MICHAEL PALIN AND MY ARMCHAIR SCHEDULE

I HAVE THE BEST PLAN based on Daughter Suz presenting me with Michael Palin’s Around the World in 80 Days: I’m going to savor each of his 80 days of travel by reading a daily episode at a time.

This reading rate will be in marked contrast to my enjoying other Palin works: North Korea Journal and Into Iraq, each of which I found enlightening, entertaining, and relatively rapid armchair travel.

Background. I’ve had good fun with Jules Verne’s original and its variations in “Around the World in Five Genres.” For example, American journalist Nellie Bly emulated Verne’s Phileas Fogg in an 1889 circumnavigation that resulted in her best-selling Around the World in Seventy-Two Days.

Orson Welles had one of his rare theatrical flops in Around the World; this, despite its music by Cole Porter and 38 sets designed in the style of Georges Méliès.

Mike Todd (who bailed out of the Welles production) went on to transform the theme into a spectacular, star-studded film version. 

Palin’s Adventure, Day 1. Palin’s book begins, “I leave the Reform Club, Pall Mall, London one hundred and fifteen years, three hundred and fifty-six days, ten and three-quarter hours after Phileas Fogg. It’s a wet, stuffy morning, I’ve had three and a half hours sleep and the only thing I envy Phileas is that he’s fictional.”

Palin continues, “Fogg went from the Reform Club to Charing Cross Station, I leave from Victoria. Here I find Passpartout, who will travel everywhere with me. Unlike Fogg’s Passpartout, mine is five people, has fifty pieces of baggage and works for the BBC.” 

Boarding the Orient Express. “However,” Palin says, “I am leaving London in a manner of which he would doubtless have approved had it been available in 1872, aboard the Venice-Simplon Orient Express…. Fogg’s friends were bankers. Mine, Messrs Hones and Gilliam, are Pythons.” 

Palin had been a member of the Monty Python comedy entourage.

“I am installed in a sumptuous refurbished Pullman coach called ‘Zena.’ Behind me are ‘Ibis,’ ‘Lucille,’ ‘Cygnus,’ and ‘Ione.’ Antimacassars, marble washbasins, upholstered armchairs and inlaid walnut panelling come as a bit of a shock to one used to the Gatwick Express, but I try hard to forget about guilt and silly things like that and sit back and sniff the fresh orchids and sip a little champagne.” 

Gee. My kinda travel.  

Pre-Chunnel. The Channel Tunnel wasn’t completed until 1994, and Palin is traveling half a decade prior to this: “No longer do the ferries carry trains and at Folkstone Harbour I part company with ‘Zena’ and take up with the Horsa, a 6000-tonne vessel which has been plying the 22-mile crossing to France for 16 years.”

Palin continues, “ ‘It’s that Monty Python bloke!’ shouts one of the crew as I mount the first of many gangplanks of the world. He turns confidently to me: ‘If you want a farce, you’ve got one here.’ The passageways of the Horsa smell of day-old school food, but we Oriental Expressers are ushered into our own private lounge.” 

“The Channel crossing is bumpy,” Palin recalls, “but to the director’s chagrin nothing more. A Force 5. ‘I’ve had her out in a Force 12,’ says the captain, eyes skinned for stray fishing boats, tankers, ferries, yachts, channel-swimmer’s support vessels and every floating thing that makes this one of the busiest waterways in the world.” 

Back Aboard the Express. “I am billeted in sleeping car 3544, built in 1929, decorated in ‘Sapelli Pearl’ inlay by René Prou and having been, in the course of a long and distinguished career, a brothel for German officers and part of the Dutch royal train.… I turn once more to make-believe, and begin unpacking my dinner jacket.”

Business Types and Vacationers. “Nice people,” Palin says, “but, looking around, I’m rather disappointed at the lack of princesses, murderers, and deposed heads of Europe.” 

Later at the end of Day 1: “The train is heading for the Belfort Gap, my head is buzzing with an evening’s champagne, and so far circumnavigation is a doodle.” 

So is my plan of a day’s armchair savoring for each day of Palin’s trip. Wish us both luck. ds 

© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2023