About opera

The first opera I saw was Verdi’s “la Traviata” at the Fenice (where it was first performed). I was seventeen, in Venice while inter-railing and was standing up in the gods, having foregone a proper dinner for the ticket-price. The audience was clearly having a great time. I remember them singing along to the chorus “Libiamo” when it was encore-d.
It was a long time before I went again; that was in the late eighties in Brussels to see Mozart’s “la Finta giardiniera”. It was at the time of the Théâtre de la Monnaie’s renovation, so it was put on in the much smaller Théâtre Royal du Parc which meant we were sitting close to the stage and could really see the singers’ expressions and acting, which convinced me of the theatrical potential of opera. It was also in one of the Hermanns’ delightful stagings. That was what prompted me to take out a season ticket with the Monnaie, which was easy to do just then as the newly enlarged theatre could accommodate more opera-goers the next season. Since then I have seen eight to ten operas a year, including those caught elsewhere on my travels.
I’ve seen well over a hundred different operas performed live, and heard as many again done in concert version or of course on CD. I find, however, I don’t listen to opera that often on CD, apart perhaps from on long car journeys, as I need to have enough time to get all the way through a work. Most operas, being conceived as an evening’s entertainment, last two to three hours. So I prefer my opera in the opera-house. I’ve seen some bad performances of operas I like on CD and seen some good performances of operas the music of which I don’t particularly care for.

We recently had the perfect operatic experience at the Monnaie at the first night of Verdi’s “la Forza del Destino”. Everything was just right.
The singing was tremendous with big voices from the principal tenor Zoran Todorovich as Don Alvaro and soprano Eva-Maria Westbroek, as Leonora, both young and relatively unknown (at least to me) but really giving it some, which is just what is called for - bel canto is not dead. The whole cast was good and it was nice to see José van Dam as the cameo grumpy monk Fra Melitone: his voice in old age is sadly not what it was, but is still suited to this rôle. The huge choir was on top form, especially in “Rataplan”.
The Monnaie orchestra played beautifully conducted by Kazushi Ono, their departing musical director, with whom they have a great rapport.
It was great music.
The staging was simple and sympathetic, concentrating attention on the singers and the action. Against a plain backdrop of varying colour, indicating in a minimalist way the location, they stood out in period costume, lit often like so many scenes from the golden age of Spanish painting. Some terrific effects were achieved just by lighting especially in the battle scene. The acting was convincingly natural and everyone had the “physique du rôle”.
It was great theatre.

This is what opera should be: great music and great theatre at the same time.
If you have read previous postings, you will know I like both classical music and theatre, so when the conditions are right, opera is a wonderful experience.
It’s not always that way of course. Sometimes the singing is not so good, the staging rather ridiculous and the music boring.

A first key to success is to put on a work that is worth performing.
“La Forza” is not put on often, but it is Verdi in his mature period, and undeservedly neglected. The overture is one of his best and well known. It contains three beautiful tunes that return prominently (at the climax of Act I, at the final show-down between Don Alvaro and Don Carlo in Act IV and on Leonora’s arrival at the monastery in Act II) and are quoted at key moments (not quite in the manner of Wagner’s leitmotiv, more as dramatic pointers). For my taste great tunes are called for in an opera and their recognition gives the audience satisfaction. There is a whole lot more good music in la Forza: stirring arias, great duets and big choruses. Although it comes in at nearly three hours, we didn’t notice the time passing.
This opera is often shunned for its length, uneven tone and totally ramshackle plot and is regarded as difficult to stage. It certainly didn’t feel that way in this performance. As the title “the force of destiny” suggests, the whole point is that seemingly random events and improbable coincidences shape our lives. So actually the very far-fetched nature of the story is appropriate. Likewise the fact that the story is not stripped down to its bare essentials but spread over a period of several years and presented in a whole mixed bag of scenes including intimate ensemble, crowd scenes (tavern, monastery, battlefield) genre (grumpy monk, fortune-teller, camp-following pedlar), tragic and comic, sets it in a full range of random circumstances which may or not have an impact on the outcome. So it does actually make dramatic sense.
Some of the text is diificult to take these days: most famously the line “Morte ai tedeschi” (Death to the Germans); but also “Viva la guerra” (long live war); and plenty of heavy-duty Catholicism. But actually if scenes are on the battlefield and in a monastery, it is of a piece with the action (and of course as always in Verdi with the situation of Italy at his time).
In short, “La Forza” is a good Verdi opera and worth staging. I have now seen thirteen of Verdi’s operas performed. My favourite is “la Traviata” with “Rigoletto” a close second.

Mozart is my other favourite composer of opera, I have seen eight of his, and like “Don Giovanni” best followed by “die Zauberflöte” and “le Nozze di Figaro”.
Mozart is quite different to Verdi. For a start Mozart mainly does comedy, while Verdi mainly does tragedy. but they do both go in for great tunes. Mozart’s operas are not through-composed like Verdi’s, rather the numbers are separated by recitative accompanied by harpsichord (or even in the case of the German ones, by spoken text). That makes it easier to follow the text (if you understand the language). and plot, then the arias mark the key dramatic moments giving depth to the characters’ feelings. Mozart’s operas are not conceived on the same grand scale as Verdi’s, the forces are smaller (orchestra, choir) and the instrumentation, of a different period, is quite different, much lighter and airier.
It so happens that I saw “le Nozze di Figaro” in Prague a couple of weeks earlier in the Estates Theatre, a beautiful small 18thC house which is one of the first theatres where it was performed, actually conducted there by Mozart himself in 1787. The vibe of seeing this opera in these ideal historic conditions was wonderful. As it’s on a small scale you’re quite close to the singers and can really see their facial expressions and gesture. The small orchestra (40 players) doesn’t make a sound so big that it drowns out the voices. This is how Mozart should be performed and is best enjoyed. I have to admit that though I know the music well and have seen “le Nozze” a few times, there were some aspects of the plot I got for the first time!
Also like Verdi, Mozart adores ensemble singing but he takes it further with his trick of adding more and more singers as the finales build up. You get the different characters singing their contradicting views at the same time and the music actually makes it all work. Mozart excels in this truly dramatic art of getting his charcters to interact in an intimate setting. He is not interested in painting a huge historic fresco with atmospheric music. I say Mozart, but he obviously owes a lot to Da Ponte the gifted librettist of his three great Italian operas “le Nozze di Figaro”, “Don Giovanni” and “Cosi fan tutte””. Having said that, the texts without the music would be nothing. Great opera is the succesful combination of good music and a text that works dramatically as theatre.

