Author: Abellio

I like writing, but I’ve spent most of my life writing about things that don’t particularly interest me. Finally, as I neared the age of 60, I decided to change that. I wanted to write about things that interested me. What really interests me is beauty. So I’ve focused this blog on beautiful things. I could be writing about a formally beautiful object in a museum. But it could also be something sitting quietly on a shelf. Or it could be just a fleeting view that's caught my eye, or a momentary splash of colour-on-colour at the turn of the road. Or it could be a piece of music I've just heard. Or a piece of poetry. Or food. And I’m sure I’ve missed things. But I’ll also write about interesting things that I hear or read about. Isn't there a beauty about things pleasing to the mind? I started just writing, but my wife quickly persuaded me to include photos. I tried it and I liked it. So my posts are now a mix of words and pictures, most of which I find on the internet. What else about me? When I first started this blog, my wife and I lived in Beijing where I was head of the regional office of the UN Agency I worked for. So at the beginning I wrote a lot about things Chinese. Then we moved to Bangkok, where again I headed up my Agency's regional office. So for a period I wrote about Thailand and South-East Asia more generally. But we had lived in Austria for many years before moving to China, and anyway we both come from Europe my wife is Italian while I'm half English, half French - so I often write about things European. Now I'm retired and we've moved back to Europe, so I suppose I will be writing a lot more about the Old Continent, interspersed with posts we have gone to visit. What else? We have two grown children, who had already left the nest when we moved to China, but they still figure from time to time in my posts. I’ll let my readers figure out more about me from reading what I've written. As these readers will discover, I really like trees. So I chose a tree - an apple tree, painted by the Austrian painter Gustav Klimt - as my gravatar. And I chose Abellio as my name because he is the Celtic God of the apple tree. I hope you enjoy my posts. http://ipaintingsforsale.com/UploadPic/Gustav Klimt/big/Apple Tree I.jpg

QUIRKY CARS

Vienna, 29 August 2024
updated Sori, 10 March 2025

My wife and I were walking along some street a few weeks ago when I spotted a gorgeous red FIAT 500 driving past. Of course, I didn’t have the gumption to take a photo, so this one which I’ve lifted from the web will have to do.

I have a doubt, though. Was it a FIAT 500, or was it a FIAT 600? I must confess to never having been able to distinguish very well between the two. So just in case, I also throw in a photo of a red 600.

Just to help readers understand why I get confused between the two, I throw in a composite photo of a FIAT 500 and FIAT 600 nose-to-nose.

I think readers will agree that they really are very similar, with the 600 being slightly longer to allow passengers to (more or less) sit comfortably in the back seat.

I’ve always had a fondness for quirky little cars. The VW Beetle comes to mind.

So does the Citroën’s Deux-Chevaux (2CV).

My childish side moves me to also include here a photo of two of the deux-chevaux’s equally quirky drivers, Dupont and Dupond from Tintin.

My excuse for doing so is that my mother had as friends two old ladies who were twins, and they would always come and visit us in a deux-chevaux. While they didn’t drive quite as badly as Dupont and Dupond, their arrival was always accompanied by a mini-drama when they were parking.

I think I can go so far as to add the Morris Mini-Minor to the list of quirky cars, although, while having a fairly high quirkiness coefficient, it is not, in my humble opinion, as quirky as the other cars I’ve mentioned.

That being said, it did have a pretty cool part to play in the original 1969 film “The Italian Job”, with Michael Caine.

In my youth, I would also see bubble cars like this one.

In my opinion, though, they’re not quirky, they’re just weird, like Trump.

I might be fond of quirky cars, but I’ve never actually owned one. The closest I’ve ever been to quirky-car ownership is through my wife, when she co-owned a white FIAT 600 with her flatmate while doing her graduate studies in Bologna. It must have been twenty-fifth hand, that car. We took it on a long road trip over a Christmas holiday to Puglia. My mother-in-law accompanied us; the saintly woman spent the whole trip wedged in the back. Being rather old, the car had a problem of leakage from the radiator. Every 100 km or so, we had to stop and top up the water. At these moments, my mother-in-law would ask out loud if we would ever make it to our destination. To capture a little of that drive to Puglia, I throw in a photo of a FIAT 600 rockin’ down the highway, as the Doobie Brothers sang way back in 1972.

That one trip is the only time I’ve ever driven one of these quirky cars. I once accompanied a University flat mate of mine on a long, long trip from London to her mother’s place in Austria (I mentioned this trip in my last post). She was driving a Dyane, not quite as quirky as the original deux-chevaux but close enough.

I didn’t drive because I didn’t have my license yet (I’m not sure she would have let me drive anyway; she was very possessive of her Dyane). Apart from the length of the trip, the only notable thing that happened is that a Frenchman wearing a beret (I kid you not) drove into my side of the Dyane about half an hour after we had left Dunkirk. Classic British-French misunderstanding. My friend thought she had priority because she was on a large main road and the bereted Frenchman was coming in from a small road on the right. He, on the other hand, was strictly applying that quirky French rule of the road “Priorité à droite”, regardless of relative road sizes.

At least my friend wasn’t driving on the left-hand side of the road … This is a cartoon from way back in 1966 by the famous British cartoonist Giles.

In contrast, a FIAT 500 (or maybe FIAT 600) was part of a scene of Italian-British cultural exchange earlier in my life. The one and only cruise I’ve ever been on (it is the subject of an an earlier post) stopped off in Brindisi on the way back to Venice. It was 1968 or ’69. A group of us youngsters on the ship went for a stroll through town. We were of course noticed by the local population, especially since one of us was a very pretty blue-eyed, blonde-haired teenager. Within minutes of us beginning our walk, this white 500 (or maybe 600) came careening around the corner on two wheels and came screeching to a halt next to us. The car’s driver and passengers all hopped out and after much hand waving and some words we managed to understand that they were inviting us to a café for a drink. Since none of us spoke Italian and none of them spoke English, the conversation was exceedingly limited. Nevertheless, a good time was had by all. Eventually, we went our separate ways, they in the 500 (or 600?), which careened away around the corner on two wheels. To celebrate this moment of entente cordiale in Italy, I throw in a photo of a bar in Brindisi from perhaps 10 years earlier, with what definitely looks like a FIAT 600 parked outside it.

These quirky cars are of course collectibles now. One fellow who I worked with – the one who once spent more time getting local salted capers than doing the work, as I’ve mentioned in an earlier post – recounted to me in excruciating detail his efforts to do up an old 500 he had bought. Maybe it looked something like this when he bought it; this particular FIAT 500 has been quietly mouldering away for at least ten years now in a parking space down the road from our apartment at the seaside.

