Greetings from Mykanos,
I only got back here on Friday after a couple of months away, mostly in London, and I must admit it’s nice to have room to move and pure air to breathe and no need to wear shoes, especially as I read about snow the length and breadth of Britain.
Our car was waiting patiently for us in Bogotá and Adriano drove the entire way, very proficiently, leaving me to enjoy the magnificent scenery. We came via the route through Ibagué and Armenia. It climbs up over the highest range of the Andes in this part of Colombia, the top of which is designated La Linea. As we crossed La Linea we were enveloped completely by dense cloud and it wasn’t until we descended a few hundred metres or so that we emerged into clear air again.
Friday was a public holiday (The Day of the Virgin), which meant that big trucks and semitrailers were banned from highways and we passed literally hundreds of them, parked by the road and at truck stops, being monitored by police. One can only imagine how much longer the trip would have taken if these behemoths were on the road, which is a very steep, sinuous single carriageway, on which it is almost impossible to pass. Immense engineering works are currently transforming the road up and over La Linea, bridging vast valleys and boring through massive mountains. Once completed it will revolutionise road travel between Mykanos and Bogotá, as well as other bits of Colombia of course.
As it was, we arrived here mid afternoon in plenty of time for doing the traditional candle and farolito (paper lantern) lighting that marks the 8th, but I will spare you the details, having bored you with it countless times before.
In London we were back staying in Stepney Green, next to Whitechapel, and again I was enchanted by the mix of ancient and modern, side by side, glass and stainless steel cheek by jowl with centuries old sandstone. For me it makes the city feel alive, keeping the best and replacing the rest, not preserving everything to make a theme park of how it was, but instead creating a contemporary, forward looking metropolis that treasures and builds on what went before and which made the present possible.
Art, as always, was at the forefront of Adriano’s mind and we made the most of what was on show, including ‘Impressionists in London’ at Tate Britain; ‘Matisse in the Studio’, ‘Jasper Johns’, ‘Dali and Duchamp’ at the Royal Academy; ‘Soutine’ at the Courtauld; and ‘Degas, Drawn in Colour’ at the National Gallery.
There was also an impressive show on the history of opera at the V&A, ‘Opera: Passion, Power and Politics’, which was a collaboration between the V&A and the Royal Opera House. It included an audio guide that used Near Field Communications to give you the narration, opera excerpts and atmospherics as you moved from area to area … from Venice, to London, to Paris, to Vienna, to Dresden etc.
My final artistic outing, which Adriano missed unfortunately because he had to leave the day before it opened, was the Modigliani at Tate Modern. There was a lot of great painting. I particularly liked the portrait of French writer, artist, designer, filmmaker Jean Cocteau. Cocteau’s comment was that his portrait didn’t look so much like him, but more like Modigliani, which he thought was a much better outcome.
I have been a fan of Cocteau for many years, and we have visited the Chapelle de Saint-Pierre des Pecheurs in Villefranche-sur-Mer in the south of France a couple of times. The church is decorated totally by him.
There is, however, as I am sure many of you know, also a chapel decorated by Cocteau in London; the Lady Chapel in the church of Notre Dame de France in the heart of Chinatown in Soho. On the three walls of the Lady Chapel, there are murals depicting scenes in the life of the Virgin, painted by Cocteau in 1959. They are the only works of their kind outside of France, and we have always admired them.
Adriano dropped in to have a look as usual, and while sitting there noticed a man asleep at the end of the pew. He proceeded to sketch him, taking advantage of his static state. When Adriano returned the next day, the man was there asleep again, and again became an unwitting life drawing model. But he was not the only one. Strewn throughout the church were numerous sleeping bodies waiting to be sketched. Adriano eventually worked out that they were cooks and waiters from the nearby Soho restaurants who napped in the tranquil serenity of the church between shifts.
Overall we caught up with friends, saw two of my Godchildren and enjoyed many memorable meals cooked by Adriano, usually inspired by a day full of art museums and sketching. For him, cooking is just another form of artistic expression.
There were a couple of notable anniversaries while we were in London. One was the 30th anniversary of the Great Storm, which occurred while we were living there in1987. The other was the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, for which we were not.
The Great Storm of 1987 blew down thousands of trees in and around London, reducing Sevenoaks to Twinoaks and Holland Park to Holland Plain. It was just two years after my arrival in London, and two years after my first job in the UK, which was writing the script for a British Telecom road show launching Cellnet, BT’s mobile phone service. Vodaphone had done theirs a few months earlier.
In those days, if you were important in business, or a high-powered ‘yuppie’, your essential accoutrements were a mobile phone the size of a brick, and a Filofax, at least three inches thick. These days a slim Smartphone does so much more than both, as well as allowing you, instantly, to provide photos and video footage of natural disasters and contemporary events for television news coverage.
Such things we now take for granted.
Interestingly enough, while in London I discovered that the same could be said of chickens in the UK.
Chicken was more or less a luxury in Britain pre-WWII. Few could afford it. With the end of rationing and price control of feedstuffs in 1953, however, the poultry industry was utterly transformed through intensive rearing and factory farming, leading to a revolution in the British diet.
In 1950 British households consumed only around one million chickens. In 1965 more than 150 million chickens were sold for consumption, and more than 200 million by 1967.
This amazing resource of affordable protein must have been a real Godsend after the lean years of rationing, but the intensively reared birds carried their own dangers and their arrival post-War coincided, for many people, with the end of professional cooks working in the home, leaving the lady of the house ill equipped to prepare the bird safely. Salmonella and food poisoning proliferated.
Something similar happened with the rising post-War popularity of DIY. Instead of hiring professionals to fix and do things around their homes, people decided to do it themselves, and were often electrocuted or seriously injured in the process.
I know the dangers well. Fewer people use professional writers these days for their speeches, presentations and corporate communications, and they wonder why their message isn’t getting through. Maybe that is contributing to the poor levels of productivity that bedevil the UK. Oh well. That’s showbiz.
Here, it is business as usual. The cosecha has not been as big this year but at least we got a reasonable price for our coffee as Adriano had sold it in advance, as a futures contract, earlier in the year. Others have not been so lucky. The place is looking beautiful, our animals are breeding incessantly and a lot of the usual avian visitors from colder Northern climes have arrived to enjoy our climate, breed, and get their chicks ready for the flight back to Canada.
Pispirispis was particularly pleased to see us and waits impatiently each morning for her Pispiccino. She is certainly the cat that gets the crème.
Love from him and me
Barry
