Night Crossing, Paris Streets and Rouen's Musee de Beaux Arts

There's a kind of magic, a tangible feeling of the land being wrapped in something other, different, like entering a fairy story, as soon as the shore on the other side of the water [La Manche] is reached. I don't feel it so strongly now but still feel it. The first time – and it was dark then too - jumped straight up into my imagination, scented and lamplit, first the soft glow of the batons held by the harbour guards at Calais, to guide the cars coming off the ferry and later, the straight dark roads, as we headed south west, the trees lit by the yellow headlamps, these roads had their guardian poplar trees accompanying them. The sheer luck of being waved on by trees, whispered over by trees as the road went on and on. The roadside cafés, the lamps and of course the language. And it's all still there, it comes rushing to meet me, each time I cross the water. There was – and still is – a sense of belonging somewhere different, maybe even belonging in the fairy-story, true home being magical and so – an undercurrent of laughter, sometimes bubbling up.
When I was very young I don't think I was too aware of living on an island. But as soon as I had left it, then, I knew. Each time I leave it now, it's a return to that other place, other self, even – other land of self, entering the magical and other land, as soon as the other side of the water is reached. The north side of the stretch of water has nothing of romantic in it, it is the path of commerce only. There are the rough-hewn steps and blatant props of travel. Rusting cranes by docksides, splinterings of wooden crates, a sheen of oil on water, stench of old and mouldering coiled ropes or nets. No perfume, no distance. Bilge water, old oil, tar and detritus of greasy wrappings ripped and plucked apart by seagulls' beaks. But once on the other side, the south shore, there is the vastness of a continent beneath your feet, that you are joined to. A sense of allure like a lightly fingered treasure casket.

Night crossing.
Waiting at the ferry terminal, flocks of birds rose, strangely silent, spinning like pieces of paper caught in wind. Bright as flecks of foam, tattered flakes catching the beams of light from the string of lamps between ferry and the lines of trucks and cars waiting to drive on.
The water rocks the ferry as if it's determined everyone should sleep, but I'm not sleepy, listening to the regular swoosh of the water, like a thick black whale breathing, with its white foam breath.
The wind on deck is fierce and wet, tearing at clothes, hair, slapping at bare skin.

Paris.
Because I didn't sleep overnight I'm tired. I wander up Boulevard Magenta, past the Marché de St.Quentin, and the Déjeuner café, down St. Martin, past Notre Dame and a crowd of hunched pigeons, and along by the Seine, with change for the homeless man and the two sleeping puppies.

When I meet up with C she takes me to St. Sulpice, buys me a book by Catherine Clément, and then back to her amazing apartment on rue Vaugirard, every room piled with books. Every room is an office, she laughs. She was the President of the French Byron Society and tells me of someone, whose name I forget, who came to give a talk and claimed to be wearing Byron's ring. 'But how could that be? she said. How could he come to have Byron's ring? Surely they did not sell it? The British, she says, I'm sorry to say this, but the British can be so mercantile.' A truly delicious description! We have an aperitif of port, sitting at a tiny table with a brass tray, books piled all around us, and she then makes soup and lentils à la Auvergnoise.

Rouen
I wanted to visit the Flaubert museum, but it was closed for renovation. So I went to the Musée de Beaux Arts, where I have never seen so many Impressionist paintings all together. Apart from many Sisleys and Monets – including of course, his Porte de la Cathédrale de Rouen - there was René de Saint-Délis's Le Port d'Honfleur, with light striking the water.

Leaving Calais, the sky was storm grey, but here too, there was a line of light which must have jumped around a cloud, to hit the water.

Walking in Tirana's Streets

Walking in Tirana's Streets

I head for my usual supplier of hardback notebooks, the huge bazaar at the end of Rruga Dibres, just past the Medresa. But all the notebooks only have squared paper. The woman who has the stall gestures towards a young man, her son, and he says to me – please wait five minutes – and goes off. He returns with two packs of notebooks. Some of them have lines rather than squares, but the formerly kitsh cover designs have turned into ugly images of grimacing little boys with motor bikes. They think I don't like these because I want them for a girl. How old is she, asks the son. The ones with cute little girls are equally impossible for me to use. 16 I say, rather than attempt to explain that they are for me to write in, that the Chinese paper and the kitsh covers are precisely what I love about them. The only possible lined one is plain blue so I take that one and a squared one with gorgeous heart patterns like plush satin. 300 lek for the 2 (£2), the same as they cost 4 years ago.

