Staying still

In June 2020 the journal had a choice that a lot of travel pages pretended not to have. We could describe hotels we were not in, plates we were not eating, and cities behaving as if the year were ordinary. Or we could publish the truth of the season, which was a desk, a closed border, and a standard we did not intend to drop because the calendar was empty.

We chose the desk. Issue No. 14 is short on glamour and long on refusal. Empty rooms were the honest photograph: not because emptiness is beautiful, though it photographs that way, but because claiming otherwise would have made every later issue unbelievable. A journal that will invent a stay in a bad year will invent one in a good year too.

Readers were home. So were we. What remained worth saying was how a great hotel behaves when it is not performing - the skeleton of service, the way a dining room is a set of relationships and not a room - and how much of travel writing had been mood in the first place. We kept the essays that could survive without a boarding pass. We spiked the rest.

The issue still sits in the archive because a decade that includes only the easy years is not a decade. If you are new here, read this one before you read the parties. It explains the labels.