David Bramwell - The Odysseum: Strange journeys that obliterated convention

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First published in the United States and Great Britain in 2018 by Brewers, an imprint of Chambers Publishing Limited.

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Copyright Jo Tinsley and David Bramwell

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ISBN 978 1 473 68871 1

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For a short while in the early 1980s Monty Pythons Graham Chapman was a member of the notorious Dangerous Sports Club. In his occasional role as warm-up act for The Who, Chapman liked to recount hair-raising tales of how he and fellow members of the club travelled down ski slopes on hospital beds, wheelchairs and grand pianos, half joking that the last one to break a leg was the winner. Chapman quit the group when they started hang-gliding from the rims of active volcanoes. Everyone has their limits.

Journeys long or short, on foot or by grand piano are a part of our daily lives. While many are prosaic, such as a trip to the corner shop, when approached with a sense of novelty, imagination or Dadaist absurdism they can (quite literally in Chapmans case) catapult us in new directions. As youll discover in The Odysseum, for some, even the daily commute can be an epic and surreal experience.

What constitutes an unconventional journey differs wildly throughout history and across cultures. For those living in the Middle Ages, the idea of walking into the wilderness for pleasure was anathema such places were considered godless. The word heathen was used pejoratively for anyone choosing to shun town or village life. Until recently, many of us viewed our urban hinterlands with similar disdain. Over the past 20 years, however, a growing interest in psychogeography has led many to drift through industrial backwaters, edgelands and sewers in search of new meaning and connection. Writer and philosopher Alain de Botton is even fond of taking fellow seekers for a ramble around Heathrow Airport.

While we salute the intrepid travels of Charles Darwin, Ernest Shackleton, Captain Scott and the like, their stories are not to be found in The Odysseum. Instead, we seek out more bizarre and unfamiliar tales, as well as delving into the psychological impact of such journeys. These really are the paths less travelled.

We begin with Nazi architect Albert Speer who spent 11 years walking around the world. During his 19,250-mile (31,000-km) ramble, Speer endured sweltering desert heat and the extreme cold of the Siberian tundra. He jostled with a surging crowd in Beijing and witnessed the Northern Lights transform the world around him into a phantasmagoria of snow and light. He even became the first person to cross the Bering Strait in the dead of winter. Most remarkable of all, as youll discover, Speer did all of this without leaving the confines of Spandau Prison in Berlin.

While Speer journeyed inwardly to preserve his mental wellbeing fortifying his visualizations by poring over travelogues in the prisons library for others, mental peregrinations can result in an unravelling of the mind. In 1979 myriad journeys unfolded after artist Kit Williams instigated the worlds biggest treasure hunt thorough his book Masquerade. While many of the 2 million people taking part remained armchair sleuths, thousands of the more zealous Masqueraders set off on monumental wild-goose chases, resulting in air-sea rescues, arrests for trespassing and, for some, a slow descent into madness. The eventual uncovering of the treasure was so cloaked in subterfuge it remains worthy of the plot of a John le Carr novel.

Of course, weve also chosen to focus on extreme feats of physical endurance: the French doctor who deliberately drifted across the Atlantic Ocean to prove that he could survive at sea on saltwater, plankton and freshly squeezed fish; the men who packed themselves into crates and posted themselves around the world; and an unfortunate paraglider sucked up to 30,000 feet (9,144 m) by a storm cloud.

But perhaps some of the most unusual and fascinating journeys we unearthed revolve around totems: personal odysseys with objects that dont have to make sense to anyone other than the travellers themselves. When artist Grayson Perry embarked on a pilgrimage to Bavaria with his teddy bear, Alan Measles, he did so to make peace with the German people, after demonizing them in his childhood games. Motivated by a similar desire to lay past ills to rest, when his father passed away film-maker Andrew Ktting decided to take a giant, inflatable Deadad on a tour around the world, inflating and then deflating his father at 65 places that held significance to them both.

Finally, its been intriguing to unearth tales of famous body parts that have been on unlikely adventures after parting from their hosts. Rasputins penis, in case youre interested (we know you are), went on an epic tour of Europe following the peasant-turned-holy mans assassination in 1916, spending time being worshiped as a holy relic in Paris before being swapped for a sea cucumber. As for the travels of Einsteins brain, Evitas mummified corpse and Hitlers jaw, well, youll have to read on to find out DB & JT

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Albert Speer: the Nazi who walked around the world | Xavier De Maistre: the writer who voyaged around his bedroom

Solitude, deep snow, forest. I am several hundred km north of Okhotsk. Endless forests surround me; in the distance are smoking volcanoes with glaciers snaking down them Approximately two thousand km more before I must make the crossing at Bering Strait, where I ought to arrive in about sixty weeks.

Diary extract, 17 April 1962

On 19 March 1955 his 50th birthday a lone traveller completes a 75-mile (120-km) walk from Berlin to his home town of Heidelberg in Germany. Thirty dried peas nestle in his trouser pocket, essential to the success of his journey. But the pilgrimage has provided little salvation for his tormented soul. In desperate need of further distraction, the traveller later mentions to an acquaintance that he plans to continue his walk, taking in Munich, Vienna, Rome and Sicily.