The most travelled Jesuan?
Unlike many former Jesuans, Phil Goddard (MML, 1978) did not become a captain of industry. His career as a translator has given him a lot of freedom to see the world, and with 116 countries and a 3,000-mile walk under his belt, he thinks he may be the College鈥檚 most travelled graduate . . .
I鈥檓 old enough to remember the days when PC stood not for personal computer or politically correct, but postcard. In pre-Facebook days, they were an essential means of keeping in touch. And Cameron Wilson, my director of studies in French literature at Jesus, had an awful lot of them.
By tradition, any of his students who travelled abroad would send him a card. His mantelpiece was literally overflowing with them, stacked fifteen deep. Sometimes one would flutter down onto his faded carpet in the middle of an earnest debate on Racine or Corneille, and he would pick it up without pausing for breath.
We all loved Cameron, and choosing a card to send him became an important part of any trip. Sometimes it even influenced our choice of destination: the obscurer the better. My crowning glory was when fellow linguist Tim Skeet and I sent him a card from Burkina Faso which briefly enjoyed pride of place on the mantelpiece until another arrived to cover it up. Those postcards were one of the reasons I started going to odd places.
At some time in the late 1980s, I realised I鈥檇 been to seven new countries in one year, and someone said why don鈥檛 you try and visit them all. That sounded like a good idea, though not compatible with a nine-to-five job. I鈥檇 been working for Citibank until then, but decided I preferred words to numbers and tried my hand at freelance translating, which is what I鈥檝e been doing ever since. I don鈥檛 mind admitting it often sends me to sleep, but it pays the bills and allows me and my wife to travel.
How many countries are there? It depends on how you define a country. My preferred number is 197: the 193 full members of the United Nations, plus the Vatican and Palestine, which have observer status, and Taiwan and Kosovo, which are not universally recognized. I鈥檝e been to 116 so far. If I die before my wife, I鈥檝e jokingly instructed her to Fedex a little bit of my ashes to each of the remaining countries.
And what constitutes a visit? Stopovers don鈥檛 count: I have to leave the airport and spend at least a few hours looking around. My shortest stays have been New Zealand, Liechtenstein, and the Philippines, at half a day each. Some might say this is a superficial way of travelling, but I鈥檇 rather see a little of each country than none at all. And my longest stay is the United States, where I鈥檝e lived for thirteen years.
My favourite countries are the tiny ones nobody has heard of, where the immigration officer raises an eyebrow when you say the purpose of your visit is tourism. Like S茫o Tom茅 and Pr铆ncipe, two specks off the coast of Central Africa, where the remains of the Portuguese colonial era are fast vanishing beneath a blanket of tropical vegetation. Kiribati, in the Pacific, is disappearing too, this time beneath the waves as a result of global warming. And Transdnistr, next door to Moldova, has gone one step further: it doesn鈥檛 officially exist, since no one recognizes it.
Once I wandered out of a blizzard and into a pizza restaurant in Barrow, Alaska, the northernmost town in America. There were only two customers inside, and they waved me over. It turned out that one was Norman D. Vaughan, who took part in Admiral Byrd鈥檚 first expedition to the south pole and had a mountain named after him in Antarctica. The other was George Meegan, who walked from Tierra del Fuego to Arctic Alaska, following a very circuitous 19,000-mile route that took him seven years to complete. After our third bottle of wine, I decided I鈥檇 like to do something like that.
Years later, I did. It was a bad time in my life: my first wife died of cancer, aged only 49, and I needed something to cheer me up and get me out of the London house where we鈥檇 lived happily for nineteen years.
So I walked from New York to Los Angeles, and it was the most extraordinary and life-changing thing I鈥檝e ever done. I wore out three pairs of boots, so each lasted about a thousand miles. I stayed with a Mennonite community in Pennsylvania, and at a Buddhist retreat in the Arizona desert where people took a five-year vow of silence. And I met the woman who鈥檚 now my wife.
Cambridge is a place of infinite possibilities. I wasn鈥檛 an especially distinguished student, and I didn鈥檛 have the drive and confidence to follow many of those possibilities. But I hope I鈥檝e gone some way towards putting that right since then.
Phil Goddard thinks he may be the College鈥檚 most travelled alumnus, but he鈥檇 love to be proved wrong. If you know otherwise, you can contact him via
