The Flâneuse Diaries – Page 2 – Getting Lost in the City

August 16, 2020August 16, 2020

Armchair Cartography

I had been looking forward to donning a bikini this August. I just hadn’t realised I’d be wearing it in the living room with all the curtains closed. Temperatures at my desk have reached a balmy 31.5 degrees and I’ve retreated to the slightly cooler climes of the bedroom where I’m being serenaded by the sound of a power drill emanating from the longest flat refurbishment in history downstairs. I would sit in the garden and top up the vitamin D, but my neighbour is ‘de-magging’ the wheelie bins on the yellowing lawn, so that takes another limited option off the table. I know we should all be counting our blessings right now, but I’ve had better summers.

I’m afraid I haven’t settled into this pandemic. If you’re someone with no desire (or opportunity) to see new places or have new experiences, perhaps you’ve been able to make some kind of peace with its limitations. You can live without the thrill of knowing tomorrow something new and different beckons because of who you’ve met, or where you’ve been or what you’ve seen when you got there. The sheer joy and infinite variety of being alive feels absent right now and a big part of that is the freedom to move across distances. We’re all told we have to be citizens of somewhere but why does it have to be here?

I’ve been thinking a lot about my relationship with travel recently and how it enhances my sense of self. How it comforts me with its rituals and creates the sense of occasion and the landmarks in time that I crave. As the world shrinks, are we going to go backwards to a time when international travel is only for the privileged few? For me, Center Parcs would be like descending into one of the portals of inflatable hell and whilst holidaying in the UK can be wonderful, it’s rarely cheap. If you want to avoid ‘Jeanette and Dougie from Manchester’ (to steal from Willy Russell) you really need to broaden your horizons and go where they are not.

Me pensively channelling Lucy Honeychurch in 1989

Like most kids of my generation, we didn’t travel abroad much. Up to the age of seventeen I can recall only a handful of occasions and they were a very mixed bag. The first foreign place I ever encountered was Amsterdam. I was ten and we stayed on a floating hotel on the canal – Mamma Flâneuse, my grandmother and me, together on our first package holiday. The type where you drive for hours by coach for a photo opportunity involving a pair of outsized clogs against a backdrop of blowsy tulips. I’m pretty sure I enjoyed the novelty of this experience, but I have only a couple of memories now which are more feelings than images. One is staring with inexplicable sadness at the solitary Delftware loo in Anne Frank’s house and the other the sound of my normally prudish grandmother laughing uncontrollably as she recounted her guided tour of somewhere I hadn’t been allowed to go called the Red Light District. This must surely be the genesis of all my FoMo.

The following year I took my first flight and there is a photograph of me coming down the aeroplane steps and onto the runway at Alicante airport, looking ashen-faced and clutching a Snoopy. I had a week in an apartment in Coveta Fumá with my father and stepmother who basked like lizards in the unfamiliar, dry heat, smoking king-size cigarettes and reading fat paperbacks. It couldn’t have been memorable because other than ex-pats looking glitzy and red-faced on bar stools and the sound of Paul McCartney and Wings on the stereo, I don’t remember it at all. My experiences of Southern Spain since then, beyond the triumvirate of pool, pub and hypermarket, are like they come from a different world.

More teenage moodiness on the banks of the Arno

It was another three years before I would get on a plane again. I was that saddest of sounding things an unaccompanied minor, heading off for a fortnight in Germany to see a pen pal in the Moselle Valley and it was the longest two weeks of my life when I realised – as we often did – that she was nothing like her letters. As a natural Latino type, I didn’t gel with the Teutonic way and was bewildered by the sausage parties and the oompah bands (true story). I was more homesick than I have ever been.

There were happier trips to Florence where I channelled my best Lucy Honeychurch in a pensione overlooking a convent because we were all obsessed with Merchant Ivory films and Helena Bonham-Carter’s hair. And who could forget Paris in a one star hotel, with its neon sign that flickered all night though the net curtains and kept us awake, leaving us slightly hysterical in the morning as we ate dry baguettes in the lobby? Basic accommodation didn’t matter so much when you stepped outside into the City of Light. Foreign travel opened our eyes and our minds.

The monotony of unvaried days and the fear of missing out is not going away any time soon, but the point of the Flâneuse is, after all, to wander aimlessly and that’s hard to do in a global pandemic when you’re playing holiday roulette. What we have for now are memories, books and maps. We are the armchair cartographers of our own far-flung dreams.

In other news, I really can’t be arsed to fight with Ryan Air, so it’s no People’s Republic of Cork for me this month. Instead I will be reaching for ‘Hitching for Hope: A Journey Into the Heart and Soul of Ireland’, by Irish Times bestseller Ruari McKiernan and listening to the sound of much needed rain.

If I imagine hard enough, I might even be there.

May 10, 2020May 10, 2020

Why Do The Wrong People Travel?

