Not an island

Continuing the island theme, we have just spent the Christmas week in Swanage, on the Isle of Purbeck. This is, of course, not an island at all. Physically, it is very much a part of the mainland, although its particular geography means that there are only really two ways of getting to Purbeck, and one of them involves a ferry across the entrance to Poole Harbour.

Even better, this island has a steam railway! And a pretty impressive one at that. And the bus service was not that bad either. There are hourly buses from Poole/Wareham and Bournemouth. The latter using the Sandbanks-Shell Bay chain ferry.


Swanage is English seaside on a nice small, genteel scale. OK, it is not as up-market as St Ives, and it obviously has its fair share of chav youth, but it does pretty well for a small seaside town. In high season, I would imagine that it is pretty awful, but in Decenmber it was actually OK, and the weather was still good enough for us to have some fun on the beach. Good choice all round I'd say. Though it helped that we had pretty good weather most of the time.

Freecycle

I had been hanging on to a variety of computer gear for a while now (well, a few years actually) - an old PC with a defunct power supply, an unwanted surround-sound system, flatbed scanner that was not compatible with my current PC, and so on. I don't like to just throw-away things like that. It seems almost criminal to trash something that cost you £1,200 six years ago, and is still perfectly useable (with a bit of attention). And in any case, it is not that easy to get rid of bulky stuff when you live in a tower block - it just won't fit down the rubbish chute.

So, I had been hanging on to this stuff for quite a while, wondering what to do with it. I looked to see if there were any charity shops nearby that would come and collect. When I was a lad, people from voluntary organisations used to come around regularly collecting for "jumble sales". I myself used to do this for the cubs and scouts. But I have never encountered anything like that in the 23 years I have been living in London.

I assumed that there would be loads of local groups willing to take this stuff off my hands, but I could find nothing on the net. What I did find, however, was Freecycle. This is, effectively, a non-profit network of people who offload their unwanted stuff on each other. They use the Yahoo! Groups system to allow people to advertise stuff they don't want to people that might want or make use of it. For free. Members can also ask for stuff they are looking for.

I have to say that I was a bit dubious at first. But then I saw how much traffic there was in our own local area - the Lewisham Freecycle group has 5,688 members, and averages around 1,700 posts per month in it's group. So I decided to give it a try.

I was convinced that my pathetic collection of ancient and clapped-out computer hardware and software would not interest anybody. I was wrong. Within a few hours of posting my "OFFERED" items I received over 20 expressions of interest. I have to admit that I was a bit slow in following these up - partly because it was difficult to know where (or with whom) to start, and then I hadn't counted on the first few people I responded to ignoring my e-mails. But a week or so later my old PC and sound system have found a new home, the scanner is nearly gone, and there is actually someone who is interested in my carrier bag of old games CD-ROMs.

I am quite pleased with the outcome. Although it was slightly more of an effort to make the final arrangements than I had expected, it actually all worked well. I really don't like just throwing away perfectly good stuff just because I don't want or need it anymore, and Freecycle seems to be the answer. I'll certainly use it again.

Extremities

We have now travelled to the northern- and southernmost extremities of the UK rail network.

Two years ago we started our North Atlantic island-hopping trip by travelling by train from London to Thurso in the far North of the mainland Scotland - Britain's most northerly railway station. Today we returned from a pleasant break in St Ives, Cornwall, via Penzance - the most southerly station in the country. The two are some 600 miles (966km) apart as the crow flies, or 870 miles (1,400km) by train via London. 600 miles is about the same as the distance between London and Copenhagen, or Berlin, Prague, Milan, or Marseille.

We don't think of our country being that big. In fact, within Europe (excluding Russia), only Norway, Sweden and France have larger "tip-to-toe" dimensions (Norway being about 1,100 miles from far north to south, Sweden about 970 miles, and mainland France about 670 miles from Brittany to the Cote d'Azure). These days we sometimes think of ourselves as a small island off the coast of Europe, but we share latitude with 14 other EU countries, including the capitals of 12 of them (more than any other EU country).

On our 2005 North Atlantic trip we also visited the UK's most northerly inhabited place - Skaw, on the island of Unst in Shetland. A profoundly remote but attractive place, by surface transport you need to take three ferries to get there from mainland Britain. But it is worth the effort for the stunning coastal scenery, empty beaches, and the eerily deserted settlements on the surrounding hillsides.

