BETWIXT: Europe

My Very Own Spaces in Between

2011-10-19T12:49:00.003+01:00

Even when intensely focused - on Coryat, his route, the Rhine, just finishing, the detail of everything from light to the often mythological names of the container ships that cruise the river - I am also living the bi-polar existence of multiple personality, at once deracinated and simultaneously acutely gripped. It's what they used to call being a generalist, before post-modernism and the digital made seductive ahistorical overtures, willing a constant present upon us that my own lifestyle choices in London and New York, fuelled by Wallpaper and label-dependance alike, did nothing to refute. I think it must have been first a few fraught weeks in Cairo, followed by several years living in Eastern Europe, that refreshed my visceral need for a sense of the something beyond the download and the wifi; discovering by accident the work of Thomas Coryat I was given, like Mathew Barney is the early video work I experienced in Basel, both the limits and the potential for delicious inventive variation, that inform this staccato journey.

Some of my All About Eve lives at this moment in Duisberg morning include the doctoral scholar, seeking moments of understanding when confronted by early religious art in the kunsthouses of Switzerland and Germany; the would be poet, checking proofs on a private collection I've written (and where does this impulse come from, the pieces are formal and metre-strict, not the free verse of escape but the prison of order...?); the traveller missing home and its pleasures, a belated family life (travelling themselves now, in America, across Europe by car...); the writer trying to find a harmony that might inspire a book proposal for this project that isn't either labyrinthine and pretentious or a guide book; the lover of Kiefer and the reader in English of Heine whose two week German language immersion is proving unsurprisingly inadequate.

Another life that is increasingly impinging is that of researcher for a radio programme I am going to make next year; I need to understand an architect, and occasionally on the trip I read some of his pieces tucked away in the Papers app on the Ipad. He seems so wise, so thoughtful in his ability to meld old and new; the requirements of monumentality and those of the solitary individual; and his dates and passions mirror those of my own father, who died a couple of years ago and the anniversary of which is today - in brutalist Duisberg.

It's not hard to feel stupendously ignorant on a journey such as this; too fast to dismiss, or too taken with the superficial; or similarly quick to rush headfirst over the top about something, a painting or a building, a bar where people were friendly. An Englishman always takes his time, Eartha sang, but it can't always be true, sometimes we too - and perhaps increasingly - are a little premature ourselves.

Which is how I arrived for my cathartic Kiefers two hours early and stuck in the modern watery redeveloped wastelands of Duisberg, I sat down and had a little weep for a while.

A few weeks later, in fact two days back in London, I am at the tube station waiting to travel to the British Library for the first time in three months. My clothes are clean for a change and I have my fancy headphones back. On the floor, dirty and well-trodden, is a pull out section of this morning's Financial Times. For some reason I am drawn to it: the supplement is titled: Doing Business in North Rhine-Westphalia; and on page four a long feature on the redevelopment of Dusiberg's former bulk cargo harbour. It is one of those very strange moments; the scruffy supplement is open in front of me now, sitting in the British Library, recollecting the last three weeks of my journey. I read about Norman Foster's grand plan, about the "targeted" investment, the switch from cargo harbour for the local coal and steel industry - we are in Ruhr-Land - towards being a "logistics hub". But mostly I gulp in horror at the sentences about "luring residents and tourists with a mix of museums (including a Lego museum), shops and restaurants."

I've been here last night and today, on a restlessly emotional day, the vision is grim: neither the neo-futurism of Canary Wharf (from where I've always imagined the Blade Runners of the late twenty first century will operate, chasing not facsimile humans but their algorithms), nor the Truffaut-esque Alphavillery of La Defence. No science fiction flies here, no sense of Super-Cannes just an acute embarrassment that this is probably all Britain's (and her Bomber Classes) fault.

I can't even bring myself to go into one of the cafe for a coffee, so I snuffle around taking grey photographs and wait for the art museum to open. In the FT's relocation guide to Westphalia - Where to Live; Schools; Shopping and Leisure; Transport Links are the sub-heads to the article - there's not a mention of Duisberg, it is all about the Bonn, Cologne, Dusseldorf triangle, and prose so deathless Bomber Harris might have written it. Anyway...

At eleven the doors to the museum-kueppersmuehle finally opens and I scurry around its nihilistically white high ceilinged rooms, taking in epic photography by Hans-Christian Schink that covers the entire ground floor. I'm not sure what to think, the work is very precise and at times seems overly simplistic, but gradually as I middle-agedly take in that I have been to many of these photo's environments, I warm to Schink's bleak tourism. It is as if the the desire to efface any suggestion of an emotional response has been removed, and a cold technocratic vision judges silently. I think of the work of Nadav Kander, of whose photoshopped images these remind me, and I have learnt to like those very much...and anyway this is just the foreplay. Crowds bussed in from somewhere arrive and I play a game of hide and seek with them as they are umbilically linked to a guide and so I move wherever they are not. As in Dusseldorf the museum is a cathedral of chilly calm; but without those interactive dancers. This is a museum of solitary introspection; at least it favours no visions of the bleak outside.

Once again, though, it is the permanent collection that excites me. For years now I have found in Anslem Kiefer's work some kind of synthesis of the very public and the intensely personal. I find it almost mind numbingly emotional. The work is huge in scale and ambition and so resolutely serious as to suggest it comes out of no obvious post war tradition, except that - as here - the thickness of the paint and the broad, architectural sight lines, make for a post-religious kind of sacredness. Anyway, I am moved and thus immobile in each of the two rooms with Kiefer's art, four and four. I scribble and stare for hours, like a monk with a bunch of stations of the cross to consider.

I will write at length one day about the work but it seems to me that it personifies the state of being in-between, the betwixtedness of my journey and everybody else's. I spend much of my life at desk 2178 in the British Library until recently unsure as to why this space is so conducive to work. Now, having delved through the essays of Colin St John Wilson, and the work of Alvar Aalto, I understand their obsession with this state of in between, the relationship of the out to the in; the concept of threshold. Kiefer's work seems perpetually on the threshold, neither exploiting the allusions, the quotes, the familiar buildings he paints, the mythological, the huge dead fields, nor ignoring their potential for being remade. He seems to be able to paint this state of betwixtedness at the grand scale without making the viewer cowered. His work is assertion, but not i feel confrontation. Wilson writes: "We can still be moved deeply by buildings yet have no adequate terms to deal with the fact," and this is how I feel about Kiefer. Wilson compares the sensation to sexual attractiveness...I think I prefer the idea of alchemy.

Or Wordsworth's: "unknown modes of being."

There is other work: Richter, being colourful. Polke....But my lessons were well learnt with Kate, just a few pieces today, at length. There is a sliver of sunlight when I leave the museum and I wander back into town in search of the best cup of coffee. I realize as I yomp the mall boulevards that the image I have see most often - consciously, for I'm sure I've blocked out the MacDonald's signs - is the H&M carrier bag. Today there is a contagion of them.

The best coffee shop (non Dutch meaning) is nice, but hardly the Cafe de Flore in Paris where Sartre wrote that man is condemned to be free. White and stylish and a myriad of people who look as if they have escaped a mall pass through. I try to write. "Art is with us," Nietzsche writes, "in order that we may not perish with the truth."

I have a friend who has done well by his books, after a shaky start. These days he and his wife have relocated to Carmel and Hollywood has called, but when I knew him well he swore by shopping mall cafes. He could write longhand or on a laptop 5000/7000 words a day and then tear them up without remorse if he saw fit. I've arrived here via the harbor wharf, Japanese businessmen scurrying around, the Hitachi Europe offices are here; the "City" museum....phrooofff.....then a tram to the university district in search of life - but there is none, negatively none, it is a vacuum of inaction. A university....Hmmm.

The cafe Fino's virtues are that it isn't on the main street and the coffee is good and that's about it. I ask a stylish couple where to eat tonight: they say there are great restaurants at the cargo harbour development. I die a little more and keep speed drinking espressos. I start to write a poem about in betweenness and their spaces....

At my cafe window seat the owners have left half a dozen copies of the latest IKEA catalogue. I think back to Kiefer's monumental Brandenberg painting that's in the kueppersmuehle, It is both the colonnaded facade and the liminal space in front, dark and thonic, "In the back of every dictator is a doric column," Herbert Read once wrote. Somewhere in my tweeted universe I have read about the founder of IKEA again, those far right links much stronger than suspected all those years ago....When I die the music may be German techno in Hell, maybe not, but the decor will definitely be IKEA.

The questions mount: where does everyone go at night? Where are the students? Is everybody doing their anthropological research in the shopping malls? In a tiny fragment of the old town that has been dug up a sign in several languages explains how everything was destroyed in the war - I really should detour and go to the Ruhr museum in Essen.

It's a strange feeling, elated from Kiefer, experiencing a kind of betwixt epiphany, and yet stuck in an oasis of zombie-future world. On cue Sade comes on the cafe soundtrack singing Your Love is King, for a few weeks in the early 80s this was the sound of sophistication; then the diurnal soundtrack of shopping. A sax solo! Oh yeah, Lady Gaga has made them hot again. I yearn for some music so slip on my iPod and listen to a French samba version of Blur's Girls and Boys.

I make the gallery DKM too late, but the owner opens up for me with a big smile and goes to find me English texts and says I must to Bochum where there is a great show. There's an Asian theme here and ever since the Dusseldorf Dude I've been aware of the Chinese influences in art: following the money.

My poem starts: Spaces in Between are pockets of resistance, fight escalated prairies of market perfection.....hmmm

"Bolero is good," echoes in my mind as I finish the last espresso - how could they recommend the harbour places of Immelhafen?....I ask the coffee guys if there is "anything like this, but, you know, in a bar?" A bit of head scratching and then with the aid of my Gmaps they say - well there is one place......er.....here. That's not too bad."

I wanderweg back to my hotel and then on a largely domestic back street find a promising looking (there is graffiti) narrow bar that's not yet open and then as I am crossing the square of my hotel I see a sign for the Film Forum. Film Forum means Jean Luc Goddard. Means not 3D. Means a heartbeat of something. I head straight for its cafe. It's about 6pm now. A sense of darkness as late summer descends. And people. There is an Italian Film Festival happening.

People talking, not carrying H&M bags. Free wifi. The poem gets knocked off. A lovely older couple who've just seen the new Woody Allen, or perhaps an old one, ask me if I am famous as I look like an actor. Loving this. There is a different drum beating here and even the music has pretensions of being ok. Men wear belted jackets; women in berets. Silver hair is allowed. Here the fascism of the mall is being fought, centimetre by centimetre.

I go to the narrow bar I've found and very quickly the owner is telling all about it. Different of course, an artist has built the mis en scene; its not for everyone. A hint of Tingerlay, but it ain't him, but I am happy. "We had to work for this," she says. She tells me about a story she's seen: two American guys who walked around the world for a bottle of whiskey. This place is a home to ponytails and how rarely I imagined I'd welcome that sentence. I start talking to Stefan at the bar, he's a sound engineer, wanted to be a rock and roll star but now just makes soundscapes for films, yes he makes films too, it may be a pick up, I'm not really sure but I am smiling away, freed from IKEA. There's a long conversation about the genius of Douglas Adams, to which I can't contribute a huge amount but I do try - throwing in that I used to play tennis with his wife, and commission him to write for me at Wired - and that does the trick.

In the end it always pares down to will people talk and Stefan talked; there was life here. I head, a little squiffily, to the bar recommended by the cafe folk. It is easy to miss, a door, nothing fancy.

Finally: men who dress like Jarvis Cocker, women bereft of H&M; ambient Duane Eddy minimalist music. A vibe. It is midnight. I have found the uber space in between. Yay me. A stranger would find this bar, unmentioned online, once in a million goes. The music switches to "The Selector" a ska song I bought in Brixton when I was eight. Teary now, obviously. The owner is a Munsterman, that's German Munster, but has been to Irish Munster recently in a kind of why not way. He's red-haired could so easily be Irish. I'm talking to lots of people now, the music is cool, there's a 20 year old Seberg who is off to study film in Hamburg, full of excitement and fear with blonde bob; there's guys who are musicians, and then I am dragged off to meet an older woman who sits on a raised dais, wearing all black - a famous actress I am told. Soon I have met her son as well, he's just back from Iraq where he's been doing theatre therapy for fucked-up soldiers. These are my people. The notes from my Moleskine from now on are a little tricky to transcribe. However...

The actresses son launches into a vitriolic attack on Sir Norman Foster and how the people of Duisberg would like to sending him packing down river - actually it was a little more visceral than that, but this is a family blog. "If you are from Dusiberg you hate Norman Foster, that's the bottom line." There are places like this, the people tell me, but they are unusual. The townies would rather go to Dusseldorf or Cologne, we build something, just something here.

Then there is the history of the local football team. "It's shit, always has been, but we are proud - so proud - our fans are famous and even been taken up by Bayern Munich fans. It's a history thing. We've always been the poor relative, and nobody who isn't from here will understand. MSV Duisberg, I'll write it for you. [The only clear piece of writing on that page]...The Actress often performs here; she's just back from a one woman show about Goethe. Faust. Bliss. She promises to send me a poem she has written about Duisberg. We swap emails. Thomas a primary school teacher tells me about the problems, the drugs sure, the sense of this not being a boom town, having been eviscerated and never really recapturing a post war soul. Except that it is all over this bar. The actress is Kristina; at some point she dubs Seberg as the town Lolita - certainly she has been around the room several times and now she's back with us as Kristina recites a little Goethe. It's about 2.30 in the morning and all is well. I have one of those late night booze-inflected epiphanies. Two in a day. I think about my dad and stumble off to bed. In the morning this is in my in box:

Poem for Duisburg

I didn’t choose you,
rather been caught by you.
Probably we suit to each other.
The longer I know you,
The more we seem to be similar.
Too proud, to be offended.
Wide city to the one who does understand.
Having had better times.
But even worse of them.
Even you are an eldest sister.
Younger ones are snivelling.
Your governors are
The Third world of governors.
Your worldly wisdom
Is the high amount of cares.
Even you don’t make holydays.
Such a kind of thing we don’t need at all.
You make the championship
And show a sweet Blue
On the tower of the municipality.
Happy without triumph.
If you were allowed to wish something,
You’d give a party like me.
If you are sick,
You don’t open the phone like me.
No one loves you because of vanity
And you don’t answer love by symbols.
You were misused as armour
And did receive your ruins.
Now your are sold out
As old model.
And you know it better:
The city is then place of its humans,
Nothing else.
If foreigners take you as a brave one,
They don’t understand:
You just cannot get out of your skin.
Your harbours are buried alive,
Your chimneys are blasted
And ceremoniously rust your giants.
But your breath is long,
Even if you got asthma hundred times.
You go on continuing –
But not to survive!
You are devote to life!

I take a train half way to Rees, my next stop, because I am old and hung over and I am sure Tom took a boat here. Bleedin' cheat. It is a Friday and I walk through a lot of stinky farm land, see many horses and cows and stuff. But I am still thinking about Duisberg and its spirits of resistance.

The Walk to Duisburg

2011-10-12T15:37:00.002+01:00

This far into the journey a potential 40 kilometre walk holds few fears, and though the hills and mountains that have formed my backdrop in the mid Rhine have gone and i'm preparing for the flatlands of Holland there is still much pleasure to be found in the minute variations of light, the bright grey clouds, the limiting lines of sky or water, the bridges, their graffiti, the neat rows of trees; the way my path seques from forrest to open stretch, to village hinterland and back.

The light is playing dark tricks today, very photo-friendly and a reminder for some reason of the annihilating blurred light that cast few shadows which I experienced for so long in northern Italy all those years ago now on the first stage of the journey. I am walking from Dusseldorf, I start from Joseph Beuys street, to Duisburg.

I do though have a few fears about the latter as I know it was pretty much destroyed by blanket Allied bombing in the second world war. But whatever I find there will, I insist, be spaces of interest. And the art museum here does have Kiefers, eight of them. I can't wait.

As I walk I think about my conversation with the art dude last night; he's German but art takes him around the world. I'd assumed for a long while that he lived in Dusseldorf, but he was only there to teach; he lives in Paris.

"Why Paris?"
"Why not, I always wanted to live there, and now I have a place in the second. it's not big but, hey, I live in Paris."

And why not? Europe for all it's faults and flaws and Berlusconis is an amazing place, and now I know that if I need extra "energy" I just need to hop to Shanghai.

I am hungry by the time I hit Lieversberg. I have passed the massive Dusseldorf Messe complex and marvelled at more container ships and burnt out the camera battery taking essentially the same photograph over and over in search of the perfectly lit sky, cloud, river, boat combo. There is wifi and it's not summer any more so most of the diners are inside. The usual snitznel fizzy water double espresso fags lunch and afterwards I load the photos from the camera onto the iPad. My waiter clocks me. "Did you see the light this morning? It was magnificent on the river."

I agree and then receive a list of detours I should make for high-end nature photography. I jot the names gratefully, but for another trip, another kind of experience. I've long acclimatized now to my sense of nature, which includes every "ugly" pylon and pig farm and haven and industrial complex. I know from David Blackburn's marvellous The Conquest of Nature how unlike Tom's rhine is the river I walk; and when he took boats, when he rowed with his ex-pat English mates as now on this part of his trip, the tides and the banks and the complexities were far greater than those which confront all on the Rhine today, yachtsman and skullers, container drivers and cruise ferries (there's nothing doing from Dusseldorf to Duisburg today though, maybe it is the end of the season, or perhaps Duisburg isn't quite Versailles). I suspect the latter.

It's very hard to explain the pleasures of the very slow: tantric walking is cool - Sting would approve, and Mrs Sting too, I suspect, if she could bring her cook along - it makes for a very intensified looking, a miss-nothing attitude to trees and skies, and a lot of turning around to make sure the guys going in the other direction aren't having a better time.

Then came the blocks of power stations, pumping a white smoke into the ether that is the colour of Tintoretto's clouds, eerily whiter than the rest of the sky furniture. More photos ensue. More farms, long flat Kiefer landscapes - truly on this stretch the mis en scene is pure Kiefer. Grunged into a thick dense and textured world in which field and factory and sky merge into a giant live poster for German industrialism. I guess I am in the Ruhr. I veer inland to get a closer view of the factories and then tack back towards a shipyard cum container haven. There's a giant bridge looming on my north-western front and I assume this is Duisburg. Then a village, but lost from the river and my GMap not, er, 100 per cent, I ask a woman coming out of a hairdresser's where the centre of Duisburg is. It's 15 kilometres away she says. I don't believe her and so she very kindly packs me into her Audi and drives me 10 kilometers inland, leaving me in a bleak casino and international phone call shop heavy suburban hinterland that despite my love of all things bleak makes me feel quite, er.... bleak. I've walked a long way today, then been driven, and for the next two hours I walk the suburbs, which is pretty tough. Finally I hop a tram for the last stop and then I am Duisburg central railway station. I have no hotel booking and so I start walking into the centre.

OOOOfffff. If the Champs Elysees had been re-imagined as a pedestrianized set of shopping malls from the ninth circle it couldn't have been more uninviting. This is a new town; the bombings must have taken away everything. Eventually I find tourist information on the ground floor of a huge smug mall, nestling next to a plethora of plastic international cuisines. Only the extreme friendliness of the staff prevent a mini breakdown. And even then I am soon contending with "Fantastic selection of restaurants in the malls, and there is a stunning waterfront complex..." We book a room and I ask. Where's the best cup of coffee in town?

The answer, thankfully, isn't Starbucks. I try desperately to get away from the mall-ish vibe of the entire centre with little success though my hotel isn't bad tucked away in a square that feels a little "older", except that there are a lot of Messe delegates drooling around speaking that Orwellian Deep Dive Bollox, like religious converts to the God of Ayn Rand. I ask again about nice places at reception and am sent to the Waterside complex, a walk that is not aesthetically in my top two million. And then I am staring at a row of identikit restaurants where, inside, identikit people listen to Duffy and Sade. I turn around, go home, and skoff the mini-bar. At least in the morning there is Kiefer.

First thing this morning, before i left Dusseldorf I phoned the largest Kiefer collector in the world and got his secretary. Yer man was in Paris with The Man. I was told to call back tonight. The phone rang for an age without voicemail. OK: tomorrow.

When I will also be in search of the best coffee shop; because with coffeeshop comes the possibility the staff might recommend somewhere else that is not mass-produced, that's how it really works: forget online, this is word of mouth....

Art Haus

2011-10-11T15:25:00.004+01:00

The first towne that I came unto was Dysseldorp a faire towne of Cleve-land, situate hard by the Rhene, which is famous for two things, the one a magnificent Palace belonging to the Duke: the other the residence of the Dukes Court here.

With the scrubbed up shoe sellers - there is a shoe convention at the Dusseldorf Messe I've discovered - I take a leisurely hi-tech breakfast with herrings and wifi. Long after the iPhone voice mails have been left and final make-up and hair reconstruction achieved by the boy and girl delegates here, I'm still noodling away. I write this, a beginning of something:

Who ate all the Sushi?

“The only reliable, durable, and perpetual
guarantor of independence is profit.”

The world isn't getting warmer,
Forlorner, more medicated
Or self-obsessed. Every corner
Forms a wi-fi hotspot; the Fed
Finds no evidence for arrest;
The heir apparent reneges
His bonus, cites the very best
Reasons. Sports seasons pass like plagues

The main art gallery in Dusseldorf, and boy is Dusseldorf an art city, is split into three discrete buildings spread around the city. My first port of call is the Kunstsammlung, which "can be characterized as one of polyphony and contrast" the website states. I am more inclined to see it as a temporary show, Move It, which I missed in London, and the collection which is largely twentieth century and totally mouth-watering. At the ticket desk I'm told that the second building is closed today, there's an opening tomorrow for Jordan Wolfson from New York. But, as for the third building across town, promising spectacular video installations, there's a free shuttle bus every fifteen minutes. This is all very impressive.

In the main gallery space for Move It, three young dancers are limbering up as I wander the work, stopping for a good while first in front of a trusty Pollock. Another exhibit, by La Ribot, is a collection of folding wooden chairs that lean against a wall; each has a quotation of some sort and can be used to sit anywhere for artistic contemplation. One quote reads:

Without Walking I Would Not Be Able to Make any Observations.

I think I am going to like it here.

I near a plank based balancing act of art and the dancers, as one, rise from the floor, say good morning in accented English (how did they guess?) and ask if I have any questions.
"Er, what is this all about?" I am not the first to start my interaction in this way...

They are Fatima, Monica and Else, from Venezuela, Switzerland and Sweden; young dancers who interact both with the crowds who walk the show, and with their iPhones, especially programmed with a series of movements created by the piece's creator, Xavier Le Roy. I tell them about my walk, within a minute or two we have taken four chairs from La Ribot's art and are sitting in a semi-circle discussing stuff. I mention the arts cuts in the UK, Else, who knows London well, says, "perhaps this is a good thing, subsidy creates a sense of entitlement, I think the work will get better. My work is better when I have earned the money to produce it, you know, by selling tickets, having a job, I'd rather sell tickets at the cinema to make money than get an Arts Council Grant. It focuses creativity. I like the recession, it makes us change the way we think, Britain needs it." The others are not so sure, dance festivals are great - and yes they don't pay very much for all the rehearsal time that goes into a work, but "I do expect to be paid something," Fatima says. They are more interested in my walk and its dynamic, in a sense it is a far slower - and less graceful - version of their own piece: interacting with whatever comes along and following, in a way, a set of rules (in my case Tom Coryat's, not Xavier Le Roy). Later, after I have experienced the rest of Move It, including 30 mins lying on the lid of a leather facsimile of a piano surrounded by speakers, in solitary confinement as I endure/enjoy most of Boris Charmitz strange video piece about the impossibility of capturing "dance" on camera - full of grunts and sex and stuff - the show's dancers are interacting with more visitors. I like this, it makes the show move. Ushers an unusual rhythm into what could be a stately progression. Oh, but upstairs....

At the river this morning, early for the latest moody cloudy photographs that obsess me, I find myself on Joseph Beuys street. And I know more treats are in store. Dusseldorf is home to one of the very great art schools, the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Look it up of Wikipedia, but the short list of the long list includes: Demand, Polke, Richter, Kiefer, Beuys, Gursky, Struth..Peter Doig teaches there....

It is an industrial power house of post war German (European) art. One of those places that would have been great to study at; like MIT in the 80s, or Oxford in 1930...

Upstair in the permanent collection Beuys work stands out for me, entombed in a pair of rooms, mythic and visceral and I'm struck with Ted Hughes-ish feelings about mortality. There is a gorgeous open window by Picasso from 1919, all gray and dark lime and pale blue and I spend more time on this simple piece than many others; it is overload, but without many visitors....pretty perfect. An elderly invigilator does a dance in front of me, "I am Moving It," he says, rather sweetly. There are huge photo works by Gursky...It is like Christmas. No Kiefer though....Hmm.

I spend hours here, then cross the street in the first rain for a long time to the Kunstalle Dusseldorf: it is a proud large space that dwarfs the work and I can't get excited; neither by the 50 percent off in the museum's cafe, The Salon des Amateurs - which is utterly empty.
It is nicely furnished in faux leather and if there were people...
.....I note it down as a potential space in between. Half heartedly though, I mean who in a city with a thousand bars, the longest bar in the world, would come here?

A spurt of photography in the rain, dark clouds, spots of light, modernist architecture, school kids truanting over fags, and then I take the shuttle across town, out of the old zone and past malls I'll never visit to Ständehausstraße and the K21 part of the experience. A gutted out stadthaus now a wonder of light and space; in the basement fields of video installations, Steve McQueen is first port of call, loud and thonic and an entire theatre to myself in the gothic dark. A three video piece by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, the Strasbourg born artist. Three evocative enigmatic films about place. On a wall Dominique states: "Having been a prisoner of literature for two years or more, captured by a triangle formed by Enrique Vila-Metas, Roberto Bolano, W.G Sebald, three stoires of Robert Walser and J.C Borges, it is impossible for me to present anything else here than three short stories which can be seen or read in any order." It is if she has lived my life. I watch the slow films, one by one, and piece my own narrative. The films are shot, I think, in various locations in Sao Paulo. All I remember is that I first ate sushi there, many years ago. Now I'm writing about sushi as a metaphor for something utterly other. The work is mesmeric.

There is much good young work here, but on the third floor a simple exhibit of newspaper front pages from September 12, 2001 - in multiple languages and from many places - slows me to a standstill. The tenth anniversary is in a few days.

Back at the Einhorn I chat to an American who has lived here for a few years; she followed her heart, after tango took her to Buenos Aires. A paired down life of adventures; a past sadness I sense but don't want to explore. We are similar, I think.

Later I jot that cathedrals are like railways stations, museums like cathedrals once were, and it is only in found spaces that we are able to impose a clear sense of individual meaning. I have no idea what this means now.

The greying of Dusseldorf with the rain sends me home and I watch a film named The Hangover, which is oddly funny in its way, and then with the heavens still thundering I wonder about dinner. I have had an art overload today and I could just Einhorn and be done with it, but my spaces in between antenna is buzzing and so I make for the dark and empty looking Salon des Amateurs where there are a few people drinking; older, corduroy-types, bearded, dare one say fatter? Smokers outside. I go the bar and order some wine and then later go outside for a cigarette. Jens is about my age perhaps. "Ah, English...You know that tonight is a poetry recital? How is your German?"

I mumble: Goethe Institute two week course, back this up with my undying devotion to Heine and Durs Grünbein. "Yes, but how's your German?"

"I love the sound and assonance of poetry, I'll make do without meaning," I say. I explain my trip, "Ah, do you make a sentimental journey?" Jens asks. "Yes, indeed, just like Laurence Stern, did you know he invented the phrase in his book about travel -"
- Jens does. I feel a bit stupid. He probably translated Sterne into German I think. I stumble back inside and take my place at the bar. The cafe is full now and the poets are pacing, warming up like retired footballers playing in a charity tournament. One of the organizing men, not so old, not so young, is wearing flares - which is a first on this journey. I note down, this poetry can not be any more impenetrable than the iconography of Joseph Beuys, or the reasons why I spent time in Cologne drinking as parties partied to Neil Diamond-playing brass bands. These are my fates.

The first poem, from a spectacled, slightly nervous man, seems to be aus dem hinterland - and I'm feeling: hey poetry this is easy....and then there's a long one which involves the names of many, many German footballers through history, so that's a breeze. Then a Romanian woman reads a very long poem in German about the last days of the Ceausescus in Bucharest. And while I understand not a word I have lived in Bucharest for a little while and - as it were - know the story.

The drink break does come, though, with a little relief. In fact there is little for me. Jens is introducing me to other English speakers, an Englishman who has lived here for thirty years who writes plays and poetry and the "definitive guide to the Ruhr" as he put it. I am a little grouchily yeah-yeah where are the Germans, but put it down to tiredness. Then I am introduced to the next poet, he promises to dedicate a poem to me. Thus, back at my place at the bar, I am subjected to stares of abject pity as the poet explains how I understand bugger-all.

His poem is onomatopoeic, lots of Germanesque sounds and nobody much laughs. whoosh, sploosh, mooosh....I don't know. There are many more poems and the audience seems fretful and then it is break time again.

"They weren't laughing with him, they were embarrassed," says a young woman. "It's a tough crowd here and everyone knows everyone." The woman's English is very good, what do you do, I ask.

"I am a satirist," she says, without irony.
"How's it gong?"
"Not so well...."

The crowd disperses but I go back inside to write and end up talking to a guy from the art academy. "did you enjoy the poetry?" I ask.
"I wasn't listening, I just came for a drink while I worked." All the time he is scribbling in a notebook. "A writer?"
"Yes, but now I am just writing a to do list for China, I am off tomorrow."
We talk for about an hour, he tells me about Liu Xiadonj, He Yanchang, Li Gang and the thriving Chinese art market. "I used to go to New York for the energy, all gone, now that energy is in Beijing and Shanghai," he says. He's read everythjng, teaches at the academy, writes, does deals in China, and is generally pretty cool. Finally I tell him about my Kiefer obsession and he casually jogs down the number of his biggest collector for me. He lives here. OMG, as they say. Epic win. It's late when I get home and there is not a shoe soul in sight.

Tatort in Dusseldorf, following the money

2011-10-03T15:42:00.005+01:00

Late Sunday sun on Ratinger strasse in Dusseldorf, close to the river, and I am sitting on a bench at the Goldenen Einhorn, the Golden Unicorn, number 18 and built in 1630 - though in those days I assume the bar didn't offer live Sunday night Tatort (the oldest and longest running German cop show) screenings. I have history with Tatort, but I have never seen it. Tonight I will be back.

The vibe is very different from anything experienced in Cologne and I ask the waitress about it. "Oh, it's much more hoity-toilty here," she says somewhat surprisingly, sounding almost Coryation..."it's stuck up; Cologne is more industrial, grungey. I should dress up when you go out."

The other boys at my table find this slightly amusing; of the three two are head to toe Prada, with plenty of logo. I have been for many post Naomi years very much Kein Logo, though hypocritically so, but am, as ever, utterly non-judgmental. They are testing out a new cologne named "Matador" and recalling the highlights of a recent trip to the Dominican Republic. We don't speak; my IPad may have something to do with this.

At my next espresso order I ask the waitress if I am vaguely suitably dressed for an evening. "you look alright" she says, "Sure, why not shake them up a bit? I should tell you that there are more Porsche drivers here than anywhere you've been on your route so far."

Stay pedestrian, I think. Easy in the old town. Ratinger street has many bars, and the hot night, I am told, is Wednesday. Just a few metres away a club promises Hugh Cornwall, founder of the Stranglers, live-ish, soon. I wander down a street that's done business for a good 700 years. On the river the light is sensational - again - and a few hundred metres away a street performer is making rude shapes with balloons and many of the audience are convulsed. "More stuck up?" They must be tourists, I hear an English voice and scurry home to my hotel.

In the evening, spruced by shower rather than a change of clothes, I wander around the old town, there are thousands of bars, all doing good mid-September business. None appeals. There's a lot of boutiques, and smart clothes, and I can't imagine what the new city super malls are like. Thankfully I don't have to find out.

Back at the Golden Unicorn I read my Cologne notes, some a little blurry. "The problem with the Brits in Dubai," I read, "is that they still believe they are running an Empire." it occurs to me that Germany, the places I have seen at least, are a successful regional empire that needs no geographically expansionist dreams any longer. Is it finally at ease with itself? I like to think so.

The opening credits to Tatort have been the same for over 40 years. Saul Bass and Burt Kamfert meet in limbo to suggest big action. Almost. A dozen or so have gathered inside to eat dinner to Tatort and the atmosphere is gently nostalgic; a one time common culture that's now deracinated by download and time-shift, demographics and the web. But this is, despite the small numbers, a collective experience. The show is based in various cities, with various casts, a precursor if you like, of CSI. It begins bang on 8.15, displaying none of those on the hour insecurities that bedevil British or US networks. A ninety minute show with no adverts, it is truly a time-travelling experience. This episode opens - in Cologne, and familiar vistas and those Cathedral towers - with an opera soundtrack - revealing my operatic ignorance - played on domestic vinyl, and a middle aged man dressing up as a woman not utterly dissimilar to Grayson's "Clare". This could be the BBC, though the editing lacks Spooks' ADD driven propulsion, and despite the deaths and mid-life tentative romances and burly jean-clad "Gene Hunt" detective it is all really rather cozy. There are men with axes and sundry nice retro cars and it is a classical way to end Sunday after a heavy weekend of sun, gun clubs, and thrash metal bars...

I wander towards boutique home and the shoe sales-people but just a few metres away it is salsa night at the Schlösser Quartier Bohème. The place is very close to the main art museum, and seems closer too to the Dusedorf money. Men and women in high heels and burnished leather wander back and forth from the dance floor to salsa or sit out or change partners. I jot: long legs and silk dresses. A man stops to ponder my terrace jottings and says: "but words are never the present for yesterday has gone," then he asks to buy a cigarette. A taxi of blondes arrive and the burnished shoe boys hover, and as I walk home I pass an underground car park from where a Maserati sticks out its shiny red nose with a growl of Ruhr industrialism and Italian design. Kein Porsches tonight for me.

There is chocolate on my pillow for the first time on my journey. In the morning at designer breakfast the shoe sellers are very smart indeed. And many are Russian.

A little Cruditie

2011-09-30T14:12:00.003+01:00

I felt bad taking the train to Dusseldorf until I discovered that Tom had taken a boat all the way from Cologne to Rees, and he'd ganged up with a bunch of Englishmen who he travelled with for the rest of his journey. No such luxury for me. In fact he only spent 15 minutes in "Dysseldorp", but I was having no such lacuna. The sweaty walk from Dusseldorf's railway station went through the 80 or 90 per cent of the city I'd never see again: I was focused on the old town, on the Rhine, and some pretty tasty sounding art galleries. Strange how quickly one can reacclimatise when Beuys and Kiefer are in the picture. I was a middle aged grunge hero by the time I made the tourist office in the old town, a dripping mess. So when the lovely tourist officer, hearing of my desire to stay in the old town, said: "Most of the guys who do that just want to drink all night and have a bed to crash, the places are not so nice," I was thankful she recognised my inner poet. I looked like a guy who might have been all night in a Cologne heavy metal hangout who then got freaked out by mass-taking German gun clubs. But somewhere in my ruddy look she saw Heine. Forty minutes later I was in a suburban boutique hotel, ten minutes walk from the old town, surrounded by shoe salesmen - and women. The TV was flatscreen and plasma and not bolted high from the ceiling; there was no smell of kebab. And the breakfast bar had Apple desktops for web access.

Haus!