He told me that all he needed to find was the original of one small part (some sort of knob) and he was done. The car would be worth millions! (of liras) I never did find out if he managed to lay his hands on that small part …

Of course, it comes with my age to say that they don’t make things the way they used to anymore. But in the case of quirky cars, it’s really true. Modern cars are so boring, no character, just boxes on wheels. Even the modern cars whose manufacturers exploit the mythic status of the old quirky cars by giving them the same name are but pale imitations of the originals – if they look like the original at all.

The new FIAT 500 EV looks quite like the old 500, just pumped up, as if it has been attending a body-builders’ gym.

The new FIAT 600, on the other hand, bears absolutely no resemblance to the old FIAT 600.

For its part, the new Mini Cooper looks a teeny-weeny bit like the old Mini-Minor.

As for the deux-chevaux and the Volkswagen beetle, no-one has (yet) dared come out with a modern imitation of them.

The only exception I would make to my damning judgement of modern cars is the Smart Fortwo car.

Now that is a car with character! You can see in the photo one of its quirky characteristics, that it can be parked head onto the pavement.

My wife and I once stayed at a hotel which offered a free drive in a Smart. No idea why, but we said “what the hell, why not?” and we took it for a spin. A most delightful experience! If I had to own a car, which I most definitely do not, I would try to persuade my wife to buy a Smart. Actually, instead of buying why not join a car sharing scheme? Car2go offers Smarts.

What new quirky cars might I see before I pop my clogs? Surely the new era of EVs will throw up a quirky car or two. I wait with bated breath.

ONION DOMES

Vienna, 8 August 2024

In my last post, I mentioned the brief trip my wife and I made to Schruns in the Montafon valley. We liked the Montafon valley so much that we decided to go back for some more hiking. This time, we explored new side valleys and some of the (artificial) lakes at the top of the valley. But I don’t want to talk about that, delightful though it has been. I want to talk about the view from the terrace when we were eating our dinner.

As readers can see, the town’s church tower is capped by a delightful example of an onion dome. The towers of many churches in Austria and Bavaria, as well as in other parts of the German lands, are crowned with onion domes. In the valley of Montafon alone, my wife and I saw five onion domes during our hikes or from the bus on our way to our hikes’ starting points.
Sankt Gallenkirch:

Gortipohl:

Gaschurn:

Partenen:

And finally Tschagguns, where a lantern has been inserted into the onion:

I first remember seeing these onion domes decades ago, when one of my flatmates at University invited me to spend the Easter vacation at her mother’s place in the Alps in Austria (her mother was Austrian). We drove all the way there from the UK. At some point, we crossed into Bavaria and I began seeing these onion domes atop church towers through the car window. I was rather astonished; for me, onion domes was something you only found in Christian Orthodox lands. The example that comes to mind for most people is St. Basil’s Cathedral on Moscow’s Red Square, but I refuse to give space to the invaders of Ukraine. I shall instead insert a photo St. Michael’s monastery in Kyiv.

What on earth were these onion domes doing in Germany and Austria?! I didn’t get an answer to my question at the time – even though my flatmate was studying architecture, she had never posed herself the question – and life rolled by. It wasn’t until I was sitting on that terrace staring at the tower of Schruns’s church that I posed myself the question anew. Luckily, in the intervening decades the internet has come along and Wikipedia – that splendid instrument for giving answers to the most off-the-wall questions – has been created.

The story which Wikipedia tells is a fascinating one. First of all, this was not a question of German-speaking church builders importing a new style from further east in Europe. It seems, rather, that the answer lies with a certain Bernhard von Braidenbach, an important official in the Archdiocese of Mainz, who lived from about 1440 to 1497. He was important enough to deserve a tombstone in Mainz cathedral, of the type that brass rubbers love. I throw in a photo of his tombstone.

Braidenbach is chiefly remembered today for a book he wrote in 1486, Peregrinatio in terram sanctam, in which he recounted his pilgrimage to the Holy Land undertaken in 1483-84. He was actually accompanying (i.e., keeping an eye on) the young Count Johann von Solms-Lich, so he also had a knight with him to protect the Count and the party. And, very important for us, he took along a certain Erhard Reuwich, an artist from Mainz. Why he decided to take an artist with him is unknown – at least to me. But it’s good that he did, as we shall see. Once back in Mainz (minus the count, alas, who had died on the return trip), Braidenbach wrote what was essentially a travel guide for future pilgrims to the Holy Land. What was groundbreaking about the book is that he inserted into the text some 25 woodcuts prepared by Reuwich, of views of the cities they passed through and other topics.

The book was an instant hit with European elites. It went through several editions and was translated into numerous languages. And – what is important for our story – church builders picked up on a detail in one of the woodcuts, Reuwich’s view of Jerusalem as seen from the Mount of Olives.

Sharp-eyed readers will immediately see the unmistakably onion-shaped dome on the building in the foreground of the woodcut. I blow up the photo for those of my readers whose sight, like mine, is less than perfect.

So there we have it. That little feature in one of the book’s woodcuts – admittedly of one of the holiest places in the world for Christians – seems to have inspired builders in the southern German lands to crown their church towers with onion domes.

The building whose onion dome they copied is the Dome of the Rock, an Islamic shrine at the centre of the Al-Aqsa mosque compound on the Temple Mount in the Old City of Jerusalem. This aerial photo is taken more or less from above the Mount of Olives and gives a very similar view as the woodcut.

The photo shows the unmistakable octagonal arcade surrounding the dome. It also shows – shock! horror! – that the dome is not onion-shaped! From my extensive reading (in Wikipedia), it seems that it never was. As far as I can make out, the dome has kept the same shape it had when it was built back in 692 AD.

I have to assume that our friend Erhard Reuwich was taken by a fit of poetic license when he prepared the woodcut. Quite honestly, I’m glad that he was feeling poetic the day he laboured over the woodcut, because otherwise I wouldn’t have found myself staring with such pleasure at the church tower in Schruns and other places in Montafon valley.

In this day and age of hostility between the Islamic and Christian worlds, I’m also rather pleased to see that Christian church builders don’t seem to have had any scruples about copying the dome of an Islamic building for their Christian churches.

Well, I finished this post on the train back to Vienna, and as I paused and stared out of the window somewhere in Bavaria, a church tower with an onion dome flashed by.

THE COMMON RHODODENDRON – PRETTY FLOWER, INVASIVE SPECIES

Vienna, 30 July 2024

I mentioned briefly in my last post that our grandson had spent some time with us. Wonderful! But tiring. After we had waved him and his parents goodbye, my wife and I headed into the Austrian Alps for a few days of well-deserved R&R. Specifically, we went to a place called Schruns, which – for those readers who are interested – lies in the Austrian province of Vorarlberg. But provincial boundaries – or any boundaries, really – are just lines in our heads, abstractions we impose on the landscape which surrounds us. It would be better to say that Schruns sits in the lower part of the valley of the river Ill, a river that starts its course at the head of the high Alpine valley of Ochsental, up on the slopes of the Piz Buin (Ox Peak in the local Rhaeto-Romance language), the highest peak in Voralberg, and then runs through the 40-km long Montafon valley.

