Bombay Mix

I’m in Mumbai where the taxi drivers are not unnaturally obsessed with the imminent World Cup match between India and Pakistan.  But however open to it as a sporting occasion, the cricket hasn’t mellowed their feelings on booting as many Muslims as possible out of India. 

 I have two drivers in a row who, unprompted, volunteer their ‘all Muslims are terrorists’ thoughts – although perhaps the continuing high security around the Taj Malabar hotel serves as some sort of prompt, a visible reminder of what is referred to here simply as 26/11. 

Gandhi's statue in Mumbai

I want to show my 11-year-old son Gandhi’s house.  The elderly taxi driver is not impressed. ‘Gandhiji!  he snorts.  ‘Div-id-ed the country.’ (He stresses “divided” so hard the word almost falls in half).  “I don’t like him at all.  My family had land in Northern Bengal (now Bangladesh).  We lost it at Partition.  So now I am a taxi driver.’   And appreciation of Gandhi in India is often less fervent than the casual Western visitor might presuppose.  I have heard similar views expressed from Kochin to the Himalaya.  His ideals of ecumenical pacifism, vegetarianism, let alone his much debated celibacy, are not shared by many. 

There is a revealing exchange of correspondence in the Gandhi Museum with the man from whom many of his ideals came from, Tolstoy.  Gandhi is in some ways the disciple, who had collaborated at the Tolstoy farm in South Africa – yet in the letter he comes over bossily, as the one demanding attention, while the gentle Tolstoy, who by this stage, 1910, was very frail, goes out of his way to placate Gandhi by saying that he has read a biography of him.  

In some ways, how much more quietly impressive does the current Prime Minister of India, Manmohan Singh, seem, the architect of India’s financial recovery in the 1990s and now a sane advocate of dialogue with Pakistan – over a game of cricket, if that helps.

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Afghan show at the British Museum

Museums do make life easy.  Four years ago I tried to reach the fabled site of Aï Khanum on the shores of the River Oxus in north-eastern Afghanistan, the Greek city built by the followers of Alexander the Great.  Despite having Ahmad Shah Massoud’s ex-bodyguard with us, we were beaten back just a few miles from the site by the turbulent security situation close to the Tajik border. Even if we had got there, we might not have found much: recent photographs show that the lower half of the city has been comprehensively looted in recent years.

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Now the finest pieces excavated from that site are on display rather more accessibly just up the Holborn road.  The British Museum’s superb new exhibition of the treasures of Afghanistan illustrates the extraordinary cross-cultural influences that one might expect from this crossroads of Asia:   an Aphrodite with an Indian bindi mark on her forehead;  another Greek goddess riding a Persian chariot across a silver lunar landscape;  Corinthian capitals beside Indian ivories.

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But the exhibition also raises some interesting wider questions.  It has only been made possible by some brave Afghan curators who hid the artefacts while the National Museum of Kabul was looted by mujahedeen in the civil wars.  For the past five years, the treasures of ‘Alexandria on Oxus’ have been homeless, on a permanent roving international exhibition that keeps them in perpetual exile but also has the effect that they are seen by far many more people than if they had remained at home.

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making fun of Mexicans

The Top Gear team’s controversial comments about Mexico  may have been just as much making fun of the stereotype as of actual Mexicans;  although Richard Hammond’s “Mexican cars are just going to be lazy, feckless, flatulent, overweight, leaning against a fence asleep looking at a cactus with a blanket with a hole in the middle on as a coat,” is close to the edge on that. 

Mexicans, like most nationalities, are more than happy to make jokes about themselves, just not very pleased when others do.  Their favourite one is that when God was creating the world and sharing out mineral wealth, natural resources, climate and other benefits equally among all the nations, when He came to Mexico,  He put all the chips on their table – prompting an attendant angel to ask Him why He was being so unfair.  God replied: ‘ Don’t worry, it will even out.  Just wait until you see the Mexicans.’ 

Far from being a mañana culture, the Mexicans actually have the reputation among other Latin Americans of being fast-talking, fast-moving and dynamic – if anything, a little too much so.  

