New Mobile, New Chur, New Labour

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

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.