More than 100 years after his death on 28^th January 1917 at Hébuterne on the Somme front, we went at last to visit my Great Grandfather’s grave nearby, outside the small village of Couin.  The chateau there was divisional HQ where he was probably based as he had been seconded from his regiment, the Royall Scots Greys, to the Staff.  He was shot by a German sniper while inspecting a trench.  His only son, my Grandfather was also killed by a sniper in WWII and is buried in a small CWGC graveyard at Uden, near Arnhem in the Netherlands.  At least, I suppose, they both lived long enough to be married and have a child. Two of my husband's relatives, a cousin and a great uncle died on the same day, 1st December 1917, both won MCs posthumously. They were 22 and 24.  Next to one of them lies his fellow Coldstream officer who won both the MC and the VC. On the other side, Patrick Shaw Stewart, the poet who wrote 'I saw a man this morning'.  

All those who believe we should break away now from the friendly embrace of our closest allies in Europe should realise the sacrifices they and we made and the seed that was propagated in the horror of repeated war to flower in an enduring economic friendship. If that friendship is littered with day to day pettifogging regulation, so much the better. We can squabble over detail as friends will do but we need never stand on our own when faced with greater threat, whether from chlorinated American chicken or Chinese expansionism. 

‘This happy breed of men, this little world, this precious stone set in the silver sea’. Visits to the splendid new history centre at Agincourt and the wooden viewing tower overlooking the field of the Battle of Crécy, bring out the half-remembered Shakespeare but our little world etc etc hasn’t got too much going for it these days.  We have to be part of a greater whole unless we are inspired by some of the worst of our politicians to become a chillier version of Singapore.  The Agincourt centre is a treat for all ages although the excellent electronically illustrated commentary on the battle leaves its audience a little uncertain as to the final victor. The excessive competitive chivalry of the French knights, that was largely responsible for their defeat both at Agincourt and seventy years earlier at Crécy, was not dwelt on too heavily.  On the other hand, the unusual slaughter of potentially ransomable prisoners by the English, when threatened by further French assaults, played out in filmed silhouette on giant screens round the room.  Hooray for French patriotism and we did win after all. 

It is easy to forget what an enormous country France is and, pottering about Picardy and the Pays de Calais for four days we seemed to cover vast amounts of ground that are little more than a small blemish on the map of the whole country.  We drove through miles of cultivated land, lavishly dotted with wind turbines.  There is space for so much on these flat lands of past trench warfare and battle that rise to those famously named woods and ridges, the high ground fought over again and again during WWI.  Everywhere there are cemeteries, not much bigger than a tennis court or a football pitch most of them. Young men, 19, 20, 22, French, English, German, New Zealanders, Canadians and Germans, all buried among immaculate green lawns and flower beds.  Sometimes a Chinese member of a Labour battalion, Indians and those who fought from other Commonwealth countries, and, always, the nameless, buried here and there among their fellows. They are all remembered on the vast memorial arch at Thiepval where there is another immaculate new museum to add flesh and blood narrative to the tragedy of the monument to so many who lie in unnamed graves.

We stayed for 3 nights in the Petit Chateau B&B in the small village of Willeman, near Hesdin, in an area of tidy villages and the smallholdings catered for in the agricultural co-operatives on village outskirts.  The mostly 20^th century houses in this regularly embattled and devastated region cluster round their spired churches, some of which, dramatically fortified, date back as far as the Hundred Years War. The Petit Chateau, up a quiet lane, just outside the woods and wall surrounding the Chateau of Willeman, is run by Madeleine, who is English, with Xavier, her French partner. They have two comfortable double rooms in their converted garage surrounded by the garden with breakfast including the flakiest possible croissants, in the conservatory of the main house and the option of a delicious dinner if ordered in advance. 

Willemans is well under two hours drive from the Eurotunnel and from there we could easily visit graveyards and major sites of the region. and allow ourselves to be distracted from our route  by a sight of distant ruin, an intriguing road sign or a previously unvisited monument or memorial. We set off  to find  what turned out to be the ruined towers of the Abbaye of Mont St Eloi when we spotted them from the main Arras road.  The great Abbaye was reputedly founded in the 7th century but its ruination came during the French Revolution.  The towers that were its only standing remains were subject to heavy German shelling in 1915 when they were used by French troops to observe German movements on Vimy Ridge.  The French position was given away by the birds that still roost among the old stones.

We were easily distracted too, in distinctly autumnal weather, by thoughts of a good lunch with a lot of beer or rosé in a promising road side restaurant or one, identified by Michelin or Google, in the centre of a  town. At Arras, near the glorious Grand Place, we ate classic baveuse omelette aux cepes and rather a lot of fried potatoes. At Amiens, lured by the cathedral, the largest gothic building in France, we failed to find a table in the most popular nearby restaurant and were rapidly frozen out by the attitude of the only waitress at the next.  We fell on our feet at last on the edge of the cathedral square at a family run brasserie where 'Maman' was moving so fast with the orders that her feet barely touched the ground.

