The 60th Adventure

Today I ate my lunch in the ballroom of the Château Laurier.

"220 outstanding senior high school students from across Canada" came to Ottawa this week "in a program designed to develop their potential as leaders in their communities and in Canadian society." Organised by the Rotary Club, this is a scheme which sprang to life sixty years ago and is still going strong. Chris and I are one of the host families co-opted to look after the young "Adventurers in Citizenship" (as they've been called since 1951); this year it was a couple of boys, Lucas from British Columbia and Dennis from Nova Scotia. Had he come from Wales, Dennis might have been known as Dennis-the-Tennis because he's particularly good at that game; he is trying to win a "tennis scholarship" to a university in the States on the strength of his abilities. Lucas is a clarinet and saxophone player. Both are keen historians, courteous, idealistic, intelligent, well-meaning young men who want to have a hand in changing the world (or their part of Canada) for the better. All Chris and I had to do was provide them with bed and breakfast and drive them downtown early in the mornings for four days, picking them up and bringing them home in the evenings; for having done this we were invited to the posh lunch.

The Rotarians in charge of this year's programme sat at the high table to give introductory speeches, telling the assembly that "...we do this for the good of Canada and of our fellow citizens" and that these young people were "a force for good in this world." (And so they are.) It was all very worthy, potent stuff. The Chair of the organising committee who also runs a Conflict Resolution programme said that the point of the young people's political discussions was to learn how to be forgiving of one another for one's disagreements and differences of opinion.

As has been the pattern since 1951, each province was represented by a Young Adventurer who stood up to make a speech about what the experience had meant to him or her. This year, one or two spoke of how exciting it had been to meet the MP Justin Trudeau (son of the former PM). Some, the girl from Prince Edward Island for example, whose ambition was to be a teacher, spoke very fluently. The young Inuit chap representing Nunavut had not made speeches before but was loudly and warmly applauded after each utterance in his not quite perfect English. The other kids particularly liked it (Woop, woop, way to go!) when he said about his four days in Ottawa: "I was shy at first, but now I'm confident!" Like nearly all the others he said he was proud to be Canadian, and the thing he had liked best was yesterday evening's dance at the Crowne Plaza Hotel.

At the end, when we had polished off our white chocolate trifles, drunk our coffees and heard all the speeches, Suzanne Pinel Judge of the Citizenship court (the lady who once swore Chris and me into Canadian citizenship, not to mention thousands of others in Ottawa) came up to the podium to lead the whole gathering in the singing of the National Anthem; it now seems to be the convention to sing the middle part of it in French, so I had better pull my socks up and learn the words:

O Canada, our home and native land!
True patriot love in all thy sons command.
Car ton bras sait porter l'épée,
Il sait porter la croix!
Ton histoire est une épopée
Des plus brillants exploits.
God keep our land glorious and free!
O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.
O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.

We seem to have lost track of our glowing hearts and the True North strong and free, for the sake of a bilingual pride in swords and crucifixes. I might have said something about the significance of that, this week, had I been a not too shy Young Adventurer.

Fleeting memories of Spain and France in April

In and around Barcelona:,

The voice of a cuckoo calling early in the morning. Seagulls, swifts, wagtails, wild parrots squawking in the trees. Cats and dogs. Poplars, just coming into leaf, cherry trees in bloom, crepe myrtle. Twisted pine trees, wild cacti and palms.

Smoked hams hanging in the carnisserias. Frutas y flores on the street corners. Fresh bread and pastries, good coffee, tapas. Free bottles of agua mineral with every meal.

A crowd of African men carrying their belongings in blankets down the tunnels in the metro.

In Paris:

Pale sandstone houses, wrought iron balconies, shutters, chimneys. A hodgepodge of bikes, motorbikes and small cars parked at random. Wicker chairs and small round café tables edged with chrome. Little dogs.

Graffiti. The pervasive smell of tobacco and coffee.

Rumble of the metro and the clunk of the train doors. Accordion and saxophone players, the African voices of street sellers.

Tartines with jam for breakfast.

Eyjafjallajökull

I see that the good old Wikipedia already has a fulsome entry concerning the effects of the volcanic eruption in Iceland. Click here.

Not the "Scream"

There's a very good introduction to the exhibition I saw at the Pinacothèque, opposite the Madeleine in Paris, on this webpage. If you click on the Culturebox video, you can access an audio-visual commentary on it, too.

In these galleries were 170 of the rarely exhibited paintings, sketches, drawings and lithographs which the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch refused to sell. The famous "Scream" (Skrik) was not part of this exhibition although its mood was all-prevalent. Solitude, fear, despair: those were Munch's themes.

