Nature – Page 20 – the heart thrills

I, TOO, CHOSE THE NAME OF FRANCIS

19 March 2013

In a previous post, I have admitted to being a lapsed Catholic, to having fallen off the straight-and-narrow when I was a young man. But this does not stop me from taking an interest in moments of high Catholic drama such as papal elections. These are held against one of the world’s most beautiful backdrops (St. Peter’s square in Rome)

They have quaint customs like black and white smoke to announce the results of ballots (“is it white? is it black?”)

There are all these old, principally white, men wandering around in bright red and purple cassocks, surrounded by toy soldiers dressed in renaissance garb

There are the Latin pronouncements (“habemus papam” et cetera).

So when Benedict XVI made his surprise announcement about retiring, sending the world media into fibrillation (“first pope to retire in 600 years!”), I settled down to enjoy the show. My wife – also a lapsed Catholic although less militant about it than I – joined me on the sofa as we surfed around the international TV stations, dropping in on their twitterings about various aspects of popes, the papacy and papal elections.

I left for a business trip just as the cardinals were processing into the Sistine chapel, sure that they would still be at it when I got back two days later. I mean, there was that election back in the Middle Ages during which the cardinals had been balloting for ages without coming to an agreement; they were finally locked into the chapel by irritated guards and told they would get only bread and water until they had agreed on a candidate. So you can judge my surprise, and disappointment, when my wife announced to me as I walked in the door that the new pope had already been chosen. I had missed the smoke! The blessing from the window! The announcement of the papal name! My wife made sympathetic noises and then dropped a bomb. He had chosen the name Francis!

I suppose it can be considered a crime of lèse majesté for me to compare myself to the pope, but I have to tell you that many years ago, in the one time in my life that I got to choose a name for myself, I too had chosen the name Francis.

Before turning away irrevocably from the faith, I had been through all the rituals required of a good Catholic child. I had done my First Confession, my First Communion, and – critically for this story – my Confirmation. I was 14 when I went through this last ritual, so getting towards an age when I more or less knew what I was doing. On the great day itself, which took place at school, my parents came; they had arranged to be in the country for the event. Our local bishop presided. He sat enthroned before the altar of the school’s church as each one of us (we were a group of some 20 boys) came up before him to be confirmed. My father came up to the altar with me as my sponsor, and stood solemnly behind me as I knelt before the bishop and his hovering acolytes and announced to him the confirmation name I had chosen: Francis. The bishop read through the ritual words, anointed me, and then it was time to leave the place to the next boy.

Francis doesn’t appear on any official document of mine, but I am particularly proud of it since it is the only name I have ever gotten to choose. My parents chose all the others before I was even born: one to commemorate various fusty old ancestors, one to commemorate my godfather, and one to commemorate a fusty old saint that my mother particularly venerated. But Francis, that was my choice.

Like the pope, I chose Francis in memory of St. Francis of Assisi. I chose him because, as my children might have said some ten years ago, I thought he was a pretty cool dude. I mean, here was a guy who had had everything – money, intelligence, friends, wit, all the women he could want, doting parents who let him do whatever he wished – and he turned away from it all, to live a life of complete poverty and simplicity, among the poorest of the poor and the outcasts of society. Without really trying to, he gathered around him hundreds and eventually thousands of followers and started a huge movement in Europe striving for a simpler life. In many ways he reminds me of the Buddha.

And he wrote a wonderful poem, one of the earliest in the Italian language, or rather in the Umbrian dialect spoken in his native Assisi: the canticle of the sun. Here are a few lines from the original:

Laudato sie, mi Signore cum tucte le Tue creature,
spetialmente messor lo frate Sole,
lo qual è iorno, et allumini noi per lui.
Et ellu è bellu e radiante cum grande splendore:
de Te, Altissimo, porta significatione.

Laudato si, mi Signore, per sora Luna e le stelle:
in celu l’ài formate clarite et pretiose et belle.

…

Let me continue with a translation:

Be praised, my Lord, through all your creatures,
especially through my lord Brother Sun,
who brings the day; and you give light through him.
And he is beautiful and radiant in all his splendour!
Of you, Most High, he bears the likeness.

Be praised, my Lord, through Sister Moon and the stars;
in the heavens you have made them bright, precious and beautiful.

