the heart thrills

FOOTPRINTS

Bangkok, 6 July 2015

A couple of river-bus stops downriver from where my wife and I live in Bangkok stands the temple Wat Pho, whose main claim to fame is a large reclining Buddha.

It is, I read, 46 metres long and 15 metres high, and walking along it certainly is impressive. But I much prefer the soles of the statue’s feet.

These soles have been divided into 108 panels each of which contains, in the form of mother-of-pearl inlays, the 108 auspicious symbols by which the Buddha can be identified, like flowers, dancers, white elephants, tigers and altar accessories.

Wat Pho’s reclining Buddha was the first time I saw this interesting art form. But actually it is quite common for reclining Buddhas to have the soles of their feet so decorated. For instance, I find this particular reclining Buddha in Yangon in Myanmar more naturalistic – certainly the pose of the feet is more pleasing to the eye than those stiff blocks in Wat Pho.

I later learned that the decorations of the feet of Buddha statues are actually a reflection – almost literally – of a much older iconography for depicting the Buddha, that of his footprint. Before anyone made statues of the Buddha, they made his footprints. They were a powerful way to remind the faithful that the Buddha had been present on earth: “the Buddha passed this way”. Quite quickly, the footprints were decorated with some of the symbols used to identify the Buddha. For instance, this footprint of the Buddha made in the 1^st Century AD in the kingdom of Gandhara, in what is now the Swat valley in Pakistan, carries the Darmachakra, the “wheel of law”, and the triratna, the “triple gem” of Buddhism: Buddha (the Enlightened One), Dharma (the Teaching), and Sangha (the Community).

As time went on, more and more symbols were squeezed onto the footprints. And then some bright spark came up with the “positive print”, as it were, where the soles of reclining Buddhas carry the symbols of the Buddha.

Buddhism is not the only religion that has used footprints of its religious leaders as iconography, although it surely has used them more than any other (there is an estimate of 3,000 Buddha footprints throughout the Buddhist lands). My wife and I came across a footprint of the Prophet Muhammad in the Topkapi museum in Istanbul

and there is a pair of footprints of Jesus in the Church of Domine Quo Vadis (“Lord, where are you going?”) on the outskirts of Rome.

It is true to say that footprints are an incredibly powerful symbol of someone passing, of having been close by. One of the best remembered stories in Robinson Crusoe is of his finding a footprint on the beach.

“It happened, one day about noon going towards my boat, I was exceedingly surprised, with the print of a man’s naked foot on the shore, which was very plain to be seen in the sand. I stood like one thunder-struck, or as if I had seen an apparition; I listened, I looked round me, I could hear nothing, nor see anything; I went up to a rising ground to look farther; I went up the shore and down the shore, but it was all one, I could see no other impression but that one. I went to it again to see if there were any more, and to observe if it might not be my fancy; but there was no room for that, for there was exactly the very print of a foot, toes, heel, and every part of a foot; how it came thither I knew not, nor could in the least imagine. But after innumerable fluttering thoughts, like a man perfectly confused and out of myself, I came home to my fortification, not feeling, as we say, the ground I went on, but terrified to the last degree, looking behind me at every two or three steps, mistaking every bush and tree, and fancying every stump at a distance to be a man.”

That footprint struck fear in Robinson Crusoe, fear of the unknown, fear of attack, fear of savagery. But I get a thrill when I see the footprints that some 15 people left 2,000 years ago in the ash and mud on the shore of Lake Managua in Nicaragua.

I get goose bumps on seeing the footprints left 1.5 million years ago by Homo erectus near the village of Ileret in Northern Kenya on the eastern shore of Lake Turkana.

The hairs on my neck rise at the sight of footprints left 3.7 million years ago by three members of the species Australopithecus afarensis at Laetoli in Tanzania, which show that already then bipedalism, such a distinctive feature of our species, was in place.

I find these footprints a much more powerful reminder of the Family of Man than a piece of jawbone or a tooth. I can imagine my distant, distant ancestors going about their business, as I will go about mine today.

And within the much narrower circuit of my family, my wife and I have two relics, which currently slumber with all our stuff in a warehouse in Vienna but which we will keep preciously until the end of our lives. These are the footprints which the hospital gave us of our children’s feet, made just after they were born; they look like this

They will forever remind us of the great joy which we experienced when our two children entered our lives and for a few decades walked with us before taking their own path in life.

___________

Reclining Buddha, Wat Pho, Bangkok: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8d/Bangkok_Wat_Pho_reclining_Buddha.jpg/280px-Bangkok_Wat_Pho_reclining_Buddha.jpg (in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wat_Pho)
Reclining Buddha’s feet: http://s4.perpetualexplorer.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/wat_pho.jpg (in http://perpetualexplorer.com/2013/03/03/buddhist-temples/)
Reclining Buddha, Chaukhtatgyi Paya, Yangon: http://www.heybrian.com/lib/images/travels/myanmar/yangon_reclining_buddha_feet.jpg (in http://www.heybrian.com/travels/myanmar/)
Buddha footprint, 1st century, Gandhāra: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/73/Buddha-Footprint.jpeg (in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddha_footprint)
Muhammad footprint, Istanbul: http://www.usna.edu/Users/humss/bwheeler/images/footistanbul.jpg (in http://www.usna.edu/Users/humss/bwheeler/footprints_pm.html)
Jesus footprints, church of Domine Quo Vadis: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b1/I_piedi_del_quo_vadis.jpg (in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_Domine_Quo_Vadis)
Crusoe and the footprint: http://www.bookdrum.com/images/books/92999_m.jpg (in http://www.bookdrum.com/books/the-graveyard-book/16401/bookmark/92998.html)
Nicaragua footprints: http://www.geog.cam.ac.uk/research/projects/eruptions/figures/thumbnails/05_11.jpg (in http://www.geog.cam.ac.uk/research/projects/eruptions/figures.html)
Homo erectus Ileret Kenya: https://nutcrakerman.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/ileret.jpg (in http://nutcrackerman.com/2014/10/14/the-oldest-human-footprints-by-continent/comment-page-1/)
Hominid footprints, Laetoli: http://auth.mhhe.com/socscience/anthropology/image-bank/kottak/chap07/kot37055_0705ta.jpg (in http://auth.mhhe.com/socscience/anthropology/image-bank/kottak/chap07/image7.htm)
Newborn footprints: http://semma.com/Joey/images/Joey/Joey%27s%20Footprints.jpg (in http://semma.com/Joey/photo2.html)

A PAPAL ENCYCLICAL

Bangkok, 2 July 2015

There’s been quite a bit of brouhaha in the press about the new Encyclical which Pope Francis brought out on 18 June, with the title “Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home”. Normally, I would just read what the press has to say and move on. Although I come out of the Catholic tradition, I fell off the Straight- and-Narrow decades ago and it never occurred to me to read any of the Encyclicals brought out by Paul VI or John-Paul II, and certainly none by Benedict XVI, who always struck me as a complete dinosaur. I remember my father reading the Encyclicals, in the original Latin no less (his was probably the last generation of Europeans who were given a serious education in classics; he read Latin and Greek at University). But me, no way, I wasn’t going to read these letters by old, white, celibate men, most of whose views were diametrically opposite mine.

But this Encyclical was different. It was about avoiding a planetary ecological disaster, brought about by climate change and other environmental catastrophes, something which I’ve been wrestling with all my professional life. And it was different from the kind of work I do, which is technical and scientific. It was bringing ethics to bear on the problem, which have been sadly lacking. So I decided that it was time for me to try this rather special form of literature.

Here’s how the Encyclical starts:

“Laudato si’, mi’ Signore” – “Praise be to you, my Lord”. In the words of this beautiful canticle, Saint Francis of Assisi reminds us that our common home is like a sister with whom we share our life and a beautiful mother who opens her arms to embrace us. “Praise be to you, my Lord, through our Sister, Mother Earth, who sustains and governs us, and who produces various fruit with coloured flowers and herbs”.
This sister now cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her by our irresponsible use and abuse of the goods with which God has endowed her. We have come to see ourselves as her lords and masters, entitled to plunder her at will. The violence present in our hearts, wounded by sin, is also reflected in the symptoms of sickness evident in the soil, in the water, in the air and in all forms of life. This is why the earth herself, burdened and laid waste, is among the most abandoned and maltreated of our poor; she “groans in travail” (Rom 8:22). We have forgotten that we ourselves are dust of the earth (cf. Gen 2:7); our very bodies are made up of her elements, we breathe her air and we receive life and refreshment from her waters.

Whoa! Stirring words, pretty different from the stuff I normally read. Thoroughly intrigued, I settled down to read the whole document, all 246 paragraphs of it. Allow me to rapidly summarize its contents for any of my readers who might be too busy or distracted by other things to read it (by the way, the Encyclical has a message for them: “true wisdom, as the fruit of self-examination, dialogue and generous encounter between persons, is not acquired by a mere accumulation of data which eventually leads to overload and confusion, a sort of mental pollution”).

After a review of the state of the planetary environment, whose conclusion can be summed up in this other punchy quote, “the earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth”, the Pope reminds us that our inability to look after our Earth is reflected in our inability to look after our poor: “we should be particularly indignant at the enormous inequalities in our midst, whereby we continue to tolerate some considering themselves more worthy than others. We fail to see that some are mired in desperate and degrading poverty, with no way out, while others have not the faintest idea of what to do with their possessions, vainly showing off their supposed superiority and leaving behind them so much waste which, if it were the case everywhere, would destroy the planet”, to conclude that “a true ecological approach always becomes a social approach; it must integrate questions of justice in debates on the environment, so as to hear both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor.”

His main conclusion is that both the environmental ills of the planet as well as the ills which bedevil our societies have their roots in excessive consumption by the better-off amongst us.

