Lawson - The battle for room service: journeys to all the safe places

MARK LAWSON

THE BATTLE
FOR
ROOM SERVICE

Journey to all the Safe Places

PICADOR ORIGINAL

T O F RANK AND T ERESA L AWSON

My mother and father

With love and thanks

PROLOGUE

The Northern Ireland correspondent for a London newspaper once told me the intriguing story of the Belfast Tourist Board. This outfit sounds like the winner in a joky magazine competition to come up with the ultimate thankless profession other contenders might be the Tel Aviv Bacon Marketing Board or the British Royal Marriage Guidance Council but Belfast does, in fact, have a tourist body dedicated to convincing prospective visitors that they will not end up as, well, a tourist body.

The existence of this organization was a source of great amusement to my informant. His cynicism was perhaps justifiable, given the nature of his daily work. The flashier kind of word processors have something called save-get keys, allowing a frequently used phrase or formula to be stored and called up with a single stab. The Belfast correspondent was thinking of electronically memorizing the sentences The victim was a married man with children and The later claimed responsibility in a phone call to a local newspaper, simply typing in the number of offspring and the initials of the killers later on. So you can understand why he was somewhat unpatriotic in his attitude to the Belfast Tourist Board. He would pass the time between reporting sectarian executions by imagining slogans to be used by the BTB in its advertising campaigns. One, I remember, ran: If you long to feel the soil of Ireland under your feet, come to Dublin. If you long to feel the soil of Ireland over your feet, come to Belfast. An equally melodious piece of deceit was: Belfast where the cares of daily existence will be taken away from you.

But the journalist was perplexed not only by the mere existence of the Belfast Tourist Board but by its apparent success. Every January, the organization would issue a press release proudly announcing an upsurge in visitors in the previous year. Surprised to see a rise claimed at the end of a period of more than common atrocities, he re-examined previous figures. The pattern was standard. The more bombings and shootings in any twelve months, the greater the tourist boom in the subsequent dozen.

Worried that he had discovered a phenomenon of ghoulish tourism a more formalized equivalent of car-crash gawping he asked the board for its methods of measurement. It transpired that they judged traveller traffic by (1) airline tickets (2) hotel capacity (3) car rental bookings. He realized the truth. Those holiday rushes consisted of out-of-town journalists, flying in to write BELFAST TWINNED WITH HELL pieces, after some particularly grim incident.

The moral of the above story is a simple one: that, in broad terms, the world divides into the tourist zones and the terrorist zones. It is inevitable that travel agents and tourist boards will try to haze the borders between them as a resource which is theoretically renewable for ever, travellers make a significant difference to a nations balance of payments as traditional industries fail but these attempts should be treated with some scepticism.

It is true that a country may occasionally move from one zone to another, sometimes with uncomfortable rapidity. Most of the 1992 guidebooks had managed to pull Yugoslavia out of the sections detailing what to do in Europe. But some had not and their breathless recommendations friendly people, quiet beaches, plentiful and cheap food stood as a warning of the fragility of lucrative tranquillity. Similarly, Beirut was once a resort mentioned in the same breath as Biarritz. I recently read that there is to be an attempt by the Lebanese to reinstate Beirut as a vacation place, but, unless they adopt criteria similar to those of the Belfast Tourist Board counting the ordeal of the Western hostages as 1500 hotel nights, for example it would seem a hard market to crack.

Certainly, you are unlikely to be find me on the first Lazy Lebanon Days Package tour. I have stuck as both a journalist and a holidaymaker to the tourist zones. It has always been my problem that I love travel but am touchy about where I end up. Wanderlust and cowardice make uneasy headfellows. I live under the Heathrow flightpath. In the window of the room in which I work, the 747s are briefly suspended, in miniature size, in the top quarter-pane of glass as they bank for landing. Wishing myself on each one, I then reconsider the desire in the light of the liveries. I particularly magic myself aboard the flights of Qantas and American.

But catering to such neuroses is now a profession. I read in a business magazine, left appropriately enough as a compliment in a hotel room that Control Risks, a security and crisis consultancy, divided the places of the world in to four categories for prospective travellers. These were:

L EVEL O NE (Aware): The crime risk is insignificant. No terrorist groups are active and, although isolated incidents are possible, the security threat to travellers is minimal. Example: Singapore.

L EVEL T WO (Vigilant): There are occasional demonstrations or terrorist incidents, but these provide no more than incidental threats to business travellers. There is little crime risk to travellers provided they exercise common-sense discretion. Example: South Korea.

L EVEL T HREE (Caution): There is a high crime rate or significant political unrest which could disrupt business travel at short notice. Terrorist attacks occasionally cause disruption. Example: Berlin.

L EVEL F OUR (Danger): Conditions verge on war or civil war; law and order are in imminent danger of breaking down; or there is a terrorist campaign directly affecting business travellers. Travel should be postponed unless absolutely necessary. Example: Iraq.

I realize that the genre of travel writing is, these days, mostly practised on Level Four nations. If there is no political disturbance, then an equal danger must be found in the geography or wildlife of the terrain attempted. Level Three destinations may be accepted if the place concerned is probably merely in transition to four-star awfulness: i.e., at the time of writing, Berlin, New York, Los Angeles.

I am equally aware that the territories described in this book New Zealand, Australia, Middle America, Alaska, Canada, Luxembourg, Brussels, Switzerland, Milton Keynes, Disney-world, Expo 92 and Center Parcs would, in the eyes of most people, not even merit a level one rating. It would be necessary to invent another:

L EVEL Z ERO (Nonchalance): There is almost no serious crime. Politically, one right-wing monetarist government is occasionally replaced by another, but this leads only to minor traffic hold-ups on polling day or during a royal visit or religious procession.

The genesis of this project an attempted journey in to the heart of lightness of the modern world should therefore be sketched in.

James Fenton, a long-time hero of mine and one of the bravest journalists of his generation, wrote in the introduction to his battle-scar memoirs All the Wrong Places of his hunger, from a young age, to put himself in the presence of danger. In the squirmiest scene of many in this work, hunger proves literally dangerous, when Fentons hosts in Cambodia hand him a bowl of rice, on which, he notices as he lowers his fingers to eat, an army of ants is already feasting. Reluctant to give offence, he shovels down both the rice and the lice.

You have heroes for two reasons: in hope of emulation or in acknowledgement of the impossibility of following. My interest in Fenton was of the second kind. One of the most cowardly journalists of his or any other generation, I have, all my life, had a hunger to put myself in the presence of safety. Ants in the rice? A fly in the soup and I was checking the insurance policy. Thrilling as it was to read fearless reporting from the frontlines of the world, I always knew that fearful reporting from the backlines was more my cup of (weak) tea. Not only did I not cover the Gulf War, but, sent to America on an unrelated assignment during the conflict, I insisted on flying Swissair via Zurich because of the terrorist threat to Western airlines.