It's a hot summer here in France, and today I was thinking about my first French summer, and what for me at the time – I was 16 – was an epic journey hitch-hiking down through France and Spain. It was the school holidays and there not being much money around it was either hitch-hike or stay at home. What little money I had I invested in a ticket to get me across the English Channel. I remember that even as a boy I deeply resented the economic barrier to my freedom of movement that Britain's insularity represented, the fact I had to pay to get off the island. I found that deeply unfair. It was a sentiment strengthened that summer by my being able to walk across the Franco-Spanish and Franco-Belgian frontiers for free. 
Those of you who read this blog regularly will know of my passion for the photographic image. But, I did not always have access to cameras. And I made that trip without one. And yet, the images I have in my mind of my time on the road are as vivid as yesterday.
For me it was pure adventure. I won't pretend there weren't moments when I was scared of travelling alone. I tried to team up with people in youth hostels along the way, but most people were already travelling in pairs, and in any case if you wanted to catch a ride it was better to be on your own. Of course, I can't imagine letting a child of mine undertake that kind of journey today. My mother later told me that every day I was gone she lived in fear. We had no phone at home and in any case the cost of a phone call was prohibitive, so she had to make do with the occasional postcard.
The trip didn't start well. Having caught the bus down to London's Victoria station I let my self be conned out of some of my precious pounds while in the queue for the boat-train. A man with a trans-Atlantic accent claiming to work for NATO in Brussels promised to give me a lift once we got to the other side. He asked me for change to get some beers for the journey and I gave it to him, only to gradually realize I'd never see him again. The next morning I woke up having slept in a Brussels railway station platform waiting room, and set off hitch-hiking.
The first night I was in Mons, the next day I got as far as Paris. And after a few relatively expensive days in Paris living off bread and cheese, I set off in the direction of Spain and got as far as Bordeaux. The next day I got a ride with a man who evidently was interested in more than just chatting, but managed to fend him off and get another lift as far as Bayonne. I'd arranged to meet a couple of Danish boys I'd met in Mons. Miraculously they showed up. We were staying in a large shed-like dormitory that passed for a youth hostel, and we bought cheap white wine. I didn't drink much of it, but enough to learn the next morning what a hangover felt like. In Franco's Spain, hitch-hiking was frowned upon, and traffic in any case was sparse. So, I spent some of my precious pesetas on trains and travelled down from the Basque country to Catalonia. My cultural referents were not sophisticated, I hadn't yet read Orwell, but I had read Laurie Lee's Spain-based autobiography As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning. It was in the town of Lérida, today better known as Lleida, I first heard that summer's ubiquitous tune, Gershon Kingsley's Moog synthesizer-generated Popcorn which in 1972 was a worldwide hit for Hot Butter. 
One of my most colourful memories was travelling over the Pyrenees from Lerida towards Andorra with a bus full of Spanish army recruits and watching the sun go down over the mountain: an orange golden purple sunset the like of which I'd never seen. It's an image that has remained a reference for me when looking at any other sunset.
With some of the money I still had, I invested in a bottle of duty-free Johnnie Walker in Andorra thinking it would be good capital at some point in my trip. At the French border, I caught a lift in a campervan with a British family who took me as far as Perpignan. I recall them being horrified that I was travelling alone. But I wasn't the only one doing so, and some were doing worse than me. I met a lad from Liverpool at the youth hostel who'd lost all his money and his passport and was heading for the nearest British consulate to get assistance. He left me a few potatoes wrapped in newspaper. I'd been waiting at the youth hostel for a letter from home which I hoped would contain a few British pounds. But, I fell foul of the youth hostel's 3-night rule, and on the morning of the fourth day they threw me out. 
I was wandering out of town to look for somewhere to sleep when I was approached by a young tramp; perhaps today we'd say homeless person. But, like me he was travelling, and we'd been reading W. H. Davies at school. He had unkempt, mousy blond hair and seemed like he'd tumble forward as he walked rapidly down the road. He took me under his wing and a little way out of Perpignan we found a field where I produced the potatoes. He made a fire and we ate them. He taught me a few useful phrases to add to my schoolboy French and in the morning having slept in the open, me in my sleeping bag and my companion under his overcoat, we parted ways. 
I returned to the hostel hoping the letter had arrived. It hadn't, so I set off hitch-hiking again. I had pen pals in Belgium, some 1200 kilometres away. I walked out of Perpignan as I hitched, I always kept walking. I had a theory that people would be more sympathetic to someone walking than just standing in expectation at the side of the road. After a few hours trudging along the National highway - the autoroute was still a way in the future - I came across a couple of French boys who were surviving on unripe grapes from the vineyard that ran alongside the road. They wanted food and looked like they'd do anything to get it. Unfortunately, or rather fortunately, I had nothing for them, neither money nor food. They'd been there for three days without catching a ride. I set off again a little more despondently. My apprehension was made worse after seeing a signboard towards the last fuel station for 100 kilometres. It was very hot and to the boy from Liverpool the surroundings looked desert-like. The song that filled my head during my road trip was Status Quo's 1970 Down the Dustpipe in which the protagonist is travelling with a ten-dollar bill in his jeans. 
I got lucky, a single man in a VW Beetle stopped for me. He confided a few minutes later he'd only stopped because from behind I looked like a girl; I had neck-length curly hair and was wearing patterned, purple jeans. He drove like a maniac, most of the time "on the wrong side of the road", overtaking traffic at what seemed to me like astronomic speeds. He was heading for Lyon. Just after nightfall, just south of the city for the first time I saw the brightly illuminated petrol refinery at Feyzin. Some, thirty years later I'd be drive past them with regularity but they'd always spark that teenage memory.  Just north of Lyon the man dropped me at the side of the road where there was a field on the right side of the road, but also a small corner shop that was still open on the left. I went in to buy some water and bread – by this point it was all I could afford – and ran into a group of four university students from Southhampton. I asked if I could bed down next to them for the night. It turned out they were travelling through France in an old, and very slow-moving black hearse. Two of them slept inside where the coffin would go, and two outside on sleeping bags. I was outside. The next day we progressed very slowly towards Paris. 
I got out at Auxerre at the junction for Belgium, walked out of the town and found a field next to a copse where I put down my sleeping bag; I always felt safer sleeping in an open field. The next morning I woke up to the sound of a combine harvester that was getting closer by the minute. It was a bright, fresh morning and it was my seventeenth birthday. 
After various acts of kindness were shown to me along the way, I eventually reached my destination in Belgium where the bottle of Johnnie Walker was duly handed over to my friend's father – a gruff, Italian, immigrant worker. It seemed to appease him. A week or so later I got back to the UK. 
We are saturated by images, so much so that as the ever-prescient Jacques Ellul could write already in 1981, people live increasingly by and through the image, and "are without a past. Living off a stream of images, each of which contains the entirety of what they need to know, they have no need for memory; they have no need to retain what they learn today."*
I have not a single photograph of that teenage trip to France and Spain. But, I feel no sense of absence. Later on I would start taking photographs of all the journeys and moments I lived through, and they are good to have. Especially when they can illustrate who and what have now disappeared.They're good when they can be used as a supplement to memory rather than its substitute. 
*La parole humiliée, Paris, Le Seuil.