The massive cathedral of St Omer is known for its spectacular organ and astrolabe clock.  On a gloomy afternoon the interior was more obviously dominated by the burning candles and scented lilies filling the chapel of the 13th century statue of Notre Dame des Miracles, it's walls covered with votive inscriptions and sculpture. Outside the side wall of the chapel the ancient monolithic tomb of St Erkembode is covered with  more pathetic offerings.  An Irish monk who became Bishop of the enormous diocese of Therouanne, he was constantly on the move.  Pilgrims to his shrine left their shoes in recognition of his and their own travels but these have been replaced as offerings by the small shoes of disabled children whose patron saint, for long forgotten reasons, he has become.

On our way back to Calais, we took a side road toward Cap Gris Nez and the small seaside town of Ambleteuse where the grey Channel waves beat against a fort built by Vauban in the 17th century and James II landed to go into exile in December 1689.  On a wet Monday our of season the town was  shut and shuttered apart from a trail of elderly local pensioners to the only open restaurant, the Fort des Cap.  There, excellent service, warmth, moules frites and the freshest fish sent us well fed on our return journey to Folkestone and more grim political news on Radio 4. 

Azerbaijan - Baku

The night train from Tbilisi to Baku left perfectly on time. Clean sheets, pillow case and towel arrived in the hands of a fierce female attendant with instructions from her in Russian on their precise use.  The DUVET must clearly NOT be used as a mattress although it was identical in fact to the roll out ‘mattress’ also provided.  Passengers clearly may not express their individuality and indeed all sheets, mattresses, whatever, must be folded once again in the prescribed way to be collected in the morning.  No question here of falling out of bed and the train on arrival, or of lying in bed until required at the border where there was some difficulty over a visa marked ‘male’, a typo I had chosen to ignore.  So tempting to get into the trans debate with these humourless border guards standing very much on their small authority. The early call was modified with a cup of tea and a bowl of boiled sweets and the gratifying amazement of the female gauleiter when she received and accepted a tip, proffered not least to take the wind out of her sales. The train was fine, it worked, the nearest loo didn’t but the next was bearable, it was only astonishingly noisy and appeared to be shunting something every few minutes.  I slept regardless.

First sights of Azerbaijan were brown; brown plain, brown hills in the distance and nothing growing except the odd patch of green where men on horses watched small flocks of sheep or cows close to a village of lavatory brick box houses with grey corrugated roofs. The hills closed in to the track as we came nearer to Baku, looking chewed and broken by changing sea levels and the mud volcanoes of the Gobustan area.  They are as indicative of the oil wealth of the region as Baku’s extraordinary skyline of spectacular buildings going back to the first oil boom in the last quarter of the 19^th century.  The shiningly immaculate new station where we disembarked was only more of the same.

I was met by Ruslan for the drive to the Boulevard Hotel via Nizami Street with its designer shops, Ferrari, Bentley and Aston Martin showrooms, and those palaces of the early oil barons beside post WWII government buildings in mixed neoclassical and Islamic style.  Now, probably the most famous buildings in Baku are the 3 flame shaped towers of the Land of fire, where the lighting effects at night appear to envelope the buildings in shooting flames alternating with with moving patterns. The old city, a UNESCO Heritage Site, dating back to the 12^th century and beyond, is packed with tourists. It is largely pedestrianised and has been all too recently restored so the honey coloured stonework is spotless, every caravanserai is now a restaurant, every madrassah a gift shop and other major buildings have been transformed into museums of one sort or another, all exemplars of the development based on oil riches.  Enormous wealth pours unceasingly out of the ground and the old nodding donkeys still pump away within touching distance of the fruits of their labours. 

Museums have been created in general with more enthusiasm for the idea than expertise in labelling either the historical site or its displayed treasures.  It was here where I first came across the 'dervish pouch' described by Ruslan correctly as the begging bowl of the travelling dervishes across Central Asia but not, as he maintained, made of carved wood or worked camel leather.  It was quite clearly to anyone who had ever seen one before, the half of a coco de mer and all so much more magical and extraordinary than any wood or leather.  Ruslan had never heard of such a thing and I wasn't sure he believed what I told him but that is what it was and there were others in other museums across the region, individually and collectively inspiration for a new book, The Dervish Bowl, about one of the more unusual travellers in Central Asia even in the 19th century days of the Great Game.

