Monday, September 29, 2008

About food


I enjoy my food. In fact I’m a little suspicious of people who don’t.

Of course I should preface what I’m about to write by recognizing that there are many people in this world confronted with starvation, so anything I say may sound flippant. However, “About being here” is about life as I experience it. As an affluent Westerner I am in the privileged position of being able to take the availability of food for granted. So for me food is a question not of survival but of choice.

I reached the view at quite a young age that the secret to enjoying life is first of all to enjoy the basic functions of life. First among these of course is eating. If you can arrange to eat well and enjoy your food, then that is an important step towards enjoying life. Most of the time I can choose what I eat, mainly because I eat most of my meals at home and when I eat out I’m usually somewhere where the food is good. In fact it’s quite rare that I feel I have eaten badly. Indeed I sometimes say, “Life is too short to eat crap”. I certainly spend no more than 10% of my income on food and drink, so there seems to be little point in skimping. That doesn’t mean that I am forever indulging expensive tastes, rather that I believe it’s worth paying a bit extra for better quality.

I would regard my diet as healthy. On the rare occasions I consume something to excess my body immediately demands that I compensate by being more frugal the next few days. If I have been taking a lot of exercise it demands a bigger intake. I just follow my natural instincts, I believe in neither forcing myself nor resisting my desires. I think my body is good at regulating itself, I am generally in good health and my weight remains stable. I am instinctively drawn to balanced food choices. It just happens to be what I like.
I frequently have a voracious appetite, which is viewed with envy by people who put on weight easily . But I don’t actually eat the same things that they eat. I do exercise a fair bit and I have also the following explanation as to why my body demands so much food: I once saw a BBC animal documentary that explained that an orang-utan expends 40% of its energy (and therefore food consumption) on merely keeping it’s brain running - so just think how much energy I need!

The business of food takes up quite a large part of our daily life. First of all there is the shopping, then the preparing, only then the eating together and finally the clearing up afterwards. Even if you eat out there is often the sitting about waiting. If you add it all up that’s quite a big chunk out of every day; so it better be good.

There are two very important aspects to eating. Perhaps even more important than the quality of the food itself, there is the sharing of food. I find few things sadder than eating alone, however good the food is. At home we have always insisted that the main meal of the day, usually in the evening, be taken together. This sharing of food is a fundamental moment in human society. Originally, in subsistence communities, it required joint work to produce and prepare food and the natural consequence was then to eat that food together. This is why Christianty, which has borrowed so many of its key images from the pagans before it, makes Communion so central to its rituals. The family meal is a natural moment of sharing and is at the heart of the human experience.

If truth be told, in our household Clara does more on the food front than I do. She does most of the shopping, but we do enjoy going to our local market together on Saturday morning if we have nothing else on. It has now moved back onto Place Flagey (now the works have finished) after several glorious years of being alongside the lakes, a much prettier venue in my opinion. I’ve always loved a real market. When I lived in Toulouse I did pretty well all my food shopping at the market which was held six days a week on the side of one of the boulevards. The sheer physicality of the food on display in a market is a joy - the sight, the smells, the touch (if they let you!). It’s great to follow the seasons and to compare stalls which is the true spirit of a market as used as a term in economics. Wherever I travel I like to visit a local food market (Barcelona, Riga, Istanbul have some good ones in recent memory).
We stroll down to ours on foot and buy mainly fruit and vegetables, but also anything else that catches our fancy, cheeses, bread, Italian specialities and more. I need to say at this point that we buy very little processed food and tend to cook ourselves from raw ingredients. The locally grown organic greens at the market are particularly good. I’m not an organic fanatic, I’ve worked in too many regulatory committee meetings on organic food to believe in paying unduly over the odds for all manner of fancily packaged goods at the supermarket just because they have a “bio” label. However, I like to buy naturally and locally grown stuff as it tastes objectively better and has a more satisfying texture.

