LLANGOLLEN CANAL - TEN YEARS AGO

It always amazes me how one simple image can set the mind racing to drag back something which I had forgotten. My friend Chris, who writes a very erudite Blog on Things Computorial (enigmatically titled http://chris-linfoot.net/ – read the entry for 22nd June), a small proportion of which I can actually understand, put up an image the other day which he had taken on a holiday recently. He had been with his family in North Wales, and the picture below jumped out at me.

CHRIS'S IMAGE OF THE SNAPPILY NAMED "PONTCYSYLLTE AQUEDUCT"

It is of an aqueduct which carries the Llangollen Canal over the River Dee, and shows a boat crossing it. This is no ordinary bridge – it’s a Grade 1 Listed Structure and is currently up for consideration for World Heritage Status. It is one of the very first in the world to have been constructed from cast iron, and was built by Thomas Telford in 1805. Many people, apparently were sceptical when they first saw the delicacy of the design, but good old Telford believed in his sums, and went ahead. £47,000 later, the structure, which stands 126 feet above the river, and is over 1000 feet long, came into service, and on the basis that it’s still there 202 years later, I suppose you couldn’t blame Telford for waving two fingers at his detractors.

Ten years ago, almost to the day, we went on a short canal boat holiday along the self same canal. For reasons I can’t explain, it was also (to date) our last. We picked the boat up a few hundred yards before the bridge, which is actually the second of two aqueducts in close proximity, and got our comprehensive instructions from the Welshman at the boatyard. “Push this to go forward, pull this to go backwards, and pass on the left” was about it as I remember. No mention of the bridge, bless him.

THE BOAT-YARD

It was a windy but bright day, so we gave the throttle a shove and took off. It handled like a three wheeled supermarket trolley – all over the place, and we zig-zagged our way rather drunkenly into the main channel, which was not that wide. Because the canal is built in the hills of Wales, it twists and turns to make some effort to keep on the level round the bases of the hills – very beautiful, but I could have done with a nice straight bit to get the hang of the oversteer.

TELL ME YOU DON'T LIKE THAT!

Over one aqueduct which was quite sheltered, and you thought “This is not as difficult as people say”. A sharp right turn, and you start out on this second monster. Now the laws of hydrodynamics tell you that when you force something through a narrow water channel, because you have to move the water in front of you through the gap between you and the side, the drag of the boat increases. Well, I did have a degree in Theoretical Aerodynamics, so nodding sagely to myself, I shoved the throttle forward a bit to counteract this extra resistance.

As we got onto bridge proper, the wind started to increase, and the resistance increased, and I pushed the throttle forward – and we very gradually started to slow down. More throttle, more wind, result - less speed. By about the middle of the bridge, the throttle was wide open, the wind was blowing a gale, and we elegantly came gradually to a stop, and started to move very majestically backwards.

Now when young Mr Telford built his bridge, he’d clearly got some miserable Finance Man working with him, because they decided to put a walkway on one side, with a guardrail on it. However, on the other side, they stopped the vertical side of the iron channel just over the top of the water level, and, although they put holes in to fit a guard-rail on this side, they never bothered to fit it. So, there we were, 126 feet up in the air, and if you took one pace to the left, after about 6 or 7 somersaults with pike, you spread yourself over a not inconsiderable area of the valley below. Mmmmm.

So, with yours truly as Manager, two members of the crew, to whit, one Wife, and one Son-in Law, (Yes, I know what you’re going to say) were dispatched to act as dray-horses, and add a further 2 horsepower to the engine. We slowly crept across the bridge, and after a further 500 feet reached the other side – knackered. Well, they were.

A HELPING HAND OR TWO

Welcome to Wales!

The rest of the holiday was, to coin a phrase, plain sailing. Watching the world go past at 4 miles per hour, walking along the tow-path with the only dog in the world which got sea-sick on a canal, and stopping in the various pubs alongside the canal bank for sustenance, both solid and liquid – there are many, many worse ways to spend three days.

STEADY AS SHE GOES

Going back when we neared the aqueduct, the thought entered our heads “Here we go again”, but, of course the wind was behind us and we shot across the bridge like a rocket.

RETURN JOURNEY, JUST LOOK AT THE SIDE OF THE CHANNEL!

I have to say, in all the kerfuffle, I think I forgot to make any comment to the poor sods in the boat waiting at the other end – anyway I think they were Welsh!

Tags:

pontcysyllte,
canal,
aqueduct,llangollen canal

WELL ANYWAY, IT AMUSED ME No. 26

I don't know if the grilles over the windows are to keep the burglars out, or keep the customers in.

And I'm not going to find out.

Tags:

humour,hairdressers

WELL ANYWAY, IT AMUSED ME No. 25

For the record, this was taken on June 18th.

Tags:

shrewsbury,humour

IF THE ANSWER'S "42", WHAT'S THE QUESTION?

I haven’t written much about the political goings on in this country of ours for some time – it’s just too depressing. But today, Our Glorious Leader is forcing Parliament to vote on a plan which allows the police to hold terror suspects for 42 days, rather than the current level of 28. You can argue until the cows come home about which branch of maths leads Those in Charge to decide on the number 42 – my own theory is that Gordon has read one too many Douglas Adams books.

But that’s completely beside the point.

The issue is whether we need an extension to what is already a draconian power available to this Government. We have existed since time immemorial as a nation on the basis that we all, as individuals, enjoy as much freedom as possible. Now, people will argue that that statement is the moral equivalent to the perceived length of a short piece of string – it means different things to different people. But, if you want to see what it actually means in real life, there are enough countries around the world where you can see what the alternatives are, and where most of us would very much NOT like to live. And I for one simply don’t want it here.

Sitting listening to the birds singing away this morning in sunny Shropshire, it seems so clear that the case for such an arbitrary extension is simply not there – it’s just someone’s whim. Someone whose political life is currently in freefall. Having published the draft legislation he finds himself faced with a backlash from all sides in Parliament, so what do we see? The gradual watering down of a proposed piece of legislation, with sops of modifications, obfuscations, ifs and buts, which all but destroy the principle he was setting out to achieve in the first place.

We get David Blunkett, whose stint as Home Secretary shone out as a textbook study in bullying incompetence, writing in “The Times” yesterday to support his boss, and justify the magic number of 42. His reason to increase the current position by 50% is that “in three cases, we have come close to needing every one of the 28 days currently permitted for pre-charge detention….. “. What kind of logic is that? It’s spin gone mad.

As one short letter in today’s newspaper replies, what Blunkett really meant was “.. a) in no case have the police needed to hold a suspect for the full 28 days; b) in only 3 cases did they come close to 28 days; c) in all other cases they needed nowhere near 28 days.”. If that’s the basis on which our fundamental individual rights get irrevocably removed, then it’s not just the State of Denmark where there’s something wrong.

We have here a government hell bent on removing another of our rights, based on a totally flawed logic, cravenly seeking political support by then watering the principle down just far enough to get a majority of 1, and then using second rate ex-politicians to try and justify the unjustifiable.

This “Try this for size, and if you don’t like it, I’ll change it” government style is quite odious. If they have principles, then let them fight for them. That’s what Government is about. It’s not meant to be liked. My dictionary defines it as “to rule with authority”, not “What do you think of this idea?”

We’ve seen it with the "10p in the Pound" Tax change recently, where, just because a piece of (one assumes) well thought out legislation did not find favour with the electorate just as it was about to be introduced, they borrowed another £2.7 Billion to get round it and dig themselves out of a totally self created political hole. To Hell with the Economy, it's my seat in Parliament that's really important.

I’m not sure you can have a moral cess-pit, but if you can, I know where to find one.

