Preliminaries

FLYING VISITS
Postcards from the Observer
1976-83

To Martin Amis

Then, forehead against the pane, I suddenly feel
The longing open-armed behind the bone
To drown myself in other worlds, to steal
All lives, all times, all countries not my own.

Francis Hope, Schlossbesuch

These articles, along with some of the Introduction, appeared in the Observer from time to time between 1976 and 1983. Here and there I have restored some small cuts which had to be made if the piece was to fit the page, but otherwise I have added very little. The occasional outright howler has been corrected, but only if it was a matter of detail which I should have got right in the first place. Hindsight would have allowed further improvements but there would have been no end to the process. In the second article about China, for example, it seemed likely at the time, and for some time after, that the Hong Kong dollar would hold up. A year later, the Peking mandarins having proved intractable, it fell. If I were to rewrite the piece so as to predict this fact, it would become a claim of prescience, or at any rate no longer a report written at that moment. But like any other flying visitor, in the Far East or anywhere else, I was there at that moment, ignorant as to what would happen next, and fully occupied with making the most elementary sense of what had happened already. That has been the real story of mass jet travel: the world opening up to people who have no qualifications for exploring it except the price of a ticket. But I have never been able to believe that all my fellow tourists were quite blind. Even a postcard can be written with point.