Travel Tales #3 A case of mistaken identity

At an airport once, while waiting for my flight to be called, I caught sight of someone I knew and who I really wanted to avoid. Luckily for me there was a party of Glasgow Rangers football supporters seated nearby, so I thought I would sit near them and hide behind their impenetrable accents. 


It was a good strategy that had worked once before and would have worked again if fate hadn’t once more conspired  to deal me a crummy hand.


After about ten minutes my human shield of football fans got up en masse and made their way to their boarding gate. Their flight had been called! I felt vulnerable, exposed. Luckily the object of my shyness was nowhere to be seen. But better safe than sorry, so I found another refuge, this time behind a school party of young teenage girls.


I started to feel relatively safe, cocky even, and then I looked up at the screen and was filled with a near panic when I saw that my flight was delayed for one whole hour. I was also beginning to regret that second cup of coffee I‘d had an hour earlier, knowing the way that caffeine goes through one, or at least through this one.


I prayed that something would happen to distract everyone’s attention just long enough for me to slip to the loo. Maybe the schoolgirls would suddenly turn into a flash mob and start tap dancing on the tables. Isn’t flash mobbing all the rage these days? In England flash mobs have been descending locust-like on public libraries threatened with closure and borrowing every book on the shelves leaving them empty, bare and bookless. 


I crossed my legs and pleaded to myself: Please, schoolgirls, please, don’t just sit there, start flash mobbing!!! 


But all they did was giggle and gaggle and send text messages to one another like a bunch of schoolgirls! 


I waited about twenty minutes until I could wait no longer, checked that the coast was clear, hoped that I wasn’t being watched by a pair of cat’s eyes, and then made my dash. 


I made it in five there and back without incident.


So who was this individual I was so paranoid to avoid? His name was…… No, I can’t bring myself to say it. He had a huge mop of yellow hair and was always whistling. I worked with him for about two years. He was a doom monger, a prophet of doom. We’re doomed, he used to tell us. Doomed, doomed, doomed. We needed to repent to save ourselves from being doomed. Otherwise we’d be doomed. Doomed, doomed, doomed.


Ten years on and I could still hear his doom laden voice. I couldn’t be expected to put up with that. Well, could I? Five minutes of Dr Doom and I’d be a nervous wreck.


Twenty minutes, then the screen announced that our flight was called and that we should make our way to the boarding gate. It was the school party’s flight, too, so I followed them to the escalator.


It was a long escalator, and as we were going down I spotted a head of bright yellow hair in front of us. Of a man’s bright yellow hair! My heart missed a beat. I felt doomed! Was this his way of getting his revenge for all the nasty, rude, sly, sarcastic, pointless, mean, malicious, malevolent, voraciously unnecessary, sneaky, unspeakable, low-minded and often down right gratuitous comments, insinuations and rumours that I’d made about him all those years ago? It was certainly possible, there are some people who never forget anything! 


We got off the escalator and began walking the long corridor to the boarding gate. If he recognizes me what should I do? I needed a strategy. I could either be covert, keep hiding behind the schoolgirls. Or I could be overt, put all my prejudices behind me, and greet him with open arms as a former colleague and brother in arms.


I decided on the latter, and was on the point of making this decisive move so important for my psychological, philosophical and emotional development, when he suddenly turned, first in profile, then full face……and I noticed that it wasn’t him at all!  In fact, apart from the hair, it didn’t look anything like him. Of all the low, sneaky…..


I felt a surge of something rush through me. Relief? Soulagement? I wanted to rush forward and embrace him and thank him for not being who he wasn’t (I know what I mean). But instead I just found a seat and waited for the off.


The off came about 15 minutes later and soon we were flying at 30,000 feet and speeding through the stratosphere at 500 miles per hour, or at whatever speed planes speed at when they’re speeding at 500 miles per hour (I know what I mean), with nothing but the giggling of schoolgirls to stop me from relaxing. It was a cheap price to pay.

Rain, art & immortality

Palazzo di Brera

What distinguishes real art from ersatz art and tourist art is that real art has no shelf life, no use-by date. Real art is timeless.


And in a world which, to misquote Oscar Wilde, ‘knows the price of everything and the value of nothing’, it has become a commodity to be traded in the marketplace like any other.


Fortunately for us and for the world there are many public and municipal museums and art galleries in which the artistic treasures which belong to us all are preserved and put on display for public consumption at a modest entrance fee, and often at no fee at all, and one such is the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan.


I visited the gallery one rainy day. The rain, in fact, was torrential and had been for several days and was the main topic in the news. The cathedral, il Duomo, the main tourist attraction of Milan, was open, but visits to the roof were not. This was a disappointment, but the Pinacoteca was definitely on, so it was there that I headed.


