Edgbaston Reservoir by Midland Metro

My latest video - in which we travel by tram from Wolverhampton to Birmingham and walk round an autumnal Edgbaston Reservoir.

The video is here.

A Wander round Wolverhampton

Mostly known for industry and for Wolverhampton Wanderers FC, Wolverhampton goes back further than that. Here we have a walk around and take some pictures. https://youtu.be/L59TaC1mDbk

Steam to Shrewsbury

Recently I took a journey by train.

The “Welsh Marches Express”, from Bristol to Shrewsbury.

Shrewsbury is a town in Shropshire, not far from the border with Wales - at times it has been in Wales, and may have been the capital of the Welsh kingdom of Pengwern.

The video is here. https://youtu.be/zy1PEh1iRpc

 

Language Update

I just signed up for a Welsh language course. Duolingo is ok for the basics but doesn't give you the grammar (which Welsh has a lot of). Duolingo, really: I think it's the equivalent of those little Collins phrasebooks you used to get. So now you can say a few basic useful phrases in whichever language it is, but you can't really speak it. 

And Duolingo Welsh: what's all this about pannas (parsnips)? Apparently it's some kind of injoke but it gets everywhere. 

Also, fluency isn't grammar. I suspect my French is more grammatically correct than my Spanish, but I speak Spanish more fluently. Or else there's a different reason for this: if I'm speaking French to someone in France they'll sometimes reply in English, but if I'm speaking Spanish to someone in Spain I don't get English back. 

This could be fluency or it could be a different mindset - French people: "this person is an English speaker, I'll help them by speaking English." Spanish people: "this person is making an effort to speak my language, I'll appreciate that effort and continue to speak it." I've no evidence for that though. 

I also fell out with the French conversation class I was in because - essentially - while I'm quite fond of France and French culture, it isn't to the exclusion of other, especially European, cultures.

Appointments, Deadlines ... Manifestations?

This article by Guardian regular Lucy Mangan struck a chord. 

Lucy went shopping for a diary to record, as you do, her appointments and what have you. But what does she find? 

"Every diary (bar the tremendously formal, proper-office stuff that I don’t want because it gives me flashbacks to my ill-advised years as a trainee lawyer) now has space for your Goals. Daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, life – all sorts of Goals. And frequently space for dreams, affirmations, manifestations and I don’t know what all else because I’d set fire to them by then.

My only Goal – or Dream – is to manifest a diary that allows me to record appointments and deadlines without being interrupted by drivel. Could someone affirm that this is still possible in 2023?"

I don't know, Lucy. I suspect there is one, but I have hit this phenomenon also. The "Let's Get it Done" diary (not by Letts, as it happens) contains  a calendar and lists of 'Achievements' and 'Goals' at the end of each month. Which adds pages and weight and also, months aren't really a Thing. Time doesn't stop at 23:59 on September 30, say, and resume after a reset at 00:00. It's just a convenience.

Even the smaller A6 diary by the same company has quarterly note pages and a pocket (for what? I don't know). All that and this year they can't even give it a robust cover (quality is definitely down). For the last six years I have owned one of these each year, because they have the layout I like - days on the left-hand page, note page on the right - and get on with it. This year I was all set to return mine when I finally had it in my hand but kept it anyway.

There is, of course, also the long-form diary in which you write down longer detailed notes, but that's another matter and more properly called a journal maybe.

The tall narrow diary is a thing of yesterday because we no longer slip a diary into our jacket pocket, you have a phone for that and it's somehow incredibly nerdy to carry a source of notes and information around with you (apart from your phone. As Lauren Elkin found out on the Paris bus, writing notes longhand in public makes you look sinister, but tapping away on your phone is fine).

Apparently there's now a thing called "Manifestation Diaries" which sounds like something Harry Price, ghost-hunter, would have used. "Tuesday May 2nd. Borley Rectory. Several manifestations of a green glow, a black figure thumping across the hallway, and the same black figure later. Turned out to be Willy Catterall from the village trying to hide the bottles of grog he'd pinched. I said I wouldn't tell if he gave me one. He did and I won't."

But yes, I would like clear design, legible dates, and no flow-interrupting faff with Goals and Achievements.

You need to know where to look though. Waterstones, delightful though it is, tends towards the novelty diary. Trains, birds, poetry, all those lovely things you don't really want if you need to jot down your appointments. Yes, these companies giving you space for your affirmations and the rest of it have 'reinvented' the diary, but sometimes all you need is space for your appointments and deadlines. 

