Let the Damned Breeze Dry my Face
29 Mar - 4 April, Ian. The last
Out to
Lunch blog.
In our final week the snow continued to fall, but
even on mornings when several inches lay on the ground the strengthening sun
melted it away quickly in the day. Thursday was our last skiing day. We
returned for a final run at Arolla; we stopped for lunch at the Kurhaus - and
had the high-fat Swiss favourites of rosti and fondue - but the slopes were icy
and the visibility poor so we didn't ski again in the
afternoon.
Before dinner I went for a walk up the hill above the chalet. There is a path that Paula and/or I have taken many times when we want an hour of fresh air and tranquility. It passes through larch and pine woods, and outside of these there are sweeping views both up to the head of the valley and down towards Sion. Under the cover of the trees the path retained its covering of snow but out in the open sunlight the snow had melted and for the first time I found myself walking on springy clay. Emerging from the woods, water could be seen running underneath the thin snow; I could hear the snow melting and feel frosted ice crunching underfoot. Below the dark green pines wet black slatey rocks and straw-coloured grass broke out from what has been a uniform white all month. The constant accretion of impressions such as these forms a sense of the places that we've visited that goes unrecorded in these blogs. Instead of describing events maybe a better history of our year could have been made from poetry, perhaps in the style of T.E. Hulme or Basho.
Although they may be incomplete, as far as I'm aware there aren't many gross inaccuracies in the blogs. When I occasionally re-read them I usually find typos and sections that I'd wish I'd written differently but the only uncorrected error that I can call to mind is an attribution of a couple of poems by William Blake: without any of my books, I'd confused A Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Songs of Innocence and Experience: I don't think it spoiled the point I was making so I left it. As has often been the case, my friend Mike quickly and helpfully provided me with the true facts at the time.
The blogs have, though, been as editorialised as any piece of extended factual writing. In my previous blog I wrote that The News is not the news, and the same might be said of Out to Lunch. The metaphor that comes to my mind is of a set of truths nested like Russian dolls. The blogs, if only because of the sheer number of words in them, reach closer into the truth as I tell it to myself than you'll get by asking me questions about our trip in conversation. Inside the unrecorded doll of my own interior monologue, though, there are deeper versions of our experience to be excavated, which I expect will surface partially over the years ahead. At the core of the whole set of dolls, inside any possible verbal or symbolic account, is a solid kernel: the ineffable imprint of this trip on our existential fabric.
The disciplines that we established for our trip were intended to give this experience the best framework in which to develop and to be remembered. These disciplines include the idea of a sequential monthly itinerary, the daily routines we created, our lesson schedule, the newsletters, the spreadsheet of all of the books we read, the monthly photo books and the blogs. They are akin to a coral, ostensibly seeming to be a rigid structure but actually being a plastic aggregation of pulsating live forms.
The booklists show me to be the remedial reader of the family. In the last week or so I read Headlong by Michael Frayn and Leave it to Psmith, the third and final book in the Psmith omnibus that I picked up in Bhutan. Headlong is a fine novel written with clever use of the language of philosophy; I enjoyed much of it but near the end the central character became so stupidly inept and destructive in his behaviour that it was a real struggle for me to continue reading and I skipped as quickly as I could through several chapters, as though I were running over hot coals. I read the Psmith book immediately after it because I knew that it would be enjoyable. P.G. Wodehouse can seem light but his books express an attractive and very English idea of living a life based upon an aesthetics of behaviour rather than raw morals. When writers such as Foucault or Nietzsche or Zen apologists express the same thoughts explicitly it's regarded as being very deep. Leave it to Psmith was my 44th book of the year, leaving me easily eclipsed by Zoe, who read 48, Heidi, who finished 62 and Paula, who read 70. From the books-as-luggage perspective, the girls were very efficient, having almost total overlap in what they read. Paula and I, in contrast, performed poorly, with only nine of the books we read being the same. The only book that all four of us read was by Agatha Christie.
