Opera holding hands with Rugby Players?

It isn’t often I’d think of the world of rugby at the same time as the world of opera, but in one area there are distinct similarities.

In the past those playing rugby at the top of their careers were still performing at a relatively low level of stress, on their bodies, on their emotional lives, on their ‘real’ jobs and on the families.

Equally, opera singers tended to live at a much slower pace, many of them living out their working lives in one or two theatres and seldom having to travel.

No more. Both rugby players and opera singers are expected to ‘play’ for longer and longer seasons, and there are penalties on both if they don’t show up for work. Opera singers in particular are expected to travel constantly in order to perform all over the world, and often don’t get the rest that’s needed after long flights. (Even as long ago as the 60s I can remember one jet-lagged opera singer arriving for rehearsal and getting into a real tantrum that was mostly the result of tiredness.)

So it’s probably not surprising that both opera singers and rugby players are turning more and more to drugs in order to maintain their high profiles. Expect to see an increasing number of opera stars requiring drug treatment over the next few years; already it’s becoming a cause of concern. I don’t think rugby players aren’t yet known for drug problems, but it can’t be far away.

Perhaps it’ll be a good thing if the world, because of an oil crisis, has to slow down on flying players – of both sorts – hither, thither and yon. Then we might find these talented people being able to work under less pressure, without having to resort to drugs - and alcohol – to keep them at the top.

What’s Eating Gilbert Grape

We watched the film What’s Eating Gilbert Grape again while we were in Valencia, courtesy of our host’s DVD collection. I hadn’t seen it for some time – think I caught up with in on television once – and was keen to see it again, having had fond memories of its quirky approach and intriguing characters.

Furthermore I remembered that Leonardo di Caprio was very impressive in it. He still is. I don’t know that he’s ever done anything better. Di Caprio, who was only 19 at the time the movie was made, plays a mentally handicapped 18-year-old, and conveys the behaviour of such a person with such ease and assurance that the first time around I thought the actor must have been handicapped himself (not having realized it was di Caprio). Before this, he’d hardly been in movies at all; his acting life was in television in such programmes as Parenthood, Santa Barbara, Growing Pains, and even one episode of Roseanne. After Gilbert Grape he barely looked back, and was a super star within half a decade.

Johnny Depp was thirty when he made the movie, but plays someone who’s presumably in his early twenties. Before this he’d made a number of movies, but apart from one they were nothing to write home about, and he’d had appeared for some time in a tv series called 21 Jump St. The one memorable movie prior to Gilbert Grape was the strange Edward Scissorhands, his first collaboration with Tim Burton. A cartoon story performed by real life actors, it’s an extraordinary piece.

Gilbert Grape is full of scenes that stick in the memory: the husband drowning in a foot-deep paddle pool; di Caprio climbing the water tower; the mother climbing the stairs at the end or coming to rescue her ‘baby’. But a scene I’d forgotten was when the husband, an insurance salesman, tries to sell life insurance to Gilbert, who has just been with his wife, with whom he’s been having a rather one-sided affair. On the whole life insurance, for most of us, doesn’t rank highly on our priorities in life, and it’s the same with Gilbert, who actually thinks he’s seeing the man because the latter knows about the affair. It turns out altogether differently for Gilbert and the audience; like so many scenes in the film things aren’t quite what they seem and take different directions to what we expect.

Lasse Hallström as a director doesn’t usually grab me – his version of The Shipping News was a disaster from my point of view – but in this film he has everything in place. I don’t think he’s ever made another film to equal it.

Joe's Palace

Stephen Poliakoff's latest tv film was shown last night. It’s one of two ‘companion’ pieces, the other (which stars Maggie Smith) will show next week.

Thomas Sutcliffe, of The Independent, wrote:
[it had] “a looping, elliptical style of storytelling that can make it very difficult to say, once the final credits start rolling, exactly what the whole thing was about.”

Never was a truer word said without quite being said. I don’t think Mr Sutcliffe intended to disparage Poliakoff’s piece; I think he meant to say it was full of meaning that wasn’t quite graspable. Unfortunately what his words actually say on the surface is exactly what I felt about the film – and so did the other three people watching it with me.

There was so much wrong with it: its sluggish pace, the dreadfully-acted main character Joe (if it was dreadful acting; maybe this boy can’t act) who seemed to be an empty shell; the overdone sex scenes which added nothing to the film – couldn’t we have been left to guess, along with Joe, what was going on upstairs?

