Embracing the philistine?

I've decided it’s time to admit it.  It’s time to come out of the shadows and to say how I feel.  Most contemporary art is a pile of…; well it would probably win the Turner Prize whatever it was a pile of.

It’s take a day of submerging myself in art to finally realise that I think I have very narrow tastes in art, and for that I have to thank those who run the Bavarian State Painting Collections.

For they have decided that rather than the €7 entrance fee per site that they charge Tuesday to Saturday, on a Sunday they will charge just €1 per site.  This means you can take in 600 years of European Art, spread across four neighbouring galleries for just €4.  Consequently you can take a Sunday and just consume art like an all you can eat buffet – going back for the bits you felt like licking the plate for, and ignoring the bits you took one bite off and gagged on.

First up this morning was the Alte Pinakothek which houses pre-18th century art, almost all of it of a religious bent and I fear to say it, but it left me feeling cold.  I was round and out in 30 minutes flat.  Perhaps the fact that I’d only paid €1 to see it all may have made me less willing to stop and truly appreciate the paintings, but then again I suspect I would have gone round at the same speed if I’d paid the €7 and then just grumbled that it was a waste of money.

And so, across the road to the second stop of the day, the Neue Pinakothek and its collection of 18th and 19th century art.  It was here that I had the dawning realisation that my tastes were clearly very narrow as I found, for the first time I can remember in a gallery, being overtaken by other visitors.  Rather than walking past every painting at an even (and towards the end increasing) pace I was stopping and looking at many of the pictures.  Unknown German artists through to Monet, Cezanne, Van Gogh all making me stop and look.

Perhaps it was the lack of religious symbolism, or more just the lack of portraits (I already know I’m much more of a landscape person) that had me captivated.

Moving across the road, and up a century, to the Modern art gallery again I found lots of paintings that caught my attention, along with many of the photography exhibits.  Picasso, Miro, Dali and a host of artists I’d never heard of before.  The works may not look like anything real (so perhaps it’s not just a classic landscape), yet I still found them interesting.

However, in the final gallery of the day my only reaction was “what a load of old @#$% contemporary art is.”  An entire gallery of paintings that are apparently great works of art, and yet I’m pretty certain I’d produced almost identical works whilst in nursery (and probably using a potato rather than a brush).

Which leaves me with a question…?  If I only like a very narrow range of art (18th- 20th century landscape painting, photography, cubism and surrealism) does that make me a philistine?

Or, is it just that “contemporary art” has disappeared up itself…

Eastbourne Spirit

Maybe it was because it was Airbourne, which is one of the busiest periods of the summer season for the town – but even there it was, according to all the staff at the hotel, the busiest they’d ever seen it.

Maybe it was because the weather was generally good and a sunny summer’s day will always draw people to the beach.

Or maybe it is that the town has a fighting spirit that its neighbours on the coast have lacked in the past, but it was clear that Eastbourne and its population was determined to make sure the loss of a large part of its pier to a “suspicious” fire a couple of weeks earlier wasn’t going to harm the town.

By the time I visited barely a fortnight after the pier was ablaze on the TV news there were already guys starting restoration work, with the owners aiming to have at least the decking open by Christmas, and a real buzz in town that it wasn’t going to be hurt by this.

It is a stark contrast to Hastings just along the coast which has always felt a little bit down at heel and when it’s pier was almost completely destroyed by fire (again another “Suspicious” fire) appeared to have had the wind completely knocked out of it.  There have been appeals, and the whole site is now in the custody of a trust that is determined to rebuild, but it’s still been nearly 4 years that it’s just been a rusting hulk.

And then there’s Brighton’s West Pier battered, burnt, battered some more and then finally another suspicious fire in 2003 (you’d almost think there’s someone out there deliberately going round setting light to piers – see also Western Super Mare and Southend for other pier fires) destroying any attempts to recover it.

So it is comforting to see a town so quickly start to put things right.

At one time there were over 100 piers around the coast of the UK, today it’s barely 50.  Hopefully the speed with which Eastbourne has acted will help keep that figure above 50 for long to come.