Of course, having tested the limits of the rail network, and pushed on by road to the northernmost extent of the UK, we feel bound to do the same southwestwards - to the Scilly Isles. In fact, Andrew has been there once before, in the '70s, and still has clear memories of approaching the islands on the Penzance ferry, exploring Tresco Abbey gardens, and bumping into then Prime Minister Harold Wilson on the beach near St Mary's. Of course, the Scilly Isles will also be another addition to our islands collection, and we can get there by surface transport too. Although I think that we will have to arrange it so that we go at least one way by helicopter, as that is one of the few modes of transport that neither of us has experienced so far.

Murderous wildlife

This is not my usual kind of post, but I just had to record this.

I was disturbed late last night (OK, I hadn't actually gone to sleep) by an unbelievably blood-curdling screech from outside. I was a little surprised as we live high-up on the 14th floor, and now that the nights are getting cold we have the windows closed, so for a noise from outside to be that audible it has to be pretty loud. It happened again, and continued, so I got up and looked out of the window. For the next ten minutes or so there was a hideous throaty-skwaky-screechy sound so loud that it echoed around the buildings. I presumed that it was a fox (although there have not been so many around here this year) mauling a goose or some other fowl, although the noise was so loud that it may have been another fox, as I can't really imagine any kind of bird making that sound. Certainly a fox was involved, as I saw it running across the road shortly after the death-throe sounds finally subsided. Whatever it was, the victim certainly died in excruciating agony. Nature - red in tooth and claw, in the middle of Deptford!

Obviously not satisfied with its slaughter for the night, the fox then went on to terrorise the local human population. It stalked around making aggressive screech-barking sounds for the next 20 minutes. I observed one man getting out of his car, who upon hearing the noise ran very quickly to the entrance to the block of flats and waited nervously to be let in - looking over his shoulder all the time. Not long after, a group of three lads (obviously coming back from a club) were walking down the the road when they heard the screech-barking. I heard one of them shouting "fuck! what was that?!". They looked around at each other for a second, and then they legged it down the road for a hundred yards or so before looking back. It was quite funny to watch. I imagine that these guys had no idea what it was that they were running away from, but they were certainly scared.

I am sure that those lads will get over the experience, but it is fascinating to realise that predatory animal behaviour can still have this kind of effect on humans, even in the middle of London.

(picture from the Tooth & Claw website)

Mapping bliss

I have said before how much I like maps, and for many years I have been recording our travels in electronic maps of one form or another. I have always been fascinated by maps, and I like plotting-out where we have been, or plotting (in the other sense)where we would like to go. And it suits me to organise information spatially - that's how my brain works.

Ten years ago, this meant nothing more sophisticated than manually drawing routes on a map image using PaintShop, and later using simple (crude even) GIS (geographic information systems) applications. But more recently the advent of the amazing Google Earth has meant that I can create accurate vector maps over a high quality map/image base, and include all sorts of extra information. I have found this irresistible - compulsive even, to the extent that for our last canal boat holiday I used Google Earth to produce a map showing all 110 locks we were due to pass through - to within a couple of metres accuracy. The last few times we have been away with friends they have been "treated" to detailed Google Earth files detailing the location of recommended bars and even the best route to walk from the station to the hotel. It is over-the-top I know, but I love doing it. However, I have always struggled to effectively present map information on our web pages, and until very recently I have usually had to resort to simply posting static images and screenshots.

Two fairly recent developments have changed all this. First, the excellent Google Maps service provided a method of incorporating your own information into their map viewer. This means that I can now display maps and interactive information I have created in Google Maps on a web page in any browser. And now they have introduced a simple way of embedding these interactive maps into any web page (including Blogger). You can see the results in the two examples above and below. These are both segments of our recent trip to north Norway - the first shows our route from Tromsø to the Lofoten islands, and the second is a detailed view of the centre of Tromsø. You can pan and zoom the maps, switch between map and aerial views, and if you click on the icons you will see further information and pictures etc.



It's great - I love it. Expect more!

A load of old rubbish

This weekend was London's annual "Open House" event, where hundreds of public, private and commercial buildings around the city are open to the public. We usually try to use this opportunity to see buildings we wouldn't normally have access to, and this year we decided to vist somewhere close to home - a major industrial building which dominates the view from one side of our flat in Deptford.

SELCHP (South East London Combined Heat and Power) is a refuse incineration plant which generates electricity from the domestic refuse of four London boroughs (Lewisham, Greenwich, Westminster and Bromley). The plant opened in 1994, and was a major (and not uncontroversial) addition to the local skyline. Open House gave us an opportunity to look around inside and find out exactly what happems to our rubbish.

