H.J. Hampson's Blog, page 4

A bumper blog of cities beginning with B

Belgrade

The first thing I notice about Belgrade is how absurdly friendly people are. From the old man who helps me get my huge backpack off the tram, to the

Nikola Tesla Museum

hostel owner, to the woman in the tourist office who greets me with a cheery ‘Welcome to Belgrade’. The second thing I notice is the absurd number of fast food joints, predominantly serving pizza by the slice, but also particularly Serbian delicacies such pancakes with fillings like Eurocrem e plazma (Balkan’s Nutella and biscuit crumbs).

It’s my duty to sample some of this local fodder so for lunch I try Pizzeria Trg, an eatery esteemed by local teenagers, who frequent it in force, eating pizza slices smothered in ketchup and chilli sauce. To the ambient soundtrack of loud nineties dance music I dine on a pancake filled with copious amounts of cheap cheese and mushrooms in some kind of sour cream sauce. Simply divine.

Having visited the only thing worth visiting, the Nikola Tesla museum, where you get to play with lightening and hear about the AC/DC wars, I returne to the hostel and find two Turkish guys are now sharing my dorm room. Do I want to join them for a drink they asked, before bringing out some cheap Serbian brandy. Well, so far this trip hasn’t really been that rock’n'roll so I think ‘why not, this is what travelling all about isn’t it?’. We end up getting so drunk we can’t find a bar when we finally go out to look for one so we just go back to the hostel and get even drunker. The next morning that proliferation of junk food really comes into it’s own. Perfect hngover food is a greasy slice of pizza, augmented by one of those Eurocrem and plazma pancakes later on.

But it’s my last day in Belgrade and I have to go and see Tito’s mausoleum. Another great thing about this city is that all the trams and trolley buses are effectively free. The city government is so corrupt that the drivers don’t bother to charge anyone in protest. I get the sense Tito is still quite respected across the Balkans, they have a street named after him in Sarajevo and here there is a regular flow of visitors to the ‘House of Flowers’ mausoleum. He did, after all, keep Yugoslavia united. They are selling Tito’s Cookbook in the gift shop, which I would so have bought if I could fit it in the backpack.

The next day I have an early morning train to Budapest so there was is more partying for me, but this doesn’t stop my dorm mates. They are out drinking with some girls from another room. In the morning I find four shot glasses in the sink and feel a prick of jealously, but I guess this is the nature of travelling… single serving friends as Chuck Palahnuik would say.

Budapest

St. Stephen’s Cathedral at night

Budapest is, at first, less welcoming. As we cross the border from Serbia to Hungary, police and customs officials swarm onto the train, demanding every Serbian guy with a big suitcase opens it so they can check for bootlegged fags. They take bits of the toilet apart to see if anyone is hiding in there and ask everyone questions about where they were going and why. I guess this is the frontier of the European Union. So, then, after a long journey with no buffet car, the train rolls into Budapest and I find that no currency exchange offices in the station will accept my Serbian Dinar and the only ATM in there wants to charge me about seventy quid to make a withdrawal!

Laden with backpack, I stagger around outside Keleti station and almost cave in and go to Burger King but they don’t do a veggie burger. Not that I have any Forints to buy a veggie burger with anyway. I felt feeling rather depressed and was missing Italy. But I do finally obtain some Forints, find my the hostel which is in a gorgeous old apartment block near the the river and then, to my absolute delight, find that just along the road there is a Middle Eastern café/ takeaway which does hummus and falafel. The falafel sandwich and chips I have that night was one of the best meals of the trip so far. I’ve not had chips for over six weeks!

Budapest is a beautiful city and, after the rough-around-the-edges Balkans, it’s nice to be firmly back on the tourist map. They really don’t like the communists though here. As a Cold War fan, I’m interested in how these old Eastern Bloc cities present there history. Well, here in Budapest I visit Memento Park, where you can look at old statues and buy tins supposedly containing the ‘last breath

One hell of a statue at Memento Park

of communism’. Then there is the Museum of Terror, a really good exhibition about the double occupation Hungary suffered under first the Nazis, then, effectively, the USSR. I don’t blame them for being bitter. I had no idea Hungarians were sent to the Gulags under Stalin, and, though released after Stalin’s death, were forced to remain in the USSR. The last one came back in the year 2000! In the gift shop there were candle busts of Lenin and Stalin for sale, presumably so you could enjoy watching them melt like the Wicked Witch in the Wizard of Oz.

After reading Michael Meyer’s ’1989: The Year That Changed the World’, I can’t help feel sorry for the communist party reformers including Miklos Nemeth and Imre Pozsgay, who bravely pushed through the reforms that led to the iconic image of Hungarian soldiers cutting the barbed wire border fence between Austria and Hungary, setting off a chain reaction that ultimately led to the fall of the Berlin Wall. They seem to have been forgotten. It is these great politicians, and of course, Imre Nagy, who I think of when I stand in Hero’s Square on the eve of Thatcher’s funeral back in England.

But whilst Budapest may have given me chips, I also have the worst curry ever here. The Govinda café gets glowing reviews on Trip Advisor, which I am never going to trust ever again. A vegetarian curry house? It sounds amazing. So off I trek, though the back streets and arrive at the top of the flight of stairs leading to the café, from which the scent of Indian spices floats. I almost faint with delight. But it’s hort lived. The daily deal, admittedly very cheap, consists of a dahl, some kind of curry and a naan bread. Well, each dish is so devoid of spice it is completely tasteless. The so-called curry is like cheap tomato soup with pasta in it (pasta?) and the naan bread, well let’s just say, I’ve made better ones myself. There is no time to make amends, I’m on the night train to Berlin out of here.

Berlin

Getting the night train to Berlin sounds very cool doesn’t it? Well, I arrive first thing in Hauptbarnhof and am met by a towering stack of giant Ritter Sport chocolate bars. What better way could one be welcomed to a new city? Sadly, they weren’t edible.