Despite the fact that his mother had died of TB when he was five years old and his sister of the same disease at the age of fourteen, his earliest paintings, first exhibited in the 1880s, were not so grim, more like the impressionist landscapes of the Parisians he met when he went to France (Nice, St.Cloud) as a young man. There is a woman in a blue dress (painted in 1891) beside a fjord, who at first glance looks like a Renoir, except that her red hat anticipates Munch's Madonna paintings and that the black shadow she casts has a menacing aspect. He became obsessed with the Madonna image five years later and in this exhibitions were four versions of it, lithographs with wild swirls for the eyes and breasts and with a ghost like foetal child in the bottom left hand corner of two of them.

There were sad images from his past, such as the Souvenir d'Enfance, a drawing in crayons (back view) of his mother holding him, as a child, by the hand, and of course the series of "sick child" drawings and paintings from the mid 1890s. Mostly, however, it was his unhealthy sex life that absorbed him to the extent of driving him crazy. I found etchings of a naked woman holding (squeezing?) a heart that was dripping blood over her feet, of a vampire woman, of a harpy. Not difficult to grasp the meaning of those. Baudelaire's great poem La Chevelure was mentioned in the exhibition notes. There's the life-size, crouching, Weeping Nude in oils of 1914, her face hidden by her hair, and a Baiser sur les cheveux (1915). Sin (Le Péché) was a woman with long, deshevelled hair, bare breasts, staring blue eyes and a grim expression, and in 1930 he was still painting canvasses like this: the Femme allongée les cheveux défaits (the same woman as in the Madonna pictures, by the look of her).

I suppose Munch must have tried to perk himself up from time to time by trying to paint something less negative, the four embracing couples in the park on a Summer Night, or the lithograph of a Van-Gogh-like starry night, or the famous Dance of Life (for which I saw a sketch in coloured crayons) with its white moon reflected in the water in the disturbing shape of a crucifix (this image appears in many of Munch's pictures). There was also a winter landscape very like those of the Canadian painter Emily Carr and in the last gallery of the exhibition a Manteau Bleu au Soleil, an almost cheerful picture of a woman facing forward in a sunny spot. But more typically, his work is gloomy. Five versions of Solitaires (a man and a woman standing apart, back view, staring out to sea from a rocky beach) were shown in the exhibition, in different colour combinations. Munch's self portraits were not normal either, being entitled Self Portrait with the 'flu, Self Portrait with bottle (he was an alcoholic), S P in bed, S P with beard, etc. and in the Despair of Alpha series it seemed he had completely flipped into madness, with Alpha being himself, presumably, a screaming (!) naked man, ditto being devoured or killed by beasts, Alpha drowning Omega... Omega was his female counterpart, a naked woman, pictured with a donkey, with a pig or (very young) with a big bear (representing death, most likely, Der Tod und das Mädchen) or, on a sick bed, with a devouring tiger. Again the crucifix/moon image in these pictures. They were fascinating, but not very pleasant.

Even ostensibly conventional pictures by Munch turn out, on closer inspection, to have disturbing qualities. The unfinished (?) portrait of Inger Barth (1921) has dribbles of paint running down over her hands. Munch was decades ahead of his time. Or the titles are a give-away. A portrait of Laura, 1920, is subtitled Melancholy and a canvas showing a man welcoming a woman to his house, she carrying a posy of pretty flowers, is entitled Marat and Charlotte Corday! Presumably the posy conceals a dagger.

By the way, I recently listened to a BBC podcast (in the In our Time series, chaired by Melvyn Bragg) of an informative discussion about Munch, recommended.

As if that weren't enough for me I took a look at the other exhibition in the Pinacothèque as well, a slightly ironic tribute to the Munch oeuvre, created this year by Bedri Baykam, an artist from Ankara: 4-D Lenticulaires it was called, being a large scale compilation of holograms and photographs of the Munch pictures and other familiar images (by Toulouse Lautrec, for instance) deliberately distorted and juxtaposed by parallax shift. I was too exhausted to give the pieces these attention they deserved, but they were impressive, and clever.

After seeing the two exhibitions I cleared my mind of melancholy images in the brightness of the Tuilleries gardens between Place de la Concorde and the Louvre looking at the classical white statues (Demeter, though, the Goddess of Summer, had lost a hand) and took a seat in the Café Renard "depuis 1905"—I bet they didn't charge €3.20 for a café noisette in those days, although I did get a little square of black chocolate with it, served by an obsequious waiter wearing a black waistcoat.

