Vienna 2: What Lies Beneath...
January, 2012
I wrote my post-graduate dissertation on the dramatic and symbolic meaning of blood in Ancient Rome. I am profoundly blood phobic, and every time I picked up my central text, on blood-letting, I’d end up lying on my bed with a cold flannel over my face. My father had adopted the same attitude to his fear of heights: he chose to do his national service as an airborne gunner. It wasn’t the airborne bit which made him sick every time, or the guns, but the bit in between: jumping out of the plane at 10,000 ft.
These perversities of choice (and their failure) delighted my mother, a Freudian psycho-therapist.
Nevertheless, walking down the apparently endless Währingerstrasse on a grey winter’s day, past the neo-Gothic Votivkirche, a massive Coca-Cola advertisement not so much not so much emblazoned on the porch as offering some sort of annunciation- past the dusty academic bookshops selling surgical texts and plastic skeletons, to (eventually) the Josephinum, was something of an act of courage.
TheVota-Cola Cocakirche Votivkirche, Vienna Read More...
These perversities of choice (and their failure) delighted my mother, a Freudian psycho-therapist.
Nevertheless, walking down the apparently endless Währingerstrasse on a grey winter’s day, past the neo-Gothic Votivkirche, a massive Coca-Cola advertisement not so much not so much emblazoned on the porch as offering some sort of annunciation- past the dusty academic bookshops selling surgical texts and plastic skeletons, to (eventually) the Josephinum, was something of an act of courage.
The
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December in Vienna: On Music, Memory and the Basilisk
December, 2011
My emotional landscape has always been also a geographical one. When in a strange place I simply want to wander, to be surprised. I think my wandering is about a sense of being, for a while, un-findable; of a tiny edge of risk and possibility.
This year I went to Vienna twice. In February I went by train with my brother and sister; the first journey with just us together since we were children. We had picnicked in our tiny sleeper as the Rhine, its waters obsidian, its banks all fairy lights, rushed past us with castles lit like opera sets on their crags.
Just before Christmas I returned to spend longer there.
Exquisite restraint on the Viennese Christmas Tree
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This year I went to Vienna twice. In February I went by train with my brother and sister; the first journey with just us together since we were children. We had picnicked in our tiny sleeper as the Rhine, its waters obsidian, its banks all fairy lights, rushed past us with castles lit like opera sets on their crags.
Just before Christmas I returned to spend longer there.
Exquisite restraint on the Viennese Christmas Tree
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On Grief
November, 2011
Five years ago I wrote a book: Sunlight on the Garden.
It was a patchwork history of my family as it sometimes soared, sometimes staggered through the twentieth century, wrestling with wars, dislocation, the English class system, love and loss and depression. I had myself been treated for depressive psychosis over several months in hospital a quarter of a century ago but had recovered completely and never relapsed. It was, to a degree, a biography of an illness.
I’d enjoyed writing this book, partly because I hoped it revealed that some wit might endure through the drama of intermittent mental illness (and, to be frank, melodrama). But what I’d liked most of all at was exploring the collision of history and personality and near the end of the memoir I said, triumphantly, that despite everything, we were a family of survivors.
Despite everything, no-one in my family, I wrote, had killed themselves.
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It was a patchwork history of my family as it sometimes soared, sometimes staggered through the twentieth century, wrestling with wars, dislocation, the English class system, love and loss and depression. I had myself been treated for depressive psychosis over several months in hospital a quarter of a century ago but had recovered completely and never relapsed. It was, to a degree, a biography of an illness.
I’d enjoyed writing this book, partly because I hoped it revealed that some wit might endure through the drama of intermittent mental illness (and, to be frank, melodrama). But what I’d liked most of all at was exploring the collision of history and personality and near the end of the memoir I said, triumphantly, that despite everything, we were a family of survivors.
Despite everything, no-one in my family, I wrote, had killed themselves.
Read More...
Greece: Whose (De)Fault Is It Really?
September, 2011
Greece. September
Autumn creeps over this island even though the temperatures are still around 30 degrees. But there are no cicadas now, vine leaves turn rusty, lemon leaves as yellow as their fruit lie in drifts, the velvety green globes holding almonds hang like Christmas tree baubles. The sea is clear, pale turquoise and marvellously warm, the sky is the rich blue of September.
There has been no rain here since May and the ground crackles beneath the foot. But silver grey olives, dark, shiny myrtle and melancholy cypresses, watered by the Ionian’s relentless winter rain, maintain the island’s greenness. Thunderstorms are predicted to break this drought next week but for now it is a gorgeous, peaceful time of year.
The drought and storms to come in Greece’s political situation will not turn with the season of course. The apportioning of blame: tax-evading Greeks v venal bankers is pointless now. Bankers will or will not be held to global account and Greeks have an historically justifiable mistrust of their leaders, an adversarial relationship with the authorities in general and a strongly tribal culture. Read More...
Autumn creeps over this island even though the temperatures are still around 30 degrees. But there are no cicadas now, vine leaves turn rusty, lemon leaves as yellow as their fruit lie in drifts, the velvety green globes holding almonds hang like Christmas tree baubles. The sea is clear, pale turquoise and marvellously warm, the sky is the rich blue of September.
There has been no rain here since May and the ground crackles beneath the foot. But silver grey olives, dark, shiny myrtle and melancholy cypresses, watered by the Ionian’s relentless winter rain, maintain the island’s greenness. Thunderstorms are predicted to break this drought next week but for now it is a gorgeous, peaceful time of year.
The drought and storms to come in Greece’s political situation will not turn with the season of course. The apportioning of blame: tax-evading Greeks v venal bankers is pointless now. Bankers will or will not be held to global account and Greeks have an historically justifiable mistrust of their leaders, an adversarial relationship with the authorities in general and a strongly tribal culture. Read More...
Cockerels and Goats
July, 2011
I’m an early riser by nature but in summer on Paxos it’s essential if you want to work. The air is cool and very still, the occasional cock crows, the hens and wild turkeys chatter on softly in the olive groves around my house and the cicadas have yet to start that day long thrill of sound which is so much the Mediterranean to us north Europeans who rarely hear so much as an unconvinced cricket.
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