I left Lyon airport on Friday morning for a quick trains, planes and automobiles jaunt to rural Somerset. A green and bucolic land despite its association with the Herman Hess of the Tory Party, Jacob Rees-Mogg. I am not sure whether young Jacob endured an attempted suicide, a spell in a mental institution and direct guidance by a theologian, but he certainly acted in Parliament like he did. No-one I met in Frome, North Somerset, could actually identify which part of North Somerset he represented in the house, but everyone denied it was where they lived. I was in Frome for that very American of institutions, the high school reunion. It was my first time back in four years and only my 4th time back in 30 years or so. It has changed a lot, and yet again it has not. Most of the streets and the grand old buildings are there, many have changed their purpose in life. There is a bypass, a ring road, roundabouts and many places to drink coffee, so many I expected a jittery level of attention to be everywhere, but instead it is just as sleepy as it was when most of us left. For that, you can blame the chai. It has a slightly boho, aging hippy vibe with overly frequent appearance of home knitted clothing, man buns, yoga mats and far too many crocs for my personal taste. In a counter culture sign of accord they seem to have driven the banks out of business, the 3 major banks that flanked the old Market Cross are reduced to one, and it has a sign in the window announcing its imminent closure. Nat West, as was, is a tattoo parlor, is this Frome or is this Brooklyn?
I made the rookie error of getting a train to Frome on a Friday afternoon in the summer. I got the Heathrow Express to Paddington and then waited for my train to Weymouth. Finally, the platform was announced and then what can only be described as a stampede took place to get through the ticket barriers and on the train. It was if there was free money hidden in the seats the degree of commitment to breach the barriers, finally the Great Western Railways staff, fearing for the life of their colleagues opened up two luggage gates and gave up scanning tickets. I was swept along in that flood and luckily found myself ahead of most of the crowd, still slowly scanning tickets. I found a place for my overly large suitcase and sat down in a seat. The train then filled and filled some more and then the aisles were filled, and we left almost on time. The Great Western Railways Train Manager then spent the next few minutes apologizing for the crush, blaming the powers-that-be for having allocated too small a train, a very British complaint. They must go through intensive empathy training or something, as his constant apologies became as much background noise as the rattle of the rail. Finally, after 25 minutes we arrive in our first stop Reading where I had assumed folks would get off and the pressure would be relieved but of course there is a link now from Heathrow and there were more not less people on the platform with large suitcases desperately trying to go west. This was the breaking point for the beleaguered Train Manager and on our behalf he decided that enough was enough, and he was cancelling the train and let those above him, who caused the problem, to have to address its solution. What the fuck? I was alright, Jack, I had a seat and my bag was safely stowed. But no I now had to find another train as if this was full every train following on a Friday afternoon would be full plus our train load. The local knowledge did help and I just got on the next train to Bath where I was sure I could get a train to Frome. Or so I thought as I am standing waiting for the Frome train at Bath Spa, and they announce my Frome train is cancelled, so I should get on the Warminster train to Westbury where they will either bus or taxi us to Frome. We get to Westbury and no-one has any idea about buses or taxis, they do have a Frome train though, arriving in 25 minutes. This is turns out is the train that was cancelled and now mysteriously uncanceled. Waiting at Westbury, what should arrive but the train that I had originally left Paddington on 4 hours earlier, hopefully with either a new Train Manager or the same one on sedatives. So based on my limited experience, GWR may go west, but its rails are used sparingly and the service is anything but great. I completed my transportation trifecta with a taxi to the George Hotel which was our base for the weekend.
We had a fun weekend with lots of memorializing and appropriately named the WhatsApp group for the event sharing of photos, the “Whatever happened to What’s-his-name” group. Four of us got covered in mud hiking a great 8km circular trail around the villages of Mells and Great Elm on the Saturday morning. We ate well, and we drank modest rather than outrageous amounts of beer, including at the celebrated Griffin, home of Milk Street Brewery, opposite our elementary school which is still a functioning place of learning for the little tykes of Frome. It’s in a part of town that when we would walk the 3/4 of a mile to school each day was very run down. Referred to as Chinatown by the locals, it was full of the small old working class cottages of the 19th Century when the town’s weaving and industrial past was at its height, now all restored or gone completely many were derelict in our time. The Georgian nature of the town is still there, with many narrow streets and pathways spread over the hillside. The old printing works is now apartments and the industry that remains is banished to the peripheral trading estates. Frome had an odd atmosphere partly because until its relative recent resurgence it always had an air of former glory, the old large buildings and the many houses were for workers needed in the 19th century not needed again until after the 1980s when it rose for the first time in over 100 years. Frome originally in the 19th century heyday had 52 pubs, one for every week of the year, now many, including our former stomping grounds are gone, some as homes, some as stores and some sad, boarded up and falling apart.