I don’t cook as often as Clara does, but I do at least twice a week. We also have Mme Jacobs to do some meals. When I do cook, I like to shop for my own ingredients as that’s a large part of the fun and I may only decide on the menu in the light of what looks good. I usually take charge of the Sunday roast and the Friday evening fish. It also seems natural (as it appears to be a male thing) that I tend the barbecue in the summer. Having lived with an Italian for over two decades I knock out a pretty mean pasta too.
When I did youth camps I used to direct, from the chopping board and stove, cooking for forty people or more, so it’s not something I worry about. I find cooking, admittedly when not done too often, a therapeutic and relaxing manual activity which produces a result that can be enjoyed together. I have some loud-speakers rigged up in the kitchen to listen to music whilst at it. We have a basic rule in our household that the one who hasn’t prepared the meal clears up. I think the division of labour is reasonably fair.
I’m lucky in that Clara likes cooking and is good at it. She tends to experiment more than me. We have fairly similar tastes, inevitably so I suppose, having eaten together for so long. I guess you’d call the dominant style at home Italian/French. I mainly learned to cook by helping friends in their kitchens in France. Belgian cooking (that’s Mme Jacobs) is really a version of French. We favour a fairly simple approach, letting the ingredients speak for themselves.
Olive oil features fairly prominently. At present we have some on the go that we brought back from Croatia pressed the old way from the olives of our hosts on Hvar.
I went off too much butter and cream in cooking after I had hepatitis in 1989; my liver just didn’t feel like them any more. I actually have never liked milk by itself. I was put off it for life by the third pint bottles we were forced to drink at school as kids in England. In the winter the milk had ice flakes in it and in the summer rather nasty floaters. My friendship with Lari started in primary school because he would drink it for me. On the other hand I adore cheese in pretty well most forms.

The culinary landscape in England has changed radically since I was a boy. I get particularly annoyed with escpecially French people who continue to think that you can’t get a good meal in England. That’s just not true these days. However, back in the 60’s and 70s it was pretty dire. I was fortunate in that my mother only arrived in England from the East in her teens, so she never had much time for “traditional” English cooking. We always ate very well at home and visiting friends were sometimes shocked by the rather cosmopolitan dishes on offer. I don’t remember any coercion about eating, it was regarded as something to be enjoyed and as I got older I gradually progressed onto a wider range of tastes. My father never cooked (nor did I), but when he felt mum deserved a break he would take us out to a restaurant.
When I first moved away from home I lived in the countryside in the Gers in the South-West of France. The cooking there was wonderful and quite unpretentious. Here I first experienced meals that could last for up to four hours and long conversations at table about....food.
Afterwards, when a student, eating in Hall at Christ Church, despite the grand surroundings and great company, was from the point of view of the food itself truly abysmal, but I returned sufficiently often home and to France so as not to mind too much.
It was when living for a year in Germany that I got so fed up with the repetitive fare that I actually started to cook for myself in the light of what I had observed in France.
Since then I’ve really come to enjoy it and become gradually more proficient. The kitchen is the biggest and most important room in our house. It’s also where we eat, so those at the table are aware of the preparation of food.

Apart from when we’re on holiday, we don’t tend to go out to restaurants much, even if there’s no shortage of good ones in Brussels and plenty within walking distance. I guess we are happy to stay at home having been out at work most of the day. In the summer we eat outside on our terrace as often as possible (not that that counts for so many days in the year!). I also have to eat out at restaurants when away for work and at some meetings we are served the same food as those we work for (especially ministerial lunches where the wine tends to be good). It’s true that after a run of restaurant-style food it’s nice to have something simpler at home. Restaurants never serve enough vegetables and fresh fruit in my experience.
When we do eat out together it’s surprising how often Clara and I spontaneously choose the same dish. After we may agree to try two different things and swap half way through. The real interest in eating in a restarant is after all to try things that we don’t know how to make or can’t be bothered to go through the effort to prepare ourselves. That”s also the big interest of course in ethnic restaurants. When in another country I try to eat local, but admit in some countries to having been so bored with the food after a week, I’ve resorted to foreign restaurants.