Be praised, my Lord, through Brothers Wind and Air,
and clouds and storms, and all the weather,
through which you give your creatures sustenance.

Be praised, My Lord, through Sister Water;
she is very useful, and humble, and precious, and pure.

Be praised, my Lord, through Brother Fire,
through whom you brighten the night.
He is beautiful and cheerful, and powerful and strong.

Be praised, my Lord, through our sister Mother Earth,
who feeds us and rules us,
and produces various fruits with coloured flowers and herbs.

It goes on a bit more, but I’ll stop there because these are some of the loveliest lines I know about the environment.

It is said that Francis preached to the birds and talked to the wolves. I take this all with a pinch of salt. But he did love nature passionately, which is really why I chose his name for my confirmation.

I hope the new pope is worthy of the name he chose.

___________________

St. Peter’s Square: http://readytour.ru/images/italy/excurs/6-800.jpg
White smoke: http://l.yimg.com/bt/api/res/1.2/zaEY7ikCWZpTeGB8NMi3pw–/YXBwaWQ9eW5ld3M7Zmk9aW5zZXQ7aD00MjA7cT04NTt3PTYzMA–/http://media.zenfs.com/en_us/News/gettyimages.com/conclave-cardinals-elected-pope-lead-20130313-112050-018.jpg
Cardinals and Swiss Guards: http://www.capuanaweb.insulareport.it/media/k2/items/cache/c230427c303c0684b5582388f5d0dfd7_XL.jpg
Habemus papam: http://timeglobalspin.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/cm_vatican_pope_03_13_13_178.jpg?w=753
St. Francis: http://www.thomryng.com/amateurmonk/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Francis.jpg

MAGPIES

Beijing, 17 March 2013

I am desolate.

This morning, we managed to hook up with our son on Skype, and then he managed to hook up our daughter, so that we could have a three-way conversation! This is quite beyond me and my wife. We have no idea what he did to make it happen, but we are very happy that he did it.

So we were having a pleasant conversation about this and that, catching up on what they were up to. And then I noticed that in a crook of the tree just outside our window a pair of magpies had begun to build a nest! This was really exciting, the height of our floor being such that we would have a front-seat view to the whole thing. Each magpie was bringing a twig or two and weaving it into the other twigs already there.

As my wife continued to talk to the children, I grabbed my phone and took some photos.

I was happily looking forward to making a pictorial diary of the nest building. Then I was already imagining the egg laying, the birth of the little ones, their first flutter (as it were), all immortalized in photos.

Then our son had to sign off and we continued with our daughter, who told us about the latest events in her job (exciting, but also unsettling, changes have taken place). When we finished, I went back to the window to check how the nest building was progressing.

But the magpies were not there and the scaffolding of twigs was sagging at the edges. I looked around anxiously. No magpies to be seen. Perhaps they had gone off to get extra good twigs, I thought.

We went out to lunch, and when we came back the first thing I did was to go to the window. No magpies, and the construction was drooping even further.

They’re not coming back. Something drove them off. Was it me? Did they notice a rather large shadow lurking in the near distance? I had tried to be careful, used no flash, and I think our windows are partially tinted. Was it a bad location choice? As they say of real estate – and I guess it’s as true for birds as it is for humans – it’s location, location, and location. Maybe the tree crook was a little too crooked. Or maybe it was the smog; you can see from the first pictures that it’s pretty bad today. Maybe they thought it was better to move out of town.

Whatever it was, they are not coming back. I’m really desolate.

FULL MOON

Beijing, 25 February 2013

Yesterday started with my wife finally remembering a song that had been chasing around in her head all night: “September”, by Earth, Wind and Fire, whom we see here in concert:

This is a song from “our” generation; it came out in 1978. My wife tracked down a version of it on the web and promptly played it for the rest of the day. Now don’t get me wrong, it’s a great song – a feel-good song, my wife calls it – but after you’ve sung along with the refrain

Ba de ya – say do you remember
Ba de ya – dancing in September
Ba de ya – never was a cloudy day

for the fifth time, it begins to pall – at least for me. But not my wife. Mercifully, she had to turn it off when we went to bed, but then the fireworks, which had been grumbling along all day,

began to build up to their final roar for midnight.

Because, for those of you who do not closely follow matters Chinese, yesterday was the Lantern Festival, the last day of the Chinese new year celebrations, whose end is traditionally celebrated with an orgy of fireworks.