Cologne and the Gunpowder Plot

2011-09-30T13:02:00.000+01:00

One final detail. On his last day in Cologne Tom saw, somewhere in the city, a portrait of the Jesuit Priest, Henry Garnett, who had been executed in London in 1606 in controversial circumstances. After his hanging it was claimed that a piece of straw was found nearby that "looked" like Garnett. It became a Jesuit icon. Well, in Cologne just two years later, Tom saw a printed image of the piece of straw. An early example of viral global conspiracy theory. "Though I thinke the truth of it is such, that it may be well ranked amongst the merry tales of Poggius the Florentine...."

A moment from Stifel, Cologne - the human juke box

2011-09-28T13:39:00.004+01:00

Sitting in the pub window watching the world go by, about eleven on Saturday night. A man dressed with a silver foil wrapped box on his head on which a number of rectangles with words are arranged stops. He is "Gerd Box" the human juke box, and will sing any song from his selection. They are all heavy metal classics. There are no instruments involved; and he can't sing.

What follows ends up with most of the bar singing acapella a song whose chorus is "loving you is like loving the dead". I have money of this being a Bauhaus song, but who knows? The gun club may even have approved.

At Cologne Cathedral

2011-09-28T12:30:00.000+01:00

The situation of Colen is very delectable...

Their Cathedrall Church which is dedicated to St. Peter is a goodly building, but it is a great pittie that it is so imperfect. For it but halfe ended. Doubtlesse it would be a very glorious & beautifull worke if had been thoroughly finished....

Tommy Boy....

A few hours sleep after Underground and I am preparing for the walk to Dusseldorf, but first I want one last vision of Cologne's cathedral because Tommy has dedicated twenty something pages to its description, pretty much tomb by tomb. Who knows if this was real time reportage or copied from some guide in German?

So I am in the square that houses one side of the cathedral, a hotel, and the modern art museum. It's already about eleven, which means a late arrival in Dusseldorf. Today there are a new set of faces in the crowds that flock these spaces, faces I don't recognise from my many weeks of walking across Germany; and when I walk around the corner to the main station and its own theatrical courtyard of arrival and departure there are more and more of this strange type arriving by train.

They - as I am, high on the staircase gods watching the Lowry figures flock and separate below - are greeted by a new piece of art in the station square, perhaps twenty five metres high and wide: il papa, advertising "Germany's leading catholic radio station." In the image used the Pope's gesture is a waive, his arm is raised at least - oh god I am being charitable - that could just possibly be misunderstood, given yer man's history, nationality, and....well I am a charitable soul.

The faces are not the only unusual thing; the men, and predominantly this is a man thing, are dressed in olive green blazers adorned with medals. Many carry banners, in cloth, often with designs from the most brutal of christian art sources, St. Sebastian is big, all those arrows and homo-erotic poses... These are walrus men for the most part, with Colonel Blimp moustaches and deep double jowelled necks. Big, overweight, and certain...

But what are they? They are joined by a few women, dressed in Elsa Lanchester Bride of Frankenstein mode, the kind of style that might make the catwalk if The Wicker Man became a big seasonal influence on the people who've taken over from Alexander McQueen. (Yes the jacket and jeans doing very nicely thank you). They keep coming from the station, a relentless march of history straight out of The Lady Vanishes. Yes the Brides have a Margaret Lockwood air; yes it would be no surprise to see Caldicot and Charteris discussing the cricket somewhere....following live on the BBC website, these days.

They are joined in the cathedral's surrealist hinterlands this morning by those extraordinarily annoying silver mimes: angels, roman soldiers, more angels, and they take the majority of the attention for the genuine passer-by tourist child from China or Chigwell.

But not mine.

One green jacket particularly inspires me; a younger sort with a giant head that is buzz cut shaved and his only other facial adornment are a pair of black bull's balls that he has pierced into his nostrils. Think Hellboy meets the winner of the US Masters golf tournament. He's carrying a large St Sebastian banner and I am just thinking that he wouldn't exactly have been out of place on the dance floor to the death metal at Underground. Except that this guy means it. I get in close to these guys and take a lot of photographs. Not quite Robert Kapa in Spain, but there is a pretty strange vibe here, is it the country versus the town thing? Is it like the English football fans in Baden-Baden? No, this is celebration. I keep photographing. Beer bellies in Green, beards, those hats with a flower, more brides. Eventually I have to ask.

They are a pistol and rifle association, celebrating their 150th anniversary. Happy memories guys. From all over the state, and not really Cologne at all. There's going to be a mass in the cathedral....and there, outside the station, the Pope looks on. I mean they don't whack anyone who is taking pictures, but there aren't many smiles. I don't like this so much.

I find I've taken a couple of hundred pictures so I go off to wifi and publish a few and then realise I am exhausted. I'm not going to make Dusseldorf by foot today so I take the train...

Later there is salsa.

Written in Dusseldorf

2011-09-28T11:25:00.001+01:00

After the poetry night, coming soon after Beuys, Tartort, and salsa...

North By Northwest, again, on German TV

Early enough, as a kid, the Rushmore
Scenes, the crop duster, the drunk driving
That today seems risible when the laws
Of gravity don't exist and ceiling
Dancing, like Astaire's, happens in videos
For never pirated no-hit teen bands.
Then it was the sex, and blonde spy igloos
Of icy iridescence in whose hands
All men melt under an indifferent
Gaze. But now it's the middle initial
The existential "O" of Cary Grant
That makes necessary the serial
Pleasures found in repeated viewing
Of the perfect tale of man's renewing

A monument to monumentalists'
Thinking that's gone now we are all a brand
Made over by banana republics'
Deracinations we "read" not understand.
Roger O ran from a faint imprint
Of cold warrior and became himself
Inside tunnel and Eva Marie Saint.
To run from the accumulated wealth
Of borderless nations' big idea
Is less easy, even with CGI.
Didn't Inception just increase the fear
Mad men can't answer the question why
And the happy ever after that's rife
Is just Cary's imitation of life.

Flushing

2011-09-22T15:15:00.000+01:00

A small poem for Vlissigen

Zo de wind waait, waait z'n jasje

As the wind blows, so does his jacket

(i.e. He will jump on any bandwagon)

Dutch Proverb

To light a cigarette with a candle
Kills a sailor, they say, in Vlissigen:
Aan kust sea and sky dance a light tango,
Ships now close sail for a pale horizon
Where tobacco can be smoked any way.

Underground

2011-09-15T21:53:00.001+01:00

The older grey-haired busker is already at his spot, where he'll play a David Byrne song about ten thousand times, and noodle nice blues and chat to anyone and drink a lot and witness several dogfights and about ten thousand roller bladers in his day. It's about ten and the area in front of the cathedral is filling with paddle-led tour groups and the genuinely curious and lots of English speaking kids who may be on an Erasmus or a college swap or a who knows?

I've been trained well in going to art and know that in the next city, Dusseldorf, I have eight Kiefers that will take up the best part of a day; and Beuys...So I am not going near Cologne's very good art galleries.

I sit and write on the river front with with my Cologne geography now enhanced by last night's wanderweg. Somewhere in the middle, betwixt river front and punk bar, is Friesenstrasse where Cologne enjoys itself in the more bourgeois ways. I block out the brass bands for a while with a run through on the IPod, then give in to the mood and enjoy the pleasure (clearly expected) of the hundreds who line up, then drink out, on the disco boat that's going to be their life and the Rhine's for the next few hours. God, the music is miserable, matched only by an unfortunate sighting in Dordrecht on television of Jennifer Lopez's new single: I would have divorced her if I'd heard that song....it features some old Eurotrash melody and includes the line "put your glasses in the air" and incites people in Ibiza, Paris, LA and Worthing to get onto the floor. Ok, not Worthing.

I scrub up; which means change, and wander to Friesenstrasse, which is the usual suspect collection of All Bar One, other place, and a bunch of chic-er places that are empty, so far. There's an Irish bar, that's full of oom-pah-pah and so I order my aperol spritz and sit back to watch the "other" promenade. I am missing the river's protean People's debaucheries almost immediately. It would be no different in Lyon or Manchester, it's just that it's not me: I try the KGB bar, somewhat masochistically, and witness the world's worst burlesque for eighteen seconds. Ask the nice barman at my cafe is there is a bar with music, he sends me to the Irish bar's karaoke. Serves me right. I taxi to the deep suburbs and Underground, where heavy metal blares outside and from two discrete internal rooms, which I never make.

Hans is an architect, works in Dubai - has done for five years. Aggressive at first, suspicious of strangers - especially older English ones, "with their presumptions about Germany." Soon we're joined by chefs, gamers, programmers, a Freudian practicing in Paris; bar staff chilling out after long nights elsewhere...what do we talk about? Cologne mostly, those not living here are from here, and are here - as I feel in Stipel - in a kind of nostalgia-ridden return. "It's not as good as when..." is an almost constant refrain, and there's a lot of chat about computer games I don't know: I flannel badly, name drop Wired and tell a few stories about why I am walking. Don't get a standing ovation but Hans apologises and hopes I have a great time in Germany. I get it, he says; says the English in Dubai still behave as if they rule the Empire. And won't listen to anyone else. Forget the collapse in Dubai, there's still work. The Freudian is a Seberg, and as she talks I think only in Paris could you get away with this, but there, working with the banlieu kids, she does. Not even Lacan. The keanu-hair gamers take a shine to me and in a kind of Bill and Ted way we navigate the night and then the sun is coming up and back home the kebabeee smells, if possible, even worse.

In the morning I meet the gun clubs...

It doesn't sound like a Grand Tourist kind of day, but I'm tired of the galleries; they are they new cathedrals and the cathedrals are malls and digital flashlight and avoiding H&M is an almost impossible task. I have met some locals, tried to talk and found that Cologne can suffer nostalgia like a Tory politician. Did I mention the gun clubs?

Post Chamberlain, the Clash Years

2011-09-15T19:35:00.002+01:00

Cologne at 5.30am for geo-spatial reasons which don't involve being a Time Lord, though I have been in conversation with a pair of Afrikaans who tease me about the riots and the rugby. It is a good time to see the Cathedral, which I know quite well. Tom Coryat devotes ten pages to its splendours and it was only half finished when he saw it. There are no tourists, just the very early workers emerging from the hauptbahnhof and the old streets behind the kunstmuseum are deserted all the way to the river, which is lacking its usual oom-pah-pah, but is nevertheless full of cafes and bars that will wake up soon enough. Always guilt in Cologne, the bombing and all that, and taking a very early morning wrong turn soon finds me in canyons of brand worship and modernity and it's hard to be a believer.

I take a kebab-smelling room in a hotel on the river, sleep a while and wake up for coffee outside with bright sunshine and an Aussie at the next table who's just flown in, via Singapore, for a show at the Messe. Hasn't slept yet, his Europe tip. Biggest Outdoor Equipment show in the world (just as walking from Dusseldorf, I'll experience the biggest shoe show in the world at its messe). These shows clog up the lone traveller's hotel options, closing down towns - which is good for business but bad for planning. So I am in the hotel kebaberee, where the phones don't work and the wifi is wilful and from my room, which keeps changing for no obvious reason the back street bar by my window echoes to karaoke 80s rock....I am a saint.

Soon we are onto sport and how, even when we have a good sporting team in England, we don't have the "arrogant, killer touch." No surprises for the country that does. I mention the Ashes; Robert mentions the number of South Africans in the England team. We move onto rugby, but Robert is an Aussie Rules guy. I say I've seen Irish Rules, hurling. "Yeah we play an exhibition game against those guys, but last time it got out of hand...they don't do blindside tackling off the ball there. There were a few fights....in the end we had to tell the guys stop the blindsiders or we'll ban you back at home."

Robert's company is Chinese; he spends a lot of time there. In the next hour I learn more about the economy, and the Chinese take-over. "You know we were in Vegas for a show and I walked over to an American company and the guy said, we're not talking to you, you're with them." Well, them seem to be doing nicely. its hot, I feel I am burning, so wander off for art, but get weigh laid by just watching the Cologne riverside, on a Thursday, as the small patches of grass fill with people catching the last days of summer. Buskers sing in English....and soon enough men in identical shirts, stags who knows, are singing songs and the music is blaring. Over the next two days I'll watch this part of Cologne a lot; as the brass bands and the rockers, and the disco boaters, and the generally soused enjoy this part of town. There is never a hint of trouble, except when dogs get a bit frisky.

Often, for large swathes of the day, there isn't a cafe seat to be found. "Empire State of Mind" does well with the punters, and there is a gymnastic healthy vibe to the small stretches of grass; not a description for those who lounge the cafes knocking back the local beer, the Kölsch, which I've known from other Time Lord Lives and will ignore all weekend in favour of enigmatic red wine (a conversation starter later in the outdoor club Underground). But the booze kicks, the brass band romps (generously) through Neil Diamond and that song about Alice that I thought had died out in 1608, and well, you know the repertoire. There is much singing along; later a rockabilly band does some decent Elvis...

This is the populist core of Cologne, but I am now obsessed, and not because of Rory Stewart, with the spaces in between.

Thomas Coryat may have had many problems on his walk, but he didn't have to find the coolest cocktail bar in Cologne, with the beds downstairs and the best vibe etc etc. And as it is on Mozart street, a schlep and a half even for such a seasoned walker in the humid evening, he wouldn't have found it even if he'd had Latin GPS. It is literally, well not literally, thousands of kilometers away and I walk across town for two hours, past malls, then into residential districts, dodgy estates; I ask local after local and decide this place must be in Copenhagen, so cool and discrete it obviously is. I try again in a park where some guys are fooling' around and others playing boule and I find Beethoven street, but not Mozart. I find hosts of places, a KGB club (always bad). I console my heavily sweaty self that I now know another Cologne, but of course I'm wrong. I've passed student places and Charles Eames stores, and then finally when I hit - after more directions and bemused looks - Mozart street my bar is deader than Leninism. I end up back in the park with the boule and the university crowd talking cultural materialism and conferences in Dublin and drink very bad red wine thinking: I could do this in Bloomsbury, which is not the objective. I wanted to see "Media Cologne." Across the river the satellite dishes and steely modernism of "Vox" channel declares its power, so where are its players? It's not unpleasant, but really Russell Square sur Cologne? There are, perhaps, one too many sets of red clogs for my liking. Tom probably went boozing about 20 metres from the cathedral, where if my nose for this sort of thing is good, which it is, he'd now be singing Take Me Home Country Roads, in Latin of course.

Hair is un-reconstituted here, which is a blessing, and discussion on the intense side. One of the downsides of academic globalism is that the lingua-franca English that glues the Germans, Irish, English, Danes etc. is the inevitability of conversations about world music...I know, sorry. It must have been the same with Tom, not surprised he was hooked up with fellow Latin speaking Englishmen by now, there is only so long you can tap your foot to pan pipes. I could wander back to the self printed group t-shirts of the riverfront, but I am in a sort of post Chamberlain mountain English guilt, post riot, hacking, mood. I keep going in honour of smorgasbord Cologne. I am lucky not to have found the Friesenstrasse demimonde, tomorrow is that joy, as by now I am a middle-aged sweaty, and would look strange taking an aperol spritz and noodling on my IPad. Luckily my wanderweg takes me to a student street that shouts: "No" and texting, but there is Stipel: ancient monument to German's punk movement and in the space of a couple hours with pierced social workers (drugs, teenagers, "not here in Cologne, the smaller towns, that's where the problems are") I learn a little about another Cologne. The artist who graffiti-sprayed the front of the bar wants to talk about success, which he feels is corrupting - for everyone. "They become arseholes," he reminds me, talking first of Damien Hurst, but then moving on to pretty much everyone. There's a game of pool which is pretty intense and then I think well sod the cocktails. I have found a tiny part of Cologne. Later I will watch older Germans passing the Stipel (the boot). They always - always - smile in recognition of earlier days when they once came here, when their generation had hope - and kein cocktail. But by then they are playing The Clash, perhaps for me as I have met the DJ, though I cannot remember his name. And maybe my memory is playing a few tricks. I have recommendations for tomorrow night, some institution of metal and otherness...By the time I get back to the river even the oom-pah has gone to bed. My room smells like a group of Oil riggers have speed vomited a kebab house. I paint my nose with "Kiehls" shaving foam and fall asleep. In the morning I have culture to consume.

Anarchy in the old Capital

2011-09-15T16:58:00.001+01:00

If Bonn was Washington, then Petersburg was Camp David, incidentally a fashion label worn unselfish-consciously around town by sturdy, short cropped men who would be horrified by the camp thing; Sontag readers they do not look like. In its marble men's bathroom the Peterburg is piping Sinatra singing, It Was a Very Good Year, one of those yearning oh Christ I'm getting old songs that shouldn't be heard by men of my state in the hall of the mountain king. It's like the BBC in Manchester.

I write:

I wonder if Chamberlain danced the cha-cha-cha
In the ballroom, Clinton inhaled by the terrace?
Did Byron look down on Drachenfels from here,
The hills echo to Prince Phillip's German jokes?

I call it:

A Large Hotel Near a Small Town in Germany.

Then I walk back down to the Konigswinter riverside and on towards Bonn.

It is a sign of the moving on that the Bonn Kunstmuseum is so full at midday there is not a seat inside or out that is free. Housed down among the renovated ruins of modernity that is the new town, it is grand and white and offering Pop Art; I don't have the will. A lot of runners and cyclists and roller skaters use the Post Office tower nearby as a turn-around, and I bone up some history for another day, then copy the roller bladers. My hotel is in the Boho-ish student area and nice restaurants and fancy-ish bars are flecked among the streets. A media town, I think. I chat wine with an estate agent and watch a bunch of young bankers Blackberry cheat their way with Google on some bet; a red-braced Mohican of impeccable Bauhaus (the band) taste makes an entry or two and I leave for bed; then wander to the river where some thrash punks have set up for an impromptu burst of anarchy. When the police arrive it's all polite conversation. What did they say, I ask the lead singer. "they were just worried it might get like London..."

Boom Boom.

There are plenty of plasma screens and Adidas sneakers in the shop windows of the new town, but no sense of trouble. In fact my only brush with intolerance comes at the river, in a terrace close to the opera, where a young businessman has such trouble keeping still he makes my table wobble, ADD or something. I cant write, I say. (true for much of this trip). Businessman, because his casual was too slick. He takes his party away to another table with a hissed "have a nice day." The late night punk rockers surprise the bar staff. But everyone smiles away...why not, nothing wrong with a little lite anarchy. Probably wouldn't get this in Speyer, but then Speyer seems a long way away now, a happy memory of conversations about the Royal Family, and the Kings of Leon...

Bonn seems to have got the post politics blues over; though I suspect for fun people zoom off to nearby Cologne. I'm sure there's a little more anarchy there.

Where Britain Lost its Morality (1938)

2011-09-15T16:02:00.001+01:00

You're only here once, so you've got to get it right
- no time to fuss and fight -
Coz life doesn't mean much if it's measured out in someone else's time

XTC, King for a Day, 1989

A lot of IPod this time, walking; speeding the pace and breaking out the sweat. Standing on the bow, staring Byronically into space. The walk back to Konigswinter is a sign of what it is to come in Bonn, capital between 1949 and 1989 and reunification. There is a nice old town, riverside bars, a sense of fun. But there's also Alphaville down the road, where now the Post Office Tower dominates. Politics is gone; though there is a healthy amount of marxist merlarky in the bookshops near where I've been sick in Bonn.

So down through Alphaville, without stopping, that's for Bonn when I'm back, then a twist to cross the bridge and a four hour romp to Konigswinter. A two street town in once sense; that's where the cafes and restaurants are, but looming behind, the Seven Mountains, the Siebengebirge, where the dragon was slayed by Siegfried. Dragon is Drach, see various plays on this in Bram Stoker and indeed Ian Fleming, Moonraker's villain is Drax. And Fleming always said his plot was George (Siegfried) versus the Dragon.

The hills merge and at their peaks, inevitably, castles or ruins. Drachenfels, which gets its own stanza in Byron, is the daily tourist schlep. Most go by the mini-railway, stopping off at the late 19th century industrialists' house cum castle, half way, or going straight for the top and what is, very often, a foggy day in Konigswinter town. It seems fitting that the view back down the way I've come is clouded and mysterious; This is a new phase, moving into the Ruhr, and expected industry. I can cope; quite like the bleak industrial. From the peak of Drachenfels a view backwards reveals an imposing building on the Petersburg. What's that? Hmm, a huge hotel; that would have been the state residence of the President, had the hotels refurbishment not been completed in 1990. Bad timing. Anyway, I make a note to walk up there tomorrow.

There's a wedding going on in the industrialist's ex-haus. Cameramen and women in hats. Inside there's a lot of late 19th faux frilly art, which was once so popular books were published so that arriviste Germans could copy the style in their own houses. The place is monstrously large, and became a catholic boys college in the 1930s - what they must have made of the largely naked Greek-ish art....anyway, then it was a Nazi college of some kind, but details are thin these days. I wander back down to the river, order some schnitzel and download John Le Carre's A Small Town in Germany. A mini classic of espionage from 1969, which benefits from Le Carre's having lived here; in fact I think he wrote The Spy Who Came in From the Cold here. God it's a bleak book; the back drop is a suspected rise in the German far right; and Britain's general impotent uselessness. I read the whole thing in a riverside gloom of red wine as the tourist boats pull away from the bank in search of more fertile excitements.

The facial type I keep seeing is Putin and Harrison Ford. Strange. The world of Bonn and Konigswinter found in Le Carre makes me weep tears of joy I wasn't an adult for the 60s; grey, brutish and run by Etonians. Er...and that's the other thing: the riots in London are playing out their political aftermath and the London hacking scandal lurches on in more - no, they didn't hack thems... - and it is impossible not to follow this real-time on Guardian or Telegraph feeds, how The Times must wish it wasn't behind a firewall....not. So it is a curious triangular experience, the real, the fiction and the Siegfriedian, and what's happening in the world. I've got the Skype app now as well, so London can be calling anytime. The world grows small. The Petersburg Hotel, I learn from A Small Town is where Neville Chamberlain stayed when he signed off on the last vestiges of morality that Britain owned in the 1930s, that we call the Munich Agreement. As I climb the windy forest past a series of 18th century stations of the cross that have been restored now, I think about the car driving the British delegation up here; and I've just read of anxious meetings over lunch here between the diplomats and the Bonn hacks, trying to get a story in the cold war 60s.

The Petersburg is restored now, but a conference centre; the Clintons, Mandela, the Queen twice have stayed, but I am able to wander into the deserted ball room without meeting anyone. On the terrace I imagine the intrigues, then, and during Bonn's prime time. The choice was Adenauer's, a local, who signed the treaty in 1949 that restored some forms of German autonomy. There's a party of Americans and Brits taking a quick tour; most interested in the hotel chapel, where Michael Schumacher married. One of the kids, rotund, aubergine'd in the Cameron mode, throws rocks over the terrace wall with thuggish entitlement; a moment later a cry in german. He's hit an elderly woman walking back down the Petersburg with her husband. The kid does nothing; his mother shouts down in Home Counties: "He didn't mean it." A few minutes later I am in the same place as the walkers and the next Prime Minister but, say, three, is by my side throwing more rocks. "What the fuck are you doing?" I say. He wanders off, probably 9 or 10. His parents give me the full diplomatic diss as I walk past them.

History up here; but not many arrive; there's a far more modern spa half way up the hill, golf not so far away. Once all these towns housed the diplomatic teams from around the world; now they are away in Berlin. So what now for Bonn?

On not getting started, again

2011-09-15T15:06:00.001+01:00

Dordrecht, September 15.

Above me on the wall in green faux handwriting a long quote from Francis Bacon's "Of Gardens". It begins GOD Almighty first planted a garden. And indeed it is the purest of human pleasures...

This has been a different mode of travel since August; less the spiritual philosphe-weg through the vineyards of the mid-Rhine, more a series of exercises in how people live. It began in Koblenz this time, as it ended last year. I am still walking, but these pieces are in a surge of recollection and Moleskine sitting in a converted Water Tower on the outskirts of Dordrecht.

In late September 2010 I took, following Tom, my first boat, from Boppard, location of the Chinese beer-garden, at dusk, standing on the prow like one of those wooden statues from the 17th century brig, amazed at how much faster, how changed the perspective when moving with a little more speed. The colours change as well, purples and mustard yellows replace the fertile greens; the river is lead, then blue; the moon is out.

The trip ended last autumn because of stolen credit cards; and began where Koblenz let off last time in a chorus of people. Last year it was students doing a pub crawl which made my bar, Mephisto, heavenly quiet and then hellishly fully. The bar features old movie posters, plays punk - especially Richard Hell - and a plenty of Wombats, and though later in Cologne and Dusseldorf I'll be told the place is "far too commercial" it suited a need last year; this year I stay for one drink.

Albert Speer spent a great deal of time after his release from Spandau in Koblenz, pouring through the archive to prove he didn't know what people said he must know. Ultimately Gita Sereny proved that Speer's actions were in vain.

In the main square around midnight a group of strange zombie like characters in white bathrobes, but look for all the world like members of the Klu Klux Klan. Tourists from America, off a cruise liner and told to wear the outfit so they didn't get lost because these were (though hardly Chandler's) mean streets. And I am Moose Molloy.

This time it is a few weeks earlier and there are thousands of tour parties in many languages, the new spin being head-sets for each member and a guide speaking into their cell phone. No more palatable. Rain too, as before; Koblenz was then and leads this time, the sense that the sunshine of the mid-rhine is over. I wander around at night, visit the archives, really try, but can't get started....

Tom must have been exhausted by now, unlike me he hasn't had breaks, years passed, in which to regroup and make sense of his experiences. It is not a surprise to hear that he began rowing now, and picked up some other Englishmen who had been studying in Heidelberg. I think his heart was on Cologne - the last biggie, with its famous cathedral - and then London. I didn't want to be in this frame of mind, but couldn't quite connect. I wrote poetry instead....hmm.

The first walk was to Andernach and on the way I got sick; and Andernach was small and not unlike Boppard. Then I got really sick, took a train to Bonn and slept off the languor for two days. Travel wimp.

Germans had shown surprise I was walking on from the glorious mid-Rhine. It gets ugly they said. I was about to see.

The Film Forum Duisburg

2011-09-08T18:07:00.003+01:00

There are, I should say, eight fabulous Anselm Kiefers here.

Pocket Spaces

Q. Where are the nice bars?
A. In Dusseldorf

Q. What about Innenhafen?
A. It's made by computers

Spaces in between are pockets of resistance,
Fight escalated prairies of market perfection
By requiring either an informed local knowledge
Or a forensic informal nose for the nuance
That separates OK from possibilities
To learn more than the latest in high street fashion

In Duisburg the challenge is compounded by
Aerial poundings in the name of freedom,
An old town only by computer generation
In the Stadt museum; a docklands of cocktails...
Bolero ist gut, go to Innenhafen:
Identikit cultures - kubar, chilli-haus - come on...

...The rain doesn't help, sending inside helpful signs
Of independence, spirits unbowed by the mall's
Fierce grip; and a campus zoo university
Where Schliemann archaeologists must dig for life.
This victory's reward: to dream of Dusseldorf
Whose altstadt is the longest bar in the world.

Film Forum cafe, Duisburg, September 8, 2011.
A pocket of resistance.

Bonn

2011-09-01T07:48:00.001+01:00

Kulturkampf

Gott und die Staat features in the neat bookshop window frieze
Suggesting that Bonn has not lost all of its politics
With the reunifying right hand shift back to Berlin.
Because old-school Marxist analysis never said seize
The day and raise pedestrian downtown for an Adidas fix
And, here, class action isn't in pursuit of a plasma screen.

It's weird now, news, a café password and the world undresses
At the tourist table, and the unlikely urban tales
Of literal carpet bombing and god-driven primary
Infect the body-politic reading die local presses
With the ordinary disease, and my mobile betrayals
Alienate further the chance of serendipity.

Bauhaus Less is More, that revived spartan revolution
(requiring less Spartan credit facilities) that's passed
Away again with counter-revolutionary
Inevitability, poses the intuition
That a simplicity can help shape how our lives are cast -
And yes, pared down are the Apple products that I carry.

Somewhere nearby there's a Beethoven thing, claims Google
With a little luck I can walk it in eighteen minutes
From here - using GMaps - but there's a live feed, Adele...
And Test Match Special where Anderson's bowling is frugal;
Rolling updates on the acting commissioner's regrets
While across the street, for all I know, Icarus just fell

Couples reconcile, plan pregnancy, consider divorce.
Maybe...their narratives beyond my basic Goethe-trained drawl
Do I gain from the comment page of no firm conclusions?
And this pause for thought - head up, screen off - now reveals the source
Of what politicians always name the wake up call:
My battery is dead, ach, total social exclusion.

A thought on New York from Rugen island, Germany

2011-08-26T17:06:00.007+01:00

After the Thirties

Even Auden came to God in post-war years
And he did quit while we weren't ahead -
Although his Manhattan destination
Was not yet cursed by fiscal deity
And forgiveness can be found for that voice
Which, no more confused than, say, Aquinas
Preached a pretty practical kind of love.
And who not born again can think clearly
About their deficits without some help?
Clarity, he proves, isn't simplicity:
A limo'd abstraction - for poet or banker -
Adds up to a lack of vision, shorting
Opportunities to gain in kindness,
And perhaps the market for such brutal
Compassion is up for the brutal
While compassion needs bailing out, but
After attacks September went viral
Proving a universal gold standard
Which all kinds of people appreciate.

Rhinetown, a little different

2011-08-14T16:47:00.001+01:00

Rhinetown

A rash of Rhine-bank motor homes broadcast Bundesliga
From Achilles' shields and the Jesuit college is closing:
The group can deal, will later uncork Gewürztraminer
At wine festivals concluded by 'rock stars' overdosing
On crimes committed against musical humanity
And the piped paddle-steamboat accordions battle beats
With disco cruisers and containers freighting white Audis
To Cologne - while, off-Rhine, Frankfurt (am Main) counts tax receipts.
At weekends hinterland parks with tended paths and signed walks
Echo to the Iron Man ker-klunk of local baseball leagues,
In Kunstmuseum back room post-docs write Otto Dix talks.
Below, sinewed heptathletes dodge leashed dogs and frisbee geeks.
Mark Twain once hucked-up here with all the usual suspects
Of the grand theft auto tour who inflamed all their senses
With sublime stimuli for their unexpected subtexts.
Peak-top castles canto'd by many now host conferences
Where global ethical governance Powerpoints are penned
After veal and port and minstrel songs as new strategy
To spark the market engine; tidy warehouses that send
Good goods up and down stream without need of an elegy.
Spry mystics, dry vintners, prefabricated haus gurus
Ferment their vintages high in these heritage site hills
Explained by the staffs of multi-lingual tourist bureaus
In stark example of Germany's pan-european skills.
With magic Merrells sodden the only shoe shop around
Has silver Birkenstock sandals deigned by Heidi Klum
(@ several hundred Euros) - few spotted on the ground.
Ein bischen half-arsed hoodies on T-Mobile chewing gum:
Small town rebellion, Commerz-bankers' sons don't belong,
They're still winning bets by BlackBerry cheat in cocktail bars
- Peopled by red-braced Mohicans, though that could just be Bonn -
Serving tinned Sontag brunch spaghetti with chill-out guitars.
These towns that lack the serious loot and ripe Reeperbahns,
Without golf-karting Messe halls or Keifer collection
Tide along the waves of summer seasons with few alarms,
Such picturesque business gives strangers cause for reflection.

Theme Song

2011-08-09T21:05:00.001+01:00

Song of the walk, starts Thursday.

Ich habe keine Ducati

2011-08-02T12:38:00.008+01:00

So, two intensive weeks at the Goethe Institute and I am linguistically charged ein bischen.

I can now count to a thousand and name all the countries in the EU. Still have some problems translating Heine.

Anyway, the final leg begins next week from Koblenz...My only new fact about the city is that Albert Speer came often to the archives when writing his autobiography; Gitta Sereny's book was better. In fact amazing.

Still walking, no Grayson Perry motorbike for me. A last few days in the BL, writing dissertation on Elizabethan terror, and sneaking a glimpse of old Tom's Crudities, just to remind myself....

PLF

2011-06-11T11:17:00.001+01:00

"The European trek was undertaken with a book in mind – he was inspired by George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London – but 40 years would pass before Paddy published the first volume of his projected trilogy on the adventure. Asked why it took so long, he shot back: "Laziness and timidity."

Full obituary here

AUGUST 2011

2011-06-05T15:15:00.001+01:00

The final leg begins: Koblenz to Flushing in Holland.

Am Frankfurt

2010-10-28T16:48:00.003+01:00

The Chinese girls arrive home at the Boppard hotel from Frankfurt at midday Saturday; an all-nighter. Karaoke, shots, Chinese songs, R&B, Rihanna, Jay-Z. I tell them about "Online" and the sounds of the 1080s. Sounds horrible, they say. Exhausted now, they need sleep. What else did you do...? Can't really remember. Time for Homework.

At the Romer Burg restaurant, nicely ancient and, the Chocolate Cafe People tell me, the best place to write, I don't write, seems gratuitous, and instead read some more Goethe, eat well, but am surprised the staff are insistent I don't drink German red wine; Chilean, that's the stuff. The soundtrack is samba heavy and the guests wear jackets and whisper. A first-holiday together couple, American-English, laugh too loudly at each other's jokes and think about a cocktail. I wander the high street, mid-afternoon. Tom is setting up his Dobro guitar. He's from Koblenz, plays in a jazz cum blues band up there. I'll be in Koblenz soon enough; just have a couple of detours, to Frankfurt and Brussels. Tom plays beautifully, sparse and with feeling.

Way down upon the Swanee River,
Far, far away
That's where my heart is turning ever
That's where the old folks stay
All up and down the whole creation,
Sadly I roam
Still longing for the old plantation
And for the old folks at home
Chorus:
All the world is sad and dreary everywhere I roam
Oh darkiness, how my heart grows weary
Far from the old folks at home

I start weeping gently. Which must be telling me something. Back in Bingen for the night before Frankfurt I am in Swiss luxury and photograph sublimity and the mouse tower and end up in a bar full of Two Pint Glasses, Accordion Bands and Take Me Home Country Roads. Natch.

I am in bed early. Clouds over the Rhine in the morning and via Mainz I'm in Frankfurt by mid-Afternoon. Tom took a barque, so feel utterly justified in taking the train, even if some of the factories, especially Opel's, look worthy of a wander-weg. Frankfurt is a shock. Skyscrapers; Ayn Rand -esque Euro signs the size of Louise Bourgois sculptures. Starbucks and "Dolly Busters" porn everywhere, on Kaiserstrasse at least. And Hotel is slap bang in the Red Light Slapper-weg; a Tourist Office Recommendation, of course. I wander down to mid-town, then the old town, but it feels utterly rebuilt. Try to write in a few cafes but in the morning the elegant prose looks like Egyptian hieroglyphics. Of course the Germans were good at deciphering that stuff in the nineteenth century; not me. At mid- morning after a wifi cheesecake and double espresso somewhere that could be in New York or London, I brace myself for Frankfurt's double-dose of modernity, the money towers and the strong sense of rebuilt-ness, and head, as all must, to the Goethe Haus. Calm at last.

There is something so nice about reading Goethe in his own garden. Is that a wanky thing to say? Who cares, really? It is fantastic. Frankfurt begins.

Bopping to AOR

2010-10-21T14:18:00.000+01:00

So, a short walk along and next to the Rhine on the second attempt to make Boppard with all the speeding car, toy train, barge and cruise-liner semiotics. That's ok, sometimes the vineyard wanderings make me a little too sublime-centric.

Phil Collins was being interviewed last night on German TV; I watched in a type of suspended animation that never occurs wandering a Roman ruin or Reformation church. I've just been asked to go and speak in a week or so at the European Parliament in Brussels about digital piracy: I want to say that the money in music these days is in touring, getting played on Spotify, or better still soundtracking a Will Farrell movie: the CD or the I-Tunes download is really just a promotional device.

But that's subversive. Unlike Phil Collins, who seems to think he is Goethe. Faust vs. A Trick of the Tail?

