Fahrt ins Blaue

Absence

Armed border guards stare down the incoming Eurostar passengers at Brussels Zuid, as no one declares anything and we funnel through the green channel. Will they haul me aside and discover the half empty bottle of Harrogate water in my bag…..

Two hours later I board the European Sleeper to Prague, a long, old, tired train almost entirely composed of empty couchette compartments.

The stewards are teenagers - I just hope the driver has a licence. Ash trays in the corridors tell of the train’s stained history:

Supper, as advertised above, in the cramped, twenty-four seat dining car, is noisy and reminiscent of the ground floor of the Tower of Babel - conversations take place in several tongues at the same time. I drink a red beer from Dresden and am given a bowl of bright yellow pumpkin soup…

To follow, I am served ‘Schnitzel’ though, apart from the bright yellow lumpy mashed potato, it is less schnitzel and more deep fried rissole…. But I am not going to write to the management. One of the values (?) of international travel is that, through changes in routine, and variety of custom, it may induce a little homesickness…..

It is time for bed, and, having been downgraded from Sleeper to Couchette (due to a technical fault, you understand? The stewardess suggests I make the best of it…..) Slightly uncomfortably, I climb the metal ladder to slide into my sheet sleeping bag, as per the instructions on the wall (slide into the sheet sleeping bag and snuggle yourself inside.  Then, you can add the loose blanket on top.  It’s the cleanest way to get cozy without directly touching the bed surface…..) on the middle level.  ‘Snuggle,’ and ‘cozy,’ are not the words that are foremost in my attempt to sleep.

It is now very dark, and we stop for ages at Roosendaal, though nothing at all happens.  Nothing.  Then, without warning, we judder off again into the night, towards Amsterdam.

Despite another set of ‘rules’ in five languages) (We kindly ask you to be considerate of other travellers and not cause any noise nuisance….. We also ask you to not have loud conversations between 11 p.m. and 7 a.m. in order to respect the night’s sleep.) I couldn’t tell you how well the night slept, but at midnight the corridor is loud with Slavic tongues, possibly fuelled by red beer and schnitzel. I think about it, but I don’t actually say Shush!  Call me what you want, but I am not in the mood for fighting.

At 3.30 a.m. we stand silently, for maybe half an hour, in the utterly deserted Hannover Hauptbahnhof.  Nothing happens.  Nothing. Then, clanking, we lurch on. It is, I dream, like being in a bathyscape, with strange pinging sounds, and a swaying, waving, plunging series of movements, as though a giant squid is caressing the carriage.  As though implosion is a possibility.

At precisely 6.36 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, a disembodied voice comes over a crackling tannoy, saying, with no detectable emotion, Guten Morgen, before relapsing into disembodied silence. Perhaps this is obligatory, the Muezzin of the Lutheran Church, one of the 95 precepts nailed to a door in Wittenberg. Or perhaps it is a recording activated by the decreasing balance of darkness over light - like the electronic dawn in ‘Metropolis?’

Aurora rises up like wet newspaper in a dirty stream. The teenage stewardess brings a box of breakfast at 8.15 (despite a request for earlier) - I haven’t had margarine since we used to anoint diced beetroot with it for school lunch - and drizzle falls on passing allotments. 

We pass through Dresden in rain, the Elbe in flood, the landscape just on the turning edge of autumn.  Wet-roofed houses shuttered down.  Nobody about.

Not far now to the Czech border, then the last trundle down towards Prague. The sky is breaking up a bit and daylight doesn’t seem quite so depressing, but I’m a long way from home, and my thoughts stray to my quiet village, my house, my family - my late cat….. I am a little confused, just a little on the home sick side of happiness, perhaps.  I stare out the wet window, wondering why I am here.

Within the original Entrance Hall of the historic art nouveau Prague Hlavni Nadrazi (Praha hl or Prague main station) there is the Fantova Kavarna, where time passes easily with a goat’s cheese and beetroot bagety (but no margarine) and a Pilsner Urquell to drown the hour.  Then it is time for the Railjet to Brno, a busy train that is heading for Vienna and Graz.

