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Bletchley and a perspective on drinking from the same fountain

On the 28th April 1944, the code breakers at Bletchley Park deciphered possibly one of the most surprising stories of the Second World War. It was an intercept of a German signal stating that General Kreipe, commander of the Nazi Garrison in Crete, had been kidnapped.

By Nicholas Mellor

The code breaking huts worked in pairs. The tapes would come in from Hut 6, where Colossus churned away breaking the code. This resulted in a series of five letter groupings of words that would go to Hut 3 from Hut 6 by a connecting chute. Hut 3 was where there was an attempt to put these decoded messages into context where they could be translated, analysed and dispatched. That was where my mother came into the picture. On a watch there were normally 5 or so academics and intelligence experts responsible for reading them, translating them into English and deciding to whom they would be sent – the War Office, or the Air Ministry for example. It was my mother’s role to see they got to the right person as fast as possible. Sometimes she worked at the teleprinter sending them to London or would be asked to ring up the Cabinet office.

Bletchley Park for all its allure today was a shabby place near a railway junction with poor billeting, no clear picture of what they were actually doing or the impact they were having, and full of rather odd people. It was a very lonely time for my mother who had only just left school and found herself doing her shifts in a hut 3 at Bletchley and then trudging back to her billet next to one of the railway sidings. After the war she became a founding member with friends from SOE, or what is now the Special Forces Club. The staircase of the Club has portraits of its members or those who have been eligible if they had survived the war. The latter have ebony frames. The mix of pale pine and ebony is half in half.

One can only begin to imagine the incredulity of decrypting and then interpreting of such a message in the blizzard of messages being received at Bletchley Park, some only partially intercepted or decoded or translated or half understood. Eighty years ago it would have created a frisson in Bletchley in Buckinghamshire, but for the protagonists whether they were going to escape for Crete with both the General and their lives, were still in the balance.

On that very day the message arrived in Bletchley according to Billy Moss’s diary, PLF and the kidnap team had spent the day at Petrodolakkia with Xylouris and his Andartes (members of the Greek resistance), where they took many photos. Tom Dunbabin sent 3 members of his team from the Amari to the hideout, including Reg Everson and a wireless.

Their plan was to send a message to Cairo so that an evacuation date and beach can be identified, but their radio had broken. PLF sent off various messages, including one to Dick Barnes who has a radio station near Rethymno.

The team were joined by Andantes Grigori Chnarakis, Nikos Komis and Andoni Papaleonidas, who had walked up from the kidnap point. They were meant to bring the General’s driver, Alfred Fenske, but he has been killed on the journey.

PLF records the following incident:

‘A curious moment, dawn, streaming in the cave’s mouth, which framed the white crease of Mount Ida. We were all three lying smoking in silence, when the General, half to himself, slowly said:
“Vides ut alta stet nive candidum Soracte”

The opening line and a bit of one of the few odes of Horace I knew by heart. I was in luck. It was one of the few odes of Horace I knew by heart. I went on reciting where he had broken off:

‘… Nec iam sustineant onus
Silvae laboreantes, geluque
Flumina constiterint acuto’

… The General’s blue eyes swivelled away from the mountain-top to mine … after a long silence, he said:

‘Ach so, Herr Major!”

It was very strange.

‘Ja, Herr General.’ As though for a long moment, the war had ceased to exist. We both had drunk at the same fountains long before; and things were different between us for the rest of our time together.”

Paddy Leigh Fermor recounts this story in his book ‘Abducting a General’.

William Stanley Moss recorded in his own book ‘Ill Met by Moonlight’, this mutual love of the Classics of the General and his captor.

‘Paddy discovered that the General is a fair Greek scholar, and much to the amusement of our Cretan colleagues, the two of them entertained each other by exchanging verses from Sophocles.’

The Horatian scholar, Harry Eyres, might argue that the Odes of Horace have been working their magic for the last two thousand years, encouraging a more humble and human view of the world and extolling the virtues of fellowship.

Was it the sunlight on the frozen peak of Mount Ida that had inspired the General to think of that ode in its literal description of a snow-clad summit or was it about the whole Ode.

‘Vides ut alta stet nive candidum Soracte’ can be translated as ‘See how Soracte stands white with deep snow’

This is Harry’s translation.

Do you see the depth of snowfall,
On Soracte standing bright? This frost
Has stopped the rivers in their tracks;
The trees are bowed with their white, heavy pall.

In here we’re warm. Keep piling logs, Hugh,
On the blazing fire – and let’s uncork
A mellow four-year-old riserva,
Just the Sabine vino, not a fancy cru.

Give up trying to control the weather ; some god
Will calm the raging storm at sea.
The tall fame-cypresses and ancient ash
Won’t always shake and bend and madly nod.

Had the General realised that his best hope of escaping with his life was to set aside the grievances of him and his captors and recognise from now on they would be sharing the same food and drink?

The ode is underpinned by Horace’s Stoicism and Epicureanism. In the ode he is advising his friend Thaliarchus to seize the day (carpe diem) and enjoy the pleasures of the moment rather than worrying about a precarious future, living in the present, enjoying life’s simple pleasures, and remaining unfazed by the uncertainty of tomorrow.

Horace himself had fought against the Triumvirate, had escaped with his life and eventually set aside his own grievances to return to Rome, under the Augustan regime. Horace had sided with the forces of Brutus and Cassius after their assassination of Julius Caesar, but they were defeated by Mark Antony and Octavian (who would later be known as Augustus) at the Battle of Philippi in 42 BCE, he had to set aside his grievances and get on with the very people he had fought against.

General Kreipe might have realised that Horace’s own experience was the best he could hope for and Ode 1.9, the best advice he could have received.

Patrick Leigh Fermor’s ‘fountain’ has often been seen as representative of culture and conviviality, but perhaps the fountain was more specific, and he was thinking of Horace, his insight, his poetry and that Ode in particular.

Patrick Leigh Fermor’s doomed Europe

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Paddy’s passport issued in Munich to replace the one stolen

As Christmas approaches each year, it is a time to remember Paddy’s departure from London on a steamer in 1933. For me those first few weeks offer some of the best stories in A Time of Gifts occurring in that short period into the New Year when he was not only acclimatising to the frozen weather but the new surroundings and culture that he found himself in. Time and war have almost totally changed everything. This timely article is a reminder of Paddy’s genius and affability, and what was lost to us in the war.

By Michael Duggan

First published in The Critic

It is now ninety years since Patrick Leigh Fermor raced down the steps of Irongate Wharf, in the shadow of Tower Bridge, and boarded a steamer bound for the Hook of Holland. There were no other passengers. From Rotterdam — he had decided — he would walk his way across the breadth of Europe to what he persisted in calling Constantinople (or, if not, Byzantium). Later, a couple of hours before dawn, he was on a train from the Hook to the city, the solitary passenger once again. The snow and darkness completed the illusion of slipping into Europe through a secret door.

“Paddy” spent barely an hour in Rotterdam. It occupies barely more than a page of A Time of Gifts, the book which recounts all that happened on the first part of his trek, from Holland right up to the Hungarian border. Nevertheless, two human qualities take centre stage in the Dutch port and remain there for more or less the entirety of the book. The Rotterdam episode also sounds a bass note of sadness about the fate of Europe that must accompany any reading of Fermor.

The first of the human qualities is the kindness of strangers — in this case, the kindness of the owner of a quayside café, a “stout man in clogs”, Fermor’s first host on European soil. As dawn breaks, whilst the landlord polishes his glasses and cups, arranging them “in glittering ranks”, Paddy has the best fried eggs and coffee he has ever eaten. When he is finished and heads for the door, the stout man asks where he is going:

I said “Constantinople.” His brows went up and he signalled to me to wait: then he set out two small glasses and filled them with transparent liquid from a long stone bottle. We clinked them: he emptied his at one gulp and I did the same. With his wishes for godspeed in my ears and an infernal bonfire of Bols and a hand smarting from his valedictory shake, I set off. It was the formal start of my journey.

Again and again over the course of his trek, Fermor, who was only eighteen at the time, encountered this tradition of benevolence to the wandering young. In Cologne, he falls in with Uli and Peter, crewmen on a barge carrying cement to Karlsruhe, who show him a bawdy and hilarious old time, which includes going to a Laurel and Hardy film together. They feed him in their cabin on fried potatoes and cold lumps of pork fat. In Heidelberg, he is taken in by the owners of the Red Ox Inn who wash his clothes and give him a free bed for the night. In Hohenaschau, a slip of paper signed by the Bürgermeister entitles him to supper, a mug of beer, a bed and a morning bowl of coffee, “all on the parish”.

Paddy thanks God that he had put “student” on his passport (even though, at the time, he wasn’t really a student in any formal sense). The word was “an amulet and an Open Sesame. In European tradition, the word suggested a youthful, needy and earnest figure, spurred along the highways ( … ) by a thirst for learning — ( … ) a fit candidate for succour”.

The second quality that shines out of the Rotterdam episode, and out of page after page of A Time of Gifts, is one belonging to Paddy himself. This was his inimitable and expansive form of erudition, encompassing literature, religion, art and architecture, combining humility and panache in perfect, improbable harmony. The first person he sees in Rotterdam is Erasmus, in statue form, with snow piling up on his shoulders; later, in Cologne, he ends up discussing the correct pronunciation of Erasmic Latin with a couple of young Germans in the house of the widow of a Classics professor.

