Holiday habits: Nick Laird

Northern Irish poet and novelist Nick Laird talks travel

Interview: Sian Thatcher

“They say that travel broadens the mind, but in my experience, I think it narrows the mind. I’ve travelled a great deal and I’ve realised that everyone’s the same or at least everyone is the same in the most important respects. It’s just the food that’s different, really. Food and money. You’re always brought up to believe in this ‘other’, but there is no other, or the other is actually very similar to yourself.

“When I was younger, we did lots of Eurocamp holidays, and my enduring memory of this is mostly coming over on the ferry to Scotland, driving down to Dover to get the ferry across to France, with a lot of time spent in the back of the car arguing with my sister.

“My parents loved travelling and I really got the bug from them. So, when I was 18, I went off inter-railing across Europe with a couple of Scout friends from school, just before I went to university. We really made the most of it. We went to every country you could go to and we did it on a shoestring. To save money, we slept on the train as much as possible – we were away for two months and must have spent at least 45 nights on the train, so we were just constantly moving. I loved it.

“Our Scouting knowledge came in handy, too – we had a little gas burner, and we used to cook tasteless pasta onboard the trains. That was the best fun, just knocking around Europe with school friends.

“These days, my wife Zadie (Smith, also a novelist) and I don’t get much time to have a proper holiday. We lived in Rome for a while a few years ago, which was fabulous, and we’re going back soon for a few days, and then on to Venice and Tuscany. We travel a lot for work, but that will be a ‘real holiday’ holiday.

“One place I would love to go to is Finland. When I was a kid, I used to be obsessed with the place, I think it was the name. I thought ‘Helsinki’ was such an exotic word, too. So I’d like to go there and I’d like to spend some proper time in Scandinavia, too. It all seems so watery and desolate. I love to fish, and there you could fish and just be by yourself and swim in those lakes and sit in those saunas – ideal.”
Nick Laird’s new novel, Glover’s Mistake, (Fourth Estate Ltd, €17) is out now.