Sorry, let me immediately be clear that this post is not going to be a rant about the foolishness of borders. I just got carried away a bit as I wrote that last paragraph. No, it is actually the result of a hike that my wife and I did high up above Schruns, at 2300 m, on a beautiful, sunny day. Here we are at the top, looking down at Schruns in the Montafon valley below.

In case any readers are wondering, we did not hike up the 1600 metres up to the top of the mountain from Schruns. Dedicated hikers we may be, but not fanatics. We took a gondola lift up 1200 metres and then hiked up the rest of the way. In that climb, we passed through a huge field of dwarf rhododendron.

I have to say that, although the sight was very pretty, my heart sank when I saw those rhododendrons. You see, I was under the impression that all rhododendrons originally came from the Himalayas, that I was in front of an introduced species, and – based on something I had read somewhere – that rhododendrons in Europe were now an invasive species, a topic I have written about in several posts. I was biased towards this thinking by my sighting, the previous day, on a hike along the river Ill of thick stands of Himalayan Balsam, which as I’ve reported in an earlier post is indeed an invasive species here in Europe. So it was with a certain grimness that I photographed another patch of rhododendrons on a hillside in front of where we had lunch on the edges of a small Alpine pond.

Well, I’m glad to report that I was completely wrong. Yes, the Himalayas do host a large number of rhododendron species, as – surprisingly to my mind – do Papua New Guinea and Borneo. But there are a number of rhododendron species native to North America, and – key to this post – a few rhododendron species native to Europe. I am extremely glad to tell readers that two of these, closely related to each other, are native to the Alps, so no invasive species on our hike! They are the alpenrose, Rhododendron ferrugineum

and the hairy alpenrose, R. hirsutum.

I think readers will agree that there doesn’t seem to be much difference between the two. The biggest difference seems to be in the leaves. The undersides of the alpenrose’s leaves are covered in rust-brown spots, while the hairy alpenrose’s leaves have hairy edges. The pH of the soil is a prime decider of what Alp they will grow on, with the alpenrose favouring acidic soils and the hairy alpenrose alkaline soils. I suspect that once upon a time the two were one and the same species, and then they began to diverge as they adapted to different soils. They are still close enough so that they will hybridise where their ranges overlap. Since I have absolutely no idea what the pH of the soil is in the mountains above Schruns, I have correspondingly no idea which of the two alpenroses my wife and I were looking at on our hike. And I certainly didn’t get down on my knees to have a closer look at their leaves.

But where did I get this idea that rhododendrons are an invasive species? I can’t have dreamed it. Well, it turns out that there is another European species, the common or pontic rhododendron, R. ponticum, which is indeed invasive. Actually, as in the case of the alpenroses, there are two closely related species. One, the subspecies ponticum, is found around the southern Black Sea basin (hence its name) and all the way to Georgia and the northern Caucasus, with a presence also in Lebanon.

The other, subspecies baeticum, is found in a few damp valleys in a couple of mountain ranges in central and southern Portugal and southern Spain.

It is this latter subspecies that has become an invasive species in the UK and more generally in Western Europe. Its story is typical of the period when Europeans went around the world hunting for “pretty plants”, plants which simply gave pleasure because of their flowers, foliage, shape, or other characteristics. This started in the early 18th century; of course, the global trade in plants had started several centuries earlier, immediately after Europe’s discovery of the Americas, but in those earlier centuries people were interested only in plants that were commercially interesting. The common rhododendron ssp. baeticum was an early example of this massive movement of pretty plants around the world. It seems that it was brought to England in 1763 through that British foothold on the Iberian peninsula, Gibraltar, which is located quite close to its natural range. A new plant nursery in Hackney, run by a German émigré by the name of Joachim Conrad Loddiges, was the first to make the common rhododendron’s seeds available. One of the early buyers from Loddiges was the 2nd Marquess of Rockingham, who had the distinction of being British Prime Minister twice.

As readers can imagine, in those days, when Respect for one’s Betters was much more engrained, where such a Distinguished Personage went others were sure to follow. The result was that the planting of common rhododendrons in posh and then not so posh gardens quickly spread. Of course, it helped that it had a really pretty flower. But then most rhododendrons do. The craze for rhododendrons expanded as new species of rhododendrons, from North America and then from Asia, poured into the UK and Europe more generally. Rhododendrons hybridise quite easily, which added to the excitement as gardeners hybridised rhododendrons with abandon to create plants with ever more glamorous flowers. Often, to speed things up, new species were grafted onto the rootstock of common rhododendrons; the latter were tough and often there already, so it made for a quick way to turn your garden into a splendid glade of multi-hued rhododendrons. I throw in here photos of some modern examples of such dazzling displays of rhododendrons. The first, fittingly, is from Wentworth House in Yorkshire, one of two country houses that our friend the 2nd Marquess of Rockingham once owned.

Just to remind ourselves that it’s not just grand gardens that have rhododendrons, here’s one – maybe a common rhododendron, but you can’t tell, what with all the hybrids around – in someone’s back garden.

Alas! As far as the common rhododendron was concerned, it all turned out to be too good to be true. By the 1970s if not before, people had realised that it was a horribly invasive species. Primarily because of its huge production of seeds, it quite easily “hops over” garden fences and – if the soil and climate on the other side is welcoming – it goes feral. Then, once the plant has rooted, the roots send up suckers, which in no time at all grow into new bushes. The branches of all these bushes layer tightly together, blocking out sunlight and stopping anything else from growing. And to cap it all, many of the rhododendrons which were grafted onto the rootstock of common rhododendrons reverted to common rhododendrons if they weren’t looked after, creating yet more common rhododendron plants ready to hop over garden fences. The net result was thick stands of common rhododendrons taking over large swathes of land.

Here, a stand of common rhododendron is slowly engulfing a bus stop.

Well, who cares about a bus stop? But the common rhododendrons are choking stream beds and the understory of woods. They also carry a family of pathogens that can kill certain species of trees. This map shows the distribution of the common rhododendron, both inside gardens and out, throughout the UK and Ireland in the early 1970s.

Source: J.R. Cross, “Rhododendron Ponticum L.”, Jnl. Ecology, Vol. 63, No. 1, pp.345-364, Mar. 1975

Readers will notice dense patches of dots in many places in the UK, as well as in Ireland. Western Scotland and Snowdonia in Wales have been especially badly affected. Eradication programmes are underway. But it’s hard (and therefore expensive) work.

And you have to come back for at least five years after you’ve cleared a patch, to ensure that no roots were left which have thrown up suckers and no seeds were left which have sprouted. And now scientists have discovered that after you’ve cleared a patch it’s not a given that the cleared land will revert back to its original composition of plants; the balance has been disturbed and some plants may move back in faster than others and stop the slower movers from recolonising the land. So more work will be required to ensure that the original plant composition returns.

