The business of getting from here to there has become increasingly frustrating, even infuriating, and I speak as someone who once adored traveling, the slaphappy sensation of traipsing down the twisting streets of a foreign city for the first time, your jaded senses heightened by what Gerard Manley Hopkins celebrated as “all things counter, original, spare, strange.”

Of course nowadays disembark in Moscow, Barcelona, or Tel Aviv, set out for the main boulevard, and you are bound to be deflated by the familiar: a McDonald’s, a Georgio Armani boutique, a Gucci, a pizza bar, and a shop called “Wyatt Urp” or “Doge City” [sic] specializing in designer jeans and hand-tooled western boots made by prisoners in China. Overpriced restaurants will welcome American Express, Visa, and MasterCard. CNN will be available on your hotel TV, and you can count on the indigenous channel to be showing reruns of “Dallas” or “Cheers,” dubbed in Russian, Spanish, or Hebrew. Mind you, these latter variations on the familiar can be inadvertently amusing.

Item: in 1951, drifting down the Ramblas in Barcelona, somewhat footsore, I slipped into a cinema to catch a Joel McCrae western dubbed in Spanish and, lo and behold, good old reliable Joel moseyed up to a saloon bar in Tombstone and demanded, “Uno cognac, por favor.”

I first crossed the Atlantic, at the age of nineteen, in 1950, on board the Franconia, outward-bound from Quebec City to Liverpool. In those days