Walking back to the centre – walking in Tirana's streets is an enormous pleasure for me – I go into a small café to buy byrek, that delicious flaky pastry with slivers of cheese inside. The woman behind the counter is friendly, all smiles. But she has no change for my 100 lek coin. Ska, ska, she waves me away and smiles. It's nothing, don't worry, have it on me. She shrugs, smiles, waves. Faleminderit shum I say, thank you very much.

Continuing towards the centre, I'm watching a policeman at traffic lights. He waves the cars on, while the lights are at green. When they change to red, he holds up his lollipop. Good. Green man – I cross. The first car pulls up and the policeman waves the second which is in the middle of the road, over to the side, behind the first one. I'm eating my byrek, looking back at him and don't see a car coming from my right – well I wouldn't would I? There's a green pedestrian sign, and I have right of way. But the car sounds its horn, clearly intending to continue. I wave my byrek at him and walk on.

Apart from the lack of lined and flowery kitsh-patterned notebooks this part of Tirana is, quite wonderfully, unchanged. Up the Rruga Dibres and Qemal Stafa, all is the same – powerful sunlight, noise, dust, fumes, broken pavements, helpful notebook sellers and friendly byrek sellers and cars that drive through pedestrian green lights, even when there's a policeman just a few meters away.

In the centre of course, particularly in the Blok, the fashionable area, there are very visible changes, painted façades, repaired roads, glamorous shops full of fashionable clothes, and lots of shiny new cars. Even the bicycle stall has a new parasol.

Old version bicycle stall and street

New version bicycle stall and same street.

*
The sparrows were doing their usual massive flocking in the chestnut trees along Sami Frasheri. I saw many of them, zooming in like fast dark arrows, to join the seething, sparking chorus in the trees. Is it their nightly reunion? Are they squabbling for space in the trees? Have I ever seen sparrows fly so fast and so far, more like swallows – are they really sparrows anyway?

If ever I'd forgotten that identity is not something discrete and compact that one can carry around with you, like a suitcase on wheels, walking along Tirana streets would have reminded me.

We might imagine that this shifting series of impressions, thoughts, and associations, connections and interchange with other people, is who we are, but this is like comparing a thin scarf of cloud tucked into a crevice of the mountainside with the mountain itself.

Identity it seems to me, is geographical, its textures are topography, and it lives in places – or it dreams there, sleeps, until you wake it, or that part of you that lives there, wakes, when your feet touch that ground again.
These street and hillside fragments are all one being, so it seems to me.

Walking in Tirana's streets is like living a double life, an abrupt intensifying of experience. The blaring car horns, the dust and diesel fumes, the smells of hot oil, roasting corn and rosemary and the early evening chorus of the birds as they swoop into the chestnut trees on Sami Frasheri, and shout and call and laugh and greet each other.

Various pasts arrive, just like those gossiping, garrulous birds, they zoom in to join this present moment as I walk up these streets. It's vertigo as well as plain sailing. It's moving up and down with sea swell, and it's those sudden shifts in altitude too, when you drop out of nowhere and you're carried up by something that just appears, and lifts you up.
Where we are is who we are.
Walking up Tirana's streets makes me feel as if something that was previously held inside me has been released, let out.

International Byron Conference in Albania 2009

International Byron Conference, Tirana, Albania

Two hundred years ago Lord George Byron visited Greece and Albania, one of the first Englishmen to do so. He travelled on horseback from Jannina in Greece, then known as Epiros, to Tepelene in Albania, at the invitation of Ali Pasha, then ruler of Epiros and most of Albania. Byron made this journey, along with his friend Hobhouse, and local guides, through mountainous and highly dangerous terrain – Ali was fighting a war against the Pasha of Berat, a more northern Albanian city.