 

Image: "Dear Diary" by Helen Haden

Under Creative Commons v2.0 Non-Commercial

 

Tewkesbury - Land of the Abbey and the Flood

When I started this series of videos, way back in early 2021, the first place I made a specific visit to (apart from videos made in the places I was living - Kingston and then Cheltenham) was Tewkesbury. Watching it back now it has some good angles and shots but could also do with a remake.

So here we are. Filmed this summer while I was visiting my friend Tom who was in the UK for a while (his family are from Tewkesbury so he was staying there).

I'm now working full time so less able to get out and make videos - they've also become less frequent. I don't know how many more I'll make, at least in the year to come. 

So for now, here is my new video:

Tewkesbury

 

 

Rail Town - Swindon

The latest video is of the Wiltshire town of Swindon, best known for its rail industry (then) and its railway museum (now). https://youtu.be/s8CqrhAcM8o

 

Plum Centre of England - Pershore

Pershore is a small town in Worcestershire, between Worcester and Evesham. It's known for its historic Abbey and also for being a centre of plum growing. 

I took this video during the annual Plum Festival.

Link

Comfortably Brum - A Short Wak Around the Centre of Birmingham

My latest video, a walk around central Birmingham, England. Brum (as it's generally known) is a big place but the centre is quite compact, and while there are places I didn't go on this trip, this showcases some of my most familiar places. 

https://youtu.be/IwAFklQeGCM

Ross on Wye - Land of the Hedgehog

Ross on Wye is a market town in Herefordshire, England. Its name is from the Welsh 'Rhosan' meaning a headland, as the town is on a hill overlooking the river Wye. Ross is about 11km from Wales at the nearest point; in Welsh it's "Rhosan ar Wy." So there is a lot of Welsh influence here, and the western part of Herefordshire was historically in Wales. Ross is known as the birthplace of tourism in the UK due to its key position in the "Wye Tour." 

The video is here: https://youtu.be/HwZXn5Dv6gg

 

 

No More Pyrenees?

The independence movement in Catalonia seeks greater autonomy and independence from Spain, based on their cultural, linguistic and historical differences. The problem has persisted for years, fueled by economic hardship and political marginalization. The 2017 Catalan independence referendum resulted in a 90% vote in favor of independence, but it was ruled unconstitutional by the Spanish government, and Catalonia declared unilateral independence. 

This led to political unrest, including the imprisonment of Catalan leaders.
Which seems to be unfair at first glance, even reminiscent of the era (1939-75) of General Franco, when the minority cultures of Spain – Catalan, Basque, Galician – were suppressed.
But consider that only 43% of registered voters voted, and not voting could be seen as a vote for the status quo. The same was true for Brexit, where only 37% of registered voters voted “Leave”. If the United Kingdom had followed the same logic, "Remain" would have won.
Without going too far into the political aspect of the matter - which I do not consider myself qualified to speak on, although I lived in Barcelona during the 1980s and learned the Catalan language there, and even participated in the second International Congress of the Catalan Language in 1986 – for me it is rather difficult to see why Catalans want to leave a prosperous and modern country within the European Union. If they leave Spain, they also leave the EU, and it could take years to be allowed back in.

And it was a very left-wing Catalan – a member of the National Left Movement in the 1980s – who told me that if Catalonia were to separate from Spain, it would be “Goodbye Spain” in terms of the economy. Since Catalonia is the richest and most advanced region of the Spanish State, with 16% of the population but which produces 19% of the GDP. "Independence" is foremost an economic movement.

And consider one more thing.

The “Catalan Countries” (“Països Catalans” or PP.CC. in Catalan) are not only the four provinces of the Catalan autonomous region today – Barcelona, Tarragona, Lleida and Girona – but also the country of Valencia to the south. , and the Balearic Islands and Pityuses – Majorca, Menorca, Ibiza, Formentera. And also what is called “Northern Catalonia”, that is to say the French department of Pyrénées-Orientales, around the city of Perpignan.
It is a slice of Catalonia beyond the Pyrenees, whose native laws and traditions were suppressed when it was annexed by France in 1659 and whose language was abolished by Louis XIV in 1700. This same Louis XIV who, also in 1700, was able to say, during the proclamation of his grandson Philippe d'Anjou as King of Spain, “There are no more Pyrenees!"

When North Macedonia gained independence in 1991, the Greeks – because Greece has a historical region called Macedonia – became concerned about this appropriation of a name that they considered properly theirs. The new republic had to be known as the “Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia”. Otherwise is it possible that the Catalans would start looking at Northern Catalonia as belonging to the “República Catalana”?

