Gordon Haynes, Writer

I've been writing up travel experiences for years now (don't we all?). Instead of sending out e-mails to those who might be interested, it seems sensible to post them here and hope to reach a wider audience. 

Søte Regnet/Bergen

August 2016

It all started in early May when I got to thinking about how we could best mark our sapphire wedding anniversary. I thought about a party, briefly, but as we don’t do parties any more and because to throw one on an appropriate scale to justify forty-five years of marriage would involve a great deal of work from both of us, but especially from Pat, I quickly ruled it out as an option. I might have booked a dinner at Coul House Hotel (I’ve still not been) or maybe at the Oystercatcher in Portmahomack, but somehow a dinner or even a dinner and overnight stay didn’t seem like enough of a gesture. Of course I didn’t even consider getting any of the appropriate gemstones, because I did that already - six of them in one ring, forty-six years ago. Just then, Inghams’ latest brochure popped through the door and I sat for a while thumbing through it for inspiration. When we went to Norway in the late summer of 1969 we took a ferry from Newcastle to Bergen and spent our first and last nights in that city but without exploring it. Our interest lay more in the dramatic fjordland landscape. We were young, in love (at least some of the time) and up for a bit of adventure. Now we’re old. Once or twice we have thought ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to go back and see Bergen properly this time?’ So that’s what I signed up to, without consulting Pat but checking first with Kate. A child-minding clash put the idea on hold for a day allowing me to reorganise for going a week earlier. So, what’s a week in forty-five years?

    The jetstream robbed us of our summer this year and Kelda, who lives in Bergen, told me to bring umbrellas because May is the best month for weather and by August it rains more frequently. I looked it all up. She’s right. There’s typically only 100mm in May, but almost double that in August. At least the sea temperature is at its least cold when we’re going. I’m clutching at straws here because there’ll be no swimming or paddling involved. The best we can hope for is to bask in a balmy 16°C when the sun comes out. We’ll be taking our coats and jumpers.

So, this isn’t going to be a blow by blow account of how we spent four days dodging showers, because there weren’t really any showers, only the kind of rain that beats through Goretex shoes and keeps going day and night. Besides, the official statistics are out there for anyone to find and they tell of the wettest July for fifty years, the wettest summer ever (?) and the forecast wettest August since time began. OK, Norway is not the kind of place you go to if you’re looking for a heatwave, but still...how nice would that have been? 

    Our time was spent divided between Kelda, ships and rigs, the Bryggen, galleries and museums, and Sweet Rain. This last has nothing to do with the weather. It’s a Konditori run by Krastina and her husband and it was conveniently located right next door to our hotel, the Augustin. After discovering it, we went back, then went back again. How much crowd-funding would it take I wonder for Krastina to open a branch in Cromarty, or even to move her complete enterprise across the North Sea to a little town where she would indeed be noticed rather more than at present? Sweet dreams. I chose the Augustin because it is the only family owned and run hotel in central Bergen (four generations) and is therefore not part of a chain, which appealed to me. Also it has, apparently, the best wine cellar in Norway. The building has been a hotel since 1909 and professed to be Art Nouveau in character but we both looked very hard and found almost nothing to justify the claim, apart from the owner’s displayed collection of silverware. It survived the big fire of exactly a hundred years ago, that which devastated most of what was left of medieval Bergen (the Bryggen) but which is now reconstructed and conserved under the banner of a World Heritage Site. I might have chosen the Augustin for its proximity to Sweet Rain, had I known beforehand. Everyone visits the Bryggen. It’s right there on the wharf, behind all those Japanese tourists who I thought were still queueing to get into the Uffizi gallery, or maybe to photograph an empty balcony in Verona. The Bryggen Museum, tucked away at one end, is a mid-1960s modernist concrete job, with detailing to rival London’s South Bank horror show. Strangely, it was built in 1976, a decade after the architects of the world had moved on from that particular design aesthetic. It’s dark inside but has lots of stuff that Pat found interesting and useful in her latest role as archaeological reconstruction drawings expert. In my guide book (of 1968) there is absolutely no mention of the Bryggen, possibly because the fire of 1955 had burnt some more of it down, leaving precious little to see. In the section ‘How to get to Norway’, there’s a small sketch map showing only one connection with Scotland, an air link between Prestwick and Oslo. This has gone now, as have the various ferries from Newcastle and Harwich. Our travel options were still somewhat limited, all this time later. There was only one. It was ABZ-BGO by SAS, operated by Widerøe.

    We tried to get into the Cultural History Museum, in the university quarter, but it was a wet Monday and it was therefore very closed. Neither the Bryggen Museum nor the Fisheries Museum could help with a particular problem Pat has with what might be pot lids, found in considerable numbers in the Cromarty Medieval Dig, and the Cultural History was our last hope. We tried to get into the rather ugly cathedral (to get out of the rain) but, as it was a wet Monday, it too was closed. The newish Fisheries Museum wasn’t where it was shown on two maps, but we found it where it was marked on our third map, unfortunately another twenty minutes walk away, in the rain. It’s housed in an old fish warehouse and by the smell of it there was a lot of salt cod there back in the day. It’s a fascinating building, lifted out of the fjord, supported by a kind of lattice-work log stack of the model I used extensively at Glen Loy. After three years in this location the museum is still waiting for exhibits to fill its rooms. The brochure invites us to Discover our Hidden Treasures. We looked for them, we really did. The curator, a very friendly Lofoten Islander for whom 15°C is the ideal temperature for living, seemed genuinely interested in Pat’s quest for answers on the pot lid problem. He couldn’t solve it though.

    The Art Museums of the city go under the banner KODE, which means code. It doesn’t mean art. That’s just as well because we didn’t find much worthy of that title. Even the celebrated Munch collection contains some extremely dubious pieces. Yes, of course his Madonna is wonderful, as are some of the pencil sketches of the Sick Child, but I was left with a feeling that so much of his later body of work lacks painterly skill, a good eye for proportion, an assured use of colour and even basic technical ability. “So, you think you could do better do you?” “Er, well, yes actually.” The contemporary exhibition in KODE 2 was about as subtle as if somebody had tipped a rubbish bin out on the gallery floor, because somebody had done just that and the gallery people had thought fit to include it in their exhibition. 

    Accustomed as I am to watching rigs and their attendant AHTS tugs, from the proximity of Cromarty and the South Sutor, I was nevertheless astounded at seeing some of the very same anchor-handling monsters really close up, which is how they are in Bergen’s Vågen. The scale of these workhorses is such that they completely dominate the built environment of the city - but in a nice way! I think so anyway. At Invergordon everything is at arm’s length, behind security fencing, but here any Joe Public can simply walk right up to them and even climb aboard if there’s a will. The same goes for the cruise liners. Kelda took us for a drive to a place where the sun came out: the Skerry Guard, via Lille Sotra to the much bigger Sotra, where we persuaded her to pose for some ‘artistic’ figure studies. It’s OK, it’s what she does!! We looked in at the two small harbours of Glesnes and Movik (especially for Pat, now wearing her Cromarty Harbour Management Committee hat), before stopping at Ågotnes on the Hjeltefjord. Why go there? Well, it might have had something to do with there being four semi-submersible rigs, cold stacked, in the lee of the island. I may have got a little excited, in a plane-spotting kind of way, and was allowed to be expressive of this - unlike at the café in Glesnes, where I had to be very discreet in fighting off the attentions of Miss Teenage Norway. I found this a little less troublesome by concentrating on a Shetland herring drifter that was moored alongside. I liked the cut of her jib, the classic lines, the understated elegance. 

    You’re probably thinking Sutor/Sotra, what’s going on here? I was, and I got thinking too. The Cromarty Firth is guarded by two projecting hills, the North and South Sutors, between which is a deep water channel leading to the sheltered harbour. Sotra, (pronounced Sootra, I was told) is a major part of the Skerry Guard of islands that shelter places like Bergen from the extremes of North Sea weather. Deep water channels allow access for shipping right into the heart of the city. As Berwickshire turns into Lothian, there’s a hill called Soutra, from which the entire outer reaches of the Firth of Forth can be surveyed. It’s a little far-fetched perhaps to draw a parallel with the other two examples but I’m attracted by the similarity. I’ll be on the look out for more of them. 

    In town, we looked around for Italian or French street cafés to spend an hour or two just people-watching, but there aren’t any. There aren’t even any Norwegian ones. The fish markets, both the outdoor one and the covered one (guess which was my favourite), are places to buy fish but the trawlers don’t come in to the centre of town and empty their catch on the wharf any more. We saw white vans delivering smelly boxes that were dripping fishy goo on the pavement, though from where they came it wasn’t clear. Using the When in Rome analogy, we sat under a canopy heavily bowed with heavy rain and ate some fish. She had the king crab, of course, at 299 kr. I had some grilled salmon, 199 kr. That’s about £50 for a light lunch. Apart from petrol and diesel, everything else in Norway seems to be too expensive, like by a decimal point shift. Now that May and Hammond have got their own show, running the country, I for one hope that Brexit doesn’t mean the adoption of the Norwegian model - if there’s any correlation between the price of a loaf of bread and their EU relationship.

    We didn’t do the Fløyen funicular this time. I have a slide taken about a month after the first moon landing, when it rained all day for us and it’s just about possible to make out the outline of the harbour. There was more rain this time. We didn’t take the cable car up Ulriken either, for the same reason. We did see the inside of several very long tunnels, blasted out of the granite so that getting to and from the airport doesn’t take two weeks but twenty minutes. Pat used three quarters of an hour of wet weather to get her hair done on our last morning (800 kr.) and, on a different occasion, had a worrying hour or so with her left eye when it refused to focus properly. Normal service now resumed but a review some time soon might be a good idea.

    Although western Norway is only a short hop across the North Sea from eastern Scotland, getting there and back is perhaps not as easy as it might be. There’s one flight daily, each way between Aberdeen and Bergen, nothing else. Nothing connecting to Inverness. So, three hours drive to Aberdeen, but be there for check in at 7.35 am, so go the day before and spend money at the Courtyard Marriott Hotel. Flight time is a tad over an hour in a Dash 8-Q400 but in a Dash 8-Q300 with its underpowered Pratt and Whitneys and a severe headwind you can add an extra half hour to that, as we did on coming home. The early evening return flight acquires a whopping supplement, even though it is the only flight of the day going east to west. Personally I think I’ve been ripped off by £200. It was my first time in a Q300. It felt a bit like a chugger from the dark ages. It was only seventeen years old but in ‘plane terms that’s what they call ‘getting on a bit’. Bits of panelling at the rear of the engine pod were no longer as flush with each other as they should have been. Never mind, it worked, and our smiling flight attendant served us an authentically American Aunt Mabel’s Double Chocolate Muffin to make the journey time pass quicker.  Hey, it was ‘free’, unlike the small bottles of water at the airport. They were 40 kr. (£4).

    I was reminded of our crossing by ferry from Newcastle. Then, despite being the first person at the ship’s long and ample bar, I am still waiting to be served. My cloak of invisibility returned when I wanted to retrieve our suitcase from the Augustin Hotel’s locked luggage room. I presented myself at reception immediately in front of the manager receptionist who was talking into a headset, looking at a screen and playing with a mouse, clearly doing some business. Either that or looking for a Pokemon (whatever that is). I waited patiently. Others came and waited patiently too, but they all gave up. I didn’t. I stood there looking at her, waiting for eye contact and perhaps an “I’m sorry, I’ll be with you in a moment.” But there wasn’t anything to encourage me to wait, only my obstinacy and my experience of running a hotel. This continued for over quarter of an hour. When she eventually looked up and smiled at me, there was no apology. I asked her for access to the locked luggage room and she flicked a switch under the counter. It was like she was triggering an alarm in the nearest police station. So, anyway I told her that I’m a travel writer and am particularly keen on reporting attentive service in the hospitality trade. Her name is Elizabeth.

    We had a good break. It sounds like one big moan, but that’s just me.

______________________________________________________________________________________

Australia 3

Feb/March 2016

To dream, perchance to sleep

Let me start by stating that my least favourite aircraft in the world is now the brand spanking new, hi-tech, Boeing 787 Dreamliner. This plane was introduced to replace the 767, being much more efficient, cleaner, quieter etc., but please, please come back all those 767s, now mostly on cargo duty. You would think, wouldn’t you, that designers would by now have come to grips with providing levels of comfort that satisfy most travellers, particularly in the seat size, width, recline function and, most importantly, in its ability to feel rather better than an unpadded park bench? Given a seven or eight hours flight, it seems verging upon cruel to squeeze two hundred plus passengers into the rear two thirds of the plane, like proverbial sardines, and reserve the front third for the dozen or so seriously wealthy characters (or perhaps just upgrades) whose fully adjustable ‘beds’ are cordoned off with a ‘no peeping’ curtain, lest we should glimpse fawning flight attendants carrying champagne on silver trays. OK, I know this is essentially how airlines work, but the balance has been badly upset by Qatar Airways, who leave practically all of their customers feeling much distressed, when surely the opposite ought to be their intention. Basic levels of comfort are a requirement, not a disposable option. The main problem is that they squeeze in 9 abreast (3,3,3) when the planes were designed for 8 (2,4,2). All through the 1960s I nurtured a love of civil aviation, held in place by the hope that one day soon I would actually be taking part in the process, being transported aloft and gazing out over clouds or trying to work out exactly where I was from the field patterns, roads, lakes and coastlines below. The dream and the reality have rarely joined up because flying now has nothing to do with dreams and everything to do with turnover, but I still hope. 9,255 miles separate Edinburgh and Perth, but Qatar Airways still manage to consistently get their passengers to their destination early. Amazing. However, the romance of flying has probably never been part of their ethos and for this they will not be providing our chariot of the air next time we do the Perth run. We didn’t fall into a price trap either, because although our tickets were much cheaper than they had been with Emirates in 2010, they were realistic and competitive with other operators in the post global downturn era.