I’ve always been unable to answer the question “what is your favourite dish?” or at least since I was about nine. It’s just too reductive. Variety is the spice of life. It’s great to eat different things and that is the key to a balanced diet.
Regards the other question: “is there any food you don’t like?” my habitual answer is “tripe”. I can’t think of anything more repulsive. I was last confronted with some in Spain a few years back when Jo, who is Flemish, had mistakenly heard “callo” as “gallo”. This was forgiveable given the thick accent of the dishevelled landlord in this seedy tapas bar in a real hick town in central Spain. Jo thought he was ordering chicken. But it was tripe. I valliantly tried to eat some. The first mouthful refused to go down and shot straight back out of my throat. Gross! - fortunately we were sitting outside.

So what do I eat?
I shall attempt to approach this scientifically in broad categories.
I believe anyone who does a reasonable amount of physical activity should eat lots of carbohydrates as that’s the basic fuel for the body. I eat plenty of bread, preferably brown but I enjoy a crispy fresh baguette. As in France and Italy there is always bread on our table and it is handy for finishing off a good sauce.
I eat a huge amount of pasta which can be prepared in an infinite number of ways (“pesto, matriciana, ragù, tonno, zucchini, salmone” to name the more common ones at home). Then there’s potatoes in their many forms: new ones in their skins, chopped small in with the roast and less often large baked ones or home-made mash - and of course chips, when out. I love rice and eat it every day without any problem when in Asia, but at home perhaps not so often, either in risotto or basmati. I don’t like maize so much and eat polenta under sufferance.

As for protein, I don’t eat vast quantities of meat and certainly don’t insist on it at every meal, but I do enjoy a good piece of red meat in roasts, steaks, and chops; liver; poultry (stuffed quail with grapes is one of my signature dishes); game in a good sauce; ham cooked and cured; sausages if not too fatty etc - all available from our excellent butcher round the corner at la Royale.
I eat fish at least twice a week and more often at the seaside. I’m particularly fond of it grilled or done in the oven, most often at home it’s bream or bass but sometimes other fish. Seafood is more of a treat, eaten less regularly. I love a lobster but can live without oysters. A generous fish stew, paella or pasta alla scogliera are among my favourites.
I’ve already mentioned I eat lots of cheese. As an Englishman I have an abiding liking for tangy mature cheddar and Wensleydale, but I also love goat’s cheese, feta, Roquefort, Morbier, Comté, Parmesan and many more - anything with a bit of taste really.

Vegetables should be present in generous quantities at any main meal and not cooked to death so they retain their texture (steaming and stir-frying are handy). Peppers, courgettes, aubergines, tomatoes (ratatouille and peperonata); carrots; beans (especially green), pulses generally (lentils, chick peas), brassica a bit less (broccoli is fine, cabbage ok stuffed); onions and garlic frequently when preparing dishes, leeks; fennel; leafy stuff, spinach, chicory (popular in Belgium as “chicons”) etc etc, There’s so much to enjoy (I don’t like beetroot though). Let us not forget the joy of raw veg in salads too, all the different kinds of lettuce and rocket. I should make a special mention of mushrooms which we like to pick wild in season (boletus mainly), then fry lightly in olive oil with garlic and parsley.

I also eat lots of fruit: apples and pears (fine with cheese); citrus (oranges, clementines, grapefruit - I even ate lemons as a child); prunus (peaches, nectarines, apricots, plums and especially cherries); berries (strawberries, raspberries, bilberries, blackberries); grapes (I remeber my first real grape in France - the intense perfume of muscat, quite unlike anything I’d experienced as a child in England); melons (cavaillon, honeydew, water); tropical fruit (pineapple, mangoes, bananas, papaya). Freshly made fruit salad is fine too. I think it’s good to respect the seasonality of fruit, if only because it simplifies the choice.
Fruit is especialy beautiful to look at with its bright colours and round forms. It’s not surprising that it’s a favourite choice for artists when painting still lives. That’s why I’ve chosen fruit to illustrate this piece.
Let’s not forget nuts here (just peanuts, but better pistacchios, cashews, wallnuts).