If I had been in France on Saturday, I would have seen the unusual name of a saint to celebrate, that of St Germaine Cousin. Weak and ill, the girl had been born with a right hand that was deformed and paralyzed. Germaine was born near Toulouse in 1579 in a village called Pibrac and her relics are still revered there. She has a Cinderella element to her tale due to the appearance of an evil stepmother. She developed scrofula as a child, and her stepmother used it as an excuse for her to be banished from the family home. Abused by her stepmother, she lived a simple life as a shepherdess but was very pious and there were stories told of her parting waters of flooded rivers and other minor miracles before her untimely death at 21. The real magic started when her body was buried in the parish church of Pibrac in front of the pulpit. In 1644, when the grave was opened to receive one of her relatives, her body was found to be perfectly preserved so as this was in the era before Netflix and other diversions they decided to have it on public view near the pulpit. A noblewoman donated a lead casket to hold the body, and the first of several miraculous cures happened due to her relics. The casket was displayed in the church and opened in 1660 and again in 1700 and the body still it refused to rot, the local Archbishop of Toulouse testified there was no embalming. Some strange guy had an issue with this during the Revolution, and he and some mates took the body out of the casket, dug a grave and threw the body in with quick lime. It was rescued and still shown to be in good condition other than where the quick lime had attacked it. All the while miracles keep occurring, cures of blindness, of congenital disease, of hip and spinal disease and a miraculous mystery multiplication of food for the distressed community of the Good Shepherd at Bourges in 1845. The plea for beatitude attested more than 400 miracles in total and thirty fan letters from archbishops and bishops in France. Pius XI granted their wish in 1854. Her name has nothing to do with German Cousin, which I will admit to being slightly disappointed to discover.
On the food front this week, we celebrated our escape to the countryside of Soane et Loire with dinner at Doucet’s Bistro Quai. It is such a well run and efficient place to have in your backyard. His Michelin one-star restaurant is across the road, but the simple yet perfectly executed fare of Quai reflects the fact that the star chef is at the helm. Doucet himself came through and greeted every table and we, being locals I suppose, got the more personal handshake and smile. I had trout carpaccio followed by a Charollais steak with beef-fat french fries which were as decadent as they sound. Back in England I could not resist the ‘full monty’, it is one of the treats of staying at a hotel. Not sure which is more deleterious to the health, this or the beef-fat chips.
One of the most heartwarming sounds in the morning is the high-pitched whistle of the swifts as they wheel and bomb around the apartment. We are currently having a stand-off with two morning doves who are trying to nest in my herb pots on the kitchen windowsill, they are determined but so are we. There is no shortage of available roof and sill space in the city, so using my thyme and rosemary pot is off-limits. Other unwelcome visitors were the invasion last weekend of the ‘Swifties’, a predominantly North American bird, usually spotted in an Era’s t-shirt and pulling a wheelie bag. Taylor Swift played two concerts at the OL stadium on Sunday and Monday night. As you may have read, the ridiculous scandal of concert prices in the US, thanks to the evil empire that is Live Nation, reached its nadir this week with the Justice Department in the US now conducting an antitrust investigation into their activities. Their ticket system crashed when the Swift tour tickets went on sale and when it finally came back up somehow the true fans were not able to buy the tickets but the ticket resellers or touts managed to get most of the allocation. This resulted in the tickets being so expensive that people from the US found it cheaper to buy round trip airfare to Europe, hotels and concert tickets in Madrid or Lyon instead. If you are at all interested in the machinations of the sordid story of Live Nation – Ticketmaster, read the recent excellent “Big” column by Matt Stoller here, or the takedown by Cory Doctorow here.