I wanted to visit the famous art gallery for one specific reason: to see Raphael’s Lo Sposalizio della Vergine masterpiece, The Marriage of the Virgin. It is one of the glories of il Rinacimento, the Italian Renaissance.


I made my way to the rain soaked via Brera. The gallery façade was covered in tarpaulin, but the gallery was open, and I walked through the arch and into the magnificent Palazzo di Brera and into the gallery.


I paid my 5 euros and told a gallery assistant that I was looking for Lo Sposalizio. It seemed her most frequently asked question. She smiled, a curator’s smile straight from antiquity, and gave me my directions. 


Raphael painted his masterpiece in 1504, and it marks, according to the art historians, the transition from Early to High Renaissance. I found it without difficulty in Room XXIV.

The painting is oil on a wooden panel measuring 67 inches x 46 inches, and depicts the joining together in marriage of Joseph and Mary by a high priest. According to legend, each of Mary’s suitors was to place a rod on the holy altar, and whoever's rod was the first to flower would marry Mary. Attending Joseph are five of the failed suitors, one of whom is breaking his rod.


I looked at the painting for about 10 minutes, then at the other paintings in the room, then moved on to the next room and joined the flock of the faithful moving from room to room, canvas to canvas, reverential sheep from a secular world, as close as we would get to immortality.

Thinking voyeurs, Chinese laundries & political incorrectness

Place du Palais, Nice

A man goes into hospital to have a leg amputated. The surgeon performs the operation and the next day he visits the man in his bed. The man asks him how the operation went and the surgeon replies: “I have some good news and I have some bad news. The bad news is that we cut your good leg off by mistake. But the good news is that your bad leg is getting better."


Hardly had I finished telling my joke than the cabin crew told us to fasten our seat belts for landing.


The place we were flying into was Nice - yet again!!! My flights to Nice arrive at Terminal 2, which is very bright and airy and which you can get through very quickly, très rapidement, which is good news for travellers like me who are always rushing. But WHY am I always rushing??? Why, why, why, for God’s sake why??!!!?? It isn’t as if I have an important deadline to meet. I don’t do important deadlines, never have. Nevertheless, I rushed out, bought a day ticket, un pass, and hopped on the first bus to the Gare SNCF Nice-ville, the train station in the centre of the town.


It’s a great journey in, which I’ve probably blogged already, http://aworldelsewhere-finn.blogspot.com/2010/11/cote-dazur.html so I’ll cut to the chase and fast forward to the Place du Palais, the square in which the Palais de Justice, the Law Courts, are located, though it isn’t about the Palais de Justice that I want to talk about right now, as interesting and fascinating as that may be, but about a café on the square, one of my favourites in Nice.


Now let me say first of all before going any further with this rambling narrative that the food they serve in this café-restaurant, for that’s what it is, is not haute cuisine, or haute anything, in fact it’s pretty ordinary, although the omelettes are quite nice. No, the attraction of the café is its location, in a peaceful yet animated square, and one which is often filled with musical buskers, one of whom plays jazz standards on a soprano saxophone. But mostly it’s good for people watching.


In the year One Nine Hundred and Jumpin’ Sixty Nine there was a popular musical called O Calcutta! which its producers promoted as a play for the ‘thinking voyeur’. 


The thinking voyeur? Now that pretty much sums me up…..apart from the thinking bit, that is…..and I don’t believe that I’m alone in this regard. Because let’s face it, there’s a voyeur in all of us, we all like watching people, their quirks, their mannerisms, and not forgetting their national peculiarities, if that’s not a politically incorrect thing to say, though it probably is, in which case so much the better. (Political correctness is another thing I don’t do.)


Now I’ve already blogged national traits in an earlier post http://aworldelsewhere-finn.blogspot.com/2010/12/italians-are-coming-so-mind-your.html so I wont babble on about that, instead I’ll recount an esoteric conversation I had with a man on the terrace of the café who spoke English in an accent that I couldn’t quite locate but which was ineluctably east of the Danube.


I was quietly watching a young woman reading Guerre et Paix, when the man sidled up to me and said to me in all seriousness: “Excuse, sir, where I find Chinese laundry, please?”
I had no idea, but suggested that he try China.
“Is too far”, he replied, again in all seriousness.
I suggested next that he stops the first Chinaman he meets and asks him: A: Do you do laundry?; and B: Do you know a Chinaman who does? 
“Naturally”, I told him, “you will only ask B if the answer to A is in the negative”.
“And if answer to B is also negative?” he asked me.
“Then you look for another Chinaman”, I told him, “and you keep looking until you have get a positive answer either to A or to B”.
“Is shirt I want laundry”, he told me. 