If it’s not just fruit then I enjoy simple home made cakes for desserts. I like to make crumbles myself. I always prefer a little vanilla ice cream on the side to real cream. I’m also quite partial to the Eastern Mediterranean baklava and the like (I always bring a box-full back with me from the countries where it is a speciality). Chocolate, a great Belgian institution must also be mentioned here (Godiva, Marcolini and just plain Cöte d’Or).

I always make a point of having a decent breakfast and a large one if there’s any risk of lunch not appearing till the middle of the afternoon (in Spain, up a mountain, in some meetings). I like to vary it but often it’s a combination of cereals, dairy product and fruit: toast, butter and jam; bread, feta and tomatoes; porridge made with milk (great in the winter or before climbing a mountain) flavoured with cinammon and honey and a freshly squeezed orange juice on the side; muesli with milk with some fresh fruit chopped into it. When away at a hotel with a good buffet breakfast, I enjoy having something of everything.
I tend to prefer my lunch light and usually cycle home to eat it. It may be just cheese or cold cuts with a salad, or a soup in winter. Sometimes there are left-overs from yesterday’s dinner. Incidentally, we’re great believers in recycling left-overs and not wasting anything - it’s somehow disrespectful to throw away food.. If I have too much at lunch I need a siesta, which is extremely pleasant and a feature of my holidays, but a bad plan if I have to work in the afternoon. If I don’t come home I often make do with just a sandwich.
Dinner is usually my main meal and one I like to take time over. I like to accompany it with wine. Unless we’re entertaining it’s usually a two course affair, a main, which could be for example meat or fish with a carbo and a veg, or a large pasta or risotto and a simple dessert, which could be just fruit. If I’m hungry I lay into the cheese before the dessert.

In short, I eat pretty well everything (apart from tripe) and seek variety, but expect my food to be well prepared from quality ingredients. In this way I enjoy my food and that helps me feel pretty good about life in general.

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

About mountains


I manage to spend about four weeks a year in the mountains, mainly in the Alps, two in the winter and spring for skiing and two in the summer for walking and climbing. Even without any physical activity to engage in, I just enjoy being in the mountains. I love the spectacular scenery, the peace and quiet, the clean air, the contact with nature. Just being there makes me feel good.
The mountains were for me a natural progression from the moors which were close to home in Ilkley and which I used to roam as a child and teenager. Real mountains were just bigger and better. When I was 18 and working at a school in the South West of France we went down to the Pyrenees on a couple of occasions and I started to discover the potential of mountains in a way I had not experienced merely riding up them in a funicular or cable-car as I had done once on a school trip to Switzerland.
What really hooked me was my first Alpine summit reached just on foot, the modest Morgon (2324m) above Lake Serre-Ponçon. It was 1981. I had been invited to the tiny romanesque Abbey of Boscodon by a friend, Didier Bonin, who I’d been working with on a youth camp that summer, to help out barrowing for an archeological dig. One morning before starting our chores we climbed the local mountain, Morgon, in time for sunrise. It was breathtakingly beautiful. Another day we got up early to help some shepherds move a large flock of sheep from the pastures on one side of a mountain over a pass to another. Aimé the local in his 60’s who had invited us to come along was going up and down much faster than us. At 11 o’clock he produced a bottle of red wine some bread and tough-looking raw ham to refresh us. As we could see maggots moving in the ham we settled for just the wine.

