Patrick Richardson: From Beyond

I’m sitting at Café Florentine, a classy Italian delicatessen in Stockbridge, on my fourth coffee of the day, feeling slightly uncomfortable on a hardback wooden chair at one of those circular tables that shake and clatter every time you move a limb.

Richardson arrives promptly, eyes searching the room for the most likely looking interviewer from a music magazine, sees me, checks the room again and once satisfied walks over to the window at the table next to mine and says: “Lets sit at the window - I like light.”

The dishes on my table clatter as I awkwardly move to his table.

Richardson is softly spoken and has a well educated manner that doesn’t bear as much resemblance to the young explorer looking down exploding volcanoes as I’d hoped. But he is older than his younger self and has one of those childlike looks of kind curiosity.

“I first started [travelling],” he begins, “when I was going by boat to Venice to Israel in 1965 where I volunteered to go and work on a Kibbutz and that gave me a wonderful feeling, travelling through the Mediterranean. Then two years later during a university vacation I went on an overland trip to India and like a lot of people going to India [at that time] it was a completely formative experience and that was the first time I really noticed that wherever I was I started to want to go further.

“I began to travel so much that it just began to take over my life. In 1968 I went to the States and to Guatemala and after that Northern Europe, Sweden, Finland and Denmark then across North Africa and it just became a momentum of its own.”

Richardson’s adventures are marred with accidents and disasters - from narrowly surviving from drowning after falling through the ice in Lake Baikal in Siberia to being robbed by policemen in Columbia, or travelling down the Congo River on an overcrowded passenger boat with no food for five days.

“I've always rather been attracted to danger I have to say,” Richardson grins. “Quite a few of the accidents that I've had, I didn’t seek them out but I daresay that if I hadn’t been, for example, travelling on the top of a train in the middle of the Congo I wouldn’t of been knocked off the top of the train by a branch, and if I hadn’t gone walking into the middle of Lake Baikal I wouldn’t of fallen through it, and if I hadn’t of gone to the poorest place I've ever been to in my life, which is Vanuatu in the Pacific, I probably wouldn’t have been attacked by rabid dogs.

“One of the things I've loved doing in my life which is extremely risky is going up and looking down exploding volcanoes. On three separate occasions in Stromboli and Vanuatu in the Congo I've been to these places where I learned that the volcanoes in question all explode at fairly regular intervals. So I learned what those intervals were and I often walked across quite hot molten ash and through petrified forests. When I got within range of them I waited until the lava had shot up and as soon as it shot up, I'd rush to the edge of the volcano and look down into it and then rush back before the lava exploded again.

“That was a totally awe inspiring experience. Looking into the mouth of a volcano is just totally amazing - it’s like looking into a living creature - it’s alive and its gulping, gasping and gulching and sucking.”

Richardson’s 40 years of traversing the globe has seen political climates change nationally and globally, with corrupt authorities in places like Colombia and Zaire as well as famine and poverty in Vanuatu and Mali. But I do wonder if he has seen any positive change and ‘improvements’ in the world with humanitarian efforts and international aid.

“It’s certainly true that living standards are rising,” explains Richardson, “but the political situation is almost like a bubble. Where a dictator disappears in one place he just pops up in another and the world is an extraordinarily unstable place full of dictators and military regimes and I haven’t seen much improvement.

“The distribution of the world’s resources is as unequal now as they were 30, 40 years ago. In some places it’s deteriorating - for example the Congo was much more stable than it is now. On the other hand one can’t really generalise…China has improved beyond recognition.”

A child of the 60s, Richardson reflects on his own personal changes of his views of the world, attracted only by the selfless philosophy of Buddhism describing it simply as the “least blood thirsty”.

“I don’t really trust ‘isms’ anymore. I don’t trust Marxism, or Socialism, or Capitalism or Communism…the one ‘ism’ that I am attracted to is Buddhism. And I think in a way that could be seen as a cop-out but I think the world is too diverse a place to be able to find universal solutions to particular circumstances.

“I’ve seen a lot of countries where the systems have been totally disastrous, like for example Tanzania where they tried to introduce Socialism, or communism under Mao before the reforms came into place, or India before they opened up their market economy, or Cuba…seeing these places [are evidence] of just how disastrous communism has actually been,” says Richardson.

Inspired by the minimalism offshoot style of dirty realism, Richardson’s writing is consistent in description and uses the historical and cultural contexts of places, peoples and things to give meaning to his writing. His minimalist approach to words strip away personal introspection relying only on its fundamental features, rather than self-absorbed musings.

“I really want to paint pictures in words, I like to try and describe the sights, and the sounds, and the smells of a place…but I also want to tell stories, adventure stories,” explains Richardson.

“When I was much younger I was quite introspective and like a lot of people I was searching for myself and travelling gave me a goal in itself. I found it much more important to talk about other people than talk about myself - other travel writers do that like Bill Bryson and Paul Theroux. I’m more interested in other places and other people than myself.”