Once the independent state of Catalonia was established, would there be claims to Catalan land in France? And what would be the result? Would we see the secession of the Pyrénées-Orientales from France? It is certain that there would be a strengthening of Catalan nationalist feeling in and around Perpignan. There would still be Pyrenees, of course, but with a resurgence of nationalism in the west among the Basques – perhaps such an independent Basque (Euskadi) state, although the Basques these days seem content with autonomy - would there still be Pyrenees in France?

Retro Americana Day 2023

In July Cheltenham's Pittville Park hosted the second Retro Americana Day. 1950s music, cars, colourful styles and dancing. All that red, cream and chrome diner style that followed on from the drabness of WWII and was later overshadowed by Vietnam.

So I took a video - and added some musical breaks, starting with Glenn Miller (where was the jazz? Not there) and ending with a nod to Jimi Hendrix's version of "The Star-Spangled Banner."

The video is here

Nailsworth - a mill town near Stroud

The latest video is from Nailsworth. It's a former mill town now popular with walkers and cyclists, as it's on the other end of a trail (once a railway line) from Stroud. Historically it's also known as the home (when he finally managed to settle in one place) of the writer WH Davies, author of "Autobiography of a Super-Tramp."

The video is here

Lyon: Hill of Light

On the wall of my apartment there is a painting, in bright colours, of an extremely touristic place in Paris. And there is the Sacré-Coeur, and the Maison Rose, and Montmartre. I painted it from a photograph I took in 2011.

You could take it from that, that I like Paris, and I'm not against it. But if you ask me my favorite city in France, it would be Lyon.

Lyon, at the confluence of the Saône and the Rhône, is a city with a long history. Founded around 43 BC by Roman governor Munacius Plancus, who named the new settlement Lugdunum (“hill of light” or “hill of crows”). Also located on four important roads, it was an ideal site for the capital of Roman Gaul. First the colony was built on Mont Fourvière (near the modern centre and where you will find the Basilica), and later it spread towards the rivers.

During the sixteenth century Lyon had its glory days: a city of 60,000 inhabitants, several silk weaving factories, and a crossroads between France, the Rhine, the Mediterranean countries, and Switzerland.

The beginning of the 19th century saw the growth of the silk weaving industry on the slopes of Croix-Rousse, and in 1831 the ‘Revolte des Canuts’ took place, where the workers revolted against the exploitation by the merchants, who kept lowering the prices they paid for the silk, which the workers (the “canuts”) were forbidden to sell directly to the buyers. It became so serious that the canuts went on strike. The local prefect persuaded the manufacturers to give the workers a minimum wage (it was in his interest after all) but the decision was declared illegal by the government in Paris. Result, the revolt.

In the middle of the same century, Lyon was renovated by a project (by the) of the prefect-senator Vaisse, mayor of Lyon in the 1850s, who had many large buildings and new streets built, for example the Palais du Commerce, the Halles des Cordeliers, the Croix-Rousse hospital, and the Parc de la Tête D'Or, which nowadays has a zoological garden and an arts centre (the MAC – Museum of Contemporary Art). In the 1910s Lyon also became the capital of the French automobile industry.

Lyon nowadays is a thriving economic and gastronomic capital – I can assure you that I took advantage of the small restaurants, the ‘bouchons’ with their Lyonnaise cuisine. We ate quenelles - a roll made of minced white meat or fish with breadcrumbs and eggs - and sausages - pork or veal charcuterie.

The old quarter of Croix-Rousse, a former centre of silk weaving, remains charming and historic with its traboules – passages between or through buildings on the ground floor, which allowed direct access for people going on foot, when the streets were winding. There are even older monuments in this place – for example the Amphitheatre of Trois Gaules, whose history dates back twenty centuries and was rediscovered in the 1830s.

But at the same time, it is a modern city, its districts linked by a metro and trams, and with modern architecture especially at the Confluence of the Saône and the Rhône, and the city has a strong spirit cultural. You can climb the hill of Fourvière on foot – a very long staircase – or by funicular, and then look at the panorama of the city. I stayed in 2015 at La Croix-Rousse and from there, I saw spectacular sunsets. (I could also see both rivers, but barely in one of the cases). It will take at least half a day to visit the Museum of Fine Arts, one of France’s leading art museums.

My Hammock

Very close to my little hut, there was a hammock. It was not my personal hammock, it was for the free use of people who were staying, for one or two weeks, or for the summer, at our little camp near the sea.

But because the hammock was very close to my hut, I used it a lot.

In the evening, when the crickets were singing in the pines, the Scops Owls began their eternal “doub…doub…doub”. These owls were not all going at the same speed, so you would have two starting together, but one was faster than the other, and the birds phased in and out.