For the next four days I am no longer a lone intrepid vegetarian, but am joined

Me and Liz at Checkpoint Charlie

by my omnivorous best friend and fellow history geek Liz. As soon as Liz arrives we book onto both an GDR walking tour, to satisfy my Cold War obsession, and a Third Reich one, as we were both schooled by the great Hitler specialist Sir Ian Kershaw (well, he gave us one lecture anyway).

Berlin seems to have a much more comfortable relationship with it’s communist past. Maybe as the whole tourist industry seems to be based on it. You can buy USSR-themed tat galore, along with chunks of the wall and magnets of the Checkpoint Charlie sign. The tour really gives us a sense of what it was like to live in the GDR though. I think there is a dirty glamour attached to the idea now, not least as a few bars near the East Side Gallery seem to be rocking the tatty and tacky East German look. But the Palace of Tears museum tells some personal stories of what it was like living in a divided city, and the tour guide, who is kind of cute and whose cuteness only increases by his impassioned talk of Marxism’s potential, tells us about other strange features such as ghost stations – Ubahn stops in the East which West German trains looped through but never stopped at.

The Third Reich tour takes us round all the Nazi sights… it’s not aimed at EDL members though but those who want to discover more about this period of fascinating if awful history. Sitting on the blocks of the Holocaust memorial talking with the guide about how people could participate in such an evil system will be, in a strange way, one of the most memorable things from my trip around the old Eastern Bloc and Germany. All these countries seem to still be very much dealing with their pasts.

Anyway, the Third Reich guide is kind of cute too, so we toy with going on yet another tour on the third day but are too hungover and in the cold light of day, this seems a little excessive.

Only in Berlin!

The next day, still not GDR’d out, we headed to the Stasi museum about which we had heard great things but which turns out to be one of the most crap museums ever. It’s based in the Stasi HQ which looks, as Liz points out, like a regular civil service building. There are lots of old spy cameras and all the captions are in German. Disappointed and miffed at why so many people recommended this we head back into town to search for lunch and inadvertently stumble upon a better much Stasi exhibition, just called ‘Stasi’. Later, we hang out in one of those GDR-chic bars, so communist you could even smoke in there.

Liz departs back to England the next morning so I wander down Karl Marx Allee and then back to Checkpoint Charlie to try to haggle a good price on a Russian doll set of all the Soviet leaders. Fifteen euros was a bit pricey, considering only Gorbachev is totally recognisable to the untrained eye I thought.

I am taking the night train to Krakow that night. On the tour we’d seen some ‘stumbling stones’ in the Jewish Quarter… the names of a whole family who had perished at Auschwitz, so I can’t help think of them as I board the the train. Berlin is a city moving forwards, you can’t deny, but I can’t help think of the past.

Transport so far:

63 bus from East Dulwich to Kings Cross, Eurostar to Paris, Paris metro to Odeon, bus to Gare du Lyon, overnight train to Florence, train to Assisi, car up the winding roads to the artist residency.

4×4 back down the mountain, Assisi to Rome train, the notorious number 64 bus, number 23 bus.

Train from Rome to Ancona, overnight ferry to Split, coach from Split to Mostar, coach from Mostar to Sarajevo, coach from Sarajevo to Belgrade.

Train from Belgrade to Budapest, overnight train from Budapest to Berlin, lots of travels on the Sbahn and Ubahn and numerous trams.

 

 

Snipers and sunsets: A few days in Bosnia & Herzegovina

If walking up Berrnini’s staircase in the Palazzo Barberini, Rome, was heavenly, the staircase up the various floors of the ex-Yugoslavian bank is hell: it exists as part of a concrete shell, daubed with graffiti, littered with piles of broken glass. Up five floors, past empty shell and bullet casings, and discarded bank papers, you come to the sniper’s prime position. The sun is setting and the view over Mostar and the mountains which surround it is beautiful, if you look beyond the gutted block of flats on the opposite side of the square.

I’d arrived here after several hours on a sweltering coach from Split, Croatia, where I’d spent a couple of days wandering around Diocletion’s Palace, it’s nooks and crannies, courtyards and alleyways like a film set. It’s a different film here in Mostar though, or the aftermath of one. I wasn’t expecting the war to be this evident – there were bullet holes in the metal gate of the hostel I stayed in and inside the owner had some pictures to show how the house was pretty much destroyed, like 95% of all the buildings here and, of course, the famous old bridge.

The old bridge has now been rebuilt and it looks stunning. The place is gearing up for the busy summer season. Now they make pens and model tanks out of the spare bullets and you can buy them with either Bosnian marks, Croatian Kuna or Euros in the streets of souvenir shops around the bridge. I had to buy one of the pens, as personally I thought it was a great use for the bullets, the pen being mightier than the gun and all that. It writes beautifully. In the early evening, with the call to prayer echoing through the streets and the air around the bridge filled with the scent of intense, Mostar feels very peaceful now.

I was a little apprehensive about the veggie options in Bosnia, but my fears were unfounded. There’s a definite middle eastern influence, with grilled vegetables and lots of aubergine-based dishes. For dinner I had a bowl of Djuvech, which I have to admit tasted like a Vespa rice dish with a few more vegetables added,. The Sarajevska beer, brewed in Sarajevo, was good though.

And it was to Sarajevo I was headed the next day. The coach journeyed through mountains, rivers and lakes to get there. I was coachsurfing for the first time, staying with a guy called Oli, who runs a nightclub in Sarajevo. His beautiful house up in the hills overlooks the city. We went into town with two of his other guests, Americans who were trying to rent an apartment here in the huge tower blocks near the old frontline (think Peckham with real bullet marks). It’s amazing that some of these tower blocks withstood the war…I’m crediting that to the fact they were built under socialism. We joked that the landlord was going to do a runner with the money they’d given as a deposit, and then when he took ages to come and meet us, actually started to think he was really going too, but he turned up, his tardiness probably due to the fact that the bus and tram workers were striking for five days. After going to Oli’s club and sampling another local delicacy with some of his friends, far too early in the day, we picked up some Pita, a type of pastry filled with cheese and spinach. It’s made in impressive metal ovens cooked in a open-air over and is absolutely delicious.