We were pretty impressed by how they handled the visitors - of which there were, perhaps surprisingly, quite a few. We were greeted at the entrance, handed a brochure and given a short safety briefing. Then it was up to us to make our way around the marked tour route at our own pace. There was no guided tour, but there were employees stationed all along who were quite happy to answer any questions.

The tour route took you past all the main processes, although not in the logical order, which might be a little confusing for some. Possibly the least impressive thing came first - the steam turbine. For something which generates enough electricity for 35,00 homes, it didn't look that big, although it's 3,000 rpm rotor certainly created a powerful hum. More impressive was the control room, with its detailed wall-mounted plant schematic, complete with dials, flow meters and digital displays now made rather redundant by a couple of LCD computer screens that the operators actually use to control the plant these days.

But the real star of this show is on one side of the control room, where two control chairs with joysticks look out through a window into the main refuse bunker. This is where the rubbish trucks dump the refuse, and from where two giant grabbers pick-up the refuse and deposit it in the hoopers that feed the furnaces. The grabbers are operated from the control chairs just like those fairground machines where you operate a pulley-controlled grabber and try to pick-up a prize from the hopper and drop it into the chute. But these grabbers are enormous! They are about 4m in diameter and can pick-up 5 tonnes at a time. Because the process is partly automated, anyone can operate the grabbers with a little supervision from the staff. You just have to use the controls on the chair to lower the grabber, point it at a part of the pile to descend to, and then tell it to close. The raising and depositing of the load in the furnace chute is automatic. The kids loved this, and there was quite a competition to get into the chairs and have a go (so we didn't bother waiting). Seeing one of these grabbers open and descending close to the control window was pretty impressive.

The other thing that impressed me was the furnace itself. Obviously, at 1,000 degrees C you can't see directly into these, but at the bottom end of the furnace (the furnace grate is angled about 25 degrees) there are small inspection hatches with a metal plate that you can lift up and look through a thick glass plate up onto the furnace grate. What you see is a fiercely hot yellow-orange inferno with a cascade of burning rubbish slowly descending towards you. Flames shooting up, and ash and embers floating down. It really was like something from a sci-fi movie.

This may not have been the most architecurally inspiring building to visit, but it was fascinating to see how it all worked, and the ingenious engineering which make is all happen. It is also good to find out exacty what happens to all the rubbish the we generate. This kind of facility is not exactly flavour of the month at the moment, and there have always been questions about the emissions that they create, but it does mean that very little of our rubbish in Lewisham is simple sent to landfill sites.

PS: Sorry, I forgot to take any picures inside the plant!

Across the Heart of England

Thanks to six days of uncharacteristically glorious weather, our 100 mile canal trip across the Heart of England from Birmingham to Tring was highly enjoyable. Although the midday sun can become somewhat opressive when working a long flight of locks for several hours, and we did get a little sunburnt, despite lashings of sun cream and obsessive wearing of hats.

Everything (mostly) went according to plan, and we met-up with the "Chelonian" by the drawbridge at Shirley, where, conveniently, there is a pub - the first of several canalside hostelries we sampled. 5 days, 92 miles and 110 locks later we arrived at Tring in good time to get the train home. This was the longest trip we have done so far on the waterways. Thanks to Dave McI for giving us such a good time.

I have not really been to this part of the country much before, and travelling by canal is a great way of both experiencing the countryside and getting a different perspective on the towns and villages that you pass through. I particularly liked the Stratford Canal, with its small, attractive single-width locks, and the Oxford Canal section of the Grand Union Canal, which has a more peaceful rural feel that the main section. The Grand Union itself s bigger and more functional and industrial in feel (in a 19th century sort of way), but still has a great deal of charm (and some great pubs).

We are looking forward to the next trip on the "Chelonian".

An Amazing Sight

As we were criusing along the Grand Union Canal through the outskirts of Milton Keynes we looked up and saw the most amazing sight in the sky - at least ten gliders all swooping around in the same thermal - high up, but still (apparently) incredibly close together. I don't think that I have ever seen more than two gliders at any one time before, so it was truly incredible to see so many together in the same small area of sky, circling like brilliant white vultures.

(There are six gliders in this photo, which is the best I could manage with my compact digital camera. There are a couple more pictures in the linked gallery - click on the picture to see a larger version and access the galleries.)

Lock, lock, lock ...

As mentioned before (see Canals and Locks (2 August 2007)), I quite like working the locks, and am aways ready to leap off clutching my windlass ready operate the next lock. Which is just as well, as we had 110 of them on this trip, although we managed to arrange it so that there were not more than 29 in any one day. However, locks have a habit of coming in packs (or "flights"), and there were several long ones on this trip, which was going to mean a lot of hard work.