This week has been hot and wet and felt like summer, to the point where we are desperate to get out of town and head to the cooler, greener countryside of Saone et Loire. I have a trip to England for work to get out of the way first, but we will soon fly north to avoid the constant noise of the roadworks on Rue Garibaldi and the oppressive heat of a concrete city. As I mentioned St Medard last week whose feast day was celebrated yesterday on the 8th I could skip the weekly saint, but we would miss the opportunity to check in on Monday’s man, St Kevin. Kevin was quite a popular name when I was at school but faded in popularity as being seen as a bit nerdy and rarely name checked other than the perfect cousin of the Undertones. It is however very popular in France as a cool Anglicized name, it’s the French equivalent of Zachary. Yer man Kevin or Coemgen in Gaelic, was born in Ireland in 498. His name means fair begotten, and he was of noble birth, but in all honesty the sources for the history on Kev are sketchy at best. He went to a remote glen called Glendalough and led a life of fasting and praying as a hermit for seven years wearing only animal skins, sleeping on stones, and eating very sparingly. He is supposed to have slept in a small cave, which to this day is referred to as ‘St Kevin’s Bed’. His renown spread and he collected a bunch of other people around him while others came to seek his help and guidance. Glendalough grew into a renowned seminary of saints and scholars and the parent of several other monasteries, it latterly became one of the holy pilgrimage sites of Ireland, and they do like a good pilgrimage, especially if it’s only a county or so away. He is popularized in poems and a very odd song by the Dubliners, which recalls his drowning a woman who came to tempt him. So we have basically folklore and 2 sources from the late Middle Ages that no longer exist but were cited by the Bollandist Jesuits in the 17th century. Not letting facts get in the way of good story, Pope Pius X canonized Kevin in 1903.
On the culinary front this week, we had an excellent dinner at Taggat in the 6th. It’s an odd bright semi-industrial chic space that is part of a hotel on Rue Vendome. The food was what could be lazily described as fusion, but in more simple terms it was a collation of French ingredients presented with a Japanese sensibility and some Japanese ingredients. I started with the Tuna tataki then had a great Octopus dish with carrot mousse and potatoes with wakame. The stone fruits have finally arrived in the markets, but we are in peak cherry and raspberry season for a couple of weeks, so I had the glorious cherry dessert. The wine list is well-chosen, deep on both Burgundy and the Loire, with a balance of prices and some high-end big names in its own section so as not to give the normal drinking public a nosebleed. We had a modest Muscadet, Gabbro ‘Clos des Bouquinardières’ 2020, I have a real soft spot for Melon de Bourgogne, and they are some of the best values on any wine list.
I started the week a long way from Lyon. I was in good company, though. I was at an event with 900 portable storage aficionados at their annual conference and exhibition at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center. This is what it says on the can and is about the size of a small city on the banks of the Potomac, nominally outside Washington, DC. Our fellow guests were Volunteers of America and The Light of the World. I fondly remembered the Jefferson Airplane sang, “All the people I meet, got a revolution, we are volunteers of America.” Only after standing in front of the sign listing the various NGOs and charities that make up Volunteers of America did it finally dawn on me that it was indeed more than just a lyric. The Light of the World is an evangelical church who held two days of their Church of Living God services in adjacent exhibition halls, one in Spanish and one in English. All the 3000–4000 attendees hailed from Central America and arrived as if dressed for a wedding, or church. Every man and boy wore a suit and every woman a long dress, and most women’s heads were covered with shawls. As I moved from one session to another at the exhibition I was attending, the constant background noise was loud, plaintive exhortations in English and Spanish to do some more praying, honoring or celebrating celestial deities. In our conference, we were honoring and celebrating much more mundane things, including the keynote speaker Brett Baier, the host of Fox News’ ‘Special Report’. He tried to reassure us that he is from the News side of the house of Fox, not the crazy Opinion side, but he undermined his credibility slightly when he still managed to slip in the company lines about the crime wave and immigration being the greatest challenges the current administration is failing to address. However, from the comments and questions from the audience, he was playing to his people generally, and they agree with him. Whether that is because they have studied the data and made that conclusion themselves or that Fox News has been telling them that this is the case, relentlessly, every day since Grampa Biden was elected, I am not 100% sure, but I know where the smart money would be betting.