The impact on Byron of this very different culture and its ruler, Ali Pasha, was immense. Out of this journey and this meeting came Childe Harold, the long lyric poem that was to make Byron famous. Out of it too came Byron's lifelong love of Albania and its people.

There are Byron societies all over the world yet this was the first time, the 200th anniversary of his visit, that an International Byron Conference has been held in Albania. And this was thanks to the tireless efforts of Dr. Afrim Karagjozi and his colleagues and students at the University of Tirana.

All the speakers were picked up at Rinas airport. The last time I'd flown in to Tirana was nine years ago (since then I'd taken the ferry from Bari to Durres) and I could hardly believe this sumptuous place I found myself in. Spacious, airy and spotless, no long queues, and you didn't even have to pay to enter the country! (Formerly there was a charge of ten euros). We were then taken to the Hotel Mondial near the busy intersection where Rruga Kavaja meets the Unaza or ring road that encircles the city. After leaving my suitcase at the hotel I could not resist walking up Rruga Kavaja to Skanderbeg Square, drinking in the evening warmth and all the sights and sounds that were immediately so familiar and at the same time so evocative of the past, when I used to live here. The blaring of car horns, the ubiquitous dust, the scents of roasting corn, hot oil and byrek, scorched meat, pungent cheese, herbs and spices, interspersed with various perfumes. Something that is dormant in me when I am not here comes alive in me when I am. Every step along the dusty road was a greeting, an inner incredulity, every step a delight to be back here. Like the birds that cluster in the chestnut trees on Rruga Sami Frasheri in early evening, a cloud of chattering sound, I was singing, though not out loud. Only after I had made my own personal greeting to this city, by walking along its streets, could I go back to join the others, where we had a meal of so many courses I lost count, and our glasses were constantly filled by attentive waiters.

The next day Dr Karagjozi opened the conference, and we read our papers. Byron the traveller, the ghost in Byron's bedroom, his influence on so many writers, the national costumes worn by the Albanians he met, 200 years ago, a modern day journey in Byron's footsteps, the effect of Ali Pasha and Albania on Byron the writer and the man, were just some of the topics covered.

The next two days were spent travelling. We took the

coast road to Saranda, the city of forty saints, stopping

at the Llogora Pass where the mountains slope

downwards to the sea. From Saranda we went on to

Butrint, a World Heritage Site, full of classical ruins,

including the remains of an Asklepian temple, a

Greek amphitheatre, a Christian baptistry and the

mysterious Lion Gate.

The following day we visited Gjirokaster, with several

surviving old Ottoman houses built into the mountainside,

and a museum refurbished with traditional carpets and

wooden carved walls and ceilings.

We stopped at Tepelene, Ali Pasha's birthplace, to admire his statue and the few remains of the vast palace where Byron met Ali Pasha. In a letter Byron described the inner courtyard of the palace as being made of marble with a fountain playing in the centre. This can only be imagined now, beyond the remains of the wall of the entrance archway, where blue flowers sprout between the cracks in the stonework.

But the mountains are still there, quite unchanged.

Callander Poetry Festival

The legendary Callander Poetry Festival 2009 is over. I'm back home again, under greyish skies, images and feelings still circulating. So many inspiring and moving words – you can check out all the people who took part at the Poetry Scotland website.

We kicked off a day before the scheduled events, a few of us early arrivals. Left both in charge and unsupervised as Sally and Ian had to go out, it all started off well, with Maureen and I managing to make a salad, and buy wine, then a trail of people later set off for the local off license to buy more. I remember Mike and Kemal's guitar playing, and ending up in the pub up the road, but where I was to stay that night was not so easily remembered, so I needed several people to accompany me to the door, and to ring the bell, where the ever patient and hugely hospitable V sat me down and made me some tea before I headed for bed.

Before I started drinking wine, I did remember though, to turn off the cooker, so that the pot of vegetables which Sally had prepared, would not be burnt, once we sat down to talk and play music. To be absolutely sure that this could not happen, I switched the cooker off at the mains. Switching it on again the next morning, the cooker blew, and all the electrics in the house went out. I don't think I will ever live this down, though Sally and Ian, cheerful as ever, laughed it off. Somehow electricity was restored, apart from the cooker. I do not know how this was done, as my subsequent offers of help were met with a 'no, no, stay away!'

