John Ironmonger's Blog, page 9

My Map Pins (26): Ojców National Park, Krakow, Poland

 

So there we were in Krakow, in March 2020, when the country went into the first Coronavirus lockdown. There had been fourteen confirmed cases and panic had set in. (The UK would not announce its own lockdown until eleven days later.)  We had one day left of our city break and it looked as if it might be a rather bleak day. All visitor-attractions were closing. All of the delightful bars and brasseries in the city, all museums and galleries, churches and castles. The salt mine was closed. Wartime memorial sites were closed. Oscar Schindler’s factory was closed. We had already done the city walking tour (recommended). What to do? We consulted a map and popped a random metaphorical pin into this place – Ojcówski Narodwy park, and the four of us set off there in a taxi that could comfortably have taken three. Ojcow is pretty small for a national park.  But there is a charming riverside walk through the gorge, and it is really rather lovely. Halfway along the trail, the river diverts through a trout farm with its own restaurant selling freshly caught trout. Hand on heart, it is the tastiest trout I’ve ever eaten. All in all we felt the lockdown had done us a favour. Check it out if ever you’re in Krakow.

 

What3words: strategic.idiomatic.wound

My Map Pins (25): Nouakchott, Mauritania

Here's a quiz question for you. Can you name the capital of Mauritania? OK, perhaps you can because it happens to be the title of this Map-Pin post. But that's cheating. I bet you didn't know it before. Nouakchott is not a well known destination. It's a Saharan town.  A poor town in one of the poorest nations on earth. Brutally hot. I read in a travel guide that the city is subject to sandstorms on 200 days of the year. This isn't hard to believe. Everything about this city creates the impression that it is clinging onto life at the very fringes of habitability. We were there for just one night, driving through. We found a cheap hotel that put us up in a tent on the roof. 

In the morning, driving south on the long road towards Senegal, we witnessed a daily ritual that keeps the city alive. A tanker filled with freshwater had docked at the port, and now hundreds of donkeys were delivering water around the city. A standpipe at a crossroads was filling barrels and assorted containers, and a huge queue of donkeys and their drivers were lining up for their ration. What other city has a dependency on an army of donkeys for its water supply? We were quickly gone, leaving the city and its donkeys behind us, but I would like to have stayed longer. It felt as if there was a lot to explore here, and we missed it. It felt like a secret city, like Timbuktu, or something from the Arabian Nights. I often think about Nouakchott. This unlikely city in the sand. I don't suppose I shall ever go back. I feel quite sad about that. 

What3Words: rinse.claw.reheat

My Map Pins (24): Llyn Elsi, Snowdonia, Wales

The trail to Llyn Elsi, one thousand feet above the town of Betws-y-coed in Snowdonia, is one of our favourite walks. Pick a fine day to do it. Take a picnic. Park up behind St Mary's Church. Lace up your boots, and off you go.  It isn't a long walk. It's around four miles. But the first mile is pretty brutal - this is where you do most of the uphill stuff. When you reach the top, there's a surprise. A twisty-turny lake with a trail all the way around it. So basically, you climb the hill, you walk half way around the lake, you pick a spot with an amazing view for lunch, then in a more leisurely fashion you complete the circuit of the lake and you descend to Betws for a coffee or something stronger. Honestly you won't find many better walks than this. You can thank me when you've done it. 

 What3Words: ranks.doses.parrot

My Map Pins (23): Skara Brae, Orkney

 

Skara Brae is Europe’s most complete Neolithic village. It is older than Stonehenge or the Pyramids and was occupied for about seven centuries which is quite a humbling fact. It was built around 3,100 BC - so if you trace your ancestors back for 200 generations the chances are pretty good that someone in your family line helped build it. Why would Neolithic people choose to live in this windswept bleak corner of the British Isles? Why wouldn't they just set off south and make a home in Cornwall? Who knows? But it is truly an amazing place. I’d recommend a visit. It is a fair old journey to get there mind. We drove to Thurso on the very north tip of the Scottish mainland, and took the ferry. We might have seen an orca. Some passengers did. But what we saw might just have been a wave. Never mind. We always need to remember, as TS Eliot said, ‘It is the journey, not the arrival that matters.’ That is especially true of Orkney, but mainly because the journey there is so beautiful. If you’ve never been to Orkney, add it to your wish list. 