Curtain Call

“From Stettin in the Baltic, to Trieste in the Adriatic an "Iron Curtain" has descended across the continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia…”

Winston Churchill: 5th March 1946

Having come across the quote on numerous occasions I’d never really paid it much attention, but a few years ago I saw a programme on Deutsche Welle about someone taking a bike trip along the former East German border, in celebration of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

I didn't pay it much attention at the time, but it started to come back into my mind as I looked to plan a “big trip” for 2012 – Why not travel from Stettin (which only after a bit of hunting around did I find out was now Szczecin in Poland) to Trieste?

It was very obvious early on that to try and squeeze that into a fortnight would be an almost impossible task if I actually wanted to spend time in any of the places I was planning to go through.

So I split the trip up into three, uneven, but doable bits without even considering the finishing date.

In 2012 I started in Szczecin (Stettin) on the Baltic and travelled round the edge of what had once been the DDR

In 2013 I travelled through some of the areas most impacted by the Iron Curtain – Dresden left with a hole in its city centre as a reminder of what “The West” had done, Prague and Budapest – scenes of the brutal repression the Warsaw pact handed out to people who didn't toe the line and through the former Czechoslovakia a country that following the fall of communism decided to go one stage further and without any bloodshed or fighting simply dissolve its marriage and let its two nations go their own way.

As I started to plan for 2014, the final leg through the former Yugoslavia and down to the Adriatic at Trieste, it suddenly started to dawn on me quite how important a year this is.

It was, after all, in Sarajevo in 1914 that a single shot sparked the bloodbath of the First World War as Europe ripped itself to shreds.

And, it was just 15 years ago that American and British planes were “strategically bombing” Serbia in an attempt to bring an end to the ethnic wars that had torn Yugoslavia apart.

But, perhaps most relevantly to my journey down the Iron Curtain were the actions that took place on May 2nd 1989.  25 years ago without consulting anyone the Hungarian government decided to open its borders with Austria; it dismantled 150 miles of barbed wire and with it opened the flood gates.

Whilst democracy movements had already started to take hold in both Poland and Hungary by then, this was the first hole being punched in the Iron Curtain, a fatal hole that just 6 months late on November 9th saw Berliners dancing on the top of the Berlin Wall.

25 years on and there are a host of new or newly-independent countries.  Some like the Czech Republic and Slovakia achieving this amicably and smoothly, some like the Baltic States and Slovenia after some fighting and sadly in the rest of the Balkans through years of horrific war.

But, what’s clear, 25 years on from the curtains collapse, and 15 years on from the end of the wars in the Balkans, Europe has stitched itself back together.

From Szczecin on the Baltic to Trieste on the Adriatic it’s been an interesting, and at times eye-opening journey through a part of the world that once looked like it had disappeared for ever.

Fears fade away

I've travelled a lot around Europe.  But up until now everywhere has been into the known.

If it’s not been an EU state it’s been Norway, Iceland or Switzerland, which are highly likely to be top answers in a quiz “name three countries you’d describe as safe”.

The only other exit from EU/EFTA has been to Dubrovnik in Croatia, and that’s always been such a holiday resort that I didn't bat an eyelid with that.

But Serbia, the mystic point where Central Europe becomes Eastern Europe.  Through so much of my late teens held up as the modern day bad guy of Europe – so bad we went to war with them, well a massively one-sided war where we dropped bombs on their key cities.  This is the point in Europe where even the alphabet changes - where Z becomes 3 and N becomes H.

So it was with some trepidation last September that I booked three nights in a hotel in Belgrade.  How would I cope with a completely different alphabet and more importantly, how do Brits go down in a country that we helped to damage so badly just 15 years ago.

Then there was also the delicate situation that I’d managed, through my own fault, to put myself in – I was aiming to come to Serbia direct from Croatia, two countries that it’s fair to say have a slightly fractious relationship.

In the end, the weather helped to solve the issue of entry into the country.  With such bad flooding during the spring in Serbia, which at one point looked like it might overwhelm Belgrade itself, I decided that the direct train route was a bit of a risk as services kept getting cancelled as lines were damaged.  Yes, everything would probably have been fine by late July, but I didn't want to risk that.

So instead I opted to fly, at which point it becomes clear how good the relationship between Zagreb and Belgrade is – there are no direct flights, not even from low cost or other countries carriers – so instead I was forced to go on a massive diversion and go via Dubrovnik.  However, this did mean that whilst I would still be arriving into Belgrade from Croatia, I would be doing it from almost on the Montenegrin border and, more importantly, I’d be doing it on Air Serbia.