This brings me to why I dislike Wagner who is the third great composer of operas in the canon alongside Mozart and Verdi, certainly in terms of how often their works are performed. I have seen ten of Wagner’s operas performed (as we have a season ticket at the Monnaie, we see all of their new productions), so mine is an opinion informed by some experience. I have tried hard to keep an open mind about Wagner, given the fact than many opera-goers do enjoy him and that he has an important place in the history of music. He is of course not helped by the fact that he was Hitler’s favourite composer, but I shall ignore that and tell you what I don’t like about his operas.
To start with, Wagner’s orchestration is too thick and opaque. You can’t really hear the singers properly and there is little variety of texture or relief. The music is relentlessly through-composed without there being any distinction between recitative style passages and arias: it’s all the same and never really breaks into song. Oddly enough Wagner’s best tunes are in the instrumental bits (flight of the Walkyries, wedding march, Tristan and Isolde prelude/Liebestod). The singing is not beautiful: most of the time it’s bombastic, heroic, declamatory rather than lyrical. His music after about fifteen minutes begins to pall and bore me big time, and his operas last for three hours and longer. For me it’s just not great music.
At the same time there is no action. There is no ensemble singing, it’s just one interminable monologue after another talking about things that have happened elsewhere: hardly anything happens on stage and the characters don’t really interact. He wrote his own librettos. The text is absolute doggerel, unreadable (I have ploughed through the whole libretto for “Tristan”) and full of dliberately archaic German. The stories are invented mythology: there is nothing that rings falser than fake myths, there’s something not quite right and rather silly about them. So dramatically, Wagner is dead in the water. His operas lend themselves to colossal over the top gloomy sets and no movement. For me, it’s just not great theatre.
Between the boring music and the boring stage business, I always fall asleep at some point during a Wagner opera. I really fail to see the attraction, and I make no apology for that, I’ve seen pretty well all of his operas and they leave me cold.

So whose operas do I like apart from Mozart’s and Verdi’s?

Puccini seems to be spurned by the Monnaie who rarely put on his operas, perhaps finding them too low-brow compared to Wagner. I think Puccini is good. He has a great dramatic sense, is very economical and effective in creating emotions in the audience and can be quite moving. He gets through to me more than many other composers. He has some great tunes (“lucevan le stelle”, “nessun dorma””) and clear and varied instrumentation. “Tosca” is my favourite by him.

Britten too has an unerring sense for what works on stage and a fine and boldly original sense of melody. “Peter Grimes” has some terrific dramatic moments and you feel the tension between this loner and the tight-knit village community (some great passages for the choir), with always the presence of the elemental sea in the orchestral interludes.

Shostakovich was stopped dead in his operatic tracks by severe criticism from the Stalinist régime of his second opera “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk”. To play safe, and probably to save his skin, he then avoided the genre - a great loss for us. “Lady Macbeth” is really very good with moments of high comedy and deep tragedy: it is a very powerful piece with some fantastic orchestration, as one would expect from Shostakovich. I saw a great production in Riga set in the last days of crumbling Soviet Latvia with lots ol allusions to daily life not lost on the audience. His earlier comic “the Nose”, based on Gogol, is terrific fun as a cheeky youthful piece.

You certainly need the surtitles for Janacek, sung in Czech, but I enjoy his highly original instrumentation, his slightly folk-music like tune and rhythms and his theatrical sense. “Jenufa” is best. Surtitles by the way are an essential requirement for enjoying opera as theatre and have fortunately become the norm in most opera-houses.

Rossini and Donizetti were very prolific in both comedy and tragedy. I can’t help liking the tuneful singing and sometimes over the top virtuosity they never fail to provide. I’ve seen many good productions of their operas over the years. They’re rarely opera at its most profound, but are reliable for a good evening out.

However, my enjoyment of a good opera can be marred if it is staged unsympathetically. On some rare occasions I have felt like closing my eyes just to listen to the music. My main wish is for the director to treat the opera as theatre rather than as conceptual art, that is taking the form of a series of static tableaux with special effects which are meant to symbolize some particular bee in his bonnet. It really annoys me when the director seems not to have bothered reading the text so that the stage business doesn’t match the words that are being sung. He misses the point and substitutes one of his own not actually in the work. I remember a particularly dreadful staging of “la Traviata” in Nuremberg, where for example in their final love duet “Parigi, cara” Adolfo and Violetta were apart at opposite extremes of the stage. Many German directors seem to go in for this sort of thing.
Having said that, I hasten to add that I do like the highly inventive Hermann couple’s work, their marvellous series of Mozart operas for the Monnaie, also Rossini’s “il Turco in Italia” and more recently Handel’s “Giulio Cesare”. They do pay close attention to the text but bring their idiosyncratic playfulness to bear in a way that illustrates it amusingly and can often help maintain interest in otherwise over-long passages. Theirs are certainly some of the productions that have stuck in my memory for their aesthetic appearance.
As for dramatic impact I would single out this season’s “Wozzeck” which I mentioned in “About theatre” -
“In “Wozzeck” the opera, you basically get the text in a sing-song way with atmospheric musical backing. With the action played here realistically in period costume in a dark minimalist setting, the overall effect was devastating. The drowning of Wozzeck at the climax was actually staged - he was seen to disappear into a pond of water leaving his cap floating on the surface. Great stuff!”

One of my worst operatic experiences also occured during this season. It was “Phaedra” a new work by Henze (which has nothing to do with the tragedy by Racine). The production designer admitted he had never even staged a play before. He took the orchestra out of the pit and placed it at the back of the stalls. He covered the entire back of the stage with a giant mirror in which the audience could see itself and the orchestra reflected. For the first scene, which contained a lot of important background information for the plot, he had the surtitles switched off so no one knew what was going on, the singers unidentifiable and a slowly revolving gold ring in the dark caught in a spotlight above the auditorium casting reflections - for ten minutes. All very gimmicky but it had nothing to do with the story. The music was unspeakable: the worst excesses of tuneless disjointed percussive modernism that soon became boring in its very predictable inanity. The text was like bad sixth-form poetry. Proceedings reached an embarrassing all-time low when the main character simulated a rape on top of a grand piano crying out “Freiheit” (freedom). The evening was toe-curlingly bad from all points of view. It was bad music and bad theatre by a self-indulgent composer and a self-indulgent director.

This brings me back to my starting point: good opera is great music and great theatre at the same time. When it fails to deliver, bad opera can get very boring and rather silly, but when good opera works it can be a captivating and deeply satisfyng artistic experience.

About gardening

Our garden is the width of the house, 5.5m, and about 16.5m long. That’s not very large but it’s big enough to keep me busy in season.
So gardening for me is not a major chore but an enjoyable and I would say therapeutic activity, both manual and creative.
As an Englishman I think I always aspired to having a garden of my own and it was an important criterion in looking for a house.
If truth be told, though, I hadn’t actually had a garden before moving here, but I took to it with great enthusiasm, discovering soon that I had green fingers.

The previous owners had clearly not been into gardening and I was faced with a veritable jungle on which I was free to place my own stamp. I regret very much never having taken photographs to show what it was like before I started.
My initial approach was to eliminate everything that I knew to be an undesirable weed and see what was left, in some cases waiting to be sure before deciding what to eradicate. Eradicate is the right word, some of those plants, in particular the nettles and something tall and yellow I’ve since seen growing alongside railway lines, had prodigious root systems. I discovered even the roots of nettles sting. Ivy had to go too as it is a menace to the walls and a generally depressing plant. Out came too a number of unwanted saplings that had seeded themselves over the years.

As I removed stuff, the underlying plan of the garden started to emerge and I have kept it.
Next to the house is a terrace, then there is a section with a large central oval flower bed and then a more open area with two trees at the very back - a large cherry and a tall holly. There was a third tree halfway down, a fir, basically a Christmas tree that had been planted out and grown into something towering above our three storey house, far too big for the garden, blocking out light and preventing anything from growing underneath it. That one had to be removed professionally. It’s never a comfortable decision to fell a tree, but the garden was immeasurably improved and the neighbours much relieved by its diappearance. I planted a rhodo and heather on top of the stump.
We had the disused staircase to the cellar filled in to widen the terrace and had the whole area re-tiled. It’s a great space for eating and sitting out.
We also had the paving around the central bed redone but kept its shape, mainly because it turned out to contain several serviceable rose-bushes which couldn’t be moved.
The open area seemed to have once been a vegetable garden with rows separated by paving tiles. I dug them all out and stacked them for future use, in particular to make a small terrace for a bench by the holly and a stepping stone path down the garden for when it’s wet. I turned the cleared open area into a lawn with the children in mind. It’s pretty small, it takes all of ten minutes to mow it, but it’s nice to have the open green space. At one stage we had it turfed but it has gradually reverted to the indifferent patchy condition it was in before.