A few years later Jon Day and I began to organize our youth camps not far from there in the Queyras region in the Southern French Alps. Over the years we did seven camps round there, mainly at Brunissard, so I got to know the area quite well. The Queyras Alps are not very high, only occasionally reaching 3000m but they are blessed with many days of sunshine in a year. They are great for hiking that is technically not difficult but can be challenging and rewarding. I used to lead groups of teenagers over quite long routes sometimes camping wild at altitude by streams.
Jon Day and I also used to spend Christmas and New Year with other friends not far from here in two fairly primitive chalets near the Oisans, Clot Raffin (with the most fantastic view of la Meije) and les Rochas. One had no electricity, the other no running water, both were twenty minutes uphill from where we parked. Ostensibly there to do some skiing, we in fact spent most of our time just being in the mountains fending for ourselves. If there wasn’t much snow for skiing, walking was an equally welcome alternative. I remember going to fetch milk in the village of le Chazelet from the Mathonnet family who kept the key. to the chalet When you walked in the cows were immediately to the left of the entrance corridor, and to the right was the kitchen in which everything seemed to take place and where the grandfather had his bed. These are scenes from a previous age, sadly disappearing.


I also know the Queyras from ski de rando in springtime. I have described ski touring (as it can be called in English) in “About skiing”. Ski touring is a form of winter moutaineering. You climb the mountain without any infrastructure and you ski back down it without any “pistes”. In this way you are in full contact with the real mountain. The mountains actually are quite inhospitable in winter (and spring at altitude), but they can be stunningly beautiful covered in snow with crisp visibility and remarkable silence. It’s in the winter that you really appreciate the comfort of a hut. (Huts or refuges are a chapter in themselves, which I won’t write this time)..
For years I went in groups with guides organized by UCPA a French outdoor sports association. I have always had a great group experience when doing ski de rando. People of different ages, from different backgrounds and of different abilities, but sharing the same motivation and patience seem to gel effortlessly. That coming together through the shared activity, the relative safety in numbers when confronted with the vastness of nature, the grinning and bearing it together, the elation of achieving goals together, while at the same time feeling in a way humbled by the whole scale of it, all instill a very special and deeply human cameraderie - a quite non-intellectual intensity of being.
I also once did a basic mountaineering skills course with UCPA at Chamonix involving “schools” as the French put it of rock, snow and ice, learning about ropes, crampons and ice-axes. At the end of the week it was all then put into practice on l’Aiguille du Tour (3540m), which we climbed in crampons over the glacier and up the scrambly rock. It was in cloud. Fortunately for me I’d already been up it a year or two before on a blue sky day, having approached it on skis - a better option in my opinion, not least for getting back down to the valley. It was only much later that I returned to really high mountains in the summer with Alex who is rather partial to a glacier.


In the meantime, summer mountains were more a family holiday affair. Clara was keen that I should discover the Alps in Italy and suggested we go to the area where a friend of hers had once been a school-teacher: the Comelico around Santo Stefano di Cadore. So in 1999 we ended up staying in a hamlet called Gera in the house of Ave Sacco and have been going regularly ever since for a week or so in July. The Comelico is a holiday destination for Italian families from the North East (our case too) a couple of hours or so drive away from the often unbearble summer heat down on the plain. It has a nice, laid-back, uncommercial and very Italian feel to it. Gera itself is small and off the main road a few minutes up the valley from Santo Stefano. It is situated on a flat area at the confluence of two mountain rivers, the Padola and Digon, which are the noisiest things in this peaceful environment. It’s only at 1000m so it’s not at all harsh and pleasantly warm in the evenings. I’ve really come to love it as a spot and instantly feel relaxed on arriving.
Gera is well placed for everything from a gentle family stroll through picture postcard scenery to quite difficult high altitude hikes and ferrata routes, not to mention some good moutain-biking. On the west side of the valley rise the spectacular Sexten Dolomites and their forbidding tortuous rocky peaks, while on the east side towards the Austrian border there are gentler grassy summits that are easier to walk up .
It was great this summer after so many years to show the area to Jon Day and his family . Even better was then to go off for a day with Jon like old times, but also with Thomas, to do Punta Fiscalina (2675m) from Val Fiscalino (1450m) near the Tre Cime. After the summit we just made it to Locatelli hut as a colossal storm broke. We watched the lightning play and listened to the thunder roll for over an hour from the shelter of the terrace as we ate lunch and sat huddled close to keep warm. Once the storm had passed the clarity of the views, the beauty of the light, the freshness of the air, the relief it was over and we could start walking again, all combined into an almost ecstatic feeling, an intense joy at being alive and being where we were.
One of my all time favourite Alpine hikes is the tour of the Tre Cime di Lavaredo. You cheat by driving up to over 2000m and then enjoy an unending spectacle during a moderate 4 hour walk.
As in many parts of the Italian Alps along the old border with Austria there are routes to explore round here made by soldiers in the Great War. Some of these are the original examples of the via ferrata where cables, metal rods and even ladders were placed to help soldiers over difficult passages to strategic positions and look-outs. The first ferrata route I ever did was with Thomas, as a side trip to the Tre Cime tour. It begins with a long staircase inside a tunnel (like something out of Lord of the Rings) emerging through a window in the rock onto a ledge from which departs a cable to clip onto for protection as you climb the rock towards the summit of Monte Paterno (2744m). We came back to do the summit on a second trip with proper equipment, the first time we continued a long a series of natural and man-made ledges below it back to the main walking route.