Then there was the Michael Gambon character, which Gambon did his utmost to invest with some intelligence. Unfortunately, Poliakoff gave him so little to work on, and such a poor motivation for his long-standing reticence to do anything useful with his life, that in the end you thought: Get on with it, you silly old duffer. He finally did, and not before time.

People kept coming into The House and saying there were strange vibes – all except Joe, who didn’t seem to know a vibe from a vibraphone. He just sat listening to his CDs with his headphones on (including a very silly pair he picked from a host of silly gifts) or writing his notes, and people kept interrupting him. His response was to sound as dull as possible so that hopefully they’d go away and leave him alone. Eventually they pretty much did.

Shooting the present

One of the great revolutions of the late twentieth century must have been the arrival of digital cameras. Everywhere you go now, you see them, and of course they’ve infiltrated the cellphone scene and the palm pilot area as well.

Everyone has one. I don’t think I’ve seen a person toting a ‘real’ camera since we’ve been in England, and the only person I know who still has one that he uses occasionally is a friend of mine back in New Zealand, whose hobby is photography. But even he’s succumbed to the convenience and ease of digital cameras.

I just wish we’d had one when we were in Rome thirty-three years ago. We’d have a lot more photographs, instead of the few we possess, and we’ve have actually been able to take more successful photos of things we only have scruffy photos of.

Of course proper cameras require you to take some care in what you’re photographing. Digitals don’t, and you can get rid of as much as you take if you want. That’s the great bonus of the system.

Our digital camera has long since superseded the proper camera we still have at home, and probably will maintain its dominance. Yet the photography processing shops don’t seem to be suffering. Plenty of people (unlike us, for the most part) want to keep ‘real’ photographs, even if they’re taken off a digital camera. We have hundreds of photos of our holiday over here on computer (and a back up zip drive) but not a one we can actually hand to someone. Strange how we accept such change, isn’t it?

Shooting the Past

We watched the first two episodes of Shooting the Past on tv last night. BBC (I think) was repeating them. They first came out in 1999.

Timothy Spall plays one of the lead roles, in his pre-Harry Potter period. As always he’s a joy to watch: confronting, wheedling, keeping other people on the back foot. He’s not necessarily the lead character, but he certainly takes up much of the viewer’s attention.

The story is that an American business company wants to take over a building that houses a library of ten million mostly black and white photographs. The Americans would quite happily ditch the lot. The five somewhat eccentric workers in the place attempt to dissuade them from such drastic action, in part by presenting stories through the photographs. The program is worth watching for the photographs alone: they’re by turns poignant, humorous, startling, outstanding, and even seemingly ordinary. They capture the tone and times of the 20^th century in a wide variety of ways.

I’m not sure when the next episode is on, but because we never seem to be in one place for long it’s quite possible we’ll miss it. I’ll have to make an effort to catch up with it.

Catching up on HitTail

Because I’ve been on holiday in Europe for a month I haven’t been attending to my HitTail results. Naturally, when I checked them out today I found there was rather a large number of them to sort through. Ce la vie.

I thought I’d take a slightly different approach to them this time. Rather than working through them one by one, I’ve gone back to the section called My HitTail where I can see all the results in a kind of graph. The highest search query gets 48 hits, and of course, being HitTail, there are some two or three hundred one hit queries.

The 48 hits related to people looking for Mike Crowl, something I find rather astonishing – unless it means that unconsciously I’ve been searching for my own name regularly. Obviously it means people have been searching for all the other Mike Crowls in the world. It’s not a common name, but common enough.

Brent Stavig still comes up high on the list; this time at second place. He also appears as Brent Stavig Seattle, Brent Stavig Starbucks and just as Stavig. I suspect Stavig is a less common name than Crowl.

Queries to do with my off-the-cuff jokey post about athlete's fingers, come third. But we also get athlete’s fingers/fingers itch/foot hand, even athletes foot tongue! Crikey. And foot blog - you mean there’s someone writing a blog about athletes’ feet? Well, not entirely. Footcaresales in the UK have a blog on foot problems with only three posts in it. Not sure that that really counts as a blog.

The ever popular shrinking shirts continue to make news, and Chrissy Popadics, whom I’d never heard of until I did a blog on her home town and team of Boise.

These hits are all above the twenty mark. In the teens we get only James Berardinelli, one of my favourite online movie reviewers, and the ubiquitous Michael Crowl.