What3Words: calendars.handwriting.rotation

My Map Pins (22): Gole Alcantara, Sicily

 

I’m not quite sure how, or why we ended up at Alcantara Gorge. I suspect we had exhausted the charms of Taormina and we were looking for a way to fill an hour or so, and there was a throwaway line in a guide book that made it sound interesting. The approach isn’t auspicious. It’s like a low budget theme park with a rather empty car park and turnstiles. But the gorge itself was a surprise. Sue is a geologist so she loved it. I can’t remember the technical explanation behind the curious rocks. It has to do with the volcano (the gorge is on the foothills of Etna). I don't need to know. But it is pretty spectacular. Worth the trip if you’re visiting Taormina.  

What3words: Unpaged.skaters.operational

A Farewell to Barbara Whitnell

 

My aunt, Ann Hutton, was the novelist Barbara Whitnell - (a name she took from her own grandmother). She was, I believe, the author of 14 published novels, and she made the Times Bestseller list. She died this week just short of her 92nd birthday. Ann was a big inspiration to me and encouraged me to write. I owe her a great deal. She was a larger than life character. She was just ten when the war broke out, and sixteen when it ended, but it often felt to me as if she was more at ease with the post war generation. She was more of a 1950s-breakout-woman, than a 1940s-war-girl; always slightly rebellious, a rule breaker, a risk taker. She lived a glamorous life - living in places like Kenya and the Turks and Caicos Islands, but it was to Cornwall, the county of her childhood, that she so often returned, and about which she would write many of her stories. She and her husband Bill retired to Fowey, a little fishing village on the Cornish coast, and is was from here that Ann wrote many of her books.

I can reveal now that Ann was the inspiration behind the character of Demelza Trevarrick in my novel, 'Not Forgetting the Whale.' (The Whale at the End of the World). One clue, for anyone with a memory long enough, was the name of Ann's house in St Austell in the 1960s - 'Trevarrick'. There wasn't much similarity between Ann's life and Demelza's (beyond the fact that both were romantic novelists living in Cornish seaside villages), but all the same it was Ann's voice that I could hear in my head whenever Demelza spoke. She had a knowing way of talking, with the allure of someone who knows everything and has seen everything. I remember Ann in the 1960s used to smoke cigarettes in a holder like Audrey Hepburn, and that too, for some reason, became an image I attached to Demelza.

It occurs to me now, as I write this, that there is a coincidence I can relate. Sometime in the 1990s (I shall guess at 1996) I was boarding a flight at Heathrow bound for Johannesburg. It was a business trip. I heard a voice calling my name. There was Ann. I hadn't met or spoken to her for several years. But by an extraordinary twist of fate she was on the same flight, off on a book tour of South Africa. She and Bill were in First Class. I was in steerage. Nonetheless, when we were in the air, she came and sat in the seat next to me and we gossiped for much of the journey. We talked a lot about writing. About the discipline, and the mechanics, and the preparation. I had written a non fiction book at this stage (The Good Zoo Guide) but I wanted to write fiction. She gave me some advice that I have often passed onto others as if the wisdom was my own. 'Just write it,' she told me. 'It may not be a masterpiece. Your first novel rarely is. But writing is a craft, and you will get better.'

Ann leaves behind her four lovely children, my cousins Lindsay, Judi, Chis and Tim - and of course her grandchildren and great grandchildren. She also leaves those books.

My Map Pins (21): Fuveau, Provence, A very French Book Festival

 

Every autumn the lovely, hilltop village of Fuveau, in Provence, hosts a three day book festival.  And what a festival! Book lovers come from all over France. There are also a couple of hundred authors, all with books to promote. (I am shamelessly guessing that number. Maybe someone will tell me the real figure some day and I can correct it). The writers all sit behind tables in the main town square, with heaps of their books on display. It is like a huge flea-market for books. Visitors browse around and look at the books, and chat, and occasionally they will buy one and the author will sign it, and it is all enormously convivial and very French. The festival is organised by Les Ecrivains en Provence. Each year they invite four guest writers from another country, and for these fortunate authors they put on a generous display of Provencal hospitality, and as you might expect, there is music and frivolity, and a great deal of wine is drunk, and food consumed. In 2016 Britain was the featured country and I was hugely privileged to be one of the four British writers invited to be there (the others were Stuart Neville, Amanda Hodgkinson, and the brilliantly entertaining Peter Gutteridge.)   If you happen to be in the South of France in the autumn, check their website.  (https://www.fuveau.com/SSL.htm) – you might just catch the festival. You don’t have to be French to enjoy it. And Fuveau itself is a charming place.    