The other area in which I have some stats is blog readership. I started collecting info on the blogs as I wrote them in late October, and in February I republished the whole blog so that I could start to get data about readership of the whole thing. Consequently March is the only month for which I have complete stats, and in this month I had just under 2,000 hits from 825 distinct readers. (This contrasts with the relatively small number - at the time of writing there have only been 4,118 in the entire year - who visit our Homepage.) Mondays are, on average, the busiest days and it declines through the week. I don't have too strong a sense of who the readers all are. There seem to be about 50 or 60 people who regularly check out the latest blogs within a few days of them being published. Then there are occasional readers who infrequently tune in and catch up on all the ones that they've missed. Then I get about 10 hits a day from people finding one of the blogs from a search engine - my favourite report amongst my web stats is the page showing me recent search activity.
More solid than the stats, or even than the blogs, are the hardback photo albums that I've made every month. If you get a chance you really should see one of them - they're a great way of recording anything. The last one I have to make up is for Switzerland, where I probably took the least photographs. We spent much of our time skiing, and although I took some snaps on the slopes I don't think I managed to get any true sense of the activity. The cloudy and unseasonal weather that brought us so much good snow was an enemy to photography when we travelled around sightseeing, so my snaps of Zurich, Luzerne and elsewhere are gloomy and dull. Some of the best shots I have were from Sion. As I've written before, two castles surmount hills that rise impressively above the city and on Monday we finally climbed up to visit them. The grander of the two has a basilica with some frescoes of a Christ figure who is being extravagantly speared with arrows.
From there we drove to a centre that is more central to the values of our own age: Carrefour. Belatedly, I realised that Switzerland is also part of DVD Region 2, so we could have been watching new movies in the evenings. For our last couple of days I bought Ripley's Game, since Paula and I had both enjoyed the book this year, and Harry Potter & Le Coupe de Feu. No film based on a script by Patricia Highsmith and with John Malkovich playing the lead role is likely to be bad, but Ripley's Game was a little disappointing: changes to the plot were to be expected, but the characters were re-drawn and the relationships between them altered, and, presumably to make it more appealing to a US audience, Ripley was moved from a middle class house in France to a huge Tuscan palace; none of these alterations was an improvement. The Harry Potter movie (which we of course watched in English) requires more adaptation from the huge fantasy novel on which it's based, but it's done better. I suspect that the translation to French was more problematic. In the original, Voldermort, the bad guy, is often referred to as "he-who-must-not-be-named"; this is already as much of a mouthful as can be managed without absurdity, and yet the French more than doubles the number of syllables with "celui-dont-on-ne-doit-pas-prononcer-le-nom". As I wrote before, the French tendency to resist the simple phrase salts the earth for pop culture.
These were our last cultural experiences (excluding some bizarre goings on in the thermal baths at Saillon, about which I have no intention of writing) before our return. On Sunday morning, after a poor night's sleep, I awoke to face the prospect of the journey home. I miss my friends as much as anyone but I was extremely sad: although Paula and I could do something like this again, it's unlikely that I'll ever pass another year entirely in the presence of Zoe and Heidi. And the routines of working life are so much less enriching than those of our travels and the human behaviour that is sometimes encountered so much shoddier. Saturday's Guardian predicted thunderstorms in both Geneva and London, but none of them materialised: all day long we travelled under bright sun and cloudless blue skies. Cruising along the Swiss three-lane motorways in 6th in the Audi at 140km/h seemed like the apt way to travel; unfortunately, the local law enshrines a different view, and I expect I'll be getting one last fine as a memento, unless the photo that was automatically taken of us was for a kinder souvenir, like those taken at Disney when you plummet down Splash Mountain.
Our flight was delayed not by weather but by the pilot getting shirty with the business class passengers about their hand luggage ("We only get this in Geneva," he moaned). The business crowd were angry and self-righteous about the rebukes, and the delay. The guy next to me wouldn't stop whining about how much he and his fellow frequent travellers knew from experience, never giving a thought to the possibility that I might have done some business travel myself. Mind you, even when I do fly on business I don't have the uniform clothes or wheely suitcase + laptop two bag set.
