the Gulf of Mexico, taking the pulse of America, and taking me with him. As he had lived inside Twain’s book, so I did inside his, letting the river grow around me, “until the world consisted of nothing but me and that great comforting gulf of water where catfish rootled and wild fruit hung from the trees on the towhead-islands”.

I thought immediately of Old Glory when I received an email towards the end of March from Ben Ross of the Telegraph. “Never,” he began, “has a deskbound traveller been more relevant.” Given the curtailment of actual travel, he’d decided it would be a good idea to have a weekly page for a while of literary travel; might I like to look after it? 

We settled on a format: a lead that would be an extract from a travel classic or from a newly published book; a roundup of themed reading (trains, India, the American South, etc), with a paragraph on each of five or six titles; a “browser” panel alerting readers to new books on travel and place and new things online, such as Robert Macfarlane’s “#CoReadingVirus” book club on Twitter, which opened with Nan Shepherd’s sensual exploration of the Cairngorms, The Living Mountain; and a crisp “Last word”. On the first page, published on April 4*, the last word was from David Livingstone, taken from the original introduction to Missionary Travels in South Africa (1857): “I think I would rather cross the African continent again than write another book. It is far easier to travel than to write about it.” And the first words? Those were from Jonathan Raban, in an extract from Old Glory. 

If I were pressed to name a favourite travel writer, it would be Raban. He’s a writer who travels, rather than a traveller who writes**; he has published three novels as well as more than a dozen works of non-fiction. “The writer’s working conditions,” he has said, “tend to drive him to travel, just as they often drive him to drink.” 

I took my extract from Old Glory partly because the book had carried me away from the flu, but also because, being about another country, the United States, it suited the Telegraph’s purpose. Old Glory was the first of Raban’s books I read, but my favourite (again, if I’m pressed to choose) is Coasting. It demonstrates that you don’t have to be driven far to write a great travel book: Raban approaches home as if he’s not an Englishman but a foreigner, sailing into Britain in the year of the Falklands War (1982) in his 30-foot ketch:

Even when you’ve spent just a few hours at sea, it is always a bit difficult to learn to walk on land. After water, earth is a sickmakingly unstable element… At first I took the news of the war as another symptom of this general topsy-turviness of things on land. I didn’t trust it, any more than I trusted the scaly cobbles of the fish market or its green filigree roof, which was swaying dangerously overhead. It seemed beyond belief.

Coasting is a portrait of home that’s both fond and wickedly funny. (When I re-read it in 2018, when it was among five Raban titles reissued by Eland, that loving custodian of travel classics, it seemed bang on the Brexit button: “England, seen from the sea, looks so withdrawn, preoccupied and inward… its fringe of garden posted against trespassers.”). It’s a book that demonstrates powerfully, too, the freedom of the form — assuming there’s a form at all, for travel writing licenses you to draw on pretty well anything. Boundaries between genres? Just slip ’em. Glide back and forth like an otter on the Liddel Water, heedless of that mapmaker’s line dividing England from Scotland.

Raban, in Coasting, exploits the possibilities to the full. He was inspired by Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey (1768), a book Sterne wrote partly to poke fun at a contemporary, Tobias Smollett, and his plodding, linear account of a journey through France and Italy. Raban’s plan was that his book “would be part meditation, part autobiography, part adventure story, and it would, with luck and grace, have the improvised, imaginative structure of a work of fiction, rather than the Gradgrindish, topographical progression from A to B of the conventional travel book”. He succeeded brilliantly.

“Watching water move,” he writes in Coasting, “is a much sweeter and less unpredictable way of altering the mind than inhaling the smoke of marijuana.” Reading Raban on that movement can be similarly effective in opening doors to perception:

  The Irish Sea is, as Seas go, small, shallow and parochial. It responds, as parochial places do, to any news or change with the rapidity of a village. When a gale blows up, the Irish Sea turns instantly to whipped cream; when the wind dies, it goes flat in an hour.