    I have some other grumbles with them: ‘The safety of our passengers is our priority.’ Well, they demonstrate this by not having the attendants stand in front of us with their arms waving and pretending to blow up a life-saver, but by showing a video of Barcelona footballers ducking low as one of their team members shoots for goal over their heads. This jokey video is how the brace position is now explained. No questions about concealment of dangerous stuff (like water and nail clippers) are asked at baggage check-in. Also, they present possibly the least inspired meals anywhere in the airline community. We had three breakfasts - once on the DOH-PER link and once on each of the return flights - and all of them were identical. Indeed, on the DOH-EDI run, our breakfast (haven’t I just tried to eat this a few hours ago?) was followed several hours later by something that they called a sandwich, but which the box identified as an all-day snack. This was our lot  whilst sitting in the afore-mentioned seats for longer than a working day. ‘Get up and move around every half an hour’ they tell us. Yeah, right. How and where to? Perhaps to the shoebox toilet (going in backwards is the only way to come out forwards - if you want also to use the facility). Locked into our seats, there is only the seat-back entertainment centre to look at and to try to communicate with. Without going into more tiresome details, suffice to say that they don’t all work and they do all fail any sensible GUI test. This is a failing that spreads beyond their 787 fleet. On our 777 from PER to DOH, for which they used  their newest aircraft - only seventy-six days old - I worked through three failing headsets before the attendant tossed three more at me, the second of which worked but didn’t cut out ambient noise in the cabin. Then there’s the brief pilot messages - one before taxiing and one just before landing - clearly a duty that no pilot wants to be lumbered with. Interference and rapidly garbled (mumbled) words of wisdom fell on deaf ears. Much harder to ignore were the babies and children whose parents clearly knew nothing of Phenergan, with the consequence that our plane quickly became a Screamliner. We were surrounded, back, front and side by this local problem. If children had been allowed on the other side, viz. on the wing, perhaps a quieter time would have been enjoyed by all. I voted for it. Dreamliners are normally noticeably quieter than other planes. They have touch control dimming of the windows, which are a little slow to react, and they have sexy wings from which hang the impressive power plants with interestingly scalloped rear edge casings. But no, it’s not enough. Did I convince you? I certainly hope so because this is the most important lesson I learnt in the last three weeks, apart perhaps from not going to Perth in February.

When did it last rain in Perth?

Yes, the three weeks we set aside did fit very well with Kate’s shifts and annual leave allocation, but February and March are unbearably hot in Western Australia. Graeme warned us and said that it had been over 40°C for a week or so before we arrived. He also said that the worst part of summer was probably over. Maybe for him, but we endured 100°F on day two and 102°F on our last day, with other days mostly reaching well into the nineties. I’m using old money here because I’m old and it’s what I understand. By 5.30am, things had usually cooled down to about 70°F. Thankfully the humidity was low to lowish, which helped, a little. We escaped just before what was expected to be the hottest March day for four years. “Only four?” asked Caroline, as my mind drifted off in the direction of the snowstorm that we left in Scotland. “It’s climate change,” she advised. NASA have just confirmed that February 2016 was the hottest month ever recorded, globally.

    Don’t get me wrong, we had been craving an injection of heat as a reward for a winter that has seen moss take over from grass in our lawns and the roots of our boundary hedge being submerged for so long (thanks to the drongo builder who banked his soil levels four inches up our mutual post and wire fence line).

Travel diversions

There weren’t many, but I had fixed up to meet with friends Alan and Jean in Edinburgh on the way out. The idea was that we’d do the catching up thing, check out some galleries, have dinner somewhere nice and get to ride one of the city’s trams for the first time. Actually this all happened, but Pat didn’t take part owing to aching joints and a debilitating bug/virus that had been choking her respiratory tract for several days beforehand and which made her feel like death was just around the corner. Imagine how much she enjoyed the 787 experience.

    Edinburgh trams are clearly labelled with the words ‘Edinburgh trams’, just in case you should mistake them for a rapid transit device between the airport and the city centre. They do the journey in about forty minutes, stopping at what appear to be some really random locations along the way. When not stopped, they are sluggishly slow and a little creaky on the bends. At ten o’clock at night they run nearly empty because a) they’re quite expensive and b) there’s not a lot of traffic between the airport and the city after dark. They have a low count of seats per square mile and, should you want to transport your bicycle on one, you must place it across the doorway. Anyway, we discovered that they share a trait with the driver-less ‘trains’ that ply from end to end of the Hamad International Terminal at Doha. Next time you find yourself with three hours to kill in this enormous, empty box, notice how these vehicles have no passengers either. The seats are all shrink-wrapped as if they have only just been delivered  from the manufacturer. Notwithstanding this, every five minutes they pass silently along the tracks providing some kinetic stimulus, akin to a Dan Dare film in slow-motion. The terminal is a large soaring space that seems to have been designed for giants. Its flight information screens are difficult to read as they are constantly flicking through different flights before you can find your own. The one advantage is that, as all the flights are operated by Qatar Airways, you only need to focus on the numbers. Still, not friendly in the middle of the night.

    Every time we cross the Forth Road Bridge, we glance over at what the signs tell us is the ‘Replacement Forth Crossing’. It’s coming on fast now, the cantilevers almost touching each other in the centre of each span. I do hope they come up with a better name for it though.

    A few thoughts about piloting. Our first landing at Doha was severe. We hit the ground crunching and I imagine that A7-BCN would have required a change of tyres before flying on anywhere else. Leaving Perth in A7-BEG was a remarkable experience unlike any of my previous one hundred and sixty-five take offs. From a standing start rather than a rolling one, we jerked forward three or four times, bumping and thumping as if the end of the runway had been  planted with sleeping policemen. Everyone in our section of the plane was alarmed. Heads turned, eyebrows raised, hands gripped tight, a few prayers were offered up, then just before the back section of fuselage disconnected itself from the rest of the Triple Seven, a magician turned our multi-ton monster into a lighter than air junk-food café.

Food of the world

On this, our third visit to the erstwhile colony, Graeme was busy with work and Caroline was busy with work and university. We made ourselves useful by sitting and reading, which was interspersed with eating. It was too hot do a lot of exploring, driving, walking, sunbathing, although we did manage all of these things in moderation. Graeme does most of the food preparation at 35/49 Sixth Avenue and his style is light and healthy, verging on vegetarian and invariably includes salad based on water melon. Pat helped out a couple of times, a debate on the relative merits of her and his pizza recipes could only be conducted by practical experimentation on the barbecue hotplate. Voting resulted in a tie. 

    We dined out perhaps less frequently than on other visits, I think because Graeme is more comfortable these days with his own prowess in the kitchen and with his own ways of making coffee. He looks fit on it anyway, helped by a punishing regime of cycling. Driving in Perth drives him crazy, so he takes the bike to work and, whilst old people from the old country line up under the air conditioner, he goes out in the midday sun to do a twenty-five kilometre circuit around the lower Swan River on his Specialized gearless, back-pedal braking, gold-chained, matt-black, stealth-like conveyance of choice.

    I forced myself to exercise by hiding in as many shadows as possible whilst walking briskly from Sixth to Eighth Avenues (five minutes each way) to replenish stocks of choc-ices at the nearest IGA (Independent Grocers Alliance). Life is a struggle.

    My personal favourite dining out moment came at the Genesis in the Hills Restaurant at Roleystone near Armadale. This is about half an hour’s drive south east of the city in the Perth Hills and close to a self-catering cottage that we rented for a couple of nights. Their Genesis vegetarian salad is a delight. Other times we had a meal at The Elizabethan Village Pub, also near Roleystone and now noted less for its food as for where we came face to face with bandicoots (they like chips) and where Caroline lost her wallet (found two days later, intact); at an Indian in the outskirts of Fremantle; at the Araluen Botanic Park, a peculiar place in that very few of the trees or shrubs are labelled, but the cheesecake is, prominently; at a Chinese in Maylands with Robin and Vera; at a Spanish tapas outlet in Guildford, the food less exciting than the fact that the restaurant is under the airport flightpath - an Emirates A380 glided over at two hundred miles an hour; at a Korean restaurant in Perth city centre, noteworthy for its extremely noisy dining environment; brunch at Cottesloe Beach (toasted fruit loaf); desserts at the Hainault Winery in the Perth Hills; and a Vietnamese lunch around the corner from where Graeme and Caroline live. OK, so maybe we did eat out quite a lot, and travelled the world in the process! 

Getaways

There were two of these. The first has been mentioned, in the Perth Hills, where we stayed in a cottage on one of Caroline’s new friends’ family-owned business enterprise - the Lakeside Country Resort. The location, near the top of the Darling Ranges, offers wide views over the coastal lowlands and the city. At night, from friend Fiona’s house, it resembled the view of L A from Mulholland Drive (which is good because now I don’t actually have to go there). Graeme took a rowing boat out on the lake, I stalked wild roos and watched black parrots with red tail feathers, Pat and Caroline thought about a swim in the lake but only for a nanosecond. The Armadale area feels a little cut off, yet is fed by a newish freeway that passes by the airport. People live here out of choice, commuting rather than suffering the constant traffic noise and pollution in Perth. 

    We also rented a beach cottage in Coogee, just south of Freo, just for a night. So, there was no out-of-region travel and Wave Rock will have to wait for a future winter. Pat and Caroline took an Indian Ocean dip in the late afternoon at Coogee beach while I photographed an oystercatcher that seemed oblivious to the fact that I was so close that I could have reached out and touched it. We’d earlier been up the coast at Cottesloe, to view ‘Sculpture by the Sea’, multiple pieces arranged along a mile of the much longer beach. The outstanding exhibit for me was Zilvinas Kempinas’ kakashi (2012), previously shown at Bondi Beach in 2015: so simple, so interactive, so site specific (or at least appropriate) and so dazzling. Brilliant. A few others caught my attention, but this was the outright star and made getting there worth all the struggle associated with closed roads and traffic jams, the annoying consequence of preparations for a cycling event. In the hour and a half it took to drive, Graeme could have cycled there and back! He wasn’t a happy bunny. Cottesloe has been on Pat’s radar for a long time, probably since the programme Wanted Down Under first aired. It was very busy with coach tours and well-behaved school parties but the eating opportunities were disappointingly scarce and very average in quality. Graeme took us out to Scarborough Beach a few days earlier and let us explore whilst he and his partners had a meeting with a new client. All these beaches passed the no-little-jumpy-molluscs test and offered some respite from the intense heat with their on-shore breezes. 

Campus life

Caroline has just started her second year at Edith Cowan (she on the A$50 note) University at their Mount Lawley campus. She showed me around, one baking morning, and I found it to be a world-class facility. I also read or part-read three of her text books as a way of trying to understand the work she’s doing for her degree and it surprised me just how complex the programmes, for example, of the humanities and maths are. I read as much as I could, then switched to Bryson’s Road to Little Dribbling. At Mount Lawley the buildings are modern, some arrestingly so and are clean and graffiti free, there’s no rubbish anywhere, the student body clearly have a respect for their environment and cup cakes are given away to random travellers such as me. Actually, this last was a celebration of it being the twenty-fifth year since ECU opened this campus, one of three. I was most impressed, but less so with the small 712 section of their library, held on the second floor of a spacious and user-friendly building that might have been one of the earliest buildings on the site. Landscape Design is represented by the predictable reference works that were written in the 1950s and ‘60s, many of which are now hopelessly out of date and of no value whatsoever to today’s students of the discipline. The librarian was not at his/her desk, otherwise I might have been interested in starting a discussion, which would inevitably have covered the fact that my own books had just had a surge in sales, according to Amazon. 

    About twenty years ago I was tempted by an advertisement for a senior lecturer position at the University of Western Australia, where a new course in Landscape Architecture was being established. I knew the then President of the Australian Institute and thought my chances of getting selected might have been above average, but in the end I didn’t bother. I couldn’t understand too much of the language on the application form. Anyway, we stopped by to check the place out. Located on Matilda Bay, just west of the city centre, the grounds have magnificent mature trees in the spaces between the department buildings, variously neo-Italian renaissance style and 1970s. Everything was much better presented than at the Araluen Botanics. It all looked very conservative, very old-money. Would I have been happy there? Maybe for a couple of years, but the climate would have done for me if nothing else did.