Arriving into Belgrade it was pretty obvious that this was a major international airport as everything was in English, but more importantly everything was in two versions of Serbian – the Cyrillic and the Latin.  Suddenly things started to make sense, that jumble of characters Београд did actually spell Beograd, maybe it wasn't going to be so difficult to get around.

However, the clearest sign that I’d need never have worried was in every interaction I had with a Serbian – from the border guard to waiters to random strangers – a few faltering attempts at Serbian always led to near perfect “Can I just practice my English, as I don’t think it’s particularly good at the moment” and the rest of the conversation in perfect English.

On the first evening I was having a wander around the Belgrade Fortress, close to sunset and on a couple of occasions got talking to local people.  Hesitantly I would say I was from London, expecting a negative response back about what we did to them – but every time people's reaction was happiness that another Brit had made it to Serbia, that the country was slowly winning back tourists from the west and that the bad days were behind us all – after all, hadn't we both fought together as comrades during the worst years of the 20th Century.

It probably helps that it is the 100th anniversary of the start of the First World War (and if asked the question by a Serbian I've found “The Kaiser and the Hapsburg's were spoiling for a fight and any excuse would have been used” is the best answer to who’s responsible for starting the war) had brought back into focus the alliances that were forged across Europe in those dark days, alliances that on the whole remained the same 21 years later when it all erupted again and are probably easier to look to than the darker days of the recent past.

Yes, the scars that NATO members inflicted on Belgrade and other Serbian cities are still there to see – entire blocks in the centre of Belgrade still left in the state they were after the bombs fell – But, and it’s a big but, Serbia has moved on.

The centre of Belgrade is, in places, still a bit shabby – but then the same can be said for any city that had to be rebuilt in the 1950’s.  But there is still clearly grandeur there – from the Fortress on its hill overlooking the Danube and Sava rivers merging, to the Parliament and the newly restored turn of the 20th century buildings across the city.

I left Zagreb apprehensive about where I was heading.  I left Belgrade wanting to stay longer and visit more of this amazing country.

Fingers crossed for Margate

Many years ago, as a kid, I was taken to Margate for a birthday treat to visit, what was then, Bembom Brothers Theme Park (for the short period in its life when it wasn't Dreamland).  Vividly sticking in my mind, even to this day, was the Scenic railway roller-coaster.

It wasn't the highest or fastest ride in the Park, it didn't loop the loop or induce stomach churning nausea from spinning, but it probably was the scariest.

Scariest because it looked old, and on some of the drops it was just a piece of scaffolding pole resting about 2 inches above your knees that stopped you from flying out of the car, and those two inches meant at times your knee was on the bar and the seat wasn't in contact any longer.

So it’s with sadness over a number of years to have heard, and seen in the news, the slow decline and then closure of park and even the partial damage to the Scenic Roller-coaster in an arson attack.

At the same time the news stories have painted a similar picture for Thanet, a slow, probably terminal decline.

But, perhaps (to abuse a much misquoted statement of Mark Twain), reports of Margate's death have been exaggerated.

Yes, along the seafront there are boarded up arcades and closed down nightclubs.  But perhaps this is just a symptom of the heart of Margate having temporarily shifted to the stunning Turner contemporary gallery.

I wasn't expecting the picturesque Old Town, packed with café’s and retro shops similar to Brighton’s North Laines, but without the hordes of camera wielding tourists (self-excluded), and I certainly wasn't expecting the Tudor House, with the excellent guided tour thrown in.

This wasn't the Margate that the news likes to portray, this was a Margate that is dusting itself down, picking itself up, and hopefully now on its way to restoring its pride.

Yes, until such time as aviation fuel pushes the price of flying off to the Med up so high that the British seaside suddenly becomes the only coastal option, it's unlikely that Margate’s wide sandy beaches will be as thronged as they must have been in the 50’s and 60’s.  But with a growing base of attractions for tourists, and at least a very decent Premier Inn it’s certainly got a lot going for it.

There's even now a real chance that the Scenic Railway can be scaring more children in the future.

Find out more about the campaign to save and restore Dreamland at www.savedreamland.co.uk

More Europe than just the EU

Trying to get a grasp on the number of European institutions located in Strasbourg is complicated enough, if they were all part of the same organisation.