In the words of Karen Blixen, I am a mental traveller. I have recently taken to cutting wistful pictures out of my Lonely Planet magazines and – when the pritt stick I ordered on Amazon Prime finally arrives – there will be a collage of a trip stretching from Malaga to Athens. I’m calling it The Flaneuse’s Great Depression Tour and, because the continent of Europe is so wide Mein Herr, I’m thinking six weeks, two carbon-busting flights and the rest navigated hobo-style by boat, road and rail.

The last time I attempted anything like this I was a scatty 19 year old. It was during the Kosovo War so the only direction you could go from Italy was west. The ensuing tour of Mitteleuropa wasn’t my dream itinerary, but I made the best of things, lurching from one interrailing nightmare to the next, attaching (and later freeing myself from) a conveyor belt of gap year Americans enroute to South East Asia.

One night I took a sleeper train from Vienna and woke up alone with no people, no buildings and not a scooby doo where in the world I was. The night before I’d been at an open air film festival near the Ringstrasse with a born again Christian from Illinois. Now I was trapped in an abandoned rail carriage, hyperventilating and looking like a refugee because twelve hours can be a long time in travel. I’d booted down the only unlocked door I could find and staggered down the tracks, frantically drawing on a Gauloise Blonde and crying like a silent screen ingénue. After an embarrassingly short amount of time I was rescued by a German train driver who shunted me back to civilisation on something that wouldn’t have looked out of place on Ivor the Engine. In his own Teutonic way, he’d found the whole caper hilarious and kept miming the international hand gesture for ‘schlafen’. It turned out I was in a siding 10 minutes outside of Munich.

Next time will be different. I have a bigger budget and I’m slightly less of a moron when it comes to planning. As the UK congas their way BEYOND THE THUNDERDOME, I predict the motivation to be elsewhere will become overwhelming. The question is will anyone want us? With my trip to ‘relatively unscathed’ Greece next month now in the can, the irony that it is we who are the most diseased country in Europe is not lost. After our visit to Palermo in early March, my friend and I sailed effortlessly through Gatwick without so much as a sighting of a poster about a public health emergency of international concern. Today we’re told in garish colours to ‘stay alert’ as if Covid-19 is a pervert loitering outside the school playground with a bag of lemon sherbets and the offer of a ride in a Datsun Cherry. I thought ‘stay safe’ was getting on my tits. The new government advice is the ministerial equivalent of Alan Partridge flicking two L-shaped fingers at you and saying ‘Be Lucky’.

With this in mind, I think 2021 is going to be magnificent for the British. Watch us as we catapult ourselves out of a V Shaped recovery like Roger Moore transcending the skies in a Union Jack parachute. Up we’ll sail, high above the wafting scent of fruit and veg rotting in the fields. I was thinking a move to New Zealand might be good, but it probably wouldn’t be quite far enough.

Being alone in my flat for nearly 9 weeks has certainly changed my attitude to solo travel. Before, my threshold to solitude would have been about 5 days and that’s with the company of obliging waiters. Now I could circumnavigate the globe without a companion, providing I wasn’t travelling in steerage and had an internet connection.

I won’t pretend I’m not disappointed about my trip to Greece. My happy place is sitting on the deck of a Blue Star Ferry, sipping a beer and listening to Bob Dylan as the islands rise up around me like ancient spirits. The plan – in the halcyon days of plans – was a week in Syros with a friend, followed by five nights channelling the 1960s bohemians on Hydra. It was going to be elegantly rounded off with a weekend in an artist’s apartment with an Acropolis view where I would blast the bejesus out of Maria Callas.

The host in my last Athens apartment knew how to make me happy

My last two week holiday was Santorini in 2011. I’d been fantasising about this island on the edge of Europe since I was a teenager and wrote in my journal about the headlong instincts of its residents, accustomed to living on the edge of a volcano. I wrote about the nightly applause for the sunset on the caldera and the man who rode his motorbike bareheaded, smoking a cigarette, with a white poodle under his arm. The resinous taste of retsina made me shudder, but I noted this was the only place I’d ever been where I could order a pina colada without embarrassment. Ultimately, it is our senses we appeal to and the snapshots of our travels we remember and store in our bank of memories.

The word is that domestic travel is going to boom later in the year. Sadly, it will be all the wrong people who will travel. Another excellent reason for the right people to stay at home and make a collage of better times.

Next Up: Memories of Andalucia.

March 8, 2020March 8, 2020

Last Exit to Palermo

Timing has never been my strong point. I decide to start a travel blog, the world decides to raise me a global pandemic. I never did get to the Northern Lights last month, but I’m damned if Coronavirus is going to stop me making it to Palermo for my birthday. Fading glamour elegantly interspersed with clapped out bits you can’t be bothered to rebuild? This is a city made to turn 47 in.

This time I’m travelling with my friend Chris who has both good Italian and an excellent sense of direction, something of a boon when you’re abroad with yours truly. We fly out from Stansted, which ironically boasts the only Boots in South East England that is still stocking antiseptic wipes and hand sanitiser. The woman behind the counter tells me she’s just sold 50 quid’s worth to someone on their way to Lanzarote, so it’s good to hear we’re all keeping our sanity.

