Spectator Life

As the S-Bahn tram slid along Bernauer Straße, through its windows I could see tourists posing for photos beside the remains of the Berlin Wall. Everyone fixates on the border that cut through West and East Berlin. We forget that Berlin itself was deep in the GDR and that hundreds of kilometres to the west another border ran down the entire seam of West and East Germany. Observation Post Alpha, the West’s most important military observation post on that border, still stands today as a memorial to the folly of geopolitical games. It was erected to overlook the so-called Fulda Gap, an area of land deemed strategically vital by the Allies. This was where hordes of Russian tanks would charge through in the event of a full-scale attack on the West.

Economy fliers everywhere, rejoice! After a long stint of what can only be described as tight-fisted meanness, British Airways and other short-haul carriers including Virgin Atlantic have started to compete on service again. The trolley-dolly is officially back. Now, once you are (semi) comfortably seated in economy and cruising at altitude, you will be offered tea or coffee and maybe even a biscuit. Airlines have long competed in a race to the bottom on price but are undergoing something of a volte face. This new customer service strategy is driven by competition from the state-subsidised airlines in Asia and the Gulf. This can only be good news for those of us who fly economy but believe that we belong in another part of the plane. I include myself in this number.

You saw Homicide: Life on the Street, right? You know, that gritty TV police drama set in Baltimore. What? Ah, no, you’re thinking of The Wire, that other gritty TV police drama set in Baltimore, the one with Idris Elba and Dominic West. Homicide predates The Wire and was filmed largely around Fells Point and along Baltimore’s historic waterfront. The former City Recreation Pier, which stood in for the police department, is now a swanky hotel, the Sagamore Pendry Baltimore, in whose comfortable embrace I have just wallowed. Baltimore doesn’t have a great reputation. Whenever I tell American friends I’ve been there they affect horror and ask what on earth I was thinking. Couldn’t I have gone to Boston, New Orleans, New York, Washington D.C.

‘I have searched everywhere for the “city of dreams” and found it here, in Ronda,’ Rilke wrote. Hemingway was more practical: ‘[Ronda] is where you should go if you ever go to Spain on a honeymoon or if you ever bolt with anyone. The entire town and as far as you can see in any direction is romantic background…’ Sixty miles inland from Málaga, encircled by mountains, Ronda stands on a plateau cut by a steep, narrow gorge some two hundred yards deep. Eroded over a period of five million years by the river that runs through it, this ravine divides the town in two and ends in a sheer cliff drop to the plain below. Cacti and fig trees grow out of its sides; birds wheel and swoop down the chasm to their nests on the rock face.

No one is quite sure who invented the phrase ‘the shock of the new’. It may have been the American writer Harold Rosenberg back in the 1960s. Alternatively, it may have been the late, great Australian intellectual Robert Hughes, who used it as a title for a TV series. Whatever the answer, the phrase aptly captures a very human moment: when you encounter something so strangely and profoundly innovative you experience a visceral, emotional jolt. Those two thinkers applied the phrase to modern art, to the first jarring encounter with impressionism, Cubism, abstract expressionism. But it can also be applied, perhaps more appositely, to the first encounter with remarkable technology. Technology, in the famous vision of Arthur C.

I am five minutes out of the Faroe Islands’ windy, stomach-churning airport when the world twists into legend. It looks like Lord of the Rings but more menacing. Ten minutes later it’s a nightmare of single-track tunnels – go slooooow – carved into the earth by crazed dwarfs with too much time on their hands. Five minutes after that it’s Tolkien again, but redrafted by a boozed-up Norse god: dramatic buttes crumble into the Atlantic, mad farmers are ploughing near-vertical slopes, and waterfalls leap joyously from enormous cliffs to dissolve into lacy surf 300 yards below. The land here feels tormented, as if the sky and the sea endured a bitter divorce and the cliffs are their broken children: jagged, furious and full of vengeance.

Call me crazy, but I’ve always loved Belfast. Even when it was grim, scary and unlovable, I loved Belfast. It doubtless helped that when I came to know it, I was courting a local girl. I loved it because she loved it and, well, I loved it even after she chucked me. The people, the bars, the craic – gosh, the very air – invariably get under my skin. I’ve always felt at home in the city’s embrace. And now that Belfast is no longer grim, scary and unlovable – and long since my Colleen came to love another and long since I came to love another too – I love Belfast even more. The craic is just as hilarious as that in Cork, Dublin or Galway. And today it’s even more so thanks to a swank and a pride (and a peace) that was absent before.

There’s good reason oak leaves have long been incorporated into German military decorations like the Iron Cross. The oak tree is the tree of Germany – its leaves standing for strength, courage and tradition – something I witnessed while hiking from Berlin to Erfurt through the former communist lands of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik. Traversing what used to be East Germany on foot, I realised the extent of its forest cover (and how poor the UK’s is in comparison). There are forests everywhere – about a third of present-day Germany is covered by woodland that is also protected thanks to the political influence of the Greens – and these enclaves are entwined in the German psyche.