“We all know that it is not possible to sustain the present level of consumption in developed countries and wealthier sectors of society, where the habit of wasting and discarding has reached unprecedented levels.”
“To blame population growth instead of extreme and selective consumerism on the part of some, is one way of refusing to face the issues. It is an attempt to legitimize the present model of distribution, where a minority believes that it has the right to consume in a way which can never be universalized, since the planet could not even contain the waste products of such consumption.”
“… poor countries … need to acknowledge the scandalous level of consumption in some privileged sectors of their population and to combat corruption more effectively.”
“We may well be leaving to coming generations debris, desolation and filth. The pace of consumption, waste and environmental change has so stretched the planet’s capacity that our contemporary lifestyle, unsustainable as it is, can only precipitate catastrophes, such as those which even now periodically occur in different areas of the world.”
“.. given the insatiable and irresponsible growth produced over many decades, we need also to think of containing growth by setting some reasonable limits and even retracing our steps before it is too late.”
“… a world of exacerbated consumption is at the same time a world which mistreats life in all its forms.”

All music to my ears! For ten years now, I’ve seen that excessive consumption is the key to all our most intractable environmental problems and have been wrestling with what to do about it. We have to do something to reduce the levels of consumption in the richest countries, or more specifically among the world’s richest people (because as the Pope pointed out even the poor countries have hideously rich people).

But to have this happen is a huge, huge political problem. To explain why, let me borrow a photo or two from the photographer Peter Menzel and others who have copied him. Mr. Menzel went around the world photographing families outside their homes with all their stuff piled up around them (anyone wanting to see the whole series should dip into his book “Material World: A Global Family Portrait”). His idea proved so popular that others copied him. This photo, which is of a family in Inner Mongolia

shows a level of stuff-ownership which is typical of millions, if not billions, of families around the world. These families want a materially better life. And why not? There is no reason they should not have it. But if the goal of every family in the world is to end up like this one

– well, it’s simply not possible, because a lifestyle like this for everyone requires a level of consumption of the world’s resources that would need 4 or more Earths to sustain

and, except for those of us who live in a parallel universe, we all know that there is but one planet.

But it’s also not possible to have a world where a few families can live like kings while everyone else has to live like the huddled masses or else the planet goes into meltdown. Somehow, those who currently are over-consuming have to accept to reduce their consumption.

What kind of material sacrifice would be required of these over-consumers? To answer this question, let me use myself as an example. A little while back, curious to see how large my personal environmental footprint might be, I used a footprint calculator offered by the Environmental Protection Agency of the State of Victoria in Australia (there are a number of such calculators on-line; I chose this one because it’s easy to use and I reckon that Southern Australia’s climate is quite similar to Italy’s where I intend to retire – I couldn’t find a good Italian footprint calculator). With an eye to my upcoming retirement, I entered data for myself and my wife on our eating habits, on the home we will live in, and the modes of transport we will be using. To put it in a nutshell, the two of us will live in a 120 sq. metre apartment in an apartment block, whose electricity will partially come from renewable energy. We’ll be having several servings a day of dairy, eggs, fish, or meat products, and a quarter of the food that we’ll eat will be either processed, packaged, or imported. Since we’ll be recycling a lot we’ll throw away less than one 30 litre bin-bag of waste a week. We’ll be using a lot of public transportation, but we’ll still have a small car to potter around town a bit, while twice a year we’ll fly to see the kids in the States. I pushed the last button, and the answer came back … “If everyone lived like you, we would need 3.9 planets” Aarrgh!!!! I was one of those guys greedily overusing the Earth’s resources! I could NOT believe it! I had worked in the environmental field all my professional life, and yet here I was devouring the planet! O-M-G!!

Once the shock wore off, I started doing what scientists call sensitivity analysis: I changed my answers one at a time, to see which changes would give me the biggest reductions. That would give me a menu of changes to our lifestyles which we could adopt, with the goal of bringing that horrible figure of 3.9 down to 1.0 – I think it’s OK to have a lifestyle which, were everyone to have it, would use only 1 planet’s worth of resources.

I won’t weary my readers with a full summary of the results, let me just give the highlights. The biggest reduction in my levels of planetary destruction comes from changes in diet. Having only a few servings a week of dairy, eggs, fish, or meat products, instead of several a day, cuts 1 full planet out of my footprint. That’s great, I knew that meat-eating especially is terribly harmful to the environment. I think we can switch to a strongly vegetarian diet without too much difficulty.

So that’s already 1.0 planet’s worth of reduction.

The other big reduction, though, 1.1 planets’ worth, comes from basically cutting out air travel. No, no, this is not possible, we cannot stop visiting our children! And we can’t just tell the kids to come instead, that would be foisting onto them part of our footprint! What to do? I suppose we could cut our trips to once a year … Alright, let’s say that, so that’s half a planet’s worth of reduction.

That gives us a running total of 1.5 planets’ worth of reduction.

The next biggest reduction, 0.7 planet’s worth, would come if we switched from living in a multi-storey apartment building to a free-standing house without running water. OK, we’re not going to cut off our water, but my take-away here is that saving water has a significant impact on the size of my footprint. We can’t stop drinking, but we’ll ruthlessly chop at our three other big water uses, hot showers, clothes washing, and toilet flushing. We’ll simply shower less, wash our clothes less often, and (ugh!) flush less often. Let’s clock that in at 0.35 planet’s worth.

So, the running total is now 1.85 planets’ worth of reduction.

Next on my list is to switch to a green design residence, which would give me half a planet’s worth of reduction. Well, we can’t change apartments at this point. But we can do things to make the apartment more energy efficient: compact fluorescent bulbs (although they will look totally hideous in the chandelier we have in the living room), double-glazed windows everywhere (more costs …), if possible more insulation on that wall in our bedroom, … I don’t know, there must be other things we can do. Let’s just assume that there are and clock this in at 0.25 planet’s worth.

That gives me a running total of 2.1 planets’ worth of reduction.

What else?

Well, next on the list is simply to cut off the electricity to the apartment, which would give me another half a planet’s worth of reduction. Well, that ain’t gonna happen … But we could reduce our consumption of electricity. The CFLs I’ve already decided to install will help here, as will the reductions in the use of the washing machine. We can mostly wash our dishes by hand, which will reduce the use of the dishwasher (which will also help reduce water use). We could unplug all those gadgets with pilot lights so they aren’t on all the time. I promise not to leave the lights on after leaving a room (a bad habit I have). We could climb the stairs rather than use the elevator (which will be good exercise anyway). I don’t know if they offer this in Italy, but if they do I could ask to have all my electricity booked as coming from renewable energy…. OK, let’s assume 0.25 planet’s worth for all this.

Running total: 2.35 planets’ worth of reduction.

I’m running out of options here, and I still need to chop 0.55 planet’s worth out of our lifestyle!

OK, we can switch to riding bicycles around town and walking even more, so as to reduce our use of public transportation (I have us hardly using a car). Maybe we could squeeze another 0.2 planet’s worth out of our lifestyle in this way.

Running total: 2.55 planets’ worth of reduction.

Let me see, what else? … I’m really scraping the bottom of the barrel here … Well, we could have a third person come and live with us. I choose this option with extreme reluctance. One of the kids would be ideal, but they probably have no desire to come and live with their parents. And anyway, they would need a job in Italy, which in this economic climate is not at all a given. Maybe we could take in a student, preferably one who is studying environmental sciences and who would enthusiastically join in the hunt for things to do to reduce our footprint. One more person in the apartment would give us 0.3 planet’s worth of reduction.

That gives us a grand total of 2.85 planets’ worth of reduction, close enough to the goal of 2.9.

That was hard, really hard! I’m making big sacrifices here. I don’t think eating much more greens will be that bad, but not being able to see the children more than once a year, that will be tough. And having to share the apartment with a stranger does not fill me with joy at all.

And therein lies the huge political problem. This all sounds like an intense diet, and as we all know diets are not greeted with joy but with mournful suffering. Who wants to do them? We need to flip this, we need to make people like me feel happy as they merrily throw out of their lives the mountain of stuff that surrounds them.

This is where the rest of Pope Francis’s Encyclical comes in. In the case of Catholics, it’s easy. He’s telling them that it is their moral duty to change their lifestyles, and he strongly suggests this to other Christians too. But to the others amongst us who are not Christians? I can do no better than quote another chunk of text:

We need to take up an ancient lesson, found in different religious traditions and also in the Bible. It is the conviction that “less is more”. A constant flood of new consumer goods can baffle the heart and prevent us from cherishing each thing and each moment. To be serenely present to each reality, however small it may be, opens us to much greater horizons of understanding and personal fulfilment. Christian spirituality proposes a growth marked by moderation and the capacity to be happy with little. It is a return to that simplicity which allows us to stop and appreciate the small things, to be grateful for the opportunities which life affords us, to be spiritually detached from what we possess, and not to succumb to sadness for what we lack. This implies avoiding the dynamic of dominion and the mere accumulation of pleasures.

Such sobriety, when lived freely and consciously, is liberating. It is not a lesser life or one lived with less intensity. On the contrary, it is a way of living life to the full. In reality, those who enjoy more and live better each moment are those who have given up dipping here and there, always on the look-out for what they do not have. They experience what it means to appreciate each person and each thing, learning familiarity with the simplest things and how to enjoy them. So they are able to shed unsatisfied needs, reducing their obsessiveness and weariness. Even living on little, they can live a lot, above all when they cultivate other pleasures and find satisfaction in fraternal encounters, in service, in developing their gifts, in music and art, in contact with nature, in prayer. Happiness means knowing how to limit some needs which only diminish us, and being open to the many different possibilities which life can offer.

We need to start a huge campaign to persuade people of the rightness of the message “less is more”, and to have them actively wanting to drastically reduce their material needs, of feeling bad, almost sick, if they start accumulating too much. If we don’t change this basic mindset we are doomed. As the Encyclical so rightly says, there is no technical solution to climate change and other severe global environmental problems, there is only an ethical choice.

I hope this piece can be one small part of this campaign.