The garden is surrounded by fairly high walls. We had the coping tiles replaced as some were ready to fall on the heads of playing children and the second winter I gradually repainted it all white, cementing some of the more crumbly bits as I went. Over the years I have pursued a policy of training plants up and along the walls to make up for lack of space on the ground, so not much of them is visible now and they won’t get repainted. Down one side there is an incredibly vigorous wisteria which also grows all the way up the rear façade of the house. It’s fabulous when in full purply blue flower, but it grows very fast and I have to make clear to it who”s boss. There are also several clematis, a vine that occasionally manages a few edible grapes and a well established passion flower.
The walls are also obscured by a series of tall shrubs/short trees. They are in order down the left, after the wisteria, a kerria japonica, an oak, a white rhododendron an apple and a forsythia, before reaching the cherry; and on the right an Oregon grape, a purple lilac (that sadly doesn’t flower much) and an immense rosemary (which flowers a lot) before the holly. Most of these started as small pot plants from the nursery and the kerria as cuttings from my parents’ garden.

Other cuttings from that source include the hydrangeas along the back wall and some white osteospernums which being resistant even to Yorkshire frosts have far outlived any I bought from a nursery.
As far as survivors from the starting garden go, they are mainly indigenous - lily of the valley, tall campanulas and foxgloves, forget-me-nots, wild strawberries and also yellow corydalis.
Also in the indegenous category are the bluebells which have spread considerably in the central bed from the few bulbs we originally dug out from the woods at Villers-la-Ville.
The mid-size inhabitants of the central bed have changed over the years. Sadly I’ve given up on dahlias as whatever I do the slugs seem to get them when just pushing up. There was a big lupin to begin with too but that died off and successors didn’t thrive. Instead I now have a bushy pink lavatera that I cut back to the ground every autumn, some tall dark irises and some lilies. There is a very old large fern right next to the terrace which has a fresh feel in the summer.

Although there are a few herbs by the rosemary and a meagre crop of apples, I mainly garden for flowers. I’ve worked at there always being something in bloom and put quite a lot of annuals in alongside the perennials.
First there are the bulbs (I put in over a hundred every year); these are staggered in themselves, between daffodils, hyacinths and various kinds of tulip. They are accompanied by the yellow forsythia and later kerria. In the first half of April the cherry is spectacular with white blossom. Then things really get going with the pink clematis montana, and the wisteria on the walls. Then the rhododendrons, peonies, irises and roses. Different clematis take over and the passion flower starts. Next are the hydrangeas, day lillies and agapanthus. On the ground in the main bed there are busy lizzies in the spring and summer and pansies in the autumn and winter, also a lot of alyssum late in the summer.
The terrace is surrounded by a number of window boxes, hanging baskets and pots full of small annuals which I put in in May for the whole season. In the winter I put violas in the window boxes so there is something colourful to look out on.

As I’ve been working on this small plot for eighteen years it’s what you would call a well established garden.
Gardens are artificial man-made places in which nature is a guest. Gardeners are by definition control freaks but it is best to work with nature rather than against it. I’m fairly indulgent and let things grow if they seem to like it where they are. My preferred approach is to thin out the luxuriant rather than to try to coax the sickly.
By the time we get to this season the foliage is very thick, but that’s nice and refreshing making the garden an oasis on a hot day like today. Leaves also absorb distant traffic noise. The garden is very popular with birds which is nice - to name some: tits, blackbirds, jays, magpies, pigeons, even parrots!
Then in the winter when everything has died back it’s quite bare with just the shapes of the trees, bushes and dead flower heads on the hydrangeas and agapanthus.
I like to watch the passing of the seasons and each one brings its different tasks to perform in the garden in an annual cycle: scarifying the lawn, pruning dead-wood, digging out the compost heap, putting in the bedding plants and annuals, thinning the new growth on the bushes and trees, mowing the lawn, raking up the dead leaves, planting the bulbs and so on.
But it all remains a hobby rather than a chore, a great excuse to get outside. The only downside is that sometimes I find it difficult just to sit still in the garden because I’ve noticed something that needs doing, a weed to be pulled out, a dead head to remove, a plant to be staked.
Finally though, especially at table on the terrace and on a long summer evening, I do sit still out there and look on fondly with some satisfaction at the results of my own gardening.

About painting

There seems to be a fundamental desire in man to record his life and surroundings in picture form, that is by the difficult task of reducing three dimensional reality to a two dimensional representation of it. The cavemen after all painted already and I myself like to draw and paint when I find the time and inclination. Painting is the highest expression of this desire and is one of the great achievements of Western culture. Painting is a tradition within which artists draw on those who came before them, either deriving from them or revolting against them, as they cater for and form the aesthetic of their age.

Painting has reached something of a crisis in modern art and these days for example the Turner prize is rarely given to a painter. Initially, striving to find a new purpose after the advent of photography, which could create pictures of reality mechanically, painters often veered away into abstraction. I think abstraction misses the point of painting which is to show how the artist sees the world or sees himself. When painting ceases to depict, it runs the risk of becoming merely decorative.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting that all painting should be realistic or from life; many of the best paintings take various elements from reality and rearrange them into imagined patterns to make a point. Abstraction, on the other hand, from failing to engage with external reality becomes purely self-indulgent.

Another trap of abstraction is that increasing simplification of shape and colour lead it to a point where it requires no real painterly technique. The legitimate response it elicits from the viewer is "I could do better than that". I want to admire the painter's achievement, not be presented with something that is basically facile and poorly executed. There is no real technique in a Mondrian. Modern painting all too often has lost the delight in the physical technical skill of good brushwork.

In all of this there is an element of Emperor's new clothes. Out of intellectual snobbery too many of us are afraid to denounce a lot of modern painting for the vacuous work it is. Truly great art is of universal appeal. Everybody can find something in it on some level. You don't have to be initiated to get something out of it. Those who would have you believe that you don’t appreciate something because you are ignorant are merely promoting their own arrogance. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and if you find a picture ugly or just plain boring, no amount of explaining will make you instantly like it. Have faith in your taste, over time it will evolve and you may one day come to enjoy Jackson Pollock - or then again, probably not.

When I was in my teens at grammar school I started to become interested in painting and its history and began poring over Thames and Hudson, Skira and other illustrated books in the school library. As I paint myself, my initial interest was to see what others had done and how.
It was only somewhat later that I started to have the opportunities to actually see some of these masterpieces “in the flesh” in the famous galleries of Europe (National Gallery London, Louvre, Prado, Rijksmuseum, Uffizi, Gallerie dell’Accademia, Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna - to name but a few). Seeing a painting full-size, in its actual colours and being able to inspect closely its brushwork brings a canvas to life to me even more than a live performance of music brings to life a piece I have on CD. Graphic reproduction is just not nearly as good as that of sound.
Inevitably I was drawn firstly to the impressionists in print and one of my first great gallery experiences was in the old Jeu de Paume in Paris when I was seventeen.