I glanced at the young woman reading War and Peace. I read it once myself and only liked the war bits. A woman friend of mine also read it and only liked the peace bits. I wondered which bits the young woman on the café terrace liked. Her face was intense, she was obviously absorbed in the book. Possibly she was reading the part where Napoleon abandoned his retreating army and scooted off post-haste to Warsaw for some extra-marital sex with his Polish mistress. All in all, not a terrifically responsible thing to do, but typical of the great personalities of history, all of whom were completely irresponsible. Imagine how much duller the history of the world would be if they weren’t!


“Please, what I do?” the man asked me.
“Um?” I said. “You still here? Well, if you don’t like my first suggestion, you could always try the tourist office or the public library”.
The man thought for a moment and then replied: “Yes. Is good. I try”. And then he left as promptly as he had come.


I looked across at the young woman reading Tolstoy but she too had gone. So I cast my voyeuristic eyes at the tables around me, but apart from an elderly English couple talking to a young seedy looking waiter who obviously couldn‘t understand a word they were saying, there wasn’t much happening.


So I got up and left and swear that I spent the rest of the day involuntarily looking for a Chinese laundry. I found none and so can positively affirm that they do not exist in the beautiful city of Nice. But please don’t quote me on that.   

A whinge and a prayer in Euroland

Why oh why did Europe ever adopt the single currency? The euro! Even the name’s a joke. It’s not a name at all…it’s a prefix! There’s that little tiny one…the 1 eurocent…so small you need a magnifying glass to read the writing on it. The notes are like Transylvanian Monopoly money. And the pictures they put on them: windows, monuments. No national heroes!...Napoleon, Beethoven, Rembrandt, Caesar. With so many national prides and egos not to damage, better to keep it safe and bland.


Europe is such a fascinating continent with its rich and varied diversity of cultures and traditions and languages…so why is it being reduced to eurosameness? The money is only the tip of the iceberg. That Low-Minded Cabal of Eurobeaurocrats, the European Commission, decreed once that costermongers in the United Kingdom must cease selling their apples and their pears in Imperial measurements and use metric weights instead. The cowardly supermarkets complied at once, but the free spirited market traders gave the eurocrats in Brussels the two-finger salute - the ’get stuffed!' variety - and continued - and still continue! - to sell their produce by the pound. (Ask a market trader in Liverpool for a kilo of onions and he’ll look at you like you’ve just stepped out of a spaceship from Mars.)


Several Eurozone countries now hate the euro and wish they’d never heard of the it. Greece hates it as it is officially bankrupt and being bailed out by Germany. Germany hates it as it is having to bail out bankrupt Greece. Then it was Ireland’s turn with Portugal and Spain waiting in the wings. 


So maybe the writing’s on the wall for the euro and it’s about to croak like a eurocrat with a nut in his throat.


Let’s all pray that it is and wish it a fond adieu.

Travel Tales #2 A spiritual haven for the New Age Traveller

Every so often the traveller stumbles upon a location that almost leaps out at him (or her) and such it was with this peaceful cobbled street in Antibes.


It was a hot day and had seemed a long one, not helped by a discourse with a passenger on a bus on the “merits” (he said) of the Revolutionary Calendar, this “supreme monument to human folly and stupidity” (I said) from the French Revolution.


The Revolutionary Calendar was a part of the Metric System which decided that everything should be divisible by ten. It therefore decreed that each year would be composed of ten months, each week of ten days and each day of ten hours. 


“Clearly the citizens behind this foolery had never heard of the Laws of Nature and the cyclical movements of the earth around the sun and the moon around the earth”, I told my fellow traveller.


He laughed amiably, but already I was in full flow.


“We can only be grateful”, I told him, “that your revolution occurred in the eighteenth century and not at the dawn of human civilisation, otherwise Hercules would have had Ten Labours to perform; there would be Ten Deadly Sins; Ten Wonders of the Ancient World; Jesus would have had Ten Disciples; and Shakespeare would have had to redraft his play as The Ten Gentlemen of Verona.”


We moved on to discuss Globalization. 


“Is it a plot? A conspiracy? Some sinister design to rid every community of each last vestige of its culture and its uniqueness and replace it with a bland one-size-fits-all monoculture? Or is it a mere marketing ploy to allow global multi-nationals get their grubby little hands on the contents of your wallet?”


This was me. Clearly I was unstoppable. Almost New Age. He disagreed, said it was helping to lift poor people out of their poverty. I disagreed, said that was “Bollocks!”