Other contemporary buildings and exhibition spaces include the remarkable and utterly beautiful Zaha Hadid, Heydar Aliyev Centre with its museum dedicated to Aliyev, the authoritarian 3^rd President of independent Azerbaijan. It stands in its own green space dotted with primary coloured sculptures, the various levels of terraces used for temporary exhbitions and the curves and background of the building a magnet for bridal group photography. Less beautiful by far but a curiosity in its own right, the carpet museum, down close to the shore, is designed as a rolled carpet - makes sense except, we are told, from the point of view of actually displaying anything inside on all those tightly curved walls.

More Russian is to be heard on the streets in Azerbaijan than in Georgia although mixed with Azerbaijani as we tour the old city.  UNESCO status notwithstanding, it is only moderately interesting to anyone who has seen less reconstructed examples of similar period.  Lunch with Ruslan at a popular restaurant just inside the city walls on this rather whistlestop tour of Baku's best was thin pastry to be rolled around a filling of minced meat a bit like Turkish borek and a similar pancake roll with kebab meat, Qutab, plus aubergine salad, and, much needed, a lot of cold beer.  Ruslan's English is enthusiastic if idiosyncratic and he was at least as interested in stories of life in other countries as in telling me about his own.  He referred constantly to his 24 year old 'bride' - they were in fact due to get married in a few months if hefty wedding expenses could be covered besides the problems of finding affordable housing, the merits of renting over a loan for down payment on a house, questions of working abroad and the difficulties.  The 'bride' is to be sent to do a manicure course, the diploma then a passport to additional financial support.

After lunch, on the street outside the walls we met Farhad the owner and director of SF Travel, recommended by a UK friend with Azerbaijani contacts. If his Lexus 4WD and the air of prosperity of him and his wife were anything to go by, Farhad is doing very well as might be expected of a German educated, chess grandmaster.  He was delightful, well-travelled, sophisticated and with a clear view of what is needed to improve the quality of the tourist experience in Azerbaijan. He was right too, the Boulevard Hotel looks like any other good quality business and tourism hotel anywhere in the world and the rooms are extremely comfortable but service is chaotic and, when the going gets rough, there is a dearth of charm or helpfulness among staff who don't really know what they are doing and revert to abrupt and bad-tempered ignorance and a non-existent rule book that requires everything to be paid for in advance, including breakfast.  Farhad appeared to have contacts in every possible camp in the city but even he was flummoxed by the vagaries of the Caspian ferry system and our potential journey to Turkmenbashi, Turkmenistan, by that doubtful method of travel.  By the time we had waited up for most of one night for the call to go to the terminal we all knew each other very well indeed.

Before that, however, there was more to see with Ruslan as I awaited the arrival of Barbara, my travelling companion through Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, IF the ferry ever arrived.  We set off out of Baku proper for the Gobustan petroglyph park a few miles down the coast back towards the West. Here, among the broken hills, rock falls, earth movements and time have exposed the interiors of former caves and the rock faces are covered with remarkable pre-historic paintings and carvings.  These include images of aurochs; yalli, traditional group folk dances; hunters and their prey, might that be a hippo or a rhino? In more modern times, a Roman legionary cut an inscription stating that the 12th legion had been there during the reign of Augustus Germanicus and there is an excellent little museum with timelines and exhibits from the area.

From there we went to Yana Dag, the famous burning hillside, now a mere patch of fire at the edge of the huge blackened area that has burned here since the 1950s.  It was probably only one among many such phenomena in the Land of Fire, where Zoroastrianism was unsurprisingly the main religion.  The Ateshgah or Temple of Fire with its one time natural eternal flame is reputed to be an ancient Zoroastrian Fire Temple but had clearly been as much a caravanserai used simultaneouslyr by Hindus and Sikhs, travelling pilgrims or as likely migrant workers, craftspeople and merchants from Indian communities living on and among the networks of the Silk routes through Central Asia.  The temple has inscription in Sanskrit and Gurmukh - on a hot summer's day, the sun bears down on the bold midday pilgrim to the much scrubbed and restored site and the shade of the cafe terrace and a ready supply of cold beer rapidly become the holy of holies of this particular pilgrimage.

Barbara arrived in the early hours of the morning from a flight via Moscow and, as a result, without any of her luggage.  While its whereabouts were pursued by the highly resourceful Farhad - it eventually and almost miraculously arrived a few days later at the extraordinary airport in Ashgabat, the capital of Turkmenistan, we went shopping for replacement essentials.  This involved visiting a number of internationally well-known chainstores in a huge contemporary shopping mall and a successful line in men's cotton shirts,  if rather less satisfactory excursions into underwear departments intended to beguile the very young and very slight.

When the call for the ferry eventually came via Farhad's contacts around 2 in the morning we set off for the port and a long wait in shipping container waiting room/cafe crammed with our fellow passengers and their mountains of luggage.  They were all Turkmen going home after shopping expeditions and laden with goods to sell on in local markets at home and were mainly the tough-faced, strong looking, strident women you would expect to find in any fishmarket in any country and any century of the last 2 millennia.  They knew their route and how it worked so much better than we did and our additional payments through Farhad for a double berthed cabin for us alone might have been so much wastepaper but then, if you travel as 'cargo' under a bill of lading, in the end you are just that, to be disposed by whoever is in charge.