On the flight over we sit next to Giovanni, a well-heeled Palermitan who is in his early 70s and clearly has the imp of mischief on his shoulder. He tells us he is a leather merchant in Bollaró Market and points at his squinting eye, which is presumably code for watch you don’t get your handbag nicked. He later takes us through the various other Italian hand gestures on offer which is particularly useful for me as a non-speaker. The wrist-flicking ‘whaddya want from me?’ I have seen a number of Italians perform in traffic over the years, but the rotating finger in the cheek is a new one and it means ‘it’s delicious’. Sadly this doesn’t stretch to the Ryan Air paninis, but it’s bound to come in handy over the coming days as I mainline caponata.

A strong tail wind means we arrive half an hour early and we’re greeted by four men in Red Cross jumpsuits who are here to do a temperature check. For a peri-menopausal woman this is a minefield and I am relieved to pass through with ease. Our bus drops us off very late at Palermo station and it is so eerily quiet it looks as though there should be tumbleweed blowing across its shiny marble floors. Luckily our Airbnb isn’t far away and we find ourselves in the much livelier neighbourhood of La Kalsa where the young Palermitani are at play, nibbling on chick pea fritters and swigging bottles of Moretti. Stylish bastardos.

We’ve only made one pre-booking here and it’s to see the Palazzo Conte Federico which has two tours a week on a Saturday. These small, private showings are conducted by the Contessa who greets us Eva Peron style at a wrought iron balcony which forms part of the palm-tree filled courtyard. We gaze up in awe of her piss elegance and she proceeds over the next hour to ladle out charm and wit like Joanna Lumley on steroids. The Contessa is whippet thin with a French Riviera face and expensive blond hair and she definitely knows her way around an artichoke. I decide that I want to be her.

The group are mostly Italians with one heavily made up American in platform boots who is at great pains not to touch anything. We quickly learn that the Contessa is a native of Salzburg, is passionate about music and can speak three languages perfectly. She asks me if I’m French (more brownie points) and is relieved when she hears I’m not as apparently her French ‘isn’t great’, something that of course no-one believes.

The Palazzo really is their home and the Contessa shows us her bedroom with its bottles of perfume on the dressing table and her study with its vintage fur coat draped over the chair for chilly afternoons (chilly by Sicilian standards which means anything south of 18 degrees draws much complaint). A cat snoozes on an incongruous IKEA recliner and next to it is a grand piano that was once played by Wagner when he was a guest of the family in 1882. Above our heads an opalescent Murano chandelier out-blings anything I’ve seen in Venice.

The Conte, a descendant of Frederick II, a 13^th Century King of Sicily, is clearly a competitive sort and amongst the baroque drama of the rooms are festooned his many sporting medals, intertwined with the Contessa’s swimming accolades because naturally she’s also a mermaid. As in aristocratic homes the world over there are silver-framed family photographs on every available surface, many of them showing the Conte holding cups aloft or climbing victoriously out of red racing cars. We learn later from online snooping that the couple met when she was singing at a ball at the Austrian Embassy in Rome. Smitten, he followed her to China where she was studying and, though she could barely understand a word of Italian, she soon got the gist when he went down on one knee and proposed with the family engagement ring.

I am suddenly reminded that today is a leap year and I offer to propose to Chris who I know is just desperate for an Irish passport. We’re tempted to announce this on Facebook with a specially staged photograph. Perhaps next to one of the more blousy statues in Piazza Pretoria where Neptune is blowing his horn. SURPRISE!

Piazza Pretoria – if you sit down a policeman blows a whistle at you.

Palermo is a sharp-eyed city. It’s tough and scrawny and there are bombed out buildings from the Second World War that no one has thought to resurrect. The air can feel dusty and polluted, but everywhere you look there is a sense of a gracious past that lives on in the overblown architecture. It’s a mongrel mix of everything – Byzantine, Norman, Spanish, Arabic, Italian and all the east and west cultures that have ever criss-crossed it – yet still it remains resolutely itself.

Above all it is baroque (boy, is it baroque) and it’s going to hit you with everything it’s got: gilded cherubs; undulating marble, porphyry and serpentine; alabaster statues of goddesses frolicking in fountains and more chandeliers than Liberace. For these reasons it’s easy to get churched out here, but just roll with it. The interiors will make you laugh out loud, not because they’re funny but because you can’t believe this kind of craftsmanship is possible. There are too many to list, but Chiesa del Gesú in The Albergheria district will have you gawping helplessly at its splendour.

On Sunday we have breakfast at Piazza Bellini and take a tour of Chiesa Santa Caterina and the adjoining convent where we hit Peak Catholicism. Set around a stunning courtyard of orange, lemon and pomegranate trees, it’s a fascinating labyrinth of rooms where we encounter the remnants of nuns’ past lives, along with some really sinister dolls in glass domes and the jawbone of a female saint from the 11^th century. There’s a choral sound track throughout and at the end of it a dolci (bakery) where someone makes you a tooth achingly sweet canollo to order. We love it all.