They say that travel broadens the mind.  Well, partly due to the two men behind me who prattle loudly for the entire two and a half hours of the trip, my cortex has been so broadened that it is flatter than gold leaf - broad, maybe, but not deep.  

Then, the train arrives and a plaque on the wall welcomes me in the underpass with a picture of Woodrow Wilson and his words, delivered to Congress in 1917 when seeking a declaration of war against Germany, The world must be made safe for democracy, (though it appears that it was President of the USA George Bushe (sic) who quoted this on a visit in 1990 when he was drumming up European support for bellicose intentions in the Middle East….)  

A short walk up a slippery cobbled lane takes me to a boutique hotel, whose lobby sports a photo of Vaclav Havel that he signed in November 2009.

It is grey, and damp, but I climb the tower of the old town hall, from the balcony of which Queen Elizabeth II addressed the crowds, with Havel by her side, in 1996.  (And, incidentally, where author Simon Mawer was photographed some twenty  years later.  Simon tells me that the last celebrity photographed here before Queen Elizabeth was Adolf Hitler.) The vegetable market square lies before me, then there is the cathedral of St Peter and St Paul, its twin neo-gothic spires scratching the clouds.  On the hill behind me squats the solid Spielberk Castle, with a ghastly history of successive regimes of torture and imprisonment, going back through the Red Army, the Nazis, the Austrians, Napoleon and the rest.  

And then across the city, part hidden among some mature trees, a bright white slab is all I can see of Mies van Der Rohe’s 1928 Villa Tugendhat, inspiration for Simon Mawer’s Booker Prize shortlisted novel, The Glass Room, and the reason for my visit…..

But that is for tomorrow.  Now is the time for goulasch and unfiltered pivo.  And perhaps a shot of  Becherovka……

Until tomorrow…..

And in the meantime: 

Truth and love must prevail over lies and hatred. 

Vaclav Havel

https://www.visitczechia.com/en-us/news/2021/12/n-vaclav-havel

On a Wing and a Prayer

Learning to fly

It is a beautiful morning, so fresh after the storms.  The early morning sun slices across the Norfolk landscape like a silver knife through a pat of warm butter.  It is cool, and the wind tugs at the long grass, shaking the bushes by the path.  The tide is out, and the waves splutter harmlessly some way away.  Above me a copper blue sky, which tinges down to a daub of stilton smeared across the horizon where there is a bank of clouds above the wind farm.

I stagger backwards up the beach, locked tight to Karl by the straps and carabiners in my harness, then, as the updraft fills the elliptical wing above us we charge left, my legs all over the place, and we leave the ground, silently rising close to the chalk cliffs of Old Hunstanton, then we are aloft - the beach, the sea, the grassy slopes falling rapidly away.

I thought I might be scared. In my youth I would get vertigo on a thick pile carpet, and, though nowadays I can steel myself to the top of tall buildings, looking down from the the Mole Antonelliana in Turin (at 167.5 metres still the world's tallest unreinforced brick building) and standing on the glass floor of the 170 metre Spinnaker Tower in Portsmouth, I tremble half way up a ladder to clean my gutters.

But no.  There is no fear.  I suppose there's not much point. Karl is sitting on a reserve parachute, but we aren't high enough for it to open if we needed it, even though I guess we must be thirty of more metres above the ground by now.

How am I here, vying with the gulls in the chill air?  Well, I held a launch party for my new book (see below), and Karl should have been in Saudi Arabia flying for some sheik, but that was cancelled at the last minute, so he turned up at my house, and, after a few drinks, he suggested I might like a tandem flight at eight the next morning (as a contribution to charity).

I probably should not have drunk so much....  not because I wouldn't have accepted the generous offer, but because early in the morning I could actually have felt better.  Anyway, after a hurried breakfast of two cups of tea, two ginger biscuits and a pair of paracetamol, I stumble to the car park at Hunstanton cliffs, where several hardy types are already careering across the sky.  It's a brilliant morning, and they all seem to know each other, so there's immediately a tangible camaraderie.  One lends me gloves (I needed them!) others help us launch. 