The impressionists are hugely popular now, although they didn’t go down so well with all of their contemporaries. I think it is easy to see why they appeal to so many people today. They depict what is recognizable everyday reality. Their subject matter is democratic, you don’t have to be well up on biblical stories, mythology or symbolist conventions to see what it’s about. What you see is what you get. What you see is also intended as an impression, a fleeting view - which also suits the modern sensibility. Their paintings are,as I say, recognizable, deliberately figurative; seeing what the subject is, you can feel “yes, they’ve brought that effect off well”. And yet it s obviously not photographic. Since they lived in the first great age of photography, it was important to the impressionists that their work should move away from a merely photgraphic representation. Perhaps too, at the time of black and white photography, that is also why colour was so important to them. So the untutored viewer at once recognizes the subject and the fact that it is “art” and is pleased by that. Many of their pictures are quite simply and undemandingly beautiful.
So I signed up wholesale for the extended family: Manet, Monet, Renoir, Degas, Pissarro, Sisley, Seurat, Toulouse-Lautrec, Cézanne, Gaugin, Van Gogh. And they are still among my firm favourites.
The painters who immediately followed the impressionists (including already those at the end of my last list) are on the cusp of the modern and its final flight from figuration, recognizability and the desire to please anyone else apart from the artist himself (or maybe the critic and the dealer). So having developed a taste for impressionism, it was easy for me to explore forwards and of course backwards from them through art history.

Perhaps one should design major galleries accordingly. You could have a first room with all the popular impressionists and then the possibility of going backwards in time to the left and forwards to the right, until your interest peters out on repetitive clumsy anonymous altarpieces or large ugly pointless (and also clumsily executed) abstracts. Of course we are all free to organize our tours of galleries as we like and are all familiar with the phenomenon of fast forwarding through a series of unpromising rooms (often acres of Rubens or 18thC still lives of vases of flowers or dead animals). The key to any enjoyable gallery visit is after all, in my opinion, not to spend ten seconds on each single painting in the endless collection, but to spend plenty of time looking carefully at what catches your eye and interest and indeed to return to it again later in your visit (or on another visit). Incidentally, I think the great galleries should be free of charge to local residents so they can just pop in to see maybe the Bruegels for fifteen minutes.

Now is a great time to visit the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam: since it is under major restoration they have taken the best works from just one period, the Dutch golden age, and hung them well in a reduced area so that the visitor’s attention is really focused. The great galleries of the world are impossible to take in on one visit - a fact that really struck me in the Metropolitan in New York. Concentrated shows are handy, but best of all is the freedom to return again and again.

So, without attempting a potted history of Western painting, who are the painters I linger in front of ? In writing this I’ve discovered there are many. Here are thirty of them.

Bosch:
Forget about Dali and Magritte, the greatest surrealist is here. Bosch’s imagination and fantastic creation are boundless. But he is also an extremely fine painter, the detail is delicate and spectacular and nowhere more so in the Garden of Delights tryptich.

Botticelli:
Spring/Primavera as an allegory of nascent fruitfulness is totally imaginary and an opportunity for capturing a number of elegant figures, mainly beautiful women, in a carefully balanced group composition. You don’t have to understand the symbols to enjoy the clarity and beauty of the forms and the sharpness of the detail.

Bruegel:
The detail in a Bruegel is encyclopaedic and a delight, beautifully and often humorously executed. And yet the overall design is always clear, without clutter and confusion. He is really a painter of man rooted in his social relations and environment; the subliminal message is everyday life is our lot. In the Fall of Icarus the over-ambitious Icarus is a mere splash in the sea while the foreground is held by the unperturbed toiling ploughman, contemplative shepherd and patient fisherman. My favourite is Hunters in the snow: the hunters and their dogs return empty-handed to the village while those outside the inn work at toasting grain. The main subject though is the glorious fantasy winter landscape of frozen lakes and distant peaks with countless small figures at work and play. The composition is really elegant with depth, pictures within pictures. The bright white of the snow, the sharp outline of the dark bare trees and the otherwise wan colours capture perfectly the atmosphere. You can feel the cold.

Caravaggio:
A fine way of passing a day in Rome is to go on a Caravaggio hunt from church to church. Caravaggio is of course famous for his dramatic chiaroscuro lighting effects. His characters are really alive, caught in a moment in a shaft of light against a dark background, their feet dirty and clothes stained. In the Supper at Emmaus they spring out of the canvas at you as the resurrected Christ reveals his identity. Caravaggio has a larger-than-life vivid intensity, which many have tried to imitate but rarely equalled.

Cézanne:
Cézanne has long been my favourite painter. I like what he paints but I mainly like how he paints. I like the chunky tangibility of his paint. I like the careful geometric composition and I adore his use of colour. Cézanne must have spent hours on a canvas and the effort invested communicates itself to the viewer. You can spend hours looking at a Cézanne. There is nothing slapdash about it. Every single stroke is carefully placed and the colours nuanced. It all adds up to an absorbing whole giving a satisfying sense of order and serenity. I particularly like the landscapes, especially those at l'Estaque. They are just right. The intensity of contemplation they convey is perhaps a key to a different awareness of being. Cézanne also achieves this in his still lives and portraits.

Dali:
Dali doesn’t just have an original crazy imagination, he can really paint well with a fine sophisticated finish. Some of his messages implicit in the titles really hit the mark (Civil war).

Degas:
Degas specializes in the unusual angle of view and framing of his compositions in which ordinary people feature giving them a snapshot of life feel which seems to imply some story of often hard everyday life (les Repasseuses, l’Absinthe).

Dürer:
Dürer is an incredibly fine draughtsman and some of his best work is in his drawings, though he left us a few fine sharp paintings. I’ve always been intrigued by the visionary clarity of his Self-portrait as Christ.

Freud, Lucian:
Some find Freud’s brutally realistic treatment of the human body of his rather normal sitters too much to take, but I welcome its honesty as it tells us far more about the reality of the human condition than the flattering diet usually served up to us.

Friedrich, Caspar David:
Friedrich’s romantic landscapes are idealized and present a powerful Nature that disdains insignificant man, who when he appears in his paintings is often seen from behind in contemplation of it. There is an eerie quality to his crystalline mountains that I find entrancing.

Goya:
Goya is of course several different painters. First he is the painter of the cartons for the tapestries, a fabulous series of beuatifully coloured and keenly observed everyday scenes in and around Madrid where all human life is present. I particularly like the optimistic young couple in Parasol and the Marriage procession. Then he is the court painter of royal portraits whose objective sincerity is yet beautiful and therefore gets away with showing his patrons warts and all (Family of Carlos IV). Finally he is the witness of attrocities and the dark side of man whose pessimistic black period works counterbalance the joy of his first period (3rd May 1808, Romeria de San Isidro). Throughout his career his gift is his penetrating observation of the human face and behaviour and his ability to hint at the rest with free brushwork.

El Greco:
It’s sometimes hard to remember that El Greco was painting in the 16thC: his elongated, distorted body shapes, strange backgrounds and unorthodox colour schemes are really modern. Some of his paintings seem like halucinatory expressionism as in the top half of the Burial of Count Orgaz in Toledo

Kirchner:
Kirchner is one of my favourite moderns; He is basically a fauve with a penchant for primitive art and brings that technique to bear on city life in Berlin, female nudes and the tranquil Swiss Alps with surprising results.

Klimt:
Initially drawn to Klimt as a teenager by his subdued eroticism, I contnue to enjoy his very personal decadent style. His lesser known landscapes are very fine too.