It’s still really quiet on the streets and not only are their hardly any tourists about, there’s hardly any Sicilians either. Shop keepers drum their fingers on counters and waiters stand idly around in black latex gloves hoping for some custom. The news here isn’t the virus, it’s what it’s doing to the economy. If Italians are meant to be the drama queens of Europe, compared to what is being dished up at home on our Twitter feeds, they seem pretty circumspect to us.

After a tour of the Teatro Massimo and a tantalising peek of the dancers rehearsing for next month’s production of Coppelia, Chris and I head for a spritz on the Piazza Verdi where we both make a shocking admission. Neither of us have ever seen The Godfather. Not one of them. (Writing this I’ve just googled the last scene where Al Pacino’s daughter gets shot on the theatre steps and blimey that face should have been worth an Oscar alone). We don’t see a lot of references to The Godfather out here, just the odd T-shirt in the markets and overall it is surprisingly untacky, apart from the women’s boutiques which are packed full of the glitzy and the frou-frou.

Walking along the Via della Libertá and suddenly, out of nowhere, there is a sea of humanity out to shop and be seen. The Sunday passegiata has commenced and this is the most amount of people we’ve encountered in 48 hours. It’s like someone has just sounded the all-clear siren and they’re exuberantly walking off their cabin fever.

Brits are thin on the ground here and the only time we hear an English accent is on our last day. We’re drinking coffee and watching two Pakistani boys playing cricket against the crumbling, chaotic backdrop of a disused palazzo which is probably the most Palermo thing you can imagine. Behind us a man in his 60s is having a pre-midday livener and complaining to his wife about ‘bureaucracy and unelected officials’ salaries’. I am instantly reminded of my biggest fear about Brexit. Being trapped on a tiny island with people such as these, condemned to a life of whinging mediocrity and no longer able to travel.

But for now we keep on keeping on, in the hope that one way or another our wings are not clipped. This is my third visit to Sicily and there will be more because finding my way into its dark heart will probably take a life-time. In the meantime, I will be self-isolating with Spaghetti alla Norma and Inspector Montalbano on IPlayer……

January 23, 2020January 23, 2020

Highland Fling

I love flying out of City Airport at night. It’s like a Peter Pan view of all the landmarks in miniature as you watch the river bending beneath you like a dark, glossy snake. We’re in that sleepy time between Christmas and New Year and the mood on board my FlyBe flight to Edinburgh is notably relaxed. ‘If you’re sitting on the left-hand side of this Bombardier Q400 you will see the beautiful city sky scrapers lit up like jewels. If you’re on the right,’ says our casual pilot, ‘You’ll see Wembley Stadium (pause for effect) And Essex’. He concludes the routine with a joke he got from a cracker and heads off into the cockpit, leaving Jane the air hostess trilling like Miss Jean Brodie into the tannoy about emergency exits. I’m sitting above one of the propellers. I know it’s going to be noisy and that my eyes will be trained on it for the next hour and a half making sure it’s still going around.

Post security, I’ve got a ritual at an airport. It starts with an obligatory squirt of Chanel’s Chance in Duty Free which I wear like a perfumed amulet because, apart from the take-off and ascent, flying is something I only tolerate. The clean smell of pink pepper, jasmine and vanilla always make me feel like I’m going somewhere and the sharp, citrusy taste of a gin and tonic seals the moment. I’m unsure why we turn into Wetherspoons clientele at an air terminal, but as with many of my fellow travellers this can be an 11 am beverage and it’s absolutely fine.

I’m going for the all-new lean me in 2020, so this is the first time I have ever flown with just hand luggage. Owing to the number of bottles required for a 5-night trip to the Highlands, it hasn’t been a success. ‘Is there anything here you can throw away?’, says the man at security trying to reassemble my overflowing plastic bag like a task on the Krypton Factor. ‘This is Lancome and Clarins,’ I explain removing it from his hand, ‘I’m going back to the check in’.

My first night will be at The Rutland Hotel in Edinburgh and then onto V&A Dundee to meet my friends Rosemary and Rebecca before we head to Loch Rannoch. The taxi driver who meets me at the airport was born in Pakistan and has been living in Edinburgh for sixteen years. As we drive into the city centre, he tells me how much he loves the people and the opportunities for his kids here. I ruminate from the back seat that I have literally never heard any foreign-born taxi driver say this in England. It seems like I’m not in Kansas anymore and frankly it’s a relief.

The feeling of liberation continues in the bar of The Rutland Hotel. Maybe it’s my state of mind, but I’m looking around and thinking but everyone looks so sane and hopeful! The staff couldn’t be kinder and respond brilliantly when I have an odd episode with a vibrating bed (not as much fun as you might think) due to my room being located above a rogue kitchen fan. It’s temporary and it’s sorted, so frankly if you want somewhere welcoming and luxurious to stay where you can step outside and look straight up at the castle, just book here.