What3words: Showy.tearooms.joggers

My Map Pins (21): Fuveau, Provence

 

Every autumn the lovely, hilltop village of Fuveau, in Provence, hosts a three day book festival.  And what a festival! Book lovers come from all over France. There are also a couple of hundred authors, all with books to promote. (I am shamelessly guessing that number. Maybe someone will tell me the real figure some day and I can correct it). The writers all sit behind tables in the main town square, with heaps of their books on display. It is like a huge flea-market for books. Visitors browse around and look at the books, and chat, and occasionally they will buy one and the author will sign it, and it is all enormously convivial and very French. The festival is organised by Les Ecrivains en Provence. Each year they invite four guest writers from another country, and for these fortunate authors they put on a generous display of Provencal hospitality, and as you might expect, there is music and frivolity, and a great deal of wine is drunk, and food consumed. In 2016 Britain was the featured country and I was hugely privileged to be one of the four British writers invited to be there (the others were Stuart Neville, Amanda Hodgkinson, and the brilliantly entertaining Peter Gutteridge.)   If you happen to be in the South of France in the autumn, check their website.  (https://www.fuveau.com/SSL.htm) – you might just catch the festival. You don’t have to be French to enjoy it. And Fuveau itself is a charming place.    

What3words: Showy.tearooms.joggers

My Map Pins (20): Nyhavn, Copenhagen (Tattoo Ole's)

 

Sometimes you come across a place in a novel and you really want to visit. There’s a tattoo parlour that features in John Irving’s novel, ‘Until I Find You,’ called Tattoo Ole’s. It might help to know that the novel unfolds within the rather curious subculture of European nautical tattoo shops, and Tattoo Ole’s is one of these. (Great novel by the way – although it is 824 pages long and I did regret taking it on holiday; it was like carrying around a brick.) Irving describes the location of the tattoo shop in Nyhavn, Copenhagen, and I was left wondering if this was a place Irving had invented (perfectly allowable) or if, perhaps, it was real. Well it turns out that Irving does his research. Tattoo Ole’s is said to be the oldest tattoo shop in the world. I wasn’t even looking for it, I was just mooching (again – see my map pins no.18) but when I discovered it here on the waterfront. I was strangely delighted. What’s more it was exactly how I’d imagined it. Books can do that.

What3Words: squeezed.lamps.outreach

My Map Pins (19): The Pyramids at Saqqara and Abusir

 

So I read about this in The Rough Guide and really wanted to do it. You hire camels at Giza, and then you ride across the desert to the pyramids at Abusir, and onwards to the pyramid field at Saqqara. It is about fifteen kilometres to Abusir, and another three or four kilometres to Saqqara. So it is perfectly do-able. The trick, apparently, is to get a taxi to Giza quite early in the morning and ask around for anyone who rents out camels and a guide. And that turned out to be easy. But it is, nonetheless, a pretty tough ride. It takes around four or five hours, there is no shade at all, and it gets hot. Ridiculously hot. We had two guides, two camels, and a stallion. Sue preferred the stallion to the camels. I stuck to my camel. 
One of the best things is watching the great pyramids getting smaller and smaller on the distant horizon.  And then at last you get to Abusir and Saqqara and you have these extraordinary historical sites to yourself. All the crowds are at Giza. I don't think many people do this desert trip. At one point a police Landcruiser came racing towards us over the sand. They had never seen tourists this far out in the desert. Perhaps we were being abducted. 
 I would so recommend this adventure. In fact I would do it all again in a heartbeat.
What3words: fresh.masters.destroyer