By the time we moved from the airless container,  dragging our bags through the early morning drizzle to a different part of the largely deserted new port, pecking orders were well established and we were at the bottom, somehow in the care of a personable but ultimately unpleasant and bullying young man, Aziz, aged 24,  with his pregnant archetypal dumpy, slavic blonde, Russian wife, Vera, aged about 19. Their baby, born safely by now one can hope, was to be called Beatrice if the wanted daughter arrived.  Their 9 month old son had been left at home with grandparents. On embarking, barely a crew member in sight, actually we never saw more than about 3 including the 2nd mate who made unwelcome and extremely unexpected advances given our ages versus his own but was otherwise both harmless and apparently short of any sort of useful job.  We never saw a first mate or a captain,even on the bridge, which may have accounted for the tortoise like speed of our crossing under some sort of remote control - 48 hours, as opposed to Lord Curzon's journey across the Caspian between sunset and sunrise of one day in 1888 and Fitzroy Maclean's 24 hours, 50 years later once soviet efficiencies had had its effect on regional systems.

Thanks to the organisational skills of the Turkmen traders, we found ourselves sharing a 6 berth cabin with Aziz and Vera plus their friends, another young and pregnant couple, Raoul and Zarina, who were a great deal easier to deal with.  We realised the prized double cabin/s even had their own bathrooms with showers, the communal versions were expectedly disgusting BUT after 24 hours, I remembered that water out of a tap/shower/hose is always better than none at all, found dry enough spaces for my clothes and had a glorious shower regardless of the surroundings.  After that the water ran out for much of the rest of the trip and the gallon demi-johns carried by many of the passengers made more sense.Bizarrely the first lunch on board, in a communal room we thought might be our home for the crossing, as we sat for a further 20 hours in limbo at the quay, was utterly delicious chicken and vegetable soup after which we more or less gave up eating other than a few handfuls of dried fruit and nuts, until we arrived at Turkmenbashi in order to avoid as much as possible visits to the appalling loo.

Instead we lay, left totally alone, on the bubbled paint of the top deck between pipes and stanchions and watched the near empty sea, meandering at near walking pace or occasionally stopping altogether so far as we could tell.  We had already realised, once our passports had received their exit stamps that we were in limbo, unable with our single entry visas to go back and barely moving forwards.  It was strangely disconcerting to be nowhere for hour upon hour as occasional other ferries steamed busily past in the distance and the opposite direction.So we read our books; exchanged boiled sweets and confused histories for tea with the only crew member we met apart from the over friendly 2nd mate. 'Were there mussulmans (not a term we would have expected to hear since about 1900) in our country?' He wanted to know and how were they treated? What about Liverpool football team?  Did we know that most Turkmens had all their teeth taken out?  We were shortly to understand that one as every smile revealed a mouthful of gold.  What about Roman Abramovich? And we bruised our bones on the hard surface of the deck and burned our noses in the sun, finally returning below to the cabin as the sun went down, where the atmosphere was increasingly crotchety and the air grew stale.  Aziz fought with with and occasionally seemed on the verge of beating Vera and we were bitten by bedbugs or flying bugs or both until we agreed that:

The curse of the Caspian Sea
Is a fly with a fondness for me.
Is it odd that my smell like bad meat
After days in the upper deck heat
Should so sadly proved to agree
With the curse of the Caspian Sea?

We had an idea by the end that Aziz was our appointed minder, certainly he was very determined to tell two women, older than his own parents what to do and was disappointed clearly to find female charges of any age who paid no heed to his exhortations. He was not the only one in Turkmenistan where the driver who was indeed a minder, took unkindly to any mooted deviation from our itinerary or our itinerary as he chose to interpret it.  Aziz became slightly more useful on landing at the brand new port in Turkmenbashi in translating to get us through customs but melted away never to be seen again as we fought mistakenly over the necessary bribes.  What possessed us to stand on principle and argue over US$5, god knows, apart from objecting almost to so negligible a display of endemic corruption.  What was the point for anyone given the number of staff in the customs hall to take a share and the paucity of tourists to provide the wherewithal?  Perhaps the demand was also a point of principle. We were innocents abroad and should have paid our 'border tax' with a smile to save missing our flight to Asghabat although we saw more of the famous and endlessly empty Karakum desert on our alternative 8 hour taxi ride. Anyway we may have got off lightly; when researching his book The Dawn of Eurasia, Bruno Macaes took 3 or 4 hours to clear immigration and customs as the only foreigner 'arriving that day, or, most likely, that month'.  He fails to mention 'border tax'.