There is something really quite ironic about the common rhododendron letting rip and taking over large swathes of British, and other European, countryside. Back in the Iberian peninsula, where the plant came from originally, it is hanging on by its fingernails. It is a relict population from the the original laurissilva forests which covered the Iberian peninsula 66 million years ago, It is no longer suited to the dry climate in Iberia and has retreated into a few damp valleys. Reproduction is largely confined to the roots sending out suckers as the climate is now too dry for seedlings to survive. With climate change turning the southern part of the Iberian peninsula into a semi-desert, I suspect it will expire there. But, luckily for it, and unluckily for other plants, a bunch of ignorant plant traders brought it into an ecological niche where it just thrives, thank you very much! Of course, we can’t really blame the people who back in 1763 carried the plant to the UK, no-one then had the knowledge of what impacts there can be from moving plants around the planet. But now we do know, and yet we still do it. Are we stupid or what?!

Sorry, I can sense another rant coming on, time to stop. But if any of my readers have common rhododendrons in their gardens I beg them to rip them out without delay. If they really want rhododendrons, there are many, many equally pretty rhododendrons which do not “go forth and multiply”, as the Bible has it.

PAWPAWS, NOT PAPAYAS

Vienna, 20 July 2024

My wife and I recently had our annual check-up with our GP in Vienna. He’s been our doctor here for nigh on 20 years. The first thing he told us was that he was retiring at the end of the week. Tutto cambia, tutto su transforma, everything changes, everything is transformed, as I mournfully intoned in an earlier post. After he had given us our prescriptions for the routine blood and other tests we do every year (the results of which, though, will be reviewed this year by his partner in the medical practice), we chatted a bit about his retirement plans. He told us that he and his partner would be selling their apartment in Vienna (which is how we met him; they lived on the floor below ours), and they would be moving to a house which they have spent the last couple of years restoring, out in the countryside in southern Styria.

He was especially enthusiastic about its garden. He told us that he has filled it with all sorts of exotic plants, which have been flourishing. It doesn’t surprise me, he has exceedingly green fingers; we would gaze down with wonderment (and not a little envy) at the terrace of their apartment, a riot of flowers and plants, which he would lovingly curate in the evenings during the spring and summer. He told us with a note of pride in his voice that he had even successfully planted a pau-pau tree. A what tree, my wife and I both asked? After some toing and froing, we finally understood he was talking about a tree that produces a fruit called pawpaw. But the confusion wasn’t over yet. Since neither of us had ever heard of pawpaw fruits, my wife fished out her iPad and undertook a rapid Google search to see what they looked like. The search term “pawpaw” resulted in this image.

You mean papaya, we asked? This is what we call this fruit. No, no, our doctor said, not papayas; pawpaws. More Google searching and my wife came up with this.

Yes, the good doctor said, that’s the one.

Well, well, they say you learn something new every day (who coined that phrase, I wonder? Must Google it). My wife and I certainly did that day, along with the distressing news about our doctor’s retirement. After promising to visit the two of them in Styria one of these days, we said our emotional goodbyes.

Of course, I couldn’t leave it there. I was just like my little grandson picking at a scab (did I mention that he’s been staying with us?). I just had to find out more about this pawpaw. Which was fine, because it turned out to be a really interesting fruit.

First of all, as this map shows, pawpaws are native to the US, and more specifically to the eastern, southern, and midwestern states – the push into southern Ontario is probably man-induced, as we shall see in a minute.

It’s intriguing that the pawpaw tree is found this far north, in temperate climes, because it actually belongs to a family nearly all of whose members are tropical. It’s a nice example of environmental adaptation. It would seem that the ancestor of the pawpaw developed on what is now the North American continent when the climate was tropical. As the climate cooled, the plant reacted by adapting to the chillier temperatures. Nevertheless, it never quite lost its earlier tropical “look”. Its leaves, for instance, have drip tips, a typical feature of tropical plants which are subjected to heavy rains.

And the fruit itself looks quite tropical; looking at the photo above one could easily mistake it for a mango, for instance.

The name “pawpaw” is a bit of a puzzle. It seems that there was a confusion between the pawpaw and the papaya. Down in the British Caribbean colonies, the papaya was known as the pawpaw – and still today, in the UK and in many ex-British colonies, the papaya is called pawpaw. There was a brisk trade between the Caribbean and American colonies, and the thinking goes that when Brits coming from the Caribbean landed in the more southerly American colonies and first set eyes on this tree and its fruit they said “Ooh, look, those look like pawpaws” and the name stuck. Those Brits must have had very poor eyesight, though. In these next few photos, I invite my readers to compare various aspects of the two plants. Here’s what the tree looks like.

Here’s what the leaves look like

Here’s what the flower looks like.

Here’s what the fruits look like on the outside.

And here is what they look like on the inside.

I think my readers will agree that, with the possible exception of the whole fruits, the two really don’t look like each other at all. Maybe those Brits from the Caribbean were actually comparing the taste of the two fruits? For reasons that will become clear in a minute, neither I nor my wife have ever eaten pawpaw, so I am relying here on other people’s impressions of the fruit’s taste. This description, from its entry in Wikipedia, seems to summarise quite well various attempts I have found around the internet to describe the taste : “a flavour somewhat similar to banana, mango, and pineapple”. I haven’t eaten piles of papaya, but that description doesn’t fit with my sense of the papaya’s taste. I rather agree with one person’s assessment that the papaya tastes like a cross between a cantaloupe and a mango.

So the mystery remains: what the hell were those initial namers thinking?! They just created a big confusion. Why didn’t the colonists in the American colonies adopt the name given to the fruit by the local First Nations tribes? The Virginians did it with persimmons, after all (a transliteration of the Algonquian name for the fruit: “pessamin”).

The coureurs des bois (roamers of the woods), French Canadians who traded for furs with the First Nations and who were a key figure in the North American fur trade, were often the first Europeans to explore the part of the US which is the fruit’s natural range. They sensibly adopted the Algonquian name for the fruit, “assimin”, giving it a French twist, though, coming up with “asiminier”. Here we have an etching of a heroic-looking coureur des bois which appeared in a French Canadian magazine from 1871.

Taking a leaf from the Virginian colonists’ book, I shall start a campaign to have the fruit’s name changed to assimmon. Readers are welcome to join me in this futile tilting at windmills; just for the hell of it, I insert Picasso’s take on the original tilter at windmills, Don Quixote, with his faithful sidekick, Sancho Panchez.

I have to say, I do have a sort-of official approval for this effort: the plant’s proper botanical name is Asimina triloba, where the first part of the name picked up the coureurs des bois’s name. In fact, I shall start right now. I shall call the fruit assimon in the rest of this post.

