Departure(s) by Julian Barnes

Do poets still dream of the exotic, but never depart, so that the dream of leaving festers into a poem? Perhaps. But in the nineteenth century, most people never left the boundaries of their village, let alone country, and the few who did often made a single trip which lasted them the rest of their lives. Nowadays, exotic travel has become routine, a gap-year endeavour which parents follow on their Google locators. In place of 'Where would you like to go/ The breeze is about to blow' we have 'the whiff of kerosene as you approach the airport (a smell I used to find as exotic as any sea breeze or scent of tamarind trees) and the lure of duty-free. Back then, they wrote the poetry of departure; today we write the bucket list.'

Do I have a bucket list, now that I am more than three-quarters of a century old? Machu Picchu? Angkor Wat? The Antarctic? An African safari? No, I'm not a geographical completist... I'd prefer to loiter again in European towns and cities, watch the sea from the safety of a promenade and snow-topped mountains from a warm distance.