The Arts

We landed just after the PIAF had kicked off. This is the Perth International Arts Festival. Caroline had organised for us all to attend one of the events called ‘Five in the Quarry’: essentially a ballet performance held in the site of an old limestone quarry in the western zone of the city. We took our own picnic and shared space with René and Chris, long-time friends of Graeme and Caroline. It was magical, occasionally spell-binding. No photography was allowed, which is fair enough I suppose, but the setting was so photogenic that it seemed a great pity. The stars were out, the planets were aligning, the moon helped to cast a background glow and Pat’s coughing stayed under control for two hours. It was an inspired way to begin our visit and a kind of consolation for having just missed the Perth Writers weekend. The border control officer had asked me, glancing at my green card, “What kind of writing do you do Mr. Haynes?” 

    “Books.” 

    “Novels?” 

    “No, histories mostly.” 

    “Histories of what?” 

    “Design.” At this point I was wondering whether we and the backed-up queue would ever get to our destinations. The polite discussion was turning into a rather lengthy interrogation.     “You’ve just missed the Perth Writers event at PIAF.” 

    “I know. The best I can do is to chance my arm at science fiction and turn the clock back by a few days.” She let us through, thankfully without asking Pat what kind of painting she did.

    The ‘Sculptures by the Sea’ was also part of PIAF, as was a video display in three rooms of PICA (Contemporary Arts). We didn’t linger there for too long, but the galleries were a wonderful respite from the alternative of burning up outside on the concourse. The Museum of Western Australia, just opposite, had other contributions to the festival, but we only made it as far as their shop, which, on its own is almost worth travelling a very long distance for. 

    “So, what did you think of PIAF? Any regrets?” 

    “Non, je ne regrette rien.”

    Caroline came with me (Pat was still suffering at this point and found lounging pool-side easier to hack than catching trains) into the Elizabeth Quay sector of downtown. We were there in the evening: all lights and loud music. She regressed a few years, unable to resist the lure of candy floss (fairy floss locally) and we had a drink at an outdoor bar from where the concert in the adjoining marquee could be ‘enjoyed’ for free. There are plans to build ten towers here, a mix of residential and commercial anchored by an extremely ugly Ritz Carlton hotel. Next time we visit we won’t recognise the place.

    Graeme’s own contribution to the arts was to offer us the latest films and TV box-set series on his mini home cinema, of an evening. Qatar Airways had stuffed up when I was part way through watching a film, so my choice was the Oscar nominated Room, but, like so many products of the industry it left me feeling sleepy. After about twenty minutes. Well, it was better than that perhaps, but for anyone who has read even a little about women being kept captive for years on end in cellars or garden sheds, the film added zilch. There was also The Revenant, whose star was not DiCaprio but a grizzly bear, after whose six minutes in the spotlight the film fell a bit flat.

Freo

Pat and I took ourselves off, by train, for a day in Fremantle, because we like it there. It was Leap Day. We didn’t do a lot when we got there, but last time we hadn’t got around to seeing the Fishing Boat Harbour or the Bathing Bay so we plodded off to check these out. Luckily there was some cloud around and the sea breeze was noticeable too. Temperatures plummeted to the mid 90s. Later, we went back with Graeme and Caroline and spent some quality time in the enormous covered market (1897), which is still being used as originally intended. Notre Dame University has bought up many historic buildings in Freo and has, externally at least, renovated them in the best possible taste. This is not like Venice, where nearly everything from first floor level upwards is in a desperate state of repair. The architectural details, including the vibrant colours, have been restored to an ‘as new’ condition. It’s a little like an old version of ECU, both places having a superficial aura of being a life-sized model, rather than a fully functional environment. I once felt that way about Boston too.

Sport

They’re building a new stadium on the south of the Swan River at Burswood. It’s going to be bigger than the WACA and will host the future Test Matches. This is akin to Yorkshire CC deciding that Headingley has seen better days and that it should be replaced on the other side of the Aire in Kirkstall. OK, so the WACA is the smallest stadium hosting Test Matches in Australia, but there’s a history there. There’s also the Fremantle Doctor. There are specific conditions that set the WACA apart from other grounds. It has always been a batsmen’s ground, the pitch being fast and true. It alarmed me to discover that the first time a Test was held there was as recently as December 1970, when England just had the edge over Australia in a drawn match. In 2010 it was looking a bit creaky, but now the painters and decorators have been in and spruced it up for me. Thinking that this might be my last opportunity to watch cricket there, I turned up for the first morning of the Sheffield Shield match between the home side and Queensland. Runs were scored easily. Wickets didn’t fall. More research indicated that the stadium will be retained for lesser matches and for training purposes. I walked back to Maylands, taking an hour to do so, the rest of the day being in recovery. Other times I hiked down to the Maylands Foreshore Reserve and Graeme and I walked around one of his favoured locations for buying a property, Ascot. Mostly though it was too easy to sit on the balcony and read, bottle of water at hand, factor 50 liberally spread. Pat, as ever, was drawn to water, taking all opportunities (excepting at Armadale) for a dip.

    Meanwhile, back home, my team stumbled to another defeat and began another slide down the Premier League table. What is to become of United?

And finally

There was a repeat performance of the interrogation for me at the border control, leaving Perth airport. I wondered whether they were trying to catch me out if I gave different answers from those offered three weeks earlier. Many hours later, there was snow in the Borders as we banked to line up for landing at Edinburgh and I steeled myself for a difficult drive north, having only cat-napped over the southern Indian Ocean during the previous twenty-four hours. But, no. It was a gorgeous, clear, dry day and a beautiful drive up the A9. The Grampians have rarely been so accommodating. Having done a FaceTime link for Brooke’s sixth birthday early in the holiday, we had a quick turn around to get over to Muir of Ord on the morning after our return, for Natasha’s fourth birthday. However good it is to get away, it’s always great to come home, especially when there are granddaughters to cuddle.

    Qatar Airways e-mailed me asking that I evaluate my recent flight. I did so and must assume that if everyone else does so as honestly as I did then the service will not be around in a few years time - because they’re not going to change their planes, only move them to different routes.

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Alsace/Schwarzwald

September 2015

We had some lively discussion, as always, about where to go this autumn. She wanted sun and beaches; I preferred culture, medieval towns, a wine district, fly-drive. After much soul searching we agreed to compromise and decided on flying out to Basel and picking up a car so that we could do a loop up the Vosges and back down the Schwarzwald. At least one of our hotels has a pool. With the spirit of our visit to Chablis nine years ago very much in mind, I fixed up to meet a couple of acquaintances for dinner. We met Camille and Xavier at Glenmoriston when they were staying with Adam and Barbara, but reconnecting was not on Pat’s radar at all, because I didn’t tell her. It has been five years since we were last in France, which is simply not good enough. It gets worse, because it was in May 1988 that I was last in Germany and we have to go back another twenty years, to June 1968, since Pat’s last visit, which was when we were on the MCAD Venice or Bust tour. So, much reconnecting to do. As a boy of twelve, I wrote a journal of our family holiday to Austria, which involved driving through the Black Forest in a coach, by night, taking the Strasbourg, Freiburg, Schaffhausen route, which means that we sliced through the middle part from west to east. This time we’ve planned to drive down from north to south, by day. It should be more memorable, although I find that the summer of 1961 is still really quite vivid.

As we prepare to head off, I have a worry about finding and getting parked in the underground car park in Strasbourg, but most other things have been planned out as well as we can, all in the interests of avoiding unnecessary stress. We both need this change of scene, this fillip before winter. We crave the stimulus and thank Kate and Mikey for letting us off two of our child-minding dates so that we can do this. With a revisit to Australia on the cards for next spring, we’ll have to start negotiating a more protracted break from duties as soon as we get back.

    Day one was all about getting there. Early start, long pause at the halfway point, worry about getting to our hotel in time for dinner. Got stress if you want it. However, by travelling together and talking these things through rationally, we somehow managed to do it all and lived to tell. The above mentioned Strasbourg problem was on a different level altogether as no amount of preparation can account for road signs suddenly giving off contradictory instructions and a driver ignoring what seemed like a perfectly sound plan (his own) to exit at junction 2. Notwithstanding, time was allowed for cock-ups and we never missed any of our (my) projected deadlines, unlike easyJet who missed all of theirs, typically by at least half an hour. By the way, Gatwick needs a second runway. Seriously. Did anyone arrive or depart on time in the last twenty years? A rhetorical question, of course. 

    Our companion for nine days was not an Opel Corsa, as ordered, but an upgraded Ford Fiesta diesel, which - it pains me to say so - I fell in love with instantly. Okay, maybe love is a bit strong, but boy can it handle the hairpins of the isostatic uplift block mountains either side of the Rhine with tremendous ease. We ‘did’ the Hautes Vosges in the first two full days and the Schwarzwald in the last two. From our base camp in Todtnauberg it was an easyish climb up to the Feldberg gipfel, but we chose not to bother with the last thousand metres just for the sake of ticking it off. Pat’s well-padded feet were anyway beginning to grumble after four miles of hiking and I had this annoyingly upbeat mid-1960s jingly tune by Horst Jankowski buzzing around in my head. I had to make it stop. We toured the highest Ballons in the Vosges (Grand and d’Alsace) by car, avoiding motorbikes (which typically travel in packs of seven - I didn’t know that) and stopping regularly for tarte au myrtilles, as you do. The bikers were more populous than  push-bikers. Another surprise. Contrary to popular belief, we found the French to be courteous and understanding drivers, the Germans to be ultra patient and meticulously observant of speed limits. Mind you, we weren’t in Paris or on the Ruhr Autobahns this time.

    Hotels were well-chosen. No big disappointments. The last one was family owned and was in the process of renovation, having been stuck in 1980 since birth, and the first one was something of a building site (extensions etc.) but otherwise, no complaints. The Maison Rouge in central Strasbourg had, before us, been the chosen hotel for Konrad Adenauer, Winston Churchill, the Duke of Windsor, Maurice Chevalier and Mistinguette. We know this because visitor book extracts were framed on the main stair. We found it to be grand without being too opulent, though perhaps a little up itself. We ate out mostly on this trip, and definitely so in Strasbourg. Pat grew weary of bread and little flour dumplings called spitzle. I gave up trying to find drinkable local wines in Baden Würtemburg and moved to beer instead. We didn’t see any Black Forest gateau. In Carspach our hotel was partly chosen for its kitchen and wine list and I went for a reliable old friend of a wine, Grand-Puy-Lacoste. Regrettably, standards of service are not what they used to be and the cork was pulled much too quickly, breaking in two with granules spilling into the bottle, and thence the glass. Presentation rules were broken but the 2002 was, despite this, a fine bottle indeed. With Xavier and Camille, at the restaurant that his company had designed some years ago - the De La Gare in Guewenheim - we enjoyed Roederer’s Blanc de Blancs 2005, having ordered and paid for the same marque’s non vintage Brut. Good deal. The next table were tucking into one of four vintages of Petrus on the list at the time, none at less than €1,250. Suffice to say that the restaurant’s trophy cabinet is something of a wet dream for people like me. 

    So, what else was there? Part of the compromise that we agreed upon, was that I would be indulged by visits to some planned towns, so they simply had to be endured. I think Pat enjoyed the unplanned ones rather more, but we managed to squeeze in one in France and one in Germany. Neuf-Brisach (which more understandably used to be Neu Brisach) is a star-shaped double-fortified medieval town staring over the river towards Breisach am Rhein and is one of those World Heritage Site thingies. The grounds maintenance contract to keep the steeply grassed embankments tidy might have been being renegotiated because it was, frankly, all a bit rough. Impressive that so much of the structure has survived though. We didn’t stop long because we had Colmar and Riquewihr to do in the afternoon. Freudenstadt, in the northern part of what the French call le forêt noir, is a later plan, dating from 1599 and was built for refugees (in this case Protestant miners from Carinthia and the Steiermark - now southern Austria). Germany has some history in resettlement of refugees. Freude means joy, delight. I’m not sure whether Pat was feeling the joy as much as she was the cold wind as we sat with our soups in a café in the square. Helpfully, all the street cafés hang blankets on their chairs for their guests’ convenience. Way back in pre-history Freudenstadt kept coming up in my German ‘O’ level studies. I have no idea why but it was good to at last make a visit there. As a little bonus surprise Pat got to use the lakeside spa pool at our hotel that night. That was the hotel which upgraded us to one of their biggest and best suites, probably because it’s the end of the season and because they just could. Our drive south intersected that of the 1961 trip at Titisee, but that was indeed a lifetime ago and we had the radio switched off. The drivers of Lyons Tour no. 13 played Radio Luxembourg right through the night. Always on the look out for things that spark a memory, all I got was different stuff. At a place called Triberg we stopped for a break. We weren’t tempted by the highest waterfall in Germany, nor by any of the touristy shops selling clocks, mostly of the cuckcuck (cuckoo?) variety. 