Rue du Havre

On April 21st, in Paris, I made a pilgrimage to the rue du Havre in honour of Paul Guimard's novel, Rue du Havre, set at that location in the 1950s. I first read the book in 1981 or thereabouts, coming across it by chance in a second hand bookshop in the arcades of Bern. Not able to get the story out of my head, seven or eight years later I set about translating it into English, and it is still a favourite of mine. The week after next I am going to give a talk about this and about Guimard's other books. While I was in the neighbourhood of the rue du Havre I took photographs of the places mentioned in the book: Here, for example, is the first mention of the eponymous street:

En quittant la Cour de Rome, Julien Legris se laissa porter par la foule vers la rue du Havre...

[...] Devant Julien, comme devant une borne, défilait une humanité indifférente, hétéroclite, que jour après jour il avait appris à déchiffrer, à connaître et, faute de mieux, à aimer. En dix années de station immobile, il avait levé les masques de beaucoup de ces robots qui, à d'invariables heures, le frôlaient sans le voir.

It touched me to find beggars in the very spot where the pathetic, lonely old man in the book, Julien Legris, stands watching the people who pass by. The Lycée de Concordet, the school for boys, is still there as well.

Le dernier retardaire de Concordet, le front lourd de racines cubiques mal digérées, franchit la triste porte du lycée. La grande hâte du matin s'apaisa. Les courants de la rue du Havre, qui débordait sur la chaussé, rentrèrent sagement dans le lit des troittoirs. Les premiers flâneurs apparurent.

Here's a view looking down the rue du Havre from the front of the railway station, the Gare Saint-Lazare.

Nul ne gîte à Saint-Lazare. C'est un quartier de passe...

The station clock is an all-important element in the narrative...

Absorbé par son exploration de la foule, Julien avait oublié la grande horloge de Saint-Lazare.

And like the writer Paul Guimard, the artist who designed this tower of clocks outside the station also seems to have been obsessed with the tyrrany of time.

—Je vous en prie, dit Julien, donnez-moi encore six minutes...

I went into the station building to pay hommage to the platforms and the trains.

Les banlieusards mériterait qu'une fois dans leur vie le train biquotidien, oubliant qu'il n'est qu'un moyen de transport, leur offre le miracle d'um vrai voyage [...] A huit heures quarante et une, François descendit sur le quai de la gare Saint-Lazare [...] Le train de Catherine ralentit pour entrer en gare.

At the end of the story, a little girl, or deus ex machina, inadvertently changes the destiny of three people. She lives in one of the houses above the street.

Au cinquième étage ... une petite fille rousse de trois ans, nommée Constance, s'éveilla de mauvaise humeur ... Elle passa en revue les sottises assez insignes pour apaiser ses ressentiments.

(Incidentally the writer's own daughter is called Constance. I have just discovered her website!) After studying the station and the rue du Havre, I extended my pilgimage to the neighbouring territory, the famous department stores.

Les trottoirs du boulevard Haussmann, du côté des grands magasins, ploient sous le poids des passants... Dans cette foule qui n'est que regards, j'ai le sentiment épuisant de n'être pas d'ici.

I took a look inside the Galeries Lafayette where the young man in the novel, François, works as a window dresser, to take a look at his environment.

Moi, obscur desservant de ce temple où la civilisation de mon temps rassemble ses merveilles, j'en ornais paisiblement l'une des chapelles qu'on nomme ici vitrine. Mais aujourd'hui, je vois enfin les fidèles dans leur cathédrale et le tableau est fabuleux.

And I ate a sandwich in the little nearby square where Julien also sits to eat his meagre lunch, in Chapter 2.

Les oasis sont rares dans ce quartier sans loisirs et Julien appréciait les verdures du square Louis-XIV ... tel qu'il est, ce jardinet mélancholique permet une halte en marge de la frénésie du boulevard Haussmann. Julien s'assit sur un banc familier, face à la chapelle expiatoire consacrée à la mémoire du pauvre roi-serrurier, et commença son repas.

It is still exactly as the book describes. At the end of the novel two of the main characters symbolically move away from that part of the city which has kept them captive.

En arrivant au carrefour du boulevard Haussmann ils n'amorcèrent pas le mouvement qui les eût séparés, François à gauche, Catherine à droite. Ils continuèrent de marcher vers la Madeleine ...

Eventually, so did I.

Flying home

These next few blogposts are not going to be posted in the correct chronological order. Never mind. I wrote this one by hand, 38000ft above sea level somewhere over Labrador which was still white and frozen. I had forgotten about winter.

Today has been as confusingly multicultural as the rest of my recent days. I began the day skimming through the 104 pages of The Daily Mail (I had no choice of paper) over a very English breakfast in the Roebuck pub lounge and chatting to Terry, the landlord. Then round to Emma's place to say goodbye where, with Alexander on my lap, we watched an old episode of Bagpuss (1974) and where I overheard Sha talking excitedly to her mother on a Skype call to Beijing in Mandarin Chinese.

