On a recent trip to Portugal, Patrick Galbraith was laid up with food poisoning. It allowed him time to reflect on tourism, tradition and the great travel writer Norman Lewis.
I spent most of a recent weekend lying on the bathroom floor in a hotel room in Lisbon. It wasn’t what I had planned and my only advice for visiting the city — having seen almost none of it — is don’t buy oysters from the half-drunk man with a big moustache at his stall down by Martim Moniz Square.
It was a pity, because Constance almost never manages to persuade me to go abroad and I can’t say I’m desperate to go again. It’s not only the risk of shellfish poisoning, I’ve never been good at doing nothing. Before I got sick, I saw a sign in a butcher’s shop advertising for an assistant; the obvious language barrier aside, I was tempted to apply. It could have been the start of something great.
As I lay there, drinking cold cans of Coke, I read Norman Lewis’s brilliant book Voices of the Old Sea. Lewis, in the 1980s and 1990s, was a great name in travel writing. He was one of the first people, having married a Sicilian, to write authoritatively on the Mafia. He worked extensively with Don McCullin on The Sunday Times and his journalism led to the creation of Survival International, which protects indigenous peoples. Nowadays, however, we speak little of Lewis, perhaps because, unlike Bruce Chatwin or Patrick Leigh Fermor, he was a relatively ordinary man, with little flamboyance. He set up a chain of camera shops to fund his journeys, rather than drawing on familial funds.
Naples ’44 is probably his most famous book, but Voices of the Old Sea is, by my reckoning, his best. It records the three years Lewis spent on what we now call the Costa Brava, when the region was on the brink of tremendous change. When he arrives, he finds villages full of fishermen, superstition and eccentric cork barons; by the time he leaves, tourists have started to come and the fishermen, rather than catching sardines, have become guides, their boats no longer laden with nets, but weighed down by drunk visitors.
As I read, I wondered what Lisbon had been like. No doubt the churches were full on Sundays and the port rich with spices and life. Now, there are stickers on lamp posts that read: ‘Airbnb is ruining this city.’ The Portuguese capital — what I saw of it — is still beautiful, but, as have many European destinations, has undergone a process of cultural homogenisation. We are drawn to the foreign and interesting, but by our presence we make these places both less foreign and far less interesting.
Clearly, nothing stays the same. Lisbon was once a Moorish stronghold and, until 1668, Portugal was part of Spain, but wherever we are, we should, I think, try to preserve something of what was. We should do things differently, rather than insisting that things are done differently for us. I heard recently from a Norfolk gamekeeper who is having trouble with second-home owners finding his shoot a bit noisy. He doesn’t go in for deep thinking, but he asked, ponderously, what I thought about moving to the country and then objecting to the way that things have gone on there for a long time. ‘Not all that much,’ I replied.
Lewis writes of fishermen touching their testicles and spitting into the wind when the village priest goes by. It is an old tradition that supposedly wards off bad luck. If you’re on the Costa Brava and see a man of the cloth, give it a go. I can’t promise it staves off oyster poisoning, but it’s worth a shot. As for me, I’m planning my honeymoon and it looks as if it will be the Fens. Eel trapping was once a mainstay of life there. Perhaps I’ll give it a go.
Patrick Galbraith is an author, editor and journalist. His latest book, Uncommon Ground, is out on April 10
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