Twelve Days in the Year: 27th August 2025

Wake up with a painful throat. Oh dear, here we go again. Air conditioning in this hotel? People in the train yesterday? People in the audience on Monday? A. had mentioned on Monday evening, as she reminds me, that my glands looked as if they might be up, which would then suggest that this started earlier and I may have infected a portion of the Tristan und Isolde audience. To be fair, I felt perfectly fine until this morning. Come to think of it, Andreas Schager seemed a little under the weather in Act One, and the capacity of a world-leading Heldentenor to project germs around an auditorium is surely unrivalled.

To compound things, this being a German hotel room there is no capacity to make a cup of tea. We discuss the need to investigate travel kettles for future trips. Read through the papers, do the regular Wordle and sudoku puzzles, shower. Meet son in lobby, walk over to the station to get some breakfast before our train. We head off in different directions, then reconvene at Kamps where I’ve got a coffee and Rosinenschnecke (alas, the Käsekuchen they had on Sunday morning on our trip out seems to be a weekend-only thing) to legitimise our occupation of one of their tables. Brief stop at an Apotheke for paracetamol and throat sweets, then up to the platform.

Unlike yesterday, when we found ourselves with an extra hour and a half in Nürnberg, the train is on time. We head towards dark clouds – some of them figurative. It was certainly a mistake to look at the UK news this morning, as competitive racist authoritarian gets ratcheted up ever further: Farage’s fascists promise to send Afghan children back to the Taliban, various people too extreme for that party call for mass deportation of non-whites, and Starmer takes their very real and not at all racist concerns very seriously and promises to develop more practical approaches to trampling on human rights. Utterly infuriating, loathsome people. I suppose this just makes me the sort of liberal elite who is betraying Real British People. Redraft ideas for relevant chapter of my book on how Thucydides would have been unsurprised by all this crap – which raises a question of whether we might see this as a delayed response to the Plague, loss of concern with honour, chronic short-termism and so forth.

Switch to reading jazz magazine for a bit and listening to some new Nordic jazz/folk/electronica crossover: Benedicte Maurseth on Hardanger fiddle with piano and bass, a concept album on reindeer life cycles – certainly a lot more interesting than the duo concert of Hardanger fiddle and organ we saw a year or so ago back, which was just doing traditional songs. Start to worry that this sort of music might be co-opted into a European identity movement, implying a kind of Blut und Boden worldview (with reindeer), but it seems sufficiently abstract and atonal that the fash are unlikely to enjoy it. Ditto, in a very different manner, the Tomeka Reid Quartet, whom I listen to next. Have another throat sweet.

I’ve been tagged into a Facebook conversation about gleaning and whether there’s any classical evidence for it. Always nice when someone thinks I might have something useful to contribute, even if in this case it’s basically negative that I can’t think of any sources – Cato’s stinginess looks to preclude any such custom, but I don’t recall any explicit rejection of it. There was no duty of helping the poor per se – but what about one’s obligation to neighbours or demesmen? One turns as ever to Theophrastus’ Characters to see if there’s any sign of him mocking the sort of man who wouldn’t let his poor neighbour scavenge what’s left over after harvest.

We arrive at Brussels on time, so have three hours to kill – quirk of Eurostar scheduling is that you’re either bored for ages or rushing from platform to platform in a panicked manner as the changeover time is uncomfortably short. Buy a couple of bottles of Belgian beer from the supermarket, then expensive coffee (for me) and weird tea (for A. and the son; it looks like the terrible overly milky latte of teas), then outside to find a bistro for lunch: acceptable if bloody expensive carbonnade de boeuf. Back in the station for waffles – made with dough, as is the Belgian norm but this year for the first time I’ve noticed seems to have spreads widely across Germany, including to our Bayreuth hotel. Eurostar check-in and security – at least there’s much more room here and it’s so much calmer than London. Buy a fancier bottle of beer (a Trappist Quadrupel!) as here they have the special editions (there used to be some in a corner of the specialist gourmet shop in the main station shopping area, from which I once obtained a bottle of beer that’s supposed only to be sold to locals at the monastery gate – arguably not really worth the money but it’s about the experience – but now that is entirely chocolates and waffles).

Train is on time once again. Having previously exhausted/been exhausted by the news headlines, I avoid the temptation to doomscroll by… continuing with volume 8 of Volker Kutscher’s Rath Krimis, which has now hit 1936 and the Berlin Olympics. Remarkable to think that he began this series back in 2007, when Berlin 1920s-1930s was an interesting setting for a historical crime novel rather than an ever more pressing parallel for our times. We have reached the point where even the somewhat oblivious hero is conscious that things aren’t great, without having yet become completely inured to torture and corruption, which I guess matches the sense that we are no longer anticipating what will happen (as was the case for the volumes set in the early 1930s) but feeling ourselves right in the middle of it with no obvious prospect of escape or relief. Rath’s attempts at avoiding the Hitlergrüss without making this dangerously obvious are an especially nice symptom of gradual moral compromise – at some point he’s either going to go all-in for fear of the consequences, or get into real trouble. I wonder vaguely whether I should save the book for next year’s World Cup, which will probably involve similar propaganda and weasely compromises.

Listening to more Mary Halvorsen – try as I might, and much as I love her records with Tomeka Reid and Thumbscrew, I struggle to get into her critically-lauded albums with her own group – and then an impressive but slightly too frenetic live album by Joe Henderson and McCoy Tyner. Feeling somewhat grotty but less than the man two rows behind who sounds like he has TB – his wife/partner actually moved to sit somewhere else, not returning until just before we arrived in London. Son had taken advantage of free seats to move away from our table in order to escape maternal interrogation for a bit; we were joined instead after Lille by a man with a baby, as his wife was looking after slightly older child – baby fast asleep all the way.

We arrive at St Pancras on time – which means that we have hours to kill after the straightforward tube journey via Oxford Circus down to Waterloo. Changing the tickets to get an earlier train would, I establish, cost more than treble the original price so not an option. We find a cafe for tea (A), chai latte (son) and apple juice (I feel as if I’ve had too much caffeine). At least it’s relatively quiet and has seats. Up to M&S to buy snacks for the evening; hauling suitcases up the stairs as A. has managed to upset the lift, pushing the ‘up’ button repeatedly until the thing seems to be incapable of doing anything other than opening and closing its doors repeatedly, plaintively insisting that it is going down.

Train leaves on time, which is a relief, as I’m feeling rubbish again, counting down the time until I can have some more paracetamol. Fairly straightforward journey; we walk back to where the car is parked, drive son down to the Travellodge where he’s staying for the night, and then home. We do the basic unpacking, then I take more painkillers and go to bed while A. is still winding down.