Almost anywhere you go in Cardigan Bay – that bite out of West Wales which runs a hundred miles along the Irish Sea – the spirit of Dylan Thomas seems to go with you. The Swansea-born poet may only have lived in Cardiganshire intermittently, fleeing the bohemian bedlam of Fitzrovia during the second world war, but the time he spent there produced some of his greatest poems – among them ‘The Conversation of Prayer’, ‘A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London’, and the beginnings of ‘Fern Hill’ – his ringing, singing recollection of a lost and longed-for childhood.

It smells, very badly. And even after decades of complaints, it seems Parisians still consider themselves too chic to pick up after their dogs. Taxis are a nightmare. The traffic makes central London seem like a village in Ireland. Uber drivers park as far away as possible from the designated pick-up point, fail to answer messages or calls, then charge a fortune in waiting time. The expense is phenomenal. For three coffees, one mint tea and a croissant that had the texture of a carpet slipper, I was charged more than £30. And don’t get me started on the coffee: if Paris is the home of café culture, shouldn’t it also be that of good coffee? Wrong! It usually tastes like recycled dishwater, or as if it’s been dredged from the bottom of the Seine.

I’m driving a dirt road in the wilds of central Sardinia. And I mean what I say by ‘wilds’. This rugged region in the sunburned Supramonte mountains was called ‘Barbagia’ by Cicero – i.e. ‘land of the barbarians’ – as even the Romans never quite managed to subdue it. Centuries later it became famous for bandits, kidnaps, local mafias – and casu marzu, the infamous ‘Sardinian maggot cheese’. I turn to my resourceful local guide, driver and interpreter, Viola, as she negotiates the olive groves and goat tracks. ‘Do you really think we will find casu marzu?’ My voice is slightly falsetto with tension. Viola turns: ‘I hope so, there is a pretty good chance. And maybe we will find something even more unusual…’ But first, let’s rewind 30 years.

I’m standing at a bar in a car park on the rooftop of a shopping centre. I ask the bartender if the beer on draught is big or small. ‘That depends on your definition,’ he says. ‘What is big? What is small?’ The oonce-oonce of German trance music makes it hard to hear, and I’m distracted by the solitary figure on the dance floor wearing all black and contorting her body into the shape of a pretzel. ‘Is the beer groß or klein?’ I shout. The bartender – who is well over 50 and has the fashion sense of a Green Day groupie from 2005 – just smirks and says, ‘That’s for you to decide.’ I order the beer anyway. It is small (klein). I don’t tip. This is Berlin. Berlin is big.

You might have missed this because it hasn’t exactly been saturated with media coverage, but this week is the 200th birthday of Britain’s railway. In fact, it’s the 200th birthday of all railways, since we invented them. It was on 27 September 1825 that service began on the Stockton and Darlington Railway. Travelling a distance of just eight-and-a-half miles at about 15mph, the world’s first public commercial rail service arrived to a crowd of 10,000 and – as would become a characteristic feature of future British rail travel – was delayed by half an hour due to engineering problems. Yes, the worldwide rail revolution began in the north-east of England – the Silicon Valley of rail. I know, not since H.G.

At the Eurostar terminal at London St Pancras, on my way back to Paris, I stopped at the Station Pantry. It’s a counter at the back of the terminal, and it does a roaring trade because it’s the only coffee place between immigration, security and the trains. There’s little else to do while you wait to be called to board, particularly when there aren’t enough seats for everyone. I ordered an espresso for £3.60. The cashier swung the screen around for me to pay. Ten, 15, 20 per cent? A tip for a cup I was about to carry away myself. I said it was wrong to be asked for a tip on takeaway coffee. She said that if I didn’t like it, I could press the red button and decline. But that’s not the point. This practice of prompting us to leave tips hasn’t come from customers.

There are many destinations which spring to mind when considering the options for a weekend away with a young family. There are beaches by the dozen, theme parks and glamping opportunities galore. But there is only one Florence. And I cannot say this strongly enough: when it comes to the kids, the Center Parcs of the Renaissance will not let you down. It begins with Tuscany itself, a place so beautiful that you can get Stendhal syndrome on the bus on the way from the airport. And even if your children are glued to their screens, eventually motion sickness will force them to look up and they may glimpse its dreamy vistas, too.

If you’re a fan of American billionaires buying up much-loved British institutions, then you, too, might be rejoicing at news that Larry Ellison has set his sights on purchasing much of Oxford. The squillionaire owner of the software technology company Oracle (net worth: $270 billion, or thereabouts) has started relatively small, however. In addition to spending a huge amount of money on the Ellison Institute of Technology in the city’s Science Park, he has also paid a supposed $10 million for one of its best-known and most-loved alehouses, the Eagle and Child, aka ‘the Bird and Baby’.

London on Monday night was mad and hilarious. At the Hyde Park Corner crossing, the number of people on Lime bikes must have been approaching 100. Invariably described as menaces, murderers and leg-breakers, these Lime bikes and their riders waited for the traffic light to turn green. When it did, battalions of these 35-kilo machines toppled and wobbled around each other, as the same number came in the other direction, green and white overwhelming the eyes. Yet no knees were crunched, no one fell off and those brave enough managed to render the tube strikes a minor inconvenience. If you believe in the state as protector, nanny and moraliser, and the world as a perfectible place where hazard can be eliminated, they should be banned It was good to see.