Tags:

politics,gordon brown,42 days

PROVENCE - PONT DU GARD

Around twenty five years ago, we went two or three times en famille to Provence for our annual holiday. It was a marvellous place to spend a couple of weeks each summer – the light, the views, the food, the people, the wine, the markets and a very relaxed way of life ….. and … and. It was no surprise over the next few years to see the semi mass migration of British people wanting to set up a second home there, or just live there permanently. For reasons I can’t explain, it has taken me until May 2008 to return.

One of the unique aspects about the place is the number and the quality of their Roman antiquities. You can’t call them ruins because in most cases, they aren’t ruined. Within a thirty or so mile radius of where we were staying, you could visit Arles, Nimes, Orange, Vaison la Romaine, Les Baux and be transported back two thousand years in an instant. You can walk inside them, outside them, underneath them, and on top of them. They are real world treasures, not screened off, to be admired from afar.

When, around the birth of Christ, Rome decided to flex its muscles and invade/educate (Delete as applicable) the Western World, the first place they annexed was Provence. The name says it all – “Provincia” in Latin means The Province. They took, among other things, their civilisation, their sense of structure and order, their vineyards, and their buildings – Oh and the Aqueduct. For further information on this, please see “The Life of Brian”. The buildings and the vineyards are still there.

Many of the Roman structures leave you impressed, but there are a select few which make you absolutely gasp. “How on earth did they do that?” will be on most people’s lips when they see the theatre at Orange, or the Arena at Nimes. But the one that does it for me is an aqueduct which bridges the River Gard, and was built around 1900 years ago to carry water to Nimes – the Pont du Gard. It’s a simple piece of utilitarian construction – but one which to my untutored eyes is quite beautiful. It performed a simple but vital function, and the Romans constructed something that simply “does exactly what it says on the tin”, but in Latin, of course. I haven’t actually set to and measured it, but I’ll bet that if you match Golden Sections and Fibonacci numbers to it, you would come up with some things of interest. It sits so perfectly in the landscape.

IS THAT, OR IS THAT NOT, A FANTASTIC SIGHT?

UNDERNEATH THE ARCHES

The other thing that strikes you immediately when you first see it, is its size. The top of the aqueduct is 165 feet above the river – that’s the height of Nelson’s column. It’s around 900 feet long, and the blocks from which it’s made weigh up to 6 tons each. The thing that clinches it for me is that there is no mortar between the stones – and it doesn’t leak!.

We’d have more than a little difficulty doing that today.

I approached it a few days ago with tons of anticipation. The last time we were here, we wandered around it at river level, and then took ourselves off to the top, where we walked along the massive stones which cover the water channel, gazing down 160 odd feet over the (non guard railed!!!) side onto the river a very long way below. The picture shows what it was like in 1985. Masses of people there, picnics in full flow, children waving their legs over the edge, and no-one worrying a great deal.

TAKEN IN 1985 - I'D LOOK WHERE I WAS GOING IF I WERE YOU

When you got to the centre, the stones covering the water in the aqueduct were missing, leaving the centre section as two vertical stone side walls, each around 2 feet wide, with the water course separating them. If you wanted to get to the other side, you simply walked across the top of one of the walls, and “Bob’s your Uncle”. Simple really. My daughter, who was 12 at the time, and I did just that, because, in 1985, it seemed the natural thing to do. We remember remarking at the time how refreshing this was. In England, the whole thing would either be cordoned off, or there would be guard rails and notices everywhere, and we said then how good it was that the French took a much more laid back approach to it all.

In 2008 however, in the words of the Romans, “Tempus” has very much “Fugitted”.

It’s still an awesome structure, and there are still no guardrails there, for the simple reason that you are not allowed anywhere above the base level without a guide. And then only, I think, inside the aqueduct, where you can’t fall off. I don’t know why I found this so depressing, that the Men in Grey Suits had managed to withdraw this avenue of pleasure for today’s world. I suppose I am looking at it a little through Rose coloured spectacles. I’m sure there must have been a few cases of Pierre giving his irritating little brother Lucien a push just a tad harder that was strictly necessary, resulting in an immediate and rather messy reduction in the number of family mouths to feed. But, it still left me thinking that if it’s got to the French, then there’s no hope.

PICNIC BY THE RIVER

WALKING ACROSS FOR CISSIES ON THE LOWEST LEVEL - FALL OFF HERE AND YOU ONLY BREAK A COUPLE OF LEGS

So, for the average visitor, you get a huge crick in your neck as you stare vertically upwards. It’s still one hell of a sight, imposing and majestic, and something you don’t forget in a long time.

Tags:

provence,pont du gard,health and safety

PROVENCE - MONT VENTOUX

Mont Ventoux is only 6,300 feet high, which as French mountains go is nothing special. But, and it's a big But, it sits on its own away from any other mountain of any size. And much of the surrounding area of Provence from which you see it, is near ground level. So, instead of seeing an immense mountain from the slopes of one nearly as big, most of the views of Ventoux make it look huge.

MONT VENTOUX, WITH THE SUNRISE HITTING THE SUMMIT

As you meander around just about anywhere in the Rhone Valley, and you look east, you can't avoid it - it dominates the horizon with its brooding size ever present. Rather than just admire it for what it is, the French have built a radar station and a television mast on the very top, and you can see these from tens of miles around. It is a truly majestic mountain.

Bless them, with the scientific stations at the top came two roads, one going up the north side of the mountain to the very top and the other coming down the south side. From the top, on a clear day, you can see both the Pyrenees and the Alps.

"Vent" in French means "wind", and the mountain is extremely well named. Wind speeds nearing 200 mph have been measured there. Up to about 1600 metres, the ground is covered with an assortment of Provençale trees, but as you continue to climb, the trees disappear, and you quickly find yourself in a very alien landscape. Huge, huge areas of unremitting limestone shale and shingle are the only things surrounding you. You drive relentlessly upwards on a Long and Winding Road, marked by poles to guide you through the winter snows. In the distance you can see the scientific stations at the summit, which in themselves look like a huge Saturn Rocket next to an enormous Golf ball. But there's nothing else. It's like being on the Moon.

LIKE BEING ON THE MOON

THE LONG AND WINDING ROAD - 1

Being in the South of France, the French passion for cycling is not far away, so it has been the location of some of the most iconic cycle races ever in the Tour de France. Every few years, one of the mountain stages of that gruelling event involves the climb of the mountain, usually in the fierce 95 degree heat of a July afternoon. As a recipe for sorting cycling men from boys, it has few peers, and everyone with an interest in cycling looks forward intently when the Tour passes through.

The main part of the climb stretches over nearly 22 kilometres, during which the riders climbs over 1,600 metres, nearly 5,000 feet. As you reach the top, with the tree line's protection from the wind and the heat having died away, the gradient, rather nastily, gradually increases. The last kilometre is a constant 1 in 10.

A friend of mine, who considers himself to be of a good "county" standard as a cyclist, set off a few years ago on a pilgrimage to climb it, and was pleased to get to the top in around 3 hours. The current professional record is just under 56 minutes!

Such a test stretches them to the limit – and sometimes beyond. Half a mile from the summit, you come across a small memorial to Tom Simpson, a great British cyclist who, in 1967, due to a combination of drugs, alcohol, heat, illness and unbelievable determination rode himself to a total standstill there - and fell over. His last words were "Put me back on my bike", which they did, and he died still clipped into his pedals. The small monument is very moving, always with a permanent collection of souvenirs and memorabilia surrounding it. A desolate place indeed.

TOM SIMPSON'S MEMORIAL, WITH THE SUMMIT IN THE BACKGROUND

IT SAYS "THEY NEVER LEARN 1967-2007" ... AND IT'S IN ENGLISH

I drove up very early one morning, just after sunrise in late May. Expecting the glorious Provencal weather later that day, I ventured out in shorts and a thin T-shirt to take my pictures. Thank Goodness, there was no-one on the mountain to see my antics as I drove up. Towards the top, I had the car heater full-on, and I sat in the car between shots to unfreeze myself, just before rushing outside to get each picture. It was blowing nearly a gale, and the temperature was 2 degrees. Quite why I'd left my brain so far below me in the valley, I don't know.

