Hyde Park – A Short Walk To The Centre Of The Universe or ‘Sometime In London City’

There was a moment when I was in the crowd of 80,000 for the final Olympics concert in Hyde Park, on the evening of the closing ceremony, and New Order were playing ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’, when the last of the late August sun fell over the crowd’s faces  – a crowd who were singing along to the song – and a realisation came home to me which had been growing for the last couple of years. Slowly but surely, Hyde Park has become a concentration of wonderful energies from around the world.

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When I was a kid growing up in London it was a dull place, a place of nannies with prams and the Round Pond and not much happening.

But slowly and quietly things have been changing.  It began with the outburst of emotion over Diana’s death when the railings of the park spilled over with flowers;  her memorial fountain  – treated more as a long water slide by delighted kids – and flower walk softened the martial regularity of the place.

With its intricate system of paths all radiating out from one another in complex geometrical patterns, rather like those children’s games where you make a point and then swing a compass to see where you can get to next, it is a park one can get lost in constantly and discover new surprises:  the Lido where the hardy can still swim the Serpentine;  the beautiful new statue beside it, unveiled in 2009, of a 10 foot high bronze ibis;  the many families from the Middle East who feed the ducks as a Sunday outing, carefully avoiding the Rasta-locked rollerbladers who swing along the tarmac;  Speakers Corner, where fundamentalist Americans wearing khaki debate with sober Hasidic scholars wearing suits.  The joggers of every nation pass the couples sitting on a bench, or the students playing Frisbee.

The park technically speaking is made up of two republics joined at the hip, like the old Czechoslovakia;  Kensington Gardens to the West and Hyde Park itself to the East.  But to all intents and purposes Londoners treat them as the same contiguous park, regardless of bureaucratic distinctions.  The Serpentine that snakes between them, with its strange boomerang shape, is not so much a border as a binder.

By happy chance Yoko Ono currently has a show in centre of the park, at the Serpentine Gallery beside the lake, with ‘peace trees’ outside, festooned with the notes and wishes of visitors.  The show not only demonstrates that she was doing conceptual art of great simplicity and rigour when the new sensationalists like Hirst and  Emin were just a gleam in the art teacher’s eye, but encapsulates the feeling that what used to be the preserve of Central Park in New York – the internationalism, the love, the casual mingling of nations, many wearing rollerblades – has now come here to the centre of London:  the park as a world of its own; the park as the centre of the world.

 

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2012 – End of the Maya Long Count

Catastrophe theorists have been having a field day – or rather year.  2012 is when the Maya long count ends.

As catastrophe theorists have loved to point out, 2012 marks the end of the old Maya long count, the end-date of a 5,125-year-long cycle;  but before we get too depressed,  Mayanists have been quick to add that just because one count ends, it doesn’t mean the Maya believed another couldn’t begin.

As ever, nothing is ever quite as you think it is with the Maya.

Thirty-five years ago, I visited my first Maya site, at Palenque.  From the top of the Palacio temple, a staircase led down inside it to the burial chamber of a ruler.  The ‘secret staircase’ – it is difficult to use any other less melodramatic term – had only been discovered in 1949.  An archaeologist noticed there were holes which had been filled with stone plugs in one of the floor slabs;  the temple wall also extended below ground level, suggesting some lower chamber.

When they lifted the slab, they found a stairway filled so densely with rubble that it took three years to get to the bottom.

Going down the corbelled staircase on my own felt like something out of John Buchan.  At that time, visitors were asked to bring their own torches, as there were only low-voltage lights running from an intermittent generator.

For the archaeologists who first saw the funeral vault at the bottom, it must have been the revelation of a lifetime:  the room was still preserved as they had found it, with the king’s funeral tomb dominating the chamber.

The size of the crypt was impressive:  it was at least twenty feet high.  After the descent down a narrow staircase, this was like finding a cavern after pot-holing.

