Interview with Mary Dinan for 'The Global Suitcase'
Q: What are your earliest memories of travel?
When I was six years old, my father went on a business trip to the USA. He flew there and came back on the Queen Mary. My mother, little sister and I were driven to Southampton in a big car with leather seats and we came back by train. I had never been on a train before. The compartment filled with American toys and the excitement of family reunion led me to collect train journeys throughout the world.
Q: What drew you to Greece?
For as long as I can remember I’ve loved Greek stories. I get a thrill from standing in places that are part of my mental landscape. This year I went to Pergamon, Sardis and Troy and although there's not much to see, they live in the imagination and give me the feeling of coming home.
Q: What was it like to live in Athens after London? Was it difficult to adapt?
Life in Greece was so different from Britain. Foreigners and children are welcome. Families and family values are predominant. Good humour, cheerfulness, optimism, argument, sociability, an obsession with food and talking about food. It was a most engaging and refreshing place to live. It was so easy to adapt, so easy to flee from Thatcher's Britain, so easy to throw off snobbery and stand-offishness and weather and introversion and xenophobia and...you name it.
Q: You saw Greece when it was re-building after seven years of dictatorship. How has it changed?
It's hardly changed at all. Greeks have stumbled from one political and economic catastrophe to another since its independence. Their ideals and aspirations have always outstripped an ability to realise them. They are the instigators of their own problems and blame foreigners for them.
It isn’t Arcadia by any means – poverty, emigration, corruption, rightwing/leftwing political fissures are woven into society. The basic Greek social unit is the extended family and the network of mutual obligations and loyalties that bind it together. The net stretches very far. The dark side of this is the mistrust, the desire to outdo and do down other 'families'. It makes the kind of civic society we have in Northern Europe very hard to replicate. For example the idea that an elected representative should defend the interests of all their constituency and not just of those who voted for them is alien in Greek politics.
Q: Would you prefer the Greece of today or yesterday? Would you like time to stand still?
Time does stand still. It's us who grow old and die. It's best to make the most of now.
Q: You met some colourful characters on your travels. Who was the most memorable?
- The Mogho Naba, King of the Mossi tribe, under a baobab tree outside his palace in Ouagadougou surrounded by aged courtiers and a woman killing chickens behind me. Since childhood he was fed millet beer and consequently filled his outdoor throne, a two seater G-plan sofa. He has considerable political power in parallel with the official institutions.
- A Yemeni driver I engaged whenever I went to the Gulf. He learned his few words of English in the British hospital in Aden when it was a colony. He'd greet you by snapping to attention, saluting and booming in Home Counties English “Good morning Sah. Have your bowels moved?” He demonstrated his expertise at catching snakes and summoning the Haji Eagle in Abu Dhabi zoo.
- Pat O'Connor of the British army catering corps. He saw plenty of action in the Korean War. Forward troops did not have ration packs but were supplied from the corps kitchens. Pat's job was to guard deliveries of Irish stew and spotted dick from Chinese ambush. Their motto was 'The stew must get through'. Now a sprightly octaganerian and full of stories.
- Elpida the wise woman of our Greek village who cured my back back with a raw egg, herbs and incantations.
- Mother Shyama, (Guru Shyama Devi) a lovely lady who founded the Radha Krishna Ashram in Balham. She radiated goodness and welcome. She is credited with the gift of bilocation having simultaneously attended weddings in Leicester and South London.
Q: Who was the most influential person you met on your travels?
In St Petersburg I once lectured a room of politicians about entrepreneurship. They included one of the two new deputy mayors, Vladimir Putin. He’s a little chap so in those days you wouldn’t pick him out in a crowded room. Perhaps I gave him an idea or two.
Q: What was your most memorable journey?
How to choose? The most eye-opening was the train from Abidjan in Cote D'Ivoire to Ouagadougou, capital of Burkina Faso. Then to Niamey and northern Niger by bus and taxi. It was fascinating to see the transition from tropical forest through savannah to the Sahara and how peoples adapt to their environment.
The country I find the most expensive and the best value for money is Japan. Everything is different or odd or baffling but always exquisite.
Q: What is the most hilarious experience you have had while travelling
I’ve had plenty. Once I went into a church in Moscow where a service was going on. Lovely Russian choir. It was packed except for a side chapel. The main occupants were two dead old ladies lying in open coffins. One of them had lots of mourners standing around her and flowers and candles and stuff. The other had nobody. I felt sorry for her being on her own. So I lit a candle and stuck it on her coffin. When I backed off another little old lady grabbed my arm. I got a shock because she looked just like the dead one. “She knew you’d come” she said.
She dragged me off to an old man leaning on two sticks. I was nervous in case it was my putative father. But she stuck his hand in mine and told me to take him outside to the soup kitchen next door. He was a horrible yellow colour and covered in bright red scabs and had the worst case of the shakes. We shimmied and shook down the aisle and when we got outside he steered us to a whitewashed shack that was a makeshift lavatory. In front of gutter he had a lot of trouble undoing himself and he said “hold it please”. Oh Lord. In for a penny. So I took it out for him. Remarkably, and very conveniently, it was the only bit of him that didn’t shake. I tried to think beautiful thoughts. I tucked him back in and he looked up at me. “I only wanted you to hold my stick. But thanks anyway.”
Q In 1995 you set up and implemented a project to control water hyacinth on Lake Victoria, Tanzania. How did you become aware of this as a problem?
Sitting on the shore of the lake chatting to fishermen who couldn't launch their boats.
Q: What do you most like about London?
The British library. I collect library reader's cards in preparation for old age: Bodleian, Bibliothėque Nationale, Gennadius in Athens, Lenin Library. There's always a warm radiator, something to read and somewhere quiet to doze off.
Q: Do you ever go on a conventional holiday?
I like trundlecasing - the bus-passer's equivalent of backpacking. A step away from shoppingtrolleying, then zimmering. Travelling on buses and staying in hors-suite rooms with no bedside light and mosquito splats on the walls. I love the rumble of a trundle case, so romantic, like a ship’s siren.
Q: What have you learned from your travels?
First, never leave home without six feet of string. So many uses from a tourniquet to a washing line.
Second, avoid airports. My millennial resolution was never again to fly over anywhere I hadn't seen on the ground. Six weeks later I was invited to Korea. I took the Trans-Siberian to Beijing and then trains and buses. I’ve stuck to it ever since. When I do fly it's satisfying to look at the map on the seat in front and know what's down there.
