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.
Showing posts with label IPAD. Show all posts
Showing posts with label IPAD. Show all posts
Thursday, 1 September 2011
Wednesday, 1 September 2010
Pussy Galore in Baden
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.
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.
Thursday, 26 August 2010
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.
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.
Monday, 23 August 2010
@ 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.
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.
Thursday, 19 August 2010
Thusis and Learning to slow down
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.
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.
Wednesday, 18 August 2010
Some thoughts on returning to Tom Coryat's Walk
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.
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
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
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
Friday, 23 July 2010
Countdown
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.
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