Are you longing for those days when we could easily book a flight, pack our bags, and head to the airport? Here in Melbourne, Australia at the bottom of the world, we are in the sixth lock-down of the pandemic and limited to 5km travel from our homes, only for the five allowed reasons to open the front door and leave home. No visitors allowed and certainly no chance of leaving the country easily. And where would we go, with the Delta strain of Covid-19 doing the rounds of the planet?

I’m writing some essays and trying to find documents on my computer from 2006 and as my filing system is hopeless I am having a bit of trouble. But as usual, I’m finding things I wasn’t looking for and this includes an interview from 2011 with travel writer Paul Theroux on his book The Tao of Travel in which he lists and describes all the excellent rules and tips he has amassed for his adventures over the years designed to avoid all of the things that make you anxious about traveling. Rules about going by foot or train, and rules about making sure you know just how to get out of a place fast as soon as you get there, just in case. Rules about what to pack and what to wear and what to read in the times when you have to wait for a bus or a visa or for one of the endless hold-ups.

As Theroux says: “A person who doesn't want to wait has no business or really shouldn't hit the road. Waiting, nuisance and delay are the absolute very, very...they're facts of travel. Travel is all about waiting, it's all about being hassled, it's being trifled with. If you have a week in a luxury resort, no, there's no waiting, but in travel, there's a lot of waiting and a lot of delay. So what do you do? Well, read a book, write your notes or whatever. It is a fact of life or travel that most of the travel isn't fun, it's grubby.”

And at this moment in time, it just might be nostalgic fun for you to listen to the interview and read the transcript here, in case we’ll all be able to pack our bags in the next little while. And if not, we can dream can’t we?