Fermor’s erudition was a constant stimulus to his imagination. Entering the Groote Kirk of Rotterdam in the dim early morning light, his familiarity with Dutch painting allows him to fill the empty church with “those seventeenth-century groups which should have been sitting or strolling there: burghers with pointed corn-coloured beards — and impious spaniels that refused to stay outside — conferring gravely with their wives and their children, still as chessmen, in black broadcloth and identical honeycomb ruffs”. He is at this again, three or four days later, when his legs have taken him as far as Brabant. Here it is the “Hobbema-like avenues of wintry trees” leading to the gates of “seemly manor houses” that set him off, exploring the interiors of these houses in his imagination. Every step of the way, Paddy takes this erudition with him, seeing correspondences, formulating theories, letting his imagination soar, and having a whale of a time inside his head.

It is not possible to talk about Fermor in Rotterdam without talking about what happened to that city a few years later. Paddy noted it himself: this beautiful place was “bombed to fragments” in May 1940 (“I would have lingered, had I known”). Aerial images of the destruction are chilling: one can see the pattern of the streets, but the buildings are all gone. The eye is drawn to the quaysides where the café Fermor visited must have stood. There’s nothing there.

The new Rotterdam built on the rubble of the old is not a pretty sight. In the words of the English travel writer Nick Hunt, who in 2011 set off to replicate Fermor’s “great trudge”, the continuity between the two cities was “absolutely severed”: “The Rotterdam of the Middle Ages had been blasted into the realm of fairy tales, and the new reality of McDonald’s and Lush, Starbucks and Vodafone had rushed to fill the vacuum. The destruction seemed less an act of war than apocalyptic town planning, a Europe-wide sweep of medieval clutter to clear the way for the consumer age.”

The fate of Rotterdam highlights a facet of A Time of Gifts and its successor Between the Woods and the Water (which takes us from Fermor’s arrival in Hungary to the Iron Gate gorge on the Danube, separating the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and Romania). The writing is ebullient, funny, joyful and true both to the youth Patrick Leigh Fermor was and to the man he became — some people found him an insufferable show-off, but most who knew him craved his company — but Paddy knew as he was writing (just as we know as we are reading) that the Rotterdam of then, along with the Europe of then, have gone.

It was, of course, already going when Fermor disembarked at the Hook of Holland: Hitler had been Chancellor for nearly a year. Crossing Germany, Fermor saw Nazis up close more than once. Writing about these encounters, his habitual powers of observation are not warped by any retrospective performative disgust, which must have been tempting to indulge in, so many years after the events described and with no chance of someone turning up to contradict his account. He sees humans in uniforms, being slowly poisoned by those same uniforms (or by the sight of them) and by what they represent, but remaining human even in their descent into dark obsessions and moral squalor. According to Artemis Cooper, Patrick Leigh Fermor’s biographer, Communism never exerted any pull on him, any more than Fascism: both were “ready to destroy everything he loved about European civilization in order to build their aggressively utilitarian superstates”.

On his trek, Fermor was one of the last travellers able to move amongst the remnants of old Europe left behind by the First World War — the customs, the beliefs, the strange dialects, the hidden tribes, the curious institutions — either before they were finally swept from the board (some of them into a basket labelled “heritage”) by the Second World War or by modernity hitting top stride; or before they disappeared behind the Iron Curtain and were rendered extinct.

The great severing of Europe, in time and space, hit Patrick Leigh Fermor personally. In 1935, in Athens, he met and fell in love with Balasha Cantacuzène, sixteen years his elder, a princess and painter belonging to one of the great dynasties of eastern Europe. They spent much of their four years together on the run-down family estate in Moldavia, Rumania, from whence Paddy returned to England immediately after Britain declared war on Germany in order to sign up. He later wrote an account of the last day of peace in Moldavia when he rode with others in a cavalcade of horses and an old open carriage, through sunlit fields and vineyards, to a mushroom wood. Coming home, “The track followed the crest of a high ridge with the dales of Moldavia flowing away on either hand. We were moving through illimitable sweeps of still air”.

Balasha Cantacuzene ended up marooned behind the Iron Curtain. It was over a quarter of a century before she and Patrick Leigh Fermor saw one another again and for the last time. The Europe they knew had been extinguished forever.

You can listen to an AI generated reading of this here.

About The Critic. It is a monthly magazine for politics, ideas, art, literature and much more edited by Christopher Montgomery. The Critic says it exists to push back against a self-regarding and dangerous consensus that finds critical voices troubling, triggering, insensitive and disrespectful. The point is not provocation or trolling. The point of honest criticism is to better approach truth, not deny its possibility. You can find out more and subscribe here. This blog has no affiliation with The Critic.

Announcement of the death of Lord Byron

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Lord Byron’s Oath on the Grave of Marco Botzaris

I just found this and thought some may find it interesting. The resolution isn’t great but it is readable. Right click and select “open image in new tab” and it will be somewhat clearer.

The announcement of Lord Byron’s death by the provisional Greek government

For more mentions of Byron on the blog click here.

Event – The Britannias: An Archipelago’s Tale

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I’ll say more about the way forward for the blog over the coming weeks, but we’ve always spoken a lot about more general walking and the benefits of pilgrimage. That might be a theme! If you are in London on Tuesday 21st November, you can hear author Alice Albinia and Dr Guy Hayward of the British Pilgrimage Trust discuss Alice’s new book, The Britannias: An Archipelago’s Tale. There will be much talk about walking and pilgrimage! Hope to see some of you there.

The event will be held at any traveller’s favourite bookshop Stanfords. You can book tickets here.

Here are the details:

Alice Albinia has spent the past seven years travelling around the edges of Britain, piecing together ancient, medieval and modern myths of islands ruled by women.

Join us for an evening of fascinating conversation with Alice and fellow author and pilgrim Dr Guy Hayward as we journey through her new book The Britannias and discover some hidden histories.

The Britannias reveals how much of Britain’s culture, history and ways of thinking has been formed by the islands around it. From Neolithic Orkney to modern-day Thanet, Alice Albinia takes us on a journey around the furthest reaches of Britain’s island topography, once known (wrote Pliny) by the collective term, Britanniae. Sailing over borders, between languages and genres, trespassing through the past to understand the present, this book knocks the centre out to foreground neglected epics and subversive voices. An ancient British mythology of islands ruled by women runs like a secret, hidden river through the literature of this land – from Roman colonial-era reports to early Welsh poetry, Renaissance drama to Restoration utopias – transcending and subverting the most male-fixated of ages. The Britannias looks far back into the past for direction and solace, while searching for new meaning about women’s status in the body politic. Boldly upturning established truths about Britain, it pays homage to the islands’ beauty, independence and their suppressed or forgotten histories.

The Britannias boldly upturns established truths about Britain, while revealing its suppressed and forgotten beauty.

About the speakers:

Alice Albinia is an award-winning author of fiction and non-fiction. Her books include Empires of the Indus: The Story of a River and Cwen, set on an archipelago which comes under female rule, which was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction. Albinia has worked as an editor and journalist, writing for publications including the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times and National Geographic. She has taught writing in Orkney for the Islands’ Council, at King’s College London and the University of Kent.

Dr Guy Hayward is Director of the British Pilgrimage Trust (britishpilgrimage.org), which he co-founded in 2014 to promote ‘bring your own beliefs’ pilgrimage in Britain, and leads guided pilgrimages around Britain. He has been interviewed about modern pilgrimage for BBC1 and BBC2 TV’s ‘Pilgrimage’ and Channel 4’s ‘Britain’s Ancient Tracks’, BBC Radio 4 and has written for the Guardian. Guy completed a PhD at Cambridge on how singing forms community, founded choralevensong.org and is half of musical comedy double act Bounder & Cad. His website is guyhayward.com follow him on IG / TW on @drguyhayward

The event will start promptly at 7.00pm

Tickets £7

Includes glass of wine/soft drink

£5.00 off the published price of The Britannias for ticket holders when purchased on the evening.

Patrick Leigh Fermor book sparks Spanish craze for travel writing

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María José Solano

First published in The Times

The British war hero and writer Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor charmed everybody he met, from strangers hiking on mountain paths to the German general he kidnapped on Crete.

His appeal to women became the stuff of legend. His amorous entanglements led Somerset Maugham — who was not captivated by him — to dub him “a middle-class gigolo for upper-class women”.

Over a decade after his death, Leigh Fermor is winning hearts in an unexpected quarter: Spain. The recent publication of two Spanish books about his life, both impassioned homages written by women, has highlighted a fanatical following amongst the country’s social and literary elite.

“There is a sect of Leigh Fermorphiles that is really surprising given Spain has no great tradition of reading travel books,” said Santiago de Mora-Figueroa y Williams, the Marquis of Tamarón, who became friends with the author while serving as ambassador to London from 1999 to 2004. “Also he never wrote a book about Spain. But as a romantic figure, full of courage and wit, he is irresistible to certain Spaniards.”

Known to all as “Paddy”, Leigh Fermor, who died aged 96 in 2011, led a spirited life. Expelled from the King’s School, Canterbury, for — to use his euphemism — holding hands with a greengrocer’s daughter, his solitary trek as an 18-year-old across 1930s Europe formed the basis of his most famous work, A Time of Gifts. Serving with the Special Operations Executive during the Second World War on Crete, he kidnapped General Kreipe, the island’s German commander, with whom he struck up a friendship over a shared fondness for Horace’s Odes.

His derring-do, literary panache and good looks have prompted a posthumous flowering of aficionados in Spain, said María José Solano, whose account of her travels in Leigh Fermor’s footsteps was published this month. To Spanish minds, she added, his postwar, lifelong residence in Greece, where he built a home in the village of Kardamyli in Mani, made him a fellow Mediterranean.

“He belongs to the lineage of mythological heroes. And was a seducer. And a rogue,” said Solano. “My book is one of absolute admiration and I did not feel like hiding it.” Arturo Pérez-Reverte, the bestselling novelist, said: “Leigh Fermor was until now only appreciated by a very select minority of readers in Spain but Solano’s book has popularised him.”