THE LONG AND WINDING ROAD - 2

It was about 7am as I rolled over the top, and started to descend the other side. About 50 metres from the summit, a speck in the distance appeared, looking just like the French equivalent of Omar Sharif's amazing entrance in "Lawrence of Arabia". Except, he was on a bike, not a camel. He pedalled, frighteningly quickly I thought, up towards me, wearing the condom like top and shorts beloved by most keen cyclists. In the howling wind, and zero degree temperature, he passed me at a fair old lick, with a cheery "Bonjour Monsieur". I just stood there clapping him, quite astonished.

"BONJOUR MONSIEUR" - AND NOT EVEN BREATHING HARD

NOW THESE TWO WERE STRUGGLING - AND THEY'D ONLY JUST STARTED!

Just to prove that the French can be as mad as anyone else, once a year, there is a competition for amateur riders, where you have to ride up the mountain as many times as possible in 24 hours. The record is 11 ascents!!!

But going down can be just as dangerous. In a car, you can go the whole way without engaging a gear – I know because I've done it. You get great fuel consumption, but the brakes end up glowing Cherry Red! This time, part of the way down, I stopped to take a few pictures of the flowers at the side of the road, only to hear a sudden explosive whoosh behind me. If I had stepped back 3 inches at that precise moment, there would have been two dead people on the mountain that morning, and you would have been looking for something else to read at this moment. He must have been doing 60 mph.

I can read the ad on e-bay now – "Unexpectedly for sale - D300 camera – light use only. Slight scuff marks to body. Residual blood stains and minor tarmac indentations are a little unsightly but do not affect operation of camera."

After all, it is a Nikon.

Tags:

provence,mont ventoux,tom simpson,tour de france

NARROW DOG TO CARCASSONNE - AND WRITER'S BLOCK!

I’ve just spent a delightful few days roaming around in Provence. I usually write a sort of diary when I go away, mainly because when I get home I don’t seem to be able to recall all the little things which happen – the ones which add the light and shade, the texture and the detail to such a jaunt. My nearest and dearest has a slightly different take on this and implies that the local brew may somehow play a part, but that is, of course, a lie and a slur.

This time though, I ran into a problem. I try to take a book away with me which bears some relationship to where I’m going, and this time I picked one up in Waterstones, our local bookshop, called “Narrow Dog to Carcassonne”, by a guy named Terry Darlington. It was the simple story, so the blurb inside said, of a couple “of a certain age” (code for “old, of pensionable age, past it” etc) and their dog (who turns out to be the total star of the book – Lassie reincarnated in a whippet, for Goodness sake) meandering their way on a narrow canal boat from Stone in Staffordshire, across the English Channel, and down through the French waterways to the walled city of Carcassonne in South-West France. For those lacking a geography O level, that’s a bloody long way!

My problem was I found the writing in the book to be absolutely amazing – it grabbed me and enthralled me from Page 1 - the whole thing quite blew me away. As a result, I hit a blast of Writer’s Block. The author was so much better at his craft that I really felt like not bothering. You know the way it is – it’s like when you go to a golf tournament, and watch the professionals playing, and you realise, in an instant, that if you did nothing else but practice constantly for the rest of your life, there is no way you could match what you’d just seen them do. So you give up. They are simply in a different league.

The book is, at different times, hugely informative, gives a scalpel like precision to the ways (good and bad) of “les grenouilles”, hysterically funny and sometimes very moving in a typically English way – simply the best read I’ve had in ages.

One of the ways I judge my own appreciation of anything I read, is the point in the book where I start to get withdrawal symptom’s about finishing it, and never being able to suffer the pleasure I’m currently experiencing again. If it happens at all, it’s usually a few pages from the end. Here, as soon as they turned onto the Burgundy Canal, about halfway through France, they started.

It’s full of the most varied literary allusions, ranging from Speedy Gonzales, Bony Moronie and Great Balls of Fire to The Waste Land, The Canterbury Tales and The Faerie Queen – all via Gene Roddenberry and St Matthew’s Gospel. Either the guy is a gigantic pseud or a Grande Fromage in his field – (I think the latter). But the result was that I was left with a feeling of something approaching inadequacy by the skilled word-smithing I was enjoying. A bit like Wodehouse, I often found myself re-reading a sentence to take simple pleasure in the way it had been constructed – not that his style is remotely like Wodehouse, as you will find out if you join him on their voyage.

I’m over it a bit now, hence this piece, but it was a very strange feeling for a few days.

I’ve retraced my own steps a little, and rather than writing a “First we did this, then we did that” pile of words as we chomped our way around the sights of Provence, I decided to concentrate on two or three “vignettes” of our visit rather than bore the world to tears with the serial happenings of two old gits swimming around in the middle of a French wine lake.

So here goes………

Watch this space.

Tags:

narrow boat,narrow boat to carcassonne,terry darlington

WELL ANYWAY, IT AMUSED ME No. 24

It would be fair to say that I'm not the greatest fan of "Toys Я Us".

I suppose you could say we get not only the Government but the Toy Shops we deserve, and it's really all our own fault. But, ignoring the Government (which is actually quite a good idea in this country, at the moment) for the purposes of this short note, places like Toys Я Us do seem to exploit their position in the way they contribute to the development of the minds of the nation's offspring, and the way they are taught to play.

I'm no statistician, and having visited the place on no more than 6 occasions in my entire life, I can say with absolute certainty that my own views do not form a meaningful sample. But, the impression I have from these 6 visits is that, for all the girls in the world, the only colour existing today in the inhabited Toy Universe is PINK. Not pink, but that PINK which only exists inside the cores of ill-maintained Russian Nuclear Reactors. And is it me or do all the boy's toys on sale aim to progress the destruction of as much of the Human population as quickly as possible?

I am prepared to admit to a soupçon (I've just spent a few days in la Belle France, hence the cedilla) of bias here, but I have to say I find the whole toy shopping experience hugely depressing in such places. My personal "6 visit poll" has found the staff unhelpful and uninterested. And no-one in there seems to smile, an odd situation for a toy shop, where I'd have thought pleasure was one of the main aims of the game.

Even the name irritates me – the nation's ability to spell is under enough threat already without a responsible retailer calling itself something that reads as if they are teaching us the basics of Cyrillic Texting. Perhaps I've missed the plot completely, and it's actually educational, but I don't think so.

Anyway, just to support my point, here is a picture taken outside one of their stores the other day. It purports to explain their Opening Hours to the public at large.

If it makes sense to you, you're a better man than me. Or again, maybe, it's an early adoption of some new EEC based Flexible Working Initiative.

You decide.

FIVE DAYS IN PROVENCE - DAY 1

The bug has bitten again and I'm off on my travels again – this time to Provence in the South of France. The family have been here several times, with the last time being, rather frighteningly, around 20 years ago. I'm here this time with my Brother in Law, and we're spending 4 days in a small town called Vaison-la-Romaine, which is about 30 kilometres from Avignon.

It sits dead in the centre of the Cotes de Rhone Wine region, and for those drunkards who can recite the names of the 17 or so villages which qualify for the Cotes de Rhone Villages Appellation in Wine Making, most of them are only a few minutes drive from Vaison.

Vaison has one of the the largest set of Roman Ruins in Europe, but they were discovered under the edge of the town, so the ability to excavate the full remains is limited by the need to flatten a large part of the current town sitting on top of them, which the locals are, perhaps understandably, finding difficult to come to terms with.

Anyway, we drove to Birmingham Airport, and got on an Air France Canadair jet. This was operated by a company called Brit Air, which seemed to indicate the possibility of yer actual cooperation between a French and a British Airline. Now this is something which struck me as a complete No-No. Remember Agincourt, and all that. But on searching around, it seems that Brit Air is actually a French company – very odd.

