Status Updates From Questions of Travel

He bookmarked the site.
Over time, he came to build a collection of abandoned websites. If an official site fell into obsolescence, it was remodelled or removed from The commissioning organisation’s server. But sites set up for private purposes merely languished when the need they fulfilled had passed. These derelict places drew Ravi. Some, like the Trojan Room coffee-pot site, had once been famous.

‘Have you noticed, the only word you never hear around this place is “tourism”? Because tourism’s about dollars, no argument. But “travel” lets you pretend. Travel has an aura. It allows us to believe that publishing guidebooks is, you know, a good thing. We can tell ourselves that what we do contributes to global harmony, international understanding, you know the stuff I mean.

EVERY DAY, THE NEW, THE unexpected, the arbitrary arrived in Laura’s inbox, in her in-tray, in person. Accustomed to working alone and without interruption, she was ill prepared for office life. It was like being dropped into a country where she didn’t understand the language: the disorientation, the constant switching of focus, the way the trivial and the momentous presented on the same plane.

In flower-sprinkled grass, Fair Play was liberating a moth from the wheel of existence. Plumbago draped the fence; the blue of flowers turned unearthly at dusk. In the middle of the yard rose what Ravi had taken for the skeleton of a giant shade umbrella. Hazel showed him how to peg his washing to its ribs. It was called a Hills hoist: ‘A great Australian invention.’ For a long time, Ravi went on thinking of it