Michael Palin Quotes

If all goes well we should be in Lusaka by tonight, then Victoria Falls, and from what I hear our troubles are over after that. Zimbabwe and South Africa are comfortable, efficient, Westernized. Akuna Matata. No Problem. Wild, uncomfortable, incomprehensible Africa will give way to tamed and tidied Africa – hot baths and iced beers, air-conditioning and daily newspapers, French wines and credit cards. Lying here, listening to the aching wind in a hut by a lake in a forest, I feel a pain of sadness at the prospect of leaving behind all I have been through these past months and returning to a world where experience is sanitized – rationed out second-hand by television and newspapers and magazines and marketing companies.

My room, my books, my house, the garden, my interest in everything around me renewed by absence. This little world suddenly special, no longer commonplace … something to relish. It’s a remarkable feeling and one which I count as paradoxically one of the great pleasures of travel. The almost sensuous delight in the ordinary and commonplace.

NOBODY EXPECTS THE SPANISH INQUISITION!!

Rae was an explorer in the mould of Amundsen and Nansen, listening to the locals, learning from them what to wear, what to eat and how to survive. In his lifetime he mapped 1,750 miles of unexplored territory, with the loss of only one man. What a contrast with the disastrous expedition whose fate he was the first to discover.

Of all the euphemisms for drunkenness, I think ‘disordering the attic’ one of the most poetic.

Beryl leaves to have her verruca attended to yet again. Someone had told her that banana was good for ridding oneself of verrucas, so she’d slept with a banana in her bed feeling rather silly, before being told it was only the skin.

My parents have been married forty-two years. I wonder how many of those were happy.

I feel this evening that I am too hopelessly and happily corrupted by the richness of London life to ever be right for Dorset, or vice-versa.

The bird life, was, as ever, of great interest to ship’s surgeon McCormick. On seeing hovering over the ship what he believed to be a new species of Lestris, or Arctic Yager, described by Audubon, the great American bird illustrator, as an ‘indefatigable teaser of the smaller gulls’, he took a pot-shot at it. His shot failed to despatch the bird cleanly and, after descending near the deck, it recovered and flew away with one leg broken. McCormick, unusually, felt compelled to justify himself: ‘For notwithstanding that my duties as ornithologist compel me to take the lives of these most beautiful and interesting creatures . . . I never do so without a sharp sting of pain and qualm of conscience, so fond am I of all the feathered race.’ So fond, indeed, that on the same night he recorded that ‘Between midnight and one a.m. I succeeded in adding two more of the elegant white petrel to my collection, one falling dead on the quarter-deck and the other on the gun-room skylight . . . a third I shot . . . fell overboard into the sea.

They are trying their best to indict a young generation, who seem to be setting a triumphant example to the older generation – an example of how to enjoy oneself, something which most Englishmen don’t seem really capable of, especially the cynical pressmen of the News of the World. It’s all very sad.

One of the difficult things of so much travelling is to say goodbye.

(Later in my journey I was told of an outrageous but apparently successful attempt to bring tourists to Great Nicobar. During the monsoon torrential rain comes down spectacularly. A bright Indian entrepreneur advertised a tour for rich Arabs from the arid Gulf who could sit on their hotel balcony and watch rain for a week. It was a sell-out.)

Die Erebus war nicht zufällig nach dem Gott der Unterwelt benannt, und für die Männer an Bord muss es sich angefühlt haben, als wären sie dort angekommen

"12.00 midnight: whilst soaking in my bath I hear a distant shout. "I'm going to bed, but I don't necessarily have to go alo-o-ne." It's Dr Chapman in the passage. He repeats the line three times, like someone selling scrap iron and it recedes along the corridor."

Mostly very ordinary, but I do buy an original Ken Livingstone watercolour of Thatcher in a coffin with a Struwwelpeter-like Heseltine looming over her. Painted the day she resigned! Outbid someone at £110.00.