Richard Wilkinson, a professor at Nottingham University in England, was particularly persuasive, and he had some nice figures to back him up.
Essentially he argued that a gross imbalance between high and low earners is divisive (well, we know that) and drives people to put the pursuit of money above the pursuit of happiness. In consequence they spend more time working and less time communicating with family and friends.
(Incidentally he had some intriguing studies to show that having lots of friends is good for your health)
For really low-wage earners working several jobs is probably a necessity, but for the great majority, the middle classes, it has more to do with pumping up the image and with fear of losing ground.
The really important thing to recognize here is that they are drawn into this incessant beavering away because they lack confidence in themselves as persons, and confuse their own worth with net worth.
Fearing that they can’t command respect simply by being who they are, they hope to do it by packing ever more horsepower into their garages, and ever more goodies into their houses.
None of this is really news to me. I never cease to be amazed at the importance people attach to stuff. From my own experience I know that anyone who travels any distance in this world comes back much more secure in their own value, and much less interested in the trappings of a consumer society.
The irony is that despite all this frantic activity and consumerism, the wages of ninety percent of Americans have scarcely moved in forty years, while the infamous one percent have become richer to the point of obscenity. Well, all right, this too is an old story, which the Occupiers were retelling raucously a year ago.
But last night I heard some startling evidence of a different connection; although when you think about it, you can see it must be true. It apears that the more unevenly wealth is spread across a society, the more violent and abusive that society becomes.
And one of the causes of this unpleasantness is that people have lost the art of talking to each other about what matters because they spend so little time doing it.
One thing that has always bothered me in America was how scared people are to talk about politics or religion, as though it could lead to bloodshed.
A friend of mine, a Royal Marine, once described the three stages of a discussion in the officer’s mess after the port had gone round a few times: they were a bald assertion, a flat denial, and physical violence. He was joking, but often in America I feel it’s not a joke.
One of the skills a traveller has to acquire to stay out of trouble and to benefit from the experience is the ability to talk to people who have sharply different ideas; usually political or religious ideas, but occasionally ideas of inflicting actual bodily harm. And now, suddenly, I see how important it is that as many of us as possible develop this skill and practice it.
I live in a country where 20 school children were recently slaughtered and  34 people are murdered by gunfire on average every day. While at the other end of the spectrum of violence a bunch of politicians are willing to do great harm to a lot of poor people because they’re too hot-headed to talk to each other. I would make it obligatory for every congressman to travel alone across India or Africa, preferably on foot. They’d come back with a more useful perspective on life.
Meanwhile we have to do it for them, and the more of us doing it and infecting our neighbors with tolerance and understanding the sooner we will be able to dig ourselves out of this pit of greed, and rage, and suicidal consumption.
What a traveller learns to appreciate is the beauty and value of human beings and their natural instincts. In my view, what American workers need above all else, is longer holidays, a fairer slice of the cake, and a lot of friends. Instead of busting a gut for the man.

And a bit of Auld Ireland – a Belfast mural

A few years ago a magazine editor asked me where I would take my last ride and I was rather taken aback. I don’t spend much time thinking about the end of things, since age seems to have left me fairly intact so far, but I suppose it was a reasonable request given that I was already well into my seventies.

Of course his request begs the question: How would I know that it was my last? Well, there would be one way of making sure. I could leave a neat pile of personal effects, topped by a helmet, at the edge of a very high cliff? I’ve known at least one person who took that final ride, and I can imagine that as way of preempting a painful end it might be thrilling, but I hope I can think of better ways to hang up my helmet.

So, eschewing suicide, I said I’d plump for nostalgia. Of course there remain many places on earth – China, Japan, Russia, to name a few – where I would still like to ride a bike, but for the ultimate excursion I said I thought I’d circle back to the beginning, and try to recover some of those early experiences in the land where I was raised. And so, having thought of it, it became almost inevitable that I would do it.

Since I moved to France in 1968 I’ve seen rather little of the British Isles, but when I was at school, a few years after the end of the war (do I really have to tell you which one?) I used to hitch-hike all over the place, sometimes alone, sometimes with a school friend or two. It was the only way we could afford to get around.
There was a girl in Glasgow I was smitten with and I used to boast that I could get there from London’s North Circular in 18 hours. In the forties that was pretty good time.

It went like clockwork, and always on lorries, because in those days cars were still a rarity. Towards evening you’d get a bus out along the Finchley road to a junction on the North Circular and catch a lorry on its way north up the A6. The drivers liked the company; it helped them to stay awake, so getting a lift was pretty easy.

