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.
Showing posts with label Rhine. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rhine. Show all posts
Thursday, 15 September 2011
Thursday, 21 October 2010
Bopping to AOR
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.
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.
Wednesday, 8 September 2010
Diccon Blues
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.
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.
Friday, 3 September 2010
G-LOST, the fifty kilometre day
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.
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.
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