When I was in bed at night, I fell asleep amused by listening to them, and to the crickets that do not stop singing all at once, but one after another, moving slowly towards silence.

There was very little in the shack except for the bed: a clothes rail, a chair, and that's about it. For washing and other needs, there were collective facilities outside.

My neighbour was a yoga instructor.

Beyond the walls, there was, almost forgotten, the eternal blue of the Aegean Sea.

We were, of course, in Greece. On the island of Skyros, among the Sporades Islands. It was in Skyros that the English poet Rupert Brooke died on April 23, 1915. He is buried there, in a public place but away from the tourist trails. The island is home to a landrace of horses – small, as is the norm for islands breeds, and quite rare. During one of my stays in Skyros, a woman in our group was so fascinated by these horses that she moved to Skyros to work with them.

Speaking of nature, a very strong symbol of Skyros for me, and of Greece and the Mediterranean, is Eleonora's falcon. A medium-sized bird of prey, which, unusually, breeds in autumn, in order to feed its young on migratory birds.

The town of Khora, capital of Skyros, is quintessentially Greek with its small white houses and narrow streets; and then you have the port of Linaria where the liner comes from the neighbouring island, Evoia. It is also possible to arrive by plane, but the trip from Athens via Evoia is a classic. Not to be missed: the Faltaits Museum, a place of history, literature and folklore.

And then also you have Atsitsa. A former industrial port – relics of its past remain in the sea near the island – Atsitsa is today known for the Alternative Tourist Centre. Where I stayed on four occasions – as well as a week in Khora, where some courses, for example creative writing courses, take place. We spent the days in trying new things, for example painting or yoga. Afternoons were for siestas or going to the beach – I'm not a person for beaches, I prefer to go swimming, and then get out of the water and back to the café nearby, nicknamed “Marianna’s Sunset Café” or “Le Ktima d'Atsitsa.” 'Ktima' means in this sense 'a place apart' or a refuge. There is good coffee and excellent ice cream here.

It's a simple life, for a little while each year, which of course requires a complicated life to pay for it.

The next time I go to Greece, it is quite possible that it will be mainland Greece, in Thessaloniki, where a few decades ago, I spent six months … but that is another story.

 

Skyros Guide: https://www.greeka.com/sporades/skyros/

Atsitsa: https://www.aroundskyros.com/villages/atsitsa

Scops Owl Call: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkGP2OP7wvc

Eleonora's Falcon: https://ebird.org/species/elefal1

My Garden

I don't have a garden. Previously, when I lived in London, in the suburbs, I had a garden behind the house. It was narrow but quite long – about sixty feet – and didn't get much sunlight, given the huge tree which, rooted in the ground of the neighbouring garden, blocked my light with its branches and thick foliage. But I had shade-tolerant plants, bushes, and a small pond where frogs sometimes lived. In the evening I sat down to watch bats flitter between the trees. It was never going to be Monet's garden, but I had a glass annexe there that I used as a painting studio. It was low maintenance, this green space, since I'm not very interested in plants themselves. I used to read up on gardening, plant what’s appropriate, and let the vegetation get on with it. There were hedge plants from Wiggly Wigglers, some shade-loving plants and ferns, and a yew tree at the end of the garden, that I planted some time around 2006.

And when I spent time in my garden, I saw my neighbours in theirs, and we talked over the fence, which was only a metre and a half high. It was good to have such friendly people nearby. They were interested in travel, and local environmental issues, so we had that in common. They were part of my support network in Kingston.

These days I live much closer to the countryside, but having no garden, I take advantage of the green space in front of the flats. I can go there, and I go there most days. There are also trees and bushes, and more sky and birds. I even have a westerly aspect and can watch the sunset (and bats from time to time).

As for my garden in London, with its new owners, it is still there, but changed – I saw it this weekend when I visited my old neighbours. The new arrivals have installed a jacuzzi at the end of the garden, in place of the shed that I had there (but which I did not have installed). They’ve also apparently removed the yew tree. My glass lean-to, they kept it. But all that doesn't concern me anymore.

It was moving to see my friends who were my neighbours again; leaving the city on Monday, it was perhaps difficult to remember that I no longer lived there. Was I someone who lived in Kingston and visited Gloucestershire, or the other way around? It wasn't that I would want to go back to live there – I find Kingston too crowded these days – but rather that it was hard to separate myself from a city where I lived for sixteen years (if you include the four years I spent in Birmingham in the middle of those years).

Where I lived before Kingston, in the middle of London, in West Kensington, I didn't have a garden either, but there were also green spaces and trees, and I once thought "I live in a garden.” Where I live now is very similar.

