Cough drop

Time spent in airports and train stations has begun to seem a lot like visiting an additional country called 'Terminus' (French pronunciation please). There are the unintelligible but important announcements, the general sense of resignation amongst the populace, the mystifying signage and machines which do the opposite of what they say they do. Or perhaps I've just been reading too much Walser.

One experience I'm not eager to repeat is catching the Eurostar underneath the Channel. It was very claustrophobic and reminded me horribly of being inside the Great Pyramid where you wonder whether all the re-breathed oxygen is ever going to be enough to go round.

The Beauvoir Hotel in Paris, which of course I selected on the basis of its name, didn't turn out to be at all bad, in spite of its situation at the bleaker end of the Boulevard St Michel. It sits right above Port Royal on the RER, which took me everywhere I wanted to go, including directly from the Gare du Nord and much more easily than if I'd used the Metro.

It's also very close to the Catacombes, a place I've considered visiting for years but never quite wanted to enough. This might be as close as I ever get.

The Beauvoir didn't seem to have any definable connection with Simone de, although I did wonder if the peculiar sausage roll pillow might be a leftover from some pre-war sleeping arrangement. Other than that the Beavoir also had CNN so I gulped down a bit more of the credit crunch.

Being in Paris is always the same for me, whichever boulevard or avenue I happen to be on. The trees are the only thing that make it different. At the moment the trees are Autumnal, although the day temperature was not particularly cold, especially encased in the splendid Milanese fur.

On Sunday I had lunch with various people I've got to know over the years at St George's (rue August Vacquerie, handily close to Charles de Gaulle Etoille and the Arc de Triomphe). Turning up intermittently has made me into a regular in some way and generally triggers off the same 'Australian' jokes I've now been hearing from our English cousins since the 70s. These jokes generally turn upon our collective single-figure IQ and frightful vowels. It's tempting to go along with all this in deference to the great Sir Les and Dame Edna, but I did refuse to repeat a joke about bison, pointing out that I personally do know how to pronounce the word 'basin'.


It was good to return to the Tuscan sun but not to my Florentine cough. The choice has been stark - being cold and damp, or coughing non-stop. On consideration coughing has my vote. And I'm hoping to shed it back into the pollution it came from. But it didn't stop me from eating lots more extremely good food, listening to a gypsy band, or walking up the steps to San Mineato, the monastery which overlooks Florence and from which I was able to take some parting shots:

And the walk back into the Centre, which took surprisingly little time, brought us along the banks of the Arno. I finally crossed the Ponte Vecchio, and visited Santa Croce, the two things I didn't want not to have done.

So now it's back to 'Terminus' for an extended visit and then to my own large warm house where I hope finally to vanquish my cough.

Temps perdu

Getting to London on Monday was like a fiendish board game where every throw of the dice raises yet another awful setback. A general public transport strike removed the normal trains to Pisa Airport. The buses from Rifredi to the main station ceased after 9:00 am. The 12:30 shuttle bus to Pisa I booked myself onto the day before was overbooked and with one seat left to distribute among at least 20 other equally entitled passengers the game seemed to be over. But Jeanette surged into the human sea, arguing my case like an Italian Mama and miraculously the crowd parted and I was ushered aboard. When I reached Gatwick the difficulties began anew. It was pouring with rain. My Gatwick Express ticket refused to emerge from the station machine, but a third attempt produced three separate tickets. It was about then that I realized my English money was still in Florence along with the camera cable and power converter for my laptop. But Catherine had a delicious dinner ready, we talked heaps, drank the far too tiny bottle of Chianti from Pisa Airport and the full horror of the day subsided into a long, warm and untroubled sleep.




Catherine's family, connected both past and present to a who's who of people at the centre of European history, threw up the astonishing Countess Karolina Lanckoronska, author of a memoir I was able to read while staying with her: Those who trespass against us : one woman's war against the Nazis. This book, written in the mid-1940s, tended to put my own tribulations in perspective. She witnessed Poland's dismemberment at the hands of the Russians and Germans, survived the murder of hundreds of friends and colleagues, worked for the Polish resistance while organising food for the many political prisoners undergoing a long death by starvation, and finally emerged from Ravensbruck and the death sentence she had been under since 1942. The photographs taken at that time show a formidable figure who managed to intimidate even some of the German Commandants she encountered. To me she was the shadowy aunt Catherine stayed with intermittently in Rome when I worked with her long ago. In fact she died only recently at the age of 104.

Being in London again after 30 years has been something of a trek back into lost time for me.






I spent a morning in Hampstead, revisiting the Past on a No 24 bus, which thankfully returned me to SW1 and 2008 at the end of the day.