Another night, another sunset and this time me, Kurt (another American who is working at Oli’s through the HelpX scheme), and Blackie the dog went up to the watch it on some rocks on the top of the hill. Oli had warned us that there might be unexploded mines in the area, but I can’t resist a good photo opp. Having climbed up there without getting blown up, the view was worth it. The city entire city was sprawled below us, filling the valley. As Kurt remarked, this unfortunately made it so easy to attack and in fact, these rocks were also sniper positions. Seeing this gorgeous sunset and the countryside the day before, I wondered how such atrocious violence could happen when humans are dwarfed by such stunning natural beauty, the whole conflict seemed so pointless to me.

The next day I went on a free walking tour with Neno – something I’d definitely recommend if you ever find yourself here. Neno spent three hours telling me all about the city, from its formation under Ottoman times to the current day, now the Bosnians are facing economic crisis like everyone else in the Europe. Many of the old Austria-Hungarian buildings were completely destroyed in the war, and have been rebuilt pretty much exactly the way they were.

A ‘Sarajevo Rose’… resin filling in the holes made by a shell that killed someone.

Neno was just a child in the 1990s and spent the whole of the siege living in a basement. He told me how his mother, unable to bear staying underground, decided to go and work to help some public services keep running, but this meant walking though one of the most dangerous places on earth every day. I just can’t comprehend what it must be like to be a child in a war, cooped up in a basement and wondering if your Mum will come home each day. We had a Bosnian coffee and Neno preferred to eat the sugar lumps, dipped in coffee over the Turkish Delight that came on the side, it’s a trait developed in the siege when he would eat grains of sugar as there were no other sweets.

It was over coffee that I plucked up the courage to ask my burning question: why do Bosnia and Serbia give twelve points to each other in the Eurovision? Neno reckoned that it’s probably because of the number of Bosnian Serbs that live in the east of the country, but also the fact that Bosnians like Serbian pop music, and yes, for the Serbs, their twelve points is a small peace offering. Neno was optimistic, despite the high unemployment in the county, that things would continue to get better. Whether it is really is progress or not is debatable, but looking out across the city from Oli’s house, you can see the few shiny new glass buildings built with Russian money and I expect more will go up in the future.

I’m writing this blog on the coach to Belgrade, a torturous eight hour journey that seems to stop at every single service station in Serbia. I am hungover (thanks for the wine, Oli!) and have spent the whole journey being serenaded by bad Slavic pop music, though now the radio is actually playing Emile sodding Sande. Not wanting to end this blog with the words, Emile Sande, I’ll end by saying that at one of these service stops, I treated myself to a Serbian Kit-Kat-like chocolate bar and I can report that is actually tasted better than a real Kit Kat.

Transport so far:

63 bus from East Dulwich to Kings Cross, Eurostar to Paris, Paris metro to Odeon, bus to Gare du Lyon, overnight train to Florence, train to Assisi, car up the winding roads to the artist residency.

4×4 back down the mountain, Assisi to Rome train, the notorious number 64 bus, number 23 bus.

Train from Rome to Ancona, overnight ferry to Split, coach from Split to Mostar, coach from Mostar to Sarajevo, coach from Sarajevo to Belgrade.

Roma

I’ve been in Rome a few days and am totally exhausted. If I have to walk down another cobbled street again it will be too soon.  But I’m still in love with the place.

Easter breakfast at Arte Studio Ginestrelle

Of course, it was sad to leave Arte Studio Ginestrelle.  We had a fantastic Easter breakfast there, with traditional cheese bread and a shot of fortified wine. I’m seriously missing the breakfasts there!  I managed to get up to the fifty thousand mark on my new novel there which I was pretty impressed with.

Last night here in Roma, I went up to Ganicolo Hill, which is just behind the hostel here in Trastevere, to watch the sun go down over the Eternal City. I took a bit of cold pizza, even though I’m sick of it, I’d bought in a Trastevere bakery, some salad, which I’ve been desperate for, and a little bottle of prosecco not only as a farewell drink but also as a little celebration as Vanity Game is released in France today.

The day before I was feeling a little depressed as last time I came here I was twenty one, was with my best friend, Liz, and had free interrail tickets. Eleven years later and I’m not spending my nights on the Colosseum Pub Crawl, but going out with my camera to take pictures of the sights in the dark. I went up to St. Peters and found that the Via della Concillazione is lined with drunkards and vagrants at night. I was a bit paranoid I was going to get mugged, which would have been quite embarrassing as Vatican City must be the most absurd place you could get robbed. Then I went to Piazza Navona, which eleven years earlier was scene of the end of that famous pub crawl. Last night I almost stood in a pile of vomit as I lined up my long exposure shot of Bernini’s fountain. Bernini’s fountain was the last thing on our minds back when we were twenty one. Anyway, tonight, sitting there watching all the lights come on across the city with my plastic mug full of prosecco getting some funny looks from the passing couples who’d come up there for a romantic schmooze, I thought ‘fuck it’, back when I was twenty one I wouldn’t have had the balls to do that, the sense to bring a plastic mug with me, or or have the appreciation for fine wine (well, not that it was that fine).