Her unabashed love letter, Una Aventura Griega (A Greek Adventure), follows another written by Dolores Payás, Leigh Fermor’s Spanish translator, detailing their friendship and daily life at his house in his last years. Its title, Drink Time, refers to his routine of announcing at 1.30pm and again at 8pm that it was the hour for a strong tipple.

Calling her work an “homage without any complexes to a proud, invincible and adorable elderly gentleman”, Payas said: “My memories of working with him — we spent most of the time chatting and drinking wine — consist of a succession of glorious, radiant and golden days”.

The passion for Leigh Fermor has led to a group of Spaniards, known as “le club Paddy”, travelling in his footsteps to Crete to visit the scene of the famous kidnap (the subject of the film Ill Met by Moonlight) and Cairo, where the author and his comrades partied during the war.

Others have made the pilgrimage to his Greek house, which impressed Sir John Betjeman, hosted friends such as Nancy Mitford and “Debo” — the Duchess of Devonshire, and is now open to guests. Amongst those intending to make the journey to Leigh Fermor’s lair is Ramón Pérez-Maura, an aristocrat and journalist. “My love for Paddy’s books and Payas’s “Drink time!” have made me look forward to a visit to Kardamyli in the near future,” he said.

The Marquis of Tamarón, the former ambassador, said the adulation was because “he epitomises the idea of the best king of Englishman, whose virtues are the sort we would like to possess”. He recalled giving a lift in his ambassadorial car to Leigh Fermor from Chatsworth, the Duke of Devonshire’s Derbyshire seat, to London after a party. “Before we set off he shot back into the house and re-emerged with a bottle of whisky for the journey,” he said. “We have a Spanish expression ‘tiene buen vino’, which literally means ‘has good wine’, but signifies he was an entertaining, convivial drinker.”

It is a love that was not unrequited. Artemis Cooper, his biographer, said that although Leigh Fermor did not write a book about Spain, his letters and recollections of his travels in the country were tinged with fascination. “He adored Seville and went there to see the Fiesta de Nuestra Señora del Rocio,” she said. “He told me how magnificent the caballeros looked as they rode in, with their wives or girlfriends in fabulous flounced skirts behind them.” A letter written by him about a trip in 1975 begins: “Spain. This was all glory.”

Solano’s book is available on Amazon but only in Spanish

It’s been a while

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Hello everyone. It has been some time since I was active on the blog and posting regularly. My excuse is probably somewhat weak but it is the best I can come up with!

Over the last nine months or so we have been quite distracted by a house renovation project. It commenced in February and was finished by our amazing builders in late July. Since then it has been a time of unpacking boxes and deciding where to hang the many pictures we have, an activity that is still not quite 100%. This is one of the most challenging of decisions, even perhaps more so than some of the architectural or building decisions (and there seemed to be at least two per day), that needed to be made!

Alongside that there has been a job change and the house move plus a whole host of other things. Matters are now much more settled and I am very much hoping to recommence posting here. as autumn closes in. I do have quite a lot of material and certainly want to tidy up some things which no longer work such as broken links for external things that have disappeared.

I am looking forward to posting on here and my Byzantine blog which has been neglected for even longer. Please do keep in touch and if you have suggestions or content to post please send it to me!

Richard J. Scheuer and Patrick Leigh Fermor – fellow travellers

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Richard J. Scheuer, Woman with Veil, Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, 1934/2018

I found this very interesting and I hope that you do too.

By Jeffrey Kastner

First published in Artforum

On a December evening in 1933, an English teenager named Patrick Leigh Fermor boarded a steamship in London bound for the Hook of Holland. Disembarking the next morning, Fermor walked into the snowy Dutch countryside with a rucksack full of clothes and gear from an army surplus shop to begin what would become a thirteen-month journey, on foot, to Istanbul. Along the way, he slept in workhouses, barns, and castles and drank with farmers, aristocrats, and budding Nazis, finally arriving at his destination on New Year’s Day 1935. Though he had recorded his experiences in journals—and eventually went on to have a distinguished career as a travel writer—it wasn’t until 1977 that Fermor published A Time of Gifts, the first volume of what would ultimately be a trilogy about his formative adventure, and one of the genre’s richest achievements.

Roughly seven months after Fermor left London, seventeen-year-old Richard J. Scheuer sailed from New York with his father, Simon, for Le Havre, France, where they began an eight-week journey around Europe, visiting Spain, Italy, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Poland, and Russia. Dick, as the younger Scheuer was known, had brought along a camera and took photographs everywhere he went. On his return, he had contact sheets made, but none of the images were printed until roughly eighty years later, after his son Dan discovered his late father’s negatives in an old cardboard box at the family’s home and enlisted a friend, Charles Seton, a photographer and photographic technician, to help restore them.

Beyond the wildly delayed way each body of work finally came to light, what unites Fermor’s travelogue and Scheuer’s documentary project—the latter of which was recently the subject of this modest but engrossing exhibition at the Jewish Institute of Religion at Hebrew Union College, a Reform Jewish seminary in New York’s Greenwich Village—is the uncanny mix of innocence and portentousness generated by the specifics of their shared temporality. In many ways, they are perfectly pendant. Fermor took no pictures, and no journals from Scheuer’s travels survive, so each account fleshes out the other. The two young men, strangers to each other yet joined by some force of history, ended up recording the same moment in time as oblivious witnesses to a continent on the brink of World War II.

The forty works in the exhibition, mostly shots of regular people in their everyday surroundings, confirm Scheuer’s compositional precocity. A skilled street photographer virtually avant la lettre, he had an eye for the revealing candid moment, stemming in no small part, one imagines, from the fact that he himself must have cut such an unassuming figure, being not all that much older than the gaggle of placid-faced French girls in summer chapeaus he captured in one image, or the members of a teenage kazoo band performing on a Moscow street in another. A number of pictures here featured vendors and customers in markets around Yugoslavia—showing both customs and costumes that suggest the nineteenth as much as the twentieth century—including a remarkable shot of a woman standing on a curb in Sarajevo, a black veil framing her face in a way that all but disembodies it. But none of the images crystalize the puncturing, melancholic “that-has-been” identified by Roland Barthes as the operative essence of the photograph as much as the ten taken in Warsaw’s Jewish Quarter. A smiling man outside a women’s clothing store, a watermelon seller with a thick hunk of fruit in his hand, a burly shoemaker who turns to the camera with a wide grin: These subjects would likely not have known that, next door in Germany, the country’s president, Paul von Hindenberg, had just died, and that Adolf Hitler had successfully merged party and state into what would become a murderous totalitarian machine. And they certainly could not have imagined a future that we now know as historical fact: During a summer six years later, that machine would build a ten-foot-high wall around their neighborhoods and transform them first into a ghetto, and then later a concentration camp.

Walking for pleasure is the legacy of the pandemic with many people strolling and hiking more

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“Three in four people said that walking has helped their physical and mental health already this year, according to a new survey.”

There’s nothing new here to those of us who walk or have read about the effects of walking on bodily and mental health, but it’s always good to have your views reinforced by others. Solvitur ambulando!

By George Styllis and Catherine Lough

First published in the Daily Telegraph

People may have abandoned many of the habits foisted on them during the Covid lockdowns, whether it was mask-wearing or elbow bumping, but walking isn’t one of them.

For two years a walk was one of the only forms of exercise available to people, as Covid restrictions kept businesses such as gyms closed and cars off the road.

But after millions opted to stroll more during the pandemic as one of the few available pastimes while restrictions remained in place, three in four people have said that walking has helped their physical and mental health this year, according to a new survey.

The study by retailer GO Outdoors and mental health charity Mind also found that 65 per cent believed this was a legacy of the pandemic. Prior to Covid, more than half of people (55 per cent) simply saw walking as a means to get from A to B.

The survey of 2,012 adults also showed that three-quarters of people now find walking to be their most preferred form of exercise because it has no financial barriers (75 per cent), is good for their mental health (74 per cent) and is inclusive (73 per cent).

Walking in nature has been shown to have positive effects for both physical and mental wellbeing. Andrew Lee, director of Countryside Policy and Management at the South Downs National Park Authority, said that for many: “The lockdowns provided an opportunity to experience the joys and benefit of walking in nature for the first time”.

Haroon Mota, who founded the walking group Muslim Hikers during the pandemic, said he did so to address rising loneliness.

“During the global pandemic, I enjoyed going out for a hike or walk as a way to get some fresh air and to destress but I found it strange that, despite living in a diverse city (Coventry), there weren’t many people that looked like me doing the same,” he told Parkrun.com.

“That’s why, at a time when lots of people were becoming increasingly lonely, I set up an online community with the aim of inspiring and empowering more ethnic minorities to enjoy the outdoors together.”

“I’ve found that some people just won’t go outside on their own and lots of people are motivated by the community side of what we do, which again is so similar to parkrun.”

The latest data from the capital shows that Londoners are more likely to walk since the pandemic.

Before Covid, around 35 per cent of journeys in London were made on foot, whereas the latest quarter of available data, from April to September 2022, showed that 41 per cent of journeys were now made on foot, and that the number of walking journeys made per person per day during the same period was 11 per cent higher than the 2019-20 pre-pandemic average.

Last year, Fitness app Strava found that the number of users worldwide uploading information about their hiking routes had tripled since the pandemic and launched a feature, “Trail routes”, in response to the phenomenon. The UK’s most popular hikes, according to the app, are Ben Nevis, the Llanberis path to Snowdon in Wales, and Pen-y-Ghent, the smallest of Yorkshire’s three peaks.

