Category Archive: TRAVEL
The Witchery
Edinburgh, summer, 2013 If you are staying in Edinburgh, book dinner here. Ensure that you book ahead. You may need to be content with a late booking. We wended along the Royal Mile, ascending towards the Castle. L negotiated the cobbles expertly in her high heels. By 9.30pm we were past Boswell’s walk and ready to descend to the secret garden, our way lit by candles on each step (ladies with long gowns, beware). The day had been dry and sunny, with a bone chilling wind. From our cosy vantage, the sky was an arctic blue and pink and you could…
Continue Reading →Amalfi Coast
Painting by Edmund Berninger, 1929
(May 2013) We started the day well, with a very fast and comfy train, replete with champagne, from Rome to Naples. But then we were emptied at Naples station where an old gent showed us to a shop, where a young fellow, probably the grandson, sold us tickets on a local caboose to Sorrento. P spent the trip standing at 10 degrees off perpendicular, and L was groped. In Tasso’s town, we caught a hotel jalopy that took us up a 60 degree slope on a nerve-twanging single road to the Art Hotel Gran Paradiso, a chichi, vaguely Bohemian pile…
Continue Reading →Eternal Rome
(April/May 2013) From the hell of Fiumicino Airport, an official looking chauffeur took us on a mid afternoon drive past the Forum, Trajan’s Column and the Colosseo and deposited us, bang on cocktail time, at the Hassler, atop the Spanish steps. The Varnished Culture knew from the H.H Kirst novel* that we were due a treat and so it proved. The hotel guests were just as exotic: Japanese in fluorescent sports gear, dancing a jig; a rich Italian with a blond 2/3rds his age; an odd couple feted by the staff; a short, plump American with dead, gold hair, accompanied by…
Continue Reading →Death Cloud Over Pompeii
"The Last Day(s) of Pompeii" (Karl Briullov, 1827-33)
(Pompeii, AD 79) On a pleasant warm day, a soft breeze soughing through the pines, we chugged on a local caboose through Campania from Sorrento to Pompeii. Buried under a massive blanket of ash and pumice from the eruption of Vesuvius in AD79, only uncovered in 1750, ruins remain but ruins of startling length and breadth, including extant frescoes, streets and buildings, and corpses. Pliny the Younger was a 17 year old and described in a letter how some of his family’s land went up in smoke (initially in a cloud of vapours, shaped like a pine tree) along with his uncle, who died attempting…
Continue Reading →The Geography of Bliss
It won't be long
(Eric Weiner) This is another of those sorts of books which are labelled “holiday” or “beach” reads but for once, it really might be worthwhile to read at 30,000 feet while jetting in to meet some joyful Icelanders (by far the best chapter in the book) or away from the moaning Moldovans (who, TVC is surprised to note, don’t even seem to be cheered by their relative success at Eurovision). Is Bhutan really the happiest country in the world? Despite its telegenic crinkle-faced monks, its measure of Gross National Happiness and its being the site of Shangri-La (which was, interestingly enough, the former name…
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