Mexico City in particular is one of the fastest and biggest of North American conurbations – no place for sleeping in the shade and potentially daunting for visiting Europeans who try to keep to the slow lane.  I did actually take my driving test in Mexico, so can speak directly to Top Gear preconceptions! (Like everyone else I had to bribe the test examiner and then didn’t actually have to do any driving) – see Tequila Oil. 

So in answer to Richard Hammond, I would expect a Mexican car to be incredibly tough, versatile and have a fair amount of style…  which is why the car you will actually see most in Mexico City is the VW Beetle (there was a big factory in nearby Puebla which only ceased production of the ‘Mexican Vocho’ a few years ago).  Taxi-drivers have used them for years , although recent laws about having four-door cars for ease of use by passengers have opened the door to Japanese imports;  as readers of Tequila Oil will know, having enough doors for a taxi was a crucial concern when selling my own Oldsmobile …

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Crossing the Equator

We crossed the equator off the coast of Ecuador, the country named after it.  Fitting then to have the familiar ceremony that sailors have followed for centuries — the holding of a mock court on deck in which “King Neptune” inducts his ‘Shellbacks’ from the novitiate ‘Pollywogs’, who have never crossed the equator before. 

I’ve seen the induction a couple of times and it tends these days to be a cross between an Am Dram pantomime and a University rag, with the participants covered in shaving foam and thrown in a bucket of water (or pool if the boat is large and lucky enough to have one). 

It’s a far cry from the far darker account of the ceremony in William Golding’s novel Rites of Passage,  set in the early 19th century, when it was the rite that marked a licence for moral degeneration and foul deeds;  and quite recently there have been several episodes on naval boats where it’s clearly got out of hand – as evidenced by the fact that most navies have now had to bring in regulations that prohibit physical attacks on sailors undergoing the line-crossing. 

On civilian boats, it’s still a ceremony that is particularly enjoyed by those crew members who are rarely on deck — the engine room boys or galley staff, who hang from the rails with enjoyment as they watch their more unfortunate colleagues getting dunked in the foam and water. 

My own thoughts on entering the Southern Hemisphere are coloured by what has been happening in the Pacific below us.  That rare weather event, “La Niña”, the unruly sister of El Niño, has been brewing cold water in the centre of the Pacific which has in turn caused precipitation right across the basin and over to Brazil, whose terrible floods have been matched by ones in Sri Lanka, the Philippines and Australia. 

Bizarrely, the world’s media seem to have done little to relate to these floods together, treating them as isolated incidents of Candide-like irrationality, not the product of a uniform meteorological pattern.  Perhaps it’s time we stopped being so parochial in our weather reports and followed weather maps outside of the UK – indeed ones that crossed the equator.

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Another dissolute memoir

Another dissolute memoir which turns out to be a travel book in disguise.  It seems only a few weeks ago that I posted on Howard Marks’s High Times (no I wasn’t referring to mine…).  But I have a particular interest in ‘Life’, this autobiography by Keef (I had never realised this was a self-appointed nickname):  before publication his managers had been talking to me about possibly directing the forthcoming documentary that will complement the book.  Talks went on for a while but were then blown out of the window when Johnny Depp said he wanted to do it as his first directing job – clearly rather a better name to have over the marquee and an old friend of Keef’s anyway. 

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Life is fun – some good stories told with the trademark louche bonhomie, either travelling through the Badlands of the southern States or downtown Kingston.  And one of the most memorable passages is when he takes us to Morocco, Tangier and Marrakesh for a key moment in his story, the love affair with Anita Pallenberg when she leaves Brian Jones for him, almost pulling the Stones apart in the process. 

Someone has to make it into an opera – the beautiful but tempestuous boy (Brian), the beautiful and even more tempestuous Anita (“she certainly made a man out of me”) and Keith himself, the picaresque hero, with the story played out against a sixties Morocco that he describes well — the kef and hash, the orange trees, the sheer alien nature of the place just a slip of a way from Europe (“it could have been 1000 years ago”). 

