[John Whitworth]

Sphereans done good here, with Cris O'Carroll yet again leading the pack and Bazza and Frank O just in behind. Adrian Fry not far behind. Well done all. I really must work on my prose. I could always call it Fre Verse, couldn't I?

Voyagers

In Competition No. 2786 you were invited to submit a feature for a travel supplement as it might have been written by a well-known novelist, living or dead.

Derek Morgan’s George Orwell is in Paris and insufficiently down-and-out: ‘Although I would have preferred to haul my suitcase on foot from Gare du Nord, a taxi whisked me to Place des Vosges and my nearby four-star hotel with its sickeningly servile staff.’ I also liked Johannes Kerkhoven’s Cannery Row-inspired take on the Argentinian city of Tilcara, and Adrian Fry’s evocation of a Spanish ghost town filtered through Ballard’s dystopian lens. It was a cracking entry. Congratulations all round. The winners take £25. The bonus fiver is Chris O’Carroll’s.

New Orleans calls itself the Big Easy, but the sultry languor of the bayou is far from being a nerveless or quiescent thing. There is strenuous passion in the hot, bright ease of this place, where the air is moist, heavy and fragrant under the almost tropical sun. One senses the city’s passion in the fathomless intensity of the mighty Mississippi River, whose urgent currents are forever rippling their blind, instinctive caress along the flank of the French Quarter as the softly clamorous waterway slides eagerly toward the fulfilment of oneness with the Gulf of Mexico. One hears and feels it in the jazz pulsating through the Bourbon Street night. A dark beauty throbs in the rhythms of the music, while brilliant, quivering crescendos swirl and jump like flames. There is no lazy complacency in the ease of this Crescent City, but a deep and perpetual restlessness.
Chris O’Carroll/D.H. Lawrence

The cathedral in Helsinki is a white building but it is not white like the white of the Andalusian villages in the summer of 1932 when Belmonte fought six Miura bulls in the ring at Seville and the Mayor sent his car to bring Belmonte to a civic reception at the ayuntamiento and Belmonte diverted it to a brothel but could not pass through the cheering crowd who trampled the orange blossom. The crowd was obstinate, and of many people. The whole town smelt of orange blossom and Belmonte’s money was no good at Rosita’s or anywhere in Seville that summer.

But the white of Helsinki is the white of a marlin’s bones when the flesh has been boiled off. It is a pure white, and of an incomparable whiteness, but its purity is the purity of death, like the Finnish vodka that is white death in a bottle.
Basil Ransome-Davies/Hemingway

Though few, unlike me, can afford to savour the pleasures of Paris, Versailles and beyond, there are joys to be had on a bicycle, riding the windswept slopes of England’s South and West. After pedalling slowly up Yell’ham Hill, where seven buxom women once slithered and slid on a cold, winter’s day, refresh yourself at The Traveller’s Rest, famed for its sprightly serving maids. A short ride hence heralds Wynyard’s Gap which, apart from its views, marks the start of the trampwoman’s ill-fated trek to the jail where her woebegone sweetheart would swing from the hangman’s noose. Returning southwards, an easy descent from the Wessex heights leads to Casterbridge town where hangings were once a popular sight. As a journey’s end, Budmouth’s Harbour Bridge offers welcoming inns with their smokers’ club-stories of lovers’ torments and drowning wives! These are the tragedies everyone likes — And so will you.
Alan Millard/Thomas Hardy

As requested, I record my impressions of this Saga Mini-Cruise through the blooming bulbfields of Holland, and its suitability for single ladies, travelling alone or in a party. On quondam coach holidays one’s company was restricted by daily seating arrangements. More genteel, this cruise avoids such disadvantage. Larger groupings sit on deck or in the comfortable lounge, conversing over apparently endless cups of tea and a positive cornucopia of pastries and cakes, while windmills and country scenes float past. Considerable goodwill reigns among them, with sufficient eccentricities among fellow travellers to excite comment. One handsome, somewhat lame gentleman spent much time with a neat younger lady. Gossip speculated on their relationship; I concluded her to be merely a carer. With efficient, unobtrusive service this is an undemanding and amenable holiday. A titled widow assured me that it surpassed celebrity-led, cultural cruises on greater waterways. Miss Matty would be well suited.
Alanna Blake/Elizabeth Gaskell

After dark the rue des Bouchers had the phantasmagoric appearance of a narrow lamplit tunnel of which the only roof was the sombre, enveloping sky beyond the flare of wildly illuminated restaurant signs. Its cobbled floor had been shrunk to a dangerously erratic path by the encroachment of crowded tables on either side, at which tribal lips exercised themselves on giant pots of mussels that hissed like ancient steam tugs or wantonly rehearsed a multitude of office scandals and political rumours. It was impossible in that suffocating nocturnal arrest of daylight emotion not to feel the oppressive weight of a pervasive invisible bureaucracy, for which the mass of piratical diners were but a grotesque local epitome. Brussels by night provoked only equivocal reactions, the ironic nub of the experience being that I was visiting the city which had once hosted the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs.
G.M. Davis/Joseph Conrad

You drive in LA. You drive because this is a big, empty city where the heat melts your molars faster than a hood can hotwire a late-model Lamborghini. You drive because the sidewalks sport cracks capable of swallowing a good-sized Great Dane and because what passes for rapid transit here is neither, but mostly, you drive to escape the vapid reek of this place, the existential stench that seeps from the jacarandas like cheap perfume off a two-bit taxi-dancer. And when you drive fast enough through these dry canyons, past the flophouses and fly-blown burger stands, to the cool sweep of the Pacific Coast Highway cutting cleanly up the coast, everything still blends into a beautiful blue oblivion as potent as a Rohypnol highball. You drive a subcompact lavender Kia because Dennis, the kid at the rental-car counter, claimed he didn’t have your reservation and that’s all they had left.
Frank Osen/Raymond Chandler