Skip to main content

Posts

Water bed

Travel by air and you’ll see airports, travel by land and you’ll see landscape, travel by sea and you can expect to get a good night’s sleep. For this reason, I take the overnight ferry to Hook of Holland for a weekend in Den Haag. Stena line ferries are not just for cars, they take foot passengers too. I use a rail-and-sail deal connecting Liverpool St station to port in Harwich, where judging by the décor in the waiting area it is still 1982. Not so on the Ferry where a pristine world of swirly carpets and brass handrails spreads over several floors. It’s surprisingly peaceful up high above the waves and the views are wonderful from the restaurant. The people-watching is also rich: travellers I spot fall into two broad camps: hauliers glad of a few hours’ rest and a pint at the bar, and swarms of beige-clad early retirees queuing expectantly with trays at the buffet counter. On the fringes a few backpackers and French families can be spotted. I’m the anomaly. The Stena Britannica an
Post a Comment
Read more
Recent posts

Viennese whirl

It's 75 years since The Third Man was shot in Vienna and Orson Welles looked down over the city from the original Ferris wheel and delivered his famous observation about little black dots of people below being insignificant. Now, three quarters of a century later I gaze up at that same wheel in awe as my friend Daniel looks on blankly, “It’s for tourists” he mutters, but I don't care. I want to ride Vienna’s iconic fairground attraction. That film noire classic remains as vivid to me as when I first saw it while playing truant from school. Something about the harsh devastation of post-war Vienna made an indelible mark on my young Betamax-fuelled imagination leading, decades later, to this pilgrimage of a city break. The Austrian capital, with its carefully preserved palaces and much lauded artistic legacy is a quite different place today. Forget post-war; nowadays Vienna is post-gentrification, post-yuppie and definitely post-Lederhosen. Underneath that wheel, for instance, is
Post a Comment
Read more

Alma, mater and pater

  Jeffrey Talbot was sitting in the back of his Father's VW Beetle as it trundled noisily down a long and unmemorable A-road, one which would, he hoped, eventually lead to the much-discussed Devonshire holiday. The atmosphere in the car was tense following and incident with a map that had caused an argument between his parents. His father was driving now, so the radio was under his control and therefore tuned to football results which were momentarily disrupted each time they drove under a bridge, causing him to tut and slap the steering wheel as he missed the score of a particularly important team. In stark contrast his mother was very obviously not listening to the radio, rather she had turned slightly towards her passenger window and was smoking in a slightly theatrical manner. Every few moments she aimed a jet of smoke at the gap between the top of the glass on the door from where it would hit the incoming breeze and blow backwards in Jeffrey’s direction. Now, and again, she wo
Post a Comment
Read more

Josh & Miguel

More than one person had described Josh as aggressively handsome in the 10 or so years since he left university, and instinctively the people who heard that description knew what was meant by it. A tall blonde guy from the north of England, he had two basic outfits: jeans and a cable knit jumper for cold days, and sportswear for the entire rest of the year. All his trainers were white and filthy. His body was indeed as muscular and impressive as its description suggested but it was a trained muscularity, awkward and inelegant - earned through a fastidious devotion to working out and eating chicken McNuggets afterwards. He frowned while biting his nails. Furthermore, Josh, like his name, was famously monosyllabic - whether he was genuinely tongue tied or just uninterested in conversation was never quite clear, but the combination of moody and untalkative had made him popular among a particular subsection of the older gay community, the sort who preferred to do all the talking themselves
Post a Comment
Read more

Welcome wanderer

I was the sort of child that got upset because no one ate the Shreddies. We ignored them until they went stale and had to be thrown out, clearly defeated by the golden appeal of Cornflakes. As an adult I am still visited by such pointless episodes of melancholia, triggered by small, seemingly innocuous events. Proust too, could be struck by similar attacks; but I’m not claiming a special similarity with his talent. Yesterday I asked my partner to carry a bag out to the rubbish bins. There are quite a lot of bags being carried out from my flat to the rubbish bins at the moment as I am in the middle of a major clear out, the sort which only takes place in anticipation of moving house or a significant birthday. Alongside a slow secretion of paperbacks into my local charity shop and old tax returns to my shredder, I am also getting strict about the sorts of objects that E F Benson would have called bibilos. So thhat particular rubbish bag contained an assortment of oddities that would not
Post a Comment
Read more