It is always a mystery how Sally manages to feed everyone and this year was particularly miraculous, working sans cooker. Yet once again, plates brimmed with food, with the peach jelly and baklava being particularly memorable for me. Wine overflowed. Yet by Friday night I was enjoying blackcurrant juice and wondering if I would ever drink wine again. (I did, the following day.)

Every year, apart from the superb mix of poets, there is always some particularly fascinating and unusual event. One year we had a resident Zen Buddhist monk, on another occasion, poetry was put to music which was made into a CD, (Snappy Day). This year's special resident was the Itinerant Poetry Librarian who has spent the last three years in various different parts of the world, taking her amazing collection of poetry with her. Her concept, activities, the collection, and her delightful self, are all heart-warming. This is only the second time, she told us, that she has been invited to a specific poetry event. The first invitation was to the International Poetry Festival at Rotterdam! When she talks on her website about liminality and 'the periphery of the periphery' I felt an immediate kinship with this idea, as it was what I was trying to express in the title of the previous post – Loose Threads on a Bead Attached to a Frayed Loop on the Outermost Edge of the Fringe.

On the last evening, after the official events were over, there was more music and singing, and I was able to join in with the inimitable Onya Wick. But just before that, I made an amazing find in the bookshop. For some time I'd wanted to read the novels of Robin Lloyd-Jones [his website is under construction] but when I asked him about them he said they were out of print. But while I was browsing the bookshop I found a copy of one of them! What can be better than coming home with a bagful of books you look forward to reading? My rucksack broke under the strain, so I foraged in Callander's shops before I left, and bought a new one.

The bookshop cat sat on the ....computer.

Loose Threads on the Fringe

Loose Threads on a Bead Attached to a Frayed Loop on the Outermost Edge of the Fringe.

Travel from Cahors to home only took about 30 hours, with little waiting in between trains and buses. Train to Paris, overnight bus to London, then buses home to Scotland.
This is London in early morning light.

While I was away in France, flowers I planted in pots bloomed, and leeks and one glossy green courgette were waiting for me.... and the slugs hadn't eaten all the lettuces...hallo lovely plants I said...
*
Jane and Louise Wilson's installation at the Talbot Rice Gallery, Unfolding the Aryan Papers, stills from and commentary by the actress Johanna ter Steege who was to star in Stanley Kubrick's film, based on Louis Begley's novel, Wartime Lies. The film was never made, but it existed in the thoughts and imagination of both Kubrick and the actress, and now a film or installation has been made by J & L Wilson of her thoughts, of the archive stills, with their categories, which Johanna reads out in an even voice. 'Specific scenes' (we see A. Hitler with a child in a pushchair, a prisoner about to be shot by soldiers); 'civilian activities' ( people sitting having picnics beside vintage cars); 'Warsaw ghetto', 'slum interiors', 'interiors' – with huge bold- patterned wallpaper that looks vulnerable to me now, especially in these black and white photographs, no trace of real boldness, more a kind of patterned sensitivity, soaked with time and sadness.

When I come out of the exhibition, into the empty courtyard of the Old Quad, it is raining, and I feel I am still in a film set, the rain, the grey cobbles and Georgian architecture, the complete absence of any other human beings. I walk slowly, surrounded by these buildings that have been transposed to somewhere in mainland Europe in some place that I once knew so well, and again now, know so intimately, the camera of the Major Director tracking me, this moment, this empty courtyard in the rain.

*
Fatos Lubonja at the Book Festival, talking of his 17-year prison sentence in Albania, for 'agitation and propaganda'. A warm person, who smiles easily, he talks of the sense of the double self, the inner one that says – you can't say that or write that – because of the dictatorship. He says it is a daily struggle, even now, to be truthful, to say the truth. Invited to give a talk in Belgrade, he was going to give it on what he thought Danilo Kiš, the Serbian writer had said viz. that if you can't tell the truth, say nothing. But apparently Kiš said if you can't tell the truth, use metaphor, and so what he tried to do was bridge the gap between silence and metaphor.
He spoke of how the past in Albania has not really been confronted – none of the former regime have been held accountable for what they did, never mind put on trial. The people in political power now are the same as the ones in power in the Communist regime. In his book, Second Sentence, Fatos wrote about two writers and journalists, Fadil and Vangjel, who wrote a letter to Enver Hoxha suggesting a reconciliation with Russia (Albania was more Stalinist than Russia, after Stalin's death, and so broke off relations with Russia, making the country utterly isolated). For daring to write this letter they were put on trial and sentenced to death. No-one, he said, has looked for the bodies of Fadil and Vangjel and given them a proper grave.

