'Tis the season to get cheap flights

Flying anywhere in late November is a pleasure easily comparable to shuffling through piles of dead leaves

By Jeremy Atiyah

Published: 19 November 2000

When everything is dark and meaningless, and people are too depressed to think about going away, air fares become ridiculously cheap. That's why I like the end of November.
When everything is dark and meaningless, and people are too depressed to think about going away, air fares become ridiculously cheap. That's why I like the end of November.
The owners of airlines, by contrast, must hate this time of year. The sight of the last yellow leaves clinging feebly to the treetops means empty seats in planes. Because what customer in their right mind is going to plan a holiday four weeks before Christmas? The only consolation for Go, Ryan Air, Buzz et al is that this low-season also gives them the opportunity to trumpet some absurdly cheap fares.
In six months' time, when the leaves are green and bees are buzzing in the sunshine again, some of that favourable publicity will begin to pay off. People will get up in the morning and ask each other: "Where did I see that advertisement for flights to Barcelona for £49?" By then, of course, the price will have doubled or tripled, but that won't matter: the seed of the idea that flights to Barcelona are cheap will have germinated in the spring warmth.
Anyway, right now, I can't get enough of these feeble yellow leaves. There are some at the bottom of my garden which I have been staring at fixedly for a fortnight. I am willing them to drop. It's a kind of superstition I have: cherry-tree leaves a-dropping, flights a-going cheap.
During the past week I've seen tickets to Lisbon, Madrid, Barcelona, Sardinia and Calabria all advertised for under fifty quid, including taxes. I couldn't help picking one up, almost as an involuntary reaction, like wiping a drop from the end of my nose. I regard buying tickets at this time of year as a seasonal rite, even if one has no intention of travelling. What do you lose after all? Well, £50, I suppose. But the gains are enormous: namely, the possibility of flying south, when everyone else is too depressed to move.
By the way, buying tickets merely on the grounds that they are extremely cheap (regardless of whether or not you will be able to use them) is another of those special pleasures that I associate with dark afternoons and mulch underfoot. It makes you realise how much of the joy of travel is in the anticipation.
Try it yourself: buy a ticket to Lisbon for £50 and carry it around in your pocket for a week. If you are feeling well-off, buy two or three tickets simultaneously to different destinations. Ask yourself how much pleasure the experience has given you. Then throw away the tickets.
Of course if you actually decide to get on one of your flights, then so much the better. Flying anywhere in late November is a pleasure easily comparable to shuffling through piles of dead leaves.
What I especially like, as soon as I get off the plane, is the sight of Latins dressed up for November: vast padded coats designed for Siberia - just bought for the season - tend to come out whenever the temperature drops below 15C.
And it's those giant autumn coats that help people, sitting over their correspondingly tiny coffees, to look serious. Before the atmosphere goes downhill in January with the addition of silly hats, these coats add to the general gravitas; to the sense of creativity, depth and intelligence.
Basically, they give you all the reassurance you need, that you are not completely out of your right mind taking a holiday four weeks before Christmas.
When everything is dark and meaningless, and people are too depressed to think about going away, air fares become ridiculously cheap. That's why I like the end of November.


The owners of airlines, by contrast, must hate this time of year. The sight of the last yellow leaves clinging feebly to the treetops means empty seats in planes. Because what customer in their right mind is going to plan a holiday four weeks before Christmas? The only consolation for Go, Ryan Air, Buzz et al is that this low-season also gives them the opportunity to trumpet some absurdly cheap fares.


In six months' time, when the leaves are green and bees are buzzing in the sunshine again, some of that favourable publicity will begin to pay off. People will get up in the morning and ask each other: "Where did I see that advertisement for flights to Barcelona for £49?" By then, of course, the price will have doubled or tripled, but that won't matter: the seed of the idea that flights to Barcelona are cheap will have germinated in the spring warmth.


Anyway, right now, I can't get enough of these feeble yellow leaves. There are some at the bottom of my garden which I have been staring at fixedly for a fortnight. I am willing them to drop. It's a kind of superstition I have: cherry-tree leaves a-dropping, flights a-going cheap.


During the past week I've seen tickets to Lisbon, Madrid, Barcelona, Sardinia and Calabria all advertised for under fifty quid, including taxes. I couldn't help picking one up, almost as an involuntary reaction, like wiping a drop from the end of my nose. I regard buying tickets at this time of year as a seasonal rite, even if one has no intention of travelling. What do you lose after all? Well, £50, I suppose. But the gains are enormous: namely, the possibility of flying south, when everyone else is too depressed to move.


By the way, buying tickets merely on the grounds that they are extremely cheap (regardless of whether or not you will be able to use them) is another of those special pleasures that I associate with dark afternoons and mulch underfoot. It makes you realise how much of the joy of travel is in the anticipation.


Try it yourself: buy a ticket to Lisbon for £50 and carry it around in your pocket for a week. If you are feeling well-off, buy two or three tickets simultaneously to different destinations. Ask yourself how much pleasure the experience has given you. Then throw away the tickets.


Of course if you actually decide to get on one of your flights, then so much the better. Flying anywhere in late November is a pleasure easily comparable to shuffling through piles of dead leaves.
What I especially like, as soon as I get off the plane, is the sight of Latins dressed up for November: vast padded coats designed for Siberia - just bought for the season - tend to come out whenever the temperature drops below 15C.


And it's those giant autumn coats that help people, sitting over their correspondingly tiny coffees, to look serious. Before the atmosphere goes downhill in January with the addition of silly hats, these coats add to the general gravitas; to the sense of creativity, depth and intelligence.