However, as many even European tourists find out, the various institutions based here are not necessarily all part of the same body.

Let’s start with the easy one – the European Parliament Building

This is the giant White Elephant that is used for just 12 weeks of the year because the European Union has it written into treaties that the Parliament (that’s where your local MEP ends up) must sit in Strasbourg 12 times a year for symbolic reasons, and any attempt to remove that clause would just be vetoed by the French on the spot.

This is part of the European Union (or just “Brussels” as the British Press like to portray it).  This part of the EU is the most democratic being entirely elected by 400 Million odd eligible voters of the EU.  This is also the place where Britain sends the people it likes to get rid of for a while (Robert Kilroy-Silk being the obvious example)


Next up is the European Court of Human Rights
This is the bizarre but strangely elegant lopsided cylinders building just down from the Parliament.  This is a noble institution, founded after the Second World War to ensure the human rights of every citizen on the continent is respected by members.  Anyone who has exhausted their home court system can take their case to the ECHR (or as the British Press describe it “Strasbourg” or when a case goes against what the press want – “unelected Euro-judges in Strasbourg imposing their Justice on Britain” – not that British judges are elected, by why let that stand in the way of righteous indignation) to seek a final, binding, ruling – The most recent example in the UK being the blanket ban on prisoners voting being ruled unlawful (it should be noted it’s not unlawful to ban prisoners from voting, just not all prisoners – the rights or wrongs of allowing those people who are likely to be back in society before the end of the next parliament the right to decide their elected representative possibly a vital part of reintegrating people into society – or as certain papers would describe it – woolly liberalism)


Finally we have the Council of Europe
The politest that could be said about the building is that it is distinctive.  I think quite a bit of the design may have been base on, or inspired the design of, Darth Vader’s helmet.

Despite the fact it fly’s the 12 star flag of the EU, it’s not part of the European Union.  In fact it’s a much wider group encompassing some 47 member states including EU refusniks Switzerland and Norway, the minnows of Liechtenstein, San Marino and Andorra (though notably not the Vatican City) and many of the former Soviet nations including Russia, Ukraine and Georgia.

And it’s this institution whose membership comes with the obligation to submit to the European Court of Human Rights.

Confused, you should be!

Perhaps it might be easier to explain the differences between Britain and the UK, then again…

Virgin vs First

Earlier today I was asked in a Tweet where I stood regarding the franchise on the West Coast Main Line.

There has been a lot of press coverage over the decision to award the franchise to First Group over the incumbent Virgin Trains, with the whole process looking like the Government have awarded the franchise based solely on the amount of money that was being offered without taking into consideration that this has not always worked in the past.

As my travels show I am a fairly frequent traveller on Britain’s Railways, and in addition to my journeys on trips I also commute to work by train and regularly travel for work, so have a fair breadth of experience on the niceties of the various train operating companies.

Personally, I am disappointed that Virgin has lost the franchise.  Whenever I’ve travelled with them for work the service has always been excellent, and even on my travels they have scored highly, with just one journey being marked down (and re-reading my review I was probably being a little over harsh with them.)

Virgin does have its faults.  I’m a Virgin Media customer for broadband and TV at home and at times I would happily wrap the telephone cord round Richard Branson’s throat, their service can be patchy and unreliable and when things go wrong they take ages to get fixed (so, in summary as useless as BT)

I always preferred HMV to Virgin for music and if you gave me a choice between BA and Virgin Atlantic I would probably go for BA.

So I’m not enamoured with the Virgin brand, but their trains are something different.

When First ScotRail totally failed with the sleeper service it was the Virgin trains staff at Stafford Station who helped calm everyone down and try to make onward arrangements.

You always get the impression that Virgin train staff actually enjoy their jobs.

That’s not to say that First Group services are all bad.

From recent experience First Hull Trains is an excellent service and I’ve not really got much to hold against First Transpennine express.

First Great Western, when things are working fine, are great – but when they start to have wobbles, you can see how little backup there is.

First ScotRail in general are good, but again, when things go wrong they go spectacularly wrong.  Twice I’ve had the sleeper fail on me and the number of times I’ve had other trains cancelled is pretty high.

Then there’s First Capital Connect.  And this, I think, is the one that really does make me scared for the future of the West Coast Main Line.