As it still is.  I have been over to Morocco three times in the last year and it never ceases to amaze me how such a wild country can be just a few hours on a no-frills flight away (Ryanair from London Stansted). 

For my feelings on how you can “get lost in Fez”, see the recent feature I did for the January issue of Conde Nast Traveller. 

But one particular moment in Keef’s travels particularly intrigued me – when he fetches up in, of all places, Urubamba, the small town in Peru where I lived with my family five years ago, as recounted in Cochineal Red:  he and Mick have to sing for their supper (and a room for the night) as no one knows who they are.  

It’s a story I’d heard when staying in Urubamba but always discounted as one of those tall stories.  Sure the Rolling Stones came here and played here in the small corner cafe on the square.  Pass the Inca treasure will you…

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The 19th Century Moonshot

There’s something about a lock gate opening that always excites me, the admission to a new territory, whether it’s a stretch of the upper Thames or in this case the opening of the locks to the most ambitious canal in the world, that of Panama. 

The fact that it’s dawn and pelicans and frigate birds are circling round us as steam rises from the jungle to either side just heightens the sensation.  The red and green navigation lights are blinking to either side as we nudge our way down the channel towards the gates, and there’s an appealing pinging noise made by the mechanical ‘mules’ (electric carriages on tracks) that escort us on the shore. 

Even though we’re in a 650 foot long boat of 32,000 tons, the procedure for entering the lock is charmingly simple in some ways.  Two men come out in a rowing boat to grab some tow ropes which can then be pulled along the sides of the lock to guide the boat in. 

The ropes are thrown down from the boat by a local team of pilots who come on board.  It’s quite an art to hit a rowing boat with a rope from a distance – not least when you have a great many idle spectators to comment if you get it wrong – and on the side of the lock they’ve set up a bull’s-eye and throwing pitch so they can practise in their downtime. 

container ship travelling through Culebra Cut

Approaching from the Caribbean side, boats have to rise about 85 feet to reach the large inland lake of Gatun, man-made and created by flooding the valley, which we will then cross before taking the infamous Culebra Cut through the hills – infamous because so many men died making it – and then emerge through further locks into the Pacific on the other side. 

While still, almost a century after it was completed, one of the great engineering marvels of the world, the moonshot of its day, I find it hard to forget the lives that were lost building the Panama Canal:  a quite staggering 25,000, most of the deaths occurring during the failed earlier French attempt of the late 19th century when they had yet to get the measure of the challenge — in particular the need to provide sanitation and rid the area of the standing water in which yellow fever and malaria mosquitoes could breed. 

The French used many Chinese labourers and refused to let them take their habitual opium, about the only thing which had kept those same labourers going when working on the North American railroads.  As a result many ‘fell into a perpetual melancholy’, as one observer reported, and some committed mass suicide at the Culebra Cut.  

The real killer was of course yellow fever, from which only some 30% of those infected were likely to recover. 

The whole affair was a débâcle of the first order.  The French instigator of the canal, de Lesseps, a national hero for having completed the Suez canal earlier, badly underestimated the nature of the task – cutting a canal not through malleable desert sand but through some of the most humid jungle in the world.  When they abandoned their attempt, it was not only national pride that suffered:  the French economy nosedived after the earlier hyping of shares in the ‘ Panama bubble’, and because de Lesseps was Jewish, an atmosphere of anti-Semitism was fermented that prefigured the Dreyfus affair. 

But the waters of the lake are placid now.  There’s an island that has become a bird sanctuary and the transition to Panamanian control that was completed some 10 years ago has been a success – to the extent that they are now widening the channels so as to be able to take larger tankers.  When first opened in 1914, the Americans ‘future-proofed’ their fine new canal with channels of the then phenomenal width of around 100 feet – allowing boats of what became known as the Panamax standard – some 85 feet wide – to squeeze through.  But there are plenty of larger supertankers that have to take the long route around Cape Horn, adding 8000 miles to the trip , so are in the market for a wider canal. 

All this comes naturally at a price – around $50,000 passage fee for a boat like ours.  Not that I’m paying it.  But it does justify drinking champagne at six in the morning as we float up and enter the final lock gates that allow us onto the lake.

