tim wright: digital writer

European Train Trip: Brussels and home

Brussels was hard won. The train at Köln had been cancelled so it was every traveller for themselves in terms of finding a way into Belgium. My route, courtesy of Google, involved three changes and some unnerving minutes standing on obscure rural station platforms at sunset, hoping that the next train would appear. My phone kept congratulating me for entering another country – France, Germany, then France again, then Belgium. At last!

Brussels seems bigger and grander than I remember it. I used to come here on journo jollies in the early 90s when I was editor of Which Computer? Magazine. It was usually Olivetti who shipped us here (yes, I know they’re Italian but they seemed to have some connection with Brussels I don’t know why). I have fond memories of getting a private tour of the Tintin Museum, and also sitting on raked seating in a small square watching a chess match played out between a computer and a grandmaster using giant chess pieces (this second memory might just be a dream).

The personal computer was so monied at that time. Journos like me were shipped to all kinds of places around the world and wined and dined just so we’d give them a poxy 500 words in our not-so-widely-read publication.

I was flown all the way to LA once to get a 30-minute one to one with Steve Jobs – which I wasted with inane questions. We were shipped from Stockholm to Helsinki by Nokia on the all night booze cruiser, and were so hungover at the press conference that we couldn’t ask any coherent questions at all. We were lunched at the Gavroche at Christmas by Apricot Computer, taken to Wimbledon and Edgbaston by IBM. Long nights in casinos courtesy of Borland, tedious concerts at the Albert Hall with Compuease.  We were gifted computer and software worth thousands of pounds. And all this for what? I guess you might say that it did in the end deliver the PC revolution, the world we have now where I tap away on my laptop and send out this drivel.

So – where was I? – ah yes – Brussels. It turns out that there are mighty squares here, and big parks and lots of statues to men called Leopold. I thought my hotel was a bit snooty, to be fair, and then I started to think that Brussels might be a bit snooty – or at least a bit snootier than all the German towns I’ve been in. But that might just be my English antipathy toward a more Francophile culture, where waiters and receptionists are just that bit more classy, and equipped with sang-froid when dealing with a scruffy snotty Brit.

To be completely fair, I think I just was in a better class of hotel, much near the smarter parts of town. Just five minutes round the corner is the main art museum. It contained a load of Dutch pronk – lobsters and strung-up pheasants and hams on spits. And so many images of Christ and Mary and John the Baptist and all the martyrs  - and a disturbing large number of representations of Lot and his daughters.

The Breughels were the highlight. I had forgotten there are two Breughels – older and younger – and it gets even more confusing when they both choose to paint the same scene. They are both such interesting painters and not like anyone else around them. Always offering lots of little figures scurrying around a village rather than three or four grand be-robed torsos striving towards heaven as per Rubens (the other painter they seem to have a lot of in Brussels). And there’s a LOT of drink about – big barrels of booze being shared out by the peasants, with accompanying fighting and dancing and snogging. Even in the depths of winter with the rivers freezing over and snow several inches depth they’re all out there gathering around the barrel or larking about in ones or twos. Generally, Dutch and Belgian art of the middle ages is packed full of big-faced drinkers and gropers. Beats Christ on the cross every time in my book.

I am coming to the end of my trip. One more humiliating train delay to go as I queue for the Eurostar in the decidedly seedy surroundings of Brussels Midi.

There is no time to reflect. Already the texts are coming about what needs doing in the house - a horrible damp smell in the basement, a dog that needs worming, a niece who is coming to stay, endless DIY and painting.

I started off being a bit frightened about trying to write every day. I think you can see that I was trying too hard at the beginning. After two weeks, it flows more easily and I’m less worried about the quality. It is now more of a stream. It would be nice to make it a habit, but I doubt I will keep it up. Being in a home, being part of family takes up so much time and brain-space. Perhaps my often-mentioned desire to get away on my own is, in part, about a desire to write? Or am I simply using my family as an excuse.

If I really had the time and space, what would I really do? I answered that question on the Eurostar, I think. I bought two beers and a box of Pringles  - and then snoozed. I am looking forward to being in my own bed. ZZZZZZZZZZZ.

