Swing Time

Take a deep breath......
 

Pick yourself up,

Take a deep breath,

Dust yourself off

And start all over again.

 

Dorothy Fields / Jerome Kern

 
Curses!  I hate Europe(an Sleepers!) On my way south and east, the company had downgraded me from Sleeper to Couchette, citing ‘technical issues.’  Now, with only days before the return, I am emailed to say the same will apply for the leg from Prague to Brussels.  Curses!

 
As has often been said, it is better to travel hopefully than to arrive, and much of the attraction of travel for me has always been in the anticipation.  Like my father before me, I spend much time planning routes, choosing places to stay and sometimes even places to eat, things to see and do – and that is part of the pleasure.

 
When I was much younger, I enjoyed the chaos of Italian trains, standing in the corridor with no room to move, or spending nights sitting in compartments with smoking soldiers in Yugoslavia, even perching on the step of an open train door travelling through the night north of Madrid.  I rode trains up and down India and across Africa, excited by the experience, and not too bothered about creature comforts.

 
But now, having clocked up my three score and ten, I like a little luxury now and then.  I worked for it!  And the journeys between Brussels and Prague were supposed to be spent in Sleeping Cars, not Couchettes, saving nights in hotels and arriving reasonably rested.
 
But curses!  These plans have been foiled and I will not trust the company, ‘European Sleepers,’ again!  They even had the cheek to email me yesterday about their new sleeper deal to Venice – but no way can I contemplate that now, and I advise all to beware this particular outfit.

 
Some will say they told me so!  Some will blame Europe – but I don’t.  Some will blame capitalism, others communism – but I don’t.

No, I suspect the problem is something to do with an inexperienced start up business without the expertise or the infrastructure to live up to their aims.  But I don’t know.  What I do know is that this trip has been tainted by these let downs, and by the discomfort of dirty carriages and compartments, poor service, delays and no attempt at apology.
 
Anyway, where was I?  
 
Oh, yes.  Brno (pronounced Burn-oh). This was the main focus of the expedition, though I wasn’t quite sure about it, as Brno is the capital of Moravia and the second largest city in Czechia (with nearly half a million people) and was once a busy industrial town (mainly textiles) when it wasn’t being fought over (the battle of Austerlitz – also known as The Battle of the Three Emperors - took place only a few miles down the road) .....  But it turns out OK.

The people are friendly and Špilberk Castle, a hefty building atop a hill with a terrifying history, is actually rather fine, and the third-floor rooms are filled with Czech art, and there’s hardly anyone around.
 
Across the city there is the Villa Tugendhat, designed and built in 1929/30 by Mies van der Rohe, for a wealthy industrialist.  This is the only example of modern architecture in the Czech Republic inscribed in the list of UNESCO World Cultural Heritage sites and was the inspiration for my friend Simon Mawer’s 2009 Man Booker Prize shortlisted novel, ‘The Glass Room.’  

Thanks to Simon I join a guided tour in English (my Czech wouldn’t even bounce) and am impressed by the sense of floating space in the living areas, the beautiful onyx wall, and the views across the city to the Cathedral and the Castle.  The design, engineering, and the use of materials, were revolutionary and still, almost a hundred years later, feel modern.  You wouldn’t be surprised to see it on Grand Designs! 

Although, (pace Simon) having followed Kevin McCloud’s progress from his Dunstable upbringing, I cannot help but feel that even he may occasionally doubt that the outcome of expensive projects will necessarily lead to eternal partnerships of harmony and light. Certainly, the story of ‘The Glass Room’ is not a reflection of serene happiness.

 
But, yes, Brno is a hit.  I visit the Žlutý kopec Water Tanks, and test for Echoes, wondering where Narcissus is (You don’t know?  Ed.)  I drink Burcák (pronounced Boor-chark) from girls in stalls on the street.  This is essentially the first fermentation of the grape harvest, and is thick, sweet, and not too strong (like me, he jested - That's a jest?  Ed)....

 
And then it is time to leave.  Next stop Vienna, a city haunted, for me, by memories of previous visits.  OK, the first time was in 1978, when I attempted to drive a flock of my students through the remains of Graham Greene’s imagination as well as the whole gamut of tourist attractions from the Prater to the Boys’ Choir.  

But since then, Amanda and I checked in and sipped Wiener Melanges in Café Hawelka, and got dazzled by Klimt and Schiele.  And so, although I am travelling with an old friend, I cannot help but feel alone in the midst of the morass of touring humanity.  In the swirling throngs of tourists (yes, I know I am one too!) I feel I am drowning in a dark vat of microplastic chips, and I cannot tell up from down.