It was in 2000 flying back from the Nice summit that Alex noticed I was studying the Alps out of the window, looking for landmarks in the Queyras, and we got into conversation about mountains. Shortly after he asked me to go indoor climbing with him and so started a regular shared activity which led to our annual three to four day outings in the summer in the Alps, often on the border between Italy and Austria. We have climbed some pretty high summits but also we’ve done a fair bit of what Alex calls “pointless moutaineering” where we don’t actually get to the top of anything significant, as the initial project turns out to be too ambitious or the weather not good enough.
The spirit of these trips is epitomized by last year’s one to the Stubai Alps. As we were coming from Gera we walked up the Italian side; most people come up the shorter route from the Austrian side using a cable car. So starting at 1450m we had set ourselves a pointlessly long ascent which we split with a first night in a hut. By lunch on the second day we reached the Becherhütte at 3190m perched on top of a rocky outcrop surrounded by glaciers. It is nicknamed the Wolkenschloss or “cloud castle” and promptly lived up to its name as we disappeared into fog; it even started to hail. The best plan seemed to be to go to sleep which we did quite blissfully in our cozy little wooden bedroom. About 4pm we went back outside and saw that the nearby Wilder Freiger (3418m) was emerging from the cloud. It looked promising. Quickly we got ready and set off up the rocky ridge. As the sky steadily cleared we were rewarded with stunning views of the glaciers below and the peaks all around. It was a beautiful summit. No sooner had we got back to the hut after two hours out than the weather closed in again. The evening was enlivened by a group of young locals from the Südtirol who sang with great gusto and some humour.
The next day it was still cloudy so we decided to abandon our objective of Zuckerhüterl, which would have meant traversing a glacier in the fog, and set off back down. As we were in no particular hurry we made many pauses. It was fantastic to appreciate the gradually changing scenery as we descended over 1700m. Rocks snow and ice with vistas of glaciers and morraine lakes gradually started to give way to grass and roaring torrents. Later, as we dropped in stages into seemingly new valleys, there appeared the first cows and trees. Finally we were treated to a superb series of waterfalls in a wooded valley. At every hut and watering hole we met the jolly young crew from the previous evening who seemed to have adopted a similar leisurely pace to ourselves.
Alex and I share the same motivations and enjoy each other’s company. These little expeditions have really deepened our friendship.