Picking up our bags from the carousel we could finally say without jinxing ourselves that we've travelled a whole year without losing any luggage, in the same spirit that I can also report that I didn't once fall over when skiing (apart from when knocked over by a daughter or a ski drag). Neither have we sustained any very bad accidents or illnesses. For me, the worst incident was getting thrown from a horse, and apart from the physical knocks this only started to trouble me some months afterwards, when the memory of being on the back of a runaway horse at full gallop approaching a fence became more viscerally ominous.
Stonehenge always lifts my spirits as I pass it and on the way home it was at its best in the late afternoon sun. More visitors than usual beetled along the path describing the circumference of nearest approach. We started to get really excited when we left the A303 and made our way along the country lanes, past our local and towards our house. By the time we pulled into the farm track leading to our house the girls were squealing. When we left our house was being re-thatched and it was the bright yellow of new straw. Now it's finished and the thatch has mellowed to a more liveable brown. Arriving home was even better than expected. It was good to be met by Adrienne and Tony and to have had the house lived in for a year. Although I was never conscious of it while we were away, I like our house more than any of those we stayed in and it's the place I would choose to return to. The sun was still out and the spring lambs grazed with the sheep behind where Zoe and Heidi jumped up and down on the trampoline. Adrienne cooked us up some local pork and I cracked open a bottle of Chateauneuf du Pape. Later, I set my bed-side radio to sleep mode and slumbered off listening to Radio 4.
Since then I've pottered around doing chores. Although I am very keen to catch up with friends, my return to work tomorrow will not be the unmixed blessing that the return home has been; but that's another story. Over the next week or so I'll close off this year, which will include cutting an Out to Lunch soundtrack CD featuring many of the tracks mentioned in the blog - let me know if you'd like a copy. Also let me know if you're interested in whatever on-line venture I might do next, or if you have any idea what it might be, or if you'd like to join me in it.
Looking back on our year I can think of many things that I'd do differently if I were to do it again, and this is a powerful metaphor for life: we just have to seize our chances as best we can the first time round because we don't get another go. There is no god and no afterlife, and illness and misfortune can strike at any time. Many thanks to everyone who has followed this blog and stayed in touch and encouraged us in our enjoyment over the last twelve months.
Ian
Before dinner I went for a walk up the hill above the chalet. There is a path that Paula and/or I have taken many times when we want an hour of fresh air and tranquility. It passes through larch and pine woods, and outside of these there are sweeping views both up to the head of the valley and down towards Sion. Under the cover of the trees the path retained its covering of snow but out in the open sunlight the snow had melted and for the first time I found myself walking on springy clay. Emerging from the woods, water could be seen running underneath the thin snow; I could hear the snow melting and feel frosted ice crunching underfoot. Below the dark green pines wet black slatey rocks and straw-coloured grass broke out from what has been a uniform white all month. The constant accretion of impressions such as these forms a sense of the places that we've visited that goes unrecorded in these blogs. Instead of describing events maybe a better history of our year could have been made from poetry, perhaps in the style of T.E. Hulme or Basho.
Although they may be incomplete, as far as I'm aware there aren't many gross inaccuracies in the blogs. When I occasionally re-read them I usually find typos and sections that I'd wish I'd written differently but the only uncorrected error that I can call to mind is an attribution of a couple of poems by William Blake: without any of my books, I'd confused A Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Songs of Innocence and Experience: I don't think it spoiled the point I was making so I left it. As has often been the case, my friend Mike quickly and helpfully provided me with the true facts at the time.
The blogs have, though, been as editorialised as any piece of extended factual writing. In my previous blog I wrote that The News is not the news, and the same might be said of Out to Lunch. The metaphor that comes to my mind is of a set of truths nested like Russian dolls. The blogs, if only because of the sheer number of words in them, reach closer into the truth as I tell it to myself than you'll get by asking me questions about our trip in conversation. Inside the unrecorded doll of my own interior monologue, though, there are deeper versions of our experience to be excavated, which I expect will surface partially over the years ahead. At the core of the whole set of dolls, inside any possible verbal or symbolic account, is a solid kernel: the ineffable imprint of this trip on our existential fabric.
