Caravaning in England and locating a place to rest and recharge for the next day’s adventures always presented surprises. On the whole, we were afforded some breathtaking views without even the need for craning one’s neck and the pricing structure—for the off-season—was fairly reasonable.
Since 1917, Canada has sought to incorporate the Crown suzerainty of the Turks and the Caicos Islands in the Caribbean as its southerly province in order that the expansive nation be able to offer its residents the full-spectrum of tourism-opportunities without leaving the country, as TYWKIWDBI informs. When devolution has occurred in the past, it is not without precedent, like Australia or New Zealand administering even farther removed UK possessions in the Pacific, that such associations can be arranged. Previous polling as shown enthusiasm on both sides, and although the long, unusual quest has been going on for almost a century, the matter is on the docket for discussion for this weekend’s plenary party talks of Canada’s new government. I wonder if we will have anything new to report on this front soon.
In anticipation of Saint Patrick’s Day, Kuriositas treats us to a fine whistle-stop tour through Dublin to visit the statues and public monuments that people the capital. As fond and committed city commissioners are for honouring local sons and daughters, residents are just as keen to bestow affectionate monikers on these silent neighbours. Read more about the “Tart with the Cart” or the “Hags with Bags” and other choice nicknames for the street urchins of Dublin and sight-see during your next visit with native knowledge.
The always marvellous Nag on the Lake poses the question why many British toponyms are so odd, eliciting sniggering or a blush but also some really fascinating history of occupation, migration and conquest.
A Sunday drive through the Midlands connecting Wednesbury, Newton Burgoland and Ashby-de-la-Zouch also conveys one through ages from the Celts, the Romans, the arrival of the Scandinavians, through to Norman times. Despite all the diverse influences and upheavals, these place names are retain a certain Englishness whether or not original rooted in that language, which is just as adaptive and with the same pedigree. Many others, of course, are later Anglicisations of places on the peripheries of the isle. I recall when we were travelling in County Cork passing through a fine and picturesque village called in Irish Bรฉal รtha Leice (meaning the flat stone at the mouth of the bay) which was unfortunately transliterated as Ballylickey on the road signs. There is also a fun, interactive map that gives select etymologies of England’s town and villages.
Messy Nessy Chic furnishes us with an update on the anticipated maiden voyage of the Titanic II in 2018, a meticulous replica of the original announced by an ambitious Australian mining tycoon first back in 2012, on the centenary of the cruise-liner’s tragic sinking. The project has suffered some setbacks, and one does have to wonder about the wisdom or folly of tempting fate and declaiming another unsinkable behemoth, but the berthing and christening are being planned and the attention to detail in below deck is absolutely astounding. Please sure to visit the link for a large gallery of images of the new cabins, dining halls, gymnasia and grand reception area in comparison to the original historic photographs.
Forty years ago this week, the maiden voyages of the sleek, supersonic jet liner, Concorde a joint Franco-British collaboration, took place, continuing for twenty-seven years before the fleet was retired. The combination of low fuel prices and industries still slowly being decommissioned as Europe transitioned into its Cold War identity made the time just right for this sort of venture—which sounds like fun and familiar times, four decades on.
The decision to ground the planes and put them on almost taxidermical display so one can wonder and be nostalgic over having never been whisked across the ocean at twice the speed of sound always strikes me as an affront to progress—no matter how elite and exclusive that the manifest tended to be, and was driven in part to the 9/11 Terror Attacks that drained all the romance out of jet-setting and also to the development of higher capacity freighters to shuttle more and more passengers to their destinations, teethed on high-overhead and unchecked competition. Maybe it’s even more retrograde to try to recapture past accomplish, though the technical achievement (at least for something that is commercially available) was never repeated, and though although new break-through in รฆro-space but it would behove one to remember that cruise-goers (or soldiers’ of fortune) are not the heroes that astronauts are, and while space-tourism might be driven by individual investment and could very well lead to innovations in efficiency, that enterprise—purely a commercial venture—also strikes me as giving up the ghost. Like for Concorde, there’s no separate flag-ship and we’re all just classed in different ways—through cordons and charters that might make the flying experience marginally less traumatic for a few but generally, democratically bad all around. What do you think? Can you believe it’s been forty years since the inaugural flight?
Mental Floss features an interesting article on a collection of the most remote human settlements. I always enjoy perusing such profiles of remote and lonely places and despite the forlorn familiarity, it’s always fun to learn more.