A birthday in Venice - It's all about ME

To Venice with most of the family to cold sunshine and bright blue skies for my husband’s birthday the week after New Year 2019.  As he said 'It's all about ME!' Extraordinarily in the alarming number of years he has clocked up at the beginning  The rest of the family of course consider themselves old hands almost anywhere in Italy where some have studied history of art or Italian and others been marched forcibly round churches and galleries on the mother led, ice-cream fuelled, cultural holidays of their childhoods and adolescence. of another decade, he had never been to Venice, nor indeed my even older ex-husband who came with us.

This was a trip of two parts, less of the cultural activity for those there for a short weekend before rushing back on Easyjet to work and small children and more for those with an extra day or two to spare.  The husbands were not disappointed, the one in particular by an important visit to Harry’s Bar for the most expensive Bloody Marys or Bellinis available in those iconic surroundings, albeit not a visit to Cipriani’s famous hotel, another landmark from the past, now the Belmont Cipriani; the other by the discovery that Venice really is built on water which, photographic evidence notwithstanding, he had never quite believed.  Well one lives and learns even in old age and he was given the full dose of delightful storytelling Carpaccios in the Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni if not quite in the Accademia where the St Ursula cycle was ‘in restauro’; of Tintoretto in the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, which is altogether too much to digest in one short visit, and everywhere else the ‘little dyer’, otherwise recently given back his real name,Jacopo Comin, starred in his home town.

The Giorgone Tempest in the Accademia too, hiding its light under a bushel since it is always so much smaller than expected.  We failed to get to San Zaccaria for one of the greatest Bellini altarpieces but saw others hither and thither, the glorious triptych in the Frari at the third attempt, thwarted previously by Sunday mass and a Monday funeral, and a less well-known Sacra Conversazione altarpiece in a side chapel of the second Franciscan church in Venice, equally vast and less visited San Francesco della Vigna which is full of further treasures including the only confirmed painting by Fra Antonio da Negroponte, a glorious Virgin and Child surrounded by a garden of flowers and birds. Just on the left of the back door of the church, it is easy to walk past in the chilly January gloom and only revealed in all its wonder after scrabbling about for the necessary 50 cents for illumination.  Even then there is almost too much detail for the eye to absorb – definitely one to visit and re-visit like the Carpaccios and the Bellinis, where a resigned looking San Sebastian skewered by the longest arrows is a favourite flanker in a Sacra Conversazione. San Francesco was deserted aside from a burly Franciscan priest presumably in his thermals, sitting at a desk to keep an eye on the postcards for sale and an almost life-sized nativity scene in the nave with kings newly arrived the day after epiphany. 

And we walked our feet off, thank god for the old Clark’s boots that have seen service round India and Central Asia and had to be tucked firmly under the chair in respectable surroundings like Harry’s Bar, and for an equally old but less decrepit down filled coat and a Rialto market acquired fake fur hat of perfect proportions to cover the ears.  On our last day, my husband and I ascended the campanile of San Giorgio Maggiore  to gaze down on Venice spread like a mediaeval map below including a close view of the adjacent and more contemporary huge swimming pool of the Cipriani where I stayed now and then with my grandmother in my adolescence during her annual visit. In those days Venice was still home to human relics of the past who had washed up there in their old ages and included the likes of the Oswald Moseleys; various middle European princes whose family estates had long since disappeared behind the Iron Curtain and odds and ends of aesthetic art historians and writers living in high ceilinged apartments in one or another palazzo up and down the Grand Canal or tucked away in the back streets of the Giudecca.

We ate Sunday lunch in almost the only open trattoria on the Giudecca after a palladian interlude in Santa Maria della Salute and the Redentore, both of which for all their exquisite proportions go a fair way in my view to chilling more than uplifting the spirit in much the same way as does the nearly contemporaneous cavernous space of St Paul’s Cathedral.  Mind you, if that trattoria was no more than it said on the tin, we ate astonishingly well in general, expensive yes but not as exorbitant as present Venetian tourist legend would expect.  Our major festive dinner, a 7 or 8 course feast at the Osteria di Santa Marina was a triumph aside from a minor slip up with cold and heavy raw tuna rolls and involved a delectable pudding, mainly cream and meringue, with the ubiquitous birthday candle for my husband.  Our last two evening were a repeat performance 2 minutes from the Hotel Palazzo Paruta, San Marco, where we all stayed in box like but cosy rooms on a Booking.com deal, at Bacaro da Fiore, not to be confused with the better known and far grander Da Fiore but perfect territory and excellent food and wine for a very short walk on 2 icy winter’s evenings after a heavy sightseeing day. 

