For the first time ever, I was seized with a strong impatience to write a review of a book that almost accidentally fell into my hands. Two days on the way to a long-awaited rest in the car there is absolutely nothing to do and I want something easy to unload my brains. I'll take Gill's "Travel Experience" ("Is Further Away"). Sounds like what I'm looking for.

Almost from the first pages, I understand that this is absolutely not what I was looking for. "The Experience of Travel" turned out to be a collection of essays written by a man with one of the most lively languages I have met, a man who struck me to the heart with his style of writing, seasoned with intellectual truth-telling and the broadest horizons of the author. I didn't get what I wanted, but a lot more.

I would recommend reading this book to anyone who is "alive" and knows how to think. And if you ask "why", then I will answer that in order for your brain to get at least a little pleasure, savor these expressions, become "wider". It's food for the mind, and from one of the best restaurants, you know? :) By the way, Gill is not only a columnist writer, but also a restaurant critic for The Sunday Times and Vanity Fair Magazine.

Those who are fluent in English should definitely read in the original. Special thanks to the translators, it was very pleasant to read a translation of such high quality, especially since it is clear that the higher the "syllable", the more difficult it is to translate.

Now a few words about the content: you probably think that the book is only about traveling to places. I hasten to disabuse. In this collection you will see not only places, but also reflections on old age, dyslexia, which Gill is ill with, fatherhood and fishing, the 2008 US elections, "events of a metaphorical order," as the author himself writes. You will go with Gill to Haiti and not at all for snow-white coconuts, but so that your throat will squeeze when reading about what it was like there in April 2010, right after one of the most terrible earthquakes. You will want to see Turner's paintings (if you haven't seen them yet), you will want to get into places that you thought were completely unknown (such as Hyde Park) and look at them from a new point of view.

"Someday I will be able to reach the horizon. My days will be over, and the last thing I will regret (having lost my muscles, teeth, eyes, sense of smell and everything else) is not that there was not enough sex or caviar, cashmere or laughter in my life, I will regret that I never saw the northern lights or Timbuktu, not I got to the desert by Attacks, did not meet with the Naga tribe in the Indian state Nagaland did not see the thickets of araucaria in Chile. There will be places I will regret and places I will remember. We pass this road many times. As I get older and get closer to the horizon, I realize that my opportunities are decreasing every day. I am a realist and I understand that I will never be able to conquer the Matterhorn or run a marathon in the desert. The vastness and depth will always be stronger than us. And it makes me look more closely at what is happening next to me. Travel has nothing to do with distances".

"Travel Experience", Adrian Gill

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