Today was the biggest challenge - the Hatton flight, just outside Warwick. It is a very attractive setting, with a great view of Warwick from the top of the flight, but 21 locks in the space of 2 miles is a bit daunting, particularly as we started the day with the last six locks of the Lapworth flight (we did the first 13 the previous evening). However, we teamed-up with a very friendly crew from a hire boat (they were just coming to the end of their 2-week holiday), and we had picked up an extra crew member at Hatton, so there were six of us and six of them in total. We got a good rhythm going (one pair walking on to prepare the next lock each time etc.) so it took us less than three hours to complete the flight (about 8 minutes per lock). It was tough in the sun and heat (we started the top lock at 12:30), and the hydraulic paddle mechanisms on that part of the Grand Union are heavy going, but we had a good time.

After completing the final lock, we said farewell to our co-crew and continued into Warwick for a well-earned drink (or three) at the excellent canalside pub The Cape of Good Hope. We then continued on (through two more locks) to moor not far outside Leamington, and an excellent fish 'n' chip supper (onion rings not withstanding).

Strange Pavillions

Since I arrived a little early for my Prom concert at the Royal Albert Hall tonight I decided to go for a little wander around Hyde Park/Kensington Gardens (I am never quite sure where one ends and the other begins). The weather had started to turn a little brighter - a little more like a proper summer evening than of late - and I wanted to see what this year's summer pavillion at the Serpentine Gallery was like.

I was not much taken by last year's bloated baloon offering by Rem Koolhaas, although it certainly had scale and impact - it's huge white helium-filled dome visible from some distance towering over the classical gallery like some billious eruption. I thought it rather vulgar.

This year, the pavillion has been designed by the Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson, and is a rather more intruiging affair. Actually, it is not quite finished yet, and they still appear to be putting finishing touches to the interior, but the exterior appears to be complete. It is a helical structure of dark wood with an almost continuous open gap (instead of a wall) curving around the edge and up to the inclined conical roof. Between the upper and lower edges of the open gap there are skeins of thin white thread strung with a slight twist, which gives an interesting visual effect as you walk around the outside. The feel is almost like a place of worship - the building is substantially open, but it is difficult to make out what is happening inside. I'll be curious to take another look when it is finally open to the public.

As for tonight's Prom, that was another strange piece of architecture, although Bartok's Bluebeard's Castle is bigger, darker and altogther more disturbing the the Serpentine pavillions. But Bartok's psychological architecture uses light, colour and sound in a way which I am sure Olafur Eliasson would appreciate (Eliasson is best known in the UK for his hugely popular "Weather Project" installation at the Tate Modern in 2003, which involved a giant monochrome sodium lamp "sun" and an apparent doubling of the height of the turbine hall by mirroring the entire ceiling).

Canals and Locks

At last we have another holiday planned before the summer is over. Our rather expensive trip to Norway in May had heightened Dave's current sense of inpecunity, and so we have done without a "proper" holiday this summer. However, our friend Dave McI has come to the rescue by inviting us on his 300 mile canal trip from Macclesfield to Reading.

Dave McI owns a 60-foot traditional style British narrowboat (the Chelonian), and we have spent a number of long weekends on the boat with him, but this is the first time that we will have joined him on such a long trip. Actually, the current plan is for us to do the middle section across the Midlands between Birmingham and the edge of London: six days, 103 miles and 114 locks. It is going to be hard work - particularly as the second day will involve 41 manually operated locks - but it should be good fun as long as the weather behaves.

Actually, I quite like the manually operated locks. They can be very hard work, particularly on the smaller, older canals, but it is good exercise and quite satisfying. Last year we joined Dave McI on a couple of trips on the Thames between Oxford and Weybridge. There all the locks are hydraulically operated by resident lock-keepers, so there is really not much to do other than holding the lines to keep the boat steady as the lock fills/empties. I ended-up getting quite chilly, sitting around not doing very much, and was really relieved when we finally turned into the River Wey navigation, which is improbably old (completed in 1653) and had lots of quaint, attractive, and labour-intensive locks to operate.

The most locks I have operated in one day is 15 (plus 5 swing bridges), and that was quite knackering. So I don't know quite how I'll feel after 40 or so in one day. I am beginning to wonder if it is a good idea to go straight back to work the day after we finish.

The full itinerary is here, and there are links to maps on Google Maps and Google Earth too.

Non-encore (noncore?)

Can you have an encore that has never been performed before? And do we really need encores anyway?