I re-water at a biker's motel right on the river, filled for some reason with lots of salty dog, shiver-my-timbers, Billy Budd imagery. At least the water is only 1 Euro. Then Bad Salzig for a bun. It's not that the castles have become boring, but they are repetitive. It is hard to make judgements about which to hop to, and which to merely shoot from afar. I walk past a cyclist, older, my age, but he looks really fit and tanned. He's doing "Heidelburg-Cologne" in two days. In many ways I even him, but I so like my slowness these days. I realise belatedly that I have never yet been on the Rhine; everything else but not on. I wonder what that experience is like?

I take a couple of photographs for my cyclist and he stops for a sandwich, half an hour later he passes with a wave and a happy-walk. Soon enough I am noodling into Boppard. It is early afternoon, feels so like a market town. Humming - in its own way - with end of the week-ness. A brass band walks out from the Boppard Tourist Office in outfits that would shock Yes or Supertramp at their most pompous. Half Pearly-Queen, half Gutenberg Bible. It is five minutes to three.

Later I wander towards the railway station, looking for an off Rhine hotel; there are about a zillion on the water front, each waiting for the cruise ships to arrive. I've wander-weg'd the front and feel like a change. Lolling at the station two Chinese girls, students perhaps, but dressed to kill, Last Emperoresses both. Sisters. Where are you going, I ask.

The younger pouts; the older - Frankfurt. Their parents came here thirty years ago; originally their from a city south of Shanghai, but the girls are born here. They like New York, relatives, in business, not really sure what. And Atlantic City, relatives, in business, not really sure what. Not interested in Las Vegas, but Disneyland - oh yeah. They work in the hotel in the summers, study economics - and, clearly fashion. They've met a lot of English students, "you know, getting Kulture." I tell them about walking in the Vineyards. The pouty faces again. "But how can you do that in stilettos?" They phone and text and are off for the night to Frankfurt.

I book into their parent's hotel, complete with Chinese restaurant. Back in the marketplace the Brass Band has made-over into red frock coat based outfits. It seems the mid-Rhine is cigar friendly, there are a lot being smoked out here in the crisp chilling sun over beers and ice creams and the occasional coffee. Dali-style moustaches are also not unknown. The band kicks in, I polish another espresso and watch as from an apartment window above the Restaurant Alte Schmede a sweet-faced granny bops away like crazy to the music. Perhaps this is where Boppard gets its name?

The band is called The Blue Mops, they have come from Nigmegan in Holland, because - oh yes, I had forgotten, there is a wine festival tonight. Here is their first set in full. Everyone of the songs rocking with a rather fine rhythm quite unlike those oom-pah Brass Bands of old. And one member just dances, like the man who stood next to Suggs in Madness. I think of a scene in The Ipcress File with Michael Caine and his stiff-upper-lip boss in Hyde Park listening to the old-school brass band for a while.

The Set.

The Lion Sleeps Tonight
Boogie-Oogie
We Will Rock You
We Are the Champions
River Deep, Mountain High
I'm So Excited!
Something German that everyone claps along with
Take Me Home, Country Roads (obligatory in the mid-Rhine, it appears)
Top of the World

By the time the Blue Mops exit, everyone is happy. I celebrate by ordering a Dunkle Trinkschokolade Mit Chilli. I think of that movie set in France, Leslie Caron, Juliet Binoche, all that whimsey and Chocolate. If I am really unlucky the next visitor to Boppard's marketsquare will be Johnny Depp carrying a ridiculous Irish accent.

In my book, Goethe's Frankfurt house has been garrisoned by the French. I think back to Mainz and Napoleon's brothel for his officers. From one of the waiters in the chocolate cafe I learn that small change is Kleingeld, sounds Wagnerian - if a little too minimal for his usual grand tastes.

I meet an architect on the pull at the wine tastings, in a second marketplace centred on the town's main church. Vineyard stalls have set up around its periphery, and at the far end a stage for tonight's "live" concert. A band named "Online". I speculate on their playlist, only time will tell. My pulling architect is slick, though showing a photograph of your young son does seem a little...crap. "I design houses like women,," he says. The wine seller mentions her boyfriend in Berlin for the eighth time.

She's Stephanie, though everyone calls her "murky". Her brother, who's has died, started calling her that twenty years ago, when murky was 10. She's down from Berlin to help out her father, who runs a hotel here - everyone's father seems to run a hotel here. Murky went out with the same boy for 13 years, lived and worked and played here. They split up around her 29th birthday: it was time for a change. "My cousins kept saying come to Berlin, but, you know, it's so cool, different from here. I went there last autumn, loved it, and now I have a new life."

I start sampling white wines, very unusual. I hate white wines. "It's better tomorrow," Murky says, "there are fireworks." I sip a Goldene Kammerpreismunze. Not bad. In the background Architect is on his third pull, and Online are warming up by circumcising the melody to some horror by Bon Jovi. I sip a something else and then another. "Boppard used to be very big for bowling clubs, but the numbers are falling off now," says Murcky. "Now the older people think: hey, what about Majorca?" When she left college she went with a friend to London for the excitement of it all; she stayed a few weeks and bought a cheap ticket to Thailand. "I understand why the old people want the sun, it's just hard for business here." The Top Mops come into the square but they are initially drowned by "Online" and their soundcheck. When it is quiet enough they play, for some strange reason, the very oom-pah style brass band that NOBODY wants to hear. They last two songs and slink off for a kebab. "My ex cycled the same journey you've walked," Murcky says. "Except they started in March. So stupid. They got close to the Italian border and in some village a guy said to them, 'how are you going to fit the skis on your bikes?'"

Boppard is having fun, but it's older. I understand why the Chinese girls have gone to Frankfurt; how Murky is only here to help her father. "Online" kick off with We Built This City. Oh Gott. Easy Lover follows. When the singer announces in a key further from the melody than I am from Bejing that she "made it through the wilderness" I begin to weep for live music. Let's Dance. Something Got Me Started. Billy Jean (oh, ouch). Hot Stuff.

It is the pop syllabus of the 40s generation; me too, at a stretch. This is a set honed on cruise liners and Rhine holidays. Online move into the 1990s with Relight My Fire. I go and buy a hot dog, burn my palette, and smoother my Moleskine with mustard. Good Wine Tasting, I guess.

At the RhineLust hotel it is worse still. A disco featuring only 1970s German Pop. I buy an overpriced espresso and hack their wi-fi. Murcky's mother, she's divorced now, came form England. She arrived in Boppard thirty years ago at the start of her world tour.

And fell in love.

Tomorrow: the Chinese return, the Romer Burg, sublimity, Tom the Busker and Tears...And then Frankfurt, the Book Fair.

Am Rhein.

Circular St. Goar

2010-10-11T08:37:00.001+01:00

An early Biedermann heavy frustuk. A glamourous blonde German woman of the later years says: "I hope you jogged," when I explain where I have walked from.

In the wi-fi annex I meet Antonio, an Australian travelling with his wife. He's running the Cologne half-marathon soon. More pertinently to my needs he has an IPad and we talk SIMs and roaming and pros and cons.

Rheinfels is already moodily higher than the town of St. Goar, it looks imperiously down - but frankly all the castles do that. Down there is a pretty motley collection of cafes and cuckoo clock shops, and it holds little allure. I head up, away from the river, climb through the hinterlands to avoid the two valleys which add two more climbs and descents. Lets be efficient about this.

I'm moving upriver, through a flurry of larger bungalows and then into open land, rectangles of colour, like 60s wallpaper. Like yesterday, except that the light is very different; and this is starting to matter. It's not that I am becoming an artist; it is just that I am looking more closely at everything, and more slowly. It is a dark wet morning, the clouds are pale gray, or darker, hinting at coal. Burrowing down on the abbreviated horizons, ploughing the painters' facades I'm seeing every moment. The uneven geometries of grazing land, fields, forests and pathways, primeval information highways; from dark pastels yesterday to full rich oils today. These scenes are all around, emergent from the light morning darkness. Once again I whirl, a wet dervish this time, wiping the camera lens often, yet frequently finding on "playback" that a spot of moisture has ruined the shot.

Cows and bulls lumber; the isolated trees stand proudly morose, thoughtful. And then, past the bird-watchers' raised hut and into the woods. Properly now, light fades, is glimpsed through the tips of trees. 25 kilometres to go.

It's been raining all morning, lightly. Now outside the forest the deluge begins. I put on my wooly hat for the first time since crossing the French Alps from La Chambre, three years ago. June 2007. New hat.

A new kind of silence descends, far from absolute quiet, but far also form the bustling cacophony of the riverside. Which in turn is church peaceful in comparison with even a small town, with Oberwesel or Bacharach. Bird songs and falling leaves lead the chorus; the Steve Reich monotony of the rain droning above.

Enclosed now, the footpath is narrow, at the right hand edge the ground falls away steeply down deep ravines, below fallen trees, upended, assume new positions, different ecological roles to play. I feel closer to Tom than for ages, certain that he was around here. A turn; a choice, left or right. Soon, naturally enough, the diurnal connection with Tom is bust and I am vaulting streams, walking across upended trees, temporary bridges, and scrabbling hillsides. Another choice, left, right. Open land again, progress. I look across to a pair of trees, like a Kiefer. They are the same trees I've obsessively photographed an hour ago, from another perspective. The light and the rain are different now, so I obsess
some more. Then turn around. Back into the forest. Hours pass. I see pizza sized and coloured - like a pepperoni - mushrooms. Every kind of mushroom; apple trees; hear bird songs I cannot place. It is cosy in the forest, hermetic - signalless.

Eventually I emerge to a stunning almost horizonless vista of fields and plots and horses. In the dark distance pretty much Constable's Haywain - minus the haywain. I plunge the camera to lower and lower angles, emphasising either the vast gray-white clouds or the moist green fields broken apart by long straight farming paths and lanes. Finally a village. I must be close. A football field. A church spire in the distance, peeling. It is three in the afternoon. I ask a local man how far now to Boppard.

It's about 20 kilometres, perhaps you should go to St. Goar and take the bus? It's only 2 kilometres away.

I have inadvertently walked a giant five hour circle. Brilliant me. St Goar may be 2 kilometres away but I am down the wrong valley. I climb through vineyards wet with ripe and readiness, and then in the cloudy distance my castle home emerges, with the Rhine next door, still rolling along. The castle, like Greta Garbo, gives good face in all kinds of weather. She's moody today. Perhaps she is still angry with the Plastics' boys singing last night.

Down, down, to the river and outskirts of St Goar. My wonderful Merrells are soaked through. For my unexpected new afternoon back at Rheinfels castle - I will have to stay another night now - I could do with some trainers, something. I walk into a wet half-empty town, the forlorn cafes of storm-time in mid-week. In Tourist Information I ask about shoe shops in St Goar. "Ah, yes we have Birkenstock, just down the road."...

We Mexicanly stand-off for a few seconds; she breaks first. Into laughter. "I guess sandals aren't exactly what you want? Sorry." I laugh too - it's funny.

In the Birkenstock shop window Heidi Klum's silver "designer" sandals get pride of place. With no brick to throw, I wanderweg back up the final climb to Rheinfels. I take a muddy right half-way up the hill walk and find a small outhouse, known as a "Tusculum" . A place of retreat and creative solitude. It was the idea of Landgravine Anna-Elizabeth, born in 1549. Otto Dix, the artist, came here a lot in the 1920s. I make a note to 1) learn some proper German history 2) Find out about Otto Dix.

Back in Biedermann-Spa territory I change rooms, download the new John Le Carre, Our Kind of Traitor, because some of it is set in Switzerland, and polish off a bad though strangely compelling book before dinner. Dinner experiences no acapella singng and in the late night house bar the cattle owner's wife has some trouble fighting off an 80 year old German with a pepperoni pizza red nose, who spends most of the evening in pursuit of her upper thighs. I guess you have to kiss a lot of Biedermann ass if you run a castle-hotel five minutes from Loreley.

Later I get to meet a Lion - which is like the Rotarians, I learn, only they have an unlikely seat at the UN. He explains the Rhine wines is great detail, loving detail. The bullet point is that the roots of the Riesling grape can be incredibly long. I wrote down 15 metres, but perhaps I had drunk one too many Rieslings. So it needs very particular kinds of soil, and earth. AKA around here.

Chardonay is a slapper, by comparison. She'll do it anywhere.

Fritz wasn't always a sommelier, he used to run an electric organ factory nearby, employing 80 people. Then the banks got involved. "You know that everyday those guys play with eight times the world's GDP?" he says.

I don't. "They really do run the world."
Handy: I'll be in financial Frankfurt soon, I can see for myself. On the curious time-machine digital jukebox that Gustel the High German Scribe cum barmaid plays Gilbert O'Sullivan is singing "Nothing Rhymed." I'm so tired from my circular day it sounds positively Irving, if not Isaiah, Berlin. Upstairs walking to my room in the old castle I stumble across one of the staff in full medieval costume. The team are having a locked door party downstairs somewhere. It is 11.30.In the morning I'll walk to Boppard the river route, zoning out the cars and trains and cruisers. I'd like to - like - get there.

I chat to Antonio about IPads some more in the post frustuck wifi annex meet up zone. Mouthful. He tells me there's a wine tasting weekend kicking off in Boppard tonight. With live music.

I wonder if it will creep beyond the 1970s?

I'm Not Singing in St. Goar

2010-10-08T13:37:00.004+01:00

The first thing that changed things was the dog, a dachshund called Spritz. It is late and after a grandish dinner in a place on Bacharach's market square, a dark woody restaurant where elderly German Warrrior Queens with unfeasibly large breasts snigger with their somewhat smaller husbands about the man in leather on his own (who is actually reading James Fenimore Cooper's Rhine diaries from 1836, newly downloaded onto I-books) I am in the late night retreat up a narrow alley.

That's me in the leather, BTW. Serves me right for going a little upscale. Still the venison was lovely. Now I'm sitting with my free, digital, Last Mohican author and realising it's all been done before (again) and Spritz is all over me in the corner. It's a local Bacharach bar, but there are English voices, an Australian woman, it is her birthday, she's pleased she tells me later, once my bona fides as genuine listener are established by Spritz's owner, because she came to Bacharach ten years ago and has never left. There's been a hiatus with her boyfriend, but he's come tonight, the first time they've seen each other in three weeks. "Now I can get back to my old, real, life," she says.

Somewhere else an American woman is talking about the haircut she needs before she goes home to see her parents. She hasn't seen them for "about 15 years." She works in munitions at base somewhere.

Spritz speeds outside with me when I go for a smoke. His owner follows. A scholarly looking chap, neat but tweedy, scarf, the air of someone who quotes Thomas Adorno or Klaus Mann. He's my age, I discover, but could easily be 30. Is there a hint of a lisp? "I come from an old family, I mean old, East Germany, way back, I mean we had a lot of workers, we were farmers with land. They were loyal, patriotic, and then something snapped in my grandfather, he realised it [the war] was wrong. He and his wife began to hide people, a professor of Russian, one of the old school. At the end of the war he had to move, the Russians wanted him dead. He became very religious, Calvinist, we couldn't know anything of the world, no newspapers, no television; he wanted us taught at home. Very strict. And the professor of Russian, well he married my cousin and she became a great translator of Russians, I mean Breznev, he was a friend...Gorbachev...

What do you do Wilhelm? (And why are you in exile in this tiny town on the Rhine?). "I teach, in a high school, politics and civil engineering. I've been here eight weeks, with Spritz. I mean everyone might not know me yet, but everyone knows Spritz."

Why are there American soldiers here, is there a base?
Dismissive, yes, 80 kilometres away. "Do you want to know something? I used to work - I'm 52 - for a minister, in Berlin. I went to university....many places. I was his advisor, I went to many countries with him. I was in Washington, just before the invasion of Iraq. With Senators and Congressmen and (there is a list of very famous names, the usual suspects of the Washington of 2003). Afterwards we went to a bar and - ha! - said to me, this war is a good thing, we can get rid of some of our rubbish, and get hold of the oil." I shrug, the detail is good, but the idea is a commonplace of anti-Americanism. Who knows?

"The minister wanted me to get involved, being a member of the parliament, but I couldn't balance, I mean, the life led at cocktail parties and receptions and the formality, with my real friends, my life."

And so Bacharach?

The expression is beyond wistful. I realise that Wilhelm is in some kind of exile. Was it a scandal in Berlin, or just a sudden Emersonian desire for escape? "Writing a book? That's good, I should like to write a book one day. What stories I have!"

In the hotel I've done a search for "The Rhine" on I-Books and Amazon, and come up with the unexpected James Fenimore Cooper title, "A Residence in France with an Excursion up the Rhine."

"To write anything new or interesting of this well-trodden path, one must linger days among the ruins, explore the valleys, and dive into the local traditions."

Or as my friend who grew up in Bingen emailed: "you must go up."

At first it is the shafts of early morning light exocetting through puffy off-white clouds. The housetops of Bacharach, the spires and the absurdist castles are the natural beneficiaries. And then the vineyards begin and the sun starts to make a more concerted effort; the clouds develop subtleties, gradations, lighter and darker shades, gaping mouths of whiteness and jaws of deep gray. And the landscapes colours beg to be bathed in. After the relentless routine of Rhineside walking on cycle paths, this is something utterly different, and not 500 metres in land.

Just "up".

The greens (Hildgard of Bingen was obsessed with "greening" a kind of religious metaphor for spiritual growth, as I understand it), the dark soil, soiled, earthy and fertile. The russets. Silence descends, but quickly I realise this is not silence, just not urban-sound. It's like nature's version of John Cale's musical theories.

The vineyards vie with tilled fields; sheep grazing suddenly achieve acute definition as the sun breaks loose. And punctuating everything trees solitary, in pairs, clumps and forests, each with their own allegory to tell. Solitary beasts of aged knowledge, imperious rows like sentries. There is a curious geometry to it all. Or perhaps it is just the pantheist neural network that lies dormant in my head kicking in.

In the hills ahead a small town, lolling in the contradictions of the skies. Somewhere, not so far away, the Rhine. But for once, for now, nowhere in sight, unseen and un-needed.

I am photographing like a Dervish, a sufi of spinning shots and dances as I try and bring the sky and the land together in compositions. A hundred, two hundred...by Oberwesel, when I come down, I've taken 700 photographs.

The light had seemed mysterious and un-catchable from the first moments I climbed out of Bacharach. It played restless tricks on its canvasses. A few hundred metres from the vineyards the Riesling green vines swim in a yellow wash; then a more formal undulating green, Turner town, Constable, if I was a painter I'd never leave. This is fashion shoot territory too: I can imagine Nadav Kander - or indeed Mathew Barney - up here. Abstract, crisp, delineated and then lost. Architypical, biblical...Claude....no wonder they loved the Rhine, those guys. I hope Tom got up here. Wasn't down by the river with the kiss me quick brigades.

It does become easier, suddenly, to understand the Romantic Sublime.

Later I go down, a trick of descents and re-climbs, into another hilltop castled town, Oberwesel. There's an Italian ice-cream and coffee shop. The young waiter is surly at first, checking out the old leathery man with the Ipad but when I tell him about the first walk, across northern Italy, and now Splugen, he gets very excited. "I've only seen people like you on the television," he says. I want to say that if they were on television they had a crew and a make-up artist with them, however solitary their jaunt. Some elderly cyclists, grazing on giant sundaes, just say: "Bravo!" when they hear my story.

Down the main street and a little right, falling towards the river there's an old school hotel where the German national anthem was first sung. I go check it out. There's a plaque and a framed document, but it's all a bit too uber ales for my mood. I'll write more about German singing and songs from St Goar, my afternoon destination.

I stay low now, the trains pass by near me and across the river; and the barges, the cruisers, cyclists, cars on the B9 road. The valley has narrowed, it's tight now and must once has been so treacherous....cue, suddenly the Loreley "thing". A big slab of rock that means a lot. Cruise ships cruise it like seedy businessmen on the Kaiserstrasse in Frankfurt. One boat named "Germania" handily passes as I'm taking pictures. Thanks Tom.

The river arc as I approach St. Goar is a demi-crescent of motor-caravans; a caravanserai of mobile homes. And every one of them has, or is in the process of having attached - a satellite dish. Deck chairs, pick nick stuff; late afternoon sun puffing now, thinking about a rest. Long long shadows. "What you watching?" I ask a man from Munich.

"Champions League,"

Ah yes. And Mainz are still top. "On Saturday, all over, they play us."
We will see. I like the fact that the small underdog team is top of the Bundeslege.

Another climb, muddy paths, steps. Blowing for air, and I am fit now. But still smoking. Finally Rheinfels castle, now a splashy-ish hotel and spa. "We've been expecting you, Mr. Hunt." At least Herr Owner does not have a white cat. The view from the bar is everything a Turner or Claude might want. I'm in the Mrs Rochester attic, the only thing I can afford. In a strange kind of digital apartheid, the old castle rooms are ADSL, and the new conference centre annex hotel is wi-fi. I wander over in the light rain and download more Rhine books. I book a table for dinner - posh - and take a sauna, relaxing. I "dress" for dinner (new underwear). And am told the table's not ready. I sit in the gallery bar for half an hour without a drink reading Fenimore Cooper. Ignored by Buddy Holly the rookie waiter, and certainly by all the scooped cleavage waitresses who are serving a conference party in the main dining area. I go out for a smoke: there is a delegate Iphoning his wife. A Candian-German. "Plastics, we are coming together from around Germany - and the world - to exchange best practice and to ensure that the environment is our central consideration. And you?"
I explain.
"That's very cool. I live in Heidelberg once, you know."
Cool.
I go back inside still no drink. Then my table; a lonely Lorelei space surrounded by Biedermanns and their Wives. Lots of jewels. And stares. No drink, no menu. Around fifty minutes into my dinner date I get a thin gin tonic. "And to eat, sir?
A menu.
Ah.

I get up and walk out. I have my first hissy-fit of the trip, explain to the Italian maitre'd that the restaurant service is "rubbish." He practically hugs me; in reality it is more of a rugby malling movement that finds me sitting back in the gallery bar with a free glass of rather fruity Rhein red and better service than Angela Merkel gets.

I go for the venison stew.

Next door the Plastics Boys are being entertained by a fat-Falstaff with a post-modern lute. He's been warming up with a beer in the lobby, now he's on a roll. When everyone starts singing Take Me Home Country Roads, I begin to lose my new found contentment. Then the lute-ing stops and the Plastics Men sing a long acapella song that isn't Tomorrow Belongs to Me; isn't a Michael York Cabaret Closer kind of number.

But is scarily close to it. I feel sick. I start joining the dots from the Germania staute at Bingen, the National Anthem locale in Oberqwesel, the Loreley, and now something about flowers and blossoming and...well what do you rhyme burn the books with? It aint' Wagner, and it's not The Scorpions. And it is definitely not Supertramp...The Italian maitre'd looks embarrassed; so do many of the Biedermanns. Tomorrow my new Italian friend will apologise. "Too much wine," he will say.

Plastics Men vanish; they're not in the little house behind the castle where the management close down their night with the more social of the castle guests. I drink some wine, write about my day in the Moleskine, watch some Champions League, listen to pretty much every unusual song composed in the 1970s in Britain or American, I mean The Legend of Xanadu? Magic, by Pilot? Heart of Gold? Sir Duke? All Around My Hat? Then I pay. I am 16, going on 17.

The barmaid Gustel, writes the bill with a fountain pen.

In the most perfect High German Script. The handwriting is so lovely, so time consuming, I ask to keep the bill. I can have it when I leave the hotel.

Only later do I wonder why High German Script is so popular in these parts. In the morning the 30 kilometre walk to Boppard - through more of this fertile land. After eight hours in the rain I come to a village with signs (my first for hours): I had completed a perfect circle, by accident, and was 18 straight kilometres from Boppard, and two kilometres from St Goar. I am the worst walker in history. I book, damply, for another night, and am moved from Mrs Rochester's attic to Dorian Gray's. But that walk is for tomorrow.

Bingen: the mystic multimedia artist

2010-10-05T17:54:00.001+01:00

I didn't know much about Hildegard before I came to Bingen, though I did know someone who was born and grew up here. They'd said to expect a few minor miracles. They'd also said that the waterside front - where the cruise liners pull in and everyone but everyone, and I was no exception, take about a thousand bad photographs of the castle on the far bank in conjunction with the "mouse tower" on a small island close to our side - was where they smoked their first joint, many years ago. This morning it was rowers, mists, and a hint of dare one say the mystical? Probably not. I hadn't smoked anything stronger than a Marlborough Light.

You'd have to say it's pretty photo-friendly here in whatever light. Today was a dull morning, but that just made the hill-tops greener, rather than yellow, and the mists gave Germania a spectral glow. I

The museum to Hildegard is maybe thirty metres in land, around an area with a Swiss hotel, a conference centre and an ominous looking bar. It's all peace inside, and Hildegard's music is playing.

Hang on, she's a twelve century religious mystic; what gives? In 2008 the academic William Harmless wrote "Mystics" for Oxford University Press. His chapter on Hildegard is entitled: Mystic as Multimedia Artist. It is fair to say this is interesting. She was the 10th child of a noble family, born in 1098. At eight she was "enclosed" that's locked away for life, in a cell of a monastery at Mount st. Disibod, not so far from where I'm standing now. That was supposed to be it: a life given up to contemplation of God. She ends up running a monastery, touring Germany preaching, having visions, persuading the then Pope they are good visions, writes the first known European morality tale, invents a secret language and writes beautiful music. She's a prophet too. We need to know more.

"Truly," as Tom wrote, "there are very admirable matters written of this woman by the historians."

The museum is lovely, but what really grabs me are the maps: how far her letters, her relics, her ideas, her music, travelled. It is the Niebelungens all over, except that this is even earlier. I don't buy the CD in the gift show; I download it at half the price next door at the Swiss hotel on the lobby wifi.

There's a great image of Hildegard, a saint and also known as the Sibyl of the Rhine, writing on a wax tablet in her study, looking for all the world like she's checking her Facebook page on an IPad. Multimedia indeed. Her visions are apocalyptic, flame-driven. There is so much rich material here in terms of image, music, ideas, language, geography, sexual politics...Hildegard seems to have fallen off the radar in the Renaissance and her writings and ideas were only really re-discovered in the twentieth century, when some saw her as a kind of feminist icon. Did I mention the medicinal innovations? Or the sartorial freedoms her fellow sisters had in her monastery? Amazing.

There is much to be read about Hildegard of Bingen. Rhine route now, check out the mouse tower, many myths and kids stories, but really a navigational point at what was until the damning of the Rhine a treacherous (lecherous, Gershwin joke) part of any ships's navigation of the river. Hence, soon, the Loreley and all that mermaid/undine stuff.

Can't disagree it looks good, but then so do the vineyards, the castle, the freighted-up barges. In a riverside garden there's a small museum with brilliant technology, invented by the University of Dortmund. A large Mac-Style computer screen mounted on a moveable frame that is a camera/telescope to all around, the mouse tower, Germania, etc, but clickable and data emerges. Downstairs a touchscreen 10,000 year history of the Rhine, watch it change. The curators here could not be more friendly. They release me from embarrassment and pull the switch for the model railway upstairs that illustrates how trade and freight was brought from one bank to the other. The trains move too, very exciting for boys of all ages. But the train sets - on the left and right of the upstairs gallery remind me of the model railway quality of the entire mise en scene. I scoot down to the Rhine and march on Bacharach, trying not to make too many Burt jokes. But, on Facebook at least, failing miserably. About ten minutes out of town I look up and see an amazing "Gothic Novel" castle. I have to go see.

I was right. Rhinestein castle is a steep upward walk. It looms down on ground level with the same kind of broody/moody intensity possessed by Bran castle in Romania. It also has the best post box address in the world.

Romantik Schloss
Burg Rheinstein

Later the owners point out to me that whilst this is a very cool address, it is a bit of a bore having to walk up and down a steep hill to pick up the gas bill, twice a day.

There's history here alright. Bought in 1975 by a former opera singer named Hermann Hecher from Barbara Duchess of Mecklenburg - the last owner of the "House of Prussia" (which is not a retail outlet) - the castle was improbably first built in the very early years of the fourteenth century, first mentioned as "belonging to Mainz" in 1323. We're in beween, or Betwixt as we like to say in these pages, Bingerbruck and Trechtingshausen, the real start of the Middle Rhine Valley.

The restoration is sublimely good. There are libraries in rounded turrets high in the clouds that Borges would have killed for. There are amazing dining rooms; and most bizarrely perhaps there is wifi everywhere. I immediately email the info@burg-rhinestein for an interview, because I would come back like a shot. A tour party of Swiss and then French school kids Iphone their way around the rooms and later I get it pretty much all to myself. This was a place to collect taxes, oh yes. Like Bran, actually.

I email some more and then Cornelia Hecher wanders down from the family apartments. We talk for half an hour or so. Her father in law bought from the Barbara Duchess because she was threatening to sell to the Hare Krishna. There was a big pow-wow at the next castle down, local government wasn't happy. Hermann got to buy his castle.

How long did the restoration take?
It will take forever, always. Cornelia says.

The family lived at first high in the state rooms, had electricity installed, water. Now they live in housing at the rear of the castle. Cornelia and Marcus's son, Marko, is also part of the castle business here now. "We were so happy when he decided to do that."

A detour but a great one. Back at riverside the school kids are waiting for their motor cruiser: will it be Germania or Goethe or Loreley? I'm long gone when it arrives. The colours are moving towards the autumnal now. The Russets are Coming, I note. At Bacharach I'm staying in a place in the city walls. And they are old. I send emails of Bingen home. My friend who grew up there says I have to go high tomorrow from Bacharach. Into the vineyards and the woods. I feel altitude sickness already. Later after dinner I have a curious interlude in the late night pub.

Wilhelm and Exile is for tomorrow though.

Publishing and the oldest brothel in town. Mainz 2

2010-10-05T15:17:00.001+01:00

"A matter that may seeme incredible to the understanding of many men, yet most certainly verified by experience. By virtue of this arte are communicated to the publike viewe of the Worlde the monuments of all learned authors that are set abroach out of the sacred treasurie of antiquity, and being now freed from that Cimmerian darknesse wherin they lurked for the space of many hundred yeares, and where they did cum tineis ac blattis rixari, to the great prejudice of the common weale of learning, but especially of God's church, are divulged the common light, and that to the infinite utility of all lovers of the Muses and professours of learning. By this arte all the liberall sciences are now brought to full ripeness and perfection. Had not this art bene invented by the divine providence of God, it was to be feared lest the true studies of all disciplines both divine & humane would have suffered a kind of shipwrack and have bene halfe extinct before this age wherein we breathe. I would to God we would use this great benefite of our gracious God (as a learned author saith) not to the obscuration but the illustration of Gods glory, not to dis-joine but rather to conjoine the members of Christes militant Church here on earth."

Thomas got printing in Mainz, there's no doubt of that. There is an argument that says printing created the Reformation, helped to promulgate its "framework." I'm really struck here in Mainz about the relationship of printing, especially those early printing centres that emerge in the later fifteenth century and onwards to Tom's time in the early years of the seventeenth, to the "River". Especially the Rhine. Strasbourg, Basel, Zurich, Mainz - and Frankfurt just a barge away up the Main - are all deeply constructed around the River as information highway, surely? This is for more thought, in colder, bookier, climes. AKA London.

Baby Photographer One told me about her previous job, house photographer on cruise lines, navigating the world with rich, older, guests. It was hard work: wherever in the world they landed her job was to capture the myriad being happy - and photogenic - in front of, well, the pyramids, the Bob Marley museum, the skyscrapers of Dubai. Photos all day, developing at night. I tell the baby photographers about The Venetian hotel in Vegas; they tell me about the security guards that follow into the toilets in the hotels on the Emirates, because the taps to flush are pure gold. "I'd rather have the smell of real Venice," Baby Photographer 2 says. "Although, I like casinos, as long as I win."

On the outskirts of Mainz heading for Bingen, not so far away up the Rhine, I stumble across a very modern building (photos on Facebook). It is beautiful in a slightly kitsch angular way, and it is certainly out of kilter with its surroundings. An older couple are investigating the exterior, seeing if it is possible to go inside. What is it, I ask.

The new synagogue, it is not even open yet.
It's rather amazing, no?
Yes, very nice. It is a Swiss architect. Mr. Hertz. (Although a later news story says from Cologne.)

They are cousins, he has has come to visit her. She has just retired as Professor of Archaeology here, he too is retired and nowadays translates Irish and Anglo-Irish poetry.
- He's very good, says the archaeologist.
The most recent a volume of Bernard O'Donoghue.
Cool.
Yes and next an anthology of anglo-Irish writers including Derek Mahon - one of my own favourites. We talk a little of The Hudson Letters. Both Swiss, both enjoying the new Synagogue, an unexpected surprise.

I had my first IPad meeting last night. At the next table a well dressed young man, flipping through his "Flipboard" app - Norbert got me clued into that in Zurich, I use it myself, it is a kind of mobile "Daily Me" thing.

You enjoying yours?
Absolutely, for work really.
Of course.

He's a publisher of a business magazine, a trade title, about fast moving consumer goods, FMCG. His title has a great market share, and German - good old still "making things" Germany - is riding the recession a little better, as it were, than Britain or American. We talk about publishing for ages, he's met my old boss; hung in New York with the Economist guys. Likeable, fun. A professional. Apps may be the salvation for publishing? We discuss. In Germany the regional press has a much greater strength and resilience than in American or Britain.

I wonder too if it also has a more refined readership.

The Pubishers' Wife arrives; she's involved in NGO work, Africa. Practical, friendly. They have travelled a great deal, big trips, southern India is next week. I talk about my love of that region, how once, many years ago, I got engaged down there. And next?

Oh next is another big trip - or a baby. I think it is time. The juggle of lives. It is time for dinner, they are going home. We swap Facebooks, then The Publisher says, hey, want to see the oldest Brothel in Mainz?

Irresistible, obviously.

It is their home, right in the centre of town, metres from the cathedral. They have an apartment; it's a very old house, but the interiors are modern and bauhausly less is more.
"Napoleon, when he was here, set this house up as the brothel for his officers. In the grand simple lobby a glass framed exhibit of Roman finds made here, when the rebuilding was being done. An instant series of archaeological and historical allusions.

"Julius Caesar having conquered all the Cities on this side of the Rhine which was in his time called Gallicum littusthe shore of Gallia &c. planted garrisons in each of them...for the better fortification of the place, and to keepe the bordering people living in the same territorie in awe and subjection of the Romans. For which cause he assigned Lieutenants called in Latin Proefecti to all the principall cities and Townesthat he had conquered," Tom writes. I think about that long sequence in Goethe's autobiography in which he describes his family house in Frankfurt being sequestered by the French - he makes some interesting observations, which find an echo I something I read by Tony Judt, but I'll come to them in Frankfurt.

I somehow miss dinner and chat to a couple about terrorism. An IT guy and a Graphic Designer, what really struck me, he says, about 9/11 was how personally I took it. I really thought "these guys are after people like me. And I'm just a regular guy who works with computers."

There's a Siegfried statue outside the Deutsch bank offices, and Mainz win again in their mid-week match. Top of the league still. In the bottom of my back pack I find a ripped newspaper article I've found. The London Daily Mail from September 15. An English woman who fell asleep and woke up speaking perfect French. I sometimes wish I could have that kind of sleep.

Instead I wake and walk to Bingen. It's about six hours, along the Rhine, the Rhine is its mid-Rhine glory, where each curve in the bend augurs another castle on the hills; more vineyards, and a lot of pleasure cruises, with or without in-house photographers. I stick low, close to the river, and parallel to road B9 - and the trains. Which now resemble a giant train set, spotted across the river, some great fantasy of mittel-European play. But they carry everything from people to tanks.