___________

Inner Mongolian family: http://fast.mediamatic.nl/f/sjnh/image/146/188097-500-400.jpg
Developed country family’s stuff: http://akkermanlc.weebly.com/uploads/1/2/7/5/12751216/4773841_orig.png (in http://akkermanlc.weebly.com/quality-of-life-project.html)
Four planets: http://image.slidesharecdn.com/foodinasustainablematerialfootprint-131011032957-phpapp01/95/food-in-sustainable-consumption-2-638.jpg?cb=1381463878 (in http://www.slideshare.net/lettenmeier/food-in-sustainable-consumption)

THE FLESH CRIES OUT

Bangkok, 21 June 2015

After years of bugging by our children, especially by our daughter, and after watching a couple of our friends Go the Way of All Flesh or nearly so, my wife and I have committed to a serious training regime. Twice a week, a personal trainer turns up at our apartment block, and in the very rudimentary gym which we have (it’s really just a common space where some exercise machines have been installed) he puts us through one hour of rigorous exercises. In addition, my wife goes to a gym every day for an hour, while I do (more or less, depending on my schedule) half an hour’s worth of exercises at home in the evening. We’ve been at it for three and a half months.

I don’t know, I feel that after a suitable period of shock at the beginning – we have, to be very, very frank, done bugger-all exercise for nigh on forty years – we should now be looking forward to going to our twice-weekly routine and feel happy after it

perhaps not as blissfully happy as this couple, but at least somewhat satisfied.

Yet it is not so. As we go down to the makeshift gym we feel like what those poor people in Singapore must feel like as they go to get 100 lashes for dropping chewing gum on the pavement or whatever, and the exercises themselves are still excruciating. We both feel like poor old Laocoön and his sons as we put our protesting bodies through the routines

while when we try to get up from a floor exercise we both look and feel like this dying Gaul

Understand me, I’m not hoping to look like Hercules by the end of all this

Something like this would do me very nicely

while my wife would be more than happy to end up looking like any of these three Graces

In fact, to be completely honest, I wouldn’t mind ending up looking like this as long as I was feeling good.

But I don’t feel good, I just feel like this at the end of the one hour

and continue to feel like this for the rest of the day.

Will it ever be different?

_____________

Happy exercisers: https://experiencelife.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Apr10_ExGorg1.jpg (in https://experiencelife.com/article/8-ways-exercise-makes-you-gorgeous/)
Laocoön: https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/bf/aa/24/bfaa2441e5e25a8ec7be0f9fb81db7dd.jpg (in https://www.pinterest.com/heotang/the-death/)
Dying Gaul: http://anadio.com/004b%20Ancient%20Greek%20sculpture%20web%20ss/resources/images/medium/Dying_gaul.jpg (in http://anadio.com/004b%20Ancient%20Greek%20sculpture%20web%20ss/index.html)
Herakles: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/ad/Herakles_Farnese_MAN_Napoli_Inv6001_n01.jpg/250px-Herakles_Farnese_MAN_Napoli_Inv6001_n01.jpg (in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farnese_Hercules)
God: http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/culture_test/100ideasart_2.jpg (in http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/10/from-greek-sculpture-to-graffiti-100-ideas-that-changed-art/264165/)
Three Graces: http://www.mlahanas.de/Greeks/Mythology/Images/ThreeGracesLouvreMa287.jpg (in http://www.mlahanas.de/Greeks/Mythology/ThreeGracesLouvreMa287.html)
Fat David: http://www.clevelandseniors.com/images/funny/fat-david.jpg (in http://bellasvitas.blogspot.com/2011/03/michael-angelo-sculptures.html)
Broken sculpture: http://www.visualtherapyonline.com/wp-content/uploads/banksy-fallen-sculpture-1.jpg (in http://www.visualtherapyonline.com/?p=20403)

SNIFFING AT MY INHALER

Bangkok, 20 June 2015

The Thais are a handsome race, no doubt about it. They seem to be genetically predisposed to having a gracile body structure, which leads to a race of naturally slim and slender people. Of course, there are Thais who have had a hard life, especially in rural areas, and whose bodies and faces have been marked by it. And given the popularity of fast food and of snacking on processed foods, obesity is on the rise as it is everywhere in the world. But overall, the Thais are pleasing to the eye.

So it is really very unfortunate that many Thais have this strange habit of going around with an inhaler up their nose, which obviously detracts from their natural comeliness.

Normally you just see them holding the inhaler to the nose and sniffing away as if they were snorting cocaine or some other such substance, but in extreme cases they will jam the inhaler in their nostrils and walk about with it dangling from their noses.

(I have even heard of cases of Thais with two inhalers jammed up their noses! But perhaps this is an urban legend)

Quite why they do it is not clear to me. No doubt it has something to do with warding off noxious smells, which indeed can sometimes be a problem in Thailand where open drains are still the rule rather than the exception. But the street smells can be strong even in the absence of open drains: cooking smells, for instance, can be penetrating, which may explain this lady’s use of an inhaler

Or it could be a way of keeping alert when required, as this photo of an examination room suggests

(the boy with the inhaler is towards the back left and is busily writing while the poor fellow in the front looks like he could do with an inhaler)

But various sites darkly suggest that one can become hooked and simply sniff for the artificial pleasure of it all. Bent on making a scientific examination of the issue, I purchased an inhaler at my local 7-11 – the cheapest, I’m not that dedicated –

and carried out a series of sniff tests …

… Ah yes! That eucalyptus smell that I remember soooo well from the Vicks inhalers that our mothers used to hand us young children when we had a cold

and which, together with Vicks vapo rub for our chests and Vicks cough drops for our scratchy throats were used by several generations of anxious mothers for their coughing and sniffling brood.

Yes, yes, one or two sniffs and you could feel the stuffiness in your nose magically disappearing, and the late November fogs lifting – only for stuffiness and fog to reappear after a while – to be chased away again with another sniff or two – and so the cycle went on endlessly, until Spring arrived …

… But behind the astringent, aseptic quality of the eucalyptus there lies a softer smell of mint and peppermint … of the Polo mints of my youth!

“the mint with the hole”, as the ad tag line had it

a taste which has me instinctively grasping out at one of the mint sweets that hotels in this part of the world so thoughtfully place on the check-in counter for incoming guests.

Memories, memories … I suppose I could end up walking down Bangkok’s streets, dreamily sniffing on my inhaler, letting visions of my – really quite pleasant – life unfold before me. Is that what Thailand is, a nation of dreamers? Or are these inhalers just a modern version of the pomander, that ball made of perfumes held in a perforated case, which the rich of the European Middle Ages hung around their necks to ward off the frequent bad smells around them or in the pious hope that it would protect them against the plague?

I will let my gentle readers decide.

________________

Cool Thai couple: http://garbagelapsap.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/GARBAGELAPSAP_STREETSTYLE_BANGKOK_FASHION.jpg (in http://www.elarmarioaj.com/2013_04_01_archive.html)
Women with inhalers: https://jayinthailand.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/960f.jpeg (in https://jayinthailand.wordpress.com/)
Man with inhaler in nose: http://www.mymuaythai.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/inhaler.jpg?7503ae (in http://www.mymuaythai.com/archives/poy-sian-mark-ii/)
Man with inhaler in nose-2: http://pinoyajarn.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/2-Vicks-Inhaler.png (in http://pinoyajarn.com/blog/category/living-in-thailand/)
Woman vendor with sniffing stick: https://c1.staticflickr.com/5/4048/4179283228_1a7755aca7_b.jpg (in https://www.flickr.com/photos/adrianbangkok/4179283228/)
Kid with inhaler in nose: https://theheartthrills.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/12926-photo2b1-721216.jpg (in http://nakhontuba.blogspot.com/2011_09_01_archive.html)
Inhaler: http://static07.st-sm.com/07SM/1813-thickbox_default/inhaler-nasal-siang-pure-2cc.jpg (in http://www.st-sm.com/07SM/en/pocket-inhaler/420-inhaler-nasal-siang-pure-2cc-8850109011412.html)
Vicks inhaler: https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/26/4c/26/264c2634676f95bb2998ba2b0f4b208e.jpg (in https://www.pinterest.com/lhollifield123/the-doctor-said/)
Vicks ad: https://img1.etsystatic.com/047/2/9430690/il_570xN.668385061_prsm.jpg (in https://www.etsy.com/listing/207428148/1945-vicks-vaporub-ad-vicks-inhaler)
Polo sweets: http://oi55.tinypic.com/2cffhar.jpg (in http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=2cffhar&s=7#.VYTky1Ipq-t)
Polo mint ad: http://images.esellerpro.com/2486/I/514/4/polo-mints-postcard.jpg (in http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/NEW-POLO-MINTS-POSTCARD-RETRO-VINTAGE-OPIE-OFFICIAL-IMAGE-MINT-WITH-THE-HOLE-/281202056658)
Pomander: http://www.1st-art-gallery.com/thumbnail/342661/1/Portrait-Of-Jan-Gerritz.-Van-Egmond-Van-De-Dijenborgh,-Bust-Length-Wearing-A-Black-Fur-Trimmed-Coat,-Holding-A-Pomander,-Seen-Within-An-Arched-Decorated-Embrasure,-A-Landscape-Beyond.jpg (in http://eighteenthcenturylit.pbworks.com/w/page/70599154/Smelling%20Salts)

TIME DILATION

Bangkok, 14 June 2015

Who hasn’t heard of the theory of relativity? I mean, everyone has, right? Apart maybe from some Amazonian tribes who’ve only just been discovered.

And of course everyone has heard of Albert Einstein, who came up with the theory in the first place.

OK, this photo may suggest that Einstein was not a very serious fellow, so let’s throw in a more solemn photo of him, taken a year before he published the special theory of relativity in 1905.

(as we all undoubtedly know, this is the first of two theories of relativity; Albert published the general theory of relativity in 1916).

1905, by the way, was Einstein’s annus mirabilis. His paper on the special theory of relativity was one of four seminal papers he published that year in the highly respected Annalen der Physik; the other three were on the photoelectric effect, on Brownian motion, and on mass-energy equivalence (you know, E=mc², that one). He was one hell of clever guy, no doubt about it. No wonder he got the Nobel prize! Should have got two, if you ask me.

Anyhoo, the special theory of relativity, known as STR to conoscenti like me, has two very interesting predictions: the faster you go, the smaller you get and the slower time passes. So you get squeezed tighter and tighter slower and slower. And the amazing thing is, you wouldn’t notice you’re getting all squished and that your Rolex is running slower! To you, everything looks completely normal. Like I said, Einstein was a pretty amazing guy.