Usually they were headed for Liverpool or St Helens – I was never lucky enough to find one going all the way to Scotland – and it meant changing lorries at Warrington.. These were not big lorries by modern standards though they seemed big to me then. Scammell, Dennis, Foden, Bedford, those were some of the names that have since disappeared, but I don’t remember too much about them; I wasn’t as curious as I should have been.

The cabs were primitive, scarcely insulated and usually heated by the engine block that sat between me and the driver, with an old greasy horse blanket thrown across it. They might have carried anything from six to ten tons of cargo, under a canvas cover. Going north I never knew what was in the back, but coming south I can remember the scent of coal and, on one occasion coming down the A1, fish.

The drivers were usually interesting characters, and very different from people I met otherwise. One of them I recall spoke only eight words in as many hours on the road to Glasgow. Putting his hand over the engine he said, “This thing’s as ‘ot as a fuckin’ whorehouse.”

And then, as I thought about it, more and more episodes of my early life came to mind, some hilarious, some sombre. There was that distinctly odd year I spent on a provincial paper, in and around Barrow-in-Furness when I was awaiting Her Majesty’s pleasure, with trips to Blackpool and the Lake District. And there were even stranger occurrences when I was finally recruited to the ranks of the RAF and managed to turn my national service into a working holiday, with the help of stars like Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan.
So if I did eventually arrive at Beachy Head perhaps I’d push my bike over the edge, but I’d walk away . . . and write a book.
Certainly the idea appealed to me. I thought I’d make the trip during the late summer of 2009, when the weather was most likely to be fine, taking my time, and then write the book, nothing too voluminous perhaps, through the winter for my 79th birthday in May of 2010.

****************

So I pointed us north, back on the A37, carefully circling around Yeovil on the way. I still didn’t have a decent strategy for avoiding the busiest roads. At first I’d thought that I should simply ask my TomTom to avoid motorways, until I found that there were countless other roads that used to be ordinary, but which were now really motorways by another name.

Then I thought that if I deliberately rode out into the middle of one of those white areas on the map, full of spidery lanes without numbers, the TomTom would keep me off the big roads. Instead it seemed perversely determined to take me back to the nearest howling thoroughfare. Of course I could have constantly fed new little village destinations into the machine but the mechanics of it were too cumbersome and they defeated me. Nevertheless I got a taste of what it might be like.

I managed to ride through some delightful villages with names that would have looked even more enticing on a menu, like Champflower, Ditcheat, Chesterblade and Binegar. Then I rode way off the map and found myself in Vobster. (Who could resist the temptation to try vobsters with binegar?) I also discovered that in Vobster, you – but not I – can dive in a flooded quarry and inspect sunken limousines and underwater toilet seats. Then I realised that if I was going to get to Bristol at all that day I would have to leave my rural researches for another time.

I learned one thing from this trial run, however. I was completely wrong about the English sense of curiosity. My plan to excite comment and conversation with my strange little machine was a complete failure. Even though I hadn’t yet seen another bike like mine, scarcely anyone even noticed it.

When I stopped at a pub in search of a pork pie, one person did make an off-hand remark, like “Never seen one of them before,” but he certainly didn’t invite confidences and his tone suggested that he’d be quite happy if he never saw one again
There were no pork pies, either. Funnily enough, pork pies seem to have disappeared from British pubs. When I’m in America I never think of them, but here in Britain I become mildly addicted. It seems extraordinary that in a country said to be in the grip of an obesity epidemic I can’t find one of the most pleasant sources of superfluous fat.

***********************

How can I explain why this little contraption I am riding seems so perfectly appropriate. It has the innocence of a toy, nothing so purposeful as a motorcycle, let alone a car, yet at the same time it is a definite conveyance, a rolling seat, a vehicle out of a children’s story – you get on it, and off it goes, like an ambulatory armchair.

No gears to think about. All you have to do is steer it. I could be Toad of Toad Hall, or Pooh Bear. I am wearing my elegant light tan leather jacket, my yellow kid gloves and a silk scarf. The only thing wrong with this picture is that I am not wearing my flat hat and goggles.

When I first heard of the MP3 it was believed by some that it could be classified as a tricycle exempt from the helmet law and I was overjoyed. But alas, on examination, the two front wheels appear to be not quite far enough apart. To the relief of those who love me I wear the helmet. It definitely spoils the picture but then, I don’t have to look at it.

The summer has flown by. I launched the book, visited HorizonsUnlimited in Derbyshire, rode through Germany and France visiting old friends, took Lida on a tour of the UK, and spent ten days with Angel and Teresa in Madrid where they were launching an unbelievably luxurious 40th anniversary edition of Jupiter’s Travels.