Lyon was reached early thanks to a bit of a tail wind, and we drove down the Autoroute du Soleil (why don't we name our Motorways) – towards Avignon, and branched off for the last few kilometres of the journey. Vaison was reached at the rather sociable time of 5pm, and we booked into the hotel. We had reserved the "Apartement" which was at the very top of the hotel, and reached after climbing four flights of stairs (no lift) with no rhyme or reason to the directions they randomly went off in. The good thing was it led onto a private balcony which overlooked the square in the centre of the town, which is great because you feel really in the middle of things, which actually you are!

The best word I can think of to describe the place is "Bohemian". Really off the wall art on the walls, which are painted in very distinctive colours, none of which seem to match. And a new thing for me - my bed is made of Wicker, and looks a bit like a gondola, except I don't think it would float for too long!

My ploy is always to chat up the receptionist, who thawed a bit when she heard my distinctive and rather individual approach to the French Language. We had been given half a ham roll on the plane, and apart from this, lunch seemed to bypass us, so we were on the gannetty side of ravenous by about 7 o'clock. Mademoiselle Receptioniste advised us of a decent restaurant near the river, and off we set to talk them into giving us a meal without having made a reservation.

A small degree of smiling and my idiosyncratic French aimed at the girl who seemed to be Head Cook and Bottlewasher there, secured us a place, whereupon the scale of our achievement was immediately made clear by her turning away the next couple who came in asking the same question we had. One up to us.

We ended up having the best overall meal I'd had in quite a while – Thyme smoked Duck on Balsamic Salad leaves, perfect Veal Fillet with wild mushrooms in a really zingy reduction, and a local goats cheese called Picodon, which is served with Peppercorns in a light peppery olive oil.

The wine list went on for a few pages, and none of them, apart from the Champagnes, were produced further than 20 miles away from where we were sitting. That's the way to support your local industry.

Back home to bed, except we seemed to end up in a café outside the hotel, drinking a couple of beers until just before midnight, when the hotel shut the door. The temperature was 17 degrees, the whole place still had a buzz about it and was sitting around just chatting to friends, and it all felt really rather pleasant.

Tomorrow is Market Day in Vaison, and Provencale markets are a bit special. I decided to get up early, and be on the streets before the market people arrived in the town, so I could photograph the build up, as well as the market in full swing. That meant being out of the door around 6am, which given we'd just arrived today from England, was actually 5am.

Ho Hum – we'll see.

Tags:

provence,
diary,
vaison la romaine

WORLDS AND HOURS APART

It’s really quite amazing what difference a few hours can make in the way you look at the world. A week or so ago, I was sitting on the edge of the Hudson River taking pictures of New York’s skyline as the sun went down. If you failed to be awestruck by what I was watching that night, then I simply don’t think you have a soul. Yes, I know all about the carbon footprint and the emissions and… and… and… but it was simply one of the most impressive sights I’ve ever seen in my life.

MANHATTAN'S CLASSIC SKYLINE AT DUSK

TIMES SQUARE ON SATURDAY NIGHT

Fast forward a couple of days, and I’m on a beach, in the sunshine, on England’s North Norfolk coast. I’m with my wife, and our 2 dogs ..... and basically no-one else. The beach goes on for ever. And as far as the eye can see in each direction, there is just, well … nothing.

LOOKING TO THE WEST ON HOLKHAM BEACH, NORFOLK

LOOKING EASTWARDS ON HOLKHAM BEACH, NORFOLK

THE DOGS THINK THEY'VE DIED AND GONE TO HEAVEN

WEST RUNTON BEACH - A FEW MILES ALONG FROM HOLKHAM

For the cinema buffs among you, if you’ve ever seen the Gwyneth Paltrow “Shakespeare in Love” film, the sequence at the end where she walks up an unending beach in America to start her new life there, was actually filmed on the sands where we were walking.

Talk about a contrast – the most vibrant city on earth to simple rural tranquility in a few hours.

Thank Goodness we invented the aeroplane.

Tags:

photography,
norfolk,
new york,dogs

SEMORDNILAP - FOR WANT OF A BETTER WORD

Living in the wilds of Shropshire, I’m probably the last person in the Western World to pick up on this. But, being English, it’s the taking part, and not the winning, that’s important. I am indebted, as they say, to good friend Bob, a gentleman whom you would be well advised to include in your “Pub Quiz” team, for pointing me in the direction of this little gem of English (the language) wordery.

CROSSWORD CLUE –

Response from Yorkshireman, following offer of Extra Strong Mint from backward African Prime Minister – (1,2,3,6)

Answers on a PostCard.

Please note that the ability to understand this clue is probably in inverse proportion to the distance you live away from Huddersfield or Batley. Anyone interested enough in the answer who is not lucky enough to be English, or, to stretch a point, British, can claim diplomatic immunity, and ask for further help, which, in the interests of International Co-operation will be fulsomely given.

Tags:

crossword,clues

M6 - THE LONG AND WINDING ROADWORKS

On my journey to work this morning, I slipped gently down the slip road off the M6 Motorway at Spaghetti Junction, in the centre of Birmingham. Greeting me at the roundabout at the end of the slip-road was one of those delightful yellow metal signs which gave advanced warning of impending Road Works. It said that as from May 23rd, Roadworks would gum the place up (funnily enough, they didn't use those words) for the next 71 weeks. 71 weeks – that's a year and a half.

What, in heaven's name, can they possibly do that will take 71 weeks. They've just built a brand new shopping centre costing around £200 million, in the centre of Birmingham, during which it was the biggest building site, using the largest number of cranes, in the whole of Europe, and that didn't take 71 weeks. And all this is, is a pesky roundabout.

And anyway, the idea of anyone being able to say that, whatever it is they are going to do, will take 71 weeks simply beggars belief. The precision is astounding. However, the one thing you can absolutely guarantee is that it will not take 71 weeks – it may be 56 or 93, but it won't be 71. As a sop to spurious accuracy, this is a World Class example, presumably designed to make you think they know what they’re doing. Prime numbers (apart from 1, and I seem to recall, through a glass, very darkly, that 1 isn't actually a prime number anyway) play no part in roadwork durations.

All we need now is the Cones Telephone Hot-line number to appear (has anyone ever actually rung it?), and another notice advising us that there may be "Delays Possible". Of course there "may well" be delays possible – they're stopping the use of the roundabout on the most used exit on the most used motorway in Europe. Do they think we're cretins or something?

And I was quite enjoying my drive into Birmingham up until that point.

Tags:

roadworks,
birmingham,
m6

THE HUMBLE PHOTOGRAPHER

I’d never really thought of myself as an arrogant git – I leave that to others. But when you’ve done something for a decent length of time, you tend to reach a point where, if you’re not careful, you know it all. Of course, you don’t know it all – you just think you do. Which makes it infinitely worse.

So, one of the things I’ve tried to impose on myself as life flows along, is as much as possible, to see things with an open mind. I specifically and deliberately exclude Rap Music from this, on the basis that every rule must have an exception.

But, take Photography. Now, I know a little bit about it, not an enormous amount, but quite a lot more than Mr Average. Over the last twenty years, I have had more “religious” (in a non God like way) experiences with a camera in my hand, than at any other time. I take predominantly landscape images, and the utter beauty of being the only one within eye-shot of a glorious sunrise, or a menacing storm-cloud, can make me feel that time has stopped, and all I see in front of me is being produced by some power just to make my life perfect for a few minutes.

But even here, I like to think I’ve developed a personal “style”, which is ME. I like it when people point at a picture, among a selection in front of them, and say “That’s one of yours, isn’t it?” I can’t see the point of it all, if all you do is emulate other people’s work.