Another Raban title reissued by Eland was For Love & Money, which is about making a living from words. I first read it in paperback in 1988 and, as with Coasting, have returned to it many times since. Raban was born in 1942 and taught English and American literature at university before turning to writing. Younger readers who have come to his work for the first time thanks to Eland — especially those struggling to pay rent  — will be envious to learn just how little he could get by on in London when starting out. In 1969, he recalls, “For £7 a week (or about 300 words) I rented a large and comfortable room in a flat in Highgate and set up in business as a professional writer.” Younger writers (and quite a few older ones) will marvel at an age in which a critic could afford to read a book twice before pronouncing on it.

  If his finances now seem like the stuff of fantasy, his teach-ins on his chosen trade could still be applied in the 21^st century. Here he is on the difference between the journey and the story, and the process of unearthing the second from the first: 

  Memory, not the notebook, holds the key. I try to keep a notebook when I’m on the move (largely because writing in it makes one feel that one’s at work, despite all appearances to the contrary) but hardly ever find anything in the notebook that’s worth using later… 

 Memory, though, is always telling stories to itself, filing experience in narrative form. It feeds irrelevancies to the shredder, enlarges on crucial details, makes links and patterns, finds symbols, constructs plots. In memory, the journey takes shape and grows; in the notebook it merely languishes, with the notes themselves like a pile of cigarette butts confronted the morning after a party.

As I said, his teach-ins could still be applied. Journalistic training makes me wary of “enlarging on crucial details”, and lessons learnt during lockdown have made me distrustful of what I thought was my good memory. “Tell me,” an older colleague once asked, when I had commissioned him to write his first travel piece, “when I’m filing for your pages, am I on oath?” “Maybe not,” I told him, “but I don’t want you filing fiction.” Otherwise, yes, travel, especially within the constraints demanded by a newspaper, can be liberating; it can be “part meditation, part autobiography, part adventure story”. The possibilities are limitless.

I was lucky enough to spend some time with Raban in 2008, in his adopted home of Seattle. When I read of my younger colleagues being forced by the pandemic to “meet” tourist-board representatives only on Zoom, I think back to how things were then…

* * * 

8.30am in the chandeliered splendour of the Georgian Room at the Fairmont Olympic Hotel. It must have been a quiet day at the Seattle tourist board, for three of its staff had arrived to brief me over breakfast on how their city was doing despite having neither the theme parks of Los Angeles (“Thank God”) nor the budget of San Francisco (“We wish”), and to suggest a few things I should see.

They stressed that, though Seattle seemed to be forging new flight connections almost monthly with Asian cities, it was still keen to attract visitors from Europe. They hoped that a second non-stop service from Heathrow (due to be started by Northwest Airlines in competition with British Airways shortly after I got home) would boost tourism from Britain.

“But only,” I told them, “if the tourists can be sure they’re not going to be arrested on the ferries.” I showed them a headline in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer: “FBI says men in ferry photo were innocent sightseers.” The story told how a “global manhunt” had been called off for two men who “looked Middle Eastern and were spotted snapping pictures and demonstrating ‘suspicious behaviour’ on a Washington [State] ferry last summer.” The men, whose pictures were published by some media organisations, had turned up at a US embassy and satisfied the Feds that they weren’t terrorists on a reconnaissance mission.

Surely, I said, this wasn’t the kind of thing that happened here; not in a Democratic city, not under a mayor who wanted tighter gun controls and who championed the Kyoto Protocol on reducing greenhouse gases that George Bush had so emphatically rejected…

There were laughs that turned into coughs, then we moved on to the safer territory of coffee culture, grunge music and cruise-ship traffic, up from six ships in 1999 to 211 that year. When your city has been dismissed in a Tom Hanks film (Sleepless in Seattle) as somewhere it “rains nine months of the year”, heavy-handedness with tourists on ferries is the kind of own goal you don’t want to dwell on.

 I showed the same headline to Jonathan Raban that evening over dinner. He might have said: “I did warn them.”

Raban arrived in Seattle from Britain in 1990, intending to stay six weeks, and had been there ever since. He still sounded like an Englishman, and had the uneven smile of one, though he had taken to wearing a baseball cap. “Male pattern baldness,” he told me with an air of resignation. He had stayed in the city partly because he had fathered a daughter there and partly, he half-joked, because he found the rainy season good working weather for a writer. He liked “the water, the countless bridges, the passionate liberal politics of the place, the sense of living in an Asian-facing city that feels like the Next Big Thing”.