The last time I was in Edinburgh was the summer of 1993. I was performing at the Edinburgh Fringe in an original musical called A Barrowload of Oranges so you can imagine the fun the critics had with that title. We’d rehearsed for a month at Leeds University and arrived to discover that our stage was the size of a picnic rug and located above a Leisure Centre called Marcos. The choreography didn’t fit and the dramatic tension – which to be fair is doing quite a bit of heavy lifting in this sentence – found itself going head to head with the sounds of high impact aerobics that no amount of chest belt could drown out. This lingering theatrical suicide lasted three weeks, culminating with one of the cast being head butted by an audience member at The Fringe Club after we’d performed an excerpt for ‘promotional reasons’.

Other than dropping flyers all over it I don’t remember much of the city, so it feels like a blank canvas. I’ve only got a morning in Edinburgh so I want to get a sense of it’s dark, brooding atmosphere which today is nobly aided by the weather, a classic Celtic mizzle with metallic grey skies. All along Princes Street, Hogmanay preparations are underway. Cherry-pickers are bustling about, men in high vis are carrying huge ropes of cables and it seems as if the world is about to throw a party I’m not able to attend. I head straight to the Old Town for the Royal Mile and the Castle and my first feeling is this is such a youthful city. My second feeling is there is A LOT of cashmere. A kaleidoscope of cashmere, much of which is too stressful to root through. I won’t critique the tourist hot spots, but I will say don’t miss the stunning interior of St Giles Cathedral because (sorry Rome) nobody does a stained glass window like the Scots.

It’s café time because this is after all The Flâneuse Diaries and I have people to stare at. The Instagrammers favourite is The Milkman on Cockburn Street but I can’t get a seat and I’m not sitting outside and getting my hair frizzy. Instead I head to The Edinburgh Press Club which is a couple of hundred metres up the road and serves very good coffee and ginger cake. I’ve picked up a copy The Scotsman and pass over the Brexit news to note that Mackies will be launching the world’s first limited-edition haggis, neeps and tatties crisps just in time for Burns Night. Sorry England, but this leaves your Brussel Sprout crisps IN THE SHADE.

It is my third encounter with the concept of haggis since arrival, with the first being ‘short ribs and haggis balls’ on the bar snacks menu at The Rutland (I passed) and ‘veggie haggis’ at breakfast (I succumbed to the ersatz soya version – pretty good). In front of me three students in their early twenties are asleep on the formica-topped table. Don’t these kids have any stamina?

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If you’ve not seen the Highlands before it’s hard to prepare yourself for its raw, resin-scented beauty. We’re staying on the shores of Loch Rannoch which you reach by driving for bloody miles along a slalom-poled winding road, warding off car sickness by keeping your eyes trained on the horizon like an ancient mariner. On our first morning we take the dog for a walk and climb up what is effectively half a small mountain, a fact not revealed to me until we are some way up it. I’m unfit and as far away from mountain goat sure-footedness as you can get, but I really want to do it because there’s a memorial bench at the top dedicated to Rosemary’s lovely daughter Emma who passed away five years ago.

There’s not much call for waterproof trousers in North London so I’m in borrowed gear and half way up I’m getting an uncomfortable flashback to a teenage skiing trip where I was also perilously out of breath and sweating in salopettes. I stagger on and arrive beetroot faced at the bench whilst Mabel the Sprocker, springs about like an Olympic athlete. When I said The Flâneuse Diaries, this wasn’t quite what I had in mind, but the view is incredible. Oh Emma, you will be laughing at me now.

It’s odd how travelling to new places can trigger old memories. On the way to Dundee, the train stopped in Kirkaldy and I found myself staring at the sign thinking: Hang on a minute. Didn’t I once date an alcoholic from Kirkaldy in the late 90s? Didn’t I once spend the worst EVER New Year’s Eve being completely ignored at a house party in West London by a total knob in a kilt who didn’t even want to kiss me at midnight?

For those who have followed me for the past decade, you will be aware I am actually a fan of New Year. I don’t have to do anything splashy, but I do have to experience something different and this year it’s going to be the Loch Rannoch Village Hall where there is a live band and possibly some sort of Kayleigh. (Yes, I am aware this is a song by Marillion but as well as being frightening to do, I find it absolutely terrifying to spell).

When we arrive the band – who front the small gathering like they’re playing Wembley – are largely belting out covers from the past three decades. With the exception of two blonde ladies of a certain age getting down to Don’t Stop Me Now in matching wrap around sequins, the dance floor at this stage is sparsely populated. Most people are drinking or counting raffle tickets and, around the sides of the room, an assortment of children with jet black hair and splashes of tartan are jumping into the splits like Italia Conti graduates. I think we can say the atmosphere is camp.