Anna Leese, the opera singer, and Karl Maugham, the NZ painter come in at 7 each, while Ronnie Rinalde, the whistler, and the book, The Coroner’s Lunch come in at 5. When we get to the number 4, we have several queries vying for attention: Andrew J Hiduke, about whom I still know next to nothing; endowment express; the Dunedin website, godunedin; James Mason in the movie, Odd Man Out; a rock group called Lyrical Whips, and finally, Postie.com, which is part of the PayPerPost site. PayPerPost has for some odd reason now changed its name to IZEA, which sounds like something you ought to have in a NZ firm. (I remember reading some while back in The Listener, how New Zealanders tend to hone in on the letter Z, when reading, because subconsciously they have this thing about Z been primarily related to NZ, or New Zealand. And it’s true. I take notice of the letter Z frequently!)

We’re getting down the list now, and at number 3 we have the following:
Fallacious arguments;
Funky P, in Luxembourg, the band I ‘discovered’ while I was over there;
HitTail itself;
Itchy between fingers;
John Pratt, the man who enjoys making puzzles;
One of my other blogs: Mike Crowl’s Travel Diary;
Rob Roberge, the author of a neo-noir novel;
Shaun Tilby, the basketball player in the Nuggets Team (in Dunedin);
Those Were the Days notes – I presume this relates to some book, but on my site it relates to eating cheese rolls, rolls with cheese too hot to eat and dripping with butter. Nowadays they tend to be soggy, tepid, with a bit of margarine scraped across them.

I’m not going to detail those who made it into number 2, except to mention that to my surprise Kiri te Kanawa is there; Maggie Smith; something to do with design flaws relating to Bill Bryson; Emma Fraser, another singer; Gareth Farr the actor, not the composer (the latter appears under several different queries: Gareth Farr blog/facts/naked/orchestral music of the sea with samples); Kavi Raz, the Indian film actor; Simon O’Neill, another Dunedin opera singer; and Michael Tippett, the composer.

Okay, you say, having read – or skimmed through - all this: What’s the Point? Purely my own satisfaction. I like HitTails’ approach, and I like seeing what people are looking for. That’s it, really. If you want to check out the original posts on any of these topics, you don't need to go to Google.com to do it. Just putting the search query in the search box at the very top of this page will find everything that's been written about any of these subjects.

Online surveys - and an acquisition

Back when I was out of work last year, I started (amongst many other things online) doing more surveys online. Sorry, market research, not surveys.

In spite of what’s said about doing surveys online, it’s not a very lucrative way of earning money, and some of the research places don’t actually offer cash direct, but various other ways of spending the points you earn, which personally I could do without.

I’m one of those people who enjoys doing surveys, although I must admit that some online surveys are very boring in their layout. They don’t fit on the screen well, and they ask the same questions over and over, on screen after screen – until you want to scream.

I’ve always thought face-to-face surveys that just asked the same questions for page after page were badly organised, and it’s the same online. I’ve thrown the towel in with some of them, because they get tedious, and all you can think is: when will this ever end?

On the other hand, some survey companies have made use of the Net’s capabilities rather more, using short videos, and even recreating ads on screen. This is a far better way to go, and shows that some researchers have become more innovative. Let’s hope others follow in their footsteps.

Apropos of all this, I see that yet another NZ company has been taken over, this time Research Solutions, which has been acquired by Synovate. Well, well, NZ will soon be entirely owned by overseas interests and then we won’t have to worry about anything any more!

Las Vegas' other side

Most people will have heard of the Tropicana Las Vegas, but have you heard of Opera Las Vegas? It doesn’t sound like something that goes with the city, does it? Nevertheless, there is an opera company in Las Vegas, and their latest production is Pagliacci. I’m not sure how you can just put Pagliacci on, on its own, but that’s what they’re doing. Normally Pagliacci is done in tandem with Cavalleria Rusticana, but obviously not here. (An old friend of mine used to refer to them rather flippantly as Cav and Pag.)
Opera in Las Vegas is a bit of a struggle, it must be admitted. As they say on their the company’s home page: Opera Las Vegas is raising the city's cultural life to a High Note.
Even apart from the pun (which may or may not be intentional - there’s a typo on one of the links on the home page as well, and ‘language‘ is spelt langurage on the auditions page) this speaks of a group that’s finding the people who live in Las Vegas or who visit the city are in general more likely to be swayed by the delights of the Tropicana than the Rusticana. (Which may account for the latter’s absence from the programme.)
I say, Go for it, Opera Las Vegas. Raise the standards of your community. Your amateur opera company’s productions must be a welcome change to some people at least.