The Caravaggio Odyssey

Diligent readers of the blog will recall that when I came to Rome on a day trip a couple of weeks ago I mistakenly went to the wrong church in my search for Caravaggio’s The Calling of Saint Matthew. Well, I looked up the right church and went off to find it on Tuesday. It’s in the San Luigi of Francesci church, but I got there too early and found it was shut. ‘oh well’, I thought, I would continue my Caravaggio odyssey with a trip to the Palazzo Barberini. As I trekked along the Via Tritone the sky turned decidedly grey and by the time I got to Palazzi Barberini and was being told that it was, in fact, closed today, it was chucking it down. I ended up going to the Carpuchin Crypt instead, which is the weirdest fucking thing I have ever seen. First, you walk through the most boring museum in the world, which tells you how, amongs other things, how pious and holy the monks are, then you enter into the crypt, of which the thing is that a couple of hundred years ago some monk decided to dig up a load of his dead colleagues and arrange all their bones into various ‘scenes’, like the ‘chapel of the pelvic and thigh bones’ and such, plus some full skeletons dressed in monks habits. There were even lampshades fashioned out of human bones. To make things even more disturbing the whole thing was prefaced by a quote from the Marquis De Sade. Sadly, pictures were not allowed. It mad me feel a little bit sick but after I’d traipsed back to the Pantheon I’d worked up quite an appetite. I was browsing the savoury counter in Caffe Giolitti when the heavens really opened. There was a waterfall thundering off the awning of the cafe and I had to shout my order over the thunder.

When the rain eased I went back to the church of San Luigi. There were the Caravaggios over several banks of pews! I began to walk towards them, elated that I was finally in the church, when a grumpy warden came and shooed everyone out, as the church was closing for the lunch time interlude. By now, as you can imagine, I was feeling rather fed up. I wanted to go home and put Alice in Chain’s ‘Dem Bones’ on really loud, but I don’t think my hostel dorm-mates would would have appreciated it.

Caravaggio’s The Calling of St Matthew, Finally!

Wednesday was better though, I got to the church and it was open and no one threw me out and I spent a wonderful few hours in the fully open Palazzio Barberini. If Galleria Borghese was sexy and a bit sleazy, Palazzo Barberini is a cool, stylish beauty. None of that gawdy pink and peach interiors here, just some subtly decorated rooms chronicling art through the ages, up to the perfection of Caravaggio and a little afterwards, when it went down hill again. It was so quiet, I had Caravaggio’s Narcissus all to myself, to bad he was too absorbed in his own reflection.

To get up to the second level a polite sign asked if you would ‘Please take Bernini’s staircase…’

What a pleasure this was, walking up those pure white marble steps, between the graceful columns in complete solitude. It was such a contrast to the rowdy scenes outside the Colosseum where I walked earlier in the day, with the hordes of tourists and the tour hawkers.

 Kitties

I went and saw a load more sights today, including the Largo Argentina, where there are a load of ruins, including the place Julius Caesar was murdered. It’s also a cat sanctuary. Those who know me will know that I find it hard to resist stroking a cat should one be unfortunate enough to cross my path, so I couldn’t resist the sign inviting my into the shelter. All the cats were so friendly and very cute. There are over two hundred and though I didn’t meet them all I managed to maul quite a few. I left with a ten euro fridge magnet (ten euros?! And I don’t even have a fridge) but had the sense not to adopt a cat.

Food

Oh, yes, this blog is supposed to be about food, right? Well, what can I saw… I’m eaten so much ice cream I don’t think I could bear anymore. I think my favourite was the chocolate one I had from Cremerie Montefortie near the Pantheon. The best pizza I’ve found is served at Pizzeria Dar Poeta on Vicolo di Bologna in Trastevere. So good, I went back twice which is probably why I’m sick of pizza too. And the coffee… well, Caffe Sant’ Eustacio likes to think it’s the best, but I wasn’t that impressed by their two euro odd ‘gran caffe’. The mini-brioche filled with cannolo-like sweet cream cheese was delicious though. For coffee, though, I preferred the bitter espresso at the unassuming but highly-rated Caffe Tazza De Ora – and it was only ninety cents.

Now it’s onto Croatia on the overnight ferry. No idea if I suffer from seasickness, I guess I will find out though.

Transport so far:

63 bus from East Dulwich to Kings Cross, Eurostar to Paris, Paris metro to Odeon, bus to Gare du Lyon, overnight train to Florence, train to Assisi, car up the winding roads to the artist residency.

4×4 back down the mountain, Assisi to Rome train, the notorious number 64 bus, number 23 bus.

Mongolian visas and the sexiest art gallery in the world

I went to Rome yesterday to collect my passport from the Mongolian embassy, complete, I hoped, with a Mongolian visa. I’ve already got the Russian and Chinese ones, both of which were bureaucratic nightmares in London. They have privatised ‘visa centres’ which employ a whole load of people to wade through all this bureaucracy. Well, the Mongolian visa application process was nothing like that. Firstly, it took some investigate work to discover there actually was an embassy in Rome, anyway when I did, (flashback to a week or so ago) I went to drop my passport and the necessary documents there.

Crap map

It was off the ‘tourist map’ (beyond Villa Borghese), so I drew a map myself from the National Modern Art museum onwards, and found as soon as I was past the museum that this map corresponded in no way to the actual streets (more of getting lost in the Villa Borghese later). Anyway, when I finally found the place it turned out not to be some gigantic thing with big flags like most embassies but a few rooms in what looked like a posh apartment block. You ring the bell to gain admittance. I left my passport there, walked the length and breadth of Rome and then returned to Arte Studio Ginestrelle, where I’ve been powering though the first draft of my new novel – on the cusp of 30,000 words already. I think it must be the mountain air.

So, I went back to Rome and to the Mongolian Embassy yesterday. A very sweet lady told me to take a seat before I could even say anything, disappeared into a room then came out with my passport, complete with visa. I didn’t even have to say my name. Either Mongolians have super-impressive memories, or they don’t get many applications here.