Seattle, however, hadn’t escaped the shockwaves of the last big thing. His novel Surveillance, published in 2006, is concerned with the fallout from 9/11. As one character sees it, “fear of earthquakes had given way to government-sponsored rumours that Seattle was a prime target for dusky, hook-nosed, towel-headed bogeymen in beards, and a perfect site for the administration to test all the new bells and whistles of its fright-machine”.

Raban has written of his adopted home that it is “the first big city to which people have swarmed in order to get closer to nature”. My first crane-necked glimpse of it from my aisle seat on the plane was of trees and water, and more trees and water. Coming into town by taxi from the airport, before I saw the Space Needle’s chopsticks spearing their portion of dim sum, I saw, banking left and then right to ascend from a verge, the unmistakable bone-white head and tail and ruler-straight wings of a bald eagle.***

 The eagle went up into a blue sky, which wasn’t what the forecast had promised. “Yeah, you’ve been lucky today,” the taxi driver said, with the unspoken implication that that sort of luck couldn’t hold, no, sir, not here in Seattle. But it did. The skies were leaden more often than blue for the rest of my stay, but it didn’t rain until the day I left, and then it was only drizzle.

 Rain is to Seattle as fog is to San Francisco: an accident of geography, something to be put up with and, if you’re resourceful enough, a marketing opportunity. I saw T-shirts printed with coffee cups and the slogan “When it rains, we pour”; if you liked the place enough to settle, you could, as Raban did, have an email address that ended “@nwrain.com”.

 But my favourite example of enterprise was in Pike Place Market: a stall selling Rainwater Soap, in scents from Almond Latte to Elliott Bay Rum, “crafted for bath & body in Seattle, Washington”. Pike Place, which is one of the oldest, continuously operating public markets in the United States (it was founded in 1907), is an obligatory stop. Its sprawling interlinked buildings house stalls selling fruit, flowers and fish; restaurants serving Alaskan salmon and Dungeness crabs; shops peddling clockwork toys, mandolins, scorpions in amber, rugs from Afghanistan and retablos (devotional paintings) from Mexico.

 No stall had a higher ratio of gawkers to shoppers than the Pike Place Fish Company. Its staff, in yellow oilskin dungarees, did occasionally fillet a salmon and sometimes even sell one, but they spent much of their time chatting up tourists and throwing from one side of the counter to the other their famous “flying fish” — usually at just that moment when the tourists, having had cameras at the ready for 10 minutes, had given up on the possibility of a picture and put them away.

 Hanging over their stall while I was there, jaws propped open by a stick, was a doleful giant monkfish, more mouth than body. A tourist in straining shorts bent to look at it. He moved closer. Closer still. The fish lunged at him and he reared back, almost flattening the couple behind him. The stick in the mouth had been tied to a rope behind the counter, and the spectator had turned performer: the patsy in the Pike Place panto.

 Tourists’ spending aside, Seattle seemed to be feeling the pinch. Cab drivers were adding a “temporary” surcharge of $1.50 to fares; a chef told me his restaurant had had its slowest March in 15 years; cookery columnists were offering advice on “Centsable meals”.

 “You should see South Lake Union,” said Raban. In Seattle’s hour-glass shape, South Lake Union is tucked just below the waistline, hemmed in by main roads to east and west. We met in Paddy Coyne’s, an “Irish” pub with a Quiet Man poster on the wall, “Himself” and “Herself” signs on the loo doors, and a menu with both Irish stew and cottage pie, the latter with a mash top as rigidly moulded as the dome of a flying saucer. Then we zipped around in Raban’s Mazda convertible, while he pointed out building site after building site. “Is this what a recession looks like? Count the cranes in the sky.”

  When he moved to Seattle, South Lake Union had been the sort of place you went looking when you needed an ancient sepia photograph or the bodywork of a classic car retouched. No longer. Single-storey shops and wooden houses from the start of the last century were being flattened to make way for a second downtown of offices and condominiums, workplace and home for the staff of Microsoft, Amazon and the University of Washington. “It’ll be a complete readymade town — but comprised only of 27-year-olds.”