European Train Trip: Mainz

I am much taken by the discovery at Mainz that nobody actually knows what Gutenberg looked like.

In order to turn him into a brand as the founder of movable type printing (in Europe), the Germans felt he needed to have an identity. They came up with the idea of an old guy with a beard. But to distinguish him from God and Father Christmas, they gave him a distinctive ‘mediaeval’ hat. Over the centuries this look has stuck and now you can see his statue in the town square and an engraved ‘portrait’ set against pretty much any online article you want to look up about the birth of printing. His beardy behatted visage has even appeared on banknotes at one point. And yet it is all completely bogus. For all we know he could be beardless, hatless, with three ears.

Do you not perhaps think it is the same with John Foxx or the Bunnymen? What you saw in them was not what they actually were. They posed for album covers, slapped on make-up, wore what their manager told them to wear, copied the haircuts of others – until they were quite unlike their own selves. With painted cross-dressers like Bowie and Bolan it was a bit more obvious – a way for the girls to join in with the identity-hunt maybe. But hard to think of someone entirely authentic who you might meet in the street and know them to be the same person as the poseur on the front cover of NME. Not anyone from the 80s anyway.

As I told you, John Foxx’s real name is Dennis Leigh. He sounds like someone I might meet up at the allotment where we’d share concerns about water pressure, or swap notes on the potential problems associated with fermented banana as a growth accelerant for pumpkins. Perhaps his next album will be called “Growth Accelerant for Pumpkins”.

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Salman Rushdie has been stabbed and I am standing in the Guttenberg Museum, looking at a vast collection of centuries-old books and ancient printing presses – each exhibit a shining example of the human urge to write, to publish, to offend. 

There are Bibles, Korans, news pamphlets, song books, folk tales, medical tomes, plant identification manuals, pocket books, philosophical treatises, political propaganda, moral tales for children, law books, astrological charts. It feels like every educated/monied person in Western Europe (well Germany definitely) had been bursting to tell the world a thing or two about something – about God, about the King, about plants, about the stars, about good and evil.

And it seems doubtful that anyone was waiting around to worry about offending their peers. Yes, a lot of people were executed. A lot of books were burned. That can’t be denied. But human beings generally didn’t decide that independent writing and publishing was a terrible thing that must be stopped. It continued as a practice to thrive and grow exponentially and spread across the globe.

What makes the idea of Gutenberg so powerful, it seems to me, is the sheer accessibility of it all – how simple it became to set up a press and publish whatever views you wanted to spout. In the museum, I find that the Europeans were behind the curve, in fact. The Chinese had already been printing for several hundred years. So too the Koreans. Everybody was at it.

Stabbing a writer with a knife is a senseless and cruel thing to do. And it’s also *pointless*. History proves that human beings love to write and publish and read, even when threatened or imprisoned or beaten or stabbed.

I hope to hell that Salman Rushdie survives and gets back writing and publishing as soon as he can. He’s a symbol of what could happen to the rest of us, and an inspiration to keep writing, keep offending.

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Mainz, by the way, is another German town that was bombed to hell by the Allies in WW2. And yet when you visit it on a sunny Saturday, the war seems far away. There is a vibrant food and drink market. The rebuilt red-stone Dom towers over the square where locals quaff fizzy wine and stuff their bags with fruit and veg and cheese. A short walk away is the Rhine with a rough and ready riverside boulevard, and a string of laid back ‘beach’ bars. There are municipal fountains spouting out water even though there’s a drought on. And a statue of Schiller benevolently looks down on little kids licking ice-creams and splashing in the water. A rather decent medium-sized town has grown out of the ashes of a Nazi fortress. Life seems to find a way.

European Train Trip: Vienna/Munich

My time in Vienna was very short. I got in late and left early. Had just a couple of hours to wander around the Belvedere Gardens, which are impressive but, like the rest of Europe’s public spaces at the moment, scorched. What should be impressive vistas of elegant topiary, tidy pathways and green lawns is now a collection of patchy dusty browns with carefully placed plants and trees wilting in the heat. The place is packed with tourists, queueing in the bright sunshine for entrance to the ancient palaces. I’ve never understood why one would pay to traipse around in a line staring at ancestral portraits, spindly chairs unholstered in garish fabrics, four-poster beds made for midgets with far too many layers of heavy bedding, and room after room of statues, vases, cabinets, tapestries, clocks and cutlery.