At one moment during the evening I slipped out to the local 7-11 to buy a bottle of our favourite wine (a Spanish tempranillo – but I digress). Coming back, I looked up and glimpsed through the clouds what all this sound and fury was all about: the full moon.

Because the Chinese new year is really a lunar festival. It starts on the second new moon after the winter solstice and ends 15 days later at the full moon. I had picked up the new moon – or newish moon; it had already waxed a few days – in Luang Prabang.

And now I was seeing the full moon, shining serenely down on all this silliness.

A full moon is a beautiful thing. It certainly has caught the attention of many poets. A short search on the web brought to light at least 100 poems about the moon by well-known poets; Lord knows how many have been written by bad poets. But the poem which always comes to my mind when I see a full moon is not actually about the moon. I need to explain. One night in Vienna, I woke up and was enchanted by the brilliant nearly full moon pouring its white light into the bedroom. Two nights later, I was in Cambodia on the shore of the Mekong River. Looking up, I saw the full moon and thought to myself “This same moon will be shining down on my wife and children in a few hours” and found that thought immensely comforting. Now for the poem, which is by the Welsh poet Alun Lewis. He wrote it during the Second World War, when he was far away in India, in the city of Poona.

Last night I did not fight for sleep
But lay awake from midnight while the world
Turned its slow features to the moving deep
Of darkness, till I knew that you were furled,

Beloved, in the same dark watch as I.
And sixty degrees of longitude beside
Vanished as though a swan in ecstasy
Had spanned the distance from your sleeping side.

And like to swan or moon the whole of Wales
Glided within the parish of my care:
I saw the green tide leap on Cardigan,
Your red yacht riding like a legend there.

And the great mountains Dafydd and Llewelyn,
Plynlimmon, Cader Idris and Eryri
Threshing the darkness back from head and fin,
And also the small nameless mining valley

Whose slopes are scratched with streets and sprawling graves
Dark in the lap of firwoods and great boulders
Where you lay waiting, listening to the waves
My hot hands touched your white despondent shoulders

And then ten thousand miles of daylight grew
Between us, and I heard the wild daws crake
In India’s starving throat; whereat I knew
That Time upon the heart can break
But love survives the venom of the snake.

When I read the poem for the first time, I was reminded of that night in Vienna with its full moon. And now, when I’m far away from home and see the moon, I think of this poem and of my wife.

_____________________

Earth Wind and Fire concert: http://sharelike.me/image/pics/EarthWindandFireconcertPics1ApCC7Md5iwM.jpg
Fireworks-1: http://cdn.ph.upi.com/sv/em/upi/UPI-16811361735171/2013/1/9eb14390c758aeb27fd87349de4d55bc/China-celebrate-Lunar-New-Year.jpg
Fireworks-2: http://findlaydonnan.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/fireworks-to-celebrate-the-chinese-new-year-light-up-the-sky-above-beijing-china-on-january-26-2009-chinese-welcomed-the-arrival-of-the-year-of-the-ox-with-raucous-celebrations-on-sun.jpg?w=497&h=283
Full moon: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-gY39tpbGmzg/TnLTHVEnSyI/AAAAAAAABaM/R2kBI2LddYg/s1600/Moon_Lantern_Festival.jpg
New moon Luang Prabang: my photo

COAL

Beijing, 23 February 2013

Whenever I visited my French grandmother at Easter, we used to stay in her house in the countryside. It was still cold enough for us to need heating, which meant that we spent much of our time in the living room, huddled around a venerable stove. It looked like this:

although it had a chimney that came out of the back, which after a metre or so took a right-angle turn and exited through the living room wall.

During the day, my grandmother burned wood scrap – fallen branches, pinecones, bark, whatever lay around the garden after the winter storms – which she sent me out to collect on a regular basis. At night, though, she would load the stove up with coal, and it was my job to fill the coal scuttle. This meant taking the scuttle down to the cellar, where the coal was stored, to fill it up. This is what the scuttle looked like:

I loved that cellar. It was really the ground floor of the house – there was a door at the back which gave onto the road outside. From the garden side, though, you had to open a door with a large key, of the kind gaolers had in medieval times, go down a few stairs past dark corners where all the garden utensils were stored, and through a second door into the cellar proper. And there, stretched out in the semi-darkness, was a world of enchantment. For starters, the cellar had a dirt floor, which gave it a very particular smell. Then all around, strange and wonderful things loomed out of the dark. The coal was stored in an untidy pile to the left of the door, and beyond it was an old wooden table on which were stored my grandmother’s cache of goat cheeses bought from a nearby farm, the bottled fruit which she prepared during the summer, and a small wooden barrel in which she made her vinegar. Wonderful, wonderful, that vinegar was! It seemed to me total magic that my grandmother would pour the local red wine in, let it stand for a while, and hey-presto! out came delicious vinegar. I tried making vinegar of my own decades later in Vienna. The results were … mixed, let us say. Next to the vinegar barrel was the wine rack, good rough Beaujolais wines from the local vineyards. Over on the cellar’s right were piles of wood, various pieces of old furniture, ancient utensils whose use I could not figure out, an old bike or two, some hay, and I don’t know what else.

I always spent a few moments poking around in the corners seeing what new things I might stumble across, before filling up the scuttle and hauling it back up to the living room. The coal was, of course, dusty and left all your fingers black, but it came in nice, neat egg-shaped pieces. I never thought about it at the time, but I suppose this was pulverized coal pressed and molded; I remember the mold lines running around the pieces. Here’s what it looked like, in a coal scuttle; really heavy to carry! (appropriately enough, this is a photo from a museum; we are talking history here):

As for my English grandmother’s house, it had no coal. The use of coal had been banned in London after the last big smog of 1952. I remember my mother telling us about that smog when we were children, how she had had to walk down the road and almost panicked at not being able to see a thing. Soon thereafter, my parents escaped to the sunnier climes of Africa where I was born.

The house had no coal but still had a coal cellar, which was located under the pavement. A manhole in its ceiling had once allowed the coal-man to handily pour in the coal without coming into the house. My grandmother didn’t really use the coal cellar for much. The only thing I ever saw her put in there were the French cheeses which my father bought when we visited. He had a fondness for the smellier French cheeses like Roquefort:

My grandmother, in true English style, detested smells, so she banished his cheeses to the coal cellar between meals. Lucky for her that my father didn’t eat the aptly-named Crotte du diable, or devil’s droppings!

Truly, evilly smelly – in fact, it seems not to exist anymore, which is a tragedy because it tasted absolutely wonderful (you had to wash your hands very well after eating it, though …).

In any event, things changed and moved on. My French grandmother had a heart attack while picking strawberries in her vegetable garden and was eventually moved into a home, and the stove stopped being used. I came across coal one more time, at school, where we had an open fire in the school monitors’ room and a ration of coal to feed it with. The coal looked more like the stuff that’s dug out of the ground, rough chunks:

I liked to pick up a chunk and turn it in the light. Coal can be very beautiful, with black, glistening surfaces, reminiscent of obsidian:

I also liked to sit next to the fire and gaze deep into the glowing coals rather than study for my A-levels:

which may partially explain why I didn’t do too well in my A-levels.

After that, coal disappeared from my life, as it did from the lives of all us in Europe.

Then we came to China.

Some statistics, courtesy of Wikipedia [1]: China is third in the world in terms of total coal reserves. It is the largest coal producer in the world, with the world’s largest (and deadliest) coal mining industry. It is also the largest consumer of coal in the world. Over half of the coal is used to make electricity, another third is used by industry, some is used in district heating plants, leaving a mere 3% to be used in residences. But you sure see that 3%.

You see them shoveling up huge chunks of coal – I was astonished at how big the chunks are; they have come straight from the coal face – you see them trucking it around, and piled up in street corners.

And more than anything you see China’s version of molded coal, which looks like this:

You see them transporting it around on the tricycles which I wrote about in an earlier post:

You see it piled up outside houses:

Then it’s burned in these special stoves:

which leaves behind the consumed molds which you see in the bottom right-hand corner of the picture. Cities’ rubbish is littered with these discards.

All this coal burning leaves a taste in the air, a taste which instantly takes me back to my early years in the UK, when you would walk through a town or village and smell the sharp, acidic taste of coal being burned.

And it gives rise to smog:

Not much different from London’s smogs.

I’m optimistic. Like the UK did, China will eventually get rid of the smogs – probably by stopping to burn coal.

