Number Seventy News

Which actually, I didn’t on this trip to London, preferring to use my free bus pass and enjoy the superior views.  But the special poster exhibition at the London Transport Museum (extremely well refurbished since I was there last) was a nostalgic joy.  The history of the use of imaginative posters to encourage travel by train, tube and bus was laid out, with useful discussion on technique. Some less successful were included - they weren’t all crowd pullers but their range and variety was quite astonishing, even to someone like me who had been used to seeing them on subway walls. Most of the artists had got the message to keep it simple - not a lot of text, but a simple few word text.  Eternally grateful to Frank Pick who commissioned all the early works especially for LT

Bus with folding bike to Tadcaster - Wharfe reasonably full, but not excessively so.  Off along the lane to Bolton Percy - peaceful Autumn countryside, very quiet, few birds along this stretch.  Fine colours in the hedges, particularly birch.  Bolton Percy dank, the beck spread all over the gloomy fields below the village, grey and stagnant.  Leaving the village, a huge flock of birds over towards Colton, too far away to recognise, too small for starlings, I thought, but they might have been. 

From the bridge at Colton Junction a fine view of traffic on the ECML and from Leeds.  A couple of real trains, a 225 and a 125 in full white/grey national express livery, and several of the Cross Country ex Virgin mini trains, even the 5 car version ridiculously short for the distances they cover, taking in commuter traffic for various parts of the journey, as they do.  (I’m not suggesting the 12-coach standard of London commuter lines, but surely replacing the HSTs with reduced sets, even if more frequent, showed little faith in the future railway. Thanks, Branson!)

And so to Colton and through to the Roman road to Copmanthorpe, where I had to mend a puncture, caused by the ever-thoughtful farmers’ habit of flail-mowing hawthorn hedges and spreading thorns across the carriageway.  But successfully mended en-route, and so home. It was good to be out.

No, not my account of everyday life at number 70, but a reminder that there is a fascinating exibitionat the Queen’s House, next to the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich.  The exhibition is called “Turmoil and Tranquillity: the sea trhough the eyes of Dutch and Flemish masters, 1550-1700.”  It’s the most wonderful collection of marine paintings from that period, covering everything from shipwrecks real and imagined, illustrating life’s uncertainty and brevity, and usually with some icon to encourage viewers to turn to salvation, to scenes of shipsbecalmed, fishing, or fighting.  There are some interesting themes drawn out about trade and exploration too.  It’s on until January 11th 2009.

And it’s always fun to go to Greenwich, though this time I didn’t have spare time to enjoy the foreshore, the park, or the town itself.  But South Eastern Trains got me there and back expeditiously.  It’s strange to see commuter trains in Yorkshire of 2 or three carriages when the standard in so much of the London commuter network is 12, or 8.  And then there’s Virgin Cross Country (of blessed memory) who thought it was a good idea to replace 8 coach HSTs with 4 or 5 coach Voyagers. Don’t get me started.

Horrors.  After spending two weeks in the country, back in August, not a single word has been said. So - a major task here.

Ferry from Newcastle to Stavanger / Bergen.  This is such a wonderful way to start a holiday - yet apparently not enough of us do it so DFDS has stopped the route from September.  There’s been a direct ferry from the UK to Norway for at least 150 years so this is an historic disaster.  The voyage from Stavanger to Bergen is a delight - weaving our huge ship between islands, looking down on people sitting on their verandahs, watching the speedboats leaping our wake, mountains in the distance, with still some snow in hollows on the North side.

Bergen - and a taxi driver who couldn’t find an address on a street right in the middle of town, who couldn’t certainly read a map and maybe couldn’t read.  But that aside, a nice flat just above the Floybanen station, and immediately above the best coffee bar in the world.  It rained, as it does Bergen, but stayed fine for a concert at Grieg’s house - Nils Okland, violin and a young piano player whose name I did know at the time.  Grieg had the most magnificent view from his house - west facing across a lake. The concert hall was set on a hillside and behind the stage a huge glass window gave onto a beautiful calm evening inlet of the lake. Magical. Music by Grieg, Ole Bull, and Okland.

Begen - Olso by Train. This is one of the great railway journeys of the world, a line constructed across the trackless wastes of the Hardangervidda and not finished until into the 20th century. It winds up from sea level at Bergen, through Voss to the junction with the precipitous Flamsbana at Myrdal and then over the top.  The trouble is that Norwegian Railways take the perfectly understandable view that it’s more important to keep the trains running than to provide dramatic views. The result is more snow tunnels than one would like, and a particularly long tunnel around the summit at Finse.  So it’s tantalising glimpses of bleak upland, sedge, tiny lakes, and glaciers.  Sorry to be ungrateful, NSB !