This summer we went to Slovenia to do Triglav (2864m) the highest peak in the Julian Alps.
It’s only in the last few years that I have turned my attention to the Julians, which are a short drive from Monfalcone. The Julians lack the range of the high Alps and in parcticular the torrents as they are very dry. But being off the beaten track they have a satisfyingly wild appeal and boast some lovely corners such as the lakes at Fusini and the Grego hut. Since the valleys are low the ascents can be quite long.
The first summit I climbed there was Montasio (2750m). It took three attempts; The first time I was by myself and took the wrong route: having gone round a fairly exposed ledge I found myself at the bottom of a gulley requiring scrambling, and the top of which was in cloud. That seemed like a bad idea on my own and unequipped so I turned back, admiring a few ibex on the way back down. The second time I went with Thomas (still only 12 then) in late August but it had snowed in the night and as we got higher the snow got thicker and the terrain potentially slippier and our hands colder (we hadn’t taken gloves). So we gave up. The third time was late October but there was no snow and we finally made the summit. I mention this because it is important when climbing a mountain to know when to turn back if the conditions are not right, rather than to expose yourself and your companions to unnecessary risks. Mountains don’t go away, they will still be there on better days.
Thomas enjoys a challenging mountain climb and at sixteen he is now better than I am at many things in the moutains. This summer we climbed Canin (2568m) from the North using the ferrata Julia. There was a time that this would have required a crampon approach up a bit of glacier. Now the glacier has all but disappeared leaving a small snowfield to climb to the foot of the ferrata which has had to be extended by about 10m. below where it once started.
(Rapidly receeding glaciers in the Alps are a sure sign of global warming. My most striking experience of this was in the summer of 2005 on the Adamello glacier, one of the southernmost in the Alps. You could almost see and certainly hear the ice melting. Somewhere beneath our feet could be heard the worrying sound of gushing streams of melt-water.)
The Julians were first really explored and extolled by Julius Kugy, a German speaker living in Trieste at the end of the 19th century. In his book “From the life of a moutaineer” he wrote that you only really get to know a mountain when you sleep on it. That was really the case for me with the Julians when Alex and I spent three nights up there in three rather different huts two years ago. Watching the evening draw in, seeing the starry night, waking up to a new day at altitude really adds a new dimension. Another of Kugy’s great sayings is that the best part of any mountain walk are the pauses. It’s not that we dislike the physical effort of walking; it’s just that some times as we’ve been concentrating so much on where we put our feet, that we only start to take in where we are when we take a well earned break and admire with some satisfaction where we’ve managed to arrive by our own efforts.. The best break of course is the one on the summit.


It would be disingenuous to deny that to be truly satisfying a mountain outing takes in a summit. There’s an unbeatable feeling that comes from actually getting to the top of a mountain and being able to survey the 360° panorama. Near Brunissard I used to love climbing Cöte Belle (2844m) and just sitting there for as long as I could. Frequently there are imperative reasons to start on down, but if the conditions are good, it’s the right place for lunch. Getting to the top of a mountain in the cloud, is not such a high to me, as I realized with Alex on top of Triglav this summer. Ok, I’ve been there and I can put it on my list, but it won’t loom large in my memory.
Yes, I admit I do have a list of summits I have climbed and here are the highest five:
Dôme de neige des Ecrins (4015m) by ski, with Thomas
Gross Venediger (3674m) in the summer, with Alex
Similaun (3597m) by ski
Aiguille du Tour (3540m) by ski and also in the summer
Hochfeiler (3510m) in the summer, with Alex
Ticking off summits might give kudos, but it is not really what moutaineering is about. I have had plenty of great outings where no summit was reached but the experience was special because of the conditions, the views, the overcoming of adversity, the companionship.

There are of course many mountains outside the Alps and I try to seek them out when I can in other countries and on other continents. I once did a fabulous two week trek in the Himalayas in Nepal to the Annapurna Sanctuary and would love to go back there. The Himalayas actually make the Alps look small, but their real charm is in observing and meeting the people who live up there. In North America I have enjoyed hiking in the wonderful Sierra Nevada in Yosemite National Park. I have walked up Table Mountain (1060) in South Africa starting in the centre of Cape Town, and taking the cable car back down. That’s the way to do it ! I find coming down more tiring than going up these days as years of mountaineering, skiing and cycling have started to wear out my knees.
But in many ways the Alps beat all the other mountains. As they are younger and not yet worn down, their jaggedness makes them more spectacular. There is a huge variety in landscape and human settlement through the long arc of the Alps. I never tire of the Alps which is why I try to spend as much time as I can manage there.

