The consequences of eating are of abiding interest to British travellers of old.After the food, Leek’s Italian offers the regretful: “I feel qualmish, sick.”No destination is without its particular intestinal anxiety.“After vomiting his food,” explains one physiologically intriguing entry in an old Korean manual, “his constipation was relieved.”A 1903 medical phrasebook for Luganda, a Bantu language, offers the unexplained but authoritative: “Keep everything you vomit.”To judge by these publications, the Briton abroad must have cut a strange figure.Many position themselves as aids to conversation.The 1909 “Manual of Palestinian Arabic”, for example, explains that its sample sentences “will, it is hoped, be useful to the traveller in his hotel” and “may conceivably be of use in daily life”.The book’s phrases include: “We reached the precipice and saw him fall down”; “He died before we found him”; and the gnomic “Gargle twice daily.”Conversation will have hung heavy in the foyers of Jerusalem.Books from the colonial era are unintentionally telling.History books tend to concentrate on the obvious moments of imperial brutality - on war and rebellion.