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With Dylan along the Cuban coast

Been sailing along the Cuban coast – although I’m in a powerful boat, the island of Cuba is so long (getting on for 1200 kilometres) that it has taken us 24 hours to sail along the shore before we head south through the Westward Passage and towards the Panama Canal.

Seeing the lights of Cuba twinkling alongside us at night, I’ve been remembering some wonderful times I had at each end of the island in the past — both in Havana to the west but also in Santiago de Cuba right in the far east, the Cuban Oriente, home of son  and so of salsa, and a place like New Orleans which is just busting out with dance, music and musicians wherever you look.

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Perhaps oddly it also makes me think of Bob Dylan.  Why?  Well I constantly play him anyway when travelling and I’ve just been reading an intriguing new book, Dylan in America by Sean Wilentz, which is a reminder of what a musical magpie he’s always been – sometimes controversially as in recent years he’s been accused of plagiarism, which is as absurd as accusing TS Eliot of doing the same in ‘The Waste Land’.

It helped me realise why he likes The Clash so much that he played ‘London Calling’ (to my great surprise) at the last concert he gave at the O2 – a song completely unsuited to his voice but very suited to the rough rock ‘n’ roll quality of the Hawks-like backing bands he now favours .  Perhaps it’s because The Clash, like him, are just such musical magpies who pick and choose from a huge variety of musical styles, and also viewed themselves as the troubadours and custodians  of a whole range of styles of older music, from ska to rockabilly to the whole Sandinista library.

What’s this got to do with Cuba given that ‘Dylan does salsa’ is almost as unlikely a thought as ‘Dylan does a Christmas album’ (except that did actually happen and in fact Dylan has often strayed south of the border, ‘lost in Juarez and it’s Easter time too’, with Latin touches to his music and facial hair – that gaucho moustache).  Cuba too is an extraordinary melting pot of musical styles, far less homogenous than people suppose.  Santiago in the east regards itself as the musical heritage city, again much like New Orleans, with an authentic earlier form of son which was later much adulterated and commercialised in Havana by the nightclub owners and pre-revolutionary Batista American gangsters who ran the place.  

The American State Department is contemplating relaxing the current stringent restrictions on American citizens visiting Cuba.  What better way to celebrate this if it does happen than for Dylan to play Santiago de Cuba as the first visiting American musician? Probably one of the last places in the world he hasn’t played yet on his ‘everlasting tour’ and sure the Cubans would take him to their very large hearts as un músico con corazón e alma y cojones.  I’d love to be there to shake a tambourine.

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When Snow Falls

Wonderful to have a white Xmas.  My children, nephews and nieces all went sledging with me down a hill in the Chilterns at great speed – and is there anything more beautiful than travelling across England on a sunny day when it is completely under snow, as it was on Christmas Day? 

That said, the ‘weather events’ of the last few weeks have left me wondering if we have lost the ability (or humility) to know when not to make the journey.  Are we so used to being able to “beat nature” and control it that when clearly uncontrollable forces arrive we still try to soldier on when the wise course of action would be to beat a retreat?

I noticed this when caught myself in a whiteout blizzard on the M25 as it crosses the North Downs in Surrey.  We think of suburban Surrey within the M25 ring road as being about as tame as England gets;  but the hills of the North Downs collect the first wave of any incoming north-easterly snow and can fast turn into a bleak and hazardous environment. 

On this occasion within just 20 minutes the scene looked like something out of the German retreat from Moscow:  heavy lorries lumbering to a standstill (400 ended up parked on the hard shoulder overnight), visibility down to a few yards, the slipways icing up so that it was only with extreme difficulty that anyone could leave the motorway at all.  …

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Wine and Granta’s ‘best of young Spanish language novelists’

Literary launches are often dull affairs — dutiful publishers, respectful friends, bashful authors — so very agreeable to be invited to the Granta launch for their new ‘best of’ list of ‘young Spanish language novelists’ – in Granta 113.  Someone (Saskia Vogel) has had the bright idea of combining the reading with a professionally hosted wine tasting so that each writer is paired with a fine Spanish vintage.  As punters are only given one glass, this means they have to drain it between each reading to get a refill.  Result?  A happily inebriated audience who appreciate every last word that the writers feed them. 