We talk a good deal in academic parlance about erasure: the deletion or at best marginalization of narratives and people(s) from history. Many, most in fact, are simply absent. They've never existed in the narrative and so there's no need for actual erasure. The histories, fiction, plays and films we try to write about colonized and enslaved peoples are more often than not attempts to compensate for such absence. My book The Eighth Chinese Merchant and the Disappeared Chinese Seamen was just such an attempt. There were no written testimonies and almost no oral recollections from the side of the seafarer victims, and naturally no discussion between a seven-year old boy and his eighty-year old grandfather, the Chinese merchant of the title. A few families had recollections of their seafaring husbands or fathers being deported in 1946-1947. However, by and large the story of the thousands of Chinese who were illegally expelled from the United Kingdom by the government, police and Blue Funnel shipping company acting in concert, had been buried for half a century. Only a semi-fictional approach could even pretend to give them voice.
But, then there are also texts and objects that did once commemorate and celebrate, but then later were erased, or "obliterated" to use a term from the lexicon of the US President. In a previous blogpost,  I wrote about long-standing libraries in Palestine and attempts to remove them, but there are many such examples of cultural and politically iconic spaces that have been demolished, erased, deleted. I lived in China during a decade of change, the 1980s, and saw at first hand the disappearance not just of famed buildings and monuments, but also of vernacular architecture, the fabric within which daily life took place. Much of old Beijing was demolished ahead of the 2008 Olympic Games, but so have many other old city centres throughout China. Those of you who follow my Photographic Archive will have seen pictures of old market streets in cities that were just coming back to life after the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution. They are now all but gone; their absence aggravated by the conservation of the occasional isolated building surrounded by high-rise concrete and steel. 
When I was researching The Eighth Chinese Merchant, I returned to Anfield Cemetery to revisit the gravestones of members of the First World War British Army Chinese Labour Corps. I was surprised to find that the original stones had been replaced with bright white, newly engraved ones. What had been special about the original headstones were the Chinese characters that local Liverpool stone masons had attempted to carve into them. They were often ham-fisted and poorly executed, but although clumsy they held a special significance, they had a certain aura. They represented an effort to recall these men for posterity in their own language. I contacted the war graves authorities and several e-mails were exchanged. I simply wanted to know where the old stones had been stored; I'd hoped they could be exhibited in a local museum. Eventually the official in charge told me flatly that my quest was futile since the war graves commission policy was to destroy all old headstones as soon as they were replaced. The men's names are now carved into new stones, but the visual immediacy of how they had been remembered for some eighty years has been crushed out of existence.
I came across a photograph the other day that dates from the mid-1970s. It's a black and white shot of me posing on a podium erected by the Transport and General Workers Union (TGWU) at Mann Island at the far end of Liverpool's famed Pier Head. The metal structure was sculpted by the – then – celebrated former Camell Laird shipyard welder turned sculptor Arthur Dooley (1929-1994). Dooley was an unconventional, gutsy character with a colourful past. In 1945, he'd served in the Irish Guards in Mandatory Palestine. He disagreed with the way the British were treating the Palestinians and deserted from the army. There is even a story about his having stolen and handed over a tank to the Arab resistance.   
 
