diary by ASBO

2009-03-07T13:42:00.000-08:00

Fighter Boys

"Bandits 5 o'clock!","Tally Ho chaps!","Rat-a-tat-tat!", "Eat lead, squarehead!","I think I got him, skipper!". Let's be quite honest about this. There's an eternal schoolboy in most of us (males, British, born within ten years of the end of the war) for whom dog-fights and vapour trails over the skies of Kent are utterly irresistible. It's not something we would readily admit to in sophisticated company, but hang sophistication, you'd need to be a particularly earth-bound soul for your heart not to be lifted by the soaring romance of the "Brylcreem Boys" in their Spitfires and Hurricanes. But my reversion to pre-adolescent type was triggered by pure accident (is there such a thing?) Let me explain...

Wandering the streets of Brussels one day, waiting for my car to be fixed, I came across the "Librairie de l'Escadron". Fronted by a profoundly banal newsagents, the back-room into which I was ushered by the conspiratorial owner was a veritable cornucopia of unacknowledgable delights. "Krigsporno" my brother calls it, using the impact-laden Danish expression. "War-porn" I suppose in English. Wall upon wall, row upon row of shelving was stacked high with books of military history. Even the gangways were virtually barricaded with sandbag piles of regimental memoirs and accounts of long-forgotten campaigns. There were whole redoubts of WWII literature including detailed monographs on uniforms, equipment and hardware etc. Each book was discretely wrapped in an individual transparent wrapper presumably to discourage obsessive drooling over some of the more uninhibited material. Clearing my throat rather awkwardly, I asked if I might be allowed to "bouqiner" - just poke around the shelves. With a knowing look I was left to my own devices. 15-20 minutes later I presented myself at the counter shyly proferring a copy of "The Eastern Front 1914-1918 - Suicide of the Empires" by Alan Clark. Pretty hard core really - a grisly, detailed account of the pointless slaughter of millions. Perfect! He's not really a likeable man, but Alan Clark the historian is irresistible. Energetic, yet elegant use of language, a firm grasp of the political issues, a clear understanding of military practicalities, eminently readable - I batted the whole thing off in the course of a quiet afternoon at work.

A couple of weeks later, again on some skimpy automotive pretext, I found myself ineluctably drawn back to the Librairie de l'Escadron. Having spent a good half hour poring over the shelves, I was too embarrassed not to buy something. I finally emerged clutching a copy of Patrick Bishop's "Fighter Boys - Saving Britain 1940". I raised a superior eyebrow at the blurb. "Unputdownable" was the considered view of Alistair Horne. But he was right. I was through it in a flash and regretted finishing. And not just because of the time-honoured combat clichés so beloved of afficionados of Commando Magazine and War Picture Library. The book does of course contain many gripping eyewitness accounts of aerial warfare, but the real achievement of "Fighter Boys" is the intelligent and sympathetic insight it gives us into the human reality of Fighter Command during the Battle of Britain. My father flew with the RAF during the war (although not in fighters). Britain's "Finest Hour" and the universe of ethical and national assumptions that it gave rise to, formed the unspoken yet omnipresent backdrop to my whole upbringing and education. Arguably the heroism of the Few artificially buttressed the sense of moral superiority of the Many for generations to come. We're still dining out on them today. The strange British attitude of condescension towards continental Europe is to a large degree based upon the unthinking assumption of superior martial prowess - "we won the war". What Patrick Bishop shows us is that it wasn't, isn't, really like that.

In 1940 the RAF was still a young service and relatively free of the class-consciousness which permeated the Army and the Navy. As the threat of war grew through the thirties, so the authorities recognised the need to train more pilots. Numerous schemes were devised to make it possible for young men from all walks of life to realise their ambition to fly an aeroplane. Technical ability took precedence over blue blood, while the blue uniform became the unmistakable livery of a new youthful aristocracy. 19 to 26 was the age bracket of the fighter pilots during the Battle of Britain - young even for a football team. They were an elite, the coolest guys in town. This was what my father wanted to be a part of when he joined up in 1941 - a band of airborne warrior-brothers, revelling in a classless confraternity, affecting a careless, cigarette-smoking nonchalance as they basked in the gratitude of the nation. But they had to be young: only that sense of youthful invulnerability could have enabled them to continue taking off time and time again to engage in the terrifying ordeal of aerial combat. Camaraderie, that sense of fellowship which is the special preserve of the young, was what kept them going. Expressions of jingoistic nationalism were treated with contempt. Losses were treated with a studied resignation. Fear was suppressed or even joked about: the nervous tingling of the anal sphinctre brought on by anxiety was known as "ring twitch". Drinking bouts were the preferred psychotherapy viewed as infinitely preferable to morbid introspection. Sincerity and decency were instinctively the qualities most demanded by the group ethic. Not to be "gen" guaranteed ostracisation. Those that survived the war often found it difficult to readapt to the habitual insincerities of civilian life. [I suspect that many regretted the sense of solidarity that permeated wartime society. I remember my mother-in-law speaking of how that special atmosphere evaporated almost the instant peace was declared.] While media-nationalism was ridiculed, love of country was undeniably a motivating force for many, reinforced by the fact of constantly flying over the map of England. When, after the Battle of Britain, the air-war moved to the continent, the sentiment was never quite the same.

The air defence of the Britain was almost certainly the country's most important contribution to the overall war effort, preserving as it did a vital jumping-off point for the re-invasion of Europe and the final destruction of the Nazi regime. It was probably more of a statistical exercise than we would really care to admit. It was a lot less about the courage of individual pilots or the shooting down of enemy planes than it was about maintaining a fighter command in being. No German invasion could be contemplated without first having obtained air superiority, which was why the British were so relieved when the Luftwaffe ceased attacking airfields in order to bomb London. Civilians were expendable, planes and pilots vital. There were many pilots who never made any "kills" at all. Some were unnecessarily shot down over-eagerly trying to "bag" their first enemy.

War is a terrible thing but it exerts an undeniable fascination - a fascination, we are bound to admit, with the imminence of death. How would I perform under such extreme circumstances? How would I confront the possibility, the likelihood even, of my own sudden extinction? I remember as a boy asking my father about his war-time experiences. Having trained in Canada, he joined Transport Command as a Navigator flying DC3's. He towed gliders at D-Day, Arnhem and the Rhine crossing. "What's it like when they shoot at you?" I asked. He answered directly and with brutal frankness: "You go in your pants".

[Footnote: The RAF uniform conveyed fabulous status during and even after the war. In the late forties my father was stationed in Copenhagen helping the Danes to redevelop civil aviation at Kastrup airport. It was at that time that he met my mother who was, I can't help suspecting, largely bowled over by the uniform. Who knows? Without that uniform I probably wouldn't be here today!]

2009-02-22T01:30:00.000-08:00

Some Thoughts on Virginia Woolf

Thinkin' ain't doin' me no good no

Thinkin' ain't doin' me no good no people

Thinkin' ain't doin' me no good no good

Joey Covington, Jefferson Airplane

Thanks to the liberating influence of Pierre Bayard (How to talk about Books you haven't Read), I am happy to confess to never having properly read Virginia Woolf. I have a vague recollection of, many moons ago, skimming through "The Waves". Since then I've had a couple of goes at "To the Lighthouse", each time getting stranded some third of the way through. But for all my inadequacies as a reader, like so many others, I cannot help being fascinated by the person of Virginia Woolf. Why? I'm sure it's because she presses so many of our socio-cultural buttons. Wonderfully well-connected, yet with unimpeachable bohemian credentials; unequivocally avant-garde, yet reassuringly upper-middle in manner and voice; intellectually brilliant, yet emotionally tragic; deeply serious, but enormous fun. Then there's that fantastic, and fantastically English, look. And the whole Bloomsbury thing. And the whole proto-feminist thing. And on you go.

One birthday, a couple of years ago, Carol got me a book entitled "Maisons d'Ecrivains", an album of atmospheric photographs taken of writers' homes, now turned into museums. [The "touch-the-relic" implications of these modern-day shrines probably deserve more detailed scrutiny, however...] The featured authors included Karen Blixen, Jean Cocteau, Lawrence Durrell, William Faulkner, Knut Hamsun, Ernest Hemingway, Hermann Hesse, Selma Lagerlöf, Alberto Moravia, Vita Sackville-West, Dylan Thomas, Mark Twain, W.B. Yeats, Marguerite Yourcenar. Quite a guest list! Each of the homes was fascinating in its own way, but if there was one place you might actually like to live, it was Monk's House, the Woolfs' cottage in Rodmell, Sussex. Charming, tasteful, comfortable, bohemian; all low ceilings, tall sash windows, exposed beams, green distempered walls, elegantly distressed furniture, original paintings, scattered books and cushions and flowers, Omega pottery, a wild expanse of semi-kept garden...an ideal context in which to receive Vanessa Bell, Clive Bell, Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, Lytton Strachey, Maynard Keynes etc., etc. Let's face it: Virginia Woolf is what we all would like to be, only more so. A Sunday-supplement embodiment of the highest aspirations of the middle class, floating carelessly above mere material concerns, gifted with rare sensibility and acute intelligence, at the forefront of the latest developments in literature and life, receiving as an equal and in unaffected good taste the artistic and intellectual giants of the age.

Actually no. No one in their right mind would want to be Virginia Woolf and she clearly wasn't. In fact it was fear of her own madness that drove her to suicide. The autumn before last we walked past Monk's House while over visiting family in Lewes. Thankfully in a way, the museum was closed, but we walked through the lovely village of Rodmell and on down to the river Ouse. Impossible not to be touched by the thought of the suffering Virginia Woolf filling her pockets full of stones in order to drown herself in the muddy waters. Suicide always seems an unbearably irretrievable misunderstanding. One of my best friends at university killed himself aged 20. He too was particularly gifted. Can one be too sensitive for this world? Possibly, but it seems to me that the suicide suffers from an irrational overconfidence in his own powers of judgement. Life may seem to be utterly bleak, unceasing misery and suffering stretching endlessly into a dark tunnel of pointlessness, but could it be that maybe, just maybe, I've missed something, that I don't know everything about my own life. The fact is we don't really know anything about our own lives, which remain utterly beyond our own ken. It could be said that, in a way, suicide is the ultimate vanity: the definitive promotion of Self above Life. Still, probably wise not to rush to any too easy judgement.

The truth is that it was hardly surprising if Virginia Woolf was a bit funny. Traumatised by the premature deaths of her mother and, shortly after, her half-sister, terrorised by her tyrannical and self-pitying father, molested by her half-brothers, stifled by the smothering conventions of her Victorian upbringing, Virginia Woolf's life was a triumph of courage over adversity. She was, however, subject to manic-depressive interludes and schizophrenic tendancies. It seems she killed herself in order to escape the growingly insistent voices in her head. Incredibly sad - and incredibly ironic - that an author whose literary art focuses on the essential instability of personality, should succumb to her own mental fragility. But in a way inevitable. Her ferociously honest insights into human nature and the fluctuating complexities of the seemingly simplest human relations could only have been won by unflinching self-observation. Difficult not to suspect that this rare capacity for self-understanding, amounting almost to a sixth sense, was a function of her condition, which was a function of her experience, which was a function of the people and events in her life, all of which in turn where influenced by her own inner state... and so on. This, I believe, is the core of Virginia Woolf's insight - that what we believe to be firm and solid in ourselves, our own personality, is in fact a nucleus of temperament around which certain influences more or less randomly coalesce. And as these influence-globules jostle with each other in the stream of life, so they are constantly influencing and being influenced, changing and being changed. This is not an abstruse literary notion: any remotely sincere self-observation will reveal how, talking with different people, we ourselves become different people. Which immediately begs the question: what am I? With unwavering intellectual integrity, Virginia Woolf devoted her life and her writing to a permanent confrontation with this question. Could this process have ultimately led to the disintegration of personality which finally killed her? It's difficult not to suspect that it was at least a contributory factor. She herself admitted: "Leonard (her husband) says I shouldn't think about myself so much, I should think about outside things."

Is it possible to "think" your way to a true understanding of self? I would say almost certainly not. Associative thought is the very stuff out of which we construct our protean "personality". To seek to use that tool as a means to self-knowledge is like a dog trying to bite its own tail. Virginia Woolf's contemporary and fellow modernist, T.S. Eliot, wrestled with these same questions of the nature of human identity. He reaches similar conclusions about the heterogeneous nature of consciousness - "I know only a heap of broken images" or "These fragments I have shored against my ruin" (The Waste Land). But he goes further, pointing the way to a whole other dimension of understanding, through the abandoning of self in the direct experience of transcendental reality - "The awful daring of a moment's surrender". Was this ultimate experience of meaning denied to Virginia Woolf?

Reading "Moments of Being", a collection of her memoirs, it becomes clear that she certainly had intimations of this "other" reality. The editor, Jeanne Schulkind, spells out the point in an extremely helpful introduction:

...the individual in his daily life is cut off from 'reality' but at rare moments receives a shock. These shocks or 'moments of being' are not, as she imagined as a child, simply random manifestations of some malevolent force but 'a token of some real thing behind appearances'. The idea of a privileged moment when a spiritually transcendent truth of either personal or cosmic dimensions is perceived in a flash of intuition is, of course, a commonplace of religious experience and in particular of mystical traditions of thought...

Virginia Woolf formulated her own thinking as follows:

From this I reach what I might call a philosophy; at any rate it is a constant idea of mine; that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we - I mean all human beings - are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art. "Hamlet" or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.

The pantheistic twist she gives to this idea points, I think, to the source of her despair. "God" is not an old man in a beard telling you you have to be good, but rather a way of expressing the sacred idea of different levels of meaning, different levels of reality. A "Moment of Being" is the intrusion of a higher into a lower level of reality. Abandon the idea of levels and everything is equally significant or equally senseless, depending on your mood. A dangerous situation for someone as susceptible as Virginia Woolf. [I also believe there is an inherent danger in the whole process of converting experience into words, especially in the case of experience of, for want of a better expression, a higher order. The ineffable is all too easily pulled down to the level of the literal, precious insight reduced to dust. We like the words, they give us a sense of control, but the real experience has been betrayed and we are left with an empty formula. Writers (and bloggers) beware.]

These, then, are a few thoughts on and around the subject of Virginia Woolf. Despite the Get-out-of-jail-free card I hold in the shape of Pierre Bayard, I am conscious of an inner teacher with a red biro writing "give examples!", "refer to the text!" I firmly resolve to return to the works. If I haven't stuck with them, it's probably because a) having got the basic point of stream-of-consciousness, the novels seem like so many variations on the same theme, and b) the necessarily introverted style involves, well, too much thinking of self, not enough outside things. That this is a rugby player's objection I am well aware. Are rugby players secretly afraid of Virginia Woolf?

[Postscript: My latest Virginia Woolf craze was kicked off by reading Mrs.Woolf and the Servants by Alison Light. I enjoyed it for the usual rather shameful class-conscious reasons. The basic point is an obvious one: for all their avant-garde intellectualism, Virginia Woolf and all her trendy friends were unable to shift for themselves. They needed servants to cook, clean and deal with all the everyday practicalities of life. The constant dependence on, and close proximity to these unintellectual, practical souls was a source of permanent stress. In Virginia Woolf's case they knew all her business in general and her history of mental illness in particular, a situation she sometimes felt almost unbearable. The book is basically an attack on snobbery and the undervaluing of seemingly humble lives. The implication is that VW couldn't have indulged her fine-madamy thoughts if she'd had to scrub her own floors and do her own laundry. Probably true, but I'm not quite sure where that leaves us - that writers and intellectuals aren't as important as they (and their readers) like to think they are, perhaps? Quite possibly, but there's a whiff of the re-education camp to this whole argument. The other question is: how emancipating is a feminism which depends on the drudgery of others - a relevant point in the modern dual-income world with its nannies and its home helps. Actually, VW's feminism was rather more subtle than the modern unreflected "parity-with-men" call. She believed that women should strive to be "non-participants in the Great Patriarchal Machine". Equal, but different.

Bitten by the bug, I went on to read "Moments of Being", a collection of VW's memoirs. I really enjoyed the bright, energetic, slightly gossipy style of "Reminiscences"- about her childhood and her mother, "A Sketch of the Past" covering her childhood and adolescence, but written much later in 1939, "22 Hyde Park Gate" - her later adolescence and the move to Bloomsbury, "Old Bloomsbury" about the Bloomsbury set, and finally the self-ironic "Am I a Snob?" The introductory essay by Jeanne Schulkind is particularly useful.

I then had a go at Lyndall Gordon's "Virginia Woolf - a Writer's Life". Wonderfully subtle and insightful, if a trifle over-written, it gives an intuitive sense of the subject's ambitions and dilemmas. Biography is a tricky genre - the wood can easily get lost for the trees as you hack your way through a detailed chronology without really getting a feel for the person. But I left this book with what I felt was a genuine understanding of what made VW tick.

I also saw "The Hours" when it came out. I seem to remember we laughed inappropriately and left early. Nicole Kidman was probably a bad idea.

Finally there's the film "Orlando" by Sally Potter, based on VW's novel of the same name. It's a few years since I saw it, but I remember it for its visual sumptiousness and its coy exploration of chameleon identity and sexuality in space and time. On the recommendation of my old Literature and Film lecturer from Leuven University I have a copy of the DVD. I could watch it again or, er, read the book even.]

2009-01-29T10:05:00.000-08:00

January Thoughts

Looking back over what is now three years of blogging, it's interesting to see where I started and where I've ended up. My original idea was that the blog should be a genuine diary, spontaneous jottings of daily experience, which would be amusing to myself and possibly to others. What I've ended up with is a series of set pieces focussed mainly on my holidays and my reading. A lot less constant work than daily jottings, perhaps, but even the set pieces sometimes haunt me like an uncompleted undergraduate essay. Why put myself under all that pressure? For pleasure? Well, re-reading some of the old pieces has given me genuine pleasure. It's the same pleasure as looking through an old photograph album; for a moment, time past comes alive again. I hope that some of this pleasure communicates itself to the reader. It's the only recompense that I can offer for your being used, in the sense that, if I didn't think that someone out there might just be reading this, I would probably succumb to my innate sloth and drop the whole project - which would be a shame for a serious reason which I shall try to explain.

At one level, like any literary enterprise, this diary is an attempt to give narrative shape to the seemingly arbitrary chaos of experience. In that sense it is an act of self-creation. In fact, in the ordinary way of things, we are constantly creating and recreating ourselves. But, the way in which we recreate ourselves is essentially selective, an interpretation, an edited version, often overly self-flattering, of the chaotic raw material of experience. One could almost say that our version of ourselves is a convenient fiction, practical to a degree for the purposes of living in society, but ultimately limiting. Which is why, running through this blog, there is a sort of subterranean counter-current: the idea of a dimension of thought which flows in the opposite direction to this habitual process of self-invention, and which can free us from the involuntary identification with our invented selves. In other words, not a narrowing but a widening of consciousness. That this wider consciousness can be experienced through a certain type of effort is the notion which, more or less explicitly, informs all of these writings. What is this effort? It is an intentional relaxation into a state of questioning, a state of "unknowing", a direct experience of the mystery of what it means to be alive. This effort is the antithesis of any "belief" - religious or secular. It could be called a sort of creative agnosticism, although vocabulary is largely counterproductive in an area where it is above all the experience of an active silence that can lead to a new awareness of being.

The real thrust of this blog is that this other dimension of being is not something distant and abstract, but something near, immediate and existentially compelling. All genuine experience points in this same direction: artistic experience, literary experience, musical experience, the experience of nature, the intense physical sensation of being alive which are the true wages of the mountaineer, the experience of love, the sudden insight into the profound significance of the apparently mundane, all invite us to a greater or lesser degree, in innumerable different ways, to abandon for a moment our invented selves and participate directly in the mystery of life itself. I would even suggest that the whole point of experience is missed if our intention, avowed or unavowed, is merely to store it in our memory banks. In so doing we become like the servant in the parable who buried his talent.

Why it is that a man must constantly be reminded to remember he is alive is a mystery within a mystery. My hope is that this blog can help me, even us, remember. Anyway, thank you for reading.

2008-11-09T14:57:00.000-08:00

Scotland Again

Belgian friends, learning of our connection to Scotland and nervously curious about the possibility of a holiday there, often ask what the best season would be to visit. I hesitate to give my honest opinion. End October/early November strikes most people as more than just eccentric. Anyway, I'm pretty scared of possible come-backs of the type: "You recommended the late Autumn, but it rained and blew all day, every day and got dark half-way through the afternoon!" But sometimes you're lucky, and this time we were. The long, lingering autumn had left the trees incandescent with aureate foliage, while sudden late October snow-falls had cloaked the hills in a mantle of immaculate white. Then, a spell of high pressure brought clear, blue skies, which turned every casual glance into a perfect Scottish calendar view.

Nigel met me at Inverness station and was very soon whisking me (and Ben the dog) down narrow country lanes in the trusty Xantia (see earlier entry). His original intention was to head on down Glen Cannich, but it quickly became apparent that, even with all warp-engines on full thrape in the traditional Lyle manner, we were going to be strapped for time. We found ourselves admiring an icing-sugar hill to the north of the entrance to Glen Strathfarrar. We had a reasonable prospect of getting up and down it before it got dark. "Anyway, one hill's much like any other", I opined heretically and so we decided on Beinn a' Bha'ach Ard, a throat-clearer of a Corbett, weighing in at 862m.

One hill's much like any other

The first problem we encountered was that we didn't have a map. Resourcefully, Nigel revealed a hidden cartographic talent, artistically transcribing the sketch-map in his SMC Corbetts book onto the back of a screwed-up check-out receipt and we set off.

Nigel's sketch-map

All orientation difficulties thus solved, we headed west along the road by the River Farrar for a mile or so (so far, so good), before turning off at the power station. From there we followed a track up through golden birches and snowy heather out onto the open hillside. I asked after Nigel's mother. Nigel's father had recently died. "Well, she's been very busy dealing with all the practicalities, which has sustained her in a way." "And yourself?" "Well, they say it's a mercy it was all so sudden, but I can't help feeling cheated." "To be honest," I answered, "having lost both my parents, I think it's difficult to know what you feel. Everything seems to happen at a level which isn't really affected by our normal coping strategies." We continued on up in a pensive mood. Morbidly, we discussed the relative merits of a sudden as against a slow lingering death. On reflection, it strikes me that all death is sudden. One minute you're there and then you're gone. How utterly, utterly strange life is. You don't have to go far in any direction before bumping into the questions: Who am I? What am I?

On the slopes of Ben a' Bha'ach Ard. Beinn in foreground

Meanwhile, we were headed in the direction of the broad southern ridge of Beinn a' Bha'ach Ard. It was heavy enough going. A surface crust on the snow would just about sustain our weight - until it didn't - and we would plunge in up to the knee. We started to develop a Miss Smilla type feeling for the snow. That bit looks like it might just hold, that's obviously too powdery. And in this exigent fashion, we continued on up the slope, finally arriving at the top of the hill.

Our heroes at the summit

We stopped to take in the vast winter vista, then continued northward along the tops to Sgurr a' Phollain. A new degree of urgency entered into the proceedings, as it became obvious that the light was beginning to fail. We headed east for a bit, then, as suggested by our "map", set off down in a south-south-easterly direction. It quickly became clear that we weren't going to just skip off the mountain and nip home for an early tea. On this side of the hill the snow was much softer and deeper. Even heading downhill, we were labouring and floundering. There wasn't the faintest hope of finding any sort of path. We were drawn to the security of the burn, which in the gloaming, at least offered us some sort of guide to follow. But as we thrashed our way down, it became increasingly clear that we were drifting too far to the west. We should have been passing by the eastern shore of the little Loch na Beiste. Peering through the half-light, it was difficult to interpret the landscape. Was that the Loch? Hadn't we already passed it, covered in snow? Was that shadow a track? Occasional glimpses of lights from the roadside houses offered us some encouragement. Basically, we just plunged on down. We blundered into a deer fence. We climbed it straight, lifting Ben perilously over, only to discover there was a step a few yards away. Five minutes later we had to reclimb the fence to get out of the plantation! On we went, through forest now, and then down steep grassy slopes, tripping over the bracken. With less snow lower down, the going was easier, but in the dark it was hard to know where the going was taking us. With a sort of uncanny instinct, Nigel found the best place to cross the burn and led us up to the track by the lit farmhouse. Phew! Fifteen minutes later we arrived back at the car, sodden but relieved.

Nigel was staying at a mansion in the Black Isle with a group of scoutmasters and mistresses of his acquaintance. I was given to understand that it would be mal vu to appear late at dinner. White tie, it seemed, was, given the circumstances, not de rigueur, but nevertheless it was clearly expected that certain niceties be observed. I was quite happy to abandon my anti-establishment principles in exchange for a warm dining-room and a hot meal. In fact, we couldn't get there quickly enough as far as I was concerned. The only trouble was we couldn't see where we were going. The "trusty" Xantia's demister was on the blink. Peering and wiping, opening and closing of windows, nothing really helped. Nigel passed me a baby-wipe(!) with which I succeeded only in smearing a layer of cloying, scented, greasy soap across the inside of the windscreen. Using a unique combination of ESP and head-out-the-window techniques, we guessed our way across the Black Isle and finally arrived at the magnificent, tastefully down-at-heel Poyntzfield House.

Poyntzfield House

I was a bit nervous about meeting the whole party. I felt a bit like a new boy arriving in some hellish prep school. Everybody, except me, knows what's going on. Everybody knows each other, everybody knows the school rules and, more importantly still, everbody is tacitly au fait with the unspoken codes of conduct. My anxiety was quite unwarranted, of course; everyone, including matron and the headmaster, was very charming and very welcoming, quickly putting me at my ease. I have sometimes thought it would be great to rent a big place and have all your mates come for a week. In fact, in my hippy(-ish) youth, I imagined it might be very stimulating to live in a commune, where a group of like-minded and creative people could strike sparks off each other. A close friend of mine did actually live in a commune in Copenhagen in the late sixties, early seventies. He said that, at its best, it was just that, a crescendo of creativity. But it fell down on the obvious things: who does the cleaning? who does the dishes? It's just a question of organisation, I hear you answering; but there's no more than a cigarette paper between necessary organisation and a rigid set of rules. Yet a straight-jacket of rules is what destroys the spirit of spontaneity which we (presumably) are seeking. It's a dilemma, and a dilemma we face whether or not we live in a group. In myself, I veer between psychotic control-mania and casualness to the point of irresponsibility. There are times, however, when I have felt the influence of a sort of organic order, while still being free, freer than normal in fact, to be myself. This is not a state I can impose, but I nevertheless need somehow to be deliberately open to it...

Dinner was served to a couple of dozen people around the large mahogany table. It was a well-ordered, but gargantuan affair. I ate heartily, but with a degree, I like to think, of polite decorum. Nigel, however, gave uninhibited rein to his trencherman talents. In this area he is peerless. Hefty second portions were followed by thirds and, as supplies failed to keep up, he resorted shamelessly to snaffling up others' leavings. Confronted with an anguished choice of pudding, Nigel compromised and had all three! Admittedly, we had an ambitious programme for the next day, but it would take a couple of Himalayan 8,000ers to work off that lot!

Next morning's breakfast was almost as elaborate. Grapefruit, porridge, bacon and eggs, toast and marmelade etc. etc. I was anxious to get going, but Nigel had deviously opted for a visit to the far end of Glen Strathfarrar. "They don't open the gate until 9 o'clock. No point in rushing." I acquiesced, sceptically, suspecting that we would be finishing in darkness again. We set off into the fine morning, but with the threat of cloud coming in from the north. Bombing cross-country, it was not yet 9 o'clock when we arrived at the estate lodge at the start of the glen (the previous day's starting point). With jobsworth pedantry the lady-gatekeeper refused to let us through before the appointed hour. We had a lot of remote hills to climb and every minute counted if we were to get back before the gate shut again at six in the evening. But she was not to be persuaded. Dante must have a special place in Inferno for these people. Finally we were allowed past the barrier and we were soon rattling up the glen.

We drove through scenes of breathtaking beauty. The massive glens to the west of Loch Ness are renowned for their loveliness. Years previously Carol and I had spent a few days camping in Glen Affric. I remember idyllic (and "refreshing") early-morning skinny-dipping in Loch Affric itself. But, if anything, our drive up Glen Strathfarrar was even more outrageously spectacular than those magical spring days of 1982. The intense autumn hues intermingled with the dignified stands of ancient Caledonian pine, both emerging dramatically against the soaring background of the snowy mountains, suddenly so much taller in their winter raiment. Deer were everywhere. Young stags grazing by the roadside would suddenly start at the approach of the car and trot away, proudly bearing their antler-crowns. It was as though we were drinking in a sort of condensed elixir of Scotland, the whole landscape imbued with that special Scottish quality, which I can only describe as a yearning nostalgia for the infinite. Words are inadequate, but those that have sensed this same "Spirit of the Hills" will understand what I mean.

Then suddenly we were lost. Our map had failed to distinguish between the metalled road and the land-rover track. Following what we thought was the most direct route, we forded the river and found ourselves bumping across the open moorside. We were now heading south, when we should have been heading west. We back-tracked until we found a route which took us in the right direction, but it was very slow going. We passed a lonely road-mender in a digger. We could read from the ironic smirk he gave us from his cabin, that we were not the first to have unwittingly eschewed the easy convenience of a tarmac surface. Still, having tested the terrain-going qualities of the old Xantia to the limit, we finally made it to the parking place at the little power station in Glean Innis an Loichel. We got out our kit and made ready. With confident, sweeping gestures of the hand, Nigel indicated his preferred itinerary for the day. A quick pull up to the bealach at the head of the Alt an Eas Bhàin Mhoir, a short detour to knock off An Riabhachan, before proceeding to an elegant traverse of Sgurr na Lapaich and Carn nan Gobhar, finally dropping down the hillside and easily back to the car. The fact that these desolate hills happened to be Munros was clearly purely coincidental. I kept my own counsel, merely drawing attention to the fact that we would need to be back at the car by 4.30 if we were to be sure to get out of the glen before the boom came down.

It must have been at least 10.30 before we finally set off. The going was easy enough at first, as we followed a well-laid stalkers' path up the glen. But, turning off the main track, we followed a sketchier route diagonally up the hillside. The higher we climbed, the deeper was the snow. By teetering on the outside edge of the track, however, we were able to avoid the heavier going. Just as any discernible track ran out, we arrived at the edge of the corrie. Routefinding became more complicated. We sought to skirt the deepest drifts, while at the same time avoiding unnecessary height gains. The rule of thumb seemed to be to avoid the very white snow and walk where the greatest number of grass-tufts showed through. In this way we picked our way to Loch Mor, a scene of lonely beauty and desolate purity. From a strictly landscape point of view, the mountain lochans are most often far finer than the summits. Perhaps I should draw up a table of the 500 best mountain lochs in Scotland. They would be called the Smiths, of course. A badge bearing the embossed emblem of a shrivelled male organ would be awarded to anyone who'd swum in all 500 of them! [It's probably already been done. Didn't Tom Weir write a book?]

Loch Mor

We stopped for a bite to eat and pondered our position. Swimming was obviously out, except for Ben. Another thing was equally obvious: there wasn't the faintest hope of our completing our projected route within the available time. It was now a toss-up between An Riabhachan and Sgurr na Lapaich. We opted for An Riabhachan. Nigel adduced some contrived topographical argument in its favour, but the bottom line was transparently obvious. An Riabhachan was the only Munro on our list that couldn't easily be climbed another day from Glen Cannich.

We set off round the eastern side of the lochan. On more than one occasion we were deceived by the stalks of grass and found ourselves plunging chest-deep into snow-choked stream-beds. We would wrestle ourselves free of the snow's grasp and blunder heavily on. It was hard work and it didn't get any easier as we hit the steeper slopes leading up to the col. Arriving at the col, it was blowing hard, as the wind funnelled through the gap between the hills. We adjusted our dress accordingly and set off in the direction of An Riabhachan. I started off across the first snow-slope, plodding unimaginatively away, well within my comfort zone. Behind me, however, I could sense Nigel getting impatient. At this gentlemanly pace there was a real prospect of his being cheated of his prize. Did he suspect me of deliberate anti-Munroist sabotage? Did he see me as a climbing anarchist striking a blow for Pointless Mountaineering? On some thinly-veiled routefinding pretext he forged past me and was soon disappearing off into the middle distance. I had no option but to start picking up my feet. With the tops clouding over and the weather clearly deteriorating it was probably a good idea to keep him in view. Actually, it wasn't a bad climb. The ridge steepened to a rocky edge and we were frequently forced onto the steep northern flank to avoid toiling exhaustingly through the heavy drifts. From the cairn at the top of the ridge we carried on through the mist to the summit. I had the map in a map case around my neck. Caught in the wind it acted as a propellor, winding up the chord around my neck until I near choked. Arriving at the summit, I had ignominiously to ask Nigel to release me from my garotte. Nigel took a photograph which subsequently revealed itself to be an experimental video of my feet: it might do something at some festival of avant-garde film. We returned to the subsiduary top, took a bearing and headed due north down the westerly arm of the corrie. We had a vague idea of finding a route back down to the corrie itself, but as we emerged from the cloud, it became obvious that we would do best to continue on down the long flank where the going was easier, the wind having blown away much of the snow. Once clear of the crags to our right, we set off cross-country in an east-north-easterly direction with a view to rejoining the original path up. I'd imagined I would at least be able to hold my own with Nigel on the way down. Far from it. He had the bit between his teeth and was going hell-for-leather. I struggled to keep up as we slithered and stumbled and plunged and bounded down and across the trackless hillside. It started to snow perfectly formed flakes, borne horizontally on the wind, like a souvenir snowstorm rotated through ninety degrees. Meanwhile, the wild cloud-driven hills to the north were illuminated by an unreal, other-worldly blue light. I was awakened from my aesthetic reveries by Nigel calling back to me that he had found the path. He waited to allow me to catch up and we continued on down together, crossed the burn, and hit the main track. The easier going seemed to trigger the turbo-charger in Nigel's bionic leg. There was no keeping up with him. At one stage I tried actually jogging, but quickly concluded that it would be less distressing to accept reaching the car a few minutes after him. Arriving, I threw myself into the moving vehicule, rucksack and all, as we careered round the bends and bombed down the straights. Nostrils flaring at the prospect of another slap-up country-house dinner, Nigel wasn't taking any chances. No way was he wasn't going to be locked out on the hill for the night. Following the metalled road this time, we rallyed our way around and over the Strathfarrar dams and on down the glen. Deer loomed scarily out of the night into the beam of our headlights. Unperturbed, Nigel raced on through the darkness. We reached the lodge gate a very generous fifteen minutes early.

The easy dawdle up An Riabhachan

Back at Poyntzfield we bathed and changed for dinner. The vast repast was followed by organised parlour-games in the gigantic sitting-room, the highlight of which was a wine-and-cheese guessing game. Although highly fancied as a "continental", I disappointed my team-mates with my hapless ignorance. Cheaply, I retreated behind the "I-only-know-expensive-wines-and-French-cheese" ploy. An old trick, but I escaped unchallenged.

The next day I had to catch the five o'clock train from Inverness, so we would have to be off the hill by three in the afternoon. We opted for a shortish day in Strathconon. So did the rest of the house-party. A convoy of vehicles headed up the glen and parked at Strathanmore. Our goal was Meall nan Uan, an elegant Corbett. It occured to me that, by setting off ahead of the main group, I could at least pretend to have the hills to myself. I followed the track up the slope. It took an agreeably shallow line. Assuming it would take a generous zig-zag back in the proper direction, I allowed myself to be tempted and followed it across the Allt an t-Strathan Mhoir where, neglected by the deer that had presumably made it, it promptly disappeared entirely. I had to contour steeply back to the proper route, over slippery rocks and through deep heather. No tragedy in itself, except that a sizable proportion of the party had rashly followed me on my idiotic detour. I felt like a retarded Pied Piper. However, I was still in front with the virgin slopes ahead of me. I plodded steadily on up. As the angle got steeper and the snow deeper, I became increasingly reconciled to sacrificing my lonely commune with nature for the convenience of having someone else break the trail. Sweating from the work, I stopped to take off a jersey and happily relinquished the lead. Our group stopped for a short rest behind the shelter of some rocks just short of the ridge as Nigel and Jane caught up. We spent the rest of the morning on a glorious winter ridge-walk, first up Creag Ruadh and then on to the enticing summit of Meall nan Uan. At the summit, we sat on scattered rocks and ate our lunch. I got to talking with one of the party, who shyly confessed to being one of my blogfans (bless you sir!) Oh really, and what bits do you like best? Oh, the bits where you make fun of Nigel, of course! I felt a defensive pang towards my oldest friend, but it quickly became obvious that Nigel is held in great affection by all, not least because of his idiosyncracies.

The enticing summit of Meall nan Uan

And so we headed back down, flying, as it were, along the perfect ridge. There was a slight regret that we didn't have the time to continue on with the "élite" group, which was doing the full round of the corrie to take in Sgurr a' Mhuilinn, but, then again, one hill's much like any other! Back at the car, I quickly got changed into civvies and stuffed my muddy gear into my pack. I stashed it in the back of the Xantia, got into the back seat with Jane in front, and before I'd even closed the door, Nigel had dropped the clutch and we were on our way, so we thought, to Inverness station. For the sake of variety he decided to take the quiet back road. Thrashing along at the usual full tilt, he suddenly had to brake violently as he pulled in to allow an oncoming vehicule along the single-track. The engine promptly died. We got out of the car and stood around vaguely. The Xantia was well past its prime but still not old enough to be the sort of car you can fix. However, as it transpired, hanging around seemed to do the trick. Nigel turned the engine over in the spirit of desperate hope - and it fired! Everybody back in and flat out down the narrow lane. We continued in this way for a mile or so. Then the engine cut out again. Despite violent attempts to bump it, Nigel couldn't coax it back to life. We limped into a passing place and pondered our next move. I was resigning myself to missing my train and had even started phoning to that effect, when a chunky 4x4 appeared from the other direction and drew up alongside to commiserate. The driver was a friendly southerner with a poney-tail. He had something of the ageing rock star about him. He could have been the model for "Celeb" in Private Eye. We explained our train problem. No problem. I'll just drop off a couple of things at my place and come back and take you to the station. It's the sort of gesture that restores your faith in human nature. True to his word, he was back within the twenty minutes. I felt a bit awkward about abandoning Nigel and Jane to their fate, but they urged me on my way. I didn't insist.

Thanks to my guardian angel I made the train. Embarrassed, I offered him money for petrol but he wouldn't hear of it. The whole situation was redolent of my old hitch-hiking days in the early seventies, when lift-givers and lift-takers shared an unspoken bond of non-conformist sympathy. I remember queues of hitchers at certain key junctions. Where are they now? All too rich? Or too scared? Something magical has been lost, it seems to me.

And so all ended happily. Nigel was fully insured against breakdown and the car had nothing more serious than air in the fuel lines, I made it to my haute cuisine dinner appointment with the family at the Roman Camp in Callander, and, most importantly, inspired by natural beauty, constant friendship and human decency, I have taken renewed courage to live till I die.

2008-08-20T13:02:00.000-07:00

Nyhavn (Anna Smith)

What do we do given life?

We move, we move around.

(Stephen Stills)

What must a Martian observer think as he looks down from his red planet and surveys the annual Völkerwanderung which is the European summer holiday? Perhaps he would see some biological necessity in what must look like some vast, mechanised transhumance; he might conclude that, like sharks, humankind must be in a state of perpetual movement in order to maintain basic life-functions; he might conceivably interpret the whole phenomenon as some sort of socio-religious ritual. Could he possibly deduce from all this apparently unmotivated agitation that whole societies are in fact engaged in mass escapism? An escape from "real" life into ... what exactly? A fantasy of what life could be if it were not for the inconvenient fact of having to make a living? The heart sinks. There is something deeply depressing about the idea of a few weeks vacation somehow compensating for an entire year of soul-destroying drudgery. This is asking an awful lot of a holiday. In fact, psychologists maintain that holidays can be the most stressful time of year. Impossible expectations, unfamiliar circumstances, nagging inconvenience - all conspire to create unbearable disappointment.

So what is it that we are really doing when we go on holiday? More specifically, if I were tractor-beamed up to a Martian space-ship and experimented upon, what would would the little green men discover? Here are the provisional test-results:

The test-subject's motives are confused and contradictory. Two principle impulses, however, have been identified:

1. A compulsive need to acquire experience-modules to include in his autobiographical C.V.

2. A semi-conscious aspiration to be shocked into a new intensity of being through the "newness" of his impressions.

It is immediately obvious that these two ambitions collide. It is specifically this life-story that we tell ourselves, the self-fable, constantly rehearsed, continually trimmed and adapted , which stands in the way of that unmediated apperception of the Now which is our existential birth-right, sold for a mess of self-congratulatory pottage. Of course, requiring that a holiday be an epiphany really is asking an awful lot, but, it should, by releasing us into a world of different influences, at least offer us a temporary escape from our habitual selves and the deadening anaesthetic of our autobiographies.

