In the late 70s, I got a summer job at Metaxa Travel helping my mother and Julia Metaxa sell cut-price package holidays to Ibiza and Corfu.
The agency had a small office overlooking Leicester Square Station and I agreed with Mr Metaxa (he dealt with the money) that I would get Thursday mornings off to collect unemployment because he didn’t pay me enough.
Most days I delivered airline vouchers around London, elbowing my way past brown plaid bell-bottomed Americans who looked lost in Piccadilly Circus.
But I also helped the travel agents out on the phones. When the person on the other end of the line sounded posh I had to add in Fuel Surcharge and then add Airport Tax, only to knock it off as a ‘discount’ if they complained.
Travel was always in my blood even though I did not realize it.
By the time the new decade had rolled in, the complaints about Greek hotels under construction and goats pissing in the alleys filled a three-inch binder, but package holidays had started to go out of fashion and anyway, I’d moved on…
1982 and Motorcycle Kate persuaded me and a few of her friends to join her and her boyfriend on a trip around the continent – It would be better, she said, than two weeks on a beach with Greek goats and no air con.
We were to take Euro Rail from Waterloo to the Gare du Nord, then roll through France and Switzerland before arriving in Rome, where I could meet up with my girlfriend, Sophie Priest. We’d figure out what to do from there.
Sophie was a librarian from the home counties. Her black, centre-parted bangs framed an angelic face dotted with light brown freckles under hazel eyes, and I loved her even though she did not believe it. In Tuscany, Sophie and I split off from Kate and crew, and the two of us lovebirds continued our European vacation north through Germany, before heading to Amsterdam and back.
I still remember the sparkle of the Neckar River in Heidelberg – Nothing like the silt and stank of the Thames down by Canary Wharf.
Well, Sophie and I broke up nine months later and, travel-hardened now, the delicate girl from Berkshire went off to smash wine-ready grapes on a kibbutz before setting off solo through a war-torn West Bank to Jordan and beyond.
Going further afield was a thing, Sophie insisted, no matter what the BBC news reported.I still remember the sparkle of the Neckar River in Heidelberg – Nothing like the silt and stank of the Thames down by Canary Wharf.
Well, Sophie and I broke up nine months later and, travel-hardened now, the delicate girl from Berkshire went off to smash wine-ready grapes on a kibbutz before setting off solo through a war torn West Bank to Jordan and beyond.
Going further afield was a thing, Sophie insisted, no matter what the BBC news reported.
One year later and London was different.
The music had changed, Duran Duran instead of the Damned, the fashion had changed, floppy hair instead of spiky. London felt more cosmopolitan – it felt like the people coming to my home town was at an all-time high, and most days I’d take the Central Line from the suburbs out west into the centre of town, so that I could embrace it all.
There there was no reason to go anywhere else.
Dinner at The Spaghetti House was replaced by Nepalese Nights off of Tottenham Court Road.
You could drink cheap red wine and watch the Flamenco students dance on the tables up Kentish Town.
New Middle Eastern cultures influxed along the Edgware Road, bronzed men, gold watches, red roped headdresses, flash of money. They had replaced the Americans and they came with women dripping gold.
But it was also the year I met Peggy Tomashevsky.
And it was Peggy who left the deepest impression.
Peggy was different from Sophie, though both of them had the travel bug. Peggy was a curvy and boss-eyed yellow-haired blonde. She and I graduated at the same time, but when I decided to look for jobs, Peggy said, “Fuck that!” and took off for Asia instead.
Fifteen months later, upon her return, she showed me photos of remote exploits in Thailand, China, Indonesia and the Far East.
And it was then that my world opened up.
Not only could you travel but you could travel indefinitely. That was the point.
“Aim high, it will be OK,” Peggy said.
Everyone else was telling me, No!
Look I admit that I had been sheltered from the world around me, myself like Peggy, being from mixed culture parents reluctant to mix with the neighbours.
The differences between me and my classroom friends dawned on me in a seemingly trivial way, in my first year of secondary school – when my mum picked up the phone but instead, the call was for me.
The next morning, in the playground, my friend blurted out, “Your mum? She’s foreign, ain’t she?” and I replied, “How did you know?” like I was hiding it, but no, it was because I thought she spoke perfect English.
I told him she was serving dinner when he called, though eight-thirty was later than usual.
Well, they were always done with tea by six-thirty he sneered, so what was she cooking?
Now I thought everyone ate rice at home, but no, everyone ate potatoes.
No one eats rice at home! his friend pointed out.
Well, my dad likes and fish and chips but my mum is Armenian, and Armenians do! I nearly replied, but didn’t.
Instead, I kept silent because keeping that stuff to myself seemed the best recourse.
And slowly the friends I made, even in those tender years, veered away from the English, and towards the foreigners in school, the Chinese, the Italians, the Poles, the Pakistanis, and the Indians – just as, in our parallel universe, my mother and father shielded us from the people next door and associated with the Armenians, the Persians and the Greeks instead.
While Peggy had been off gallivanting around the world, it took me time to absorb her sense of wanderlust, to realise that my future lay outside of England, and anyway, my sense of adventure was still coming from the rejuvenated and increasingly welcoming place that was 1980s London.
In addition to the Flamenco bars and exotic eats, weekends were spent clubbing downtown at the Hippodrome, jumping to Melle Mel’s White Lines with friends who originated from Goa, Bangladesh and the Ukraine, with blonde hipsters from Berlin and with the new arrivals from (then) Yugoslavia.
Everyone was coming here, they said.
Why would I want to go anywhere else?
It’s for later, but this logic would make its return again and again.
Peggy flicked through her photos, while I asked about the people she had met. I loved her stories.
What was her route?
Did she do a gold run?
Why was the sky always overcast?
It was the humidity.
So two years later I quit my job and my boss, forty years my senior, pinned me, literally, against the wall and yelled, “Why do you want to go to Asia?”
“But I’ve had all my shots!” I stammered.
Another one, telling me, No!
Angela C, the head of HR, pulled me into her windowless office and sat me down. She described how she had once turned down a trip to Southeast Asia. “Send me a postcard from Bali,” she said.
I could not tell her that I did not know where Bali was.
The deal was, I would spend the next three months transitioning my work to a colleague, they would give me a bonus to compensate for the extra time required, then I would leave as I had requested.
I felt valuable for the first time.
That night I dreamt that a bird, black like a cormorant flew across my path. It opened its dark wings wide, gliding close to the water before it settled on the lake’s smooth mirrored surface and dived down, out of sight.
From that dream, I read that the world can only be your oyster if you take the plunge.
Aim high, as Peggy had said. As Sophie had said. As Angela C had said.
What follows then, is a collection of stories, from my own travels.
August 2024
وا حد. Uncle Vartan’s Carrots