As readers can imagine, the pawpaw – sorry, the assimon – was very popular with the First Nation tribes who occupied the fruit’s range. Here you have what turns out to be the largest edible fruit that is indigenous to the US, and it’s delicious to boot! The tribes loved it so much that they extended the fruit’s original range by carrying it with them when they moved into new territories (as they did with the Jerusalem artichoke – and of course maize). This most probably explains the fruit’s presence in Southern Ontario, brought there, it is theorised, by the Erie and Onondaga tribes. To bring us back to those far-off times, I throw in a photo of a figure that appeared in Samuel de Champlain’s books on his voyages in what is now Canada and the US. It relates to an attack Champlain carried out together with the Hurons on an Onondaga village, situated on what is now called Onondaga lake, close to the modern city of Syracuse in the northern New York State.

It’s lucky that the First Nations did move the assimon tree around, because it had evolved into a cul-de-sac. If readers go back to the photo of the open assimon fruit, they will notice its large stones. Fruit stones have evolved to be swallowed by the animals which consume the fruit, to be then expelled in a nice, fertilising pile of poo somewhere else as the animal in question wanders around. The bigger the fruit stone, the larger must be the animals eat the fruit – otherwise, they can’t swallow it. It’s been theorised that the assimon’s very large stone means that it evolved to be eaten by the American continent’s megafauna. Here is a photo of these large beasts, also showing humans, to give an idea of their enormous size.

Only the omnivores amongst them ate fruit, of course, but those which did spread the assimon around.

About 10,000 years ago, though, America’s megafauna died out. Quite why this happened is hotly debated, but the arrival of human beings, the ancestors of the First Nations, from across the Bering Straits was in all probability a big factor in this wave of extinctions. The modern bear is now the only animal big enough to swallow the stones of the assimon without choking. So it was just as well for the plant that humans stepped in and moved the plant around – and it was only fair that they did so, given the role they had played in the extinction of the megafauna.

As I said earlier, even though my wife and I lived something like eight years all told in the assimon’s range, we never tried it. We never even saw it being sold in supermarkets. How can it be that the US’s largest indigenous fruit is not readily available in every supermarket in the country? How can it be that enterprising Americans didn’t bring the plant to Europe, China, Japan, and anywhere else with the same temperate climate and establish assimon orchards?

The sad fact is that the assimon, in contrast to more popular – and non-American – commercial fruits like apples, pears, or peaches, stores poorly, primarily because the fruit ripens to the point of fermentation very quickly after it is picked. An assimon only keeps for 2–3 days at room temperature, about double that if it is refrigerated. This short shelf-life and therefore difficulty in shipping the fruit any distance means that the food industry is simply not interested in it. I have commented unfavourably in an earlier post about the fact that many of the foodstuffs eaten in the US are not native there, suggesting that native foodstuffs should be eaten. But in this case it really seems that the assimon is simply unsuited to our modern way of life. The best one can hope for is to find it in farmers’ markets held in the fruit’s range. And they will only offer it during the month of September, which is when the fruit ripens (there is a niche market for the shipping of the fruit over longer distances, but it must be a risky business).

Or you plant a tree in your garden if you live in the right climate. Which brings me back to my good doctor! We said we would go and see them. Maybe we could go and see them in September, when his assimons are ripe. But we need to know very precisely when they are ripe and then immediately go down to visit them and try this delectable fruit. But how to do this without sounding crass? “Hello, are your assimons ripe? If not, we’re not interested in coming.” I shall have to discuss this with my wife and try and find a more subtle way of doing this.

OUR DOLOMITES HIKE, 2024

Vienna, 27 June 2024

My wife and I recently completed our annual hike in the Dolomites. We returned to old stamping grounds this year, to the Val di Fassa, in the autonomous province of Trento. This was where we started our annual pilgrimages to the Dolomites five years ago. That year, however, our carefully constructed six-day hike was thrown into chaos and confusion by two mega-meteorological events. The first was a hugely powerful windstorm, Vaia, which swept through the Italian Alps in late October of 2018 and brought millions of trees crashing to the ground – the official tally talks of 8 million cubic metres of trees being downed.

The second was a monster snowfall in May of 2019, a mere month before we were meant to start our hike.

As we saw over and over again during our severely modified hike, the Val di Fassa was badly hit by Vaia.

A good number of the trails we were meant to take were blocked off over long sections by downed trees. The local tourism authorities had planned to use the month of May to clear the trails, but the monster snowfall of that month put paid to their plan. On top of it, that unexpectedly heavy snowfall meant that a good number of the huts we were meant to spend nights at, and the trails leading into them and out from them, were still blocked with snow when we arrived in the Val di Fassa.

Five years on, the weather behaved better in the preceding months, and we were able to do a good number of the trails blocked to us back in 2019. We got off to an iffy start, hiking in fog so thick that we could have been in a park in Milan during the month of November.

But after that, the weather cleared and glorious sights awaited us!

It wasn’t just towering mountains and emerald valleys far below us that left us breathless (although some of the breathlessness was also due to our climbing hundreds of metres of steep slopes). It was also the streams and small lakes we passed by.

Or the wild flowers that greeted us along the paths we passed along.

Even the smallest beings we came across had the power to enchant us.

There were shadows among all this wonderfulnness, though, notably the clusters of dead European spruce trees we saw dotting the woods that clothed the steep flanks of the valleys.

All was not right. There hadn’t been so many standing dead trees in 2019. What was going on? A massive infestation by another beetle was what was going on. A beetle not nearly as cute-looking as the other beetles we had seen and photographed.

A beetle which goes by the name of European spruce bark beetle in English and bostrico tipografo in Italian. The English name is rather prosaic, merely confirming the beetle’s preferred victim to be the European spruce. The Italian name is much more interesting. The second part of the name rather colourfully indicates the type of intriguing “calligraphy” which the beetle and its offspring create in the tree as they burrow into it – and kill it.

The first part of the Italian name also harks back to the elegant whorl-shaped channels which other members of this family of wood-burrowing beetle creates. It is an italianization of the name that Aristotle gave to the family, βόστρυχος, which is the Greek word for “curl”.

I hope my readers will excuse this little riff on the etymology of the beetle’s name, but I feel that often the origin of words tells us a lot about how our ancestors perceived the world around them. In any event, for all its intriguingly shaped burrows, this beetle kills the European spruces (and other trees) which it infects, and it kills them quite quickly, within a few months. The trees first look peeky, their crown wilting and turning rust-coloured, then they start massively losing their needles, then they dry out, at which point, to borrow – with the necessary adaptations – John Cleese’s speech about the dead Norwegian parrot, the trees are no more, they have ceased to be, they’re expired and gone to meet their maker, they are late trees, bereft of life they rest in peace, they’ve rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible: they are ex-trees.