I had a dream the other night.  I was trying to get away from a truck of soldiers in grey uniforms.  I scrambled bareback onto a beautiful chestnut horse, and we leapt over a fence and across a field at full pelt, then crashed through a dense hedge and I came adrift, slipping back off my mount but grabbing desperately for its tail as it tore away.  Then I was alone, adrift, the soldiers approaching.

 
I wanted to go back to the Albertina, but the queues, even late into Saturday evening, were down the steps and along the street.  In St Stephen’s cathedral the aisles are as crowded as Euston on a Friday afternoon, and about as religious.

 

But Sunday is different, and I get to pay my respects to Chagall et al in the Albertina after all, without too much hassle, and then head out to Grinzing for lunch at a fabulous Heuriger (Zanderfilet – pike perch - with Riesling, then Zwetschkenknodel – plum dumpling – with Trilogie, then coffee with Müllers schnapps....) Then, for a wonderful view (and some fresh air) up to Kahlenberg Hill.  Take a deep breath!

 
It isn’t far from Vienna to the Bohemian diamond, and I spend a very pleasant afternoon walking by the vast Svět fish pond at Třeboň.

It’s a small town, around 450 metres above sea level, and though the sun is kind in the day, the evening becomes fresh, and the streets empty.

Though this is somewhere new to me, the dark emptiness oppresses me.  It is now eight months since Amanda died, and though I know I won’t see her again, of course I still miss her terribly.  It wasn’t a shock when she died – it was something of a relief, after the years of decline and suffering – but there is no getting away from the loneliness.  Looking back, all the good times just made me sadder, so now it is time to look forward, even though all sorts of needles prick my nerves.

I begin to blame her for leaving me, then I reprimand myself for such selfish thoughts, such shameful self-pity.  She would tell me not to be so foolish.  She would say, take a deep breath, dust yourself off, pick yourself up and start all over again.  Who would have thought that in the depths of Bohemia, Jerome Kern (as voiced by Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers) would be giving me strength?

 
The last stages of my journey see me passing through Tábor, four times as large as Třeboň, but really much the same.  Again, lots of carp and beer.....

 
Then Prague, with a resident population of around 1.3 million and (according to data from the Czech Statistical Office) 7.4 million tourists – both domestic and international – in 2023.  It is hard to make progress through the Old Town Square and the Castle is impossible.  

Amanda and I first came here in around 1986, when it was relatively quiet, and then we visited again about eight years ago, when she was already failing, but it was still manageable.  

This time I make a trip out to Karlstejn 

to avoid the crowds, and then fill in an hour or so at the Strahovský klášter (the Strahov Monastery) whose astonishing 200,000 volume library has a Baroque Theological Hall, established between 1671 and 1674, 

and a Philosophical Hall dating from 1794.  

And then it is time to take the European Sleeper back to Brussels, of which I have said enough already.  What a pain!  Two hours late and no apology, but time enough for a drink at À La Mort Subite, Jacques Brel’s (and my) favourite bar, 

and then a wonderful evening in my favourite Brasserie, which I am not going to name, as some things remain sacred.....

Then all the way back home.  For the record, just as all the trains I took on this trip (apart from the European Sleeper) were punctual, clean and generally quiet, the Eurostar from Brussels to London made it in under two hours.  But then it was the best part of four hours from King’s Cross to home, on a standing room only train to Cambridge, then on to Ely from where it was a coach substitute to King’s Lynn.

 
It was a relief to get back.  I love travelling, but perhaps the best is in the past?  Now, somehow, I have to follow Fred Astaire’s advice, and,
 

Pick myself up,

Take a deep breath,

Dust myself off

And start all over again.

 

Dorothy Fields / Jerome Kern

 

{I just wish I could dance! Watch this clip}

 

https://youtu.be/NJ9qkJKAWkw?feature=shared

Fahrt ins Blaue

Out of Order

Armed border guards stare down the incoming Eurostar passengers at Brussels Zuid, as no one declares anything and we funnel through the green channel. Will they haul me aside and discover the half empty bottle of Harrogate water in my bag…..

Two hours later I board the European Sleeper to Prague, a long, old, tired train almost entirely composed of empty couchette compartments.

The stewards are teenagers - I just hope the driver has a licence. Ash trays in the corridors tell of the train’s tobacco stained history:

Supper, as advertised below, in the cramped, twenty-four seat dining car, is noisy and reminiscent of the ground floor of the Tower of Babel - conversations take place in several tongues at the same time. I drink a red beer from Dresden and am given a bowl of bright yellow pumpkin soup…

To follow, I am served ‘Schnitzel’ though, disregarding the bright yellow lumpy mashed potato, it is less schnitzel and more deep fried rissole…. But I am not going to write to the management. One of the values (?) of international travel is that, through changes in routine, and variety of custom, it may induce a little homesickness…..