Wherever they are mountains fascinate me and free me, whether it’s sitting quietly contemplating them from the valley or making the effort to scale them.

Tuesday, September 2, 2008

About the Carso


Just behind Monfalcone starts the Carso. The limestone rises up into a plateau between 100 and 150 m full of curious depressions, scattered with stones and covered with exuberant Mediterranean maquis vegetation. It’s very dry. A lot of the plants are armed with thorns to protect their hard won growth. The water from occasional showers is sucked into the ground before it can go anywhere forming numerous sink-holes and patches of reddish earth that has washed away and then dried out again.
The Carso continues on gradually higher towards Trieste and into Slovenia where it is called Kras. Under the Austro-Hungarian empire it was also called Karst in German, a name familiar to geologists for this kind of honey-combed limestone terrain. The Monfalcone or Isonzo Carso is separated from the Carso further East by a good sized valley called simply il Vallone, so that it forms a quite discreet and well defined area.
This has become Thomas’ and my favourite terrain for mountain-biking in the region (notwithstanding risk of puncture by thorns). It’s close to home and in an hour or two you can get in a decent ride with plenty of climbing and off-roading, and lots to discover.
From a natural point of view, the flora is very rich, although the Carso is dry it can also be quite green and full of flowers. I particularly like the slender light blue thistle-like flowers that are everywhere in the summer (eryngium amethystium). Because of the geology and micro-climate you can even find normally Alpine flora in some pockets. There are animals too, right up to small deer and plenty of birds and butterflies. You can also observe strangely worn rocks and a lake in a dead end valley that comes and goes (Doberdo).
The views on a clear day are wonderful with to the South the whole sweep of the Gulf of Trieste right across to Croatia, to the West the plain stretching away towards Venice with church bell-towers sticking up here and there, to the North the distant high wall of the Alps, especially the Julians with Canin and Mangart and to the East the higher hills in Slovenia.
It’s an area full of history too. There are old tracks edged by dry-stone walls, small fields and vineyards still worked in the fertile depressions and a few picturesque villages. Then quite shockingly the scars of numerous First World War trenches. These military workings represent various front lines and fall back positions of the Italians and Austrians. Yes, this pretty area was once the scene of insane trench warfare in a barren lunar landscape (they burned down all the vegetation) with tens of thousands of casualties. On the West flank at Redipuglia there’s a huge war cemetry and at the highest point on Monte San Michele a museum.
The poet Ungaretti came back from Paris to fight for Italy out of patriotic choice, and ended up serving on the Carso.. Somewhat sobered by his experience he wrote a fine collection of short poems encapsulating how it felt to be there, mentioning after each one the time and place of their composition. At Easter I went with Julia, who was studying Ungaretti, around the various locations reading the poems where they were written. It was quite a moving exercise in literature and history, imagining these peaceful places in a quite different setting nearly a century ago.
There are some curious war memorials in purest Fascist style from the 1930’s in the oddest places. One is a column (Cippo Corridoni) about 10m high right in the middle of the maquis with stylised fascii and eagles on it and the inscription to “those who by the sacrifice of their lives fecundated the future of labour” - very strange! A quite different sentiment to Ungaretti’s.
There’s even some industrial archeology: on our last outing we found a former soda quarry and the base of a dismantled cable way to take the stones to the quite distant industrial port.
It’s fun to explore up there and the network of tracks has been improved recently so as to facilitate the access of fire-fighters but also cyclists and walkers.. Quite a few trenches have also had the undergrowth removed around them and been excavated with explanatory signs put up. People are redisovering the Carso.
For me though, despite the historic interest, it is the natural beauty and curiosity of the place that attracts me.