Well, of course science fiction writers latched onto the second of these predictions – so-called time dilation to conoscenti like me – like that leach latched onto my leg many decades ago. For instance, they have imagined some poor married astronaut going off on an interstellar journey, travelling at near the speed of light for a couple of years and then coming back, also at near the speed of light, TO FIND HIS WIFE AN OLD CRONE! At his super speed, he has only aged a few years, but his wife, traveling at the Earth’s much slower pace, has aged decades. Amazing thought, no? This plot line was the basis of the original “Planet of the Apes” movie of 1968 (no doubt only old fuddy-duddies like me even remember that there was such a movie). The astronaut hero, Charlton Heston, has been on super-fast intergalactic travel and crashes onto a planet, which he discovers is run by apes.

Only at the end of the movie, after many super exciting adventures, does he realize that the planet is actually Earth, hundreds of years after he had left it.

In the real world, it took a while for clever scientists to design experiments to test Einstein’s predictions. Time dilation was only proved for the first time in 1938, by two fellows at Harvard. To be honest, their experiment was so clever that I don’t understand it. I understand much better an experiment carried out down the road, at MIT, in 1963, which involved measuring the number of muons whizzing by at the top of Mt. Washington in New Hampshire and the amount whizzing into MIT’s campus. You see, as muons rain down from the outer layers of the atmosphere, where they are created, they decay, like uranium atoms, and clever scientists know the speed with which they decay.

So if you measure the muon whizz-by rate at the top of the mountain as well as the number of muons so whizzing, and if you know the muon decay rate as well as the difference in height between Mt. Washington and the MIT campus, then you can calculate how many muons should have decayed away before reaching said campus, and you can compare that to the actual number you measure whizzing into your lab on campus. And you would find many more arriving than you calculated! BUT, if you now went back to the blackboard

(or whiteboard in this day and age) and factored in Einstein’s time dilation effects, then the difference between what you calculated and what you measured would pretty much disappear. Because, you see, while you, the clever scientist in your MIT lab, was saying “well, it should take one millisecond for a muon to go from the height of Mt. Washington to the height of my lab”, the muon, speeding along at something near the speed of light, would glance at its Rolex and say “hang on a millisec, it only took me one microsecond to get here, so I ain’t decayed yet.” Clever, no?

Of course, all these experiments cost a lot of money. I have just discovered a much cheaper experiment proving the time dilation effect, although admittedly it takes a good deal longer to carry out. It came to me in a flash a few days ago. I saw a shop, which proudly proclaimed that it had been established in 1975. “Pah!”, I said “that’s just yesterday”. But then I thought, “Hang on. If in 1975 I had seen a shop proclaiming that it had been established in 1935, I would have said, ‘Wow, that’s a long time ago!'”. Which proves time dilation incontrovertibly: as each of us moves faster and faster through life towards the grave, time past seems to go by slower and slower. QED, as Einstein would have said in his heavy German accent.

I wonder if I can get this proof published in Nature?

_______________

Uncontacted tribe: http://b.vimeocdn.com/ts/125/234/125234174_640.jpg (in http://all-that-is-interesting.com/last-uncontacted-tribes)
Einstein with tongue out: http://theartmad.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Albert-Einstein-Tongue-Wallpaper-4.jpg (in http://theartmad.com/wallpapers-of-albert-einstein/albert-einstein-tongue-wallpaper-4/)
Young Einstein: http://blogs.esa.int/atv/files/2013/07/Einstein_patentoffice.jpg (in http://blogs.esa.int/atv/2013/07/04/atv-made-in-switzerland-2/einstein_patentoffice/)
Heston and the apes: https://aworldoffilm.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/u4s4b3xrz5gohwzo2knedqil7bf.jpg (in http://aworldoffilm.com/2014/04/02/planet-of-the-apes-franklin-j-shaffner-1968-niall-mcardle/)
Heston and the statue of liberty: http://25fps.cz/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/www.monstermagazineworld.blogspot.complanetaopic1.jpg (inhttp://25fps.cz/2011/alec-charles-cz/)
Muons: http://www.physi.uni-heidelberg.de/Einrichtungen/FP/anleitungen/F13/jpg/cosmics.jpg (in http://www.science20.com/quantum_diaries_survivor/muon_tomography_who_leading_research)
Blackboard: http://alphanumericjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/mathematics-chalkboards_003104581.jpg (in http://alphanumericjournal.com/)

FADO

Bangkok, 11 June 2015

I get many invitations to diplomatic dos. I almost always bin them, but when I received one from the Embassy of Portugal to celebrate the country’s National Day, I hesitated. They do have the most wonderful Embassy here, right on the Chaophraya River.

My wife and I pass it very time we take the water bus down to Sathorn, and as we pass I always feel a twinge of nostalgia, to see this lovely villa from the 1870s, with its lawn sweeping down to the river, squeezed now between modern buildings of concrete, glass and steel. Ah, the Bangkok that once was …

It was decided. I would accept the Ambassador’s invitation, to give us a chance to see this wonderful property up close.

So it was that last night, as dusk was falling, we joined a line of guests to shake the Ambassador warmly by the hand, and then were left free to wander around the lawn, with a white wine in hand. We walked over to the river, turned around, and admired the scene.

As we stood there, sipping our wine, from under the flame tree came the unmistakable lilting lament of fado. Song after song floated across the lawn

É meu e vosso este fado
destino que nos amarra
por mais que seja negado
às cordas de uma guitarra

Sempre que se ouve um gemido
duma guitarra a cantar
fica-se logo perdido
com vontade de chorar

Ó gente da minha terra
agora é que eu percebi
esta tristeza que trago
foi de vós que a recebi

E pareceria ternura
se eu me deixasse embalar
era maior a amargura
menos triste o meu cantar

Ó gente da minha terra

This fado is mine and yours,
A destiny that binds us,
No matter how much denied,
To the strings of a guitar

When we hear the lament
Of a guitar in song
We are instantly lost
In a desire to weep

Oh people of my land,
Now is it that I understand
This sadness which I carry.
I received it from you

And it would seem a tenderness
To allow myself to be soothed.
The bitterness would be greater
My singing less sad.

Oh people of my land

And so filled with saudade, that indefinable existential melancholy which we are told pervades the Portuguese soul, as well as with several glasses of excellent Portuguese wine, we slowly made our way inside the villa, to eat bacalhau à Gomes de Sá.

___________

Embassy from River: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2a/Embassy_of_Portugal_Bangkok.JPG (in http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Embassy_of_Portugal_Bangkok.JPG)

The other picture: mine

COQ AU VIN

Bangkok, 8 June 2015

Yesterday evening, my wife and I went over to the Central World mall to see a film (“Spy”, a hilarious film, well worth seeing). Afterwards, feeling peckish, we decided to stay and have dinner in the mall – at least it was well refrigerated there, a decided plus in this hot season when the promised rains are failing to come to cool us. The problem is, most of the restaurants in the mall are of Asian extraction – Japanese is a definite favourite, followed by Korean, and then trailing far behind a few Chinese, Thai, and “international” (i.e., mixed Asian) – and that’s not what I felt like eating. I wanted something “different”, although I wasn’t quite sure what that “different” might be. We made a bee line for a French restaurant advertised on the information board, but it had disappeared since they had last updated the board. We sighted an Italian restaurant, although something called “Spaghetti Factory” surely is to be avoided like the plague. We got a fleeting glimpse of a Mexican restaurant tucked away in a corner, but Mexican food didn’t entice me … You get the picture. I was being finicky, and time was passing. Eventually, we saw a bar-cum-restaurant called “1881”, which looked nice enough. We rapidly checked the menu, and since it looked suitably international we went for it.

Ensconced at our table, we scanned the menu more closely. For the main course, we both happily plumped for the coq au vin. It had been an age since we had eaten this, we both exclaimed. To keep us going while we waited, we ordered some starters, and of course a glass of red wine. The starters were delicious, the wine was good, everything looked set for a memorable dinner. Alas! it was not to be. When the coq au vin arrived, we found ourselves faced with a chicken leg, deep fried à la manière KFC, sitting on some sort of thick tomato-based sauce peppered with carrots and onions, maybe something which had been recycled from an osso buco dish, and which had obviously never seen a drop of vin. We glumly ate our poulet à une sauce indéfinie, agreeing with each other that something had definitely got lost in translation. The dessert, a great pannacotta with some sort of balsamic-strawberry gelée, partially made up for the very disappointing main dish, but it was undeniable that the coq au vin had been a black hole in our sensory experiences of the evening.

I feel I owe it to my genes, to my heritage, to right the balance, to advertise from the rooftops the greatness of coq au vin. At least describing how the dish is made might allow me to partially enjoy, if only in my imagination, the taste of the Real Thing.

Let me start by saying that in the olden days coq au vin was not a dish that would have been served to the Great Sun King, Louis XIV

or some other such august personage, unless of course you wanted to be sent to the Mediterranean galleys or to rot away on L’île du Diable. The great French chef of the mid-19^th Century, Marie-Antoine Carême, author of the encyclopedic L’Art de la Cuisine Française and other works, never mentioned it, nor did the even greater French chef of the late 19^th-early 20^th Century, Auguste Escoffier, in his various publications. No, this was above all a peasant’s dish, a way of recycling that rooster in the yard which had reached the end of the rooster road. It was people like these who created coq au vin, making a virtue out of necessity.

So now let us see how this wonderful dish is made. The paysan (or paysanne) will first have laid his (or her) hands on a rooster like this one

and wrung its neck. We modern men and women are squeamish about killing to eat, but what to do: unless you hang around prides of hunting lions and scavenge what they are kind enough to leave behind, to eat meat you need to kill; simple as that. Oh, and by the way, it’s good to slit the rooster’s throat and drain its blood, which you will use later in making the dish. If you can’t bring yourself to do all this, you can subcontract the task to a butcher. You can also subcontract him the task of plucking the bird, which the paysanne would have done herself (I remember my French grandmother doing this, while she sat on the balcony discussing this, that, and the other with my mother). The wonderful feathers of the rooster should be conserved, although I’m not quite sure what to do with them. In any event, in one way or another you should end up with something like this:

Personally, to support the Home Team, that is to say Burgundy, where the French side of me comes from, I would want a rooster from Bresse, which is on the other side of the River Saône from Burgundy: the Burgundians gave the people of Bresse their wine and in return got farm products like chickens.