He got off the bus before me and I continued to Antibes and came upon this picturesque café where Revolutionary Calendars and Globalization seemed light years away, and where it was more congenial, almost spiritual even, to watch people than to dispute with them.

Travel Tales #1 Charles de Gaulle Airport

We’ve all met them, on planes or on trains, maybe at train stations or airport departure lounges, bores who insist on telling you every boring detail of their boring lives.

I remember one at Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport while waiting for a plane that was around five hours late. He droned on in his Estuary English, which is the fashion these days, and told me his life had once been routine and predictable, without any purpose or meaning, until one day he discovered what was missing from it.
“You’re probably wondering what it was that was missing from my life, aren’t you? he asked me.
“No”. I replied.
“Yes, you are”, he persisted. “Go on, ask me what was missing from my life”.
I breathed heavily and then with as much disinterest as I could muster said: “What was missing from your life?”
“MONEY!” he screamed and burst out laughing.


He showed me a photo of his wife who was absolutely stunning. 
“She’s beautiful, isn’t she?” he said.
“She is”, I said. “Did you win her in a competition?”


He wasn’t insulted by my sarcastic impertinence, he just laughed again, the kind of laugh that told me that in his mind at least we were now old friends. 


We talked some more, by which I mean he talked some more, and told me among other things that he was on his way back home from a trip to Italy where he’d been to Rome, Venice, Florence, Verona, Milan, the full Monty in fact. 


“It must have been marvellous”, I said with obvious irony, but he was deficient in that particular commodity and took me at my word and proceeded to show me some photographs on his digital camera of just how marvellous Italy had been.


As it happens Verona is one of those places I have always wanted to visit but never have, though of course I didn‘t tell him that. But I’d heard they have a Shakespeare festival every year in recognition of the plays that the lad set in Verona, including Romeo and Juliet.  It is even possible to see Juliet’s balcony, even though she never existed and Shakespeare doesn’t mention a balcony anywhere in the play. I once saw a production in which she was on a step ladder and her star-crossed teenage beloved was standing on a table.  

Juliet's balcony, Verona, But did she ever stand on it?

Apropos of Shakespeare, what kind of a man was he, after all? The professors’ write volumes in their unreadable university jargon trying to address this question when it’s obvious that they no more know a hawk from a handsaw about it than the rest of us.  I once asked the curator of Hall Croft, the house of Shakespeare’s son-in-law in Stratford-upon-Avon, what he thought. “A bit of a boy”, he replied, without hesitation. It sounded good to me.


After we’d looked at his photos for about half an hour my new friend asked me: “So what do you do for a living?”
“Well”, I said, “do you know those official forms you get to fill in with a box on them with the words ‘DO NOT WRITE HERE’? Well my job is to rub candle wax over the box on the grounds that if I can’t write there nobody else can either”.
“Did you need a lot training for the job?” he asked me.
“Not a lot”, I replied.


A short while later the airline decided that we could all have a cup of coffee free, gratis and for nothing, and told us to make our way to the café. 
“You coming?” my friend asked me.
“I have a caffeine intolerance”, I lied, and as soon as he had walked away I looked for refuge in another part of the departure lounge where I skulked for a couple of hours behind a party from Glasgow. Then I saw him going through the boarding gate for a flight to God knows where, but not back to his gorgeous wife who he told me he was separated from (did I mention it?), and not where I was going, and that was all that mattered.


Two or three hours later my flight was called and they bussed us to the plane out on the apron. And no, I still haven’t ticked Verona off my list of places to go. Not that I ever tick places off my list of places to go. Not that I even have a list of places to go.

London: the city of kites and crows

It is 10 a.m. on the eve of St Bartholomew’s Day, Tuesday 24th August 1604, as William Shakespeare leaves the house of Mountjoy, his Huguenot landlord, on Silver street, and sets off eastwards along Cheapside.


The day is warm and sunny, and the streets are full of the cries of traders and the rumble of carts bringing the day’s provisions from the surrounding countryside. 


Arriving at Bishopsgate, Shakespeare glances at the tiny church of St. Helen’s where he worshipped when he first came to the metropolis, then continues his journey towards the Bridge, the pride of all Londoners. It is a large and animated structure with shops and residences, and even a tiny chapel. Shakespeare pays his toll and quickens his step, for he has an important meeting to attend.


He looks to the left, to the Tower of London, the mighty edifice in which Sir Walter Raleigh languishes in his cell in the Bloody Tower, perhaps working on his Historie of the World, or reminiscing on the heady days of the School of Night not long past. Cries of the wherry boatmen, the river taxi-drivers, rise up from the river. Shakespeare stops briefly to buy a herring pie, then continues onward, through Bridge Gate and into Southwick.