I returned to the main drag and had a cannolo and cappuccino to fortify myself at the Caffe Giolitti, near Marcus Aurelius’ column. It’s meant to serve the best ice cream in Rome, but I’ve become obsessed with finding a good cannolo and I can highly recommend theirs. I’m going back to try to ice cream as well, don’t worry. I was fortifying myself because I’d planned an afternoon visit to the Galleria Borghese, which I’ve heard is quite an experience – some people have been known to suffer from Stendal Syndrome there… perhaps the cannolo wasn’t a good idea. They run a reserved ticket policy, so everyone turns up for their timeslot at once, which is slightly chaotic and leaves you all hot and bothered. Then you’re thrown into this explosion of art. Immersed in total art, as the Borgheses envisaged it. I can see why some people have a funny turn in this gallery. It’s only two floors, but the window seats were crammed with people looking exhausted by it all. Even before you consider the paintings and sculptures, every room is a riot of pink, peach, gold, ceilings frescoed to the nines. The rooms fold out of each other, some tiny, some large, and you find yourself going round in circles. You have the sense of being trapped yet not wanting to leave.

But still, to induce nausea and dizziness? Is it because people can’t handle the

Caravaggio’s ‘Boy With A Basket of Fruit’, Galleria Borghese, Rome

fact that so much genius is crammed into one small gallery? Like Bernini’s gravity defying, belief-suspending sculptures, Caravaggio’s perfection, the ingenuity of Roman art? Or, my theory, is it’s all the sex thrown at you in such a small space. I mean, the place seethed with it… take Bernini’s The Rape of Proserpina, which depicts Pluto grappling with the goddess. How Bernini managed to convey the violence/ eroticism of the story in marble is just amazing, the way Pluto’s hand grips the goddess’ thigh, as if the stone is the softest skin. Or take Caravaggio’s wet-lipped young boys, or Raphael’s topless, flirty La Fornarina, just a few of the carnal delights.

Apparently Cardinal Scipione Borghese liked young boys, so he was particularly drawn to Carravagio’s Boy With A Basket of Fruit, one of my favourite pictures as well… right now one of my favourite things in the world. I like to think the boy was some hustler Caravaggio picked up from the Piazza Navona, it’s probably not too far off the mark. Did the lad know what he was getting himself into? He seems kind of wary, like he’s unnerved by Carravagio’s (lustful?!) gaze. There was a couple snogging in front of this picture, and on the other side of the room there was a guy sitting in the window seat with his head in his hands looking severely worse for wear. Sounds like a student disco, right? It’s testament to Caravaggio’s talent that these 500 odd year old paintings can do this to people.

I left the gallery and it was like coming out some strange, beautiful time machine, back into the dreary, ugly present, but thankfully it didn’t induce nausea. I found myself wandering aimlessly in the rain through the Villa Borghese. It took a while for me to realise I was lost and that it was totally chucking it down. Finally I found my way onto Via Veneto which in the rain didn’t look quite as cool as it did in La Dolce Vita.

Attempting to take a picture of the rain falling through the Pantheon roof

One drawback of Rome is they’ve never really cottoned onto pavements, so you, the cars and mopeds are all sloshing about down those cobbled streets together. But the sight of rain falling through the hole in the Pantheon ceiling makes up for soaking trainers.

I had lunch at the Cul-De-Sac restaurant on the Piazza Pasquino, named after the ancient and much battered, but talkative, torso that’s propped up on the corner. Cul-de-Sac is one of the oldest wine cellars in London and so I couldn’t not have a glass of vino with my tagliatelle with broccoli and Pecorino cheese. Both the food and wine were gorgeous and very reasonable. Ever so slightly tipsy, I wandered back towards the train station, stopping by a church which I thought had Caravaggio’s The Calling of St. Matthew in it, but it turned out to be the wrong church… easy mistake to make as there are so many of the things. It did have Michaelangelo’s Risen Christ in it, whose nudity the clergy were so shocked by they to make him a bronze loincloth. Honestly, them old artists and their boys.

One visitor to Rome not put off by the rain

So, only about a week left at the Art Studio Ginestrelle now… I wish I was here another month. But alas, I must return to Rome for a few days and then onwards to the Balkans.

 

Vanity Game French cover

While I’ve been ‘slaving away’ on my next novel, here in at the Arte Studio Ginestrelle up in the Umbrian Mountains, my French publishers, Editions Liana Levi have finalised the cover for the French edition of The Vanity Game. The definite article may have been dropped, but I think it looks great. I love the imagery of a table-football player. It perfectly sums up the main character in the book – Beaumont, a preened football trapped in the vice of fame. And of course, there has to be a little bit of  blood as well.

It is due to be released in France on the 5th April.

Pizza, birdsong & skeletons – my first week in the residency

I can’t believe my first week in the Arte Studio Ginestrelle has gone so fast. Each day the snow seems to recede off the top of Mount Subasio and little more and the fields become more dazzling green as Spring announces itself.

It’s strange trying to start a detective novel set on the dirty streets of London and finish a screenplay set on the Yorkshire coast while trying to embrace the Umbrian way of life but I am just about managing it. Last night Marina, who runs the residency, and the wonderful cook and house keeper, Adria, showed me how to make proper Italian pizza and I’ve already learnt how to make

My homemade pizza

proper Italian coffee which I am consuming in suitably vast quantities. The house where me and three other (proper!) artists (Lena from Denmark, Linda from the US and Lisa from Berlin) are living is absolutely stunning. The porch has a money-shot view of the mountain, though it’s not been quite warm enough to sit and sip wine out there in the evening yet. There are plenty of log fires and wood-burning stoves in the house to keep us warm though.

I’m still getting used to the geography of the surrounding area – it would be easy to get lost amongst the forests here, and there are wild boars, wolves, venomous snakes and the odd hermit monk roaming around out there. Yesterday  Lena, Marina and myself went to by eggs from a nearby farm. I say nearby – it took us about two hours there and back walking up the steep mountain paths, but it was quite an adventure. The sun came in and out of the clouds as we walked, illuminating fields, patches of forest and scrubland in turn. The landscape is a tableau of greens, from dark teal to shimmering lime green grass – an epic countryside landscape that Constable would be envious of. As we passed by a farmhouse, the farmer appeared from his field, quite an apparition in the morning light, in his woolly hat, tweed jacket and wellingtons, brandishing a bright green lettuce like a bouquet.