So I could also say, these days, that I live in a garden, and the garden surrounds me.

Calke Abbey - Preserved in a State of Decay

Calke Abbey, Derbyshire, is an 18th century house built on the site of an Augustinian priory. 

Many of the UK’s country houses are owned by the National Trust. But while most have been restored to showcase the upstairs/downstairs life of people in earlier centuries, Calke Abbey is different. The walls are cracked and browned, rooms are full of personal effects and collections assembled by a reclusive owner. The outbuildings are as they were in the days of the horse and cart. But the result of this apparent neglect and decay, is that Calke preserves the atmosphere of its long-gone past among its six hundred acres (240 Hectares) of parkland.

For the video go here:

Calke Abbey, Derbyshire - Preserved in a state of decay - YouTube

The Important Matter of Sleeping

 The Important Matter of Sleeping

John was sitting on the couch in the living room. The couch, bought from Wal-Mart at the time that John’s mom and dad had decided to refurnish the entire lower floor of their house, was angled at roughly thirty degrees to the back wall - the same back wall that provided  a structural member and division with the next house along, that was owned by an African-American family called the Davises, and faced the long front window of the house, roughly tour times as long as it was high, divided regularly into vertical bays by white-painted wooden pillars. Past the window John could see Joe Meyer and Chet Vole playing ball, and someone - a person unknown because not visible, hidden by the right hand (as John faced it) end of the window - making up the triangle.

John would very much have liked to go out and join in their game. Although he was unsure of the legality, or permissibility, of such a situation. The ball they were using looked soft enough - he was fully aware of the familial ordinance against the use of hardballs near the fronts of people’s houses, and their cars, etc - and would no doubt have bounced harmlessly off surfaces such as the front window of any house along the street, or the sharply raked windscreen of Bertha Mace’s Lexus coupe, or the shiny bald pate of Dervinus Scrope who just at that moment came shuffling along the street from Wal-mart with his weekly bag of groceries. John thought about Bertha Mace and the way she wore dresses that were too short for her, and regularly had gentleman callers, as his mom put it. Dervinus Scrope had once in John’s hearing, to Mr Davis, chuckled and said,

- The woman’s a tart. Nothing wrong with that, either.

John understood that it would not be a good idea to ask any responsible adults (or his older sister Marjorie, who was away at college anyway) what a tart was, and particularly why it applied to Bertha Mace (and why there was ‘nothing wrong with that’ when possibly there was), though it did seem odd that the woman was able to afford a shiny new red Lexus coupé when as far as he knew her job was cutting coupons. Mom forbade John to speak to Dervinus Scrope not because the man was African-American - the Davises were no way off limits - but because he was ‘a dirty old man’. Although John in later life - aged, say, twenty - was to feel mightily peeved by the fact that his parents had never warned him that Dervinus Scrope might attempt to pervert, manhandle, fondle, sodomise, or otherwise interfere with John, while his buddies, Joe Meyer and Chet Vole particularly, had been warned loud and long about the possibility of falling perverted prey to a pedophile. Although with double hindsight, John figured that Scrope probably wasn’t a pedophile anyway, there being no evidence whatsoever to that effect - it was much like assuming a shaven-headed man with a flattened nose is a bank robber because ‘that’s what bank robbers look like’. Scrope merely lived alone and spoke to people; had he been female this would have been treated as normal, but such behavior seemed to be unacceptable in a man, it being far more acceptable somehow to treat him as a neighbourhood pariah, never speak to him, and assume he was a dangerous pervert when there was actually no reason to do so. The later John would point out that most abuse happens within families so it was statistically less likely that Scrope was a molester.

Thus it was for no reason of this kind that John wanted to stay on the Wal-Mart brand couch rather than go into the street and play ball with Chet and Joe and the third player who now was revealed as the Davis’ son Kelvin. John felt a woeful lack of engagement, unconnected with uncorrelated accusations of perversion against his neighbour, or the presence over John’s corduroyed thighs and patellae of the family cat, Howler, whose large brindled flank rose and fell in contented sleep; John was reluctant to wake Howler but knew full well that the ‘useless furry lump’ (as dad called it, usually when looking at the cat with a look full of loving kindness, thus the words were clearly not intended to be taken at face value) would take to being removed from John’s upper legs and placed on the floor without breaking his (the cat’s) stride in the important matter of sleeping.