*
R talks about the degree show at the Art College she went to. There was an installation consisting of a motor bike and beside it, the engine, and the artist was sitting beside the engine. She asked him what his work was about. Oh, I just love fixing motor bikes he says. Ah, so it's about love, says R. Uh – says the artist, who clearly hadn't thought of it in this way before - yeah, I suppose so. How wonderful I say to her, because of your question, he realised something about his work that he wasn't aware of before.

Cubertou - The Last Days

Cubertou – The Last Days

Peace and silence. In the kitchen, E whisks something in a bowl. His running commentary, sometimes to himself, sometimes to others.
I'm making mayonnaise. Put bread in the oven. Maximum. I'm going to slice it. There is – potato salad – salami – cheese – use up the lettuce as well. All you need to do is reheat the stew a little bit.
To me – the bread in the oven – check it in two minutes, press it – he gestures with thumb and finger - if it goes crik, crik, it's ready.

I drive to Bergerac airport to pick up some new arrivals. When we pass through Villeréal it's 36 degrees. But there's a pale and fuzzy wedge of cloud moving across the sky heading towards us. It has a pearly innocent glow to it. But then it grows thicker and thicker and overhead there are swirling patterns of shades of grey and silver. The first fast drops of rain fall, chilly and personal on the skin.

Driving back between Villeréal and Montflanquin the light gathers and swoops on the cut wheat fields, a blaze of burnt yellow, stinging the eyes. Over towards the horizon the sky is a haze of smoky purplish grey like a picture fading out, dissolving at the edges.

Back at the Cubertou kitchen E lines the plates up on the counter, lays fish on them, then spoons out vegetables and finally, the sauce. Then he points to them. Go, go! he says.
We carry them out across the courtyard. Thick drops of rain are falling. Last week the stars watched over us. Tonight the air is heavy with moisture, a clammy dusk. The candles flicker and struggle with the wet and drooping sky. New people and new weather.
OK, these are ready, go, go!

We come back to the kitchen, carry two more plates over to the barn where the tables are laid out, covered with the blue waxed cloths.
We'll hear this in our sleep I think, E's voice saying, Go, go!
That and the thunder following the forked lightning. And the monotonous drip drip outside the barn as rain splashes onto something metal.

Cubertou dramas:
Water shortage. Ja and I catch the last drops from a dribbling tap into carafes, so that at least people will not die of thirst before the supply runs out completely. (the water came on again the next day.)
H weeping in the courtyard in the middle of the night because there was a spider in her room, so I persuade her to come up to the spare bed in the large upper room.
An accident – a lorry running into M and Ir's car (but no-one hurt) the car a write-off, having to be towed away.
S falling ill with tonsillitis.
J-L's blackberry going missing.
A's plane from Southampton having to turn back because the rubber was coming away from the windscreen.
It's like a Guy de Maupassant story says B.

The next day is overcast, which means its cool enough for me to walk all day. I take the forest path to Chateau Bonaguil.

The following day it's hot again. I take the train (ie the SNCF bus) from Fumel to Puy l'Eveque. I'm the only passenger until Vire sur Lot. When the bus approaches I stick my hand out and it stops. The driver says I shouldn't have waited there but at the other side of the road, where there's a shelter. But that's going in the other direction I say. Doesn't matter apparently that's where I should have waited.

Sitting in the old streets of Puy L'Eveque, there's one of those moments when life feels like a reflection, with a burst of music from an open doorway, a memory, the sound of water trickling over stones, the tone of a church bell. The dry chirp of a bird.