The view from the porch of snow-topped Mount Subasio

Further on, we met two old women – they’re sister-in-laws and live with three brothers and another wife in a huge, rambling farmhouse. One of the women stood, leaning against her mop, chatting with Marina, looking like the perfect Italian version of Hilda Ogden. The farm was still further, up past the shrine to the Virgin Mary and the cemetery. As we approached we saw fat brown rabbits romping in the field, and the hens who laid the eggs were were about to buy picked about in the grass, as free range as you are ever likely to get. After a lengthy conversation about quantity and price, in Italian, between Marina and the female farmer who was dressed up in a Addidas tracksuit suit pants and a milkman-style coat, we received our eggs wrapped in newspaper and tied in plastic bags. Then we had to walk all the back down the mountain without slipping over and breaking them. We took a short-cut through Ginestrelle’s own fields – full of the Ginestra bushes after which it is named – and passed art works left by previous residents. One the hill opposite, the eye is caught by a slick of aqua-marine: the recently installed swimming pool at the back of a house owned by a film producer. He’s not there at the moment. He must be off living in some other place which is a world away from the old Umbrian farmers who’ve lived their whole lives in these mountains.

Also nearby is a deserted house. I went up there one day to have a look. The roof has totally gone and the some of upper floors has collapsed, so it’s just a shell filled with rubble, tree trubks and twisted machinery. The sun was out so I sat on grass for while and listened – no sound but birdsong. I wish I could have bottled that feeling of absolutely serenity – I know I’ll wish I was back here when I am lost in some chaotic, polluted South East city or sterile, CCTV infested airport.

This week I also I undertook the two and a half hour walk to Assisi…and when I got there it started raining which soon turned into a downpour. Still, at least you can take shelter in the Basilica San Francisco… I could spend ages looking at Giotto’s frescos. I’ve noticed some cool looking skeletons along the bottom of huge scene which decorates the main dome. I think they are the dead being woken up to be taken to heaven, or else Giotto invented zombies, I don’t know. Hmm, has anyone done a Biblical-epic-zombie movie? I think I feel an idea coming on…

Neroni, the residency’s aloof cat

London – Paris – Assisi

It’s sometime around 7am and the queue for Cafe Nero is obscene. I’m at St. Pancras International station and this might be last experience of the UK for the next year – stood behind a four businessmen in suits and pointed Italian leather shoes, chattering as only the middle classes can. My backpack, laden with most (without a doubt not all) of the things I’ll need for the journey around the circumference of the planet is already killing me. The businessmen reach the counter and order four skinny lattes. I watch them and wonder if I’ll ever really understand London or England, and if I’ll maybe do better in one of the many cities and countries I’ll be calling home for a little while over the next year. ‘Fucking hell,” I think, “I’m basically taking a train to China”, albeit with many stops in between. I’m too tired to be terrified, but if I was more awake I’m sure I would be.

So the Eurostar set off for Paris and I was serenaded all the way by the raucous chatter of a group of middle aged Brits (definitely Brits, not Englishmen like the guys in the coffee queue). The Brits drank champagne and talked loudly of pubs in Paris. They looked too old to be on a stag do, and Paris isn’t a stag do destination, but they certainly sounded like a stag do. I was embarrassed because there were French people on the train trying to sleep.

The Eurostar arrived at the Gare du Nord and disgorged the suspected stag do, the sleepy French, myself and everyone else into the chilly Parisian afternoon. I took the underground, where I was stared at by teenage girls and old men who couldn’t work out why anyone would want to carry so much luggage.

The first stop on my round-the-world trip was a meeting with my French publishers… yes, you don’t get that with an STA ‘RTW’ deal do you? I was rather nervous but everyone in the office was very friendly and it was exciting to see the latest cover of my novel, Vanity Game which is coming out in France in

Trying to see the Mona Lisa

April. My editor, Sylvie and translator, Fanchita took me for a scrumptious lunch (potato and truffle salad, goats cheese encrusted in wonton-like pastry on a bed off posh coleslaw) at the lively Brasserie Balzar, and then, after a couple of glasses of wine, I went the Louvre. This is a bad idea after lunch with wine. I must have looked pretty pathetic as I stood there under the glass pyramid, totally dumbfounded by the whole thing. A girl breezed past me and handed me a free ticket, which spurred me on. Into the Denon Wing I went, following the sign to the Mona Lisa with what felt like every school child in Paris. I was underwhelmed as I stood there by the barrier, being jostled by the scrum, staring at the petite painting. I tried to assess her beauty but her face was obscured by the flashes of the scrum’s camera phones. I decided to go and look for Eugene Delacroix’s ‘Liberty Leading the People’ instead, but there was an empty space on the wall and a notice saying it had gone to Louvre Lens. I was missing the National Gallery already.

It was only a flyby visit to Paris as I had to take board the night train to Florence. No stag parties on this train, in fact there was hardly anyone. I was alone in my compartment and couldn’t work out how to turn the lights on so I went to the next one along, and asked the guy in there if he spoke English. ‘Non’ he said, so I said ‘lumiere’ and waved my arms around. After that he came and sat in my compartment and we managed to converse for about three hours on everything from Zinedine Zidane to the advantages of living in Paris compared to Cairo.

It was a rough night’s sleep though and when I finally drifted off I dreamt of Russian trains. I awoke at about 5am paranoid I was going to miss my stop. We were going through the mountains somewhere near the French/ Italy boarder. Outside in the half-light everything was covered in snow.