A merry Christmas to you all for 2022 – Kennt ihr das Land in deutschen Gauen

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One of my favourite posts from 2011. I thought I would share this again at this Christmas time. A Merry Christmas to you all and best wishes for a peaceful 2023. Thank you for supporting the blog during the course of another year. Please keep sending in your contributions and comments; they keep it lively …

I guess that many of us enjoy the chapter in A Time of Gifts when the eighteen year old Paddy spent two nights in Stuttgart with two very pretty nineteen year old German girls, Lise and Annie. It was Epiphany, 6th January 1934, and they went to a party where Paddy had to pretend to be Mr Brown, a family friend. He particularly enjoyed singing a song about the Neckar Valley and Swabia. Paddy could not remember all the words but his stunning memory recalled most of them (page 66).

As we approach that time of year I thought we ought to share this delightful song.

As you play the You Tube video the words are below so that you too can sing along! Let’s hear it now, one two three ….

Kennt ihr das Land in deutschen Gauen,
Das schönste dort am Neckarstrand?
Die grünen Rebenhügel schauen
Ins Tal von hoher Felsenwand.
Refrain:
Es ist das Land, das mich gebar,
Wo meiner Väter Wiege stand,
Drum sing’ ich heut’ und immerdar:
Das schöne Schwaben ist mein Heimatland!

2. Kennt ihr das Land in deutschen Gauen,
Mit Wald und Flur so reich bekränzt,
Wo auf den weiten, reichen Auen
Im Sonnenschein die Ähre glänzt?
Es ist das Land, . . . . .

3. Kennt ihr das Land in deutschen Gauen,
Wo Tann’ und Efeu immer grün,
Wo starke Männer, edle Frauen
In deutscher Kraft und Sitte blühn?
Es ist das Land, . . . . .4. Kennt ihr das Land im deutschen Süden,
So oft bewährt in Kampf und Streit,
Dem zwischen seiner Wälder Frieden
So frisch die deutsche Kraft gedeiht? Ja, wackre Deutsche laßt uns sein!
Drauf reichet euch die deutsche Hand;
Denn Schwabenland ist’s nicht allein:
Das ganze Deutschland ist mein Hei

The global choir of roosters

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Dear readers,

I am on a train and have received an email from a follower of the blog who asks “can you help me find a passage in which Paddy describes a global choir of roosters crowing as the sun rises around the globe?”

My first thoughts are to Roumeli, but then perhaps Mani.

Can anyone help us both?

Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 1926-2022

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Queen Elizabeth II photographed at Windsor Castle in May 2022 CREDIT: Ranald Mackechnie /PA

Buckingham Palace has published the Order of Service for the State Funeral of HM Queen Elizabeth II, which will be held in Westminster Abbey today Monday 19th September 2022.

The service will be conducted by the Dean of Westminster, the Very Reverend Dr David Hoyle, who will say in his Bidding: ‘In grief, to this House of God and House of Kings, where Queen Elizabeth was married and crowned, we have come from across the nation, from the Commonwealth, and from the nations of the world, to mourn our loss, to give thanks to almighty God for her long life, and lovingly, confidently to entrust her immortal soul to the mercy of God, our Maker and Redeemer.’

The Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Reverend and Right Honourable Justin Welby, will preach the sermon and will lead the commendation.

Among the hymns will be The day thou gavest, Lord, is ended; The Lord’s my shepherd, which was sung at the wedding of the late Queen when she married HRH The Duke of Edinburgh in the Abbey in 1947; and Love divine, all loves excelling, in an arrangement first sung at the wedding of TRH The Prince and Princess of Wales in the Abbey in 2011.

Like as the hart, a setting of Psalm 42 by Master of the King’s Music, Judith Weir, and the anthem Who shall separate us?, drawing on words from Romans 8, by Sir James MacMillan, have both been composed specially for the service.

The Right Honourable The Baroness Scotland KC, Secretary-General of the Commonwealth will read from Corinthians 15; and the Right Honourable Elizabeth Truss MP, the Prime Minister, will read John 14: 1 – 9a.

The prayers will be led by the Abbey’s Precentor, the Reverend Mark Birch, and will be said by representatives of the churches of the United Kingdom.

Last Post will be sounded by the State Trumpeters of the Household Cavalry, before a two-minute silence observed in the Abbey and throughout the United Kingdom.

The service will be sung by the Choirs of Westminster Abbey and His Majesty’s Chapel Royal, St James’s Palace, under the direction of James O’Donnell, Organist and Master of the Choristers of Westminster Abbey.

You can download the Order of Servce here.

John Pendlebury, Winchester College memorial

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John Pendlebury mention on the Winchester College War Memorial Cloister at Winchester College. The year 1918 notes his date of entry to Winchester College

I was walking around the College and thought that you might like to see this.

Prague to Dresden – a walk down the River Elbe

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A view of the Elbe looking North towards the “Saxon Switzerland”

My Elbe walk was completed a couple of weeks ago. I walked about 160km in seven days, plus a rest day. I followed Paddy’s little paper boat and on the one occasion I was beside a boat paddled by two men, I was walking at the same speed, so that little paper boat would have taken a very long time to reach the sea at Hamburg, not to mention the hazards of passing through locks!

It was a varied walk. The first part being somewhat dull, with unvarying scenery, although I did hear at least five cuckoos. It has been more that ten years since I heard one in England. I didn’t follow the river all the time as I cut off some bends or sought out sites and interesting country by following countryside and forest tracks.

I have added a selection of photos to a Google shared album so that you might get a flavour. The journey starts in (very ) beautiful Prague, thence to Melnick, and some photos taken at Terezin, or as most of us would know it, Theresienstadt. Spending a night there was very peculiar; you can really feel the ghosts of those who suffered and died at the hands of the 20th century Nazis. The Bohemian and Saxon Switzerland (Sächsische Schweiz) was a very enjoyable change and I spent two days walking through some spectacular rock formations with equally amazing views of the river. I took a rest day at Bad Schandau. Dresden was the real surprise. We know it suffered devastating bombing, but the restoration is outstanding. Lots of grand baroque buildings and churches, as well as great food, with music in every square.

A final thank you to those who made donations to support the work of the Red Cross in Ukraine.

The selection of photos is here.

Obituary: Dervla Murphy

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Dervla Murphy in 1990. She had a tolerance for hardship and a curiosity about everyday elsewheres, which she kept through half a century of advancing by bike, foot, mule and cart (she never drove a car) on and off road across four continents. Photograph: Gamma-Rapho/Getty

Travel writer who famously journeyed alone from her native Ireland to India on a bicycle, armed with a pistol and a compass

First published in The Guardian

Dervla Murphy’s Full Tilt: Ireland to India With a Bicycle, published in 1965, is now as much a historical document of a gone world as a travel book, but its feeling of release, cycling towards a wide future while running away from a confined past, still exhilarates. Like notable 19th-century women travellers such as Isabella Bird Bishop, when at last released from a cage of domestic duty Murphy travelled, riding through the cold, snowy winter of 1962-63.

She went armed with a .25 pistol and basic instruction from the County Waterford gardai on how to use it, which she did to confront wolves and thieves, and also with the maps and compass through which she had explored the planet in her imagination since childhood. Most of all she had a tolerance for hardship (her total budget was £64) and a curiosity about everyday elsewheres, which she kept through half a century of advancing by bike, foot, mule and cart (she never drove a car) on and off road across four continents.

Murphy, who has died aged 90, wrote 26 books, many in the diary style of Full Tilt, approaching each day, person and place, fresh on the page as she had experienced it. That directness appealed to readers, along with Murphy’s viewpoint, which was novel because of her background: she was a voracious reader but with little formal education and, being from the Irish countryside, outside those higher levels of the class structure that dominated travel writing. Rural poverty around the globe was no surprise to Murphy, who had attended a village primary school with barefoot, hungry classmates, and knew families dying of tuberculosis.

She arrived alone at each destination without social introductions, was shy at home but en route talked with anyone who responded, and, in life as well as writing, downplayed risks and tribulations – from injury, sickness and assault to dirt and nothing for supper.

Aged 10, she had realised on riding her first bike that simple pedal power might one day take her to India, and on the way there she discovered how each day’s whizz of the wheels of her Armstrong Cadet cycle, Roz (short for Rozinante, Don Quixote’s horse), carried her forward to kind strangers’ hospitality. Coming fast down a mountain road always thrilled her; touring the Balkans in her 70s, she was clocked descending at 65mph by a military patrol and reproved for not applying her brakes.

Murphy’s attitude to gender and social norms was also uncommon at the time. Tall, deep-voiced, muscled, practical and with a decisiveness accrued from constant solo choices, she was often taken for a man by other societies, and occasionally romanticised the restricted roles of those societies’ womenfolk, which she would never have put up with herself.

Dervla Murphy in India

She was sure of her own life’s direction, if uncertain of its meanderings. She never intended to marry, but once able to support herself through writing, did want a child. Her daughter, Rachel, deliberately conceived with Terence de Vere White, the literary editor of the Irish Times, was born in 1968, and her mother raised her alone, never naming the father publicly until after his death in 1994.

Rachel had her fifth birthday in Kodagu (then called Coorg), south-west India, on the first of her journeys with her mother; they later went to Baltistan, Peru, Madagascar and Cameroon. Until Rachel reached puberty, when the people they met travelling began to regard her as an adult who shared a sealed bubble of foreignness with her mother, she was an asset, a connection to families, though also, sometimes, a distraction, interrupting Murphy’s communion with the deep, pre-modern silence of the Himalayas or Andes. Their relationship could be difficult, but it lasted, and in time Murphy, Rachel, and Rachel’s daughters, Rose, Clodagh and Zea, all dossed down together on a Cuban beach for a three-generation trip on the usual shoestring, in 2005.