On our last day, I was determined to get to one of my favourite churches in the world, Santa Maria Assunta.  Sadly my husband’s train fever got us as far as a walk through those of the glass factories and outlets on the main canal in Murano before we turned back to base for it must be admitted a final and unexpectedly excellent lunch in the Osteria Al Ponte las Patatina in San Polo not far from the Frari where we chanced to sit at a table next to glass artist Amadi Bruno whose shop is more or less next door in Calle Saoneri.  We only resisted the lure of exquisite glass peas in pods and other perfectly modelled and entirely delectable glass fruit and vegetables due to an earlier purchase from Alessandro Merlin another old time artist whose wonderful erotica and fish painted ceramic dishes cost practically nothing to make unique presents and most pleasing souvenirs. Both workshops can be explored online and acquisitions made and posted although it is certainly more fun to visit and choose in person. 

In ideal circumstances for minimum crowds possibly a week further in January might be the absolute ideal for a Venetian visit.  We were there for the Epiphany holiday and the last days of school holidays but still, aside from the Piazza San Marco, streets were generally quiet, no queues for the Accademia, minimal for the basilica itself and the most crowded site was probably the Guggenheim with its narrow passages and tight little rooms.  To his disappointment my husband found it hard to conjure up the image of Maria, Marchesa Casati, former owner of the truncated Palazzo in that rather sterile space surrounded by works of the great surrealist artists that are only in a few cases their best exemplars.  For myself, Alexander Calder’s highly decorative twirly silver bedhead always sticks in the memory as something desirable although I don’t suppose I should reject a number of paintings if they arrived gift wrapped on my doorstep, not least for the stories behind them and their makers.

What did I discover that was new on this occasion?  Well somehow familiar but perhaps from so long ago I had forgotten, the Giandomenico Tiepolo, Tiepolo junior in other words, paintings from the family villa in Zianigo, now exhibited together in special rooms in the Ca’ Rezzonico where the 19^th century collection includes mannerist horrors besides the Canalettos, are a complete joy.  They include the punchinellos with which the painter was obsessed as well as splendid scenes of street entertainments and walks with the family dog or a portrait of him alone.  Venetians it seems were no less fond of the dogs, who appear in one after another painting down the centuries throughout their history, than they are now where one after another winter coated pedigree breed and even the odd wolf, coat unnecessary in their cases, trots proudly through the streets with its owner. 

Beyond the grand palace, we came upon the Evangelical Lutheran Church hidden quietly upstairs in a charming pink early 18th century building, the Scuola dell'Angelo Custode in Campo Santi Apostoli.  Its treasure, avoiding the fluffy baroque altarpiece of the Madonna in Glory by Sebastiano Ricci is a much more satisfactorily austere little portrait of Luther himself from the hand or studio of Lucas Cranach, whether father or son is lost to time.  As a rough balance on the other side of the altar there is a small Titian of Christ, hung as casually apparently on any old nail and presented to the church it is said when it was in the Fondaco dei Tedeschi. Hidden treasure then indeed.  

Finally at the end of a fifth day, a return to the immaculate airport by the Alilaguna orange line across the lagoon and a flight unmarred by problems until London when to no one’s surprise the Gatwick Express was running late due to problems with a signal.  Our journey out was straightforward too with an OTS minibus collecting everyone from different waypoints, a slight hold up and irritable telephone conversation when the Venetian taxi failed to arrive.  Only slightly delayed we make it to Piazzale Roma by road for the altogether too short Riva taxi trip down the Grand Canal to the Sant’Angelo vaporetto stop to arrive in proper style a couple of hundred yards from the hotel before launching ourselves in search of splendid Cantina de Mori for cicchetti and wine at, I fear, tourist prices, and follow up afternoon cocktails on the terrace of the Gritti Hotel where all unnoticing in the last of the winter afternoon sun, everyone froze to the marrow.

 

Tallinn

The black bread in Lithuania at its freshest best is more like aerated treacle toffee than anything made of grain.  I found I could eat it in quite astonishing quantities.  Food otherwise is inclined to be simple  - meat, cured meat, soups, pickles, plainly cooked vegetables and, at this time of year, plenty of fruit.  To go with the good bread, there are greater tests of the bakers skill in tarts, cheesecakes and other pastry confections not to mention the ubiquitous marzipan.  In the window of the most famous and oldest cafe/confectioner in Tallinn, Malasmokk, too overcrowded with tourists at this time of year to sit in, there are marzipan houses and an entire population of marzipan figures.

In fact in two days we had a lot of ground to cover and not too much time for frequenting cafes. Estonia is wonderfully proud of itself and its emergence as a successful independent country and member of the EU from a history of serial invasion and occupation until the fall of the Soviet Union. Tallinn is a showcase for that history and for national amour propre.  The town is spotless and there are enough museums almost for every day of the year.  They include Kumu the rather spectacular modern art gallery opened in 2006, the comfortably sized Kadriorg Palace with its art collections, lovely baroque rooms and splendid tiled stoves, built by Peter the Great for his wife, the Empress Catherine and a wide range of smaller showcases such as the City Museum and the Museum of Occupations.  All history good or bad is to be remembered it seems and, where possible, celebrated.  The collections are not in general extraordinary or famous but the very best is made of what is available and, as a result, the viewer looks carefully at exhibits that might be passed over when faced with better known and theoretically internationally more important works and absorbs to a greater extent the history of each one.