Up above Hunstanton there are rights of way, as we sail along on the rising wind, passing by, or over, or under individuals who swing and veer through the air flaring on their Moustaches.

Below us pink people take part in a park run, walkers wave, and tiny people walk tiny dogs on the beach, our shadow sweeping after them across the sand.

It is calm.  Karl manoeuvres by pulling down the control line on one side and easing up on the other, so one side of the wing slows and we turn.  It all seems easy, but then he's been doing it for twenty-five years, all over the world.  I feel quite safe. It is thrilling, riding the rolling level.... striding high.... rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing.....

But then it is time to think about landing....

And the land is far below us.... And landing means the meeting of two bodies and all our gear attracted by the gravitational pull of the earth, with a forward speed of, say, ten miles an hour, all at the mercy of a gusting wind and the pull of a few strings..... As we approach the beach Karl calls to two of his mates for them to act as brakes (?) and we are suddenly in contact with the solid part of the planet. Ideally we should have hit the ground running. the trailing edge of the wing flopping behind us and the brakes (?) holding us by the risers and the carabiners (?) Unfortunately, on this particular occasion, the wind tips the leading edge of the wing over us and we collapse face forward at some speed, strapped tightly together, scrambling crablike across the uneven sand. Fortunately, no harm is done. My camera is shaken, not shattered, and it is only my dignity that is damaged.

Wow!  

Thank you, Karl!

Brothers in arms!

**********

I caught this morning morning's minion, king-

dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding

Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding

High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing

In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,

As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding

Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding

Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here

Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion

Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion

Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,

Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

The Windhover

Gerard Manley Hopkins

**********

And, in case you didn't know, my new book:

is now available to buy (all proceeds to charity).  It is almost as good as sliced bread, and if you don't believe me, read what others say about it:

Simply the finest book I have read about Norfolk this week.

Sir John Betjeman

Bloodsports Weekly

Your man Gibbs has a fine way with plagiarism - and the daguerreotypes are great!

George Bernard Shaw

The London Review of Books

I have nothing to declare but my genius - Oh?  You wanted something about that book?  Well, it's very nice.....

Oscar Wilde

Time Out

I say, Jeeves, what a spiffing book!

Bertie Wooster

Indeed, Sir?

Jeeves

I want the film rights.....

Sam Peckinpah

Just email me at richardpgibbs@aol.com

An Ode to the Equilux

Is nothing sacred?

A false Autumn - the effect of Horse Chestnut Leaf Miners

Almost two years ago, I wrote a piece called Autumn Leaves/Les feuilles mortes, musing on Eva Cassidy and her untimely early death and the turning of the world. My wife, Amanda, was still with us, but she was already then in residential care, although when I composed the piece she had just spent several very confusing days in the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, King’s Lynn, having possibly suffered a minor stroke.

Now, as the autumn leaves begin to fall again, it is over six months since she died. Who knows where the time goes? I may be sentimental, but why not? It’s not wrong to miss someone, even though the world keeps on turning, and there’s no going back. 

And I am.  I do....

Sunday was the Autumn Equinox, traditionally defined as the time when the plane of Earth's equator passes through the geometric centre of the Sun's disk. The sun appears to rise due east and set due west and, in theory, the day is as long as the night, though we don’t have the light switch dusks and dawns that (almost) occur on the equator. 

But now I learn that in fact we have a few days when the days are still longer than the nights due to refraction of the sun’s rays through the atmosphere, so we have to wait for the Equilux to get our full night’s sleep..... 

Is nothing sacred?

The spent flowers of the Sweet Chestnut

So, instead of equinoctial gales, are we now to expect equiluctial storms? I cannot find the word, and when I look it up I find that equinoctial storms are something of a myth anyway (pace Boris, et al). But in researching that particular word, I find myself surrounded by words I didn’t know before. 

Ouch! 

I didn’t know I suffered from Occhiolism – which apparently is a neologism for the awareness of the small scope of one's own perspective and the way it limits one's ability to fully understand the world.....

Well, that certainly helps!