I once visited Houghton Hall in Norfolk, the mighty pile that the first Lord Walpole had built for himself in his pomp. I came away feeling quite nauseous about how he must have hoovered up every material resource within 50 miles of the place in order to create his palace, and must have drawn pretty much everyone who could walk into his service. The Hall sits there like a huge vacuum cleaner, sucking in all the metal, wood, gold, silver, paint, food, fuel, stone, brick and even all the animals (deer, cow, sheep, dog) from the whole of North Norfolk and beyond. The amount of energy that must have been consumed to drag everything grand to that place – marble from Italy, furniture from France, rare plants from America etc – is revolting to think about. Belvedere leaves me with the same feeling.

My time in Munich is short too. I manage to push myself out of my hotel and take advantage of a late opening time of the Galerie an der Pinakothek der Moderne, a massive art barn plonked beside a public park where dozens of the better-looking and younger locals intensely practice outdoor dance exercise, onerous fitness routines, stretching, weightlifting, boxercise and salsa (not all at once).

Battling through this frenzy of noisy exertion, it becomes quite hard to find the entrance to the art gallery. Once inside, there is sudden echoey silence and no signeage in a massive white stone auditorium. In the distance a tiny ticket office with one person quietly sits behind a glass screen. A couple of security guards in Covid masks lean against a wall and whisper to each other. It feels like a scene from ‘Brazil’ when Price has to visit Palin in some vast civic torture hall.

The place is a maze across umpteen floors. There is no map or guide. Each room leads to another room that then has side rooms that leads to another corridor or set of stairs.

There is Joseph Beuys’s felt suit hanging on a wall. I accidentally wander into a long airhanger space that is a tribute to the architecture design effort that gave us the Munich 1972 Olympics. In the basement I find a collection of German concept cars.

Everywhere there is art, old and new. A Vasari in a corridor knocks up against a spread of UK pop art, then a scroll of chaotic black squiggles by a contemporary Iranian artist. The curators have clearly decided on a policy of placing older pieces from the collection alongside more recently acquired paintings, prints and sculpture – and then attempting to establish a link or a theme in each space using windy and specious art text.

To be fair, the juxtapositions are often surprising and sometimes interesting – with no need for curator-speak to explain it. There are Warhols, Picassos, Klees, Cezannes – all the big hitters – hanging alongside a range of contemporary German, Polish, Austrian and Czech artists I’ve obviously never heard of. I’m made to feel as if the world is suddenly full of fine artists rattling off busy, messy, fractures replies to what the Old Modern Masters have mysteriously telegraphed into the future. They’re all around me these people. I am surrounded by artists! There are even some British painters in here that appear to be much heralded In Germany, but I’ve never seen any of their work in a gallery back in the UK or read about them in a magazine.

I mean, who the hell is Cecily Brown!?

I leave feeling a bit confused and overwhelmed, pushing my way through the crowds of salsa dancers and boxercisers. It’s a balmy evening in Munich. A lot of people are out on the streets. It’s the first German town where I see a lot of homeless people and beggars. I am tempted to enter a beer garden until I see the sweaty corpulent crowds within. Instead I buy a McDonalds meal and head for my hotel room. That is enough Kultur for one day. 

European Train Trip: Auschwitz and a Wedding

I have trundled down the tracks from Amsterdam to Krakow for a wedding, whinging all the way about the quality of coffee, the heat of the day, the endless delays. 

And now I am here on an abandoned siding, with just one ancient windowless truck to consider, painted the colour of dried blood. No windows.

Behind it are fences of ancient barbed wire, wooden gates and wide dusty tracks leading to the ghostly remains of hut after hut hut, all burnet down leaving just the small brick chimneys that survived an inferno, poking up proudly out of the grass, like a crap modern art installation.