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Prom No. 19: Hallé/Mark Elder
R. Strauss: Macbeth
Britten: Les Illuminations
Nielsen: Symphony No.4, 'The Inextinguishable'

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Obviously that is a largely pointless semantic/linguistic question, but one that arose following tonight's Prom concert at the Royal Albert Hall, where the Hallé Orchestra played as an encore a new orchestration (by Colin Matthews) of a previously lost, late piano piece by Debussy. According to conductor Mark Elder, the orchestration had never been performed before, so how could it be an "encore" (French: "again"). It is a frivolous debate, of course, but it did get me thinking about how I feel about this sort of Proms programming and encores in general.

I booked this particular Prom for the Nielsen symphony, and that alone. I was not bothered about the Strauss or Britten in the first half. And that is part of the problem with Proms programming these days - so often the really interesting stuff is mixed-in with seemingly more "safe" material that I can really do without. I know that this is partly an issue with my own tastes, which are probably much less conservative than the mainstream audience that the programmers are trying to attract. But when the notes in the printed programme describes a work (Strauss' 'Macbeth') in contrast to his "two real masterpieces" ('Don Juan' and 'Tod und Verkarung'), and refers to the "sometimes opressively heavy" execution, and a fanfare that is "hardly fresh to the ears", then one can hardly be blamed for not giving it much attention.

Britten's 'Les Illuminations' didn't do much more for me either. I really do not appreciate this kind of work, or the style of singing involved, and Joan Rodgers' operatic posturing was frankly embarassing at times. So, first half of the concert - not good. But I was not expecting much anyway.

Second half: Nielsen's Symphony No.4, 'The Inextinguishable' - Fantastic. I'm so fond of this piece, and all the wonderfully spine-tingly moments were there. The performance couldn't be faulted really, and I felt quite exhilarated at the end. So I was a bit aprehentious when they decided to do an encore.

It is difficult when a concert ends with a rousing or emotionally moving piece which has been performed well. The audience show their appreciation, but do you really want to spoil the impact of the performance by playing an encore? Of course one obvious response is to adhere to the original sense and meaning of the term and play the piece again (or at least the final section). I have heard that done before, usually to good effect, but all to often the encore is just one of the orchestra's standard set pieces - a short and usually frivolous piece that may have no relation to the main work preceeding it. When listening on the radio, these are usually prefaced by the announcer declaring that we are about to hear "a real treat". This usually spells disaster. I recall a Prom a couple of years ago when the Vienna Philharmonic followed the "Rite of Spring" with a couple of tacky J Strauss II waltzes. Just awful. It really spoilt my evening, like following a perfect steak with a malteezer McFlurry for dessert.

That said, a carefully chosen encore can enhance the overall experience. The Scandinavian/Nordic orchestras seem to be quite good at this, for example following a Nielsen symphony with his "Helios" or the Maskarade overture, or following a Sibelius symphony with one of the Lemminkainen legends or one of a number of other Sibelius 'shorts' like "Death of Melisande", "Valse Triste", "Alla marcia" or "Finlandia". But maybe I am naturally biased towards this music anyway.

At tonight's concert the Hallé's unusual approach to chosing an encore seemed to work reasonably well. By playing a piece that nobody had heard before (at least not in that form), it was guaranteed to engage some interest and not have that stomach churning "Ah! Now here comes a real treat" effect. And the work itself was 'light' enough not to compete with the main work, whilst being at the same time not too frivolous. I have to say that I could still have done without it, but at least on this occasion it did not ruin the "main meal".

Proms 2007

First Prom of the season:

Prom No. 5
Sam Hayden: Substratum (BBC commission: world premiere)
Bernstein: Symphony No. 2, 'The Age of Anxiety'
Ives: Symphony No. 4

Rather surprised at quite how small the audience is - can't be more than 25% capacity. I was expecting more, particularly for Ives' richly packed and rarely performed 4th Symphony.

At least the poor attendance meant that it was not too hot in there, but it was a strangely cold audience, and not a particularly memorable concert.

New tack and old chic

Today we went over to North Greenwich to have a look at the recently reopened millennium dome - now renamed The O2. We were not really sure what to expect, but I have to say that they have done a pretty uninspiring job of fitting it out. There seems to have been a complete lack of imagination in designing the new buildings and structures inside. Instead of taking advantage of the huge covered space, they have crammed it with traditional buildings along a traditional street pattern. The result is quite claustrophobic in parts, and all rather pointless. To make matters worse, most of the buildings have been designed in a chinzy fake art deco style, giving it all a kind of tawdry mock Miami Beach feel (complete with fake palm trees). As a result, there is nothing special here, it is just like being in any mediocre shopping mall, except there are no shops - just a lot of franchised overpriced restaurants.