The disciplines that we established for our trip were intended to give this experience the best framework in which to develop and to be remembered. These disciplines include the idea of a sequential monthly itinerary, the daily routines we created, our lesson schedule, the newsletters, the spreadsheet of all of the books we read, the monthly photo books and the blogs. They are akin to a coral, ostensibly seeming to be a rigid structure but actually being a plastic aggregation of pulsating live forms.
The booklists show me to be the remedial reader of the family. In the last week or so I read Headlong by Michael Frayn and Leave it to Psmith, the third and final book in the Psmith omnibus that I picked up in Bhutan. Headlong is a fine novel written with clever use of the language of philosophy; I enjoyed much of it but near the end the central character became so stupidly inept and destructive in his behaviour that it was a real struggle for me to continue reading and I skipped as quickly as I could through several chapters, as though I were running over hot coals. I read the Psmith book immediately after it because I knew that it would be enjoyable. P.G. Wodehouse can seem light but his books express an attractive and very English idea of living a life based upon an aesthetics of behaviour rather than raw morals. When writers such as Foucault or Nietzsche or Zen apologists express the same thoughts explicitly it's regarded as being very deep. Leave it to Psmith was my 44th book of the year, leaving me easily eclipsed by Zoe, who read 48, Heidi, who finished 62 and Paula, who read 70. From the books-as-luggage perspective, the girls were very efficient, having almost total overlap in what they read. Paula and I, in contrast, performed poorly, with only nine of the books we read being the same. The only book that all four of us read was by Agatha Christie.
The other area in which I have some stats is blog readership. I started collecting info on the blogs as I wrote them in late October, and in February I republished the whole blog so that I could start to get data about readership of the whole thing. Consequently March is the only month for which I have complete stats, and in this month I had just under 2,000 hits from 825 distinct readers. (This contrasts with the relatively small number - at the time of writing there have only been 4,118 in the entire year - who visit our Homepage.) Mondays are, on average, the busiest days and it declines through the week. I don't have too strong a sense of who the readers all are. There seem to be about 50 or 60 people who regularly check out the latest blogs within a few days of them being published. Then there are occasional readers who infrequently tune in and catch up on all the ones that they've missed. Then I get about 10 hits a day from people finding one of the blogs from a search engine - my favourite report amongst my web stats is the page showing me recent search activity.
More solid than the stats, or even than the blogs, are the hardback photo albums that I've made every month. If you get a chance you really should see one of them - they're a great way of recording anything. The last one I have to make up is for Switzerland, where I probably took the least photographs. We spent much of our time skiing, and although I took some snaps on the slopes I don't think I managed to get any true sense of the activity. The cloudy and unseasonal weather that brought us so much good snow was an enemy to photography when we travelled around sightseeing, so my snaps of Zurich, Luzerne and elsewhere are gloomy and dull. Some of the best shots I have were from Sion. As I've written before, two castles surmount hills that rise impressively above the city and on Monday we finally climbed up to visit them. The grander of the two has a basilica with some frescoes of a Christ figure who is being extravagantly speared with arrows.
From there we drove to a centre that is more central to the values of our own age: Carrefour. Belatedly, I realised that Switzerland is also part of DVD Region 2, so we could have been watching new movies in the evenings. For our last couple of days I bought Ripley's Game, since Paula and I had both enjoyed the book this year, and Harry Potter & Le Coupe de Feu. No film based on a script by Patricia Highsmith and with John Malkovich playing the lead role is likely to be bad, but Ripley's Game was a little disappointing: changes to the plot were to be expected, but the characters were re-drawn and the relationships between them altered, and, presumably to make it more appealing to a US audience, Ripley was moved from a middle class house in France to a huge Tuscan palace; none of these alterations was an improvement. The Harry Potter movie (which we of course watched in English) requires more adaptation from the huge fantasy novel on which it's based, but it's done better. I suspect that the translation to French was more problematic. In the original, Voldermort, the bad guy, is often referred to as "he-who-must-not-be-named"; this is already as much of a mouthful as can be managed without absurdity, and yet the French more than doubles the number of syllables with "celui-dont-on-ne-doit-pas-prononcer-le-nom". As I wrote before, the French tendency to resist the simple phrase salts the earth for pop culture.