I use the Thameslink service quite a bit and it was always pretty useless when it was run by Go-Ahead.  West Anglia Great Northern was regularly called We Are Going Nowhere when it was run by National Express.

These are pretty low baselines to start from, so it was with high-hopes that First Group was awarded the combined Thameslink and Great Northern franchise.

Sadly, from a dire service they’ve actually managed to make it worse.  First Capital Connect is an example of how to run trains for profit rather than customer service.  The trains are dirtier, the carriages more uncomfortable than they were before.  The number of trains they allow to run around absolutely covered in Graffiti that other companies clean off is amazing, it’s almost like they don’t care about the customer experience.

I’d like to think that if First Group do get the franchise that they will bring the Hull Trains level of service to the West Coast, which will match and possibly slightly better Virgins.  However, I fear that it’s three years of First Capital Connect levels of service before First Group do a National Express and decide they can’t be bothered any longer, throw the keys back at the government and walk away.

GNER was an excellent service, they overbid, cut and became so poor that they collapsed and the franchise had to be re-let to National Express who over bid, cut and then walked away from the service.

You would have thought after that the department of transport might have learnt some lessons.

I’m not going to refuse to travel on the West Coast if it is run by First, but I will be quick to complain if the service is anything less than Virgin’s standards.

And yes, I have signed the petition to get the whole fiasco reversed.

Loving the lingua franca

I’m sitting in the bar of the hotel listing to an interesting conversation between a restaurant customer, the lady on reception and the hotel manager.
The conversation is a discussion over whether the hotel should be charging for parking for someone who is just dining in the restaurant rather than staying.

What’s most amazing is that all three are having the conversation in a language other than their mother tongue.

The customer is French (he has stated this fact on at least four occasions “at home in France we do not charge to visit the restaurant”), the lady on reception is Polish, the manager, judging from the accent (and the name on the duty manager board) is German.

Yet they are all having this conversation in English, which means I can listen in and enjoy a rather pompous customer being brought down a peg or two.

His general complaint is that in France you are never charged car parking to visit a hotel restaurant, and has finally escalated to the statement that if the hotel was run by a proper hotel chain this wouldn’t happen.

I’m trying not to laugh, as I’ll give the game away, as I can clearly see both the receptionist and manager are about to leap on this open goal.

It’s at this point I suddenly realise that perhaps English has become a little too pervasive.  The fact that it was automatically the language of choice for the customer when travelling abroad, and the fact that the hotel staff are fluent leaves me feeling a little thick.  After all, I can barely master please and thank you in Polish, let alone attempt to defuse an annoyed patron in another language.

And the punch line.

The hotel is part of the Accor chain.  France’s largest hotel chain

Globalisation in action

With the flexing nature of the borders in this part of the world Wrocław has lead an interesting life (being Breslau for a significant part of it right up to the end of the war)

Today it’s a confidently Polish city, but everywhere I looked I caught glimpses of other cities.

Heading in on the tram we went past a block of buildings with a Nordsee fish bar and Rossmann chemists, both big German chains, and then a little further on a Marks and Spencers next door to a BP garage with a large sign pointing to the Tesco Express on the edge of town.

Oh, and there was a Carrefour.

…due to a fault on the train which cannot be rectified at Aachen

Perhaps the next time my journey to work is disrupted due to a “Failed train at Balham”, I’ll be a little more understanding.

I always thought failed train was a euphemism for “you know what, we can’t actually be bothered”. The sheer number of trains that appear to fail in South London on a daily basis had me wondering how our trains can be so bad, when, for example, the German’s are so reliable.

Except, I found out today, they are not.

Whilst I was sitting on my train in Aachen station waiting to head back to Köln there was a train on the adjacent platform.

It was already 10 minutes late and getting later by the minute, which I’ve discovered is not as rare occurrence as one might have thought on German railways.

After another couple of minutes a member of staff could be seen kicking at something underneath the doors. He stepped back, looked at it, kicked it again, stepped back and repeated for a good six or seven times.

He then walked away and a couple of minutes later returned with several other members of staff. They all took it in turns to kick whatever it was underneath the door, then tried opening and closing the doors.

There was much staring and pointing, and then a decision was made.

30 seconds later there was the sound of an announcement being made in the train, within a few more seconds everyone on board the, pretty busy, train got up and disembarked.

I think that officially makes it a cancellation?