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You could study the Thomas Cook book for years and never truly understand its deeper complexities. And yet these are matters that could affect one’s life. Every year there must be scores of people who end up hundreds of miles from their destination because they failed to notice the footnote that said, ‘Non-stop to Arctic Circle after Karlskrona – see Table 721 a/b. Hot-water bottle advisable. Hard tack only after Murmansk. Return journey via Anchorage and Mexicali. Boy oh boy, have you fucked up this time, pal.’
    Hammerfest had been a kind of over-extended limbering-up exercise, but now I was going to get down to some serious travelling – and by that I mean the moving-about kind of travelling. I had an itch to roam. I wanted to wander through Europe, to see movie posters for films that would never come to Britain, gaze wonderingly at hoardings and shop notices full of exotic umlauts and cedillas and No Parking-sign øs, hear pop songs that could not by even the most charitable stretch of the imagination be a hit in any country but their own, encounter people whose lives would never again intersect with mine, be hopelessly unfamiliar with everything, from the workings of a phone box to the identity of a foodstuff.
    I wanted to be puzzled and charmed, to experience the endless, beguiling variety of a continent where you can board a train and an hour later be somewhere where the inhabitants speak a different language, eat different foods, work different hours, live lives that are at once so different and yet so oddly similar. I wanted to be a tourist.
    But first it was time to go home.

4. Paris

    I returned to England and waited for winter to go. I spent an absurd amount of time shopping for things for the trip – a travel clock, a Swiss Army knife, a bright green and yellow rucksack, which my wife assured me would be just the thing if I decided to do any gay camping – and spent a day crawling around the attic searching for my beloved Kümmerly and Frey maps. I bought nearly the whole European set in 1972 and it was one of the few intelligent investments of my younger years. What am I saying? It was the intelligent investment of my younger years.
    Printed in Switzerland, with all the obsessive precision and expense that that implies, each Kümmerly and Frey map covered one or two countries within its smart blue and yellow folders. Unfolded, they were vast and crisp and beautifully printed on quality paper. Best of all, the explanatory notes were in German and French only, which gave them an exotic ring that appealed to me in 1972 and appeals to me still. There is just something inherently more earnest and worldly about a traveller who carries maps with titles like ‘Jugoslawien 1:1 Mio’ and ‘Schwarzwald 1: 250 000’. It tells the world, Don’t fuck with me. I’m a guy who knows his maps.
    With a stack of K&Fs and the latest Thomas Cook European Timetable, I spent long, absorbed evenings trying to draw up an itinerary that was both comprehensive and achievable, and failed repeatedly on both counts. Europe isn’t easy to systematize. You can’t go from coast to coast. There are few topographical features that suggest a natural beginning and end, and those that do – the Alps, the Rhine, the Danube – were either physically beyond me or had been done a thousand times. And besides, it’s just too big, too packed with things to see. There isn’t any place that’s not worth going.
    In the end, I decided on a fairly random approach. I would return to Oslo to pick up the trail where I had left off and go wherever the fancy took me. Then, a week or so before I was due to fly out, I suddenly had the cold realization that Oslo was the last place I wanted to be. It was still winter in Oslo. I had been there only two months before. A voice that seemed not to be my own said, ‘Hell, Bill, go to Paris.’ So I did.

    The girl at my travel agency in Yorkshire, whose grasp of the geography of the world south of Leeds