______________________

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_in_China

coal stove: http://img.fr.clasf.com/2012/11/22/poele-a-charbon-ancien-maill-20121122191235.jpg
coal scuttle: http://gillesrenaud9.free.fr/Seau%20%C3%A0%20charbon/P1050541.jpg
coal scuttle-fullhttp://a406.idata.over-blog.com/600×879/1/05/04/45/photos-blog-N-21/le-seau-a-charbon-boulets-musee-de-la-mine.jpg
London smog 1952: http://www.thefloridastandard.com/files/2013/02/smogdm1403_468x673.jpg
Roquefort: http://img.dooyoo.co.uk/GB_EN/orig/0/1/0/2/8/102828.jpg
Crotte due diable: http://i.ebayimg.com/00/s/MTYwMFgxMTgy/$%28KGrHqF,!iUE8cj4nvorBPVlcwEB,!~~60_35.JPG
Coal at school: http://i01.i.aliimg.com/photo/v0/112891981/Tissue_Paper_Coal_Palm_oils_Pail.jpg
Bituminous coal: http://www.ua.all.biz/img/ua/catalog/1865574.jpeg
Glowing coal: http://bargainsbegin.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Heater-3-edit.jpg
Chinese shoveling coal: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2011/12/21/business/coal/coal-blog480.jpg
Molded coal China: http://lexpansion.lexpress.fr/pictures/1455/745377_des-briques-de-charbon-dans-un-commerce-de-huaibei-en-chine.jpg
Tricycle with molded coal: http://www.travel-pictures-gallery.com/images/china/beijing/beijing-0042.jpg
Molded coal China against the wall: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ASl1mhpkw5k/TkRxVCEtoII/AAAAAAAAA14/pgggOooaKE0/s400/Hutong%2Bcoal.jpg
Stove for burning molded coal: http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5164/5261127408_36ccd1d718_z.jpg
Molded in coal China-consumed: http://farm1.staticflickr.com/68/424608074_e7f49e2f9a_z.jpg?zz=1
Beijing smog: http://feww.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/china-smog-17feb2013.jpg

SUNSET OVER THE MEKONG

Luang Prabang, 16 February 2013

I first came into contact with the Mekong some ten years ago, in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. I remember looking in awe at this hugely wide river and planning some day to take a boat down it to Vietnam; a plan still waiting to be executed. In the meantime, our lives have crossed the Mekong many times. Several years ago, my wife and I had a close brush with it when we cruised on Tonle Sap Lake while we were visiting Angkor Wat. This lake has a strange relationship with the Mekong: during the dry season it drains into the Mekong, but during the rainy season the Mekong’s current is so strong that the flow reverses and it is the river that runs into the lake. Two years ago, in September, we came across the Mekong again, red-brown and very silty, at Xishuangbanna in the far south of Yunnan province, down by the border with Myanmar, Thailand and Laos. While we were there, a story broke of the captain and crew of a Chinese ship plying the Mekong being executed by shooting one night under mysterious circumstances; a story of drug running, it turned out, in that wild part of the world. And now we were in Laos, a country traversed by the Mekong and much of whose borders are defined by the river. While we were in Vientiane a few days ago, we walked along its bank and looked over to Thailand on the other shore. And we have spent the last two days in Luang Prabang, the country’s ancient royal capital, which lies at the confluence of the Nam Khan River and the Mekong. As we have criss-crossed the narrow tongue of land between the two rivers on which the old town was founded, we have found ourselves gazing down on the Mekong many times. We have watched the ferry crossing it:

We have watched ships taking tourists up and down the river:

We have crossed a spindly bamboo bridge spanning the Nam Khan:

to gaze down on the confluence of the two rivers:

And now, on our last evening, we have been sitting on steps leading down to the river and have been watching the sun set behind the hills on the far shore.

And with that last flash of light there has floated into my mind some lines from a hymn we used to sing at school when I was young, sung to a serenely tranquil tune:

Lord of all gentleness, Lord of all calm,
Whose voice is contentment, whose presence is balm,
Be there at our sleeping, and give us, we pray,
Your peace in our hearts, Lord, at the end of the day.

FLOWERS IN LAOS

Vientiane, 12 February 2013

If there is one thing that my wife and I really regretted leaving in Vienna, that was our little garden. With our last apartment we had been really lucky in getting a small roof garden. We loved that garden. My wife tended it with tender care and the summer evenings spent enveloped in flowers were magical. Of course, winters were dreary but there was always the next summer to look forward to with its new crop of flowers.