Manet:

Not really a full-on impressionist at all, Manet is simply one of the best unsentimental painters of ordinary people. I really like the Barmaid at the Folies Bergères, looking rather bored behind the fabulously painted bar and with the room packed with customers reflected in the mirror behind her.

Michelangelo:
The problem of including Michelangelo here is that virtually his entire painterly output is in the frescoes on the walls and ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. I was knocked out by the beautiful colours and clear lines when I saw it again in 1995 after the accumulated grime of Papal concaves had been removed. You can see the sculptor in Michelangelo at work, though flat the figures have an almost three-dimensional presence.

Monet:
It was Monet’s picture Impression that gave the name to the movement and in many ways he is the king and most prolific of the impressionists. Since the light of the fleeting moment was everything to him, he often reworked the same subject as in the series of Rouen Cathedral. There are so many good Monets you keep on discovering new ones. It is of course in landscapes where he excels, especially with the presence of water which allows him to fully exploit the effects of reflected light (Regatta).

Picasso:
Picasso was extremely prolific and went through various periods: his is an unbridled energy of creation, an almost physical need to throw off works. I don’t by any means like all of his ouput, but there is something in the boldness of his simple lines and his fertile imagination that commands admiration. I have a great liking for his earlier blue and pink periods ( Self-portrait Family of saltimbanques) before he started to break really new ground, I just find the brushwork less rushed and more satisfying and the images more beautiful. His great achievement though is doubtless his monumental Guernica actually one of his few paintings to have a message, rather than being just an exercise in seeing things differently.

Raffaello:
Raphael’s pictures have the clarity, simplicity and purity that many overdone cluttered works by other Italian renaissance painters lack. The composition and colours of Virgin in the meadow are exquisite: it is a picture of perfect balance.

Rembrandt:
Although his range in colour and subject are a bit limited for my taste, I have to admit to being captivated by Rembrandt’s skill as a portraitist and his often free and innovatory way of painting.

Renoir:
Though I’ve never really liked his nudes and children, I do like Renoir’s group and crowd scenes (Moulin de la Galette). He has a broad range and a light touch.

Riviera, Diego:
To avoid being accused of pure Euro-centrism I include Riviera for his grandly conceived and winningly executed murals in Mexico City.

Schiele:
The expressionist Schiele’s angular scrawny figures have a slightly disturbing quality that conveys a modern existenial angst in a way that I find gripping and fascinating.

Tiziano:
Titian is a fantastic portraitist and an untiring enthusiast of the joys of paint. He can also place a ravishing nude to good effect in a composition, as in the Venus of Urbino. Here the gorgeously painted knowingly sensuous reclining nude woman takes up the whole foreground. In one half of the background are two other female figures: a little girl with her head in a box (innocence) watched over by a matron. I see an allegory of three ages of womanhood.

Turner:
Turner’s totally free and impressionistic way with paint to create stunning light effects is revolutionary (the Fighting Téméraire).

Van der Weyden:
One of my favourite paintings in the Prado is Van der Weyden’s Descent from the cross. The large figures in their bright blues, reds and greens stand out against a plain background in a tight geometric pattern, the body of the swooning Mary parallels the limp Christ being lowered from the cross. The grief on the fantastically life-like faces is palpable. It is a deeply moving painting.

Van Eyck:
Van Eyck is here for two brilliant masterpieces: the huge religious work called for its central panel the Adoration of the lamb in Ghent; and the secular portrait of the Arnolfini couple. Both works are charcterized by perfectly balanced composition, stunning colour, miniscule detail and lifelike faces. The finish is immaculate throughout the whole painted surface.

Van Gogh:
Van Gogh has one of the most instantly recognizable personal styles of any painter. The texture of the paint is everything: contorted, swirling, writhing, restlessly worked over. The colours are liberating. The designs charmingly naive. The images are direct and cogent. People thought he painted like a madman. He was one. His disturbed, uneasy vision is very 20thC already and yet often curiously optimistic in a way that places him in a brighter past.

Velazquez:
Just how good a painter Velazquez is you can see in the Topers/Bacchus where the group composition is skilfully managed, the facial expressions are fantastic and some of the detail such as the wine in the cup exquisitely brought off. His masterpiece is perhaps las Meninas a huge cleverly composed and enigmatic picture of life in the Spanish court, more particularly in the artist’s studio. The viewer is in the position of the sitters whom the artist is seen painting from behind his canvas and are in turn caught in the mirror on the back wall. The children, the main subject, are caught as though not posing, the girl being consoled by the maid, the boy teasing the dog. But who is the grotesque midget and the man in the doorway at the back?

Vermeer:
There are only about forty pictures by Vermeer extant. You can see he must have put a lot of time into producing one. The paint is beautiful: the choice of colours, the play of the light, the surface pearly, smooth, translucent. His favourite subject is a woman caught unawares going about an everyday task, reading, pouring milk, lit by daylight falling into a room. The effect is spontaneously natural, but that is a fiction as the entire composition is carefully and geometrically planned and the objects, all beautifully observed, chosen for their symbolic value to suggest a story.

Vermeer brings me full circle to the picture at the top of this piece. We see him (the self-portrayed artist) working in his studio painting his model. He takes his inspiration from her beauty as a woman, from the ravishing colour of her dress and from the other arts, music and literature (she holds an instrument and a book). He reflects this carefully in paint on his canvas, producing a work of beauty in form and colour that at the same time makes a statement as to how he views the world, its surface and what is behind it, and of course how he views himself. This is a true painter at work.

About playing the guitar

My instrument is the guitar. I first took it up when I was about fifteen. I never had any lessons: I am totally self-taught and have picked up things over the years by watching other players. That means there are certain limitations to my technique, but on the other hand it’s all my own and quite personal. After all I play for relaxation not to achieve a perfect rendition. I have a good left hand (chord changes) and a not very subtle right hand (strumming and picking). I like to strum chords to accompany myself singing. I haven’t had too many opportunities to play regularly with other musicians, which is a shame but always fun when the chance arises. I like to play and sing by myself but also for anyone who wants to listen and maybe join in. I did youth camps for twenty years and I was a mainstay of the entertainment. I still enjoy a good sing-along session. We had a great one at my old friend Lyndon’s 50th at New Year. He’s also a keen singer/player. We played some Brassens together.
I probably have a repertoire of about 200 to 300 songs, I haven’t tried to count them scientifically. It’s funny how stuff I haven’t played for years may suddenly come back. There are songs I have learned for some occasion and then completely forgotten and others I thought I’d forgotten that resurface. In the end if I don’t play something every now and again it slips away. Then again it’s always fun to learn something new and only time will tell if it stays with me.
I play a lot of Beatles songs - time has shown from generation to generation that they are well loved quite simply because they’re good, with strong attractive melodies and appealing texts. Other songwriters who feature prominently in my repertoire include Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Neil Young, David Bowie and on the French side Brassens and Brel. However, that short list doesn’t really give much of an idea of everything I play as my repertoire is very eclectic and covers several languages.
I have made the effort to decypher some classical scores and commit them to memory. But while I can still remember how to play Villa-Lobos prelude n°1, I can’t get through much else, though I could once play Albeniz’ Asturias after a fashion. I’m really more of an accompanying chords player at heart than a soloist.
The earliest of my guitars which I still have is one we gave to my friend Dave Berry for his 18th but he gave up a year or two later and gave it back to me. It’s in the flat in Monfalcone now. It’s a nylon strung Spanish classical guitar. It has a nice easy action and a snappy sound and is incredibly light. I carried in strapped to my rucksack for ten days once on a walking camp we did in the Alps to play outside the tents and by the campfire in the evenings. It is rather battered now.
The guitar I used for years in the camps and still use away from home is a classical nylon strung Yamaha (first one 1980, later stolen and replaced in 1986). Yamaha don’t just make motorbikes but very serviceable precise musical instruments - our piano is a Yamaha too. It’s a good all-round instrument with a big enough sound to lead singing.
When I lived in Madrid in 1995 I really had of course to buy a good Spanish guitar and this instrument has become my favourite guitar. It’s an all cedar wood (it smelled gorgeous when new) classical nylon strung by José Ramirez - a nice sounding instrument that’s easy to play.
All young guitarists dream of taking up the electric. I was no exception, so with one of my first pay-cheques in Brussels I bought a simple two pick-up Fender Bullit (similar to the Stratocaster), but never really went very far with it. When my children, Julia and Thomas, took up electric bass and guitar I started playing along with them and treated myself to an Epiphone Les Paul which is a much more enjoyable instrument to play and stays in tune longer too. However, since I’m not used to playing steel strings, my finger-tips tire after a while.
So it’s to the trusty acoustic I return.
Playing and singing is one of my favourite ways of relaxing, especially on the terrace in the summer with a glass of wine to sip on between songs.