George and I didn't say goodbye in quite the way we'd imagined because when my bus arrived at the bus stop he was about to help a handicapped lady across the road.

I had a French-style breakfast Chez Gérard in the departure lounge at Heathrow, not quite of the same quality as my breakfasts in Paris, alas, while reading a few more chapters of Benoîte Groult's novel La Touche Etoile.

On the 'plane I heard some Mozart on the iPod as we took off, then watched The White Ribbon, the much talked-about black and white film in German, and Pedro Almodovar's Broken Embraces in Spanish, that latter film being particularly good.

Leaving Barcelona for Paris

Yesterday George and Sha travelled on to England in the Eurostar seats they'd booked earlier. Before they left me in Paris, I too managed to reserve a seat on the London train, but not that one. Mine leaves on Friday. It took me a nerve wracking hour to make this booking on the Eurostar website; it was so overloaded that the pages kept blanking out. I believe mine was one of the last available seats, because when I went to the Gare du Nord to pick up my printed reservation card, a notice board said: no more seats available this week. I have been very lucky. I also have an Air Canada seat on the flight from London to Ottawa next Sunday. That one took me two hours' research, trial and error, using George's laptop in my hotel room in the middle of the night.

When we realised that both our flights were cancellada we made the big decision to rent a car (little Ford Fiesta, again, practically the last vehicle available from Hertz, costing over 1000 Euros) and take the road to Paris instead. We couldn't find a road map at the airport so set off very vaguely towards the only other city I'd heard of on the signposts, Girona, which I assumed was in the right direction. It was, but the road took us right through the centre of Barcelona, a tough start indeed for George in a car he wasn't at all used to. I wasn't able to take over since I've never learned how to drive with manual geers, so did my best to help with the navigation. Sha couldn't drive either, as her Chinese driver's licence is treated with suspicion over here. Anyway, we passed the city's bull ring (Plaza de Toros) and a giant architectural "gherkin" like the one in London and finally found ourselves, as if by magic, beyond the city on the correct road, Autopista 7. The speed limit was 130 kph until at various points we had to stop to pay a toll (scrabbling for coins in our purses). We stopped at the first service station we came to and bought a map of Francia (France).

After the Guardia Civil had waved us through the border in the Pyrennees, 30 km south of Perpignan, we paid another toll to get off the motorway, drove down some little roads across the salt flats (flamingos advertised, but we didn't see any) and stopped for a short walk in the sand on a Mediterranean beach at Port-la-Nouvelle near Narbonne. Driving on, we stayed overnight at a little 2-star hotel in Béziers, the Hotel de France. There was an Hotel d'Angleterre there too with 3 stars, but we didn't come across that one until later when we were walking around the old town under a crescent moon, near the floodlit fountains in the main square. Next morning we headed north through the vineyards (just coming into leaf) in the direction of Clermont Ferrand, crossing the beautiful Massif Central, 1000m above sea level, and the highest viaduct in the world, the Viaduc de Millau over the River Tarn. There too we stopped for a walk, parking at the Aire du Viaduc and impressive visitors' centre to climb a steep hill dotted with Alpine flowers for a view of the whole bridge.

Lunch in the Auvergne was at a nice grill house just off the road, with pine trees around us, and after that point the surroundings gradually became more and more northern, lambs, calves and windfarms beside the road. As we approached Paris, we became increasingly nervous. With no adequate map of the Paris roads, would we be able to find our way around the city to the northern side where we knew the Charles de Gaulle was situated? Actually they call it Roissy here, confusing, to say the least. I was sitting in front as navigator for this last stretch and decided that at each spaghetti junction we should simply follow the signposts to Lille, as the airport seemed to be more or less adjacent to the A1 to Lille. We got stuck in a traffic jam for a long time, but the plan worked; only as we got much closer to our destination did we see a signpost that actually said Charles de Gaulle airport, mind. We stopped just short (on now deserted approach roads, the airport being closed!) to fill the tank before returning our vehicle and when I got out of the car I found I was shaking with tension. We found the place to deposit our car and walked into an empty terminal, extraordinary.
Fortunately, the trains to the city were still running. After a couple of failed attempts I managed to call the hotel to let them know we were late, but still intending to arrive. We shared a carriage with a group of young men trying in vain to reach various other parts of Europe, then feeling exhausted and shaky I sat on a wall at the Gare du Nord with Sha while George stood with the luggage in the queue for our taxi. Once I was in my room (at the IBIS Bastille-Opera) I began to recover and came downstairs for a very late buffet supper at the hotel, while the other two set out to find a meal in the neighbourhood.

There's an album of my photos of the journey on Facebook.