The tall black church spires,with what remains of the city walls round the old city have made the remarkable skyline of Tallinn through centuries.  It must have seemed the setting for fairy tales when viewed from the chilly Baltic Sea on the deck of an approaching ship.  Now the modern town surrounds the old but the towering pinnacles of churches like the Niguliste and the Oleviste, not to mention that of the town hall with its soldier weather vane, Old Thomas, standing high above the red tiled towers of the city walls, remain the town's greatest landmarks and signposts.

Their interiors are the spare and whitewashed Gothic reminiscent of 16th and 17th century paintings of Dutch and Belgian church interiors and just as attractive and welcoming.  The towering space of the Niguliste, restored after Soviet bombing raids in 1944, is a repository of treasures such as a gloriously humorous Danse Macabre where death is definitely en fete unlike his rather grand victims. The Dome church has huge box pews at ground level and above them the family boxes, like enclosed opera boxes, of two of Tallinn's most powerful families.  Other families are remembered in the highly ornate armorial shields that cover the walls and in a variety of grand tombs. Most churches are possessors of beautiful and highly decorated organs.

The 14th century Church of the Holy Ghost adjacent to the Town Hall Square in particular has the atmosphere of a place both used and loved. It is more like a refectory with its painted galleries and air of welcome even when empty of people.  There is a real and unusual sense in all the churches of their role as centres of the community which cannot always have been the case. Now huge numbers of tourists are temporarily grafted on to the core of that community which for all its friendliness manages to remain somehow aloof and untouched or that at least is the rather comforting sense in the streets of greater Tallinn from very short experience.  That experience included a visit to the Estonian Open Air Museum, where traditional buildings have been transported and rebuilt from all over the country.  An ersatz, touristic glimpse of real country life it may be but away from the particularly overpopulated areas where tour groups congregate in force, a walk through the woods and by the sea there on a nice day is a pleasure and whets the appetite for a proper driving tour of the countryside of the Baltic States on another occasion.

We stayed conveniently centrally and quite comfortably in the Old Town in the Rixwell Olevi hotel, in a mildly decrepit originally 15th century building.  An initial hiccup with our first night booking after an extremely delayed arrival without any luggage courtesy of British Airways landed us one night in the typical contemporary hotel tower block of the Radisson Olumpia.  Little to be said about that beyond mention of the grimly plastic Sports Bar where we had a late night drink in the absence of dinner and the spectacular view of the city - a distinctly redeeming feature.  On the strength of some level of perceived fault on the part of the Olevi in not fitting us in that night in spite of a booking due to 'technical difficulties' that were either water or electricity related, they gave us a discount which rather made up for the Sports Bar.

Other famous sites of old Tallinn very close to the Hotel include the splendid variety of houses along Pikk Street, most famously, the House of the Blackheads, once owned by the Brotherhood of the Blackheads, the young, single merchants who had not yet graduated to membership of the Great Guild.  The Great Guild Hall on the same street is now the Estonian History Museum.  Unexpectedly these early buildings are neighboured by the glorious Art Nouveau Draakoni House with its splendid dragons and Egyptian figures as well as the 19th century apartment block that was once the HQ of Soviet security.

The Silvery Tay

I never go anywhere without my camera, except I did on this occasion and I regretted it extremely. Well my smaller camera had a flat battery, I was only carrying hand luggage and, for heavens sake, who goes to Scotland in March for a varicose veins operation and really believes they are going to take photographs. Then I had never seen Dundee, a city built on hills overlooking the Tay, truly silvery for two whole days of bright spring sunshine. Beyond the water, across the infamous rail bridge,become a joke image thanks to William McGonagall,  and its road companion, the further hills of Angus. Whatever the merits of the iphone, and other people's photographs using that medium look quite perfect, I cannot take a decent picture with a telephone and now I am sorry for it.

Dundee is a city full of quiet treasures, whether the steep streets of painted Georgian terraced houses or more expected dark sandstone Victorian public buildings of considerable grandeur to reflect Dundee's wealth. Built on jute, jam and journalism, there was more besides in whaling and ship building which included the construction of RRS Discovery, Robert Falcon Scott's Antartic exploration ship.  The renovated ship is now part of the Discovery Centre exhibition, an educational and highly enjoyable experience adjacent to the waterfront building site where a new Victoria & Albert Museum, its design inspired by a ship, is beginning to take shape.

