Before You Call the Day Ruined

There is a word I try not to use on a journey, and it is "ruined". It arrives too quickly. The train is late, the sky opens over the square you meant to cross slowly, the person beside you is tired before breakfast, and there it is, ready to sum up a day that has barely started.

I wrote Leave Room for Rain because that word nearly always comes before the facts. A wet afternoon and an official weather warning are very different events. A cancelled connection asks for information before it asks for cleverness. A companion who needs to sit down deserves more than a brisk suggestion to keep walking. We tend to meet all of them with the same disappointed sigh, and then spend the rest of the trip trying to recover a plan that stopped serving us hours ago.

Hinges, not welds

The book begins before anyone leaves home. Most of us plan a day as a sequence: six stops in a precise order, each one leaning on the last. Close one street and the whole thing collapses. I would rather you began with the purpose of the day in plain words. You want time outside, or a long conversation somewhere that feels unlike home, or a meal you will remember without a photograph. The particular doorway or café is only one way of getting there.

Once the purpose is clear, the anchors show themselves: the room you need tonight, the departure that is booked, the documents, the medicine, the access arrangement that has to work. Those stay firm. Everything between them is allowed to move. I spend the first part of the book on that difference, and on the small, unglamorous habits that make a change less frightening: one place for the important details, a little margin in the bag, a sensible hour on the evening before to check what is live and then stop checking.

A good itinerary is a promise to pay attention, not a command to finish a list.

What kind of change is this?

Then the trip begins, and things go wrong in ordinary ways. A connection disappears. A door that should be open stays closed. Rain falls on the good day. Sometimes the weather becomes a warning, and then the question of a pleasant walk is simply over. Sometimes the body casts its vote. Later come the costs you did not expect, and the delicate business of sharing an itinerary with someone whose energy is not the same as yours.

For each of these I try to slow the moment down. What is still true? What needs checking, and with whom? What small choice can you make now that you will be glad of later? Where a decision could touch your safety, your money or your access, I lean on official travel, weather, transport and health guidance rather than on my own enthusiasm, and I say plainly that no timetable or policy stays the same for ever. Check what is current for your own journey.

Imagined travellers, real decisions

You will meet a good many people in these pages who never existed. A visitor stands on a corner with one long afternoon and a closed street. Someone in Porto cancels a walk because of a single cloud on a phone. A family in Taipei works out how often to check tomorrow's train before putting the devices away. A traveller in a station in Chicago watches the line across the middle of the day vanish. Every one of these scenes is imagined, across North America, Asia, Europe, South America and Africa, and none of them pretends to report a real trip. They are rehearsals. I wanted the habit to travel further than one country, and I wanted you to see the choices being made rather than simply being told about them.

I should also say what this book is not. It is not a promise of a smooth holiday, and it will not persuade you to enjoy every interruption. You are allowed to be cross, hungry or disappointed. I only hope that after a moment you will ask the next useful question, and that the answer will be kinder to you and to the people you travel with.

The place after the schedule

What I love most about a changed day is what turns up in the gap. Light rain brings out the colour of brick and leaves. A café window you would have walked straight past becomes the thing you remember. A small street on the way to the celebrated building turns out to be the best part of the morning.

If you have a trip coming up, or if you have ever stood in the rain holding a plan that no longer fits the sky, Leave Room for Rain is waiting for you. Read it before you leave, and open it again on the afternoon the itinerary becomes fiction.