I belong to a local Photographic Society, where several times a year visiting lecturers gives talks on his or her speciality. Most times I can admire, but what they say or show doesn’t affect me greatly. Just occasionally, however, an hour there can set your mind racing off in directions you were not expecting.

Two or three years ago, a young lady (she must have been all of 30) arrived with the most ancient of manual SLR cameras, and a single fixed 50mm lens, to give a talk on Taking pictures of Flowers. We all looked down our noses rather snootily at her camera, and thought the worst – we were in for a boring evening.

I was absolutely transfixed. Her pictures of flowers were like nothing I’d seen before. They were almost abstract, impressionistic, colour washed images with an ethereal beauty which suited their subject perfectly. A million miles away from the sterile “everything in focus” way Club photography tends to approach such a subject. I was hooked – I’d never bothered to take pictures of flowers before, but I certainly did after looking at this lady’s work. Well done her, and she probably never knew about the conversion she had made.

I’ve also never been into portraiture or people pictures. It always struck me that it was a bit like Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle in Quantum Physics. Here, if I understand it correctly, the position or the momentum of an atomic particle is changed by the act of locating it, so you can never know both accurately. In photography, when you point a camera at someone to catch a mood, or a look, the act of pointing the camera at them changes the look to something different – which is exactly what you don’t want. So setting someone up for a portrait would not give you a “real” picture of who they were – what you would get is the picture of who they wanted you to see – a very different animal indeed. Rather like someone presenting themselves at an interview, and we all know how false that can be.

So getting a natural picture was almost impossible, and I didn’t bother. Until a Dutch ex-newspaper photographer came along and showed how he took real candid pictures, with the predictable results that I, and a few other like minded individuals said, “Now they’re the sort of pictures I want to take”. They were unforced, they showed life as it actually was, rather than as the participants wanted you to see it, and another convert was made.

Recently in New York, I tried it all out, and was tolerably pleased with the results. You get a lot of failures, but it’s the ones which aren’t failures which make it worthwhile.

So this may sound like an e-sermon, which, given it’s Sunday over here, is reasonably appropriate, but this is Proof Positive, to me at least, that if you keep listening and watching other people at work or play, sooner or later, you’ll learn something important.

Now, I’m off to ask one of my offspring to borrow a Rap CD.

Tags:

photography

JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT YOU'D SEEN EVERYTHING - ALONG COMES A SCARECROW FESTIVAL

It’s so easy to get dispirited by what you read in the newspapers - the unending saga of the unravelling of Gordon Brown (didn’t Blair SO get his timing right?), the whole economic situation, the impending demise of the planet due to my inability to remember, when in a supermarket, to use the plastic bags I’ve once again left in the car, Andrew Flintoff getting out twice in five balls the other day (although I bet they pick him for the Test next week), and we’ve now got to endure Cherie Blair’s memoirs being remorselessly serialised all next week in the Times.

It’s easy to get really wound up about all these things, and wonder where the world’s going. Except, I’ve just come back from a short trip into Holt in Norfolk, and driven through one of those things which seriously makes you glad to be alive – the next village from where we are staying, is putting on - you'd better believe it - a Scarecrow Festival.

Outside the houses, the pubs, and the guest houses, life size scarecrows have been planted – at least I’m assuming they didn’t get there on their own. Who knows – we are in a very rural part of the country – it could be Norfolk’s answer to the “Wicker Man”.

They (the scarecrows) are sailing on the village pond, chatting over the garden wall, mending their cars (as one does) and generally loafing around doing not a lot - apart from presumably Scaring a few Crows. They look brilliantly zany, and are just what England needs just at the moment – a touch of utterly pointless, but charming, silliness.

In typically English fashion, you watch a good proportion of the tourists driving through the village, eyes facing forward, and completely missing the whole thing. Quite odd. They don’t know what they’re missing.

I’ve put a few pictures below, and there’s more, which I’ll include in Episode 2 in a couple of days.

"HEY JIM, I HAVE FOUND IT!" - I'VE NO IDEA WHAT IT MEANS!

JUST BECAUSE I BURNT HIS STEAK - NORFOLK HUMOUR

SENOR SCARECROW - SIESTA

BINGE DRINKING - SCARECROW STYLE

ON THE VILLAGE POND

ON THE BONNET IT SAYS - "WOT, NO BATTERY!

OVER THE GARDEN WALL - THE SPITTING IMAGE OF LES DAWSON!

BOXER AND REFEREE IN FRONT OF THE LOCAL CHURCH

- NORFOLK SURREALISM AT WORK

You’d never get this in Manhattan! It makes you proud to be English.

Tags:

norfolk,
photography,
scarecrows,
wighton

LETTER FROM AMERICA - DAY 6

Guess what the weather was doing when I looked out of the window this morning. Yup, you got it, it was raining, not hard, but that insistent fine rain the Scots call a "har". Rats!

But before I went out, a bit of boring Admin first - Pack and check out. I left my stuff in the hotel, and went out present hunting for the family, complete with all my camera gear in a rucksack on my back, looking decidedly like Quasimodo. I decided to try one of the big Department stores just to see what they're like, and went off to Macys.

There's one thing you can say about it. It's big. They claim it's the biggest Department Store in the World, and they may well be right. I have to say though, it didn't impress me as much as I had expected. Selfridges in London, for instance, is much better, And it looks as if a lick of paint and a bit of TLC wouldn't have gone amiss. It's got a really weird layout. In effect it's two shops, one for Men separated from the other which is for Women. Odd!

Anyway, presents having been bought, I had about 4 hours left before picking my belongings up at the hotel and heading towards JFK. I wanted to have a look at Chelsea Village, which is about 15 blocks to the South. The rain had just about stopped now, so I decided to walk. I noticed before when walking down 5th Avenue that the stratospherically posh bit stopped around 35th Street, and the further you walked South, the more, well, either real world or tatty are the words that comes to mind, it became. Now I was over on the West side, the same impression forced itself on me. The buildings get lower, and less grand, there are more general purpose shops, and the gloss seems less glossy.

That's not to be critical, it just changes. As you walk, the nature of the surroundings take on different styles. You pass through a district which has a collection of Flower Shops, one after the other. It's called, not surprisingly, the Flower District – at least it's not FLODI. Predictably, the flower shops are bigger than any at home with much more produce on sale. The area is a really bustling, and rather charming little bit of the City. The flowers, trees and ornamental bamboos and grasses spill out onto the street, and you find yourself walking through an avenue of green – like a 100 yard long Garden Centre.

You can feel the scale of everything reducing as you keep walking, and 10 blocks further on you reach Chelsea Village, which has a bit of a yuppy, slightly Bohemian feel to it. It's much more residential now, and the shops show a more individual, arty crafty side which you don't get at the top of 5th Avenue. I headed for a place called Chelsea Market, which is one of those old warehouses very trendily turned into artisan shops.

One was a rather good Wine shop where the balance of wines is very different from what you'd find in the UK. It had a huge stock of rather pretentious looking American wines, almost all of which were foreign to me (I've just realised how stupid that last phrase is). A large range of Italian wines dwarfed the French section, and they had a good collection of German wines – a dying breed in England. I asked the guy there where he recommended to eat and he pointed me to an Italian place located in what looked like a 5th scale tryout of the FlatIron Building. So, in we went to feed the inner man. The comparison with the Italian Pizza place yesterday was comical. This was smooth, suave American Italian, rather than Italian Italian. But it looked good, so in we went.

It was full of people who seemed to want to be seen – heaven knows what they made of a damp, black cagoule covered individual with a large rucksack on his back. I chomped my way through baked Asparagus, Crab, Salmon and Sea-Bass cake in a brioche, and two rather delightful home made sorbets – Poached Pear and Blood Orange. It was really rather good, and at $45 (£25) was not expensive.