Now we can start the cooking.

First, you will cut up the rooster. Place the pieces in some container, to which you will add diced carrots, onions, and shallots, and – if you really must – chopped garlic (personally, I would drop the garlic; I’m not a fan of this particular bulb). The paysan would have collected these from his vegetable garden like the one my French grandmother had hidden behind her lilac bushes, but I recognize that in our modern, highly urbanized society most of us do not have access to vegetable gardens, so we will have to make do with the local grocery store, or even the local supermarket. Add laurel, thyme and parsley. Add a little stock. Salt and pepper. And now we come to the wine.

Obviously, this is a key ingredient, so some thought needs to go into its choice. Nothing too fancy, of course – not going to waste a $100 bottle of wine to cook our rooster. Something with a good body but not too tannic should do the trick. I would go for a red wine, although there are parts of France (Alsace, for instance, or the Jura) where the dish is made with white. Since, as I’ve mentioned, I’m batting for the Home Team, I would personally go for a red Burgundy, maybe shading into a Beaujolais, something just down the road from where my Grandmother lived.

Our paysanne would have gone down into the cellar of the kind my Grandmother had and taken a bottle of wine made from grapes growing in one of the surrounding vineyards and bottled in that very cellar or at least locally. But we – with a sigh – will make do with what we find at our local wine store.

In any event, pour in enough wine to just cover the rooster. Cover the container and leave it in a cool place. You will let the rooster and the vegetables marinate for a full 24 hours.

The next day, fresh from a good night’s sleep, you will begin the next phase.

As a first step, fish the rooster pieces out of the marinade, draining them well. Do the same for the vegetables. Do not throw away the marinade! Very important.

Put all these aside, and take a large skillet, in which you will heat a little butter and oil. Frankly, I don’t think the paysanne would have used oil, at least not in Burgundy. Traditionally, Burgundy was not an oil country. I would guess, from a perusal of an old French cookery book from 1651, that she would have used butter and/or lard. Nevertheless, we will go with butter and oil since nowadays oil you find in shops but lard only with difficulty.

Once the butter-cum-oil is hot enough, slide in the rooster pieces, together with some chunks of bacon, and let the whole brown nicely. Throw in the vegetables from the marinade and let them colour a bit. Sprinkle with flour and let it all cook a moment. Move the skillet off any open flame, take a small glass of cognac, sprinkle it over the rooster pieces, and light it up with a match – taking care, of course, that your face is not too close; the last thing you need is to find yourself eating the final product without eyebrows. In Burgundy, the paysanne would probably have used a Marc de Bourgogne, which is a brandy made with the solid leftovers from the grape presses. But unless you actually live in Burgundy, you probably do not have this at hand, so go with cognac. Once the flames have died down, add in the marinade, and bring the whole back to a boil for a few minutes.

You will now let the mix simmer slowly for a long, long time: aim for six hours. Let it fill your kitchen with a gorgeous aroma, but don’t hang around there because otherwise you will soon no longer be able to stand it and you will throw yourself on the cooking rooster and wolf it down. As would have done the paysanne, go and busy yourself in the garden, in the studio, anywhere that is some distance from the kitchen. Keep your mind and hands busy with other things, just popping in from time to time to check. As the hours pass, the meat softens and falls off the bone, it absorbs the wonderful aromas it is basting in, and the sauce itself slowly thickens. Towards the end of this long simmering period, you will take the blood you collected when you killed the rooster (remember that?) and add it to the sauce to thicken it. You will also prepare boiled potatoes a little while before the end, to accompany the coq au vin.

The coq au vin is now ready to eat. Lay out the pieces of coq in a serving plate, pour the sauce au vin over them.

Place the potatoes on the side, bring out that special bottle of Burgundy you’ve been keeping for an exceptional moment, call in the family and your special friends, and enjoy!

Mmm, there’s a rooster I keep hearing over the other side of the lane, in a building site. Maybe tonight, I’ll go out with this cleaver which we bought in China

And find me a rooster for a nice coq au vin …

______________________

Louis XIV: http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lkzid3Jvkb1qggdq1.jpg (in http://wtfarthistory.com/post/5361387982/red-high-heels-for-him)
French peasants-1: http://www.myartprints.co.uk/kunst/french_photographer_19th_century/peasant_family_of_the_sarthe_a_hi.jpg (in http://www.myartprints.co.uk/a/frenchphotographer19thcen/peasantfamilyofthesarthea.html)
French peasants-2: http://img.over-blog-kiwi.com/0/81/05/67/201311/ob_9bbe36_conde-sur-noireau-calvados-comice-agricole.jpg (in http://stephane.guillard.over-blog.com/2013/11/l-histoire-des-comices-agricoles-en-france-xixe-xxe-si%C3%A8cles.html)
French peasants-3: http://tnhistoirexix.tableau-noir.net/images/scene-de-moissons.jpg (in http://tnhistoirexix.tableau-noir.net/pages/campagnes-xix-siecle.html)
Rooster: http://monia2009.m.o.pic.centerblog.net/gg7spkhz.jpg (in http://lenissa.musicblog.fr/3467011/France-Allemagne-C-est-fini/
Rooster ready to cook: http://www.lesplaisirsdegargantua.com/419/coq-fermier-pret-a-cuire.jpg (in http://www.lesplaisirsdegargantua.com/sitemap.xml)
Mâcon rouge: http://sohowine.co.uk/import/images/B-MACON.jpg (in http://sohowine.co.uk/?c=products&deptno=2&country=France&region=Burgundy&page=2)
Coq au vin: http://www.joyce-farms.com/topics/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/coqauvin.jpg (in http://www.mairie-reffannes.fr/news/soireecoqauvinaumuguet)
Meal: https://labelleassiette.fr/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/DSCN0568.jpg (in https://labelleassiette.fr/blog/diner-lba-3-avec-philippe-engammare/)
Cleaver: http://img92.imageshack.us/img92/7854/shun9wy.jpg (in http://www.knifeforums.com/forums/showtopic.php?tid/771029/)

JOHAN ET PIRLOUIT

Bangkok, 26 May 2015

A week or so ago, I was in Cambodia for some official business relating to a project we are about to start there to reduce dioxin emissions. But actually, that is irrelevant to this post. What is relevant is that I was staying in a hotel room half of whose lights were blue. Why, is a mystery. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that the hotel claimed to also be a spa; perhaps people in spas like the rather cold light that blue creates. Or perhaps it had something to do with the modern furniture that graced the room; it was Nordic-looking in its design, cool, remote, and the blue light made it all that much cooler. But I’m just hazarding guesses here; perhaps blue bulbs were simply the cheapest on the market at the time the hotel was purchasing its light bulbs.

Whatever the reason, this blue light turned me blue. I only realised it when, skyping my wife, I noticed with astonishment that in the small icon which held my image I was a lovely blue hue. Basically, I looked like this fellow:

The very youngest amongst us will immediately tell us that he is a Smurf. They are wrong – well, not quite right. He is a Schtroumpf; Smurf is the Dutch translation, adopted later by the English-speaking world.

Aah, the Schtroumpfs …they are my youth! This fellow may look young, but actually I am just a few years older than him. I burst onto the scene in 1954, the Schtroumpfs burst onto the cartoon scene in 1957, invented by the Belgian cartoonist Peyo.

But here I have to clarify something. My real love was not the Schtroumpfs. It was Johan and Pirlouit, invented some years earlier by Peyo. Johan came first, hustling into the lives of little fellows like me in 1952, before I was even a gleam in my parent’s eyes, in the story Le Châtiment de Basenhau, The Punishment of Basenhau. This was the cover of the album (Johan is the young fellow dressed in ragged brown).

The details of the story are irrelevant. The important point is that Johan lived in the Middle Ages and that he was a dashing young fellow. After Le Châtiment de Basenhau came Le Maître de Roucybeuf, The Master of Roucybeuf, in 1953

and then in 1954, when my mother was heavily pregnant with me, came Le Lutin du Bois aux Roches, The Imp of Rocks’ Wood, in which Peyo introduced us to Pirlouit, who was to become Johan’s bosom buddy.

Pirlouit is the little blond-haired fellow holding the very large hammer. While Johan was the serious, Boy Scout type, straight as an arrow, Pirlouit was the joker, a hilarious guy who was always doing silly things. But when push came to shove, he was there by Johan’s side, as they fought off the assorted Medieval baddies they had to deal with. From now on, the two were to be inseparable.

Their stories of derring-do, wielding sword, shield, bow, and other assorted medieval weaponry, galloping through dark, forbidding forests – Johan on a horse, Pirlouit on a goat (he was a little person, remember), dealing with sorcerers and their potions, … these were so thrilling to that young me – I was, what? ten-eleven years old when I discovered these albums, when Peyo was already famous throughout the length and breadth of France. I whiled away many a wonderful summer afternoon at my cousins’ house, tearing my way through the collection:

La Pierre de Lune, The Moonstone

Le Serment des Vikings, The Oath of the Vikings

La Source des Dieux, The Spring of the Gods

La Fleche Noire, The Black Arrow

Le Sire de Montrésor, The Lord of Montresor

to arrive at La Flûte à Six Schtroumpfs, The Flute with Six Schtroumpfs

This is where the Schtroumpfs first made their entry onto the world stage. And this is where I start to cry.

Understand me, the Schtroumpfs were nice enough, they added a fun element to the story. But in my view they were minor characters. It was Johan and Pirlouit who were firmly centre stage.

Alas! I was in a minority. The junior readers of Spirou magazine – the stories originally came out in serialized format – wrote letters to the magazine enthusing about the little Schtroumpfs. The editors of the magazine, and Peyo himself, saw the commercial possibilities. And so Peyo took the first steps down the slippery slope. He started with minor albums of Schtroumpf stories. He graduated to major albums. He got involved in animated films. First, in Belgium. Then in the US. Then the breakfast cereal companies came knocking on the door: they wanted Schtroumpf statuettes in the Cornflake packages.