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And the writers themselves?  Granta make much of the idea that this new generation (i.e. born after 1975) have not experienced the repression of Franco or the Latin American dictators, so write more of the personal than the political.  This perhaps oversimplifies the work of the older generation – like Vargas Llosa and Márquez – and also ignores the work of some of the finest young Peruvian writers like Daniel Alarcón (Lost City Radio) and Santiago Roncagliolo (Red April) which is intensely political. 

But they do have a point as it is true that one huge influence hangs over this generation and not necessarily a benign one:  the late Robert Bolaño, who was been canonised by the literary world since his untimely death.  Bolaño made a virtue of an autobiographical approach – what it was like to live as a writer in the  Latin American bohemian world of casual sex and drugs – which in the hands of a master is all very well,  but when played out in infinite variations by disciples can become introverted and dull.  Writers have affairs and literary rivalries — fine .  But give me Macondo or the War At The End Of The World for a bit of scale and vision.  Both Alarcón and Roncagliolo provide that in their novels above, as do some of the others;  the best of the work here is, to use one of Borges’s favourite words, nítido,  lucid and intense (and very well translated), and as ‘viscerally real’ as Bolaño wanted South American literature to become.  Granta are to be commended for their commitment in launching the project. 

What is notable is the lack of women writers.  All six of those reading tonight are men.  And only a quarter of the total published list are women.  This is not the fault of Granta, who have rightly selected just on merit not political correctness.  But surely the next wave of Latin American writing will see far more from the likes of the remarkably accomplished Lucía Puenzo, who is both a filmmaker and writer. 

Back to the winetasting, which should be developed further by other literary publicists:  I’d like to see a vodka tasting with Martin Amis and Ian McEwan;  champagnes with Howard Jacobson;  and ‘Amazonian armpit arguardientes’ with Will Self.

see my full review of the issue

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Jonathan Franzen and Tolstoy

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Like everybody else at the moment I’m reading Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom. 

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There have been many references to it as being Tolstoyan in ambition, partly because of its length and scale – the intimate lives of his characters played out against contemporary events like 9/11 –  and because the author references War And Peace himself once or twice in the text. 

But I think it’s Tolstoyan in subtler, different ways:  Franzen seems to have the same ability to slip in and out of different characters’ heads, particularly his female ones.  Few male contemporary writers would dare to begin their book with a long testimonial from their heroine, ranging across issues from motherhood to sex to her fraught relationship with her own mother.  In a way what Franzen has done very successfully is to take territory usually occupied by such brilliant North American female novelists as Alison Lurie (The War Between The Tates), Carol Shields and Anne Tyler and give it a male twist while preserving the intimacy of detail. 

He’s also Tolstoyan in the way that when major events happen — one of his characters falls in love with someone they shouldn’t have, or someone dies – he just lets them occur baldly in the narrative rather than building up an elaborate scaffold of preparation, as a lesser novelist might do.  What interests him are not the large stones dropping in the water but the ripples that they cast – and that while his characters may often rationally know what they should do (which man to marry, what not to say), events and random emotions may somehow compel them to do precisely the opposite. 

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Tolstoy in 1908

Are there any British novelists achieving a similar scale over here?  not that I can think of – although there is another question that interests me perhaps even more:  are there any that would want to? There is still a modernist agenda here which values formal ability – of the sort that David Mitchell for instance has so dazzlingly displayed – over the slow unweaving of characters’ lives against an uncompromising historical background of the sort that Tolstoy would recognise.  

Not that Tolstoy, at the time of the centenary of his death (November 1910), is that much of an influence still in Russia itself:  when I asked a young Russian novelist in Moscow whether his generation viewed Tolstoy as an influence, he laughed and asked, quite fairly, whether Dickens was still an influence in Britain.  Although the fairer comparison might be George Eliot….

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