Now I’m back in California trying to make up for lost time. Well, you could hardly call it lost, it was packed with good things.

One memory has haunted me, though, and that was an evening in Duisburg, so I’ve written a little essay about it.
Although I have a good friend in Duisburg, probably the only thing that keeps me going there is my old motorcycle. Duisburg would not be high on a list of picturesque and historically significant German towns.
It was a steel town, like Sheffield, or Gary, Indiana, one of the cities which make up that part of Germany called the Ruhr, where vast mills smoked up the heavens and spewed forth the tanks and artillery that overwhelmed Europe twice in the last century.
But the glory days of Krupps and Thyssen are over. The immense factories stand idle or are converted to other uses, such as offices or museums.
During my first visits, in the nineties, the town shared in the general prosperity of the economic miracle. Today it suffers seriously from unemployment, and is generally shabby, unkempt, and not at all what you expect to see in Germany.

My bike is an old BMW Funduro, and my friend Dirk Erker, a master mechanic, keeps it alive for me so that I can run around Europe in a pleasing and economic fashion. When I go to collect it I usually spend a night there, and in the nineties I got into the habit of visiting a particular restaurant in the centre of town.
It was the kind of place that’s dear to me Ð old-fashioned, comfortable, business-like and unpretentious. There were no windows onto the street so that it had a very private, almost club-like feeling. When you went in there was a large polished counter to the left, displaying various beer pumps, and a few tables to the right. All the furniture was wood and everything was very solid and grounded.
The back of the room was raised up like a dais, with a couple of steps and a railing, and there were more tables up there. The customers all looked as though they had been there for ever, and were obviously known to the two severely practical ladies who ran the visible part of the establishment.
The kitchen must have been in the basement because the food came up on a dumb waiter. The menu was quite broad and the wine was very reasonable. I was very fond of the North Sea muscles that were brought to the table in huge specially designed pans, but all the fish was good.

Duisburg is on the Rhine river, a broad and busy waterway, and all those cities on the Rhine feel very connected to the North Sea. I used to assume that the restaurant was eternal, a permanent part of the town’s social life, and although I only visited very rarely it comforted me to know it was there.
This summer, for the first time in many years, I had to spend a night in Duisburg again and I was looking forward with delight to an evening at that restaurant. The centre of Duisburg is quite small. I used to find my way easily without knowing the street names, and I knew the restaurant by the black beams and white plaster on the facade outside. I had never made a note of it’s name and I simply walked to the street where it should have been but when I got there I thought I’d made a mistake. The street was wider than I remembered and, as is the fashion in many European cities, it had become a pedestrian-only area. I seemed to have lost my bearings and I walked around the city in vain for almost an hour. Then, back where I started on that broad pedestrian precinct, I began to take in the scene.
It was decked out in the usual street furniture that indicates a prosperous and active community, clusters of globe street lamps, kiosks, benches, and little arcades. But the happy couples, the merry shoppers were missing. It had a miserable, neglected air. There were a few groups of young men looking lost and faintly aggressive, with beer bottles dangling from their fists. Women scurried past bent on some other business. There was melancholy, and litter.

Then it came to me that all this must have been accomplished in a great wave of euphoria since I was there last. To widen the street the restaurant must have been demolished to make way for a department store that was now desperately trying to move its goods at ridiculous discounts.
I noticed an older man sitting on a bench beside his bicycle. He was in shorts, almost bald, with a neatly trimmed grey beard and youthful, evenly tanned skin, but what struck me most was that, unlike everyone else in sight, he seemed eminently contented.
He had a gleam in his eye and gazed about him with a benign air as though everything was exactly as it should be. I asked him if he knew anything of my old restaurant where they serve North Sea muscles, and described it to him as best I could. He made an honest effort but he couldn’t help.
“There’s a fish restaurant at the end of this road called the Nordsee,” he said, pointing in the direction of the railway station. “Perhaps that’s the one. It’s very good.”
I walked there, about a quarter of a mile, but the Nordsee was like a fast food joint, new and shiny, and surrounded by glass windows. Over the counter were big, illuminated pictures of various fish dishes as though the clients couldn’t be counted on to read or, at the very least, imagine what a plate of fish would look like.
The place was empty but nevertheless I ate there and the food was unexpectedly good. I was the last customer, and the manager, probably Turkish, was making a minute inventory of every last morsel of food left on the counters before closing.
The woman who served me must have been at least sixty, a good-tempered, vigorous person. She said the Nordsee had been there for a very long time and she’d been working there for ages but she knew nothing of the place I’d been searching after.
I said if the Nordsee was old they must have renovated it quite recently but she seemed puzzled by my remark and said, No, and this failure to connect disturbed me.