Dad’s approach to the cat had the air of desperation about it, moments seized between his apparently important work for a government agency and the desperate desire to watch ‘Jeopardy!’ on the television (a twenty-three inch JVC, bought from Cram’s Electrical in Burlington the week before it was closed down and replaced by a WalMart) or sit in the living room with a bottle of beer in the evenings. Dad’s approach to Mom had the air of a long-held armed truce. Marjorie, who was several years older than John, had gone away. In the eight years between their ages there had been another child, Matthew. Mattie had barely lived long enough to go to school, and of the family, only John couldn’t remember him. This, he felt, froze him out ever so subtly by comparison with Dad and Mom and Marjorie, but sometimes when Mom and John were in the kitchen, and Dad was elsewhere, Mom would hold John closely and he would hear her crying above him.

The ball curvetted and bounced off the sloping windscreen of Bertha Mace’s scarlet Lexus convertible. Kelvin Davis’ face appeared at the window and his fingers tapped on the window, alerting John from his cat-excused indolence.

John reluctantly shifted the cat and got up.

- 2011

Melbourne and the Cloud Trail

Melbourne is a village in Derbyshire. It was formerly a centre of market gardening, and is also known for Melbourne Hall and being the place that gave its name to a city in Australia.

Until the 1980s it had a railway connection to Derby: this has been converted into a walking and cycling route called the Cloud Trail.

See the video here

Melbourne and the Cloud Trail - YouTube

Derby - Museums and Cathedral

A video of a visit to Derby's Museums and Art Gallery.
Derby - the Museums and the Cathedral - YouTube

The Garonne

 

GARONNE

Chris Amies

When I was twenty I went to Bordeaux, during the third year of my Bachelor of Arts course at the Polytechnic of Central London, which today is cthe University of Westminster.

Had it been more recently I wouldn't have been able to go to Bordeaux– back then students could choose any university for their six months in France, but nowadays you have (if I'm not mistaken) the choice between Paris and Aix-en-Provence. Which could have been better because I would have had friends from the Polytechnic, but I always had a loner tendency.

So I spent a month in Caen, doing a preparatory course, and after that five months in Bordeaux, but I stayed on the other side of the Garonne, in a suburb called Lormont – when people wrote to me they sometimes put “Lormont, near Bordeaux” in the address. The experience made me swear that if I was going to live in a city, I would live near the centre. It remains to be seen if I succeeded with my current accommodation, now it takes me twenty-five minutes on foot to reach the centre of town…

I was staying with a woman who I established a good rapport with – after my return to London she and I kept in touch until ten years ago. I met her daughter and son-in-law, and other family members.

But apart from that, I don't remember much about my stay in Bordeaux. Connected to the city by bus, especially the 4 in Gradignan-Beausoleil - there was no tramway in Bordeaux at the time - I felt very isolated. I thought, later, of L'Emploi du Temps (1956) by Michel Butor, where the city itself becomes a sort of puzzle or a labyrinth from which one cannot escape. (Like Butor, I was a teacher in Thessaloniki. We may have been influenced in the same way.) Although the buses were reliable, the names of the destinations, like “La Buttinière” or “Cenon-La Marègue”, fill me with dread to this day.

I remember some of the teachers, for example PierreTucoo-Chala (1924-2015), professor of literature, but also a historian of the Pyrenees. His last name, if I remember it, means 'bald hill' in the Béarnaise language. Others have been harder to find at this distance of decades.

But I must also note that return visits in the following years, back to Bordeaux and the Gironde region, pleased me much more, including visits to the vineyards, and a lunch on a boat in the middle of the Garonne, looking at the tourist premises with my former landlady’s grandson, who was at the time - the year 2002 – a tall young man of twenty. I also visited the Citadel of Vauban in Blaye –that there are several citadels of Vauban dotted around France, fortifications built in the 1680s. I visited that of Blaye twice, and also that of Mont-Louis, in the Pyrénées Orientales, much less maintained even in 2018.

Of course I also visited Bordeaux, that 'Little Paris' with its 18th Century buildings, the Esplanade des Quinconces – 25.6 hectares, three times larger than the Place de la Concorde – and its Monument to the Girondins, the Rue Sainte-Catherine which traces the line of a Gallo-Roman street, the Palais Gallien also built by the Romans, the enormous Grand-Théâtre, and so on.

It was the Garonne that separated me from the city of Bordeaux. As is my habit, I went on long hikes, like a flâneur – a concept I touched on recently, when I read the account of Lauren Elkin, an American living in Paris (at the time she wrote), No. 91/92: notes on a daily trip to Paris (2021). As with Butor in L’Emploi du Temps, buses are important here; not the buses themselves, but where they go, and how people behave there. (It should be noted that the action of The Timetable takes place in Manchester, another city which did not have a tram at the time, but which has one now.)