Murphy’s own hard family situation had formed her, she wrote in Wheels Within Wheels (1979). Her parents went from Dublin to Lismore in Waterford when her father, Fergus Murphy, was appointed county librarian. Soon after Dervla’s birth, her mother, Kathleen, contracted a rare rheumatoid arthritis that crippled her: perhaps in compensation she nurtured Dervla’s daring, giving her that first bike despite money always being short. But, aged 14, Dervla was withdrawn from the Ursuline convent boarding school in Waterford to serve as Kathleen’s carer for 16 years. Kathleen encouraged her brief bike jaunts to England and Europe, though Dervla had to return from each few weeks’ freedom to burdensome duty.

Fergus died in 1961 and Kathleen the following year, leaving Murphy with a house, books (her lifetime collection grew to 9,000), strong convictions about political and social injustice, and her freedom. After Full Tilt, based on diaries published only because of a chance meeting in Delhi with Penelope Chetwode, John Betjeman’s wife, came Tibetan Foothold (1966) and The Waiting Land (1967), which grew out of work with Tibetan refugees in India and Nepal. From the late 1970s, the purpose of her travels shifted to inquiring into the effects of recent history on people and places, beginning with A Place Apart (1978), a bike ride round Northern Ireland, then at an implacable stage of its Troubles.

On a Greyhound bus crossing the US, she passed close to Three Mile Island, the site in 1979 of the US’s worst nuclear power accident, which inspired Nuclear Stakes, Race to the Finish (1982), the first of the books in which her politics mattered more than the travelling, through Kenya and Zimbabwe during the Aids epidemic, Romania after its revolution, Rwanda after genocide, the Balkans after a decade of wars.

These culminated with an unfinished trilogy on Palestinian territorial fragments – Gaza Strip, West Bank, Jordanian camps – researched as ever over coffee in crowded tenements or tea on tent floors. She was strongly for socialism, and against almost everything else, especially mass tourism.

A hip replacement after a fall in Jerusalem, aged almost 80, plus arthritis and emphysema, finally confined Murphy to her austere base in Lismore, the remnant of a 17th-century cattle market plus eccentric outbuildings, where she organised a travel-writing festival and received pilgrims, including Michael Palin, visiting for a television documentary, Who Is Dervla Murphy?, in 2016. She asked him to join her daily skinny dip in the River Blackwater.

Her daughter and granddaughters survive her.

Dervla Murphy, traveller and writer, born 28 November 1931; died 22 May 2022

In the wake of Paddy’s paper boat

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I’m in Prague. I have my battered, and much marked up copy of A Time of Gifts with me, and I’ve been struck just how wrong Paddy’s memory was! That section, whilst beautifully written as usual is a bit of a nonsense.

Anyway. Why am I here and not in England celebrating the Jubilee of our gracious Sovereign Elizabeth?

Many months ago I got the idea in my head to walk one of Germany’s great rivers. I have never been to Saxony and that appealed well enough. Then I discovered an area called Saxon Switzerland and knew I had to visit this beautiful sandstone landscape. So a walk down the Elbe seemed to fit. There’s a route for cyclists which is my guide and it starts in Prague and finishes Dresden. I’ve only discovered in the last couple of days that this “German” walk is actually 80% in the Czech Republic but that just adds to the enjoyment. 225 km in nine days. Easy peasy.

As you can see from the extract from ATOG, Paddy imagined a little paper boat making its way downstream. I shall be following in the wake of that little boat.

I also thought that it would be a good excuse to ask you, dear readers, for some money. If you would like to sponsor me please make a donation to the British Red Cross and the Ukrainian Red Cross Society (URCS) to support those who are suffering in Putins war of aggression against a peaceful sovereign state.

I’ll try to update you.

The link to donate is below. Maybe add a comment on the blog when you have done so. It would be nice to hear your thoughts.

https://donate.redcross.org.uk/appeal/ukraine-crisis-appeal

Seeking monastic peace from the world

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Rievaulx Abbey was a Cistercian abbey in Yorkshire (Photo: Getty/Andrea Pucci)

This interesting item which I’ve had ready to go for over a year reminds me a little of A Time to Keep Silence. Given the state of the world now, it is perhaps even more relevant.

By Sarah Sands

First published in inews.co.uk

As editor of the Today programme, I was addicted to news – but now I’m seeking monastic peace from the world. Sarah Sands believes there is a forgotten wisdom in monasteries that provides an answer to the tumult of our times – monks and nuns have acquired a hidden knowledge of how to live.

On a winter’s day, in which the sky hangs like a flat sheet over Norfolk, I look out at the remains of a 13th-century monastery wall. It’s in the field at the edge of my garden – all that remains of Marham Abbey, a Cistercian nunnery destroyed by Henry VIII.

The king found nothing of note in the abbey – the total loot was worth £46 – yet its last remnants exist as a centre of gravity in my life. The lessons of monastic life are contained within this wall, lessons that have increasingly offered guidance and inspiration for me in times of stress.

The great English Cistercian monastery is Rievaulx Abbey in North Yorkshire, a five-hour drive from my home. Deciding that I needed to learn more about the community who built my wall, one day in 2019 I set off with an inexplicable sense of purpose. I drove past miles of skeleton trees, descending into a remote valley of the river Rye in the North Yorkshire moors. The hidden nature of Rievaulx makes its revelation all the more heart stopping.

St Aelred, abbot of Rievaulx monastery, once said, ‘everywhere peace, everywhere serenity and a marvellous freedom from the tumult of the world”(Photo: Getty/Ian Forsyth)

There, alone, I wandered through the vistas of columns and framed views of stirring countryside. I imagined the first monks who sheltered there under the rocks of the valley and among the elm trees. The remoteness of monasteries – best viewed from the heavens – is in their essence; it is a rejection of the material world, its rhythms and its values.

The monks lived by sunrise and sunset and spent their time between in learning, meditation and manual labour. This inner concentration buoyed them in an extraordinary weightlessness. In the 12th century, St Aelred, abbot of Rievaulx monastery said: “Everywhere peace, everywhere serenity and a marvellous freedom from the tumult of the world.”

When I returned from Rievaulx, I was changed. I saw my wall in a different light. My sense of kinship with it deepened and my curiosity tingled. I saw that it was part of a network of monasteries across the country; ruined, silent, consigned to history, they all had stories to tell.

I began travelling to more and more of them, exploring them one by one – and travelling to monasteries around the world, too, from Greece to Egypt, from Japan to Bhutan, journeys I’ve been since reflecting on for my book The Interior Silence.

There was wisdom in these institutions. There was medicine. From the monasteries came both universities and hospitals, and the monks showed an early understanding of what we now call mental health.

The monastic way of living intrigued me – it had become a secret corner of my life. My work is in London, but Norfolk is my place of sanctuary. The wall represents something antithetical to my London life. It is the still small voice that provides a contrast to the needy, WhatsApp-ing, power-conscious world of politics and media.

‘Today’ and tomorrows

The job that I held when I visited Rievaulx was editing the BBC’s flagship news and current affairs show, the Today programme, during the most politically and socially fractious of periods. People were angry about whether or not Britain should leave the EU, and Today was a lightning rod.

I was responsible for the running order of the show, which was a work in progress over 24 hours. My phone beeped incessantly. There were months when it buzzed hysterically between 3am and 5am, until I realised that, apart from all the journalistic messages, I had somehow become the switchboard for all the taxis ordered by the BBC news department.

Skimming six hours sleep a night and ever part of a jittery and constant news conversation, I was finding it hard to switch off.

One night, during which I simply could not sleep, I picked up a book. It was a slim volume, called A Time to Keep Silence, by the great adventurer Patrick Leigh Fermor. Published in 1957, it is an account of his sojourns at three wonderful French monastic buildings: the Abbey of St Wandrille, Solesmes Abbey and La Grande Trappe.

In the book, Leigh Fermor confessed to depression and anxiety; he yearned for peace and stillness. “In spite of private limitations I was profoundly affected by the places I have described,” he wrote.

“The kindness of the monks has something to do with this. But more important was the discovery of a capacity for solitude and (on however humble a level compared to that of most people who resort to monasteries) for the recollectedness and clarity of spirit that accompany the silent monastic life.”

There is a wisdom in the monasteries which answers the affliction of our times (Photo: Getty/Ian Forsyth)

He also experienced a higher plane of sleeping: “After initial spells of insomnia, nightmare and falling asleep by day, I found that my capacity for sleep became more remarkable and my sleep was so profound that I might have been under the influence of some hypnotic drug… Then began an extraordinary transformation: night shrank to five hours of light, dreamless and perfect sleep, followed by awakenings full of energy and limpid freshness.

Can you imagine this? City sleep resembles an operating theatre of lights, movement and bleeping devices. We seek instant remedies for sleep, as for everything else. Of course, I am not going to give up alcohol, but I will throw in a herbal tea at the end of the evening. And I know to close the day with a book, although every few paragraphs my hand slides towards my iPhone, just to check messages or to Instagram.

Sometimes I try to meditate for a few minutes, which only jolts my memory of the emails I should have sent. This is not the path to the dreamless and perfect sleep of which Leigh Fermor writes.

The following day, I bumped into my friend Tom Bradby, the ITV news anchor who had been off work for many months, suffering from extreme insomnia. He had recovered but had not forgotten his state or the causes of it. He had a new awareness of the meaning of what he called “the worried mind”.

I reflected again on what Leigh Fermor had written: “In spite of private limitations, I was profoundly affected [by the monasteries].” This was how I felt about my Norfolk ruins. I knew they touched me deeply but did not know why and certainly did not attribute it to any virtue on my part.

There is a wisdom in the monasteries which answers the affliction of our times. Renouncing the world, the monks and nuns have acquired a hidden knowledge of how to live. They labour, they learn and they master what is described as “the interior silence”. Some orders are in permanent retreat, but others are expected to maintain the stillness of self in the midst of public bustle.

