– The Milky Way (1)

 Trains of Thought...

 

After three weeks and three thousand miles, mainly on trains, I am home.  The cats mew welcomes and I drop my bag, exhausted.  I think this may have been the longest separation from Amanda in forty years and I am looking forward to collecting her from Respite in the morning, but first I must burn some heating (the house is cold! - but can we afford it?)  I am cold.  And tired, and need to lie down.....

 

Three-thirty in the morning and I cough myself awake, unable to sleep again, not feeling good.  Seven-thirty and two thin red lines stare back at me from their plastic frame.  After three years and three vaccinations, and despite wearing a mask for three thousand miles, finally the bug has got me.  Plans change.  I cannot pick Amanda up.  

 

Time for reflection.  The point of this break was in part for me to recharge my batteries, to allow me to prolong my care for Amanda at home.  In part, however, it was to see how she got on in the local care home, conveniently nearby.  I had planned to bring her home for a few days to see how she was with me, then to take her back for the weekend while I collected my thoughts and then to make a final decision on the Monday following my return.

 

For anyone caring for someone, there are many things to consider, the first of which is to allow the cared for to remain safe in his or her decline.  A secondary consideration, however, concerns the carer.  For example, if I, or one of the dedicated carers who have been helping Amanda at home, were to become ill or incapacitated, then the situation would rapidly become problematic.  Whereas if she takes up residence in a care home, there is 24-hour assistance, and, while no one can pretend it will be as “nice” for her as being in her own home, if we are nearby and can visit, take her out or bring her home regularly, then maybe everyone benefits.

 

For readers unfamiliar with this story, Amanda was diagnosed with dementia about eleven years ago (to be honest, it’s a blur now and I cannot remember quite how long ago it was, it may have been longer). Initially we were told that it was early onset Alzheimer’s disease, but I contested this and after brain scans and extensive testing it was agreed that the correct diagnosis was Frontotemporal Dementia (Semantic Variant) a relatively rare (and long-lived) condition.  In practical terms this doesn’t make a huge difference – no dementia can currently be cured, and all converge eventually in some kind of death – but in Amanda’s case it has meant that while she hasn’t had some of the symptoms that can be so distressing in dementia – such as extreme behaviours, anxiety, disconcertingly repetitive actions – she has now lost almost every shred of language, both in her understanding and in her ability to communicate.  

 

She continued working, and driving, for some time, and apart from struggling to find the right word at times you might not have known she was affected.  It is a slow, silent, stealthy insurrection however, and day by day plaques, abnormal clusters of protein fragments, build up between nerve cells, then dead and dying nerve cells contain tangles, which are made up of twisted strands of protein.  Nutrients and other essential supplies can no longer move through the cells, which eventually die; the brain shrinks dramatically and the effects become more noticeable.  

 

We continued to travel, though our trip to Bologna and Ravenna in 2015 was a milestone as I had an epiphany at the Easter Vigil in the Metropolitan cathedral as the Paschal Candle was lit to the singing of the Exultet:

 

Accept this Easter candle,
a flame divided but undimmed,
a pillar of fire that glows to the honour of God.
(For it is fed by the holy melting wax, which the mother bee brought forth
to make this precious candle.)
Let it mingle with the lights of heaven
and continue bravely burning
to dispel the darkness of this night!
May the Morning Star which never sets
find this flame still burning:
Christ, that Morning Star,
who came back from the dead,
and shed his peaceful light on all humanity,
your Son, who lives and reigns for ever and ever.

Amen.

 

Unlike Amanda, unfortunately I have no faith.  But in the dimness of that crowded place I realised that we had come to a point of no return, and that our relationship could not maintain the equilibrium we had enjoyed for over thirty years.

 

After Amanda had to retire, we visited our daughters in China and Australia in 2016, but then settled down to quiet routines of swimming, walking, and watching Escape to the Country, rowing back against the advancing deterioration.

 

Our last overseas trip was to see the Christmas markets in Krakow in 2019, after which the pandemic raised its ugly head and we were locked down, just the two of us, sneaking out for two walks a day (no swimming) and awkwardly waving and clapping on Thursday evenings on the doorstep to keep in with the neighbours....

 

During that time, while I caught up on some heavy reading (Boswell’s Life of Johnson – an ironic choice given the lifelessness of the then Prime Minister – and John dos Passos’s USA) Amanda spent her time cutting and pasting, creating Christmas and Birthday cards for her friends and relations all the way up to 2029....)