Traces of a squirrel feast

Nor did I know that I may have Agnosthesia – which is the state of not knowing how you really feel about something, which forces you to sift through clues hidden in your own behaviour, as if you were some other person. 

I wish I’d never looked. 

And then there’s Oneirataxia - the inability to distinguish between fantasy and reality.... 

Well, I just didn’t know there was a word for it!

Sycamore leaf showing Tarspot Fungus

And as for Kairosclerosis - the moment you realize that you're currently happy - consciously trying to savour the feeling - which prompts your intellect to identify it, pick it apart and put it in context, where it will slowly dissolve until it's little more than an aftertaste. 

Oh Lord, take me now!

Seeds of the Common Lime

But, where was I? 

Oh yes, Autumn leaves..... Amanda and I used to love Autumn in Italy. A sharpness in the light. The plumes of smoke from the chestnut groves, as the contadini cleared the ground ready for the harvest.  The cars by the morning roadside, left by city workers gleaning porcini (Boletus Edulis) from the woods to gain a week’s wages in a peaceful few hours (not to mention to augment the family tables).... Picnics with the kids playing in the aromatic airs near Lago di Vico, feasting on cassoulet and hunks of fresh bread.....

Oh yes...

Since you went away the days grow long

And soon I'll hear old winter's song

But I miss you most of all my darling

When autumn leaves start to fall

Johnny Mercer

Oh no....

Mais la vie sépare ceux qui s’aiment

Tout doucement sans faire de bruit

Et la mer efface sur la sable

Les pas des amants désunis

{But life separates those who are in love

Gently, without a sound,

And the sea erases from the sand

The footprints of parted lovers}

Jacques Prévert

All pictures taken in the last two days on my iPhone 

It's not what you see - it's how you see it.....

And I am not alone,

while my love is near me,

I know it will be so,

until it's time to go,

So come the storms of winter,

and then the birds in spring again,

I have no fear of time.

For who knows,

how my love grows?

And who knows,

where the time goes?

Sandy Denny

PS:  If you haven't yet ordered a copy of my new book about NW Norfolk, please don't miss the chance!  It will make a beautiful Christmas present....

£12 a copy (plus p&p) but all will go to charity (The National Brain Appeal and The Friends of St Mary's, Snettisham) after print costs have been met....

Just email me: richardpgibbs@aol.com

In memory of Amanda

Thanks

Richard

An extract from my forthcoming book

King's Lynn

King's Lynn and the Great Ouse

King’s Lynn, or Bishop’s Lynn as it was, or just Lynn as she is to locals, was once the third largest port in the country, and a member of the lucrative Hanseatic League. The name derives from a word for a lake, and the King was Henry VIII. 

The Trinity Guildhall

Trinity Guildhall, with its flushwork (the patterning that contrasts freestone with knapped flint) facade has stood on the Saturday Market Place since the early 15th century. Today it forms part of the Town Hall, and houses the Stories of Lynn Museum and the Old Gaol House.

Windows of the Trinity Guildhall

Just across the Saturday Market Place is another great building - King’s Lynn Minster, 

St Margaret's Church, now King's Lynn Minster

which was founded in 1101 by Herbert de Losinga, the first Bishop of Norwich. It has been considerably altered since then, with the west front showing four centuries of the development of English church architecture.

The High Altar - The Minster

The King's Lynn Heritage Action Zone area, with the Conservation Area at its heart, contains 462 listed buildings (17 Grade I, 55 Grade II* and 390 Grade II), including the Grade I St Nicholas Chapel, England’s largest surviving parochial chapel;

 

St Nicholas' Chapel

the Grade I St George’s Guildhall, the largest surviving medieval guildhall in the country 

Outside the Guildhall of St George

and the Grade I Hanse House (1485), the only surviving Hanseatic Warehouse in England.

The Hanse House

A 42 acre restored 18th century park, known as The Walks, contains the 15th century Red Mount Chapel, one of only two octagonal chapels in Europe.

Red Mount Chapel

This was once a wayside chapel for pilgrims to Walsingham, many of whom arrived by ship in King’s Lynn. Near by is Greyfriars Tower, all that remains of a Franciscan Friary founded in the early 13th century.