When we moved to Beijing, we guessed we would never find an apartment with even a small balcony on which to put some flower pots, at least not at prices we could afford. And so it was. We couldn’t be completely plantless so my wife bought some house plants. They give a tinge of green to the apartment, but they are meagre consolation for our roof garden in Vienna.

Imagine, then, our delight when after a seven-hour journey from cold and snowy Beijing we opened the window of our hotel in Vientiane, Laos, and we found this before us.

It was a flowering vine, thrown carelessly, or so it seemed, over the mango tree at our window. Five steps down, peering down from our common balcony we saw this, the flower of a banana tree.

I have to say that this burst of botanical colour made me feel rather light-headed, and I started rushing about the hotel’s garden snapping pictures with my phone. I show you here just a few of the photos I took:

I’ve always been fond of the colour of light through banana tree leaves …

The loveliness didn’t stop at the gates of the hotel. Walking through the streets of Vientiane was like walking though a garden, as flowering plants and trees popped up everywhere.

Even the non-flowering trees were magnificent, especially along the road skirting the Mekong River where there were huge banyan and eucalyptus trees. But the tree that took my heart is a tree called the Deer’s Ear (wonderful name …), whose leaves are going red and shedding at this time of year.

This tree is all over town, and each one has reached a different level of redness, so you go from bright green all the way to a deep vermilion. It’s rather like being in Vermont in the Fall.

As I recall, many learned men in the Middle Ages spent much time trying to pinpoint where exactly the Garden of Eden had been. For me, it’s obvious; it must have been somewhere in a tropical or subtropical country like Laos.

I suppose the damned mosquitoes were added by God afterwards as part of Adam and Eve’s punishment …

DUST TO DUST, ASHES TO ASHES

Beijing, 4 February 2013

From time to time in Buddhist temples in this part of the world one sees a metal sculpture standing on altars, which takes the form of a stem of a lotus plant to which are attached a flower bud, a fully opened flower, and the seed pod from which the petals have fallen off; sometimes they are accompanied by a young leaf unrolling, a fully mature leaf, and an old leaf, ragged and torn. It is a visual allegory for the cycle to which we are all subject: birth – life – death. It is a gentler reminder of what I was harshly told every Ash Wednesday when I was a boy: “Remember, man, that thou art dust, and to dust thou shalt return”.

I was reminded of this as the tulips – so lovely two posts ago – paled, wilted, and lost their petals, to finally leave the stamens standing naked and forlorn. I decided to record this decay down to death.

Friday morning:

Saturday morning:

Saturday evening:

Sunday morning:

Sunday evening:

I would like to think that my life currently stands at Saturday evening. Cold objectivity suggests instead that it stands at Sunday morning.

TULIPS AND MANDARINS

Beijing, 2 February 2013

The last week has been dreadful for air quality in Beijing. The brief break we had which I wrote about a few posts ago was but a temporary remission and we soon plunged back into the murk. My wife was a little more philosophical about it than I. She remarked that it reminded her of her childhood in Milan, when smog was frequent, and reminisced about having to cross the road to go to primary school and not being able to see if the light had changed. But still, we both suffered.

To cheer us up, my wife bought a bunch of tulips. They were still closed when she brought them home, but she placed them in a jar and we watched them slowly open over the following few days. Yesterday morning, we woke up to a gloriously bright and clear day. Thanking all the spirits I could think of, I stepped humming into the dining room, only to be greeted by the tulips which had fully opened over night. The sunlight pouring in through the windows was picking out their delicate pinks, whites and greens. I just had to memorialize the occasion.

The mandarins which were also on the table kept nudging themselves into the frame, so eventually, I brought them in too.

Wonderful, wonderful fruit, those! They don’t look up to much, but aah the taste, my friends! First comes the delicate mandarin aroma which breaks out as you begin to peel the fruit and prepares you for what lies ahead. Then comes the citrically acidic taste with sharp mandarin overtones which hits your taste buds as you pop one segment in after the other. They are completely addictive; between my wife and I, that plate of mandarins lasted but one breakfast. She has found a greengrocers up the road which sells them. Sorry, the address will remain a secret.