Basically, they give you all the reassurance you need, that you are not completely out of your right mind taking a holiday four weeks before Christmas.

Why must these gentle exiles from the world's most powerful nation humbly apologise for everything?

By Jeremy Atiyah

Published: 12 November 2000

Don't talk to me about American politics. The only Americans I care about are the exiles: the sad ones, travelling the highways and byways of the world.

I am not, of course, talking about the sort of people who spend a week in New York and then go home to Texas believing they have seen Rome. Or the schoolkids in Wisconsin who don't even know that there are foreign countries.

No. It's the real American travellers - the world specialists - who fascinate me. The best travellers you can ever meet. There's no greater pleasure in life than bumping into solitary, bearded Americans in places like Kashmir or Beirut, looking depressed about the state of the world.

They don't necessarily say it out loud, but the feeling is written all over their pale blue eyes, watery after the latest sandstorm in, say, the Sinai Desert: "We come from a powerful country," they want to say, "but unfortunately we are powerless people."

They explain to me, modestly, that this country of theirs is located in the ocean half way between Japan and Britain. ("It divides the Atlantic from the Pacific," they say. "You find it between Canada and Mexico.") They then spend hours crushed into uncomfortable buses, telling me how sorry they are for everything.

It's taken me years to get the point. "Sorry for what?" I say, wondering if it is their squashy peaches I am sitting on. "Oh, you know," they murmur, in non-assertive voices, with Burmese peasants sleeping on their shoulders or sundry Vietnamese babies in their laps. "For... isolationism. For ignorance. For what we have done. For the mistakes we have made."

It is as if they think that the whole world is lined up in righteous accusation against them, behind Ayatollah Khomeini, and, moreover, that they themselves - even in sarongs - are morally responsible for global warming and Third World debt.

I actually feel very sorry for them. They are doing their bit. They know what all good travellers should know (that Yemenis, for example, use tufts of camel hair as coffee filters, and that there are pirates in the Sulu Sea).

I want to try to reassure them. "Oh don't worry about it," I say. "We're still grateful for the Marshall Plan." But they keep on giving me that sad and guilty look, even if they then turn out to have done a seven-year PhD in a dialect spoken only by the tribespeople of eastern Bangladesh, and have since devoted years of their lives to re-educating child-prostitutes and drug-users in northern Thailand.
A strange symptom of the heavy responsibility of world leadership? Probably. And perhaps these sad, gentle people in their big quilted coats up there in the High Karakoram (or in their sandals down there by the Ganges) were once sponsored by the State Department. Who can say?

But now they have become ultra-knowledgeable travellers. They are experts in unusual kinds of tea. They can summarise nations. They speak quietly, in the hope that nobody will recognise their accents. They get their facts right.

And regardless of whatever happens in Washington, I am looking forward to meeting many more American travellers like these in the very near future.

How to re-define fame

If you think the West has bizarre ideas about what defines celebrity, try visiting China

By Jeremy Atiyah

Published: 06 November 2000

I'm just back from China and am having to get used to the fact that people are no longer jostling to get better views of me as I step down from my bicycle rickshaw.

What a depressing transition. Last week, people were offering me congratulatory glasses of Chinese vodka every time I opened my mouth to speak. Since my return home - on the other hand - nobody has paid me the slightest bit of attention.

Nobody has asked me how much I earn, for example, or if I am married, or why I am balding, or how old I am, or whether it is true that the English masses drive their own cars. Now I know how bad Princess Diana would have felt had she ever found herself ignored by the paparazzi.
Celebrity status in China is great. It's also quite easy to acquire, if you have a big enough nose. Some of the most famous men in the world are obscure English teachers who have managed to get themselves on to Chinese television a few times.

What happens to you if you are a Chinese-speaking foreigner in China is that you instantly become a spokesperson acting on behalf of the entire Western world. You become the special envoy of the European and American intelligentsia (or proletariat, or peasantry, depending on how recently you have shaved).

For most Chinese, after all, it is a God-given truth that Chinese speak Chinese, and foreigners foreign - just as Chinese eat rice, drink tea and use chopsticks, while foreigners eat chips, drink coffee and use knives and forks. Any daring attempt on the part of a man with pale eyes and a giant nose to break these laws of heaven is enough to stop a billion people right there in their tracks. Your casual remarks during long bus journeys through Sichuan province will be capable of altering the future course of history. I have found that it helps to be polite.

Of course, fame in China has its low points, as it no doubt does in Hollywood as well. There are days when you would rather not have people staring at you too closely. The responsibility of representing the combined peoples of Europe and America is less attractive, for example, when you have just got off the Peking-Canton Express along with a population equivalent to that of several small African countries.

I'm also none too keen on being woken from my sleep just because somebody wants to ask me if I would mind posing for a photograph with his daughter who is due to be married later in the day. And be careful with that nose of yours which is going to generate such intense interest: whatever you do, don't pick it, and don't blow it loudly in public places.

But make no mistake. Stardom in China has its uses. With a nose as big as yours, you will be allowed to use first-class waiting rooms at stations even if you are travelling on a second-class ticket. You'll always get to the fronts of queues more easily.

Best of all, though, is this: that the nicest, cleverest people in China will be queueing up to pay you attention. Just sit back and wait for them. Subjects for discussion will range from your attitude to China, right through to your feelings about your children and the level of your income.

And don't worry. You will also be congratulated, as often as you like, on your ability to speak Chinese (and to use chopsticks).