About Istanbul

I first visited Istanbul in 1986. I’d been back briefly twice and was glad of the opportunity to take Clara and Thomas for four days last week on their first visit.
As a Westerner it’s impossible not to be delighted and fascinated by the familiarity and exoticism of Istanbul. As the last city in Europe it is still European in many ways and yet already quite Eastern.
Atatürk’s move notwithstanding, Istanbul is still the commercial and cultural capital of Turkey, and Its very nature is at the heart of the Turkish dilemma. The Turks arrived in Byzantium in 1453, liked a lot of what they saw and kept it, adapting it to their ways (as in Aya Sofya). The Ottoman empire expanded westwards, their push only being stopped at Vienna, and assimilated much from Eastern Europe (as the Balkans did in return from Turkey, especially the cooking and music). The 19thC Sultans aspired to Western luxuries, moving out of Topkapi to Dolmabahçe palace; Istanbul modernized through its many trading contacts; in its decline Turkey was described as the sick man “of Europe”. Republican and secular Atatürk’s reforms were another logical step in the history of the country and city straddling two continents and different cultures. Yet he moved the capital East to Ankara confirming Istanbul’s decline.
I have been reading Orhan Pamuk’s magnificent memoir “Istanbul - memories and the city”. (The finest book in its genre I have read since Coetzee’s “Boyhood”). He writes elegantly of the Istanbullus’ “hüzün” or melancholy, their and their city’s default mood in the face of decline. And yet, as Western tourists, Istanbul strikes us as a vibrant exuberant place. It often has, Pamuk writes of its 19thC literary French visitors, Flaubert, Nerval and Gauthier. They used to stay several weeks, in our modern hurried age we manage a few days.
The quintessential Turk, ever uncertain of his own identity, Pamuk welcomes the view of the outside Westerner. I in turn welcome his view of the insider of fifty years. He adds a little depth to my inevitably superficial impressions.
The tourist comes to Istanbul first to see the great sights. The best place to start is Haghia Sophia, the Church of Holy Wisdom. Built by Justinian in the 6thC it was for the best part of a thousand years the biggest and most important Christian church in the world. Following 1453, the Turks, suitably impressed, added four minarets and it became as Aya Sofya their greatest mosque for nearly 500 years. Atatürk had it turned into a museum. Each time I enter the building it amazes me more, the sheer size and yet grace of the interior are an incredible accomplishment for a building nearly 1500 years old.
Since it couldn’t be bettered, the Sultans imitated it and it became the basic design for all the great imperial mosques with the addition of a courtyard. The grandest and most successful of these faces Aya Sofya across the square, the Sultan Ahmet or Blue Mosque (named for the predominant colour of the tiled interior). But the others are fine too, notably the Süleymaniye (inconveniently for us under restoration at present), and their repeated similar silhouettes dominate the beautiful Istanbul skyline seen so marvellously from and across the water of the Bosphorus and Golden Horn, immortalized already in the early 19thC in Melling’s engravings. Melling having lived in Istanbul for twenty years drew with the eyes of both Westerner and insider (much to Pamuk’s and my admiration).
The imperial mosques are architectural masterpieces like cathedrals, poems in stone They are a synthesis of East and West (this is amusingly obvious in the baroque 18thC Nuruosmaniye Mosque - not to my taste). Their soaring interiors, light and airy, act as peaceful shelters from the bustle of the cities, and make you feel meditative - their very purpose. Instead of the tower with bells, they have minarets with loudspeakers broadcasting the muezzins’ call to prayer. It may seem surprisingly loud (especially at 5 am), but as with the bells in Europe, most people just ignore it and continue with their daily life. The sound is just another part of the cacophonic soundtrack of the city. I used to think the call was a tape-recording (I know nobody climbs the minaret any more) but having seen the mixing deck and microphone in the reduced size interior of the Süleymaniye, I now realize the performance is live. Indeed, paying close attention to the muezzins aroud the Hippodrome at night, I could hear one waiting for his neighbour to finish before singing the next phrase - a competition of improvisation. In fact listening more closely, I was transported to Andalucia: this is pure male flamenco singing.
After Aya Sofya we went down into the great underground Basilica cistern - not a religious construction at all but a huge and impressive Byzantine reservoir. The curious thing about Istanbul, considering it was the capital of the Roman Empire in the East for so many centuries, is actually how few Roman ruins there are about town compared to Rome. There are the huge city walls, bits of aqueduct, the invisible cistern and Aya Sofya and some former churches, but that’s about it, whereas Rome is positively littered with ruins. Did the stones go into the mosques? Hardly into the Ottoman traditional wooden houses. Or was most of it brick and earthquake prone? Whatever the reason the urban landscape in the old centre is a pleasing mixture of the centuries following the fall of Constantinople, old stone mosques, markets, cemetries, palaces, wooden houses, turn of the century commercial buildings and the less pleasing encroaching modern.
Endless, aimless strolling is the best way to experience Istanbul and seems to have made up a large part of the young Pamuk’s life too. The first thing to strike you is of course the sheer number of people on the streets. Then the profusion of small shops selling all things at all times and keen to attract your custom; and, pleasingly, the countless vendors of street food and refreshments. There is always something bright and unusual to catch your attention, people going about their daily life in a different but similar way catch your interest and then when you need somewhere quieter to sit down, the calm interior of a mosque beckons or a leafy tea garden for a refreshing glass of çai.
On Saturday afternoon we caught the tram out to Besiktas to see Rob Lewis, an old friend who has lived in Istanbul for eight years now and has a Turkish wife and a young daughter. We continued to stroll in this newer part of the city, on through the Yildiz park and down to Ortaköy with its picturesque mosque dwarfed by the Bosphorus suspension bridge. Here we were away from the tourists, strolling amongst Istanbullus.
Later that evening we took a dolmus up to Taksim to stroll down Istiklal caddesi, once the Grande Rue de Pera, the elegant main street of the late 19thC early 20thC commercial centre of the new city. This very long street is now pedestrianized. But it wasn’t the quiet night-time stroll we had expected: Galataseray had just won something important and thousands of jubilant football fans decked in red and yellow were noisily streaming down the street towards us. Yet they were in no way aggressive or threatening, the atmosphere was of one big party.
The next day we visited Topkapi palace starting with the harem. These elegant private appartments of the Sultan’s family and concubines were the ultimate gilded cage which few would ever leave. The women were in effect slaves and as such could not by Islamic law be taken from among Muslims but had to be pressed into service from elsewhere (hence the plot of Mozart’s “die Entführung aus dem Serail”). Now this is very curious, as the ones who became the Sultan’s favourites would become mothers of future Sultans: so the Sultan was never a pure blood Turk and his mother, who rose to be the most important person in the domestic life of the palace, the Sultan Valide, a foreigner who learned Turkish on entering the harem. That’s a rather interesting way of running a royal family, moreover the successor was chosen from among the sons and was not necessarily the first born - leading to great palace intrigues. It is in fact a very imperial system. Remember, the Roman Emperors as the Empire developed were rarely Italian.
Istanbul itself was an imperial capital. At the turn of the 19th/20thC only half the population was muslim, there were of course many Greeks, who had never gone away, and other nationalities from all over the Empire (the Ottomans were for a long time tolerant of other religious and ethnic groups). Istanbul was once far less Turkish and more cosmopolitan than it is today, a fact Pamuk wistfully regrets. Istanbul was an international capital, like imperial Rome, like Hapsburg Vienna - or dare I say it, in our modern European bureaucratic empire, like Brussels. As such Istanbul developed and has retained much sophistication, which inevitably appears in its food which is far superior to the surviving remains of Ottoman cuisine to be found in Greece and the Balkans.
In the afternoon we crossed the Bosphorus on the ferry to Üsküdar as Thomas had never set foot in Asia and then took a short Bosphorus cruise up to the second bridge and back. Istanbul was built strategically at the mouth of the Bosphorus, the incredible geographic phenomenon of a long sea channel linking the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara and ultimately the Mediterranean. Not many cities have a major international shipping lane running through their middle. Pamuk writes of spectating cataclysmic colisions in it. The Bosphorus is close to the heart of Istanbullus and they aspire to a home with a Bosphorus view. Most of those on our cruise were locals out for the ride. And very beautiful it was too, the deep almost purple blue of the mysteriously flowing water, the old wooden yali mansions, the green of the hills, the great vistas of Istanbul. What other way to conclude the day than to eat locally caught fish under the Galata bridge?
On our last full day we headed for the more touristy covered market or Grand Bazar to start with, but also explored the adjacent streets. The Bazar is a vast and veritable warren of colourful stalls. I enjoyed the patter of one of the first sellers to accost us “Please sir, tell me how I can take your money off you”. That about sums it up, but if done with a smile and you’re aware of what’s going on, there’s no harm done. On the contrary, it’s quite entertaining. Having bought a carpet on a previous trip, I felt under no compulsion to buy another and just strolled. Thomas who is a keener shopper than I am was happy to buy plenty of fake designer brand clothes and a watch, knowing they are not “genuine” but good value. We checked out some of the lesser mosques (Sokollu Mehmet Pasa, Firuz Aga, Küçük Aya Sofya) discovering some exquisite interiors, sipped a tea or two and played a game of backgammon, stocked up on baklava to bring home and continued to stroll.
And so the Western tourist that I am felt upbeat and stimulated by the colourful bustling exotic city, quite different to the melancholic mood described by Pamuk. But the tourist does not live the same life as the local. The local lives all the year through in Istanbul and sees plenty of grey days, rain and even snow. It was pleasantly sunny while we were there, yet surprisingly cooler than in Brussels. The local has to put up with things that don’t work and congestion, rather than being enchanted by the picturesque delapidation of certain quarters and the general bustle. Pamuk and the locals clearly love their city but have a different take on it. It’s a whole way of life for them caught in the contradiction of being simultaneously Western and Eastern. It’s something we can only scratch the surface of in a few days which is why it’s good to read books like Pamuk’s.

