London-Blackpool

For reasons too complicated to describe I find myself in Blackpool early one Sunday morning, with Toby and a rented car. The waterfront is very attractive in a crumbling, almost Eastern European sort of way. As an archetypical working-class resort, Blackpool is overrun by hen parties in improbable outfits on their way to drunken oblivion at 10.30 in the morning. It is also quite rough and full of topless, manky, pale, tattooed, swaggering chavs who slap their bling-wearing, peroxyd-blond, betablocked screaming girlfriends in front of their hyperactive, raging, clueless kids.

Berne-London

Ah, the glory of London. One nip down Old Compton Street and you can return to wherever you are from reassured that they are still there: the bald butch, the old queers, the emaciated Prada Nazis, the punks, hipsters, Goths and flyer waifs mixed with a liberal sprinkling of lesbians of every creed and the odd tourist marveling at the complexity of it all.

Tokyo-Berne

There is no greater relief than to be off the packed plane and into a warm, balmy, summer day at the main station in Zürich. As the train pulls out of the station, I listen to Beethoven’s Rasumovsky quartet and everything seems just right, as if the twisted wheels of a complex mechanism had suddenly sprung into place and clicked. Even the war-related newspaper headlines in front of one’s very eyes seem very far away and a quick glance out of the window over the summery landscape of golden corn fields will reassure you that this is what’s real and what matters and that everything unpleasant is remotely removed. As if under Sylvia Plath’s bell jar were a place where you actually could breathe.