Seljord.   The purpose of going to Norway was to see friends, and our daughter.  After a couple of hours on Drammen station (NSB really has not got its connections right - in Germany the connection would have been 6 minutes) we travelled on to our friends on the banks of Seljord lake.  Highlights were an open air concert in the rain by the very accomplished Hardanger fiddle player of the family, umbrellas for performers, audience in the rain in the yard of a beautiful old lakeside farm.  And then the art barn in Seljord - my favourite exhibit a very cross young woman smashing bottles on an endlessly looped video. Trips through the mountains to the Dalen hotel (all wood) - still living in its glory days but taking half an hour to prepare a simple salad.

Around Tonsberg.  Enjoyable journey by car to a village near Tonsberg, where our daughter lives. A house in the middle of a forest of silver birch.  Excursions from here to Tonsberg - ancient Hansa port - modern glass library, most overstuffed second-hand bookshop in the world. Then to Verdens Ende - a promontory stretching into the Oslo fjord where there used to be a lighthouse - wind and rain, rain and wind - but very stimulating. Found a wonderful posh hotel that wouldn’t serve us coffee - but they did recommend a restaurant in a small fishing village which proved to be excellent, if with a most eccentric selection of music including hearty sea-shanties.

Oslo and the Jazz Festival. Oslo weather was on its best behaviour, so one could sit in the park on Karl Johann’s Gata and listen to New Orleans Jazz. Karin Krog and John Surman in the early evening - a delight to hear the grande dame of Norwegian Jazz and to watch John Surman really enjoying himself as a backing musician (with some solos, of course).  Later on, in a pub, the Ralph Alessi Quintet.  Too much waily waily soprano sax here - some nice phrases but no tunes, so not so much my cup of tea. Not my pint of beer too, at almost £6 a pint !  (And Tonsberg station charges you £1 for a pee). Next morning time to see the new Opera House - lots of external inclined planes so you end up on the roof - great views over the fjord and harbour.  Foyer restaurant looked really tempting but I really needed to go and sit in the Jazz cafe - so I did.

Stavanger.  So, by train to Stavanger (another hour at Drammen on the way).  Woods and lakes - and some sea views on the final section.  Stavanger is a European City of Culture this year but we were there on a Sunday so there wasn’t much culture on offer.  We did want to go to the art museum but a bus driver didn’t want to take us and a taxi driver had to have some coaching to get him there. It was actually only just over a mile from the harbour so we walked back.  Real highlight was the Hermeneutic Museum (fish canning) which revealed how massive the industry was in the 19th and early 20th centuries, with exports all over the world and most of Stavanger engaged in the business.  

And so, back to Newcastle. Apologies to any where that feels left out.

Two stations in Paris, about as far apart as Euston and St. Pancras  From England, you arrive in the far corner of the Gare Du Nord - a little enclave behind barriers to protect GB from unchecked foreigners.  On parallel tracks outside the frontier are Thalys  and TGVs to Belgium and Germany, and beyond that trains to the northern departments of France and to the teeming suburbs of Paris.  Outside, it’s very cosmopolitan; lots of groups of men to circumnavigate with your luggage on the gently downhill walk to the Gare de l’Est, about which more later. First, I must mention the Excellent Brasserie du Nord opposite the G du N.  Food at all hours, specialising in Oysters but of course plenty of other things, including a fabulous bouillabaise.  (Nicely old fashioned service, but not as quaintly typical asthe Brasserie de L’Ile St. Louis, where all the waiters are over 60, and flat footed, though the food is equally excellent.)

And so to the Gare de L’ESt which seems less brash than the Gare du Nord - whence long-distance trains to southern Germany via Strasbourg.  Just beyond the station, between it and the Canal St Martin, is the Jardin Villemin - everything you could want in an inner city green space - boules, tennis, play area for very little kids, where all the neigbourhood mums grandmas dads grandads gather on seats round the edge, playground for older kids, space to lie on the grass, and plants and trees and a view across the canal.  And just beyond that, on the corner of the Rue des Recollets, a really nice unassuming little bistro.  It’s the thing about great cities - round every corner some sort of delight.

We stayed in a small hotel on the Rue Chabrol; from the garret window of our room we could see the Gare du Nord straight ahead and the Gare de’Est. Just beneath our window, at the junction of the Rue de Chabrol and the Boulevard Magenta was a small covered market, including a most exciting fish stall.

If we hadn’t been so parsimoious when we built our railways, and only left enough height for a man with a top hat to stand up in an open third class truck, and only made our carriages as wide as a stage coach, then we could have had wonderful double decker trains as they do in Holland and France and Germany and Switzerland.  The Swiss ones seem the best designed - wider stairs and more room for luggage. And what a delight to sit so high above the countryside !