The influences we chose to expose ourselves to for our summer holiday were Danish and Swedish. It was Anna's decision - the last holiday with her parents before going away to University. It was a revealing choice, confirming our feeling that Anna is the most Scandinavian of our children. In herself she combines a number of typically Scandinavian qualities: an uncomplicated practical intelligence, an innate respect for the material, a balanced equanimity of temper, a well-developed sense of the aesthetic. She must be carrying on my mother's Danish genes. Yes, Denmark for me is family and for that reason it speaks to me in a particularly intimate way. Everything about it, however superficially banal, is informed with an inner significance which is incommunicable except to those, like Anna, who already understand intuitively. It is like a childhood bedroom with all the objects and furnishings intact; an old toy which one rediscovers with a magical thrill, every colour, every facet a secret source of wonder. Just walking about the streets of Copenhagen induces an inner excitement, a sort of intensity of familiarity, which is both reassuring and liberating; liberating, I think, because what is vibrating in sympathy with these old-new impressions, is an unpoilt essential self, which predates the encrusted carapace of pretence and affectation with which we ordinarily confront the world. The Danish language itself sounds a deep, warm inner chord, evoking the profound security of childhood - an essence language, which, because it isn't English, remains uncorrupted by the coaching in self-serving hypocrisy and anxious snobbery purveyed by my profoundly English education. I am talking about my subjective experience of these languages. I am not saying that Danish is a language of innocence and English a language of corruption. They are, however, the languages of my innocence and my corruption. The fact is that modern Danish is an idiom of impertinent sophistication, but, as that is a register of language I learned only much later, I view it from outside, in a way that can no longer contaminate my inner essence.

All of this leads us into the dense thickets of the role of language and of education in our society. I can't help thinking that the gift of language is much abused. Surely language should be more than a mere vehicule for schoolboy cleverness, a medium for the trivial display of quiz-show factoids: to name something is not the same thing as to understand it. Language should grow out of a substantial, material, essential comprehension, rather than be a sort of freeze-dried convenient alternative to the real thing. This is asking an awful lot of language - and of our own sincerity.

Tivoli (Anna Smith)

We spent four days taking in Copenhagen, based at our favourite pension on Amagerstrandvej, now just a quick subway-ride from the centre of town. Victoria arrived from Glasgow to join us. We did all the usual things: up and down Ströget, Nyhavn, the boat-trip round the harbour, Tivoli (of course). Carol and I visited Kommunehospitalet where we first met in April 1973 (Carol was nursing there). The stairway of the nurses' home where I used to visit her still smelt the same! We went out to Nörrebro to check out some trendy boutiques Anna had her eye on. I ducked out of shopping sprees, and in and out of rain showers, to revisit my old haunts, the second-hand bookshops and the city library. The characteristic smell of books of different nationality - impossible to describe, but a vital ingredient of the "suchness" of things, the ordinary miracle to which we are habitually blind.

A vision of loveliness in Copenhagen (Anna Smith)

We spent four days wandering the streets of Copenhagen before taking the train to Stockholm for the second four days of our short holiday. Comparisons are odious but inevitable: Copenhagen is urban and alive, Stockholm dignified and poised; Copenhagen is witty and ironic, Stockholm elegant and sophisticated; Copenhagen is the big capital of a small country, Stockholm is the less big capital of a vast, but thinly populated country; Copenhagen is coquettish, garrulous, self-absorbed, trendy, Stockholm beautiful, sublime, timeless, open to the sea and sky. I could almost be describing the difference between Danish and Swedish. I cannot lay claim to the same intimate symbiosis with Swedish as I feel with Danish, but it is a language I hold in great affection. It has a sort of formal, poetic dignity which Danish only rarely achieves, but it lends itself less to the voluble good humour which is somehow the dominant characteristic of Danish.

We checked into our fabulously dinky little flat just off Stora Torget. From there we set off on mini-expeditions around the superb Gamla Stan and beyond. Stockholm must surely be one of the world's most beautiful capitals: sea, sky and architecture conjoined in perfect harmony. Apart from the simple pleasures of walking the streets, exploring the shops and stopping off for coffees, we visited the city museum (brilliant models of old Stockholm) and the Palace arsenal (Gustavus Adolphus' tunic in which he was killed at Lützen - complete with bullet-hole).

[Sweden's history of militarism is something which tends to escape the popular consciousness, camouflaged as it now is by the "Swedish Model", the Nobel prizes and Sweden's modern humanitarian tradition. In fact, having escaped Danish domination in the 16th century, Sweden then rose by sheer force of arms to become the most powerful force in 17th century Northern Europe. This was an extraordinary achievement for what was essentially a poor and sparsely populated country. The Swedes' success was largely due to superior organisation and the efficiency of their bureaucracy. They led the way, for example, in the standardised manufacture of military equipment which contributed greatly to the performance of their armies in the Thirty Years' War. Expansionist ambition culminated in the megalomaniac excesses of Charles XII. It was his defeat in the Great Nordic War which ushered in the end of Sweden's imperialistic fantasies and the beginnings of a parliamentary system of government.]

Archipelago Sky (Anna Smith)

The highspot of the trip was our Skjärgardsresa - a cruise around the Stockholm Archipelago. It was a sort of quintessence of holiday. Under the bright sky, high and wide, dotted with complex patterns of cloud, a Waxholmbolag-steamer nosing through the blue waters, out on deck, the wind in our faces, friendly sailing boats tacking freely about. The countless small rocky islands with their smooth rocks, sandy beaches and little clumps of pines. The numerous stop-offs, with their jolly embarcations. The landing at Sandhamn in the outer archipelago, all red or yellow-painted timber construction with Swedish flags, Swedish voices, kiosks with ice-creams and liquorice. We walked for a bit to find our own beach of white sand flanked by smooth grey rocks. The giggling change into swimming costumes, the cold shock of the water, splashing in and out as our bodies grew accustomed. Then back to the harbour for coffee and home-made Kanelbullar (cinnamon buns), back up the gangplank and the deliciously relaxed return to Stockholm with spectacular views of the city from the water.

Arcipelago Harbour (Anna Smith)

I remember years ago reading one of Colin Wilson's books, I think it was "The Occult", in which he speaks of what he calls "Faculty X" - the heightened capacity to actually experience experience. He equated this faculty to "holiday consciousness", as he put it, in other words, a more intense awareness of being alive in a world which is pregnant with an innate significance. This is why we go on holiday - to be alive. What would it take to be alive for the rest of the year?

2008-07-29T12:46:00.001-07:00

In the Julian Alps

Why is it that the Julian Alps remind me in a peculiar way of the English Lake District? Other than the stupidly obvious fact that they are both mountainous, they wouldn't appear to have an awful lot in common. I can only say that, for me, what both areas share is a certain quality of miniature perfection. Not seeking to impose by their sheer mass, each in its own way wins you over with the delicacy and grace of an intimate beauty approaching to a sort of platonic ideal of mountain landscape. Andy and I had visited the Italian Julians two years previously and had been entranced by them. This year, turning our backs on the more blatant attractions of the great glaciated peaks, we once again opted for small is beautiful and planned what we hoped would be an idyllic long weekend, this time on the Slovenian side of the range, setting out from the Hartleys' place in Monfalcone on the Italian Adriatic coast.

Landing in Treviso on the evening flight from Charleroi, I drove down the hellish autostrada to Monfalcone. Andy was there right on schedule to meet me and guide me straight to a family party organised in honour of his sister-in-law's birthday. It was like a scene lifted directly out of a Fellini movie! I blundered into a crowd of new faces and through a bewildering fast-forward of introductions. "Piacere, piacere!" My pleasure was completely sincere. There is something irresistibly contagious about good humour and hospitality, particularly when coupled with the unerring Italian instinct for the human. All too humanly, I soon found myself outside a good few glasses of the unpretentious, but highly potable local wine. In the balmy summer evening, under the illuminated awning, around the gingham-decked tables, with Andy, Clara and my new-found friends, all was more than well with the world. I got to talking with "Johnson", a larger-than-life Obelix figure with a classic shaddapayaface accent. He had worked in England in the sixties and, amazingly, had retained a very positive memory of the experience. He had done factory work in Preston and had subsequently worked 12-hour shifts tunnelling the Picadilly line. I sought to bond with him by recounting my experience as a so-called chain-boy, working on the M5 near Cheltenham in the Spring of 1970. [Readers will be relieved to learn that I was never actually bound in chains. The "chain" in question is an antiquated unit of measurement: 22 yards if I remember rightly. A chain-boy was, in fact, an engineer´s assistant - the lad holding the measuring stick for surveying the levels. Part of the job involved pounding heavy stakes into the ground with a sledge-hammer, prior to fixing a cross-lath to it to mark the level. The sledge-hammer was a bit of a knack. I went through an appalling ritual of 17 year-old humiliation before mastering it. I do however know what a bench-mark actually is: a fixed mark in the ground with a known height above sea-level from which all fresh points can be determined. Working on any new site involved first identifying the local bench-mark, taking the measure and working from there. Hence the verb,"to bench-mark".] By now I was on the grappa. Andy was strumming his genial, if by now uncritical, way through a few numbers on the guitar. "When I'm 64" featured prominently for self-evident reasons. Suddenly we discovered we were among the last of the guests. We made our farewells, headed back to the Hartleys' flat and passed out for the night.

We were up and away the next morning by half-past nine - not bad considering the previous evening's overindulgence. We had the usual rashly ambitious programme ahead of us, the first stage being the drive to the mountain heartland of Slovenia. We drove north out of Monfalcone, following the frontier on the Italian side over the limestone Carso and on to Gorizia. In the town we crossed the abandoned border post into Slovenia and continued up the valley of the Isonzo, the Soca, in the language of the new, mysterious country we had entered. There is something improbable about Slovenia - like a vast set for a modern remake of the Prisoner of Zenda. The strangeness of the language on the signposts and hoardings adds to the atmosphere of unreality. At any moment you expect a cigar-chewing director to intervene impatiently with an abrasive "CUT! OK, let's take it again, but this time lose the trees!" Heading east away from the river, we motored on through densely forested hill-country to Podbrdo, beyond which we entered a lost kingdom of wild hairpins as we revved and gunned our way through ludicrously picturesque villages, up and over the mountain pass and tortuously on down to Bohinjska Bistrica and Bohinjsko Jezero - Lake Bohinj itself.

Lake Bohijn

We squeezed into what must have been the last parking space in the village of Stara Fuzina and set off through warm sunshine and sunny meadows to the eastern end of the lake. Perfectly landscaped among the surrounding mountains, it was an enticing prospect. Bathers were splashing in the water and sunning themselves on the little beach. It was a holiday brochure come alive. Andy confessed to having stashed two pairs of trunks in his pack. We were tempted... but, doubtless moved by an atavistic puritanism, resisted, promising ourselves a dip on the way back down. La dolce vita could wait, or so we thought. We walked round the northern shore of the lake, passing other ramblers, mainly local, in an atmosphere reminiscent of a summer Sunday in the Ardennes. Sitting down at the edge of the water to eat our lunch, we spotted the antiquated ferry making its way along the lake. We could have taken it! Wouldn't it have made an elegant start to our climb? Andy somehow implied that I was getting soft. Was it my imagination or was he whistling the tune of a hymn? ...but the steep and rugged pathway may we tread rejoicingly... we would have plenty of steep and rugged by the time we were finished!

Leaving the western end of the lake, we headed up a track beneath a grateful shade of mountain beech in the direction of the Slap Savica, a local beauty spot. Slap is the Slovenian for waterfall, a linguistic accident which predictably released an outpouring of schoolboy puns, the best of which was Andy's definition of the fall, and the less powerful force of water downstream of it, as the "Slap and Trickle". Having dutifully admired the Slap, we followed the path up the steepening escarpment of Komarca. The fun and games were definitely over. We slogged up a seemingly interminable series of steep zig-zags, to arrive at the Crno Jezero, a perfect mountain tarn of inky-green water nestling among fir trees and boulder scree. We threw off our packs and rested for a while on its shores. Small, liquorice-black salamanders paddled awkwardly with their proto-limbs in the shallows at the water's edge, escorted by darting schools of tiny fishes. That this ungainly, primitive life-form should have survived to eke out its little existence in this harsh ecological niche, was somehow a source of wonder and fascination. Yet how strange, I thought, that we should constantly forget the wonder of our own so-much-more complex existence. It struck me that, as salamander life is to ours, so is our sleep-life to the conscious life within and about us, which we contrive to neglect, for fear of...what? accepting our relative salamander status, perhaps?

Crno Jezero

Continuing on from the lake, we lost our way momentarily, but were quickly able to correct our error and reestablish contact with the main path, which led us unforgivingly up the wooded Lopucniska Dolina. On we trudged. It had already been a long first day out for a couple of hungover gentlemen in their late prime, but we still had a good way to go. Completing another apparently endless series of zig-zags and we suddenly found ourselves in ... The Promised Land! We had debouched into the Dolina Triglavskih Jezer, the valley of the lakes of Triglav. Before us was the first of a series of seven lakes from which this high mountain valley gets its name. All tiredness gone, we wandered through a vision of utter loveliness. The golden evening light imbued the scene with an other-worldly beauty. Looking up to the soaring crags of amber-lit limestone and around at a teeming infinity of exquisite alpine blooms, we proceeded as through an earthly Eden. The heart has no choice but to open itself in a spontaneous movement of gratitude and humility, of acknowledgment of our participation in the greater mystery of life. This, I feel , is the true nature of all aesthetic experience - that, like it or not, one is called to something more noble in oneself. The same is surely true of all real Art. To talk of Art's supposed ennobling purpose always sounds unbearably worthy. But to understand that this is not so much a moral question, as a question of a broadening of consciousness, offers the possibility of new insight.

Approaching the Triglav Lakes

Arriving at the Triglav Lakes hut, we dumped our gear upstairs and went back down for dinner. The place was buzzing with the organised chaos and general hubbub of hut life. The voices were overwhelmingly Slovene, the Julians in general and Triglav in particular being a place of national pilgrimage. Gesture and rudimentary English enabled us to obtain a hearty goulash-soup, followed by the local speciality, palachinke, pancakes, which they seem to rustle up at the drop of a hat and with a swanky little fold! Retiring to the cosy privacy of our little room, we were soon sleeping the deep sleep of the just. We had full need of it. The next day didn't promise to be any easier. If anything, it was going to be more physically demanding than what we'd already done.

The absence of any glacier spared us the purgatory of an alpine start. After a leisurely breakfast, we shouldered our packs and set off up the valley. We planned to undertake the traverse of Kanjavec, descending to the Trzaska hut, from where we hoped to climb Triglav the following day. There was a lot of low cloud, but our hope was that we could time our arrival at the summit to coincide with one of the breaks which seemed to occur at irregular intervals. As we continued up, we gradually left the alpine garden behind us. The scene became sparser, rockier. Splashes of bright colour were provided by patches of a sort of densely flowering moss presenting a mass of tiny blooms in pinky red and intense yellow. Heading past the Jezero Ledvica lake, we arrived at the little Zeleno Jezero where we sat down for a short rest. Then the climbing started in earnest. Breaking out of the valley of the lakes, we headed east up steep screes to the col below our designated peak. As we climbed steadily on up, we emerged into a totally other, mist-shrouded, geological world, an undifferentiated chaos of derelict boulders and shattered rocks. There was no sign of the cloud lifting. Would we be able to find our way through this lunar landscape? Steering by compass offered no guarantee of us finding the best route. Fortunately, as so often happens in the Alps, our way was marked. Moving from one red and white stripe to the next, we climbed by numbers. And so, in this reassuring if possibly less-than-adventurous manner, we carried on until we found ourselves on the summit of Kanjavec (2568m). With very little prospect of a view, there was no temptation to linger. We were soon up and away, on down the other side, but were quickly brought to an abrupt halt as the route seemed to lead down a vertical cliff. We donned our via ferrata harnesses. These allow you to clip on to in situ metal hawsers, thus limiting the consequences of any slip. Not particularly heroic perhaps, but terribly welcome. Gingerly, we edged ourselves over the drop. After only a few meters we found ourselves again on easy ground. With a certain sense of anti-climax we restashed the gear and clattered on down the marked way through loose rocks and scree, arriving presently at the Trzaska hut.

Rock Blooms

Inside the hut we reflected on our position. We were in something of a quandry. Although we had completed our route as planned, it was still only early afternoon. Ordering a soup, we explored the options. Basically, it came down to a straight choice between luxuriating where we were or pressing on to a higher hut. Heading higher would cut a couple of hours off what was going to be a long enough day anyway - the ascent of Triglav followed by the long descent back down to Bohinj. It would mean missing out on the ambitious traverse originally planned, but the unpredictability of the weather counselled against such an undertaking anyway. Timetable constraints also dictated a return to Monfalcone the following evening. The logic of the situation was inescapable. Despite the automatic protests of the flesh, we heaved on our packs and plodded off in the direction of the Dom Planika, the classic jumping-off point for Triglav. It was a grinding enough exercise, but we consoled ourselves with the thought that any step taken today would be one less that we would have to take tomorrow. As we worked our way around the flank of Smarjetna Glava and across the southern slopes of Triglav itself, sudden breaks in the cloud tantalizingly revealed the next day's goal to us.

Looking out of the hut window the next morning, we were confronted with cloud and rain. We'd mostly been lucky on our trips, but this time it looked as though our luck had run out. We dragged out breakfast, hoping for an improvement. No such luck. We calculated that if we were not able to set off for Triglav before ten o'clock, we would not have time to climb the mountain and get all the way back to the car before nightfall. We waited in a state of bored impatience. Then, shortly before ten, we put our noses outside the door to find that the rain had ceased and that the mist seemed to be brightening. That was good enough. We were off. The forecast was for a gradual improvement. We might yet be fortunate enough to obtain a view from the summit.

On the Triglav Ridge

Route-finding was no object. The trade-route was generously marked with red-and-white stripes, with the trickier sections equipped with hand-rails and cables. Excitingly, but in complete security, we followed the twisting ridge through the mist up to Little Triglav and on to Triglav itself (2864m). Arriving at the summit, we were still in cloud. There was a small group waiting, hoping like us that the sky might clear. We nibbled on some food and chatted. The leader of the other party manifested the slightly tiresome confidence of the self-appointed local guru. Proudly, he confided that this was the nth time that he'd been at the summit of his country's highest peak. We widened our eyes and opened our mouths in a grotesque simulacrum of amazement. "Do you know what they did when Tito died?" "Impale his severed head on the summit cross?", I didn't say out loud. " They came up here to fly a Yugoslav flag at half mast!" We affected an unfelt empathy with his national-political ardour. "Oh, and have you been whipped?" "Whipped?" "Yes, it's a tradition. You have to accept." He claimed that new Triglavians were required to undergo a rite of passage, which involved putting their head in a sort of aluminium box on the summit and submitting to a ritual beating with a piece of climbing equipment. Meekly, we subjected ourselves to this humiliation. They're probably still laughing at us now!

On the summit of Triglav

Reluctantly admitting that we weren't going to get the view, we headed back. Collecting our spare belongings at the hut, we continued on down. It was a relief to escape the world of stone and mist which we had inhabited for the last 24 hours and allow our senses to be assailed by nature's own green. Coming down the steep path from the Planika to the mountain crossroads of the Koniski Preval, we enjoyed splendid views across to to the mountains to the east of the Krma valley. We were going at full tilt now, on round an awkward "false step" in the path, heading in the direction of the Vodnikov Dom. Here the slopes were thick with dwarf pine and Alpenrosen. At the hut we met a group of Germans, two couples with their children. By dint of constantly leap-frogging each other on the way down, we got on quite friendly terms.

View across the Krma Valley

Continuing on down from the hut, all of a sudden we found ourselves in a fantastic never-never land of alpine flowers. The Triglav lakes had been something very special, but this was a whole other dimension. I can honestly say that I have never seen anything quite like it. It was like moving through a canvas of Hieronymous Bosch's "Garden of Delights", but untrammeled by any anthropomorphic symbolism or laboured moralism. It was exactly what it was - a living miracle. Nor was it just a small local phenomenon, it went on and on. An extasy of life, but life of a subtle, unforced delicay to which no greenhouse bloom could hope to aspire. I am no botanist and anyway, no mechanical listing of names could possibly convey the overwhelming effect of such an unconstrained multitude of different flowers. I can particularly remember a sort of red orchid (could it be?) that contrived to turn back on itself like a living geometrical figure, or an almost obscene purple and white kind of cow parsley bursting with uninhibited life, or a scruffy-haired waif of a plant like a sort of botanical hippy. Beyond mere enumeration was the overwhelming impression of spontaneous harmony brought about by the unaffected juxtaposition of different groupings of varieties - not only of blooms, but of leaves. And all of this, as it were, landscaped, tumbling down the steep slopes and interspersed with perfectly gnarled small larch and pine. If I concentrate hard enough, I can still smell the air, heady with scent and fresh from the morning rain.

In the Alpine Garden

As we climbed on down, the effects gradually subsided and we moved among taller trees and denser forest. Mists hanging in the trees created their own magical monochrome effects. As we continued on down, pine gave way to deciduous forest. Still further on down, forest gave way to delightful unmown meadows, which in turn gave out, as we plunged into forests of still greater trees. By this time Andy was slowing. A cartilage problem in the knee was turning very painful as a result of the constant downward jolt. He battled on manfully, but, stopping at the Planinska Koca na Vojah, we found ourselves exploring the alternatives. We ordered soup. It was so poor compared to the rich, nourishing brews we had enjoyed at the higher huts, that it convinced us not to spend the night. We opted for a taxi which took us the last three or four kilometers to Stara Fuzina.

During the difficult late-night drive back across the mountain passes and round the hairpin bends, Andy very considerately kept me alert with constant conversation and intellectual parlour-games. We made it safely, physically tired, but elated by the intensity of our shared experience.

2008-06-21T17:33:00.000-07:00

Two books by Maurice Nicoll

Responding to my heavy-handed hints, Carol got me these books for my birthday. I'd once owned, many years ago, a copy of "The New Man", but it seemed to have evaporated - probably lent out and never returned. I can understand why a lendee might want to hang on to it. It really is the most extraordinary book. It is the only thing I have ever read that even comes remotely near a meaningful interpretation of the teachings of Christ. We are so familiar with the traffic-noise of Christianity that we can't hear it anymore. Nicoll succeeds in revealing the baffling strangeness of the New Testament and points the way to an entirely fresh understanding of Jesus' message. "The Mark", a volume of writings collected posthumously, is a sequel, expanding, with fresh examples, the basic argument of the earlier publication.

The idea behind all sacred writing, Nicoll insists, is to convey a higher meaning than the literal words contain, the truth of which must be seen by man internally. This higher, concealed, inner, or esoteric, meaning, cast in the words and sense-images of ordinary usage, can only be grasped by the understanding, and it is exactly here that the first difficulty lies in conveying higher meaning to Man. A person's literal understanding is not necessarily equal to grasping psychological meaning. To understand literally is one thing: to understand psychologically is another.

He then goes on to take a series of incidents in the life of Jesus, his teachings, particularly the parables, and, lifting them to the light of a subtle intelligence, turns them gently until wholly unsuspected facets are revealed. He carefully avoids the trap of producing a mere glossary of symbols - such clumsy literalism would negate his intention, which is, by delicate hints and promptings, to awaken in us a new sensibilty capable of apprehending a deeper truth, to bring out a new understanding, impossible at a literal level. To brutally summarise would be to betray the deliberate obliqueness of Nicoll's approach. Better, perhaps, to offer an example taken directly from the text. On the subject of the Kingdom of Heaven he writes:

...understood internally, the Universe is a series of levels, and a thing is what it is according to where it is, in this series. The level above Man is called the Kingdom of Heaven or Kingdom of God in the Gospels. It has many other names in different writings. In the Gospels, it is said that the Kingdom of Heaven is within. It is at a higher level of a man. To reach it a man must reach a higher level in himself. If everyone did this, the level of life on this earth would change. The whole earth would take a step up in evolution. But this step can only be taken by an individual man.

A man can reach a higher level in himself and yet live in the life of this earth. Each person has an inner but different access to a higher level. It is a possibility in him, for Man is created as a being capable of a further individual evolution or, as it is called in the Gospels, a rebirth. A man does not have to wait until he observes with his own eyes a visible kingdom called the Kingdom of Heaven surrounding him. Christ said that the Kingdom of Heaven is not to be looked for as coming in a way that can be observed outwardly. He said:"And being asked by the Pharisees when the Kingdom of God cometh, he answereth them and said, The Kingdom of God cometh not with observation: neither shall they say, Lo, here! or, There! for lo, the Kingdom of God is within you" (Luke XVII, 20).

The Kingdom of Heaven is an inner state, not an outer place. It is an inner state of development that a man can reach. There is no question of time and space, of when or where connected with it, for it is above a man, always, as a higher possibility of himself.

In "The Mark", Nicoll makes an intriguing etymological point about the idea of "repentance":

The word translated throughout the New Testament as repentance is in the Greek meta-noia which means change of mind...The word metanoia therefore has to do with transformation of the mind in its essential meaning... The English word repentance is derived from the Latin poenitare which means 'to feel sorry'. Penitence, feeling sorry, feeling pain or regret - this is a mood experienced by everyone from time to time. But the Greek word metanoia stands far above such a meaning, and is not a mere mood. It contains no idea of pain or sorrow. It refers to a new mind... A new mind means an entirely new way of thinking, new ideas, new knowledge, and a new approach to everything in life.

The New Man and The Mark do more than merely communicate information, facts to be stored and possibly put to use on some future occasion. They somehow communicate something of the author's deep understanding of the teachings of Jesus in a way that continues to resonate in the mind long after the book has been put away. The beginnings of Metanoia perhaps?

2008-05-22T10:10:00.001-07:00

In early May, when the flower is still on the broom and the gorse puts forth its own shameless display, Scotland is alive with pullulating yellow. From Stirling, past Perth, up over the Drumochter pass to Dalwhinnie and on to Loch Laggan, teeming roadside blossom cheered us on our way. Our spirits buoyed up by this uninhibited welcome, we pulled into the car park at Aberarder on the north shore of the loch and got ready to climb. Nigel and Jane had set out from Cheshire that same morning in their latest vehicular acquisition, a Citroën Xantia. Xantia - a name to conjur with, evoking as it does images of Narnia, Xanadu and the Age of Conan! Certainly, by Lyle standards, it was one swanky motor! In tasteful Essex white, it sported a residual boy-race spoiler and go-faster rust-flecked welding - an exorbitantly cool image from which the conspicuous absence of hub-caps could scarcely subtract. Nigel had thoughtfully customised it with a fan-belt squeal simulator, which was a reassuring auditory accompaniment throughout our peregrinations.

We set off a little before midday, late enough, but not bad considering the distances covered to get there. As it turned out, it was the earliest start we managed over our entire extended weekend! While Jane opted for an easier stroll up to Corrie Ardair, Nigel and I, with an eye to our reputations as mountaineers, embarked on the complete round of Creag Meagaidh. Starting off up the luxuriously appointed main path, we soon veered off northwards onto more traditional boggy tracks as we aimed for Carn Liath, 1006m, our first top of the day. The sky was overcast, but the cloud cover remained high with the occasional hint of pale sun. We followed a literally primrose path up through the gradually self-reconstituting natural woodland of the nature reserve. Ben, Nigel's irrepressible black labrador, bounded along beside us. It was one of those days when climbing becomes somehow effortless. Seemingly without particular exertion we passed over Na Cnapanan and soon found ourselves on the upper slopes of our hill, wandering across the final easy screes to shelter at the cairn. We munched and chatted and took pictures of ourselves and then drifted on westwards along the tops: Meall an t-Snaim, Sron Coire a' Chriochairean. We trended down on the southerly side of the ridge in order to view the tremendous cliffs of Coire Ardair. They had taken on mythical proportions ever since Nigel and I had attended a school lecture given by the celebrated mountain photographer, John Cleare (it must have been 68/69!). He gave a riveting slide-show account of Tom Patey's Creag Meagaidh Crab-Crawl. The spectacular drama of the winter climbing, the swashbuckling fearlessness of the mountaineers, the unmistakable whiff of anti-authoritarianism, all made a deep impression on our adolescent minds. And here we were, some forty years later, still irretrievably adolescent at heart!

Ageing adolescents on Creag Meagaidh

Nigel pointed out Staghorn Gully to me. A few years previously he had had to retreat from it in poor conditions. I was suitably impressed. We earmarked it for a future escapade or life and continued on our way up and over Stob Poite Coire Ardair and down towards the "window" where the track comes up from the corrie. Looking across to lonely Lochan Uaine and the wild hills beyond, I was struck by the almost abstract beauty of the rhythmic drapes and loops formed by the half-melted snow-fields: like a picture of clouds by the Swiss painter Ferdinand Hodler.

Painting of a Mountain by Hodler

The next section involved a steepish climb up onto the Creag Meagaidh plateau proper. What might have been a bit of a slog was rendered mildly entertaining by the exquisite bathos of Nigel's taking a mobile call from his daughter's bank manager in Cornwall! Moving up past the blue-gaping remains of the winter cornices, we emerged onto the upper snow fields and levitated on towards the summit. Near the top we came across a pointy-beaked wader-type bird. It strutted ostentatiously about, seeking to draw Ben away from its otherwise invisible nest. Clearly not a ptarmigan. A curlew? Too small. A snipe? Too big. Both impossible anyway at such an altitude. Only later did we realise that it must have been a dottrel - the pride of the Creag Meagaidh nature reserve.

Dottrel

At the summit we sat down by the cairn. The cloud cover was thickening. Wishing to put an aesthetic gloss on this discouraging prospect, I commented on the infinite variety of shades of grey in this natural grisaille. Nigel scoffed at my contrived literary fancy. Rain threatened. We pulled on our anoraks. We were joined by a group of seven or eight who had come up from the corrie. Old pals on an annual beano, they were a friendly lot and we engaged in an exchange of pleasantries before continuing on our way. We went directly east towards Puist Coire Ardair across terrain that appeared so scrupulously landscaped, so carefully manicured, it might have been a high-level golf course! It finally started to rain. We performed the traditional ritual of supplication to the local deity and wrestled into our overtrousers. This small sacrifice of personal convenience had the desired effect and the rain eased. We had glimpses down into the desolate Lochan Coire Choille-rais, its surface littered with pack-ice débris. Following along the ridge from the Puist, we enjoyed sensational plunging views down to the Lochan a' Choire and across to the cliffs of Coire Ardair, then, turning to the south, we headed down Creag Mhor and the Allt Coire Choille-rais. Only now, eight hours out, wading through interminable heather, impatient to reach the road, did we finally start to feel tired. Jane met us near Moy lodge and drove us to Roy Bridge, our base for the next few days.

The cliffs of Coire Ardair from the south

As a member of the Climbers' Club, Nigel had access to their hut, well, bungalow really, in the village. It was happily undersubscribed and I had a whole room to myself where I slept the sleep of the just. Nigel, with kind attention worthy of a Nepali guide, woke me gently the next morning with a cup of tea. I took this as a hint that we should be getting on and out. All too soon, however, we found ourselves severely bogged down among the peat hags of breakfast. Breakfast with the Lyles is rather like tea with a maiden aunt, where refusing the umpteenth slab of fruit-cake is not only an affront, but incontravertible evidence of an unmanly lack of appetite. Two, or better still, three Weetabix are followed by a gargantuan fry-up of bacon, eggs, sausage, tomatoes, mushrooms, beans etc., all accompanied throughout by lashings of tea, toast and marmelade. By the time we had ingested this copious and cholesterol-friendly repast, done the dishes, gone shopping, packed up and havered about where we were going, it was after 11 o'clock before we got away.

I had persuaded Nigel that we should explore the head of Loch Arkaig. It was a place I had always wanted to visit ever since my juvenile imagination had been stirred by a photograph in an old S.M.C. (Scottish Mountaineering Club) guidebook encaptioned "Strathan and the Streaps". It somehow captured for me the essence of romantic wanderings among wild hills. Nor can it be denied that the names, the rhythmic repetition of the the str sound (imagine a properly rolled Scots r), the abrupt, rugged eaps termination, must have worked their own incantatory magic.

Crossing the Caledonian canal at Gairlochy, we drove north up the western shore of Loch Lochy through a sylvan idyll to Clunes, then west to Loch Arkaig, following the narrow road by the lochside all the way to Murlaggan. Beyond Murlaggan the road ends. This was the jumping-off point for a number of cross-country routes. Parked vehicules littered the roadside. Nigel has performed feats of incredible mountaineering endurance in all the world's major ranges, but never will you get him to walk anywhere where he can drive! It is a point of honour with him to leave the car as close to the final barrier as possible. Unbowed, egged on even, by a stream of reasonable protest from Jane, with just a few millimeters tolerance, he shoe-horned the Xantia into an impossibly small and uneven space. But the point was made!

We walked down the track to Strathan - with particularly gratifying views across to the Streaps - then turned north up the path to Glen Kingie and Loch Quoich. Our plan was to knock off Sgurr Mhurlagain and Fraoch Bheinn, two distinctive Corbetts with the prospect of magnificent views. Jane, preferring a more leisurely pace, decided for the second of the two only. Not that we were going to break any records. It was an in-between sort of a day - not properly cloudy, not really sunny, slightly close. The long heave up the shoulder of Sgurr Mhurlagain was also an in-between experience. Was it tiresome because it was tiring? More probably the reverse. We chatted to distract our minds from the unimaginative trudge. Our conversation ranged widely over myriad topics. Idiotic school reminiscences, "where are they now?" inquiries about mutual friends and acquaintances, people we knew who had died, getting older, the passing of time, the meaning of life, the pat formulae served up by religion in general, the preferability of a live question to a dead answer, how to keep a question alive, mysteries which can only be expressed mathematically, the implications of arithmetical conundra, what is the present?, what it might mean to live in the present, the pitfalls of nostalgia...I spoke of how sad it was that, for so many of our circle, university days had been the high-spot of their lives from which began a slow and irresistible descent into hopelesness and mediocrity. It's all right for you, Nigel answered, in your work you're fortunate enough to be surrounded by like-minded people. It's only when I graduated as an engineer and started work, that I realised how lively and stimulating, but above all varied, the crowd I knew at Cambridge actually was. Yes, but is it university that's stimulating or just being young? How can you stay inwardly young?

On Sgurr Mhurlagain

With these burning questions happily unanswered, but our vision of life somehow enlarged by the spirit of inquiry they represented, we found ourselves at the top of our hill. The magnificent vista dispelled any final vestige of small-mindedness. To the south and east the vast and wondrous extent of Loch Arkaig lay stretched out at our feet, with the hulking mass of Gulvain rising from the opposite shore of the loch. To the south-west our familiars, Streap and Streap Comhlaidh. To the west our next hill, Fraoch Bheinn. We trundled back down to the flattish, boggy section between the two mountains, then moved on up to get to grips with its east ridge. After the drudgery of our last climb, we weren't really looking forward to it. However, without ever getting remotely technical, certainly nothing Ben couldn't cope with easily, it presented enough small route-finding challenges and little bits of scrambling to divert us from the secret self-pity which is the inevitable concomitant of the mindless plod. When we reached the top it was late afternoon. Luxuriating in the decadent pleasure of tired relaxation, we beheld a miraculous vision to the west. All was still, but below us, low-level cloud, moved on secret currents of air, caressed the hills, probing, exploring, gently embracing every dip, every knoll, every hummock. In the direction of Loch Morar, the whole valley was filled with mist as with a benign glacier, spilling up and over the gaps between the hills and tumbling in gossamer strands down the other side. The peaks of the Rough Bounds of Knoydart, thrusting up through haloes of cloud, had taken on an other-worldly aspect, like some Tolkien-inspired faery-land, but somehow more mysterious, because real.

Ben and the Rough Bounds of Knoydart

After a full nine hours on the hill, we arrived back at the car, jemmied it out of its space and set off back to Roy Bridge. We turned in that night fully intending to set sail the next morning on the first tide, but when the time came, we once again found ourselves becalmed in the breakfast doldrums. Jane, who had to get back for work, had very kindly arranged a lift back to Cheshire so that we could keep the car. Leaving her for a last walk by Ben Nevis, we pressed on to the Corran ferry and Garbh Bheinn of Ardgour. Our intention was to climb the Great Ridge, some 1000 feet of severe climbing, on a vast, remote and relatively unfrequented crag. Pinnacle Ridge, a highly recommended moderate scramble, might have been the better option, but Nigel had done it before and relished the greater challenge.

By the time we set off up Coire nan Iubhair, it was already hopelessly late. Nor was our timetable improved by my having to rush back to fetch the map we'd blitheringly left behind. After an hour or so of walking up alongside the Abhainn Coire an Iubhair, we crossed the river and headed up the steep corrie beneath the intimidating bulk of the crags of Garbh Bheinn. They were enormous in a rather blunt and unsubtle way. It was heavy going with all the climbing gear. Near a subterranean dribble of water we stopped for a late lunch before turning our attention to the climb. We'd left the guide-book behind to save weight on the rash assumption that the start of the definitive ridge climb on the mountain would be self-evident. Far from it. We spent an age trying to match our memory of the description to the typography of the rock in front of us. Nigel finally identified what he thought "had to be" the line, roped up and tentatively set off. In his (our) youth, Nigel was one of the boldest and most confident leaders I had ever come across. Fortunately perhaps, he has grown a lot more circumspect with the years. Now he seemed to take an eternity to place his protection, before easing up a couple of feet, still unsure of the route, worried about the dampness of the vegetated crack, concerned at the absence of any trace of a previous passage. More nervous placement of nuts, more unconvinced peerings upwards, a couple of moves, possibly, maybe, but... This was taking far too long. It was already past four in the afternoon and we hadn't even managed the first pitch. If we continued at this pace, despite the long days of May, we would be finishing in the dark. That decided it. Nigel climbed back down. We packed up the gear and flogged up the rest of the Garbh Choire Mor and on to the top of Garbh Bheinn at 885 meters.

View over Loch Linnhe from Garbh Bheinn

We loitered on and around the summit, watching as the play of the clouds and the late afternoon light somehow caused the whole landscape to radiate with an inner glow. Something in us warmed in instinctive sympathy, a state of psychic relaxation beyond mere physical tiredness permitted the beginnings of a new opening. The mountains and lochs of the West of Scotland seemed to extend for ever and ever: the vast sweep of Loch Linnhe to the east, the perfect cone of Sgurr Dhomhnuill to the north. To the west, the distinctive profiles of the isles of Rhum and Eigg shone purple and red, while the long tongue of Loch Sunart filled with liquid gold. Drinking in these impressions of beauty beyond words, an inward innocence was nourished, despite ourselves.

What is the purpose of human life? To "collect" experience like bubble-gum cards? Rather, it seems that our task is to consciously reconcile the two dimensions of time in which we live, move and have our being - ordinary passing time and the eternal present. Sometimes mountains can reveal to the heart what the mind cannot comprehend.

2008-04-23T14:14:00.001-07:00

Note on Cézanne

Montagne Ste.-Victoire (Grand Pin)

Paul Cézanne is omnipresent in Aix. There is even a Cézanne trail which takes in the sights of the town and places where the painter might have hung out. Yet, during much of his lifetime, the citizens of Aix had very little time for the master. His intense but unconventional daubs left them bemused and uncomprehending. He became, even, the subject of popular mockery. There are less Cézannes in the Musée Granet at Aix than might have been the case if the curators had been a bit quicker off the mark. What they could have picked up for a song was only purchased much later and at great expense after Cézanne's rise to celebrity. That Cézanne should ever have been a controversial figure is difficult to fathom today. Reproductions have made his work an all-too-familiar part of our cultural landscape. With his reputation as the father of modern art, we inevitably tend to see his work through the prism of Art History. What is it in the quiet intensity of his structured landscapes and still-lifes that presage the radical breakthrough into the world of the modern? Herbert Read in his A Concise History of Modern Painting suggests that the two most important factors are what Cézanne himself called réalisation and modulation. Réalisation is the extraction of an essential structure from an apparently confused and random nature. Modulation is the modelling of blocks of colour to create a definitive, monumental effect. Cézanne's ambition was to be a classical master in a modern idiom; what he succeeded in doing was separating the work from the motif, thus paving the way to L'art pour l'art - the work as something with its own intrinsic value, independent of whether or not it is a successful imitation of nature. Even today, controversy still surrounds the topic of Modern Art. How strange that Cézanne's painting, often giving the impression of an almost cramped obsession with control, should have opened the flood gates to the wild effusions of a Wassily Kandinsky or a Jackson Pollock!