When I briefly met Lauren Elkin the year after last, we talked about buses... anyway, the concept of the flâneur (Elkin calls herself a 'flâneuse,' noting that the female experience of traveling the streets is not exactly the same as for men; one of her works is called "Flâneuse") has remained close to my heart. The idea is to extract immediate feelings from your experience, no matter how subjective and against the majority opinion. And, it seems, you don't necessarily have to go on foot to be a flaneur. I believe it's impossible by car, but being part of the crowd on the bus would have sufficed.

Elkin is also interested in the OULIPO, the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle of the 60s – and of which Butor was not a part, unfortunately, or we could have linked everything up very neatly. And there's something surreal about the notes she enters on her cell phone as she takes the bus in the morning; of André Breton commenting on the squares and monuments of Paris of his time, for example “The very beautiful and very useless Porte St-Denis” (Nadja, 1928).

It may be that when I arrived in Bordeaux for my stay in France, I was at the time too young or inexperienced to appreciate it, possibly like that young American woman who went to Florence to continue her studies, and who was ridiculed for her subjective impressions of a city she perhaps did not love enough to appease public opinion. 

But travel writing should be subjective. If it is not the story of your personal experience, it becomes an advertisement for the tourist agency; and if bad impressions (or good ones) are received, they should be noted. 

It is also true that I had loved Barcelona when I arrived there the following February, but that it also took a period of adjustment, and that I ended that particular adventure homeless, having lost my home all of a sudden. But otherwise, it was a good experience.

Derby - City of Making

Derby - City of Making 

This is the first of a series of videos from and around the English city of Derby. 

Derby is a city and unitary authority area in Derbyshire, England, on the River Derwent in south Derbyshire, in the East Midlands. The population was 261,400 in 2021. It has a long history beginning with the Romans, and since the 18th century has been a place of manufacture and industry.

Tivoli and the Suffolks, Cheltenham - video

A new video about two neighbouring areas of Cheltenham, Gloucestershire.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFGXXo-a6G4

Montpellier and the Observation Wheel, Cheltenham

Montpellier is a district of Cheltenham, Gloucestershire (England), at the end of the Promenade south of the town centre. Originally developed in the 1830s in conjunction with the spas, it is now known for its bars, cafés, restaurants and range of specialist shops.

The Observation Wheel is a regular fixture in Cheltenham's Imperial Gardens in the early part of the year.

Link to video:

Montpellier and the Observation Wheel - YouTube

Cheltenham's Best Kept Secret?

The only mediaeval building in a largely Regency town, right behind the High Street but if you didn't know it was there you might walk straight past.

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCTohmw53PQ

What was the Brentford Griffin?

 

In the early 1980s a strange rumour spread around the West London suburb of Brentford. A quiet place (by London standards), it had once had a thriving docklands but that had long since been turned into green space and flats. It had a football ground (Griffin Park), a brewery, and was on the road to Ealing. It had a shiny new arts centre, the Watermans, nestled between road and river. Opposite the Watermans a low boat-haunted island, Brentford Ait, lay in the current of the Thames. Much that was weird could happen on an island like that.

But this rumour, now. People spoke of seeing a huge bird silhouetted against the sky; and looking more closely the bird appeared to have the rear body of a lion, and an eagle’s head.

Others asked – facetiously but not without truth – whether those who claimed to have seen the beast had perhaps been refreshed in one or more of Brentford’s many hostelries.

The first sighting we know of was in that long summer of 1984, when Kevin Chippendale was walking along near Green Dragon Lane (ominous name, that) and saw a weird creature in the sky above him. He for some reason didn’t report this until he saw it again in 1985, more clearly this time and realised it bore a strange resemblance to the heraldic animal on the signs of Fullers pubs. Brentford, as suggested above, is Fullers country. It is a rare public house around there that isn’t Fullers. So the beast was already, in effigy, everywhere.

The beast. The griffin.

A lion-like body and hind legs, feathered forequarters and clawed forelegs and the wings, head and beak of an eagle. Once a creature of malign influence it has fortunately changed its aspect through the centuries so that in recent years it is seen as a benevolent and protective being.

Now back in the days when the Watermans was built there used to be a gasometer close by. These structures, vast towers built to hold gas, have a place in the race-memory of every, at least older Londoner. And one day Angela Keyhoe was on the top deck of a bus, on the way past this gasometer when she saw something dark and winged taking a rest on top of the structure.

There were several other sightings, and the beastie found its way into the Six O’clock News. Psychic investigator Andy Collins set off for the wilds of Brentford to investigate. Collins’ booklet on the subject, The Brentford Griffin, appeared in 1985.

