Hungry Heart Roaming
In lockdown, Sherds has been travelling vicariously through the works of various writers, including Charles Moseley, the Cambridge medievalist, whose latest book, Hungry Heart Roaming, has been described by Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury, as ‘neither a conventional memoir nor a conventional travel book [but], like Patrick Leigh Fermor, a masterpiece of autobiography’.
The praise is well deserved, and the title speaks to our current state of lockdown. It comes from Tennyson’s marvellous poem ‘Ulysses’ (the Roman name for Odysseus), in which the aging Trojan War survivor – a man of insatiable curiosity who had himself lashed to his ship’s mast so he could hear the Sirens’ seductive song – yearns to travel again and enjoy one more adventure before he dies. ‘For always roaming with a hungry heart/Much have I seen and known’, he says, in a speech reminiscent of that moving moment in Blade Runner when the replicant remembers all the great marvels he has seen and expresses his very human love of life.
The 19th-century diary craze
One of many impressive features of Moseley’s book is his apparently total recall of events, journeys, conversations, and feelings that he experienced half a century ago. Did he keep a diary? If so, he follows in a 200-year tradition that owes its origins to the entrepreneurship of the London stationer John Letts (1772-1851). The Continent had just reopened to tourism after the Battle of Waterloo (18 June 1815), and those who could afford it were flooding across the Channel to visit the sites of British military triumph and wonder at the novel and eccentric manners, food, drink, and housing of our ‘foreign’ neighbours.
Urban jungles