Cahors, at the Musée Henri Martin. A neon sign says the temperature is 43 degrees. Henri Martin lived near Cahors and adopted the pointilliste style. His Toits Rouges is not on display there, but it was the photo of that painting, of the red roof-tiles against the blue water that made me want to go to the exhibition. The water reminded me of a lake near Shkodra in the north of Albania. A group of us went there on a Search and Rescue exercise. We left much too early in the morning, about 5, before it got too hot. The students had to find the location of a (simulated) downed plane, using compass and map references. Fortunately, I did not have to do this, I took photographs and wrote a report of the exercise. I took a short cut to the lake, where we were all going for a swim afterwards. Scrambling down a scree-covered hill I lost my footing and got covered in bramble scratches. I was glad I was on my own and there was no-one there to see my undignified fall.

Cahors was just as hot as that day in the north of Albania. But there were no mountains to climb. And the Musée was cool. And even though Les Toits Rouges was not on display, there were several landscapes of villages, hills and snaky long poplar and cypress trees.
Back at Cubertou, the thunderheads were climbing up in the sky again, muttering and deliberating about a forthcoming drama. But it didn't rain.

Cubertou, Too

Cubertou, Une Autre Vie

A butterfly swoops down over my head,
in the direction of the buddlea.
Their faded candle blossoms wave,
uncertain arrows
pointing to this part of sky, now to another,
with so much blue, who can decide
which blue way to waver or to point to,
which blue ripple to outline
with dark-blossom direction?

Sometimes I am waitress, bartender, translator. This morning, because S is ill and has been taken to the doctor, I am kitchen hand. Carry the food from E's car into the kitchen, put the baguettes into the wicker basket, take the cheeses downstairs into the cave. Peel the shallots. What knife shall I use? I ask E, the chef. You can use mine he says, and sharpens it. You're honoured, says Js, the other kitchen hand, the more permanent one, he never lets me use his knife. Js peels the onions and cries into the dish. E walks past me and straightens my shoulders. You must not hunch over like that he says. I peel two net bags of shallots. Shall I do the third one? No – hang it up over there. On the hooks are net bags of lemons and oranges. But I've already opened the third net bag so it won't hang up. I slip the bag of shallots in beside a solitary lemon.

It's coq au vin tonight and E pours the wine from plastic bottles into a vast tureen. JL comes into the kitchen, takes the empty plastic bottles and cuts them in half. Then he turns the top half with the narrow neck, upside down and replaces it in the lower half. Pours a little beer into the bottom, and his wasp trap is complete. Exits, to take it outside to the barn where they getting ready for the morning's music lesson.

Next I peel the cucumbers. The dark green peel comes away in long stripes, heap on the table like damp snakes. Then E hands me a grater. I grate the cucumbers into a yellow bowl.
We will have lunch in the open air, in the sloping field with trees at the far end, for shade. Blankets are put out for people to sit on. Two bamboo tables hold the salad, the bread, the lentil dish, the paté. Glasses, cutlery and plates are carried in the wicker trays.

E mixes lemon into the lentil dish. Is that enough? he asks me. Taste it. Get a spoon. From there – he points to the drawer. I fetch a spoon, I taste the lentils. A little more lemon, I say. He puts more in. Is that better? he asks me. Yes, I say.
Do you make pancakes? How many eggs do you put in?
He produces an enormous salmon. I've salted it he says. Try it. Is there too much salt? A little. Further up where it is thicker, it will not be so salty.
Can I go outside now, have a coffee break?
Yes, go. I am ahead of myself today.

Outside, at the table. In the courtyard, E's painting of the mandolin player. Earlier, I helped him bring the other paintings out of the sunlight, but this one is pinned up on an easel. I wonder if it too should be brought in. The shade moves and shifts across the table. Everybody interrupts me and I like their questions. E leans out of the kitchen window. Can you bring in the painting that's outside? I forgot about it. That's just what I was thinking of, I say. I unpin the painting and put it with the others.
Js joins me at the table. Do you have another pen?
Then he brings out his guitar. Which chord sounds better do you think?
Ella reads the paper. Oh, we have a good-looking man in the government she says, and shows me a picture of Muhammad Abdi. And he is smoking a cigarette too!