@ 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.

Today is the 400th anniversary of Tom's Departure

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?

Out: Verona. In : Hawaii. Shakespeare to work on next series of "Heroes"

"I shall say good night till it be morrow."

"Romeo Montague dies for Juliet and awakens in this age on a volcano in Hawaii, where he meets a wise Zen Master. So is the premise of James Edwards' new time-travel romance novel: "Romeo and Juliet: A Modern Day Sequel." In the story, Shakespeare's Juliet has reincarnated as a famous actress who falls in love with Romeo in an Internet chatroom. The story draws on themes from Zen Buddhism, Hollywood narcissism and new-age philosophy as the two star-crossed lovers recall their past lives in Egypt and Atlantis and overcome many obstacles to meet again."

The new west side story?

Chapter One free on the website.

“Oh reason not the need.”

In 1603, another plague year in London, William Shakespeare took his players on a tour. The Chamberlain’s men visited Bath, Rochester and came here, to Dover. Was this the time that he wrote, or at least visualized, King Lear? That he saw the White Cliffs and was inspired to write one of the great scenes in modern drama - when blinded Gloucester jumps to what he believes will be his death? My Arden Shakespeare, edited by R.A Foakes, says the play was written between 1605 and 6. It’s all possible.

I like to imagine that Dover Castle helped to inspire King Lear, with its themes of confused family, inheritance and property rights; of Kings and Alpha Men now shaken into crisis by the thrusting greed of their middle-aged children and their own visions of mortality. I imagine too the playwright walking the cliffs before a performance of some work – they are now known as the Shakespeare Cliffs - and plotting The Tempest and its brave new worlds. I also imagine swathes of Kent, the Garden of England, inspiring Midsummer Night’s Dream or As You Like It. It is not hard to. Dream on, here.

Below, the Alkham Valley in Kent, yesterday:



The first performance of Lear was for King James Ist at Whitehall, London, in December 1606. Perhaps Tom Coryat saw it along with the Prince of Wales, his patron. Let’s hope: the play was not performed again in Tom or Shakespeare’s lifetime.

Twenty years ago this spring a National Theatre production of King Lear ended my relationship with drama - until last autumn. I thought Anthony Hopkins’ Lear and Michael Bryant’s Gloucester the best thing I’d ever seen. David Hare directed. I tried theatre afterwards but the plays seemed lightweight; the ideas weak. Last autumn watching Carolina or Change and The Coram Boy at the National Theatre in London I realized I missed the collective wonder that great theatre brings.

Surely that is one of the web’s most pressing issues: its collective is tangible but not visceral: and its shared pleasures consumed alone. Of course watching kids in front of their screens, in internet cafes, or wi-fi’d up and instant messaging as we once chatted, this may just be my age speaking. The academic Sherry Turkel once wrote that unless one was born after 1985 the web was a learned language, not something adopted at birth. My generation is Betwixt indeed.

And theatre is far cheaper than even mediocre football these days.

Coming Shortly

One year short of the 400th anniversary of the “first” tourist’s journey across Europe, Robin Hunt follows in the footsteps of one of Shakespeare’s drinking mates, Thomas Coryat, armed with the latest communication technologies (and an online computer database filled with 400 years of European history, rumour, culture, scandal and stories of exile) to create a twenty-first century mosaic that considers travel, identity, pleasure and place, in words, sounds and pictures.

Shakespeare News

The idea of the Renaissance Computer will feature here over the next few months. Meanwhile in America and London...And happy birthday... Even if Will was not "A man of travel, that hath seen the world."

In the electronic age with its vast databank of stored knowledge, when the mot juste is just a Wikiquote away and human memory of facts all but redundant, the idea of a commonplace book may seem quaint. Every blog, after all, is a sort of commonplace book, with items culled from elsewhere, reassembled, and subjected to vigorous commentary along the way.

One man who has seen much of the world and Kabul writes nicely about the Commonplace Book - the Wiki of Shakespeare's day, as Neil Rhodes suggests in many of his books, see quote above.