Wishing to find out more about the artist, I picked up Bernard Fauconnier's "Cézanne". Inevitably there is a lot of focus on the vicissitudes of his life, in itself ironic for a painter seeking to create an art of timeless monumentality. But a biography, hélas, is a biography and Fauconnier goes about his work with an almost breathless verve and enthusiasm. He gives a lively impression of Cézanne's idyllic youth, his friendship with his schoolfriend, Emile Zola, his strained relations with his rich but miserly father, the official rejection of his work, his stubborn, cantankerous persistence, his disasterous marriage and his final acceptance and recognition. It was interesting to see how Cézanne, in his obscurity, despised those who lacked the insight to appreciate what he was trying to do and how, once famous, he despised his admirers for their failure to comprehend the true nature of his work! There are memorable passages in the book that seek to encapsulate Cézanne's ambition. For example:

Plus vrai et plus savant. Les deux seuls adjectifs qui puissent définir la recherche artistique qu'il a entreprise. Vérité et science, conscience que l'oeuvre d'art n'est pas affaire de spontanéité, ni simplement d'habile exécution. Il s'agit de créer un autre monde, d'arriver au vrai non par le vraisemblable ou l'imitation, mais par l'autonomie de la forme. L'impressionisme est une étape, un renouvellement, une boufée d'air pur. Mais cela ne suffit pas. Il ne suffit pas de peindre la beauté de la nature, la lumière, le plein air et de se laissé guider par ses sensations: tout artiste est dépositaire d'une vision du monde, donc d'une architecture.

Cézanne is often his own most persuasive advocate:

Pour l'artiste, voir c'est concevoir, et concevoir c'est composer. L'art est une religion. Son but est l'élévation de la pensée. Peindre d'après nature ce n'est pas copier l'objectif, c'est réaliser des sensations. Tout se résume en ceci: avoir des sensations et lire la nature. Travailler sans souci de personne et devenir fort, tel est le but de l'artiste, le reste ne vaut même pas le mot de Cambronne.

[For the artist, to see is to conceive, and to conceive is to compose. Art is a religion. It's aim is to elevate thought. To paint after nature is not to copy what you see, it is to give concrete form to sensation. It all comes down to this: experience sensations and read nature. To work without worrying about what people think and to become strong, that is the aim of the artist, the rest isn't worth s**t.]

Can art be a religion? Instinctively one senses the presence of a false god. However the final proof of the pudding must surely be in the eating. Does the contemplation of Cézanne's work induce in us a sense of the numinous? Are we called to some higher part of ourselves? It's unlikely, in all honesty, although you'd need to spend a lot of time in front of the originals before being able to pass a definitive judgement. The poise, harmony and stillness of some of the Sainte-Victoires testify to a hard-won artistic insight. Not so much a religion, perhaps, as a way to a certain understanding and self knowledge for the artist. In this sense too, Cézanne is a precursor of the modern. The work is of considerable interest to the artist, but increasingly the artist speaks a personal language in which it becomes virtually impossible to engage in a dialogue with the public. We find ourselves in a solipsistic hell, listening only to the sound of our own thoughts. HELP! IS THERE ANYBODY THERE?

2008-04-06T13:53:00.000-07:00

It's ridiculously unfair, but "A Year in Provence" (HB) somehow put me off the South of France. The fear of being taken for a Peter Mayle groupie became an almost insuperable barrier to revisiting a magnificent area which we had explored only briefly years previously. [I can't help thinking that objective self-examination would reveal countless such childish inhibitions which cramp a natural way of being - perhaps, dear reader, we should set up a self-help group, Hangups Anonymous or something!] Probably I am most embarrassed at my own inner Peter Mayle: the would-be ironic connoisseur of good living smugly mining other cultures for colour and anecdote, and successfully selling it on to a gullible public. Less susceptible to such invented inhibitions, Carol has always been straight-forwardly intrigued by the fact that places we visit to satisfy curiosity are home to people whose whole lives are lived out there. We come and we go away, but their life carries on as before. That instinctive humility towards the other is the antithesis of the Maylist approach which reduces people and places to raw material for a book - or a blog.

Aix by night

All to say that I allowed myself to be persuaded to travel down to Aix-en-Provence for the Easter weekend. From the Gare de Lyon in Paris to Aix's TGV station takes no more than three hours, so it's really not very far. We booked ourselves into a hotel for three nights, which gave us two full days and an afternoon and a morning to take in the area. We'd had visions of shirt-sleeved sauntering in perfect spring sunshine. Nothing of the sort. It was perishingly cold. Blowing off the snows of the Massif Central, the Mistral funnels down the Rhône valley and gives an object lesson in wind-chill. So we spent our time in the South of France all wrapped up in coats and scarves. Our first afternoon we devoted to acquainting ourselves with the town, wandering from fountained square to fountained square, braving the elements to take coffee on the terrasse coûte que coûte, trying to get lost among the dinky streets, investigating the dinky shops, soaking up the inimitable Frenchness of the scene. I adjusted my ear to the rhythms and cadences of midi French. French is the Latin language adopted by the Germanic Franks, but as spoken in the south its Latin-ness is far more apparent. And it's not a question of the sound alone. It also has something to do with a whole attitude to language. In the north, the assumption is that language is primarily a means of communication, a pragmatic tool which enables you to explain your requirements and get things done. In the south it is more a means of decoration, something which invests the irreducible practicalities of life with elegance and charm. The ostensibly workaday topics of conversation are no more than pretexts for a pleasant passing of the time, in agreeable mutual acknowledgement of each other's presence in the world. Of course, this can lead to a divorce between language and "reality", which in turn can give rise to accusations of double-dealing and hypocrisy. Which reminds me of a story. As a race, the Celts tend to share this same love of language for its own sake. It seems that a famous Irishman, on returning to Ireland after many years' exile, was asked what he had missed most. "I think the hypocrisy" came the reply!

The next morning after a leisurely breakfast we set off in the direction of the Lubéron. There is a significant incidence of les plus beaux villages de France in the area and our ambition was to to tick off as many as we could in the time available. Probably quite a bad plan, but anything more elaborate or reflected would have taken up a lot more time than we had. Succumbing to our weakness for ecclesiastical ruins, we headed off in the direction of the Abbey of Silvacane, only stopping off in Rognes to make a few purchases for our picnic - a crusty fresh baguette, a couple of slices of delicious jambon aux herbes, a bottle of water and some fruit, in other words the simple rudiments of heaven! The sing-song voices and the elaborate formules de politesses made each transaction a secret joy, as when, on my first ever school-trip to France, I was amazed at the fact that the Whitmarsh French I had learned using the same brainless method as for the study of Latin revealed itself to be a valid and even indispensable means of communication between actual living people! Arriving at the abbey, we got embroiled in an intense discussion with the car park attendant. It being nearly half-past-twelve, he was off for his lunch and didn't recommend actually leaving the car in the unattended car-park as there had been break-ins and you never know these days. Also, the staff of the Abbey ticket office would also be off for their lunch, but not until one o'clock, which meant that we could, if we wanted, have a quick look round the Abbey, although most people took about an hour, but if we did anyway, it would be better to drive down the little lane and park nearer the converted outhouse which served as ticket-office and bookshop. This wasn't normally allowed but, while he was away they didn't usually mind. Anyway, if there was a problem, he knew them and would be able to iron out any difficulties. We replied that we would in fact be quite happy to go for a walk and return to visit the Abbey afterwards. Would it be easier to park in the village? In actual fact we had a walk book, perhaps he could show us where to start? Well, there was a marked trail, but it didn't start here, but somewhere else, but anyway it was a circular route so you could go round the other way, although (looks at book) it might be easier to follow the order of the text. I see, they mark the start from the cemetery and then up through the Forêt de la Roque d'Anthéon. Yes, it's nice up there, but that wasn't actually the walk I had in mind. The one I was thinking about starts over there (points vaguely in the opposite direction from the village) and ends up in an acoustically indecipherable place. There seemed no way in which this conversation could ever be brought to a conclusion. The fact was, he was bored and in need of the indispensable Latin stimulus of conversation. However, after seemingly interminable tergiversation, we concluded that it would be easiest to start from where we were. Royally waiving the fee, our cicerone insisted on our parking down the little lane and so we finally set out. Five minutes later we were lost by the Canal de Marseilles. Not so much what we would call a canal as an aqueduct. Drinking water for the big city? It was marked on the map as owned by E.D.F., the French electrical company. Cooling water for a power plant perhaps? What had once been rights of way were now blocked off, perhaps for security reasons. Anyway, we retraced our steps, praying not to bump into the attendant, and, finally making it into the forest, sat down at the first available picnic spot to tuck into our Gallic ambrosia.

The marked trail took us on a charming two-hour wander in the woods, largely through a scrubby tangle of oak and pine, with the occasional olive grove. It never ceases to amaze me how different different types of forest can be. Here the oaks were twisted, gnarled, low-to-the-ground, the pines, pins maritimes, rugged, coarse-barked, sun-beaten. The soil is different, the smells are different, the light is different, the feel is different. We gradually became permeated by this world of new impressions. Out of the wind, the sun began to warm us, and we slung our overcoats across the top of my little pack. The absence of appropriate, modern gortex-style hiking paraphernalia gave our walk a sort of innocent bohemian feel. Abandoning all notions of "efficiency" and "achievement", we could simply enjoy being together and being alive.

Cloisters at Silvacane

Back at the abbey, we bought our tickets and went in. Silvacane is a collection of 12th century Cistercian buildings with the sober and austere beauty typical of that order's architecture. It is as though the Cistercians strove deliberately to distance themselves from the sculptural extravagance which so marks Romanesque architecture in general and which so touches us today with its profound sense of the sacred and yet its deep comprehension of the human. The Cistercians sought to return to the strict adherence to the Benedictine rule, even exceeding it in austerity. Did they wrongly neglect the human? I learned recently that St. Bernard, who did so much to spread the order throughout Christendom, was foremost among church leaders in preaching the Albigensian crusade. The ruthless sectarian cleansing of the Cathars remains a dark blot on the conscience of history. It would seem that it is but a short step from self-righteous austerity to appalling crimes against humanity. Apparently a Cathar community survived in what is modern-day Bosnia. During the Ottoman period they converted to Islam. What a nightmarish irony that the descendants of the Cathars should again become the victims of "ethnic" cleansing in Srebrenice-style massacres, in a modern-day re-enactment of Montségur!

View of Gordes

We motored on, past the village of Lourmarin, up and over the dramatic Lubéron massif and onward towards Gordes in the heart of the Vaucluse. Driving along the country roads of France is one of the simple, yet truly civilized pleasures of life. Cyril Connolly listed not being able to drive in France among the greatest deprivations of wartime austerity. The "swish, swish, swish" as the car drives along a lane of poplars was for him the very essence of life itself. Difficult not to agree. Gordes, "village perché", is irresistibly spectacular, but an impossible tourist magnet. Despite the chilling ferocity of the Mistral, the traffic police were out, guiding people to a vast parking area at the top end of the village. Blown back down to the central square, we rapidly took shelter in what revealed itself to be the world's chicest and probably most expensive tea room. Trendy colours, designer wrought-iron furniture, original art-work on the walls. Affecting a tired familiarity with this category of establishment, I quickly rang the bank to check my overdraft facility before ordering coffee and pancakes. Settling the bill with an air of casual insouciance, I thought to avail myself of the facilities, just to get my money's worth really. I promptly succeeded in locking myself in the loo! Maintaining "cool" when stuck in the lavatory is an interesting modern challenge. A rising crescendo of concerned voices could be heard outside the door. They finally got hold of a handyman who was able to open the cubicle and set me free. It occured to me that I should be striding through the crowd of onlookers dispensing purses of gold ducats by way of largesse. In the end I just kept focussed on not falling over! Driving back down from the village, we spotted a number of "bories" - dry-stone, beehive constructions ingeniously raised without the use of mortar or other binding material. I remembered seeing similar erections in the West of Ireland - the Gallerus Oratory on the Dingle peninsula, for example, or the "clochans" of the monks on Skellig Michael. The purpose of the "bories" remains a mystery. Were they permanent settlements or temporary shelters? Comparisons with Ireland tempt me to imagine them to be anchorites' cells. I was overcome by a schoolboy urge to try to build one of my own in the back garden. Something to keep me occupied (and out of the way) during my retirement perhaps!

Next, on to Rousillon, the dramatic red village coloured, and set in its landscape of, ochre. Parking anywhere even remotely convenient was totally out of the question. We ended up driving into the village in the sanguine hope that the gods would smile and someone would pull out just as we arrived. No such luck. Tremulously we squeezed the car through the steep narrow streets, miraculously finding a way out the other end. I normally don't feel I've "done" a place unless I've at least had a cup of coffee in it. On this occasion, however, by mutual agreement we deemed it to have been ticked off and continued on our way. We headed down past Apt, then, in the slanting afternoon sun, back through the the looming limestone escarpments of the Montagne du Lubéron. We past a signpost to Buoux, but it was getting late and we didn't have time to explore that rock-climbers' paradise. Striking across country, we just managed to take in Ansouis and its splendid fortress bathed in the luscious evening light before finally heading back to Aix for a well-deserved meal and rest.

Among the Calanques

The next morning we headed down to the coast. I'd first come across the Calanques in my readings of the great alpinist, Gaston Rébuffat. His "Neige et Roc" was one of my teenage mountaineering inspirations. It contained fabulous photographs, mostly of Rébuffat himself demonstrating some aspect or other of climbing technique. With his lithe, wiry figure, his trade-mark guide's jumper and his shock of dark hair, his every pose was a study in self-conscious elegance and style, sending out the subliminal message that you, mere mortal, would never be in the same league! A native of Marseilles, Rébuffat cut his climbing teeth in the Calanques. I'd sort of imagined them a bit like the sea-cliffs at Swanage, only bigger and warmer. They were certainly a whole lot bigger! In fact, they are an entire range, a "massif" in their own right, streching some 20 kilometres between Marseilles and Cassis. The term "calanques" refers properly to the steep sided valleys where the streams run out into narrow sea inlets in a chaos of limestone pinnacles and cliffs. We opted to visit the Calanque d'En-Vau, which was reputed to be the most spectacular of all.

We parked at the Col de la Gardiole. Stepping out onto the Karst-like limestone plateau, the Mistral chilled us to the bone. It was in full overcoat order that he headed down through the Forêt domaniale de la Gardiole, enjoying sweeping views across the Baie de Cassis to the cliffs of Cap Canaille. As we descended further, we found ourselves sheltered from the wind. In warming sun we continued on down through an enchanted world of beetling crags and soaring towers, tastefully set off by the increasingly abundant plant life. Rare tropical species thrive in this microclimate; uncommon trees abound - holm oak, pubescent or downy oak, flowering ash, Judas tree, Aleppo pine. Arriving at the the water's edge, we crept in as close to the rocks as possible to have our lunch out of the wind. The pebble beach was lapped by the blue Mediterranean. I thought of taking a dip, but quickly thought better of it. It was perishing! Nearby, climbers were working their way up a route. I was touched by a pang of envy. The Calanques are a wonderful place to climb. Truly what the Germans call a Klettergarten - a climbing garden. But how foolish to be envious. Just being where we were was its own reward

The sea at Cassis

After our exertions in the Calanques, we thought ourselves deserving of a cup of coffee and a moment or two of la dolcefarniente. With this self-indulgent end in view, we proceeded to Cassis. Cassis is everybody's preconceived notion of the South of France. A sunlit small town by the Mediterranean, its houses and shutters combining to form a delightful harmony in pastel. We lolled studiously as we sipped coffee at the waterfront terrasse, took a stroll about the town and the little port and hasarded a quick visit to the windy beach to admire the breaking rollers. Cassis has a "holiday" atmoshere, which, though difficult to describe, is instantly recognisable by the smile it brings to the face.

It was time to start back. We headed cross-country to take in St-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume. A sarcophagus in the crypt of the Basilique supposedly contains the remains of Mary Magdalen. They must have felt that so precious a relic required special protection. The church is a bulky gothic pile like some vast medieval fall-out bunker! Was it constructed to keep people out, or, conceivably, to contain the unique vibrations emitted by the saint who some maintain was Jesus' common-law wife?

From there we drove west towards Aix. In an orgy of pinks, oranges and reds, we followed the dramatic flank of the Montagne Sainte-Victoire into the setting sun. It became clear how Cézanne could have devoted so much of his life to seeking to decipher the mystery of the mountain in its various moods. Not even the wildest of the Fauves could have captured the extravagance of colour that we experienced that evening. We could almost begin to understand what Rilke wrote in the Duino Elegies:

...das Schöne ist nichts als des Schrecklichen Anfang, den wir noch gerade ertragen..

[...the beautiful is nothing other than the beginning of the terrible that we are just able to stand...]

Sunset by Montagne Sainte-Victoire

2008-03-20T04:22:00.000-07:00

It was one of those books which was so "talked about", so hyped, that, out of perverse principle, I made a point of ignoring it. Further to that, I had heard the author sounding off on some television programme and he had come across as a pompous and opinionated twerp. I am talking, of course, of Richard Dawkins and his best-selling "The God Delusion". I had previously come across (but not actually read - a Pierre Bayard HB) his earlier work "The Selfish Gene". I am in no sense a militant anti-geneticist, but my response was that this was another "just" argument: human life is "just" this, the meaning of existence is "just" that; my own feeling is that, whichever way you look at it, the fact of being alive at all is deeply mysterious and certainly never "just" anything. Reductionism is basically a way for the reductionists to think they're in control of things. My position was that of an anti-reductionist agnostic, who, among other things, thought that life was probably too short to be spending too much of it reading Richard Dawkins books.

Then Carol picked up "The God Delusion" at a station bookstall - just something to pass the journey - but, my curiosity getting the better of me, I had soon purloined it and was ploughing my way through it. It's a good read. A combination of heated invective and ruthless argument makes it a real page-turner. When you finish, however, you do breathe an inner sigh of relief as you realise that you have been listening to a man shouting at the top of his voice for 420 pages! It is this tone of intolerant insistence that betrays him. The core of his atheistic argument is really a sort of schoolboy "prove it!" - the onus is on believers to prove the existence of God, not on atheists to disprove it. Well, in that case, why get so hot under the collar about it? What point is there in trying to out-argue delusional thinkers who will anyway always be able to trump any merely rational argument by playing the faith card. Dawkins stamps and fumes like a scientific Rumplestiltskin at the injustice of it all, where an attitude of amused but patient tolerance might be more dignified and - ultimately - more convincing.

Dawkins' basic argument is that life on earth does not require any sort of supernatural intervention either to initiate or maintain it. It's really just a question of orders of magnitude. Given the infinite vastness of the universe, it was statistically probable that conditions permitting the beginnings of life would crop up somewhere. Once life gets started, natural selection gets to work. Over inconceivably long periods of geological time genetic mutations develop by exploiting their competitive advantage until finally we arrive at the acme of evolutionary creation, homo sapiens, and the acme of homo sapiens, Richard Dawkins (only kidding)! Dawkins' follow-up argument is that religion's track-record is catastrophically poor. Mankind would be far better off without the physical and psychological horrors inflicted on it in the name of religion. Human happiness requires, therefore, that we jettison delusional thinking and stand freely on our own two feet - a sort of dressed-up version of John Lennon's "Imagine".

Without sounding like some red-neck creationist nutter, there's no easy way around the evolution argument. Pursuing my inquiries, I came across a copy of "Evolution in Action" by Julian Huxley. Written in 1953, it seeks to explain some of the basic notions of evolution to the general reader. The author's calm, measured prose was a welcome antidote to Dawkins' hectic diatribe. His interpretation of evolutionary theory avoids the reductionist pitfall. He argues that evolution from single-celled creatures to man represents an undeniable progress. Man, with his unique capacities, represents a whole new evolutionary stage, a conscious stage:

In the light of evolutionary biology man can now see himself as the sole agent of further evolutionary advance on this planet, and one of the few possible instruments of progress in the universe at large.

What a tremendous responsibility! And what can we do to assume this responsibility? I turned to Julian's brother, Aldous Huxley and the introduction to his "Perennial Philosophy":

...man's final end [is] in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being...

And if the whole purpose of thousands of millions of years of evolution were the creation of beings with the potential to consciously realize Ultimate Reality? Thousands of millions of years would be as the blink of an eye in the eternal present in which all of time is encompassed. Evolution might then be seen as integral to the Cosmic Purpose of the spiritualisation of matter. What are the preconditions for us performing our evolutionary duty? Aldous Huxley again:

The Perennial Philosophy is primarily concerned with the one, divine Reality substantial to the manifold world of things and lives and minds. But the nature of this one reality is such that it cannot be directly and immediately apprehended except by those who have chosen to fulfil certain conditions, making themselves loving, pure in heart, and poor in spirit.

Richard Dawkins' bumptiousness is the opposite of any such selfless humility, and yet he cannot hide his respect for Albert Einstein's awe at the workings of Nature and the Universe. He quotes him as saying:

What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of humility. This is a genuine religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism.

Like so many arguments, the God debate is a debate about definitions. What do you mean by mysticism? What do you mean by God? What do you mean by supernatural? What do you mean by religion? There is only ever one reality, but our level of comprehension of it depends on our inner state. The final word is for Aldous Huxley:

Knowledge is a function of being. When there is a change in the being of the knower, there is a corresponding change in the nature and amount of knowing.

2008-03-02T08:08:00.001-08:00

Without Phil we had no car. Nigel unhesitatingly called up his son Tony in Edinburgh and, sure enough, early next morning he was screeching to a halt outside Phil's in yet another vehicule from Nigel's seemingly endless collection of fabulousy clapped-out bangers. This particular model had at some stage in its history been a Volkswagen Passat, but now had more in common with something left over from a demolition derby. The rear seats had been removed to accomodate a sort of mobile kennel for Ben and Tilly - Nigel's black labrador and Tony's fox terrier (sort of). Nigel and I piled joyously into this chaos, together with the day's special guest star, Bothy, Phil's sister's young border collie. Phil laconically warned us of the need to keep him on a lead near sheep. So off we set in a state of wheeled insanity, heading out of Callander up along the Keltie Water through clinging mist and the wooded Brackland Glen. We parked near Braeleny farm. Although we were still in mist, we could sense the sun behind it and set off optimistically towards Stùc a 'Chroin, our objective for the day. I had Bothy on the lead, or rather he me. Utterly indifferent to my vain attempts at dressage, he effectively pulled me along behind him. Border collies are notoriously inexhaustible, but this particular dog, like some child high on E-numbers, was maniacally hyper-active and hopelessly attention-deficient. By heaving violently on the lead and ordering "heel" in what I supposed to be a masterful tone, I could get him to walk beside me for about a second, max. It was going to be a long day.

Continuing up the track, we met with our first obstacle. The bridge marked on the map as crossing the main burn at the point where the Allt Breac-nic flows into it was non-existent, swept away in some previous spate no doubt. There was nothing else for it. We would have to strike overland and follow the tributary upstream until we could find a fording point. Not wishing to be dragged nose-first through the bog and seeing no sheep in the immediate vicinity, I let Bothy off his lead. It was like firing the bolt from a cross-bow. He shot off and disappeared wildly over the edge of the steep bluff leading down to the burn. I was distinctly worried. Admittedly he was only a dog, but I did not relish the prospect of explaining to Phil, or still worse, his sister, that I'd somehow managed to lose their favourite pet. As it was, although still in view, he was right out in the middle of the deepest and fastest-flowing part of the Keltie Water, emitting the most unearthly howling yelp. Clearly out of his depth and being swept along in the eddying brown water, it looked as though he might be in serious difficulty. I called him desperately, my voice betraying anxiety despite attempts at an authoritative tone. I needn't have bothered. Next thing, he was scrambling over the stones, shaking the water off his coat and racing about in a madcap play-chase with Ben and Tilly. We found a spot where we could boulder-hop across the burn and continued on up to the reservoir formed by the damming of the Allt a' Chroin. The scene at the dam was a veritable Scottish Shangri-La. We were now basking in morning sunshine, with only shreds of residual mist punctuating the mountain idyll. All about us was the Gleann a' Chroin cirque: to the north Stùc a' Chroin itself, Meall Odhar to the east, with Beinn Each and Beinn Bhreac to the west and south-west. We lingered for a while before relunctantly moving on to tackling the real work of the day.

We climbed up from the reservoir to the croft at Arivurichardich. Looking back down, we spotted a movement in the glassy surface of the water, which we fancied might be the ducking and resurfacing of an otter. From there, the path led us diagonally up the hillside, then up a steepish section to Tiol nan Tarbh, where we sat down to enjoy a first instalment of lunch. Although the climbing had been hot work, the February air cooled us quickly and we were not too proud to don fleeces and anoraks. Continuing on our way, we wandered up the easy-angled Aonach Gaineamhach to the steeper final slopes before the summit of Stùc a' Chroin. At the cairn I interrupted the meditations of a lone climber who had reached the top a bit before us. We got to talking. He was a plumber and heating engineer from Glasgow who had the freedom to organize his work in a way that enabled him to get to the hills away from the weekends. We looked north-east across to Ben Vorlich. "On a Sunday they'd be like wasps over there!" He pronounced the word with a proper open 'a', which somehow conveyed far greater contempt than the tame, bloodless 'wosp'! Nigel and Tony joined us at the summit. Gazing to the south, we surveyed the entirety of the Lowlands of Scotland covered in cloud. A classic temperature inversion meant that we were lifted like demi-gods into a magical sunlit realm far above the dreary, workaday world and its grey fog-bound cares. We felt exultant, exalted, privileged to be able to experience a moment of rare wonder soaring above the ordinary plane of quotidian hebetude.

Sheltering from the wind on the northern slopes, we had another sandwich and contemplated the hills spread out before us. Ben More and Stobinian were prominent and Ben Nevis just visible in the distance. We had toyed with the idea of making our way down the rocky northeast ridge to the Bealach an Dubh Choirein and on to Ben Vorlich. But the way home would have involved negotiating some fairly intimidating peat-hags. So we turned to the west with the intention of making the complete round of the hills above Gleann a' Chroin. So far we had been engaged in classic guide-book stuff. Now we were headed off into the intoxicating domain of pointless mountaineering. No Munros and, despite Nigel's contrived calculations, probably no Corbetts either. Climbing, in other words, which had no purpose outside itself. Clambering over otherwise neglected lumps for no reason other than the sheer hell of it! Up and down, through and around heathery banks and rocky outcrops, the dogs racing about us and ahead of us, squabbling and playing. Up and down, up and down - Creag Chroisg, Bealach Glas, Bealach nan Cabar, a steep pull onto Beinn Each, down again to the Bealach Coire nan Saighead, then finally along the long, open ridge to Sgiath a' Dobhrain. In failing light we headed steeply down to the Breac-nic burn. As day turned into night, Nigel interrupted our downward plunge: "Listen, you can hear the silence." There was a sound of a distant waterfall, but it served only to emphasize the profound hush of the world drawing breath. We skipped across the burn and opted to head straight across the moss to the road. Because of the presence of sheep I had Bothy back on a lead, fortunately by now a choker lead which Tony had somehow conjured up out of nowhere. However, this proved to be only a partial restraint and I was very nearly dragged into streams and bogs which the dog cleared effortlessly, leaving me trailing awkwardly behind. Finally we made it to terra firma and marched on down the long track, our way lit by the moon and the stars.

What is happiness? Perhaps best not to inquire too insistently for fear of frightening it away, but it surely has something to do with that sense of the abundance of life, within and without, which we experienced that day climbing Stuc a' Chroin.

2008-02-17T15:32:00.000-08:00

Travelling up to Scotland in February, I nurtured the secret hope of sneaking away to the hills and enjoying authentic Scottish winter conditions. I was out of luck. Mild weather had melted much of the snow on the tops and what was left in the gullies was hopelessly soggy. "If only you'd been up a couple of weeks ago!" I felt like murder. "Never mind. We'll go for a walk", I suggested with exaggerated cheerfulness. Phil and I left Callander early and met Nigel and Roger at Tyndrum about half-past-eight. The cloud was low with intermittent drizzle. Central gully on Ben Lui, our original objective, was clearly off. Nigel, speaking in his capacity as an "outed" Munroist, came in with a strong pitch for Béinn Achaladair. He pronounced it Achaladare, by analogy, presumably, with "Where Eagles Dare". Despite local guru Phil's delicate promptings of Achàllader, Nigel persisted unperturbed with his sassenach pronounciation. Oh God, the humiliation!

We parked the cars by the wildly romantic ruined tower at Achallader farm, got geared up and set off, following a helpful sign indicating "To the Hill"! Ten yards further on we stopped to get our bearings. There was a map-board which recommended the path by the Water of Tulla, while stating unequivocally that it was forbidden to walk on the railway-line. Phil, familiar as he was with the area, confirmed that the waterside track was a particularly agreeable and pleasant saunter. Nigel would have none of it. The railway was shorter, the railway it had to be. He cut short the last murmurings of debate by accusing me of betraying my anti-authoritarian principles. We caved in, plodded up to the top of the embankment and scrambled down onto the track. Is it deliberate? Perhaps not, but the fact remains that railways sleepers are cunningly placed at a distance from each other such as to make simple walking a near-excruciating experience. It gives some idea of what it must be like to be a Chinese woman with bound feet. Walking on the ballast was equally uneven and laborious. At times it was possible to follow a slight path alongside the track, but this required awkward lurches up mini-embankments, upsetting both to equilibrium and equanimity. Still, at least it had stopped raining. We blundered on towards the constantly receding vanishing point until we met with the path crossing over the track and leading up into Crannach wood. The path wound its way in and out of heather hillocks and scots pines, largely following the railway track, but infinitely more pleasant. There is something very special about these remnants of the Caledonian forest which, it is claimed, once covered the whole of the Scottish Highlands. There are those that argue that it should be encouraged to grow back. Phil disagreed. "It would take away their uniqueness". Possibly, but there's still an awful lot of Scotland which is just bare hills!

Reaching the end of the wood, we headed south-east and started up the long steady pull to the top of the first summit of Beinn a Chreachan. There was just sufficient hint of sunshine above the cloud-cover to give some limited grounds for optimism, but, for the time being at least, we pushed unrelentingly up the slope through enveloping mist. Phil and I somehow got separated from Nigel and Roger, but there was little real cause for concern and, sure enough, we bumped into them again as we converged on the gradually narrowing ridge. More unimaginative plodding finally brought us to the first top at 894 meters. Still in the mist, we sat down and got out our sandwiches. Having each prepared our own, they revealed themselves to be a motley collection. This generated an ill-informed, but nevertheless wide-ranging discussion of the relative merits of various food groups. Roger seemed somehow to have acquired an encyclopaedic knowledge of the subject. The near boundless, yet hopelessly cryptic information on the packaging of my own "Freerange Egg and Cress", looted from the previous day's train hamper, provided a surprisingly rich point of departure. Having first exhausted the much-vexed question as to whether the "freerange" qualified the "cress" as well as the "egg", we then drifted onto the subject of quick as against slow release sugars. Roger trumped my sandwich with his very own oatmeal and honey elaboration which, he claimed with unrebuttable confidence, matched all relevant release criteria. Routed, I suggested we press on quickly before my blood-glucose was exhausted. We headed south towards top 961 and then, in a more south-westerly direction, towards the highest top at 1081. The last part leading up to the summit narrowed to quite an impressive snow ridge. With a sugar issue to prove, I found myself in the lead, and without an ice-axe or even a Leki stick to steady me, I suddenly became very conscious of the mountain falling away steeply to both right and left. It would have taken quite some falling off, but I have never been indifferent to exposure. We did not linger long on the top but continued on round in the direction of Beinn Achaladair proper. We were very pleased with ourselves when our mist-navigation brought us out exactly onto the intermediate Meall Buidhe at 978. We carried on easily to point 813. Our progress was slowed by the steeper climb to the mountain's first top at 1036, but after a short rest, we followed the ridge to the slightly higher summit proper and swept on from there. We had been in mist throughout but had enjoyed our own freedom of movement and that intimate feeling for the mountain which mist-walking evokes.

It was Nigel who spotted it first. As we arrived at the third, southernmost top, there was a sudden beam of sunshine coming out of the west. "Look, Glories!" he called out. And turning, we saw our shadows projected onto the mist, with each of us seeing the head of his own shadow, and his own shadow alone, framed by a halo of refracted light. It was an amazing, if unrealistically flattering sight. A portent of some immanent Pentecostal gift perhaps? But we were not worthy and the effect passed. Still, a full Brocken Spectre with Glory, was a miraculous though unsought reward for a day spent prosaically ploughing through cloud. As the visibility improved, we hurried down the mountain in order to be able to return to the car before nightfall. Down Coire Daingean and then on down Coire Achaladair, from where, looking back, we could see up into the impressive northern corrie of Beinn an Dothaidh and its enticing snow gullies. Some other time, perhaps. In fact, returning the following weekend in better conditions, Phil was able to climb the West Gully with his fiancée, our daughter, Victoria.

Roger had to leave us that evening to drive back to Lancashire. Phil had some work of his own to do, so Nigel and I would be left to our own devices for the following day.

2008-02-03T13:58:00.000-08:00

-A Philosophy of Boredom, Lars Svendsen

Jari passed this on to me with an arch and knowing look! The title is more than a little "nudge-nudge", but I suppose even philosophers need a marketing strategy. To be perfectly honest, I don't really like "philosophy". As currently practised it seems to have precious little to do with any genuine love of wisdom. Philosophical argument always sounds to me like a too-clever 6th-former trying to talk away the embarrassing reality of the elephant in the room. The elephant is the tremendous, terrifying, naked reality of existence itself, which is per se beyond the comprehension of mere discursive reasoning. To protect his sense of self-importance from the horrendous implications of the infinite void of space, our schoolboy sage arms himself with vocabulary. Like a horror-movie spider he spins a web of mind-numbing verbal complexity around the elephant until it is entirely immobilised in a silken shroud, utterly at the mercy of our arachnoid-penseur. The life-blood is then slowly but steadily sucked out of reality. The dried and shrunken carcass is then fought over by an army of fellow-spiders, who, unable to extract any real nourishment from the dessicated remains, nevertheless continue spinning in order to enhance their personal status through attempting to weave the most pointlessly ingenious web.

Having said that, "A Philosophy of Boredom" remains just about readable, although there are enough "ontologicals", "epistemologicals" and "hermeneutics" to cause me to release the safety-catch on my critical pistol. Thanks to Pierre Bayard (see previous entry), I have lost all shame and turned directly to the end to see what conclusion the philosopher was able to reach:

Boredom has to be accepted as an unavoidable fact, as life's own gravity. This is no grand solution, for the problem of boredom has none.

Well, thanks. If I were Jari, I'd ask for my money back!

The book is divided into four parts. The first part, "The Problem of Boredom", basically says that there are two sorts of boredom: 1. Temporary boredom, when something interesting will come along later, and 2. Existential boredom, which is essentially a sort of depression resulting from a failure of meaning. This second type is increasingly prevalent in the modern world. Part Two is "Stories of Boredom", historical examples of boredom. An interesting section here on Andy Warhol who affected to embrace meaninglessness and boredom as an aesthetic stance. Part Four, "The Ethics of Boredom", basically says that that's the way it is and we have to learn to put up with it. Part Three, "The Phenomenology of Boredom", is the most interesting. Svendsen explores (and high-handedly rejects) Heidegger's contention that (I summarize) existential boredom is a precursor of a transcendental epiphany. I can go through boredom and come out the other side, in other words. A bit like Kirkegaard's "Earthly hope must be killed; only then can we be saved by true hope" (see earlier entry). If I were truly able to experience and acknowledge my inner emptiness, I would have in me a space which could be filled with a sense of reality. As it is, I am never sufficiently bored with the dreams and pretensions which bolster my ordinary imagination of myself to be able to leave a space for something greater, something unknown. But the elephant is always in the room. Do we dare embrace it?

2008-01-30T13:53:00.000-08:00

-How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read, Pierre Bayard

Thank you Pierre Bayard! A huge weight has been lifted off my shoulders. I have been freed from any number of unspoken complexes and secret fears. There may be a slight residual anxiety at the fact that I failed to read the original French version, but since I got the English translation as a stocking-filler I think I'm in the clear! Actually, the author's stylised irony works very well in English. Seemingly frivolous and lightweight, his rapier thrusts cut to the quick.

His basic point is almost embarrassingly obvious. Given the almost impossible number of books in existence, however many I read, I will barely be able even to scratch the surface. Books I have read thoroughly quickly return to the oblivion from which they emerged, books I claim to have read I only ever half-read, many books I just skimmed, and there are any number of books I have heard about and that's about all. Bayard maintains that, for other than specialists, this has to be the case for absolutely everyone, so there is no reason for cultural shame. He goes so far as to suggest that superficiality is indispensable to an overview, the sense of what fits in where, which is probably more important and useful than a detailed reading of what must necessarily be an extremely limited number of texts. He makes the ruthless point that most books are in fact "screen" books, upon which we project our own attitudes and prejudices. He goes so far as to suggest that books are far more "plastic" than we realise, their contents bending and stretching under the influence of discussion and debate.

...what is essential is to speak about ourselves and not about books, or to speak about ourselves by way of books (which is the only way, in all probability, to speak well about them)...

There is an amusing list of abbreviations at the beginning of the text, including:

UB book unknown to me

SB book I have skimmed

HB book I have heard about

FB book I have forgotten

And one particularly liberating paragraph:

To speak without shame about books we haven't read, we would thus do well to free ourselves of the oppressive image of cultural literacy without gaps, as transmitted and imposed by family and school, for we can strive toward this image for a lifetime without ever managing to coincide with it. Truth destined for others is less important than truthfulness to ourselves, something attainable only by those who free themselves from the obligation to seem cultivated, which tyrannizes us from within and prevents us from being ourselves.

2008-01-23T13:23:00.000-08:00

-Kafka, a Collection of Critical Essays. Edited by Ronald Gray (Twentieth Century Views)

While studying Dutch at Leuven University, I followed a lecture series in Film and Literature - mostly about what happens when you turn a book into a film. The highlight of the course was a case study of Orson Welles' film of Kafka's "The Trial". The film is a stunning work in its own right, but what was particularly rewarding was the opportunity of a serious reading of the original book. I had read "Metamorphosis" in my youth, remembering only the oddly prosaic portrayal of a man turned into a giant beetle. I knew and had shamelessly made use of the expression "Kafkaesque". I knew "The Trial" was a tale of non-specific guilt and uncomprehending and incomprehensible bureaucracy. What I now experienced in returning to the original was the strangely compelling atmosphere of the tale, the totally convincing way in which the author's rigorous and concrete prose depicts a situation of nightmarish absurdity. All one's instincts grope for a key to what one feels must surely be an analogy, a parable for the modern age, but plausible-seeming symbols ultimately remain contradictory and impenetrable. And yet "The Trial" is pregnant with the sense of a sincere and earnest pursuit of meaning perpetually frustrated. Above all it has, for want of a better expression, the ring of truth.

That a definitive interpretation of "The Trial" should remain tantalizingly beyond any intellectual grasp is surely the author's deliberate intention, but, coming across this collection of essays on Kafka in a second-hand bookshop, I delved straight into it in the search for clues to the Sphynxian riddle. To summarize brutally, there are three basic schools of thought about Kafka's writings. 1. He is a profound religious thinker. 2. He is seeking to give expression to the existential dilemma of modern man, alienated in the new mass society. 3. He is an oversensitive loser with a neurotic compunction to depict, in detail, his own state of loserdom. Of course, he is all of these things at once! I had read Nicholas Murray's admittedly rather workaday biography. [The crit-quotes on the back of the book remain priceless examples of how to damn with faint praise. My personal favourite is "Sound, compact, refreshingly judicious" which must be a euphemism for "Dull, short, hopelessly timid"!] Throughout his life, Kafka struggled with outer circumstance and inner demons - his scrupulous demands of his own writing, his recurring bouts of tuberculosis, his sense of personal isolation, his work as a lawyer for a workers' insurance society, his difficult relationship with his father, his complex attitude to his own Jewish background, his situation as a member of the German-speaking minority in Prague, his tormented relationship with his fiancée, his need to create the conditions in which he could write. It would be impossible for these influences on and resultants of his own temperament not to find their way into his writings. The state of society in general and the specific conditions in post First World War Czechoslovakia, as part of Kafka's experience, are inevitably reflected in his work. But the real point is ultimately a simple one, it seems to me. All of this material is processed through the artistic sensibility in order to be reshaped into the work. And the work is about a quest for order and meaning - in Kafka's case, apparently a fruitless one. But a fruitless quest is still a quest and any sincere quest, I would maintain, demands in and of itself a religious attitude. I mean, no attitude of quest is required to conclude that life is utterly devoid of meaning and purpose! And it may be that, in the final analysis, Kafka is less pessimistic than he appears on the surface. In an essay entitled "Hope and the Absurd in the Work of Franz Kafka", Albert Camus quotes Kirkegaard (much admired by Kafka): "Earthly hope must be killed; only then can we be saved by true hope."