And that was about that. I found my way back to the hotel, picked up my bags, and got on the subway to JFK Airport. They've built one of those little Overhead trains which runs the last bit, but it does seem odd, that from the centre of Manhattan, there is no direct route to get to the City's major Airport. That's the way we Brits would have done it!

Back on the last plane out at night, we had the pleasure of a 45 minute hold-up on take-off because they'd had an emergency when one plane's brakes had overheated on the runway, and 42 aircraft were sitting in a rather dismal traffic jam.

Still, we got going, and the pilot had clearly decided to try and get as much of the delay back as possible, so he put his foot down a bit.

I managed to get the two English hooligans behind me. As a race (or is it a tribe?), we do let ourselves down sometimes. They were from Liverpool (they always are in my experience), and they managed to drink far more than was sensible very quickly, and the arguments at 2 in the morning UK time increased to the point where I thought we were going to have one of those "Come outside and let's sort it Out" moments. That might have been a very satisfactory solution from my view point. But the stewardess, by threatening them rather forcibly with potential legal proceedings, managed to defuse the situation. And then, bless her, taking pity on poor little me, she suggested I move forward to spend the rest of the flight in the posh end of the plane, with miles of leg room.

Excellent. And when we arrived in London, what did we meet?

Rain - by the bucket-load.

Tags:

diary,
new york

ISN’T IT NICE WHEN THINGS JUST … WORK

Regular readers to this site will be aware that I’ve just spent a few days in New York, wandering around, eating myself silly, and taking a pile of photographs. As close to Paradise as I can get on my own.

Before I went, I decided to lash out and buy a new camera. Which in turn got me thinking about the real issues which decided me on one brand rather than another.

When I got into photography too many years ago for me to want to remember, I had read all the magazines, and reviews, and had come to the conclusion that what I really, really needed was a Canon EOS 5, a new camera which had just been launched onto the market. In the English vernacular, it was the “Bees’ Knees”. And I wanted one, badly.

I went to a Camera Fair to touch and play with one, just to confirm my conclusions, and it was with bated breath that I got to the Canon stand, and started handling, possibly even fondling one. To my huge disappointment, I was slightly underwhelmed, and reluctantly put it down.

I wandered round the rest of the show, picked up a Nikon F90, and within 10 seconds was completely converted. It was solid, sat in my hand beautifully, almost as if it had been designed just for me, and felt so right. I read the specification which said that the shutter had been designed for 180,000 exposures – that’s nearly 100 years at the rate I used to take pictures, and that convinced me. It exuded quality, and I bought one on the spot. Never have I made a better purchase.

This put me straight into the Nikon family, and it was followed by a D100 a few years later – another great camera. There I stayed for almost a decade, until the spectre of the Digital demon came over us all.

Now, it’s fair to say that Canon, for reasons I still don’t totally understand, have probably had the technical drop on Nikon in the Digital field of Professional/Serious Amateur cameras for quite a few years now, although I still stayed loyal to Nikon when their D70 came out in around 2004.

In reality, the cost of change is not just the camera, it’s the ancillary bits and pieces, the lenses and the flashguns, and just as importantly, knowing almost instinctively the way the camera works, which keeps you in the family. The Nikons I’ve owned were particularly intuitive. If you didn’t know how something worked on them, the odds were that if you took a guess at it, you would more often be right. When you want to do something in a hurry, that’s a very comforting feeling.

And Nikon were not daft – they kept as much of their operating methodology for a new camera as similar as possible to the last product, on the basis that “If it isn’t broken, don’t change it”. They maintain a lens mount which allows you to fit and use almost any lens they have produced in the last 50 years. So anyone who was versed in the Nikon style, and who picked up a brand new Nikon, could easily start taking decent pictures almost immediately.

I don’t change my camera each time the manufacturer brings out a new model, but recently, I started to look rather enviously at their newest offering, the D300, and its larger sibling, the D3. Apart from the D3 being 3 times the price of its smaller brother, it also weighed a ton, and I couldn’t convince myself that I needed such a beast. But the D300, well that was another story. As soon as I handled it, it murmured to me “Buy me, buy me, I’m the one that you want”, and I gave in immediately.

Wandering around New York, I took around 1000 pictures with it, without having had almost any time to familiarise myself properly with it. It just works. It’s blazingly fast, very intuitive, and seems to be able to do anything I want from a camera. The LCD panel on the back is quite superb, much better than on any other camera you can buy, and this means you can check the focus almost immediately rather than having to press the zoom button umpteen times as I had to do on all the other cameras I’ve owned. Simple, obvious and effective.

But the thing which unexpectedly astounded me about it, was its performance at high ASAs. On everything I’ve owned before, when you get much above 400ASA, the noise performance starts to deteriorate markedly. And if you want an image in low light, the noise is just something you have to live with. On this D300, I reckon you can get an almost noiseless image up to around 1000 ASA, which means you can take decent candids, in almost any light available.

This is something I simply hadn’t expected, and greatly expanded the envelope within which I could take pictures that pleased me. It really is a technical tour de force, and if you flick back to the title of this piece, which is the strap-line of a marvellous Honda TV car advert, you can put this lovely machine in the same category.

I probably don’t use the camera at its extremes, but I’ve sat and thought about it a lot – to try and think what I would improve on it. I read somewhere that the difference between the Canon and Nikon design philosophy was that Canons are designed by Engineers, and Nikons are designed by Photographers. This may sound a bit of a silly statement, but I can feel what it means quite clearly when I play with my new toy. It feels almost part of you.

Quite what Nikon are going to do when they set about developing the D400, I have no idea.

Tags:

nikon,
d300,
cameras,canon

LETTER FROM AMERICA - DAY 5

Got up to find it wasn’t raining like yesterday. It was absolutely bucketing down. How truly wonderful.

So, following the Billy Connolly dictum, that “There’s no such thing as bad weather, just the wrong clothes”, I put on my Designer Bin Liner cagoule, nicked a Hotel umbrella, and waded out for breakfast.

Being a few yards from Wall Street, this place is littered with Delis, where the earnest Financial wizards grab something on the way to their toils. And they are earnest – looking resolutely forward as they stride on (they don’t walk), phone in one hand, talking very loudly as they go, coffee and a bag of breakfast goodies in the other hand, and somehow they’ve got the laptop and other paraphernalia in yet another one.

There is a slight guilty pleasure, which actually I don’t find all that shameful, in walking past them with a guidebook in my pocket, an umbrella in my hand and mentally rehearsing the Gene Kelly impression I am about to unleash on the unsuspecting public.

The Deli chosen to receive my custom this morning is called “Au bon Pain”, so the possibility of a decent croissant wafts naughtily into my mind. These places continue to amaze me – you can get just about anything food-wise in them. But the locals don’t like some gitoid who doesn’t know his way around, who can’t navigate the menus in a flash, and frankly can’t make his mind up about what to eat. Especially, as he’s still wearing this black plastic bag, and looks as if he’s from another planet, let alone another country.They want to be in, shout an order, fling the money across the counter, and get out.

The food looks enticing, so it’s an egg and bacon and Bagel, Fresh Orange Juice, a decent looking croissant and a Small (ie enormous) Coffee. 6 out of 10 for the food – falling to 3 if you only mark the croissant. As far as the croissant was concerned, the “pain” was anything but “bon”. It looked perfect, but didn’t taste of much at all.

Being Monday and raining, restricted the possibilities a little. My plan to go up the Empire State Building fell at the First. With a Mist Ceiling of around 300 feet (estimated by counting the number of floors I could see on a convenient Skyscraper), the idea of standing on an Observation Platform staring down into 900 feet of absolutely nothing didn’t turn me on. So an Inside Day beckoned, but you need to navigate the opening times of the Museums a bit carefully, as Mondays and Tuesdays are closing days. I decided on MOMA (Museum of Modern Art) as we New Yorkers call it.