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

Paul Torday’s debut novel makes me intensely jealous. There is no way I could ever get a first novel off the ground with such wit and humour, such intelligence and satire. But then I’m not Torday, and I’m not writing a first novel about a most odd subject.
I just finished this book today. It’s had some mixed reviews around the globe, but I found it perfectly charming. It doesn’t go far in any direction: the aspects of faith aren’t pushed so far that they become unbelievable (although obviously some grumpy secularist reviewers thought they were); the romance aspect is quietly handled, and there’s no shattering of marriages or sudden changes of direction for the characters; the use of various official papers and private notes and letters is hardly a new approach, but Torday handles it pretty well (except when he decided to put some sections out of sequence, something that didn’t strike me as necessary); the characters are more sharply drawn than some reviewers believed (probably the same secularists again); and though we don’t have dramatic scenes in the sense of characters playing off against each other (well, pretty rarely) because everything is told somewhat at one remove, we do have a competent approach to the action that does happen.
And then there’s all the stuff about salmon fishing. I don’t know that this book will convert a whole pile of readers into salmon fishers, but it won’t put them off either. The fishing side of things is interesting, and there’s just enough of it at any time. This avoids making the reader think: this isn’t a novel, it’s a fishing manual.
I found this book in a Valencia bookshop: I was desperate for something to read because my wife was taking so long to finish the fifth Ian Rankin, and Torday’s book was the only thing that looked worth a try. It was worth a try, and I thoroughly enjoyed it, reading it in two days - unfortunately. And my wife still hasn’t finished with Inspector Rebus.

Here are some short extracts from the book:
In the first, the main character, Fred has had a bit of an argument with his so-superior wife, who always expects everything to be on her terms.
“The rest of the evening was a bit of a frost, but when we went to bed, I think Mary must have felt a little guilty about the way she had changed her plans. Suffice to say, my new Marks & Spencer pyjamas were not required for the early part of the night. A relatively rare event in our marriage of late.
Afterwards Mary said, ‘There now, darling, that should keep you going for a bit.’” (Page 30)

Later Fred is having a meal with the Sheikh whose idea it is to enable his people to fish for salmon in the Yemen, and he tells Fred:
“’I regret to see your sadness, Dr Alfred. I would rather see you with an untroubled spirit and with your whole heart and mind bent upon our project. You need to learn to have faith, Dr Alfred. We believe that faith is the cure that heals all troubles. Without faith there is no hope and no love. Faith comes before hope, and before love.”’ (Page 139)

Much later, Fred reflects on this:
“I thought about the sheikh saying, although I could not remember his exact words, ‘Without faith, there is no hope. Without faith, there is no love.’
Then in a moment, in that vast space of rocks and sky and scorching sun, I understood that he had not meant religious faith, not exactly. He was not urging me to become a Muslim or to believe in one interpretation of God rather than another. He knew me for what I was, an old, cold, cautious scientist. That was what I was then. And he was simply pointing out to me the first step to take. The word he had used was faith, but what he meant was belief. The first step was simple: it was to believe in belief itself. I had just taken that step. At long last I understood.
I had belief. I did not know, or for the moment care, what exactly it was I had to believe in. I only knew that belief in something was the first step away from believing in nothing, the first step away from a world which only recognised what it could count, measure, sell or buy. The people here [in the Yemen] still had that innocent power of belief: not the angry denial of other people’s belief of religious fanatics, but a quiet affirmation. That was what I sensed here, in this land and in this place, which made it so different from home. It was not the clothes, not the language, not the customs, not the sense of being in another century. It was none of these. It was the pervading sense of belief. “ (Page 281)