2008-01-21T13:14:00.000-08:00

Not so much a New Year's Resolution, more a self-defence mechanism. I'm going to have to write up books as I read them if I'm to avoid a repeat of the (still unfinished) marathon of the December entry! So, here goes...

- Oliver James, "Affluenza"

If this book is a bestseller, which is what is claimed on the cover, then it's pretty ironic, given that it is an out and out attack on the consumer society. A perfect illustration really of just how there is no escape from the amorphous but ubiquitous Shopping Monster which sucks all human hopes and aspirations into its omnivorous maw. It looks like Oliver James is getting rich telling us how money doesn't make us happy! If, however, we can will ourselves to suspend our awareness of this awkward fact, "Affluenza" tells an interesting story. Oliver James argues, convincingly, that there is a straight correlation between the superficial values induced by what he calls in his shorthand "Selfish Capitalism" and emotional distress expressed in depression, anxiety, substance abuse, and personality disorders. His research is based on individual interviews carried out in New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, Shanghai, Moscow, Copenhagen and New York, which throw light on the extent to which the different nations are afflicted by what he terms the "Affluenza Virus" - the placing of a high value on money, possessions, appearances (physical and social) and fame. Inevitably we arrive at the foregone conclusion: the more you got the virus, the unhappier you are. His method is scarcely scientific, extrapolating as it does from the specific to the general. But his results, however obvious, cannot be stated too often or too emphatically. He implies that the creation of artificial "needs" is all a sort of corporate conspiracy aimed at inculcating in us the false values which are indispensable to sustaining demand for superfluous goods and services. Well, like obviously, duh! If you're selling, you need to convince the customer to buy. Beyond certain basic essentials, most purchases are made in order to satisfy psychological needs of greater or lesser sophistication. James proposes ways in which we can insulate ourselves from the virus. Basically they boil down to asking yourself whether you really need something before you buy it. Could be quite a puritan programme! Frivolous consumption is surely innocent enough within limits. Sound advice includes not buying more house than you can easily afford, so as not to become a mortgage slave. All right in theory, but, for many, even the most modest accomodation will turn them into mortgage slaves. His most important recommendation is that we revalue the status of motherhood. It is absurd that the most important role in all our lives is now somehow faintly embarrassing. Oh, is that all you do?

I enjoyed this book, cheering inwardly as I read it. However, to my mind, his conclusions don't go far enough. The problem, as I see it, is that we all of us have an inner emptiness which needs to be filled. In the apparent absence of any alternative, failing to comprehend our real need, we fill that emptiness with the random bric-à-brac of the consumer society. If that inner space were nourished by a profound sense of the meaning and pupose of our lives, we could be as rich as Croesus and still remain inwardly untouched.

2008-01-09T16:07:00.000-08:00

New Year's Resolutions. As the years pass, the cloak of good intentions with which we cover our inadequacies grows increasingly threadbare. I must be more organised, I must lose weight, I must get fit, I must finish off any number of half-started projects, I must stop being sarcastic, I must eradicate self-pity, I must avoid ill-temper etc. etc. All pretty pathetic really! In the final analysis it amounts to a sort of "I must be good", like lines at Infant School. In fact, I have always suspected that there is something deeply pretentious about trying to pull oneself up by one's own moral bootstrings. It implies that I am, potentially at least, a far better person than I actually am, that my sometimes base or passive behaviour is some sort of temporary aberration from a Platonic idea which is my norm. It is certain that the world is full of people who are utterly convinced of the fact that they in some way actually embody moral perfection. That way lies the burning of heretics.

And yet the desire to improve in some way is something that is deeply rooted in us all. We are all inhabited, I am sure, by a sense that we are somehow incomplete beings. In a way it is this constant state of "want" which is the clockwork motor which keeps us moving. And not just in the moral dimension. In the society of relative plenty in which we live today, it is the force which powers the consumer society. Once I get the house/car/I-pod/ exotic holiday etc. etc., then I shall be complete. It's a joke, but a joke to weep bitter tears over.

What to do? It seems to me that the first thing we need to try is to stop trying to do something about it. Any effort based on a fiction of how I would like to be, of how I would like to appear to myself and others, is part of the problem, not part of the solution. All the great teachings in the history of humanity point in the same direction. The only escape from the hamster-wheel scrabble of life in the ordinary dimension of time is through the cultivation of Being. Since we are alive in every second, this state is not so far away. Try it. I dare you. Just drop "doing" for a moment and BE - HERE - NOW. Sense the relaxation of the body. Don't permit automatic thoughts to distract. Don't comment or explain. Dare not to know. Dare to be.

If I have a resolution, it is this: I shall remember. I shall remember to turn from automatic "doing" and satisfy my real want. I shall remember to be.

2007-12-14T09:00:00.000-08:00

ASBO's Book of the Year - no more than a pretext, really, for trying to get some order and structure into my reading of 2007. Regular visitors to this site will be aware of my contradictory views about reading in general. Through our education, reading has become elevated to the status of a sort of "higher good". At school, our English teacher handed us a list (lost unfortunately) of 100 titles. It wasn't headed "100 Books to Read Before you Die (or Detention)", but it might as well have been. Certainly, he had written a paragraph at the end of the list, which exhorted us to read the proposed canon "in a year, in a decade, in a lifetime", the implication being that, reading "great literature" was more than just a pleasurable pastime, it was an intrinsically edifying and ennobling experience. This sort of attitude was much in line with the general ethos of the school. Muscular Rugby, muscular Christianity, muscular Literature. The school motto was "Labor Omnia Vincit". As a precocious but undisciplined student, that salutory maxim became a focus for all I affected to despise. My friend and I used to ostentatiously read J.T. Edson cowboy novelettes as a sort of protest. That showed 'em! Yet there is something irresistible about lists. They imply that, with sufficient application, the totality of what is worth knowing can be known; that, put shortly, we can have control over our lives. However, despite my schoolboy susceptibility to lists, my more profound conviction is that our lives are not really "ours" at all, and that any "control" we pretend to is largely a self-comforting illusion and that the creation of a real order involves an attitude of humility, an inner recognition of one's participation in and dependence on the infinite mystery of "Life". Any true work of literature, any true work of art must somehow point us in that direction. If it does not, it is mere entertainment. The Royal Theater in Copenhagen has its motto carved in the masonry of its neo-classical portico: "Ej Blot til Lyst". Not just for amusement, or, perhaps better, not just for amusement.

The 2007 list is made up of some 20-odd titles. Some I read thoroughly, some I read skimpily, some I read laboriously slowly, some I raced through in a few hours. While I remember having read them, it is shocking to realise how much of the actual content now escapes me. What I shall try to do is reconstruct, if not the take-away message, at least the take-away impression left by each book, then draw up a short list and finally announce the official winner of the ASBO book prize for 2007! In no particular order, then:

- Ruth Padel, "52 Ways of Looking at a Poem"

As a mere lyricist, I have a bit of a complex about real poetry. My own occassional efforts only rarely achieve that sense of concentrated intensity which is the true stuff of poetry. Reading more poetry is surely the best way of learning to write it better, but we are straightaway confronted with two basic problems: 1. Finding the time. 2. Wrestling with the difficulty. Above all else, Ruth Padel's book gives us the inspiration and courage to have a go. 52 poems then, one for each week of the year, each with a bit of background on the poet and a critical analysis of the poem. There is an excellent introduction which champions "complexity" as: 1. a reflection of the self-referential media-oriented world we inhabit, and 2. an expression of poetry's need to constantly renew itself. She is unflinching in her defence of the motto: "Don't explain, show" and an enthusiastic supporter of what she views as poetry's new democratic face, with a strong showing from women poets, Irish-origin poets, ethnic minority poets, working-class poets etc. Strangely, this leads to many of the poems seeming a bit "samey" in style and/or a bit self-consciously tendentious in content. Inevitably, yesterday's latest thing becomes today's unreflected conformism. She is best in her lucid advocacy of the role of poetry:

One of poetry's jobs is to transform real life imaginatively so we understand our lives new-paintedly, more fully. To make familiar things look strange so you see them new.

I would go still further. Poetry should be an instrument, an objective emotional science capable of recreating our essential state of wonder at being alive at all. That sudden realisation of existential "strangeness" is a step towards a higher consciousness, the quest for which is the witting or unwitting goal of all human life.

- Golo Mann, "Deutsche Geschichte des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts"

I can safely say that this is one of the best books I have ever read. This book does what so many history books fail to do - it lets you understand why things were the way they were and why they are the way they are. It is a work of empathy, I would say even of compassion. His mastery of the facts is beyond question, the pithy elegance of his style a sheer joy to read, but it is above all his psychological insight that is so breathtakingly perceptive. Above all he has an intuitive grasp of the mysterious reciprocal interplay between people's inner attitudes, the outer manifestations of those attitudes and the way in which these, in their turn, influence the inner psyche. Of course, it is a long book and in German, so it's been heavy going at times and there are chapters I've glossed over or have yet to finish, but I'll get there. Just writing it up has re-inspired me! I shan't attempt to summarise but rather offer up a couple of the most stunning passages which I marked in pencil as I read:

Of self-deluding German indignation at their "betrayal" in 1918 he writes:

Aber die Wahrheit war kompliziert und unerfreulich. Warum sich um der Wahrheit willen viel Kopfzerbrechen machen?

Of the troubled beginnings of the Weimar Republic:

Es sind nur seltene Augenblicke des Rausches, der Krise, der allgemeinen Wirrsal, in denen politische Leidenschaft den einzelnen packt, die öffentliche Sache ihm wichtiger dünkt als die private. So war es im August 1914 gewesen, so vielleicht im November 1918. So ist es nicht unter normalen Bedingungen. Da spürt der Bürger die Politik so wenig, wie der gesunde Mensch seinen eigenen Körper spürt; er weiss, dass er ihn hat, aber kümmert sich nicht darum, die Lebensfunktionen vollziehen sich von alleine. Zu einem normalen Dasein zurückzukehren, zu arbeiten und zu essen, das war jetzt der Wunsch der grössten Zahl der Deutschen.

[There's a superb chapter on Marx which I can't quote here. Get it and read it!]

Despite this being a largely a chronicle of wickedness and foolishness, Golo Mann leaves you with something very positive - the sense that, through the exercise of a truly discerning intelligence, it should be possible for us to live more human lives.

- Ferzanna Riley, "Unbroken Spirit"

I picked this up pretty much by accident in Waterstone's one day. I say by accident, but there is more than a slight suspicion that I am merely the dupe of some clever marketing ploy. Be that as it may, it made absolutely gripping reading - I got through the whole thing pretty much in one go. Subtitled "How a young Muslim refused to be enslaved by her culture", it is the author's tale of how she survived the most incredible brutality on the part of her own family to become an independent wife and mother - on her own terms. Bullied twice over at school for being Pakistani and clever, she was systematically brutalised, both physically and psychologically by her own father. As she grew older, it became clear that the only two means of escape were marriage or education. As no acceptable suitors could be found, she contrived to leave her home in Lancashire in order to study in London. All went well to start with, but her parents, shocked at reports of her loose living, caught up with her and spirited her away to Pakistan, where she was held captive by her mother's family. Her mother had turned violently against her, furious at the loss of izzat (honour) implicit in having an unmarried, immoral daughter. She was threatened with being sold into slavery and only rescued when a cousin came to her rescue. Both her and her sister had come very close to becoming the victims of "honour killings". Back in England, she finally married an Englishman and has her own family.

"Unbroken Spirit" ruthlessly identifies the cruelties and hypocrisies of islamic "tradition" and izzat psychosis. Still, I rather suspect that Ferzanna Riley would have been a "difficult" daughter for any parents, its just that for a Pakistani family that in itself is a source of almost intolerable social embarrassment. Tradition required of the parents that they "break" their daughter while it simultaneously provided them with a moral alibi for their inhuman actions. Arguments generally have more to them than meet the eye - the actual issue is of far less real importance than the business of winning. Ferzanna's tale is of a clash of wills careening wildly out of control.

One of the things I particularly enjoyed about this book was the author's choice of epigraphs at the beginning of each chapter. A few examples:

Collective fear stimulates herd instinct and tends to produce ferocity towards those who are not regarded as members of the herd. Bertrand Russel

Too often children get answers to remember rather than problems to solve. Roger Lewin

Martyrdom has always been a proof of the intensity, never the correctness of a belief. Arthur Schnitzler

Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim. George Santayana

I was particularly gripped by one argument Ferzanna has with her mother. Forced to wear "modest" Pakistani dress, she protests at the hypocrisy of western women being required to wear the veil in countries like Saudi Arabia, without their being any reciprocal requirement not to wear it in the west. Her mother found this perfectly normal, given the fact that Islam is the only true religion. It reminded me of a recent conversation with a Moroccan taxi driver. He was intelligent, informed and spoke very good English. We discussed the ills of the world in the usual manner. Our conversation strayed onto the subject of religion. By way of a contribution to inter-faith reconciliation, I offered the view that, deep down, Judaism, Christianity and Islam are really one and the same. Well, he answered, it's the same God, but the others lead up to Islam. He was no bigot, no fanatic, he was voicing what, for him, was a self-evident truth. I really must research that whole "Seal of the Prophets" business in detail. The notion that your team has some sort of exclusivity deal with the Almighty is the most terrible thing. God spare us from those who are convinced He is on their side.

- Melanie Phillips, " Londonistan"

I bought this at the same time as "Unbroken Spirit" and I can now remember why. Carol had sent me to get her another copy of an Alison Weir novel she'd left on the train and I swept up the other titles as part of a 3 for 2 deal. I can't really be left to go shopping on my own! Certainly adult supervision would have prevented my acquiring "Londonistan". The cover consists of a montage of mugshots of convicted islamist terrorists, but with the images manipulated as in a hall of mirrors to create an exaggeratedly sinister impression. Oops -I've already given away the story! Melanie Phillips, it turns out, is a columnist for the Daily Mail and is much exercised by the British authorities' craven refusal to crack down hard on radicalism and extremism. The book is subtitled "How Britain is creating a terror state within" and argues with considerable insistence that too little is being done to stem the tide of religious terrorism. She may have a point, but her aggressive tone of carping criticism and self-righteous indignation is tiresome and off-putting.

The problem of radicalisation is a very real one, but an issue which has to be approached with incredible sensitivity. "Cracking down" can very quickly become counter-productive. If we assume, as we must, that it is not possible to expel all Muslims from Britain, every possible effort must be made to win the hearts and minds of the muslim community, a community which already feels itself victimised for reasons of race if not of religion. The likelihood is that the indignation generated by a generalised sweep on potential islamist sympathisers (presumably a constituency largely made up of disaffected youths wanting to be important) would create ten times as many new recruits. So the security services have a watching brief. Observing, monitoring, infiltrating, compiling intelligence, stepping in only to apprehend actual perpetrators. Meanwhile British society must reach out to Islam, recognising it for what it is, one of the great religions of mankind, encouraging the "right" sort of Islam, showing sympathy and understanding, not out of hypocritical self interest, but out of genuine respect. Ms.Phillips mocks Prince Charles for his openness towards Islam, as though it somehow constituted a betrayal of Christianity. Not at all. Radical Islam will only ever be defeated by enlightened Islam. Every possible effort must be made to encourage this new Islamic enlightenment. I saw a programme on TV about Cat Stevens, now Yusuf Islam, who having converted to Islam is now a leading light in the muslim community. If ever Britain is to become part of the Ummah, it will be through the efforts and more especially the example of figures like him, most certainly not through the indiscriminate bombing of civilians. This is the message which has to be got across to the Muslim community, not Ms.Phillips all-too-easy demonisation of fanatics. People who are prepared to blow themselves up for a cause are not insincere, they're just tragically mistaken. Also, I suspect that most of these radical movements are ultimately trends - like hippies or the hula-hoop. Gradually, gradually they slip out of fashion. They fade away when deprived of the light of attention.

- Robert Fisk, "The Great War for Civilisation"

Another impulse purchase, this time in Borders in Glasgow if I remember correctly. This work too has a subtitle: "The Conquest of the Middle East". It's a pretty chunky tome, coming in at some 1,300 pages, and I have to confess straight off that I haven't read all of them. It is a record of what a highly respected journalist has seen and reported since 1976 throughout the wider Middle East, in Afghanistan, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Algeria, Turkey and beyond. At the same time it is a record of his journalistc adventures, which include, not least, a series of interviews with Osama bin Laden. It is an interesting, informative, an exciting book even, but horribly tainted by that ghastly Besserwisser tone at which journalists all too often excell. The unspoken implication is that the world is populated entirely by rogues and fools, except, of course for Robert Fisk, who has a corner on perspicacity and moral indignation. Having said that, it would be difficult not to feel a sense of moral outrage at his desperate chronicle of greed, cruelty, foolishness, vanity, cynicism and self-seeking. Fisk seems to conclude by saying that his testimony can, of itself, serve to extricate us from the infernal spiral of fear, hatred and violence. He writes:

I think in the end we have to accept that our tragedy lies always in our past, that we have to live with our ancestors' folly and suffer for it, just as they, in their turn, suffered, and as we, through our vanity and arrogance, ensure the pain and suffering of our own children. How to correct history, that's the thing.

I don't know whether you can "correct" history. I certainly can't see how "The Great War for Civilisation" can correct anything. It is too detailed, yet at the same time too superficial. It lacks a proper esprit de synthèse. It's quite possible that by opening old wounds Robert Fisk is making matters worse. However, I do believe that it is possible to repair the past by bringing a new kind of intelligence to the present, a combination of an honest acknowledgement of what has happened and a true spirit of forgiveness. This higher intelligence, this higher emotion requires a special courage - an opening of heart and mind to something greater than the ordinary egotistical thought- and emotion-processes. I don't think it is too much to say that if a sufficient number of people were able to attain this higher state there could be peace on earth.

- Clive James, "Cultural Amnesia"

I enjoyed this book tremendously, so, although I've already written about it in a previous diary entry, I'd like to add a few more words here. Basically it's a sort of à la recherche of all the books Clive James has read and all the cultural experiences he's had. It could be dry, but Clive James wears his pretension lightly and is, above all, very funny. He is also inspiring. Just reading "Cultural Amnesia" caused my reading list to lengthen considerably. Clive James is clever and entertaining. That he is sometimes too clever and on occasion flip is the price we willingly pay to have him among us. The hero of the book is Egon Friedell, who is clearly the author as he would like to see himself:

Egon Friedell looms large in this book. Active from the early years of the twentieth century until the Nazis turned out the lights in Austria, the Viennese prodigy knew everything, or talked as if he did. There was nothing he could not talk about brilliantly. Some thought him a charlatan, but no charlatan is ever remembered for making clever remarks: only for trying to make them. One of the most famous cabaret artists of his day, Friedell in the 1920's combined his career in show business with a monkish dedication to his library, in which he produced a book of his own that must count as one of the strangest and most wonderful of the twentieth century: Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit (The Cultural History of the Modern Age). A fabulous effort of style and concentration, a prestidigitator's trick box packed with epigrammatic summaries of all the creativity in every field of art and science since the Renaissance, a prose epic raised to the level of poetry, Friedell's magic show of a book remains a fantastic demonstration of the mind at serious play.

I like the notion of serious play. It is almost a definition of culture - the antithesis of priggish "seriousness" which is often little more than self-important play-acting.

- Thomas Mann, "Bekentnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull"

Influenced by Clive James' enthusiastic recommendation, I took "Felix Krull" down from the shelf where it had waited since a much earlier failed attempt. Thomas Mann described his own work as leichtsinnig, but it is hardly light. Above all else it is an exercise in writing technique, all literary pirouettes and linguistic pyrotechnics. The ironic effect is achieved through setting the narcissistic insousiance of the hero in a ponderous décor of German Schachtelsätze - self-conscious subordinate clauses built into self-conscious subordinate clauses. Hard going, until you get the rhythm of the language, but once you do, you fall under its spell. Which is what I think the book is really all about - the "magical", but not entirely honest, capacity of words to charm. It is Thomas Mann's literary confession of the unspoken secret that writers are confidence tricksters and words covers for the truth.

Mann died before he was able to finish the novel, but it is difficult to see how he could have ended it without breaking the spell. A happy ending for Krull would be morally untenable; for him to get his come-uppance insufferably moralistic. What we are left with is the ambivalence which is implicit in the hero's name. The reader is directly confronted with a dilemma. Are we not willing moral dupes, drawn as we are to Felix, the happy wordsmith, while conspiring to ignore the cruel (Krull) deception in which he is engaged? The whole duplicitous exercise is pregnant with questions. Do writers make the world a happier place? If they do, is it a good thing, if words are ultimately lies? The frivolity of "Felix Krull" becomes its deeper message. One could almost describe it as serious play.

- Sven Möller Kristensen, "Digtning og Livsyn"

Poking around the second-hand bookshops of Copenhagen during our week there in the summer, I succumbed to temptation and emerged from the dusty shelves with a handfull of books which included this one. I'd used it as a reference (well, a crib really) in writing essays in my final year at university. At the time, I gave a silent undertaking to return to Digtning og Livsyn* with less exploitative intent. So, here I am, 34 years later, engaged in an act of ritual atonement. [* The easy, but rather anaemic translation would be "Poetry and Philosophy". Perhaps "Literature and Life-View", though awkward, has more red corpuscles.]

Digtning og Livsyn is a example of how, at its best, literary criticism is an art form in its own right. Sven Möller Kristensen takes seven works of Danish literature of the 19th and 20th centuries and subjects them to his creative scrutiny. "Criticism" is somehow the wrong word. There is nothing negative about his approach. Everything is intelligence and light. Elucidation in the full sense. I turned first of all to his essay on Johannes V. Jensen's Kongens Fald [The Fall of the King]. It was only right. It was after all the chapter I had made most use of in my undergraduate days. He starts the piece with a bang:

Det er ikke for meget sagt at Johs. V. Jensens roman "Kongens Fald" er den mest brogede, mest sammensatte bog i dansk litteratur.

[It is not too much to say that J.V.J.'s novel "The Fall of the King" is the most richly diverse and intricately complex book in Danish literature.]

Jensen's work, he maintains, is about the constant interplay of Eros and Death. Inexhaustible life and inevitable death. He illustrates this with some lines from his poem Interferens:

Naar Forestillingen om Verdens topmaalte Under mödes med Overbevisningen om alle Tings Endelighed, da lever jeg.

[When the conception of the utter wonder of the world meets with the conviction that all things must pass, then I am alive.]

Kristensen then goes on:

Den fölelse, den tone ligger som et orgelpunkt under romanens mangestemmige kor.

[That feeling, that note sounds like an organ pedal point beneath the novel's polyphonic choir.]

I'd liked "The Fall of the King" before reading Sven Möller Kristensen. What he did was explain to me why I liked it and inspired me to return to the original with new insight. There can be no higher praise for a literary critic. Still, he's left me with a lot of reading and/or re-reading to do!

- Om Hamsun, edited by Poul Knudsen

Danes take great pride in the fact that it was they who "discovered" Knut Hamsun. Ignored in his own Norway, a haggard Hamsun came to Copenhagen clutching a manuscript copy of his now famous novel Sult (Hunger). He presented it to newspaper editor Edvard Brandes, brother of the celebrated critic, Georg Brandes. Intrigued by Hamsun's dilapidated appearance, he agreed to read it. He was so gripped by it, that he promptly published the first chapter in his newspaper.

Om Hamsun (About Hamsun) is an elegant little volume which groups together a number of letters, articles and extracts by or about Hamsun. There is an interesting introduction by the editor, Poul Knudsen, which, apart from telling the story of Hamsun's discovery, also explores his post-war fall from grace as a Nazi sympathiser. A member of the "Quisling" Norwegian Nazi Party, he even met and admired Hitler. It seems that his leanings towards Nazism were dictated by his distaste for the vulgar commercialism of the English-speaking world in general and Britain in particular. He was also an ardent anti-Soviet. He looked to "Blut und Erde" as an antidote to the spreading virus of (dare one say it?) the consumer society, a bulwark of the individual spirit against undifferentiated mass man and a defence against the tyranny of communism. The wrong conclusions for the right reasons? He certainly paid a heavy price for his dotty views - not only in terms of his reputation, but also in cash - he was required to pay a ruinous fine.

In the literary world, however, the reputation of his early work - Hunger, Pan, Mysteries - remains intact. Isaac Bashevis Singer said of him: "The whole modern school of fiction in the twentieth century stems from Hamsun." Introspection, inner monologue, pantheism, the artist as outsider are some of the concepts and techniques which he pioneered. On the subject of his approach to character, he writes:

Fra jeg begyndte tror jeg ikke det findes i hele min Produksjon en Person med en slik hel, retlinjet herskende Evne. De er alle uten saakaldt "Karakter", de er splittet og opstykket, ikke gode og ikke onde, men begge Deler, nuanserte, skiftende i sit Sind og i sine Handlinger.

[From when I started I do not think there is a single person in the whole of my production who possesses one of those complete, clearly delineated dominant qualities. They are all without so-called "Character", they are divided and split, not good and not evil, but both, nuanced and changeable in their psyche and in their actions.]

I am convinced that any impartial self-observation will bear out Hamsun's remarks.

- Hermann Hesse, "Politische Betrachtungen"

Hermann Hesse enjoyed a strange vogue in the late sixties and early seventies. The best clue as to why is probably "Steppenwolf", the band that is, which took their name from Hesse's novel. The book is a confusing, kaleidoscopic investigation into the essential multiplicity of personality (cf. Knut Hamsun!), the suffering which this situation brings with it and the possibility of redemption through the transcending of the personality. The "hero", Harry Haller, is also the Steppenwolf. He is tortured by his conflicting natures. Half man, half beast, half conformist bourgeois, half selfish animal. This untamed nature is the slave of its carnal appetites, but free of social convention. It is doubtless this last part which appealed to the alternative hippie culture. "Born to be Wild" etc. But Hesse really isn't a "let it all hang out" kind of guy. In the final analysis his message is a Buddhist one: in the sincere and impartial contemplation of the impermanence of what we call our "selves" lies the way of universal compassion and freedom from the ego.

To be honest, I have always found Hesse's novels hard going. They have a strange atmosphere. An odd combination of a faux ingénu narrative tone, with bewildering moral conflicts and baffling abstract concepts. But I like him. One has a clear sense of his being on the side of the angels. The message which comes across strongly in his "Politische Betrachtungen", a collection of letters and essays from 1914 to 1961, is as profound as it is simple: if our leaders had the courage to subject their motives and prejudices to that special inner scrutiny, political "problems"would solve themselves. A few examples then:

Wenn ich meine Aufsätze "politisch" nenne, so tue ich dies stets in Anführungszeichen, denn politisch an ihnen ist nichts als die Atmosphäre, in der sie jeweils entstanden. Im übrigen sind sie das Gegenteil von politisch, denn jede dieser Betrachtungen sucht den Leser nicht vor das Welttheater und seine politischen Probleme zu führen, sondern in sein eigenes Inneres, vor sein ganz persönliches Gewissen. Hierin bin ich mit den Politikern aller Richtungen durchaus nicht einig und werde darin stets unbelehrbar bleiben, das ich im Menschen, im einzelnen Menschen und seiner Seele Bezirke anerkenne, wohin politische Antriebe und Prägungen nicht reichen.

Dass Liebe höher sei als Hass, Verständnis höher als Zorn, Friede edler als Krieg, das muss ja eben dieser unselige Weltkrieg uns tiefer einbrennen, als wir es je gefühlt. Wo wäre sonst sein Nutzen?

Der Hass gegen die Juden ist ein verkleidetes Minderwertigkeitsgefühl: dem sehr alten und sehr intelligenten Volk der Juden gegenüber empfinden die weniger klugen Schichten einer andern Rasse Konkurrenzneid und beschämende Unterlegenheit, und je lauter und heftiger dies üble Gefühl sich als Herrentum aufspielt, desto gewisser steckt Furcht und Schwäche dahinter.

In a way, Hesse embodies what for me has gradually become a self-evident truth. Our world will not be saved by commited activism, universal peace will not be achieved through political imposition, however well-intentioned. If, however, a critical mass of people were able to attain what one can only call inner peace, everything could be different. I seem to remember Toynbee saying that contemplation was the ultimate altruistic act.

-Sören Mörch, "Den sidste Danmarkshistorie"

I was flicking through the pages of this in the bookshop, when it received the unsollicited recommendation of a fellow browser. So, after a dignified minute or two, I emerged blinking into the daylight with "The Latest History of Denmark" under my arm. Why the latest? Because, since the notion of the unitary state no longer stands up, the idea of a received national history is outmoded and irrelevant. In our modern, compartmentalised society, relativism is the order of the day. No one ideological party line then, but a series of thoughts and reflections on Danish history from the point of view of the author. 57 Tales of the Fatherland's History is the subtitle. 57 essays taking their point of departure in an aspect of Danish history. I am a fan of the essay. It is a convenient length which allows for poised reflection, without making unreasonable demands on the reader. A sort of ideal conversation in a way. Sören Mörch takes full advantage of the genre with a natural but vigorous prose style. If I have a criticism, it is that it is a bit too "now". History is viewed from the slightly smug vantage point of the present, without that sense of emotional empathy with how people must have felt and thought which alone gives a true sense of the past. Also, it is very Danish. An unfair criticism of a book of Danish history? Possibly, but their could be more made of the broader global or European context, given that he is deliberately seeking to escape the tradition of the national chronicle.

I was particularly interested in a chapter where the author interprets his own personal experience from an historical perspective. As a young man, he trained as a silversmith, spending long hours at the workbench learning how to tap out silver plate with a hammer. But he was at the tail-end of a craft tradition, which, by the time he had finished his apprenticeship, was no longer economically viable. With the development of mass production, the price of skilled labour made the whole sector uncompetitive. However, Mörch had few regrets at the passing of the all-too-fixed and hierarchical values of the old regime. Jumping on the sixties' educational bandwaggon, he was able to retrain as a professional historian. He has no doubts about the progress of society over his lifetime. Only, I can't help a sense of regret at the disappearance the skilled workman/working-class intellectual - a type to which so many of my Danish grandparents' generation conformed. That combination of hard-won humanity and unpretentious curiosity about the world is all too rarely found today: the price of meritocracy, I suppose.

2007-11-23T14:06:00.000-08:00

November is a much maligned month, a Cinderella month relegated to the supposedly dark and miserable back-end of the year. However, once you have made allowances for the shorter days and the odd bit of wind and rain, the season reveals its own indisputable charms. In fact it is often in November that the most spectacular of the autumn colours are to be enjoyed - as though the earth were releasing a final intense breath before retreating into itself to regather its forces for the Spring. Travelling up to Scotland ahead of the family, I had arranged to meet Nigel Lyle and his wife Jane in Edinburgh. The train rattled up through Northumberland and the Borders in brilliant sunshine - was this going to be our lucky Toussaint holiday? I located the Lyles, parked illegally on the Waverly concourse in their used, well-used it must be said, camper-van. I had no foreknowledge of this tastefully decrepit vehicule, but, as yet unaware of its implications, my rucksack and I piled into the cheerful chaos which typically characterises any Lylemobile. Nigel has always eschewed the vulgar convenience of any vehicule of even remotely recent manufacture. An award-winning engineer, he has nothing but contempt for any conveyance which does not require constant string-and-chewing-gum maintenance. We nosed out of Edinburgh to the accompaniment of demonic fan-belt squeal and compensatory gunning of the engine. Lovely day, what's the forecast? Wet and windy. I don't believe you! It's all right, the Eastern Cairngorms are supposed to be OK. But I thought we were going to stay in a comfortable club hut in Roy Bridge? Don't worry, we've got the van. The van was what I was most worried about, but I put any anxieties temporarily to the back of my mind.

Resolving to make the best of the afternoon, we crossed the Forth Road Bridge, drove up past Loch Leven and turned off towards Falkland. From there we headed up to the gap between the two Lomonds, the cleavage, as it were, of the Paps of Fife. We pulled over into the car park and started to get ready for our double assault on these twin peaks. I was already dimly aware of the fact that this seemed to involve an inordinate amount of stashing and restashing of gear - without realising the full implications. Under louring skies we knocked off the two hills. I'd passed them innumerable times en route for my parents' home in Carnoustie. I'd even failed at a half-hearted attempt with my, at the time, young family, due to a combination of mutiny and nightfall. This time, however, we made it and were able to enjoying sweeping views right across the centre of Scotland. Particularly entertaining was the vista to the east, where we could read the details of the life-size coastal map from the Lothians in the south to Angus in the north. With the wind rising and darkness coming on, we quickly returned to the van and headed into the night. The van rattled and whirred its way northward, past Perth, and on to Blairgowrie, where we stopped to take on provisions. I view Tayside as my home beat and there was some talk of maybe staying at my brother's house in Kirriemuir, but we finally opted to head for Braemar and the high Cairngorms. Determined to have a pint, we pulled into the car park of the Spittal of Glenshee. One can but admire the post-modern way in which the decorators of the bar have, presumably ironically, embraced tartan kitsch! Squeezing in among numerous bus parties of O.A.P.s, we polished off our beers and continued on our way, up over the Devil's Elbow and down Glen Clunie.

On the old road, opposite Auchallater, we found somewhere to pull the van over and settle down for the night. One of the problems about owning a camping-van is that one feels inevitably constrained to make use of it. Seeing in me a kindred spirit of many years, Nigel convinced me that there could be no more enticing prospect than a night spent in a cramped and uncomfortable shambles. Where shall I sleep? On the shelf, of course! The "shelf" involved clearing all the gear out of the upper luggage niche, piling it randomly about and positioning a couple of thinly padded boards across the width of the vehicule. I was then required to haul myself up and make myself as comfortable as I could. Nigel looked on with uninhibited Schadenfreude as I found myself with my head jammed down the thin end, unable to turn round. My attempts at advanced contortionism having ended in inevitable frustration, I was forced to climb back down and try to get up again feet first. It was ungainly, undignified and uncomfortable. I was determined to make the best of it and stretched out. Lights out. After two minutes my hip was sore from my own weight forcing it down against the boards. I wriggled and adjusted. The boards creaked violently. I turned again. They creaked some more. Fearing to disturb Nigel and Jane below, I resolved to remain still by sheer willpower. I lay in a state of growing hysteria. Silently snapping, I moved. The boards groaned. By now my oesophagus was smarting from the effects of dinner. Heartburn was interfering with natural breathing. We had eaten one of Nigel's weird concoctions. A sort of rehashed rissotto in which sour apples from his own garden played a significant though non-specific role. All washed down with lashings of some Bulgarian hootch I'd picked up in Blairgowrie, a town with an international reputation for its wine connoisseurship. Suddenly I realised my feet were too hot. I knew I would surely go mad if I didn't remove my socks. At the expense of wracking cramps I got them off. My face was too close to the ceiling. There wasn't enough air! I wrestled with the vent and just about got my nose out into the open. I gulped in cool oxygen and laid back down. My feet felt cold...

And so the night passed. I must have slept fitfully because I remember dreaming of being chained up in a slave-ship. Gradually it got lighter. I poked my head out the vent. Above the dark humps of Sron Dubh and Sron nan Gabhar, the sky was streaked in bands of the intensest pink and turquoise. Could we be in for a fine day? I snoozed a bit longer. Gradually the three of us emerged from our sleeping bags. Wrestling yet again with stashes of gear, we located the galley and rustled up the traditional gourmand breakfast of eggs and bacon and the local speciality, Lorne sausage. By the time we'd got dressed and finished shifting and shunting it was 10 o'clock and the sky had clouded over. Our plan was to head up Glen Callater and across to Loch Muick. Jane kindly volunteered to drive round and pick us up at the other end. It was good to get going. We could have been anywhere in the Eastern Grampians. Seemingly endlessly, undistinguished and indistinguishable heather-clad hills succeeded one another under scudding grey clouds. The accumulated effect, while not dramatic, is soothing and harmonious. The intimate familiarity of these eastern hills is reassuring and comforting, like walking at the side of an old, loyal friend. Nigel and I laughed together. It looked like we were set for a day of pointless mountaineering - my favourite sort. But I had not reckoned on Nigel's secret vice. We had spoken of striking up from Loch Callater, contouring round the southern slopes of Cairn an t-Sagairt Mor and heading down the Allt an Dubh-Loch to admire the cliffs of the Dubh Loch itself, then on down to Loch Muick and home. After all, with the cloud right down, flogging aimlessly through the mist was a less than irresistible prospect.

Leaving the main route which continues up over Jock's Road to Glen Clova, we branched off from Loch Callater, worked our way around the base of Creag an Loch and pushed on up the slopes of Cairn an t-Sagairt Mor. "Might as well climb to the top now we're here." My feelings on the matter were insufficiently strong to warrant my contradicting Nigel's mild-mannered suggestion. Our supplementary exertions were richly rewarded. Near the top of the mountain we started huge coveys of ptarmigan. Neither of us had ever seen so many together. So perfectly camouflaged as to be indistinguishable from the surrounding rocks to within a few feet, they would suddenly lift, soaring and wheeling in perfect formation before realighting at a safe distance from our inconsiderate intrusion. At the summit we took a seat and had a first round of sandwiches. Seeking to orientate ourselves in the mist, I pulled out the map. Casually, Nigel offered his opinion: "Best to head north-east. We can follow the stream down from there." "Er, yeah, OK." Heading down the other side of the hill we came across the wreckage of a fighter aircraft. We went over and took a closer look. Neither of us was sufficiently knowledgable to identify the type. Did the pilot have time to bail out? We feared the worst. He probably hit the mountainside flying too low in claggy weather. Much like the conditions we found ourselves in now. "Now that we're here, we might as well take in Carn an t-Sagairt Beag". I supposed so. We flogged on up. "Actually, from here we can get on to the Stuic and get the view down into Coire Loch nan Eun." Hang on. That would be a part of Lochnagar proper. The terrible truth was beginning to dawn. Nigel was a crypto-Munroist. The reason we had "somehow" wandered up into the wind and the mist was to satisfy his perverse urge to tick off a few lumps that happened to be over 3000 feet above sea-level. The Ordnance Survey maps all measure height in meters, which rather subtracts from the point of the whole exercise. While I have always sought to embrace the essential pointlessness of mountaineering, this utterly contrived purpose was the very antithesis of the sort of purification of motive which I was seeking. It got worse. No sooner had we hit the path around the rim of the corrie, than we veered off it again in order to take in Carn a' Choire Bhoidheach, a scarcely discernible minor outlier. At the "summit", a slight blip in the plateau, there were two cairns a short distance apart. Nigel suffered an agony of ethical doubt deciding which was the highest and thus the authentic top. In fairness, the cairn itself would have been worth the diversion. It was an object of genuine aesthetic delight, like a Henry Moore or something from a Japanese garden. The uppermost stone was perfectly rounded and smooth, accentuating, as Nigel later put it, the gentle curvature of the mountain itself. By now we were committed to the full traverse of Lochnagar. We followed the path more steeply up to Cac Carn Mor and then on to summit tor of Cac Carn Beag, at 1155 meters, the mountain's highest top. The wind was pretty strong by now and we sheltered behind the rocks to eat the rest of our lunch. We had hoped to get the full view of the main Lochnagar crags, but sadly they remained in cloud throughout. And so we headed down. We took the beautifully constructed path down the Glas Allt, past the spectacular waterfall, through the delightful little wood by the Glas-allt Shiel at the western end of Loch Muick. As darkness fell, we followed the track along the northern shore, crossed the river where it flows out of the loch and made for Spittal of Glenmuick where we were greeted by the cheery light of the camper. It had been a good, full-blooded eight hour day out on the hill.