What a wasted oportunity. When you are building under a giant weatherproof tent you don't need walls, windows, roofs (or even doors) in the traditional sense. They could have done some really great stuff in here, but what you have is actually worse than the original Millennium contents (and some of that was quite poor). Shame on the developers/designers for turning out this insipid tat.


Depressed by the dull and unimaginative experience of the O2, we decided to get a riverbus on Thames Clippers new scheduled service between the O2 and Waterloo, to go and take a look at the also recently reopened Festival Hall. Here the opportunity for innovation was much more limited as it is a listed building (even the carpet is listed). However, the refurbishment of the interior seems to have gone quite well (even if it is clearly not quite finished yet). The original layout is virtually identical, but they have managed to create more space and keep (improve even) the light and airy feel of the lobby and foyer spaces. We had a good look around (at my insistance - I don't think that Dave was that interested really), and it is all still there - all the old places, the tucked-away lobby areas, they just seem to be a bit bigger now. It will be interesting to see how it all works when there is a concert on.

Of course the carpet is still there (at least it is the same design, but new carpet), and the overwhelming feel is light-natural-beige, and the stylish 50s chic that we love the Festival Hall so much for. So I am quite encouraged overall, but we didn't get to see inside the auditorium itself. That will probably be the subject of another blog.

Stockholm

Well, we had a pretty good weekend in Stockholm. The getting there was not exactly great - our flight was delayed by an hour, and then we spent another 45 minutes waiting to take-off. After we finally arrived at Arlanda airport, we decided to get a taxi into town - big mistake. There were four of us, so a taxi was cheaper overall than using the hideously expensive Arlanda Express rail service. However, we hadn't reckoned on Friday afternoon traffic conspiring with roadworks and a nasty road traffic accident to make our journey into the city centre excruciatingly slow. I hate travelling by car at the best of times. On this occasion I was sorely tempted to just jump out and walk. Please bring back congestion charging in Stockholm!

So, I was not in the best of moods when we finally arrived at our hotel - over an hour and a half after leaving Arlanda. However, the weather was lovely and sunny, so we wandered-off to find somewhere pleasant to have a good drink. Fortunately, we found the perfect place at Tehuset under the elm trees in Kungsträdgården. Sitting in the half-shade of the early summer sunshine, it didn't take long to get rid of the "anti-holiday" feeling.

The next day we had glorious weather again, so we took a little train trip to the spa resort of Saltsjöbaden about 15km south east of the city on the edge of the archipelago. After a very pleasant wander along the boardwalks around the attractive harbour, we took a slightly tortuous bus-train-train-bus journey to Nacka Strand at the entrance to Stockholm harbour. This recent marina development has a great restaurant and terrace by the harbour, so we took advantage and had a delicious al fresco lunch of some of our favourite Swedish food - gravad lax and löjrom. We finished off our excellent outing with a boat trip back to the city.

Although we have now been to Stockholm 15 times in the past 9 years we never seem to tire of it. There are still loads of places I want to see and things I want to do.

It doesn't get much better than this

Now we are back from our trip to north Norway there are going to be a few postings like this as we go through our photos and other memorabilia. Please indulge us!

This is Reine in the Lofoten islands. In fact, this is the view from the living room of the "rorbu" (fisherman's cabin) where we stayed for a couple of days. Fantastic, isn't it?

Actually, I nearly cried when we arrived. It was perfect - the weather was bright and sunny; the scenery was stunning; the village was as picturesque as you could wish; the 'cabin' (think 'chalet' really) was spacious, comfortable, very nicely furnished, and wonderfully sited; the rorbu manager was exceptionally friendly and welcoming; it was quiet and peaceful. We had had a lovely day driving through the Lofoten islands, and I just felt very, very happy.

Cross ref: Blog Holiday!!!!!! (Wednesday, 9 May 2007) on what we were expecting.

Holiday!!!!!!

To counter Dave's rather negative post below (which largely belongs on his own blog really), I'd just like to mention that we are actually going on holiday. To somewhere we've talked about visiting for ages. Two hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle actually (which I think qualifies it as being "the arctic"). So it's a nice little adventure, like we normally do, but with a little bit of extra "edge" (which I think maybe Dave is just a little bit nervous about).

