BEING THERE: Travel Diaries 1970s-1980s

By Jean and John Dillon

ISBN 978-1-8383454-3-3 / 314 pp / 6” x 9” / €15.00 / Pub date: 12 September 2023

In this tome, Jean and John Dillon open their old travel diaries to take us fondly back to the days of pre-millennium travel, when getting there was achieved with the use of maps and signposts, as opposed to pings and notifications, and being there was recorded in a daily journal.

Whether for leisure or scholarly pursuit, Jean and John bring us to North America, Mexico, Europe, Hawaii, Israel – and most fondly of all, perhaps – to Greece. The diaries are frank, witty, and always entertaining.  They represent the first sortie into travel writing for the authors.

The instinct to wander, John writes in his introduction, is today, “sadly, facilitated as never before by increasing prosperity, at least in the developed world … and is now putting insupportable burdens upon previously charming venues, and contributing to the devastation of the planet.”  However, the peregrinations in Being There, from half a century or so ago, he continues, “are a record of a period when this was not yet the case.”  The travels are a mixture of family holidays and jaunts undertaken by John in connection with academic conferences around the world.

Also of note is the upcoming title, Tourism and Culture in Philosophical Perspective (Springer Verlag, Germany, 2023) on which John Dillon, along with Professor Marie-Elise Zovko, serves as editor.