When I walked out into the dusk I saw, to my surprise, the same elderly cyclist sitting in almost exactly the same pose on a similar bench outside the restaurant. Again he was surveying the desolate scene around him with approval, as though he had created it and found it good.

Facing me across the open space was one other restaurant, a brilliantly lit Subway. I have nothing against Subways, but it struck me as extraordinary that Germany, which boasts the most delicious bread rolls in the world, and stuffs them with the finest array of ingredients, could support a Subway. Although I still hope that somehow I got it all wrong, that my old restaurant still flourishes in some other parallel Duisburg that I missed, I am pretty sure it has gone for ever. Instead there’s a Subway and, beyond it, behind another group of disconsolate drunks, tucked into the corner of the square, a new casino. And this cycle of hope and decadence was all accomplished in little more than a decade.

Six more months have passed, with not a word from me, but at last there’s news.
I am the proud father of another book and though the labour was long and, at times, agonising, my latest offspring has finally gone to press and looks lovely.

Because it is all about my journey through the British Isles there are no plans yet to publish it in the USA, but that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t interest American readers, at least not the ones who have followed me on my other journeys. It is more than usually autobiographical and I’ve finally let rip with my opinions and prejudices. If you’d like a taste, you could go here and read a few snippets. Anyway, there will be copies of the book available in a week or two, and I think I can get them sent over here before I leave for Europe at the beginning of June. So if you want a copy, signed by me, send me an email soon at tsimon@mcn.org.

I’ll be at the Overland Expo in Arizona again this year and I hope to have copies of the new book there – as well as the usual collection. This year it’s at Flagstaff, and I know it’s going to be a really cool event.
On June 5th I’m flying to London to talk about the book. Lida is already visiting in Ukraine and we’ll meet in England later to see friends and go to the HorizonsUnlimited meeting in Ripley which has become a touchstone for me.
After that we’ll fly to Madrid where Angel and Teresa are launching a special anniversary edition of Los Viages de Jupiter – Oh man, am I looking forward to the tapas and the vino and that special Spanish heat.
So, that’s the summer taken care of. Now I just have to find someone else to take care of my garden.
If you still have an appetite for more, try the blog on my foundation website.

What distinguished Jupiter’s Travels from most motorcycle adventure sagas was the attention that it paid to what was going on around me as I travelled.
The Ted Simon Foundation (I still blush a little when I say it) is dedicated to promoting that kind of travel.
It’s not good enough to travel through the world obsessed with your own little moments of triumph and despair. Individual explorers have a great role to play in comprehending what is going on in the world, and communicating their observations. These personal observations, to my mind, are at least as useful as any media reporting that’s done these days.
The foundation will be launched alongside my old bike in Coventry on October 6th.
Read about it here.

The warthogs of Sondzela park

What was I doing there in Swaziland? Well, more than a year ago an IT guy from Pretoria with a fondness for motorcycles took it into his head to send me an email offering to fly me to South Africa and take care of me when I was there. How could I refuse?
I didn’t know him. More to the point, he didn’t know me, but having read the book I guess he wanted to.

Well, it turned out he thought I lived in England, and the fare from San Francisco was a bit out of reach, but fortunately a fellow called Steve Berry who organizes Wilderness Lectures in Bristol invited me to put in an appearance there in November, and that took care of my United flight from SFO.

It’s happy coincidences like that which give life an extra lift. The lecture was rewarding for me, and about 300 people had an enjoyable winter’s evening. I had time to take my MP3 back to Stephen in Hampshire, got a wonderful lunch into the bargain, and the next day I was off to meet Ben Breedenkamp at Johannesburg airport.
Ben is one of those interesting people who don’t let social inhibitions get in the way of their enthusiasms. He’s young, fit, fashionably bald, with a joyful wife, a sweet little daughter, two bikes in the garage, a company car and some very good friends.

Ben Breedenkamp

Among his friends is Roger, part owner of Bavarian BMW who was persuaded to put up the airfare in exchange for a couple of talks by me. Heike, Ben’s wife, gave me their bedroom over my protests, and after a rather grueling 24-hour flight via Dubai, I sank gratefully into their double bed.

Next day we set off for Swaziland. There were four of us on bikes. I was on a brand new F800. Next to me were Bruno, Ben and Adriaan. Heike with her little girl, and a peaceful giant from Italy called Corrado, followed in the car. On our way there, just after Ermelo, I was struck by a guinea fowl.

I watched this incompetent bird with amazement as it lurched out of the bushes and sailed into my path. It tipped the edge of my should before bouncing off in a flurry of feathers.