 

And then we moved, to Norfolk, in an attempt to find a home where our daughters could stay comfortably should they be able to help with care, and where we could potentially have residential carers should we reach that stage.  It was a good move, though, with retrospect, too late for Amanda to appreciate.  The upheaval disturbed her, and her condition worsened.  So that now, despite all the help and goodwill from family, friends and carers, we are faced with the trauma of dislocation once more.  

 

And so, over eighteen months since we moved, and exactly a year since I last went anywhere at all, with all this in mind, I take a series of trains to Harwich, a place of diminished charm:

to ship to the continent, with a meticulously planned itinerary to visit old friends and haunts, and to revitalise my tired thoughts.  Amanda is safely installed in a local care home for a period of respite, and I am temporarily free.  

In Amsterdam I pass a wonderfully convivial evening with a family of dear friends who we knew from Rome, though as this was almost my first social evening in someone else’s home for some years I was perhaps over-excited? 

 

 

With two other friends, by chance on a similar trajectory, we revisit the Rijksmuseum and Van Gogh, but I am already troubled.  What is it that is gained through this incessant interaction between visitors and works of art?  I don’t tire of Rembrandt or Vermeer, and Van Gogh’s frenetic output never ceases to impress.  But as I gaze at the Lowry like scene in the foyer:

or at the serious attention paid to walls covered in oils, 

I have a welling sense of futility.

 

On September 8^th at around 16.10 local time, a double rainbow rises from the North Sea.  The following morning the papers are awash with the royal story. And so they are in Germany, Austria and Italy for days to come.  I’m not the only one with problems.

 

Stranded by a Dutch train strike (yes, it isn’t only Great British Railways, though I must say this was handled differently....) I spend a night where Chet Baker died, and wander Amsterdam in the rain, seeking solace behind locked church doors, 

and views from on high....

 

Then I am away, and coursing through Germany, streaking away from my responsibilities, I spend a night in Bamberg, entranced by both the half-timbered Altes Rathaus, 

perched above the Regnitz, and jars of Rauchbier (smoked beer) in the dark and warm interior of the Hofbräu.....

 

Then on to Munich, where other beer halls attract, 

as does the rather moth-eaten Alte Pinakothek, 

once (1836) the largest art gallery in the world, though with almost every picture glazed with reflecting glass I again find it difficult to know what I am looking at, or for....

 

I reach the high spot of this part of my journey in Innsbruck, where funicular and the Nordketter Cable Car transports me to Hafelekar at 2,269 metres above sea level.  Here spectacular views across the Tyrol are crystal clear in the mountain air.  Alpine Choughs:

hop about round my feet, and for a moment I feel almost weightless, though from here the only way is down.....

 

This journey is a pilgrimage, like the wanderings of the peregrine, or like a journey down the Milky Way to Santiago de Compostela, a journey that in Luis Buñuel's film La Voie Lactée plays with time, and entertains questions of orthodoxy and heresy. I don’t mean to exaggerate, but if we are thinking beings, we should be examining the purpose of existence and trying to make some sense of our place in the universe. On my various trains my thoughts turn frequently to Amanda and the life we have shared, the places we have visited. At the top of the Karwendel Nature Park above Innsbruck, I am reminded of a trip Amanda and I made to Salzburg, before the children were born. From there we had a day trip up into the Tyrol, in shiny blue weather, like today, and we surveyed the rocky and snowy world from on high.

 

And we believed, then, in a bright future.

 

Now I am home, alone.  I really do not feel that well.  It’s time for bed.....

[All photos, except that of the two of us in the Tyrol, taken either on my iPhone SE or my Canon EOS R5]

Amsterdam 2018

We all need to escape.....

Angry Young Man John Osborne never stayed in the Grand Hotel Amrâth Amsterdam as, at the time of his death in 1994, it was the headquarters of the city's public transport company (GVB). It had been created just before the First World War as the Scheepvaarthuis (Dutch for House of Shipping), the joint head office for six shipping companies. Architect Jo Van der Mey combined Art Nouveau with contemporary Dutch and nautical ideas to form the key work of the Amsterdam School.

In The Hotel in Amsterdam, six friends from London, whose lives and work are overshadowed by K.L., a demanding film producer, flee the country for a weekend to escape his influence. In a hotel in Amsterdam, the uneasy equilibrium that has existed between them begins to unravel as the alcohol starts to flow. John Osborne's account of these relationships won the Evening Standard Best Play of the Year Award in 1968. 

The play was revived at the Donmar Warehouse starring Tom Hollander (a happily coincidental name) in September 2003, but is rarely performed these days, though it is not without current relevance.   They are escaping the clutches of K.L, who is described as, the biggest, most poisonous, voracious, Machiavellian dinosaur in the movies.... And we all know what that means......  Indeed, I think we do, Mr Weinstein?