About cycling

I cycle about 3400 km in a year. That’s not very much really (if you divide it by 52 weeks) so I guess it’s all I find time for, but it keeps me ticking over. My cycling falls into two categories: it’s my main means of locomotion to and from work and around town; and it’s my favourite way of taking exercise for pleasure when in Brussels.

I cycle to work pretty well every day - and more often than not back home for lunch too. I draw the line at cycling in snow (I’ve come off in it once or twice and don’t feel so confident about it) but it doesn’t snow that often here. Sometimes, if it’s raining really heavily, I may skip coming home for lunch or accept a lift from Clara. I often later regret it, because it often stops raining and I find myself stranded without my own transport. So generally, rain or shine, you’ll find me on my bike on the way to work.
Unlike in the car or on public transport, I know exactly how long it’s going to take me by bike and I don’t feel I’m being taken hostage, I feel free and in control. Also the exercise and fresh air wake me up on the way in and on the way back it’s rather relaxing to pedal away if it’s been a mentally tiring day. It’s great to feel the seasons go by, cold and hot, dry and wet, light and dark.
Depending on the building I’m working in it usually takes 10 to 15 minutes to get in and is mainly downhill. I find that over a typical urban distance of 3 to 4 km the bike is the fastest way of getting anywhere in Brussels and once there you don’t have to worry about parking. That’s what makes cycling so good for small errands and little purchases. I have a side panier that clips on and off very easily for this purpose.
Brussels has quite a few hills though and good gears and brakes are essential.
I do my regular maintenance myself: cleaning and lubricating the chain, tightening and renewing the brakes, cleaning off the unspeakable urban grime, pumping up and changing the tyres.
I don’t have an ecological axe to grind, I just find cycling about town more convenient and often more comfortable as I like being outdoors. Having said that, a bit of eco-smugness can sometimes come in handy when debating issues with certain people. Also, as I’ve had my daily exercise in a utilitarian way, I don’t have to make the time and go out of my way to get it in some other form.
People often ask if cycling in Brussels isn’t dangerous. It’s not so bad if you watch out. The main thing is to make sure that drivers have seen you, I always say “don’t do anything till you’ve seen the whites of their eyes”. Actually you have to watch out as much for pedestrians, it’s amazing how many just step into the road without looking, on the assumption that since they’ve heard nothing, there’s nothing there. One day these people will be run over by a Toyota Prius. That’s also why the cycle lane on the Rue de la Loi, which is on the pavement, is much less satisfactory than those on the road.
I also wear a helmet. Ten years ago people used to point at me and laugh, but helmets are quite common these days, and if they get you noticed that’s half the battle won. I’ve been knocked off a few times by idiots throwing open car doors without looking first and I once had a fall by braking on the white paint of a zebra crossing in the rain - you skid out of control. But actually that’s very few and no serious accidents in over twenty years, so it’s safer than many fear. Nor does it actually rain as often as people think, though I carry full waterproofs in case I get caught. Another issue is using a dry lubricant so you don’t run up a horrendous dry-cleaning bill for oil-stained trousers.
More people should try cycling: if you’re not going too far and don’t have much to carry, it’s the best way to get about town. On my bike in my suit I still get laughed at by young men in souped-up Golfs. The joke is on them though: they’re far greater losers than I am.