How can they do that? Is the virtue of interior silence something that can prevail in an era of peak technological distraction? I was beginning to question my 5G life. The connectivity, the drip feed of news, the superficiality of politics.

As Radio 4 listeners will know, in the middle of the Today programme is Thought for the Day, a three-and-a-half-minute sermon by a religious figure. It is an anomaly in a daily news show, but I have come to appreciate it as an oasis of reflection. News counts but meaning matters more.

I experienced that juxtaposition of connectivity and meaning at a dinner for the tech industry in the same week that I had read Leigh Fermor’s book from cover to cover – properly read it, rather than speed-read it as I usually do.

The conversation at the tech gathering was all about pace of change and personal realisation. We are driven by multiples of success and scale. Meanwhile, at my table, a broadcaster was looking furiously at her Twitter feed because a political joke had started a bush fire of condemnation. By the end of the evening, her resignation from the BBC was being demanded. This was a time of maximum hubris, before the arrival of the great reckoning.

The ubiquity of news media is a form of hubris, at odds with monasticism. Aggravated by social media, the journalistic impulse is exhibitionism and noise and entitlement.

The former Conservative strategist Lynton Crosby, who campaigned for Boris Johnson as London mayor and later as prime minister, said to me that people were motivated by jobs, money and family. His candidates won, he said, because he and they understood this. The remarkable thing about the monasteries is that they are inspired by none of these things. They are there on behalf of humanity, suspended between heaven and earth.

What if I were able to step away, I thought, even in the midst of political and media battle? There is a history of spiritual retreat after all.

Lockdown isolation

After three years of editing the Today programme, I left the BBC last September. I had made the decision at the start of 2020. The addiction to news had become corrosive to me and I had learned how to exist outside the news cycle, thanks to contemplative trips to monasteries. My hectic, distracted mind had experienced stillness.

News is generally regarded as a form of enlightenment but it is often just information wrapped in judgement, or worse, incitement. News demands drama and hyperbole. I remember when I was the editor of The Sunday Telegraph more than a decade ago, looking at a headline claiming local ‘fury’ over a piece of planning permission. I remarked to the news editor that having read the quotes from residents it seemed more a case of mild irritation than fury. The news editor responded wryly: “Irritation isn’t a headline word.”

I was planning to visit more monasteries ahead of my departure. Easter week was meant to have been spent in Salzburg, at the Nonberg Abbey – otherwise known as the setting for The Sound of Music – but in March last year lockdown arrived. Flights were halted, hotels closed. Monasteries continued in their customary state of self-isolation, and I was unable to reach them.

The Government demanded that the population return to their homes: mine was in Norfolk, in the remains of Marham Abbey. A monument to mortality and the futility of secular ambition. Henry VIII destroyed this monastery but could not destroy its meaning; perhaps because its endurance was based on acceptance of powerlessness.

Newspapers carried photographs of vats of beer and wine being tipped away. This was the London economy – bars and coffee shops. Farewell to my working life.

The existence that I was trying to escape suddenly seemed unbearably delightful. I watched television scenes of dinner parties or concerts as if through a looking glass. My bank statements read like an historical archive. Soho House, Joe the Juice, Caffè Nero, Daniel Galvin and, in the final days, Wigmore Street Pharmacy, Boots, Boots, Boots.

The Today programme was being produced remotely, and I spent hours pacing the garden on Zoom. What were the latest death figures? What was the state of the Prime Minister’s health? The country staked its identity on the principle of caring for the sick. A principle begun in its monasteries. Indeed, St Thomas’ Hospital in London, where the Prime Minister was treated, grew out of a priory.

Like everyone else, I was separated from what and whom I knew and loved. My younger son FaceTimed me from Hong Kong. He told me that he would not be coming home for his summer break because of the strict rule of quarantine. My elder son sent me a photograph of my grandson, only 20 miles away, but beyond reach now. My daughter went into lockdown in London, the epicentre of the virus. Every family had a story to tell of separation.

Monasticism teaches that you can love and participate, while being absent. This was what I had to learn; to appreciate relationships in the abstract. To delight in the existence of others without physical engagement in their lives.

I would describe the feelings I associated with the wall in my garden during those weeks of isolation as intense serenity and a sense of belonging. Most of all, I associated it with birdsong. The trees surrounding the abbey remains were full of birds – blackbirds, blue tits, finches, wrens, chiffchaffs, robins, rooks and, descending from the wide skies, the first swallows.

There was one thing I wished to learn in isolation: the distinctive differences in birdsong. On the first day I picked up the alarm call of the blue tits and the different whistles of the great tit. I wondered at the lung capacity of the tiny wrens. The busy sound of the chiffchaff will always remind me of this time, this period of death tolls and birdsong.

I hope to be visiting more monasteries soon, when life opens up again, but I’m lucky to have my wall. There is something about the melancholy ruins against a Norfolk sky that reminds you that a contemplative life has a natural setting and that the endless striving and building around it will not last. The tranquil message of my ruins of Marham Abbey and the great Rievaulx is humility. Personal ambition is an impediment, not a triumphant force.

This is an edited excerpt from The Interior Silence: My Encounters with Calm, Joy, and Compassion at 10 Monasteries Around the World by Sarah Sands. Buy it here.

Beautiful Ukraine – Spring is coming

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Like all of you I have been shocked and totally absorbed by the war (yes it is Mr Putin) in Ukraine over the past few weeks. I have work colleagues and friends there.

We have all seen too many dreadful images coming out of that beautiful and sophisticated country. I wanted to share something completely different. A music video called Vesna (which means Spring) that celebrates the beauty of the countryside, cities and people of Ukraine. It is by Dakha Brakha whose music is quite eclectic. This image of people caught up in the powerful rhythmic music always makes me smile and feel good. I hope it does the same for you.

Slava Ukraini !!

Thank you for Friday!

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Just a quick note to thank all of you who attended the Paddy Chat on Friday. We had a really interesting and eclectic mix of people from the USA, Germany, Belgium, the UK, a Briton on holiday in Greece, and a particularly devoted fan from Melbourne, Australia (0300 his time!).

We covered a range of topics, but mostly how we came to find Paddy.

Perhaps we might have one in the lead-up to Christmas, and I thought we could discuss Paddy at Christmas 🙂

For those who attended and still wish to access the information I mentioned, please contact me using the Gmail account on the About and Contact page.

A sensual Greek goddess

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Joan: The Remarkable Life of Joan Leigh Fermor by Simon Fenwick is perhaps the outstanding biography of the Fermors. This review includes the background to Fenwick’s growing interest in Joan as a person, as Paddy’s muse, and not just the wife.

By Nicholas Shakespeare.

First published in The Spectator.

Joan Leigh Fermor died in 2003, aged 91, after falling in her bathroom in the house on a rocky headland of the Peloponnese which she had financed by selling her jewellery. Afterwards, whenever Joan’s husband and companion of nearly six decades reclined in her place on the sofa to read, eight of her 73 cats would gather round him in a recumbent group — but after a few minutes slope off. Paddy (who died in 2011) wrote: ‘They had realised they were being fobbed off with a fake.’

This biography, by the archivist who went to sort out Paddy Leigh Fermor’s papers before they returned to England, makes a charming case for Joan to be considered the proper foundation of Paddy’s existence; his muse and ‘greatest collaborator’, whose wealth and talent as a sounding board underpinned his career as an author. ‘Joan made it possible for Paddy to write.’

She was like one of her cats, all of whom descended from a single Abyssinian ‘which had mated freely with the village toms’: fiercely independent (she and Paddy had a ‘pact of liberty’), alluring, a watchful presence in the shadows. ‘Sensual, somewhat aloof and deeply private,’ writes Simon Fenwick. ‘This is Joan.’

Tall, slender, with her blonde hair cut short: Lawrence Durrell called her the ‘Corn Goddess’. To John Betjeman, who made a late declaration of love, she was ‘Dotty’, with ‘eyes like tennis balls’. To Cyril Connolly, with whom she went to bed during her first marriage — and whose photograph, ‘eaten by tiny insects’, she kept in her bedroom — she was a ‘lovely boy-girl… like a casual, loving, decadent Eton athlete’. To Noel Annan, on the first page of his 450-page history, Our Age, she was a ‘life-enhancer’. Careful never to tread into the foreground, she runs like a silken thread through the memoirs of her generation, a thread which Fenwick skilfully tugs out and spins into a gossamer portrait, reminiscent of Ann Wroe’s biography of Orpheus, composed of glances and glimpses — and fingerprints, like those that Joan left on Cecil Beaton’s bathroom wall at Ashcombe, ‘to the left of the towel rail’.

A semi-professional photographer, with a taste for bombed-out buildings and cemeteries, Joan ‘always hated being photographed’, and left her films to be developed by other hands. The image she had of herself was of a bad-tempered, selfish Aquarian, withdrawn, given to grumbling, and indecisive. In a 1936 pocket diary, one of only three fragments of the paper trail that survives from before the 1940s, she confessed her lifelong dilemma:

A gregarious loner, she steps across Fenwick’s pages as simultaneously self-effacing and attention-seeking — once gaining notoriety for wearing ‘a single extraordinary earring’ consisting of ‘a bunch of 42 small gilt safety pins’. To almost everyone (including the author of this review, who met her in Kardamyli), she exuded, as Michael Wishart remarked of Barbara Skelton, ‘a tantalising quality of needing a tamer, while something about her suggested she was untameable’. A walk-alone feline who fluttered at will into a social butterfly, and a pin-up for other androgynous admirers, like the Oxford don Maurice Bowra, she has, not surprisingly, proved hard to pin down.

