There's a family tradition that's been in existence since 1986.
I make a pleasantly large number of trips abroad, professionally
as well as personally, and I generally try to keep a diary of
each trip.
There's a down side to the professional trips. However exotic
and unfamiliar the location is, there are always endless captive
hours alone in your hotel room. The diaries started as a means
of sharing these trips with people back home, but also as a way
of filling these hours.
Sometimes, they're so personal and specific to the trip that they're
probably incomprehensible to anyone else. Sometimes, though, they
contain a personalised 'Lonely Planet' style guide to wherever
I ended up. If you're about to set off for one of these places
- or if you're just interested - you can e-mail me for a copy.
Mostly they'll come by snail mail, because you wouldn't thank
me for an electronic copy, but a couple of them are available
for downloading as an experiment. The latest offering A Mathematician's
Guide to the Alhambra is a mean 3Mb! The illustration is from
that - one of the carvings on a pillar in the Alhambra Palace
in Granada in Spain. I went there for a TV programme in 1994,
and I've doctored the photographs used in the programme to highlight
the symmetries. As well as telling you where to find them!
I've used a variety of techniques for recording the diaries, as
well as for presenting them. Early ones tended to be straightforward
notes in a book, typed up on return. A couple were recorded onto
audio-tape. Latterly, most have been typed directly onto a portable
computer. And by an interesting coincidence, each one has been
finished off on a different computer or document processing package.
There's an automated order form at the end of this page
This was a two-week trip to the Open University of Sri Lanka in
Colombo, on behalf of UNESCO. This was a handwritten diary that
I just happened to type up and circulate when I got back. It describes
a residential conference in Moratura, North of Colombo, a weekend
by the Indian Ocean at Hikkaduwa with a side trip to Galle, and
finally a week in Colombo. It's not illustrated, and it isn't
much use as a guide book.
Manuscript/BBC Model B micro-computer/Wordwise.
This was my first trip to either country. I went to New Delhi
(and never got outside it - the trip to Agra that didn't happen
is part of the story) to research a book on Computing in Third
World Schools. I then flew on via Bombay to Nairobi for the Aga
Khan Foundation, on a recce for a project that never happened.
To get the schedule working, I just had to have a week's
holiday touring the game parks and driving to Mombasa. Slightly
better at telling you what to see, as long as you don't want it
to be comprehensive! Still not illustrated, though.
Typed directly into a Sinclair C4 portable computer/Pipedream.
Download
this journal (106Kb as a zipped Word file)
The longest trip - five weeks for the World Bank in a newly-emerging
China. There are two passages through Beijing, but the bulk of
the trip was spent in Shijauzhang, some four hours to the South.
This place was pretty intolerable. It was compensated for by a
final week in Hangzhou, which was delightful. This is a better
offering as a guide to anyone visiting the area, but it's pre-Tiananmen
Square, so is pretty antiquated. For the first time, it's illustrated.
Photographs, decorations, maps &c. It's almost unique in not
being a day-to-day reckoning of events. Instead, it's arranged
thematically.
Written up from notes/BBC Master 128/View
A recce for a later filming trip, for a UNICEF project. This is
one of the ones that is a transcription of a spoken record, made
each evening over a leisurely glass of malt whisky. This is heavily
specific (and engagingly incautious) about the people I met, so
it's not much use as a guide book It's quite entertaining though,
in compensation. Despite the success of the illustrations in the
previous journal, this is text only.
Spoken into a cassette recorder/Macintosh SE30/Word for the
Macintosh
The filming trip itself, with a week at the end in Bangkok. Illustrated
again and a slightly better bet as a guide book, but not much.
This was the second and last outing of the portable cassette recorder.
The title refers to the familiar phenomenon observed by all travellers
of never being able to exactly spend all of your foreign
currency. This time, I really thought that I would leave Bangladesh
without a spare taka to my name. It didn't work, and you'll
find out why!
Spoken into a cassette recorder/286 PC/Word for Windows
This time, I did get to Agra to see the Taj Mahal. This
is a better guide to Delhi if you're prepared to want to see the
things I saw. I was there running a two-week course for the British
Council at the Indira Gandhi National Open University, so quite
a bit of this is about that course, but I did some of the sight-seeing
that I missed in 1988. We're still illustrated, so you'll get
to see the people I'm talking about. It also has an index!
Typed into a 386 PC portable on site/finished off on a PC 486/Word
for Windows 2
Purely pleasure, without any work commitments. The story of a
car trip to the Khyber Pass, and the Swat Valley. It covers Peshawar,
Lahore, Islamabad, Rawalpindi and very briefly Karachi. Being
turned back by a snow storm the day before swimming in a hotel
pool in the sunshine. This one is broadly chronological but also
thematic and works pretty well as a guide. If you ever go to this
area, you'll follow the same tourist trail as we did! It's quite
funny, especially about Pakistan International Airlines and about
the strictures of visiting during Ramadan. Hard to choose the
highspots - the armed guard that you hire for about a pound to
get you safely to the Khyber Pass, or the certificate attesting
that I'm a foreign, non-Moslem, alcoholic! It was going to be
illustrated, but I never quite got there. The same goes for the
index - that didn't make it either.
Manuscript/Macintosh LCII/Word 5 for the Macintosh
A filming trip for a computing programme about the timber industry
in North-West America. A novel format (landscape and clip art)
and the first attempt to deliberately parody a prose style. It's
a series of short items, each with a tabloid-style headline. No
other illustrations, unfortunately, largely because the camcorder
seems to have replaced the camera in our lives. This could be
quite useful as a guide book, because there's a review (and a
separate index) of every restaurant we ate in. Covers Vancouver,
Victoria and Portland, Oregon.
PC486 portable/Word 6 for Windows
Download
a sample of this journal (about 75% of it, as a 739Kb zipped
Word file)
This is here for completeness - it isn't finished yet! This was
a conference near Oslo, where we deliberately took the long way
round and went via Stavanger and Bergen. It's another parody,
this time in the style of the Guardian's 'Pass Notes'.
Watch this space!
Manuscript/Macintosh Powerbook 100/Word 5 for the Macintosh
The most recent production started on a filming trip to Granada
for a programme about the tiling patterns in the Alhambra Palace.
We returned with some delicious stills of the tiles and carvings,
but it took until 1996 to turn this into the first specialist
guide book. It illustrates everything that we photographed. We
were testing the claim that all seventeen possible tiling patterns
are found in the Alhambra. As you'll see, this isn't quite
true. There's an introduction on symmetry, and the photographs
are annotated to show up the various rotations, reflections and
so forth that can be found therein. It's most useful because it
tells you where to look.
Pentium 133/Word 7
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