Jane had thoughtfully booked us in to a comfortable bunkhouse in Braemar. I revelled in the depraved decadence of a warm shower and my own little room, my own little bed and my own little bedside light. No five-star hotel could compare! At breakfast the next morning, Nigel scoured the map for a suitable objective. The big mountains to the north were off-limits. We had to be heading homewards that same evening and needed to be off the hill at a reasonable hour. Nigel came up with a subsiduary summit of Carn Cruinn, a determinedly nondescript mountain at the head of Glen Ey. I supposed it was a top he had inexplicably omitted in the course of some previous Munro-bagging outing. We set off in the van for Inverey through idyllically autumnal upper Deeside, with interspersed larch, birch and pine creating a perfect seasonal effect against the backdrop of rugged heather hills and the languid meanders of the river. We parked and set off up the true left bank of the Ey Burn. At one point the course of the stream had carved out a miniature gorge in the schistose rock, creating an almost theme-park effect. We identified a number of perfect pools for swimming. But today was the not the day for it. The wind was blowing strongly out of the south-west. As we turned off the main track and headed for the base of our mountain, we found ourselves pushing into the teeth of a gale. We consoled ourselves with the thought that we would have the wind behind us for the return journey. Arriving at the bottom of our hill, there was little scope for subtle routefinding. A brutal frontal assault was the order of the day. We just carried straight on up. It was a stiff pull at times, as we forced a passage through the traditional thigh-deep vertical heather, but by dint of unimaginative persistence we made it to the summit. At the cairn, we took what shelter we could from the wind and the scotch mist and munched on our sandwiches. It was gloriously pointless! On the way down, sudden rents in the wind-shunted cloud afforded us dramatic, Flying Dutchman views of the nearby hills and the Cairngorms proper to the north. With the wind in our sails, we surged excitedly downhill, then settled into a rhythm as we hit the main track and headed back to the van.

Nigel and I chatted about mutual friends, their successes, their problems, their tragedies even. The question of what constitutes a "successful" life is something that has always intrigued me. That it has nothing to do with wealth and fame seems a point too obvious to be laboured. Since being cynically made redundant by ICI, Nigel has seized the opportunity to make a more independent life for himself as a part-time, one-man property-developer-cum-jobbing-builder and full-time climbing bum. Since he alone can measure his achievement, he is on occasion prone to self-doubt. However, for me, he remains a living testimony to the fact that it is the inner man and not the outward show which counts. I hope in this lifetime to share many more mountain days with him - the more pointless, the better!

2007-10-24T14:17:00.000-07:00

Have you ever tried repeating your own name until the sound of it became utterly strange and mysterious to you? Do you remember the queer sense of separation from self which your own name induced? Visiting England has the same sort of effect on me. Everything so utterly familiar, everything so utterly odd. We were over for the weekend visiting Carol's sister and brother-in-law in the little Sussex town of Lewes. All I knew about Lewes was that every Guy Fawkes night they traditionally burn an effigy of the Pope on a bonfire. Personally, I find such displays of Ye Olde Englishe Bigotrie less than attractive. However, November 5th was not for another month, so we would presumably be spared the worst excesses of Catholic-baiting. [The "rabidness" of Protestantism has always been a matter of enormous curiosity to me. I can't help thinking of it as a sort of mass-psychosis instigated and harnessed for cynical political ends, a kind of 16th century Cultural Revolution. The trouble is that, once the genie is out of the bottle, it does as it wills, and fear and loathing are unleashed upon the world. There will always be always a sizable constituency for a "tabula rasa" policy, which allows people to dress up their negative instincts as the path of whatever "righteousness" is currently in vogue. Smash, burn, destroy - we are creating a New Jerusalem. Lord have Mercy.]
However, modern-day Lewes is innocent enough. In fact, it is deeply and improbably quaint, as though reconstituted exclusively from architectural and social clues gleaned from an Agatha Christie novel. In my estranged psychological state, walking round the town, I felt like an invisible time-traveller witnessing the hypnotised populace unconsciously act out a dream of being English. It was eery, as though a veil had been accidentally drawn aside and I had been granted a momentary glimpse of the horror of sleeping humanity self-satisfiedly playing out a fantasy, while unwittingly serving a cosmic purpose indifferent to either its joys or its sufferings. As for myself, I had no grounds for smugness. Clearly, my own thoughts, emotions and actions were governed in an equally automatic way by hard-wired inner attitudes and fantastical notions about myself. To be a conscious human being requires, it seems to me, an acceptance of the fact that I am not "special", that I too act and think in sleep, that I do not know who or what I am. At that moment a new possibility arises...

We visited Charleston, the little farmhouse which effectively became the country annex of the Bloomsbury set. "Bloomsbury set" - as difficult, almost, to write as to say, without a certain ironic sneer. E.M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, Maynard Keynes, Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell et al- a bunch of well-heeled pansies and neurotics playing at being bohemian. And yet they were at the forefront of an extraordinary changing of the cultural guard, the effects of which continue to mark the world today. They were the avant-garde of a whole movement which rejected the stuffy conventions and rigid formality of the Victorian England in which they had been brought up. That women and homosexuals were over-represented in the group is hardly surprising: they were the ones most obviously oppressed by the prevailing conformity. Their manifesto favoured a freer, happier life, in which intelligent conversation was more greatly admired than material wealth, and artistic sensibility more highly valued than social status. Difficult to argue against, really! Charleston was ultimately marked by tragedy. Vanessa Bell's son, Julian, was killed in the Spanish civil war where he had volunteered to serve as an ambulance driver. Vanessa, it seems, never really got over it. She sank into a state of more or less permanent depression. Her sister, Virginia Woolf, of a similarly melancholic disposition, drowned herself.

Inevitably, Charleston had its own teashop and bookshop attached. Succumbing to temptation, I acquired a copy of "Among the Bohemians - Experiments in Living 1900-1939". The author was Virginia Nicholson, Vanessa Bell's granddaughter. There is a corner of my psyche which has continued to nurture a secret hankering after the bohemian life of the artist. Let the superficial, materialistic values of society go hang! We (it requires a group) will live, love, create, paint, make music, write poetry, live in a commune, explore new ways of living, travel the world, have fantastic parties, drink wine, laugh and be happy, our minds free from the mental slavery which "straight" society seeks to impose! This is the the theory. In practice, an inner instinct has always recoiled from the pretence, affectation, hypocrisy and downright snobbery which so often emanates from Bohemia's self-appointed exponents. Plus ça change...

"Among the Bohemians" is a light read, full of gossipy trivia and insightful background. What emerges very clearly is that pre-social security bohemia was often the real thing. People actually could, and did, starve in freezing garrets. The author's more serious intent is revealed in a series of questions which she lists under each chapter heading, for example:

Paying the Price. Why is poverty so romantic? - Why do artists despise money? - How does one survive while producing something that no one will buy? - What does an artist do who runs out of money? - Does being rich disqualify one from Bohemia? - If being Bohemian means being poor, is the pain worth the gain?

Or New Brooms. Must women give all their time to housework? - How can one cope with housework without modern machinery? - Is an experimental lifestyle compatible with having servants? - What are the advantages of remaining dirty? - Must one have baths? - Can one admit to the existence of lavatories? - Must creativity be sacrificed fro the sake of cleanliness and order? - Does domesticity have any value for the artist?

I sometimes think that the ability to question what it is we do and why we do it is what makes us truly human. What frightens me about today's society is that even our questions have somehow been subsumed into the omnivorous monster of consumerism. If every thing, every idea, every dream can be bought and sold in the market-place, is it actually possible to revolt against the God of Shopping? Does anyone dare, unironically, I mean, to ask who we are and why are here, if not just to shop?

2007-09-06T14:38:00.000-07:00

Where Denmark is warmly and reassuringly familiar, Sweden remains, for me at least, excitingly exotic. Before I studied Swedish and got to know Sweden better, I was unconsciously tainted by the Danes' unreflected prejudices about their neighbour-rival. " Svenskerne, de er bare tysker klaedt ud som mennesker!" [Swedes, they're just Germans disguised as human beings] This was my grandmother's double-swipe condemnation, unhesitatingly expressed despite the fact that her own mother was Swedish! Her views, like those of her whole generation, were influenced by the German occupation and the Swedes too easy accomodation of the Third Reich. Younger generations don't have the same excuse, but the old habits of mind linger on. Probably, the Danish folk-consciousness has never come to terms with Sweden becoming "top nation" in the Baltic in the 17th century. The attitude that persists in today's Denmark is of Sweden as sort of impossibly sensible, quite possibly rather dull elder brother, stolidly amused at the wacky antics of his garrulous but not quite reliable sibling. Swedes see Danes as "sophisticated" and "continental", which, basically, is their over-generous interpretation of Denmark's relatively lax drinking laws!

With these distinctions in mind we crossed the Sound. We were headed for Gotland, Sweden's celebrated holiday isle in the Baltic. On the way we travelled to Smaland to take in the charming wooden town of Eksjö. One of my secret fantasies is to live in a tastefully run-down, Falun-red-painted timber cottage in a lonely forest by a lake, where I will find the quiet of mind to write great works of literature and engage in perceptive correspondence with like-minded writers and intellectuals from around the world. I found just the place in an estate-agent's window. It seemed incredibly cheap - just the job. Needed some work - well, a bit of occupational therapy between poems would be entirely appropriate to the Renaissance man that I shall become. No electricity - not to worry, those old paraffin lamps are so wonderfully romantic. There was the matter of the "Utedass" or outside toilet. An integral part of the authentic rustic experience - in fact I would insist upon one. Carol brought me down to earth with a jarring bump. "Don't be bloody stupid. I know you. You'd be bored out of your mind after five minutes. I couldn't bear it. Anyway, I'm not going anywhere with no TV and proper plumbing! And there's nowhere to shop!!"

My artistic soul severely bruised by this brutal battering, we headed on to Kalmar, a place I had always wanted to visit. It was in this former frontier stronghold on June 17 1397 that the Kalmar Union was signed, establishing a union of the crowns of Denmark, Sweden and Norway. Denmark became the dominant partner of a northern empire which stretched from Finland in the east to Greenland in the west, embracing also Iceland , the Faroes, Orkney and Shetland as also the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein. This explains the apparently eccentric anomaly whereby the huge landmass of Greenland is still held by the Danish crown. Now, that's the book I could be writing in my idyllic sylvan retreat: "The Decline and Fall of the Danish Empire!" The parallells with Gibbon are glaringly apparent. In the same way that Christianity's concern for the individual soul sapped Rome's vital tradition of civic responsibility, so the worm of hedonistic consumerism gnawed away the virile fibre of a once-noble viking race... hmm, we'll see. The Union held for over a hundred years, but the Swedish nobility were never happy at Danish dominance and it broke up when Gustav Vasa became king of a seperate Sweden in 1523. We looked round the castle, spectacularly situated at the water's edge, dominating both sea and land with its authoratitive presence. What is the irresistible attraction of these old stones? Is it not the primitive intuition that time past has in some mysterious way been absorbed into the fabric of these ancient constructions, the sense that, through direct contact with these material remains, we can enter into a subliminal bond with persons now long gone who once lived, moved and had their being in their immediate proximity? I suspect that this sort of magical thinking is far more widespread than we realize or would even care to admit. I am convinced that many of the things we own, for example, are far more personal fetishes than they are objects of value or practical use. Anything we have had about us for any length of time becomes impregnated with our vibration or smell or whatever it is. Thus they become an extension of ourselves, which presumably is why we accumulate so much junk that we cannot bear to part with for "sentimental reasons", the allowed euphemistic expression for the essential, magical link which exists between ourselves and our stuff. When my mother died, her vibration lingered on in her flat for a long time afterwards. In the end my brother and I were happy to clear out the place and sell. A profound instinct within us knows that life must go on. But it is easy to understand how parents who lose a child are tempted to leave the child's bedroom exactly as it was. Not really a "shrine" as is often suggested, but a magical link with the dear departed. I remember once being deeply moved reading in a novel (sorry, can't remember title or author) of a recently bereaved husband putting on his dead wife's favourite dress in order to be closer to her.

The next morning we bussed across Öland and caught the ferry to Gotland. Arriving in Visby we were astonished. We had been prepared to be disappointed. Often the camera-angles of the tourist brochure involve some judicious editing, implying that the very best views are typical, which mostly isn't the case. But in Visby we were confronted with an integral and authentic medieval townscape, where the overall impression was so much more than just the sum of individual buildings or sights. We looked forward to spending a few days in thorough exploration, but meanwhile we had to find our hotel. Picking up our rental car, we headed south out of town. I'd booked into what, on the web-site at least, seemed a charming "pension". A beautiful ex-royal pavillon constructed entirely of wood, painted in traditional yellow with decorated balconies, set in delightful parkland with spectacular sea views. Photos of the accomodation hinted at simple, but tastefully appointed appartments in the finest Scandinavian manner. We arrived and were shown up to our rooms. Our hearts sank. It was a complete dump. It was like a cross between a spartan youth hostel and an old lady's chintz paradise gone to seed. Any gesture in the direction of "improvement" had been ill-conceived and counter-productive. Naff sub-Ikea furniture blocked passages and windows. To hide worn floor-boards, wood imitation lino had been inexpertly laid. Worst of all, everything stank of carbolic soap. [In all honesty, my reference to carbolic soap is no more than a literary convention - a portmanteau expression which seeks to convey that all-pervasive odour of antiseptic puritanism which destroyed the very last vestiges of what we might just have permitted ourselves to have construed as bohemian charm.] For a few minutes we struggled inwardly in an attempt to find it OK. Then we abandoned the struggle. The girls smuggled our cases out to the car, while I went to face the management. I addressed the rather stuck-up ladies in my eccentric Swedish. They obviously had some royalty-snobbery thing going on. They were wearing funny little crown badges in their lapels. I refused to be impressed. " We've changed our plans. We won't be staying here." Too quickly perhaps, I offered, in fairness, to pay for one night. They accepted this arrangement rather too readily, I thought. Clearly, they had a certain familiarity with walk-outs, some, doubtless, less soft-hearted than myself. So far, so good, but that still left us needing a place for the night - well, four nights actually. With utter predictability we ended up in the swankiest joint in Visby, in a beautiful and beautifully comfortable room, mini-bar et al. To hell with the expense! We were on holiday!

And what a great holiday! Gotland is a very "holidayish" place and Visby is definitely the best place to be based. The town itself is a feast for the eye, comparable to other preserved medieval towns like Bruges or Rothenburg ob der Tauber, but with the added charm of being on the sea.
It became fabulously rich in the early middle-ages as a result of its monopoly of the fur-trade with Russia. Conspicuous consumption as a vehicle for growth! At its apogee it rivalled London and Paris. But the German Hansa towns gradually mananged to muscle their way to a share of the action and Visby began its gradual decline. This was only accelerated by the Danish invasion of Gotland in 1361. Under the Danish king Valdemar Atterdag, the invading force perpetrated a notorious massacre of armed peasants beneath the walls of Visby and then proceeded to exact tribute of the town's rich burghers. But what finally did for Visby, apparently, was the silting up of its port. "Silting" might be too generous a term. It seems that Visby had a relatively advanced sewage system which, however, led out into the port. The centuries' build-up of faecal deposits ultimately made it impossible for the the newer deep-draughted vessels to anchor at the dock-side. Visby's commercial fate was sealed. But in that failure the seeds of a new birth lay dormant. Visby is now Sweden's greatest tourist draw after Stockholm! But it is a short season. By mid-August we are already in what is known as "sensommaren", the late summer, when, for most Swedes, the holidays are at an end. At no stage was our pleasure marred by anything like thronging crowds. We wandered happily about the town and around the walls, taking in the poised charm of the place. We also had a good look around the island, visiting innumerable medieval churches, each testifying to the wealth of the peasantry, prospering happily out of supplying Visby. We cycled along the coast and swam from perfect sandy beaches under the high, wide Baltic sky. Truly a holiday.

And finally on to Stockholm. Is Stockholm Europe's most beautiful capital city? Certainly its situation is incomparable. The interplay of land and water, buildings and boats is quite unique. Gamla Stan, the Old Town, is the jewel in the crown. Our favourite hotel is located there. We reacted rather huffily when, upon our arrival, the receptionist ushered us to the annex, but as it turned out, the annex was a perfect bijou apartment just off Stortorget, the main square in the heart of the old town. The area is extravagantly picturesque. The Sunday we left, I got up early to take in the streets of Gamla Stan in the quiet of the morning. I walked alone on the square, down past the Tyska Kyrkan, on through the maze of narrow streets, past tastefully decrepit buildings in dark green, siena red and yellow ochre. What rendered it all so magical, however, was the light, the, I would almost say, intelligent Baltic light, that subtle, delicate, angled illumination, which, without brashness, without the slightest hint of force, allows the object of vision, however modest, a wall, say, or a door, to reveal itself as it truly is - a part of God's mysterious but ordered creation. In such moments it is not too much to say that true beauty is food for the soul.

2007-08-21T13:46:00.000-07:00

I am old enough to predate the era of mass tourism. When I was young, living in Ealing, the only holiday we ever had was visiting family. Scotland at Easter and Denmark in the summer. Our palates unjaded by exotic school trips or weekends in European capitals, these destinations were to us infinitely magical. My grandparents' modest apartment in a nondescript suburb of Copenhagen was for us a cornucopia of delight, each and every object in it invested with that special aura only childhood can bestow.* Later, I came to Copenhagen as a student, learned to speak Danish properly, got a job, freed myself, to a degree at least, from the mental shackles of English sociology. I met my wife. The city will always have a unique and special attraction. Most years we try and spend at least a few days there. This time, not having been for a while, we thought we would stay for a whole week.

[*It's always seemed to me that this is the basic point behind Proust's "A la Recherche du Temps Perdu". Most of our so-called memories have a rather abstract quality, like a dry filing-cabinet of experience. Some memories, however, particularly those of childhood, retain a vivid immediacy as though somehow exempt from the ordinary dictates of time. My own suspicion is that the intensity of memory is a function of the directness of perception. Childhood memories are unsullied by any autobiographical preconceptions on the part of the perceiver. Hence their greater vividness. A special effort of imagination can allow you to somehow reconstitute these moments. Proust devoted a literary lifetime to that effort. But, to be honest, I never got into Proust, despite a number of goes. I know he has his devotees. It's precisely that degree of devotion that I find uncomfortable. I once heard someone actually say: "I don't know how I could get through the day if it weren't for Proust." Makes him sound like a heroin fix! Could it be that Proust is the opium of the effete literati? A sensibility supplement for the emotionally retarded? Apart from my allergic reaction to Proustians, I have a couple of rather flat-footed pragmatic reservations to the whole exercise of "A la recherche". 1. If we assume that time devoted to the reconstitution of vivid-memory experiences is time well spent, wouldn't we be better off working on our own memories rather than spending whatever time it takes reading Proust's copious tomes? 2. If, as seems to be implied, vivid immediacy of experience is the gateway to another dimension of time, wouldn't we (and Proust) be better served seeking to free ourselves from the veil of subjectivity which blinds us to the true vision of the world here and now? Where was Proust when he delved into his memory? Almost by definition he was not in the present moment.]

Romantically (it's certainly not cheaper), we took the night-train to Hamburg, where we changed for Copenhagen. The train clanked onto the ferry at Puttgarden. The crossing of water is one of the emblematic experiences of the Danish holiday. How to convey the unreasoned excitement of the short boat journey? Scrambling up to the lounge decks, force-feeding oneself the first wienerbröd*, pushing open the heavy doors to step out on to the soldaek (sun deck), sensing the invigorating breeze, feeling the movement of the sea, looking to the vast northern sky, turning one's face to the sun in that typically Danish movement of the head!

[* Known to most of the rest of the world as "Danish Pastry", this fabulous delicacy was by all accounts introduced to Denmark by an Austrian pastry-chef, hence the name. Much copied, nothing, however, comes even remotely close to the real thing. What is usually passed off as a "Danish" is a less than pale imitation which, in a just world, would be in breach of an international trades description act. The Swedes, just a bridge away across the Sound, produce a product which they shamelessly describe as wienerbröd: it's more like a two-day old Belgian "huit", but not as good.]

Across the aisle from us on the train were two Danish girls returning from a holiday in the south of France. From overhearing their conversation we gathered they were in their final year at "Gymnasium" which would make them about 18-19 years old. Sweet, intelligent, good-humoured, healthily good-looking, confident, unassumingly practical, they somehow embodied Denmark at its best. My heart melted. If only time could stand still and they could stay that way for ever. I was reminded of a line of verse from the Danish poet, Sophus Claussen:

Og det var paa Skandeborg Station

Der blev mine Tanker forflöjne

Jeg saa en nydelig ung Person

Med nöddebrune Öjne

[At Skandeborg station my thoughts were carried away, I saw a lovely young person with nut-brown eyes]

Entitled "Rejseminder" (travel memories), the poem bemoans the loss of youth and its enthusiasms in the stifling conformity of bourgeois middle age. Sophus Claussen may have a point! In any event, it is my impression that time is particularly cruel to Danish girls. It is as if they become prematurely petrified by the diminutive certainties of Danish life. I love Denmark, but Denmark sometimes irritates me as only those you love are able to irritate. And the most irritating feature of Denmark is in many ways its most admirable quality: that unhurried instinct for the practical detail, that unerring feel for the most sensible way to do things. Maybe it's just the envy of the organically disorganised for those who are able to keep their stuff in perfect order, but I sometimes want to shake people and say: yes, you're practical, yes, you're organised, but there must be more to life than this! HF, who, despite his Austrian blood, is as Danish as they come, summed it up as follows: after the loss of Schleswig-Holstein in 1864, Denmark became emotionally committed to being a small country. In making a virtue of this new necessity it proved to be tremendously successful. But this success was paid for by a certain blinkering of the spirit, a studied indifference to the big picture, an inward-looking self satisfaction. Hence the persistence of a semi-detached attitude to Europe, hence the quasi-racist asylum and immigration policy, hence the tacit assumption that nobody can do anything quite as well as us. As HF once put it: " Der er ingen is helt som Frisko is!" [There's no ice-cream quite like Frisko ice-cream (a bog-standard Danish brand).] I understand that this criticism must sound harsh. Perhaps it is just another expression of the deep psychological truth that we hate what we love and love what we hate. The only other country which can generate for me that same degree of inner frustration is Scotland, my other ancestral home. A country of incomparable natural beauty, with a population enjoying an in-built propensity for honest decency, open-hearted humanity, unaffected intelligence and boundless wit, which nevertheless devotes much of its energies to nihilistic self-destruction, mindless religious bigotry, senseless violence and the assiduous nursing of an imaginary grievance against its southern neighbour. A country in sore need, in other words, of some of the Danish virtues. The difference is that Scots would never claim to have the business of life "down". Nor would Danes, not publicly at least, but, deep down, it's what they think, and it's what gives Denmark a self-limiting feel. Opinion polls reveal, that of all European populations, it is the Danes that are most satisfied with their lot. Why is that so oddly depressing?

Meanwhile, it was bliss to be in Copenhagen. From the moment of arrival at Hovedbanegaarden (Central Station) every detail was pregnant with a preternatural inner intensity: the texture of the patterned floor-tiles, the elaborate carving of the the mock-viking wooden arches, the all-pervasive smell of pölser (Danish sausages) and - the sound of the language! It is difficult for English-speakers to appreciate the implications of a language like Danish. It is often naively assumed that language is essentially a means of communication. This is true of English, which, when it's not the first, is the second language of the whole world. Danish, however, by virtue of the fact that it excludes the vast bulk of the world's population, is as much a tribal Shibboleth as it is a mode of communication. To speak it is to belong. Which is what makes it so fascinating to hear people of obvious South Asian origin speaking absolutely perfect Copenhagen! Linguistically, they belong. Not only linguistically. They are Danish. The inner attitude, the body language, the colour of their thoughts are all Danish. They are more Danish than me, though I have the blood credentials. Some Danes might resent this intrusion into the inner sanctum. Personally, I welcome it. It is new blood, a breath of fresh air, a linguistic opening on the world. What this phenomenon does throw up is a series of questions about the nature of national identity. I can't help thinking that language is far and away a more determining factor than ethnicity. Within the great "Ummah" of the English-speaking world, it is language, in the sense of accents, which specifies the sub-groups: English, Americans, Australians, Canadians, New Zealanders, South Africans, Scotsmen, Irishmen, Welshmen, Indians, West Indians etc. The identification is instant. You can then go on to present the details of your ethnic CV, but it doesn't really count. I can go to enormous lengths to explain how my father is Scottish, my mother Danish, that I was born in France, but for all practical purposes I am an Englishman, because I sound like one.

All to say that the opportunity to speak and listen to Danish is a thrill in itself. After all, as my mother's tongue, it speaks to me in a particularly intimate way. The pettiest transaction contains a secret excitement. Ordering sausages, say: " To almindelige med bröd tak" [two regular with bread please.] This triggers the traditional response: "Sennep og ketchup?" [mustard and ketchup?] " Ja tak." "Ja! Det bli'r tusind kroner!" [Right! That'll be a thousand kroner] or whatever apparently fantastical price they seem to make up on the spot! In Denmark, I still reckon in 1973 prices, so things seem wildly expensive. It being Copenhagen fashion week, we couldn't rent an apartment in town as we'd hoped. We ended up in the tastefully decorated annex/flat of a pension on Amager Strandvej. Amager Strand, seemingly banal, is a venue of special intensity in my personal history. Most of the endless and endlessly sunny days of our childhood holiday would be spent at Helgoland, a wooden sea-bathing station which projected out into the Sound. To my horror, I discovered that it's now been demolished. "It was rotten and dangerous", our hostess explained. "They're building a replacement." Very sensible, no doubt, but how could she hope to understand?

So we spent a week playing "house" in Copenhagen - a life we could have lived if things had turned out differently. We did the "usual" things. Up and down "Ströget", the city's principle walking street, a boat-trip round the harbour and canals, the climb up the "curly-wurly tower" of Vor Frelsers Kirke, bookshops, clothes shops, art exhibitions, Tivoli (!), a trip to the romantic fishing-harbour of Dragör. One day we rented a convertible for a classic day-trip to Möns Klint, a famed Danish beauty spot which I'd never got round to visiting. Love blossomed in the prescence of the beloved. In my youth, Denmark had been for me a sort of promised land. But the trees don't grow up to heaven, as they say, and I was inevitably disappointed. Now I can accept Denmark for what it is, a country whose drawbacks are the inevitable reverse of its qualities, and discover a whole new affection for it. While visiting the National Art Museum, we came across a small exhibition dedicated to an enquiry into the nature of Danishness. On the wall was a printed extract from the Danish National Encyclopaedia:

Danskhed: I et positivt perspektiv bliver danskheden set som demokratisk sindelag, jaevnhed, tolerance, ligefremhed, og antiautoritetstro. I et negativt perspektiv ses danskheden som magelig, selvtilstraekkelig, ufunderet bedrevaerd, smaalighed og dyrkelse af janteloven.

[ Danishness: From a positive point of view Danishness is seen as democratic, unpretentious, tolerant, straightforward, anti-authoritarian. From a negative point of view it is seen as comfort-loving, self-satisfied, with an unfounded sense of superiority, small-minded, with a preference for safe mediocrity.]

The ruthless impartiality of the summary took my breath away. Something is healthy in the state of Denmark!

2007-07-28T11:22:00.000-07:00

Most people will have heard of the Stubai Alps, but how many could locate the Alpi Breonie di Ponente? Not many, but it scarcely matters, as they are the same thing, near as damn it. We are in the Alto Adige or rather the Südtirol - the spoils of war granted to Italy under the Treaty of Saint Germain in 1919. During the fascist period, a policy of deliberate Italianisation was pursued by the authorities. This involved the cooption of language "experts" to dream up Italian equivalents to well-nigh all German place-names. Thus we obtained not only "Bressanone" for Brixen and "Bolzano" for Bozen, but also such wonderful concoctions as "Villabassa" (Niederdorf), "Rio di Pusteria" (Mühlenbach), or "Monte Croce di Comélico" (Kreuzberg) etc. etc.

Andy Hartley and I were making our way through this equivocal linguistic landscape en route for Masséria (Maiern) in the Val di Ridanna (Ridnauertal), our starting point for an all-out assault on just a few of the peaks in the main Stubai chain. I'd been to the Stubai once before, in the summer of 1977, when Carol and I did our Grand European Tour in our Ford Transit camping-van, with nine-month old Victoria strapped smilingly into her travel seat. Relunctantly acknowledging that parenthood might just put a bit of a crimp on my climbing activities, I'd cunningly arranged our itinerary so as to at least have the opportunity to "case" some of the more celebrated alpine valleys. I had recently acquired a copy of Walter Pause's "Klassische Alpengipfel". He listed no less than seven eligible peaks in the Stubai group alone. The area had to be checked out. We drove up the Stubai valley and camped near Ranalt, just opposite Maiern on the other side of the range in fact. I remember entertaining thoughts of knocking off Habicht (3277m) straight from the valley, but gallantly allowed myself to be persuaded otherwise! As it was, Andy and I had two Pause peaks on the list for our projected four day expedition. Pause is an enthusiastic proponent of that genre of high-flown purple prose, in German, which can invest even the most shapeless heap of scree-slag with a "wildromantisch" aura. Of one of our intended peaks he writes:

...den Wilder Freiger erkennt man sofort am alles überstrahlenden Gletscherplatt. Breit und mächtig glänzt es rechts der schwarzen Tribulaune, anziehend - auch wenn dem Gipfel die Eleganz der zugespitzten Form fehlt.

He was looking from the Austrian side. From our side the mountain looked a lot pointier. But we hadn't go there yet! By the time we'd got parked, had a bite of lunch and packed the gear, it was after two in the afternoon before we left Maiern (1419m). Still, allowing for our probable fitness deficit, Andy had proposed that, for our first half-day, we climb no further than the Teplitzer Hütte (2586m). Guide-book time: three-and-half hours. That should get us in nicely in time. I heaved my rucksack onto my shoulders. Despite what I fancied to be ruthless packing, it felt ominously heavy. Rope, harness, crampons, ice-axe. It soon adds up. But that's the price you pay for wanting to travel on glaciers. No point in complaining. We set off, settling rapidly into that rhythmic plod, which, in theory at least, patiently but remorselessly consumes height and distance. It was hot in the afternoon sun and we were grateful that the first part of the hike in was through dense forest - although it was steep enough as we followed the path up the true left bank of the mountain torrent. I'd carefully kept a small towel to hand and was very soon making good use of it to wipe the sweat pouring off my face. We emerged from the forest onto the Agglboden, a flat-bottomed alpine pasture of open and sunny aspect. We crossed the river and continued on up to the next level, a steep-sided gorge with an impressive drop down to the raging waters below. Now the climbing started in earnest. This was hard work. Plodding on, I was less and less able to consciously absorb the scene. One step, another step, one step, another step. We flopped down by a little stream to rest, seeking out what little shade there was as a respite from the merciless sun. All too soon we were continuing on our way again. Finally we made it to our next rest-place, the Grohmannhütte (2254m). Andy got there sufficiently ahead of me to be emerging from the hut with a couple of Apfelschorles just as I arrived. This was no gamesmanship though. I was finding it tough. We thankfully downed our drinks and continued stubbornly on up. Andy wasn't finding it easy either, but seemed to have a yard or so on me. The Teplitzer was not so far now, but that last bit was a steep pull. Keep going, slowly maybe, but don't stop. I was beginning to get cramps in my thighs. As the wind got up, I stopped to put on my jacket. Succumbing to temptation, I lay down for a while. What bliss! Dragging myself to my feet, I gritted my teeth for the last, seemingly interminable climb. Finally, mercifully, I was at the hut. I was just about done in. Finding our room, I collapsed on a bunk. Those first day hut grinds were never easy, but were they as bad as this? Probably, even certainly, but I had not been haunted by the anxiety that I might be getting past it. Training will cure lack of fitness, but not the effect of the years. We were well over the official time. Were we up to our ambitious three-and-a-bit-day programme?

Still, once we'd polished off our Knödelsuppe and Schweinebraten, morale began to improve and, further encouraged by a Weissbier or two, it became positively buoyant. We stepped outside to get our bearings. The mountain opposite the hut was clearly not the Zuckerhütl, as we had originally assumed, but rather the Sonklarspitze, the bigger mountain being hidden from our gaze. We could see our next day's goal, the Beckerhaus, the self-styled Wolkenschloss, perched melodramatically on its spectacular rock promintory. In the clarity of the evening light, the stratification of the mountain landscape became explicitly apparent. The scene at our level, where the clinging vegetation was still able to sustain a little life, retained a greenish hue. Next came a discrete band of warmly glowing, russet-coloured rock. Finally, the high peaks and glaciers in starkly contrasting black and white. It deserved to be painted in a semi-abstract style. All I could do was take a photograph. We turned in, resolving that next day, come what may, we would at least drag ourselves up to the Beckerhaus.

Andy had booked us in to the comparative luxury of a Zimmer, thus sparing us the mass grunting, coughing, snoring and worse of the Lager. This, and the fact that no alpine start was required, gave us the chance of a good night's rest. And, sure enough, waking the next morning, we felt a whole lot better. The weather was fair, with occasional clouds obscuring the summits. We breakfasted, packed and set off. We quickly settled in to a decent pace. This was more like it. We could progress steadily, while enjoying the scene around us. I was pleasantly surprised when we even managed to overtake one party: so we weren't the slowest pair on the mountain. We stopped for a rest above a steep scree-slope which looked dramatically down on a moraine lake of perfect aquamarine. We calculated it must in previous times have been an arm of the Ebener Ferner now, like all the alpine glaciers, in significant retreat. We pushed on, climbing and traversing until, slip-sliding down a mess of moraine, we reached a narrow tongue of the glacier. It was "dry", in other words, pure ice. Only 100 metres or so. Hardly worth putting on crampons. We teetered nervously across. There was no real distance to fall, but a slip and dead drop onto the hard ice was not an attractive proposition. We then had to scramble strenuously up the moraine on the far side, and after that there was little let-up. I was determined to keep going now. Silently, I repeated my mantra: kleine Schritte, nur nicht stehenbleiben. I was a little bit ahead of Andy at this stage, which afforded me the justification to stop to let him catch up. We rested briefly, had a drink and then attacked the final steep part up to the Beckerhaus (3190m). We were now above the 3000m mark, and I, at least, was beginning to feel it: the hollow feeling in the stomach, the sudden greedy panting, the heaviness in the legs. Andy seemed to be faring slightly better and went on ahead. I plodded on with frequent little rests, but eventually made it to the hut just a few minutes behind him. We were tired enough, but pleased at having managed it pretty much within guide-book time. A week or so of this and we would be properly fit. Only we didn't have even a week. This was no preparation. This was it.
According to our schedule we should be climbing the Wilder Freiger (3418m) that same afternoon. For the following day we had earmarked the Wilder Pfaff (3458m) and the Zuckerhütl (3505m) combined with a descent back down to the Teplitzer, in order, the next day, to have time to get back to the car and drive to Andy's place in Gera, near Santo Stefano in the heart of the Dolomites, and then, for me, on to Treviso airport and back to Brussels.

Meanwhile the Wolkenschloss was living up to its name. Looking out the window of the hut there was nothing but blank mist. Then it came on to hail. We retired to our bunks and promptly fell fast asleep. We woke an hour or so later hugely refreshed. With little enthusiasm we took a perfunctory look outside. There was still a lot of cloud about, but right where we were it seemed to be clearing. The decision was taken there and then. The Wilder Freiger was on! Within minutes we were on the ridge. Climbing with our lightened packs felt almost like flying. We opted to stay on the rocks, reserving the right to use the snow escalator on the way back down. At times, cloud threatened to boil up from the eastern corrie, but we climbed on in sunshine, negotiating our way around the various rock obstacles, pushing on up and up. Below the Signalkuppe we were welcomed by the reassuring prescence of fixed cables. This was a trade route, but in our little weather-window we had the place to ourselves. Up onto the summit of the Signalkuppe, topped by a mysterious confusion of what I presumed to be meteorological equipment. The Wilder Freiger proper was just a little bit further. We proceeded along a spectacular ridge, encountering, absurdly, a signpost indicating Achtung Landesgrenze. What sort of response was required of us? There was certainly little room for evasive action! And then, following a steep scramble up the final rocks, we were at the summit. Mere superlatives cannot begin to describe the gloriousness of our situation. All alone at the top of our mountain, bathed in sunshine, we looked out on a perfect sea of mist from which surged startling mountain peaks. It was exhilarating, a view as from an aeroplane, but much closer to hand. We were in it, a part of it, not just looking from outside. No mere satisfaction of curiosity, but a profound nourishing of what one can only call the soul. We tried to identify ranges and summits, but that somehow missed the point. "Even if we don't manage anything else, I'd be happy enough just with this." I agreed with Andy completely.

And that, in fact, is how it turned out. The next day turned cloudy and uncertain. After what we had experienced, we were not at all interested in a long and tiring day snow-plodding in the mist. We had a blissful day idling our way back down to Maiern and arrived in relaxed fashion back to Gera in the late afternoon. We could sincerely claim to have had a glimpse of that true spirit of mountaineering of which Himalayan explorer Tom Longstaff writes:

Mountaineering is but an expression of the basic instinct to explore the unknown... Since happiness is most often found by those who have learned to live in every moment of the present, none has such prodigal opportunities of attaining that as the traveller ... attainment of a set objective is but a secondary matter, the traveller should not anticipate the journey's end. So long as he loses consciousness of self, and is aware in all his senses of the present scene, almost any part of the world is as good as any other. Mountain or desert it is all one.

2007-07-04T13:33:00.000-07:00

When I was at school we had a teacher* who recommended that we make notes on every book we read. [*It was John Boulter, Olympic athlete and British 1000m record-holder in 1969. He took us for French, although we always sensed his heart was never entirely in it. However, he led us on a brief tour around the whole of French Literature, a course which, although irrelevant in terms of exam results, was a source of long-term inspiration. He came late to a lesson one Saturday morning, with his pyjamas clearly visible under his jacket. He was newly-married at the time and we prurient adolescents fondly imagined that he had only minutes before torn himself from his young wife's amorous embraces! We called him "Boggle" Boulter. I can't remember why, but it was somehow perfect.] Each work, he suggested, should be the subject of a short précis, an indication of the major issues and a quotation or two, all on one side of A4. Accumulated sheets, carefully filed, would ultimately constitute an invaluable reference source. I never got round to it, of course, but the idea must have struck me as a good one or I wouldn't have remembered it. And now that I have read countless books, the contents of most of which have been effectively consigned to oblivion, I regret that I didn't follow Boggle's advice. There is something terribly humiliating about our capacity to forget. So much experience, so much interest, so much information, so much understanding, all just so much water under the bridge. Our instinct to gather together all this material in an orderly, structured, meaningful way is a very powerful one. In a sense, this diary is an expression of that instinct.

So it was with an intense combination of admiration and envy that I read Clive James' "Cultural Amnesia", which is the product of a whole lifetime spent reading with a pencil to hand. He has, with incredible ambition, sought to compile all the thoughts he ever noted in the margins of a book into a coherent whole, relating his copious reading to the catastrophic history of the 20th century and distilling from all of that a Weltanschauung of sorts. Clive James is a hard man not to like. Above all he is funny. He writes vigorously, intelligently, perceptively, on subjects ranging from Margaret Thatcher to Ludwig Wittgenstein. He is particularly strong on the group of pre-war (largely Jewish) intellectuals, writers and wits that constituted Viennese café society. His special favourite is Egon Friedell (of whom I had not heard previously):

Egon Friedell (1878-1938), a student of natural sciences who graduated to the twin status of cabaret star and polymath, was a figure unparalleled even in Vienna, where there were several learned cabaret artists and even a few funny polymaths, but nobody else who could be both those things on such an heroic scale. To think of an equivalent in an English-speaking context is impossible: you would have to imagine a combination of George Saintsbury, Aldous Huxley, Peter Ustinov, Kenneth Clark and Isaiah Berlin.