These were our last cultural experiences (excluding some bizarre goings on in the thermal baths at Saillon, about which I have no intention of writing) before our return. On Sunday morning, after a poor night's sleep, I awoke to face the prospect of the journey home. I miss my friends as much as anyone but I was extremely sad: although Paula and I could do something like this again, it's unlikely that I'll ever pass another year entirely in the presence of Zoe and Heidi. And the routines of working life are so much less enriching than those of our travels and the human behaviour that is sometimes encountered so much shoddier. Saturday's Guardian predicted thunderstorms in both Geneva and London, but none of them materialised: all day long we travelled under bright sun and cloudless blue skies. Cruising along the Swiss three-lane motorways in 6th in the Audi at 140km/h seemed like the apt way to travel; unfortunately, the local law enshrines a different view, and I expect I'll be getting one last fine as a memento, unless the photo that was automatically taken of us was for a kinder souvenir, like those taken at Disney when you plummet down Splash Mountain.
Our flight was delayed not by weather but by the pilot getting shirty with the business class passengers about their hand luggage ("We only get this in Geneva," he moaned). The business crowd were angry and self-righteous about the rebukes, and the delay. The guy next to me wouldn't stop whining about how much he and his fellow frequent travellers knew from experience, never giving a thought to the possibility that I might have done some business travel myself. Mind you, even when I do fly on business I don't have the uniform clothes or wheely suitcase + laptop two bag set.
Picking up our bags from the carousel we could finally say without jinxing ourselves that we've travelled a whole year without losing any luggage, in the same spirit that I can also report that I didn't once fall over when skiing (apart from when knocked over by a daughter or a ski drag). Neither have we sustained any very bad accidents or illnesses. For me, the worst incident was getting thrown from a horse, and apart from the physical knocks this only started to trouble me some months afterwards, when the memory of being on the back of a runaway horse at full gallop approaching a fence became more viscerally ominous.
Stonehenge always lifts my spirits as I pass it and on the way home it was at its best in the late afternoon sun. More visitors than usual beetled along the path describing the circumference of nearest approach. We started to get really excited when we left the A303 and made our way along the country lanes, past our local and towards our house. By the time we pulled into the farm track leading to our house the girls were squealing. When we left our house was being re-thatched and it was the bright yellow of new straw. Now it's finished and the thatch has mellowed to a more liveable brown. Arriving home was even better than expected. It was good to be met by Adrienne and Tony and to have had the house lived in for a year. Although I was never conscious of it while we were away, I like our house more than any of those we stayed in and it's the place I would choose to return to. The sun was still out and the spring lambs grazed with the sheep behind where Zoe and Heidi jumped up and down on the trampoline. Adrienne cooked us up some local pork and I cracked open a bottle of Chateauneuf du Pape. Later, I set my bed-side radio to sleep mode and slumbered off listening to Radio 4.
Since then I've pottered around doing chores. Although I am very keen to catch up with friends, my return to work tomorrow will not be the unmixed blessing that the return home has been; but that's another story. Over the next week or so I'll close off this year, which will include cutting an Out to Lunch soundtrack CD featuring many of the tracks mentioned in the blog - let me know if you'd like a copy. Also let me know if you're interested in whatever on-line venture I might do next, or if you have any idea what it might be, or if you'd like to join me in it.
Looking back on our year I can think of many things that I'd do differently if I were to do it again, and this is a powerful metaphor for life: we just have to seize our chances as best we can the first time round because we don't get another go. There is no god and no afterlife, and illness and misfortune can strike at any time. Many thanks to everyone who has followed this blog and stayed in touch and encouraged us in our enjoyment over the last twelve months.
Ian
Posted: Tue - April 4, 2006 at 12:08 PM
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Published On: Apr 04, 2006 03:23 PM
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Published On: Apr 04, 2006 03:23 PM