I am standing at a decision point. The eighty or so starved men, women and children  who were crammed inside this carriage will have been going one of three ways – to the work camp, to the infirmary or to the gas chamber. A number of them will have already died, having failed to endure as much as 10 days and nights in the truck, not knowing where they were, not knowing where they were going.

A Nazi doctor had less than 30 seconds to assess each person and then casually wave a hand left or right. Left meant walking through the wire fence and into the camp, seemingly safe – for now. Right meant back on the train to the end of the line, a few hundred metres to the edge of the camp and the underground ‘undressing’ room, where hair would be cut (and kept) belongings given a number and a ticket issued as if you might be coming back to reclaim them.

From there, the naked crowd would be herded quickly and roughly, no time to think or react, through a narrow passage and into the ‘showers’.

And next door would be the furnaces, belching out ash and smoke, and presumably an unspeakable smell.

All this ghastly infrastructure was blown up and set fire to, as the Russian army neared. But enough remains to imagine walking down the steps into the undressing room, being shoved into a gas chamber, or becoming one of the workers piling up corpses on trolleys and shovelling them into the furnaces, or scraping up the ashes and scattering them across the adjoining fields or trucking them out for dumping into the Vistula where presumably they would coagulate into clods that might flow all the way to Krakow.

Nothing prepares you for the industrial scale of the death camp. Thousands brought in, killed and disposed of day after day after day. We shuffle past displays of human hair as long and tall as two haystacks, mountainous piles of shoes, the gibbets at the morning roll-call square, Mengele’s medical room.

A long long corridor displays ‘registration’ photographs of men and women with roughly shaved heads and the familiar striped prison clothes. Their expressions are generally blank, tired, mistrustful, confused, scared. But some are smiling. As if a smile is going to help.

We have a day and a night to process all this before donning our best togs for a family wedding. Much drinking and dancing and laughing and clapping. So much life. So much optimism about the loving couple’s future.

I am advised not to spoil the atmosphere with too much talk of Auschwitz. Instead I swap polite small talk over the pork loin main with a great-aunt about the pros and cons of Mediterranean cruises and her husband’s enthusiasm for pilgrim routes, the travails of managing an apple orchard.

Meanwhile the wedding Whatsapp group swells with badly cropped images of the bride and groom making vows, cutting a cakes, having a dance, making a speech, being showered with rose petals. Vodka and beer flow and the Irish arm of the family become gradually more rowdy. The Polish contingent take over the music, oom-pah disco blares out and a huge conga staggers through the room, out into the gardens and then back again.

It’s time to go home before drink entirely takes me. I have already been chastised for ‘booing the conga’, and then asked by the younger Irish boys if I might adopt them as their ‘new dad’. Somewhere on the way back to the hotel I lose my sunglasses in the dark.

In the morning, the phone pings every 5 mins with alerts from the Whatsapp group. Every other post is an image of a positive Covid test. We have shared more than joy.

I want my Whatsapp to be full of loving thankyous, teasing jokes, party photos and please for lost items. Instead the sick list grows and grows – Granpa has it, son-in-law  has it but his kids don’t, Aunty  is ill but isn’t taking a test….

As phone continues to ping, I board my train. I am back on the tracks, perhaps the same ones that carried that dried-blood red carriage to Birkenau.

European Train Trip: Krakow

To eke out one’s days on a mythical shore in the east, knowing one can never be found, and no-one can ever visit. Surrounded by locals who talk in a strange tongue almost impossible to master. Is that my fate?

Perhaps that is why I am shifting along on these trains, in search of that space where I can rest alone (sans dog). Poland doesn’t have an eastern shore either. But here I am.

The train journey from Wroclaw to Krakow was challenging. An hour into the journey we stopped for four hours, waiting for a bridge across the Oder to be made safe. Outside it was 40 degrees, and the track had supposedly warped and softened in the heat. Inside the carriage, with no air conditioning, the temperature went above 45 degrees. We are all warped and softened also.

I was reminded of InterRail trips from my teens. Here I am again, forty years later, in a carriage full of foreigners stopped in the middle of nowhere with no information about what is happening or when the endurance trial might end. Locals make off with their bags across the tracks, abandoning ship, taking with them any knowledge that might have helped the rest of us get out of here. I sit in the heat, or stand outside in the shade of the train, sipping water from a plastic bottle, wondering how long I can make this tiny portion of liquid last. The fug of foreign cigarettes surrounds me.  