In the Grand Hotel Amrâth we are not escaping anyone.  We have come to see old friends, as well as Rembrandt, Van Gogh et al.  We have come to revive ourselves with the delights of foreign travel, while we still can.  The hotel itself is an extraordinary building and we marvel at the way architect Ray Kentie and his team of artists renovated the office building.  It took a year and a half of demolition and clearance, starting in 2003, and then a further two and half to complete the restoration.

With a glance over my shoulder at Osborne, however, we feel just a little oppressed by the city, and by the hotel.  It is shadowy, and the heavy woods and thick wallpapers dull our spirits.  The irony is that, as tourists, we are ever trying to escape ourselves.  Amanda and I first visited the Rembrandthuis over twenty years ago, and were welcomed in through the front door into a relatively quiet, dark seventeenth century town house.  It seemed as if the owner had just stepped out for a stroll, and we made ourselves at home in anticipation of his return.  Now you enter through a glass, steel and concrete atrium, and jostle with hundreds of others, all intently glued to audio guides.  There were 265,000 such visitors last year and I am told that they anticipate 300,000 this year.

The Van Gogh museum only takes online bookings. There are queues for the Rijksmuseum.  The Red Light district is now swamped by tour groups. There's hardly a sailor in sight. No chance of privacy.....

What can we do?  We are tourists too.

We escape. Again.  To Haarlem.  Seventeen minutes on a train from Amsterdam Centraal, and a totally different atmosphere.  The Grote Kerk, dedicated to St Bavo, is an oasis of peace, despite the monumental organ once deftly played by the ten-year-old Mozart. 

We pay our respects to Frans Hals, though the Laughing Cavalier is resting in the Groot Heiligland, the Alms House for old men where he ended his days, in anticipation of celebrations later in the day.....

A fact endorsed by excited locals, who seem to be bursting pink and turquoise balloons in our honour....

The pedestrian streets are quiet, their quaint, wonky houses immaculate (apart from the occasional reference to South Park).....

And the windmill waves at us across the Grebe-infested river.

Back in Amsterdam we have a beer at Café Papeneiland, a bruine kroeg from 1642,

then find an old fashioned restaurant in Jordaan and eat stamppot andijvie met lamsbout, which is mighty fine. After this we have a de Koninck and oude genever at the Café Karpershoek before retiring to the Amrâth, feeling full, and a little wobbly, and not quite so jaded.

We look back.  But not in anger.  I met John Osborne in Rome once, not that long before he died.  The man who changed British theatre was no longer an angry young man.  He was more an avuncular old boy with the husky Fulham tones of the late John Hurt playing Jeffrey Barnard.  I asked him whether he ever regretted writing Look Back in Anger?  He smiled, perhaps at my naivety.  It pays the rent, he said,with a chuckle. 

I didn't ask him about The Hotel in Amsterdam.....

In actual fact, I look back, whenever I look back, with great affection, whether to Amsterdam or not......  Perhaps looking forward is not so easy nowadays? 

Amsterdam and The Hague - The Netherlands - Part 2 - Golden Age

Musées des Beaux Arts....

My visit to Den Haag (The Hague) is singleminded. I have not come to watch the Dutch Parliament in session; to attend the application of the convention on the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide (CROATIA v. SERBIA) at the International Court of Justice; to visit one of the largest Apple Stores in the oldest shopping arcade in the Netherlands, nor to take a dip off the beach at unpronounceable Scheveningen (apparently this was the word used to get German spies to give themselves away)..... This is a lightning raid on The Mauritshuis, a recently renovated jewel in the crown of the Dutch Golden Age.

Meisje met de parel, Johannes Vermeer, c 1665

As the publicity says, the girl is back in town, and I have a date.....  Her home was designed and built in 1644 by Jacob van Campen, the most famous architect of his time (who also provided Rembrandt with his grand home in Amsterdam). Count Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen (1604-1679) commissioned it, hence its name, but he was not at home when I called.  

The new main entrance to The Mauritshuis (or you can take the glass lift)

The museum has recently undergone extensive refurbishment and modernisation which provide an airy and bright entrance lobby, as well as extended space for new exhibitions.  But the original interior, even when lit with LED systems which are calibrated to blend daylight with candleglow is as designed in the seventeenth century.  As Laura Cumming wrote in The Observer, the Mauritshuis is the ideal museum.  It's a home from home for art.  The rooms are on a human scale.....  Vermeer's Girl, for all her Mona Lisa fame, is in a modest wood-panelled chamber..... 

Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens,
The Garden of Eden with the Fall of Man, c. 1615
Primary Art - a teacher and her rat instruct young minds....

It is a place to muse, and to amuse. The Greek origin of the word museum denoted a place or temple dedicated to the Muses. Hence it has come to mean a building set apart for study and the arts. One of the more famous pictures on show here is itself of a lesson - Rembrandt's justly acclaimed The Anatomy Lesson of Doctor Nicolaes Tulp (1632).....

Dr Tulp's Anatomy Lesson: Aris Kindt, armed robber, executed by hanging

As Jonathan Jones commented in The Guardian, the eye is led irresistibly into a dark tunnel between the arm's exposed muscles - and into the body itself. Rembrandt leads the onlooker from the visible world to the invisible darkness within. What lies there?

Self-portrait with Lace Collar, 1629

As Rembrandt himself looks confidently out at the viewing public, I muse on what it is that I am seeing. Why have I come all this way? Jonathan Jones suggests that, the true reason to come here is to encounter some of the world's most profound works of art. Perhaps I should have spent more time in Den Haag, and visited the International Court of Justice. It is fitting perhaps that the Mauritshuis and the Peace Palace are near neighbours. Somehow I feel that Vermeer and Rembrandt still work as ambassadors for peace, and that whatever else we gain from great art the very act of admiring such works is in itself an act of peace:

About suffering they were never wrong,

The old Masters: how well they understood

Its human position: how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

But I hasten to Amsterdam.....

And go straight to the also recently refurbished Rijksmuseum, a great palace of art, exhausting in its dimensions and in its scope. 

The Rijksmuseum is the museum of the Netherlands.  It was first opened in 1800 (ironically in Den Haag), but moved to Amsterdam in 1808 and then to its current location in 1885. It has recently been extensively refurbished, and when I was last here, about five years ago, less than half the collection was on view.  

Rembrandt's De Nachtwacht, 1642

Now there is more than enough.  I mean, much more.  From the Middle Ages through the Golden Age, to Dutch Colonialism, to (almost) now.  Guess who I find looking a little uneasy beneath all the pomp and splendour?

Vincent Van Gogh, Self-Portrait with Grey Felt Hat (1886-87)

Everywhere there are talking points, pictures to amuse, artefacts, sculptures, allegories, portraits.  Sometimes, I almost feel the models are here to admire themselves....

But what leads me out, takes me from myself here are the pictures of life....  In the Mauritshuis there were wonderful pictures of life, by Jan Steen for example, and here, with David Teniers, in his Peasant Kermis (1665), you get an impression of the world as it is.  I particularly like the complex visions of village activity in winter, like this:

Winter Landscape with Ice Skaters, Hendrick Avercamp, 1608

But I also enjoy the pictures that you could almost walk out into, like this Amsterdam canal scene, though there are fewer cars (or bicycles!) and more leaves on the trees in this picture than now.....

Jan van der Heyden, Amsterdam View with Houses on the Herengracht.... (1670)

And outside, this elegant city is a museum in itself. The canals reflect the buildings and light fills the windows, and the shifting shapes of the narrow-fronted houses bring to mind the world with which de Hooch and Vermeer might have been familiar.

And the waters of the canals, the bridges and boats, cannot have changed that much.....

And the sky, the sense of space and the vanishing points, are still in the air.....

It is not difficult to dream a little in Amsterdam. Musing in the galleries and then wandering one way or another, time hangs lightly draped across your shoulders. The canals seep an atmosphere of quiet. At the Vishuisje Herengracht I have a snack of oysters and a delicious herring broodje (sandwich) and feel that the world is not such a bad place after all.

And in the Cafe Bouwman, close by, I make a new friend (though I understand that felines are no longer allowed in bars by law....)

In the Vondelpark, the willows do not so much weep as relax, their tendrils hair-like in the winter cool....

And on the canals themselves, as dusk gathers, the lights glow warm and welcoming.....

My trip to Amsterdam was not singleminded. I was not only there for the Museum.  Even when ice and snow gather and life slows to winter rhythms....

And over the water sails a boat, just like back then

Though it is cold outside, Peace comes dropping slow in this most picturesque of places.....  And the evening closes with supper with a family of old friends who live overlooking one of the quieter canals. On the third floor of what once was a convent school we eat and drink and discuss the politics of museums, the nature of the Netherlands, and the passing of time. 

Good night, Amsterdam......  Let's drink to another Golden Age!

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting

For the miraculous birth, there always must be

Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating 

On a pond at the edge of the wood....

W H Auden