And finally comes "Love", which arrives for Julia in Bali in the shape of rugged, handsome and impetuous Javier Bardem. Luckily for our girl, underneath the slightly hippy exterior he is also something of an alpha male, being a successful businessman. So no money worries in the future, either. Talk about landing on your feet. 

I saw Eat Pray Love in California, where prevailing New Age preoccupations and epic self-absorption meant it was, predictably, going down a storm. The audience was full of middle-class women who, no doubt nursing some sense of being under-appreciated, were fully behind Julia and her half-baked attempts to find herself. But what is it exactly that they have lost? What terrible hand has been dealt them? Are they just too good, too spiritual, for this nasty masculine world of Eat, Shoot, Leave? Or is it simply that they work in marketing and Javier Bardem doesn't fancy them? 

Maybe what was once seen as a little girl's fairy-story is now seen by baby-boomer women as an inalienable right. A little self-knowledge would go a long way here. But this movie is not about self-knowledge. The audience will come out of Eat Pray Love none the wiser on how to put their stuff in order. Rather, it's all about looking beautiful and having hunks lust after you in beautiful settings, with some faded old Sixties mantras thrown in to add to that feel of quality. And there is something distasteful about the kind of pick-and-mix, magpie-like attitude to different cultures that this film shamelessly displays. 

In any case travel — the modern variety anyway — increasingly narrows the mind, I find. It's become a fetish, a manifestation of personal disquiet rather than a genuine desire to explore. Gilbert was wrong and Dorothy was right — you don't need to go any further than your own backyard. Or try therapy, if you must. 

It is, after all, very rare to come across anybody who has genuinely been changed by a stint living here or there, whatever they might claim to the contrary. Travel, in and of itself, never makes a person more interesting. A boring person's take on their experiences will be the same whether they're in Bali or Boston — even if they do look like Julia Roberts.