Some books are best read slowly – not perused or skipped through – with every page savoured, like a sip of a good vintage wine. In our age of supersonic speeds and unending rush, there is a growing tendency for slowness.
You may have heard of the Slow Food movement, founded in 1986 by Carlo Petrini from the Italian town of Bra, home of the world’s only University of Gastronomic Sciences. On BBC Radio 4’s Broadcasting House, you can listen to a weekly slot of the Slow Radio: rhythmic sounds of machinery, birds or animals. And Slow Travel, of course...
“The slower you travel – the further you get,” goes an old Russian proverb.
In 2013, Dan Kieran, one of my fellow ‘elves’ on the question-setting team for BBC quiz show 'QI', published ‘The Idle Traveller – The Art of Slow Travel’, the first book of its kind, calling, among other things, for gliding rather than flying, as well as for “embracing disasters”. That book was followed by Bradt’s 'Slow Travel' guides...