The list’s ostensibly top of the pole of inaccessibility is Tristan da Cunha—which is far closer to South Africa than the Island of Saint Helena, where Napoleon spent his exile, that it’s administratively coupled with—the British having bought the archipelago from Dutch Cape, first evicting a trio of American squatters who claimed the Refreshment Islands as their own, of Good Hope so the French might not use it as a staging platform for a rescue operation. Edinburgh of the Seven Seas, the main village, was evacuated in the early 1960s when a volcanic eruption threatened to engulf the whole island, and when residents returned to find a city-limits sign installed on a path leading into town, I recall reading once, there was a minor clamour over this bureaucratic insistence, as no one happen there without great determination.
over-extended: the Swiss will vote to effectively ban banks from creating money by lending more than they have in reserve
like genghis khan bathed in sherbet: the unlikely mantis shrimp is one of our favourite animals too
en voyage pathologique: a select handful of the throngs of tourists visiting the City of Light come down with the Paris Syndrome when it fails to live up to their expectations
jingle-jangle: mid-eighties Alpine White song was a strong forerunning carol in the assault on Christmas
axial precession: the December solstice falls on the twenty-second this year—plus nine bonus facts
life-savers: the marketing and minting of mints
Whilst in Vienna, H and I of course paid our respects at what’s described as a temple to Art Nouveau (Jugendstil) design. The Secession Building is not a museum on the interior, as we discovered after being confronted with a gallery of quite nice but incongruous exhibition of grainy photographs of rippling water and stars—though I suppose appropriate for celebrating the centennial of Einstein’s big and world-changing ideas, but rather as a hall for embracing the avant-garde as the founding artists had done.
The fresco itself also was executed only as a temporary decoration for a 1903 showing of contemporary artists, but was preserved by a collector with foresight and carefully prised off the wall upstairs before being installed in its permanent home. The Muse of Poetry looks like she’s consulting a tablet computer and does not want to be bothered (photography was not allowed and monitored, which made the experience all the more holy—down a rabbit hole of allegory) and stands in between an angelic choir and the monstrous giant Typhลus, the gorilla creature, attended by his Gorgon daughters—all elements in the struggle of the tone poem that became a national hymn.
The frieze ends with a knight in shining armour having doffed his protection and embracing his damsel in distress, illustrating the final stanza of “this kiss to the whole world,” diesen Kuss der ganzen Welt. Outside we spied one of the ubiquitous pedestrian crossing signs that Vienna installed to celebrate its inclusive victory in the Eurovision song contest—depicting the freedom to love whomever.
H and I wandered through the gardens and the courtyards of the massive campus of the Hofburg of central Vienna—the wintering residence of the Hapsburg dynasty. Built up since 1279 and with a dizzying array of attractions vying for attention, we knew unfortunately we needed to be selective and could only see so much in a limited amount of time, ever a precious commodity. We passed several wings and chose one of the ten museums housed in the sprawling complex, the Imperial Treasury, Der Kaiserliche Schatzkammer. Though depleted notably over the centuries to finance wars with Prussia, the collection of secular and ecclesiastical treasures comprised some astounding rarities and the trappings of empire and ceremony.
There were many other iconic and bizarre items in a maze of galleries, like this bassinette for the infant heir-apparent, a key cabinet for the sarcophagi of the emperor’s entombed in the city (there’s a certainly a tangible fascination with remembrance, death and the macabre associated with Vienna, and a jewelled hat that is metonymy for the Kingdom of Hungary. The artefacts and wardrobe of state was expansive and dazzling but the core of the consignment is the imperial regalia (die Reichskleinodien). These manifestations of spiritual and temporal power were kept in Nuremburg until around 1800 when the Napoleonic Wars saw the dissolution of the Holy and Roman Empire of the Germans when they were sent to Vienna for safe-keeping.
With the annexation of Austria by the Third Reich, Adolf Hitler did not plunder Vienna’s treasury but did specifically repatriate those symbols of state, believing the relic to be a powerful talisman and rightfully belonged back in Nuremburg, which Hitler styled as the spiritual centre of Germany. During the bombing campaign of Nuremburg, the regalia was found by the US Army and expatriated by General Patton once again to Vienna where they have remained since. Legendary matters of course have a tendency to snowball but there are some strange coincidences associated with that historical vestige.
Late in the afternoon, we returned to the Hofburg by way of the Opera to see it fully illuminated and the Christmas Village (Weihnachtsdorf) bustling on the grounds.Via the always interesting and never boring The Browser, comes an announcement of an Indiana Jones-style hunt for the tomb and (looted treasure) of Alaric I under the waters of the river Busento flowing through the town of Cosenza (an army of mourners apparently dammed and diverted the river in order to give Alaric a proper burial) in southern Italy, where the victorious Alaric suddenly and unexpectedly died.