It is, however, going to get a lot camper. The music revs up and a young girl with a high ponytail sails onto the dance floor spinning a woman in her sixties around in her wheelchair like Debbie McGee presenting a magic trick. An absolutely shambolic Gay Gordons ensues sharply followed by a vigorous Strip the Willow which is funny but goes on for a long time (almost as long as the raffle which seems to stretch to the end of the decade). In true flâneuse style, I am observing not participating, but once the horror of group dancing is over, I’m back out there and I’m getting ready for 2020 which as ever with New Year’s is a total anti-climax.

After a deafening Auld Lang Syne, the band launches into The Proclaimers 500 Miles and everyone, (even the eight-year olds) knows ALL the words and they’re singing it like an anthem. There’s an unfamiliar atmosphere which I later realise is a feeling of intergenerational harmony and community spirit. When Billy Connolly said recently in an interview that Scotland was in great shape politically and socially, he wasn’t wrong. I feel impressed and rather envious.

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If you’re a shopper like me you really need to go to the fabulous House of Bruar near Blair Atholl, a Caledonian style Harrods which is equally bewildering in layout. The clientele is a mixed bag, but you can always entertain yourself watching gaudy nouveau riche types kitting themselves out for a shooting weekend. The women’s clothing department has a thoughtful area for catatonically bored husbands where there are squashy sofas and a roaring fire and where you can flick through copies of Country Life mentally purchasing real estate. It’s unclear why the young shop assistants are made to dress like Dr Findlay’s secretary, but let’s hope they’re on a good commission.

My own shopping is confined to getting ready for the north of Norway in February where I’m told it’s a balmy minus 15 and where – if we’re in luck – we will see the Aurora Borealis. I have plenty of form with Scandinavia, but more of that next time. For now I’m packing my Norwegian friend Tom’s top British essentials – mince pies (are they now as rare as hen’s teeth?) Terry’s Chocolate Orange and Bisto gravy granules. And this time, no hand luggage….

December 29, 2019December 29, 2019

All Roads Lead to Rome

When I was a teenager I pinned a quote on my wardrobe which read in laboured calligraphy ‘All Roads Lead to Rome’. It stayed there for years and became a bit of a mantra. I’m not sure where I thought I was heading, but it was a pithy line to throw at foolish decisions.

I finally made it to Rome in late Spring of 2005. I’d always envisaged that entering the Eternal City would be glamorous. I’d arrive pristine in an ivory suit, channelling Sophia Loren alongside a swarthy Latino in an open topped Alfa Romeo Spider. The reality turned out to be dispiriting, involving an overcrowded train from Bologna which hurtled through every one of the seven hills whilst my friend and I stood up in a packed smoker’s carriage and took it in turns to breathe. We arrived at the bewildering Termini, travel sick and eyes streaming, alert for the marauding bag-snatchers we’d been warned about. Things improved rapidly when we saw the soaring majesty of the architecture. Rome is a film set on every corner.

As we begin this travel odyssey together, let me state for the record, I hate Christmas in the UK. I loathe enforced jollity and mawkish television so I opt to get on a plane. This has now become a tradition and alongside my mother – we’ll call her Mamma Flâneuse – we find a different city to experience. It’s taken me a while to win her round to this one. I have a cousin who was once mugged on The Spanish Steps and this has put her off, but Budapest last year has emboldened tastes so here we are, in the heart of the Vatican, with twinkling Christmas lights strung like jewels along the streets and calendars of priest hunks in the shops. After dark, the nuns are out in force, administering food and kindness to the many homeless who shelter under the buttresses around Piazza San Pietro. The billboard of the local cinema towers above our heads with the ironic words I Due Papi. Where else could we be?

There is an abundance to see in Rome and it’s best not to try and do it all. You’ll fail spectacularly. I never made it to Villa Borghese or the many palazzos and churches that are strewn across it, but that can be for another time. This trip is about Christmas and avoiding the turkey and stuffing.

The dinner on Christmas Eve is the main celebratory meal and it’s always heavy with fish. Our restaurant is not far from Campo de Fiori and we’re going to be sampling sea urchin pasta. It’s hard to describe the flavour and smell of sea urchin, but when I put it in my mouth I know I will still be tasting it next Christmas. Imagine a heady combination of kitchen cleaner and tropical fish food and you are in the ball park. Two Japanese tourists valiantly plough through their plates and I almost expect the late, great Clive James to appear with commentary. The remaining four courses are delicious so I can only conclude it is the ingredients and not the cooking. In the morning, Mamma Flâneuse flings the shutters of our room open and says the place smells of urchin. Merry Christmas one and all!

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Christmas morning and Piazza San Pietro is showing us its shiniest face. On the way, we are verbally accosted by six people in the space of 1 minute trying to flog us tickets to the Sistine Chapel. ‘Jesus wept’ says Mamma F.

The sky is like a china blue plate and I have to put a scarf on my head to keep the sun from burning me. We’re here for the Pope’s blessing and so are several hundred thousand other people, only we’re early and we’re getting a seat which has pleased mother and her blister. I have done the Pope thing before. In 2005, shortly after the ordination of the creepy Benedict XVI, we came to the Square to watch him pop up at one of the smaller balconies. There were no barriers or airport style security and the atmosphere was raucous with cries of Papa and people letting rip. It’s more sedate and sanitised today, although we think that some way back the crowd are singing La Bamba with gusto. Turns out they’re actually singing ‘Buon Natale’ to the same tune. It all feels a bit Hare Krishna.