It is time for bed, and, having been downgraded from Sleeper to Couchette (due to a technical fault, you understand? The stewardess suggests I make the best of it…..) Slightly uncomfortably, I climb the metal ladder to slide into my sheet sleeping bag on the middle level, as per the instructions on the wall.  ‘Snuggle,’ and ‘cozy,’ are not the words that are foremost in my attempt to sleep.

It is now very dark, and we stop for ages at Roosendaal, though nothing at all happens.  Nothing.  Then, without warning, we judder off again into the night, towards Amsterdam.

Despite another set of ‘rules’ in five languages) (We kindly ask you to be considerate of other travellers and not cause any noise nuisance….. We also ask you to not have loud conversations between 11 p.m. and 7 a.m. in order to respect the night’s sleep.) I couldn’t tell you how well the night slept, but at midnight the corridor is loud with Slavic tongues, possibly fuelled by red beer and schnitzel. I think about it, but I don’t actually say Shush!  Call me what you want, but I am not in the mood for fighting.

At 3.30 a.m. we stand silently, for maybe half an hour, in the utterly deserted Hannover Hauptbahnhof.  Nothing happens.  Nothing. Then, clanking, we lurch on. It is, I dream, like being in a bathyscape, with strange pinging sounds, and a swaying, waving, plunging series of movements, as though a giant squid is caressing the carriage.  As though implosion is a possibility.

At precisely 6.36 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, a disembodied voice comes over a crackling tannoy, saying, with no detectable emotion, Guten Morgen, before relapsing into disembodied silence. Perhaps this is obligatory, the Muezzin of the Lutheran Church, one of the 95 precepts nailed to a door in Wittenberg. Or perhaps it is a recording activated by the decreasing balance of darkness over light - like the electronic dawn in ‘Metropolis?’

Aurora rises up like wet newspaper in a muddy stream. The teenage stewardess brings a box of breakfast at 8.15 (despite my request for earlier).  I haven’t had margarine since we used to anoint diced beetroot with it for school lunch.  Meanwhile drizzle falls on passing allotments. 

We pass through Dresden in rain, the Elbe in flood, the landscape just on the turning edge of autumn.  Wet-roofed houses shuttered down.  Nobody about.

Not far now to the Czech border, then the last trundle down towards Prague. The sky is breaking up a bit and daylight doesn’t seem quite so depressing, but I’m a long way from home, and my thoughts stray to my quiet village, my house, my family - my late cat….. I am a little confused, just a bit on the homesick side of happiness, perhaps.  I stare out the wet window, wondering why I am here.

Then, the train arrives and a plaque on the wall welcomes me in the underpass with a picture of Woodrow Wilson and his words, delivered to Congress in 1917 when seeking a declaration of war against Germany, The world must be made safe for democracy, (though it was President of the USA George Bushe (sic) who quoted this on a visit in 1990 when he was drumming up European support for bellicose intentions in the Middle East….) 

Within the original Entrance Hall of the historic art nouveau Prague Hlavni Nadrazi (Praha hl or Prague main station) there is the Fantova Kavarna, where time passes easily with a goat’s cheese and beetroot bagety (but no margarine) and a Pilsner Urquell to drown the hour.  Then it is time for the Railjet to Brno, a busy train that is heading for Vienna and Graz.

They say that travel broadens the mind.  Well, partly due to the two men behind me who prattle loudly for the entire two and a half hours of the trip, my cortex has been so broadened that it is flatter than gold leaf - broad, maybe, but not deep.  

Once in Brno (pronounced, I think, Burn-oh), a short walk up a slippery cobbled lane takes me to a boutique hotel, whose lobby sports a photo of Vaclav Havel that he signed in November 2009.

It is grey, and damp, but I climb the tower of the old town hall, from the balcony of which Queen Elizabeth II addressed the crowds, with Havel by her side, in 1996.  (And, incidentally, where author Simon Mawer was photographed some twenty  years later.  Simon tells me that the last celebrity photographed here before Queen Elizabeth was Adolf Hitler). The vegetable market square lies before me, then there is the cathedral of St Peter and St Paul, its twin neo-gothic spires scratching at the clouds.  

On the hill behind me squats the solid Spielberk Castle, with a ghastly history of successive regimes of torture and imprisonment, going back through the Red Army, the Nazis, the Austrians, Napoleon and the rest.  

And then across the city, part hidden among some mature trees, a bright white slab is all I can see of Mies van Der Rohe’s 1929/30 Villa Tugendhat, the inspiration for Simon Mawer’s 2009 Man Booker Prize shortlisted novel, The Glass Room, and the reason for my visit…..