My furnished workweek apartment has scattered shelves of mostly decorative books lining the room—some visually striking vintage paperbacks, the 1937 definitive edition of a German encyclopedia that’s an interesting snapshot but the selection is mostly of the harlequin and coffee-table (perhaps also the load-bearing) variety.
Dusting the shelves, however, I was surprised to see a title that I hadn’t noticed beforehand, Graf Luckner’s Seeteufel erobert Amerika (the Sea-Devil raids America) published in 1955. A few weeks ago, I first heard of the amazing but mostly forgotten adventures and exploits of gentleman-raider Felix Graf von Luckner. After the wars, the gracious and big-spirited Luckner was reunited was many of his hostages and toured America to great acclaim, recounting his conquests and even ripping telephone books asunder with his bare hands. I will read through the book and suppose that finding a copy just under my nose is testimony to the fame and celebrity that deserves further inspection—happily revived by the curious story-tellers at Futility Closet.
Once Protestantism took hold in large swathes of northern Europe, particularly in England, the pilgrimage undertaken to exotic lands fell out of fashion, people of means needed to articulate another rite of passage that would fulfil this lost outlet. Almost immediately, the notion of the Grand Tour was invented as an authoritative substitute, since one could claim instant superiority in matters of taste and worldliness over one’s neighbours for having seen the masterpieces of the continent first-hand and having even brought back some art as souvenirs.
A stuffed giraffe and other taxidermical creations were witness to proceedings as they could not be removed from the gallery without being decapitated. Despite not having access to the halls of power, it was nonetheless, an interesting experience to reflect on everything that had transpired on this one street. Aside from the secular, recent history, I was surprised to learn of Bonn’s religious connections and significance as the seat of the archdiocese and did not have the wherewithal to explore the old town too much—there was some festival that rendered the market-square pretty hectic and crowded—but it did of course seem worthy of further investigation, with Beethoven’s home, its Roman origins and fortification and many corporate headquarters as a sign of homesteading in the former capital as prognosis for what’s yet to come.
The sentry-station at the summit was unmanned and seemed long-abandoned though not in ruin and lay at a nice geographical pocket of flatness to admire the peaks of the Bergamont Alps. We descended into the estuary of Lake Como, fed by the run-off waters of River Mera to return to a comfortable and picturesque campsite near the village of Sorico. I learnt that this terminus of the mountain range represents the easiest point for migratory animals to ford the Alps and there were scores of exotic birds to be seen at this cross-roads of African and Asian pathways.
I also learnt that the River Mera was named in honour of a wandering monk who roamed the hill tops over Sorico and venerated as a sort of miraculous rain-maker in times of drought for Lake Como below. Perhaps Hermit Mera was a little over-zealous at the moment as the deluge was unrelenting and the forecast did not bode any better. As a result, we decided to respectfully depart for sunnier weather on Lake Garda.
After returning to Lake Como turned out to be rather a wash (more on this later), H and I decamped to the shores of Lake Garda (Gardasee, Lago di Garda and known in antiquity as Benaco where Roman forces defeated the Alamanni confederation—whose name is lent to the French and Spanish exonyms for Germany although Deutschland is Germania in Italian).
We chose a nice site on a south-western peninsula of the lake called Manerba del Garda—pleasantly peopled but not over-crowded since high-season was over but yet not too cold for a dip in the water. This region in general has been a sheltered one—eons before the tourist crunch, due to its climate and is the most northerly clime for citrus orchards, particularly lemon trees but not neglecting wine and olives, and the fact that many structures have foundations that reach into pre-history and neolithic times is probably a reliable indicator of the weather. The silhouette of La Rocca greeted us every morning, framed dramatically by welling clouds and though perhaps not the highest cliff on the lake, it was certainly the closest.
The old town centre rising up on a hill more inland was something to behold as well, but what we found to be the most delightful accent to the peninsula demarcating just one protected cove was the Isola San Biagio.
Separated from the main beach by barely a shin’s depth of water, one could walk to the little island along a path of pebbles to discover (though privately-owned, entrance just seemed to be not brining in outside beverages or dogs and maybe a visit to the snack-bar) free range bunnies (conigli). They were everywhere—tame and underfoot like the growing flock of ducks that visited every morning just in time for breakfast.
The rabbits appeared among the tents later on as well. Perhaps this reserve had origins as stock for a private hunt—which happily does not seem to be customary any longer, but makes me think rather on the origins of Manerba, which is believed to have been founded round a grove sacred to the goddess Minerva—the patroness of the hunt and harvest and other virtues besides. This Etruscan avatar of Athena overlaps what is properly the bailiwick of Artemis but there was a lot of cross-over for champions and I wonder if the keeping of bunnies did not reach back that far and into mythology as well.