It is dark when I hit Bingen and the hotel sheets are itchy. In the back streets there is a lot of Russian being spoken. In the internet cafe, because there's no wifi around, a group of Turks and Slavs Skype home.

But I haven't seen Bingen by day, so I can't really judge. I know there is a big feminist mystic thing here. Hildegard. I fall asleep staring out of the windown into the gloom across the river and the vineyard hills. There is something up there, bright when the fog or the clouds move. I check the hotel tourist sheets. It is the statue of Germania, one of those Rhine Warrior Women. Frustuck is rather doleful; I head for the Hildegarde museum in the rain. Above me, in and out of the clouds, Germania looks down across the vineyards of the right bank.

Mainz Kind a Town

2010-09-29T00:57:00.001+01:00

An easy walk out of Oppenheim, and a sense that up there on the hill, the old clerics did their job further afield. They could see so far. The Rhine is not elusive today, but still I walk an inlet, see some archery, and then turn around, feel stupid.

At Nierstein a wine loving couple give precise instructions and big smiles, soon I am in the vineyards and the lines and the smells are fantastic. They go on and on; I almost believe in white wine for a while. Then down to the river, which means the other side of the railway line that always follows me, I tune it out, and on for the afternoon towards Mainz.

The town arrives in a six at night glow; beer gardens on the river, kids playing frisbee (new sport) and laying around. The light is as if God decided Mainz around Harvest Moon should be Ectachrome, all sixties. I don't know if I am on the Campus of Berkley 1968, or something earlier and George Seurat. Very nice.

The bells are ringing of course. It's probably 6.15 but it feels welcoming. Everything is good, the Dom, the Marketplatz; the modernity of the Rathaus and the combination of the two worlds. But no wifi in the hotel; in fact a sort of analogue dismissal.

I wander the streets of the old town pimping for a signal - in Germany I haven't yet found anywhere to give me a new SIM and 3G access, as in Switzerland. There's a bar, an "of course", and soon I am talking to two professional photographers. They make their money shooting new born babies at the hospital; most hospitals now have websites with such things. The great thing is, everybody is happy at the shoot. They recommend an Italian place for dinner.

I sit outside and listen as a pair of Mainzers, husband and wife, she dictating from her IPhone, discuss the evening football scores in the Bundeslige. I ask if they support Mainz, currently top of the league. It is early in the season. Of course, but the fun ends on Saturday - Mainz plays Bayern Munich, the Siegfried of Teams. The husband was born in 1942, his family left Berlin at the end of the war, came here. "Mainz is very Roman," he says, you will see. And the Dom? Well the craftsman who made that...is very respected, the academics say so.

Back at the wifi cafe the Baby Photographers are still drinking; it's someone's birthday, maybe even one of them. I go inside to write; they come later, on their way home, to tell me I am a very "open" man. Later lawyers, students, they all want to work abroad. Spain or New York.

In the morning the Gutenberg museum is a riot of questions. A sea of wonder on many floors, where in the basement kids watch a printing lesson and upstairs I get another lesson in how little I know about the quality and the web-page like intensity of mid sixteenth century print works from the region. It is also a sea of lost meanings, a man stands on a fish, in turn suspended on an Ionian column. He holds a basket of fruit in one hand, a wheel in the other. From the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, grr, supposed to know about that stuff. I am sure I can find out the "meaning". But I'll never share the illustrations' assumptions to its contemporary viewership. I think about this in the DIY Dom, all being fixed up, the film crew on location with some school kids. Nice, but wrong vibe. Didn't sing for the Chagall stained glass either, he was 91 when he started, after all.

Last night's Husband and Wife go back to Berlin twice a year, even then they are amazed at the changes. East Berlin...."is like New York."

I'm proficient at old towns now; know how to wake up to their bells, wanner their logical streets, centre myself at marketplatz and think. I hear there is a Mainz "Willemsberg". I weg my way there, for hours. Pass the Mainz football stadium, a couple of high schools, and there is a cross between Hampstead Garden Suburb and the Arsenal at Woolwich, that is an old munitions factory. There are supposed to be lots of creative artisans there. I find only a bunch of non-creatives having lunch. Ask the barmaid. Ach yes, photographers and fashion designers and architects and ceramicists and painters and...it is Medici Florence.

But I just find the seamstresses and the assistant to one fashion designer "of London". she studied at St Martins, a few years ago. Where is everyone, I ask Gudrun. Holiday?

No, they just don't feel creative, I guess. Not everyone can be creative every day. Gutenberg spun a little in his grave. And I am sure the workaholic baby photographers did too. I change hotels to one which began in 1346, and is next to the Guttenberg museum. Write and drink coffee and realise, again, how little I know. And how hard it really is to be creative. Tomorrow, well later today, but written tomorrow, the oldest Brothel in Mainz, some Publishing Talk and a bit of a take on 9/11. Mainz kinda Town.

Kein Problem.

More Sagas

2010-09-26T13:41:00.001+01:00

A early sunny start in Worms takes me to the river, a statue of Hagen throwing the treasure of the Niebelungen into the Rhine, and the vineyards that brought us Liebfraumilch. A Proustian moment - not. Too many 1970s allusions without any of the ameliorating punk songs, just loon pants and Abigail's parties.

The Dom is not so far from the Martin Luther memorial; and the campaign that will bring the tourists here en masse for 2021 - the 500th anniversary of Luther's address to the Diet of Worms - is already up and running. To get there, and it's still around 8am, I've walked past the Jewish cemetery, outside the city walls. I know I should know about Luther and the Jews, but I don't - I make a note to find out.

The Niebelungen museum is controversial; a lot of locals didn't want it, there were too many bad associations with Germany's "Illiad". It is a very clever piece of design, built into a slice of the still remaining city walls. Standing on these walls after a couple of hours inside I wonder: where in the world has not been invaded in, say, the past two hundred years? And is there any correlation between being - or not being - physically invaded and a country's relationship to overseas war? It is just a thought.

The museum is an audio-visual experience of the good kind. In fact the entire point of the museum is that it is a fascinating series of spaces, towers, which the visitor climbs to watch and listen to the story, and some of the recital, of the German saga. Who knew it was centred in Worms?

The narrator of the piece is the anonymous author of the German version of the Niebelungen. Even in English he has a nice fruity voice, and a gentle sense of humour. On small video monitors clips from old black and white German movie tellings of the myth, including Fritz Lang's play away, moodily. And there's a modern music score that adds to the atmosphere.

"When I wrote this story, some 800 years ago, the world was a very different place...Over the centuries I have seen what you, the living, have made of my story, and how you have interpreted it..." The narrator disagrees with some of Snorri's version..."many interpreted my poem as they pleased, not really caring for the truth...There were many who let themselves be compared to him [Siegfried]. All this has nothing to do with my work. What fiendish interpretations were these! Oh sceptre of misfortune!"

It makes me think of Luther, his "re-interpretation" - his going back to The Word - of the Bible. It is the curse of all texts to be too open, too malleable. I think too about the word "freedom" in the past decade. Then back inside, our narrator does not rate Wagner's take on the myth so highly. Indeed the museum's creators say that they "deliberately shied away from all of the Romantic epics..."

In the "Listening Tower" there is a real panorama across the city to the cathedral, and in the other direction to the Rhine. There's also a series of audio clips of where exactly the "Burgundians" - yes indeed, the original Worms folk were Burgundians - travelled. Iceland, Hungary, Jerusalem, Denmark...It shames us, even Tom, how far they went.

The cycle path to Oppenheim starts at the railway station in Worms. I buy sandwiches and water from a shop there. The woman behind the counter is wearing a nice Burberry scarf. I praise it, "from England," I say.

"Ach, from Istanbul," she laughs. "It's a fake."

This morning I've received an invitation to talk at the European Parliament, at a conference about copyright. Brussels. Not on the route, but not so far away. Copyright a year on from Britain's Digital Act. Should be interesting. But what to wear? The travel clothes will be walking by themselves soon, leaving their stinky presence...Hope the shops are good in Brussels. Maybe I should - like Tom in 1612 - hop to Istanbul...

I start at around 12 and it's still warm, the weather doesn't break until Thursday. Still the one hour detour around an inlet that leads nowhere puts me back an hour, though I do get to see some archery fields. Another sport for the list. It's plain sailing down the river, but a long way, and when I'm forced to take the ferry across to Gernsheim and find that at 5-ish it is still about another 20 kilometres I wilt, sit and have a water and a giant Snickers bar. And head for the cycle route.

Go wrong, first time on the right bank of the Rhine. Always been a Left Bank kind of Guy.
Hot, tired. A vision. She's a schoolgirl, well just finished, going to study mechanical engineering at Darmstadt next month. She leads me to the railway station, explains the complex train route I'm going to have to take to get to Oppenheim (it involves going to Frankfurt, briefly), and then marches me off to the supermarket to get provisions as I have 20 mins in hand. By the time I collapse in my somewhat swanky just off the hill hotel in steep-streeted Oppenheim The Schoolgirl has already tracked me down to be a Facebook friend. She may well Rule the World shortly.

In the morning I wander the hilly streets and enjoy a small city museum that fills in a few Tom gaps. I realise I am not reading Tom much at the moment, am too ensconced in Don Quixote. There'll be time in Mainz. I leave at midday and am in Mainz by 5.30. The walk through the vineyards of Nierstein is fantastic.

And for tomorrow.

My Diet in Worms

2010-09-20T15:45:00.002+01:00

Frankenthal's cloudy centre is drinking beer at 9.30, but it is Sunday. The weekend cyclists soon appear as I walk towards the Rhine, through a subdued suburbia close to the autobahn. It is a morning of sports, first the teenage footballers in their new kits, ready for grudge matches. The weather is amazing, in the literature of the region that I picked up in Speyer it repeatedly uses the word "Mediterranean" - now I begin to see why. The sun doing its shadow dance with the trees across the river, the fields, the paths I'm walking. My own shadow making me a temporary hero of some Rhine Saga. Taller at least.

It's warm, but the air has something chilled about it, like a good Riesling. September on the Rhine.

The river is majestic now - and I've not yet reached the alleged Romantic Sector, where all the Lorelei action takes place - it's boulevarded by massive trees, neat like a classical garden. The kayaks are out, the power boats, the long-slung barges slink by. Then the cycling parties, dog walkers with great packs of beasts, largely tethered and all well behaved. Fishermen, couple just noodling on the bits of beach. I zig-zag from the walking path to the cycling, changing the angle of these vistas. A woman practicing her dressage on a spotless small course. A horse and buggy come down a glade; it is 1890 and Sherlock Holmes must be in pursuit. Or perhaps he's in Pinewood, working on the sequel.

More heartache as the Turner riverscapes just keep coming; my camera must be getting bored with staring into the sun for those Wagnerian cloud formations. Not so far today, about 15 kilometres, or less. Another woody glade and then a strange sound, one that I recognise but it can't be possible: metallic, montonous, repetitive. Out of the glade and the fields, really a park, open out.

It is.

The Worms Cannibals and warming up for their baseball game with the Cannibal Old Boys. I take a seat behind the pitching frame. Pierro is from Frankentahl, but lives here now. "It's a global game - it's just that nobody knows that. They've been playing baseball in Worms for years." The practice goes on, friends and family turn up. I can't say surreal anymore, but it was unusual.

I turn inland just before the Niebelungen bridge, that can wait for sunrise. In a car park, somewhere south of the centre I ask a middle-aged woman in a shiny Beemer, door open, where is the Zentrum? She shakes her head violently, don't know, don't know. The man beside her closes his wallet.

The diet of Worms on Sunday is ice cream. I guess I have missed lunch. There are hundreds of outdoor tables in the marketplatz and around the DOM hotel. And hundreds of different kinds of gellato. Even the waiters look Italian. As my baseball player was "Pierro" I wonder if there is some kind of Italian community, some Roman connection. Perhaps it is just the Mediterranean climate.

At dusk I drink coffee and hear about a new archaeological find in the past year: an underground bridge, the Volks Brucke. It's seventeenth century.

Valhallah.

Sleep.

The Niebelungen bridge in very early morning, crossing the Rhine, not so far from the Niebelungen Museum, closed today so I book another night, somewhere else (not so keen on last night's place, particularly the thirty or so nineteenth century Chucky dolls in the tiny hotel reception, sitting on all the seats). The Bridge Gate - the Brucketurm - is a big Gothic-style "hello" or "goodbye" to Worms. It's surrounded by a host of highways and paths and autobahns to all parts of Germany. Heavy Goods Vehicles Chunder by, barges slip their way: I like the contrast, the continuity. In fact the bridge gate is not so old, just over a 100 years, but it looks it - sort of Hogwartian, full of tricks. Close by a modern statue celebrating where Hagen threw the Niebelungen treasure into the Rhine long before Joan Rivers. More on this when I have Ein Klue (Museums shut on Monday in Europe).

The new - old - underground bridge is not so far away and is, not so dug yet. Is nascent, a promise of digs to come. At tourist information Sabrina explains that this was built in the early seventeenth century when the Rhine was not controlled, not dammed, and smaller tributaries served the walled city, bringing the food and goods to the marketplatz in small boats. I am getting closer to an idea of Tom's Worms.

Around the city walls, the synagogue, rebuilt in the late 1950s, after wartime destruction, but first here in the eleventh century. A monument to King Leopold; and then another massive multi-figured memorial to Martin Luther, looking pretty good. This is said to be the largest memorial to The Reformation anywhere in Europe. Plenty of tourists take its picture.

It is positively Greek Island Heat at lunchtime and I'm pondering last night's discovery that Worms fights with Trier to claim their position as oldest city in Germany. More of that when the culture re-kicks on Tuesday, plus the Niebelungen Saga, Martin Luther and the 1521 Diet of Worms (they are already advertising the 500th anniversary in 2021).

But, for the first time in ages, I am live. I have, as it were, caught up with myself. So much is unwritten, missing, missed. But I am here, the sun is out as I write and I'm getting tanned. In front of me a pair of middle-aged Loreleis that Lunch have just put away a meat platter about the size of Hampstead Heath, in London. They are both posh thin. There must be something in the wine.

Or the Rhine.

It is September 20, 2010 and the bells of the cathedral have just given us the quick 2 0'Luther.

A short little palimpsest of Speyer

2010-09-20T00:02:00.007+01:00

Ever since I saw and became obsessed with the work of the German conceptual artist, Anselm Kiefer, I've wanted to see - and walk - and, inevitably, photograph, haphazardly, some of the rhineland landscapes that appear to have influenced his monumentalist work.

Kiefer''s art tries to - I think - reclaim a connection, a continuity, with a long, ancient, tradition concerning land that was eviscerated, literally burnt away, by the twentieth century in Germany. All that history that I know I must confront at some time.

In much of his most central work Kiefer uses quotes, ideas, and allusions to, Jewish mysticism, the cabbala - but not that LA-Madonna stuff - that I am discovering has a very strong link to the Rhine towns I am visiting now, here in Speyer and in Worms - not so far away beyond Frankenthal. Here, and separately in medieval Spain, the Jewish mystic tradition evolved in the 11th and 12th centuries; it feels strange as I enter the world of the Niebelung, the Germanic Saga, to be realising this.

Simon Schama, the historian, who I should really just quote every day, but a traveling man has some pride and hopes for originality, wrote of the 2007 Kiefer show in London at the White Cube:

"Much of Kiefer's art represents a resistance to this inhuman virtualisation of memory; its lazy democracy of significance, its translation into weightless impressions. The opposing pole from that alt/delete disposability is to make history obstinately material, laid down in dense, sedimentary deposits that demand patient, rugged excavation. Kiefer's work burrows away at time, and what it exposes also makes visible the painful toil of the dig, skinned knuckles, barked shins and all.

For a German born amid the slaughterhouses of 1945, booting up could never be glibly electronic. Kiefer became famous in the 1970s and 80s for his frontal engagements with the totems of German history: blood- spattered trails befouling the deep Teutonic woods (his name means fir tree) from which the national culture had been proverbially rough-hewn; torch-lit timbered pantheons within which heroes and anti-heroes lay provisionally interred."

Yes.

I think perhaps I have seen some of this land now, and meeting the Roma twice I feel we are still not home, still determined to find scapegoats, to torch land - my mind, dislocated by the travel and the attentiveness to detail not the big picture, still can't understand the Koran-burning fiascos of Florida.

There's a judenhaus here in Speyer, bathhouse remains, restored ruins. I visit on the Friday afternoon of Yom Kippur, atonement. Speyer had a long tradition, a vibrant, integrated community, of jews until around 1540 - unlike many towns that, while tolerant, still placed their jews in ghettos.

I keep thinking about the Roma, on the run from Sarkozy. Walking to the cathedral later a girl passes in a "I 'heart' Roma" t-shirt. She's more Spanish Steps, Armani store on the via Condotti, I suspect - still I read it as a gesture in Anti Sarkozy-Bruni (I think we have to add her, regretfully) polemic.

In the bookshop at the judenhaus there's a small brochure about the jewish mystics of the region. If this diary every becomes a book I will, in Chatwinny/Stewartian prose talk about these men. For the moment their lives are for contemplation back at the British Library.
I spend a few hours in the cathedral, but nothing quite becomes it like first viewing, walking the rhine, church as media, presence, power. It is plain, huge, being restored with vast UNESCO funds; down in the crypts those Emperors that Slyvie talked about yesterday in the dreamy, statue-filled, gardens of Schwetzinger. It really was a sublime pitstop, a wander into a truly other world for an hour. I imagine pageants there, bacchanalian festivals, regal strolling. But it is the Palatinate, and I am stupidly ignorant about it.

Down in the crypts the tombs are like giant loaves of bread, pressed into the walls. Upstairs I sit and consider the Romanesque interior, very plain, arched, austere. I can't help but think of certain mosques I've seen in Istanbul.

There is more that connects us than separates.

There's no phone, no television and no wi-fi in my Catholic hostel. I find a network at Maximillian and read about the Pope and terror arrests in London. (Later the suspects are all released). There is a tepid conversation with loud Russian women, who give me a what's he worth once over: not much they conclude.

--

In Baden-Baden walking to a cafe at around nine one evening I heard the most pitiful sound. From a side street comes the echo, from a building with the terrifying blue neon logo often seen "abroad", away from England, that just reads "pub". The sound is of a male chorus, clearly well on their way, singing in various keys, Carly Simon's "You're So Vain."

I'm remembering that moment now as I go for a late night coffee/red-wine at the Irish bar in Speyer. I don't do this sort of thing. But last night, walking home, it was quiz night at the Irish bar, and one of the answers that boomed out into the courtyard to a question was "Schnitzel." Which brought about large-scale applause. At least it will be German Irish, not Englishmen singing You're So Vain, or indeed Anticipation or Mockingbird. Inside it is pretty quiet. A couple of guys my age standing at the bar, drinking Guinness. I order a red wine. Gunter says: "Why are you drinking red wine in an Irish bar?"

--

"We started in the Library, with champagne. The Oriental Club, just off Oxford street, in Marylebone. And then the food...the wine...Finally, we stand, we say the Loyal Toast, to the Queen! I am 18, in a borrowed morning suit, the first time in London. Me, from Speyer. The wedding [a family friend's son - connected, investment banking....Hong-Kong heiress...] was in St Pauls! I mean people took their video cameras out, they filmed...us."

The following year Gunter met an older, and married, woman...

I loved this story because it touches at so many things: travel, difference, influence, class, marriage, money...the English, but most of all the moments that matter - that change us. I think - I feel - that this story, this spot in time to misuse Wordsworth's idea, changed Gunter's way of seeing the world. He's seen a lot of it now, and like many of us, feels spiritually at home in New York, that confusing brutal melting point where old Europe meets Steel-Canyon Modernity.

Gunter's friend Peter tells me about the Palatinate, the subtle distinctions of "east" and "west" of the Rhine. I listen and learn and sadly forget. Because Peter wants to know about the British Royal Family.

What do you think of them? They're very...expensive.
"But a great tradition," says Gunter.
"Very expensive," I say. I laugh. "Look, did you guys see The Queen?" [It is part of my doctoral thesis, exploring the distance between Peter Morgan's script and some sense of what really happened. And yet The Queen is an Oscar winning movie.]

"Of course," Peter's mantra.

"Well, I don't think it really happened like that." I give a pompous lecture on history, narrative, new media and trust.

"A bit like the English histories of what happened in Ireland?'
- Exactly.
"Absolutely."
"But what do you think of the Royal Family, expensive aren't they?"
Soon we are trying to think of something useful, and inconsequential, for Prince Charles to do.
"Look, they're all useless except for the Queen," I say, "she does her job. But look, I'm a champagne socialist sort of guy, I would say this."
"From Hampstead," says Gunter, who understands these things.

We end, after a lovely chat, tilting at windmills in a bar named Don Quixote. But not for long; in the basement there is frenzied youth and deadly music. Gunter and I agree to meet next year; there's a Clapton concert in London. My round, this time.

There is more that connects us, than separates, I say to Gunter and Peter. Why not?
I like my new red-wine, rhine-side, aphorism. It is perhaps a little Howard's End, but..why not.

After the Farmer's Market with Serious Hangover, and the Pope or God punishing me by hexing the wi-fi in the hostel, and at Maximillians, and by ensuring that when I phone my friends to meet up - via a train - nearby - they are in a shopping mall without mobile reception, I resign myself to a train to Frankenthal. It's about 30 kilometres and I'm not in the mood. By the railway station there's a unicorn [see Facebook for photographs]. My first of the trip.

Frankenthal is a bit belchy. A lot of men on the street with plastic bottles of vodka. A lot of men milling about generally. Don't like the mood, though the town is nice enough to look at. At the family bar it is Ladies Night, which allows Robbie Williams' Angels to be played without postmodern irony.

It's not for me. At the sport's bar I learn that Mainz are top of the Bundes-League. The first time in their history. And I'll be there in a few days.

Still, I suspect, missing super Speyer.

Rolling on a - wrong - river. To Speyer, Spira as was

2010-09-18T21:49:00.002+01:00

Another Heidelberg philosphe weg, my fourth, down to the new bridge, past the Irish bar that Angela said was good, but I don't do Irish bars unless they are in Ireland. Then a joyous pilgrimage down the Neckar river, as instructed by my lovely, old school, hotelier. All dams and fishermen and long shadow silhouettes and turns to see the castle and the wonders of Old Heidelberg. Dramatic clouds.

All wrong of course. Wrong river. You can't, as Goethe wrote, teach ein alt hund neue tricksen. I just will never get this real life GPS thing right; I'm saved by my IPAD - again.
I walk back, meet a bunch of youngsters running the toe-path, then their teacher. I ask him the way. I could walk to meet the Rhine, but that's to Mannheim. No.

What are the kids doing?
Orienteering.
They're better than me.
You'll learn, good luck.

Back through neue Heidelberg, nichts so nice, and then the barnhof and the tourist information. A nice map-paper-based guide. Up past the station, watching a huge caravanserai of Audi cars of a train to Frankfurt. Then a US military base, some autobahn hugging, and then full Americana: Holiday Inn followed by drive through Burger King - where I buy water that comes in a carton, not a bottle. Then the paths open up on wonderful farmlands, and the sun is playing, doing marvellous dramatic things to the clouds, and the pylons and the church spires. I'm happy. The factory meets the fields meets the pylons and the spires - that light. I have those rapturous early Anita Baker songs in my head. Feel wind-blasted and demi-sun-kissed. A dauphin shortly to visit my summer palace.

It will be Schwetzinger for lunch and schloss. But - naturally - I am two hours later than I should be. Late because I necked the Neckar too long. But is worth it, a L'Oreal River.

Tired by Schwetzinger I carb on Carbonara, then walk to the schloss, whose labyrinthine, classically designed gardens are an hour's visual distraction, lovely. An elderly Mannheim couple feeding the aristocratically fat carp. They loved holidaying in Cornwall, in Penzance, in the old days. Live for pleasure, Sylvie says, but in moderation.

You will enjoy Speyer, she says, then quotes some Shakespeare, There is a time in the fortunes of man...You know that there's a story, a myth, that when the Emperors knew they were going to die, they went to Speyer. I don't know how many of them are buried there. How nice to know.

I'm in the Palatinate Emperor's summer residence, very baroque. Nice gig.

Outiside Ketsh, on the home run, Rhine-side, stunning late afternoon landscapes, sun-shadows, the river curving like it did outside Strasbourg, like Richmond, Surrey. Then, suddenly, a large caravan, clothes hanging by every window, a tractor to tow it. A bunch of women picking vegetables, fruit?, from a field. I take a photo.

No photos, no photos. A woman tells a man, he repeats the request. More Roma, more dispossessed. This is terrible, what does Sarkozy think he is doing? He should have married Joan Baez. Another miserable moment.

A few ups and downs, nothing too heavy, a air strip - gliders, oh Thomas Crown, c'est moi.

And then the view down the sun-darkened river to Speyer, four towers; that cathedral. Romanesque. Unesco, world heritage etc. 357 photographs down since Heidelberg.

A pedestrian town, pretty perfect, old town Rathaus and Tower. Canterbury without the students or the choirboys. At the guest house Ingrid is in russet. No nonsense. I complement her on the jacket. "I've had it 20 years. I bring it out for this week of autumn."

Over filet steak for energy I write up my day, and know that it does no justice to its elemental happiness.

Now, what is the bloody Romanesque?

Philosphies of Life

2010-09-18T14:52:00.004+01:00

Lazlo runs a brand new vinyl store in the clubby street; the late night old town, about half a hiccough from my bridge-side Heidelberg hotel. In his stylish shop window there's a copy of the soundtrack to Stanley Donen's European road movie, Two for the Road. Ah, those days when Europe - to catch a thief, pussycat don't look back - was young again, and exciting.

The new Erasmus students, celebrating their pan-European cultural heritage and academic brilliance over cheap cocktails at the Brass Monkey (owner from Nottingham; ex-pat exile-drinkers unfriendly, suspicious of questions) talk party-party nonsense and watch Spain take a thumping from Argentina, live from Buenos Aires thanks to Mr. Murdoch. These kids look younger than policemen, not quite the heirs of Erasmus. Outside a boy and girl, complaining because one year in their supervisor has asked for evidence of work. Happy daze, I guess.

Earlier in lieu of England vs Switzerland - unsurprisingly absent from the plasmas of Heidelberg's finest Gerwurtz-ing Establishments - I watch Germany rip through Azerbijan. 6:1 finally. I do so in a small bar with a pair of sisters. one a sports student, the other a young publisher. They have one of those traveller's tales.

They grew up in Karlsruhe, not so far away, but it never felt like home. As they talk about Karlsruhe it feels as though they left some bad times behind when they moved, independently to Heidelberg. Both studied here. Their father is German; their mother from Brittany in France. Brittany is a kind of home, the parents have moved there finally. Beautiful, different, quiet. But not home-home.

The girls grew up in Buenos Aires, where their father taught German. First lessons were in Argentine Spanish. They still remember.

So where is "home"?

Florent says: "I was walking over the old bridge here, last year, it was cold, and I suddenly thought, this is home, this is where I want to be. It was a great feeling. I'm 24, and I'm home." Boyfriends arrive, a golf-pro with a gamy knee. The German team keeps scoring. Everybody is happy.

They are four: from all parts of Britain, young and my age, two men, two women. Business travellers, but not so that you would notice. We're in Destille, the Last Stop before Bed. They are IT people, work for a company that got bought, last year, by a German Corp. So now they need to upgrade the SAP, or whatever, here in H-berg. They are here a lot. In the modern way they live in different places in England but are connected by the network. One has been on the "tour" of Heidelberg, starts sprouting useful facts, facts I don't know. They are buried now in a Moleskine. Something about the castle, the ....Oasis close down Destille, and for once a mass rendition of Wonderwall seems an affirmation rather than a Dirge. As the cathedral bell strikes two, everyone is "After all, you're my..."

Heidelberg is split up for me by an emergency trip home, as careful readers of my Facebook pages may have spotted. Just five days, but it changes my attentiveness. On the mini-coach out to Frankfurt airport I meet an Iraqi Kurd who, at 44, has lived in many countries, fought a bloody war; survived. He was an art student, then conscripted aged 18, to fight against Iran for eight years. Then smuggled, fake passports, stick on photographs, to Moscow where he worked, but won't say as what, for three years. Then Hungary, Slovenia, Chechnya, Turkey....Lebanon, then finally Germany, a wife, children. A job. Home. "It's better now in north Iraq," he says. "My family is happy."

Back, days later, vibing into the mood. Angela is around my age, she writes about business travel. She woke up this morning in a South African themed hotel, all ostrich eggs and hunting rifles, in the Highlands of Scotland. Her luggage got left somewhere in Edinburgh. Tomorrow she flies to Malta; Monday to Japan. In the 1970s she visited Afghanistan. Everyone did. She studied at Heidelberg, so did her parents, and theirs. It is a family tradition, like taking a boat up the canal to Strasbourg for holidays.

There was an English boyfriend. He lives about fifteen inches from my old 1990s flat in Islington. Of course. For a long time Angela was a literary critic. She tells me about a highly autobiographical novel, just reprinted, by David Lodge, the Catholic-Campus guy that we all read and thought clever in about 1982. It's set in 1950s Heidelberg. (But not electronic yet, so it can wait...) Angela asks about the big novelists; I've grown up with them, the usual suspects, and can't suspend disbelief anymore, the offspring of their second marriages fleck the north London schools I know, pushy parents try and make their sons - those Tristrams - befriend them. And besides Saturday is quite simply the Worst Novel Ever Written.

"You will love Speyer, it's very...mystical," Angela says.

Lazlo is 30, his parents left Pest, well a little town just outside the Pest side of Budapest, in 1985, just as the Perestroikan Years kicked in. It seems a lifetime ago now. He's a musician and his vinyl store is a week old. "If I make enough money to cover my costs and make some music I will be happy." He plays me on ITunes some his moody modern jazz. Nice.

There is money in the rare vinyl biz. Lazlo sells old, cool, obscure, freeform, jazz on vinyl to Japanese buyers. He tells me about Drug Store, an old school men's coffeeshop, oaky and full of chess-playing Magyars.

Janos is pushing - well old. He has his own seat at Drug Store. He left Hungary just after the second world war, in 48, long before the failed revolution. He studied, but never got to work in his field. "I ended up in gastronomy," he says. With a chuckle. I show him the street in which I lived in Pest on my GMapp, app thing. Janos points at Margit island, nearby, where I used to run most, some, mornings. "Ah very beautiful," Janos says. "When I was a boy I went to the therme, the baths. Beautiful."

Across the smoke, yup despite the laws, there are ways around the smoking ban, it all depends on the size of a place and whether there is food cooked, old men open, defend, ponder and endgame. Often with audiences. Chess: never got it, but it looks cool.

Later a Scotsman with a wounded dog, who dates a barmaid here, tells me about his times in Budapest with a bunch of subsidised artists. After the wall came down and everything changed they lost their state salary. So they sued the new government - and won. Won the right to be paid to be artists. The free-market Insead-ers of Basel would not be happy.

And I don't think they're still getting their salaries.

There's jazz on somewhere, a little way out of the old town, almost no distance at all, but most centrists don't know. At nine, the newspaper says. I turn up fashionably late at 9.10 but there's just a guitarist and three guys in wooly jumpers, big bellies, beards. "The singer will be here within an hour," the guitarist says.

"Stay," says a wooly beard, "we brew our own beer."

It is 9.11, and I'm drinking wine in a restaurant opposite the unhappening jazz bar. Trestle tables, lots of them, platter food, big plates. An atrium, a back room full of 200 men talking turkey, in what sounds suspiciously, vaguely, like English.

I smoke, meet a marketing executive for a hedge fund guy, who is, in fact, heavily tattoo'd, I see the legal ones. When she divorced she got an abdominal one which reads, "through the darkness into the light". Saucy. Doesn't it hurt?

Life hurts.

Not just a marketing person, she also owns a couple of bars in Hamburg: one burlesque, one punky 1976, Ramoney Pistolian. I must visit, she says: then back to her bankers. Work, work...

I'm trying to figure out the ciggy machine. Down by the men's toilets. I've got my plastic ziggy card, I've dialled the number, and paid out my Euros. Nichts.

Three men, English speakers. We're all trying. They go get a "native" German speaker. I put in my credit card...Nichts again.

Who are you guys?
American military, sir. (I know, but what kind?)
Ok, what you all doing here?
We're at a conference.
Ok.
Silence
Ok, about what?
Silence.
Come on, who can I tell, I can't even buy a pack of (don't say fags, don't)...cigarettes.
It's about Europe.
(Slightly drunk guy, ominously): And Russia.

Ah. So 200 plus, Spook-sytle, intelligence men and analysts - because these guys don't look like the ones who hide behind bushes in Kabul - are two-day conferencing about Russia? What now? Bomb the spa towns, invade the Sushi bars?

Every morning, four times in total, I philospheweg. I cross the old bridge, climb an abrupt narrow trail, that puffing opens up to areas to "think", look across the river, and "philosophise." There's a circuit, old bridge to new bridge for those with the lungs to climb; other way around for those without. A famous route. Everyone's been at it, Goethe to Weber. Fashionable first in the early 1800s, in fact the Romans did much the same - only the walk was through their vineyards. Can't fail but feel connection to smart people doing this. Read Holderlin on the IPAD up high, contemplating the ruined castle. If I stay long enough, I figure. I'll write the Great European Novel.

Everyone should have a philospheweg.

In Destille three Siberians - one who is uncannily ABBA, despite being 17 - tell me that the Russian money in Baden-Baden in "new". No shit, Sherlockski. Actually, there's a lot of old money there too.

A Californian firegfigher, over - early - for Octoberfest, with many tatts too, wants to argue about mosques in New York. Do my elderly liberal stickt, and despite it being late o'clock he says, "yeah dude, you're right."

An electrician from a small town twenty kilometres away is in Heidelberg for an electrician's conference. In November he's going to New Zealand for three months. "Once in a lifetime thing," he says. "It will be so marvellous. Maybe there will be The Girl."

Going home now, a guy and two girls, trainee teachers, sitting out, wrapping. "Cool town," I say. "Is this it, nothing else tonight?"
"Nothing else."
A guy in a linen jacket, polyester pants, comb-over hair, comes over. "Where's the action?"
He says.
"No action," says the guy.
"Come on,"
"We're talking to Robin, he's fun."
"No, he's scary, I saw him before."

Linen/Polyster man disappears to his Travel Pussy, and I to my Happy Hof Hotel. Speyer in the morning. And mystical things, we hope. Back at the hotel a late night smoke with the night porter, Michael. He comes from a village in East Germany, there's no work there, everyone drinks. He commutes 90 kilometres to do this shift. A nice man.

Somewhere in another country the Pope is talking rubbish about atheists. He needs a philospheweg.

Or a travel pussy.

Heidelberg: philosophy compulsory

2010-09-17T14:07:00.001+01:00

My favourite moment of the Baden-Baden Grayson Perry incident happens without him, back at the Capuchin-Radisson reception desk. An elderly German couple were, they explain, sitting behind me in the Travel Pussy cafe. They want to know, pretty simply - what the hell was all that about?

Neither my German or their English are up to the post-modernish complexities of Grayson Perry's life, art work, persona; the project itself; or Philippa Perry - yes, I keep saying, Grayson's wife. This is a stumbling block.

We use the receptionist, Russian, to translate - even then we are in Scarlett/Bill Murray land, lost in translation.

The photographs of the meeting with the BBC crew, the artist and his wife, are all on Facebook, so sign up if you need to see these, plus a ton of rapturous landscapes. One of the foibles of the IPAD is that it doesn't look as if I can post pix to my blog site, though Facebook is a simple email exercise. Well done Mr. Zuckermann. Sorry about the movie.

For those that haven't seen the pictures the point about Grayson Perry's persona, is that he is dressed in an exotic costume, a woman's dress that's a sort of space-cadet take on Tootsie, and it's all to do with someone called "Clare." There's a lot of iconography going on, but that's for real Freeze art critics, I've got enough on my plate with the catholics and protestants.