We called on a friend of his, another British-born writer, Lesley Hazleton (whose subjects have included both religion and fast cars), in her houseboat on the lake. Over tea made with mint plucked from a pot at her front door, she told me how regulation and speculation had seen the houseboats shrink in number from more than 2,000 in the 1930s to a few hundred, and their occupants of fishermen, artists and students supplanted by empty-nesters, young professionals and out-of-towners. Her boat, “a shack, basically”, which she had bought for $101,000 in 1995, was now worth more than $600,000, but with property taxes rising fast she didn’t know how much longer she could hold on to it. Leading us to the end of the jetty, she pointed across at the houseboat from which Tom Hanks’s character had gazed mournfully over the water in Sleepless in Seattle: “They bought that in ’94 for $650,000. It’s now worth $2.5 million.”

She was amused that her own presence had become part of the realtors’ patter, a throwaway addition to all the talk of square feet and prime space: “‘…and this one,’” they say on the way past, “‘is owned by a published author.’”

Seattle is a city of readers as well as writers, a place where a new Central Library could draw 25,000 visitors on its opening day in 2004 and where, in one bookshop at least, the work of a local author, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie, could (initially, at least) outsell the latest Harry Potter. The library, designed by the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, bursts from a line of curtain-wall skyscrapers along Fifth Avenue, all juts and angles, like some Transformer in mid-morph from car into Autobot. Inside, a gently sloping “books spiral” winds through floors of non-fiction, so one can move through the entire collection without depending on stairs, lifts or escalators.

On Level 5, on six LCD screens above the librarians’ desk, I saw the bibliophile’s equivalent of a stock-exchange ticker keeping its tally of books, CDs, DVDs and videos checked out by number, key words, Dewey Decimal classification and — for the past hour — title. The idea was “to show what the community is thinking, based on the flow of books leaving the library”. It was, for a few minutes at least, mesmerising.

 This being a city of relaxed typographical standards, the library’s donors were lauded in lower case: under “founders”, the paul g. allen foundation and bill & melinda gates foundation: under “distinguished benefactors”, the microsoft corporation and the starbucks foundation. The name-check for the last helped explain why, in a remarkably long list of prohibitions for a city that prides itself on tolerance, there was no ban on drinking in the library from a cup, provided it had a lid. 

(Seattle is as ready for the lawsuit as any other American city. I picked up a guide for runners and walkers left in my hotel room. “This picturesque course [along the waterfront] poses the usual hazards of urban jogging/walking,’ it said. “Please take precautions to ensure your safety — including use of the route preferably during daylight hours. The Fairmont Olympic Hotel does not patrol nor maintain the course so assumes no responsibility for the safety of our guests who traverse it.” Lewis and Clark would have had a dull old time if they had had to go exploring with a lawyer.)

And the bookshop that champions the local? That’s the Elliott Bay Book Company, which has a three-masted sailing ship for a logo. It’s now in the Capitol Hill area, but when I was in town it was in Pioneer Square, in a building that, with its nooks and crannies and creaking timbers, had something of the feel of a seagoing vessel. 

It was in Pioneer Square that Seattle got its start as a timber and shipping town, sliding logs down hills that still test the legs of visitors, and on which a suitcase-wheeling visitor, if he’s not careful, can find himself run over by his case. The trajectory from logging to blogging had, Raban told me, been entirely logical. The shipbuilders turned their talents to aircraft, and their early efforts, which can be seen in the Museum of Flight just south of the city, were essentially ships of the air. Boeing’s demand for graduates with a technological bent led to schools of excellence in high-tech engineering and computer science being developed at Washington University, which thus had a deep pool of talent available when a young man named Bill Gates returned to his native Seattle with big plans.

 Skid Road, Murray Morgan’s history of Seattle told through its greatest characters, throws up other pleasing snippets. Long before computer nerds were mangling the language, the white men negotiating with Chief Sealth, or Si’ahl — the Native American from whom the city takes its name — were doing so in “the Jargon”, a bastard tongue of 300 words of Native American, English and French derivation that was, Morgan observes, “better suited to barter than precise diplomacy”. And long before there was a dotcom — before, indeed, Seattle had made itself the biggest municipal noise on Puget Sound — a handful of millworkers had established a settlement called Whatcom.

