A few months ago, I went to see Simon Reeve talk at The Hexagon in Reading. I love Reeve’s travelogues, which provide such a rich sense of places I’m very unlikely ever to visit – their flora and fauna, their people. Reeve is certainly very watchable and engaging to listen to.

I confess I was a bit disappointed by him, though. His main message to all of us in the audience was to live adventurously. He did, in fairness, say that adventures don’t have to involve travelling to remote places: that it’s possible to have adventures much closer to home. But he didn’t really emphasize the latter much. There was more enthusiasm in his voice when he talked about the benefits of eco-tourism for native peoples … Now, if what we want to do is help native peoples around the world, we can always donate through charities like Practical Action, Oxfam, the International Red Cross, Global Giving, etc.; and skip the climate damage caused by travelling there and back! And/or we can buy selectively – e.g. Palestinian olive oil, by way of a single and topical example to convey what I mean.

So here’s a personal instance of an adventure much closer to home. Looking back over 2024, it feels like I’ve been on a journey, a journey of essentially no mileage. I’ve ‘discovered’ acting in a theatre this year. Treading the boards. OK, I’m never going to be professional – West End audiences can breathe a sigh of relief – but I don’t think I’m all that bad, people enjoy the local performances at our theatre in Reading, the cast enjoy putting them on, and it’s the enjoyment that counts. In my latest role – the unstable father in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – the directing team opined that I’d ‘been on a journey’. And that is certainly what it’s felt like. My personal journey of adventure without travel in 2024.

Not all journeys require flying thousands of miles in a plane.

Resentment

As the world heats up, and the prospect of ever more frequent and serious climate-related food wars grows, it’s easy for greens like me to fall into the trap of feeling a bit resentful. After all, here we are, eating our soya beans and avoiding airports, while all around us most people continue with their burgers – and Christmas turkey – and winter getaways in the sun. We’re trying to do our bit for the planet, we say to ourselves, but it all seems to be in vain as most people aren’t.

Perhaps, though, if we feel resentment, we’re just slipping into the same mind-set as those we resent. The mind-set that a good life is, really, one with a lot of meat in it, and travel, and stuff. If we didn’t feel that, we’d be less inclined to feel resentful.

In his book The Art of Travel, the philosopher Alain de Botton describes an eccentric Frenchman who spent a fortnight ‘on holiday’ confined to his bedroom. Each day, this crackpot would ‘explore’ an item of furniture in it, or an object or piece of art he’d not really looked at properly before. Of course, neither de Botton – nor the eccentric Frenchman I think – is seriously suggesting we spend vacations in our bedrooms. But there is this serious point being made: what matters is not how much we see, but how much we notice what we do see.

The good life

It seems to me that the good life isn’t one that needs a lot of meat, or stuff, or two houses, or travel. It needs the effort, the practice, of noticing what we see, however seemingly limited our personal journey, and doing our best for the people and other life forms we bump into on the way. Granted, we need to avoid becoming parochial, we should help people who live far away if we can, but we don’t need to travel extensively as a precondition either to understand them or to be helpful to them.

Nobody’s perfect. I can think of some bon viveurs who I’d rather spend time with than some fellow greens. The latter might think the same about me. And maybe the occasional journey – at a frequency of once every five or ten years, say – could take in an exotic location. But there are so many personal journeys which can be done so much closer to home that there’s really no rush …

And in the meantime, I think I’ll concentrate on not feeling resentful. For two reasons. The first is that being restrained in my own consumption of resources – of materials, or space, or energy, or food, or land – does make a difference, even if it doesn’t feel like it. But secondly, and more importantly, because it’s wrong-headed. My happiness is found when I discover I don’t need to consume much after all.

It’s found when I successfully re-imagine what it is to be a bon viveur.