Heidelberg looks a bit grim @ the Banhof, then blossoms in a gorgeous triangulation of river, hills, ruins, and old town. It's raining and who cares?

It really has all happened here: Martin Luther, Goethe, Hannah Arendt and the American army (still based in a camp just outside town) have lived in Heidelberg. There's a pedestrianised old main street, with glossy stores and a Foreign-Student Pleasing Starbucks, almost empty. A fine bricked marketplatz and cathedral, a dominating, high on the hill.semi-ruined castle out of the imagination of every gothic novel, and then some. Only it is far older.

As Johann Holderlin wrote, in Heidelberg:

But heavy, hulking into the valley hung
The Fate-Acquainted castle, the vast, all Torn
And battered down to its foundations:
Neverthesless even there the sun now...

Coryat like the place too:

Moreover there are fome that affirmed it i called Heidelberg quasi Adelberg, that is, a noble City, in regard of the nobility, the elegancy, and fweetneffe of the fituation thereof...

I march up to the castle without funicular, the views are stunning, everything triangulates, seems whole. Even the hundreds of camera-friendly umbrella holders, Japanese often. At the arch to the old bridge, fifty metres from my hotel there appears to a continuous Japanese wedding taking place. I think for a moment of Barney and Bjork and their Japanese Whale Ship.

I miss lunch.

It's hard not to feel philosophical here.. Compulsory really. I walk back down windy curved streets and take in the university where Luther defended his revolutionary thesis, and kick-started the Protestant Revolution. And where 400 years later Max Weber invented the Protestant Work Ethic. Then a second hand book store, old boxed set DVDs of Fasbinder, Douglas Sirk, Catherine Deneuve.

I immediately imagine a Jacques Demy movie set here, The Philosophers of Heidelberg. Francois Dorleac as Hannah Arendt, Maybe Delon as Karl Jaspers...People next, I guess.

Grayson Perry and the travel pussy

2010-09-17T09:32:00.001+01:00

It's one part Hugh Hefner to another part Bond this morning, the first time in my life I have spent from waking until late afternoon in a bathrobe. Frustuk in the Capuchin wing of the monastery (those old monks presumably spinning in their graves, perhaps they moved to CERN). High ceilings, last days of Marienbad vibe. I download - buy - Dostoievski, complete works for one pound ninety nine.

It is fantastic to be able to buy and then read the books referenced in a place. In seconds. Perhaps for many the e-book is a modernity too far, but for me - on the road and unable to have a sherpa carry my extensive library - it is perfection.

Dostoievski published The Gamblers in 1866; but reading the novella now on the sun recliner next to the thermal whirligig pool it is as fresh and relevant and contemporary - and as cynical - as an AMC series about Madisson Avenue ad executives.

I whirl and gig in between the duplicitous, tragi-comic chapters. The Gamblers is a pretty savage comic-mode death-job on spa towns. I know, but have no facts, that we British went crazy for German spa in the Victorian Era. I'm pretty sure it was to here, Baden-Baden that William "Vanity Fair" Thackeray brought his chronically depressed wife for - failed - treatment.

Thackeray was the Wayne Rooney of the Victorian Novelists - ballerinas were his WAGs; and he ate like food was going extinct the next day. In one of his travel books, From Cornhill to Grand Cairo, he records a 12 course lunch, more food than I've consumed on this trip.

The Gamblers is located in BB, and thematically at the nexus of money, sex, race, Europe, marriage - and gambling. Funny that the "new" post-Bankruptcy B-Baden, seems so similar.

My poolside companions (inside and out) are leathered and German. They fill out those books of games fur uhr upon uhr. I guess they think I am dull for playing on a computer for hours. But it's digital Dostoievski, so who cares? I start off feeling very white; later very pink.

At five I go back into town, and sit at the cafe which dominates the central crossroads. It's not anything very special except that yesterday in the basement loos I've first seen - shades of Chapman's Homer, Keats lovers - a "travel pussy." In a vending machine that in the UK would be full of condomania, are one kind of condom, one "mini vibrator" and two types of artificial vagina. They are doing the Vagina Monologues in Strasbourg in November, but this vagina monologue appeared more about not having to "speak to the hand." I needed a photograph.

Which is how I get to meet Turner-Prize winning artist, Grayson Perry.

The photographic plan was pretty simple, drink coffee, go for pee, take pix. But then as I am nursing another espresso (up to about eight a day, plus water and wine is my soul liquid intake...) when a slightly prim woman in vaguely punkish spex comes over. I guess because I have been looking over at the outdoor tables near me - where a large group of people dressed for a Hercule Poirot or Jeeves and Wooster shoot are drinking; a couple have wanderweg-ged over to a statue, a funny looking woman. Everyone is speaking English. About a millisecond before Punk Prim asks: "And who are you?" I hear the word "Grayson."

So my reply to the question mutates. I say: "Actually, I am a critic from Freeze magazine."
"Fuck, no!"
"That was a joke. I'm doing this walk..." Philippa Perry relaxes and we move into a long conversation about what's going on - it's a project for the BBC's very own Medici Prince, Alan Yentob. The only man who's nearly killed me at lunch. A long time ago at Kensington Place: I foolishly ate the monk fish, cue green skin, passing out....

Grayson is travelling - as his persona, "Clare" - Bavaria in a customised Harley Davidson bike, with a glass case at the rear where he keeps his teddy bear. The case is miked and camera'd to catch what the locals say. It's all very high-end conceptual meets dressing up day on a particularly bohemian cycling holiday. Philppa has just published a well-received graphic novel, Couch Fiction; a graphic tale of psychotherapy. I promise to read it, though suspect I'll have to wait for print, rather than IPAD download.

I meet the director, who asks about my shoes - he's always had problems. An actress who has just been doing Shakespeare at the Globe; a publisher who wanted to come along. The elderly gentleman and his partner who customised the motorbike and travel with the gang to keep the Harley fine-tuned. Very "Imagine"; very old school BBC, the kind of thing we may have to fight for soon. Lovely, in fact.

We say goodbye and I go back to my Moleskine. Then Grayson comes over and sits with me because he knows how lonely it is travelling alone. He mentions a visit to Japan. He's just ridden the Nürburgring with teddy. We get somehow onto mountains, church bells - how the English invented winter sports. He's a friendly, very clever guy. I wish I knew more about his work.

"In the Swiss mountains, and again, more recently, " I say, "I keep thinking about Casper David -
"- Friedrich," I know, says Grayson. "I was driving the Nürburgring, and it goes pretty high and I was thinking Friedrich..."
"It's funny how it took Romanticism to make people 'like' mountains."
"They finally felt safe, felt safety, I think. The mountains weren't the enemy any more."

I begin to talk about Matthew Barney and the Slaugen show in Basel."
"I have a problem with Matthew Barney -" But we never found out what.

Three London Biker-Geezers have arrived at the table. "I've got ten pounds says you were on 'Have I Got News for You?" a couple of weeks ago."
"Yes I was."
Big grin - tenners all around. "You were good."
"And what are you boys doing here?"
"We're motorbiking Germany."
"I just did the Nürburgring yesterday."
"So did I, what time did you do?"
"Oh, it was slow. Where are you all from?"
"Essex."
"I'm from Chelmsford [also Essex]."

We all get special Victoria Miro Gallery Postcards of the Project. The programme is out next year, 2011 - if the BBC still exists. I tell Philippa about the travel pussy. "We don't need them," she says, we'll all travelling with our fuckees."

Later, winding home to the Capuchin Radisson, I stop at a posh bar in the hope of Russians, instead I meet a handsome local couple, Rainer and Renata (say), and they work as executives in one of the really smart hotels here. They're sharp and fun, and they talk of the long Russian heritage here. Rainer's just back from Argentina, lived in Chicago a long time. He loves the new bands, Hurts, and Delphic, and they're both coming here - yes here - shortly. Better than Deep Purple, or Barclay James Harvest.

A bus stops by our table. A - sizeable - Englishman, young jumps out. "Casino?" he shouts. Twice. Nobody says a word. I stand up and give him instructions - straight, right, look out for, well you'll find it.

"I thought I was back in Bournemouth," Rainer says. Then I work out that the pair come from the hotel where the 2006 English World Cup Wags stayed. "Oh we loved Posh," they say. Funny then, that this morning in a very Baden-Baden/Gamblers everything is for sale kind of way, that one WAG's life, or at least their public personna's life, has unravelled a little.

In the morning I begin to understand the Englishman and the casino. Tom slept rough the next two nights on the way to Heidelberg. I'm not doing that: it's a bitch with the wifi. So I walk to the railway station, a two hour plus feat, far away from the old town, past malls and media centres and more casinos. The railway station has been taken over by England football fans. There is a nasty dark menace to the cafes and - yes bars. Everyone is drinking, it is 10am. The England match is in Basel, across the border. I wonder if these guys might have been turned back on an airplane. I don't speak a word of English, but am so nervous, not speaking, I knock over and break a plastic moulded croissant. The boys just laugh. Two hours later I'm in Heidelberg and experiencing a spectacular time warp. Goodbye Proto Vegas; hello Second Athens.

On the Road Road to Baden-Baden

2010-09-15T12:06:00.001+01:00

I get good karma kudos at breakfast, as word seems to have spread that I'm a crazy English walker, and not an investment banker with IPAD fashion accessory. Over fruity fruhstuk I ask Dieter about the area around Ziebelhof. He doesn't go far, 6 kilometres is far enough - to the supermarket to get food for his guests. He'd like to hunt more, to shoot, but it's busy being a hotelier. A nod from a male and female biker team, good luck.

See you next time, Dieter says. And hey, next time be sensible.

Bring a car.

And I am walking again. Flat, fields of maize; Lichetenau soon enough, a small town, with active Sunday morning services, women priests again, as I'll find in Heidelberg too. Sun determinedly out, and Baden Baden not too far away - perhaps 20 kilometres.

I should say, perhaps, that despite the casual insouciance of these narratives I am a bad walker: I get lost all the time. Were it not for the compass cum travel guide that is my IPAD, I would by now be close to the Andes. I am really trying to re-invent myself as an accomplished walker, and I can do the distance, and the hills, but whatever nomadic DNA trace that remains has been systematically eradicated by the socialisation processes of my past 51 years.

I can't use the sun; I have no in-built radar; or even sense of direction. I do - now as a matter of course - ask the way every time I see someone. The problem is that many of these people also have lost the "walkers" perspective. Later, sweaty and very grouchy, I ask a couple how far to Baden Baden. They say 2 kilometres. In the end I walked 18 kilometres further...Not their fault, but an idea of how distance and our sense of it, has mutated. In cities and towns I am getting a feel for the subtle shifts of meaning and mood; even just a hint of Tom's time - and by this I mean beyond the recognition of buildings present in 1608, I mean the dynamic of church, bell, marketplace, river - media.

Re: grouchy. I haven't written about this before but travelling alone does encourage talking to oneself, particularly as the day passes by and tiredness is kicking in and the destination still seems miles away. I have a sort of pornographic/offensive/guttural/ vocabulary, the viler the better to ameliorate the paucity of signs, or the bad advice I've been given, or just the horribleness of walking on the autobahn, which I've had to do again today for a while. I won't give any examples, wanting to not be banned from blogging, but the screamed oaths are very satisfying.

Yes, lost again today. Wimbush City Limits. But no Ike and Tina. Oh Lord I know I have often lost my way in the Journey of Life, but get me back on fucking track. The Beemers pass at 160 kilometres an hour, the Beemers and Mercs and Porschsters...and I'm gingerly edging the tall grass alongside, wondering when I will see a sign for cyclists or walkers. When the sign won't say: Frankfurt 200 kilometres.

The first chills of autumn this afternoon, a little bite to the air. In successive conversations in what I believe to be the hinterlands of Baden-Baden I am told 2k, 2-4k, 5-7k, then 10k. Ten minutes, thirty.

I was three hours and 18 kilometres away still. When I leave Baden-Baden by rail, Tommy sleeping rough for two days before Heidelberg, it takes me three hours to walk, then find, the station - from the old town. Baden-Baden IS Los Angeles.

Crossed with Las Vegas. Or rather Saratoga Springs circa 1955 - when Ian Fleming visited (read Live and Let Die...).

There isn't a sign that says Baden-Baden ever on my walk there. I encircle, suburb, cut-through, turn back. Find a park - even the Rhine. But old Baden-Baden?

I really do stagger into town, Brokeback Digerati. I walk straight into the first hotel I see, a Radisson, far more upmarket than anything I've stayed in before. It is remarkably cheap, given that it has the full monty of thermal whiizzy whirligig stuff. And it was a Capuchin monastery in 1608...oh bingo. It is huge and fin de siecle-ly. I sleep, then go to buy some swimming trunks for the whirlpool thingy. The only ones in the hotel shop are 85 euros. And it is Sunday. I can wait.

Opposite the casino in the showy-off park, a temporary stage. It is the last night of the racing meet, and as the spring meet was cancelled because of bankruptcy, the town is happy. A band called - oh something grim, actually it is Groovin' Affairs - are knocking out Relight My Fire, Sweet Dreams, Tina/Celene, 80s....80s....80s...

The audience is my age, my people, only with less preposterous haircuts. They fist pump and sing and remember when they were young. A daughter carries out her drunk Russian mom at about 9.40. The curse of casino towns, I guess. I saw this before in Bad Ragatz.

Porsches and Ferraris are not unknown here. And there is a sense, only heightened tomorrow when I'll read Dostoievski's The Gambler, set here, that everything - everything - is for sale.

The local brothels take out page adverts in the local tourist literature, here at the Villa d'Fellatio we offer...blah blah. Very blatant, very part of the package. My hotel is part of the Royal Spas of Europe.

And Wayne Rooney has, my IPAD tells, just got caught in the Manchester version of the Villa d'Fellatio.

Now there is a surprise. The bar in the casino, recommended by my hotel, is probably the best example of 1970s sauna chic seen this side of a white flared-jean Belmondo policier. It is truly the grimmest place on earth. I last 3.6 seconds and retire to a MacDonalds for coffee.

It is the only revolutionary act I can think of. Tomorrow: more Russians, Grayson Perry - yay - and tales of the Wags circa 2006....

Into Germany, leaving the Alsatians

2010-09-14T17:27:00.001+01:00

The walking out of Strasbourg dismantles the theories of "tiny" spatial differences somewhat, but only because I can't knock on doors and check out the Biedermanns in their many forms in the massive mansion blocks. But, things change again long before I've left the old town canals. There's the "plage" boat cafe disco things that complement the canal cruises I've stayed well clear of.

The University, loving it's students, proclaims a large poster. Big wide Haussmann streets, shops not so frequent, shiny cars; then the Council of Europe and all those flags, quiet today, Saturday. Warm too. I zig through the Orangerie, pass the roller skaters and couples and boaters, and a lakeside cafe with a battalion of purple pool tables, as though in wait of the artist now known as Prince again

The other side of the park; suburbia, a turn and I am on the canal - well the Rhine, actually. Houseboats, swans, powerboats, and the inkling of heavy industry. A few wrong turnings and I'm peeing under a bridge at a dead end, a hidden spot, with a large Che graffiti and half a dozen beer cans.

Scramble back, and the industry starts riverside. Large wide low barges. A tow path for bikers. But first a long stretch of Berlin-style Checkpoint Charley wasteland - it is the route - that I walk in the sun alone. The Spy Who Came in from the Hot.

To my left a park with huge warnings about toxic waste and nuclear power, so maybe not. Then the walk. Five hours, straight. By the river, jealous of the power boats; even the container barges. The cyclists pass in singles, pairs and groups. I smile at each. But five hours later I am very tired, and Lichtenau, my destination, seems hours away yet. At one of those border restaurants (with added tourist office) I slump to be entertained by a waiter who speaks about a hundred languages. The tourist office says that Lichtenau is out of her jurisdiction, and books me into Ziegelhof - still Germany. Only two hours walk, she says - though she phones to warn the hotel I'll be, er, late.

Across the river; an autobahn, and a pit stop at a petrol station for ice-tea and chocolate reserves for later. Lost path, lost river. IPAD says go sort of 45 degrees. I ask: down there, past the lake and then the side of the village. Easy after that.

Long shadows now, and a punishing day already. I walk past a cement factory, and then the lake. The cars above are crashing past at German speeds. Into a small forest. A picnic, 20 people.

It isn't a picnic. It is three of four sets of Roma families, cooking rough. Out in the wild. They don't look at me, don't acknowledge. It is like a scene from a war; a scene of exile. I wonder if they have come over from France because of the French government laws. I feel terrible.

I take the village cut though. Past the factory with the long low wire fences. At about 6.30 as the sun is beginning to set and the shadows grow ever longer I turn to see two alsatian dogs, one black, one white, running at me from 200 metres. I genuinely think I am going to die. In a somewhat pathetic manner I cower.

They don't jump. Just go insane about four feet from me.

I turn around and walk through the village, and then another; fields playing Van Gogh tricks; Kiefer tricks. Rain. Lost. IPAD not helpful. Great sunset, another village, but not Ziebelhof. Nobody's heard of it.

A village, deserted, dead. And at its centre, The Pussy Cat Strip Club. Last used 450 millennia ago, it seems. Out of the mists along a track a 15 year old girl on roller skates. Ziebelhof, I say. Never heard of it. I'll go look.

She zooms off, a vision of wonder. Twenty heavy minutes later she returns. I've found it, keep going, not so far, stay to the road.

And with a sweet smile she is gone. The Gods have smiled on me for liking roller skaters, ever since early Switzerland. The visions have been wonderful today; the industry lurking just outside Strasbourg, Basel-esquely. The long stretches of river, very like, only far longer, that stretch of the Thames at Richmond which Turner and Wordsworth loved. I wonder if Tom, who knew that part of the Thames what with one John Dee or King or Queen or Prince - or another, thought the same thing. There's no doubting that we talked, Tom and I, for a minute during that part of the walk.

Dark now and Ziebelhof, five miles (now the signs tell me) from Lichtenau, where Tom stayed. The town is actually a motel, and two houses. Inside the motel there's a bunch of domestic bikers having dinner. Dieter, the owner, is an ex East German policeman, 28 years. "And then I had to start working," he says. He loves my IPAD; shows me his IPhone apps - the favourite? An app for streaming country music.

German country music from the 1970s.

What about the Pussy Cat Club? I ask Dieter. Ach, closed forever.
"Open, in fact," says a man who lives two weeks a month here, doing something with the electricity. "Even the coffee starts at 8 Euros."

I turn on the television and doze over wifi. Then some channel launches Help, by The Beatles. In German. I burst uncontrollably into tears. Then, in the post-modern way, post this fact on Facebook.

In the morning Dieter tells me about the "community". But that really is for tomorrow's walk; and my first real full day with German signage. Or indeed, its absence.

On Marrying Elvis Presley

2010-09-14T15:02:00.002+01:00

There's a courtyard view from my hotel room; not looking towards the cathedral but away to another space I've not been. Leaving by the front entrance is a confrontational experience, fighting the many who sit in the cafes and restaurants, those fleeing the cathedral, the lost, the hawkers with head-umbrellas: they cluster. And eat cheese. Buy hats.

But here from my window is an almost empty courtyard below. In fact, as I GPS, it's in between the cathedral square and the street I've temporarily named rue de Aldolfo Domingez, as his fashion is sold there, Hermes is just up that street. It is in fact the Rue de Veil L'hopital.

I wind to the courtyard, and find a brasserie. The customers are different, local, tied up with reading the local paper, or a book, gossiping about something. We are twenty metres from the storming of the Cathedral and we could be in another country. It is a Friday; school's out by lunchtime and there are lots of kids smooching canal side, hanging outside the school gates. But here is contentment, of the local kind.

It is a very different mood in term time; I assume this only increases when the undergraduates, Erasmuses (more on them later), and politicians return for duty. At each turn away the alleys and streets and boulevards - but mostly the alleys - bring a new and more variegated community. The longer I travel the easier, perhaps, to sense difference. We are certainly, if temporarily, back in France. Though Strasbourg is "particularly" French, in the same way that Rennes and Cassis are particular. There is a sense of hermetic openness. Roman once, of course. Alsace now, more than most.

It seems, thus, ironic, that next week the Strasbourg parliament will debate, with vigour, the position of the French government in relation to its "Roma". The newspapers here - and all over the world - are full of the story. The sniff of exile, of the Rhine trail, of Guttenberg, who worked here, is all about. What is absent is the sense of the political; the people who make Human Rights Law. Who fight governments over Roma deportations. "They all live in the big apartments around the Orangerie," Jim - or Jules - said last night. "You don't see them." And it is true that the old part of town, which can seem many things, never feels like Brussels sur mer; or Westminster. Because it is Friday, perhaps, the shops and every cafe and bar hum from midday, at the centre, at the periphery, along the canals and tucked away in courtyards. Hum with locality. Not tourism.

There is a lot of middle aged snogging - tongues and all. This seems quite strange to an Englander. Especially at my hideaway local brasserie where a couple not so much younger than me, let's say maximum ten years, are nipple-tweaking and tongue-wrestling over a couple of espressos. This doesn't happen in the Columbus Circle Starbucks. My protestant puritanism, had I got any, would be shaken.

Later I ask the actresses about this. Binoche 1 says: "If you have it, you flaunt it, it's common here." What I'm - distantly - getting closer to is a sense of the smallness that cities once possessed, not exactly the smallness of Tom's Strasbourg, but the idea of the feet - metres - that change the social construction of "place". Interesting as I think back to those amazing north Italian towns, the Cremonas and Mantuas of the first trip, that I didn't think in this way: I thought about towns as entities, with commonalities. Now I begin to think about multiple entities with overlapping communities. This may be wrong; but no wronger, I suspect than the the lazy Baslers are different from Zurich people discussions of a few nights ago. I eat well for lunch, cordon bleu veal: tomorrow and the next day are country walking towards Baden Baden, and I don't know what to expect. France to Germany too...

At the roof top cafe of the modern art gallery I am feeling a little underwhelmed, though the nineteenth century landscapes I've seen, betwixt a bunch of sculptural installations that revealed not much, make sense. In fact I've found my entire art aesthetic, other than Barney, growing old and non-Italianate, northern in fact. There is plenty of torture and pain in the cathedral museum. It does increasingly make sense.

The wide shopping boulevards, pedestrian normally, do have a transcendent blandness, but where do they not? It is the average cafes and bars you judge, by attempting a kind of process that absents first rich tourists, then other tourists, bikers-by, then...well, whoever else doesn't seem appropriate. I'm trying a kind of unrecognizing. I think about Jim last night, his returning to the scenes of a broken love affair, trying to ignite a new one. As though, what? As though it is geography that creates the right environment. I think too of Barney's show, the "lines of restraint" he feels are embeddied and embodied in us all.

I met a black kid last night somewhere between Il Cherche Tourjours and Jules et Jim's Most Horrible Date. He had the most fantastic English accent, somewhere between a BBC newscaster and, say, the mottled mockney of Tony Balir. He looks like a young Hendrix and rides a mountain bike. He's started speaking because he heard me, and he "loves speaking English."

Where did you live in England? I ask, expecting a narrative of embassies and fee-paying schools and bitter nights on the training field. Instead: "I was just talking to English people, online, voice-chat, when I was gaming. Such a cool accent. No, not World of Warcraft, but Counterstrike." He's a musician too, but "it's really hard to be a professional musician these days." Later it becomes clear he's studying at the most prestigious place - well I think it was Environmental science and how to save the world, or something similar. He looks like he might.

It's mid afternoon, I've trekked my culture, and realised that the first leg, three years ago, in which I covered everything each city or town had created, was a Tom Trip in my pursuit of the constructed, which took me over kilometres of urban spaces but often left me exhausted for the "walks" and so these were often "augmented" by - no cars - transport, was a very different affair. Now I've walked as much as Tom, for two weeks, and he, despite his five week break in Venice (come on, he must have been a spy), was really pounding it out and doing his churchgoing - and in the intellectual centres, having the conversations. We've lost a little of curiosity stamina, I think.

This morning my hotel front-desk Penelope has written me an Odyssean list of cafes and bars that locals use. BTW only in France could the monthly glossy travel magazine be named Odysse. So I've checked out a coffee shop, and the old Irish bar, but it was blazer-heavy even if only metaphorically. I'm double-expresso-ing at the Bar Exile, on Rue de L'Air and I'm thinking, not nodal like the behemoths of Petty France, or the Cafe Broglie; the machines of the Cathedral square. Yet it is local.

Later still, but early enough, Jeannette et les Cycleux. I almost missed it. This is a cafe right opposite Le Cloche au Fromage where we've eaten cheese in spectacular lunches, I mean spectacular. This is a city of cycles and limos, I write. Because fifteen feet from Le Cloche, Jeanette's is another canton - with everything that this means. Unless you miss it, and its meaning. Which is easy to do. Here pearls and neck-tatts, crown-jewel fingers and harem pants all sit happily. I am beginning to see in other ways, perhaps.

I'm talking to one of chefs, who has just finished for the day. She's telling me about the local products she's sourced for the charcuterie, and about the Alsace bio-tech valley, from here to Basel is like a biological Silicon valley. She's helping to shape ideas about Alsace in relation to France, and German; suggesting the traditions and the laws are different from both. Her boyfriend, who will appear soon, is metis, mixed raced. A man, a DJ, from the Caribbean, French father, Caribbean mother. He wants to talk string and big bang and a new unifying theory called "E8" - I still haven't looked it up. "The spirit is different when it is white fathers, black mothers; rather than the other way around..." Mahta says, the tiny differences that mean a lot.

In Germany it will be easier to meet people Mahta says, "image is not so important." She's stopped going skiing - it is far too dangerous, I'd rather walk the mountains. And Florian just didn't get the snow ski climb thing.

I've learnt in Chur that, of course the English invented all that alpine adventure stuff in the nineteenth century, but that's another story. Although one that tells an interesting story about us - English - and our confused relationship to the Alps; to Germany too. Not so long ago it was a favoured tourist destination.

Mahta's father, a Swiss, loves the ritual of the ski.

Rosalind sits down and asks about media jobs in London. I am trying to work out why. In fact her story is the story of travel and love. She was in New York a while back, on her own. There was a boy in a (famous) book shop, the (ah ha) section. She saw; two days later they kissed; two more no need for the Harry/Sally Thesis...and then she must come home, on Thursday. That day Eyjafjallajökull went up in Iceland. Thus: two more weeks in Brooklyn....Now they are moving to London...

Rosalind tells the story of the cafe's name. In Alsace in the 1960s when boys didn't have cars, they had motorbikes, then as now, there was always The Girl. To try and impress her they would buff and customise their machines, so that in the coffee bar, the cafe, The Girl would notice. They would be The One. Except for one thing: The Girl is in love with Elvis Presley, and wants to move to America. (There was, I feel, a similar mythos around Julie Christie's character in Billy Liar. And didn't she end up on the train to London...)

Thus, the iconography of the rooms inside, bikes half embedded in the walls, photo images of French girls in cowboy shirts. It's very fine. "And that," I ask Rosalind, "is the story of Alsace girls in the 1960s?"

"No, that's the story of France now."

Mahta asks me to remember that the Swiss are famous for mercenary armies; the Swiss guard at the Vatican...but I can't now remember why. Also the toleration that allowed for Dominicans, and Jews to settle. (I note that I must check my history here; though later walking through the newer town closer to the EU buildings on a Friday night, I see a lot of Jewish families on their way to a sabbath service, or a Shabbas dinner).

Mahta and Florian are laid-back; bereft of the anxiety that can surround some here, those that critique the il cherche tourjours mentality. Those that get over-Proustian and weepy in old bars. There's a conversation going on behind me in English, though none of participants are English, it ranges over albums, tracks, computer games, festivals, arenas, DVDs.

When I was a teenager, travelling europe, the lingua-franca was the cod conversation about liking Pink Floyd; twenty five years later in Eastern Europe this had evolved to Radiohead. I wondered if I was in the midst of one of this meme's new pan-European moments. But when their dates, The Binoches, arrive I suspect I've stumbled onto a Jean Luc Godard casting, circa 1962. The roll-up cigarettes, the leather, the conversations about Moliere, Marivaux; learning about the word beuark. The hard years in the conservatoire, making it or not as an actress; the curiously interlinked world of the three French film production companies that get grants from the French government. Beart's botox - she now looks like a duck (there are other allegations, but the English laws of libel, even online).... The Cigogne, the Bird of Alsace, "if you don't see one flying just go to the tourist shops and ask to see a plate. The drink of the evening: rose pamplemousse. A local speciality.

A Strasbourg girl with a perfect English accent, who's dating the bass player of a local band - more Hives than Strokes, very Arktik Munkee - that just toured the Baltics, and also did a gig in the Hawley Arms in London, maybe. but certainly after a Chinese punk act that all wore dresses, starts talking to me about translation. She looks like a young Wuthering Heights Kate Bush. "But I don't av the ears," she says.I mean perfect Nrf lundon. Where were you born?

Here.

The accent is amazing.

I met an old Etonian on my Erasmus year in Berlin. His family had the whole thing, the "cottage" next to the main house, the chapel, the Porsche in the drive but no money, the strict no-tears rule when the dog died. They hated me, obviously. 'He' asked to delete me from his Facebook friends recently, because "he didn't like reading French in his news feed." The Binoches are rehearsing for a play, Sunday. Fables, Marivaux...will be fun. Binoche 1 played a punk on TV; Binoche 2 has done a film and dates a harpist, Binoche 3 is going to Brussels to study Arts Administration.

And then the casting is over. The lights are killed. The cathedral is still there. And in about six hours I have to walk into Germany, to Lichtenau - which is currently foxing the GMApp on the IPAD.

I'll get there. I'm just not sure how to edit tonight's movie to make it look like Band a Part.

Strasbourg (1) The Spaces in Between

2010-09-12T21:18:00.002+01:00

It's warm in Strasbourg, the last days of real summer. Around the cathedral square and along the canals of the old city an influx of visitors are consuming. Wine, cheese, culture. More cheese. The flow around the cathedral is relentless, bus tours stop over for headphone commentary reconnaissances. Leather Road Warriors, bikers on their way from or to Milan or Paris, devil may care alpine crossings, pull over, turn off their machines and take a beer while they, at least look at, the amazing cathedral facade. Like a steep, sheer, giant Hindu carving, a supra-elaborate series of narratives.

The facade is stories, media. At 10 in the evening there is a crappy Queen-Concert light show; one might expect Brian May to pop up at the Quasimodo level and windmill arm a power chord. But, even so, the nooks and crannies are fill of tales.

I'm staying in the old town, right on the square. For some reason, perhaps it is the daily stampede around these streets, its easy to get a room. It may be different next week, when the politicians are back with their caravanserai of lobbyists and webmeisters and 'friends'. Who knows? I was here very recently with Portia: we ate the fine food, and made wine-tasting trips to Colmar, not so far away down the Alsace road. We hung in the French Quarter, relaxed on the roof-top cafe at the Modern Art Museum, the Musée d'Art Moderne et Contemporain de Strasbourg, played backgammon all over town, and generally had one of those adult - kids with their dad - kind of holidays.

This time it was the same, but different. I know to visit the cathedral early; to avoid the presentation about the Strasbourg astronomical clock in the Cathédrale Notre-Dame, I know to miss the tour-party dinner places; to not worry about exploring the arena around the EU. Tom was old town - my mantra - so I stay there, and wander there. Last time we got lost often in Strasbourg and I wasn't sure why. I wanted to know.

My thesis now is that we hadn't grasped the scale of the old town; by which I don't mean the considerable size, or the constant closeness to a canal, but to what - I am forced to call in a Rory Stewart echo - the Spaces in Between. Leaving the cathedral square north, south, east and west reveals almost different countries: if you are looking carefully. Different countries, that is, of experience.

It is in Strasbourg that I begin to appreciate the fine detail of distance, not just in the grand architectural lines of the cathedral, the ringing effect of the canals; the spectre of "otherness" somewhere close on the big boulevards that lead to the EU buildings, but in something else. The detail of social distance. In the same way that Basel and Barney helped me to, in a small way, take the Kunsthaus out of the art I consumed, so here I began to try and imagine the grand, but small, town Tom visited. He loved the clock, obviously: the cathedral was a tourist attraction long before his visit. I'll write about the clock and "time" separately, later, for now just in passing.

The social distance then, and in fact now, between the cathedral square, and the next, and the French quarter - not really five minutes away, is important. Cities as villages, and globalised in their way, then and now. The cathedral I must escape, because it dominates, an Eiffel of its time - the tallest spires in the "world", until Cologne cathedral's grand scheme was completed, finally, in the nineteenth century.

Inside, first, and the famous astrological clock. Impossible, in my era of GPS'd IPAD to imagine the impact of a machine that combines world times with a figurine march-past of symbols, overlooked by death. It is very different, this "northern" worldview.

So many media, then. The arrivals, and city gates; the central square and the imposing, competitive, spires. Bells, the higher the longer they echo; the sun overhead. High above Heidelberg in a few days time, walking my "philosopheweg" for the third time, following not Tom, but Goethe, Schelling, and maybe even Hanah Arendt's footsteps, I listen to the cathedral bells echoing down the Rhine valley, travelling as far - well, as far as "safety."

I try and imagine Strasbourg cathedral's media reach. When there was no new town; no court of Human Rights; and no hinterland.

Today every cafe and bar is full, noisy with transience. From the cafes to the north of the cathedral to the Irish pubs near the University, to the Django-jazz bars of the French quarter.

I am at the Beer Academy, on the edges of the "French" part of town. We are, I should remind us, "in" France, though this is, as the history museum so brilliantly and practically demonstrates (models of the armour from 1600 to wear, pull-out drawers with posters, explanations of "Argentina" - the Romans' name for Strasbourg, it being the tax collecting centre) a city with a complex paternity. I'm in the beer academy because it is slightly off kilter from the Django bars, and it is opposite a tattoo parlour, and I am - since Chur, and particularly since the revelations of both Barney and the "tortured" art of Basel, somewhat obsessed with both the "mark" and with "pain".

I sit and write for hours in the Moleskine, a new one, dutifully found in what appears to be a religious bookshop (I didn't ask). It's quite late now, still writing, Go outside for a ciggy. when I return the table in front of me, we're in small pew style seating, is amused. I start writing again. The relation of here to Basel, the French thing. the Jewish tradition. The hermeneutics of the amazing cathedral. I am in Alsace, that's the thing; betwixt in the real sense.

"Il cherche," says one of the boozed guys in front of me.
"Il cherche, tourjours," says another, surlier guy. Boozed up aussi. Boy Laughing, a la Anglais.

I think about this for a moment, and don't like my moment. "Yes indeed," I say, my first words to the table in front of me. "I do cherche tourjours. It makes life interesting."

There is an uneasy silence. Boozy Guys move into a more aggressive mode. We are, as usual, saved by a woman, the woman at their table. She translates, I explain about Tom, the walk, etc.

""Keep searching," I say as I leave for, almost, home. I'm not sure if the message got through.

So it is 3am in the morning and I am acting as a kind of marriage guidance counsellor to a young, handsome, Strasbourg couple, if we accept the slight detour from the Truffaut original, lets call the girl Jules and the boy Jim. I know...

They look the perfect couple, young, talking happily, together at 3am without seeming like a late night conjunction, fluent. We're outside, they approach. "We have a question for you," the boy says, let's call him Jim.

"Can a man and a woman have a friendship, be friends, without sex? Without them at least wanting to have sex with each other?"

Ah. The much discussed Crystal-Ryan Doctoral Thesis from 1989. When, er, Harry faire la connaissance de Sally. Hope that is vaguely right.