It is difficult not to suspect that Clive James rather fancies himself as a latter-day Egon Friedell. Well, Clive James is, if not a polymath, certainly an avid reader, who takes the idea of culture seriously, i.e. someone who didn't stop reading set books the day he graduated. He can also make you laugh out loud. His inherent qualities of common decency and natural humanity come through on every page. "Cultural Amnesia" is also inspirational in the sense that it makes you want straightaway to order all the books he writes about. If I have a reservation, it is that Clive James is too omnipresent in a book which amounts to some 850 pages. As a journalist he is unsurpassed. While still at school we used to devour his scintillating TV reviews, which we mined for clever things to say. But a whole book! It's a bit like going on a month's camping holiday with someone with an automatic compunction to be clever at all times. There are occasions when he might have benefitted from a teacher with a red biro writing "stick to the point"! I suppose it's Clive James' book and he can write what he likes, but too often you feel a bit like Old Mother Hubbard. Opening the book at what you imagine to be a particularly juicy chapter, you are disappointed when it barely touches upon its purported subject. I rushed to the essay on Heinrich Heine, hoping for an idiot's guide to a poet of whom I know too little, only to get a load of hot tips on how to deal with inconvenient fans. So, for James and Heine, both, celebrity is a terrible drag! Another slightly irritating trait is his weakness for the polyglot name-drop. We are constantly reminded, en passant, of his linguistic facility in German, French, Italian, Spanish, Russian and Japanese. I'm sorry, but I can't help being a bit sceptical. I've seen too many CV's claiming that their authors are "fluent" in French, say, when, in point of fact, they are barely able to order a beer. But if you must do the foreign name-drop, get it right! Schoolboy howlers like "der Stadt" or "ungülcklich" undermine confidence. Elsewhere, pointscoring efforts are converted into own goals through shoddy research. Regretting the demise of rote-learning and showing off his capacity to remember Tennyson's "The Brook", he proceeds to misquote it: "I come from haunts of coot and hern". "Hern"? A cross between a hen and a tern, perhaps?

So what theme does emerge from the "apparent randomness", as Clive James describes his own work? One consistently returning idea is that the only viable antidote to totalitarian inhumanity is "liberal humanism". These terms are never defined in any detail, but he means them to be more than just the usual euphemisms for capitalism and atheism . What James is really seeking to define is the sort of society which permits and encourages basic decency and intellectual curiosity. A world safe, in other words, for Clive James. It's a nice idea, but probably not enough. Despite his instictive revulsion at and morbid fascination for the totalitarian despotisms of the twentieth century, and despite his avowed admiration for the author, he has overlooked the central issue which Michael Burleigh identified so clearly in "The Third Reich" and "Sacred Causes". Nazism, Stalinism, Maoism are not just political movements, they are pseudo religions. In the absence of a genuine sense of the numinous, these spiritual Ersatz products fill the God-shaped space in the human soul. The only true antidote to mass psychosis is a human life nourished by a genuine sense of meaning and purpose. Literature and culture, however entertaining, however intellectually stimulating, can, at best, only hint at the possibility of this greater synthesis.

While I was studying at Leuven, our lecturer in semiotics (God help us) suggested that we really ought to read one book and see one film every day! Even at that impossible pace, you couldn't even begin to cover every game in town. It's the Jari Peteri syndrome. Jari is a Finnish friend, who, sensing a kindred spirit, has put me in the way of a number of Finnish books and films. Most of the material has been translated into Swedish, the other national language, so I am able to read it. There's some fantastic stuff, but already endless. None of it features in Clive James' book. How could it? Not even he can read everything. We can only conclude that it is not in the vain pursuit of what the Tao Te Ching calls the ten thousand things, that meaning and purpose can ultimately be found:

Returning is the motion of the Tao.
Yielding is the way of the Tao.
The ten thousand things are born of being.
Being is born of not being.

2007-05-23T14:16:00.000-07:00

Marrakesh. Another one of those place-names which conjurs up a whole world of mystery and fascination. Maintaining a tradition of exotic getaway for the May half-term, we booked a "low-budget" flight to Morocco. There is something profoundly odd about modern mass air travel. A hundred plus people, pretending to be utterly blasé, are crammed into a steel tube and projected through the sky to a distant destination. On arrival they are processed with cold efficiency through an abattoir-like arrival hall and released into a third world city for the exclusive purpose of being shorn of their hard currency. No cultural preparation, no linguistic credentials required, just get out there and consume the experience of the "other"! But an "other" so homogenised and vacuum-packed, that you could almost get a better sense of the exotic through watching a decent TV documentary. It would certainly be cheaper, more convenient and a damn sight more comfortable.

Actually, despite the huge influx of tourists, Marrakesh remains a fabulous destination, most definitely retaining its ability to shock through difference. What the numbers rob you of is the sense of the uniqueness of your experience. There is absolutely no notion of coming across something yourself and discovering "your" Morocco. No way that you could convince yourself that, through exercising qualities of resourcefulness, initiative, sensitivity and good taste, you have obtained a special insight into local customs and mores, which no lesser sensibility could possibly share. All of which begs the question as to whether travel isn't mostly about a sort of snobbery: "Oh dahling, we must give you the address of the wonderful Riad we stayed in" or "Our driver was simply wonderful, took us to places most tourists never get to see" etc. etc. Regular readers will be familiar with my qualms at collecting "experiences" like bubble-gum cards. Often enough, having been somewhere is at least as, if not more important than actually being there. However, if everyone in the playground is clutching the same card, its value deteriorates accordingly. Also, an influx of tourists, all in pursuit of the same experience of authenticity, changes a place irrevocably, to the extent of their becoming an integral part of the landscape. In fact, we probably spent as much time gawping at other tourists as we did actually taking in the indigenous scene.

We'd booked ourselves into a "riad" in the northern part of the Medina - the old city encompassed by its ancient walls. A traditional town-house built around a central atrium courtyard, our riad was a mini-palace. Richly adorned with a wealth of stucco-work and antique "zelliges" tiles, it remained comfortably cool inside, even under the baking midday sun. Eating by candlelight by the courtyard pool, looking up at the stars, with a rampant bougainvillea spilling down from the wooden ballustrades of the upper levels was a truly enchanting experience. It seems that back in the seventies, many semi-derelict riads were picked up for a song by Europeans who realised their extraordinary potential. Now you would have to pay something well in excess of 300,000 euros for even a small one.

Venturing forth from the unruffled calm of the Riad into the seething streets of Marrakesh was a shock. In every nook and every cranny, at every archway and corner, through every tortuous alleyway, throngs a mass of humanity, all intent, it would seem, on extracting money from your wallet. Hawkers, vendors, beggars, street urchins and con-artists spot the perplexed demeanour of the greenhorns with ruthless acuity. Later I read in my Lonely Planet of the need to avoid phony guides who take you round to their friends to get you to buy things. I winced with inner embarrassment. First day out, less than fifty yards from the door of our riad, we were latched onto by the jovial Abdul. Abdul, apparently, was a teacher in a Koranic infants school, who, as an educated man, relished the prospect of practicing his English, while showing us around some of the sights of his quarter of town. Not tourist stuff, you know, how real Moroccans live. We informed him brightly that we would be only too delighted to take up his kind offer. Following him, we were soon lost in the warren of the Medina, now entirely dependent upon him to lead us back to the familiar tourist haunts. Which, patrolled as they are by the tourist police, were just the areas he wanted to avoid! So, we were chaperoned nervously through the maze, gazing with awkward fascination upon the lives of "poor people". All the while, the strangeness of the scene was accentuated by unfamiliar smells - all variety of spices and herbs, public bakeries, incense and donkey dung, tagine cooking and the fumes of cheap petrol. A bit like a live version of the Jorvik viking exhibition - commented Anna. We were invited to visit an artisan's workshop, "just to see". We emerged clutching a parcel of hand-painted pottery for which we'd obviously paid well over the local odds. They have a clever negotiating technique. The vendor takes a piece of paper and writes down his opening price in the left hand column. He then invites the customer to put down a counter-offer on the right hand side. Wise as you are, you enter a figure which is a third of the original asking price. It's all over. You are committed to making a purchase at at least that price and he's already made his margin. Convention requires that you finally close the deal at around two-thirds the asking price, but that's just the icing on the cake. Still, we like what we got and it would certainly have cost a lot more back home - a fact of which they are extremely aware.

Abdul marched us briskly off to a shop by the Bab el Khemis, a gate in the northern part of the city wall - "just to see how they make the Berber carpets". Crossing the threshold, we were welcomed by a dark-skinned, oleaginous gentleman, clad in flowing blue, claiming to be a Touareg. A Touareg possibly, but surely not one who made a habit of month-long Saharan caravan journeys. With his delicate build, trendy spectacles and extravagantly flash watch, he looked more like an Artificial Intelligence major. He offered us a mint tea - "Berber whisky! Ha ha." How kind! We were hooked. Would we care to take a look at a few carpets while he explained the different traditions and techniques? How wonderful! Honey poured from his lips, unction oozed from every pore. Just say if there's one you like the look of. No obligation to purchase. That is our way - deal or no deal, we remain friends. The Prophet enjoins us to smile and be happy at all times. Happy, we've never been happier!

The assistant threw down a gorgeous Berber peasant rug with a fantastically detailed pattern in authentic natural colours. The Touareg sensed our inner movement almost before we were aware of it ourselves. Yes, a truly beautiful piece and becoming rare. It's increasingly difficult to get the women of the villages to undertake such hard and painstaking work. Obviously, we could perfectly well understand that! Would we be interested in acquiring this unique artifact? Well, you know, we hadn't actually been thinking in terms of actually buying a carpet. No, but for a thing so beautiful - I could offer you a good price! He quoted a figure, which, though doubtless outrageous, was meaningless, as we were entirely ignorant of the going rates. Isn't there an bit of economic jargon to describe this situation? Information disequilibrium or something?

We opted for a policy of distraction, the girls suddenly assuming an exaggerated enthusiasm for some jewellery. They negotiated a poorish deal on some quite cool dangly earrings of thin silver sheet. Still stalling, we expressed an interest in a delicately worked pewter teapot. A desultory discussion of price ensued. Just as concentration was waning, the Touareg went for the jugular. I can let you have the carpet for X (a figure half his original proposal) - final price! Er, well... And I'll throw in the teapot! We retreated to deliberate and ... accepted. Smiles all round. The Touareg made flattering remarks about the loveliness of the girls, the warmth of our family, our extraordinary business acumen and exquisite good taste. We counted out and handed over a great wad of cash. It had to be too much. We were given a parting gift of a beautiful cotton scarf each, which suggested strongly that he'd made his margin and some. Still, we were very pleased with our acquisitions, which, however overpriced, we could well afford. This is the hard fact that lies at the heart of all these tourist transactions - we get decent stuff at a reasonable price, they make a killing. Win-win? Still, I wonder about the suppliers.

The assistant busied himself rolling up and packing the carpet. The Touareg leaned over to me in a conspiratorial, word-to-the-wise manner. It is customary to tip the boy. I fumbled in my wallet for what might be an appropriate denomination. His eagle-eye spotted a red ten-euro note. Ten euros would be a good amount! The implication being that anything less would be unworthy of my newly acquired status as a wild spendthrift. Er, I dunno, isn't that a bit much? I handed over a grubby Dirham note. The Touareg gave me an eloquent look expressing simultaneously his full and entire comprehension for my financial prudence yet sad disappointment at the inelegance of my gesture. "Fuck off and tip him yourself, you slime-ball", I said to him in no uncertain terms. Well, no, I didn't exactly say it, but I thought it real hard.

We blundered out of the shop into the heat of the day. There was Abdul. We'd almost forgotten about him. He was looking pretty shifty. With hindsight, he must have been torn between fear of the police and the avaricious craving for baksheesh. Baksheesh had won, but only just. We gave him what we later realised was a ludicrously lavish tip, explaining it was "for his school". I just caught his "yeah, sure" look, before he disappeared hurriedly into the crowds, leaving us to navigate our own way back to the riad.

And so our week in Marrakesh passed. Gradually we began to adapt. The route from our riad in Bab Taghzout to the Place Jemaa el-Fna in the heart of the town took us on a twenty minute walk through all the souks. We passed there most days. We began to be recognised. We were pestered a bit less. We started to learn how to bargain, who to tip and how much, which beggars were deserving, which shoe-shines worth hiring. We learned how to get a laugh. Pestered by some child to be allowed to be our guide, Carol, with unconscious colonial hauteur, let out a Bertie Woosterish "la shoukran!" - no thank you. The child fell away in peals of laughter. A beggar-woman, her face set in a look of theatrical despair, appealed to my spirit of charity by showing me her Ventolin inhaler. I fetched my own out of my pocket and showed it to her. She laughed out loud. We began to enjoy the tumultuous horde - as the Moroccans so obviously do themselves. The Arabs were an urban society long before western Europe. For them the constant to-ing and fro-ing, ducking and weaving, wheeling and dealing is the very essence of being. To participate in this constant movement, this unceasing flow is to be part of life itself. And all of life is there. The rich and the poor, the old and the young, the bulbous and the svelte, the straight and the crooked, the halt and the lame, blind beggars and raving madmen, the pious, the corrupt, the modest, the vulgar, girls wearing the full veil, flirting outrageously with kohl-blacked eyes, girls in tight jeans and high-heel pumps shopping sweetly with their grannies. Outside the narrow lanes of the souk, the traffic is a creative chaos, as each vehicule describes its own sinuous line through the madness, creating a terrifying arabesque in permanent motion. Ancient gentlemen on rickety bicyles, veiled beauties three-up on scooters, dilapidated taxis in the hands of near-miss specialists, bearded Koranic scholars on mobylettes barrelling through the jams in their Evel Knievel helmets like human cannonballs. This joy of movement is made possible by the total absence of self-righteous indignation, the predominant emotion of our European driving culture. Everyone going about their business but with an instinctive consideration for the other. Not altruism exactly, but an innate sense of community.

Is this the result of Islam, the Ummah, the community of the faithful? Certainly the influence of Islam is omnipresent. It is as natural to the people as the air that they breathe. And it lends them a certain natural dignity, a spontaneous humanity. Mohammed asks no less of his followers than that they abandon themselves utterly to the will of God. To put away love of self and be filled with the grace of God is a gift rarely bestowed. But a society constructed about that aspiration will always offer its people more real sustenance than a society such as our own, which, frankly, is constructed about the aspiration of egotistical self-gratification. I was reminded of R.H. Tawney's "Religion and the Rise of Capitalism". He expresses a certain regret at the loss of the medieval notion of a universal christendom and the sense of a christian community. That people fall short of these lofty ideals does not subtract from them as aspirations. An aspiration, even an unattainable one, gives a purpose and a direction and a sense of community in pursuing it.

The heart of the city to which one constantly gravitates is the Jemaa el-Fna. It used to be a place of execution, hence the name - "Assembly of the Dead". There can hardly be a place on this earth containing so much life. It is effectively an open air theatre, permitting a whole other dimension of people-watching. The effect is overwhelming; orange-juice sellers with their elegantly crafted stands piled high with produce, water-sellers with their absurdly colourful outfits and pointy straw hats, all manner of bicycles, scooters and donkey-carts weaving their way through the crowds and the open-air kebab stalls. Snake charmers, tattooists, acrobats, story-tellers, fire-eaters, each surrounded by a circle of the curious and the fascinated. As dusk falls, the gnaoua bands start up, their persistent, pulsating African rhythms putting both participants and spectators into a state of trance. Eating one evening on the balcony of Chez Chegrouni we were lucky enough to get a ringside seat to watch the comings and goings on the square below. We were especially riveted by the real-life drama of a group of female macaroon sellers and their small children. Unmarried mothers? Women abandoned by their husbands? Later we saw a group of women basket-sellers, faces horribly burnt behind their veils, desperate to make a sale. Who had done this to them? Husbands, rivals, mothers-in-law? I was approached by a frail and hungry looking old man requesting alms by calling out the name of God: "Allah, Allah!" I pressed a one dirham coin into his hand. In gratitude for this princely gift of 10 cents, he pressed my hand to his mouth and kissed it. I was mortified.

One of the disappointing aspects of visiting Morocco is the fact that the mosques are largely off-limits to non-moslems. This was an arrangement originally made by the French protecting power in order to avoid giving offence to the local populace, and it's been kept on. While this very properly avoids appalling scenes of the merely curious gawping inanely at the faithful, it debars lovers of Islamic art from enjoying that art's highest expression. However, we religiously visited those second-string sites which offer at least a hint of what we were missing. The Médersa Ali ben Youssef, the Bahia palace, the Dar Si Saïd museum, the Saadien tombs. At a time when Islam is suffering from a catastrophic public relations problem, its art stands as irrefutable testimony to the religious truth which lies at its heart. The poise, the harmony, the humanity, the humility, the intelligence, the unequalled craftsmanship are a concrete manifestation of an aspiration to that state of grace which only submission to the source of all life can bring. For all its abstract complexity, for all its infinite variation, for all its wanton luxuriance, Islamic art seeks always to call us to the One, to the essential unity of all things.

We went on a couple of excursions out of Marrakesh, to the Ourika Valley in the Atlas mountains and Essaouira on the Atlantic coast. This allowed us to get some sense of the situation of the city within the surrounding countryside, allowing us to appreciate the obvious fact that Marrakesh is not just a film-set package holiday destination, but a living, working economic entity. The ordinary suburbs are reminiscent of equivalent developments in Italian cities. On the road to the coast we passed through an area of incipient desertification. Ahmed, our driver, explained how drought was accelerating the process of rural exodus. The few people who remained lived by "baraka", God's blessing, and small remittances sent back by relations working in Europe. Ahmed was good company. Once we'd overcome a couple of money misunderstandings, he was agreeable, discreet, thoughtful and informative. At one stage we were stopped by traffic policemen. Ahmed pulled over and greeted them particularly correctly, I thought. They asked him to step out and show his papers etc. We stayed in the car as the boot was opened and they poked about inside. More time passed and we were beginning to wonder what was going on. Finally Ahmed got back into the car and we drove off. I could sense he was hopping. What had been the problem? A routine check. And? My professional eye-test was a month out of date. So what happens? 600 dirham fine! But that's scandalous! Yes, but thankfully, he said with heavy irony, in Morocco we have the famous baksheesh! Apparently the whole set-up was a scam. By looking hard enough, the police were almost bound to find something, then offered the victim the opportunity to pay a reduced fine "en noir". "Cela n'est pas le métier d'un homme", I commented. "Non, cela c'est le metier d'un serpent!", Ahmed replied with genuine venom. Our conversation strayed on to broader issues of Moroccan society.
What about the judicial system? Is it also subject to corruption? Ahmed formed a perfect circle with his elegant thumb and forefinger as though digustedly holding the corner of a distasteful banknote. "Tout s'achète au Maroc." We fell silent. By unspoken consent there was nothing more to be said. I reflected on the extraordinary impediment to development which corruption represents and how impossible it must be to root out in a country where "baksheesh" is all-pervasive.

A final word on tourists. I was particularly disappointed at the French. I have always been something of a francophile, taking the view that, if you discount the stuck-up Enarque types, the French are generally human, "sympathique", with a sophistication, good taste and savoir-vivre, which others might well seek to imitate. Not true. At least not in the case of most of the French low-life we came across. Loud, vulgar, unsightly, exuding a sort of post-colonial arrogance they made me feel embarrassed to be European. I spoke of this to Belgian friends back in Brussels. Didn't you know? It's common knowledge. There are French who try to pass themselves off as Belgian in order to avoid being tainted by association! Pas belge mais pas fier de ne pas l'être!

2007-04-30T14:08:00.001-07:00

Ardnamurchan. I was reminded of it recently by S., who looked upon the area as the perfect place to live. I'd first heard of it from Julian Pallister, a school friend with whom I had shared blues records and climbing dreams. As a boy, he'd gone camping there with his parents most years and as a result Ardnamurchan was for him synonymous with halcyon bliss. As we were up for a few days visiting Victoria, we took the opportunity to fill in what for us was still a blank on the map of Scotland. After a morning being guided up Curved Ridge on Buachaille Etive Mor by P., I met Carol, Vic and Anna at the Clachaig Inn, from where, fortified by a traditional Scottish liquid lunch, we set off merrily for the Corran ferry. The ferry permits the crossing of the Corran narrows of Loch Linnhe. Just a couple of hundred yards and you are deposited in that magical other world of the West of Scotland. We motored southwest down the lochside to Inversanda, then cut inland. We drove across the bridge over the Amhainn Coir 'an Iubhair where the path to the Garbh Bheinn of Ardgour commences. A few months previously I had been up there with Chas, hoping to explore the precipitous northeast face of the mountain. We had set off up Glen Iubhair in an optimistic frame of mind, but before long the rain set in. We spent the day getting hopelessly drenched as we wandered pointlessly up to the head of the corrie and back down again. Returning, we were unable to recross the burn where we had originally come over, as the waters had risen in a surging spate. We splooshed our way back to the bridge through the pathless bog and heather of the right bank and ... thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. I have always found something particularly joyous in "pointless" mountaineering. It's almost an analogy of life itself. You can pretend to yourself, and others, that your life is a series of successes deliberately sought out and purposefully achieved, but, when all is said and done, it don't amount to a hill of beans. "Pointless" mountaineering returns us to mountaineering's real point - that it is an activity that allows us to taste our lives, free, for a moment, from the automatic concerns for our reputation.

Pressing on, we ran out of wide road around Strontian. Once you're on the single-track roads, you're in the real West of Scotland. European money has helped pay for an upgrade - not widened, but resurfaced and clearly marked down both sides by a clear white line. The fluent rhythm of the white lines invested the drive with a sort of abstract kinetic beauty. We swept on to Salen, following the coves and inlets of the northern shore of Loch Sunart, through a romantic tangle of ancient, stunted oak forest. Reaching the hotel, we checked into our beautifully appointed room, flopping luxuriously onto the big brass bed, enjoying spectacular views of the sea-loch, framed by the sash window. Being en famille, we ate in the restaurant, but had a drink in the bar as they took our order. The bar was perfect of its type - the Highland hotel back-bar snug. Sadly it is a threatened species and therefore worthy of careful anthropological investigation. Cosy, unaffected, atmospheric and tiny, intimacy is guaranteed by the fact that it is invariably ram-jam packed with punters demonstrating a single-minded devotion to getting tight. Sports-jacketed tourists, Aran-sweatered hikers, locals in blue dungarees and fold-down wellies stand elbow to elbow at the bar putting it away. Conversation rises to a cacophonous crescendo of enthusiastically held views. Shouted orders emerge indistinctly from a sea of sound. Fistfulls of pints are passed from hand to hand over the heads of the crowd. The bar staff work on with a concentrated rigour of attention. Nip after nip is pressed from the upside-down whisky bottles to disappear down the throats of the locals as they give (yet another) demonstration of what real drinking is about. No-one can drink like the Gaels. Even the girls will take on all comers and win hands down. Could it have something to do with the stance? Both arms and part of the upper body leaning heavily on the bar, the left leg supporting below, while the right leg is braced at an angle of 45 degrees, the wellie achieving an unrockable friction grip on the lino floor. The mellifluous yet strangely precise West Highland voices add their own aural colour to the proceedings. You might even hear Gaelic spoken - Ardnamurchan is a bulwark of Gaelic on the Scottish mainland. When I was young, Scotland was full of such places. My personal favourite was the back bar of the Loch Ericht Hotel at Dalwhinnie, sadly destroyed by fire. Still, a dignified end compared to most snugs, which were largely "modernised" to become like anywhere else - soulless lounges with fruit machines, canned music and ersatz beer.

The next day we set off on our pilgrimage to Ardnamurchan Point, the westernmost point on the Scottish mainland. The route continued along the lochside until we were confronted with the broad bulk of Ben Hiant, forcing us to cut inland and follow the road across the moor. The ever-widening sky and the growing clarity of the light betrayed the presence of the ocean even before we could see it. Then there it was in all its boundless immensity. From the lighthouse on the Point itself you look out to infinity. And at a level below (or is it above?) ordinary consciousness one is visited with an almost physical sense of one's personal insignificance before something so vast. Instinctively we draw back from the full implication of the experience by offering some feebly inadequate comment on the view or finding some footling practical distraction. As Eliot said: "Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind cannot stand very much reality."

To the north lies the Isle of Skye and in between, sounding like some necromancer's conjuration, the "small isles", Rhum, Eigg and Muck. Back in the eighties I had gone with Richard Applebee on a climbing expedition to Rhum. We disembarked on the island in the usual haphazard way, blissfully oblivious of the fact that it had been designated a protected area requiring prior authorisation for a landing. We were greeted at the Kinloch jetty by the wildlife warden, who officiously informed us of our persona non grata status. I was in the process of puffing myself up into a state of self-righteous indignation at petty officialdom etc., when Applebee smoothly intervened. Of course, we were most terribly sorry. We had absolutely no idea. We'd come all the way from continental Europe to savour the rugged charms of Scotland in general, but of the much famed Isle of Rhum in particular. We know it's a lot to ask, but you couldn't possibly make an exception in our obviously very special case? I've never seen a man melt so utterly and completely. He'd been totally überrumpelt by a Commando-style charm offensive! He could not do enough for us. There could be no question of camping. April weather can be atrocious. There's a very nice bunk-house. You'll be nice and warm. There's a couple of lads there from Preston, but you're bound to get on. Crossing the threshold, Applebee sloughed his charm-boy skin and, in the blink of an eye, mutated into "Lancashire bloke". Without recourse to such cheap expedients as putting on the voice, but doubtless leaning on the accumulated experience of his youth in Ramsbottom (sic), Richard, by the slightest modification of intonation and vocabulary, by barely discernible shifts in body-language, intimated to the Preston lads a profound bond of shared experience and attitude. They bought it. Soon they were sharing their meal with us and plying us with the last of their cans of beer! In the best of spirits, we drew up ambitious plans for the morning. We'd bring food, a cooker and sleeping bags, do the traverse of Hallival and Askival, then head for the Bealach an Oir and on down to spend the night in the Dibidil bothy on the island's south-eastern shore.

Waking up, the weather didn't look too sure. A blustery wind, a lot of cloud, but the occasional burst of sun. Pretty standard April weather, we convinced ourselves. Anyway, the mountains are only 700-800 metres high. No reason not to set off at least. And so we were committed to what was to be the major epic of our climbing lives together. We packed our gear and got going. We passed behind Kinloch castle and, heading south-west, pushed on up the path towards the Bealach Bairc-mheall between Barkeval and Hallival. Then, from the bealach, south-east up the broad snowy back of Hallival and then on down again to the bottom of the narrow scrambling ridge up Askival. Starting up the rocks, we caught up with the Preston lads. Rather than work their way around the most prominent gendarmes, they had elected to go straight at them, as a result of which they had got themselves stranded at the top of a pinnacle. We threw them a rope and coached them in the basics of abseiling. No sooner had they had been coaxed down, than they decided to call it a day and opted to return to Kinloch via Coire nan Grunnd. With the weather clearly deteriorating, we were tempted to follow them on down, but it was still reasonably early in the day and we were feeling confident, possibly overconfident, as a result of our newly acquired status as mountain instructors. We tied onto the rope and continued up the ridge. Although the wind was getting up and it was coming on to snow quite heavily, the climbing was not difficult. This was technically the hardest part of our planned route. We reckoned that once over this tricky bit, the rest of the day would be relatively plain sailing. But we had underestimated the force of the wind.

We emerged onto the pointed summit of Askival into the teeth of a howling gale. Throughout the morning we had been on the lee side of the mountain, now, for the first time we were exposed to the full force of the elements. Visibility was no more than a few yards. Powder snow, hard as ice, was now being driven painfully into our faces. Conversation was reduced to shouting into each other's ears. Map reading became well-nigh impossible as the sheet flapped wildly. However, knowing the bealach to be directly to the west, we set out on a compass bearing. We went off down what we assumed to be the ridge, but instead of easing off as it should have done, the ground was getting steeper and steeper and increasingly tricky. It didn't make sense. We were now above a precipitous chasm. We didn't dare continue. I reached into my pocket for the compass. It wasn't there. I'd had it on the summit. Somehow it must have gone missing in all the roaring chaos. How could that be? But the seriousness of the situation did not lend itself to hysterical recrimination. We calculated that we had veered off too much to the south and were now groping our way down some subsiduary bluff which ended Lord knows where. I shouted into Richard's face that we should head back to the summit and find the proper ridge. That's what the text-books recommend. Shouting back, Richard made it plain that the last thing he was going to do was to head back up into that carnage. Further to the right the rocks seemed less steep. Perhaps we could find a way down there. The most important thing was to lose height as quickly as possible. And so we slipped and slithered and bum-slided our way down over rocks and scree and steep heather banks. Eventually we were very relieved to find ourselves below the cloud, able to see our route down Glen Dibidil. Now rain was slanting down in a steady downpour and before long we were soaked to the skin. We flogged down the trackless glen, seemingly forever, in hope and expectation of a nice dry bothy with a warm fire in the grate. But when we finally got there, the scene was ominously bleak. Just above the shore-line, a lonely, black stone but 'n' ben with the rain beating mercilessly on the rusty tin roof. The huge sea sending breakers crashing loudly onto the rocks, projecting great plumes of hissing spray high into the air. Inside was equally disconsolate. There was no store of firewood and not the slightest hope of gathering drift-wood under the prevailing conditions. No wooden sleeping platforms. We could lie on the cold stone floor. We got out a stove to brew up some tea to warm us up. All my matches were soaked and Richard's lighter refused absolutely to ignite. Our sleeping bags were sodden. It wasn't looking good. We took stock. To keep warm, we would have to keep moving. It was some six miles back to Kinloch by the coastal route. With the up and down, that would take us about two-and-a-half hours. We had about an hour-and-a-half's daylight left. Plus the gloaming, but not much of that in this foul weather. I had a torch, but no spare batteries. We had no time to waste deliberating. We set off.

Hardly two hundred yards further on, we met with our first major obstacle. Vastly swollen by the incessant rain, the Dibidil River was a mad surge of white water. We roped up and Richard belayed me. The water reached up to my waist, but, using my ice-axe for support, I managed across and took in the rope for Richard. Handicapped by his bad foot, half-way over he lost his footing. He was swept violently downstream. I hung on to the rope for dear life and with my frantic hauling and his desperate scrabbling, he finally made it to the bank. He was utterly drenched and slightly in shock. But there was no time for delicacy. I coiled up the rope and we just set straight off. We had to make as much ground as possible while it was still light. We settled into a rhythm and were able to make decent enough progress where the path was distinct, but inevitably there were parts where the true route was less than clear. And as it got darker it got less and less clear. Technically, although it would have been extremely tiresome, we could have followed a compass bearing cross-country, but that option was closed to us anyway. We crashed through another burn in violent spate by binding together like front-row forwards. Finally I had to get out my torch. All my powers of attention were focussed on not losing the track, however indistinct. At one point, Richard offered to take over as pathfinder. Ten steps into his shift, he tripped and fell. The torch dropped, spilling the batteries. Inwardly I cursed his clumsiness, but, forcing myself to keep cool, groped through the grass and heather till we had recovered all the parts and put the torch back together again. What a relief to have that little beam of saving light! By this time the wind had grown incredibly strong. Wild gusts were now literally blowing us off our feet. But we had to keep going. To spend the night in the open did not bear thinking on. We struggled on. By now, despite the effort of walking and the wearing of all spare clothes, soaked as we were, we were beginning to feel cold. Would this never end? And then, as we came up over the brow of a hill, we saw the lights of Kinloch. Not exactly Manhattan, but for us it was the Promised Land. Back at the bunkhouse, we got an enthusiastic welcome from the Preston boys, who had been worrying about us. We changed into dry clothes, set about drying out the sleeping bags in front of the fire, had a hot meal and finally snuggled up near the dying embers to be as warm as possible. Only now that I was safe and warm did I succumb to bouts of intense shivering. A curious phenomenon, I thought, but a typical reaction by all accounts. We had been through a chastening experience. My father, who was born and bred in the Scottish Highlands, had always laughed at all my accumulated gear. After all, when he was a boy, he had wandered all over the hills in nothing but his everyday clothes and a pair of "tackity" boots. Unconsciously, this attitude had caused me to adopt a slightly cavalier attitude to the matter of equipment. Since our Rhum adventure I have been a lot more conscientious.

Meanwhile, the intermittent spring sunshine was warming the western shores of the Ardnamurchan peninsula, as we watched the passing fishingboats and ferries going about their business. Sudden celestial beams of light would illuminate whole areas of the swelling ocean like some unsought-for epiphany. Viewed from the lighthouse, the little beach with its clear-white sands and azure waters beckoned to us. Irresistibly we were drawn down to it. We had the place entirely to ourselves. Running along the perfect strand, we rolled up our trouser-legs and paddled gaspingly in the freezing water. Laughing and splashing at the edge of the world, with the unfathomable ocean and the boundless sky around and above, were we not, for a magical moment, freed from the shackles of ordinary time? There are mountaineers who eschew Ardnamurchan for its lack of high hills. The loss is theirs. And what's more, that loss is the result of a misunderstanding of the nature of mountaineering, an activity which has far less to do with a tick list of achievements than it has to do with training our faculty for the perception of beauty, which is an aspect of truth.

2007-04-29T14:02:00.000-07:00

I am still intrigued by a comment which has filtered back to me from one of my readers. She was confused by the fact that ASBO's blog-voice is at variance with her perception of the writer's knockabout, everyday persona. I can see what she means. But I can't help feeling that that is how personality, or rather personalities, actually work. I think it was Hume who said that, in subjecting himself to objective scrutiny, he could find nothing constant or fixed in himself. If we had what it took to really see ourselves, I am sure that is what we would all find - that we are not one. But of course we don't. In fact we spend much of the time seeking to bolster our more or less contrived self-images, choosing to ignore often glaring inconsistencies. We must all of us, surely, have some inkling of how we become different people depending on who we're with. It's not really even hypocrisy or affectation, in that the spontaneous change in the chameleon mask is involuntary. As a linguist, I am very conscious, for example, of how my inner "shape" changes subtly, depending on the language I'm speaking. Buddhism enjoins us to acknowledge and accept this constant state of flux in ourselves, and, in so doing, free ourselves from the illusion of the personality. I would be very interested to hear of readers' practical experiments in this field.

Of course, people have preconceived notions as to how a blog should sound - easy, modern, happening, throwaway, spontaneous, casual, whatever...The fact is that ASBO's diary is a blog in name only. What it is, in truth, is an exercise in creative writing carried out at the expense of the "readership". It's something between a travelogue and an eighteenth century novel written in blog form. Tristram Shandy meets Patrick Leigh Fermor in cyberspace - sort of. The existence of my (largely notional, I imagine) readership serves as a discipline. It makes me write even if I can't be bothered and makes me try to write "well". Which means, for me at least, language which I like to think is ever so slightly raised above the repetitions, hesitations and diversions of daily usage. In "East Coker", T.S. Eliot writes of writing as...

...a raid on the inarticulate

With shabby equipment always deteriorating

In a general mess of imprecision of feeling,

Undisciplined squads of emotion...

I do not pretend to be Eliot, but I certainly share the desire to tidy, organise, interpret and structure the raw material of experience, to elevate it above mere random chronology. If I sound pompous or stilted, it is because I can do no better. Perhaps, dear reader, you will be able to forgive me, knowing that my intention is good.

Thank you for reading.

2007-03-27T15:33:00.000-07:00

"It is our sacred duty to know we are alive at all times." What an inspirational notion! How seemingly impossible a task! And yet, is it not the need to feel alive that informs much of our apparently insatiable hunger for experience? Even our cleaning-lady, musing on the relentless passing of time, urges us to make best use of our allotted span: "Il faut profiter, il faut profiter!" And how? By accumulating "experiences", one supposes. Personally, I am highly susceptible to, but deeply sceptical of, the tick-list approach to life. Instinctively one feels that the quality of experience must be more significant than the quantity. Yet it cannot be denied that there are some times when one feels infinitely more alive than at others; when intensity of experience makes the sense of one's own existence so much more immediate. It is these moments that leave such a particularly vivid trace in the memory. Mountain days, for example, are very liable to leave such a deeper imprint in the memory. Like my recent trip to the Southern Highlands, for instance...

In late January, dawn is a laggard riser. But it was already getting properly light as we headed up Loch Lomondside. We were clearly too late for a proper winter start as Ben Lomond and its satellites emerged from the grey. It was a damp, mildish winter's day with the wind gusting fitfully out of the southwest. It had snowed earlier in the week, but much of it had melted and only the tops retained a scruffy white topping.
Although the cloud was broken, the forecast was, inevitably, for strengthening wind and increasing rain. My daughter Victoria had met me from the night-train in Glasgow and, although we were too late to catch up with our friends who were off to Ben Nevis, we determined to make the best of the day with an ascent of Beinn Dubhchraig by Tyndrum. Ben Lui would have been the more prestigious summit, but we had plans for the evening and had no desire for a stumbling, boggy hike back to the car in the dark. As it was, we were to encounter bog enough.
We parked the car at Dalrigh. Turning off the engine and stepping out into the Highland air, we were met by the smell on the the damp-peaty breeze. It conjured up a whole world which had lain dormant in the body's own memory. We packed up and set off. After some hesitation, I had decided to leave behind my crampons. Victoria had none and I did not wish to be tempted to go where she might not be able to follow. An error as it turned out. We crossed the River Cononish and headed off alongside the railway line. A train passed, headed for Oban, its two carriages looking toy-like, forlorn even, dwarfed by the vast landscape of moorland and mountain. Crossing the track, we headed across a sodden moss and into the Coille Coire Chuill, a forest of ancient Caledonian pine which follows the banks of the Allt Coire Dubhchraig up towards the mountain. There can hardly be a lovelier sight in the world than a vision of snow-capped hills viewed through a stand of these magnificent trees. It constitutes the concentrated quintessence of Scotland. But we needed to look to each step. The path was scarcely more than a filthy strip of bog. Any over-enthusiastic admiration of the majestic upward sweep of Ben Lui would surely have landed us thigh-deep in the glaur!
We gradually worked our way up through the muck and onto the open hillside. As the track petered out, we continued up through indistinct heather hillocks towards Coire Dubhchraig. By now we were in the cloud, with the wind growing stronger and scotch mist giving way to more persistent bursts of rain. In this shapeless terrain there was no particular point to aim for. We blundered on by compass-bearing. We were beginning to wonder whether there was much point to this exercise, but kept on climbing anyway. Eventually we found ourselves on Beinn Dubhchraig's northern spur. The mountain and our walk now took on a more orderly aspect. Still in the mist, we pushed on up the broad ridge, seeking, as we proceeded, to identify features in the landscape that might help guide us back down. Moss and stone now gave way to snow and treacherous patches of ice. We worked our way up gingerly. Eventually we found ourselves at the frozen lochan on the main ridge, where we took a bearing to the southeast, aiming for the invisible summit of our mountain. Then, perfectly on cue, there was a distinct yellow brightening in the cloud and suddenly we were bathed in sunlight. The last shreds of mist were driven off the rocky summit ahead of us. It was like the parting of the Red Sea. Wind-driven cloud boiled and seethed in the southern corrie, but our way was clear. We hurried on to the summit, but ice made for some tricky going. A party passed us, heading in the opposite direction, proceeding carelessly in their crampons. Still, we had to make the best of it, and by dint of careful route selection and judicious placing of the feet, we made it to the summit. We took a compulsory photograph, but did not linger, as there was no real shelter from the wind and the cloud was closing in again. Very delicately now, we climbed back down the rocks and then trudged on through the snow to the lochan, where we stopped for a bite and a drink. More from bravado than conviction, I mooted that we press on to Ben Oss, Dubhchraig's western sister. But Victoria was adamant. Enough was enough. It was a wise decision. Redescending our route, dealing with the ice was trickier still. Even off the snow, the wind had deep-chilled the moss to the consistency of glass. I fell painfully more than once and the hills rang to my expletives of frustration. The steeper Ben Oss would have been more than awkward under such conditions. We finally made softer ground as we got off the mountain proper. It now remained for us to trog back through the amorphous heather landscape. Failing to find the path, we crossed the deer fence further west. This meant us having to find our own route back through the Caledonian pines - something of a blessing in disguise, as we thus avoided much of the boggy path. At the end of the forest, we crossed the pretty little bridge over the Allt Gleann Auchreoch and made our way across the moss-bog, down along the railway and back to the car.
We learned later that some friends had that same day started early from the same car-park and, equipped with crampons, had done the complete circuit of not only Beinn Dubhchraig and Ben Oss, but also Ben Lui. I felt a brief pang of testosterone envy. But no. There is a place in the mountains for demonstrations of strength and endurance. But we, while breaking no records, had, for a day, gifted ourselves the knowledge of being alive.

2007-03-12T15:47:00.000-07:00

My readership comments to the effect that books are a sort of intermediate but appropriate technology which enables us to share vicariously ideas and experience in an infinitely wider context than would ordinarily be permitted by the immediate place and time in which we live. I think that must be right. In my experience, the enjoyment of a book involves above all entering into a relationship with the author - to the point that you can feel you know them and would even like to have them round for dinner. A good prose style is the equivalent of charm, a sort of literary coquetry which draws the reader in. Inevitably some flatter to deceive. Casting around for an example, one name which springs to mind is Simon Schama. Despite his scintillating writing technique, one is left with a sense of being left undernourished - like an overelaborate cake, all whipped cream and too little pastry. A propos, could I have accidentally stumbled over the origin of the word "tart" (in its vulgar sense)?

