Idiot Tours: a visiting anarchist from Barcelona unveils Bath in style

Much as I have enjoyed sampling the tours of Bath, I have noticed an increasingly predictable pattern to them: they are mostly industry standard. That is clearly no bad thing for a city that depends upon tourism for much of its livelihood. What I have seen little of, however, and have started to miss, is tours that are amateurish, political or plain eccentric. You can imagine my excitement then when, one afternoon having lunch near the station, I saw a man pass in front of the window where I was sat with a home-made sign attached to his hat that read IDIOT TOURS. I finished my meal in seconds, paid at the counter and dashed off in search of an idiot tour.  

Like an alternative tourism bloodhound, I was on the scent and found him in no time. He had a public of two keeping a sceptical distance from him, and when I arrived they left. Strangely, he spoke into the empty space some two metres to my left and not directly to me. This and his homemade outfit made me wonder if he might not be crazy. He spoke very deliberately, however, and was assured in what he did so I hung in there. He was basically parodying a tour guide and giving a few generic historical names and numbers that might, but probably weren't, be true. He then moved on to talking about Bath today but insisted on calling it Newcastle. He said Newcastle has a Costa, a Superdrug, a H&M, a Sainsburys and so on, which indeed it most probably does. After a few minutes he acknowledged my presence and we started talking. His basic angle was that tourism and consumerism make everywhere more or less the same. At this point, a lady arrived looking for a tour and when we were still there after three minutes talking about placelessness, she asked whether we were going to walk anywhere. The answer that came was not positive, as he was waiting for somebody, and with that she went on her way in search of a tour that would take her somewhere. It was funny that it was not the content of the idiot tour that she found wanting, merely its lack of momentum. That, incidentally, reminds me of the Stuttgart walking tour I took which some older ladies followed, not listening to the guide, but using it as a social stroll through the better parts of the city in which none of them had to worry about which direction to take.

With continued talking and he told me he was not from Bath at all but was from Barcelona. He said he arrived yesterday, was visiting the city for a few days and giving some idiot tours while he was about it. He continued in an anti-capitalist direction decrying the gentrification of Barcelona that came with The Olympics saying how much better the city was before. 

To prove his point he showed me his Spanish identity papers which feature this decidedly un-serious ID photo. He said it would not be permitted today. He told me he has a BLOG where he has written about this and while I did not find much on the city of Barcelona, it did give me a clearer picture of who he is. 

"Hello, my name is Clive Booth. I live in Barcelona, where, for the last 30+ years, I have freely chosen to be an artist/performer/free thinker, committed to us human animals, in the public places in the city centre. I work so as to finance my free art. I share my creations, my imagination, my ideas, my sadnesses even, with my fellow men/women. I do not have time for or interest in conventional art and culture."

There are indeed some videos showing his street performance on Youtube.

The tour ended when he handed me a small scrap of card which had written on it SOCIAL MONEY. He told me, with a smile, to use it wisely. On his blog I see he writes about it, "Our freedom is still possible - with our organisation and imagination! Make your own social money."  Looking back on the tour now, I can barely call it a tour as we mostly remained in one location and he was using the tour guide convention in order to gather an audience and do his own thing. Still, if he calls it a tour, an idiot tour no less, then I'm happy to include it here. I am on the lookout for a few more tours here in Bath which, like this one, have a social and political dimension. They seem few in number and I find it ironic that when I finally find one it is given by a visitor to the city who been here but 24 hours. That said, I'm on the trail of another, a certain Saxon Wanderer, and I hope to give further attention to more of these marginal and itinerant tours that can be found in this fine city.

The China Tour 1966-71: The Cultural Revolution Revisited

Guided tours are typically recreations of a journey that has already taken place. The guide has already passed the same way before and then repeats or fashions a route out of this experience for the benefit of those being guided. It can happen that the emphasis is more upon the territory in general than on a specific path, but this does little to alter the fact that what is presented is the recreation of a previous experience, whether it is explicitly named as such or not. A city guide, for example, will usually learn and then repeat their tour and only make deviations from it if there are problems following the normal path. It is rare that a tour is deliberately open and the route not planned in advance: the flâneur or those on a dérive are typically self-directed and not led by a guide.  

And this brings us to a special subset of tours: recreations of famous journeys. Here the guide is not a living person but rather historical documents that record a previous traveller's journey. One of the attractions that this form of tour has is that the guide is less present. Another comes from comparing both the differences and similarities between what was there and what now is to be found on the route. The two of these put together can make for a stimulating but not overly prescriptive journey. What's more, from a travel writer's or broadcaster's point of view, it can be easier to capture the imagination of the reader/viewer by hooking contemporary experiences of a big name, like Marco Polo or Alexander The Great. 

Yesterday I came across this curious book, Travels in China 1966-71 by Rewi Alley. The author, a New Zealander who settled in China, was a supporter and member of the Chinese Communist Party who wrote a great many other books about the country too. The time frame is a very specific one in Chinese history; first part of the Cultural Revolution. Whilst the book does record his travels far and wide across China, it does not read as a single journey start to finish, but rather as a series of trips made over the course of 6 years. These trips have very specific political themes and are often to such things as cement factories or farming communes. Given the highly politicised time and the author's political sympathies, ideology jumps out of every page, and yet, at base the book does still retell a series of journeys around the country.

Possibly inspired by the notion of the unreliable guide, which was pervasive in Father Courage, the mobile performance I recently worked on, I am attracted to the idea of following Alley's journey and having him as a guide. Even though the book is only 40 years old, given the rapid redevelopment of China, particularly over the last 10 years, the burying of much of the cultural revolution and embrace of capitalism, this book has aged very badly. The places he visits, however, may very well still exist, such as the commune headquarters Kwangtung (pictured above) meaning that it would be entirely possible to retrace his route. Indeed, it may be the case that the places which no longer exist are just as telling as those which remain. 

The people he met may well also still be alive and might even remember their visitor. Did this boy grow up to drive a truck, as he said he wanted to, or did the future hold something very different for him? Does he remember his photo being taken, and is he aware he featured in this New World Press's 1973 publication? I'm not about to rush out tomorrow and find out; such a tour would take serious preparation and resources. What the idea of it does do for me, however, is it highlights the value of having a guide who is not so present and not so reliable. It may be that those who follow such a guide are more or less obliged to look more closely at what  is in front of them, than those who travel with a guide who is, at least on the surface, reliable and wholly present.