I’m cast back to 1980 and the former Yugoslavia. I had been drinking beer in the rear carriage with a load of local young men, who then ask me to carry their US dollars across the border into Italy. When we near the border, I return to the Westerners section of the train holding several thousand dollars in cash.

When the border police come through checking papers, they look suspiciously at my water can that is shaped like a petrol container (it basically is a petrol container). Two German assholes we’re sharing the carriage with tell the officials that my tank doesn’t contain water but benzene. Why anyone should beleive this I don’t know, but I am immediately whisked off the train.

Word gets out down the train that the idiot English boy who is holding all the dollar is now being frog-marched by two police officers with guns down to a track-side office. All the locals hang out the windows and stare hard at me, watching to see if I’m the sort who will break easily, surrender their cash and sell them out.  I get the sense that they are no longer the friendly laughing beer-swillers I was with 30 minutes ago.

In the office, I wave my British passport vigorously. The official behind a desk has not been told why I am there. He is puzzled and irritated. He makes me wait for a few uncomfortable minutes while he flicks through my papers and makes a phone call. As I hand over my rail pass I realise that if I miss this train, I will miss all my connections that would get me back to the UK by the pass’s expiry date. I’d be stranded without money somewhere in France. I’d be forced to make a humiliating reverse charge call to my parents who had strongly disapproved of this Eurotrip in the first place.

I’d also no doubt be confronted by these boys on the train when I arrived in Trieste, asking where all their money was. It seemed unlikely they would leave me with the fingers to dial a reverse charge call.

The official eyes me lazily and dismisses me with a wave of the hand. I am to get back on the train. Still the locals are hanging out the windows, wondering if I am returning with the cash or whether I’ve handed it over and been sent on my way. I want to smile and tell them it’s ok, but boarding school training tells me I need to remain stone-faced, neutral, nothing to see here. A show of relief or joy at this point would prove some kind of guilt and I’d be hauled back again.

Only when the train has started up and we are well clear of the police do I move back through the carriages to confront my so-called friends. They eye me aggressively at first, but then I produce the rolls of dollar from my pants and from the pouch around my neck hidden under my shirt. Smiles all round and back to the conductor’s cubby hole to break yet more disgusting cheap beer. Everyone is happy. I’m ecstatic – I managed not to wet myself.

Back to the present situation, the train has decided to return to Wroclaw, so five hours after we started, we’ve progressed precisely nowhere. We sit in the station for another hour – still boiling - waiting to find out what to do. The two guards on the train have no idea what is going on. The only thing they can tell me in English is that I must ‘ stay on the train’.

Eventually another set of carriages is hooked up to our train, and the word is we’re going take rural train lines down to the east of the Oder, thus avoiding the buggered bridge. What no-one tells us is that the train will be forced to stop every 20 mins or so by some slow and outmoded signal system, and that the train is to be restricted to going at 40kmh. We take another four hours to get back to the town where we got stuck in the first place.

I arrive at Krakow station at two in the morning. A journey that should have been less than 3 hours has taken more than 14. And for half that time I’ve been slowly roasted inside a tin can. Nobody in Poland wears a mask, so I’ve essentially been in some kind of heated petri dish of human germs with the guards throwing free water at us every twenty minutes. God knows what kind of bacteria we’ve been growing and sharing between us. I can already feel a sore throat and runny nose coming on.

I am in no fit state to re-unite with my family in an AirBnB flat in a strange town at 2:30 in the morning. They have had to sort everything themselves, so now I am useless to them.  I agree to crash out in a spare room and leave them to resume their slumbers. I fail to get to sleep easily thanks to the mad tradition of a fireman trumpeter letting rip from a tower every so often to remind us all that Krakow is not burning down or being attacked by Mongol hordes.