A few hours later the train pulled into Firenze. My backpack felt even heavier as I traipsed around Santa Maria Novela station looking for the Left Luggage. Unable to find it, I went into the coffee shop and was met by the sight of crowds of Italians downing espresso at the counter and munching on brioches. It was all very confusing working out which counter you had to pay at and which you got what you paid for from. I ended up with espresso so strong it would send a pacemaker haywire and a brioche filled with jam so sweet it could rot teeth on the spot. How do the Italians all look so good eating a breakfast like this every morning?

View from the Florence to Assisi train

I finally found the Left Luggage, left my cursed backpack, and wandered aimlessly round Florence for a few hours. It was strange being back in a city which I feel I know better than maybe any other in Europe, despite only visiting twice before. There, like old friends, were the preposterous piles of garishly coloured gelato, the huge bronze doors of the mighty Basilica, and the Uffitzi gallery which I contemplated going in but couldn’t face after the Louvre experience. It was freezing cold and I was glad to get on the 12:09 to Assisi, where I was met by Marina from the Arte Studio Ginestrelle which will be home for the next month. It’s a stunning old house in the foothills of Mount Subasio. I was tired and hungry and was so grateful for the delicious home-cooked meal of locally-sourced foods, and locally brewed wine. After a nip of the local spirit – truffle liquor – I retired to bed and slept for about nine hours, and no longer dreamed of trains.

Blue skies over Umbria

Transport so far: 63 bus from East Dulwich to Kings Cross, Eurostar to Paris, Paris metro to Odeon, bus to Gare du Lyon, overnight train to Florence, train to Assisi, car up the winding roads to the artist residency.

The Intrepid Vegetarian Mission

I’ve decided to check out of society for a year and go backpacking around the world on my own.

Everything I’m taking (minus my laptop and camera) … I wonder how much of it will come back.

You know how David Bowie decided to become Ziggy Stardust for a bit? Or Prince became that symbol? Well, I have morphed in The Intrepid Vegetarian for the duration of my trip. I’ll be travelling through some of the most inhospitable countries known to herbivores and I’ll continue to blog even when I am at the point of starvation or so sick of omelettes that I feel like going into a hen farm with a suicide vest on.

Of course, it won’t just be about the food. I’ll also be blogging about trains, buses and ferries as I am trying to travel as far as I can without flying, about all interesting things I see and people I meet and, no doubt, about the inevitable alcohol-fuelled nights out and hungover meltdowns that seem to occur wherever I go.

The plan so far:

After an early morning Eurostar from London to Paris, lunch with my French publishers and a visit to the Louvre, I’m taking the overnight train to Florence and from there to Assisi.

I’m very excited about spending a month as one of the ‘artists on residence’ at the Arte Studio Ginestrelle, set in the hills nearby. I’m planning to start my next novel there, so a mental rather than physical intrepidness will be required.

After going to Naples to check out the best pizza in the world, I’m taking a ferry over the Adriatic and then travelling though Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia and Hungary by train. The Sarajevo to Belgrade route is, somewhat ironically, meant to be one of the most beautiful in Europe. On my last trip to the Balkans, I found nothing vegetarian on the menu apart form some kind of aubergine paste which looked like cat sick, so expecting big things on this leg of the trip.

Then it’s up to sausage-loving Berlin and through Poland, stopping by in Riga to brush up on my Russian before heading into the Motherland herself. I’m anticipating living on porridge and vodka as I travel the Tran-Siberian railway towards Lake Baikal. After a few days in a Russian holiday camp, I’m (China visa pending!) taking a bus into Mongolia where I believe dried meat and fermented milk are the main foodstuffs so that could be interesting.

Then onto China. I’ve been to China before and visited the Beijing Night Market where the smell made me dry heave and a trader, amused by my disgust, flicked a bit of raw snake at me. I’m hoping to take a ferry to South Korea, which if the live-octopus scene in Oldboy is anything to go by, could be interesting. Back into China, I’m hoping to travel round a bit more, then head into South East Asia, which might be the most veggie-friendly place, but presents all manner of other hazards.

In September I’m flying out of Bangkok to Tokyo for a few days then onto the States, where I’m doing another artist residency programme at the Elsewhere Studios in deepest Colorado.

After that, I’m planning to spend a bit of time in Los Angeles, losing all the spirituality and inner peace I gained in the land of the Buddha, so I can return to the UK as cynical as when I left.

See you all in 2014 or somewhere on the road!

Why I like writing about violence against women

Being a writer is a bit of a bitch (but luckily I am a bit of a bitch). By our nature, we have to be sensitive souls because we need to be able to empathise with people in all walks of life in order to create deep and meaningful characters. And yet, we also need to have skin as thick as Kate Middleton’s make-up because when we’ve laboured over creating those deep and meaningful characters any old sod can go forth and judge the characters and what we have destined them to do. In others words, getting one star reviews on Amazon is a bit shit.*

Obviously, we all have different tastes and what one person might think to be a work of unbridled genius, another might not get at all, which is fair enough. But when someone gives you a one star review because your book contains swear words, sex scenes and violence, it is rather annoying.

This happened to me recently. My book, The Vanity Game, is about a premiership footballer and so there is quite a lot of swearing, nasty sex and drugs in it. What else would you expect? Even ‘never been booked’, crisp-advertising Gary Lineker is a love rat, never mind what people like John Terry get up to. Anyway, I digress…

One particular point the review raised was how, as a female author, I could

My own picture of a (suspected) murderer!

bring myself to create such a misogynistic, obnoxious character who commits crimes against women including murder and rape. That’s a legitimate question and one I would like to address.

I do actually consider myself a feminist. I got a first in my module on the subject at university, I shall have you know. It angers me that feminism has become a dirty word, and gender inequality is still such a massive issue today. If you disagree consider that today, I mean specifically this day 14th February 2013, there is a movement happening called One Billion Rising. It aims to raise awareness of violence against women, but what’s dominating the news? Oscar Pistorius (possibly) murdering his girlfriend. Earlier in the week some poor woman killed herself after being aggressively questioned by the defence in a sex abuse case. Every week there’s a story about rape, or a man murdering a women. And it angers me how the advertising, entertainment and fashion industries tell us that if we are not pretty, thin or young enough we are not worthwhile human beings. Feminists try to take action against these things, but the tide of apathy and even hostility to their cause is so strong that it’s hard for the feminist voice to be heard.