The pomp in the lead up to the Pope’s arrival is magnificent and the biggest crowd pleasers are the harlequin garbed Swiss Guard who get an enthusiastic round of cheers and applause. In order to become the Pope’s personal body guards you have to be Swiss Catholic, male, unmarried, aged between 19 and 30 and have completed basic Swiss Army training. You also have to be prepared to wear tights in the heat. It’s quite a niche role.

As we wait for the clock to strike midday, the silent expectation is extraordinary. You don’t have to practice any kind of religion to find this profoundly moving because it’s about collective faith and hope and it’s the best of us. The Pope, when he arrives, looks like he has the weight of the world on his shoulders. After his address in Italian and the Latin benediction he finally breaks into a smile and you are relieved to see he is happy. The whole morning feels like it has been wrapped up in a bow and given to you as a gift.

You gotta love the Roman photobomber at Vittorio Emanuele II Monument

If you are ever in Rome on Christmas Day my best tip is after you’ve seen the Pope, head straight for the Basilica. If you time it right, you can be inside in under 5 minutes and get a privileged view of the crowds slowly dispersing. In the splendour stakes, St Peter outdoes every Catholic Church on earth but for my money, and just for sheer laugh-out-loud audacity, it’s got to be the Vittorio Emanuele II monument. Dedicated to the first king of the unified Italy, the Romans famously hate it. It’s been likened to a giant wedding cake, but I love it’s big dick energy. It says ‘hey, we may be a declining nation, but we’ve still got a massive schlong, a couple of eternal flames and a 717,000 square metres of marble’. One ruminates on what might the London equivalent will be in the coming years. Go and see it, clamber over its many stairs and if you can find the lift (I couldn’t) take it to the very top for an Emperor’s view

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So it seems even my café decisions are political. I leave Mamma Flâneuse at the hotel happily watching Lionel Ritchie in concert at the Vatican, and head off along the Tiber. If there’s a river running next to me I can’t get too lost. At the Piazza del Popolo I opt for the Café Rosati as a base to watch the early passeggiata. It’s a random choice but I later discover it was once frequented by left wing writers whilst Café Canova across the square was solely the domain of the right. I order an atomically strong Aperol spritz and am served an exquisite home-made salmon roe pastry. It looks like a small crown of orange jewels and the delicate bubbles burst in my mouth. This blows sea urchin right out of the water.

Santa at Piazza del Popolo. Just hanging out.

It’s Christmas Day but you get the sense that some people are doing business. A couple of the clientele look like Pauly from Goodfellas (they don’t move fast because they don’t have to) and the crowd is largely well-heeled. A man in a full Santa costume sits down to my right and says salve before checking his WhatsApp messages. His girlfriend is glamorous and dripping in furs and Fendi. You wonder about their sex life.

Although it’s a sprawling city, Rome is not that diverse. Santa aside, for the hour I spend at the Café Rosati, I see more variety in the traffic than in the passers-by. A man on a bicycle festooned with coloured lights; a tiny car packed with people, a silver haired woman giving strong direction from the passenger seat with the aid of a crutch; a bottle green Lamborghini skimming past like a vulgar frisbee. And always in the background the sporadic sound of sirens.

Rome is heavily policed and ready for an emergency. Like all major European cities, along with the number of homeless pitching tents in the green spaces, this is its most notable change. A couple of days earlier we watch as two Italians in Roman Centurion dress rip off their plastic armour and run across Ponte Sant’Angelo. A group of ebony black migrant traders carrying their wares in bundled sheets follow, hotly pursued by two members of the Carabinieri. There’s a vibrant street culture here, but much of it is illegal.

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On Boxing Day we brave the tourist epicentre. The last time I was at the Colosseum it was surrounded by legions of skinny cats stretching out in the sun, as if the spirits of lions and tigers were living on in their frail bodies. Now the cats have gone (where?) and instead there are armies of sightseers vying for space on the many tours on offer. I dislike guided tours, but the ones of the Colosseum and the Roman Forum are worth doing and I hope you get Noemie, an exuberant history of art student who counts us all in and out with aplomb. Once inside, the stories of gore are off the scale. People eating animals eating people; babies being sacrificed to the gods inside the burning stomachs of bronzed effigies. Boy, the Romans really knew how to enjoy life. Like many city landmarks here it’s undergone a huge restoration funded by a luxury brand. It seems the Italian government can’t locate the ticket revenue from the 7.2 million visitors that clamour here each year, a concept that is accepted with the same world weariness as the notion that the Ligne C subway will ever be completed.