She was born Joan Eyres Monsell, into ‘a great deal’ of money. The family wealth came from a rich skinflint, a Leeds wool baron, who, when asked why he travelled third-class on the train, answered: ‘Because there’s no fourth class!’ She claimed to have nothing in common with her family, but her father — an ‘odious’ bully — was a sailor (and later first lord of the Admiralty), and on both sides there were writers, travellers and explorers — like her cousin Gino Watkins, who disappeared in Greenland, his kayak discovered floating upside down ‘and his trousers on an ice floe’.

As well, she had the example of her triumphantly profligate great-uncle Charles Kettlewell, ‘the Wicked Uncle’, who spent two years sailing his 420-foot schooner on a scientific voyage round the Far East, before dying bankrupt aged 49, having got through his entire inheritance (£4.5 million per year in today’s money), leaving only a collection of stuffed birds that ended up in Leeds Museum.

The most remarkable thing about much of Joan’s life was its lack of focus. Her first 20 years were spent in the shadow of her gay brother Graham and his Eton and Oxford friends, such as the penniless aesthete Alan Pryce-Jones, with whom Graham had probably slept. When Joan accepted a marriage proposal from Pryce-Jones, Betjeman wrote to him: ‘There is one thing you must do before you marry— you must explain that you were once inverted. She won’t mind at all.’ But her father did. ‘No, no, Pryce-Jones, come back in a few years when you have something behind you.’

The person Joan came back with, after a wartime marriage to the Express journalist John Rayner (‘we gradually drifted apart,’ she explained), was an equally penniless aesthete: an officer with the Special Operations Executive called Paddy Leigh-Fermor, ‘with few clear prospects’, whose riches largely consisted in his appetite for life — described in his own phrase as ‘that of a sea-lion for the flung bloater’.

They met in Cairo in 1944. Their affair continued until they tied the knot in 1968; in the same year, their home in Kardamyli was completed. Leading separate lives had sustained their enchantment for each other. ‘At this distance you seem about as perfect as a human being can be,’ Paddy wrote from the French monastery where he was writing The Traveller’s Tree, in one of the letters that formed the marrow of A Time to Keep Silence. Whenever they came together, as they longed to do (‘I shall have tiny Fermors every year,’ wrote Joan, desperate for a family), they often found it hard to adapt, and there would ensue, in Paddy’s words, ‘a tremendous mutually vituperative blow up’. This might explain the most evocative entry in Joan’s commonplace book, the single Fuegian word mamihlapintafoi, meaning: ‘Looking-at-each-other-hoping-that-either-will-offer-to-do-something-which-both-parties-desire-but-are-unwilling-to-do.’

When Fenwick opened the calf-bound visitors’ book at Kardamyli he discovered ‘a Who’s Who of 20th-century society’. With only one of Schizo Joan’s diaries to rely on, and no memoir, his affectionate scrap-book of a portrait more closely mimics the ‘personalised disorder’ which he found in Paddy’s desk; one drawer was ‘aptly’ labelled ‘Total Confusion’; another drawer contained stray photographs, broken spectacles and ‘wads of small printed notices saying that he was very busy and unable to answer his correspondents’; at the bottom of a tin trunk were two pennants from General Kreipe’s staff car. ‘Somewhere, amidst all this disarray, was the story of Joan and Paddy and their lives together.’

September Paddy chat – 24 September

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The online event we held on 2 July was very successful and great fun. Those who attended wanted more, and there were many others who were unable to make it on that occasion. We sort of agreed to run another sesson after the summer.

To that end I’d like to suggest the next event as Friday 24 September after I return from my trip to the Mani! It could start at 1730 BST or 1800 BST. Please suggest what works best for you in your timezone and I’ll make a Solomon-like call.

I spoke with Chris O’Gorman recently and we thought that this time (as many of us would have introduced ourselves before) that we try to run with some broad headings. We came up with ideas like:

– What is your favourite book or passage of writing by Paddy, and what attracts you to it?

– If you did meet Paddy in the past, is there a personal account you can share about the experience?

– What do you think Paddy has to say now to our fragile and pandemic struck world?

– Where should writers and scholars focus their attention next on Paddy’s life and times?

There are many more possibilities. Why not add your ideas to the comments section? We wil probably only have time for two of these at most; maybe three. We can always run another event.

Details

Date and Time: 1730-1900 or 1800-1930 BST Friday 2 July. Your call by majority!

Location: Google Meets – see link here for requirements including web browser

Invitation: a link will be posted on the blog nearer the time – you will have to click in or accept. There will be no invitation to your calendar so you will have to make your own reminder.

Special Invitations: If you have in mind someone that you would like to attend, please pass on the details to them. If there is anyone you might like me to invite eg a writer or someone similar, please make your suggestion and I’ll see what I can do.

Hosting and Admin: I shall host to start with but this is your meeting so very happy that you take over! If anyone wishes to contact me via email to help with any admin that will be welcomed.

Dress and Protocols: Wear anything you like, or not as the case may be! Bring a drink (Vodka tonic?). I see this as a “camera on” event, otherwise things get very sterile talking to blank black windows on a conference call. As a courtesy to others I think that you should be prepared to have your camera on so we can see you if you wish to attend. In my experience, the quality of video calling makes for flattering images!

If you have any questions or suggestions, please post a comment below or contact me via gmail address.

The Travel Writing Tribe by Tim Hannigan review – an elitist genre?

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Rory Stewart on his trek across northern Afghanistan in 2002. Photograph: Rick Loomis/LA Times via Getty Images

This article is well worth a read. I don’t know about the book, but the ideas that it explores are interesting. The hypothesis is that travel writing used to be dominated by Old Etonians with colonialist tendencies; but this critique apparently shows that the ‘travellees’ are writing back.

By Ali Bhutto

First published in The Guardian

In the decades following the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism in 1978, academics have shed light on some of the uncomfortable truths about travel writing. These include its tendency to be a white, male-dominated genre that glorifies colonial sensibilities and reduces individuals encountered on a journey to mere caricatures. Over time, however, scholars adopted a more nuanced approach, recognising attempts by some works of travel writing to rectify such imbalances of power.

Nevertheless, it is fitting that the opening chapter of Tim Hannigan’s book, The Travel Writing Tribe, is titled “The Long White Track”. The book is unusual in that Hannigan, who is well versed in the scholarly critique of the genre, confronts these questions from the perspective of both an academic and a travel writer.

From the very start, he picks up on a curious pattern. Almost all the better-known male British travel writers, including Wilfred Thesiger, Peter Fleming, Robin Hanbury-Tenison and Rory Stewart, attended prestigious independent schools, most commonly Eton College, followed by a higher education at Oxford. Not all of them, however, made it to university. Patrick Leigh Fermor was “kicked out of more than one boarding school … An alarmed housemaster once described him as ‘a dangerous mixture of sophistication and recklessness’”. Likewise, Colin Thubron suffered from a “growing tally of educational miscarriages”. He sat his maths O-level at Eton three times and failed “by a wider margin each time”; he failed the entry exam to Cambridge and was later declared ineligible for national service, after which he started working at a publishing house.

Hannigan’s research takes him deep into the heart of the British establishment as he sifts through Thesiger’s diaries at the Eton College archives. He notices that the students, clad in the trademark black tails, pinstripe trousers and white ties, stood out from the rest of the townsfolk, as if they belonged a separate tribe. He writes: “I was still keen to pursue an idea about Old Etonian travel writers having some particular predilection for ‘tribal cultures’ in other parts of the world, and the possibility that this had something to do with their schooling.” This was, to an extent, evident in Thesiger’s choice of company during his travels: “In Arabia and beyond, his preferred society seems always to have been a small group of young men and boys, possessed of some elite and initiated status, perfectly isolated from the great plurality of town and village.”

The travel writing genre is often criticised for its unfair treatment of the “travellee” – the people encountered by the narrator during a journey. But a significant number of works have made a concerted effort to empower the same. In 1996, Nick Danziger, who lacks the public-school background of his fellow travellers, profiled a series of marginalised communities in Danziger’s Britain, giving their voices more space in the text than his own.

Similarly, in This Divided Island: Life, Death and the Sri Lankan War, Samanth Subramanian is challenged by a local of Kattankudy, who asks him: “What good will this conversation do for me?” – a question Subramanian is unable to answer convincingly.

Travel writing and journalism, Hannigan observes, were inextricably linked, yet there appeared to be a “strange tussle” going on between the two: “For a writer with literary aspirations, the word ‘journalist’ seemed to suggest relegation to the lower divisions … But on the other hand, for a writer with established literary credentials, eager to claim the kudos of empiricism, ‘journalist’ might appear a higher designation than ‘travel writer’.”

There was also, Hannigan notes, the genre’s complicated relationship with the portrayal of facts. Some writers had the tendency to fictionalise various details for aesthetic purposes. He had, for instance, noticed, “the slight disconnect between the raw records of Thesiger’s journeys and his books”.

Hannigan also visits the veteran travel writer Dervla Murphy, who cycled from her home in Ireland to India in 1963 and wrote about it in her debut work, Full Tilt. He learns from Barnaby Rogerson, the publisher at Eland, that despite her age, she was open to receiving visitors as long as they brought some beer with them. Her home, which “can hardly be described as a house”, was a collection of small old buildings scattered across a walled compound; it had once been the town market. During the interview, she tells him that her reputation for being a recluse is undeserved and only while writing a book does she go into “purdah”.

Murphy, whose anti-colonial middle-class Irish background sets her apart from most travel writers of her time, is hesitant to pin her books down to a specific genre, preferring instead to describe them as “journalistic records”.

Haunted by the grim commercial prospects of professional travel writers, Hannigan seeks reassurance wherever possible. According to Rogerson, limited funding for writers may in fact be producing better travel books. The best books, he argues, are not the ones churned out when writers try to meet deadlines, but those that are “oscillating inside them and had to come out … because the experience is so strong and profound”.