Apart from my town bike I have a mountain bike and a road bike (racer would perhaps be an exaggeration for the speed at which I travel). I went off the road bike a bit a couple of years ago when I strained my knee on it, probably from being in the wrong gear at the wrong time. So I tend to use the mountain bike for pleasure, I also like the freedom of being able to leave the asphalt and try a track as soon as tempted. My mountain bike is a fairly ordinary Scott Yecora with Shimano indexed 3 x 8 gears, V-brakes and front suspension. It works well for me for what I use it for and is actually my second, the first one is down in Monfalcone now. Most of my outings are into the forest (see earlier posting), sometimes coming out the other side in the parks in La Hulpe and Tervuren, so in the 20 - 35 km range. Occasionally with more time (enough to do 45 - 60 km) I like to go into the countryside to the east between Duisburg and Leuven, and the Paillotenland to the south-west, returning by the canal. There are some good car-free concrete agricultural tracks in these areas. I keep a map of everywhere I’ve been which looks like a great spider’s web around Brussels. Sometimes I stick to a familiar favourite route and let my thoughts wander, sometimes I explore (often without the map and retrace where I’ve been when back home). More rarely I take the bike down to the Ardennes (eg in the car on the way to work in Luxemburg) where routes can be more challenging.
Last year my best ride in Belgium was following the entire length of the river Lesse. I took the train to Neufchâteau which is about 10km from where it rises. The first part of the route was typical high Ardennes, fields with cows, fir plantations, small villages with the stream a little distant. The next part, the best, where the Lesse has become a proper river in a wooded valley, follows the river very closely along forest tracks and crossing the villages of Lesse, Chanly and Belvaux. Near here the river disappears under a hill to form the Grottes de Han. When you pick it up in Han for the third part, you’re in a wide flat bottomed valley, almost English in its rural meadowy idyll, and the route takes the disused railway as far as Houyet. From here the river enters a narrow gorge like valley which in part is not really for cyclists. I found myself at one point climbing a metal ladder with the bike precariously on my shoulder, and at another on quite a long staircase. Eventually the road picks up again and you emerge at the Meuse for a short riverside cycle up to Dinant to catch the train back. That was over 100km and thoroughly enjoyable.
My best ride in Italy (with Thomas) was in the Alps in Valvisdende on the “strada delle malghe” a long balcony route which is a mixture of path and track linking a series of summer dairy farms between 1800 and 2000 metres. It was a long slog up from the valley floor at 1200m but it was in the shade of the forest. Once up there, the views were fantastic. At some points the route became a narrow path traversing a steep slope with a potentially nasty drop off (there were roots and stones in the path too) so we got off and pushed. Generally I have no problem with getting off my bike and pushing it when it is safer or less tiring and actually as quick as pedalling it. Finally there was the long cruise back down. It was a memorable day in lovely weather and we met few people. I tend to prefer walking to cycling in the mountains (you don’t have to spend as much time looking at the ground) but this route was about 35 km and too long on foot. Cycling can also be a handy way of covering an approach march, which Thomas and I did the next day to get from Gera at 1000m to the top of Cavallino at 2689m. It took us two and a half hours on the bikes to get up to 1800m over a longish distance but it was brilliant to have them waiting for us as the end of the hike.
Most of my leisure cycling is far less extreme though. It’s like strolling, only I cover a longer distance. Exercise for me is ideally out of doors with fresh air and something to see. The bike allows me to be in the forest just quarter of an hour after leaving my front door. Today I saw how many more leaves had opened up since last week, quite transforming the look of the forest. Spring has finally arrived. I also surprised two deer unusually close to the Enfants Noyés lakes.
The bike is my key to this freedom and these delights.

About home

Having been away for the best part of three weeks, it is good to be back home. Home is where I feel most at ease, which is how it should be. Everything I might need is close to hand. Home is the best place to relax and be with my family; until of course countless everyday tasks of maintenance, administration and the business of merely living present themselves. But they bring their own sort of domestic satisfaction once accomplished.
It is often said that people’s homes are a reflection of themselves. Homes are best shared, so ours is a reflection not just of me but also of Clara and the children. Since “about being here” attempts to give a reflection of myself, I shall describe my home.
I don’t want to give an estate agent’s description. Home is more than a house or an investment in real estate in which you happen to live. I think I’m allergic to the expression “a nice property”. Home is not “Ideal Home” either, it’s not posing for a sterile photo in a glossy magazine; it shows all the signs of being in regular use and is cluttered with the accumulated paraphernalia of experience past and present.
We moved in here in 1989 shortly before Julia was born. It’s an average sized Brussels town house (ie in a terrace) built in the late 1920’s with a garden at the back. That means it’s tall and thin (5.5 metres) with five levels - so you get to do a lot of stairs living here.
The ground floor has the characteristic three rooms “en enfilade”, though the largest, the kitchen-dining room, is actually built out at the back. It’s the largest and most important room in the house and it opens straight onto the terrace and garden, to where activity spills over in the spring and summer. It’s quite light and you can see the plants and flowers in tha garden out of the windows and in the other direction from the dining table you can survey the ground floor right through to the front. This room is central to life in the house and reflects the importance to us of preparing food and eating together. In the middle room is the piano, a desk, the large CD collection and a large wardrobe for outdoor clothes. The front room inevitably has a large sofa (including a section for siestas) the TV, hifi and a lot of books. There are a lot of my paintings on the walls (mainly watercolour landscapes), in the middle room a big portrait of Clara and the children when young (painted by an artist who used to live down the street) and a big mirror above the old marble fireplace (sadly the fireplaces don’t work). There are also plenty of plants on the ground floor including a big monstera in the kitchen. Generally throughout the house the walls are white, the floors plain pine boards with rugs here and there and the furniture light-coloured wood (cherry in the front and middle two rooms, beech in the kitchen, oak on the first floor). The white seeks to increase the light and act as a neutral backdrop for the many pictures and photographs, the wood to give a feeling of warmth.
In the hall there is some fine original floor tiling. Other period details include the old doors and some nice plaster ceiling mouldings on the ground and first floors. I like these old details, they give the house some character. The ceilings are generally quite high giving a feeling of spaciousness.
On the first floor is our bedroom looking onto the garden and the office which doubles as dressing room. On one side the wall is taken up by cupboards built by a carpenter from Burgundy (who sadly died young), on the other is a very large desk on which sits the computer I am writing at. There are lots of pictures and books on this floor too. Then there’s the main bathroom in white and light blue.
Julia and Thomas have a room each on the second floor and a shower room. Thomas’ room in yellow and red (his own choice) breaks with the house colour scheme and is quite original in other aspects too, but despite the varied odds and ends of furniture it is usually quite neat. Julia’s room has smarter fitted furniture but is usually quite disordered.
Right at the top, the attic is a nice quiet light space which is a good place to get away from everything. It serves as spare bedroom, music room, kids’ study room, occasional studio and last home for unwanted items of furniture, discarded toys and less than likely to be re-read books.
Right at the bottom we have a large healthy dry cellar in four parts (the house is on high ground) which provides the space to store bikes, outdoor equipment, skis, wine, tools, suitcases and bags, miscellaneous junk that might come in for repairs etc. Here too are the washing machine and boiler and plenty of room to dry clothes through the long cold and damp season.
I mustn’t forget the long wooden staircase which offers plenty of wall space for posters, postcard collections, paintings and photos of the children.
The house is a generous size for a family of four, comfortable, quiet, warm, reasonably light. In short it feels like home. When we first visited it, it somehow felt right, that it would make a good home. I wouldn’t dream of moving, the idea strikes me as quite unnecessarily life disturbing. Alongside the inside of the house, other important considerations that make it home are of course the garden and the neighbourhood, but I shall write about those another time.