It will be cold, and it will probably rain alot, but I'm really looking forward to it. OK, so we will have to endure the world's worst airport (believe me, we did try to find an alternative), but at least we get that out of the way right at the start. A necessary evil perhaps - but lets not dwell upon it. I'm looking forward.

Looking forward to visiting interesting places out on the periphery - there are going to be lots of "most northerly" whatevers on this trip. Looking forward to sailing on the Hurtigrute; to taking the train through the mountains; to visiting places only Norwegians have ever heard of. And hopefully we will get some fantastic scenery too. And good food!

We are bound to meet people who will ask us "why would you want to come here?" - we always do - to which our usual answer is "its not London", which only seems to generate more bemusement. Well, we know why we are going, even if we can't quite explain it adequately (see Islands in the stream of conciousness, below). And maybe, if we get up one morning and look out of the window to see the view pictured here, we won't feel the need to justify it to ourselves or anyone else.

Post script (23 May 2007):
Well, we got exactly what we wanted on the Lofoten islands! This is what we actually got to see from our fishermans cabin in Reine. See blog It doesn't get much better than this. However, nobody asked us "why would you want to come here?". But maybe that is not that strange. After all, it was perfect.

We love maps

Andrew loves maps, and thanks to the wonderful Google Earth and Google Maps we can now share details of the route of our trip through north Norway. If you have Google earth then all you need to do is load the following file (just click on the link, or download the file and then open in Google Earth): www.highrise.dircon.co.uk/deptlads/norway07/Norway2007Summary.KML
If you don't have Google Earth then you can still see the route on Google Maps in any web browser using this link.

We are starting at Tromsø in the north and working our way south along the routes indicated on the maps, finishing in Trondheim. The route statistics are:

• Return air travel - 4,132km
• Scheduled boats - 219km
• Internal air travel - 103km
• Trains - 729km

Total distance 5,350km (1,218km not including return air travel).

Travels in The North

Sounds a bit like a radio quiz teaser, but - what could possibly link our forthcoming trip to north Norway with science fiction writing, Janacek's operas, the fight against fascism, pen & ink drawings, and a recent play about newts on Radio 4?

Well, even Google doesn't seem to be able to get you anywhere near a meaningful answer, even though I have been quite generous with the key words in the pragraph above (try it). And that is quite reassuring really, since it would seem to indicate that so-called "intelligent" search engines cannot get anywhere near emulating the processes of the human brain or capturing even the basics of "western" culture (which is something the aforementioned newts could do). Of course, now that I have written this piece (and it has been indexed by the search engines), the mystery of these unexpected connections will no longer exist, but thanks only to human intervention.

The answer is actually alluded to in an earlier post on this blog - Karel Čapek. He is one of those people who suddenly pop into your consciousness from several directions at the same time, even though you were previously never aware of them as an individual. Čapek (pronounced "chopek") was a Czech writer who is probably best known for coining (inventing, even) the word "robot" in his 1920 play "R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots)". I was aware of the Czech origins of "robot" since childhood exposure to numerous UK and US sci-fi novels (my Mum always had stacks of these paperbacks for us to read during the school holidays), but had never heard of Čapek, and certainly never realised his connections with other aspects of my life. But that all changed when we decided to go to Norway in August 2001.

One Sunday, a few weeks before going away, we were browsing around in a cluttered second hand bookshop in Greenwich. Looking along the travel shelves we were debating whether or not to buy an old Baedeker's guide to Norway (period travel books can be a good way to get a different angle on travel destinations) when I came across an intruiging yellow bound volume entitled "Travels in The North" by Karel Čapek. 'This looks promising' I thought. And I was right. Because this book had taken nearly 60 years to find me, and it was exactly what I was looking for. It was a travelogue written in the 1930s about a trip (taken some years earlier) through Denmark, Norway and Sweden. Written in an endearingly frank and reflective but humourous central European style it also incorporates many brilliant and idiosyncratic pen & ink drawings by the author. It is the sort of book that you could never imagine throwing away.

Čapek's book is not exactly a literary masterpiece, but it is charming in every positive sense of the word. The pages are stuffed full of illustrations, at least one every other page, which make it rewarding to flick though as well as read. They are mostly simple pen & ink, highly stylised and reminiscient of traditional Czech woodcuts and the newspaper cartoons that Janacek loved so much. It was the perfect companion to our trip, and will be so again when we pick-up Čapek's trail north of the Actic Circle in a few days time.

