25 September 2025 at Hong Kong Airport, about to head East
One of the earliest, greatest films ever made was ‘Around The World In 80 Days,’ based on Jules Verne’s novel of the same title, in which David Niven played Phileas Fogg. In 1956 it won the Oscar as that year’s best picture. Astonishingly, it took fewer than 80 days to film.
Set in 1872, the plot is that the eccentric and indefatigable English gentleman Phileas Fogg makes a wager of £20,000 with fellow members of The Reform Club in Pall Mall (each of the members contributing £5k to the pot) that he can circumnavigate the globe in eighty days. To win, Fogg must return to the Club at 8:45pm in precisely eighty days time.
It’s such a clever idea for an episodic story. Each of the adventures that ensues as Fogg makes his way around the world is a hugely dramatic page-turner (no spoilers here, but expect bull-fights, an arrest warrant and police chase, elephants, hot air balloons and ocean-going steamers), and it concludes with a huge twist – that travelling consistently east from London, the main protagonist and his trusty valet Passepartout cross – unwittingly – the International Date Line, and therefore live one day twice. Returning to London, Fogg – counting 81 days since he left – is devastated to have come so close to winning the wager but to have missed by one day, only to have it revealed, as I recall by buying the evening paper, that he has in fact won the wager, and after a last minute rush to get into evening dress (this being the world of gentlemen’s clubs with dress codes, nothing much changes there), he strolls nonchalantly into his Club (I think I remember a striking clock playing a major role) to claim victory, and his fortune (£20,000 then is – apparently – the equivalent of well over £2M today). The film, incidentally, was one of the first to establish ‘cameo roles’ by then-well-known actors – so look out for John Gielgud, Marlene Dietrich and Frank Sinatra to name but three of many – and almost seventy years on is, is suspect, still well worth watching. It propelled David Niven to stardom, even if it left him largely typecast as the quintessential upperclass Englishman.
This sabbatical – if you leave out the Scottish preamble – is 83 days long, and is also a round-the-world endeavour. A first and a last (I suspect) for me. But such has been the impact of jet travel since Verne’s time, than I have the luxury of circumnavigating the globe and fitting in a two month pause in New York, before strolling nonchalantly into my Club (not the Reform but the Athenaeum, two doors down), on or after the 1st December. Sadly no vast monetary prize awaits my successful return, just the pleasure of having completed the journey. But just like Fogg’s, my journey involves (right about now) crossing the International Date Line, and living one day twice. As I write this I am about to cross it (thanks to Cathay Pacific) at 33,000ft above the Pacific Ocean, eyes glued to the in-flight real-time travel map.
Try as I will, I cannot entirely get my head around this piece of magic. In a world divided into time zones so that the 24 hours are stretched around the globe to make the times of dawn and dusk in each country the same for travellers, I realise logically that the day must stop and start somewhere, but the idea that by crossing it you step back in time slightly blows my mind. Could you – I wondered briefly – fly very fast anticlockwise around the world, and by repeated crossing of the IDL become younger and younger (or presumably become older and older while living earlier and earlier in time)? But alas, no. Limited by maximum speeds and drag caused by the atmosphere, it takes – theoretically – 40 hours to fly around the world by commercial passenger plane, and still more than 24 hours by super- or hypersonic aircraft, so, while in theory it might be possible, in practice it just isn’t. (Though, of course, in near-space-orbit… but just stop…) In any case, one would – presumably – just become older and older to one’s acquaintances – just the wrong sort of time travel!!
The IDL is a jagged (and of course invisible or theoretical) line that runs North-South from pole to pole, somewhere roughly across the Pacific Ocean. It is jagged so to avoid transecting any single landmass, thus requiring – again in theory – two parts of the same village to be living simultaneously a day apart. Being a theoretical construct, it has been adjusted from time to time in order to fix some of of the problems it, unwittingly, has created (like separating Samoa from its main commercial markets by a day, a problem overcome by redrawing the line in the 1970s). It is why, annually, as the world welcomes in the New Year, that process begins far away in Sydney, long before London is ablaze with fireworks.
But as with various things in life, even if they don’t quite seem to make sense to the mind, this fact of the impact of crossing the IDL just has to be taken on trust and lived with by faith!
So good bye and thank you Japan and South East Asia, it has been amazing. And hello USA, the next two months promise much. And hello for the second time Thursday 25th September 2025. I loved it last time, and I look forward to its second iteration, even if I will be spending most of it in the air (and travelling over a quarter of the way around the world from Hong Kong to San Francisco in one hop!). Bring it on this time round!
Cool stuff