Under normal circumstances, healthy European spruce can beat off the nefarious beetle’s attacks, which usually only burrows into dead trees or trees that are already dying. The infestations are endemic but under control. But after huge destructions of trees which massive storms like Vaia bring about, there is suddenly vast amounts of dead and dying trees available for the beetle to feast on. Worse, the trees which have remained standing are – unsurprisingly – stressed and unable to defend themselves effectively, so the beetle also merrily attacks apparently healthy standing trees. The result: an uncontrolled epidemic of the beetle, with huge increases in its population, and the large patches of dead trees we were seeing everywhere.

Locals grimly told us that it could be five years or more before the situation rights itself and beetle populations drop back down to endemic levels again. By then, perhaps as many trees will have been killed off as were brought down by Vaia. I fear that if we come back to Val di Fassa in the coming years, we’ll find valleys which look like they have a bad case of the mange, with big, bald patches speckling the hillsides.

I don’t want to sound smugly virtuous, but the people who manage these forests haven’t done a very good job. Anxious to maximise profits, they have planted monocultures of European spruce and trees all of the same age, to make it easy to clear cut any particular patch of forest. If instead they had planted a mix of different species and ensured a mix of trees with different ages, they might have made less profits short-term but they would have been better able to weather big disruptions like those caused by Vaia. This is especially urgent since with climate change massive, intense storms like Vaia (wind velocities of over 200 km/hr were recorded) are going to happen more frequently.

But who is listening to old farts like me? I fear that on our future hikes, my wife and I will be mournful witnesses to ever more examples of short-term thinking: downed trees, dead trees, bad erosion, flooding, desertification, and on and on. I despair sometimes at the world we are leaving our little grandson and any other grandchildren who may soon come along.

LIME TREES TO SHOE POLISH

Milan, 11 June 2024

What is the matter with me?!

Over the last few days, we’ve been passing down alleys of lime trees.

The trees are all in flower – this one was covered with them.

The flowers fill the air with their scent, I breathe it in … and I am reminded of shoe polish.

No-one under the age of 40 will remember a world where most of the shoes we wore were made of leather. As I look around the subway carriage where I’m writing this, I can only see one pair of leather shoes among perhaps 70 pairs of feet. I, on the other hand, being well over the age of 40, still remember a time when we mostly wore leather shoes – and remember the concomitant joys and anguish of shoe polishing. At my boarding primary school (prep school in British parlance), a specific period of every week was set aside for shoe polishing. We all had to go to a room dedicated to this task, where we picked up a cloth – to spread the polish – and a brush – to put a high gloss on our shoes – before getting to work. As I picked up the tin, there was that ineffable smell of the polish. That was the joy – or at least the pleasant sensation. No doubt it was caused by the solvent which the manufacturers used to keep their polish pasty. After the spreading of the polish on my shoes came the vigorous polishing. That was the agony, as my arm very soon began to ache. But I couldn’t slow down, there was always a master on hand to bark at me to put my back into it. And then came again the joy, as I admired my well-polished shoes glowing on my feet. Of course, I have no photo of this weekly exercise. I did find this photo, though, which will give readers a sense of what it was like – although the boy in question looks to be enjoying it far too much.

After the passage of so many decades, I can’t remember the brand of polish we used. I’m guessing it was Kiwi; that was certainly the brand that my English grandmother used, and it seems to have been the most popular brand in the UK.

In passing, I should say that I learned to my surprise that Kiwi was originally an Australian brand (and was given its name by the owner to honour his wife who hailed from New Zealand). Merely another example of my unconscious Euro-centric biases …

Old brands of consumer products always have me searching for the posters they used in their advertising campaigns. I find these old posters a fascinating sub-genre of popular art. In another life I would have been an avid collector of old posters. In this case, though, I didn’t find any really scintillating Kiwi posters online. The best I found was this one.

Not so in the case of a now extinct brand of Italian shoe polish called Taos, manufactured by the now also extinct company Edoardo Pessi. Look at this lovely poster! It’s a riff on the fact that the biggest purchaser of Pessi’s shoe polish was the Italian army.

In a rush of enthusiasm, I throw in photos of a few more posters for Taos and other Italian shoe polishes.

At this point, I have to admit to having played a very small part in Edoardo Pessi’s demise. It was early on in my career as an environmental consultant. My company was hired by the multinational corporation Sara Lee (now also extinct) to carry out an environmental assessment of the Pessi factory. Sara Lee was in negotiations to purchase Edoardo Pessi, and the idea was to figure out what environmental liabilities Sara Lee might also be buying and bring down the purchase price by a corresponding amount. This is the factory where I carried out my assessment.

I don’t think I’m giving away any trade secrets when I say that there were some problems with underground tanks leaking solvents (out in the back yard there, next to that sliver of lawn; I remember it well). I guess a couple of 100,000 dollars were knocked off the purchase price because of that.

In any event, the purchase by Sara Lee went through. But it was really just an exercise in asset stripping. Quite quickly after the purchase, Sara Lee concluded that this factory had no future – which made a lot of sense; I mean, look at it, hemmed in as it is on all sides by houses. So they closed the factory down. But they didn’t shift operations to an industrial site on the outskirts of town as they could have done. Instead, the packed all the equipment off to their other factories, they laid off the workers, and sold the land to a developer, who proceeded to raze the factory to the ground and put up some swanky apartment buildings in its place. Sara Lee even stopped making the Taos shoe polish – who polishes their shoes anymore? (and they already owned Kiwi; one shoe polish brand was more than enough).

Well, all of this, although an enjoyable little trip down Memory Lane, still doesn’t explain why, when I breathe in the scent of lime tree flowers, I think shoe polish. The mysteries of olfactory chemistry …

NOTES FROM OUR HIKES

Sori, 28 May 2024

Lizards are constant companions of ours on the hikes my wife and I do during the Spring and Summer, wherever we happen to be in Italy or in Austria. We see them especially where we are moving over stony, sunny ground. They streak across our path, they scurry away from us into the surrounding vegetation or down a crevice in the rocks. Sometimes we just hear a rustle in the grass or dry leaves. In rare cases, they sit on a rock and warily watch us pass, ready to move away at lightning speed were we to suddenly make a lunge at them.

Very, very occasionally, we are not at the centre of their beady-eyed attention, but that’s only because they are embroiled in battles with other lizards, fighting over territories or mates I suppose.

We’re not talking about spectacular animals here; Komodo dragons they definitely are not.

But that’s fine. I think I would get quite nervous if I came across lizards that big. I mean, they can weigh 70kg! I’m not even sure I would want to come across monitor lizards. The ones we regularly saw swimming in the canals in Bangkok were a good metre in length. Luckily, the species we see are quite small, I’m guessing some 6cm long from snout to tail. They are not particularly beautiful, although recently I have seen some lovely green species.