Well of course, I say. I ask about this late night dive, who's here, why it has the kinds of people it does...the usual, all bars of this kind have their rationale. Jules smiles broadly at my reply; Jim is not so happy. I think we understand the - universal - situation. I explain why I am here, my walk, the search for whatever it is, "Europe" I suppose. The old Europe I knew and this new hybrid. I tell Jules et Jim about "Il cherche tourjours." I'm rather pleased with it, an epithet suitable to sit alongside my own current tombstone request: Quick Wit, Slow Fuck (but in Latin, of course, so as no sensibilities could possibly be upset). Jules laughs; Jim says: I think I can explain what they were really saying.

Ah.

The young man is saying you are a homo-sesschual (there is a long phlegmy, squelchy emphasis on the middle syllable that somehow reminds me of the name, Aschenbach, and thus ashtrays, in Death in Venice - I tell neither Jules nor Jim). I see, how interesting. Later I explain Beat's idea about finding the uber bar and watching the world go by, I explain that I've been doing that in Strasbourg.

Like where? says Jim. I quote Beat, Paris. I suggest the Marais, where people watching is fabulous.
"Famously homo-sesschual," says Jim. I'm getting bored now.

We walk back to the cathedral square without Jules, she's gone home (naturally). I hear the stories about the breakdown, the Proustian moments in the bar we've been in, where Jim cried because his last affair failed, and Jules saw, thus emasculating Jim. The switch from his academic career to being a baker; then back. Jim looks at the illuminated facade of the cathedral. I could tell stories about this for days, he says.

I'm not keen to listen now. In the spaces in between I've heard plenty of Strasbourg stories tonight.

Old school.

Diccon Blues

2010-09-08T21:56:00.002+01:00

I've done my share of American/English bookshops around the world, from Buenos Aires to Cairo to Budapest. Yeah, I know. It is fair to say that they tend to have a particular vibe to them, particularly at book launches. And especially when the author is a local, ex-pat. I remember with such great affection when my friend Olen Steinhauer made his first Budapest reading (the first, great, novel, The Confession) in Bestsellers, down the road from my flat in Pest. Check it out here: http://www.bestsellers.hu/.

Local expat "success" is not always warmly met, though in Olen's case - of course, he is far too nice. But sometimes....it shifts hierarchies, and power-relations, and, er, pulling power.

Tonight at the Bergli bookshop, in the old part of Basel Diccon Bewes is reading from his new book, Swiss Watching. He's a gay Englishman, from Hampshire, a travel writer who moved to Berne to be with his partner, they have in-laws now, he says. He too works in a bookshop. He's a thin, gentle guy, and his reading is playful, nice, lite. We laugh along. He's learnt German, doesn't want to be the kind of ex-pat who can't read the newspapers, or be "in" on the national debates. I like him, immediately.

I haven't read Swiss Watching - but I promise I will - but feel certain that it is full of nice, fine, detail. A break with the stereotype of Switzerland, without - say - the crushing brutality of P.J O'- what was his last, whatever happened to American foreign policy, name. God, it was a strange decade.

But of course I'm not only here for the Swiss Watching. I am here also to see who is watching, Swiss Watching.

There are maybe 40 of us. There is wine and there is nibbles. I find a nook at the back, sit down, look around, and start writing. Semiotic Heaven.

After about five minutes a young groomed and partnered woman (he is pink Lacoste T, chinos, loafers no socks, fuck-off watch and tan) leans towards me.

"Will you be doing that all night?"
"What?"
"That...writing. It makes a horrible noise." A gesture that suggests I torture cats slowly.
Aggressive: "Yes, I will be doing that. All night."
A bouffe, not a good French Actress bouffe, a surly, sulky, I didn't go to finishing school to sit next to people like you, bouffe.

I keep writing.

"Can't you move?" says Pink Lacoste. All: I have an MBA, you are an arts graduate, hustle. The bookshop is full now, Diccon has pulling power. PL moves his chair ostentatiously, parking himself next to a table display. "Come here," he says to sulky. "And he smells."

I smile politely. I probably do smell; but not of the stench of entitlement.

Later I ask Diccon about the impact of foreigners, immigrants to Switzerland. I am thinking about the Dutch, Danish, English, German Pussy Galores and their husbands that I've met in Baden with Norbert.

"Look," says Diccon. "Every country needs its street cleaners, even Switzerland." I say, perhaps not without a hint of gentle irony, the Diccon mode, that "I was thinking of Erasmus." There will be more on Erasmus students later...

Later this evening: another Lacoste Man, an Egyptian looking Swiss, "Yes, I know, but I am a Swiss," in an accent straight out of Lloyd Grossman's jowl'ed English. He wants to start a debate about Baslers versus Zurich people. A wall descends, I switch off. In a minute or two I get to thank Diccon, promise, promise, to read his book, and leave.

It's not the writers, it's the readers.

I've been trying to arrange a boat to Strasbourg - like Tom - but the cruises only go to Rheinfelden. I drink red wine and natter to strangers in the Kunstmuseum courtyard.

In the cavern-frustuck morning an efficient English Rose PR is preparing an American pharmaceutical client, a burnished and nasal-clipped rather confident man of high personal opinion. "I've given you a slide to talk to," she says.

When I leave he's discussing the Presentation to the Directorate. The DG, EU take.

I so hope he's found a cure for cancer.

Tomorrow that fabulous clock in Strasbourg.

Basel: the joy of dances with death

2010-09-08T12:58:00.001+01:00

For my research work at UCL I've been reading this year a lot of late sixteenth and early seventeenth century religious texts, protestant and catholic. This is post-reformation media, as it were. It looks to justify, frighten, unify, inspire, confirm or explain. Much is highly intellectual; some is pure propaganda.

And there are the illustrations. In very general terms, for this is a blog entry written on the caffeine-heavy hoof, not a footnoted research paper, the florid religious art of the Italian part of Tom's trip is not what we're talking about; this art speaks to the harsher, increasingly realistic imagery - of pain, death, martyrdom, evisceration. Revenge and punishment.

Divine.

Suddenly this kind of art is everywhere; in Basel it's part of the cultural landscape. I have dropped myself into the dark recesses of the "northern" imagination. This afternoon I will see one of the more remarkable (visceral) art installations of my life. By a contemporary artist whose work I know, who, through a brilliant collaboration with a New York based curator, has produced a show that illuminates not only his work, but also these bloody post- and pre- Reformation images. It is the imaginative landscape that can give us Lear or Bosch. And even today, in an era of SAW 9, or whatever, both the new and old art seem truly shocking.

But first the cathedral. First-first the frustuck, in a cavern with a better brand of suit than I've seen to date, and thus a tiny more froideur in the "good mornings". I wander the stairs of the Rathaus, then cross the Rhine to coffee on the far bank in order to get a little perspective in the landscapes of Basel. Where the spires sit with the map, the GMAP app, the basic old town. There's a steep, narrow road, first turn on the left, back on my bank, close to the market square and the Rathaus. It climbs: and each building is taking me back towards Tom, the dates are early, some of these buildings were already well established when Tom came through. This is a Rhine-side ascent towards a famous cathedral where it's not impossible to say some of the fault-lines of Western Europe collide. One building is now a bookshop, or publishers, with less is more editions of proper big intellectual books, those of Jean Bodin, Cervantes, Kafka...The next building is a very posh dildo store, with elegant glass models, or carved wooden with Dutch-cheese holes.

The Basel Munster started catholic, but was at the very centre of the protestant movements that follow Luther, Zwingli and the reformers who believed the catholic church had come a long and the wrong way from the church of Christ. They went back to The Word - and the images in the churches suffered. But there were other images, those of the pain, often almost sadomasochistic, inherent in belief. it's just a more cruel world. I stress this is not the academic take, just that of a visitor: I sit for a long time in the Munster, not really doing anything but trying to unlearn. I don't and can't share Tom's passion for tombstones, so instead I savour the sense of quiet. I know that in Strasbourg, another famous cathedral city, the cathedral mood is a cross between The Ministry of Sound Nightclub, and - at night - a Queen concert. So, here, before the crowds arrive, I'm happy to just sit. Outside in the square the boys are beginning to dismantle the seating and the screen used for outdoor showing of movies, sponsored by Orange phones. One guy in black t-shirt has the word "Help" in that famous Orange type. It is the end of summer; school has started, college soon enough. The tourists change, thin down. Perhaps that's why there is some peace; it is still very early. The dildo shop isn't even open.

Around the nave a great series of glass-cased manuscripts and even better explication. Tom could have done with history written this well. I learn, for instance, about the initiation rituals of the new university students in the late 1590s: they were forced to dress as wild animals. The academic regimes were tough. This is a very different world from ours, entitlement was worlds away. But death seemed vey close. Erasmus was here; is buried here. I read a little of his In Praise of Folly sitting watching the gentle movements of the morning. It's more interesting than the BBC news app.

The suffering, that's the hardest thing to begin to conceptualise. the plague-fears, the intellectual bravery. What people actually did to help create what we might call Europe's Promise. A promise that lost its way, but whose ideas fissured, and went global, and still do, despite the Twentieth Century it still means something, there are inspirations buried, here - and not here.

Tomorrow in the history museum I'll see the Basel "Dance of Death". It tells a compelling imaginative story - of our temporal being. Sometimes, often, when I'm riffing on how I am a European, I'll define this state through a relationship or series to culture, or a rough understanding of the histories, the Risk Game of it all, the alliances and the battles. The juxtapositions: Milan or Zurich; Paris or Strasbourg; Barcelona or London. But there's a geographic thing that comes with the walking, a sense of lost things, lost connections. A sense of difference, that in Strasbourg revealed itself as really just another way of looking at things - more closely, I guess. More slowly.

These dark religious images are the counter-culture to the formal portraits, the Holbeins and the Durers. Seen in museums they are very powerful, but of course they were not created for museums - so first I must take the Kunsthaus out of their meaning. And locate them where...?

The number 11 tram stops in the Market square. Soon I am past the barnhof and off out past a mini "Canary Wharf" of modernity. The gallery I am visiting, the Schaulager, is the stop. I wonder how far I will go? As far as the Gehry Vitra museum...?

The tram stops. 100 feet away a gorgeous white rectangle. Something is very cool here.

I wikipedia from the IPAD:

The Schaulager in Münchenstein/Basel

The Schaulager is a museum in Newmünchenstein, a sub-district of Münchenstein in the canton of Basel-Country, Switzerland.

Built in 2002/2003 under commission of the Laurenz Foundation, is was designed by the renowned architectural office of Herzog & de Meuron, the Schaulager was opened in 2003. The Schaulager was conceived as an open warehouse that provides the optimal spatial and climatic conditions for the preservation of works of art.

The institution functions as a mix between public museum, art storage facility and art research institute. It is primarily directed at a specialist audience but is also open to the general public for special events and the annual exhibitions.

--

This is amazing. The Schlaulager opens at midday; my Swiss tram was, of course, on time. There is 30 minutes to wait. There is no problem, the artist who has inhabited the space has two video installations playing outside. Surreal narrative based video pieces, in one a young girl first seems to be burying something, then she takes a tram to somewhere. Then we realise she is coming here...we see her enter the Schlaugen, and then begin to climb. She is (as in reality) an amazing climber. She navigates the walls of this Herzog & de Meuron space. And then she falls....falls into some primordial goo, falls, as it were, off the page, and out of the canvas.

In the other video a man - The "Artist", somebody - is arranging the installation of the "piece". By the time we've watched both videos there is a small crown, French, elderly, Swiss Capellio-glasses Men.

And then the show. After ten minutes I have to stop, go back to the bookshop and buy "Matthew Barney - Prayer Sheet with the Wound and the Nail." I read it cover to cover. And then I start again.

In his great essay, the curator Neville Wakefield, explains how he worked with Barney to create the show, a juxtaposition of Barney's "Drawing Restraint" series, with some of the mini-masterpieces of post-Reformation Christian iconography. Corneiius Cort, Crispjin de Passe, Jan Luyken...Durer's Ecce Homo.

Two floors, a ground and a crypt-like basement. Video, drawings, stuff: Barney's complex, allusive work is beyond blogging. Certainly my own. But his work succeeds, for me, that day, in taking the Kunsthaus out of these old classics. In demonstrating the restraints, and the physical sufferings, of ritualised, what, behaviour? The whole show - and a truly amazing two hour film set on board a Japanese Whale hunting ship at whose conclusion Barney and his wife, Bjork, eat each other...yes, I know, on paper it sounds gruesome. IT is, and the elderly French walk out of the cinema with a "bouffe" of displeasure. But it does make sense.

Just go see. Mortgage the dog. It is an amazing show.

Barney/Wakefield's vision changes the way I see Basel. The next day the history museum and the classical section - no Warhol for me - of the Kunsthaus make total sense. Art as a very close encounter with death; art as the eternal opposite to the Warhol-thesis of fame for 15 MegaBytes. Art viscerally unabstracted, and yet somehow universalising.

During the summer the courtyard of the Kunsthaus in Basel is turned into a cafe cum live radio station. At night, moody lights and that rap-jazz-funk thing that screams Euro-Sophistry. I talk to a chemist from Dresden. He's taking the midnight bus for Zurich, but he wanted to hang out for a bit. You know of the "Hexenhammer" of course?" Peter tells me about the last witch burnt in Europe, Anna Goldin. Wow.

In the Kunstmuseum there's a great Hans Bock painting of the Baths at Leuk. It is dated 1597. Near enough to Tom's time. It is sensuous in this northern way: all known vices included, but none of that intoxicating Italian colour. In other paintings Death Meets the Maiden. And the Christ in the Tomb, a Hans Holbein, the younger, masterpiece obsessed Dostoievski. It's funny, all these dances with death are so utterly life affirming. a new way of seeing.

Tomorrow a gay Englishman's book launch, explaining "The Swiss."

Hmm.

A few tales from the Rhine Riverbank, Spoiler Alert: No Wagner Yet

2010-09-04T10:46:00.002+01:00

Quite a lot of my days have started and continued like a tutorial at Oxford. The summoned by bells bit, woken from tired-limbed sleep by honking great church peels, at seven, half past, eight. I am usually human by eight. But they are loud. Mass Media for The Plague Generation.

Then there's the complex discussion to be had (with myself) about post-reformation politics and public spaces, witchcraft, terrorism and religion in general. There's the bikes everywhere, and now in my new maturity I have grown to love these cyclists, as not one has ever knowingly worn Lycra. This is perhaps an exaggeration.

Rheinfelden fits to Oxford Tutorial Bill, the very early bells get me up and I am not dead, which is possible proof that God was behind the Big Bang after all, despite Hawking. The light on the Rhine is crisp and deep. If I stayed a day I'm sure I would have grown to love the narrow streets and the old buildings. But I want a city. After a quick urban wanderweg I pick up my bags and go down to the river.

After yesterday's Dance of Death, I'm sticking close to the river today. I climb out of town, and turn after a Rhine-side Calendar beer brewery. In the brewery car park I ask a man of some stomach capacity if I am near the footpath. Yes, all the way to Basel. He laughs, the sound playing out a basso-profundo through the double helix of his beer sampling arena

Good, I am walking there I say.

I'm pretty sure he was still laughing when I got to Basel, certainly he was laughing a good long time.

This really is more like it. The path is feet, sometimes inches from the river at water level. It climbs away at times - the private swimming baths, the camp site, the school stuff - but it never detours far. Tales from the Riverbank. There's a real sense of Roman exploration now, there was a pontoon bridge here from Roman times, originally, when Tom came through. I pass an allotment. I ask a woman who is picking Daffodils what's she's doing. For soup, she said, or pies. Boats are moored, fishing points. An unexpected and fantastic Roman ruin, right on the path, inside three restored rooms.

I'm back to that Oxford Tutorial Mode: why don't I know more Latin History? Ok, what did they do? I known that Strasbourg, back in France, and a few days away, was "Argentina" to the Romans, city of money, the place they organised their taxes from.

Sun's out; even the factory towers have a grim beauty. At the appropriate moment in my morning the path widens out into a small sculpture park. It's not Goodwood, but a boy can't have everything.

Behind the park is a temporary marquee, with a cafe inside. Excellent, time for a coffee, etc. In fact it is a Supra-Dupra Business Lunch place, complete with chandeliers and a wine list straight out Somelier Centrale. There is one couple in place; two suits, dull, ties. They sip aperitif, and check out the menu. They discuss starters, in appropriate ways. It is 12.02. I feel certain they sat down at 11.59.45.

I am out of place, bien sur. However my host, Regine, is charm itself. She locates me in a cull de sac in the room that allows me to watch it all without being an eye-sore. The restaurant will close in a couple of weeks, it was a good summer she says. But soon it will be too cold. There's a main restaurant in town, and a sister place in Basel. I tell Regine about my trip.

Will you sail home to Brighton? she says very wistfully. as though once she had been very happy there with a man, perhaps a married man - who can say?

She is Hildy Neef and Jeanne Moreau and she has Moreau's great whiskey voice. If she started singing Lili Marlene I would not be surprised. "You will like Basel," she says. "It is smaller that Zurich, more elegant. Smarter."

I suggest that in my current unwashed state, with the leather jacket wasting away with sweat fatigue I may not play well with "smarter". Oh, but you have, though, a certain style, Regina says. In front of me two new men - suits but no ties, aka Creative - are doing the same mime over the menu, the Rhine Business Lunch Trope. I pay for my espresso and walk on, with my certain style - and deep odour trail. I am looking forward to the art in Basel; I'm also looking forward to the laundry facilities.

Soon there is a major detour inland from the river as Aufhaven, a huge facility for shifting containers and materials shipped up and down the Rhine, looms into view. This reminds me of the There, Not There Romans in Brugg. Because of course the gas, the petrol, the energy, the stuff of modernity that drives those elegant art galleries and temporary business lunch marquees, is usually invisible to us. Only in Reykjavik, Iceland, Gracefully becoming 50 with Portia, have I been aware of the public nature of our power sources - and there because it is coming straight from the volcano, as it were.

So it seems good that the Rhine footpath takes me through this modernist campsite of logos and clean lines and rail tracks and giant containers. It's like walking through a canyon of power. There's even a tiny oasis, a few apple trees, though given what is being pumped out of the towers here, I don't think I'll be trying the Aufhaven Cider anytime soon.

Is it me or do the Swiss do Factories pretty well? Anyway, onwards, a group of young kids with their teachers learning how to cook outdoors. A weir, a lock. Fishermen. The Rhine curves and in the distance the twin spires of Basel's famous cathedral. A bridge. I walk on and turn, Aufhaven is now tucked away, around the last corner. In Basel it is not necessary to think about all those engines of the economy. But I've walked them, and enjoyed it, a kind of Post-Romanticism wanderweg in the non-urban contemporary.

I climb away from the direct riverside and walk along a street with tall houses and river views. A little lite graffiti emerges, but why not? And then it's time to climb more steps and get my first vision of the city of Basel - Basil, to Tom.

The first sight is the Kunstmuseum, not 200 metres away, with a giant poster advertising the current Warhol show.

I think Basel and I are going to get along just fine. If I can wash everything.

G-LOST, the fifty kilometre day

2010-09-03T11:49:00.002+01:00

The old town of Brugg, like so many of the smaller places on the trip at this time of the year, wakes with deep sharp shadows, and a sense that the entire population is still at the beach, somewhere else.

The clean, everything is so clean, perhaps this is why graffiti is so popular, pedestrian streets are empty as I walk to the station, under it, and off towards a Roman amphitheatre, about a kilometer away.

The ruins are significant, and do not seem to have been completely excavated yet. Tom doesn't mention the Romans - here. And he is always keen to deploy his Oxford classics education. It makes me realise that all the way from Splungen the Romans have been with us; they've built hundreds of Rhine bridges in their time, though the only one to survive in a functioning sense until Tom's time was at Rhinefelden, today's destination.

Brugg emphasises the here and the not here. I begin to fumble a vague theory about Roman remains as they are considered in Tom's time, the early years of the Seventeenth century. This is before the widespeard antiquarian movement, the Grand Shopping Tours of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. But it is after the Renaissance Boom in rediscovering and then teaching the classical texts. Perhaps, most crucially for us, it is 350 years before Darwin, 300 years before dinosaur bones meant something deadly for the Biblical narrative that saw the world as 4004 years old.

Were The Romans Tom's concrete connection to his past? Did they stand-in for the textual illogicalities of The Bible, now being made available to local, vernacular, translations without (so much) danger to their authors and printers? Tom was now in a publishing hotspot, Gutenberg's long shadow looming down from Zurich, Basel and the German cities and towns. He's following - as far as I can tell - one or some of the main postal routes that connected, say, London to Venice, or Paris to Strasbourg. And postal routes leave traces, like the faded old holiday paperbacks that pepper the shelves of cheap hotels, everywhere, read and discarded.

Tom would have seen Shakespeare's (and others') Julius Caesar, the second best known global historical celebrity, after Christ. He'd know his history, through Justinian in Istanbul, Jerome, Aquinas, down to Luther, Bucer, Erasmus and, perhaps even, Montaigne.Did he feel the echo of some lost Roman soldier, as I feel the echo of Tom, and of seemingly every Western fault line, from religious persecution through intellectual rigour to the nascent stirrings of acceptance of what is now Romanticism and Nature.

Tom visited the Monastery here, a fine complex and a stirring church. This morning at 8am there are a group of men and women already dressed as Romans, I don't ask why, it just fits my mood. Food has already been cooked on stones on the ground. BarBQ Breakfast the Brugg way. I walk back past a psychiatric hospital in the same grounds, and then through an Alphaville mid-town, all underpasses and railway sidings and post-modernist office blocks. Strangely perhaps everything looks great, unbrutalised. I'm mellowing into an enjoyment of all the typos of visual stimulation available. The Lynchian suburbs, the old towns and the modernist sprawls that have grown to accommodate population explosions, now that the great annihilating plagues that define Europe for hundreds of years are, seemingly, gone - thanks in part, no doubt, to the wonders of Swiss pharmaceuticals.

I see another MIGROS store, they have been everywhere since Thusis. Yesterday Roli and Norbert told me about this store/bank/everything. It gives 1% of its turnover, not profits, to Swiss culture.
It shows.

I've also made my mental peace with cyclists, bikers, pretty much everything shy of Heavy Goods Vehicles flying down the autobahn too close to my wanderweg.

The sun is magnificently, Swiss Airly, out. I cross the river down near the medieval gate. I turn, it is always important to look back: it is the view of traveller coming the other way. Brugg: quietly calm on a Sunday morning.

I climb out of the town on a series of streets, the housing shifts for a while into decked apartments, each with a terrace, some covered now in lichen, that hug the hillside. It is a sublime day, the rain has gone, I am riverside soon, and striding out. Yesterday's wet brings a moisture to the trees and grass. I walk on, as Tom must have, following the river.

25 kilometres to go: first scheduled stop Efiingen, about an hour and a half away. At ten I sit at a riverside bench and email Portia, recording in Los Angeles, perhaps still awake. I finish my water, Effingen soon.

Then I check my GMapp application on the IPAD. Soon a glowing circle shows me where I am, and my destination route. Fantastic: mobile technology at its best.

Except that I have walked down the wrong river, gone south, not north. Not quite GLost, but GPS-ly hopeless. I ask a couple for the nearest cafe. It is hot, they argue about its location. I cross the river, hop through some gardens and then some David Lynch Landscapes: no restaurant. Finally I follow the railway line to the station. I am in Bad Somewhere, and even here nothing is open. I shovel coins into a machine, buy and drink ice-tea, water and then some more. Plus chocolate: this is going to be an energy sapping day. Then I turn around, follow the river on the other bank until I see signs for Linn, once upon a time, today, a 45 minute skip from Brugg.

A measure of how badly I had done this morning can be judged by the fact that I crossed three hills, saw bird sanctuaries, nature reserves, stunning vistas that must have crossed national borders, met elderly bike and pillion Sunday seekers, Was that really the Himalayas I could see, it already felt like it. I bumped into joggers with IPODs who yell kein problem as I wheezed up another glided hill towards Linn. And I knew, in my heart of hearts, and in my thighs, that Effingen, the first stop, was less than a quarter of the way to Rhinefelden, and the lovely spa-facility hotel I'd booked last night online.

Linn has nothing but beauty, views, nature, wells, birds and nice houses. I reach Effingen at 2.03, only four hours late. Again, everything is closed, even the petrol station. I sit at the bus stop bench, turn on the IPAD and discover that the Orange Pay to Go is over. In some miracle of GPS the GMap application is still working. I check my directions, but instead of the walking options I get the public transport. A bus schedule appears, there is a bus to Rhinefelden, four changes, in four minutes.

The Devil works in Strange Ways. I stand, walk away and head down the street for the next town, and then the next. Off river now; and The Rhine won't appear until late in the day. The bus passes me, on time of course. I make it to Brozen, it's about three something and there is a restaurant that is open. It is run by an Indian guy. I sit and eat the best wurst and cheese salad swimming in salad cream, washed down with half a gallon of water. I sit outside, inside half the town is enjoying a big Sunday banquet. Men and Women in suits and skirts sneak out for a cigarette, clutching glasses of Gavurttraminer, well, anyway, sweet looking wines. Pudding time.

After half an hour when I stand everything hurts, but especially my thighs, which are in shocked spasm. Those hills, those vistas. I try out Norbert''s Physician Heal Thyself Massage techniques, through the pockets of my jeans. I feel rather decadent, hope I pass no children's funfairs; it is as if I am auditioning for some Parisian Club de Frottage. But blimey! It works, a sense of hope returns to my legs. I march on.

Bus Stops, then Barnhofs become the temptation. But I keep going, roadside now, through this town and that. A Fair. A Market. Long sessions by the autobahn on the cycle routes. Scrabbled journeys up verges and banks to walking routes. Up - never down. Then, around five, Stein. I ask a couple for the route to RhineBaden, so tired am I that I get the name wrong. With Swiss politeness they say, "To Germany? Tonight? Good Luck." We work it out and they tell me to go down from Stein station to the old town. I can pick up the Rhine there, walk its banks all the way.

At Stein station I buy more water and watch a mother drop off her son, in full fatigues, to catch the train back to barracks. Nobody looks happy. Yesterday Roli and Norbert told about their one year conscriptions, compulsory military service with the Swiss Army: both ended up in "communications". Roli said: the first thing my officer told me was that if there was a war we, the comms guys, would be the first to die. The enemy would just dial up our crappy walkie-takes and bomb us.

Norbert remembered being in the mountains for three days, waiting for a signal from his team. It never came. They just forget about us. It was great, he said. I realise that I am travelling with better technology, and access to information, than anyone, including the military until not so long ago. We have come a long way. If only I could read a map, or follow the right river.

The sun has gone, and the clouds are out. How long until dark, I wonder? I see the Rhine, muddy and broad, down below. But what is obsessing me is the yellow sign at Stein station which informs that it is 4 hours and 45 minutes to Rhinefelden: that gets me into town at around 10-something at night.

I stay high; three more hills, and a curve. Go straight, it will be quicker, I decide. Climbing again, then cycle paths, horses, sheep. Rhine-Lost, of course, somewhere else again. I think it begins to get dark-dark at eight. The Sunday night autobahn traffic is hurtling home now. Still no signs for Rhinefelden, not even the 15 kilometres away warning for motorists. It is raining, lightly. At least my hotel has a spa, I can get a massage, Bond style.

A field, a horse and carriage, lurching towards me. All four occupants in raincoats. Now I am higher again, scrabbling with half-bent back between trees and a wire fence. But I have seen a sign for The Place. An hour later, and rather nicely, as the bells hit Eight, yes Eight, I enter the old Rhine town of Rhinefelden. The Romans had a bridge here, and the labyrinthine streets would be great if I had a pulse.

My spa-hotel, isn't. My receptionist is Basel (sic) Fawlty. He picks up the phone as I approach and laughs manically for a couple of hours. Finally a key and a room. I fall asleep fuming that I can't turn the television on. I have just walked 50 kilometres. I've tried to tell Blofeld the Receptionist, but he's too busy laughing at an old joke, perhaps it was about mad Tom Coryate.

The Gods are with me. I'd planned to stay in Rhinefelden for another night, get a massage, write up a few days. Instead I have breakfast alone at 6.30am, then root around the town a bit, then I am walking - the Rhine and NOTHING BUT - fresh and un-aching, at seven. This club de Frottage thing has legs, as we used to say to the newspaper business. I am off towards Basel, it is Einfach. I can't quite believe it myself.

And The Rhine is now so close I can touch it. Now that's What I Call Wanderweg.

Basel's marketing strapline is Culture Unlimited.

Sounds good, if a little Guardian 2002.

Im Brugg, No Colin Farrell.

2010-09-02T10:48:00.001+01:00

If there are typos, it is because it is sunny outside the Cafe in Basel I'm posting from. And the IPAD screen is not perfect. Will sort out from Strasbourg.

We stay low in Baden, leave the youth hostel and wander around the grand, sometimes faded, hotels and baths. Last night we have heard that the business is failing, the hotels not doing so well. We wander in and out of places, they are reminiscent of some lost dream of European something. The only parallel I can give is that it feels like an episode in that French novel, Le Grand Meuaulnes. Something lost and present simultaneously. Hidden, fine dining rooms. Flower-strewn atriums. The baths. The "Inhalatorium". Like a mid 90s nightclub designed by Damien Hirst. Steep paths and modern elevators. It is hard to say if this is a failing industry, or if baths always feel like this. Whatever Tom's state of arousal when witnessing the Bath-Antics; and however C19th Zurich men treated Baden as Protestant Release Mechanism; it feels new age enema-healthy. A man tells Norbert that there's been big new investments. Things are moving.

We move on.

Slowly.

For the other novel I could mention would be the magic mountain, Thomas Mann's consumption hotel classic. My pan-European smoking experiences of the pervious night have rendered me Mann-esque. At an apothke close to the barnhof, hey, I buy Nicorette. And water at the station while we wait for Roli on the 11.20 from Zurich. He's the third musketeer for today.

You know that those smoking gums are owned by the cigarette companies, don't you, Norbert says. They like to make money at every stage of the consumption process.

Roli arrives at 11.20, just as the time-table said. At a book-launch in Basel a few days later I'll hear that, amazingly, not all Swiss trains run on time. But the failure rate is ridiculously low.

It's a short walk today, 12 kilometres or so to Brugg. Bridge. Tom called it Brucke. We set off and detour after about eight seconds when Roli sees a poster for an art show in Baden. PipiLotti Rist at the Museum Langmatt. Off we go.

Classically the museum holds a fantastic collection of impressionist art; the usual suspects and unusually, less well known, so. The rooms are preserved from a fin de siecle time and are suitably grand. Pipilotti has installed herself into these rooms with lights, videos, sounds. More than installed, she has immersed new technology with the old, it is like a small version of the Frick in New York being populated with arty YouTube. A woman suddenly screams across a dining table; bookcases become living things, lamps sing, a woman swims across a river that is cascading across a wall-full of Impressionist Gems.

The curator said it took four weeks of intensive build. And months and months of conceptualising as PipiLotti decided what pieces to make, and where they would fit in the domestic arrangements of the Museum Langmatt. It's fantastic; brings a smile to us all and a touch of aesthetic rigour as well. Good work Pipilotti.

The sun is out when we leave.

We stick to the Limmat-side, until other rivers arrive and conspire to confuse us. We use male logic; it fails, of course. We see Keifer-style burnt landscapes, discuss turnips, bird hides. Roli's art pieces, when he's not teaching graphic design, emphasise the physical change if our environment. He talks about a oiece in Holland which used light and form to show us air "moving".

At Thurgli most of the restaurants are closed, we sandwich and soft-drink with old guys and their dogs. Down the road Roli has pointed out a shop specialising in hair-straightener for black hair. There are Beyonce wigs too. Semiotically this is spectacularly unlikely. But there it is. There is not a black person anywhere to be seen.

There is also a palimpsest of new music posters (all these things are photographed and captured on my Facebook page, btw). First for 70s Prog Rockers, Barclay James Harvest. Playing soon.

We try to remember their Hit.

Did they have a hit?

Then, 40 Years After, Ten Years After. Alvin Lee, right?

We muse on these new digital tablets, as I email. Why glass? When will they be material, cloth? Why can't we write onto them? Isn't there a built in hand-writing function? Handwriting to text? Ten years ago when I was paid to think about things like this, by Mcirosoft, for a short while, the handwriting part was a given. Part of the holistic whole. Right now we're not there. And I'll write about my IPAD life in a few days. It does change the way you see the world. Saved my Bacon on the rocky road to Rhinefelden.

Rivers take us all over the place, soon they will go federal and become the Rhine. But not yet. Norbert's having a bit of Day Two Syndrome, and we're content to follow the cycle routes to Brugg. The boys will take the train back from there, and be in Zurich within 30 minutes. I book into the Youth hostel, again excellent, and old this time. Then I find a corner in the HAvanna cafe, close to the river and the southernmost tower. I finish writing up a day towards Zurich just as a House-remix of One Nation Under A Groove announces that this is Saturday night and while the kids of Brugg should be out, I should be asleep. It is an early start, I have 25K to walk. And a Roman remian and a monastery first.

Except it will be 50K tomorrow. But I not smoking, a slave to my new walking injury. Nicorette Jaw.

Pussy Galore in Baden

2010-09-01T06:26:00.001+01:00

The rain continues; all night now and into the morning. We leave Zurich's cafe Schwarzenbach around 10.15 and it's still pouring. Norbert has an umbrella, I have a soft hat advertising Splugen. Today we are walking the Limmat river to Baden; we cross so that Norbert can show me what's still known as "needle park."

Zurich was famous for its hard drugs problems in the 1990s. Two of the villages near where Norbert and Beat grew up had quasi epidemics. Those comfortable suburbs where there is everything and nothing to do.

The problem was all over Zurich, very visibly, and petty crime rates were soaring as the addicts tried to make money to feed their habit. The police were stretched, and the government didn't want to know, it wasn't a good brand image for Zurich or Switzerland. The police decided on a new strategy, crack down hard on the addicts everywhere - except needle park. Soon it was the safe haven. And once the addicts were there it was impossible to ignore them. The government - the entire country - had to accept there was a problem. Nowadays there are many schemes to help addicts, things have changed, we move on. We cross the Limmat again. People swim around here, there's a throw-clothes-in-plastic bag, tie, jump thing that seems wedged in all Zurichers' imaginations.

We sit; I IPAD. A message arrives from Portia. She's standing in the security line at Heathrow to fly to Los Angeles:

So I'm 3rd in line for xray. Ahead of me, already thru, is a tall,thin man waiting for the conveyor belt to deliver his things. They're asking questions about the bag he has sent through. He looks perplexed, doesn't know what they're talking about. Time passes. We don't move. A security guy in a bright yellow vest, like a construction worker would wear, comes to study the xray. People are calm, barely watching, but I'm fascinated and don't take my eye off the scene. Nearly 10 minutes go by, a long time to stand still, while they study the xray. All this time they make no move to touch the bag. It stays in the xray. Our side of the conveyor is crammed with the next lot of stuff to go through.

A young official comes to announce that our zone is closed. As people grumble and scramble their way into the other queue, I notice an armed policemen - just one, but with a machine gun. He crosses behind the security check without even looking around, then goes thru a door by those new machines that can see thru your undies. We're all being drawn away from the area. I'm the last to get my stuff from the bins on the conveyor belt. As I'm picking them up, I hear one of the women at security say, "he's got something hidden in a false bottom of the case."

And that's it. Couldn't see or hear anything further.

This seems to me a very modern moment. Separated by hundreds of miles, and shortly by thousands, we can still communicate, instantly, our fears and our joys. Once, let us say 50 years or so ago, when daily BOAC flights to New York began, this story, or it's security variant, would have been remembered weeks later, once home. Or maybe it would have been written by letter. Now it is instant, terrifying, and then ok when 15 minutes later the On The Plane message arrives. An entire cycle over in less time than it takes Norbert and I to walk from Beat's to the Needle park.

We pass a youth centre, it was once another cause for concern - young people, poor young people, having a place to be. We walk on, I ask Norbert why Switzerland's neutrality was accepted in the Second World War.