‘Never join a queue.’ It’s not a bad motto. It keeps me away from tourist-choked hotspots. It means I don’t visit venues that offer free admission for children, advertise fast-track entry or are just one stop on ‘a multi-attraction sight-seeing experience’. My advice? If they want you to book a time slot, don’t go. As Bertrand Russell points out in The Conquest of Happiness: ‘Noise and the constant presence of strangers cause fatigue.’ It’s certainly difficult to appreciate great art or admire magnificent architecture in such circumstances. And when I’m studying the text explaining the significance of the Rosetta Stone, I don’t want someone leaning over my shoulder trying to read it at the same time. Especially when they’re chewing strawberry-flavoured gum.

This summer has been the hottest on record where I live in Burgundy. It could have been disastrous for the grapes as temperatures reached nearly 40°C. Luckily, most of the vineyards in the Côte d’Or were able to move les vendanges to mid-August instead of early September, when they were expecting to harvest. Apparently, it will be a good year nevertheless. I moved to the little village of Meursault eight years ago in October, to help with grandchildren. My daughter Annabelle works for Domaine Roulot and her husband is winemaker for Domaine de Montille. They were busy harvesting the grapes that autumn. Not any more – most vignerons here, and probably elsewhere in France, think cooler summers will never return.

There’s been a lot of talk recently about flags, especially English ones. The start of the Women's Rugby World Cup – a good excuse to bring out the bunting – has coincided with a renewed interest in proclaiming national identity. Some might see it as an outpouring of patriotic pride, while others view it as a far-right provocation. But whether it's ‘Operation Raise the Colours’ or roundabouts painted red and white (although some bright spark in Birmingham managed to paint a Danish flag by mistake), if the sight of a cross of St George sends you into a panic, I have a suggestion: head to Cornwall. If my recent experience is anything to go by, you’ll be lucky to see a single English flag.

There’s something unsettling about a statue with its head lobbed off. Sure, it’s just a piece of stone. But it represents something. There are headless statues in churches all over France, statues of bishops, martyrs, saints. It’s not surprising those statues came out of the French revolution badly; the church and its clerics weren’t popular. But the revolution was nearly 250 years ago. How come the heads haven’t been put back on? It seems lax of the church authorities, to say the least. After all, the church in France is often referred to as fille aînée de l’Église, the ‘eldest daughter of the Church’. Its roots go back to the Apostolic Age when Jesus’s earliest disciples landed in Gaul.

It is still the case on transatlantic flights that a drinks trolley comes to even the farthest reaches of Economy. If you’re lucky, the gay man or imposing Essex girl wheeling it will, with a wink and a smile, palmed you over an extra mini bottle of gin or a wine for the meal. They can tell who will be a good, and who a bad, plane drinker.  I like to think of myself as the former. I am not someone who drinks to get drunk. Yet that initial buzz from a lemony Bombay Sapphire and Fever Tree glugged through ice is hard to beat. It’s an empowering, controlled, merrymaking high. In the wrong person, this buzz causes unwanted chattiness, but in my case it makes me sit back in my cramped seat and think pulsing, magisterial thoughts about the wonders of modern life.

‘Sit up straight, heels down, lean forward, lean back, tighten the reins, loosen the reins.’ Joe's instructions replay in my head as I scan the canyon floor for rattlesnakes. I gently push my heels into the sides of my horse, Rio, and he sets off across the rocky terrain. Joe is my guide and a real-life cowboy. Guiding tourists like me through Arizona’s Sonoran Desert is his side hustle. I've signed up for a two-hour sunset trail ride, but Joe tells me he often takes groups into the desert for days. They sleep under the stars, catch fish for supper and eat fruit from barrel cacti. Joe can tell I'm anxious. I'm pretty sure Rio can too. I've been unusually stressed for a while, and no amount of London wellness treatments seem to help. I needed something more radical.

‘August for the people and their favourite islands,’ wrote W.H. Auden. My own favourite island in Britain is the Isle of Wight, even though my introduction to it was less than ideal. I was seven years old and had been sent to the island for the ritual initiation for British middle-class males of my generation: immersion in a boarding school with around 50 other pre-pubertal boys. I was, in fact, the youngest boy in the school and this was the first time I had left home. I have already written in these pages about my five years at a boarding school on the island; bizarre and bewildering rather than the hell of paedophilia and punishment described by others writing about their prep school days. But I want to convey here the curious charm of the island itself.

A recent, rather beautiful piece published here told of how the writer, Druin Burch, initially somewhat alarmed by the variety of naked bodies he unexpectedly encounters while swimming in the Med (‘I wouldn’t mind if it was only young women,’ he says to his wife) comes to appreciate the loveable imperfection of the human form. I can’t say I’m with him on this. I totally understand fit women wanting to take their tops off in public as an expression of sheer high spirits; as a teenager, I used occasionally to do it. But humanity generally? Put it away, puh-leeze! As a resident of the fair city of Brighton and Hove, I’ve got skin in the game, metaphorically.