The cold winds blasting across the Heath and up Willow Road didn't revive any fond memories, except perhaps of serving Judy Dench a croissant at Louie's during an unsuccessful interlude as a wait person. Instead the nearest suitable restaurant beckoned and we ate a good lunch, a remedy I might have turned to more rewardingly long ago. I looked in vain for the different houses I once lived in, and in the end couldn't even find the place across the way where Kingsley Amis sat writing in the upper window while Elizabeth Jane Howard, as she later complained, spent her time cooking for him downstairs, her own novels left unwritten (perhaps a good thing). As ever, looking at buildings and streets from the perspective of time, it all seems diminished as though glimpsed in a rear vision mirror.

Having the English language all around again has been disturbing, as though I've suddenly developed some ability to read thoughts. The thoughts themselves are often of limited interest, and delivered in Catherine Tate cadences. I'm sure I almost heard a teenage girl utter the words "Am I bovvered?". And I know I heard someone use the word "betterer", glottal stops and all.

I had a couple of modest ambitions for my time in London, one of which was to go and look at the Turners again in the Tate Gallery and another of which was to buy JM Coetzee's Stranger shores as I'm almost finished reading its successor volume, a book pitch perfect for a visit to contemporary Europe as so many of the essays have their attention turned upon mid-century German writers. In fact I was able to buy a copy of Robert Walser's Institute Benjamenta off the shelf at the same time in Foyles, a book I decided to get as a result of reading Coetzee. It opens with this wonderfully Kafkaesque sentence:

One learns very little here [at the Institute], there is a shortage of teachers, and none of us boys of the Benjamenta Institute will come to anything, that is to say, we shall be something very small and subordinate later in life.

But I also got to the Queen's Gallery and "Masters of Flemish painting : Bruegel to Rubens". I'm not a big Rubens fan, but I love the Flemish landscapes. The Queen's Gallery also has lots of gorgeous furniture, porcelain, armoury and jewellery on display, but as photographs are not permitted in the gallery itself I made do with the fabulous shop, laden with tat.








The loos alone are worth a visit, being very superior as one would expect.



In between our sorties out into the world we've mostly gossiped and eaten. There was a very enjoyable lunch with people I once worked with at SOAS (erstwhile province of the now UQ Librarian Keith Webster), and a delicious afternoon tea at Peter Jones. I think I may briefly have turned into one of my aunts, especially in this borrowed Milanese coat. Jeanette did offer me a fur but I wasn't quite brave enough to parade around in full seal-skin.





It's been lovely seeing Catherine again, and interesting to explore her neck of the woods, Pimlico, Belgravia etc where one sees little boys roaming about in the beige knickerbockers Prince Charles once wore when a pupil at Hill House. I reported a sighting of one in Sainsburys, clearly blown off-course from Harrods.






So now it's the Eurostar to Paris, and then back to Florence for J's birthday on Monday. And very soon I'll be sitting at my desk thinking about commencements and databases and other matters not involving food, wine and gossip. Trés triste!

Waiting for the valporetto

the first requirement of a happy life is to be born in a famous city

Although the Queensland country town of my own origins was not as lowly a birth-place as that of our new Governor-General I can't help thinking that Gympie might have failed me in some important way. By contrast Venice must be one of the most famous cities ever. Wherever I went either on the canals or the ponte, or through the campo or piazza I felt as if I had just walked into or out of a famous painting or through the ether of some historical moment. And wherever I walked thousands of other strangers to the city were right there beside me. Last night crossing the Piazza san Marco to reach my hotel a perfect row of cameras and mobile-phones had lined up to seize the one moment, when the figures of the two Moors on top of the Torre dell'Orologio struck the hour. They were lit against the night sky, with a cloudy half moon poised above and it made for a beautiful shot. If my pocket camera had been up to the job then I'd have added my own flash to the line up. Instead I'll share a few other cliché images as those are what emerge no matter what picture I have in mind.











The alternating Vivaldi concerts were a bit of a surprise, I didn't expect to see The Four Seasons exploited in quite such an unvarnished way, especially considering the number of other concerti available.



While sharing the Eurovision choices of these girls on the back of a vaporetto I began ruminating about the young ladies of Vivaldi's orchestra. Perhaps these are two of Vivaldi's inheritors, Vivaldi girls so to speak. But if they were also, like, Valley girls, I couldn't say. Although there are many Valley girls and boys around, and even some with Estuarine English as well, like, I don't know the Italian for 'like'?


I spent an afternoon in Treviso (a little town west of Venice) at the Casa dei Carraresi at a huge exhibition of the Venetian 'view' painters (Canaletto. Venezia ei suoi splendori) and it made a wonderful preparation for Venice itself. There were rooms filled with immense Canalettos, as well as some lovely works by Francesco Guardi and Luca Calrevarisj and many paintings and engravings by other lesser known vedutista (the collective noun for the Venetian view painters I think).