And after that the advertising firms came knocking at the door, asking to use the Schtroumpfs in various advertising campaigns. As this photo shows, the demand from advertizers continues unabated.

Peyo always said yes. And John and Pirlouit disappeared; he was too busy with the Schtroumpfs. Peyo managed one more great album, La Guerre des 7 Fontaines, the War of the 7 Fountains.

To me, it was his best, a wonderful story of Fall and Redemption. After that, he managed only a few more albums, pale copies of what had come before. The Schtroumpfs had eaten up his life. He had his first heart attack when he was 41, his last when he was 64.

And I am left with the memories of my youth, those golden afternoons in the France of the early ’60s, with medieval jousts and battles echoing faintly across the fields.

______________________

DREAM JOURNEY: PART IV

Bangkok, 22 May 2015

Normally, we would be rather groggy as we drive our MG off the ferry in Bari at 8 am in the morning, coming in from Dürres and the previous post. I certainly would be; I never sleep well on ships. But this is a dream, so I decree that we are bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as we roar off the ferry. Our goal is Otranto, very near the end of Italy’s high heel. We head down the old Via Traiana, now more boringly called the Strada Statale 16, as far as Brindisi. There we take the SS 613, which follows the trace of a previous local Roman road that was too modest to have a name. We pass through Lecce, where we pause. Lecce is known for its plentiful baroque buildings constructed in the 1600s, all using a beautiful local white stone, so I throw in a picture of a square there as a visual memorial to this city.

We continue on to Otranto, and drive straight up to the Cathedral. For this is the objective of our visit to Otranto – or rather the floor of the church is. When visitors enter the church, they are greeted by this magnificent floor.

It is the largest floor mosaic in Europe. It brings me back to that other floor mosaic which we visited in the first leg of our trip in Aquileia, although eight centuries separate them. Some clever fellow took this photo from the ceiling, showing more or less the full extent of the mosaic.

The subject of the mosaic is a Tree of Life, and you can indeed see the trunk of the tree working its way up the nave. Strangely enough, the narrative of this tree flows from the top down, and so near the high altar we have various scenes from the story of Adam and Eve, of which I throw in one photo.

Honestly speaking, the story is difficult to read, so I shall just insert a couple of photos of other parts of the floor. This is King Arthur

and this, Satan

while this is said to be a self-portrait of the floor’s designer, a monk by the name of Pantaleone who hailed from the monastery of San Nicola di Casole, a little to the south of Otranto.

The mosaic was laid down in the 12^th Century when this part of Italy was Norman, along with Sicily. In fact, the design of the floor rather reminds me of that other great masterpiece of Norman art, the Bayeux tapestry. I include here one photo of that tapestry, the famous scene where Harold Godwinson is killed by a Norman arrow through his eye.

Next stop: Palermo in Sicily. We’ll get there by cutting across Italy’s heel to Taranto and then along the instep and sole of the Italian boot all the way to Reggio Calabria, where we’ll catch the ferry over to Sicily. I take the back roads to get to Taranto, because I want to drive through the small town of Copertino. As far as I know, this town is known for nothing special except a large castle and a saint. But to us, it has a great importance: my wife’s maternal grandfather came from Copertino and so it is the source of one-eighth of my children’s DNA. He emigrated to Milan in the early 1900’s, part of the massive migrations out of the south of Italy at the turn of the 20^th Century. In typical migratory fashion, his departure eventually brought all his brothers and sisters up north. Family lore has it that his father ruined the family by taking the new Italian State to court over the expropriation of some of his land. He took the case all the way to the Court of Cassation, where he eventually lost the case, by which time he had also burned through all his money. Even though this is a very modest place with nothing special to write home about, I feel I must throw in a photo to commemorate it.

Onwards to Taranto, although in truth as we approach the city we turn our heads away and drive on. Taranto has been devastated by the plans of successive Italian government in the post-war period to develop the south of Italy through the implantation of heavy industry (I’ve already mentioned this in another post on Sicily). What were then the biggest steel works in Europe were plonked down here in the 1960s, and other heavy industry followed. By the 1980s, when my wife and I went to Taranto for the first time, the investment was in trouble. But the government couldn’t let it go down the tubes, it was politically too important. So money – half of it wasted through corruption and graft – was poured in to prop everything up. It’s stayed propped up – just – but in the meantime the industrial complex has poisoned half the population. Talk about sustainable development …

We are now driving through what was once Magna Graecia, Greater Greece, that string of Greek colonies which dotted the underside of the Italian boot as well as the coasts of Sicily (and even the shin and calf of that shapely Italian boot). The glittering stone in this string of cities was undoubtedly Syracuse in Sicily, where Archimedes – he of the original eureka moment – was born and was killed. But all the cities along here, from Taranto in the East to Selinunte in the West, were once flourishing and prosperous city-states. One of them, Sybaris, even became a byword for self-indulgent opulence – it was said of one of its citizens that he slept on a bed of rose petals, and if even one of them was folded over he could not sleep. The town’s name has entered the English language, a sybarite being a voluptuary or a sensualist. Now, Sybaris lies under four meters of mud. The only claim to fame of the surviving Calabrian towns is that they are infested by the ‘Ndrangheta, Calabria’s answer to Sicily’s mafia. It is said that John Paul Getty III, kidnapped in Rome back in 1973, was kept hidden in these parts. He was returned after his family forked over a ransom of $3 million – paid a good deal reluctantly (his grandfather is reported to have said, “I have 14 grandchildren. If I pay one penny now, I’ll have 14 kidnapped grandchildren”) and only after one of his ears had been cut off and sent to a newspaper. It is whispered that many a new house around here was built with Getty money.

We stop for a moment in Crotone, on the ball of Italy’s foot, not because it’s any less dreary than the other towns we’ve passed through, but because something momentous happened here: Pythagoras set up his first school and came up with all those clever mathematics, among which was his theorem which I, like every child of 11 or so, learned in geometry class: “a² + b² = c²“, or in plain English, “in a right triangle, the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the square of the other two sides”. At least, that’s what I was told by proud Crotonesi when I was here 20 years ago to do an environmental audit. Alas! It was not so. Pythagoras did indeed come to Crotone, but all he did was to set up some sort of mystical, esoteric sect which dabbled in the quasi-magic of whole numbers. It’s very unlikely that he personally came up with any of the mathematical cleverness attributed to him; his disciples did, but later. I think this painting, by a 19th Century Russian painter, captures nicely the strongly mystical (and to my way of thinking, rather weird) overtones of the initial Pythagorean movement.

What Pythagoras and his sect did do in Crotone was to eventually take over the city’s government, and it was during his time in office that Crotone destroyed Sybaris. Several other cities in the area also espoused Pythagorean forms of government, but after a while there was a backlash. Back in Crotone Pythagoras was chased out, to end his days in nearby Metapontum, another city now lying under meters of mud. But Pythagorean schools continued, although they restricted themselves to maths and “natural philosophy” and left politics to others. Probably better that way …

I take one last look at the industrial plant I audited all those years ago – another industrial works plonked down here, and another one that has closed, leaving nothing but bitterness in its wake.

It’s time to move on.

When we reach Reggio Calabria, although my wife is reluctant I insist: we must go to the Museum of Magna Graecia to see the two Bronzes of Riace. Neither of us have ever seen them, and it would be a pity not to take advantage of our passing through Reggio to have a peek. I know the objective of our trip is early Christian mosaics, but other wonders along the way should not be ignored. No sooner said than done! With a click of the mouse, I have us parked in front of the museum and magically transported past the queues of people waiting to enter the climate-controlled, earthquake-proofed room where they stand.

What magnificence! And what we see today are stripped down versions of the original. Each would have been coiffed with a Corinthian-style helmet, would have carried a shield on that raised left arm, and would have held a lance in the other. The latest theories hypothesize that they represent two of the Seven Heroes who set off from Argos to fight against Eteocles, king of Thebes and son of Oedipus (he of the complex), and died at the city’s seven gates. One expert suggests that they were originally part of a group of seven statues which stood in the Agora of the city of Argos. How they ended up on the sea bed off the coast of Calabria is anyone’s guess. My guess, for what it’s worth, is that during Roman times Argos was hard up, and rich Romans, avid for Greek art, came along and offered to buy the statues. Why not … In later centuries hard-up Italians sold their Renaissance treasures to rich Englishmen, avid for Italian art, and later still these Englishmen, hard up in their turn, sold these same treasures to rich Americans. In any event, they were being shipped to Rome, but when the ship was off the coast of Calabria a violent storm blew up, and the captain, rather than losing his ship and his life, tossed the heavy stuff overboard.

Time to catch the ferry over to Sicily, home to some of the most beautiful Byzantine-style mosaics still extant, created when the Normans controlled Sicily. The web helpfully informs us that there is a ferry over to Messina every hour or so. In this dream trip, we will not have any difficulty in catching the ferry, unlike real life 30 years ago when my wife and I decided to take her mother to spend Christmas and the New Year in Sicily. We arrived in Reggio Calabria on the evening of 23 December, along with a horde of Sicilian migrant workers returning home from Northern Europe for the holidays. We discovered to our horror that the ferry boat crews had just decided to strike for more pay. Those bastards had chosen this particular time to strike because they knew it put the owners under huge pressure to settle. Settle they did, but not before we had spent a miserable night in the ferry car park. When those ferry boat crews arrive, as they assuredly will one day, before the Pearly Gates, I hope they will be kicked off down to Hell, to roast in its fires for Eternity (anyone curious to know what that might look like can refer back to the posting with which I started this dream journey and study the photo I inserted there from the back wall of the church on the island of Torcello).

Once on the other side, we set off for Palermo. I firmly decide that we will take the normal roads to get there. In this dream we’re in no hurry, and I prefer by far the “reeling roads”, the “rolling roads”, that “ramble round the shire”, as G.K. Chesterton wrote in his most famous poem “The Rolling English Road”. Yes, I prefer by far his “merry roads” and his “mazy roads” to the smooth monotony of sterile highways. We pass Milazzo, where you can catch the boat to the Aeolian Islands – a trip for another day – and where I did yet another environmental audit 20 years ago for another struggling industrial complex, which mercifully has not closed – yet. We hum along until we arrive at the small town of Cefalù, nestling under the mighty headland which gives it its (Greek) name. We head, yet again, for the Cathedral, constructed by the Normans in the first half of the 1100s. There, some beautiful mosaics still cling to the apse and the last bay of the choir.