    This holiday was one of big contrasts and plenty of wow moments. It was great to be mobile, to go as we please, and yes, that comes at a cost but a cost that’s worth it. There was old and new, there was loud and quiet, and there was big and bigger. I’ve touched on the old already. Colmar centre was interesting with its remnant canals and timber-framed buildings, but Riquewihr, without the canals, took the medieval experience a stage further. You could walk up and down the street there a hundred times and still see something new each time. It was a bit chilly though. At Ribeauvillé, we timed our visit to coincide with the annual festival held on the first Saturday in September, the Pfifferdaj. Entry to the car park was free but was €8 per person for the day’s main attraction, which was marching bands at regular time slots and a fancy dress parade in the mid afternoon, which we missed because we were checking in to the Maison Rouge two minutes early. I don’t do marching bands normally but I surprised myself. They were colourful, loud and ‘in your face’. The sound shook your bones, painting beaming smiles on everyone in earshot. It was stirring and magnificent - even the pipers! Yes, kilted pipers led a Bavarian brass band up and down the street. It was wonderful. With none of the show, this town is spectacular enough anyway. It takes Riquewihr and multiplies the effect several times over. With a glass of Gewürztraminer in your hand it just keeps getting better. My Dad would have loved this. He wouldn’t have thought much of Strasbourg’s Musée d’art moderne et contemporain, with its multicoloured chequerboard facade. I rather liked that aspect of the building, but as it was a Monday it was, of course, closed. Also, the entrance proved to be invisible until we discovered that the art café, which is part of the complex, was it. We left in disgust. At the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in the Palais Rohan, we were greeted with “You are old people?” We got a concession for this but quickly found that not only was this not Art Deco stuff but also that over half of the gallery space was closed off. I mentioned this and got a gallic shrug for my efforts.

    If the brass bands had shock effect, walking in the highest part of the Black Forest was for the most part very quiet and really good for bird spotting. There were eagles, wasserpiepers, jays, magpies, wheatears, spotted woodpeckers, mistle thrushes and red squirrels. I know, technically squirrels aren’t birds but I’ve never before seen any, so they have to get a mention. It was also quiet where we stopped for a morning coffee on the Canal du Rhône au Rhin at a little hamlet called Kembs. We watched ducks, swans, geese and coypus all going about their business in the marina basin and I picked damsons from overhanging trees. The sun seared through our thin shirts, warming shoulders and backs in a way only holiday-makers in Cyprus know of. All very peaceful and a splendid way to bookend our holiday. But wait.

    Big was both the effect and the physical scale of Strasbourg’s most spectacular building. I had no preconceptions, had done no research, and had assumed that we would find time to check out the cathedral, but only after having immersed ourselves in Petite France, the canal/river side zone with its obvious picturesque qualities. Our Green Guide also told us that a visit must be made to the Café de l’Opéra, in the Opera House, so we did that and even ordered hot chocolate as advised, but were less than totally impressed. So, the cathedral. I’m not a lover of gothic in domestic architecture but it does the business and then some, in religious buildings. The townscape effect of this, one of the tallest of all cathedrals, is quite simply shocking. Turn a corner amongst five, six, seven storey timber-framed, brightly coloured historic properties all leaning in to make a tunnel of the street, and then there it is: a honeyed yellow and red one thousand years old (exactly) gothic masterpiece in the extreme perpendicular style, just shutting out the view. I said to myself “That’s mad” and to Pat “That’s completely fucking bonkers.” I was bowled over - and then I went for the ultimate trip. A narrow spiral stair leads up the base of what was planned to be the south tower, to the platform, and another takes you down by the north one. Only the north tower was completed so the effect is one of an unfinished, unbalanced building, but hey, wow. Now, I’m not half the man I used to be when I raced up Köln cathedral during a half hour break from study tour-leading in 1988, but I didn’t know that until about half way up and realised that I should have paced myself. The going got slower and more tentative. My legs turned to rubber. I began to look out and down. NEVER LOOK DOWN. I was hanging on with both hands, slowed to a virtual stop by the time I emerged onto the platform with thoughts (and stresses) about how I was going to get down again. Too much time to think! I allowed myself about a quarter of an hour in recovery before tackling it and, although the whole thing was a stupendous experience, I will only ever do it once so I took my time. I was sweating buckets when Pat and I reconvened in the square and a prolonged sit down was necessary. By the way, inside the cathedral was dark, gloomy even. Not uplifting.

    For another wow, I got what most other people wouldn’t even have noticed. HB-RSC is, a 1955 vintage Lockheed Super Constellation, currently residing at Euro Airport and wearing Breitling motifs. When I was a boy (sorry) Connies, Super Connies and Starliners graced London Airport even though they were already yesterday’s technology. They’re noisy, lumbering, kick out a lot of black smoke and are sensual of form. What’s not to like?

    Roaming the streets of Strasbourg I went into every bookshop that I found. My books must have been selling well, literally flying off the shelves because they were nowhere to be seen. 

    Some advice: Should you ever find yourself driving from the Bad Krozingen area south to Mullheim, west over the Rhine and south again to Basel/Mulhouse/Freiburg Euro Airport, you will find no filling stations along the way. But things like that make a holiday interesting. All in: 8/10

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SIRMIONE  September 2014

12/8

At almost the eleventh hour, Pat spent a day at the computer and twenty minutes on the phone, in the process of booking us an autumn holiday. There was a time when she could multi-task like the best of them but her medieval Cromarty dig has got in the way of everything else this summer. Now that it’s over (both the dig and summer - thank you Hurricane Bertha) we can start looking forward to a change of scene, for that is what we need. I say ‘we’ but I don’t want to be too presumptuous. It has been a long time since Amsterdam and I’m beginning to get desperate. I need something different to look at, to hear, to taste, to add to my experience of life. A long, long time ago (1968) Pat and I travelled over the St. Gotthard Pass, south through Bellinzona, Lugano, Como, Bergamo and Brescia before turning north east to Riva del Garda. It was a college study tour and that particular day spent in the back of a beaten up Bedford crew van has left almost no memories, which is sad because lakes and mountains have always appealed to me and the Lugano and Como bits of this particular route are very much of a character with Luzern, which is my spiritual home after all. But now we’re going back to Lake Garda, the south end rather than the north, which are fifty kilometres apart. Our decision is based more on availability and ease of transfer etc. rather than choosing an optimum destination. I had urged Pat to research Lake Como but she found difficulties and trials at every turn. Maybe one day though. Meanwhile I have attempted to get into the mood by picking up, dusting down and re-reading my copy of Madame Solario (1978), now out of print apparently. I’m quite sure we’ll find Sirmione in 2014 to be completely unlike the Cadenabbia of 1906, not least because ladies don’t wear Edwardian bustles any more. Neither do they wear wide-brimmed hats and carry parasols over their shoulders. Anyway, Sirmione is at least well placed for transportation links to the lower Po valley, which might provide me with a diversion.

    In the days before everyone and his dog took foreign holidays, my Nanna and Grandad Purvis were in the vanguard of such activity. Although most frequently going to Spain, they didn’t ignore Italy. In 1960 they spent eight shillings on the Hallwag Motoring Map of the country and in 1968 I acquired this from them. It was already in something of a state, with patches of sellotape across most of the folds managing to just about hold it together. It remains in this condition today, having been used infrequently by me. It is certainly, of over three hundred in my collection, the map in the poorest condition and looking at it now, I can see that I need to upgrade. Grandad was no respecter of the medium. He circled places that he visited or intended to visit and, judging by this, it seems that he and Nanna travelled the same way from the St. Gotthard to Riva during one of their holidays. I don’t circle the towns. My own lack of respect extends to tracing the route I take with a ball-point pen, sometimes also adding a date where overnight stops are taken. It can be a bit of a tiresome chore at the end of a day, but it’s really only like making detailed notes for a journal. 

    Timed to cause as little disruption to our child-minding timetable as possible, our week in Italy will overlap with the much hyped Scottish Independence Referendum. Consequently, Pat has requested to be put on the postal voting register. Recognising a tendency in myself to be lazy and forgetful on election days, I began postal voting five years ago and am overjoyed at the prospect of not having to suffer the endless waffle from political commentators whilst we mingle with the cream of Lombardy society and generally participate in what will be a fashionably late ‘season’.

Afterwards and after words

Flights, transfers and accommodation, that’s all we ask of Thomson. We have a natural aversion to everything else that comes with packages and I even have to bite my lip and send myself to another place in my head whilst the aforesaid flights and transfers are in progress because that’s the price. However, it comes with the satisfaction that we are very much taking advantage of the company by not signing up for the bits that ultimately make a difference to their profit margins. Rather than be guided around cities in a crocodile led by an umbrella, we do our own thing at our own pace. There’s no escaping the transfer though. Sirmione is no more than half an hour from Verona airport, which was part of the appeal. By transfer coach it takes twice as long and I’m sitting near the back quietly fuming about the dishonesty of the claims that this is a quick and easy transfer. We disgorged at the Hotel Fonte Boiola at 11.18am after having to get up at 3.00am that morning - we stayed the night at the Glasgow Airport Holiday Inn Express to allow a two hour check-in for the two and half hours flight. Having learnt the basics of Italian, care of our Travel Advisor, we were then advised by hotel reception that our room wasn’t ready yet. At 13.30 we gained access and I wasn’t in the best of moods. It had been ten and a half hours between hotel bedrooms which might have been fair enough if our holiday was in central Africa but northern Italy can’t reasonably be described as the back of beyond. What’s the Italian for “What the f*ck?” He didn’t tell us. 

    By now you’re probably thinking “Oh, for goodness sake, you’re always bitching about something..” and I would have to agree that you have a good point. However, the candyfloss version has already been written. It’s in the company brochure. Meanwhile, on Planet Reality, we began our settling in process, which involved a certain amount of jostling over access to the en-suite facilities and then going out to find some food. The Fonte Boiola had been chosen largely because it has something that no other hotel on the peninsula has - a garden, a lawn really, between the building and the lake. It’s somewhere to set up your sun-lounger and relax, reading or sleeping, in relative peace and tranquillity. I don’t think any lizards were trodden on during our stay. They mostly stayed on the trunks of the olive trees, fortunately. Anyway, other delights of our accommodation included long, narrow and featureless corridors, the empty walls painted hospital yellow. At all times of day at least two trolleys loaded with bedding, towels and assorted hospitality products occupied these corridors, creating a kind of chicane for the clientele. A word about the clientele: Okay, it’s a spa hotel. We knew that. What we weren’t prepared for was for it to feel like a kind of nursing home. Very old, slow-moving Italians and Germans with tanned and wrinkled faces (and bodies) dressed in regulation white dressing gowns, shuffled around the public areas, including the dining room, dropping walking sticks as they went. It was, somebody said, a bit like a scene from Cocoon. It made us feel young again. At breakfast, people were trying to eat cereal without spilling, their hands trembling from Parkinson’s, or indecision. It was a time-shift of at least twenty years that we had landed in, and coming and going from the hotel was actually more like a cross between Ground Hog Day and Doctor Who. There was certainly no pressure to bag the best pitches by marking territory with towels, even despite the high proportion of German guests. The sulphurous outdoor jacuzzi pool wasn’t big enough to do lengths in and was too hot for comfort, says Pat. She preferred the lake, at about 20 degrees. I’m a Taurean. I don’t do water, but I do know that rotten eggs don’t smell very nice.

    We were invited to join a guided walking tour of Sirmione, led by Alec and Heidi (Thomson got a two for one deal with this couple). I said no. Pat said yes. We joined. We peeled off the back at the half way point and investigated the significant Roman remains called Grotte di Catullo, built in about 100 BCE. The people who know about these things call it a villa, but it is so vast that my vote goes in the box marked ‘resort’. Both the ruins and the museum make for an excellent visit. Awe-inspiring in scale and truly fascinating in detail. The fragments of painted frescos are wonderful. That they survived about fifteen hundred years whilst the building complex simply decayed through neglect is a true wonder. Altogether, a far superior experience to that at Knossos a few years ago. (I found it quite impossible to believe in any of those creative reconstructions). Back home votes were being cast in what turned into a virtual landslide against what everyone thought was a rising tide for independence. Again, Pat said yes. I said no. Even the non-risk-averse youth of the country (16-24 age group) said no. 

    In late September Sirmione is a place heaving with tourists. The old town is tightly packed into a limited space, guarded by a medieval castle complete with drawbridge and moat, castellations and photo appeal. Ferraris, Lancias, Mercedes’, Porsches, bicycles and taxis all vie with too many gelati-licking people for the thoroughly medieval thoroughfare space available. You sign up for rubbing shoulders and fender bumping when you venture forth. And yet, in a few weeks time it all shuts down for winter and the waiters all go off on their own vacations. Indeed, some of the restaurants and hotels appeared to have already transitioned to the closed season, as the last flowers were fading on the Oleanders and the main appeal of the Flame Trees had long since been lost.

    A week of Italian food is about as much as I can cope with. The country is a culinary trap in which the same food is offered up in numerous guises, the only relief we found being ‘fish from the lake’, or sea bass with roasted vegetables. Pat found escallop of something or other with a fine sauce. Wine is, as in France, almost exclusively home grown, which meant Bardolino for red, Lugana for white and Prosecco for sparkling - all falling into the category of generic drinks, not for savouring. They are an appropriate accompaniment for the food, nothing more really. Did they see us coming? Probably. At one café, we paid €26.50 for a beer, a small glass of Bardolino, a Margherita pizza and a small bruchetta. Elsewhere, €60.50 bought us a Scaloppine con funghi with insalda mista, a Branzino alla griglia with verdure alla griglia, and a half bottle of Gewurztraminer. Would you be happy paying €8.50 for a small glass of ordinary wine and a lemon soda? We misjudged the cost of eating modest meals, even of simple drinks. By way of contrast, public transport seemed to be a bargain. The local bus took us to Verona and back for €7 each. True, there was an issue with the getting back, when the scheduled hourly service didn’t run for two hours, but it was probably the only purchase that didn’t feel like a rip-off. A large gelati cone was more expensive, and was history in three minutes flat. The stand-out food for us both was big ripe peaches offered as part of the hotel’s breakfast fayre. I haven’t tasted the likes since a lunch taken on Luzern’s waterfront in 1964. Scotland doesn’t do good peaches. It never has. 