To have a break from the ambulanza and caribinieri of Florence I stayed outside Treviso in a country B & B, La Vigna. It was blissfully quiet, the only sound at 7 a.m. being the birds as they began to stir and a few bicycles going by on the gravel.




Of course there was also the hopeful mewing of cat waiting outside for my breakfast.



In Treviso even quite elderly men and women peddle gravely to and fro, although the very old stuck to the foot-path, not like the daring fellow below. Now that I'm reaching geezer-hood myself the urge to strike out on two wheels again is probably only minutes away. The cottage gardens and Italian signage made me feel quite at home after half a lifetime in Nuovo Farme.





Venice was nothing like my morbid teenage memory of a malodorous place that smelt of floating cats although some buildings are so decayed they look as though anything could go on inside them.







I mostly mooched around on the valporetti, even venturing by accident to the Island of San Giorgio (where Stravinsky is buried), and even further, to the Lido, in the dark. This involved a bit of a Manly Ferry kind of ride out into the open sea . But I also got to the Peggy Guggenheim palazzo the following morning after eating a monumental breakfast of fruit, boiled eggs, different cheeses, croissants, juice, tea and espresso. Peggy Guggenheim lived in Venice for many years and was a great patron of contemporary artists, her collection now open as a Museum in what was once her very charming house on the Grand Canal.






Venice can speak perfectly well for itself I think, and I'm going to let it:

Brother Frank and Sister Clare

Assisi was as unforgettable as I remember it, except that in 1964 we were there during a very cold Winter and in November 2008 I couldn't have chosen a better time to go. The tourist level was minimal and the weather divine.

Taking the train also took me through the Umbrian landscape and alongside Lake Trassimeno, a leisurely journey involving a number of unexplained pauses. At times I found myself inspecting whole life cycles of different insects as they lived and died alongside the track we waited patiently upon. There was also the unusual experience of traveling through so many hillside tunnels in an unlit carriage. All around in the pitch black mobile phone screens glowed but one could only sense, not see the presence of their users. Last week at the Conference a few of the Africans complained of the 'third-world' issues which inhibit their uptake of technology. I didn't like to say so but Italy doesn't seem terribly distant from a lot of these problems either, although the ongoing presence of the Roman and Medieval past makes up in charm for a lot of the frustrations.








I caught this pic on the hop, amongst all the real live nuns and monks:

In Assisi the Bollywood level cult of St Francis and St Clare was fascinating. There are representations of one or both of them either in the body, or as relics, or sculptures in all of the many churches. In the Upper Church of the Basilica di San Francesco is an amazing three-sided sequence of Giotto frescoes of the life of St Francis (and St Clare in her place) which completely surrounds you as you walk in. I sneaked a few illicit pictures where I could by turning off my camera flash and shooting from the hip.





There's even a musical:



This week I've been taking in the cultural ambiance and gallerying gaily. J organised a reserved ticket for me at the Uffizi so I needn't join the snaking queue of people outside and down the street. The Uffizi is of course the grandmother of all Florentine art museums and has its Botticelli and Caravaggio collection to prove it. But it also has some lovely Rembrandts, and lots of pictures from the Flemish school. I always like them the most. The other place that I loved is the Gozzoli Chapel, and the Magi's journey painted by Gozzoli onto the enormous walls of the Chapel. For those who don't know of it this fresco is actually a political pilgrimage through the Tuscan landscape and a portrait of its times. All of the prominent Medici men and their friends and allies are painted into it.

I've also developed quite an interest in the African street sellers who I'm told are employed by the mafiosi. They wait outside the Bars and Newsagents flogging off weird plastic stuff or Chinese tea towels, or some other cheap rubbish one couldn't imagine a market for although lately they're usefully laden with umbrellas because there's been so much rain. When I caught the train to Assisi there were at least a dozen of these men bearing identical knotted plastic bundles, who all got out at Perugia. Because of their constant presence in the streets and aggression towards passersby they've turned themselves into a racial issue. I understand Berlusconi got back into power this time because of his promise to do something about all the illegal Africans. Their female counterparts are old gypsy women begging in the streets. I see the same women in the same places all the time. Today there was one poor old thing apparently glad-wrapped on the cathedral steps.

The main Florence hospital is near here and all day there's a soundscape of ambulanza going by the apartment, sometimes accompanied by wailing polizia and caribinieri if the traffic is very heavy. On one occasion I saw uniformed men sitting up on the window ledges of their cars, waving their little paddles at the traffic. This apparently stops cars from colliding with one another although it's unclear how.

And now by popular request:


Tomorrow I'm off to Venice. I'm dreading it.. more water everywhere.