Is a desire to travel inherited? Articolo di Philip Curnow Fotografia: www.deliciousItaly.com
If so, then mine might just have been passed down by my great-grandparents who left the tin mines of Cornwall to dig ironstone in Cleveland and North Yorkshire. Or was it my grandfather who escaped a life digging ironstone in Cleveland and North Yorkshire by dedicating himself to football and earning a professional contract with Wolverhampton Wanderers? Or perhaps from my father who left for sea with the merchant navy at the age of 16 to circumnavigate the world several times before settling down on Merseyside? Or maybe from my mother who flew with TWA out of Kansas City while she waited for my father to circumnavigate the world several times before settling down on Merseyside? Or even her father, who sailed from Liverpool to the Barents Sea during WW2 as a ship's purser, also seeing action off the north African coast? Let's just say my own first venture abroad, if you can exclude Wales and many blissful summer days spent along the coast from Anglesey to Pembrokeshire, was not Spain, France, or even Portugal, but the Arabian Gulf at the age of 9. A friend of my father from those merchant navy days was piloting now tankers into various ports of the region and suggested we take a month out for a visit. The trip was deemed to be of unique educational value by the Wirral school authorities and they let us go. It was October 1976. The only way to get there was a dusk flight from a deserted Heathrow in a British Airways VC-10. The aircraft didn't have the range to do the trip non-stop, so we sleepily disembarked in the early hours at Damascus airport. It felt like we'd arrived at the other side of the world. It was perhaps even then I understood the difference between travel and adventure, or even exploration. It was to be a full cultural immersion which I also documented in a small notebook. I still have it.