Some women, however, seem to willinging parcipate in, and hold up, the

WAGS… the enemy of equality?

‘system’. A key group are certain footballers wives, otherwise known as WAGS. These women don’t mind that they will be defined as so-and-so’s wife, in fact, they seem to relish this, and they seemingly willingly have the boob jobs and hair and fake tans and the hair extensions. Maybe they are just products of the misogynistic system, but what I think is interesting is how men relate to such women, and does the behavior of such women lead men to have lower opinions of women?

Like, for example, on the Guardian’s Secret Footballer, the mystery footballer once described how he’d heard a case of a woman coming home to find her footballer in bed with another women, but walking out of the bedroom, going downstairs and putting his dinner on, so fearful was she of (presumably) losing the financial benefits of dating or marrying a footballer. Well, this surely makes the cheating footballer assume that he can continue to be unfaithful and it will have no repercussions… eventually I would assume, living in such a world where he can do whatever he wants, his moral compass will became so skewed that concepts like fidelity will mean nothing.

The monster that is modern football fascinates and repulses me at the same time, and that is why I was drawn to writing about a very bad, immoral player. I wasn’t expecting people to sympathise with the character, Beaumont, but to empathise with him, to understand what it’s like to live in that strange world of celebrity where actions have no consequences, and inevitably, in a society like ours where sex is used to sell everything, some of those actions will involve doing anything you want to get sexual gratification.

I don’t think women writers should shy away from depicting male acts of violence against women, it is important that we continue to establish a dialogue about male against female violence because, I believe, we need to understand why this happens in order to prevent it.

The swear words I can’t justify, I just fucking love them.

 

*Though the Hollywood screenwriter has it tougher than the common garden fiction writer as William C Martell often demonstrates on his brilliant Sex in A Submarine blog

Human, all too human

I was watching the Hollywood Reporter’s 2012 round-table interview with screenwriters the other day. It may not have had a single woman on it, but it did include Michael Haneke, Judd Apatow, Argo writer Chris Terrio, Zero Dark Thirty writer Mark Boal, Promised Land writer John Krasinski and Life of Pi writer David McGee.

During this interview Mark Boal rather bafflingly point-blank refused to say whether the character of Osama Bin Laden actually features in Zero Dark Thirty. I haven’t seen the film, but considering it’s a film about OBL’s capture, one would think he surely would have to appear at some point? Anyway, what I found most interesting was that this led to discussion about portraying evil people – terrorist, dictators and the like – at the risk of ‘humanising them’, with the interviewer asking whether figures like Osama Bin Laden or Hitler should be humanised and in humanising is there a danger of evoking audience sympathy.

Michael Haneke, sitting in his dark chair apart from the Americans, launched a rather surprising critique on Oliver Hirschbiegal’s portrayal of Hitler in Downfall, claiming it was impossible to create ‘melodrama’ from such a character and saying he would never make a film about the Nazi dictator.

Twilight… humanising vampires.

Shouldn’t evil characters be humanised though? I thought it was rather simplistic to say that humanising a character invokes sympathy for them. Surely film audiences are intelligent enough to deal with the fact that a monster of a man like Osama Bin Laden is actually still a man? Or is it that they don’t want to see this? Or Hollywood thinks they don’t want to see this? They are happy enough to humanise vampires, yet not bad people who exist in the real world?

I personally feel that humanising someone considered to be bad makes them all the more evil. Take for example, Forest Whitaker’s Idi Amin in The Last King Of Scotland. Would this character be half as terrifying if he was a two-dimensional ‘bad guy’? It’s the fact that he is charming and charismatic, yet also a complete psychopath that makes him so fascinating, and indeed, on that occasion, Hollywood rewarded Whittaker with an Oscar. No-one would surely claim that by humanising Amin we were being asked to sympathise with him? Being human is a complicated business, it’s not just about being nice.

One of the best things I saw on TV here in England last year was Appropriate Adult, a two part drama about serial killer Fred West (played by Dominic West,

Dominic West as Fred West in ‘Appropriate Adult’

no relation) and his relationship with his allocated ‘appropriate adult’ (someone who has to sit in police interviews etc with a suspect who is deemed to be mentally unfit to deal with proceedings alone). Fred West committed some of the most heinous murders in recent British history, yet the drama portrayed how his ‘appropriate adult’, Janet Leach, became so manipulated by him that she was driven to attempting suicide. Knowing what West had done, it was often uncomfortable to watch because Dominic West portrayed him with such beguiling humanity, but it was an exceedingly powerful piece of drama.

It’s an insult to us as viewers to suggest that we shouldn’t be shown such things in case with begin to sympathise with evil characters. Like, is watching a humanised portrayal of Osama Bin Laden going to make us all run off and join the Taliban?

Zero Dark Thirty has been criticised for being a bit of a gung-ho US military film and I don’t see how it cannot be if it portrays Bin Laden and his cronies as simplistically evil. It’s not about sympathising with such people, it’s about understanding them. Isn’t there a saying about knowing your enemy?

Likewise Hitler – why is it wrong for a film-maker to seek to understand who this person was and why he did what he did? I love Michael Haneke but I found his criticism of Downfall rather odd.

But perhaps it’s me, I just like the bad guys. I have just been watching Oliver

Edgar Ramirez in ‘Carlos’

Assayas’ brilliant ‘Carlos‘ trilogy – a five and half hour biopic of Carlos The Jackal and I’ve got to say Edgar Ramirez looks hot as hell in a leather jacket with a machine gun.