Greyfriars Tower

The Lynn Museum, just by the bus station, tells the story of West Norfolk, and includes the Seahenge which was found on the coast near Holme. True’s Yard Fisherfolk Museum covers the town’s maritime heritage and also has a traditional tea room and shop, all housed in a reclaimed Victorian cottages.

True's Yard

Today Lynn is much changed since its heyday but it’s a busy place, with warehouses, quays and bars alongside the Great Ouse.

Old Warehouses by the Great Ouse

In the Tuesday Market Place

Dancing in the Tuesday Market Place

there has been a traditional fair, called the Mart, every February for over 800 years, and for over seventy years the King’s Lynn Arts Festival has brought classical music and the arts to Lynn in July. 

The Mayor - Councillor Paul Bland

For 39 years Festival Too has taken place in King's Lynn and in 2024 28 acts performed across three weekends in the summer, ranging from emerging local talent to internationally renowned musicians. The Guildhall of St George, on King Street, was probably built in the 1430s and is still a working theatre, with a recently discovered arch possibly leading to the dressing room Shakespeare used in 1593.

The Deputy Mayor - Councillor Andy Bullen

The port is still active, and in 2022 it handled 420,939 tonnes of cargo carried by 191 vessels. The commodities handled included aggregates, barley, fertilisers, steel, stone, sugar beet, salt, timber, and wheat. Fishing and pleasure boats tie up alongside Marriot’s Warehouse, and a ferry will take you across the river to West Lynn….

The Old Custom House, on the Purfleet

On the Purfleet there is the old Custom House, designed by Henry Bell and built in 1683, and there is a statue of explorer George Vancouver, who gave his name to, among other places, Vancouver, Vancouver Island and two Mount Vancouvers, one in the Yukon and the other in New Zealand.

Captain George Vancouver

If you would like to explore the town the best way to start is with a guided walking tour of Historic Lynn with the King’s Lynn Town Guides. The walking season is from Easter Bank Holiday Monday until 31st October and all walks start at the Saturday Market Place, outside the Tourist Information Centre (unless otherwise specified). For more information about these and other walks or to book an individual tour, visit

 www.kingslynntownguides.co.uk

Hampton Court, part of Historic Lynn

*     *     *     *     * 

Although the layout and some of the pictures will not appear like this, the text is an extract from my new book, Starting from Snettisham, which is designed as an introduction to/appreciation of some of the joys of North-West Norfolk, from King's Lynn to Wells-next-the-sea, both for those who visit or who may be new to the area, and also as a reminder to those who know Norfolk well just how fortunate we are to live here. It could make a perfect gift for visitors and relatives as well…..

The reason I have called it Starting from Snettisham is that the village of Snettisham became our home when I moved here with my wife, Amanda, a few years ago. Although Amanda was already suffering quite badly from fronto-temporal dementia, we managed to explore the area around us for a couple of years before her condition deteriorated so much that she had to move into residential care, though even then I would take her out in her wheel chair to visit places around us, such as Burnham Market, Sandringham and Hunstanton. 

The cover of the new book

In 2023 I produced A Snapshot of Snettisham, a 72 page all colour book about the village, which I sold to raise money for The Friends of St Mary’s Snettisham (which was set up for those with or without faith who are interested in supporting and protecting the church building itself and the significant role it plays within the village and the wider community) and The National Brain Appeal (the charity dedicated to raising funds for the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery and the University College of London Queen Square Institute of Neurology, which cared for Amanda). 

The cover of last year's book

Amanda died on February 1st, 2024, and I decided to produce another book in memory of the places Amanda and I explored before her dementia got the better of her. It is in the same format as its predecessor, and again I am hoping to raise money for the same two charities.

The price is £12 a copy, and once the printing costs are covered every penny will go to the two charities. If you would like to purchase one please get in touch via email (richardpgibbs@aol.com) and as soon as I can I will mail them out - though of course I will also have to charge some postage.

{Incidentally I reprinted a few more copies of A Snapshot of Snettisham, at the same price, if you think you might like one of them too!}