In the morning, we meet up with others who are attending the family wedding and traipse round the old city obediently following a desultory tour guide. Here is a tower, here is another tower. Here is a church. Here is a story about another Polish king, another Pope, another Bohemian or German invader. There are myths about dragons and brothers who fight each other with a knife that is still displayed in the old market place. There is much talk about Pope John Paul, his legendary fitness and athleticism, his clever way of siding with the Polish resistance in the war without ever actually joining the resistance, his clever way of doing business with the communist regime in exchange for the Catholic church being able to privately get on with its business – including the kiddy-fiddling presumably.

By the end of the tour, I’m heartily sick and tired. I need to go back to bed. And I also need to have a good brush up on my history to try and understand why Polish nationalist narratives are so keen to erase much of the true history of Krakow – to skim over centuries of Austrian and Prussian rule, to diminish the impact of the Hungarians, the Nazis and the Soviets. We are to look with admiration at the medieval university, the castle towers, the cloth market and marvel at the miracle of the first Polish kings, and then skip conveniently across 600 years or so to 1918 and the establishment of a Polish republic.

We do it in every country these days – cherry pick the bits of our history that bolster a nationalist programme and chuck out that bits that might suggest something more complex and real, regarding where we come from and how we might live peacefully together.

I was hoping to watch some football from my sickbed. But Brexit has meant my Sky roaming subscription can only work in the UK and no longer allows me to stream for any country in the EU. Somehow I’m still paying the same monthly fee for this much reduced service. I imagine the kings of Poland would have a way of explaining to me that things are better for me this way.  

European Train Trip: Wroclaw

I started off with a bad impression of Wroclaw. But that is because the station is in a fairly crappy area of town. I remember this now from my teenage Interrailing exploits. Stations are in shit places and full of the transient, the mad and the homeless.

Certainly the Polish train system is a step down from Deutsche Bahn. As soon as we crossed the border and swapped trains we were made to wait for an hour in a small station with one toilet and a crappy automated Nescafe machine for company. Every train I’ve been on so far in Poland has left late and arrived late. In Germany you’re not allowed on a train without a seat booking – the train simply won’t leave if there are people standing in the corridors. The Polish train is like a British one – overcrowded, people arguing over seats, badly ventilated, smelly.

Everything feels a bit older and scruffier here than in Germany. The locals are poorly dressed, many actually quite slovenly. There’s a lot of smoking going on in the parks.

However, Wroclaw does get better as you walk towards the river. There’s a whiff of medieval in the air and the architecture that Leipzig and Dresden did not have. The river walks are actually very pleasant, the boat cruises look fun, the old churches with their narrow brick-red towers and green spires arrow up nicely into the clear blue sky. You’d never really know that this was one of the last Nazi strongholds to surrender in WW2 and that the Russian army did a good job of flattening the place.

I have been reading a book called Microcosm that is a history of Wroclaw/Breslau since the beginning of time. Its main aim seems to be to show that the place can never legitimately claimed as wholly German or wholly Polish, given it sits in the middle of Silesia that has been taken over at various points by Celts, Mongols, Huns, Bohemians, Hussites, Prussians etc.

And yet it does rather seem as if the Poles are keen to claim the city as much as possible. The museums are all about great Polish victories across the ages, seeing off Russians, Germans and Czechs in moments of great triumph. Saint Jadwiga is a heavy presence – another symbol of national identity. And as already mentioned, these people definitely do not dress or look or eat or drink like the Germans I’ve been mingling with these past few days.

I end the day eating a pig’s knuckle and downing two half litres of local beer. My own attire is pretty slovenly now – dirty T-shirt and shorts, a baseball hat and dusty walking boots. Perhaps I am too quickly going native.

European Train Trip: Dresden

I’m not that far from Colditz. If I had more time I’d pay a visit. But this stop in Dresden has been a short one.

I am missing many things – the Wehrmacht Military Museum, the Life in the DDR experience, the Eric Kastner house to name but three. I definitely want to come back.

I initially cursed the long walk to the hotel. It is so very hot in Germany right now  - 35 degrees today. But at least it gave me a chance to get a feel for the city.

The direct route from the main station to the river (Elbe) takes you through one long boulevard of shops and flats. It is very blocky, but clean and seemingly well planned with lots of places to sit down, a few water features, little kiosks and every mainstream retail outlet you can think of.

