It was in Abu Simbel, as I vomited over someone’s shoes, that I decided never to visit a popular site again. I knew I would enjoy the morning more if I spent it in the hotel garden – away from the crowds and the heat – but, at the very last moment, the fear of ‘missing something’ was too great: I climbed onto the tourist bus along with everyone else, and those chunky seated figures proved my nemesis. I have never given in to the fear of missing something again.
A lot closer to home than Abu Simbel was the little Vuillard exhibition in Birmingham, earlier this year. But not close enough. I have always loved this painter who, at his early best, was a stay-at-home of the first order*, but did I really want to spend the two hours on the train that it would take to get there, and the two hours to get back again . . . ?
Anyway, there is so much within walking distance we have never paid attention to. We have been to the Taj Mahal but not, until the other day, to the Greek Orthodox Cathedral (once an Anglican church) on our own high street.
Neither of us – even though my husband has visited more than a thousand churches** – had ever thought to go inside this gloomy hulk. It turned out to house massive chandeliers which light up murals that cover every inch of wall space: not paintings of the highest quality, but displaying a depth of feeling which makes it easy to understand why this place is second home to my elderly Greek Cypriot neighbour and all her friends. This is not a church which plays to empty houses.
Less fortunate is the Spiritualist Temple in nearby Rochester Square. If this has a congregation, it is disembodied. We could find no way in.
Inevitably, this sadly neglected building has caught the eye of a developer, who could not care less that its foundation stone was laid by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
What is both shameful and surprising – for it was Sherlock Holmes who made my American husband feel at home in England forty-odd years ago and whose stories have never lost their hold – is that we didn’t know about this building until the local paper broke the story of its imminent demolition.
Ignoring the things on our own doorstep in favour of abroad has, however, paid off in more ways than one. It is lucky we have so much left to see, now that both health and the cost of insurance make travel difficult. And luckier still to have got to the ruins at Delphi before they were fenced off, to the glorious, empty stretch of sand at Malia before Malia became a tourist Mecca, and to Tallinn, my mother’s birthplace and one of the loveliest of small European cities, before it became a popular destination for stag parties.
* See my husband Robert Harbison’s blog: Vuillard the Radical
** See The Shell Guide to English Parish Churches London, 1992