So, ideally, a book should be well-enough written for you to like the author and want to go on reading to get to know him better, as it were. It should also be nourishing. It should offer some new insight, a certain deeper understanding of the nature of things, an exploration of ideas as yet unconsidered. Ideally, it will be a vehicule to reveal those unseen truths which are inaccessible to our prosaic workaday minds, calling us to a higher place in ourselves. Looking around my shelves I try to pick out authors that would fit in this latter category: T.S. Eliot, Shakespeare, D.T. Suzuki, Solzhenitsyn, Aldous Huxley, Goethe, Baudelaire, Joyce, Meister Eckhart, Maurice Nicoll, Hölderlin, Rilke, Dostoyevsky, Melville, er, Proust... but already I'm straying into the area of "would like to have read", rather than "have been strongly influenced by". Not to worry. Isn't there a Sufi saying to the effect that a man whose intellect is stuffed with information, but whose being remains untouched by the reality of the truth is as a donkey carrying a large load of books? The real question we should be asking is not: How shall I find the time and stamina to read all that stuff? The real, urgent question is: How not to be a donkey?

2007-03-06T02:04:00.000-08:00

My entire readership of Andy Hartley has commented that reading is a kind of OK second-best to real life when real life is not possible. Wow! So many implications, so little time! The first question which springs to mind is: when and why would real life not be possible? Like it or not, we are in real life all the time - " This is It!". What seems to seperate us from "real life" is a failure of awareness. We forget we are alive. I am convinced that it is our sacred duty to know we are alive at all times, that in the realisation of consciousness lies the true purpose of human existence. This seems easy, but is in fact incredibly hard. Try it. It should be possible to read (even) Proust and at the same time be aware of one's being there reading. I look forward to comments from my readership on their practical experiments in this field.

Sincere inquiry into the question of why we read is likely to prove a salutary experience. At one level it would appear obvious that we read for any number of different reasons: to obtain necessary information, to satisfy intellectual curiosity, to enjoy being entertained, to escape (from life?), to acquire "erudition" etc. etc. At a deeper level, however, I have a sense that is almost an organic function. Reading is food for the associative mind, a necessity for its proper functioning. There are different grades of food in the same way that a horse, say, can eat straw, hay or oats. "Oats" grade reading is what we would have to call, for want of a better expression, serious literature. But in the same way that a horse can founder if it eats oats but is not made to work, so, serious reading without the effort of conscious awareness can lead to intellectual constipation and a separation from real life. Reading should not be an alternative to life, but an enhancer of life. But it requires reading the right books in the right way. Quite a programme!

2007-02-28T15:28:00.000-08:00

So many books, so little time. My reading list just gets longer and longer. If each book has a bibliography of, say, ten worthwhile titles and each of those lead you on to ten others, which in turn...Where will it all end?

It's occured to me that one could always adopt a calculated actuarial approach. I am now aged 54 years. Let us say that a reasonable life expectancy would be, God willing, 75 years. I read, on average, depending on the size and difficulty of the book, say a book a month. That would leave me with about 250 books I'm likely to get through in the remainder of this life. I should really be picking my titles very carefully. I mean, what if I arrive at the pearly gates without having read Proust, say. Will I be barred as a cultural philistine? Would I be sent to a sort of purgatorial detention and forced to read "Du Côté de Chez Swann". On reflection, if heaven is populated exclusively by Proustians, the alternative venue might almost be preferable!

All of which begs the question: why do we read?

To be continued

2007-02-05T12:47:00.000-08:00

January is a hard month. Primrose intentions and naive desires in the direction of positive action are insufficient counterweights to the heavy pull of psychic gravity in this leaden time. Not even a proper hard winter to punctuate the season, but an unpleasantly balmy half-spring without delight of birdsong or the anticipation of lengthening day. One of my New Year's resolutions had been betrayed within the first week. In order to combat the erratic tendancies of a grasshopper mind, I had sworn to myself to read only one book at a time; before the cock had even thought of crowing, I had at least six on the go.

My son, William, had (upon promptings) got me Michael Burleigh's "Sacred Causes" for Christmas. I had read and hugely enjoyed his "The Third Reich: A New History", which is one of the few books on this obsessive period of history which tries to get to grips with the psychology of the Nazi phenomenon. Burleigh convincingly argues that Hitler's political success was largely attributable to the quasi-religious nature of the National Socialist movement. In the absence of real religion, people were drawn to what was essentially a crazy pseudo-religion in order to fill an existential void in their lives. "Sacred Causes" explores and develops the relation between religion and politics "from the European Dictators to Al Qaeda". He deals with Stalin's Soviet Union, Hitler's Germany, Mussolini's Italy, Franco's Spain and on to modern terrorism. He makes the same telling point for all of them - that these various ideologies are each in their way a perversion of a true religious instinct. The basic point he is making is that the rise of secular deities is the inevitable corollary of a godless society. There are passages, however, where one gets the impression that he is not always entirely honest with the reader and that tendentious opinion masquerades as disinterested history. I would prefer him to hoist his colours squarely to the mast. Chapters on Franco (relatively generous to the Caudillo) and on Pius XII (a straight exoneration) suggest that he has his own political angle - anti-fascist but right-wing conservatism with a strong sympathy for religion in general and the Catholic Church in particular. I got about half way through and skipped to the end. He does a job on Irish Nationalism, but reveals a vaguely unpleasant vindictive streak, which smacks of old-fashioned racism:

...dingy Irish theme bars are ubiquitous in Europe, with their fake swirling Celtic tat and Guinness, and giant monitors for football and rugby, Gaelic or otherwise, which only partially drowns out the relentless mindless gabbling known as "craik".

We all have our red lines and Guinness ( surely not "fake"?) is one of mine!

Carol got me Hilary Spurling's "Matisse the Master", the second volume of a thorough and thoroughly engrossing biography. I enjoyed the first volume, "The Unknown Matisse" and am looking forward to reading how Matisse "made art modern". I've flicked through the pages and had a good look at the pictures, which confirm my "préjugée favorable" for Matisse. I cannot claim to "understand" modern art, the point of which is anyway largely to by-pass the normal, literal-minded process of comprehension. Matisse, however, always gives the impression of a man with a good heart, whose paintings somehow nourish something positive and human in all of us. It's a book which is probably best read on holiday or at least in fine weather, so I have a couple of months grace!

Another Christmas gift was Alan Bennett's "Untold Stories". It contains in part a family memoir and also extracts from his diaries. I have a sneaking suspicion, probably unfair, that the memoir is likely to be more of the same - ironic tales of his northern youth and its snobbish lower-middle preoccupations. I had a good dip at the diaries. I'd read some of the entries before, as they appear annually in the London Review of Books, to which I am an intermittent subscriber. [I'm never quite sure about the LRB. Does it make me feel more intelligent or more stupid? Does reading it make me smart? Does the fact that much of it is over my head make me dumb? In fairness, it contains some brilliant articles, but also a lot of self-important hack-work. You take what you need and you leave the rest - as The Band said.] I know the diaries are good because I'm slightly envious - a sure sign of quality. They're tremendous fun and genuinely interesting. In a way they bear out what my mother said about education: "It makes your life more interesting." An obvious, though unfashionable position.

Meanwhile, I've been having a go at a Penguin edition of "Karl Marx, Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Anthropology". This is research, you understand, for an entertainment I'm preparing, but don't hold your breath. I can't help feeling that the totality of Marx's work is an attempt to give a sort of spurious nineteenth century scientific respectability to a very basic ethical prejudice - that rich people should not be horrible to poor people. The tone of his writing combines stilted verbosity and aggressive indignation, a sort of pre-emptive strike against any mild-mannered and reasoned criticism. His "philosophy" seems to be the philosophy of the bottom-line: that the material world does not flow down, as it were, from some abstract ideal, but rather, the cultural and ethical dimensions of life are exclusively a function of the material conditions which enable them to come about in the first place. The material comes first, the fancy stuff only after. You can sympathise with his intolerance of a presumed ethical superiority based on nothing other than a healthy bank balance; at the same time, you can discern already the cynical justification for the cruellest and most inhuman regimes. " No petty-bourgeois sentimentality here. We're laying the foundations of a better society!" I got distracted from Marx, but I'll be back.

Then... my Finnish culture guru, Jari Peteri, dropped off a book in my locker at work: "Kollektivt Självmord" (Collective Suicide) by Arto Paasilinna. Most works in Finnish are translated into Swedish, Finland's second language, which, in theory at least, means I can read them, but reading Swedish is always going to be harder work than reading in your own language. Anyway, I've got through a couple of chapters. Basically it's a spoof on Nordic depressivity. Two suicide candidates bump into each other just as they are trying to kill themselves. Discovering that they are kindred spirits , they set about creating an organisation for effective and efficient mass-suicide with all the advantages a pressure-group can provide. I laughed out loud, but it might turn out to be a one-joke-book.

I then went off to Scotland to clear out Mum's flat before selling it. Not something I was particularly looking forward to. However, I also took the opportunity to visit my daughter Victoria, who was keen for me to meet her new boy-friend. Either through nature or nurture, Victoria has inherited from me a profound sense of inquiry as to the nature and purpose of existence. Her boy-friend had adopted the seemingly pragmatic attitude - "Given that the mystery of life is unfathomable, why worry about it. Just get on with it." Which begs the question of what "it" may be. Generally "it" constitutes the pursuit of an unsatisfactory hotch-potch of contradictory ambitions and the cultivation of a jumble of fantastical illusions and fantasies. Personally, I am convinced, like Socrates, that the unreflected life is not worth living and that, even if there is no pat answer to the "question" of life, an attitude of, how shall I put it, deliberate agnosticism, an open sense of "not knowing", is essential to retaining our humanity.
With these thoughts in mind, I sought to arm myself for potential debate by digging out books which had strongly influenced me in my youth.

Knowing P. to be a keen mountaineer, I went first of all to W.H. Murray's "Mountaineering in Scotland" (see earlier posting). Murray incorporated his climbing activities into the broader context of a spiritual quest for beauty and truth. This attitude somehow nourished me, despite my ghastly adolescent affectations of hard-boiled cynicism. In the chapter entitled, "The Evidence of Things Not Seen", Murray writes of a vision of other-worldly beauty:

It is this that Goethe calls "the open secret." It is this that mountaineers style "the mystery of the hills." Put more broadly, it is the mystery of the universe, of which the forms of man or mountain may be likened to veils that reveal its being yet mask its very essence. Ask Nature what she does and we are answered , as Faust was answered:

So at the roaring loom of Time I ply

And weave for God the garment that ye see Him by.

If the answer be taken to heart our understanding of mountains is broadened and deepened toward the understanding of all things created; but the point of its last line strikes home only when applied to oneself.

In other words the search for meaning and purpose is ultimately an inquiry into the nature of the self.

I then turned to Alan Watts. I had stumbled over beat-Zen in the writings of Jack Kerouac and had gone on to read Watt's "Way of Zen" as a primer for imaginary hip conversations with my intellectual friends. What I discovered was a brilliant populariser with a deceptively pellucid prose style. I was led on to read more - "The Wisdom of Insecurity", "Myth and Ritual in Christianity", " The Taboo against Knowing Who You really Are" and "This is It". "This is It", what a brilliant title! It matched entirely my own sense of not experiencing the full depth of the miracle of my own existence. Of course, the notion that there is an "I" which is in some way seperate from my existence is the very misunderstanding from which Zen seeks to awaken us. An enlightened individual participates in a cosmic consciousness, seeing his ego for what it really is - "a persona or social role, a somewhat arbitrary selection of experiences with which he has been taught to identify himself. (Why, for example, do we say "I think" but not "I am beating my heart"?)" Re-reading these words again now, I can sense how even the idea that I am not my thoughts has a curious, but specific effect. How strange to be alive!

To be continued.

2007-01-12T04:03:00.000-08:00

I have always felt the period between Christmas and new Year a peculiarly dead time. Late mornings, mindless telly, simultaneous but distracted reading of two or three Christmas books, bored over-eating - all conspire to create a feeling of nervous sluggishness. The only guaranteed antidote to this sub-human state is to go to the mountains. I had suggested taking the train down to Kandersteg, one of our favourite spots in the Berner Oberland, in order to spend a few days kicking around in the snow, my own secret ambition to perhaps bag a couple of peaks on snow-shoes. Carol ruthlessly rejected this proposition on the grounds of expense, winter-sports incompetence and not really liking snow much anyway. As it turned out, with it being the mildest winter on record, there was hardly any snow in the alps. "Just as well we didn't go then" - irresistible feminine logic! What we did agree upon was to spend a few days in Paris. Having been there on our honeymoon in December 1974, Paris will always be a romantic draw. Back then we got travel from London (train and ferry!) plus four nights in the swanky Hotel Baltimore on avenue Kléber all for £27 for the two of us! This time, with the united family requiring three rooms, the bill was ever so slightly more, even though we were staying in the modest but quaint Hôtel St. Dominique in the 7ème near the Eiffel tower.

Being less than an hour-and-a-half away from Brussels on the fast train, Paris can almost seem a banal destination. Of course, in truth, it is inexhaustible - if you are tired of Paris, you are most definitely tired of life. So, as if to prove we weren't, on the morning of the 28th, Holy Innocents' Day and our wedding anniversary, we struggled out of our hibernatory torpor and somehow got ourselves down to the Gare du Midi. Knowing the fissiparious tendencies of any group, but of family groups in particular, I planned our three days with near military precision. Even "rests" were the subject of detailed forward planning. I hoped in this way to avoid lengthy and irritable debate as to what to do next, and despite a few grumblings in the ranks about the "Stalinistic" approach, things worked out broadly according to plan.
Hitting the platform at the Gare du Nord, we immediately fanned out in formation towards our respective pre-established destination points - they in a taxi to the hotel, I by Metro to FNAC to pick up the museum tickets I'd ordered in advance in order to avoid potentially fractious queuing. I then walked briskly down from the Arc de Triomphe towards the Eiffel Tower through an exhilarating shower of rain, enjoying, however briefly, the pleasure of my own company and the childish frisson of being able to stride through such a décor. Maintaining radio contact with the advance party, we were able to rendezvous at a café on the corner of Dominique and Tour-Maubourg. The place was buzzing with lunchtime customers, Parisian accents and ever-alert and occupied waiters squeezing around the closely packed tables, calling out their orders to the kitchen. Trenchantly I ordered the plat du jour and a glass of Bordeaux. Endives au jambon is virtually the Belgian national dish, but it took on a whole new flavour in this excitingly different context. No fuss bill-settling completed, we retreated to the hotel to regroup.
The Hôtel St. Dominique is a cosy little place in traditional French chintz with what estate agents call "a wealth of exposed beams" and, above all, that special French hotel smell which they all used to have but which is less and less the case these days . [On the subject of smells, I particularly regret the pungent cloud of tabac brun which used to greet you at the Gare du Nord as you stepped of the train. It was as if Concentrated Essence of France had been deliberately released in spray form. It's all no smoking these days - doubtless healthier, but something magical has been lost irretrievably.] The rue St. Dominique affords a classic view of the Eiffel Tower with the look and the feel of the shopping streets from "Chez Nous", the school magazine in French to which, aged 11, we were required to subscribe - Le Boulanger, Le Boucher, L'Epicier, Le Traiteur, Le Cordonnier, La Brasserie etc. All very Amélie Poulain.

Having established base, we proceeded according to plan to the Musée du Luxembourg to see "Titien - le Pouvoir en Face". Borrowing the master's great works from around the world, the exhibition gathered together an amazingly impressive collection of paintings you'd somehow seen somewhere before - in history of art books or as illustrations in historical biographies. All the stars were there: Charles V, François I, Phillip II, a succession of grave and wily Doges. As W. pointed out, it does give you a strange feeling to think that these unimaginably powerful figures had all actually posed for Titian and that with his paints and brushes he had created not only their image but also, even allowing for inevitable flattery, their psychological portrait - and that we were looking at them now. Fascinating, impressive, powerful. Touching? Well, not really, but then Titian wasn't working for us, le grand public, but for his patrons. He wasn't seeking to reveal unseen truths, but very specifically to reveal seen truths, the truths of prestige and power - le Pouvoir en Face. Emerging from the museum, W. threw out the line "champion brown-nose!" Hard to deny at the end of the day.
As is now unfailingly the case in this consumerist age, we were steered out via the museum shop. Amongst the stacks of Titian paraphernalia, my eye was instinctively drawn to a print of one of Matisse's later floral motifs with their blocks of rich, solid colour and the signature looping blooms. How can you compare? You cannot possibly. They were trying to do very different things. However, it cannot be denied that Matisse somehow nourishes something positive at an emotional level which remains untouched by Titian. Could it be that modern art speaks more directly to the modern age? Possibly - but looking through the post cards for a souvenir, there was Fra Angelico's Annunciation. Again I felt touched by that specially fine sensibility which Fra Angelico conveys - such delicacy, such intelligence, such understanding. I can't help thinking that real art, as opposed to sensationalist gimmickry or mercenary self-promotion, must somehow call you to a higher place in yourself. To communicate this through paint, the artist needs to be in a certain inner state himself. This ambition, as I understand it, becomes quite explicit in the case of Zen painting, where the master must spend a long time inducing in himself a certain inner state, before expressing this state as a gesture of creative spontaneity through the medium of ink on paper. Quite a demanding undertaking.

Emerging from the museum, we drifted down towards the river through the back-streets of the Latin Quarter, eventually finding ourselves on the Boulevard St. Michel. We tried to get into the Deux Magots, but there were already long queues of would-be Jean-Paul Sartres and Simone de Beauvoirs, so we continued happily on our meandering way. Wandering the streets of Paris must be one of the most civilized pleasures in the entire world. Wherever you turn there is harmony of structure and grace of line. The consistency of colour and form makes for a cityscape which is homogeneous but never monotonous. The river Seine describes a perfect bend through the city, a consistent unifying leitmotif, the two banks united and reunited by the constant rhythm and equilibrium of magnificent bridges. And all these themes lead with an expectant inevitability to the crescendo of the Ile de la Cité and the jewel at its heart, Notre Dame. Notre Dame is the one iconic building in Paris which, even disregarding its magnificent setting, is a thing of intrinsic beauty. The reputation of other obvious icons, the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, the Sacré Coeur are dependent on association and context, being in themselves eccentric, pompous and tasteless respectively. Their effect is a function of the whole, Paris in its totality.

It was above all this totality that we continued to enjoy over the next two days, museum and exhibition visits being essentially a pretext for us to tramp the streets. Passing under the Eiffel Tower, crossing the Pont d'Iena, we headed west to the Jardin de Ranelagh and the Marmottan Museum. The Marmottan contains a superb collection of Monets, and since it is a little out of the way, the visitor has the time and space to dwell on the paintings. It is sometimes claimed by art historians that the Impressionist experiment was an attempt to paint light as we really experience it. I'm not sure. I rather think we see the world with the same mechanical literal-mindedness as the video camera. What the Impressionists offer us is in fact something larger-than-life, a heightened version of the world around us. For the very reason that the themes are frankly quotidian and straightforwardly identifiable, the viewer has a glimpse of his own familiar reality elevated to a new intensity. I am convinced that this is the secret of the consistent popularity of the style, the suggestion that, behind the veil of the apparently ordinary, life can be, should be, a vivid and meaningful experience for each of us. In this sense Impressionism is profoundly democratic - the very antithesis of the elitism of Titian.

Reflecting on these ideas, I am groping my way to an understanding of the implications of what, at the time, was a revolution in art. With the radical changes brought on through industrialisation and the wider distribution of wealth and the (concomitant?) secularisation of society, do we not see the beginnings of the new (bourgeois?) religion, "Happiness in this World"? Are not the works of the Impressionists almost literally icons of this new religion? My theory was bolstered by our visit to the Musée d'Orsay. For the scrum of people wading round the exhibits, which painting was the biggest draw? A straightforward empirical experiment. And the winner was...Le Bal du Moulin de la Galette by Renoir! Dancing on a warm summer's night, drink, conversation, the lights, the colours, the pretty girls, the delectable flirtation, the wit, the sumptious dresses, the movement, the life, all done without any "ship of fools" moral commentary. Yes, of course, no question, we can be happy in this life!

Returning home, Brussels seemed scruffy, small-minded and provincial by comparison. Of course, it's quite unfair to compare - "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife"! It's in that very pell-mell, earthy quality that the charms of Brussels are to be found. And we have the Grand'Place which burns off pretty much any single monument in Paris. And don't forget - Paris is only a convenient 1h25 away on the train!

2006-12-31T11:53:00.000-08:00

It will soon be 2007 which means that we have reached the end of the blogyear. Will we continue on through the next year? Embarrassment at belonging to to the profoundly sad brotherhood of bloggers is the one thing which could make me pack in what at times can feel like an unwelcome chore. I have been approached by a number of "fellow" bloggers who, expressing an airy appreciation for my own efforts, have smoothly gone on to strongly recommend their own sites. Needless to say, I've never been near them, being far too taken up with my own oeuvre. In a way it's very like most conversations: the dictates of politeness require you to feign interest in what the other person is saying, but in point of fact all you attention is focussed exclusively on the incredibly interesting point you're burning to make. In all likelihood it's the same for the other guy. It reminds me of the cover of Pawn Hearts (Van de Graaf Generator, 1971 - my brother was a huge fan) which shows a number of dissociated individuals, each sealed in a pawn-shaped glass pod hovering randomly over a catastrophically fragmented earth. The definitive track is entitled "A Plague of Lighthouse-Keepers" - kind of says it all really. The word "solipsism" springs to mind. Checking in the dictionary, it says: "theory that the self is the only object of knowledge." Now, hang on - does this mean what I always thought it meant, that you are unwilling or unable to recognise anything outside of your wonderful self? Or could it be a reference to the notion of self knowledge in the sense of "Know Thyself"? The ancient philosophers maintained that a special sort of self-knowledge was indispensable to achieving freedom from the prison of the egotistical self. Anyway, that's how I would like to view this blog - as a medium for the exploration and ordering of my own thoughts, as an opportunity to attain greater self knowledge and, in a modest way, let my equally modest (in number) readership know that they are not alone in thinking along these same lines. And if they're not alone, then I'm not alone either. So, blog on! Happy New Year!

2006-12-31T02:51:00.000-08:00

"High Endeavours - The Life and Legend of Robin Smith" is a biography of the famous Scottish climber by his school-friend and early climbing-companion, Jimmy Cruikshank. Smith was only 23 when he was killed during an expedition to the Pamirs in 1962, but by then he already enjoyed a near-mythical reputation in climbing circles. An obituary piece in the Daily Express described him as "..a legend by the time he was twenty. He was to climbing what Stirling Moss is to Le Mans, Jim Baxter to Ibrox, Piggot to Newmarket." Of course, from the venerable position of 54 years, 23 seems a ridiculous age to die, for which no athletic immortality can ever compensate. The mountains are not some religion of such overriding importance that one should be prepared to die for them. And yet, thinking back to my own climbing experience during my student days in the early seventies, I can remember how mountaineering seemed to be so much more than just a sport, so much more existentially significant than a mere healthy outdoor pursuit. It somehow encompassed a whole series of aspects of what I thought life could or should be about - freedom and adventure, intensity of experience, vividness of impressions, pursuit of beauty, true companionship, a test of courage and resourcefulness, a bohemian indifference to the unmanly comforts of the consumer society, and, it must be admitted, a certain sense of lofty elevation above the common run of man and "straight" society in general. And, although I never had the push or the skill of a Robin Smith, I can sense these same motivations in him as I read of his various exploits, not least his own accounts of them. He wrote, both prose and poetry, in a "laconic", not to say cryptic style, heavily influenced by the "beat" writers of the time, influencing in turn the whole approach of a generation of mountain writers, away from fine sentiments and purple prose in the direction of a condensed and knowing understatement.

Mountain literature is a whole genre to itself, with a literary history of its own, from the classics such as Whymper's "Scrambles in the Alps" or Mummery's "My Climbs in the Alps and Caucasus" through to modern works such as Jon Krakauer's "Into Thin Air" or Joe Simpson's "Touching the Void". As a student I would go off to the University Library purportedly to study, but would almost unconsciously drift off to the Mountaineering section and ardently peruse its impressive collection. A highly elastic "just five minutes" enabled me to carve my way through Winthrop-Young, Frank Smythe, Colin Kirkus, Charles Evans, Edmund Hillary, Showell Styles, J.H.B. Bell, Chris Bonnington, Joe Brown, Gervasutti, Lionel Terray, Gaston Rébuffat etc. etc., but my preferred writer was, and remains, W.H. Murray. Murray wrote his classic "Mountaineering in Scotland" in 1944 while a P.O.W. in Italy and Germany. Writing in a clear, but consciously literary style, Murray incorporates mountaineering into a greater quest for beauty and truth, whereby the vigorous focus on the here-and-now which climbing demands, interspersed with periods of profound relaxation and overwhelming impressions of natural beauty are somehow able to free the mind from its habitual reductionist thinking and allow it to glimpse the universal reality behind the veil of outward appearance. The book had a truly inspirational impact upon me when I first read it in 1969 - in the immediate sense of wanting to rush out and climb all the routes he described, but also in the sense of wanting to be (dare one say it?) a better person. I know this must sound priggish or even insipid, but I don't mean this in any moralistic, "goody-goody" way. Rather, Murray kindled in me a need to try to experience life to the full, that is to say, to seek to realise that, at every moment, like it or not, one participates in an infinitely greater reality than one's own dim and contradictory notions of oneself and that, approached in the right spirit, mountaineering can be a way to this higher realisation.

Of course, not all mountaineers are sages. Climbers are at least as susceptible as others to the weaknesses of vanity and self-love, of egotistical ambition and vainglory. In fact "hard man" snobbery is one of the most tiresome aspects of the whole climbing scene. And yet I feel that, avowed or unavowed, anyone who engages in an activity as intrinsically pointless as putting themselves in potential danger in order to climb up a piece of rock, is in some way in search of something more than "life" is ordinarily able to give. This was undoubtedly the case with Robin Smith, who, as an accomplished student of academic philosophy, was more than just a simple-minded enthusiast. Smith's own writing points to a high degree of self-awareness in his climbing activities. He certainly wasn't unaware of his own talent. He was good, and he knew it, and being good, not to say the best, was his burning ambition. But there is an implicit shadow in "High Endeavours", the suggestion of a degree of irresponibility in Smith's approach, a hint of an indifference to danger amounting to recklessness. Recklessness often has its roots in unhappiness, and a devil-may-care indifference to one's own personal safety can often be an expression of a deep inner insecurity. Born in India in 1938 in the age of the Raj, Smith was sent to boarding school from the age of seven - first at Morrison's Academy in Crieff and then at Watson's in Edinburgh. He would scarcely see his parents from one year to the next. Nor was he a "fit-in" sort of a child. Chronically disorganized and untidy, brilliant but inconsistent, his sensitive but prickly nature was probably ill-suited to the conformist rigours of a "privileged" education. He was a rebel, and his climbing was, at least in part, an expression of that rebellion. Did he take unnecessary risks because deep down he didn't care for his own life? Was his tragic death a psychological accident waiting to happen? And another thing occurs to me. I have frequently sensed that a self-destructive "fuck it" is one of the constantly recurring traits of the Scottish psyche. Maybe Robin Smith fell victim to the national temperament. Or perhaps his death was just a stupid accident.

2006-11-11T08:03:00.000-08:00

A late October holiday in the West of Scotland is always a risky business. Travelling in hope of a riot of autumn colours, one all too often ends up suffering a cold and miserable drenching. Setting off, the forecast was for wind and rain, and waking up in my sleeper compartment, I looked out the window as the train crawled up a "dreich" Glen Falloch, rain slanting remorselessly down and the drenched, grey hillsides hosing water into the valley. However, morale boosted by a cup of tea brought by the attendant, I reflected on Billy Connolly's defence of the Scottish weather: "There's no such thing as bad weather, only the wrong clothes!" and stepped confidently off the train at Bridge of Orchy. Nigel was there to meet me and pleasure at seeing him somehow converted the atrocious conditions into an infinitely amusing joke. We drove off to Kinlochleven (via Fort William to pick up my phone which I'd inevitably left on the train) where he and his wife Jane were staying with friends in the well-appointed cottage of the Fell and Rock Climbing Club. Absolved from any immediate need to rush off up hill and crag, I took my time settling in, chatting with Nigel and Jane, their friend Josie Smith and her daughter Claire. After a leisurely lunch, we were tempted by a slight interlude in the weather to brave the elements and "go for a walk".
Kinlochleven is a slightly out-of-the-way sort of place, north of Glencoe, beneath the Marmore hills. It's original raison d'être was an aluminium smelt, but it's continued existence is now much more dependent upon tourism, not least the fact that it has become a favourite stopover on the now famous West Highland Way. We wandered through the village and up through the woods to admire the Grey Mare falls. Framed in autumnal perfection, they presented an absurdly ideal picture, like a Victorian print, with a great surge of white water gushing through a chute of vast rocks. Continuing on up, we emerged onto the open hillside, heading for Loch Eilde Mor, our chosen destination. To our left were the Marmores - great lumps of mist-shrouded Scottish hill. We identified Am Bodach and Na Gruagaichean. Years ago, it must have been 1983, I'd been up there with Nigel. They'd been snow on the ridges and we'd been beaten back from a full traverse by ferocious winds. Meanwhile we were being propelled uphill by only slightly less violent gusts from the south-west, while being discomfited by intermittent rain-showers. As I plodded on up, I gradually became aware of the ringing of my mobile phone. I hadn't imagined there would be a signal. With lunatic incongruousness it was the office asking me if I was able to go on mission to Turkey! Claiming other engagements, I politely declined. My companions accused me of setting the whole thing up for the purposes of swank. Nothing I said could persuade them otherwise!
We reached a broader land-rover track with easy going down to the loch. It was one of those wild, lonely places which, for me at least, make for a perfect camp-site. What could be more romantic than the orange-yellow splash of my old Vango Force Ten pitched at the loch-side, punctuating the dark green-brown of the heather and the steel-grey waters disappearing into the horizon at a point between two hills? But perhaps not today. Turning away from the loch, we headed into the teeth of the wind as we contoured around the base of Meall na Duibhe and out onto the the shoulder of the hill known as Leitir Bo Fionn. By now we were taking bursts of rain full in the face, as my gortex jacket once again failed to live up to the manufacturer's rash claims. I hurried on down the path as it cut back towards the confluence of the Allt na h'Eilde and the River Leven and the shelter of the scrubby woods. Settling down behind a stone dyke to wait for the others to catch up, I drank in the gold and brown of bracken and birch, of oak and ash and rowan - not seeking to commit the beauty of the scene to some autobiographical memory-bank, but to be open to it in the moment itself, in order to become, as it were, one with it.
The others joined me and we continued on past the wildly rushing waters of the Leven in spate and made our way back through the village to the cottage, stopping off at the off-licence to pick up a "carry-out" to fuel the evening's home entertainments.
Nigel and Jane rustled up a curry, as I cracked open the drink. With a fire burning merrily in the grate, we ate, talked, joked, reminisced, intoxicated as much by the company as by the wine. I gave a rendition of "The Seven Drunken Nights" on the harmonica and Josie sang some traditional ballads in her astonishing folk-singing voice - an amazing talent. Turning in, we made no plans for the morning, deciding to wait upon what the weather might bring.

Next day we awoke to the steady and unrelenting down-beat of West Highland rain. That decided us. Nigel and Jane would abandon what was in effect the last day of their holidays and head south, aiming to stop off in the Lake District on the way. I, meanwhile, contacted my old university climbing companion,"Chas" Chaplin, and arranged for him to drive up from Surrey and meet us at the "Three Shires" in Little Langdale that same evening. To his credit, Chas barely hesitated, seeking only confirmation from "Rain Man", his nickname for me, that we had guaranteed foul weather. Once I had assured him that the mother of low pressure areas was hovering over the north-west of England, he set off through appalling conditions and nightmare traffic with careless insousiance. He made it just before closing time. A quick welcoming pint later, we all drove the five minutes to the Lancashire Mountaineering Club hut - a "converted" barn at Blea Tarn on the road over to Great Langdale. The years fell away. An old hay loft with a long alpine style bunk on one side, a do-it-yourself kitchen range on the other and a slippery wooden stairway down through pelting rain to the outside toilet was the sort of unbridled luxury we dreamed of in our student days! Nigel and Chas had not met since my wedding. I'd known Nigel from school, Chas from university and their paths had had no particular reason to cross. Both engineers, they quickly identified shared experience and mutual friends. It would have been nice if all three of us could have gone climbing together, but Nigel absolutely had to be back in Northwich the following afternoon.
The next morning the rain was still lashing down. I was reminded of my first ever Newcastle University Mountaineering Club meet in Langdale in October 1970. The club had opted to camp, and we freshers were accomodated in a sort of mini-marquee which had been specially hired for the occasion. Predictably it deluged. On the Saturday I remember persuading some reluctant new members to take a look at Bowfell Buttress, supposedly a climb for all weathers. We waded up the Band through the mist and rain, found what I thought must be the start, only to discover that my companions had taken cold (and doubtless wet) feet. Secretly or not-so-secretly relieved, we returned to the campsite to discover that the marquee was semi-collapsed in a foot of water. We gathered up our sodden kit, dumped it in the hired van and headed for the bar of the Old Dungeon Ghyll to get as drunk as our grants would allow. On closing time there was nothing else for it but to sleep in the van, although there was very little actual sleep involved in sitting bolt upright on hard Ford Transit benches surrounded by a chaos of rucksacks and ropes. Ah, those were the days!
Chas and I bade Nigel and Jane farewell and headed over to Langdale. Along the valley bottom the road was significantly flooded. We quickly devised a plan of action commensurate with the conditions and drove off to Ambleside for a cup of coffee. A wet Saturday festering in Ambleside must come close to a climber's vision of hell, but there was worse to come. I discovered to my horror that Chas had succumbed to MCS -Modern Consumer Syndrome, and was quite happy to drag me round the boutiques telling me which brands of anorak were cool and which irretrievably naff. I do worry about him sometimes. On a previous outing I heard him most definitely refer to his jumper as "a trendy fleece" - the mother of oxymorons to my way of thinking! However, we did manage to do some sensible shopping for climbing ropes and with the weather seeming to ease a little, we returned to Langdale, parked by the New Dungeon Ghyll, and set off for a no more than slightly wet walk up to Pavey Ark. We pushed up past the spectacular Dungeon Ghyll Force, skirted around the shores of Stickle Tarn, with the cliffs of Pavey Ark looming impressively through the mist, then headed east over and through a series of ill-defined bumps - Blea Rigg, Castle How, Raw Pike. This part of the Lakes is so criss-crossed with paths, marked and unmarked on the map, that it can get confusing and, although never entirely lost, we were anxious to find the best way down into the Langdale valley, avoiding the cliffs of Whitegill crag. As a young man I had learned much of my climbing on Whitegill and had no desire to come a cropper on it 35 years later in a bitter twist of fate! However, taking our bearings by Easedale Tarn and Grasmere to the north and east, we eventually found the path down, which was just as well as without it we might never have scaled the vast cyclopean walls which seperate the grazing areas from the bracken-covered upper slopes!

Given the busy autumn week-end, the only room we could get was in the slightly pricey Old Dungeon Ghyll, but it was definitely a worthwhile experience. Steeped in climbing tradition and oozing quaint English charm, it had a drying room, an excellent little residents' bar with a good selection of beers where we had an excellent meal, a cosy, comfortable bedroom and, to top it all, a Polish receptionist of breathtaking loveliness! We stammered our way through the settling of the bill like a couple of 16 year olds, while back in the safety of our room we shared laddish jokes about the advantages enjoyed by the experienced man etc. etc. Female beauty of that calibre is an extraordinary thing. It's not just a question of sex-appeal, although it obviously is that too. It's almost as though some, in herself, perfectly ordinary girl has unwittingly become the vehicle of a Platonic "idea" of beauty embodying a truth, a truth which calls to something equivalent, something higher in the male admirer. This must surely be connected in some way with the traditional notion of the women's "civilizing" influence on men or the Goethean concept of "das Ewig-Weibliche". It is probably the inspiration behind the medieval romances and the writings of the troubadors. Next to my bed is a picture of Carol as she was when we first met, which, I realise now, serves above all as a reminder of the better person she awakened in me. Another research project for my retirement!

The next morning there wasn't a cloud in the sky. We packed up quickly and, skipping breakfast, drove over the Kirkstone pass to Ullswater. Our objective was St. Sunday Crag where Chas had identified a three-star scramble. Not getting enough practice to have confidence in our climbing abilities, scrambling offers us the frisson of exploring rock architecture without any real prospect of being able to fall off anything! With the colours of the season revealed at their spectacular best after the rain, The Lake District showed itself off in all its dinky perfection. Having just come down from Scotland, I was lured into an exercise of comparison. And although I love both, there is no denying the differences. Where the Scottish hills are vast, endless, wild and untamed, a random litter left by the uncaring powers of the ice age, the Lakeland fells are neat, circumscribed and contained as though every stone, every tree, every hillside had been carefully, lovingly put into position by some water-colour deity. The Scottish landscape seems somehow pregnant with a deep unfulfilled longing, an unspoken melancholy, the immanence of an unrealised transcendence, inducing a state of awe, a sense of humility, whereas the Lake District is English, solid, practical, confident, reassuring, cheerful, affectionate, utterly charming, but not beyond our ordinary ken. Are these just so many pathetic fallacies or am I, through the medium of landscape, stumbling over the differences between the English and the Scottish psyche? What are the differences? I shall hazard a nutshell view: where the Englishman is "bien dans sa peau", the Scotsman is not at all and each has the merits and failings of their respective states. Where the Englishman is stolid, the Scotsman is neurotic. The Englishman is at ease in his notion of the world - pragmatic, self-assured, tolerant, of an optimistic disposition, unimaginative, dependable, an honest dullard, slow to anger, but a stubborn enemy, a man content with the certainties bequeathed unto him. The Scotsman, however, is not at home within himself, nor really in this world. This renders him susceptible to impossibly utopian projects like Presbyterianism - (another) plan to permit God's rule on earth. Not confident of himself, the Scotsman must continually overcompensate through the medium of caustic wit, which is honed to a fine edge through constant practice. Not enjoying the Englishman's existential certainties, the Scotsman is intellectually curious and genuinely interested in the things of the mind. The English have intellectuals too, but abstract thought enjoys little status in a context where all that really needs to be known is already known. Being half Saxon, half Celt, the Scotsman is divided against himself; he simultaneously seeks to emulate and despise his English neighbour. He is dourly practical and wildly exalted, ruthless and sentimental, overconfident and prone to self-doubt. Where the Englishman is the finished product, the Scotsman is work in progress. But a work in progress is by definition more open-ended. Anyway, just a thought-experiment...

We walked up Grisedale, then cut off up the fellside to the start of the scramble which we found after a bit of faffing around. The route itself was a bit contrived as the trickiest bits could largely be avoided. At one point Chas insisted on the use of the rope, but more to inaugurate our new purchase than for any real consideration of security. We took a couple of pictures, posing over precipices seen only through the camera lens. Then it was over as quickly as it had started. We plodded up to the top of the hill and lounged in the sunshine, taking in Helvellyn to the west and High Street to the east. We sauntered lazily down the hill, dragging out our remaining time together, enjoying spoof-picturesque views across Ullswater. Then on down to the car, pack up and drive to Oxenholme station for me to catch the train back up to Scotland. We parted company in the secret knowledge that, so long as we are able to bash up a hill together, we can never grow old.