The flats look clean and well maintained. There is the biggest Ibis hotel I’ve ever seen. It’s the kind of place that post-war architects like van deer Rohe or Goldfinger would cream their jeans over. If they wore jeans, which I doubt.

The locals seem at ease generally and reasonably well dressed – although the German male fetish for mid-thigh length denim shorts appears to have reached its zenith in Dresden.

One has to assume this all grew up out of the devastation caused by Allied bombing. Once you’re through the retail boulevard though, you find that the old castle, cathedral and various imperial buildings have all survived – or perhaps have been immaculately restored. The difference is stark. You cross just one tramline and you’re thrown back a hundred and fifty years. And then the river – the mighty Elbe. Not that mighty at the moment given the drought, but still quite striking. Odd to think this is the same river that runs through Hamburg. And only a few years ago I was at its debouch into the North Sea at Cuxhaven. I must have floated across it on a small car ferry without really noticing. I thought I was still on the Kiel Canal.

Brünsbuttel, by the way, where the canal meets the river, is a right hole. Indeed, the whole of that area from Hamburg to Kiel is a mess – lots of very poor people hanging around the streets, derelict buildings, dirty smelly streets. As you mentioned in your last missive, we’ve been a bit misled about Germany. It is not the shiny technified efficient place we Brits think it is. At least not where I’ve been. To be fair I was expecting the east to be shitter than it is – both Leipzig and Dresden appear to be reasonably well-off and well-planned. Meanwhile places like Kiel and Hamburg seem to be crumbling into a pretty poor state – in parts on a par with, well, Scunthorpe.

Once across the river, one appreciates the randomness of bombing raids. On one side of a long avenue shaded by plane trees (or are they lindens?) there are the classic 19^th century Germanic terraces. On the other, a modern concoction of metal, and glass, flats and cafes and minisupermarkets. What survives and what gets blasted is entirely random. Architecturally it makes for an interesting mix. I can’t decide if Dresden is stuck in the past or thrusting into the future.

Hiding behind one of the old flaky buildings that survived the bombing is a lovely restaurant with seating in the extensive back garden. It’s run by a gaggle of groovy young people and it’s all very casual, organic, fresh and friendly. This is more like the Germany I remember from exchanges in the 1970s. Bohemian kids, vaguely hippy, with a penchant for Frank Zappa perhaps, making the best out of shabby surroundings, drinking fruity beer and serving up great hunks of meat with cabbage, mashed apple and wild mushrooms. I’m definitely coming back.

European Train Trip: Leipzig

I got my Richters mixed up (see previous post). Of course it’s Gerhard who does the art. Max does the music.

Leipzig is a grand old town. It feels like it’s had a major facelift in the last 20 years. All the old buildings have been refurbished and fancy new ones have been added. Every retail brand in the Western world has an outlet here.

The rail station - absolutely huge – has become a massive shopping arcade on three different levels. You feel at times as if you’re on one of those mad ocean liners that travels between Stockholm and Helsinki, jam-packed with tiers and tiers of bars and shops and walkways. At least at a railway station you can escape – if you can find one of the many fiendishly placed exits.

The main art gallery is also a barn of place. It has one of everything from France and two or three of everything from Germany. The highlight, to my mind, are the Friedrichs. There are two paintings of ships at dusk that so detailed and moody and allegorical – exquisite.

The old buildings in the centre of town are equally grand and imposing. It’s very warm and sunny here so the cafes that line every square are doing good business. There are some very imposing sundaes being scoffed and a lot of beer and local lemonade being quaffed. Generally the Leipzigers seem to love a bit of flaneur-ship and a lot of retail therapy. Definitely Western consumerism has done a number on Leipzig. I wonder what any surviving old communists make of it all. It’s not NATO needs to be frightened of, it’s McDonalds and Starbucks, Lidl and Ludwig.

Frankly, having recently visited Manchester, Barnsley and Scunthorpe, I reckon there might be a bit to learn from the Germans about how to ‘level up’ an old city seemingly far from the centre of government. But I reckon too there must have been quite a lot of EU money involved, so on that score, Scunthorpe is fucked.