Having served jail time for desertion, Dooley turned to studying art in London. He eventually returned to Liverpool to establish his sculptor's studio and initially supported himself by working at the Dunlop rubber factory in Speke. Years later, in 1973, when he was at the height of his career, he was commissioned together with the architect Jim Hunter to create the TGWU podium for the Pier Head. In 1971, the first big international strike saw Dunlop and Pirelli workers stage joint work stoppages in Britain and Italy to protest against layoffs, and the TGWU wanted to celebrate this landmark decision of Italian and British workers to strike in unison.  Returning to Liverpool in the 1990s I found the podium had disappeared. It had been removed when the Albert Dock area was developed into a tourist attraction. Labour disputes and their commemoration don't attract tourists. After Dooley's death in 1994, the local newspaper, The Liverpool Echo, discovered the broken-up structure rusting in a council depot.

I suppose the lesson is that remembrance, especially of the underdogs in history, is never a given, is never acquired for ever. Remembrance needs constant and continuous vigilance. The moral for writers and academics: just because you've told the story it won't be carved in stone. And even when carved in stone, as we've seen, there is no guarantee of its survival.

Some ten years ago I wrote a piece set in 2030, a utopian world where diversity of all sorts and a doctrine of limits and  “Slonomics” (slow economics) were the strategies by which disaster had been avoided and a new human culture had been established. It sounds even more fantastic now than it did a decade ago. I wrote that text as part one of an iBook entitled China Dreaming. I worked on it just after the 2014 Sunflower Revolution in Taiwan and the Umbrella Revolution in Hong Kong. Reading it over, so much of what I imagined happening later in that decade, did happen but in a more devastating fashion. For instance, I wrote: "The rich stayed rich, and the poor were disavowed," where in reality the rich have got even richer. But my focus was on the utopian, on the strategies put in place by a world youth movement, called the "Alliance for a New Human Culture", which had organized a planetary summit. The Chinese branch of the Alliance had produced a manifesto entitled Limits or Death  which called for the fixing of ceilings and limits proposed by Jacques Ellul as essential to the drawing up of a “road map for a possible future”. The manifesto concludes: "We believe it now falls to China, once colonized by, and currently the agent of the system, to fix “willed-for limits” since as Ellul taught us “it is not the unlimited that is capable of founding and constituting a culture, or a even a human being....It is by establishing limits that humans institute themselves as human.” I shan't cite any more of the text here, but I do encourage you to go and read it.*
We all now know that targets and ceilings, such as limiting global warming to 1.5 °C, are easily missed. Measures imposing the necessary limits and ceilings to assure a minimum chance of survival for coming generations will not come from governments who are enmeshed in the technical-economic system that refuses to face the reality of the need not simply to institute a policy of low growth but rather a strategy of ungrowth. The pressure to do so can only come from civil society through grass-roots democracy. Looking around at the world today that's quite a tall order. In the past limits on consumption, the sharing out of scarcity, has mainly only been imposed in times of war and its aftermath, such as the system rationing during the Second World War and the decade that followed. However, the so-called "socialist" countries in the twentieth-century also used rationing as a means of distributing essentials. In the case of the Soviet bloc, such rationing was accompanied by widespread corruption and black marketeering. But rationing remains the only logical alternative by regulating by pricing. As the recent soaring petrol prices have shown, consumption may well be reduced as a consequence but the hardest hit are the poor. The wealthy continue to  consume and move about as they please. 
I lived in China for many years under a system of rationing. Buying cloth and clothes were controlled by a system of cloth coupons measured in inches and feet, and rice and wheat products by a system of grain coupons. There were also coupons for cooking oil and so on. Such rationing did not cause great suffering in itself, it was rather the paucity of diet that people suffered from.
Deng Xiaoping appealed to people's desire to consume after the grey times of the Cultural Revolution, and his words were readily lapped up by a population eager for variety and plenty. But we can see forty years later the environmental and health costs of such a society of mass consumption. And then, of course, where restrictions and limits are put in place in China they are not open to discussion, they are not arrived at democratically. But is this a good example? Is autocracy the only system that could impose the limits we need to save the planet?
A "New Human Culture" would look beyond the politics of greed and the economics of penury to the cultivation of individuals within a truly a democratic society. Indeed, mass education needs to be available to inform people's choices, but people also need an education that would equip future generations for fulfilment beyond and outside established patterns of consumption. What we need now is a retort to the old Bluesman B. B. King's classic lyric “I’ve got a good mind to give up living, And go shopping instead.” In order to avoid tomorrow's generation from feeling "they'd be better off dead", we must work towards a world where it is possible and desirable to "give up on shopping and go living instead."

* China Dreaming is available free on Apple books: https://books.apple.com/us/book/china-dreaming/id1046404801. A French eBook version of my text also exists as Sortie Treize in Nathalie Caritoux and Florent Villard (ed) Nouvelles psychogéographies . If you have difficulty accessing either please let me know and I'll make a copy available.