I’d been following doctor’s orders and staying away from shops, so I hadn’t been in our local pharmacy for months. When I went back in the middle of October 2020, it was under new management, with new staff. A big screen suspended to the left of the counter touted some of the services being offered, among them a free vaccination against flu and a “Covid-19 PCR Swab Test”, including fit-to-fly certificate. I had come in for the first and had no need of the second. I was a travel writer who had given up flying to work.

  Well, that had been the plan in the middle of 2019. I had decided that I didn’t want to be encouraging readers, directly or indirectly, to burn more oil at a time when we should all be burning less. Towards the end of the year, in acknowledgement of the cumulative depth of my carbon footprint, I promised not to fly at all in 2020, joining the campaign Flight Free UK.

  When I signed up to avoid planes, of course, I had no idea that I would soon find myself being discouraged from taking boats and trains as well, and that the effects of a world health emergency would still be being felt two years later. Nor could I have expected that, in April 2020, I would receive a note from my doctor with the following advice: “The NHS has identified you… as someone at risk of severe illness if you catch Coronavirus… The safest course of action is for you to stay at home at all times and avoid all face-to-face contact for at least 12 weeks from today…”

  I got the letter, I presume, because I have asthma, and because in the early days of Covid the assumption was that anyone with a respiratory condition was at greater risk of ending up in hospital. My asthma is mild (though it wasn’t before it was diagnosed and I was given medicine to prevent and relieve it). Mild, that is, unless, when the temperature has dropped sharply, I get a chest infection of any kind. Then I’m prone to wheezing, coughing noisily and occasionally struggling for breath.

  So I took the letter seriously. I saw my children and grandchildren in the garden, and hardly saw my friends at all. I stayed away from pubs, restaurants and cafés. I avoided shops (even bookshops), and, though I’ve worked as a journalist all my adult life, and like buying my papers over the counter, I stopped calling in at the local newsagent’s and got them delivered instead.

  I followed the advice in all respects but one: I carried on exercising. I walked with my wife, and I went running. I’ve been pounding pavements since my late teens, but done little in the way of other sports, which is why I have the legs of a distance runner and the upper-body strength of a 13-year-old. I do it for fun, to “get my head showered”, as we say Northern Ireland folk say, to keep fit and to keep scribbling. I’ve got my own definition:

Running: activity in which
the writer who was dumb
at the desk hits the road,
and finds the right words,
in roughly the right order,
bubbling from feet to brain.

  My underlying asthma has never stopped me running, and nor did that doctor’s letter. But in 2020 I began running in a way I’ve never had to run before. I didn’t want to get anywhere near other people, and put the fear of death into them by breathing all over them. And I didn’t want other people doing it to me. So I began running in the manner of a prudent cyclist in London: on the defensive and ready for anything.

  Before I was a runner I was a footballer, and when I think of safe distancing, it’s football training from the earliest days that I fall back on. When I watched the TV briefings in the spring of 2020, government ministers and their scientific advisers all mouthing the line on distancing and stipulating “two metres”, what I heard was my teacher in Primary Four, at St Colum’s School in Portstewart, Northern Ireland, Joe Fairley. With his goatee beard and balding head, Mr Fairley looked a wee bit like Lenin in the photo in our encyclopaedia, except that Mr Fairley was a good Catholic and Lenin was a Communist. Mr Fairley was also our football coach. Out on the pitch, he would tell us: “It’s a free kick you’re facing here. So it’s not two yards back. It’s not five yards. It’s the full 10 yards.”

  When I visualised Coronavirus, what I saw was one of the most dangerous forwards in the world, the world I knew in the second half of the 1960s, stepping up to take a free kick: Bobby Charlton, maybe, or Eusebio. Except the number on his shirt wasn’t 9; it was 19.