Watching the owner's movies

While we’ve been in the apartment in Valencia, we’ve been making use of the owner’s DVD machine and his collection of DVDs. It’s not an extensive collection, but there are some interesting films there. I haven’t been able to persuade my wife to watch Monsters Inc again - I think it’s one of the best and funniest of the series of animated movies of the last decade. I went to see it with my younger son when it first came out, and I’ll never forget our last few minutes in the cinema. The film ends with some spurious outtakes, and at the time these seemed even funnier than the rest of the movie. The two of us were killing ourselves with laughter.
The owner’s also got a couple of Martin Scorcese movies: Raging Bull and Taxi Driver. We began to watch Raging Bull the other night, but gave up after the first ten minutes; the innate violence of the character de Niro plays just gets tedious. Instead we watched Memento, a film I’ve now seen three times. Each time I watch it I wonder if I’ve really got hold of what happens/happened. I think it’s a marvellous movie, and Guy Pierce gives a great performance - but who dun what?
The only other one we’ve watched was Finding Neverland - again, we’d seen it before. Still it’s a delightful movie, excellently performed, especially by the adult leads (Johnny Depp and Kate Winslet) and it was worth watching again. By all accounts the storyline is way off the truth, but it makes good viewing!
What would make all these movies even better would be if we had discount home theater seating - the sort that’s in the picture. Problem is, even though the living area in this apartment is substantial, seating of that size would take up most of the room…
I've just remembered I did watch another movie: Dr Strangelove, which I don't think I'd t seen since it first came out. Like so many Kubrick movies, it hasn't stood the test of time well. Kubrick didn't seem to have enough idea of pacing, and as he got older, his movies got longer and more wearisome. There are scenes, such as the one in the War Room, that go on and on; and after the Slim Pickens character goes sailing off on the hydrogen bomb (which was hair-raising when I first saw the movie) there's another scene which adds nothing to the point the film has already made more than adequately. Even Sellers' attempts to persuade Sterling Hayden's character of the wrongness of his actions is dragged out.
Kubrick gets great performances from the cast, though I think I prefer Peter Sellers' restrained President to his Dr Strangelove. The latter is too much over the top and too goonish for the rest of the movie. But Hayden is superb, and so is Keenan Wynn in his brief appearance. George C Scott plays his role without quite the subtlety it requires, but it works well enough. And it was interesting to see a very young James Earl Jones as one of the crew of the B52. I didn't recognise him until my wife pointed out that she knew that voice.

Ian Rankin

There was a Starbucks on the corner of Lothian Rd and Bread St.
He’d gone for filter, complaining that he could buy a whole jar for the price of one of the costlier options.
Ian Rankin - The Naming of the Dead - page 121

We’re been devouring Ian Rankin novels since we came to Europe. It just happened that we’d picked one up before we came, and decided to read it while we were away, one after the other, rather than carry too many books. (Jane Austin’s Northanger Abbey was the other choice.)
My wife is now on her fifth book in his Inspector Rebus series; I’m waiting for her to finish it (which means I‘ve had nothing to read - in English).
This is what we’ve finished:
Fleshmarket Close - the one we brought with us, and have now left somewhere. The Hanging Garden - we bought secondhand in Florence and then gave to someone in Barcelona. A Question of Blood - picked up in a double edition with The Hanging Garden in Florence.
Dead Souls - bought new at the Barcelona Sants railway station - the only Rankin in the English books on sale.
What’s great about Rankin as a thriller/mystery writer is that he’s literate, and doesn’t write down to his readers. It’s never annoying to read his books because of poor and hackneyed writing. There’s no formula to his books, except perhaps that he always has two investigations going on simultaneously; sometimes they connect, sometimes not, and in one or two of the books there have also been other personal and public investigations. His villains aren’t cut to any mold, and neither are his cops. Rebus’ offsider, Siobhan Clarke, may play a major or minor part in the stories. And even though some of the other officers consider Rebus a ‘dinosaur’, he usually sorts the villain(s) out, one way or the other. They may not always get convicted, but they certainly know that Rebus knows they did the deed.
Rebus himself is a dour character in some respects, though he has a great sense of wit. He’s constantly unsettled, and doesn’t sleep well. His personal relationships suffer badly from his obsession with getting his job done, and his life is often in peril because of the risks he takes. He doesn’t suffer fools gladly. He’s regarded as something of a rogue cop by his superiors, yet they don’t regard him as so much of one that they’ll finally cause him to quit. He’s too useful, and knows too much. Too much for his own good, in some cases, as when he’s so close to one of the villains in order to get even closer to another, that it’s almost uncertain which side he’s playing for. And he’s willing to act a part to get information that isn’t otherwise unobtainable.

John Hannah played Rebus in some of the tv versions of the books. I can't imagine someone less like the character; he's far too young, for a start.