In the years since my visit, much has changed in our understanding of the Maya – from new archaeological discoveries, but above all because we can now finally read the glyphs on the temple stelae.  …

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The Green Road into the Trees – Launch

The book is now out – see the reviews in the Spectator and Independent  

To celebrate the launch and what is supposed to be summer, despite constant rain, a small extract on meeting a leading Druid at the summer solstice celebrations at Avebury: 

 

A few people have gathered by the big stones that were once, when upright, set as a triptych and may have been orientated towards the rising sun.  Loud snores are coming from a sleeping-bagged bundle at the bottom of the largest stone, where it looks as if someone is  going to sleep  through this year’s dawn solstice. 

I talk to a tall man in a grey cloak with a staff, who lives in Malmesbury.  He has the languid, tired manners of an Anglican vicar. 

‘Are you a Pagan?’ he asks, as if it were the most natural question in the world.  

I mumble the sort of non-committal generalities I usually do if someone asks if I’m a Christian.  My hesitancy is reinforced when he then asks if I’m a Christian and I have to give a similar response. 

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‘Paganism,’ he explains patiently, ‘is tied to a sense of place, of being rooted in a landscape.  If you’re drawn to a place like Avebury, then you’re probably a Pagan.’ 

I nod politely. 

‘Not that it’s easy being a Pagan,’ he sighs, and leans on his staff to peer moodily at the ground. ‘The problem about Paganism is that because it’s all local, and about local places, we don’t organise ourselves on a national basis very well.’  For a moment he sounds like a Liberal Democrat.  ‘What matters to a Pagan in Malmesbury is completely different to what matters to a Pagan in’ – and he casts around for an exotic example – ‘to a Pagan in, say, Devizes.’  He pauses.   ‘Or for that matter in Aylesbury.  There are a surprising amount of Pagans in Aylesbury.’ 

‘Trying to organise Pagans is like trying to herd cats,’ he says, with bitterness. ‘It’s solstice day, the most sacred day of the year, and most of them have gone to the wrong part of the circle to celebrate!’

 

From The Green Road into the Trees:  An Exploration of England by Hugh Thomson (Preface 18.99), with illustrations by Adam Burton

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Shakespeare in Kabul

Shakespeare in KabulA remarkable new book has just come out about trying to mount a production of Shakespeare in Afghanistan, using a mixed cast, which of course is in itself a radical step.

Even the discussion about which play to select caused endless difficulties. Most of the comedies have “Male-female interactions  that could be problematic in performance”:  the Merchant of Venice raises issues of anti-Semitism; Measure for Measure and the Taming of the Shrew are not funny in a country where many women continue to be treated badly;  Miranda pursues a young man in The Tempest in a way Afghans would find ‘inappropriate’.  Obviously the history plays with their themes of invasion and insurrection could have played well – Richard II being a strong candidate.

But the producers did want to try to introduce a large female cast, so the search was on for the right comedy.

Eventually they settled on Love’s Labours Lost with its courtly conceit of four young men retiring from the world, and four young women disturbing that seclusion.  But even that caused problems. At one point the young men are required to disguise themselves as Russians to woo the women.  The actors categorically refused to dress up as Russians.  Eventually a compromise was reached.  They would disguise themselves as Indians instead.  As I know from my own travels in Afghanistan, because of Bollywood movies the Afghans think of India as the home of romance, so this transposition made sense.

As did these wonderful – and in Kabul, revolutionary – lines from Biron’s speech on the folly of forswearing the company of women:

From women’s eyes this doctrine I derive:

they sparkle still the right Promethean fire;

they are the books, the arts, the academes,

that show, contain and nourish all the world.

 

Shakespeare in Kabul (Haus) is by Stephen Landrigan and Qais Akbar Omar 

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Penguins and Battlefields

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No one would ever go to the Falklands for either the weather or the view.  That at least has been the traditional opinion ever since Darwin commented on his first arrival, ‘scarcely any views can be more dismal than that from the heights: moorland and black bog extend as far as the eye can discern, intersected by innumerable streams, and pools of yellowish water….. These islands have a miserable appearance.’