They’ve got a passion to shorten the names of all these things. Even the names of the Manhattan districts contain a fair number of truncations. SoHo is not like London, it’s South of Houston. And to make it worse, here Houston is pronounced House-ton, not Hoose-ton. Tribeca (what a stupid name) is Triangle Below Canal, Nolita is North of Little Italy, DUMBO (I kid you not) is Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass, and so on. It’s the lack of history, you see. The gorgeous Pastry shop in Little Italy, Ferrara’s, claims to be the oldest in America – and that dates only from 1892. I considered suggesting to them that if they want an old coffee shop they should try Mrs Miggins one on London – but I don’t think their minds are ready for it.

So, back into the carwash, and onto the subway, taking an Uptown 6 to 51st and Lexington, and swimming the rest of the way. In spite of my cagoule, I got soaked. Of course, if I’d bothered to think just a little bit about it, I would have realised that the other million tourists in the city had thought through their day in the same way I had (or more accurately hadn’t), and come to the same inevitable conclusion. I went to the entrance of the Museum, and was pointed very politely to The Queue. Which I walked along. I then turned right at the end of the block, and carried on walking to the end of that block, and turned right again, and halfway along, finally reaching the end. Don’t you sometimes want to hit those smug bastards near the front of the line, who leer knowingly at you as you trudge past – the ones who know something you don’t.

Anyway, the bouncy young MOMA Attendant doing the “Gid-em-up, Move ‘em out” bit at the back of the queue told us we had a 40 minute wait. So I waited for 25 minutes, and found myself inside the Museum. That’s not so bad.

On the outside it’s nothing – a dull, square, black façade with not a lot to recommend it. Inside, it’s something else. It’s laid out on 6 floors , and in summary I spent 5 utterly fascinating hours wandering round. There’s a large outside sculpture park, and each floor has a theme, Media, Drawings, Architecture and Design, Photography (the swines had closed that today – they must have known I was coming), and two floors dedicated to Modern Paintings and smaller sculpture. The top floor is reserved for special exhibitions.

The place is designed around a large Central atrium, with each floor being a series of connected rooms, all different sizes and shapes, giving a large range of canvasses to show off the works. It’s a light and airy place, with masses of space, much better suited to the job of showing pictures than the Guggenheim, whose quirkiness is actually quite restricting. And here, I didn’t have to spend the whole time leaning slightly to the left.

There’s some very serious money at play in this Museum. Many of the rooms have names, like the Ethel J Cheeseburger Room (I made that one up) which gives you a clue both to how this museum was funded, and how rich Americans want to be immortalised.

The quality of what’s on show is fabulous. If I’d thought about it, I’d have started at the top, where the “Modern”, ie older than Contemporary paintings are, and then drift down the floors of the buildings ending up with the stuff that is happening today. But I didn’t, so I went jerkily back in Time Machine mode. But No matter.

“Modern” to them starts around 1880, and their collection of Modern paintings is stunning. If you like Picassos, there are about 50 of them. Van Gogh, Cezanne, Seurat, Matisse, Monet, Chagall, all are well represented. And then it goes through the whole range of painters up to Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Jackson Pollock, Salvador Dali, Mark Rothko and the like. Some of the most iconic and well known paintings on Earth are on show here.

There is a lot of unsmiling suited attendants roaming around constantly, whose vocabulary seems to be limited to “No Flash” – photography, not exhibitionism, I assume. But, apart from that, you can get as close as you like to most of these masterpieces.

There’s an awful lot to like, and a lot which does not strike such a chord, at least in me. You can’t help being overwhelmed by a 60 foot panel of Monet’s Water Lilies, as well as the huge canvases by Jackson Pollock, though, not in my case for the same reason. My favourite painting there, the one I would have on a (very large) wall at home was one by Henri Rousseau, of a Gypsy sleeping. Quite exquisite, and you (or at least I) couldn’t take your eyes off it.

The Contemporary Floor was a real eye-opener. Some of the ideas there were weird, zany and very Left-Field – call it what you will. But if you took the time to read the little captions about them, and try to understand something about the author’s intention, quite a few drew you into them.

You do have to be a bit careful here, though. One exhibit in this section was an umbrella, leaning on the wall. There were quite a few people staring intently at it, and walking around it with quite an earnest attitude. That is until some kid rushed up to it and yelled “It’s all right, It’s still here”, picked it up and disappeared. Actually, having thought about it, it may well have been a very clever way of stealing a priceless exhibit. It’s that sort of place.

About 4pm, I reached the end, and went into the street. My stomach was making the usual demands, but I decided to walk the city a bit more, since the rain had now almost stopped. I went sort of South East, because something inside me was whispering “Pizza” rather insistently, and Little Italy seemed like a good idea. Some places you instinctively like. I ended up roughly in the area I had been a couple of days ago, and ambled down Mulberry Street, the heart of the district.

Rather than stick a pin in a restaurant map, I asked a local where the best Pizza was made, and he pointed to a rather dilapidated place on the corner, painted rather unsubtly in red, white and green. But then an awful lot of the place was in that colour. Parking meters, Fire Hydrants, and much of the road hardware seemed to have had a makeover – Italian style.

Posh, it was not. There were four or five rather dissolute looking Italian guys sitting around inside, looking as if they could easily play bit-parts in a gangster movie. But they did have a proper pizza oven, so I lived in hope. One sidled up, and waited for me to order. My attempt at chatting to the natives was not a great success. I watched as the head honcho spun the pizza dough very expertly in his hands, while chatting away to one of his mates. Ten minutes and a bottle of Peroni later, the Pizza appeared. It was predictably excellent – far better than I can make at home – and he wasn’t even concentrating. I’ll put it down to the Pizza Oven, although I suspect I’m kidding myself.

The other good thing about this restaurant was that it was 20 yards or so away from Ferrara’s where previously I had that gorgeous Tiramisu. So I trooped over there, and bought a Chocolate Canoli to take back to the hotel and trough my way through with a cup of coffee, when I got back.

Now back at base, it had turned 6pm, so I forced down a couple of beers in the bar, and I watched the Mets playing Baseball, irritating the Barman by asking him a stream of inane questions about what was going on. It was in truth a scrappy game, with neither side managing to get going. So, by about 9pm, it was Coffee and cake time. Well, it wasn’t really, but you can blame the body clock. Actually, having thought about it, you can’t, because it was 2am in the morning in England. Oh, well.

And that was about it for the day – I didn’t even give any thought to tomorrow – my last part day.

Tags:

diary,
new york,
moma

LETTER FROM AMERICA - DAY 4

Today, the weather changed, and it was chilly, windy and raining. An inside job was the order of the day. So off on the subway, up to 42nd Street and Grand Central Terminus. Being Sunday, I thought it would be a good place to look around and have some breakfast there.

I had seen many pictures of the station before, with the iconic (mid Fifties?) image taken with the very moody shafts of light cutting across the concourse being the one which stuck in my mind. But today, I wanted to see it for real. You approach it through a low, wide tunnel from the subway station, and enter directly onto the concourse.

What a magnificent structure. It hits you almost physically as you enter the huge space, with a really confident feel to the vast Concourse. The whole building has recently been subject to a major renovation project, costing something approaching $200 million, and it absolutely shows.

All the walls are newly faced with a thick, expensive coat of creamy, beige marble, giving it a lovely light, airy feel, and the roof is amazing. It has been painted in a soft green, with a gold, illuminated zodiac showing all the stars painted over it. I'm no astronomer but I understand the constellations were painted, possibly unintentionally, back to front – this being hurriedly explained, it seems, as representing "God's view" of the heavens. You had PR and spin in the 30s, so there's nothing new there. There is one small roof area which has been left unrestored, presumably to show the extent of the restoration work done.