But that is for tomorrow.  Now is the time for goulasch and unfiltered pivo.  And perhaps a shot of  Becherovka……

Until tomorrow…..

And in the meantime: 

Truth and love must prevail over lies and hatred. 

Vaclav Havel

https://www.visitczechia.com/en-us/news/2021/12/n-vaclav-havel

On a Wing and a Prayer

Learning to fly

It is a beautiful morning, so fresh after the storms.  The early morning sun slices across the Norfolk landscape like a silver knife through a pat of warm butter.  It is cool, and the wind tugs at the long grass, shaking the bushes by the path.  The tide is out, and the waves splutter harmlessly some way away.  Above me a copper blue sky, which tinges down to a daub of stilton smeared across the horizon where there is a bank of clouds above the wind farm.

I stagger backwards up the beach, locked tight to Karl by the straps and carabiners in my harness, then, as the updraft fills the elliptical wing above us we charge left, my legs all over the place, and we leave the ground, silently rising close to the chalk cliffs of Old Hunstanton, then we are aloft - the beach, the sea, the grassy slopes falling rapidly away.

I thought I might be scared. In my youth I would get vertigo on a thick pile carpet, and, though nowadays I can steel myself to the top of tall buildings, looking down from the the Mole Antonelliana in Turin (at 167.5 metres still the world's tallest unreinforced brick building) and standing on the glass floor of the 170 metre Spinnaker Tower in Portsmouth, I tremble half way up a ladder to clean my gutters.

But no.  There is no fear.  I suppose there's not much point. Karl is sitting on a reserve parachute, but we aren't high enough for it to open if we needed it, even though I guess we must be thirty of more metres above the ground by now.

How am I here, vying with the gulls in the chill air?  Well, I held a launch party for my new book (see below), and Karl should have been in Saudi Arabia flying for some sheik, but that was cancelled at the last minute, so he turned up at my house, and, after a few drinks, he suggested I might like a tandem flight at eight the next morning (as a contribution to charity).

I probably should not have drunk so much....  not because I wouldn't have accepted the generous offer, but because early in the morning I could actually have felt better.  Anyway, after a hurried breakfast of two cups of tea, two ginger biscuits and a pair of paracetamol, I stumble to the car park at Hunstanton cliffs, where several hardy types are already careering across the sky.  It's a brilliant morning, and they all seem to know each other, so there's immediately a tangible camaraderie.  One lends me gloves (I needed them!) others help us launch. 

Up above Hunstanton there are rights of way, as we sail along on the rising wind, passing by, or over, or under individuals who swing and veer through the air flaring on their Moustaches.

Below us pink people take part in a park run, walkers wave, and tiny people walk tiny dogs on the beach, our shadow sweeping after them across the sand.

It is calm.  Karl manoeuvres by pulling down the control line on one side and easing up on the other, so one side of the wing slows and we turn.  It all seems easy, but then he's been doing it for twenty-five years, all over the world.  I feel quite safe. It is thrilling, riding the rolling level.... striding high.... rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing.....

But then it is time to think about landing....

And the land is far below us.... And landing means the meeting of two bodies and all our gear attracted by the gravitational pull of the earth, with a forward speed of, say, ten miles an hour, all at the mercy of a gusting wind and the pull of a few strings..... As we approach the beach Karl calls to two of his mates for them to act as brakes (?) and we are suddenly in contact with the solid part of the planet. Ideally we should have hit the ground running. the trailing edge of the wing flopping behind us and the brakes (?) holding us by the risers and the carabiners (?) Unfortunately, on this particular occasion, the wind tips the leading edge of the wing over us and we collapse face forward at some speed, strapped tightly together, scrambling crablike across the uneven sand. Fortunately, no harm is done. My camera is shaken, not shattered, and it is only my dignity that is damaged.

Wow!  

Thank you, Karl!

Brothers in arms!

**********

I caught this morning morning's minion, king-

dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding

Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding

High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing

In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,

As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding

Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding

Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here

Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion

Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion

Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,

Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

The Windhover

Gerard Manley Hopkins

**********

And, in case you didn't know, my new book:

is now available to buy (all proceeds to charity).  It is almost as good as sliced bread, and if you don't believe me, read what others say about it:

Simply the finest book I have read about Norfolk this week.

Sir John Betjeman

Bloodsports Weekly

Your man Gibbs has a fine way with plagiarism - and the daguerreotypes are great!

George Bernard Shaw

The London Review of Books

I have nothing to declare but my genius - Oh?  You wanted something about that book?  Well, it's very nice.....

Oscar Wilde

Time Out

I say, Jeeves, what a spiffing book!

Bertie Wooster

Indeed, Sir?

Jeeves

I want the film rights.....

Sam Peckinpah

Just email me at richardpgibbs@aol.com