Like the Hebrides though, catch them on a good day with a bit of sun and they have their own wild beauty.  Throw in some accessible colonies of penguins and you have the beginnings of a tourist trade;  a surprising amount of passenger boats now stop there for a combined ‘Penguin and Battlefield’ tour, with fish and chips in one of the pubs in Port Stanley afterwards.

One reason for the bitterness the islanders feel towards Argentina is apparent as soon as you drive out of Stanley – the amount of land that is still uninhabitable because of landmines, including many of the beaches which they used to play on as children. The cost, both human and economic, of trying to clear such large areas has proved too much.

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Back in Buenos Aires

I’m back in Buenos Aires after 20 years. Outwardly, little has changed in the centre of the city. At San Telmo market they still sell Carlos Gardel, Maradonna and Benny Hill dvds, with a curious mix of old gaucho belts, movie cameras and Art Deco soda fountains. The steaks are as big as planks; the women as tall and elegant as greyhounds. The economy somehow manages to make life expensive both for inhabitants and visitors, and Peronist politics, as re-imagined by the Kirchner dynasty, are as incomprehensible as ever.

But there’s a big difference down at the docks. The old desolate area of Madero has been transformed by new buildings and promenades beside the waterfront, along which the gilded youth of B.A. rollerskate and hang out in the sun wearing as little as possible.

Porteños have always been a neurotic bunch.  It’s said that there are more psychotherapists here than in any other city on the continent. I put it down to the fact that, like some New Yorkers, they’ve always secretly wanted to be Californian but never had the access; now they can. I pass a pair of bronzed young men stripped to the waist and sipping maté. There is an equally bronzed statue of Fangio and his famous racing car; and memorial plaques to the disappeared of the dictadura.  Now that even the blonde angel of death, Alfredo Astiz, has been put away behind bars, there is a sense that that terrible period of their history is behind them, although the ghosts of 30,000 people still stalk the streets.

What gives me the greatest pleasure are the avenues of Linden trees they have planted, a tree which flourishes in Buenos Aires, just as in Berlin, but has almost died out in its wild habitat in England, despite once covering most of the south of the country in prehistoric times.  It is a fabulous tree, a tree with translucent green leaves and fragrant white blossom. As a symbol of a renascent city and country, it’s hard to beat.

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Espíritu Pampa: The Last City of the Incas

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Ten years ago I sat in the middle of the ruins of Espíritu Pampa and despaired that it would ever be cleared. Dense jungle covered the site. Kapok trees had ripped open the Inca stonework, their roots gripping doorways and niches. Brush obscured the lines of the great Plaza, the kallankas and the ornamental fountains.

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The work of ever restoring the place seemed both Herculean and pointless – the ruins were too extensive and remote, the vegetation just too dense, for this, unlike most Inca sites, had been built not in the mountains, but in the jungle on the eastern slopes of the Andes as they joined the Amazon.

The site has enormous emotional resonance – ‘the last bastion of Inca resistance’, as a noticeboard proclaims at its entrance, it saw the final dying of the flame after the Spanish conquest in 1532. Having held out in the mountains of the Vilcabamba for some 40 years, by 1572 the last Emperor, the young Tupac Amaru, was on the run, pursued down here into the rainforest by a Viceroy intent on finally wiping out “the pretender across the mountains”.

Espíritu Pampa was burnt in the process; the Emperor caught and executed.

But perhaps because it is such a potent symbol, the Peruvian government have made a superhuman effort and cleared it – one substantial section just three weeks before we arrived. I can finally appreciate the immense size of the site, radiating out from the central Plaza where they have tactfully left a few of the giant kapok trees.

Now is the time to visit, before the vegetation returns under a less benign or interested administration; or when someone realises that with just 30 or so visitors a year making the week long journey, the cost of maintaining it cannot be justified.