Lizards always take me back to my boyhood, those long summer holidays at my French grandmother’s house. She had some walls in her garden which were the haunts of many a lizard.

One of the games my cousins and I played was trying to catch them. Was that difficult! “Streaked lightning” sums lizards up well. The few times we did manage to catch one, it would more often than not break off its tail to escape. How we laughed at this! The casual cruelty of little boys …

I’ve been reading up about lizards, their biology, their ecology. Fascinating stuff! It’s at times like these that I wish I had studied biology. I did some biology at O-level and wanted to carry on with it at A-level, putting myself down for the triad of Physics, Chemistry, and Biology – anything to get away from odious mathematics. But the head of the Science department collared me – Fr. Michael, it was, I still remember his name and the talk we had. He asked me if I wanted to be a doctor, and when I said no, he said I would have more opportunities if I dropped Biology for the dreaded Mathematics. And so, like the good boy that I was, I followed his advice. My good friend Mark, on the other hand, did biology. He already knew he wanted to be a doctor, and a damned fine doctor he became.

I can’t say Fr. Michael was completely wrong. And in the end, looking back now over the intervening 50-odd years, I don’t regret the path I took. But sometimes – when I’m reading up about lizards, for instance – I do wistfully wish I had studied biology.

NOTES FROM THE SEASIDE

Sori, 21 May 2024

It’s flowering time for the rockrose. This is a lovely flower that we come across at this time of the year on our hikes close to the sea.

Wikipedia tells me that the plant is typical of the Mediterranean maquis. And indeed, we tend to find it on the dry, stony slopes giving directly on the sea, particularly where the Monte di Portofino plunges down into the sea.

The plant’s formal botanical name is cistus salviifolius, and as readers can see from the photo above its leaves are indeed quite sage-like (salvia in Latin – and in Italian). Its formal Italian name – the one you use when you’re with the urban elites – is cisto femmina; I can see where “cisto” comes from, but what is feminine about this plant? Mystery. More interestingly, ordinary Italians – country folk and such like – call it scornabecco. The Dizionario Treccani – the Italian equivalent to the Oxford English Dictionary – tells me the word is derived from scornare, to unhorn or to break horns, and becco, a name for a ram: so, ram unhorner. As I look at this small plant with its pretty flower, I can’t quite imagine how it got that name. Another mystery. Perhaps it can grow into a tough, tangled bush, which rams can get their horns caught in and broken off. Here is another photo of the plant, which is looking more bushy and tangled.

All this makes me think of the story in the Bible, of Abraham and his son Isaac. Abraham is about to sacrifice Isaac when an angel stops his hand; I leave the original text take up the story: “[The angel] said, “Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him, for now I know that you fear God, seeing you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me. And Abraham lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold, behind him was a ram, caught in a thicket by his horns. And Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son.” This gives me an excuse to throw in a photo of a painting of the scene, by my favourite artist Caravaggio.

Wikipedia also tells me that the plant is drought-resistant and likes sunshine. A perfect candidate for our terrace here! The sun can beat down mercilessly, especially in the summer, and we are away for long periods and so we cannot ensure a steady supply of water. It was for these reasons that decades ago my mother-in-law planted various succulents in a couple of vases on the terrace wall; they have survived all these years.

They may have survived but as readers can see they’re rather modest, boring even. For many years now, my wife and I have wanted to complement them with something a little more cheerful. Rockroses might be just the thing! I must nose around the local florist, to see if they sell packets of rockrose seeds. If not, just before we flee Italy for the summer (it really gets too hot here), we’ll go for a hike on the Monte di Portofino and collect seeds from the wild.

And what vase to put them in? Someone down in the village has this magnificent vase outside their front door.

After we were let out from the first Covid confinement, and finally were were able to travel down to the sea again, my wife asked the owners of that vase where they had bought it. Armed with this information, she had sent the manufacturers an email, requesting prices, delivery times, etc.. They never replied, we assume because of all the disruptions caused by Covid. We’ve never tried again, but I’m thinking that, now that I have an idea of what we could plant in that vase other than succulents, I should egg her on to have another go. Because that vase would really look magnificent on our terrace wall.

WEAVERS FROM GHANA

Milan, 21 April 2024

It’s the Salone del Mobile this week in Milan, the annual furniture and furnishings fair that the city hosts. As proud citizens of Milan (well, adopted citizen in my case) my wife and I take part in the fair – but only marginally, because there’s a huge amount of events all over town, and outside of town as we shall see, and hordes of people visiting each event. In fact, this year we have only visited one exhibition, which is taking place in Varedo, a small town on the outskirts of Milan. Varedo is best known for a huge factory it once hosted which made artificial textile fibres until it folded in 1999. It was part of the SNIA Viscosa group, which itself went belly-up in 2010 after a long agony. All that is left of the Varedo factory are mouldering industrial buildings: a sad reminder of the deindustrialisation of Europe.

The exhibition was taking place at the other end of the town, in the villa Bagatti Valsecchi, which 100 years ago had been the country house of one of the elite families of Milan, the Bagatti Valsecchi.

It didn’t look too bad from the outside, but that statue gives a premonition of what the inside looked like: it too was a mouldering mess, although at least the floors were still in place.

I haven’t managed to find out what happened exactly to the villa, but I assume it’s the same as what happened to many country houses in the UK: it simply became too expensive for the Bagatti Valsecchi family to maintain it. They “generously” donated the house and property to the municipal government, but I suspect this was a poisoned gift. The municipality certainly has done very little if anything to maintain it.

Of course, it’s edgily chic, is it not, to showcase new, shiny, cutting-edge design in mouldering rooms. Here’s the thing, though. The furniture and furnishings my wife and I were confronted with as we wandered from room to room might have been newly minted, straight from the designers’ workshops, but to my mind the design ideas behind them were as mouldering as the rooms they sat in. Nothing new, just the same old ideas we’ve been seeing for 30 years or more recycled, endlessly recycled.

The one fresh design we came across was down in the basement, in a dark, dank room. Which was OK, since the product in question was lighting. Here is what we found ourselves in front of.

Some words of explanation are required here. The design group behind this is Spanish, going by the name Fernando Diaz de Mendoza 9, or FDdM9 for short. This particular design idea came about through the merging of the need to find ways to cleverly recycle PET bottles, on the one hand, and the desire to support traditional weaving skills still in existence in various parts of the world, on the other. The result was a project which the group calls PET Lamps.

The project started by making lampshades for single ceiling lights. The clever thing was that they were using PET bottles as the lampshades’ basic infrastructure: a component that is now free pretty much everywhere in the world since we are drowning in waste PET bottles. The mouth and shoulders of the PET bottles play the role of the fitting at the top of a traditional lampshade. Through it runs the wire and light bulb socket. What’s more interesting is what happens to the rest of the bottle. It is sliced into thin strips, and then the strips are used as the initial warp for weaving the weft across. What type of weft gets used depends on the weavers with whom the group is working.