2006-10-14T08:52:00.000-07:00

Amsterdam's not much more than a couple of hours away by car and just three hours away on the meandering Inter-City we took from the Gare du Midi and yet it is so astonishingly different. It is so clearly a northern European city, more reminiscent of Copenhagen than of Brussels. The bicycles, the blondes, the brashness, the stylish discretion of the buildings, the wide northern sky, the autumn canals, the post-hippie aesthetic, the institutionalised bohemia,
the easy exchanges, the life-as-play, the unreflected naïvety, the up-front tolerance, the cool intelligence, the practical instinct, the astute business brain, the sense for money, the unstrained organisation, the literal-minded frankness, the right-on views, the straight-talking, the casual manner, the confidence in English, the belief in action, the secret conviction that they've got life cracked - all these things, so immediately apparent, cry out to be more thoroughly penetrated and more deeply understood. It surely has much to do with protestantism and capitalism - another book to write when I retire! Of course, one would have to have a fairly lengthy séjour d'étude, but a bijou apartment on a canal street with a bicycle to take me off to some hushed, but sensibly organised, university library... there are probably worse things in this world! Carol was enchanted by the atmosphere. Up on a trip for her birthday weekend, the poised, understated beauty of Amsterdam and the tasteful, safe unconventionality of the Amsterdamers appealed irresistibly to her Libran sensibility. Before ever coming to Brussels we had imagined a life in Copenhagen, with me doing literary research and Carol working in a hospital, the two of us living in a modest, but charmingly furnished appartment, surrounded by our unpretentiously creative and unfailingly devoted friends. Well, it wasn't to be, but Amsterdam somehow re-evoked that world of might-have-been, as Carol toyed with the idea of spending a couple of weeks' holiday there, with me following some course to improve my Dutch and her swanning around doing the shops and the museums! We'll see...
Our Copenhagen dream dates from 1973 and there's something of that era that has left its indelible stamp on Amsterdam. In some ways it's still dining out on its heyday as the European Capital of the Counterculture. Which was what, exactly? Sex and Drugs and Rock'n'Roll? That certainly, and it's all still there in Amsterdam, but in a tired, seedy, clapped-out version in the form of sex-shops, koffie-shops and rock dives. In the end, it's difficult not to conclude that the whole counterculture thing was largely a demographic phenomenon whereby society was overtaken by the youthful extravagances of the baby-boom generation, a vast surge of testosterone-inspired energy as the swollen cohort of the generation born in the post-war years came into its own and demanded to be noticed and listened to and was prepared to stamp its feet until it was. Given that I was born in 1952, I suppose I'm a part of it all. What I can remember feeling most of all was an extraordinary sense of energy and of possibility - anything, everything was there to be experienced, life's potential seemingly inexhaustible. Whether that is youth or the Zeitgeist is difficult to say. I tend to the view that the accumulation of such sheer quantities of youth-energy was bound to impact hugely on the ambient socio-cultural environment; and nowhere does that influence linger more strongly than in Amsterdam. At its best it brings a creative questioning allied to a sense of moral justice, and a sort of stylish puritanism with a sense of humour. At its worst it is combination of mindless dissipation and right-on clichés heavily sauced with a sour and self-righteous indignation.

What did we do during our stay? Definitely a lot of walking. Our hotel was a little bit away from the centre and, although convenient for the big museums, meant a bit of a walk down to Dam square etc. In fact, walking around Amsterdam is the very opposite of a penance. Wandering along the brick-surfaced streets, past the elegant houses, by the gently moving water of the canals, under the turning trees, over the little railed bridges, avoiding the tinkling bicycles, you are gradually able to take the special atmosphere into yourself. Of course, we also took a boat trip round the canals - an absolute romantic "must". Enjoying the spectacular view of the patrician houses along the Herengracht, one gets an impression of the extraordinary confidence and wealth which Amsterdam must have enjoyed during the Golden Age of the 17th century - the age of Rembrandt, in fact, whose house in the Jodenbreestraat we went on to visit. Rembrandt bought the house at the height of his fame and seems to have spent a fortune on it and on a vast collection of paintings, sculptures, furnishings etc. most of which was seized when he went bankrupt in 1658. The house contains an impressive array of the master's etchings and, on the day we visited, we were given a practical demonstration of the various techniques of etching in copper plate, which further increased our respect for Rembrandt's achievements in that demanding medium. Although the house is of undoubted curiosity value and well worth the visit, the paintings are displayed to greatest advantage in the Rijksmuseum. The Rijksmuseum is currently undergoing renovation and viewing has been restricted to a limited area devoted to a sort of "best of" the Golden Age of Dutch painting. Apart from a certain crush, this was really a blessing in diguise, as, if truth be told, there are only so many paintings you can take in at any one go, and a limited exhibition puts a natural limit on one's cultural incontinence. Highlights for me were the Vermeers - The Kitchen Maid and Woman Reading a Letter - and, of course, the Rembrandts. The Vermeers do exude an uncanny stillness as of a moment in time captured for ever. It's been suggested that Vermeer used a lens and a camera obscura to achieve his apparently perfect representation of reality, but no mere photograph could capture that miraculous sense of eternity in the Now. Among the Rembrandts, the prime exhibit was "The Night Watch". However impressive and however obviously a tour de force, it fails to touch in the same way as "The Jewish Bride", which reveals Rembrandt's very special gift for what one can only call compassion. Clearly Rembrandt was a technically superb artist, but a painting like "The Jewish Bride" is more than just a technical achievement; it somehow manages to reveal a deep truth about the human condition through the medium of paint. The special nature of Rembrandt's gift was further revealed in a collection of his drawings and studies. Every single figure he depicts, however provisionally, however approximately, is invested with that same grace of poise, as if it was something which came out of him and directly into the drawing, independant of his conscious volition. He couldn't not do it if he tried. I was particularly struck by a very quick sketch of what must have been Judith driving a tent peg through the skull of Holofernes. Both perpetrator and victim were somehow elevated above the sordid brutality of assassination by the timeless presence expressed through the posture of the figures. Quite amazing.

2006-10-05T05:54:00.000-07:00

Since reading Steven Levitt's "Freakonomics", I've been reflecting on the idea of an economy of human behaviour, a science of motivation, why it is that people do what they do. Self-observation reveals two consistent driving forces behind my own actions: the pursuit of physical pleasure/comfort and the craving for psychological gratification. Although these broad categories cover any number of permutations and contradictions, I can't think of any motivating factor which could not be categorised under one or the other heading. And at the same time, I can't help feeling there's something rather humiliating about this "Binsenweisheit". It's as though, despite my unceasing efforts at contriving to find myself "interesting", "clever", "creative", "original" etc., I am blindly driven by automatic desires in a manner not dissimilar to a clockwork mouse. And the worst of it is that, almost by definition, "I Can't Get No Satisfaction". Gratification is, at best, momentary and straightway I am off in pursuit of the next "experience" that will make my life complete. Our lives are constantly projected into a notional ideal future, a state of affairs which effectively chains us to the treadmill of time. I am reminded of an old Captain Beefheart song, I forget the title and the album, but it goes more or less:

There ain't no time to stop in,
There ain't no time to stop in,
And there ain't no Santa Claus on the evening stage.

Buddhism urges us to free ourselves of desire - a seemingly impossible task; the driving force of desire is at the core of human existence. The only possible clue to unravelling this conundrum lies, it seems to me, in a new understanding of the nature of time. As Maurice Nicoll argues in his "Living Time" (see earlier postings), our usual, linear sense of time is only one dimension of time; in a higher dimension all time is reconciled in the eternal Now. It seems that it is given to man, in potentiality at least, to live in these two dimensions of time simultaneously; that this is, in fact, man's proper purpose, demanding a special effort to free his consciousness from the promptings of his automatic desires and his fantasy of himself. I leave you with a few lines from Eliot's "Burnt Norton":

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and present are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.
The inner freedom from the practical desire,
The release from action and suffering, release from the inner
And the outer compulsion, yet surrounded
By a grace of sense, a white light still and moving,
Erhebung without motion, concentration
Without elimination, both a new world
And the old made explicit, understood
In the completion of its partial extasy,
The resolution of its partial horror.
Yet the enchainment of past and future
Woven in the weakness of the changing body,
Protects mankind from heaven and damnation
Which flesh cannot endure.
Time past and time future
Allow but a little consciousness.
To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered.

2006-09-25T01:46:00.000-07:00

I was off sick all last week. I'd been at a wedding in the UK the previous weekend and woke up the the next day with what seemed to be the Mother of Hangovers. It was only through bouts of shivering, hot sweats and numberless calls of nature that gradually the truth dawned. I was stricken with a particularly nasty gastric condition. Immodium just about got me home without mishap, but I had to ring in sick the next morning.

I sank into that langourous, decadent state of passive self indulgence which non-incapacitating illness brings with it. I could with an entirely clear conscience abandon the 1001 chores, responsibilities, projects, plans, letters, bills, emails, telephone calls, and blogs which hound my everyday existence and do exactly as I pleased. It is a useful, if salutory, experience for a man to have first-hand knowledge of his default position. Mine's pretty vacant - float around doing nothing in particular, a laboured sudoku or two, read a bit, nothing too challenging, mindlessly zap around daytime TV etc. It was in the course of one of these brain-dead zap sessions that I stumbled over a fascinating programme about a back-to-nature community in some remote part of Alaska. A score of young idealists had decided to move to the wilderness of Alaska in order to live an authentic life close to nature. They didn't live in a commune, but in relative proximity to each other (100 miles or so!), each family in its self-built log cabin, in a mutual self-help network. My heart skipped a beat. It was pure "Whole Earth Catalogue". They were seeking to live a freer life, free from the trammels of vulgar materialism and conspicuous consumption. They wanted to get back to the land and set their souls free.

But they were very practical and competent about it, the harsh nature of the climate not permitting of casual improvisation. They shot and killed their own food (moose etc.), but without pretending to total self-sufficiency. They traded animal furs in order to buy fuel for a generator in order to enjoy certain modern comforts such as a washing machine and a hi-fi. I didn't see any computers, but I suspect it was an old piece of documentary from before the "computer revolution" or maybe they just couldn't get broad-band! On reflection, there weren't any phone lines. Inevitably numbers dwindled over time. The critical factor was the children's education. Parents were able to teach their own children up to certain age, with the support of a sort of itinerant government back-up system, but once the children reached the age of 12 or 13, the parents generally felt that they couldn't decently deprive them of a peer group with which to socialize. Very responsibly they moved into town for the good of the children. The programme ended with a quotation from Thoreau's "Walden" to the effect that: when I come to the end of my days, I would want to feel that I had lived before I died.

It all reminded me of how as a young man I had a secret hankering after being American. It was all bound up with a notion of freedom. From my own hide-bound, stiff-upper-lip, public school background, Americans seemed so relaxed, so not uptight, so uninhibited in their right-on, can-do attitude. That's how I wanted to be, and still do in a way. Certainly, when people talk about freedom and America in the same breath (which is much too frequently), that is the only freedom which makes any sort of sense to me. What other sort is there? The freedom to make a lot of money (if you're lucky)? The freedom to practice loopy religion (God help us)? The freedom to think you're great just because your Umerkan (please)?

In my reduced condition I was able to read "Freakonomics", subtitled "A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything". It's by a self-confessed economics nerd, Steven Levitt, in collaboration with New York Times journalist, Stephen Dubner. It's the sort of dreadfully overhyped thing that I try to avoid as a matter of principle, pedantically refusing to succumb to publishing industry overkill: "A phenomenon", "Brilliant", "Prepare to be dazzled", "A sensation", "The mot du jour", "Total controversy" etc. etc. etc. Despite the gush, it's really a book about methodology. Levitt basically expands the notion of economics beyond the study of mere pecuniary exchange and investigates the broader field of "incentives". People do things for money, but also for reasons such as peer-group respect or to conform with certain moral principles. Given sufficient information, these incentives can be identified and measured, helping to explain why certain things are the way they are - a methodology, in other words, for measuring why people do what they do. So we learn of the hidden side of a number of disparate phenomena: how and why teachers and Sumo wrestlers cheat; how real-estate agents and the Klu Klux Klan are essentially exploiting an "information asymmetry"; why drug dealers live with their Moms (because the drugs industry is a very broad based pyramid with only the very top guys making a pile of cash); that the drop in the crime rate is largely attributable to easier abortion; that, in bringing up children, nature is much more significant than nurture; that there is a fascinating, though inconclusive, statistic on the names given to children by various socio-economic groups at various times. The charm of the book is its weakness. It is gloriously unsystematic, but it actually falls well sort of a methodology of human behaviour. What it does show is that inspired interpretation of statisitics can reveal some unexpected truths. It also confirms for me that Steven Levitt is my kind of American - brilliant, unaffected, original and fearless. God bless him!

2006-09-19T10:52:00.000-07:00

The Finnish Gymnich was held in Lappeenranta in Karelia, close to the Russian border. The Presidency has made relations with Russia one of its priorities, and arranging the informal Foreign Ministers' in this ancient fortress town testified to that ambition. Alongside Iran and the Middle-East, Russia was the third area of debate which had been pencilled in for free discussion over a day and a half. Clearly, history and geography both bolster the Finns claim to having a special insight into the nature of Europe's giant and often inscrutable neighbour. The fortress of Lappeenranta fell to the Russians in 1741 after the Swedish defeat at the battle of Willmanstrand (its Swedish name). The reader will forgive me if I digress on the context and background to that defeat, as it throws up a number of fascinating historical points.

The battle was the most decisive event in the course of the so-called "hattarnas krig" - the war of the hat party. The hat party, as opposed to the bonnet party (mössarna), was intent on war with Russia in order to win back territory lost at the treaty of Nystad of 1721. The treaty of Nystad concluded the long period of hostilities between Sweden and Russia initiated by the Swedish "warrior-king", Charles XII. Under that treaty, the Baltic ceased to be a Swedish inland sea. Russia became the area's major power. Sweden, under considerable pressure, was forced to make huge concessions, ceding Ingermanland (the country around the eastern end of the Gulf of Finland), Estonia, and Latvia. It succeeded, however, in retaining Finland, apart from Vyborg and part of Karelia. Twenty years later, the hats were again busy nurturing fantasies of great power status, cultivating an almost mystical belief in the invincibility of the Swedish soldier. War was declared in July 1741, in the expectation of a speedy reconquest of the lost provinces. The result, however, was the very opposite. Inadequate supplies, disease, desertion and poor military planning brought defeat at Willmanstrand in August. The following year, the entire Swedish army, shut up in Helsinki, was forced to capitulate. Under the Treaty of Abo (Turku in Finnish)1743, the Swedes lost further territory in the east of Finland.
What conclusions can we draw from this sorry tale? First of all, the all too depressingly obvious one, that militaristic adventurism is the very antithesis of sound political management - the modern parallells stare us screamingly in the face! Then there's the fact of just how difficult it is not to gasp in disbelief at Sweden "having a go" at Russia! In a modern geopolitical context the notion seems utterly absurd. And thirdly, one cannot help wondering: "what happened to the Finns?" It was Finland that was being fought on and over, yet the Finns are conspicuous by their total absence from the visible spectrum of this bellicose panorama.

And the meeting? I don't think I'm in breach of the official secrets act when I say that the most fascinating aspect of the meeting was the décor of the room. The plain white walls had been hung with a magnificent collection of the works of Ilya Repin, on loan from the Russian State Museum in St. Petersburg. I could vaguely remember having seen his famous "Volga Boatmen" during an earlier stay in St. Petersburg, but this was different. An exhibition devoted exclusively to a single body of work, with some fifty different examples of his production, from small drawings to life-size canvasses, gives a much deeper and broader impression of the sensibility of the artist. There is something of Rembrandt about him in his ability to reveal an inner soulfulness in his portraits, a quality which speaks of a deep compassion, a profound sense of solidarity with his fellow-man. Allied to that is an extraordinary lightness of touch and a breathtakng technical dexterity, but above all else an unrelenting power of observation, a sustained focus of attention of which few are capable. I was struck by a portrait of a student studying a book. Repin had somehow captured the unaffected seriousnes of this act of study in a way which momentarily evoked in me a sense of shame at my own habitual flippancy. There was a very fine portrait of Repin's friend, Rimsky-Korsakov. Above all, there was the incredibly poignant full-length portrait of Tsar Nicholas II, gazing down on proceedings throughout the meeting - living, or rather dead, proof of the fact that political decisions have their consequences. Andy and I were particularly taken by a small pencil drawing of a young peasant bride in traditional costume - a beautiful face, but with a certain movement of the eyebrow suggesting an interrogation, a reticence, a reluctance. It was exquisite.

Repin takes on a special interest in a Finnish context as a result of an accident of borders. Repin designed his own home "Penaty" just to the north of St. Petersburg. After the 1917 revolution Penaty was incorporated into Finland. He was invited by Lenin to come back to Russia but refused the invitation giving the excuse that he was too old to make the journey. With the exception of a portrait of Provisional Government head, Alexander Kerensky, he never painted anything substantial on the subjectof the 1917 revolutions or the Soviet experiment that followed. In 1930 he died in Kuokkala, Finland (now Repino, St. Petersburg Oblast).

As for the press conference, no secrets of state - we agreed that there is a possible "window of opportunity" with a new, post-Lebanon European role in the Middle East; we should try and keep talking to the Iranians without letting them off the hook; and we should continue to keep a close eye on developments in Russia - particularly the museums and art galleries, presumably!

2006-09-19T09:38:00.000-07:00

EDITORIAL NOTE. ASBO is now, very flatteringly, it must be said, the subject of a gagging order. He has been warned off writing about the content of meetings for fear of upsetting un-named parties who, it would appear, wield considerable influence and could potentially damage the interests of the SCIC in particular and the Commission in general. ASBO, while maintaining that his postings were never in any way deliberately inflammatory, has accepted these arguments with good grace.

The new editorial policy will mean that:
- accounts of meetings will be restricted exclusively to information in the public domain.
- there will be no "ad personam " references in any meeting sketches.
- back-postings have been edited according to the new guidelines.

Readers still desirous of "saucier" content, however, may wish to visit the new, subscription-only ASBO II, the address of which will be made known to the "cognoscenti".

2006-09-14T09:59:00.000-07:00

And so the new season starts. I hit the ground running with back-to-back weekends in Finland. I caught a flight on the afternoon of Wednesday 30 August to get to an Ecosoc gig in Helsinki the following day. I checked into my functional hotel, relaxed by watching a film in Finnish which I couldn't really understand. However, what I was able to deduce from the images, body language etc. was that it was about the confrontation of an older, more innocent Finland with the trendy, "liberated" world of late sixties flower-power. The story-line was, very basically: country lad falls for rock-chick visiting a summer house. She leads him on and returns to the city. He looks her up in town as she hangs out with her band cronies and she gives him the bum's rush. Rude awakening. He takes a boat out on the water and it sinks. He is rescued by his nerdy mate. End of story. What this précis fails to convey is the sense of affection for quirkiness, which I suspect is something very close to the Finnish soul and the real point of the movie.

Film over, I quit my cell to get with the action on the streets. Drifting down from hotel-land in the direction of the station, I move through a semi-abstract environment of super-rectangular modern buildings and souless restaurant-bars. Unwilling to patronise such establishments as a lonely single diner, I continue on down to the station, the inevitable magnet for that great mass of human flotsam-and-jetsam of which I am now a part. I order a bratwurst and beer at a hot-dog joint. The robotic night-staff reveal no emotion, but I know that they know that I know that they know that I am just one more of the mad and the bad and the sad who habitually congregate here at humanity terminus. My suit and tie do not debar me from the company of my fellow losers. This is the most democratic club in the world. Here you are taken for what you are, and what you are is a saddo with nowhere better to go.
I sip my beer and observe the clientele...the homeless shell-suited youths, the semi-comatose drunks, the tarts, the pimps, the faggots and the junkies, the upright citizens with no business being here, the lonely, the insane, the phantasists, the eighteen-year-old perfect doll seeking admiring eyes, the young "artist" dressed all in black with his cocked Dutch bonnet, the ageing sports cyclist in full regalia at eleven at night. The blond, blank-eyed, poker-faced staff work on mechanically, monosyllabically. I strike up a conversation with my neighbour at the bar. He's a Swede. We talk about Finland and Sweden and Denmark. There is an unspoken consensus not to pry too deeply, but he has the manner of an unemployed roadie, ekeing out what little money he has travelling, not to get anywhere particular, just to seek some relief from an unbearable inner loneliness. I buy him a beer in exchange for a cigarette. I draw hard and, having grown unused to the effects of nicotine, am immediately high as a kite. The whole drugs thing becomes instantly clear. When you're right down there YOU DON'T CARE. Any relief from the present reality, however momentary, however self-destructive, is infinitely desirable. The conspiratorial bond of the shared high is the nearest thing to human warmth you can hope to experience. The only cure - a reason for living. Our society does lifestyles, the consumerist simulacrum of a life's purpose, but what suffering humanity needs is a sense of participating in a meaningful Life. I know how you don't achieve this - by setting up as your greatest goals the hellish Trinity of Money, Sex and Prestige.

Perhaps that should be the title of the film. Maybe I can get the maker of the quirky country-boy meets flower-child movie to help me. Probably all you'd need to do is hide a camera and film the comings and goings at the hot-dog place. Surely the truth will be stranger than any fiction.

2006-09-04T10:45:00.000-07:00

Rome. One can almost feel the word vibrating on the page. I seem to remember one of the great psychologists, I think it was Jung, who despite repeated attempts, could never quite bring himself to visit the city, so in awe was he of its history and reputation. We suffered from no such inhibitions. In fact, I'd already been there on three or four occasions, but only to work, which, however enjoyable, is never quite the same thing as being on holiday. We'd booked ourselves into an hotel near the Piazza Navona for four nights, giving us three whole days to "do" Rome. Three whole days! Ridiculous really, but we weren't there to prepare a doctoral thesis. What we were looking for was the opportunity to gorge our senses on the sights, the colours, the sounds, the texture, the smell and, of course, the tastes of what the ancient Romans called the urbs, the city.

Our hotel was in an old palazzo which had been recently and creatively converted, with a fantastic (and long!) circular stone staircase which led us up to the third floor. The climb was amply repaid, however, as we were ushered into the archetypal "room with a view". Throwing open the shutters, the light poured gorgeously into the room and we were confronted with an exquisite view across the jumble of red-tiled roofs to the dome and towers of Sant'Agnese in Agone - a Baroque jewel of elegance and charm.

What is it about the colours of Italy which is so magical? It must have something to do with texture and the way the light is reflected off the walls of the buildings. Perhaps, but there remains something quite unique about the the infinite nuances of pale mustard yellow through to the deepest ochre, the siena reds, the delicate pinks set against the rich blue-greys, creating a perfect setting for the cream-white marble of the monuments and churches. All of this, don't forget, somehow melded and unified by, as it were, an ancient patina, blurring overly sharp distinctions, disguising inconsistencies and flaws, creating an effect similar to the felicitous accidents of a spontaneous watercolour. And this tastefully sensuous orgy of painter's colours is contained within a harmony of line which seems somehow to correspond to some innate aesthetic sense. Seeing the "sights" of Rome is, at bottom, no more than a thin pretext to allow oneself to move through this aesthetic vision and partake of it...Beauty as food.

We did all the "usual" things, getting just a little bit lost as we meandered across the Piazza Navona, dawdled on to the Pantheon, continuing on to the Fontana di Trevi, along to the Via Tritone and the Via del Corso, stopping to take in the column of Marcus Aurelius and back to the hotel again, using all the back streets we could find. By the time we had stopped and admired, and photographed and drunk coffees and written postcards and eaten ice-creams and had lunch at a busy trattoria, it was mid-afternoon when we got back to the air-conditioned haven of our rooms for a retreat from the madding crowd and a well-deserved siesta. Of course, Rome is a powerful magnet for tourists from around the world, but they are somehow absorbed into the urban landscape, becoming integral to it, in a way that defies that (snobbish?) sense of irritation at having to "share" one's experience with a mass of people. In fact, it is hard to imagine that there was ever a time in the history of Rome when it was not so. Ancient Rome must surely have thronged with awestruck outsiders.

Ancient Rome is omnipresent in the modern city. So near - and yet so far. It seems sometimes that some vast psychological gulf seperates us from that older world. Wandering around the Foro Romano and the Palatino and more obviously still in the Colosseum, one is deeply impressed without being touched. Nowhere does one see that aspiration to humility which, if only unconsciously, still informs our own civilisation. One has the sense that there is a ruthless and brutal materialism at the heart of the Roman vision of the world. The Romans were very obviously brilliant soldiers, administrators, engineers, organisers of sadistic spectacles, but all their creations are somehow self-referential, the central message being: "Behold and bow down! Are we not far and away the biggest shots around?"

And if one is brutally honest, some of that same spirit seems to have spilled over into the Vatican. St. Peter's is magnificently impressive in its Baroque pomposity, but nothing could be further from the notion of Christian humility. For me, St. Peter's is about one thing and about one thing only - the power and prestige of the Church in general and the Papacy in particular.

Where, however, we did begin to have a sense of the numinous was in the church of San Clemente. Just up beyond the Colosseum, excavations have revealed three architectural layers. One enters a twelfth century church with its charming Romanesque frescoes, but for small fee one can gain access to the two lower levels - a fourth century church and below that again, ancient Roman buildings, including a Temple of Mithras. I surreptitiously attached myself to a small guided party. The guide was obviously a young American Art and Archeology PhD student, who was able brilliantly to explain the significance of the stones. She told us an awful lot about Roman bricklaying techniques, brick and mosaic paving methods, water supply technology, the Mithraic cult. The Mithraic cult, it seems, was a secret society, exclusive to men, popular with the miltary, which had at its core a ritual shared meal of bread and wine. "Wow!", as one of the young American guidees exclaimed! The fourth century church also contained primitive frescoes depicting the life of St. Clement, including what our guide claimed to be the first known example of written Italian. So much to learn about, so little time. Maybe I can come back as an archeologist and write a doctoral thesis...

2006-08-19T13:11:00.000-07:00

Red-letter days in the mountains can sometimes come around quite unexpectedly. Having sweated out the tail-end of July in the stifling Brussels heat, we headed off for Switzerland in the confident expectation of continued fine weather tempered by the freshness of altitude. However, no sooner had the holiday started when the whole weather map of Europe metamorphised. The forecast was for changeable, with the possibility of thunderstorms. We had taken a chalet in Champex-lac, on the Swiss side of the Mont Blanc range, beautifully situated by the lakeside "avec les pieds dans l'eau", with, when the clouds parted, sweeping views across to the Grand Combin. We settled down to the simple pleasures of a family holiday, hoping to be able to take the mountain air and get in the odd walk as the skies briefly cleared. It was in the course of one of these sallies that I got a text message. Nigel and Jane Lyle were on their way over from their flat in Chamonix to pay us a visit.
I had known Nigel since school and it was with him that I enjoyed many of my earliest mountain adventures. I was always a more enthusiastic than talented climber, but Nigel very quickly revealed himself to be an extraordinarily powerful and gifted all-round mountaineer. In a way his gift was his undoing. At Cambridge, he was soon in with a group of crack climbers, which included the young Alan Rouse, who many considered the best climber of his generation. The end of his first year found Nigel in Chamonix, eyeing up the top climbs. Attempting an ascent of the Bonatti Pillar on the Dru, his foot was crushed by a collapsing block. A dramatic helicopter rescue saved his life, but nothing could be done for his foot, which had to be amputated. Unperturbed, Nigel has continued to climb and ski to a very high level, only recently returning, for example, from an expedition to climb Everest.
Over dinner we caught up on each others' news and indulged ourselves in an orgy of hilarious reminiscence, finally agreeing to set off "up the hill" the next morning, prepared to abandon our plans if it all got too wet and miserable.
At 8.30 we set off up the chair lift to near the top of the "Breya". Although the cloud was down, it was not enough to put us off pressing on to the first of our intermediary goals for the day, the Moiry hut. We set off through the mist at a steady, unforced pace, chatting intermittently, making good progress along the path as it cleverly took us around the flank of the Breya and on up towards the glacier. And incredibly, contrary to the forecast, the cloud seemed definitely to be lifting and by the time we caught sight of the glacier we knew that we had struck lucky with the weather. The sky turned that profound and intense blue which is the peculiarity of fine days in the mountains. What cloud there was was distant or below us. As we steadily pushed on up to the crest of the moraine ridge on the orographical left of the glacier, looking down, we were able to enjoy the strange fascination which these vast rivers of ice exert. They add a sense of seriousness and drama to the whole mountain scene, as if to say: " This is an environment where mere men proceed only at their peril". In themselves they are things of wonder and beauty, crevasses gaping open to reveal a profundity of ethereal blue. The aesthetic of the stark contrast between the clean, white expanse of the glacier and the jagged upsurge of pink-grey granite tends to an almost abstract perfection.
These are thoughts which take form only after the event. At the time, one is much taken up with putting one foot in front of the other and pushing up, mopping the sweat from one's brow, looking forward to a rest and a drink. But, all the while, there is another part of oneself which is constantly, unconsciously almost, taking in impressions of beauty. What remains is not any feeling of physical discomfort, but a sense of having been deeply nourished in the core of one's being, where light, colour, landscape, the feel of the rocks, the breeze on one's face, the smell of the air, even one's physical sensations all combine to create, not merely a snapshot of memory, but a more intense life, a freedom from one's own tired old obsessions and anxieties, a moment less in thrall to the ruthless dictates of time.

We reached the Moiry hut, tremulously poised above the glacier, and stopped for a cup of tea. So far so good. We were going well and the weather was obviously holding. We continued on to our next objective, the Cabane du Trient. Working our way up through the moraine at the glacier's edge, occasionally taking to the ice as it flattened out, we then climbed more steeply up to a shoulder on the ridge of the Pointe de Moiry, and continued round a corner to the hut. We had managed it in less than the guidebook time of one hour, so we allowed ourselves a decent rest and took in the scene laid out before us.
To the West and the South-West, across the basin of the Plateau du Trient, there were spectacular views of the Aiguilles de la Tour and the Aiguilles Dorées. Beyond them, we succeeded in identifying the indented outline of the Forbes Arête of the Chardonnet, which I had climbed with "Chas" Chaplin in 1974 at the ripe old age of 22! I don't remember beating many guidebook times back then. Maybe I'm getting stronger?
Today, at least, there was no stopping us. Finishing our drinks, we set off on the final lap of our expedition, the ascent of the Pointe de Moiry. Swarming up over boulder-scree, we were able to contour round below a subsiduary peak and scramble on up to the summit. The Pointe de Moiry is renowned as a viewpoint and we were not disappointed. Now we could see all points of the compass. To the South-East the Grand Combin was particularly prominent, while further East still we were able to recognise the Mont Blanc de Cheilon and the Dent Blanche, scenes of youthful exploits dating back to 1972! We spoke to a Roumanian gentleman who had accompanied us intermittently on the way up. He was anxious to get back down in time for the last chair-lift. Nigel rejected any sense of urgency. What was the hurry? We had acres of time. At least he thought so till he realised his watch was on UK time - an hour behind! We ate a bit of lunch and headed on down. Down past the Trient hut, down to the glacier, down the moraine, down to the Moiry hut, down past the end of the glacier, down to the divide in the path, down past the Roumanian gentleman, down the path along the flank of the Breya, juddering on down, down, down. We reached the top of the chair-lift at ten to five, with ten minutes to spare and were promptly whisked away through the air and down to the valley.

Sitting outside the picture-book chalet, looking out on the picture-book lac de Champex, we subsided into a state of blissful relaxation, in the knowledge that we had enjoyed a very special day. Our friendship was renewed in the bond of shared experience. Our sensibilities awakened by the richness of impression. Back in the seventies, we saw mountaineering as part of a dream of freedom. It seems a bit silly now, and yet...

2006-07-28T05:08:00.000-07:00

I first heard of the Julian Alps in the summer of 1975. Driving out of Glenbrittle during a climbing holiday on Skye, I gave a lift to a German girl, a healthy and enthusiastic outdoor sort, who waxed particularly lyrical about the Julians. However, tucked away at the far bottom corner of the Alps, they're not somewhere you're likely to end up by accident. The more obvious attractions of dramatic glacier landcape and soaring alpine peaks were always closer at hand. Yet the Julians attract a special sort of devotee. Many have sung their praises, but none more than the pioneer of climbing in the area, Julius Kugy. With that typical late nineteenth century combination of boundless energy and heady romanticism he set about exploring every corner of the range, setting out his adventures in that special (German) purple prose of the period. Even today he is omnipresent whenever the Julians are written about. His most celebrated dicta, carved in gnarled wood, can be read at the most famous beauty spots in the area.
So it was with eager anticipation that I headed off to join up with Andy and Clara Hartley at their flat in Monfalcone. Only an hour and a half away, the Julians had suddenly become, not a distant secondary range, but the most obvious and convenient option. Once I'd recovered from the previous evening's somewhat hectic drive down from Treviso airport, Andy and I got packed up and set off for Valbruna. Andy, an ardent porer over map and guide-book, had prepared an all-action four days for us, starting with a hike up to the Grego hut. Having completed the (for me) laborious process of getting gear organised, changing clothes, pulling on boots, we set off along a dusty road in the growing heat of the day. We crossed a bridge over a wide, but completely dry river-bed. Of course, no glaciers! Once the spring-melt is over, the flow of water reduces to a mere trickle, disappearing altogether during a dry spell. And we were now in the middle of a heat-wave. As we reached the end of the road, we were relieved to enter a wood of reduced-size deciduous trees as we made the steeper climb up to the hut itself. Suddenly the wood opened up to a little alpine meadow and we were there. We flopped down at one of the tables outside the hut and got out our lunch. Bread, cheese and ham washed down by a mug of Apfelschorle. Andy started to set out his plans for the afternoon. I was feeling strangely listless, more so than could be justified by travel tiredness. Maybe I didn't feel properly a part of what had effectively become a sort of home game for Andy? Perhaps the loss of my mother last autumn had taken away my taste for adventure? Maybe middle age was blunting the edge of my Wanderlust? Suddenly the prospect of an afternoon's mountain climbing seemed a lot less enticing than the potentially blissful indolence of lolling around at the hut. With great patience and tact, Andy coaxed me into at least taking a stroll in the direction of the Jôf di Miezegnot, his projected destination for the afternoon.

No sooner had we set off than the evil spell was broken. The obvious truth was again revealed, that there are few activities that nourish both body and spirit as fully as mountain climbing. Once the body's habitual passivity is overcome, it becomes an eager participant in that experience of the more abundant life, which is surely the true, if unavowed, purpose of mountaineering. A delectable stroll up the mountain path to a bivouac hut set among the ruins of old First War barracks, then on up over broken rocks and scree to the summit. Jôf di Miezgenot confirms the tenet that the best views are to be had from lesser mountains. In the changing afternoon light the limestone walls of the "biggies" to the south took on an increasingly spectacular aspect, inviting comparison with the Dolomites. Yet the Julians retain their own special atmosphere - more intimate, more contained. Looking west, jagged horizon succeeded jagged horizon in a series of infinite nuances of blue and grey. To the east we identified the archetypal profile of Mangart which Andy had climbed the previous autumn. Meanwhile the northern battlements of the Jôf di Montasio seemed to grow increasingly intimidating. Our planned route for the following day would require us to pick a way through that apparently impossible verticality. We began to have second thoughts...

Back at the hut we fraternized with a group of Swedes who were staying the night. From Scania, they had the accents to prove it! We took dinner out on the terrace and enjoyed an evening that will linger long in the memory. Served a delicious meal of salsiccia, polenta and frico (a "deftig" fried cheese thing), we downed a mezzo-litro of wine while we drank in the mountain vision which surrounded us. The beauty of the evening enabled the subtlety of the light to work its effects as the extraordinary mountain architecture was revealed and then re-revealed like some magic-lantern show of the gods. As evening drew on, we gazed at the heavens while the dome of night slowly filled with stars, with even a hint of the Milky Way. Humbled into awkward silence, we went up to bed to the luxury of our own room, reassured that, whatever we did the next day, it wouldn't be something stupid. All we had experienced served only to confirm that life is too precious to be risked in acts of schoolboy bravado...

One of the charms of the Julians is that they sit astride the Italian-Slovene frontier, in fact the highest peak, Triglav, is wholly within Slovenia and is a place almost of pilgrimage to the Slovenes. We weren't going to Triglav, but we were going to Slovenia. Abandoning the idea of the Amalia route on the north wall of Montasio, we returned to the car and headed for the border. Our destination was Mangart. Having climbed it a few months previously, Andy generously agreed to guide me up it by way of an introduction to a via ferrata. Crossing into Slovenia I enjoyed that special frisson of being in a country I had never visited before. Slovenia is not as foreign as it was. A self-confident member of the European Union, it will be joining the Euro next year. And yet, the incomprehensibility of the language and the baffling nature of the signposts conspire to create a sense of the exotic as in a Tintin cartoon.
We paid the toll and nosed up the steep, narrow road to the foot of our mountain. It is an obvious tourist destination, and we were not alone. We got into the queue and arrived at the start of the climb. It very quickly became apparent that our ferrata was a pretty straightforward one. Before too long we emerged on to the summit into what amounted to a crowd of revellers speaking exitedly in a variety of languages! In between eating and admiring the surrounding peaks, we got chatting to a nice Austrian couple who kindly agreed to take our photograph together. We opted to go down by the normal route in order to avoid having to return by the ferrata. This involved a degree of wading through boulder scree where I contrived, humiliatingly and painfully, to fall flat on my face! Nothing more serious than bruised knees and pride. Gazing down the vertical face of the Italian side, one of our newfound Austrian friends described it as a Caspar David Friedrich moment. Just shows how you have to be ready for culture générale at all times!

Back down the valley and across the border, Andy insisted on a minor diversion to a sort of alpine lakeside lido, which encapsulated in some intense Fellini-esque manner the quintessence of Italy on holiday. We took turns plunging into the, literally, azure waters, before treating ourselves to an espresso and setting off to out to our next destination, the Piano Alto di Montasio. Storm clouds were gathering as we arrived and, allowing for my having to return to the car to fetch a replacement film, we made haste to reach the shelter of the Rifugio Brazza before the heavens opened. Racing ahead of Andy, I arrived at the hut just as the hail started to pelt down, only to be greeted by Andy looking like the cat who'd got the cream! He'd taken a short-cut I'd missed, and, in the nick of time, had succeeded in adopting a pose of studied nonchalance to greet my arrival!

It's strange how different the huts can be. I've stayed in worse hotels than the Grego, while the Brazza fell short of the average Scottish bothy! The evening meal consisted of, er, salsiccia and polenta. Not a patch on the previous night's though - no funghi and no rib-sticking frico! After mature reflection as to our next day's programme, we decided to go for the traverse of the Buinz ridge by the Ceria-Merlone route. It is a route "con attrezzatura", i.e. partly via ferrata. It was the "partly" which worried me. What would happen when we ran out of handrail? We didn't have a rope.There was talk of it taking up to ten hours. What about afternoon thunderstorms? Hoary hut denizens spoke of the climb as being seemingly never ending. Parts were apparently horrendously exposed. We agreed, however, to have a look at it.

The next morning we were up and away before 6.30. The path up to the col at the start of the ridge was a thing of true beauty. It elevated us effortlessly to the required height, traversing elegantly across the mountainside to the start of the route. After some initial faffing around, we found the line of steel hawsers and red marks which indicated the route. From then on we were able to follow the climb almost without difficulty, up onto the ridge, which we followed, poised between earth and sky, through breathtaking rock formations and over precipitous escarpments. Groups of ibex with their demonic horns edged surefootedly aside as we passed. We proceeded with a steady rhythm, up, down and over, stopping only briefly for a drink or a bite to eat. Our pride in our own progress was only slightly undermined as we found ourselves overtaken by a guy in running shoes with a dog! The exposed part was definitely exposed and although one was as likely to fall over the precipice as one was to throw oneself off a pavement into the path of an oncoming truck, we were not unimpressed! And then suddenly we found ourselves at a small col with a marked route down off the mountain and it was all over. It was with a certain sense of anti-climax that we picked our way down to the main path and found the beaten track leading to the Rifugio Corsi. As we relaxed from the concentrated attention of the climb, we became aware of the almost miraculous expanses of alpine blooms clinging to the rough slope of scree above a residual snow-field. Arriving at gentler slopes, we dawdled, luxuriating in the afternoon sun and the satisfaction of our own tiredness. And then finally we drifted on to the hut. Subtracting dawdle time, the route had taken us eight hours - respectable by any standards.

The Corsi hut was different again. Beautifully situated, it had the atmosphere of a seventies commune. Love, peace and the comradeship of the hills was in the air. Andy dug up a guitar and gave a rendition of his very seventies repertoire. In the circumstances he could hardly fail. By mountain standards we caroused until late into the night, not getting to bed until after ten o'clock. The next morning we rose at our leisure and, not without a sense of regret, set off back to the Piano Montasio. We walked up to the col separating the two valleys through exquisite hanging gardens of mountain flora. At the summit we lingered, neither of us willing to tear ourselves away from the intimate embrace of the Julian Alps, spread before us in all their rich variety and spectacular glory. Unable to stay longer, we headed down to the tree-line, the larch and the dwarf-pine, on down through ever richer yet infinitely delicate plant-life.
As we walked, we put up hosts of tiny butterflies, which rose in greeting as if sharing with us the joy of being alive. We hit the track leading back to the car. Our short holiday was over, but I felt invigorated, rejuvenated even. This is the real secret of mountaineering which is not to be measured by routes ticked off or graded difficulties overcome. It is, in a sense, a drug, which, working in ways beyond our ordinary ken, feeds us with the elixir of life itself. Can't wait for my next fix!