The legend was embellished and propagated back again through time, as such things do. Everyone’s favourite romantic royal pair, Charles II and Nell Gwynne, now had dealings with griffins. Charles supposedly gave his beloved a tame griffin. One day the animal fell into the river and fetched up on Brentford Ait where it lived for many years (griffins are of course very long-lived), found a mate and started a breeding colony.

Brentford Watermans Park

Locals agreed that they had seen winged and lion-clawed beasts in the area, some sightings going back to the 1950s.

At this time the Writer-in-Residence of the Watermans Arts Centre was one Robert Fleming Rankin, author of celebrated tosh such as The Brentford Trilogy (currently standing at 11 books). Rankin disdained such tags as Fantasy or New Weird (not a phrase back then anyway) or Bizarro (that either), describing his work as Far-Fetched Fiction. He hosted weekly poetry nights where performers would be given a drink (unless Robert thought your performance didn’t merit it). Angela Keyhoe, she of the gasometer sighting, was a regular at these events

Collins, a man with a taste for the weird rivalling that of Rankin himself (or Charles Fort or Aleister Crowley or whichever name you’d care to drop), knew a hoax when he smelt one, and this was quite evidently a hoax; specifically, a publicity stunt dreamed up by Rankin and the Watermans’ director John Baraldi.

Intriguingly his website claims that “All but one case was found to be hoaxes perpetuated by Brentford novelist Robert Rankin.” [1]

In 1998 Martin Collins (no relation) wrote to Fortean Times stating that he remembered tales of the Griffin from his schooldays in Brentford in the 1950s, and other correspondents said they heard of it in the 1970s.

Possibly Rankin, with his love of saloon-bar tall tales, was tapping into a mythology that already existed in the area. His early novels attempted to give Brentford its own myths and legends, but perhaps he found the griffin tales already there and brought them to light. It may be worth noting that griffins don’t appear in Rankin’s novels except occasionally, as a myth mentioned in passing.

Because griffins are everywhere, in Brentford. As mentioned Brentford FC's ground was called Griffin Park (it's since been replaced and the old site will become housing), and the symbol of nearby Fullers Brewery (later Fuller Smith and Turner) is a griffin.

As it turns out, the football ground is so called because it was built on land owned by the brewery. Griffin Park had a pub on each of its four corners – the only League ground to do so.

So our next question is, why is Fullers’ symbol the griffin?

For this we must go back to 1816. Fullers – founded in the 17^th century – seeking expansion, took over the brewery of Reid and Meux in Clerkenwell. This had as its symbol the heraldic griffin. When Fullers bought it out, they presumably said something like, “That’s a nice logo, we’ll have that too.”

The Griffin Brewery in Clerkenwell is long gone; the street it stood on, the aptly named Liquorpond Street, was demolished when the Victorian high-concept Clerkenwell Road was built in the late 19^th century, but a pub called the Griffin still stands, close to the original site. (This is not in use as a public house at present).

Now if you were to ask why Reid & Meux adopted the griffin as their logo … 

Detail from Gray's Inn Hall

That creature is the heraldic badge of Grays Inn, adopted some time around 1590. Grays Inn is one of the four Inns of Court (professional associations of judges and barristers) in London, and is based at Grays Inn Square nearby. The brewery simply used a respected local symbol.

If the names 'Reid' and 'Meux' sound familiar it’s perhaps because of the more recent brewery companies Friary Meux (later part of Allied Breweries) and Watney Combe Reid (taken over by Grand Metropolitan and closed in 1979). Meux may be best known for their involvement with the Horseshoe Brewery, the largest in London, which exploded in 1814 with fatal results.

And the griffin? Far from being Nell Gwynne’s riverside pet, it seems to have flown into Brentford from Clerkenwell two hundred years ago. And set up home.

 

Sources:

https://beastsoflondon.blogspot.com/2007/04/brentford-griffin.html

https://discover.hubpages.com/religion-philosophy/The-Brentford-Griffin-and-the-West-London-Dragon

https://www.mjwayland.com/mysteries/the-brentford-griffin/

https://zythophile.co.uk/2010/10/17/so-what-really-happened-on-october-17-1814/

[1] https://www.andrewcollins.com/page/articles/andrew_collins.htm

The Griffin was originally at 5 Liquorpond Street. Other pubs on the street in 1842 were the Duke of York (no. 19), the White Hart (no. 25) and the Globe & Dolphin (no. 30).

Gray's Inn Hall picture by CP Hoffman, under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic
Original here