The Pantocrator gracing the apse is “for many the greatest portrait of Christ in all Christian art”, in the words of John Julius Norwich (I am quoting from his history of Sicily).

The style is clearly mature Byzantine, a style we’ve already seen in Istanbul as well as in the lagoons of Venice, and would have seen in Daphni and Saint Luke in Greece had we made the detour from Thessaloniki. The Normans got Byzantine artists, or artists trained in Byzantine workshops, to make the mosaics.

It’s time to go on to Palermo, which is our final destination on this leg of the journey. We hug the coast, coming into the city on its seaward side. Once we reach the port, we swing up Via Vittorio Emanuele (there’s one of these in every village, town, and city in Italy, along with a Via Garibaldi), which is the main thoroughfare through the city’s old center. When we get near the Martorana church, we miraculously find – free! – parking (this is a dream, after all) for our little MG and head over to the church.

The church has been much modified over the centuries, not least of which by a brutal Baroque make-over in the front part of the nave in the 17^th Century. But once we get past these horrors and enter the upper nave, we are greeted by some lovely mosaics: Christ in majesty in the dome of the church

the annunciation

the nativity

the dormition of the Virgin Mary

As we leave, I want particularly to see these two mosaics. In this first one, we have the greatest of all the Norman kings of Sicily, Roger II, having himself cheekily crowned by Christ himself, as if he were a Byzantine emperor

It was he who first brought this Byzantine art form to Sicily.

And here we have the original donor of the church, George of Antioch, Roger II’s admiral, humbly offering his church to the Virgin Mary (much like we saw in Cariye Kamii in Istanbul)

A final note about this church: it belongs to the Italian-Albanian community in Sicily, the remnants of the Albanians who fled to Italy in the 15^th and later Centuries as the Ottomans methodically went about conquering their home country. So it is not just geographical proximity which led the modern Albanians back in late 1990s to escape by their thousands to Italy as Albania imploded after the collapse of Communism (with many of these new arrivals squatting in and around Otranto, as it so happens).

We go back to the car and continue up Via Vittorio Emanuele to the Palazzo dei Normanni, the Palace of the Normans, which actually was originally built by the Arabs. This rather severe building houses the Cappella Palatina, which was built by Roger II as the King’s private chapel. It houses some magnificent 12^th Century mosaics.

This last one shows also the ceiling, a wonderful piece of Arab carpentry work, an example of which we last saw in the Alhambra palace in Granada.

Roger II understood that in this island with large Greek and Arab populations, he had to be open to their cultures if he was going to maintain the peace. Indeed, he welcomed this mixing of cultures. It is part of Sicily’s tragedy that later rulers did not continue this practice of toleration and openness.

We are not finished yet! We vault into the car (after constant badgering by our children we’ve taken to doing a lot of exercise recently, so I can imagine ourselves vaulting jauntily over the doors and dropping into our seats) and we keep on going up Via Vittorio Emanuele, which has now morphed into Via Calatafimi. We go on and on until we hit the hills behind Palermo, at which point we start climbing and finally find ourselves in Monreale, once a village on the outskirts of Palermo but now a suburb. We head – of course – for the cathedral and casually park the car in front of the cathedral. We walk into this late 12^th Century church and I suddenly feel that I am back in the church of Sant’Apollinare in Ravenna, where we started our dream journey.

Biblical scenes on fields of gold unfurl along upper tiers of the nave

to reach the theological high point in the apse, with its assembled saints and angels presided over by a rather severe Pantocrator.

But how the styles have changed in the intervening six centuries! Then, it was still Roman art, although of a rough-and-ready sort. Now, it is early medieval art in all its stiff, hieratic splendour.

After all that gold, we go up on the roof of the church and drink in the astringent blue of the sky, which is rather like eating a lemon sorbet after a heavy main course so as to cleanse the mouth of all that richness. We gaze out across Palermo and over the “wine-dark” Tyrrhenian Sea beyond (to borrow Homer’s rather strange description of the sea’s colour).

Tonight, we will catch the ferry and cross that sea to Naples – another Greek colony long, long ago – and from there drive up to Rome, our last stop on this exhaustive, and mentally exhausting, tour of early Christian mosaics.

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DREAM JOURNEY: PART III

Bangkok, 6 May 2015

May has arrived, the most beautiful month in the Mediterranean. It’s time for my wife and I to come out of our long, long hibernation in Istanbul and continue on our dream journey, the next leg of which will be Greece.

It’s warm enough now for us to travel by open-topped car again, so with a click of my mouse I materialize the little MG which carried us so long ago from Venice to Aquileia.

I have it pop up in front of the Hagia Sophia (probably not possible in real life but hey, this is a dream). We hop in and drive off. We will be following the trace of the Via Egnatia, the Roman road which once linked Constantinople to Dyrrachium (now Durrës in Albania) on the Adriatic coast, from whence a short ship ride could bring Roman legions and you to Bari in Italy. As always where map reading is required, my wife is driving. I have her take Divanyolu Avenue, which overlies the trace of the Mese, the main Roman street of Constantinople. Like the Mese, the Divanyolu Avenue starts just in front of Hagia Sophia. When we reach Murat Pasha Mosque, at what was once Constantinople’s Forum of the Ox, and where the Mese angled south-west, I have my wife turn left down Cerrapasha Avenue (never mind that the web informs me that the street is one way against us: this is a dream). The traffic is heavy I would imagine, we are inching along. At Koca Mustafa Pasha Mosque, things get complicated. The modern street plan no longer follows the old streets. Looking at the city map on the web, I muse on what to do next. The cars are beeping behind us, my wife is asking urgently, “which way?” I decide: go left, keep going until you somehow manage to reach Imrahor Ilyas Bey Avenue, turn right and keep going until you come to the old Theodosian city walls, which protected the city until its fall to the Ottomans. There, pass through a break in the walls, leaving to our left the remains of the Golden Gate, through which the Via Egnatia once entered the city.

We are now at the official starting point of the Via Egnatia. But I must say everything is very confused. The recent huge, jumbled expansion of the city has completely effaced any traces of the ancient road. What the hell, I know where I want to go, so I tell my wife to hang a left and head down to John Kennedy Avenue, which runs along the Sea of Marmara. After a while we pick up the trace of the Via Egnatia, and so we bowl along to Tegirdağ, where we regretfully leave the sea’s edge and cut across to Ipsala at the border with Greece (a border which has only existed a hundred years or so and whose creation left much bitterness behind). Now in Greece, we go on through Komotini and Kavala (close to which, at the Battle of Philippi, in 42 BC, Mark Antony and Octavian beat the assassins of Julius Caesar, Brutus and Longinus, thus starting the process which destroyed the Roman Republic and put in its place the Roman Empire). Finally, we arrive at our destination, Thessaloniki.

Thessaloniki … Thessalonica to the Roman and Byzantine elites, just plain old Salonika to the locals, Selânik to the Ottomans. Its nascent Christian community the recipient in the first decades of the Christian era of two of St. Paul’s most famous Epistles, the First and Second Epistles to the Thessalonians. Birthplace in the 9^th Century of Saints Cyril and Methodius, who converted Eastern Europe to Orthodox Christianity, but also in the 19^th Century of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founding father of modern Turkey.

Like Ravenna and Aquileia where I started this dream journey, Thessaloniki has suffered from the ravages of man and nature ever since it was founded by King Cassander of Macedon in 315 BC. Its history under the Romans and early Byzantines was relatively peaceful, apart from some raiding by Thracian tribes in the 50s BC, and a terrible incident in 390 AD, when some 10,000 of its citizens were massacred in the hippodrome as a punishment for starting a revolt. Its troubles really started when the Roman Empire weakened and the Barbarian tribes from the north began their incursions. Like Aquileia, it suffered from repeated attacks in the 7^th Century by Barbarian tribes, Slavs in this case, but unlike Aquileia it managed to hold them off. As if the Slavs were not enough, the city suffered a catastrophic earthquake in 620, which did much damage. There followed a few centuries of respite, but after the Byzantines lost control of the Aegean Sea, Saracens seized the city in 904. After a ten day sack they left, but not before freeing thousands of Muslim prisoners while enslaving thousands of Christians and carrying off huge amounts of booty. In 1185, at another moment of Byzantine weakness, it was the turn of the Normans of Sicily to attack and take the city. Their rule, though short, led to considerable destruction. After Constantinople was captured by the Fourth Crusade in 1204, the city became the centre of one of the feudal fiefs which the Crusaders created. It was short-lived. The city and its territory were seized in 1224 by the Greek Despot of Epirus (who in turn was subjugated by the Tsar of Bulgaria). In 1246, a reinvigorated Byzantine Empire recovered the city. After a century and a half, the Byzantines lost it again, this time to the new regional power, the Ottomans. The Ottomans’ tenure was initially short-lived. They were forced to hand the city back to the Byzantines after their disastrous defeat by Tamerlane the Lame in 1402 at the gates of Ankara. But too weak by now to hold it, the Byzantines sold the city to Venice in 1423. Seven years later, in 1430, the Ottomans definitively recaptured the city.

There followed nearly five centuries of relative tranquility, during which the city became one of the great emporia of the Mediterranean and a melting pot of different ethnicities: Greeks of course, but also Turks, as well as Jews – the Ottomans welcomed the Sephardic Jews fleeing from Spain and Portugal – and later Bulgarians. Then, as Ottoman power went into terminal decline, irredentist feelings in Greece and Bulgaria grew. Both felt the city and its surrounding territory was theirs. After various acts of provocation and terrorism, matters came to a head in the two Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913. For a while, things hung in the balance but the city finally went to Greece. In 1917, during the First World War, a huge fire, accidentally started in a kitchen, destroyed almost the entire city. This led to an exodus of the city’s Jewish population, many of whom lost everything in the conflagration. They were soon followed by the Moslem, Turkish population as a result of the massive exchange of populations which followed the end of the Greco-Turkish War in 1922. In their place came Greeks expelled from Asia Minor, making the city once again a predominantly Greek city. During the Second World War, the Germans occupied it. As a result, its port facilities were heavily if haphazardly bombed by the Allies. For their part, the SS rounded up what was left of the city’s ancient Jewish population and shipped them all off to the gas chambers. After two millennia of presence (Jews had chased St. Paul out of the city after he had preached there), the Jews effectively vanished from Thessaloniki. The city had not finished to suffer. In 1978, it was hit by a powerful earthquake, which did considerable damage to its structures, both old and new.