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The Bach museum was an absolute treat. In the garden there, even the birds seem to be musical, chirping as if they all have an understanding of a mystical pattern of sound their individual contributions can fit into. The museum holds all kinds of interesting treasures – Bach’s hand-written scores, the only portrait of the man made in his lifetime, the remains of his organ, ancient violins, trumpets and oboes, objects found in his coffin, a detailed family tree with details of his ridiculously large family. He must have spent all day writing and all evening procreating. I’m surprised he lived as long as he did.

Off to Dresden next. It is getting hotter and hotter here. Not sure I’ll be able to walk about as much if the temperature keeps rising.

European Train Trip: Köln

We cross the Rhine as we trundle into Köln on the train. It’s not unlike clunking across the Thames into Charing Cross. The Rhine is roughly the same width as the Thames, but the banks are steeper. The side we’re heading to has the bulk of the spires and big buildings. There’s a London-Eye-like merry-go round and an ugly music venue.

But you can’t really talk about Köln without talking about the Dom. You walk out of the station and it’s right there. Huge. Surprisingly huge. Scary. Stunning. Shocking. It DOM-inates.

The architecture is so elaborate and strange – it really does feel like an alien craft from a Ridley Scott film. The black-brown discolouration of the stone makes it look like it’s been scorched on entry into Earth’s atmosphere. The two massive main towers lower over the city. Any moment now you expect an invisible door to open or a ray of green light to stream out. Aliens will emerge with their ultimatum for the puny humans.

It evokes so many emotions, but I land at anger. How is it allowed to be here? It bullies everyone and everything around it. It is beyond good or bad taste. It makes its own rules. Everything else has to work around it. It is a horror. A sublime horror.

It houses, by the way, one of the oldest surviving wooden crosses in Christendom. And also the bones and robes of the Three Wise Men, closed up in a massively over-decorated gold box. I didn’t even know that the Three Wise Men were real people.

It is for us the perfect opportunity for one of our fantasy art heists. It’s quite a tricky one this, given the box is raised above the main altar and is sealed in a perspex box. And the altar feels like it’s a mile away from the front door. I saw no security guards but plenty of guys in red cassocks who looked like they might get tasty if you tried to deprive them of their shrine. I bought a guide leaflet for one euro – it at least gives us a floor plan and the details of every entrance and exit.

I went inside the Dom chiefly to see the Max Richter stained glass window, a random arrangement of coloured squares that give the impression of a set of saints pixelated, as if they had not given permission to have their photo taken as they left a nightclub. I prefer Richter when he sticks to black and white.

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The rest of my stay in Köln was fairly non-descript. I wandered through the many  shopping centres and retail streets (Primark, Body Shop, Claires Accessories), and dropped into more old churches, some more scarred by WW2 than others. The city reminded me of nothing as much as Croydon - but with more bomb damage, and modern architecture applied like bandages.

I read in the Central Library for a while – a good place to go to see the real citizens: old men reading papers, students copying stuff out of study aids, mothers trying to engage their hyperactive toddlers in picture books. Outside there sit the homeless and the drunk. Again it feels like home.

The local man I shared a table with at dinner in a small gasthaus in a side street told me that it was natural for me to feel at home in Köln. In his estimation, he had more in common with us Englanders than with some of his fellow-Germans in the East. I tell him I am heading for Leipzig and then Dresden. “They are old Germans,” he says. “The real Germans. They have no time for us people over here. I don’t think they even think we are Germans.”

My dinner companion is heading for Spain to collect a car and drive it all the way to Naples. He’s then staying on the Amalfi Coast where he says he once saved the life of a Mafia boss’s grandson. He shows me a business card that he claims he was given by the mafia boss. “He told me I can call it any time I am in trouble, wherever I am in the world, and he will sort things out for me”. The card gives the name and number of a doctor of gynaecology.

I get on the train to Leipzig this morning with a certain amount of trepidation. What will the ‘old’ Germans be like?  I’m also anxious and angry at myself – I managed to drop one of my credit cards somewhere yesterday. It’s safely cancelled, but I am now relying on the one debit card to see me through. And it reminds me of what an old dunderhead I am becoming. What else will I lose on this trip?