    So, where was I? Yes, Verona. My Auntie Olive died here in August 1963, a few days after an outing from Rimini to Venice. She really did see Venice and die. Our own outing was spent walking the old town, shopping for princess shoes in the Disney Store and ‘doing’ the Paolo Veronese exhibition at the Musei d’Arte on Piazza Bra, a fine classical-fronted building whose facade is masked from view by random evergreen trees growing in a loosely configured ‘garden’ space that occupies a large part of the piazza. A little fountain there is grossly out of scale and contributes to what is simply a misguided urban design. The main event of the space is the Arena, but access to the inside of this Roman relic is only offered to those buying performance tickets for whatever opera is currently being staged. The Veronese paintings were interesting. Close access and what seemed to be loose security arrangements allowed us to study brushstrokes and technique in great detail. My overall conclusion was that he was not the greatest technical artist. Composition might have been the best aspect of his work, but his eye for detail in architectural depiction was not up to scratch. I want my columns not to bend or lean. Is that too much to ask? Also, he painted fabrics either beautifully or crudely, nothing in between. Out in the city, in Via Cappello to be precise, a million tourists, mostly Japanese, are still trying to squeeze into a small courtyard to photograph a balcony on which no Juliet is standing. 

    One day we took a lake steamer over to Gardone on the western shore. First it had to take us to Bardolino and Garda on the eastern shore, then to Portese and Salò on the western shore. We weren’t in a hurry but it would have been good to have had a mist-free day for it. Never mind. Gardone was quite unlike Sirmione. It was quiet. Much of the tourist activity was already in shut-down mode and there seemed little to explore other than the botanic gardens, so that’s where we headed. A bit of a trudge up the hill got us to the gate where €20 would have bought us tickets to look at trees. We declined the invitation, as did another couple with whom we swopped notes later on in the week. A lot of public money has been spent on the promenade at Gardone, and spent well. That evening there was a vicious thunderstorm, very local to the village. It uprooted large trees, smashed the windows of the Grand Hotel and left the main road blocked with debris. All that we saw of the storm was a little girly rain, that had gone away by morning. Our getting back to Sirmione was by way of an old ro-ro ferry, a complete and disappointing contrast to the nearly new Andromeda of the morning run. I was surprised and delighted to see a paddle steamer moored up next to the castle one morning. The last remaining such vessel on the lake, it was built in 1902, contemporary with the oldest of the Luzern Dampfschiffen. The difference is that the G. Zanardelli is not in regular service and only gets wheeled out for special occasions or, as now, for private functions (a gay wedding as it happened). Anyway, photographs were duly taken and lustful moments were enjoyed. We went back to Bardolino on our last day and spent a pleasant hour or two looking at real shops selling real goods. We couldn’t get there for the Air Show because the steamer service was cancelled for safety reasons - the Italian red arrows were doing their aerobatic display partly over water. I watched from afar. There’s a sameness about pretty well all the lakeside settlements. They’re not exactly clones but they are much of a size and consist of much the same mix of trattorias, pizzerias, narrow streets and interesting architecture. Our choice of Sirmione as a base was easily the best as it offered more variety and visual drama than any other. Maria Callas must have thought so too. Her villa, with its identifying wall plaque, lies between the Therme di Sirmione and the Catullo ruins, on elevated ground of course and behind intimidatingly high steel fencing. For one who guarded her privacy so tightly, it might seem a little odd that she should have chosen such a honeypot of a place to live.

    Thomson have Dreamliners but not on their Glasgow to Verona route. We got their Y221-configured 757s, both of which were as-new, despite being fifteen and ten years old respectively. Well done for giving these reliable oldish aircraft a complete refit. Not good though to overfill them with 221 pax.

    We talked some about the merits of a basic package versus a non-ATOL protected DIY type of holiday. Both have advantages and disadvantages. Personally, I favour the DIY version, probably because I don’t like all the fitting in with some greater plan, but even life’s little luxuries, like holidays, often turn out to be compromises. This was no exception. We agreed that it rated a 6 stroke 7 on the official scale (I actually made it a 6.2), in which I rate anything above 7.5 as a real success. Whatever, the change of scene has been accomplished and we can now start planning for the prodigal’s return in November. Incidentally, Crete in 2012 was our only holiday ever that didn’t score over half marks, in my books. 

Footnote: I hang my head in shame at the reality that I am now responsible for releasing 33.8 tons of carbon dioxide, 1.79 kg of methane and 1.47 kg of nitrous oxide into the atmosphere as a consequence of my flying around the world the equivalent of 6.6 times during my lifetime.

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AWAYDAY IN AMSTERDAM  October 2013

They still have bookshops in Amsterdam. More’s to the point, they have English bookshops as well as Dutch ones. With time being definitely of the essence on our very short visit, I allowed myself a couple of minutes to check out one of the better looking amongst the English variety, just in case. I was in the mood for a surprise. But these days I overcome disappointments quickly, which is what I had to do because there on the shelves, exactly where my book might have been, was a thick pictorial biography of John Brookes. I know what you’re thinking - John who? Never mind.

    “Happy birthday Pat. I’m taking you out for dinner.”

    “Oh, that’s nice. Where?”

    “Well, it’s your choice, but anywhere within walking distance of the NH Tropen on Linnaeusstraat would be good.”

    Again, I know what you’re thinking - and yes, I can be, sometimes. 

    She left the choice to me and I sought advice from Emmy at Cromarty’s own Dutch Cheese House but she couldn’t offer any advice. “I doun’t knouw Omsterdom.”

    It’s possible to take international flights direct from Inverness, but you don’t have to be too choosy because it’s only a wee terminal and they can’t handle A380s yet. A320s are about the limit I think, so we’re not going to be flying off to anywhere tremendously exotic from our local hub without going through somebody else’s bigger local hub on the way. Flybe have a partnership program with KLM which allows Amsterdam to become a destination as well as a friendlier kind of hub (I’m thinking Heathrow here). So, dinner in Amsterdam? Why not? It’s only money and more importantly, it’s not London. And Embraer 175s are just the ticket. G-FBJB (both ways) is just under two years old. It has winglets but they have little or no effect upon steadying the airframe in turbulence. Also, the seats, as configured for Flybe, are non reclining. Otherwise, yeah, good enough. Not only does it fly but it drives fast too. We landed on the westerly runway, which is five kilometres away from the terminal, so the pilot seemed to think that his F1 credentials needed to be demonstrated. I don’t think he took any corners dangerously or ignored any yellow flags. It was quite a thrill ride though.

    My strategy involved catching the Sprinter train to Muiderpoort, four stops from the airport and only a short walk from our hotel. The Sprinter failed at Central Station. We detrained and re-platformed. “Where do we go?” “4 or 5.” “We want Muiderpoort.” “14a.” “Are you sure? That guard said 4 or 5.” “14a.” “OK, Dank.” A forty-five minutes delay had me on the point of fuming. Holland is not Switzerland. And I can’t afford forty-five minutes sitting on a dead train going nowhere. I can do that in Scotland. 

    We dined at de Ysbreeker, a traditional eating house on the banks of the Amstel. Getting there we walked past many other potential dining opportunities, several of which were completely empty but de Ysbreeker was heaving. Good, unpretentious food. Poor, expensive wine. We had beer (organic from Belgium). As the evening drew on the service got slower, so the option for a dessert was dropped. We’d still be there now! Anyway, all in all, that restaurant was the best option for us, even if being river/canal side made no difference to the experience, as I had hoped it might.

    One day, or rather half a day, in the city. What to do? Pat had no agenda other than a preference to spend it outside rather than inside. Time can march away alarmingly quickly once you step inside a Rijksmuseum or a Van Gogh Museum. But first, we had to find breakfast. The tram, at what should have been rush-hour, was half empty. There was no waiting for it, right outside our hotel and it whisked us in to Central Station in a kind of open-top-tourist-bus kind of way, but without the annoying “Now on your left you will shortly see the red light area of Amsterdam” commentary. And without the open top too. OK, not a good analogy. Trams are efficient but not cheap. Trains are cheap and not efficient. We threw our back pack and small suitcase (hand baggage only on Flybe) into a left luggage at the station and set off for breakfast. But first, we were not far away from the hostel that we Manchester College of Art and Design students used in April 1970. I wanted to find it and set up a ‘then and now’ photograph as Kate had done at her wedding a year ago. Pat’s compass was pulling her in one direction, towards food, whilst mine was desperately trying to locate the steps that we both sat and posed on forty-three years ago. I couldn’t find them, but was only five doors away as it happens. That’s annoying. I really should have done my homework before we left.

    We had scrambled eggs, bacon, toast and coffee sat outside at Café Tistris on Sint Antonisbree Straat, next to a canal. It’s hard to escape them. We were lucky with the weather. It was sunny, fresh, calm, almost warm, but all the Amsterdamse locals were buttoned and zipped up to their chins, quilted black jackets being much in evidence as were leather trousers. Also, scarves are the must-have accessory to top off all the heat-retaining layers. Really, what do they wear in winter? Amsterdam is a quiet city. Trams are quiet, bicycles are silent, except when you accidentally find yourself walking in a red lane, and vehicle traffic is nominal. Bicycles of course are de rigeur. They are configured for sitting up straight or slightly leaning back, and are geared for high speed with the minimum of effort. Nobody wears helmets. Nobody. Instead, they plug into their iPods and text their millions of friends, one-handed: “Ja, I’m on the bicycle.” They travel in  long, strung-out pelletons and none of them wins King or Queen of the Mountains.

    We wandered, one eye on the clocks, Pat looking for toilets, me for photo opportunities. “Mind your back!” Yes, you really do need eyes in the back of your head. We paused at the Flower Market, all beautifully arranged and with American (and British) tourists taking photos but not buying. We drifted through Dam Square - very tacky - and, accidentally, the red lights - tacky totty, before setting down at another outdoor café, the Trinity at the top end of Voorburgwaal. Big smiles from our waitress whose opening line was “The pink couple!” Indeed we were both wearing darkish pink tops - it’s an identification in a crowd device. “I wish my boyfriend would wear pink. It’s good. It looks good on you.” “I’ll take a beer please.” “Large beer?” “Er, no just a small one please.” “Oh, small, girly beer?” “Ja, dank.” I couldn’t win. Dutch men are all tall. Dutch women are taller and have very long legs. Does this sound like a generalisation? 

    Platform 14a, fifteen minutes to Schiphol, nearly two and a half hours to hang about. Can somebody tell me why two hours are needed for check-in on short hop European flights like this? The plane doesn’t even arrive at the gate before you’re sitting in the post-security lounge and there are only eighty seats on the ERJ-175s so security is quickly dealt with. Huff, puff. I’d rather be...well, almost anywhere. Pat’s friend and fellow studio renter Pat Hay (not to be confused) found us at the gate. She had travelled back from Canada and we were her taxi home to Cromarty. One of her two bags didn’t get to Inverness, which reminded me of when both our suitcases failed to come with us to Santiago de Chile fourteen years ago. That flight originated at Schiphol too. KLM gave us $200 to buy clothes while we waited three days for the bags, but that’s another story.

    Flybe offer a special deal on Bombay Sapphire: two times one litre bottles for £24. I stopped the trolly and pointed to the best deal of the century, located in the rear section of their flight magazine. Pam frowned and said “Sorry. That’s only available if you are flying out to a European destination.” Like I said, I overcome disappointments quickly these days.

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REALLY CHUFFED  Islay, July 2013

Three birds, one stone. I needed to get some visits done as research for my next book, Pat wanted to come along to sketch and get inspired for her next series of paintings, we both wanted to conquer another island. So it was that we found our way south and west to what people have long called the Queen of the Hebrides, calling in first at a couple of stops to  help satisfy my agenda.
The first thing to report is that Islay is a long way away from Cromarty. It takes a day to get there, or in our case to get back because we took two days getting there, with a stopover in Inveraray. Anyway, as always, there were highlights and lowlights so this review is not a hyperbolic tourist guide. We feel good though - it was a great little break and we feel refreshed, inspired, satisfied.