With this history, it’s little short of a miracle if any of the city’s early Christian mosaics are left at all. I direct my wife to enter the city along the trace of the Via Egnatia, which leads us straight to the Arch of Galerius and the Rotunda of St. George. Google Maps doesn’t show any parking lots around there, but this is a dream, so we easily find a little parking spot in one of the side streets for our MG. We enter the Rotunda, and walk through to the main cupola. This is what greets us: a badly damaged band of mosaics in its upper registry.

Sad. But what can you expect, these mosaics were installed 1700 years old, in the late 300s AD. Funnily enough, the little that there is left of them may have been saved by the church becoming a mosque. The Turks just whitewashed over mosaics and frescoes, after pilfering whatever gold tesserae there still were.

But let’s get up close – which we can, since this is a dream, we can just float up there. Look at the faces!

Here, we still have Roman art, but with Christian characteristics.

The internet warns me that traffic is terrible in Thessaloniki, so I decide that we will walk to the other churches. On strictly chronological grounds, I further decide that the next church we will visit is St. David’s, built in the late 4^th Century. I open Google Maps’ Street View and find that we are walking through a modern, really quite pleasant city, the product of the Great Fire of 1917 and modern planning for the city’s reconstruction. Anyway, we plunge into St. David’s. It has one remarkable mosaic left, tucked away in a lunette in a corner, depicting the vision of Ezekiel

After admiring it for a while, we head on to St. Demetrius, which celebrates the city’s patron saint. The church has just a few, rather wonderful mosaic panels left, probably installed in the late 600s, early 700s, just after the Slavs had given up trying to sack the city.

The first is still Roman art, while the other two are beginning to look Byzantine.

Next stop: Hagia Sophia, Thessaloniki’s not Istanbul’s (although it seems that the design of the Thessalonian version was based on its Constantinopolitan namesake). On the way, we pop into the early 5^th Century Church of Acheiropoietos, but there are really only shreds of mosaics left. Discouraged, we go on. And so we come to Hagia Sophia, built in the 8^th Century, and whose glory is the late 8^th Century mosaic in the cupola.

As we can in dreams, my wife and I drift up to see the Christ up close.

And we see a Christ who is becoming ever more Byzantine in his look and posture. The glories of Rome seem to be becoming a distant memory. This is even more apparent in this Virgin Mary, which reminds me of that other Virgin Mary we visited on the island of Torcello in the lagoons of Venice on the first leg of this dream trip.

At this point, I have to make a decision. My original idea for this dream trip was for my wife and I to go south and visit the walled monastery of St. Luke in Boeotia and further south still to the convent of Daphni, close to Athens. They have lovely, if late-style, mosaics, this one an example from St. Luke’s, a rendering of the Pentecost

and this one from Daphni, of Christos Pantocrator, Christ the All-Powerful

I also wanted to take this road to follow a little in the footsteps, or rather the tyre marks, of my father. In 1937, when still a university student, he spent the Easter holidays driving his Ford, in company of a cousin, all the way from Cambridge to Athens and on to Sparta, and then back. To get there, he drove through the old lands of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, across Bulgaria, and down to Thessaloniki. I feel his young shadow passing by us and want to follow it a little while. But it’s too much of a detour, and I want to get to Italy before it gets too hot. So I choose. We will continue along the trace of the Via Egnatia, to the Adriatic, and pick up the ferry to Bari.

No sooner said than done. We are whisked over to the car and are now heading out of the Thessaloniki. Studying Google maps in conjunction with Omnes Viae (“The Roman Route Planner”, which I had occasion to use in the first leg of this dream journey), I get my wife to make for Edessa, which in ancient times guarded the entrance of the Via Egnatia to the Pindus mountains but is now known more picturesquely as the “city of waters”. On the web, I watch people cavort in the city’s waters (highly mineralized by the look of it)

before continuing on. We skirt the pretty lakes of Vegoritida and Petron

and veer northwards. We cross the border into Macedonia (sorry, “the Former Yugolsav Republic of Macedonia”; political tempers run high in this region), a border which only came into existence in 1918, and we arrive at the city once called Heraclea Lyncestis but now known more prosaically as Bitola. It was an important way station on the Via Egnatia, so I take a pause and look at a panoramic view

before moving on. We’re heading west now, towards the Adriatic Sea. We skirt the beautiful Lake Ohrid

passing through the city of Ohrid, once Lychnidos, another important stop on the Via Egnatia. I’m tempted to visit the 5^th Century Polyconch Basilica to see the remains of its mosaic floor, but everything I read suggests that the remains are too fragmentary. We take to the road again and soon find ourselves crossing yet another border that only came into existence in 1918, this one into Albania.

We pass over gloriously wild mountains

before dropping into the narrow valley of the Shkumbin River, known to the Romans as the Flumen Genusus.

We follow the river as it hurries down to the sea, but shortly before getting there we turn sharp right and head for the port of Durrës. In the summer, the place is submerged in beach-goers

but luckily there aren’t so many people yet. We drive to the ferry port. The web helpfully informs me that there is a ferry leaving tonight at 10 pm, which gets into Bari at 8 am tomorrow morning. Ferrying my wife, me, and our little MG over to Italy will cost us the princely sum of £131.72 (for some reason, the site I visited quotes the prices in pounds sterling). We have time for a bite to eat before we leave. But what do you eat in Albania?

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MG: http://www.mgownersclub.co.uk/sites/default/files/member-images/1105377623_27223.jpg (in http://www.mgownersclub.co.uk/member-images/mg-t-series/1954-tf-0)
Golden gate Istanbul: http://www.livius.org/a/turkey/istanbul/walls/istanbul_wall_theodosius_s_of_golden_gate.JPG (in http://www.livius.org/cn-cs/constantinople/constantinople_land_walls.html)
St. George Rotunda-1: http://cdn1.vtourist.com/4/5034576-St_Georges_Rotunda_Thessaloniki.jpg
St. George Rotunda-2: http://www.sacred-destinations.com/greece/thessaloniki-rotunda/photos/mosaic-sts-onesiphoros-and-porphyrios-c5-wc-pd)
St. George Rotunda-3: http://dic.academic.ru/pictures/wiki/files/84/ThessHagGeorgMosCosDamien.jpg
St. George Rotunda-4-Saint Cosmas: http://www.ics.forth.gr/isl/fayum/images/image_59.jpg
St. George Rotunda-5-Saint Therinos: http://www.ics.forth.gr/isl/fayum/images/image_60.jpg
St. George Rotunda-6-Saint Philip Bishop: http://www.ics.forth.gr/isl/fayum/images/image_57.jpg
St David: https://yameee.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/hd1.jpg (in https://yameee.wordpress.com/2014/09/20/сравнительный-анализ-мозаик-церквей/
St Demetrios-1-dedicating children to Demetrios: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-EYa9zdAwg9w/Ty_EdArv9MI/AAAAAAAAAJM/Bgpaw1ttHAU/s1600/03.jpg
St. Demetrios-2-Demetrios and children: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-i536vAoKGRc/Ty_FkFneuOI/AAAAAAAAAJs/I68I0jWcfxU/s1600/07.jpg
St. Demetrios-3-Demetrios and donor: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-0C51ycpEZKQ/Ty_FNdSgPEI/AAAAAAAAAJk/rl66Pq0HZlA/s1600/06.jpg
Hagia Sophia-1: http://www.inthessaloniki.com/images/Churches/AgiasSofias/Inthessaloniki_Hagia_Sofia_C.jpg (in http://www.inthessaloniki.com/en/agia-sofia)
Hagia Sophia-2-cupola-christ detail: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-TgUH5cPxxv0/T3i6LzYE-TI/AAAAAAAABj8/5B_CxlT_GcM/s1600/%CE%91%CE%93%CE%99%CE%91+%CE%A3%CE%9F%CE%A6%CE%99%CE%91+%CE%A8%CE%99%CE%A6%CE%97%CE%94.8.JPG
Hagia Sophia-3-catino-Virgin: http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5104/5737609091_a1ff106e1b_z.jpg
Convent of Daphni: Cupola-2-detail: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3131/2618506302_de85e9decf.jpg
St. Luke-cupola-pentecost: http://users.sch.gr/geioanni/sel-ekpaideusi/sxolikes_ergasies/TRITH-GYMNASIOY-THRHSKEYTIKA/EIKONES_ENOTHTA_1/PENTHKOSTH_8.jpg
Edessa: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-R7o-WczsSEk/UT85DRLhV2I/AAAAAAAAUPs/X5W2oHAFcLs/s1600/lydialith.jpg (in http://paspartounews.blogspot.com/2013/03/blog-post_8742.html)
Lake Vegoritida: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Vegoritida#/media/File:Ostrovskoto_ezero.JPG (in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Vegoritida)
Bitola: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4e/BitolaPanorama.jpg/950px-BitolaPanorama.jpg (in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitola)
Lake Ohrid: http://www.rego-bis.pl/bin/images/c77bd7ecc_d95f83717734355.jpeg (in http://www.rego-bis.pl/hotel,hotelcaliforniaresortpobytobjazd2w1,ALBCALR.html?ofrid=0e04c3c867866ee4b5a8f79f6b760f260257028d331141b288f4e709ba8a3720)
Librazhd: http://mw2.google.com/mw-panoramio/photos/medium/40520594.jpg (in http://www.panoramio.com/user/4935966/tags/Shebenik%20National%20Park)
Shkumbin river: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shkumbin#/media/File:Shkumbin.jpg (in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shkumbin)
Durrës beach: http://www.shkendijatravel.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/durres_albania_plaze.jpeg (in http://www.shkendijatravel.com/durres-port/)