I, TOO, WAS AT DAVOS

Beijing, 31 January 2013

OK, my meeting in Davos was a little more humble than the one that just finished. We didn’t talk of global trends or the next big crisis, nor were television newscasters knocking at our doors begging for an interview. No, we were talking about e-waste and what to do with the growing mountains of broken computers and discarded mobile phones that we generate.

It was still summer, or so I thought. After all, the meeting was taking place in the first week of September. But the morning after I arrived it snowed. I could NOT believe it! My wife and I had made plans that after the meeting she would join me and we would visit the area. But we weren’t about to go visiting in the snow. That was the end of that little holiday.

Perhaps because of this, or perhaps because I realized that the meeting was actually a waste of time, whatever it was, I was not in a receptive mood. I found Davos to be a pretty nothing place. There was no part of the town that I found worth looking at, no building worth admiring, no vista to stop in front of … nothing. Just a series of anonymous-looking modern buildings along anonymous-looking streets.

Well, to be fair, there was one thing that has stayed with me and that was the train ride up to Davos. At Zurich airport, I took a train to the small town of Landquart, which stands astride the point where river Landquart meets river Rhine, still a modest river at this point on its journey to the sea. There, I changed to a narrow gauge train, which took me up to Davos. This line is part of the Rhaetian railway network (lovely name, that; it comes from the original inhabitants of the high mountain valleys of these parts, the Rhaetians). The train runs up the valley of the river Landquart to Klosters, where it turns off and begins to climb up to Davos, 10 km away and 400 metres higher. It is a truly lovely ride, reminiscent to me of the ride in the Micheline about which I wrote a post recently. Maybe it’s because the train doesn’t go too fast, or maybe it’s the narrower gauge or the single line, or maybe it’s because the trees are allowed to grow up close to the train, or maybe it’s the way the train twists and turns through the very peaceful fields and woods … but somehow in this train you feel so close to nature.

When I took it, I was alone in my compartment, so I pulled down the window (in itself a small miracle in modern trains), stuck my head out of the window, and just let the hayfields and pine trees whoosh past me, all the way to Davos.

Pity Davos and the meeting were such a let-down.

_____________________________

Davos train-1: http://www.railography.co.uk/photos/schweiz/910/files/10-D-1857.jpg
Davos train-2: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/aa/RhB_K%C3%BCblis-Saas.jpg/640px-RhB_K%C3%BCblis-Saas.jpg
Davos train-3: http://www.railography.co.uk/photos/schweiz/910/files/10-D-1840.htm
Davos train-4: http://www.railography.co.uk/photos/schweiz/910/files/10-D-1833.jpg
Davos train-5: http://www.streetviewfun.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/googletrainview-550×309.jpg

BUBBLES IN THE ICE

Beijing, 28 January 2013

This morning, I walked along the opposite side of the canal to go to work. I wanted to see what someone had written into the snow that thinly covers the ice. I took a photo. Readers interested in seeing it are referred to the postscript I have just added to my post “Clear, Pure, Clean, Peaceful”.

It so happens that a path has been cleared in the snow next to the script, which carries to the other side of the canal. Many people take a short cut across the ice to the other side. I hesitated. Crossing across the canal would shorten my walk to the office somewhat. But crossing ice like that always makes me a little nervous. Decades ago, when I was fourteen, I had ventured out onto a frozen lake where the ice got progressively thinner from one side to the other. As I trotted across, the ice began to creak and crack ominously. I beat a hasty retreat and all was well, but sometimes – especially if I venture onto iced-up water bodies – the sound of that creaky-cracking comes back to me; stuff of nightmares. So I hesitated.

I finally decided it was alright and set off across the canal. The cleared ice was very transparent, although the view through it was bent and warped by the unevenness of the ice. As I looked down through the ice, I saw a multitude of bubbles, of all shapes and sizes, ghostly white, trapped in the ice. Perhaps it was the slight trepidation I felt as I walked over the ice, but suddenly it seemed to me that I was seeing the last bubbles of air exhaled by a host of people who had got trapped under the ice. I half expected to suddenly see the ethereal face of some drowned person looking up at me through the ice.

I reached the other side. Silliness … I shook the feeling off. But as I turned around to survey the canal, I remembered a shard of T.S. Eliot’s poem. The Wasteland.

Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell
And the profit and loss.
A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool.
Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.