My most vivid memory of 15 years ago is the bar at the Castello Sant’ Angelo. Go there just before sunset for an Aperitivo and incredible views of the Vatican, before heading up to the roof to survey the long sweep of the Tiber whilst you’re slightly buzzing from your spritz. I highly recommend it as a moment of perfect happiness. Do expect, however, for you and your snacks to be eye balled by thuggish sea gulls and for tourists to film the stand-off.

Whilst I busy myself with my notebook, three Italians in their early sixties come to admire my view. When they find out I’m a Londoner one shakes his head and says sadly but you don’t belong with us anymore. For their part, they are baffled and sorry and I tell myself we will have to get used to this. We chat about democracy – or lack thereof – and they good naturedly suggest I move to Scotland. I tell them I can’t promise an imminent relocation, but I will be there for New Year…..

The gull’s eye view at Castello Sant’Angelo

‘I believe in such cartography, to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books’ – The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje

November 25, 2019December 3, 2019

The Flâneuse and Me

Aimless city wandering – the freedom to stroll and observe but yet to be unobserved – this is the domain of the flâneuse. In the 19^th and 20^th centuries the flâneur was a male figure of privilege and leisure. When I imagine him he always manifests himself as Daniel Day-Lewis playing Cecil Vyse in A Room with a View. He has pince-nez glasses and a book of verse under his arm (it’s got to be Rilke, right?). He loiters idly in European piazzas, sometimes with a fountain of pigeons cascading around his head. Like J Alfred Prufrock – surely the ultimate modernist flaneur – he walks the half-deserted streets unimpeded and unchallenged. To be fair, he’s usually a bit of an entitled moron.

A couple of years ago I read Lauren Elkin’s brilliant book Flâneuse: Women Walk the City and realised I’d been inadvertently doing this since the late 80s. Aimless wandering suits me as I have no inner compass and can’t read maps. Smartphones have improved things significantly (although I still struggle with which direction the moving dot is heading) but generally speaking I will ride on the coattails of other people’s sense of direction or simply get lost. New places mean adding twenty minutes to the journey so I can pin down visual landmarks to guide me like a lighthouse through the rocks. I always ask at least three people where I am.

But being a flâneuse isn’t about an aversion to navigation. It’s about being an observer of people and places from the position of outsider. As an extraverted introvert, I find this vantage point sits well with me and I’ve actively sought out its freedoms since I was a teenager, growing up claustrophobic in a small brewery town situated, mercifully, at the end of a railway line. Here two tribes seemed to co-exist in segregated zones. I belonged to neither.

Pinned between the parochial snobbery of the pony club and the insularity of the locals whose idea of entertainment was scrambling on off-road bikes and decimating an entire hill, I never felt I had a natural home. You were looked down upon by head-scarfed women with pockets full of pony nuts or you were told you were stuck up by the kids from the local comprehensive and, more often than not, by their parents too. ‘Who does she think she is’ was something that often came at me in stereo.

This was the 80s and 90s and half the under-25 population were on drugs to quell the skull-numbing boredom of just being there. I once did a summer stint in a packing factory with a guy who’d put his acid tabs in the fridge one morning and asked his Mum to look after them until he got home. He was going to drop one under each eye lid after his shift and he couldn’t wait to clock off. I hope this gives you a sense of the levels of aspiration.

It turns out flâneuring isn’t a lot of fun when there’s a shabby pub on every corner and the acrid smell of hops is permeating the air. Unless you wanted to study the history of Roman pots and coins or hear the story of the gruesome Victorian murder for which the town was famed, there were no interesting art galleries or museums. Neither was there a café culture to match my romantic fin de siècle imaginings, although I tried my best, rotating between the three or four tea shops and spinning out a pot of tea and a flapjack for the longest possible time whilst looking busy with my library book. The local theatre was a large converted Nissen hut that had once been used to house German prisoners of war. In 1948 it had flung open its doors to the kind of amateur dramatics for which people should have been arrested for crimes against performance.

Yes, it was tough being a flâneuse in Shitsville. Yet having waxed so lyrical about the charms of this place, I forget to tell you its greatest asset. A fast train to London was only an hour and fifteen minutes and before you could say ‘trot on’, I was on it.

Ah, London. I know its greatest moment has probably passed (for now), but to my 16 year old self it was a kaleidoscope of wonders. Here was a place where no-one knew who you were. You could wander the cool marbled halls of its great museums or take in a solo matinee performance, staring up at cherubs, snug inside the red velvet interior as you waited for the play to wrap you up and take you away. You could perch on bar stools and chat to waiters or strike up conversations with fellow diners who’d light your eager cigarettes. Or you could simply sit and watch, scribbling your train of thought into notebooks no one ever saw. You were part of something; yet you were part of nothing.

In recent years, I’ve taken this feeling abroad to many other cities and have compiled many notebooks. It’s probably true to say this has become a bit of an obsession because I dream in trips, usually of the European variety. So this is The Flâneuse Diaries; part travelogue, part memoir, partly alone, partly in company, usually lost.

First stop Rome. For Christmas.

You are welcome to join me wherever I go.