Scotland's other drink

In the Ian Rankin novels featuring Inspector Rebus that we've been reading while on holiday, he keeps mentioning Irn-Bru. Finally we looked it up on the Net, because it's obviously a drink, but that's about all we knew. Seemingly it was originally called Iron Brew, and somewhere along the line the name has been squashed. It's Scotland's other national drink (other than whiskey, that is) and is more popular than Coca Cola. It's actually a soft drink, not an alcoholic one, and it's....orange.

Horse show in a bull ring

Being in Valencia we happened upon the show, Passionata Andaluza, which features Andalusian riders and horses, as well as flamenco dancers and the popular pianist/composer, Manolo Carrasco. Carrasco is utterly energetic, wild, frenetic - and a big show off. He’s just what the show needs, yet how he copes with the heavy duty playing he does each night is beyond me. As a pianist myself, I know what he’s doing to his hands. Nevertheless, he plays with all the fury required - and occasionally some tenderness. I think he prefers fury to tenderness, but that may just be my opinion.
Apparently he’s composed all the music for this show - some of it well-known Spanish tunes adapted and arranged - and along with a top band, he plays continually throughout. There’s a superb sax player (who doubles on flute at one point), guitarists, a drummer, and three singers, who occasionally do solos in that typical wailing Spanish way.
The horses are wonderful, of course; they trot in time to the music, and do their movements with great serenity. And of course they stand on their hind legs and everyone claps. And one of them manages to lift himself completely off the ground and kick his back legs out. They’re a delight, really.
And then there are the dancers. I can’t find their names listed on the site, but they’re superb too. Five women and a couple of blokes, and their timing and passion is spot on throughout. I enjoyed them more than the horses for the most part.
The show was held in what must be a former bullring, right next to the main railway station in Valencia: the Plaza de Toros is what it’s called. It’s very large, and must hold two or three thousand people at least, though it was only about two thirds full tonight. The seating is concrete, so they provided some padded portable seats at a euro a throw. They were definitely necessary! And of course, being in the open air, people smoked all around - and drank from those Spanish skin bottles in the usual Spanish way: holding it about a foot away and letting it arc into the mouth.

Being less than perfect tourists

We’re not very good tourists. I’ve come to the conclusion that not only do we get overwhelmed by choice, but even the choices we take up aren’t necessarily the best ones. Part of this is because I’m a bit disinclined to go just for the obvious tourist attractions. For instance I could have quite happily not gone to Pisa in Italy, but in the end we did, and it was interesting, but not surprising. That’s the problem with the obvious choices: we’ve seen them so often in pictures that they’ve lost their ability to surprise.
It’s been the same with choosing which cities to visit on our way around the five countries we’d opted to come to on our Eurail pass. Originally in Germany, we were going to go to the cities on the East side: Berlin and Munich were on our list. And then we discovered problems with getting from one of these places into Switzerland, and my wife found that there was a train that took you past the Rhine for a long distance, and we ended up going for places on the West: Cologne and Heidelberg, both of which I enjoyed, but they hadn’t been our first choices.
As for picking hotels in Germany - or in any of the countries for that matter - it’s been almost a matter of taking a pin and open the telephone book at any page. Except that we’ve done the equivalent on the Internet. This has resulted in some interesting choices, ones that in hindsight we might not have made if we’d known all we know now!
The place we picked in Cologne turned out to be excellent, and very central. The place we picked in Heidelberg was odd to say the least, and I’ve written (probably at length) about it on my travel blog. Whether we’d have made better choices for hotels in Berlin or hotels in Munich is a moot point. There’s a huge range of options on the Net these days, and the unwary or even the wary traveller can find him or herself delving into all sorts of interesting corners!
Still, if we missed Bavaria and the Oktoberfest, we did see plenty of castles on the way. And if we missed the Brandenberg Gates (which to my mind are more significant because of the military and political factors than their visual interest) and the Marienplatz and St Peter’s Church, we certainly made up for it by visiting St Michael’s in Hamburg (even climbing up to the tower - some twenty or more flights of stairs) and the Cathedral in Cologne - which was overwhelming!