In the exact centre of the vast concourse floor is a booth topped by a beautiful 4-faced gold clock, It's one of those things where if you said to a friend "Meet me by the clock in Grand Central" there would be no chance of getting confused – it acts as a real focus to the building. And, almost inevitabably, to commemorate 9/11, there is an enormous Stars and Stripes hanging down from the ceiling.

Even downstairs, in the Food Hall, the same opulence carries on. I bought my breakfast there – Smoked Salmon and Cream Cheese Bagel, a very French tasting Croissant, freshly squeezed orange juice, and half decent coffee – all of it of very good quality, and costing £6.

The whole impression is excellent and gives great credit to its original designer, as well as those who undertook the restoration. It's a bit like a Twentieth Century version of what's happened to St Pancras Station in London. Here though, it's not a new futuristic railway line they're symbolising because the station is only used now for local New York Commuting trains and the days of the Twentieth Century Limited steaming into town are long gone – I looked for the Chatanooga Choo-Choo in vain. A really great feel to the place though. And Highly recommended.

This flag thing is everywhere. On a previous visit to New England, we reckoned, driving around, that 1 in 10 of the houses there had a large flag in the garden. Here, it's the Municipal Buildings where it happens. The New York Stock Exchange near Wall Street has three largish flags hanging from angled flagpoles across the front of the building. But the whole of the front of the building is then covered by a gigantic one which must be 75 feet across.

All the Americans I've had a decent conversation with, are overtly proud of their Nation and maybe this is what's behind it all. But maybe also, it's a confidence issue. They do all seem, to a man, to be really scathing about their politicians. They all have said the same thing to me – "How are we going to get out?" or "There's no way out". Meaning Iraq. It comes up time and time again. They are also, and they don't talk anywhere near so much about this, very fearful of the economic situation. They are almost ashamed of the weakness of the Dollar, and you can feel a sense of personal failure here. They are strangely reticent about it all, perhaps on the basis of not wanting to talk it down, but the Elephant, most definitely, is in the room – and it's a Big One. "It's real, real tough, out there." was the most I got out of one of them.

But, back to the Grand Tour. There was no decent light for pictures today, and it was coldish. So a bit of culture was called for. Off to Museum Mile Uptown on Fifth Avenue, and the Guggenheim. This is a remarkable looking building, and it caused a huge shock to New Yorkers when it was built in the Fifties.

Everything in Manhattan is at right angles, at least when you get above the Southern Tip. From 14th Street up to 135th Street (which is where my Map stops), the Grid system is absolute. And mixed in with "square" buildings, the architectural signature of New York is clear. Square is Cool - Curves are Out.

Until you see the Guggenheim. This is a Frank Lloyd Wright masterpiece, built as a slowly rising circular spiral building, which makes a real impact when you see pictures of it. I had huge expectations, and expected to be wowed as I walked round the corner of 88th Street.

But No. The impact this morning is very muted, because it's covered in what looks like the biggest Bin Liner in the World. Now, when you see these things, you think - It's being restored. But this is an avant garde museum, so I did wonder if it was being used for one of these "Installations" where they wrap the building up in Clingfim or Tinfoil to make a huge artistic point, like they did with the Reichstag in Berlin.

So to avoid looking like an idiot, I kept schtumm and approached it very noncommittally. You could imagine chatting to a bystander, and commenting that the builders are making a bit of a mess of the place, and "Are they going to get it finished on time?" only to find that he's the artist, and has just won the New York equivalent of the Turner Prize with his efforts.

There has even, I found out later, been an argument between Those Who Matter here about the colour the outside should be painted when the restoration is complete. When it was built, it was in Yellow, but this was later replaced by a Pale Cream. It would seem that Committees were formed, arguments were had, faces were scratched and Prams were completely emptied of Toys, but the latest Stop Press news is that The Creamists have triumphed.

Picking up a leaflet in the queue to get in, all is made clear. Yes, it's being restored - for a Fiftieth Year Old celebration in 2009. So, that's bit of a shame for those of us here in 2008. But inside, it's OK. It really is a most unusual space. The walls run in a five ring spiral, like looking outwards from the inside of a large Apple that an Accountant has peeled. All the exhibits are mounted on the walls of this spiral, which means that you view them at an angle of around 2-3 degrees off the horizontal, and spend the next hour leaning slightly to the right. Being the said Accountant, I had to suppress a constant desire to level them all up.

I'd read beforehand that the special exhibits on show were a selection of Early Twentieth Century paintings by the likes of Kandinsky, Klee and Kokoschka, and some works by a Chinese Post-Modernist artist named Cai Guo-Qiang (I've got the Microsoft Red wiggly line under that, and it won't go away!). I arrived expecting to love the pictures and hate the Chinese artist's work. It turned out exactly the opposite. I was going to say that, in the end, I leaned towards the Chinese part of the Exhibition, but I'm not going for the cheap jibe here!

There were a few pictures with which I connected – Paul Klee, Joan Miro, and a couple by Kandinsky, but the rest left me cold, and strangely unmoved.

But the installations by Cai were brilliant. One was a stream of 99 life-size tigers, teeth bared and all different. Hugely dynamic poses, which were quite frightening. You started walking through them, as if you were taking a pack of dogs for a stroll. They looked real, although they had all been made for the exhibit, and they gradually got closer together into a tight Tigerstream, and "took off" (they were mounted on wires) until at the end there was almost no space between them and they rushed headlong from above your head into a glass screen tumbling to the ground in a mass of distorted shapes. I think it's meant to be symbolic of the lead-up to Russia pulling down the Berlin Wall, but my Audio cassette had stopped working, and I was on my own in working out what was going on.

This exhibit led into the next, which was an icon of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. 102 lifesize clay models of Chinese people, some workers, some women, some children, some soldiers, all bringing the feel of fear, decay and deprivation literally in to your face as you walked through them – inches away from your face. They never stopped coming at you, and it built up in intensity as you walked through. It sounds depressing, but the quality of the sculpture, and the looks on the people's faces, as well as the sometimes agonising poses completely held you. They made a real impression on me.

I'd literally never seen anything like it, and it keeps coming back into my mind. It really, really surprised me.

Lunchtime now, and a walk across Central Park to the American Natural History Museum. In retrospect, after the Guggenheim, this was a bit of a mistake. You were brought down to earth with a bump. I had a so-so containered lunch of Chicken Caesar Salad which they managed to make without any dressing on (different!), and set off round the Museum. It's vast – a bit like our Natural History Museum, or even the British Museum.

The exhibits are Top Drawer – the Biggest This in the World, and the longest That, but it lacked sparkle to me – all a bit worthy.

You tended to rush around to try and see everything, and ended up seeing far less than if you'd picked one bit out and concentrated on it. But the sight of a full size 50 foot Blue Whale is not forgotten easily!.

It was about 4pm and I was flagging a bit now, so gave up and decided to return to base. I walked along the Avenue bordering the Park, past the Dakota building, outside which John Lennon was shot in 1980, and onto the Subway, and back to the hotel.

I went for a "peace and quiet" evening, and strolled down to the Waterfront for a leisurely evening meal. I found an old, slightly decrepit Italian place, where the menu looked as if it was of the "Whatever's delivered today, We'll cook for you" sort, and gave that a go. Apart from the massive portions, it was a good choice. Antipasta, and Seared Scallops on Garlic Pasta, Lemon Sorbet, and a couple of Beers. Had a long chat to the guy behind the bar about this and that (He hates Bush, as well – that's Six out of Six, so far). The DJ on the radio was playing songs from the Fifties and the Sixties, and rather depressingly he and I were the only ones there who knew the words. So we had a rather low key, geriatric Karaoke session until the programme finished.

We then put the world to rights, and they shut up shop and threw me out. He went home on the Staten Island ferry, and I went back to the hotel.

A lower key, "inside" day, with Grand Central Terminal and the Guggenheim being the star attractions.

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diary,
new york,
guggenheim