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River Swimming

Poor David Walliams’ illness contracted from swimming the Thames for Charity threw up (sorry!) the following quite incredible statement from Thames Water:

A spokeswoman for Thames Water said: “The Thames is not a designated bathing area and therefore the Environment Agency does not require us to disinfect the treated waste water before it goes back into the river.’

swimming on the river thames Swimming breaksWell speaking as someone who regularly swims in it anyway, why the hell not make it ‘a designated bathing area’!  It would be a fabulous resource that could be accessed from half the Home Counties.  And get rid of the many pathogens that Thames Water currently pumps in there……

One of my best memories of travelling through Russia is the way that Russians use every last available inch of water to swim, so that you see them in canals and rivers and lakes everywhere, usually with a cold bottle of vodka and some pickled mushrooms to help them recuperate afterwards.

Pioneers like Kate Rew and the admirable Outdoor Swimming Society, OSS, still have a long way to go in their campaigning to make the same thing possible in Britain.

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Highway to the Sangre de Cristo mountains

road to Sangre to Cristo mountains, Colorado

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In Colorado to ride horses in the mountains.  One of the first times I’ve been in rural America – most of my previous visits have been to the cities – and I’m blown away by the scale and wilderness.  The largely empty highways seem to go on forever.  The mountains are chunkier than I’d expected as well – we’re a stone’s throw from Pikes Peak at over 14,000 feet.

 

Even the apples are bigger in America. And there’s a reason for that.  They grow a thousand times as many apples in the States as in Britain, but they prefer theirs to be ‘meal-sized portions’ – so they export the little ones to us, with our smaller appetites and orchards.

We take a pack trip into the Sangre de Cristo mountains, south-west of Colorado Springs, and spend some nights at over 10,000 feet with nine wonderful horses who pick their way surefootedly across some difficult terrain.  The forests are a rich mixture of aspen, spruce and pine, with wild raspberries growing underfoot and a few bears lurking around to add spice to the mix (we have a large Great Dane with us called Guinness, who is said to be more than a match for any bear, as they are notoriously afraid of dogs).

I’m with my old friends Gary Ziegler, who has led trips with me in Peru many times, and his wife Amy Finger.  Their Bear Basin Ranch lies on the old stagecoach route to Westcliffe, and has over 4000 acres of fine riding country to explore.

By coincidence I’m just re-reading John Steinbeck’s excellent Travels with Charley, in which he also travels across America with a large dog, who at one point barks at a bear.  It’s almost exactly 50 years old, written in 1961, published 1962, almost his last book and a fine tribute to his love for the wide open spaces of America as well as a melancholy forecast of some of the changes he could see coming.  It came out the year he won the Nobel Prize and was subtitled ‘In Search Of America’;  perhaps helped by the Nobel Prize, it was a bestseller and deserved to be for the simple, direct approach he took to travel writing, and his perfect ear for American dialogue:  ‘the Badlands of Missouri are like the work of an evil child…’

 

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The Pinball Of Peruvian Politics: A New President

Every year, the Lima seafront becomes more Californian; not just the surfers hanging out in the Pacific breakers and paragliders spiralling around the cliffs, but the sense of affluence:  there are families strolling along the promenade after eating at one of Lima’s increasingly fashionable seafood restaurants and the shopping malls are full of  IPods, boutiques and tropical fruit flavoured ice cream.

But this is the first time I’ve been here when even the taxi drivers aren’t complaining. The Peruvian economy is booming, with a 7.1 percentage growth rate that European countries can only dream of; the Peruvian football team, serial underachievers, have done well in the Copa America, beating the old enemy, Chile, along the way. And they have been celebrating the centenary of the discovery of Machu Picchu, not only as the symbol of the country’s glorious Inca past, but because they finally managed to get back all the artefacts that American explorer Hiram Bingham took with him to Yale in 1911.

However, having told me all this, the taxi driver will then usually shrug and say “but now, quien sabe, who knows?’  For the recent elections have delivered a shock result that may take the pinball of Peruvian politics off in a completely new direction. …

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