We grew up with the story, it would have been too difficult to invade; the men would have gone into the mountains, guerilla war. It would have been like Tito's partisans in Yugoslavia, only even tougher for the Germans.

I too grew up with war stories, was "taught" in the 1970s the truths about Ireland.

Norbert points out the boat club. Once a year we send a hot soup to Strasbourg, down the river, the thing is it has to arrive hot. The Strasbourgers send something back, but we're not quite sure what. Fraternity on the Rhine, and all that. Good history, continuity.

"We lost our innocence about the war in the 1980s," Norbert says. "The stories started coming out. The deals that were struck with the Germans, the people who were sent back, the Jews, the quotas....The money in the banks, of course....The journalist who broke a lot of these stories killed himself. He just couldn't cope."

I wonder about the stories to come out of England from 2001 onwards. How many more to come? The rain still pours and we're out into the suburbs now, riverside. Norbert likes Berlin, likes its easy restlessness, its mutability. I think about the seemingly immutable Berlin, East and West, of the 1980s. Things do change.

We have lunch in a nunnery, of course. The Kloster Fahr. Fish on Friday, I joke. And cider. Later the rain stops and Norbert shows me where he played important high school soccer matches, and wrote match reports for a sports mag, rushing by engined-bike, I'm not sure what, perhaps a Swiss thing, to hand his copy to his editor on a Sunday afternoon. He's been taught a new massage technique, he has sessions on Mondays just before he plays football. If they go well he is Messi, if not just messy. The technique involved pushing into the pain with your fingers and then "thinking" the pain "soft". It can be very emotional, Norbert says.

By four it's raining again, we had sun for lunch, , we've lost our river and we're tired - and Baden is nowhere in sight.

Baden, Norbert says, is where upright Swiss Protestant Men came for hundreds of years. A canter down from Zurich, horseback or carriage. They came to stay in fine hotels, promenade in the park for show, then go off to prostitutes and gambling.

Ah, that old one. Of course Tommy has got very heated about the ladies of the Baden bath houses, and it seems he was not wrong. Protestant work ethic to Prostitute, as it were.

We are so lost Norbert knows where we are. We are close to the autobahn. In fact to the first over-road shopping mall built in Switzerland, the famous Raststahe at Wurenlos. We are wet and we ache. We buy iced tea and poisonous sweet drinks and wander though shops offering Armani and Swiss watches. It is surreal, if that phrase still means much. "When I was a kid and I saw the Raststahe I knew we were almost home," Norbert says. Today we have no such assurance.

We find the river, and hope that it is the right one, and just as nerves are fraying we bump into a gaggle of graffiti artists, who've taken the train, "ah, from somewhere" to cover a series of underpasses with paint in a town near Baden. The girls and boys work with great solemness; we are quickly cheered. Near now: a high school with large hilly grounds. Tonight it is decked out in thirty or so sound stages, "nightclubs", bars and restaurants, in cardboard mostly. It is Swiss Glee, meets Las Vegas via The Prisoner. Everyone looks so happy; the designs were done last term. Now it is the beginning of the new, two days of build, and tonight the show. [The downpour began about an hour later, we were somewhere else, but it did rain all night. At one point we did raise a glass to those poor kids.]

Baden may be famous for its industrial muscle and wealth as well as its baths, but the last few kilometres along the river are a nightmare of ups and downs from the riverbank. And it is truly pouring now. Whoever designed this bit of the route was a sadist. On the outskirts, a large building, built by the founder of ABB, once: tonight it is a wedding party, all crisp lines and perfume. We're so beat we can't even summon the spirit to crash it, though in another life...We find a bar, collapse, and realise it will be hard to ever get up again. Until I realise that Norbert is the odd man out at this busy bar: everyone else is English.

It is enough to propel me off to find our lodgings, though it hurts to walk there.

The youth hostel - yup, my first for about 42 years - is fantastic. On the river and with swipe card and clean and I am soon wondering where is the flatscreen and the pay for view porn. Norbert and I chill, dry out, change. He's got a friend who is directing a play here, in a temporary theatre close to the old railway station. A Greek guy, who is a genius and a professor at Edinburgh but has lived here in Baden 45 years, has loaned his office out to be the theatre.

It is almost intriguing. Norbert leads the way back up the hill, into the suburbs it seems. It is raining hellishly, as though we are being washed in preparation for purgatory. And then we are there: oh no. A temporary wooden structure, a few tables out, eight or so people. We start talking, they hush us. Food? Please food?

Yes, but quietly. The other side of a wooden wall actors rumble about; there is some screaming, but that may just be the inside of my head. Was it sausage? Who cares, the wine began to numb things.

When the play ends Norbert and I are at least cheered, if not a bit pissed. A flock of Saturday night theatre folk emerge. I light a cigarette, dream of beaches, and the next thing I know our entire trestle table has been taken over by elegant women of a certain age. All I can say is that 1) they are all friends, 2) come from many countries & 3) first met here in Baden in 1964 at the typing pool of ABB, one of the engines of the Swiss economy. I mean Big Engine, let's say Turbines. The girls' lingua franca is English.

"Ladies," I say, in British Timberlake, think Senorita, "Good evening."
At this point a lot of husbands appear and in German ask us to move, then to move up.

We are not moving an inch.

Vicky seems to be team leader, the orchestra leader and joker. When she came to Baden in 1964 she was already married to Tom. In fact they came, from Holland, because there they couldn't get a place to live. In Switzerland they got jobs, a house...and I suspect, then some.

Tom sits down next to me. He's well preserved and fun. He is an actor, he says. He's just been in the play, which sounds metaphorical and happiness heavy, or not. He lights up: I smoke when I act, he says. He's drinking a Sex on a Carrot.

I can wait to find out what he really is.

To get things going I suggest to Tom - an observation that is not without quite a lot of foundation - that his wife is very reminiscent of a character in a James Bond film with a Swiss connection. I sense Norbert tensing: he has seen this sort of thing before.

"Pussy Galore." Vicky looks rather pleased.
"I thought you were going to say Mrs Moneypenny," says Tom.

As if.

Tom has a story about Mrs Moneypenny, but we are finally up and running. Norbert and Vicky are nattering away about all sorts.

"I've done business in 76 countries for ABB," Tom says. He trained as an engineer, these days he has "communications businesses" - which I think his daughter runs. Tom's father was a journalist, in Holland. There were problems in the war.

Tom tells a story about working for Onasis, then for the Vietnamese Leadership, three years after the end of Vietnam War. Then Libya. Hard in Libya he says. He talks about all sorts of things. "Do you remember the Fifth Man? You know, after Burgess, MacLean, Philby and Blunt [the English spy ring for the Soviet Union]?

Cairncross, I say. John Cairncross.

Yes, that's right, I had a couple of Camparis with him in Provence. He was with a young opera singer. Very young.

Tom and Vicky lived in Jamaica for a while; Brazil. There was a whole new world to be built in the 1960s, all over the world. And when they'd helped do that Tom and Vicky came "home" to Baden. It all feels like Ayn Rand has Rewritten Mad Men for a European Audience. It is breathtaking, so the wine helps dull my amazement.

A young man with floppy hair comes over to introduce himself: he did the publicity for the play. He's a friend of David, the Director - who Norbert met in Beat's bar back in Zurich. Soon, I am sure, we will all be connected by Facebook.

The young man sticks out a hand. "Hello, I am Ferris Buhler," he says.
OK.
I did in fact say: "And I am John Hughes."
Of which I am sneakily proud, even if Ferris doesn't smile.
Andy Buhler, PR, was in Los Angles recording the audiobook to his self-help book, when a "guy" said he wouldn't get famous unless he had a better name. Now Andy is Ferris, and he never has a day off.

Ferris explains what is wrong with traditional marketing strategies, and talks about - well, actually I tuned out and went back to Pussy Galore who is cracking gags, organising female pilots to take out Fort Knox, and...well, having fun.

"This is my wife," Ferris says, introducing me to a young dark haired woman. "We met on Skype. She is from Vilnius, I said: come to Switzerland. She came. We have a child now."

Norbert and I must have blagged and smoked cigarettes from all known brands and types. In the Youth Hostel Morning, stumbling for Breakfast, my cough is so volcanic its ash could close down European Air Traffic Control.

Our Ladies and their Rich Husbands leave for what Norbert and I imagine to be Castles, and I'm not sure we're not entirely wrong.

She was quite a woman, Norbert says. We speculate on her age, then say a silent prayer that we are as hot as her at that age. As I snuggle under a thin duvet on the bottom rung of a bunk bead listening to the rain howl down on the river, I raise a toast to Pussy Galore of Baden. Tom Coryate, I am sure, would have enjoyed meeting her too.

I Belong to the Beat Generation

2010-08-30T20:25:00.004+01:00

Beat has a theory about travel. Beat is a winning Swiss-German combination of Eric Cantona, the French footballer turned actor-intellectual, Falstaff, and Anthony Lane, the New Yorker film critic. He runs a bar, the Andorra, named after the play of the same name by Max Frisch, something of a hero in these Zurich parts. We only have Frisch and Durrenmatt, he says, you have hundreds of writers.

We also, of course, have David Hare.

There's a line in Andorra that it's a place where everyone is welcome; it seems that way from last night. And I am staying in his pad, which is playing out a bit like The Odd Couple mixed with Billion Dollar Brain. And what is there not to like about that?

Anyway, Beat's theory is this: you go somewhere, a city, for a holiday. Instead of rushing around to all the churches and museums and parks you find a cafe, a seat, and you sit down with your smoke of choice and your drink as seems fitting and you watch. Theatre comes to you, or at least you watch it pass you by. He cites the Latin quarter of Paris, the Marais. Why not?

I've been to Zurich many times, that taxi from the airport to the Swiss hotel, dinner reception, do the interview/conference thing. I don't want to do it again. Instead, my Zurich starts early with the church bells and sunlight streaming through a small eave window just to the right of my bed. I stagger to the terrace and it's about 7-ish and the morning sun is bright over the churches and the Limmat river and the hills in the distance. I'm not going that far. I'm tired, for a start, and there is a lot more walking to come.

Out of Beat's front door and onto Münstergasse, the cafe Schwarzenbach is approximately 30 cm away. I trip over table three opening my front door. I've been out late discussing Swiss graphic design, and read in bed, slept maybe three hours. I need a coffee break and a read. And, ultimately, I spend most of my day here, with excursions to Tom's churches, and in homage to Max Frisch to the Schauspielhaus where his great plays were and are still are performed. It's not far, past the church, up the antiquarian bookshop street, right past the art gallery and Thomas Struth exhibition.

I try and get to see the stage at the Schauspielhaus, but the administrator says it's just a big old red theatre, we're setting up for the autumn season. Come back in mid September.

Anyway, I have paid homage. I ask about the swimming baths that Max Frisch designed in the 1950s, when he was still an architect. Classic Sixties, she says, Though they have refurbished recently, you should see. I do my churches; wander the Kunshaus...

Back to the cafe Schwarzenbach I read and write, and watch Beat Generation Style, the Zurich world; that part which isn't glitzy or investment banky or overly pierced, that is. So I get to meet a brother-sister combo from Norfolk who are doing Europe in two months. Yesterday, whenever it was, was Prague, where there was a great bar, recommended by the people in the hostel, which was unusual because often the people in the hostels are not so friendly. 16 hrs, and now four in Zurich, before - before, well, I think, before who fucking cares really?

Two women, brown-bronze, thin, an age. Yoga teachers here for a special workshop tomorrow. Bikram? No, our heat is from "within". There's an electronic festival in Bern, I learn.

At the antiquarian booksellers I ask about Tom. Tom and his book. Because he was such a pioneer, because he was roughly 150 years ahead of the Grand Tour game, his book - dismissed at the time - was picked up by the aristo-travellers of the mid eighteenth century and often torn, page by page, as they whored their way around western Europe.

They shopped as well, of course. Mostly for art.

We search the database. Nothing.

In the afternoon I read Goethe and drink coffee. A tall black shaven haired American with a pretty Swiss woman sits down. He talks Laconic Paternalist, in slow bursts. He wants soi, accepts jasmine tea. But mostly he's about iconic Mount Rushmore Musings. His shoes are white Prada. She is in All White; blonde. He mentions his aversion to the colour blue.

There is a dissuasion about the grain available in the bread. No, we wont eat. Shall we go and look at the puppies [there is a pet shop opposite]. I know you wanna.

Rushmore walks like John Wayne.

Beat's kids are sitting in the bar at Andorra, whilst he fixes it up for opening. They live with their mum, not so far away. Lovely kids, they're a bit frightened by me. I would be too. The staff can't put out all the Andorra tables in the street until the petshop closes and there's plenty of post-work people that want to hang with the rabbits. And the puppies. Rushmore told blondie that his antagonism with his mother began with an argument about The Dog.

Julie has been my waitress all day; she's off to see her boyfriend on the next train out of the centre. She's Austrian, from Graz, like her boyfriend who is a tennis teacher. He's the same age as Federer. 28. Old. He was a pro, went everywhere, but unless you make it, that's far too old to be on the circuit. Now he teaches in Zurich, There are people who will pay big time to train their kids. They start at 2 or 3. I keep thinking of my razor, which Federer, Thierry Henry and Tiger Woods so recently promoted. It's the Big Roger on his own these days, Switzerland's finest. Henry's divorced and in New York, slumming. Of Tiger I have no clue. Julie followed her boy from Graz, pays for her own way whilst she studies literature and art history here in Zurich. I couldn't just ask my parents, so I work hard now, and I still work during term, she says. Literature is taught in English; post-colonialism, Rushdie, Achabe; there's John Milton too...

Julie had a period in Australia, loved it, the sporting life, the surf, diving. They've just been to Biarritz, for the surf.

But I couldn't stay in Australia, in Melbourne. In the end I missed the mountains.

Is it true they are alive?

Oh, absolutely. Julie has to go: she's promised to Skype her mom. In two days she will be 21.

I've bought a nice bottle of red for Beat's rooftop dinner party; now to see if it is ok. Norbert has arrived from his newspaper workshop, and it went well. Upstairs on the roof Beat is grilling the steaks. The view across old Zurich is wonderful; the wine is out; there are beers in a cooler, starters. Table clothes. Napkins.

It is hard to believe women will not be involved in our evening. But this is a Boy's Night, Zurich style. We start.

Norbert tells me about the cafe, and its shop, full of fine foods. It's been here since 1864, and it is a family thing. A long time ago, when he was making corporate videos, Norbert did a shoot. "Chocolate, do you want to know about chocolate," he asks.

Once it was a poor persons' food, for energy. And then one day Mr Lindt - Norbert points across our Zurich horizon, past the church spires, to the east - invents a machine that whisks the chocolate and he adds some milk. And he merges with Mr.Sprungli (no accents on this IPAD, sorry boys) and Makes Chocolate. It's a sort of Swiss Mad Men Moment. Chocolate goes from being the food of the poor to the luxury end.

We talk football, Beat is Zurich, solid working class team, and with a maternal dispensation, having a German mother, he also gets to win things by supporting Bayern Munich. He does a good impression of being in Barcelona the night that Bayern lost to Manchester United - 1999, I think. Another Life. Football as Religion.

Norbert tests me on my day: points at the church spires in front of us, and says: the Chagall stained glass. Ding. The biggest clock face in Europe. Dong.

Very good, he says. Roli arrives. Roli is a graphic designer, teaches at the college here, and an artist. In 2001, as part of his degree work, he walked with another designer, an Englishman, from their secondment in Barcelona, to their next in Winchester, England. Six and a half weeks. 1,284,000 steps (they had step meters in their shoes). His partner made pin-hole cameras out of the film boxes. They had a mock up art gallery, they'd unfurl in villages, ask locals to show their work. But Roli's lost track of his friend. He was a drinker. Still is, badly so. Roli doesn't even know where he is now. Somewhere in London. A loss.

I'm thinking around now about Tom's nights; his dinner chats: did he use his London after-dinner speaker skills? I know I am trying to use mine. Our night is going so smoothly, steaks followed by chicken, then Swiss sausage. Jesus I am dying. The conversation moves back to our view. Norbert says: Tom would have spent his evenings asking for advice, for information. What animals on the next bit, where to turn. What signs to look out for, what river.

Yes, dinner as Google, that makes sense.

Roli wants to talk clocks. Ok, he says, why clocks on the Church spires?

So the church owns time, I say.

Discussion follows.

In Switzerland the mountains are alive, the churches and their reach, their communication by bell, by echo - by the famous Swiss horns - denote safe. If you can hear the bell, or see the spire, then the monsters of the mountains won't come.

So what about the clocks? Surely they are to control as well; to summon, to wake, to emphasise God when - the 16th century man or woman arranges a meeting - things happen. There's more: all four of us have been to Istanbul, have all been amazed by the Muezzin call. It's a form of media.

This is what the bells did, and the clocks. The discussion goes on; much later Roli is still talking about it as Grappa leads on to taxis for him and Norbert. We haven't cracked it.

After sausage and before coffee the heavens open and a torrential rain begins. It will last all night and still be hammering down when Norbert arrives under umbrella (the tool that Tom brought home to England from Italy) at 9.30 next morning.

This is a great shame, says Beat.
We'll be fine, I say.
Yes, but what about your glamorous haircut?

Oooff.

Norbert's sister went to be a circus chef when she was 19. Now she's been running the circus for almost 30 years. She married in. Today, he thinks, she's setting up in Chur. We talk parents for a while.

Inside Beat and I talk movies over grappa. He says I have not seen the funniest movie ever made. To Be or Not to Be. Mel Brookes, I say.

Lubitsch. Says Beat. The speed of the dialogue. Beat has about 10,000 DVDs. He cites Kind Hearts and Coronets, the Front Page, the Philadelphia story. It's late and we're onto Once Upon a Time in America, and the East German film posters for it that Beat has.

I'm struck by how comfortable our boyz evening has been; it wouldn't be the same with so many men in England.

In the morning Beat decides he doesn't want to take a coffee with a Grasshoppers fan, they are too posh. Later, as we are walking out of town, and after the Youth Club has been explained, Norbert - a Grasshoppers fan, obviously - will say that rather than posh, they are a "thinkers" team. Ah, football.

Tomorrow Baden, walking for the first time with someone else. Cool.

Across the Wallensee for a Zurich Reunion

2010-08-28T19:10:00.001+01:00

Bad Ragaz is utterly still, deader than ever, at 6.30am. There's nothing open for water or buns, and the hotel I'm staying in will no doubt put out a search party for Bambi, or anyone else involved with its miraculously people-free accommodation skills.

I'm headed for Walenstadt, where Tom took a barge across the Wallensee lake and then shimmied up small rivers to Zurich. It's about - it's always about - 25 kilometres away, and I've moved off the reassuring Rhine and so am interested in my navigating skills, and those of the IPAD.

I have to say the Swiss do Good Sign. Later in Zurich a pair of late night graphic designers will tell that despite the historic and continuing excellence of Swiss typefaces and typography the Zurich Client is likely to say: "we want whatever is in London."

The signs for us walkers, cyclists, roller-skaters and even once penguins, are great and always give the distance in time, a point that Tom notices 400 years ago. Of course the debate starts here, in a couple of days I am discussing with Norbert whether it is better to know that it is 20 kilometres to go, or four hours. "Four hours," Norbert says, "means you can know if you'll get there before dark, or the church service, or the closing of the city gates.

But what speed do the signs represent?

It doesn't matter, you learn that four hours means two hour, or six.

And so time twists its expanding universe around the valleys of Switzerland.

I'm soon in flat farmland near the river and I'm sticking hard to the banks, avoiding hills. I've found some water and old croissants in a petrol station, and I've checked out the larger suburban chalets, from which - as from the farm houses later - ridiculously small children emerge ladened with backpack, to catch the school mini-bus. My, they start early. It could be New York.

The valley I'm walking down to Walenstadt has proper stage-set high mountains, spectacular things that utterly dwarf the hill villages on the horizons. Riverside factories come and go; roller-skaters pass me, dogs growl and I see plenty of shooting ranges. On Saturday Roli tells me that anyone currently in the army, and Switzerland still has conscription, more later, has to practice shooting a specific number of times per year. In Brugg he points out a notice on a council board, giving the dates.

But I'm only aiming for the 11.20 boat from Walenstadt to Wessen, and hour and a bit of a lake ride. It's the northern most stop of the Wallensee. I feel very blond and teutonic today, though when I sit down to eat lunch at Walenstadt, because I miss my boat by five minutes, I still feel self-conscious among the soldiers, locals, Japanese tourists who've just done a car tour of "Heidiland" - the valley is even signposted as Heidiland, and when I first post this on Facebook a friend asks if I've had any goat's milk yet. Answer no: I'm on a coffee and fags diet, still.

I sit in the harbour and wait for the 2.00 boat; a few soldiers and a couple of locals sunbathe, and the dogs try and swim as fast as the swans. No chance. The clouds do something amazing above the mountains, a blue and white zebra crossing of foaminess.

Everything is even more blue-eyed and blond and I begin to blend in. The Walensee has the same vibe as Lake Como, back down the Splugen and the San Marco passes in ClooneyLand. The boat makes a series of zig-zag steps across the lake, throwing out the most stunning vistas. Tom writes that there was a huge wooden bridge across this lake. It's gone now, and would have really been something.

We pick up more people along the way and by Wessen we are full to disembark. There is a bus to the railway station @ Zeigelbrucke, but I decide to walk: Tom took his barge down a tributary all the way to Zurich, I feel justified in taking the train from Zeidelbrucke, but I damned if I'm going to catch the bus as well.

It gives me the chance to do Cary Grant impressions down long fields of corn, whilst crop planes fly overhead. But the biggest danger, as ever, is the BMW driver on his/her phone.

I use my map app to get from Zurich HB to the Andorra bar, in the gentrified, but not Abramovitch'd, old town near to the Limmat river. Just off Limmat quay, I turn left and walk up to an old paved street, pass the club where the Cabaret Voltaire launched in 1916, pause to take a nod to Dada, and see the Andorra bar, amidst a bunch of places, fifty metres ahead. Norbert is sitting outside, in front of a pet shop, with a beer. He's fidling with his IPhone. Soon we are having a haven't seen you for twelve years conversation.

In the early years of the web Norbert ran a very cool Interactive Newspapers conference in Zurich every November. He very kindly invited me for five or six years. The first time to give a keynote, alongside a Very Grand German Publisher who'd flown in his jet from Paris and spoke a lot about his kids in the lab and the wonders of The Renaissance. The crowd asked me to slow down, it was my first public speech and I was pumped to explain why everybody was wrong.

In later years Norbert asked me to do something else: to sit at the back and then ask to hard questions that everyone else was to polite to contemplate. It is fair to say not everybody loved me. But then in those days there was this idea that newspapers could make Croesus millions online.

Norbert has a workshop with a large regional Swiss newspaper tomorrow. He introduces me to Beat, the bar owner, who has a Boy's Own Bachelor Pad opposite, complete with roof terrance with just fantastic Rear Window views and a panorama across Old Zurich and its churches. Tomorrow night Dinner Party, Beat says. He has about 10,000 DVDs in his living room and the whole apartment is a shrine to movies, Once Upon a Time in the West seeming to get most poster action, including a rare East German poster from the 80s. Friends of Beat like to play a game where he leaves the room, somebody removes one DVD and then he has 60 seconds to guess which.

He's never lost.

We all talk for hours. Beat tells us that at one of the bars down the road a tourist has asked, "Where is the non-smoking outdoor terrace."
"She was lucky not to be clubbed to death," Beat says. The laws about smoking inside bars only changed a couple of months ago, and Switzerland or certainly Zurich is still a city of Karsh Smoke Images.

We're having a sort of boy-man (of 51, Norbert and I discover we are the same age) conversation about all those topics of middle age. We've all moved some distance from 1998. Norbert lives in Berlin now, in what was East Germany. A hip area where things change from week to week. We go back to the optimism of the early days of the web, of online newspapers: the hope, the hype, the lies and the genuine successes. These days, until in fact the arrival of the "app" and the idea that with mobile internet, accessed via a paid for app, there might be hope for a financial future for online media, the reality is desperation in the newspaper world of print. Actually the Swiss still buy print in large enough numbers, the papers are regional, and local, and read and mean something.

"I woke up about four years ago turned on my laptop and thought - my screen is so flat, everything is the same." Norbert says. "There's no nuance, nothing subtle. I read many, many more books now."

He's been reading about neuroscience, as have I. He talks about the stimulus to certain parts of the brain when we mirror the actions of others. "We need other people, the whole experiment we've lived through about the individual - it's failed. Or rather if it doesn't fail then it's all over for us all."

Beat has been to see his youngest son, who lives nearby with his mother. It is his first day of school. "I told him that the great thing about school is that it is a countdown to Life," he says.

In Switzerland, Norbert says, education is about making you "something" rather than encouraging the curious. But we need the curious. We need more than the flat, annihilating computer screen. We'll talk more, I'm sure. A happy first reunion.

The guys go to bed and I read Goethe's Autobiography on the IPAD. The young years; the intensely curious years. The fights with rote-learning teachers and personal tutors, the explorations of the Classics, Hebrew, art - people. Perhaps it is Goethe's particular genius to make this all seem fun. What price the Angry Birds game app now number one on the free downloads?

The light streams into my top floor bedroom at 6am, and the bells from the churches are made especially loud by their proximity, and the height I'm at. I stagger to the roof terrace and have a look around. In high rooms office work is starting by 7am. Hollywood Zurich style has replaced Heidiland and I am in a Big City for the first time in a week.

Bambi in Bad Ragaz; Heidi everywhere

2010-08-26T13:45:00.002+01:00

A 6am start in Chur to revisit the Cathedral and just try and imagine. By seven school kids are passing in clumps and couples and solitary singles. Does Swiss school begin at 8?

The walking out of a town is always full of details, those of the Beiderman-Klass who live in the periphery houses, or the smarter apartment blocks. Soon enough these have faded, to be replaced by river side factories. I'm using my analogue BFlat walking app today. Which means sticking close to the no-hill zones of the river, even if that means proximity to railway tracks, autobahns and factories. Tom is always saying that journeys are ten miles, which is almost never right - today I'm going to walk more like 18 by the time I am sitting in the Hotel Bambi, right in the centre of Bad Ragaz - and away from the fancy Five Star spa places and the casino.

As ever there are more fabulous stratospheric buildings on hills, they must have made their impression on Tom. Chur was around 2,500 people when Tom passed through; now it is a city of 30,000, capital of the Grisons. In fact when Tom hits Bad Ragaz, our destination today, he says it is his first stop in "Switzerland".

But Bad Ragaz, for its beauty, is a nothing much happens place. When I collapse sweating at the refined Cafe Huber, the Ladies Who Spa move their chairs slightly, as if frightened of catching something.

The last part of the trail comes off the Rhine through a tended park in which each flower and tree has a label. In nice Swiss typography. In the middle of small lake is a floating artwork, a bunch of naked men. Later in Beatz, the bar for the people who don't go to The Pub, a guy says: Bad Ragaz is always having art experiences, and there's work all over town, they never take it away.

It is a measure of the busy nature of Bad Ragaz that I'm asked to pay for my room in cash the day before, because there won't be anybody there in the morning. The winds start up and beer mats and napkins fly off down the high street towards the thermal baths.

In Beatz I meet the guys and a couple of their girlfriends. None work in Bad Ragaz, they travel to other towns. Michael starts his shifts at 6am, he's a controller in a factory that makes the machines that make solar panels. The machines are exported to Asia, the panels made, and then sold back to Europe. I start at six so I can finish at three, he says. You know, have some time to do stuff.

But everyones agrees there's not much to do in BR. Most people went to Chur, for the festival. It wasn't as good as a few years ago.

Michael's going with his girlfriend Lisa to Biarritz tomorrow, for a week of surfing; when he was a kid his family took him to Italy, over the mountains. It was so cheap. A couple of years ago he worked for nine months in an Italian town, but after work the men only wanted to chase women and talk about cars. He came home.

Lisa says that when her dad was young he bought a VW van in Bad Ragaz and drove to India. He didn't smoke though, he still insists. When the Alllied Forces invaded Afghanistan in 2001 Lisa's father said: "I've been there, they are proud people, it will never work. The Afghans will win.

Another guy at the table tells me about the Heidi tourists, often from Japan, who fly and bus in, check out the Heidi Trek and then zoom off for the Matterhorn - that's Switzerland.
Another talks about the "outsider towns" full of foreigners; that's often where the work is.

The boyz wander off for a this or that, and we have to go inside by ten: the indoor smoking laws were passed only two months ago in Switzerland and Bad Ragaz does Bad Neighbours, they don't like people on the streets. Nicole the owner has to shepherd the boys inside. Soon enough everyone's left: there is early work in the morning.

I walk home to Bambi in windy silence. And set my alarm for dawn. I am the only person in the building.

New Mobile, New Chur, New Labour

2010-08-26T09:34:00.002+01:00

Author's note. The photographs are all on my Facebook pages, so to see them you'll have to visit.

I am half way through a panegyric to the wonders of Swiss nature walking the first few miles from Ems towards Chur. Tom did this part of the walk at the end of his day from Thusis. I'm looking at the wide open meadows and the cows and the hills either side and life is Heidiland. It should be a doodle. .

And then the path sign points up. Up means climbing. I climb.

And climb. Panegyrics are forgotten. Tom, I'm guessing, stayed low near the river, though later some guys in Bad Ragaz tell me that The Rhine in Tom's time would have been much wider, and un-damned, and so the land nearby muddy and treacherous. Still, I don't think Tom would have come this far up; I've walked for half an hour and I'm still level - albeit now in the distance - with the Church at Ems. It's a great view, and now a house, high on an adjacent hill, becomes apparent. It is impossible not to marvel at the courage of those that built these vertigo-testing homes.

But my heart is beating fast. I stop to photograph some designer animals that I think are Llamas. But I'm thinking John Smith, the leader of the Labour party in the early 1990s, who died of a heart attack at 56. Smith was the great hope of old Labour. He was also a hill walker, he'd climbed all 300 of Scotland's high hills. There's a club. Hang on didn't another Labour high-up, Robin Cook, actually die hill walking? Yes, in 2005.

I'm thinking stay politically neutral as you keep climbing today.

I was told about Smith's death while on an aeroplane coming back from Martinique in the French Caribbean by the French Cultural attache. We'd had a few "political" discussions during my week on a "fact finding" mission for The Times Travel pages. Fact: Martinique is Lovely. It was May 1994.

Smith, Cook, they were part of a What-If? parallel world in which Tony Blair - and Gordon Brown - did not exist. Or rather: they had lived up to to their promise. For the period after 1994 until the election of 1997 which ended 18 years of Conservative rule, was incredibly heady. The Web was The Thing. Britain - and Britannia - was cool. There was a lot of optimism around. These are my thoughts as the path keeps climbing, my heart keeps beating, and I'm thinking I don't want some Blairite to finish the Tom Coryat project.

Tommy must have been getting excited. After the rigours of the mountains he's coming down the valley, and just about to see his first Grison city, Curia - now Chur. From on high looking down on the town I am reminded immediately of Brasov, in Romania, where I once spend a very happy half summer. Both cities nest in the strategic focal point of a valley. Both have cable car access to higher points, satellite tourist walks and skiing places. I take a guess that like Brasov the Romans must have been here in Chur. It is so their kind of thing.

Thoughts of John Smith move on to Tony Blair. His "journey" is published soon. The New Labour Project in the UK risen and fallen - and now defeated. A few days ago Wired magazine declared the Web to be dead, and sitting high in the hills outside Ems using my Orange 3G pay as you go SIM to check my route, using my mapping app - I feel I might be hitting the Matterhorn shortly - I thought: well, this mobile everywhere, everything culture, based on apps and social networks and GPS is utterly compelling. It is the Coalition of technologies.

Walking the route means I come into town the medieval way, via turreted gatehouses. Back to Work Chur is very different from its carnival weekend. I wander the old town, the Cathedral, St Martin's church, the tall 16th century building covered in astrological signs. I take a bus to the outskirts of town, to a bleak white shopping mall with large signs for an "erotic mart". Here, amidst the Vitra stories and gardening centres and car dealerships is the H.R. Giger cafe, a themed cafe based on the designs of the Chur local who created the beasts of Alien. But the theatre of the Giger cafe disappoints, it's strictly West-End, not immersive moderne. And the drama that might have been in the bathrooms - just imagine an Aliens styled Heren und Damen - is pure white IKEA.

Giger is a big name in Chur; the last time I was here the Kunsthaus had a large exhibition of his life's work, starting with the graphic novels. Giger was a sexy comic book artist very early, in the 60s. Sexy that is in a fetishy, misogynist, snakes in every orifice, kind of way. The Alien, in the greater context, makes a lot of sense. I wonder for a while about the impact of geography and location on Giger's imagination. The monsters of the mountains, the close knit families, the local sense that "everything" including the mountains is alive - in some way. The anxiety of the grand and the panoramic.

In St Martin's Church I feel very close to Tom. He is finally back in Protestant lands, though this was not Switzerland, it was the Grisons. Tom enters Switzerland in Bad Ragaz, my next stop. Giacometti's father did some of the stained glass in St Martin's, and it has a modernist take - in my eyes - on the Pre-Raphaelite. I am sure this is art-historically wrong, but it gives the feeling.

I started my day in Ems unusually with a "namaste" from a tiny Indian boy off on his first day of school - they go back early in Switzerland. And now in Chur mid-afternoon is about end of school. I wander the Cathedral, then sit at a pew and read Tom, via Google Books.

This ability to be able "carry" my reading, my guide books, maps, computer - my needs - is incredibly compelling. I hope the new mobile - web is dead - world - proves more resilient than New Labour. As if on cue a Google Alert informs me that the leader of the Coalition Government, David Cameron, and his wife, Samantha, have had a daughter.

Perhaps they should call her Apple.

@ The Big Easy, aka Der Einfache Grosse

2010-08-23T08:07:00.002+01:00

Perhaps it is my age but the Sunday afternoon version of Chur's festival is far more to my taste. The alleyways and courtyards of the old town echo to a grosser easy of old Americana tunes, Johnny B Goode, Teddy Bear and Nobody Loves You When You're etc. etc. There are no conga lines; no mass renditions of Gaga-ish Argentinia, and no hint of trouble.

Long trestle tables full of families eating sausages and three-feet long kebabs are everywhere. It's very communal - practically socialist Fox might claim. A day of catch-ups, from last night perhaps, or from time. There are numerous hugged reunions. The kids seem to love it. There are street games, straight out of Tom's time: throwing things at heads to win a prize, strength tests - even a Swiss take on the Rodeo, with a bronco buck straight out of 1960s Dinosaur movies.

Chur seems set to celebrate middle America, pick up bands knock out rock and roll and ballads, and go on and on. I'm acclimatising to the tattoos which are ubiquitous - as is the smoking. Tom's monarch, James the First, who liked to think of himself as a bit of a scholar - think Prince Charles minus Camilla plus "n" number of boys - wrote a treatise against tobacco in 1604. A Counterblaste, in fact. Clearly its message never crossed the Channel, nor got anywhere near Splugen, Thusis or Chur. Perhaps Zurich will be the new San Francisco of Switzerland. We'll See.

I haven't had time to track down Shakespeare in Splugen yet - guess I have the rest of my life to become the new Dan Brown/Stephen Greenblatt/James Shapiro/Crazy Person - but I have discovered that the alleged hotel was:

1) Built 150 years after Shakespeare's death
2) Its most famous visitor was Nietzsche
3) Then Napoleon

Resting Bikers are found in the hotel @Frustuck. I retreat to my terrace and the rhododendrons - there we go - with some Hindi-Pop in the air. Mid-morning I go to Chur. The festival works, what's there not to like about a schoolboy keyboard vocalist heading up a pop trio with an overweight George Michael guitarist on flashy Gary Moore Guitar? It's like Keane without the Public School thing. Two Calenda beers down the answer is: nothing at all.