Leather

While we were in Barcelona, my wife came across a hobby shop in the next street to where we were staying (a street that also had two rival Internet shops, incidentally, both of them run by Indians - Indians from India, that is) which sold leather for use in decoration. Like so many shops in the area it had a tiny frontage, and inside the counter stretched from just by the door to near the back. All along the right wall were little shelves and lockers, and along the left wall were reels and reels of leather in various grades of width and texture.
It immediately became my wife's favourite shop in Barcelona, and she went in there at least three times in the three days we stayed in the city. The place was constantly busy all day - and by all day I mean from the time it opened in the morning (around nine) to the time it shut in the evening (around nine). Some Spanish shops have a siesta; this one didn’t as far as we could tell.
Even though we are already loaded up fairly heavily in terms of what we have to carry around Europe, she bought some leather to use for knots, and perhaps later, to hang the enamel pendants we intend making on.
The Barcelona people obviously use the leather for all sorts of decorations: on purses, and clothing and whatever. You might wonder how such a shop could survive, but it’s obviously been there for decades - maybe more than a century.

Nothing's simple

I wonder who it was that decided the phrase notebook computer was more apt than laptop computer. Both of them are synonymous, as far as I can tell, so why have two names? The world is full of doublings-up. Here in Spain, where we’re sojourning, there seem to be two languages running along concurrently, as there are signs in both in most places. One of the languages is concise, the other uses more words to say the same thing. I don’t know which is ‘actual’ Spanish and which is something else (such as Catalan, which seems the most likely candidate, or Galician or Basque), but perhaps I’ll find out before we leave the country.
When you come to Europe you think everything is simple and that the people who live in Spain speak Spanish, the people who live in Switzerland speak Swiss (they don’t) and the people who live in Germany speak German (they mostly do). But nothing is simple, perhaps because human beings aren’t simple, and variety is the spice of life in every department.

Hard-earned cash

In one of the Ian Rankin books I've been reading he talks about immigrants trying to make a living by selling stuff on the streets - often without a hawker's license. In Italy, particularly, Asians and Africans are everywhere selling stuff. We saw one lot of Asians get their goods confiscated by the police in Milan in the Metro, and anything up to a dozen Africans will be outside most tourist spots selling leather goods. They can't make much money out of doing this, and presumably they've got to pay their 'boss', whoever that may be, for the goods in the first place. Seems like a very tough way to live.

Couple of books

On the train from Firenze to Pisa this morning we met an American woman who’s been living in Italy for many years (she’s married to an Italian). Unlike most of the Americans you meet, the ones who are on tour, she didn’t seem to be out to prove anything. She was just pleasant and down-to-earth. She’s a Christian, and it was partly because I saw her with a piece of paper that had the word Christian on it, and partly because she was reading Henry James’ short stories that we started chatting to her. She said she’d been reading a book called Reading Lolita in Iran, which has a section on Henry James in it, that got her started on reading her old high school copy of the book. Plus she’d recently seen The Others, (with Nicole Kidman), which is in part based on James’ The Turn of the Screw. From my memory of it, I wouldn’t say the film is very close to the book, but certainly it has some aspects of similarity. Reading Lolita in Iran is apparently about a woman teaching English in Iran and she works through various authors in the course of the book, showing the effect they had on the Iranian students. Sounds worth hunting down. I came across a book by awell-known British writer whose name has slipped my mind which is something about the Queen getting into reading (after a library bus stops near where she’s staying). It sounds worth getting hold of too.

Off on leave

My wife and I are travelling in Europe for about a month which explains for those who have wondered why there haven't been any posts on here for a week or more. And there won't be for another couple of weeks at least.

Sorry to disappoint all my fans, but it's difficult getting enough Internet access to do blogging at the moment. Plus I need to visit museums, art galleries, ancient ruins and the like.

Meeting in the one place

The worst thing about Auckland is that people keep moving there. People like Brent Read, the young tenor, or worse, my daughter and her two children. Worse still, it costs more to fly from Dunedin to Auckland than it does to fly from Dunedin to most Eastern Australian cities, cities like Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane.
Maybe it would be more economical for my daughter to meet us in Sydney, where we can find really cheap accommodation for all of us. Apparently you can even get serviced apartments in places like Bondi, Manly (those oh-so-familiar-beach-names) or overlooking the Darling Harbour. I think a serviced apartment might suit us all better than a cheap hotel (although apparently there are plenty of Sydney hotels that are super economical, especially in the off-season, and that provide extras - like breakfast), because then my grandchildren wouldn‘t be quite so constricted. Constricted is not a state of well-being they enjoy.
Of course there are Melbourne hotels and Brisbane hotels too, but I think Sydney would probably be the pick of the places for a Crowl family rendezvous. Maybe I could persuade all of the kids and their children to get together over there. Not!