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ISSUE 1: THE GEOGRAPHY EDITON
"Location, Location, Location"

Vanishing Act by Susan Collis

‘Travel is a vanishing act, a solitary trip down a pinched line of geography to oblivion.’ Paul Theroux – The Old Patagonian Express.

I have always wanted to travel, but have never had the guts or the money. I’m torn between an unresolved longing and the fact that I am an extremely bad traveller. I like my home comforts. I must have tea within seconds of waking, complete control over the room temperature, a pillow of precise dimensions… I hate noise, excess light, strange beds … But worst of all, the further I get from home, the more I begin to experience a kind of creeping unease, a distrust of the unfamiliar and a primeval fear of being lost…

A few weeks ago, I walked past Lambeth Pier – it was a beautiful crisp London morning. The gift shop on the pier was crammed with Japanese tourists, madly buying key-rings with mini London buses and phone-boxes on them; tiny little trophies that tell everyone back home that we’ve conquered the distance, made the trip, stood there, been there, experienced that ‘otherness’ that is travel. And I suddenly found myself capturing their excitement and imagining what it would be like to discover London for the first time, seeing it with fresh eyes.

I thought of Patrick Keillor, whose films explore the notion of being a tourist in a wholly familiar place, and I thought about how travel is largely a state of mind… an act of creative observation which alters the perception of everything that is seen…

So I am planning a journey around the coast of Great Britain by public transport....mainly local buses. Quite a major journey, but one which will combine leaving home with returning at the same time – a comforting thought for a travelaphobe. I will try to hug the coastline as far as possible. I will record what I find and make Art with it, but precisely what form this art will take, I don’t have the foggiest clue. I am lost.