Wild Birds in Britain (Brooke Bond, 1965), No.3  Chough
Three birds doesn’t look at it! We visited the RSPB Reserve at Ardnave in the north of the island, having been tipped off that this is the best place to see a certain rare and wonderful sight. I’ve only been waiting forty-eight years for this one, so I got quite excited at the prospect of ticking one of my lists. I opened the conversation with the nice girl at the Visitor Centre: “I come more in hope than expectation. Can you offer either?” “You’ve come to see these?” she pointed to a large display on the back wall. “Oh yes, please. What are my chances?” “Guaranteed, no problem,” she replied. “Guaranteed? Stone wall guaranteed?” “Yes, just walk out on the dunes, you’ll see them, guaranteed.” “Not on the cliffs? I thought cliffs.....” “No, no, about a mile in, you’ll see them.” We couldn’t stay talking any longer, much as I’d have liked to. I was through the door and off, marching north, pulse racing, wind at my back. Some twitchers were coming back along the track. “Will we see them? Are they waiting there for us?” “Yeah, yeah, there’s about thirty. You’ll see the sign. Near there, look over the edge. They’re flying low mostly.” Another group offered “Yep. About ten. Keep going.” I was almost at a jog. Pat thought she saw some a little more inland on higher ground but I wasn’t convinced. “We have to keep going. They said along this way...” And then, just as guaranteed, there they were. Not thirty, nor ten. I counted eighteen, all actively going about their business of rapid swooping followed by probing of the closely cropped dune grass for insects. We both stood out of sight clicking away with telephoto lenses, I scarcely believing what I was seeing, or at least that I was there seeing it. It was a highlight, not just of our trip but of my lifelong on/off interest in rare and wonderful birds. There were plenty of wheatears, sand martins, terns, oystercatchers, all the usual suspects enjoying the machair, but eighteen choughs. That’s pretty bl**dy impressive, isn’t it? Ardnave is a fabulous resource. Even if you haven’t waited forty-eight years to see a small crow with a curved red beak, it’s well worth the effort to get there and repays in bundles - on many levels, like seeing herds of black cattle grazing the salt marshes of upper Loch Gruinart.

3 Star hovel

It was forever called The Great Inn, but all that’s changed and now it’s the Argyll Hotel, designed by John Adam in 1750 at the northern end of Front Street and connected to the other buildings by a multi-arched screen wall. Boswell and Johnson stayed there in 1773. I wanted to stay there too. Now I’m not so sure it was a good idea. We used to get round to Inveraray in time for summer breakfasts, back in the day when we lived near Glasgow. The loch was always a mirror and the sense of arrival was always most satisfying. Can’t remember the breakfasts as such. This time I needed to survey the town, so it was an ideal opportunity to realise a modest ambition and perhaps to sleep in the same room as noted men of letters. Of course, stories don’t always have happy endings.

“You’re in one of our cottages Mr. Haynes.” OK, never mind, I thought. But this quickly turned to ‘not OK’ and ‘do mind’. The cottage was the ground floor of a tack-on Victorian shed that compromises one of the above-mentioned Georgian arches. It was small, cold, grubby, uncomfortable and well below the standard set by the Tourist Board, so somebody’s on the make, obviously. Net curtains to the street were plastic, cut to length, randomly, at about the sill level. Breakfast was inedible. Pat found butter that contained milk and a croissant that was only marginally bigger than a crumb. I waited over half an hour for some toast. I’m not going back, ever. I told them this on the booking website when we got home. Pat said the fish (not the chips) that constituted her bar supper was the best she’d ever had. I don’t believe her. I make the best fish AND chips.
So that was how we finished day one and started day two. Things could only get a lot better, and they did.

Old places and older stuff

We drove down to Lochgilphead, another planned town of the eighteenth century, and hung around long enough to take some notes and make an assessment of the place. It’s not much of a destination, nor even a terribly good place to base a touring holiday, but it is located where the Inveraray, Campbeltown and Oban roads all meet so it became more of a regional centre than any of the other places. We didn’t linger. There’s a narrow, twisty road over to Crinan from Cairnbaan which we explored in August 1972. We did it again this time and found it to be narrower and twistier. Either that or cars have got bigger. Crinan was lovely, if lost in a time-warp. It’s almost inaccessible by road but when people do find it they discover that the local café is closed until silly o’clock, so must go thirsty. We watched the sea lock gate being opened for traffic, which was building, then tootled off to see something else and kill time before catching our ferry from Kennacraig.
Without too much trouble, the something else we found was what is described as the finest prehistoric cup and ring rock carvings in Scotland, in a forestry plantation near Achnabreck farm. We photographed them and moved on, so that the man painting the railings grey could get on with his work. He didn’t seem to be in much of a hurry though, grumbling about not being able to paint in the rain. It wasn’t raining.

Finlaggan

Our ferry, both ways was the MV Finlaggan, brought into service in 2011 but looking still brand new. It was smart, clean, spacious, efficient, on time and very comfortable. Everything that the Argyll Hotel is not. We came ashore at Port Askaig in the Sound of Islay without feeling any pitching, rolling or yawing for the whole two hours. On the return from Port Ellen, it was the same story, but with sunshine. Marvellous. Caledonian MacBrayne charged us £87 for this round trip mini-cruise, which works out at about thirty-six pence a minute, all in. I’d say that was good value. They might have thrown in some whales to watch but we were unlucky.
Finlaggan is also where we spent our only wet afternoon and it wasn’t so much wet as Islay mist, not Mist. As the lady in the Visitor Centre said “It’s come in atmospheric.” Yes it had done, just for us, and probably very appropriately so given that the site is steeped in the mystery associated with the Lords of the Isles. We crossed the decking causeway onto the first of two islands, trudged around with the sheep, getting damp, and looked out at the second of the islands, a crannog that’s inaccessible but we weren’t bothered. White water lilies (Wild Flowers srs. 2, Brooke Bond, 1959, no. 27) and Phragmites communis fringe the islands to great picturesque effect. There was a dead fish too. At our age we get concessions, fortunately. Otherwise I would think twice about some of the places we visit...

Argyll’s seat

...like Inveraray Castle, for instance. I’ve wanted to visit for a very long time, probably because of the exaggerated Victorian conical toppings to the earlier circular corner towers. Taymouth Castle, which is very similar in broad plan and elevation, doesn’t have them and it looks lumpy. Inveraray has that romantic, picturesque edge that sets it apart. Inside we found a lot of empty space, all of which has to be heated somehow, so that’s why they charge £10 a head with a nominal reduction of £1.50 for old people like me. I didn’t warm to it (ha ha) inside, but it still looks great outside - except for the cast iron and glass entrance porch tacked onto the north front (which used to be the back door before Robert Mylne persuaded the then Duke to make some fundamental changes). The garden is rubbish, the Aray Bridge is fine - although an oystercatcher was very upset at my ‘invading’ its territory on the beach next to the bridge. It all costs too much, not least the coffee in the undercroft café. The shop, in the northwest tower basement, is rubbish too. But then, much of Inveraray is pretty down-market. The one gallery that we found is yet another outlet for Jolomo churn-them-out, formula landscapes, and to walk along Main Street is to smell fish and chips drowned in vinegar and being eaten from moulded polystyrene trays on the pavement, fighting with powerfully scented soaps, all to the noise of fiddles and bagpipes being played on a continuous loop out of shop doorways where fluffy hairy haggises (made in Bangladesh) and poor taste T-shirts are offered for sale. Close inspection doesn’t bear close inspection. It’s a shame, but there you are. People go and buy this stuff.

I think we’ll have a new town over here, and another one over there...

Back on Islay, I had work to do. We spent some time taking photos, noting the number and type of businesses and asking local people about how the places tick. This all involved visiting local hotels, eating a plateful of crab claws (eight giant ones each, an hour and ten minutes, at the Port Charlotte Hotel), langoustines and a whisky tasting at The Islay Hotel  in Port Ellen and an enjoyable lunch with some new French friends at the Harbour Inn, Bowmore. Regarding the whisky tasting, suffice to say that good measures of each of five Ardbeg products (two of one) for £10 was a good call, and better value than Inveraray Castle. At some point during the evening I appraised Ardbeg man of my years of wisdom.  It went something like this:

Me: “Now listen to this my good man. It’s time you stopped confusing us by giving unusual and unpronounceable names to your products, and revert to the standard that everyone understands.”
Ardbeg man: “What’s that then?”
Me: “10 years, 12 years, 15 years. It’s easy.”
Ardbeg man: “But these whiskies are all aged at least ten years and they each have an individual character dependent upon whether we use old sherry or bourbon casks. We even vary the percentage of each type of cask.”
Me: “Precisely. QED.”

Or it may have been more like this:

Me: “See you Jimmy, wanna stop givin’ them whiskies poncy names and tell us how old they is?”
Ardbeg man: “Could you keep your voice down please?”

As I write this I see that I actually have to eat my hat because of what just happened on Centre Court. I’m not the only one to get a good call.
Going looking for the clutch of planned towns and villages on this island, I felt like I did in ’84 when I went Lutyens/Jekyll garden hunting. It was the same feeling of excitement - the thrill of the chase. I don’t count the distillery villages, or Keills (which is and always was something and nothing) but there are five proper ones, all of which were the brainchild of one Campbell or another and all got ‘done’.
The ambition of the Campbells in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was groundbreaking, literally. In a bid to improve both the lot of their tenants and to bring law and order to a place which had scattered farmtouns but no urban centres or marketplaces, they planned and constructed new villages and towns, introduced new industries and improved others, leaving a legacy unique amongst the Hebridean islands. For more, you’ll have to wait for the book, if you’re at all interested.

Kintra country

Our base on the island was Kintra farm, right on the edge of the Oa and at the south end of the Laggan Bay strand, where the sand runs for 7 km and the surf is regularly up. It’s a wonderful setting and had we had more time we’d have explored the Oa, where we were guaranteed to have seen Grass of Parnassus (Wild Flowers srs. 2, no. 17) and Golden Eagles (Bird Portraits, Brooke Bond, 1957, no. 33). We were doing B&B but others had cottages or were camping. Nothing was too much trouble for Margaret, though I wish her mother had taught her how to boil eggs and especially how to scramble them. Her porridge was prodigious though and her bookshelves were a mine of information for my research. I spent two evenings taking rapid notes from out of print volumes whilst half watching Today at Wimbledon. The farmhouse garden is surrounded by a highly crafted stone wall that had me drooling, because I’m funny like that. Their beach and dunes reminded us both of halcyon days in June ’73 when we camped at Horgabost, on the Sound of Taransay, Harris. Margaret and Hamish must surely be near the end of their working lives and we guess that a considerable injection of capital might be needed to raise the standard of the interior finishes when younger family members take over. Lovely people though and yet another good call, all in all.

The Big Garden

At Bridgend is Islay House, the erstwhile lairds’ seat which, along with twenty-five acres of woodland, has been for sale these past three years because the current American owner wants to go home. We found the boutique brewery in the converted home farm building around the back, bought some unique ales for folk back home and marvelled at the scale of what is still a township despite the goings on of the 1760s. Then we found a sign that invited us to explore the walled garden. Now, there are walled gardens and walled gardens. This one, which unfortunately bears some ill-advised scars of a visit by those nice people from The Beechgrove Garden TV programme, is as unexpected as it is immense. One gardener and a few occasional volunteers tend an enormous area on behalf of the community, to whom the garden was gifted some time ago. They grow and sell vegetables in semi-industrial quantities, supplying hotels and other businesses on the island, making use of a resource that had been completely unused, unloved and quickly reverting to nature. Notwithstanding the tireless efforts of the inadequately small number of carers the  reality is that the chickweed is winning the battle, which is a great shame. We stood at the gate, surveying the scene from our elevated position and both our jaws dropped. What had it been, what could it be and what is most likely to happen next? In truth it was only ever a partially walled garden, the north side having all the lean-to glasshouses against a heated wall and facing out over the very sheltered, south-facing clearing a hundred metres  long by seventy-five wide. That’s a whole lot of weeds to control.

You take the low road...

Long after the planned new towns had been built, the only land-based communication route between the north and south of the island was along the Laggan Bay strand. Then in the mid-nineteenth century two almost parallel roads were made, linking Port Ellen with Bridgend and Bowmore respectively. The High Road, still a single track with passing places, takes a more or less direct line but the Low Road is uncompromising. For seven miles it deviates not an inch from the straight and narrow as it takes on the peat moss of middle Islay, with only the control tower of the 3-runway airport as a landmark along the way. It offers the opportunity for normal people, like me, to put the foot to the floor with apparent impunity, so we only used the High Road once. Incidentally, ‘high’ is a relative term. It’s mostly below 30 metres but hits 84 in one spot, whereas the measured seven miles fluctuates between 14 and 20 metres AOD. Nothing at all on the island gets above 500 metres, which is 200 short of the width of the Sound of Islay at Port Askaig - and from the ferry this seems dangerously close.

So, whilst I’m talking roads, we only had the uncomfortably long final leg from Kennacraig to Cromarty to suffer, made worse by incompetent Sunday drivers (on a Saturday) before closing out this little adventure. A seafood market at Tarbert interrupted the flow and put a big smile on Pat’s face. She found fat langoustines at £8 a kilo and triumphantly loaded up the boot with 3 kilos of this booty. We used some of them with Chanoine’s Tsarine Champagne to celebrate the goings on in the tennis and to enjoy a rare, sunny, warm day without wind, sitting on the garden bench looking out over a firth that was, for once, at peace with the elements.
A reward also came our way on Sunday morning with a visit from Kate, who brought Natasha and Brooke, for a little bonding. Anyone for tennis, or should that be tea?