Above the gate, impaled on grisly pikes, are the severed heads of traitors. Birds perch on the heads and try to tear the flesh off them. But the birds are useful, cleansing the city of its dead animal carcasses. The people even identify themselves with them….


- Where dwell’st thou?
- Under the canopy.
- Under the canopy?
- Ay.
- Where’s that?
- I’th’ city of kites and crows.          [Coriolanus 4.5]


Southwick is the entertainment hub of London, though technically not in London at all, but under the jurisdiction of the county of Surrey. It exists as a thorn in the side of the puritans who control London on the other side of the river. The entertainments on offer are three-fold: theatres, animal bating arenas, and brothels. And the most celebrated venue is Paris Garden, a brothel and a bear bating pit rolled into one.


Shakespeare continues past St Mary Overie where his brother Edmund was buried a year earlier to the sound of the great bell being tolled; then past Winchester House, the residence of the Bishop of Winchester. Prostitutes are frequently seen entering and leaving the house and have been awarded the charming sobriquet of ‘Winchester Geese’. They are also known as punks, and usually called Doll. [Doll Tearsheet, 2 Henry IV] But beware, for a Winchester Goose can also give you ‘goose bumps’, slang for the symptoms of venereal disease.


And then he is there, his theatre, his destination, a stone’s throw from the Clink prison in the Liberty of the Clink, the Wooden O, the Globe.

Many things have changed, of course, since Shakespeare walked the streets of London, though some things have also remained the same. The Tower is still there, as are St. Helen’s and St. Mary Overie, now Southwick Cathedral. The coney-catchers and cutpurses are there, too, only now called conmen and pickpockets. And also there is the Globe. Not the original structure, of course, that was destroyed by fire in 1613 during a performance of Henry VIII, but a magnificent reconstruction and the inspiration of Sam Wannamaker, an American actor, director, film producer, and lifelong Shakespearean.


The Globe was a large, open-air theatre with a yard in front of the stage and a two-tier terrace. It was constructed entirely from wood and during the reconstruction they remained as faithful as possible to the original. The same type of wood was used, the same carpentry methods and the same kind of tools were employed. It even has a straw roof, the first building in London to do so since the Great Fire of 1666, albeit with sprinklers to comply with fire regulations.


The plans of the original theatre were not, of course, available, but based on excavations of the old Globe, and of the nearby Rose Theatre, it was possible to obtain important information on the dimensions and the position of the stage.


But they had to compromise on audience capacity. The original theatre accommodated 3,000 spectators - 2,000 seated in the terraces, and 1,000 groundlings standing in the yard. But the new theatre only has half this amount, firstly to comply with health and safety regulations, and secondly for reasons of comfort, as people are physically larger today than they were 400 years ago.


Even before the building was finally completed it mounted its first production, on 21 August 1996, a performance of The Two Gentlemen of Verona.

Back in 1604 Shakespeare goes into the theatre and heads straight to the tiring room where a sharers’ meeting is planned. The company’s last production, Troilus and Cressida, had not pleased the masses, so this time Shakespeare, the original ’snapper-up of unconsidered trifles’ had turned to Giambattista Cinzio Giraldi for a tale from his Gli Ecatammite (The Hundred Tales) about a Moorish commander.  Shakespeare named his character Othello and is excited about the work.


In the tiring room the sharers are all present, among them Richard Burbage, John Heminges, Augustine Phillips, William Sly and Henry Condell. Dick Burbage wastes no time in asking the question.
“So what have you got for us, Will?”
“Well, lads, I think you’ll like it. It’s the story of a man who in a rage of sexual jealousy murders his wife”.
“He’d been cuckolded by the wench, eh Will? Yes, I do like it!”
“Oh no, she is the most pure, virtuous and innocent of women”.
“Then it must villainy of his part, eh? I‘ll dust off my Machiavellian costume.”
“You won’t need that, Dick. You see, he’s the noblest hero of them all”.
“A noble gentleman killing his virtuous wife? Are you sure you’ve got this one right, Will? ”
“And we’ll need to get some African costumes, too”.
“African costumes? Why the devil do we need African costumes?”
“Oh, didn’t I mention it? He’s also black”.


There is no recorded date for the first performance of Othello, but it was given before King James I on 1 November 1604 at Banqueting House at Whitehall and has now become one of the world’s most popular and enduring plays and Othello himself part of our mythology.


As for the new Globe, it is now one of London’s most visited tourist destinations. But you won’t see the kites and the crows unless you close your eyes. For the theatre, never forget, and especially the theatre of Shakespeare, is a place of the imagination. And with imagination you can see anything.