The National Railway Museum means well, bless its heart.  Hoping to make a little money, no doubt, from folks who had not a lot to do at half-term, they set up a 1968 nostalgia fest. (40 years on from the end of scheduled steam on BR).  Alas, I fear that for the organisers this had been research into ancient history, for the flavour of those heady days in summer 68 was not recaptured at all. (And I don’t mean les evenements at the Sorbonne in the same year either).  It’s all very well having Oliver Cromwell and Evening Star and Clun Castle and a Jubilee and a well-tank and a couple of delightful freight locos lined up in light steam but the only things moving were piddly.  Those of us who travelled through the night to see grimy 8Fs and Black 5s lit up by the first rays of the June sun, who stood in fields of willow herb to watch the last railtours of the last weeks of steam blast double headed over the hills and viaducts in Lancashire, who cherish the steam locomotive as a live, powerful,  working machine don’t get a lot from a static display like this.  I’d rather have had dozens of screens showing film of those last days.  The railway museum does a great job - but a few acres in York can only be a museum - they are never going to re-create the steam railway. Nice try, and I’m glad the NRM’s there, but it’s reminded me that I should visit and support more preserved lines.

Well, can’t really fault York-Exeter return on the same day by Cross Country. No more than 2 minutes late in either case, though helped of course by the generous amounts of recovery time / station stop that are now allowed. Train clean, staff polite, not much more to say. Did notice the extra platform at Bristol Parkway. And the return train was the one that does Sheffield to York direct via Pontefract and Sherburn in Elmet (not stopping at either, of course).

York to Southern Germany. Leave York 08.12, arrive Ravensburg, nearly at the Bodensee, at the other side of which is Switzerland, at 21.07 same day. Everything on time, too, at least until we got to Stuttgart, where everything was running a few minutes late, so our 6 minute change of trains was maintained (cross-platform, nice and easy)but then the Hannover-Munich ICE we were on as far as Ulm was further delayed and resulted in a frantic scamper around Ulm station where a 6 minute connection had turned into a minus 3 min connection - but they held the local train for us (and about 20 others). The Paris-Stuttgart TGV was impressively fast on the new line in France and again in Germany, and wound reasonably fast through the mountains to the West of Stuttgart. But not that impressed by the TGV on board catering - not much choice and malfunctioning microwave and grill. The Deutsche Bahn Bord-Bistro is usually better

Stuttgart to York. Leave Stuttgart 12.54, arrive York 23.12. And time enough in Paris to nip across to the Brasserie du Terminus Gare du Nord for a splendid meal - bouillabaise and Grimberger beer in my case. Even Kings X to York was on time - things may be looking up. I’ll let you all know after I’ve done York to Exeter return in a day in the near future.

Back in York, we have been having the York Literary Festival, which is definitely not a festival anything like Edinburgh, though I understand some Edinburgh Fringe events also get audience numbers in the negative if you discount grandparents, WAGS. Highlight of that sort was the Exhibition pub open mic on tour - first to York Central Library at 9.30 am on Saturday, where we had perhaps 7 poets and an audience of 4, beaten only by attendance at the Acomb Learning Centre (aka Acomb Library) on Monday night where we had 7 poets and no audience at all.

In case we should have thought that this was the audience for poetry in York, it was encouraging /depresssing to note that Carol Ann Duffy filled the Lyons Concert Hall to bursting on Thursday night and that half of the audience were undergraduates ! Many of whom laughed in the right places. C.A.D. was great, though she didn’t read anything very new - excerpts from the Laughter of Stafford Girls High (?) and some from the Worlds Wife and Rapture. An excellent hours worth. And she reads professionally and well - with some well practised pauses and sharp glances to point up some particularly waspish observation.

Normality was restored on Monday night at the Black Swan, where some mostly drab and mediocre performances (some of them by people who can be sparkling) attracted a spiffing audience of 10. (I was audience for this one, not performer). Mind you, they did have competition from the York Pagan Society meeting downstairs. Someone, not a pagan, was the second personin 48 hours to recommend I listen to early Bjork - must be something in the air.

I did go to a very interesting talk(not part of the literary festival) at the Railway Museum by Christian Wolmar, who wrote the excellent history of railways in Britain which I was given and had recently read. His main thesis is that it’s mostly governments that have screwed up the railways, never more so than currently, and he loathes the effects of privatisation as much as I do. He doesn’t think there was ever a golden age of railways, but that the final years of British Rail came pretty near it - I tend to agree.

[ I understand that many York Literary Festival events have been excellent - but Sean O'Brien's dictum about poets and poetry is borne out again - unless you're C.A.D.].