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TRAINS, BOATS, PLANES AND OTHER THRILL-RIDES  Weggis, May 2013

I’m sorry, there are more facts and figures this time. I couldn’t help it.

Eine kleine Geschichte
Anyone who knows me knows also that the school trip to Central Switzerland that I was part of in August ’64 had a profound affect on my life and contributed to my choice of career. Peter and I went back three years later and Pat and I passed through in ’68 on the MCAD Venice or Bust study tour. We also passed through, very briefly, in 2005 because it was half way between Zürich and Grindelwald. Anyway, there has always been something about Lake Lucerne that has captivated me and I wanted both to share this with Pat for the first time (properly) and to get my fix, albeit a long time after my first voyage of discovery. I thought that forty-nine years was a long time but a lady at our hotel was explaining to me that she first came to the lake in 1958, by accident - her coach broke down en-route to Italy so the courier got the party into the Hotel Rigi at Vitznau while the coach was repaired. “Has anything changed?” I asked. She said that the hotel used to stand in a rather isolated position but now has its view blocked by new buildings. Well, stuff like that happens I suppose. For me, not a lot had changed. Sure, there are more hotels, resorts and upmarket chalets, but the essential qualities of the place have remained, as has the pace of life and the quality of the environment. It’s just as fabulous now as when, as a fifteen year old, I took it all in with youthful gusto, scrambling up and down steep mountain paths, delighting in the precision and cleanliness of all aspects of the Swiss transportation systems, taking full advantage of a two weeks pre-paid tourist pass to zip me up to snowy peaks by cable car, funicular, rack railway or chair lift, also to ply the lake unlimited, on motor or paddle steamers.

Having written about one of my experiences from those days and included it in the introduction to my book, I thought it prudent to double check that my memory wasn’t playing tricks. Thankfully, because it’s too late now, it wasn’t. More of that later.

Die Flugzeuge
I had been looking forward to this bit, a lot. I always do, but often times I’m disappointed by the reality of flight. Embraer ERJ-145s are small regional jets, seating 49 in a 1+2 configuration and an offset aisle. My only experience of the type was in ’08 on a flight from Birmingham to Inverness, c/o Flybe, and it was good on several levels, not least because it’s a small plane, therefore short queues and little hassle. Flybe have since sold their fleet of 145s on to bmi regional who happen to fly from Edinburgh to Zürich. G-EMBI was one of them and we got it for both legs this time. Small plane means few creature comforts and two hours is longer than fifty minutes, so size does matter when time is added to the equation. Bravo India is a noisy aircraft. It has no winglets, which means that turbulence has to be factored in to the enjoyment or otherwise of the flight experience. We had turbulence on landing. Not scary, just annoying. I think I’ve fallen out of love with ERJ-145s (the 190s are still good though). On the way back we flew over Basel, Calais, Dover and the Thames estuary. Sitting on the starboard side, Belgium, east Kent and The Wash sequentially filled the window. Scattered cotton wool balls pock-marked the vista. Then it was the usual sharp turn to port as we flew out over the Firth of Forth for final approach with the bridges grabbing all the attention. We were quarter of an hour early, which is not bad considering that we were the same amount late leaving ZRH.

Zürich airport is the best in the world, probably. You could easily eat your meal off the floor (polished granite) but most people, having been well directed by ultra clear signage, are happy to slowly make their near-silent way towards their respective gates then repose on beautifully crafted seats and await the calling of their flight, which will be on time. Near-silent is a reference to the unseen aspect of the design at the terminals. Somewhere in the fabric is a sound absorbing component that makes this airport as friendly as your own lounge, but probably better. OK, it’s a little industrial and large scale but I see it as a destination in its own right.

The Embraer was disappointing and was well and truly trumped by a visit to the Luzern Verkehrshaus (me, not Pat, because it’s boys’ stuff). This has an excellent display of all manner of transportation through the ages, right up to the Breitling Orbiter 2. But I had time only for the briefest squint at the trains and a long drool at the planes. When Boeing and Douglas ruled the airways with 707s and DC-8s, Convair were slow to realise the potential of four-jet passenger airliners so their entry into the market had to be with a twist. Sorry, this a bit more Geschichte. Their 880s had a narrower body and were faster, but only 65 were sold. The 990 (originally the 600) was dubbed Coronado and was a stretched and even faster version which sold 37 or 39 depending on who you believe. It was also very, very noisy and equally dirty. But, it had extra fuel tanks designed as go-faster fairings on the trailing edge of the wings. The 990 was a man’s plane - a sporty, racy-looking version of a 707. It was also as rare as hen’s teeth and plane-spotters in the 1960s just had to be extremely lucky to see one anywhere in the UK. Swissair had seven and SAS had a few too, some leased from Swissair. Years ago now I walked the walk along the aisle of Concorde 002 at Yeovilton and now I am proud to announce that I also have my Coronado wings, or at least as near to that as possible. HB-ICC is the star of the Verkehrshaus, apparently flying in to the display zone but actually in suspended animation about ten feet above the tarmac. I never saw one in flight, or even on the ground. I still haven’t because ICC is propped up, as mentioned, but hey, I have now walked the aisle, peeped into the cockpit, glanced at the only loo on board, been amazed at the tiny galley space and, most importantly, stroked and fondled the aluminium. Swissair Coronados were über-cool and still are. I was born at the wrong time, or so I think at moments like this. Ten years just might have made the difference.

The website flightdiary.net tells me that on completion of my lifetime one hundred and fifty-third flight, I have now flown six and a half times around the Earth and am responsible for releasing 33.2 tons of CO2, 1.74 kg of methane and 1.44 kg of nitrous oxide. It also analyses that I am most likely to fly on a Wednesday in September.

Die Zuge
The Inter Regio train from Zürich to Luzern und zurück is a double-deck, panorama window job with play areas for children on board, upstairs. They are comfortable, clean and quiet. They also run on time. Schweizerische Bundesbahnen, the SBB part of SBB CFF FFS that all trains boldly display, in Helvetica Bold, must be the model for all train companies to emulate. Everything about the rolling stock and its functioning is perfect. Enough said, except to add that you don’t need to have German, French or Italian to make it so. I think of how every journey is an uplifting experience, as my mind drifts off to another place (it might as well be another planet) and all those years commuting as a guest of Scotrail.

We had the pleasure of travelling on one local train, from Küssnacht to Luzern. It was an unbelievable four minutes late but made up three of them in transit. The brushed steel grab bars were as-new, the seating was factory fresh, the floor was there to eat off. I felt as if I should have removed my shoes before boarding. By the way, I am not getting paid by the Swiss Tourist Office, by SBB or by anyone else. It’s just that the contrast, for whatever reason, between how they do stuff and how we do it is so dramatic that it leaves an indelible memory.

You can’t go to Lake Lucerne and not ride one of the numerous rack and pinion railways. Back in the day, I stayed at a hamlet half way up the Rigi on the blue line, at Klösterli. The red line, from Vitznau on the lake, to the top, was the first ever rack railway but surprise, surprise, we found ourselves at Klösterli this time and needing a train out of there, so it was the blue line to the rescue, the ARB - Arth Rigi Bahn. We rode up to Staffel, on the ridge, where the two lines converge for their attempts on the summit. The weather had not been good to us (snow, rain, sleet, wind, cold) but suddenly a view opened up at Staffel and Pat could see what I had first seen on the twenty-first of August 1964 and she too gave it a wow. Our legs were suffering by this point. Specifically our calf muscles had taken the strain of a steep walk down, descending 150 metres at a gradient of 1 in 5 from First to Klösterli, so the train definitely came to our rescue. Ian Bulkley and I had tripped up the 300 metres to Staffel and back down again after breakfast, and then some of us did the Klösterli to First climb and back in the afternoon. We were young and fit. There’s a rather nasty Rigi Experience tent at Staffel now. I’d be happy to see it blow away. The big hotel is weirdly empty, shuttered up, its timber shingles peeling. Big, big money could be made from this location.

Ferienkolonie, jetzt Freiämter-Ferienheim
I had to go back and take a look at where our school party had stayed. The building is still there. It has changed its name but not its function. At least, it would be a holiday hostel if there was anybody staying there but, like the Staffel hotel, it’s all closed up and looking extremely forlorn. Buildings come to life with use but die quickly without it and this one appears to be on its last legs. Sad. The Rigiaa stream occupies the cleft between the peaks of Kulm and Scheidegg. I used to go paddling there and marvel at how the water had carved out such amazing forms from the bedrock. It was a miniature landscape that has stayed with me for forty-nine years. It’s not there now. I searched in vain for the exact location but all I saw was a fast flowing gravel-bottomed stream with no excitement value whatsoever. Sad, again. Instead, there’s a high, double waterfall on the hillside facing Klösterli. It wasn’t there in ’64 but then a dry August is not a wet May.

Luftseilbahn
That’s a cable car to you and me. We got up the Rigi, not by the red line, the VRB, but by taking the Luftseilbahn from Weggis to Kaltbad. It’s a facility that wasn’t even on the drawing board in the early ‘60s but now offers the visitors to and residents of Weggis (that’s many more than at Vitznau) an alternative to the VRB. A deal was done: same tariff,  interchangeable tickets. Win, win. Even the operators of the lake steamers win because tourist companies, like Inghams that we went with, strongly suggest that you go one way and return the other, making the connection along the Rigi Riviera by boat. We used the Luftseilbahn to come down. It was more convenient that way and it offered better video opportunities, given that it had stopped snowing and the low cloud had puffed itself away. We paid CHF 24 each for the return ‘flight’, which was half the full fare. The 50% discount cards were invaluable. So our total saving was CHF 48, or about £33. It makes you think along the lines of getting new trainers or hiking boots and maybe a new body.

At Kaltbad, the station is located within a new hotel/spa complex, partly completed and completely apart from local traditional building types. I don’t like it. There was a cold wind, cowslips were poking their noses out from lying snow, flurries of fresh snow kept hitting us in the face and I worked hard to convince Pat that this trek really was a good idea. We ate our packed lunch, which, every day, was a ham and lettuce sandwich, a piece of dried cake and a rock-hard pear or a mushy apple. Food at our hotel was extraordinary for what was, in essence, a package holiday. We had 4 or 5 course dinners of at least bib gourmand standard every night and the breakfasts were ‘eat as much as you want’, but the packed lunches got a tad tiresome. Incidentally, some things don’t change at all. The Swiss offer muesli, but specifically Birchermuesli at breakfast and Tilsiter is always on the cheese board. It has always been so.

Der Aufzug Hammetschwand
On my ‘must do’ list was this outdoor lift. At 118 metres it’s the highest in Europe and was both the highest and fastest in the world when it opened in 1905. What you need to know is that the lift comes as the reward for having tramped the dare-devil cliff walk that is the Felsenweg, a two metres wide track that took five years to hack out of the north face of  the Bürgenstock in an age when nothing was considered impossible, particularly if it meant attracting thrill-seekers. I was here in ’64 and I have since given it about half a page in my latest book. I do suffer from vertigo, but I overcome that affliction for rides like this. “Guten Tag,” that’s me. “Up and down?” that’s the mission controller. “Nein, nur Bergfahrt bitte. Wieviel?” me again. “Ten francs.” he led the way into the mountain and ushered me into the capsule. “Glück!” I had just enough time to set my Nikon to video and start filming. “All engines running. And lift-off, lift-off on the Hammetschwand. The commander reports heavy breathing and some camera shake.” As what I heard some Americans refer to as the elavayder shot out of the mountainside at 2.7 metres a second I held my nerve and my camera as steady as I could. This was for Pat, she who doesn’t overcome vertigo, for nobody, never. Fair enough, but I still wanted to share and this was  the ‘safe danger’ way. Find it here:  http://youtu.be/sMt-tBEYrvc

It’s all over in under a minute, following which the brave astronaut must emerge from the escape hatch and timidly step out onto a fragile gangway of latticed steelwork that connects the tower to the relative safety of solid ground. The gentle walk through the woods back to where the Felsenweg starts and where the Bürgenstock Resort is being built by gouging an industrial scale shelf out of the south face of this narrow ridge, is no more. Instead, there is a very steep, muddy, boulder strewn scramble back to the real world, where you expect to find a rescue crew at the very least. No, Switzerland was momentarily letting me down. I didn’t expect to find this particular excursion so challenging but now fully expect to be promoted and awarded official Hero status.

Die Autobusen
I chummed up with a Chinese PhD student engineer, who had been through all this a minute or so before me and had got bogged down in the mud-bath of the south col. We arrived at where the Postbus should be, but had missed it by four minutes and thirteen seconds so we decided to walk down, or as far as we could before the next bus. Normally, the cliff walk and scary rocket thingy would be accessed by paddle steamer to Kehrsiten-Bürgenstock and thence by funicular, but of course this is 2013 and I had chosen my time poorly. Come back next year when the funicular reopens and the resort is completed. Actually, read my lips, it will not be completed next year, nor even the one after that. The work has barely begun. The upside of this is that intrepid travellers get to experience the  beautiful Obbürgen valley on foot. About an hour after setting off, the nice Postbus driver picked me up and delivered me to Stansstad Hauptbahnhof and, as on the way up, he wanted none of my hard-earned francs for his efforts. Needless to say, his bus was immaculate and my muddy boots made me feel acute shame. Did I mention the free WiFi?