 It is not necessarily the destiny of every male born in Seattle to be a Microsoftie. While I was in town, The Deadliest Catch, a Discovery Channel show about crab fishing, was making celebrities of the crew of a couple of locally based boats, including a veteran named Edgar, whose party piece was to bite the heads off herring for good luck. I found one of their boats, the Sea Star, in Fishermen’s Terminal, north-west of downtown – a great place to buy and eat fish, and to dream of escaping to sea. There were a few pleasure craft in the docks, but most of the boats were working vessels, and named accordingly: Heavy Duty, Endurance, Resilient Sea. On the noticeboard by the restrooms, amid the ads for cowl mufflers and crab boats, I found these thrilling lines: “Have purse seine permit for False Pass Alaska. Looking for partner with Boat & Gear for This Salmon Season.”

 Over the bridge in the Scandinavian enclave of Ballard, I wandered the “historic district”, every second of its 1900s buildings sporting a black plaque with silver image and lettering tracing its history and use (“During the dry years, Walter Forrester operated the Ballard Hand Laundry, which was reputedly a speakeasy”). The local paper, the Ballard News-Tribune (now part of The Westside Weekly), had an image of a sturdy trawler bursting through its masthead between Ballard and News. The Ballard Hardware & Supply Company was still serving the “Industrial Marine & Construction Trades” with everything from “abrasives to zip grips”, as it had been since 1952. But the presence opposite Marine Exhaust of “re.ju’ve.na’tion”, offering Hot Stones Relaxation and Cranio Sacral Massage, suggested that this was not a place where men who bit the heads off herring were still in the majority.

 A ferry trip, like a visit to the market, is obligatory, so I went to Bainbridge Island. It’s a 35-minute commuter run, though the film screened in the departures hall, with its footage of people sliding down chutes and assurances that “the crew will do everything possible to avoid abandoning the ship”, made it sound every bit as treacherous as False Pass, Alaska.

 At Bainbridge, the 2,500-passenger ferry slid into its dock as neatly as an SUV into a suburban garage. Bainbridge itself is neat, maybe overly so. Its portable loo, at the top of Winslow Wharf Marina, was supplied and maintained by a company called Honey Bucket. (Lesley Hazleton told me in an email when I got home: “That portable loo was indeed an actual Honey Bucket, but that has also become the name for all portable loos — i.e. they’re honey buckets in the same sense as all vacuum cleaners are (or at least once were) Hoovers and all ballpoint pens are, or once were, Biros. I have no idea if the company began in the Northwest, but the name does have a kind of wry Northwest kind of humor to it.”****)

 I liked Bainbridge’s bookshop, which by my reckoning was stocking the current reading of more than 32 clubs. The names of a few of those — Books & Booze, Kingston Rough Readers and Women on the Verge — hinted at a deeper, less honeyed Bainbridge, but not one that a day-tripper was likely to penetrate.

 I popped into a shop that was advertising kayak outings, thinking I might have time for one, but the bearded grump behind the counter put me off.

 “Is it always this quiet here?” I asked by way of an opening line.

 “Yeah,” he said. “Bainbridge isn’t a real touristy place.”

 “You been here long?”

 “Yeah.”

“It’s a nice spot.”

 “Yeah. We wanna keep it that way.”

I didn’t take any pictures on the journey out or on the return. But other passengers did, and as far as I know — and as I told those friendly people from the tourist board — nobody reported them to the Feds. What’s more, it didn’t rain.

* The last weekly page of literary travel would appear at the end of May 2020, the assumption then (a little prematurely) being that “things are beginning to open up”. 

** When I wrote these words during the pandemic, Raban was still alive. He was working on a book in which he braided together two stories: one of how his life had been changed by a stroke in 2011 that left him in a a wheelchair, the other of his parents’ marriage, the early years of which were conducted by letter while his father fought in the Second World War. Raban died in January 2023 at 80; Father & Son: A memoir about family, the past and mortality (Picador), was published later that year.

*** The Guardian reports that Raban’s daughter, Julia, said that on his last day he saw a bald eagle swooping and playing in the wind beyond his hospital window, before it flew off over Puget Sound.

**** Lezley Hazleton died on her houseboat in April 2024 at 78. She had terminal kidney cancer and chose to take her own life, as Washington State’s Death with Dignity Act allowed her to do legally, with the help of hospice volunteers. Afterwards, her friends received an email she had written, announcing her own death.