Dundee is doing a grand job of celebrating its past with projects that will enrich its present and future. Jute wealth built the often slightly fantastical, folie de grandeur I suppose, merchants' houses that look out over the Tay, some adapted now as hotels, hospitals or offices.  Many of the honest tradesmen as well as the grandees of the City are buried in the Howff cemetery, in use since the 16th century and definitely a place to explore local life and death given a little more time than I had. I do enjoy a good cemetery but I was hurrying on this occasion towards the Verdant Works Jute Museum and a walk instead through the story of Dundee jute.

Restored machinery that is still operational drives the visitor through the processes that enriched the so called Jute Barons, paying for great private mansions, estates and the foundation of that formidable Victorian public architecture that epitomised the wealth of empire. The other side of that coin is well represented in the Jute museum: the urbanisation of poverty as workers poured in from rural areas to live worse on poor city diets and suffer the epidemic diseases of overcrowded humanity in the squalor of areas like Blackness. At the moment the Jute Museum has an additional attraction. The extraordinary Great Tapestry of Scotland is on exhibition in the High Mill, the whole story of Scotland in beautifully worked unique pictures.

The story of Dundee including the vast skeleton of a whale that mistakenly swam into the Firth of Tay in 1883 towards its nemesis in a city of whalers and whale oil is easily read through the displays in the McManus Art Gallery and Museum.  This splendid purpose built museum designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott was originally opened as the Albert Institute in 1867. Contemporary and historical exhibitions illustrating the role of Dundee and her sons and daughters at home and abroad are underpinned by wonderful Victorian neo-gothic architectural flourishes. There is an enjoyable  a Victorian gallery hung Victorian style floor to ceiling with paintings typical of the period and once owned by the Jute Barons, some rather more desirable than others.  The starring role is given to the pre-raphaelite Dante's Dream by Dante Gabriel Rossetti among other works by Millais, Sargent and a raft of less well-known 19th century royal academicians and royal Scottish academicians.

The shop here as at the Jute Museum and the Discovery Centre reflects the jute, jam and journalism theme with some imagination.  Rainbow displays of neat jute bags, meet DC Thompson comics with images of their best known characters; Oor Wullie with his spiky hair or, more famous outside Scotland, the Dandy's  Desperate Dan, whose 8 foot bronze statue strides proudly through the centre of the city with his dog, Dawg, and fellow Dandy character Minnie the Minx in their wake.  Jam means Keiller and the apocryphal invention of marmalade by Janet Keiller - now there are other names, represented in museum and tourist shops beside Scottish tablet and other sweets for which the region is famous.  Famous for baking too and there is little doubt that the fruit scones at the Balgove Larder just outside St Andrews are the best to be found as recommended by a notable vascular surgeon.  The food at Balgove Larder is all home or locally grown and the farm shop, cafe and steak bar clearly do a roaring trade on the back of excellent produce, desirable location and charming pigs who answer to their names - sad only when one goes missing.

St Andrews, a mere hop skip and jump from Dundee across the Tay is another beautiful city, famous for its golf, ancient university and the glory of the long stretch of beach hard by the golf course where the opening of Chariots of Fire was filmed.  These golden sands remain quite remarkably unspoilt although they are to all intents and purposes part of and an amenity to the city.  

I stayed at the Invercarse Hotel within five minutes walking distance of the splendid Botanic Garden, nothing like a good tropical house to warm you on a chilly day, and almost directly above delightful Dundee airport where 5 flights a day to London in no way disturb the peace and catching one is no more effort than catching a train. The Invercarse is spotlessly clean, friendly,and has a ballroom which is clearly a centre for festivities from weddings to, while I was there, a 'Maths' Ball and a fundraising golf dinner. The last guests from the latter left, so the hall porter told me, at 5.45 but nothing woke me from my slumbers in an unusually comfortable bed.  So sensible too to have the single person rate which is not always available and really does encourage the single person to stay instead of searching the AirBnB site for alternatives.

Beyond the Balgove Larder and the odd cup of coffee in a museum cafe I did not have time to explore Dundee eating further than the marmalade and that fruit scone. That is not entirely true but my son, also with varicose veins, can you believe the bad luck of that inheritance, and I were entertained royally at his house by our surgeon, his GP wife and Ruby their aged jack russell who enjoys going for walks these days in a pram to take the air,  With two universities full of hungry students there are plenty of cafes and restaurants including a considerable number of grand looking Indian establishment.  One senses in Dundee that there is, beyond the usual high street chains of coffee or clothes shops, a number of independent operations that would be worth exploring on another occasion - sadly my time ran out with a horribly early but efficient flight back to Stansted and the joys of the M25 into London, possibly the only downside to the whole expedition. Dundee is a well-kept secret.  Hopefully the new V&A opening in 2018 will put the city, only an hour away from Edinburgh, London too thanks to the airport, and all its attractions seriously on the Scottish tourism map.