For the first time in my life I was glad of my narrow shoulders. Another inch and it could have knocked me off the bike.
I took it as a good omen, and in fact the whole ten days of my visit to South Africa was made in heaven.Pretoria and Cape Town treated me like royalty, and my audiences really seemed to get it.

Swazi art – I got some.

… and a very fancy restaurant

In Cape Town Renette Rauch, a tall young dirt rider who also happens to be a lawyer, lent me her 1200 GS which was in just the right state of decrepitude to make me comfortable, except that I had to stand on the pegs to get a good grip on the brake (well, not really)
I was given a complete rental cottage with every conceivable mod. con. in a lovely sea-side suburb – and I have to mention the owner because if you ever take your family to Cape Town you really have to check out Chris Grinton’s place, at www.themanorcottage.co.za You could not find a better billet.

Back in Pretoria, a big bonus. In Jupiter’s Travels, somewhere around page 170 depending on the edition, is an account of my arrival at Mader’s Hotel. Adriaan told me it’s still there and we went to look. It’s a shriveled and dilapidated version of what I hold in my memory, but for a few moments I relived those days in 1974 – a bitter-sweet memory from so long ago.

They come even bigger than this

Then we went on with Bruno to Mader’s restaurant, home of the kilogram steak and the biggest collection of junk I’ve ever seen.

I ate it all up

And later, with much pride, Adriaan took me to visit the huge granite Afrikaaner monument to the voortrekkers, his ancestors, who sought the same freedoms that first brought white men to America.

Outside

Inside

It’s great to be celebrated, the beau of the ball. In this age of image and perception it amazes me that an elderly, rather cerebral-looking man of quite un-athletic appearance should be so honoured as a pioneer in what is, after all, a rather macho mix of motorcycles and adventure. It’s just as well, I suppose, that I know how to write a book, otherwise in all probability none of this would have come my way.

It feels more like sitting on a horse, and I can lean back like a married country gentleman and survey my heritage. Funnily enough, though, although I still haven’t seen another one like it on the road, nobody seems very interested. Have the British lost their sense of curiosity?

Riding the iTune

Here I am at the harbour in Mevagissey – you can see how beautiful it is. It’s in the far south-west of England, and I thought it would be overwhelmed by tourist trash but somehow it has managed to keep it’s character as a working port for fishermen. I had a hell of a time getting a room, but after dozens of calls I found the Mandalay B&B and was received with a lovely cup of tea and an even lovelier Cornish acent.

We have known each other for seventeen years, and you may remember seeing her on my page in 2008, when she visited and travelled around the country with me. I couldn’t pull it off then, and God knows why she has succumbed now, but the deed is almost done.

I am sorry you can’t all come to the wedding.
In India, where guest lists of thousands are not unusual, we could have managed it. Every guest would get a banana leaf with a grain of rice on it and be satisfied, according to my old guru, Rajaram. But no self-respecting Ukrainian would dare to provide less food than it takes to provoke a major intestinal crisis and we can’t afford the emergency medical service.

The only loser will be my tractor, which I bought as a consolation, but it proved to be an inadequate substitute.
The wedding will be in Europe, probably in Ukraine, and I’ll be going there 12 days from now, but before that happens something else equally wonderful will arrive on my doorstep and turn my life upside down.

My new ride

I got myself a V-strom. John Rains gave me one to ride in New Zealand and I liked it so much that the first thing I did when I got back was look for one. It came off Craigs List, and my friend Kate has borrowed it for a trip. Here she is at Joshua Tree and having a great time. I’ve come very late to discovering what a cool machine it is.

My son William is doing the quintessential American thing, uprooting himself from Kentucky, and packing his girl friend, their peerless 14-month-old son, their furniture, two dogs and a riding mower into a U-Haul, to live in California and occupy my house while I’m gone. So I’ve been running around frantically making doors for low-lying cupboards, child-proofing the stairs, and facing up generally to an astounding mess.

In May, on the weekend of the 21st, I have been invited to a big Spanish motorcycle fiesta near Alicante. I will fly to Madrid from Ukraine, and then travel down to the meeting with Angel and Teresa, my two Spanish friends and publishers. Then I go back to Ukraine, rescue my bride from her school, and we will do a sort of honeymoon car trip around Europe.

Then she has to go home and await Uncle Sam’s pleasure, while I go on to the UK. I’ll be at the HorizonsUnlimited meeting near Ripley on the 25th of June, and after that I’ll start the road trip I couldn’t do last year, around the UK, for the book I promised to Little Brown. I’m going to do it on an MP3, just for the hell of it, so if you see one of those ambling past give it a wave. There can’t be that many of them, so it might be me.