I didn’t set out to write a memoir, but you need a better explanation, to step beyond this cliché.
It took a pandemic to trigger it. The only objectives I planned during the long suffocating quiet of the global lockdown was survival and a degree of success with home schooling. That plan though was suddenly extended the day I started to meet a friend regularly at either end of an isolated park bench. I proceeded to share with him a series of travel stories I had penned in decades past. They had been buried in drawers and under the bed on paper or floppy disc. All from a bygone day, lying in wait for a quarter of a century.
Scott was insistent that these dormant stories needed a public platform.
“Stop wasting your friggin’ talent man,” he said.
And I started to believe in him, or through him in myself. It sounded like he sensed a desire that I had long harboured.
So, a new challenge was added to my Covid world – to move on up; to shift from parchment to digital.
Establishing a website for all my existing tales was a huge learning curve, for a baby-boomer like me. But once I had overcome this hurdle and uploaded my library of tales, I realised how much I had never written up – travel writing worth doing – for which I still had the documentation and, thankfully, the power of recall.
I commenced with a long dormant account of a momentous visit to Berlin in 1989, which ran to twenty-thousand words. I didn’t upload it, but carried on writing, with a view to assembling enough material that might warrant a book.
One story about a geopolitical division, led to another personal one, which led to a historic one. It just carried on, until ten months later it had grown organically into eighty-five thousand words.
My memoir is also an account of failing to appreciate, in real time, the historical twists and seismic changes generated by borders. In many cases, understanding arrived only decades later, when the consequences of those moments had fully revealed themselves.
It took an age, and the world now echoing many of the same fault lines for it to become clear to me that these experiences and reflections couldn’t remain as private memory or dormant pages.
Whilst, as I set out shaping this book, the crossing of volatile frontiers was a common theme, it gradually became clearer that it wasn’t just about contentious dots on maps, but also about memory and how long it can take for the two to finally meet. These pieces were more than just separate stories. They marked a boundary I had crossed or failed to cross. They weren’t just physical and political, but emotional and personal as well — psychological walls of the mind. None of them were without incident; each one a unique fault line that had penetrated my psyche.
Much of my earlier writing was composed shortly after returning home. This book is different: it is a deeper excavation from the recesses of my mind, returning in a different era to impressions and experiences that still awaited interpretation.
My scheduled or actual arrival at destinations was often preceded or followed not long after by, for example: extreme floods; violent or peaceful revolution; murderous religious insurrection; even an outbreak of bubonic plague, a week after returning home from one destination. Not that I caused any of these, but the timing always felt uncanny. Chance took me to these places when it did. Although, I like to think that I would probably have chased these stories anyway, sensing the pull of a tale, something to scribble about.
Predominantly set in the late eighties and mid-nineties, the book is largely based in a time when over just a few years, the tectonic plates of East and West shifted dramatically. This upheaval is my main motivation for writing the book, why it is important to recount it; to relate personal, on the ground experiences from this epoch in a different millennium; when much of what was happening in places I passed through continues to have major ramifications in the present day.
Being there as history, landscapes or even the balance of my own mind tilted made it memoir material; a fusion of impressions and actual events, written from the past; nailed into the present; with lessons for the future. And after all, the past is never only past – Ukraine and the Middle East are testament enough.
The arc I cover commences in a Yugoslavia on the edge of doom, carries on through the Berlin Wall which was counting down its days, moves across the newly opened borders of Eastern Europe and the Baltics, before revisiting Berlin thirty-six years after it came back in from the cold. In addition, it includes, for example, crossing thresholds in remote parts of Canada and Turkey, and life on the edge in Mumbai on the eve of the new millennium.
This isn’t a modern-day travel blog, centred around daily updates and photos of the best beaches, the nicest views, the tastiest cake. It comes from a time when writing about travel involved, well, writing; particularly reflective writing over a sustained period of time. Although, contained here, amongst the historical reflections, there are plenty of surreal anecdotal events, recounted with a wry twist.
I am sure that if my journey was being retraced today, it would be quite different. Barriers have fallen and others risen. Travel writing literature is now also in competition with the quick-fire pulse of social media, which is a powerful force, but a different kind of craft entirely. However, that is where we stand.
I hope my border experiences fuel your imagination in some way. Perhaps they even relate to boundaries you have passed through, in which case you might identify with them, or of course you may view them through a different lens.
My own children, now in their youth, have started to travel independently as well. I hope that in twenty years time they are still doing so; that the superpower shackles of East and West, and beyond, have not become too preventive for them, that the world still exists, in at least a relatively peaceful state, and that throughout all of this, they too are now committing pen to paper.
Damian Rainford, 2026
Next Chapter in Memoir – Twilight on the Adriatic