Having bought the book (for all of four pounds), I decided to find out more about Karel Čapek. The robot connection immediately struck a chord, as I have already described. Numerous SciFi authors have acknowleged this, and it has also seeped into popular culture (according to Wikipedia, Dr Who, Batman and Futurama have all paid hommage to Čapek in relation to robot characters). Then I discovered that it was Čapek who had written the 1922 play "Věc Makropulos" ("The Makropulos Affair", which might also be classed as a scifi story), which Czech composer Leos Janacek used for his celebrated opera of the same name. I am a big fan of all of Janacek's music, and although I am not usually keen on opera, Janacek's are among the few operas that I do like. I was fascinited to discover this unexpected connection. I was also pleased to learn that Čapek was a passional anti-fascist and had a close friendship with the first Czech president Tomáš Masaryk. This position is exemplified in his celebrated 1936 play "The War with the Newts", which has a poingnant relevance to issues of economic migration today - clearly evident in a 2005 BBC Radio 3 production that was recently re-broadcast on Radio 4 (and it was listening to that play that got me thinking about writing this piece).

Originally published in Czech under the title "Cesta na sever" in 1936, my copy of "Travels in The North" is a 1942 reprint of the fourth "cheap" edition of the English translation by M. & R. Weatherall published by George Allen & Unwin. The fact that it proudly proclaims that it is printed on "War Economy Standard" paper only seems to add to the appeal (the quality of the paper is acually pretty good - not too different from todays recycled paper it has yellowed a bit but is not at all brittle, even after more than 60 years). There is also a single colour plate fronticepiece (a drawing of a boulder-strewn settlement entitled "Ljusdal") bound opposite the title page.

You won't find this book in Waterstones or Borders - as far as I am aware it has been out of print for over 50 years. Occasionally there are copies available on Amazon's marketplace (and maybe ebay too). Or, just maybe, like me, it will find you in a secondhand bookshop just as you are about to embark upon your own travels in The North.

Island moods

I am in an island mood tonight. I've just been reviewing the photos from our 2005 trip to the Faroe Islands. What a great trip that was. I'd only ever met one other person who had visited the Faroes, and he had described them (and the capital, Tórshavn) as a fish-stinking dump. Our exprience was rather different. OK, so we might have been blessed with exceptionally good weather - which was great when we were driving around the islands, but we were also very pleasantly surprised by the friendly and almost cosmopolitan nature of the tiny capital. With only 19,000 inhabitants, Tórshavn must be one of the smallest capitals in the world - rather less than 0.3% of the size of London. Nevertheless, we spent three very enjoyable nights there, eating good food and enjoying good (if rather expensive) beer. We even went to a late night bar and a nightclub (but that is another story!).

There are fewer than 50,000 Faroese - which is pretty small, even by small country standards, but they seem to be doing reasonably well stuck out there at the far extremity of the shipping forecast. I think we will be going back there sometime.

Islands in the stream of consciousness

It's odd. We are both fundamentally city-dwellers/city-lovers, but in recent years we seem to have made a habit of travelling to (mostly) remote island communities. Our trip next month to north Norway and the Lofoten islands will be just the latest in a string (an archipelago?) of visits to places many people have hardly heard of and still less have any inclination to visit.

I think that it started in 1999 when we decided to stop off for a few days in the Åland islands on our way from St Petersburg to Stockholm by train and ferry. Five years later we had no hesitation in repeating the mid-Baltic experience - in the opposite direction that time. And the following year we concocted a North Atlantic island-hopping itinerary through Orkney, Shetland, and on to the Faroe islands. Then last year we included the Danish island of Bornholm on our zig-zagging tour through Holland, Germany, Denmark and southern Sweden. And on that occasion we also managed to visit the tiny off-offshore island of Christiansø. In between there have been numerous trips to "inshore" islands in Finland, Sweden, Denmark and Norway, and Dave has even managed to get to one of the Frisian islands.

I don't know quite what it is about these places that appeals. They are mostly small, remote, isolated, and on the fringe. But they have also all been friendly, welcoming and utterly engaging, at least to us as travellers. There is certainly something about island communities that appeals, but it is difficult to put your finger on it. Just getting there usually takes some effort (mostly involving catching a ferry or two), and for us at least that is something of the appeal. All these places have strong maritime associations, and maybe that has something to do with it too. Of course, many of these islands have fantastic natural landscapes and scenery, but also, as islands, rather than mainland "wilderness" areas, they also have well defined cultural and community centres, which means that you are not usually far from a decent place to stay and eat (always important for us).

So, I still can't really say why it is that I like the idea of spending a few days on a remote island 100 miles north of the Arctic Circle with a population only slightly larger that the building we live in, but in two weeks time that is precisely what we will be doing, and I am rather looking forward to it.