I decided in 2019 to stop flying to work, but not to stop working. After all, early in January 2016, when I was researching a piece on San Sebastian’s year as a European City of Culture, I had gone from London to the Basque Country by rail. I’d edited an anthology of rail journeys in which writers had wandered much farther: one had travelled from Highgate, in north London, to Hanoi, in Vietnam; another had gone from Wick, in the north of Scotland, to Vladivostok, on the Russian shore of the sea of Japan. I knew I’d need to allow more time in 2020 if I were to do any travel writing, but I pictured myself heading off on the Eurostar, to Paris, Brussels and beyond. Instead, following medical and government advice, I was avoiding taking the train four stops down the suburban line from my home to Wimbledon.

  In 2014, I’d quit a job on a national newspaper to go freelance. One of the great benefits had been shortening the journey to work. Every weekday morning from then on, I’d travelled down a dozen stairs, across the landing and into the study. In the spring of 2020, though, I found myself beginning to think almost fondly of that old morning commute into central London.

  Running, along with walking, and a bird-loud spring I could enjoy in our back garden, kept me sane. So did reading. A few reviews of Jack, the latest novel in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead series, prompted me to reopen her earliest, Housekeeping, the story of two orphans growing up in a desolate town in the north-west of America, in the care of Sylvie, the remote sister of their dead mother. On the first page, Ruth, the narrator and one of the orphans, tells how her grandfather had grown up in a home dug out of the earth, so low that “the horizon seemed to circumscribe the sod house and nothing more”. So he began to read accounts of great expeditions.

  Like Ruth’s grandfather, I wasn’t taking trains or ships, but I was still being taken away. All thanks to the transporting power of words; a power that had prompted me, in December 2013, to set up this website, and greet visitors with these words:

Welcome to Deskbound Traveller — where you don’t need to book a holiday to get carried away.

The site’s name was both an expression of a truth and something of a joke against myself. At the time I set it up, I was running print coverage on the travel desk of a national newspaper. Having joined that desk to edit and write, I was now working under a system where I had trouble sometimes escaping for long enough for a sandwich, let alone to get out on the road.

  From the spring of 2020, Deskbound Traveller, and the writing I encounter and promote through it, was one of the things that helped to lift me out of lockdown. In one month alone, I went to Istanbul and the Balkans, to the Ukraine and St Petersburg, and into the Black Hills of South Dakota. All thanks to what DH Lawrence, in Mornings in Mexico, summed up as “one little individual, looking at a bit of sky and trees, then… making little marks on paper”. The body might not have been crossing oceans, but the mind was roaming free, and a few hundred pages between covers could take it an awfully long way.

  Mid-pandemic, my wife and I arranged a more physical change of scene: we moved house for the first time in 33 years. I started writing this introduction in suburban Surrey, five minutes’ walk from a railway station and half an hour by train from central London. I finished it in a house in Worthing, West Sussex, five minutes’ walk from the beach. In between, I went abroad only once, for a family wedding — but I carried on being transported by the travels of other writers. I was also reliving my own. My study and house are full of books and bits and pieces that remind me of different times: of a time when you didn’t have to pull on a face mask before boarding an aircraft; of a time, too, when I flew carelessly around the world before the coinage “carbon footprint”.

  There’s an ebony medal carved for me as a souvenir by a guy I met on a beach in Mombasa, Kenya, where I was planning to do a 10-kilometre run. I did the run – and ended up in the back of an ambulance. 

  There’s a rattling conical gourd about three inches tall, covered with etchings of peasant life in the central highlands of Peru. Its peaceful scenes serve as a counterpoint to stories I heard there: of “the terrorism time” under the Sendero Luminoso, or Shining Path.

  There’s a copy of James Hilton’s novel Lost Horizon, bookmarked with an entry ticket for the Potala Palace. My wife, Teri, and I climbed the palace’s steps, in the thin Tibetan air of Lhasa, while in search of Hilton’s “Shangri-La”.

  There’s a CD by the Aussie rocker Mark Seymour, whom I first heard singing live — on a “Santa Special” train between Sydney and Perth.

  The oddest thing in the collection? A Los Angeles Police Department riot stick. I remember a time when you could take one of those on to an aircraft by walking with it and limping a bit…