Pat and I needed a local bus as part of our transfer from Weggis to Zürich, so our hotel, The Gerbi, laid on a Mercedes people carrier to get us down to the Schiffstation for it. Everything connects. The low-loader mass-transit bendy bus must have been brand new, or maybe ten years old. How can you tell? It zipped us up and over the hill through Greppen to Küssnacht and once again left me in absolute awe of the service.

Die Schiffe
The crowning glory of transportation in central Switzerland is the SGV or Schifffahrtsgesellschaft Vierwaldstättersee. They operate the Lake Lucerne fleet of motor and paddle steamers. There are fifteen of the former and five of the latter. It’s these five that take 95% of my attention. Don’t get me wrong, the motor steamers are all fine craft, in a modern, clean-lined, efficiently Swiss way. The Dampfschiffe all have the same general appearance but each has its own special on-board style, representative of when it was built. I found myself going all gooey-kneed watching the Druckzylinders doing their stuff amidships on both the Uri (1901) and the Stadt Luzern (1928), and I’m just not a motorhead of any sort, but I feel I missed out by not riding the other three. Stadt Luzern is the flagship and has beautifully carved fish in variety in a frieze running around the main deck lounge. Like all the fleet, her brass is highly polished, her timber decks are immaculate and her floral decoration on the foremast is refreshed regularly. The Uri is the oldest. In 1991 she was converted to allow navigation under a low bridge, but only just. The Unterwalden (1902) was built with retracting funnel and collapsible masts for this very function. I watched in awe as it reconfigured itself at Stansstad, whilst I was waiting for my connection across the lake. The Gallia (1913) has a French theme and the Schiller (1906) is resplendent in Jugendstil character. When I didn’t appreciate these things I rode these craft, blindly.

We bought day tickets for a go as you please, jump on - jump off cruise down to the south end, stopping for lunch and a mooch in Brunnen on the way back. It only rained some of the time, when it wasn’t snowing, and it was a very pleasant way of spending the day, even if most of it was being inside looking out. I picked up a leaflet entitled Dampfe Freunde, which gives me basic details of each of the five paddle steamers and asks for CHF 30 to join the club. It’s here in front of me now and I’m looking for excuses not to send off.

Die Fahrraden
Day one was wet and cold. We opted for physical exercise and borrowed two of the hotel’s bicycles for a Riviera ride. Pat’s was branded with Tour de Suisse, which was slightly optimistic. In the teeth of a storm, we took our chances with what traffic there was and, unhelmeted, made our way along to Vitznau (mostly closed) and back, then on to Hertenstein and back - about fifteen km., thankfully nearly all of it at 435 metres above sea level. On another wet day I took a ride out to Greppen which involved a stiff climb of about eighty metres and which pretty well defeated me. Coasting back, with brakes hard on, was a real joy though. Nevertheless, I needed several hours of quality rest time with my feet up and a glass or two of red before I was ready for anything else. There was a moment when I had to swerve to avoid something in the road. On close inspection it revealed itself as a depression of about 5 mm. which had been boldly circled for repair with red spray paint. The European Champions League Final kept me amused while my lungs and legs recovered.

Schwimmen und spa
Meanwhile, while I was biking, exploring the back streets of Weggis or writing up notes, Pat was mostly using the spa facility or the heated indoor Lido pool. In this latter, she worked up to doing sixty lengths, each of 25 metres, and felt no ill effects save for a stubbed toe. The lake temperature was twelve degrees C and wasn’t tempting enough for her. Wimp. That’s water is mostly perishing.

Das Wandern
We didn’t do a great deal of hiking. I suppose we thought we might be sitting out on a sun-drenched terrace with a glass of beer and a chocolate cake instead. This has been the worst spring in Switzerland for thirty years or so and all the tourist orientated businesses are feeling it in the pocket. I say spring, but while we were there the summer timetable kicked in for all the transportation systems. If it looks like winter, feels like winter and you’ve gone prepared for summer, more fool you. Pat packed some sun cream and I took sunglasses, as you do. We borrowed an umbrella from the hotel and wore layers every time we went out. People kept apologising for the weather.

My first trek was a nominal one from the centre of Luzern to the Verkehrshaus, a little over a mile and a half along the scenic lakefront. Pat opted for the steamer and a swim as she has a barely credible disinterest in historical transport icons. On the morning of my assault on the Bürgenstock, we hiked out to Zinnen, right on the point where the Küssnachter See leads off from the main lake. We got wet but it was a lovely, peaceful stroll taking in the market-garden zone of Postunen. It would have been nice to linger, watching the swallows and martins in their heaven, skimming the lake for insects and scouting the extensive eaves of boathouses for nest locations. But my mind was half on the timetables and this was our last day, our last afternoon - my last chance to reacquaint with the big lift. Rain cleared, clouds lifted. I was a happy bunny. So was Pat. She walked back and put in some serious lengths at the Lido. Pat reported no blisters all week. Now, that’s a result.

Luzern und der KKL
On a day that was unsuitable for mountain riding, we did Luzern/Lucerne. That’s not really fair, because we only allocated half a day and it rained a lot so we didn’t feel motivated to do a great deal of exploring. Fortunately, the main event took no finding at all. It stands right next to both the landing stages and the Hauptbahnhof. The KKL, or Kultur und Kongresszentrum Luzern houses the Kunstmuseum, where modern art is exhibited on the top floor. The current exhibitions fall into the mainstream category of artists having a laugh, but the building is absolutely stupendous, particularly the roof. This is no place to go into gushing detail, so look it up and be amazed. The roof is simply not possible, and yet it is. You will be asking yourself all sorts of questions relating to cantilevers and structural integrity and then you still won’t believe your eyes. Inside, the KKL is as brand new as when it was opened in 1998. There is literally no indication that you are not the first person to tread the floor, climb the stairs, use the toilets, ride the glass lifts, mock the art. Jean Nouvel has made a masterpiece here. In a sensitive location he has both raised the standard and respected the history. Go, now.

Die Vögel
A couple of random sightings surprised us. In Hertenstein, whilst sitting on a park bench contemplating the weather and the incongruity of a bust of Rachmaninov (who, at different times, apparently called Moscow, New York and Hertenstein his home), we witnessed a pair of red kites, audibly excited and getting it on, high up in an Atlas cedar. Pat’s zoom lens is bigger than mine and she managed to get some goodish close-ups of a contented male. It’s the type of encounter that I imagine birders would give their best binoculars for. We also saw, just off shore, a pair of great crested grebes in full summer plumage (!) going through their mating display, dipping for water weed and shaking it all about, face to face. I’ve never seen great crested grebes before. I’ve never been in the right place at the right time.

Das Hotel
We chose a room at the rear of the hotel, cheaper than a lake view. However, it came with windows and double doors onto a balcony with a lake view, so we were well satisfied. Everything about the place and the hospitality of the staff was top notch, not least the dining. I mentioned the set dinners, which never repeated throughout the week. On our last night I chose smoked sturgeon with prawns; wild garlic soup; white fish and smoked salmon with a rice timbale; lime parfait with fruit salad. It was all way above expectation.

Eine Zeitkette
I don’t know if that’s actually a word but I made it up from two others. It means ‘time warp’ and it represents how we both felt when checking out the public and private garden spaces in all areas of our visit. The ground covers, the hedging shrubs, the evergreen barrier plants, the specimen trees, the climbers - all were straight out of the Manchester College of Art and Design Landscape with Plants Handbook. We imagined our tutors bringing us here and pointing out the appropriate and sensitive use of particular species to satisfy various design requirements. Nothing had moved on, but then these plants do the job perfectly well and they look damn good too. Now, British professionals would probably think of this style of planting as being retro, but then graphic designers and typographers might also consider that to be modern Helvetica Bold should be consigned to the trash can of history. Talking of history, remember Swatch? We looked in vain, thinking that they were no more, but then unexpectedly found them in a large display at Zürich airport, next to the caviar, Château d’Yquem and black truffles. “Can I help you Sir?” asked the lady as I shuffled over towards the bottles of wine containing flakes of gold and ogled the thirty year old Mouton Rothschilds and Haut-Brions. “Er, got any free samples?” said I, impishly.

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BURGUNDY IS THE NEW GREY  October 2006

For our holiday last October we turned to Burgundy, leaving from Scotland’s grey capital. It was so grey, it was dreich. Even the Forth bridges were barely visible as our captain carefully navigated his way out of Rosyth in a London pea-souper.

Anyone who can successfully navigate with Michelin maps is pretty smart, so Pat deserves a medal for her efforts. Michelin maps are to Ordnance Survey what Japanese is to Cockney and our best efforts got us to Cambrai, well north of our ultimate destination, for the first night. The grim, grey North Sea weather came with us into northern France, but this wasn’t a holiday about lying in the sun. The agenda had more to do with le shopping for booty, les fine dining experiences, un surprise connection in Chablis and plusiers d’architectural and engineering pilgrimages. It all got done, right down to the last ‘not lying in the sun’. We were going back to Burgundy and this time not just passing through, but using it as a base. There was a looseness to the pre-holiday planning, in as much as we adopted the principle let’s wing it, which is reasonably safe in October.  Notwithstanding this, we did pre-book a nice hotel mid-way between Dijon and Chablis, a sensible idea - to have at least one fixed point in an itinerary.

The Hotel de la Poste is steeped in history and is located in the centre of Avallon. Kennedy, Eisenhower and Napoleon all slept under that roof. Bryan Ferry probably too. There was lots of bowing and nodding at breakfast, as all the other guests were Japanese. We know, from having had a hotel ourselves, that they take eating very seriously and it was no surprise to find that all the boiled eggs had disappeared early. One man is still there, going back for more, eating for his country. Saturday was market day and we took full advantage by securing industrial quantities of ail rose de Lautrec before heading out for a drive in the Parc régional du Morvan. A long way to come, from Morvern to Morvan, and something of a disappointment too, because for instance: when a sign says ‘Auberge du Lac, 1 km’, you expect to come across an auberge, by a lake, in about 1 km. No auberge, no lake, just lots of brown signs à la Gulliver’s World or Shakespeare Country and lots of trees. Also a bird and fish reserve centred on a small pond, but with no birds (except a fleeting glimpse of a jay) and no fish as far as I could see. We climbed a small hill to a tor called Roche des Fées and had a picnic lunch in a delightful little village called Quarré-les-Tombes before heading for our first Auchan of the trip and stocking up with foie gras, some 2004 Grand Crus Classés (Talbot, Cos Labory, Prieuré Lichine, Haut Bages Liberal), all ridiculously cheap, as well as some oils and cheeses. With this lot safely in the bag I could relax and take anything else in my stride, even negotiating the maze of autoroutes known as Dunkerque, without a detailed street map. But that was later. Dinner in our hotel included the same foie gras starter (served with apple slices and a reduced balsamic drizzle) as we’d had twice already on the journey south. On another day it would have been spectacular but it was only second best this time. C’est la vie.

If you choose to stay in Meursault, Beaune, Chablis - any place which is also a wine label - expect to pay more for the privilege. If your base is geographically strategic you win on price and get to see more of the landscape. A lovely drive back to Chablis had us approaching the town from the south west, with all the Grands Crus facing us on the hillside opposite. The sun even came out for a while. We were there for lunch at Hostellerie des Clos, chef: Michel Vignaud, and for a ‘surprise’ meeting with Maureen and David from Calgary who, as I had planned, were sitting waiting for us to show up and supping Champagne aperitifs. Thankfully Pat does ‘surprise’ very well, but David and I had our own unexpected guests when we were served gaspacho with added limaces (slugs), slithering amongst the rocket leaves. The hotel reacted to this event by charging us full price. Whatever. I ordered a Montée de Tonnerre, zero deux, which was the highlight of my meal, although it must be said that Pat and Maureen did enjoy their menu Homard. I resisted an altercation with their l’homme de fromage, who was firmly standing his ground on the merits of Epoisses (which he did have) over Mont d’Or (which he didn’t): “Believe me, I am The Cheese Man! You are merely the peasant, fortunate enough to be in my presence.” This restaurant is pretentiously expensive and I couldn’t recommend it unless you carry platinum Amex and are up for a fight. Lunch for four was 320€, (about £200, $400).

Burgundy is a great area to investigate new ways of eating foie gras. Last October the price for bloc on the shelves of Auchan hit an all-time low, so we did what we had to do, filling the remainder nooks and crannies in the back of our Megane with riches sufficient to last the winter. Autumn is also a time when you will see men with shotguns walking the fields and shooting anything that moves, putting their game in little white vans which they have parked conveniently half on and half off verges, of the autoroutes even. I think this could only happen in France.

One essential piece of advice: Be sure to buy the latest editions of the afore-mentioned Michelin maps. On several occasions we found ourselves struggling through town centres and losing valuable drinking time. For instance, there’s no easy route from the north-east to the south-west of Auxerre but, at the frantic rate that the French build roads, there probably will be by the next time we visit. We found that after making several unplanned deviations there, the city didn’t really merite un detour, only a by-pass.