Thubron, meanwhile, is more optimistic about the future of travel writing. He refers to an edition of Granta that lists Mohsin Hamid, Rana Dasgupta and Subramanian on its cover, alongside his own – and there are others, such as Monisha Rajesh and Kapka Kassabova, both of whom Hannigan interviews. The future of the genre is fluid and adaptable, and in the hands of writers from all over the world. “The voice of those once written about is coming back and writing about us,” he says.

The 4th Book Festival in Transylvania is confirmed

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Lucy Abel-Smith has confirmed that she is going ahead with an extra special edition of the 4th Transylvanian Book Festival this year, 9th to 12th September 2021.

Due to ongoing restrictions and uncertainties over COVID, they will be limiting the size of the audience to a maximum of 40, making it a smaller event than in the past but just as special, if not more so.

By keeping it so deliberately small, they aim to be able to enjoy the unique features of the traditional party atmosphere, with guests and speakers having an even greater chance to meet over delicious meals and wine.

The hope is to reach out to friends and patrons from around the world who are unable to travel this year, by recording a number of talks and making them available online.

Currently travellers from the UK can enter Romania without having to quarantine if they can show proof of a full course of vaccination against Covid-19, completed at least 10 days before arrival. Return to the UK from Romania is currently subject to testing and quarantine but the government has just announced that they are planning to allow fully vaccinated UK residents to travel from amber listed countries without the need to quarantine, later this summer. During the pandemic, it is more important than ever to get travel insurance and check it provides sufficient cover.

Full details on the website.

Let’s keep the channel open!

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It seemed like it took the whole of the 90 minutes of the “Paddy Chat” that took place yesterday evening just to get through our introductions to each other, such were the fascinating backgrounds and stories of the 16 or so people who attended. It was difficult to make an actual count with the continual movement of what I still see as the Potteresque images of a mass online meeting.

I think it fair to say that it was a tremendous success. We only scratched the surface of observations, experiences, and possible discussions given the professions and passions of the attendees including theology, archaeology, sculpture, the law, medicine, IT, meteorology, academia, writing, and much more. People were logging on from Canada, Germany, the UK, Brussels, Hungary, Italy, Romania, the USA; a good balance from many locations. Even my 20 month old grandson Mark made an apperarance. His first literary conference!

We all enjoyed listening to individual stories and discovering the connections between us that emerged. We heard the exciting news from Dan Popescu in Romania that he has two books imminently due publication covering exchanges of letters with Paddy during that less well known period of his time in Romania before the war.

Paddy is the obvious connection, but the conversation ranged widely and was not just limited to him. We discussed biographies about Paddy and Joan, with some agreement that Simon Fenwick’s Joan is perhaps the most entertaining and revealing. I appreciate that is a controversial statement!

There was no agenda for the meeting but attendees did make some suggestions about the format of future events. Yes, we agreed we would like to arrange others! I do hope that more people can attend on the next occasion, perhaps something in September after our summer of restriction-free travel 🙂

Personally I’m so glad I got round to arranging it. I did point out that there is nothing to prevent others arranging their own, especially where time zones don’t match particularly well (calling on Maggie Rainey-Smith and Brent McCunn to organise the Antipodean version 🙂 ). Please feel free to use me as a contact point and the blog as one of your channels of communication. I can create an events section with calendar for easy reference. If you like I can arrange on your behalf if you’d rather.

It would be great if you could add suggestions to the comments section and let’s take it from there. Clearly we can arrange events to discuss particular books (or even just sections of books), or have guest writers etc discuss their work.

As Francesca, an Italian lawyer living and working in Brussels, said at the end, thinking about future events, ‘this has been a marvellous event, and let’s keep this channel open!’

Dr Foster finally got to Gloucester

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Just reporting in to those who sponsored me way back in October when I started a walk from Winchester to Gloucester. My first attempt ended after three days with a painful injury as reported here.

Lockdown and much else prevented me from completing the endeavour until these last few days. I set off from Pewsey on Saturday, walking the Kennet & Avon canal to Bradford-on-Avon, turning north across the (wet) Cotswolds, via Laurie Lee’s home in Slad, and finally hit Gloucester city limits around lunchtime yesterday, a trek of 110 km in 3.5 days.

Not the most enjoyable of my walks, but I felt I ought to complete what I set out to do.

Thank you once more to those that donated.

Proposed online discussion to remember Paddy – 2 July 2021

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A few weeks ago when I asked for suggestions as to how we might mark the tenth anniversary of Paddy’s death, some of you suggested an online discussion.

Little more has been heard about ideas for taking this forward, so I have decided to try to run something myself. There is no specific agenda, but we will have to have some sort of order. We might wish to introduce ourselves; talk about how we came to discover Paddy; our meetings with him; what inspires us about him or his work, even today; perhaps some selected readings.

The idea is to run an initial 90 minute session (come and go as you please) early on a Friday evening as this should allow the widest time-zone coverage, allowing for breakfast in California and evening across Europe. Despite a reasonably large Paddy following in Australia, it is almost impossible to arrange a respectable time that works (for what is a social event) for the Antipodes. We may be able to record the meeting for later viewing.

In order to keep this as simple as possible I plan to use Google Meets. This is free and we have no real limit on numbers. To attend you will need a Google account. If you don’t have one you can create one just for this meeting. Using Zoom would have involved cost; it may be something to consider if we decide to repeat the idea on a regular basis.

If you are interested in attending please add a comment below so I get an idea of interest in order to decide whether or not to proceed.

Details

Date and Time: 1800-1930 BST Friday 2 July

Location: Google Meets – see link here for requirements including web browser

Invitation: a link will be posted on the blog nearer the time – you will have to click in or accept. There will be no invitation to your calendar so you will have to make your own reminder.

Hosting and Admin: I shall host to start with but this is your meeting so very happy that you take over! If anyone wishes to contact me via email to help with any admin that will be welcomed.

If you have any questions or suggestions, please post a comment below or contact me via gmail address.

Calling all former PLF Society members; can you help?

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Thank you to all of you who have responded so quickly to this appeal. I have all that I need now and my inboxe(s) are overflowing! If you were going to help, thank you, but nothing further is needed. I’ll try to sort this out over the coming period (some of you know how slow I can be so the vagueness is deliberate!). Have a great weekend.

As all readers will no doubt be aware, the misson of this blog is to try to gather all Paddy related material into one useful place, and that has been more or less achieved. The PLF Society commissioned a number of articles and published these in its more than a dozen newsletters. With the demise of the Society and its website, much of this material has been lost to the public (and even former members who have lost or deleted).

I plan to create a little corner of the blog dedicated to PLF Society material as a tribute to the late Charles Arnold, founder of the Society. I believe I have about 40% of what was in the public domain, but would like to get this to 100%. This includes, in the main, the regular newsletters, The Philhellene.

I’m asking all readers if they can forward copies they still have of the Philhellene to atsawford[at]gmail.com . Thank you all in advance for your assistance. I shall update you all on progress.

Dinner commemorating the death of Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor 10 years ago

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The dinner event at Aphrodite Taverna (see here) is one month away. Thanks to Chris Joyce for organising everything. There are a couple of places still available, so if you would like to attend please let Chris have your details via chrisjoyce14 [at] outlook.com.

A deposit of £20 per person is needed, payable to Chris who has covered this so far, upon your confrmation.

Looking forward to seeing you all there for what will be a splendid evening of drinking, eating, singing, reading and spechifying!

The church at Agios Nikolaos

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This morning’s post about Bruce Chatwin has been most popular. Thank you for all the lovely comments. Nigel Dipper sent the above photo taken on one of their many visits to Agios Nikolaos. I hope that you enjoy it.

Hi Tom

Thanks for the reminder of the birthday of Bruce Chatwin; a remarkable man and a fine writer.
We often picnic at Agios Nikolaos where Chatwin’s ashes were laid to rest. It is a beautiful spot. This picture was taken in spring 2011 just before the death of PLF. I thought you might like a copy.
Up in the village above, a beer or a coffee can be had at the very friendly ‘Gorge Hotel’. The view of the Taygetos is spectacular

Regards, Nigel.

Complimentary access to Stanfords Travel Writers Festival Online Spring Edition – 8-9 May

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A little short notice, but some my find this of interest.

Standfords are partnering up with Destinations: The Holiday and Travel Show to bring you a Spring Edition of the Stanfords Travel Writers Festival.

Destinations TV will host a line up of scheduled talks, interviews and Q&A sessions at Destinations presents Travel 2021 on Saturday 8 – Sunday 9 May.

The line-up includes four brand new author talks from the Stanfords Travel Writers Festival.

Saturday 8th May: 12-1pm

I Belong Here: A Journey Along the Backbone of Britain with Anita Sethi

Saturday 8th May: 3-4pm

We Are Nature: How to reconnect with the wild with Ray Mears

Sunday 9th May: 12-1pm

Shadow City: A Woman Walks Kabul with Taran Khan

Sunday 9th May: 3-4pm

A Year of Living Simply with Kate Humble

All talks will be available to watch on demand until the 11:59pm 16 May.

A milestone: over two million views

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Some of you may be interested to know that sometime over the last few days the blog passed the point of two million views since I started it on 21 March 2010. The first post being about Ralph Stockbridge and not Paddy!

There are now 1,007 posts, and we have over 452,000 visitors to the site in that time. I do have around 250 posts in some form of draft state. I guess many of them may be duplicates or redundant now, but there is some life left in us yet!

You made this happen and thank you to all visitors for your support over these eleven years.

Don’t forget if you wish to publish something just get in contact with me atsawford [at] gmail .com

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