At my trestle table a "Beckham" in vest (Wife-Beater for the USA readers) has shoulder and arm tattoos of both cows and Chinese lettering. There are also a lot of Billy Connolly haircuts - mullets as were, but that gives the communal coiffeur-ery a 80s resonance that doesn't do justice to the beards and bi-focals.

But I'm grosser easy. It's ok.

Having a Facebook moment in the food area of the music arena I'm accosted by Varenna who is selling lottery tickets. I feign ignorance. "You know: you pay money, win prizes?"
I get the picture. We move on.

Is that an Apple Tablet?

I confirm that yes, it might be.

Then we must be friends, Varenna says. I am in online marketing. Effective online marketing strategies - that make money.

Of course.

I touch screen away; soon I'm on Varenna's home page, it's part of the Oviva Social Network. Bookmark it, Varenna says. You'll need it. Do you get comments on your blog - ouch baby, below the belt surely? - with Oviva not only do you get comments, but you get paid for them.

Ok, Ok.

I see you're on Facebook, so "they" know everything about you. On my network everything is - how you say?- secure.

And so ends my first ever listening to Latino rock at a county-town in Switzerland online marketing pitch done offline by a lottery ticket seller. I photograph a three three old wearing headphone ear muffs - well it is the trad jazz bit of the day - and chat to his parents. The husband is half-Scottish; the wife once lived off the Edgeware road. So much for journalism.

I'm asked to sign a petition about Kulture in Chur. All for it, I say, reaching for the pen. But my language choice disbars me. The next signature hunter is less discerning - clearly a girl with a lot of Facebook Friends - and I sign away. I've been away four days now, I wonder how many libraries Jeremy Hunt has closed since I left?

This is not going to be a Tom day. At the Kunsthaus - the art gallery for the Grisons region - there's a good exhibition of mountain photography: I'm going to try and meet the curator tomorrow. The images go back to the 1850s and while that's still 250 years ahead of Tom it is getting closer.

I ask the couple next to me how to say The Big Easy in German. There is much scratching of heads, we don't know. I say the words one by one: they give me the translations..

But it makes no sense in German! The man says.
The woman writes it for me anyway: Der Einfache Grosse

That's what we have today, our very own Swiss "happening".

Then I sees Cher - circa that song that required straddling a warship's canon. In fact from my trestle table outlook I can complete a Billboard Top 100 Antique Rock Starts without straining my neck. Consider Motley Crue, Fleetwood Mac and Bon Jovi as givens, then, blimey, Shirley Bassey, that Scottish woman from Texas, and for the kids we have the Osbourne girl who ditched her boyfriend by Twitter, Avril Lavine. Perhaps no New Jack City or Michael Jackson, but otherwise this is too Einfache a game.

Rock Me Slowly sings the schoolboy keyboard player, let's call him Gunter Barlow, like our Gary.

Tom was reacclimatising too: this was a different mood - indeed religion - from Italy. I'm still on the fence about his real beliefs - being even a crypto-Catholic was not a good thing after the Gunpowder Treason three years before, and yet there's something about Tom...He must have visited every church in Europe. Tomorrow I will visit Chur's, and I hope to see some Durer. Like Goethe, Durer went early to Italy and brought some of that country's sun and sex back to illuminate "northern" culture. In another kind of global exchange a Swiss girl named Sandra has got up on stage to sing a Mariah Carey song. She's not bad, and the sing along with Gunter Barlow is quite nice: they hear "music in the air." Then I twig, it's fucking Glee, for sure. They sing another song, more bluesy, and I lose any facility for aesthetic judgement, why not? Any minute now Denis Quaid will turn up and make a dodgy bust.

I ask a young policeman what time this all ends.
At five, with a fierce yet strangely sympathetic smile.

And so it comes to pass. In fact the coming down is the most impressive feature of the day. A couple of years ago I photographed the Moscow State Circus on tour in England. Now they were good at taking the tents down and spinning their boleros and stuff, but this lot in Chur are efficiency itself.

I go back to Ems, the hotel - where neither the phone, wifi or showers work - hasn't done my laundry. I go into Infer mood. How did Tom smell after three and a half months on the road in 1608? I hope he bought new boxers in Venice.

After Durer I might just squeeze in Giger again. Alien I-V and all that vs. Predator stuff, as well. There's a theme bar somewhere in town.

Shakespeare in Splugen, exclusive

2010-08-22T11:48:00.001+01:00

The payback is the next day. Unlike Tom I'm not in training. Everything aches, I walk like John Wayne after a three day ride. Brokeback Splugen.

There is another gardening centre past the railway station at Thusis, which makes three for a town of 2000 people; I'll see even more today on the walk to Chur. One thing: they leave out the cafe tables and the gardening products at the centres, they just sit there on the street at night indifferent to crime. Perhaps the punishments are draconian, or maybe it's just something in the Rhine water.

Under the railway and out into the sunshine close to the river, past the early morning tennis games and dog walkers, and into the distance the mountains are forcing the sunlight to emerge at 45 degrees, in an almost monochrome vision: like an old religious print, really. I head for Sils, crossing first the Hinterhine, and then the autobahn. I want to be away from the cars - which means I'm going to have to climb.

Tom mentions the flat meadows of the area, and the sheep and cows, as though the great mountainous beasts that surround us don't count, I think that's the point. Away from the river and the motorway Sils is absolutely quiet, not a soul has stirred yet, it is about 8.30. Late starting again.

I'm not lost, it is impossible to get lost lost when the natural map, the river, is telling you the rough direction. It's just that I want to follow the hilly trail, take in some of the villages off the Lycra Track. I find a restaurant in Sils, close to the church. I order a coffee from a tall blond man and show him my map. He follows me outside and then calls his wife.

Daniella gives great instruction, up to the next church, right, down past the - how do you say? - well, and then head for Scharans, you can't miss it. She asks how far I'm going. Holland, I say, following the Rhine. Bruno laughs, eight weeks, right? Something like that if I don't - as Tom did - take a few boats. Daniella goes inside and emerges with a new glossy magazine about the Rhine. Rheinfluss. I find the editor's email. Pull out my machine and email him. This you could not do even ten years ago. Keep it, she says, it's easier to read than those computers.

There is a castle up on the hill, you'll see it, Daniella says. There was a secret tunnel down to this building, my mother when she was a child walked about 500 metres of it, but it had collapsed.

How old was it?

I don't know, this building was started in 1450.

Then Tom would have seen it? Quite so.

I explain a little about Tom. using the "he drank with Shakespeare" line as it at least gives context if not quite documented proof. "Ah you know that Shakespeare went to Splugen," Daniella says, as if I've read all of Shakespeare's plays including Measure fur Measure and Caesar Lear. "There's a hotel up there with a sign on its walls. Shakespeare was here."

Oh no!

I can't go back, I'll check the website for the hotel later. But...From my lite reading about yer man's life I suggest the Splugen episode is not particularly well known. As we have no proof Shakespeare left the country, this is, er, interesting. During the 2007 walk I seem to remember an Italian claimed that Shakespeare was in fact a local. More pertinently, perhaps, I'm thinking that Shakespeare in Splugen might in fact be Tommy boy - he certainly crossed the Splugen Pass, the point at which I officially began my rewalk yesterday. Could he, in some boasty, bar room chat down in the town have either claimed to be the man, or told a few stories about him? This obviously needs a little more research and while I could stay with Daniella and Bruno in Sils and annoy them intensely by scouting around research papers online with my Athens log in, I'd rather listen to the sounds of the locals taking their shooting practice - which echo down the valley - have another espresso and get going. Tommy was an early starter, it makes sense, the midday sun is hot enough and really if I'm fit I could walk to Chur in about six hours. That's what Daniella tells me, anyway.

You are staying in Chur? Bruno shakes his head. The festival is on, there won't be any rooms and it will be very loud. This is double confirmation: at my hotel in Thusis they have tried to book a room, any room, in Chur. All that was on offer was a "worker-apartment" in a Best Western on the autobahn outside the town. Call me fastidious, but I decided to risk it.

Now I wasn't so sure.

Walk as far as Ems and stay there, Daniella says.
Ok, thank you, how much to I owe? Daniella shakes her head. Have a great walk she says.

Fields. You don't cross many fields in my walk of life: heaths occasionally; parks, but not fields that are either tended so that Tiger could putt on them, or chemical-free and abundant with every kind of flower. It is all very green, and above the mountains are that greeny-blue that comes with the haze of early sun. Tom mentions the ruins around here a lot and it is obvious why. God and his church DIY boys have flecked these hills with vertiginous buildings, some ruined in the appropriate gothic style others looking very much up and running. It is the sheer complexity and effort that must have gone in to getting them built that inspires. This now is Protestant Country as far as Tom's thinking goes, though he notes many "papist" allusions.

Sometimes the trail takes me close to the river, at other times I climb; soon enough I am in - well not Scharans as I should be but - Furstenau. Which is lovely and there is a huge house at its core which should be a hotel, but isn't. On one of its terraces a couple - old Swiss man, young Swiss woman - look down on me from their newspapers. The Blofelds of Furstenau. It's warm now and I'm travelling with everything, which isn't much but enough. Including leather jacket. I'm hot.

Dogs. Rory Stewart, T.E. Lawrence, Tommy, you name them, they can deal with dogs. I'm not so good since a bite in Cappadochia in central Turkey many years ago led to the dread rabies injections in the stomach. And then there's just the barking. Anyway, today every dog I pass is an untethered Alsation hungry for some red meat. And every owner is a laughing don't worry kind of Swiss. I leave the paths and hit fields, see more ruins, spin around to take in the entire valley from Thusis, and then hit a narrow road where a woman passes in horse and cart.

So: inferring Tom. What wasn't there? Easy sensory stuff first. No electricity lines humming about, no drones from cars, planes, trains. No pistol shots echoing (well not too many). The sounds he hears are the river, the wind, and in the fields the cow bells, church bells the most, surely? Perhaps the beat of hoofs, dogs. He's enjoying the meadows, and the ruins, but he's not marvelling at the mountains. He doesn't have Darwin, or dinosaur bones to prove anything. He believes the world is around 4000 years old. He tells the time by the sun, and takes his directions from the Rhine. God made all this, he thinks. But the mountains are ugly, scary places of heathen ideas, best to move on to the towns.

Hmm. C - needs more work.

I take coffee at Pratval with a man engrossed by sand wrestling live on SF Sport TV. Men wrestlers, this isn't volleyball. I check out the towns and villages ahead on Wikihood, and move on. Now I'm on a cycling path, one that goes all the way to Chur, which is now only about 16 kilometres away. I say hello to each cyclist that I pass in an attempt to break my prejudice. A particularly bad place in hell, perhaps the Walmart Wing, is reserved for the mother, an Alpha MAMIL [middle aged man in lycra], who sang "Bye" to my "hi" later in the afternoon when I was beginning to tire.

The pylon wires hum above, and the river flows to my left. I'm not really thinking about much more than the now. It is nice. Lunch - a double salami sandwich, ice tea, espresso, two glasses of fizzy water...and a Facebook post...is at Rothenbruhnen. An elderly Swiss couple sit behind me and shout non-aggressively at each other, deafening the accordion channel that is playing pop-ily on the radio. Then Madam has a volcanic coughing attack and I throw the Marboroughs in the Death in Venice (the German name for an ash tray sounds like Ashenbacker, or something. It made me laugh at the time).

The last part of the walk is inevitably the hardest and at the obligatory midday for all pasty Englishmen, like me. Was it just one relentless climb? There were great views of hilltop churches, ox-bow lakes, valley panoramas, etc. etc. But in fact all I seek is shade. Forests beat fields. Beat villages. Beat everything short of a pool. I make the 11 kilometres in just under two hours but I'm beat and my mood isn't helped by my first vision of Ems being of its golf course. And my second being its Stepfordy hinterlands. At the station I drink a gallon of water and find the only hotel on Google Maps. Having sat down to drink I discover it is actually quite hard to stand. I BrokeBack off to the Hotel Sternen.

Which, of course, is Indian.

The garden view from my terrace reminds me, I think it is the rhodadenroms, (whoops) of the Theosophical gardens in Calcutta, a life time ago. There is a lot of curry on the hotel menu, and my wifi logon is Singh. It doesn't work.

Much later I take a bus into Chur, which I remember in the rain as Croydon plus some alleyways. Today it is Mardis Gras plus Margate Funfair. The entire labyrinth of the old town is turned into temporary bars, stages, restaurants; an exercise in the communal. Everyone seems to having a lot of fun. I notice that there are many many tattoos. The entire city is in party mood. I am a bit of a party-popper, but only through tiredness. I'll be back for the other culture in a day or two.

In the concert arena - free green wrist tag compulsory - a Swiss rapper is being sarcastic. And the teenagers are being bored, plus texting. Later a progressive rock band - full title - named Headache, play with suitable pain. Later still there is a Lene Lovitchy Elastica rip off. Plus tattoos. I eat a biryani, feel my legs begin to buckle, and catch a taxi home from a place next to a strip joint named Octopussy - my first genuine Bond allusion. While I am waiting in the taxi office a MAMIL sans Lycra comes in, takes half a dozen boiled sweets from a jar on the desk, and orders a Stretch-Limo. I hope he hasn't made new friends at Octopussy - the evening could cost him quite a few superbikes.

Not to mention the saddle sores.

Brokeback Armstrong.

The Splugen: from Sophie Marceau through Wesley Schneider to Billy Idol, and back

2010-08-20T20:31:00.006+01:00

In the only Thusis bar with hints of, er, modernity, it is small, very dark and chalet-ish inside. The outside terrace, part glassed, looks out on to the rail tracks. Which is slightly unfair as the mountain view is splendid.

I am the only guest. It is 7.15 on a Friday evening. Whatever happened to that Friday afternoon seque from lunch to happy hour? The arcade game on the terrace is "Bermuda Triangle". Just below the darts. On the soundscape is early Madonna, then Billy Idol - who hasn't really had a late phase yet.

Thusis is bookended by a gardening centre at one end, and a kid's clothing shop at the other. In the centre is Blumen Frigg, yes, which is a flower shop. The furniture in my bar terrace is plastic wicker, which makes me as sole occupier the Wicker Man. Is it fortunate that I am neither a Presbyterian Policeman or a virgin? Only time will tell. Thusis may well do a good line in fertility cults.

Inside the bar is tiny; the smallest I have been in since a place in Ushuia, on the Darwiny tip of Argentina, where I bonded with my dad and various young Argentinian tax exiles.

As I start to think about my day, and perhaps even Tom's, the barman comes out to watch the train come in. The last time, in 2007, I'd made it as far as Chiavenna, around 40 kilometres away over the Splungen in Italy. There in a downpour, with a dodgy Apple, I decided to take the bus over the pass and on to Chur. It was too fast a transition from Italy into Switzerland. I never quite hit the Swiss Mode.

Today the mis-steps are more subtle. My Ipad clock is an hour slow; I miss the early bus to Splungen. When I take the next I discover I should have gone on to the Splungen Pass. I decide to nip up there. It is a three hour walk up, up, up. Johnny in the sports store sells me Factor 50+ and selects a hat. "Too posh" I say. Johnny says he likes that word, heard it a lot in London. But he couldn't live there. NYC is great though - for four days.

Nipping up there means my back turns into a IPOD Sweat Shop in China. I even stop the smokes. My path cuts across the road that leads to the pass, and Italy, and from time to time I hear the whine of the Dukati-Entitled. There are cows as well. At the top they sit with serene indifference. The view is great; not San Marco great, where it can seem after a beer or two that every mountain shy of Everest is in view, but pretty good.

I check my mail, feel guilty, and turn around to descend back to Splungen. Finally, at around 1.30 I am facing the same way as Tom, doing what he did. I begin to attempt the exorcism of the morning's allusiveness: I keep thinking about James Bond. There had been a long flat panorama and isolated petrol station that brought back memories of Connery and Tilly Masterson zooming around in Goldfinger land. Tilly wanted to kill Goldfinger because he'd painted her sister in gold, which was not good.

Then a helicopter flies over, low, with something hanging on what appears to be a short bungee-jump rope. On close inspection - really close - it turns out to be a dustbin, I think. Anyway, I start thinking about helicopters in Bond, then Sophie Marceau in The World is Not Enough, and then that NBNW rip-off at the end of From Russia With Love. I breath in, have a fag, and break my espionage ADD by fixating on a guy with walking poles who, with a terse "Bravo" has set off back to Splungen ahead of me. I give him thirty seconds and suddenly he's three hundred metres away.

I'm hating him now for his youth, his Wesley Schneider haircut and looks - I mean he may have won the Champions League, and almost the World cup, but he announced his engagement to his WAG on the intercom of the plane he was flying on. I hate him for his poles, particularly. Everyone has poles up here, everyone except me and the bikers. Wesley is my hare, but I force myself to let him run free: at my age a day one heart attack is really not cool, Tom didn't have one, neither has Rory Stewart (more of him later, I am sure). I walk in a stately manner appropriate to a man in McQueen jeans.

30 minutes later all animosity drops away as I turn a corner to find Wesley stopped and catching his breath.

Yes.

En passant I say "hi" in the Charles Ryder manner, emphasising all three syllables in a long-vowel drawl I learnt in Manhattan, being English. I move past Wesley and hear him start again, but there's only one man in this race now. I have a moment of religious awe. Then laugh a bit.

The English religious exiles from Tom's time and before, back to Henry's Big Switch from RC to P, must have seen their share of mountains on their way to Rome or Zurich or Validoloid. I make a mental note to map their routes, post routes, I am guessing. For Tom, as for everyone before Rousseau, it seems, mountains were not alluring sites for contemplation or snowboarding but brigand-heavy fearful places of in-breeding and banditry, a bit like the houses of our own Royal Family, I suppose. Tom's seen his share of mountains by now, and from the Splungen anyway, it is downhill at least. Is he still thinking about the courtesans at Venice; Palladio's Vicenza? The glanced but out of bounds Lake Como (pre Clooney). Or is he getting excited about Zurich, Basle and Strasbourg? It is possible.

Back at Splungen I announce to the tourist office that I am to walk to Thusis tonight. It is 4pm. "Eleven hours, minimum," says an officer. I find no joy in thinking about a triumphant return to Thusis at 3am, and neither I am sure do my very correct hoteliers. I walk to Sufers, take in the lake, pass a woman cycling the other way with a kiddie mobile tied to her rear tire, and a sleeping child, and catch the bus back to Thusis with 26 seconds to spare. On the bus I check email, and - somewhat sadly - read the cricket score at The Oval.

On my hotel's terrace I keep seeing Dick Cheney. This is bad. He is ill - or is he?

At the grotto bar with the rail track view Harry the barman tells me that 80,000 people are travelling as we speak to Chur - where I am supposed to be in two days - for a "rock" festival. This explains, he says, why I am the only customer in his bar. He used to have a discotheque on the top floor of the hotel I am staying in. "For twenty one years," he says, raising a multi-wrist-banded hand to his lips and kissing his fingers. "It was very nice." Today the top floor is a sauna-centre. I haven't been. Harry whistles along to Madonna's Holiday with a hint of bird-impersonator, a chaffinch I think. There would have been a career for him in vaudeville once upon a time.

It is 8pm now and Madonna and Billy Idol vie with the church bells. "Rebel Yell" starts again and it is time to eat.

Actually, it is "White Wedding". Same thing, really.

Thusis and Learning to slow down

2010-08-19T16:27:00.005+01:00

Three years ago my progress was pretty stately. Osyters in Whitsable, a night in my father's cottage near Dover, a Channel crossing; Calais in the rain. This morning was a blur of home-printed plane tickets, no check in, an Orange store at Zurich airport selling (very reasonable) pay as you go SIM cards for the IPad. In London it is a contract affair with a 30 day credit rating wait. Here the SIM costs 10 francs and comes with three free days unlimited 3G access. I'm checking my emails and sending Facebook messages from the platform of Zurich aiport's railway station in minutes.

As the succession of on time trains take me back towards the mountains and Thusis I can at any time click on my wikihood app and a google map based service tells me not only where I am, but what the nearby buildings are that I can't see. The idea of a paper guide book seems suddenly absurd. The downside, of course, is that there is more screen time than sightseeing as we cruise towards Chur. The far away hills, the nearby lake, the plains, all merge into a backdrop for my emailing and posting. I'm having a dose of empathy-lack.It is as though I've caught ADD.

`I sit at a cafe on Thusis high street, pretty much the sum of Thusis, and read Tom using my new Ton Coryat link app. I have to slow down, the rest of the day must be a process of slowing. "Alles gut" the waitresses asks the assembled groups of women taking coffee and ciggies. It is, they say, as one. This isn't the start, it's the prelude.

My Tool for this Trip

2010-08-18T21:56:00.000+01:00

All this and more. It better bloody work.

Some thoughts on returning to Tom Coryat's Walk

2010-08-18T15:50:00.005+01:00

Three and half years ago when I started this recreation, this walk across Europe, I had a laptop, a portable hard drive, and a lot of material typed in the British Library. Plus my Merrells. Now I have an IPad. I turn it on and the GPS, plus my wikihood app tells me where I am, what's around, and who has been here; then it maps it out for me. IBooks and a Kindle app let me read a myriad of out of copyright books - I'm weightlessly weighed down with Goethe, Cervantes, Erasmus, Homer, well the list is long and old skool. I can write, read, communicate, shop and learn with a thing about half the size of a baking tray. Is it the future? No, it's the here and now, and will - has - change travel forever.

Perhaps it is good that I start near the mountains: perhaps the signals will be down, and I can move into the mood more slowly. My mood is different from 2007 anyway, and I'm sure it will show. First thing: a flight to Zurich at half past horror tomorrow morning. Thusis by lunchtime, I think.

And I still have the Merrells. UCL want me to donate them afterwards in a Coryat-ish gesture.

The Letter Goes Out, the rains start pouring in London

2010-08-18T12:54:00.005+01:00

Hello everyone,

Tomorrow, August 19, I'll be restarting a walk across Europe (with some
fuel-powered assistance) that I began in May 2007. 402 years after the
event I'm again following in the footsteps and barge paths, inscriptions
and "inns" of Thomas Coryat, Jacobean oddity, English wit and global
traveller. Tom crossed Europe by foot in 1608; in 1611 he wrote a day by
day account of his trip: I'll be on his trail for around six weeks. This
time it is the "north" I'm taking on, Switzerland, a touch of France,
Germany and Holland. I start in Thusis, Tossana as was.

In 2007 I made it from Calais to Venice, turned around and crossed the
Italian mountains into Switzerland where, in the spa-cum-casino town of
Bad Ragatz, my beloved Apple gave up the ghost among the drunken gamblers and Lycra'd cyclists. As one point of this journey is to use modern technology to enhance the experience of living Tom Coryat's walk as closely as is possible, I stopped walking with the death of my computer. So did the Betwixt Europe blog.

It is back. http://betwixteurope.blogspot.com/

Now I'm armed with a miraculous IPad. The wonders of the books in the
Humanities One reading room at the British Library, and the gloved secrets of Rare Books still, as ever, inform my thinking, but this time so do GPS based apps, e-books from Amazon and Apple, and, crucially, the ideas of a history Professor from Harvard.

Dan Smail, the author of On Deep History and the Brain, very kindly wrote
to me recently in response to a question I had about my doctorate. I'm
looking at the way two events of terror were "told": these are The
Gunpowder Plot of 1605 and the World Trade Centre attacks of 2001. Dan
suggested that I start thinking about how I might infer the ways in which
the "aggregate brain" of 1605 is different from that of 2001.

The idea frightens me too. But I'm hoping that walking this half of Tom
Coryat's route - from Thusis in Switzerland to Flushing in Holland - might
help that process of inferring just a bit. Tom was a post-terror
traveller; now we all are. And Dan's book was my first e-book for the IPad, so I can just keep re-reading it until I get it.

My route is essentially the Rhine, taking in places including Zurich,
Basle, Strasbourg, Baden, Heidelberg, Worms, Mainz, Frankfurt, Duysburg,
Bommell and Flushing. The full list will be on the blog from tomorrow.

For those who prefer to follow by Facebook feel free to become my friend, I'll be cross posting:

http://www.facebook.com/AroundRobin

There will be Twitter too, I fear.

http://twitter.com/robhunt510

Finally, if any of you know people along the route who are friendly,
insightful, or both, do let me know, by email or Facebook message. In this
era of the frightening Foursquare app, people who know people - to quote
that venerable academic and pan-Europeanist, Barbra Streisand - are the
luckiest people in the world.

Many thanks,

Robin

Prep

2010-07-31T18:36:00.003+01:00

Been walking around Manhattan with my IPAD, getting into the truly mobile world of digital travel.

A thing of wonder. Even bumped into a family from Switzerland - at a Starbucks on Columbus - which seems like an omen of good things. Next week: mobile London. Then mobile Alsace. And then: back to the beginning on the Swiss border.

The Kind of Picture I Can't Take

2010-07-23T22:28:00.001+01:00

But will really try this time.

From Magnum Photos picture of the week.

That's Alec Guinness learning his lines. I'd say Richmond, upon Thames.

Countdown

2010-07-23T17:13:00.006+01:00

Whitstable, where it all began, and one of Peter's faves.

So tomorrow the countdown begins: first to New York to hang with Portia, meet old friends, buy that IPAD, and some NYC Sales' clothes. Three years on from the first walk things are different. I am a graduate student at UCL, working on representations of "terror" - Thomas Coryat might come into that as a post-Gunpowder treason "tourist". Who knows? Only the Rhine will tell.

Also, my father Peter, is dead; he died suddenly last summer - so one of my favourite readers isn't around any more. The walk will be for him, of course. All those mountains in Switzerland, the swoosh of German traffic (he hated those autobahns) - I'm sure I'll think of him a lot. Thomas's father died shortly before his walk...

These days those I tell about the journey break down into the "so like Leigh Fermor," or the "so like (that lovely) Rory Stewart" brigade. Nothing is new any more. I'll write about both men on the journey. It isn't new what I'm doing, but the technology to learn, communicate, and publish, is. This time there's a thriving Facebook community, Twitter, 18 MegaPixels instead of 3 (though I love that 3MP roughness, so perhaps I'll stick with the little Leica., and of course the new player, Foursquare. Plus, Ebooks, IPADs, more and more wonderful digital transcriptions of old stuff. Wi-Fi is now a wonderland...

...And Apps! Oh, perhaps I don't even need to leave home. But of course there's still the walking; and there's still the old (now sacred) Merrell boots. The Dean of my faculty asked if - like Tommy Boy - I'll be donating them to the University. I think they'd rather have the IPAD.

Anyway, almost there again, almost starting. Switzerland and those Alps very soon.

It begins again soon...

2010-06-24T17:37:00.002+01:00

...but this time with an IPAD.

In preparation: part two of the Journey

2009-06-24T17:36:00.000+01:00

I will shortly be starting to post my version of the journey from Venice to Bad Ragatz as an exercise in "recollection in tranquility". Patrick Leigh Fermor, whose Europe walk haunts my own, did much the same only he was in print. In the meantime I'll post a lecture I gave at the Text, Technology and Interpretation conference at Manchester's Chetham library over the weekend.

Robin

Now this is what I think of when I remember that Come Fly with Me is 50 years old

2009-02-16T13:11:00.005Z

Flickr has some great vintage French tourist shots.
Thanks to Olen Steinhauer.

And here's some Calais now, thanks also to Flickr.

Amiens raises an eyebrow

2009-01-14T16:01:00.001Z

One more film poster soon for the Jules Verne museum?

...director McG, who let slip that he wants Will Smith to star in his just-announced 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea: Captain Nemo at Disney.

"The character Nemo in this film is more about obsession, he is obsessed and people tend to forget that when you become so obsessed you end up being the villain," McG told the site, adding "Man I'm trying to get Will Smith to do it, been trying to get a hold of him. I've been wanting to work with him for a long time already. That guy's great."

An Exhibition of the old new media

2009-01-05T12:55:00.001Z

The resemblance between early Renaissance journalism and the current state of the Internet is uncanny. But there's a chastening lesson here for the Web as well. The Web is exuberant, democratic, unruly and thrilling. But Web-based journalists haven't really pioneered a new form. They've merely rejuvenated some dusty old ways of jousting with words.

From the Washington Post.

Just like that old Thin Lizzy song...

2008-12-30T18:11:00.002Z

I can't do this, but it looks like the future to me.

A nice feature of Google maps:

Take a GPS log file
Convert it into the .KML format used by Google Earth.
(You can make these with GPSbabel, amongst other utilities.)
Put it on a web server somewhere
Go to Google Maps, and search for the URL of the .KML file
You’ll get a nice map of your track. And you’ll even get information about how to link to it and how to embed it in your site. Here’s a section of the route I walked today, for example:

Here's the result.

...and here's the man who knows how.

Fantastic.

Happy christmas

2008-12-23T10:16:00.002Z

I'll be speaking about Tom next year. And walking some more, and repeating some of the journeys I've already made.

Robin

Postwar Europe

2008-12-05T12:55:00.000Z

Without such collective amnesia, Europe's astonishing post-war recovery would not have been possible.

Tony Judt
Postwar

Paris: city of booksellers?

2008-12-02T08:31:00.000Z

Those Left Bank book stalls in Paris [Bouquinistes] filled with First Editions and rare collections of poetry and are in trouble: books aren't selling so well, and plastic Eiffel towers are doing better. What happens next?

...Paris city hall, alarmed that the garish knick-knacks are damaging Paris's "cultural landscape", has launched a battle to protect the literary soul of the banks of the Seine. Bouquinistes have been invited to crisis talks at the city hall in an attempt to promote more intellectual merchandise. But some warn that if they cannot adapt to the changing market they will "die of hunger".

Imagine this in a market near you:

The trade is strictly regulated. Each bouquiniste is allowed four boxes painted dark green: three must contain books, the fourth can sell items such as prints, collectors' postcards, stamps and souvenirs.

From Le Guardian.

Founder of Technorati launches public beta of his customised print travel guides...

2008-11-18T16:45:00.000Z

...here's why:

...what I learned is that there is really something special about holding a physical printed book in your hands. Especially when you are travelling. And you know, I travel with my Blackberry and my iPhone and my Laptop and all of that and if I am in the middle of a Siok in Jerusalem or I am lying on a beach in Phuket, Thailand I don’t really want to pull out my Blackberry or end up paying those enormous data rates via my iPhone just to be able to find a piece of information that I could easily find if it was sticking in my back pocket.

Lots more here in an interview with David Sifry.

Gosh: print is back? Just as the E-book gets exciting?

Tom would have loved this

2008-10-27T13:53:00.000Z

Quicker than Tom

2008-09-27T18:53:00.000+01:00

Mr. Rossy, a Swiss pilot, leapt from the plane about 8,200 feet over Calais, France, blasted across 22 miles of water and deployed his parachute, above, over the South Foreland Lighthouse in Dover. Onlookers who dotted the famous white cliffs cheered and waved as he came into view.

Even impressed the New York Times.

The ever generous Paul Theroux

2008-09-17T07:27:00.002+01:00

Thinking about Tom and his amazing Jacobean times is actually easier when not in his exact footsteps. But I'm never far away, even back in London. Today I'm off to a conference on renaissance spies. And especially Sir Henry Wotton, who was "bureau chief" as it were, in Venice - during the early part of the reign of James I. And who certainly met Tom in 1608. (There's much more to Wotton, and maybe I will know after my conference). That's him above.

Meanwhile, back on the circle line...Paul Theroux tries to flog a new book in a free newspaper, and sounds as charmless as ever. Wasn't he rather keen on V.S. Naipaul's tracks once upon a time?

A lot of travel writing is a stunt – “Ooh, I’ll bounce a ball around Iceland, I’ll throw a Frisbee around Namibia” – and doesn’t amount to much except someone in need of a subject. The other type is people thinking: “I’ll follow the tracks of Graham Greene, that’ll be exciting!” So I thought, some gap year punk’s going to do that about me, and I don’t want that – it’s my life, my trip, I’ll do my own return journey.

Tom and Now

2008-09-05T21:52:00.001+01:00

Thanks Google.

Makes it all much easier. Betwixt continues, and will be back regularly soon.

For now don't forget around robin.

Today is the 400th anniversary of Tom's Departure

2008-05-15T12:16:00.002+01:00

A picture from Padua's railway station

Thanks Tom for inspiring my walk, changed my life - a little

And in other news: the Venice bottom snapper has finally been caught.

Normal walking service will shortly resume: I'm writing an academic paper on trust
and it's taking a little time.

Coming soon: The Rhine

A piece I wrote for The Times on Italian towns.

And Shakespeare might have made it to Venice as well as Tom. Read more here.

Another way to cross the Alps?

Happy thing

2007-12-31T19:01:00.000Z

To 2008, Switzerland, Germany & Turner

For Tom and Everyone Else

Friendly Fires "Paris"

2007-12-22T18:04:00.001Z

Best song of the Year 2007, and even Tom would have approved

As may be clear

2007-11-05T17:25:00.000Z

The view from Bad Ragatz

I am writing. Betwixt's quest begins again soon, but for now the journey in between is one of words not footwork. I'm reading in preparation for Switzerland and Germany, and I'm in search of a Grail Sword to scythe the book text that grows daily: I''ve written seventy pages and haven't got anywhere near Paris yet.

Robin

Fire in the sky-ai-ai (part one)

2007-08-31T09:11:00.000+01:00

Over the top of the pass and not so far away Wagner and his brand of booted thunder is waiting: this morning's storm is just a reminder of things to come. What is less predictable is that Cha Cha Cha Town will be offering up its own metallica within 12 hours. But then this is Lynchian Land, and already I am wondering if they put something in the water...

I am sitting with the Moleskine around 8.30 pm writing a movie, as you do, with the ole boys talking Nesta, Carnivarro and Adriano over coffee. From downwind comes a punk thrash of Louis Armstrong's What a Wonderful World...only a bit of it, this is a rehearsal, so there is a lot more une-due and drum rolls. I ask the elderly couple next to me what gives. Rock concert says Mrs Football-widow.

Opposite the Municipal offices four young men have set up in the parking space of the Orlandini ice cream and booze-u-like (beer)cafe. Yup: in the spa town of the Brambana valley there are Marshall amps, turquoise Stratocaster guitars, singing drummers and wi-fi connections. Rock and Roll is here to Spray.

"We're abusive," the lead singer shouts to me. "Abusivi."

The crowd is not particularly expectant, the youngest streches out in his pram, whilst his mother orders a Machiatto coffee. The band warm up by sitting down to strudel, followed by beer, and then ham and cheese plates. They don't look phased. Mrs Machiatto rather likes the pre-show music, jiving away like it is Prince on New Year's Eve 1999 to a reggae version of "Everything that I Own." After this Steve Tyler sings that apocalyptic one about saving the world and his daughter, Liv: and I don't want to miss a thing. Abusivi seem to like this one, they sway as they snuffle, until the CD jumps and we move onto Italian chick-skiffle, KT Tunstall meets Carla Bruni - but not in a good way.

Abusivi's lead singer gives punk baby a big grin, but the young lad seems more interested in the lights of the pharamacy opposite. Some late arrivals have monkish bald pates and nice pale blue cardigans.

The lead guitarist can riff, play chords, and smoke. But never all three at the same time. The first song is named Spirato.

Song two has a bit that goes: cook cook caroo, ay ay Cadaver. It ends with the half-line, "like a lonely song." Next up "Speedy Gonzalez" as a Green Day purgation. But half way through the heavens open and that's it. Bar staff rush out and help to get everything inside. Three songs: over. Suddenly reading the Corriella del Sporto is the New Rock and Roll. I head for bed, wave at the old football men, and turn on one of those terrible buddy-buddy, black-white, cop films that lose something in translation in any language.