This article has been taken from The Sunday Times, Travel Section, December 6 1998.
Ken Livingstone wanders up the garden path
Ken Livingstone, 53, the MP and would-be mayor of London, was educated in London. He joined the Labour party in 1969 and was leader of the GLC from 1981 to 1986, when Margaret Thatcher abolished it. He is vice-president of the Council of the Zoological Society of London. He contributes to a variety of newspapers and has published several books on politics. He lives with his companion, Kate Allen, in north London.
I'M SO exhausted by the time August comes that if I continued working and didn't have a holiday I'd end up as a basket case. I simply have to have a complete break and ease the pressure.
Where we go is determined by the fact that neither Kate nor I drive. And Kate is a vegetarian, so that cuts out Germany and Russia. Italy is great because of the pasta, but even Spain is a bit of a drag because there's a limit to how much potato omelette and tomato salad you can eat in two weeks. So that's the attraction of North America. The English-speaking world caters for vegetarians very well. And I wouldn't go anywhere that I couldn't get a decent bottle of wine. Also, as we're dependent on public transport, taxis and our own two feet, we tend to end up in small towns by the sea. We have pretty catholic tastes: in Europe the choice ranges from Sorrento to Barcelona; in North America, the West Coast - San Francisco, Seattle.
Last August we went to Vancouver. It was great because the exchange rate had fallen off the wall and we were able to stay in a three-star hotel - on the beach, in English Bay - for £25 per night per person, which was actually £5 cheaper than my B&B in Blackpool when I was there for the Labour party conference.
Normally, I go where there aren't too many Brits and I'm not recognised. But, this year, Vancouver was full of Brits taking advantage of the cheap prices, buying up the place and asking me: "Are you going for mayor, Ken?" It was such good value that people were buying everything - even underwear at Marks & Spencer - because it was so much cheaper.
I go to towns because I always need information input, I need to be learning new things. I'm on a constant self-improvement course and I need to think. My holidays are almost like being in the evening classes that the old ILEA used to run. I can also read the papers for pleasure - not scour them for work - lie on a beach and take in a film.
I've been lucky to be able to pursue my childhood passion for natural history. Wherever in the world I holiday, I look at gardens, zoos and aquariums. Some are absolutely stunning, such as the Lisbon aquarium - it's the biggest fish tank in the world. Peter Chermayeff, the architect, has produced an enormous, stunning space: a tank where you come in at the top level, walk around and down to the bottom. It's the closest people are going to get to scuba diving without getting wet. It's incredibly restful, your mind empties. It beats all that meditation thing.
It's the same thing with zoos. Some are dreadful and should be shut down. But some, such as Berlin and San Diego, are fabulous. What sentimentalists, who object to animals in zoos, don't realise is that 999 animals out of 1,000 are eaten by something else as soon as they get a little bit slower, less keen-sighted. Therefore, a good zoo - which has enough space and mental stimu-lation - is fine, given the way human-population pressures are wiping out the remaining wild areas. In 50 years from now there aren't going to be many large mammals anywhere in the world outside a zoo.
Kate is more interested in art galleries than zoos; we end up visiting one or the other on alternate days. I prefer modern painting - post-1945 - Lichtenstein, Warhol and lots of new names that nobody's heard of. I wish I'd been able to assemble Jeffrey Archer's collection of Warhols - and I certainly wouldn't be selling them.
I love gardens. In Vancouver we visited the Butchart Gardens, which are world famous and unbelievably ghastly. It is a completely overpowering mass of colour with hundreds of everything all crammed in so that it bears no relationship to the surrounding vegetation. But millions of people visit there. We bought loads of seeds.
Bellagio, in the Italian lakes, has wonderful gardens. One Easter we knew that my mum wasn't going to last much longer, so we took her on her last holiday to Bellagio. Kate's parents came along as well. There were so many wonderful memories.
When I look at gardens, I always wonder how they are constructed, what I would have done differently. It's rather like wondering what I'd do with the economy if I were chancellor. I built my own garden to look "natural" - but it takes a vast amount of time to keep it like that. One thing I envy going round these wonderful gardens, constructed and matured over centuries, is the fact that they have space - the one thing I lack in my Victorian London back garden.
Once, just after Thatcher abolished the GLC, I went on a five-week trek up to Everest's base camp. The trekking was murderous, up 2,000ft, down 2,000ft, up another 3,000ft. I thought we had to be mad. But at every minute of the day there are stunning views: tropical rainforest, dense temperate forest, then you climb through something that looks as though it's straight out of Tolkien. The ground is covered with moss and you half expect to see hobbits popping out. Then the harsh reality of the mountain environment hits you: at 18,000ft, with searing lungs, you realise how vulnerable this wafer-thin layer of life is. It's infuriat-ing when politicians are so con-temptuous of the consequences of despoiling the environment. The Nepalese, though desperately poor, have fresh air, a tiny sliver of land and enormous dignity. I don't think I could enjoy a holiday in one of the great teeming megalopoli of the Third World, where millions of people live in cardboard and take their water from what are, effectively, open sewers.
But one shouldn't forget that in Britain many, many families can't afford a holiday. That's why, when I was with the GLC, we put on virtually free weekend events in the parks and we made fares so cheap that whole families could afford to travel.
If I were Gordon Brown, I'd reinstate that, make entrance to zoos and Kew Gardens free of charge, and pay for it from a slice of airport tax.
Ken Livingstone talked to Vanya Kewley