How to tether your camel and other useful tips

Here’s a treat for Christmas: a bona fide literary treasure for under a tenner. And a handsome little hardback, too, which you could certainly squeeze into a stocking. On Travel and the Journey Through Life is an anthology of one-liners and observations on travel, from the high-spirited and romantic to the moody and downright cynical.

When it comes to travel writing, all roads lead one way or another to Eland, that elegant publisher and gritty survivor. All sorts of brilliant people say nice things about Eland. Colin Thubron, the doyen of travel writers, to cite just one, admires its ‘nearly extinct integrity’ and ‘eccentric passion for quality’. And this is what this little volume offers in spades, along with wit, wisdom, eccentricity and piercing insight that – if you take it literally – will have you switching off your laptop, dumping your phone and heading off into the nearest wilderness, destination unknown, which is just as it should be.

I started dog-earing the pages with some of the most memorable or life-enhancing quotes and then gave up because I was doing it on virtually every one. ‘To awaken alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world,’ writes that doughty traveller Freya Stark. ‘Never hesitate to go far away, beyond all seas, all frontiers, all countries, all beliefs,’ says Amin Maalouf. It’s tremendously moreish. The range is dizzying – Heraclitus, Oscar Wilde, Che Guevara, Gandhi, Guy de Maupassant, Montaigne, Václav Havel, Kalahari bushmen, and so it goes on – the observations as broad and alluring as the farthest horizon.

There is the pithy. For a generation besieged by anxiety and mental health issues, can anything beat St Augustine’s two-word life-fix: ‘Solvitur ambulando’ –it is solved by walking? Sixteen hundred years later, it remains the abiding expression of our preternatural need to shake a leg and travel, an inspiration to pedestrians the world over, Patrick Leigh Fermor and Bruce Chatwin among them.

And then there is the more long-winded, such as this from Mark Twain (despite the last three words sounding vaguely like a Tui holiday advert):

Twenty years from now, you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do.