The group started by working with weavers from the Eperara-Siapidara indigenous community in Colombia, who use the stripped down leaves of the Paja Tetara palm tree dyed with natural pigments and adopted traditional motifs.

They also worked with a community which weaved with wicker, a plant imported by the Spaniards.

They worked, too, with other communities in Colombia and Chile, but I’ll jump to Ethiopia, where FDdM9 collaborated with weavers of traditional coiled baskets from the city of Harar, to make lampshades like this.

Here’s an example of a cluster of these lamps being used in a restaurant.

I’ll skip the lampshade designs which the group collaborated on with weavers in Japan and Thailand; readers who are interested can go to the Pet Lamp website. I’ll go on to the designs they created with the Gurunsi people who live in the far north of Ghana. Together with them, they came up with a modern take on their basket weaving designs to create “wavy” lampshades. Here are the weavers at work (the weft in this case is elephant grass, by the way).

And here is an example of the final product.

While here we have a cluster of these lamps being used over a table.

Before going on with Ghana, I want to jump to Australia, where to my mind things started to get really interesting. There, FDdM9 started collaborating with weavers in Arnhem Land, in the far north of the country (I mentioned other Australian weavers in a previous post). The weavers started by making individual lampshades with designs based on their traditional mats.

But then one of the weavers began linking two lampshades together, which led the weavers to link all their lampshades together, in a way that reflected their kinship relations.

It gave this as a final product.

This is what it looks like when it is put up.

Which brings me back to Ghana. Several years after their initial collaboration with the Gurunsi people, FDdM9 went back to create large-scale “lamp tapestries” (I can’t think what else to call them) similar to those they had helped to create in Australia. Whereas the design of the tapestries in Australia were based on kinship relationships between the weavers, the designs in Ghana were based on aerial views of the houses where the weavers lived (which is actually also a representation of kinship relations if you think about it, since children built their houses next to their parents’).

Here we have the weavers at work.

And here we have a final product.

I suppose FDdM9 would expect these lamp-tapestries to be used like this.

But that’s not the way my wife and I would like to use them. We would prefer to eliminate the lamps and use the tapestry as a wall hanging, as we saw in that damp, dank cellar in Villa Bagatti Valsecchi. And we have just the wall where we could put it! Of course, the price might be an issue: one of these lamp tapestries would set us back a cool €17,800. But you have to suffer for great art! (still, though, €17,800 …)

BEAT-UP OLD PICKUP TRUCKS

Milan, 13 April 2024

The area of LA where my daughter and her partner live can be characterised as one of neat lawns in front of the houses and well tended cars parked on the streets. This photo from Google street view sums up the general feel of the area.

So one of the odder things which my wife and I spot as we take walks around the neighbourhood are the occasional rusty old bangers parked among the gleaming new cars. These photos, taken on a neighbourhood walkabout with our grandson a few days before we left LA, show what I mean.

Some internet surfing has told me that the first car is a Buick Wildcat. The second I know well. It is a Jaguar E-Type which I remember admiring on the streets of London in my youth.

As I say, this habit of having cars which would look perfectly at home in a junkyard sitting on neat, clean, well tended streets appears odd to me. That being said, oddity is in the eye of the beholder, to slightly distort an old saw.

One of the oddest examples of this sub-genre of urban decor is old pickup trucks. So that my readers can understand what I’m talking about, here is a photo I took of one such pickup truck parked some ten houses down the street from my daughter’s place. I have taken it from both directions so that readers can admire its well-worn features.

As sharp-eyed readers can see, this pickup is a Ford. Our daughter’s next-door-neighbour has instead a General Motor’s Chevrolet pickup truck.

Normally, he also parks it on the street, but he must have been away when I took this photo, because it’s parked in his driveway.

It doesn’t finish there. On a neighbourhood walk my wife and I took the last time we were in LA on the nearby hill of Mar Vista (View of the Sea, and indeed you can see the ocean from the top of the hill), I spied another such pickup truck parked on the street. I didn’t take a photo of it, so readers will just have to take my word for it. That’s three old pickup trucks in a radius of a couple of kilometres or so.

I’m no expert on pickup trucks, but Google searches suggest to me that these are all from the 1940s or ’50s. Here are photos of particularly fine examples, the first from 1940, the second from 1950.

What on earth is going on here? Allow me to try out some hypotheses on you, dear readers.

Given the obviously poor shape these pickup trucks (and the other old bangers) are in, my first thought was that their owners were indulging in a subtle piece of Keeping Up with the Joneses retro-snobbery: “The neighbours all have the latest in swanky Teslas and what not parked in front of the house? Peuh, we have a beaten-up old pickup truck. Beat that!” Just for the hell of it, I throw in a cartoon or two on the phenomenon of Keeping Up with the Joneses.

But I’ve decided that I am probably being unfair to the good folk who live in the neighbourhood.

I then thought that the owners of the pickup trucks in particular were making a political statement about the days when certain segments of American society were “eating bitterness”, as the Chinese say. Certainly, when I see these trucks, all beaten up, worn and weary, they make me think of a passage from John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath.

The family in the story, the Joads, had to abandon their farm in the Midwest which had become part of the Dust Bowl back in the 1930s. They rode out West to California in a homemade pickup truck, a cut-down 1926 Hudson Super Six sedan, to try to find work and a new life.

“The house was dead, and the fields were dead; but this truck was the active thing, the living principle. The ancient Hudson, with bent and scarred radiator screen, with grease in dusty globules at the worn edges of every moving part, with hub caps gone and caps of red dust in their places – this was the new hearth, the living center of the family; half passenger car and half truck, high-sided and clumsy.”

This is what that pickup truck looked like in the film made in 1940 of the book, with Henry Fonda in the lead role.

And then I immediately think of that famous photo taken by Dorothea Lange of a mother and her children in a camp for migrant agricultural workers in California, where the Joads ended up.

But I suspect this is too high-falutin’ an explanation.

My internet readings in the little world of old car collectors suggests a simpler explanation. It seems that one important strand of car collection is made up of people who, once they reach a certain age and high enough income bracket, buy old cars and trucks to relive comforting memories of their youth (adding a little bit of political spice, when America was Great or something like that). In the case of pickup trucks, it could be youthful memories of Grandpa, and maybe even of Grandma, working on the farm with the family pickup, that spurs urban boomers of LA to buy these rusty old pickup trucks and have them quietly sit in front of their house on the street. The memories could be like this photo of a farmer in Texas unloading feed for his cattle, using what looks like a pickup truck from the 1940s or ’50s.

Or maybe the memory is something like this.

So that’s where my thinking currently stands on this intriguing LA phenomenon. If my readers have any better explanations, I would love to hear them. Of course, the next time we are in LA, I could just go up to the neighbour and ask him – but that’s so un-English …