We ate in a variety of restaurants along the waterfront at National Harbor, in principle a complete new town built over the last 16 years with hotels and a large MGM casino. As you can imagine, what it lacks in taste or good design, it makes up for in sheer volume of places to eat bad food and shop for expensive branded goods imported from China. As we arrived, we were informed that there was a three-day emergency ‘Juvenile Curfew’ for the weekend from 6pm to 6am. I mistakenly thought this was some overzealous local overreach to prevent the Pro-Palestine protests upsetting the conventioneers; it was however an effort to prevent local teenagers from less affluent communities doing rampaging, shoplifting raids and upsetting the rich shoppers. So as we walked to the restaurants, we had enough police presence to protect a United Nations meeting.
The compensation for putting up with four days of corporate food and terrible wine was three days in Brooklyn with my daughter, her partner and a hair-shedding device hidden in a very sweet dog called Tallulah. For those who have not visited Brooklyn, it is a large part of eastern New York City, characterized by large Reddy-brown brick (brownstone) houses with wide tree-lined sidewalks. It is populated by the young and affluent, who like the more open spaces, larger apartments and, in a symbiotic response to their presence, its many places to eat, drink and be merry. It has Metro connections to Manhattan and other boroughs. Urban and large, it has a population of 2.7 million people spread over an area of 180 square kilometers. By contrast, Lyon has 1.4 million over 1,140 km2. It is less grubby, low-rise and graffitied than the neighboring Queens, less Bonfire of the Vanities than Soho and the lower end of Manhattan. We went to a comedy night at a Japanese restaurant/club/sake shop, ‘The Rule of Thirds’, which in itself is quintessentially Brooklyn, and all of the acts took the piss out of the locals as being rich, privileged and overtly hipster. The comedy was great, and I laughed at all the jokes, including stuff that I was told I probably should have not, but that comes from being the oldest member of the audience by 30 years. The stand-out act was a Norwegian guy, Daniel Simonsen, who you should check out. The agreed targets were the locals, group autism and the tech industry.
If I am in the US, I take advantage of the good food that is as easy to find in any major city as it is difficult to find in France, i.e. Mexican or Asian food. This trip was no exception, with Japanese steak and deconstructed nettle pesto at Rule of Thirds, Cantonese updated Salt and Pepper Chicken at Pot Luck Club, and Oaxacan breakfast gorditas from For All Things Good, being just some of the treats to tickle my pickle. As I struggle with American wine I drank some great beer, including a Young Master Hong Kong Pale Ale, and a Kagua Blanc White Ale from Belgium. My beef with Californian wine, in particular, is that for the most part it is caught in the climate trap of growing grapes that have flourished in the Old World and are more suited for the much cooler climate there. The basic result is too much sugar, which results in too much alcohol. The other thing that annoys the crap out of me is that having higher alcohol is not an excuse to charge more, in fact they should charge less, but that’s not the way the US wine industry works. At one of the dinners I did for work, someone chose probably the worst possible wine to have at a fish restaurant, an Orin Swift red blend, Abstract. It tasted like an abstraction of a Mexican coke, but one with 15.4% ABV.
Talking about abstraction, I was treated to tickets to a gig to see an abstract jazz-rock experimental artist called L’Rain. I had originally planned to see Julia Jacklin, but despite pre-sale notification and much discussion, someone forgot to get tickets for the night before I flew home. As a Hail Mary the previous day, that same person DM’ed her Insta account and asked Julia for tickets. We were just leaving the Pot Luck Club, which is just around the corner from Bowery Ballroom, when said person decided to post something on her Insta. Imagine her and our surprise when it transpired at 5.00 pm earlier that evening that Julia had replied to her to say, “Sorry it’s late notice but if you still want the tix let me know”. It was now 30 minutes after Julia’s show started, and we were in the Bowery and not in Brooklyn, where Ms. Jacklin was playing. So, after much wailing and gnashing of teeth, we went off to see L’Rain.
She had a merch desk selling stuff and one was a cool T-shirt saying: “I Can’t Stand L’Rain”, cute and very Ann Peebles. I have listened to a lot of noise rock and jazz fusion, from Mogwai, Metheny, Mandy, Indiana or Matmos, so arguably I have a high tolerance for atonal rhythms. After the fifth meandering shitfest of self-indulgence, where the three of us ended up standing with our fingers in our ears praying for the ‘song’ to end, I suggested it was time to go. I really wanted to buy one of those T-shirts as I really cannot stand L’Rain.
Salmon is great to eat, but less impressive as a color for pants. You can farm salmon in large lakes, lochs and open sea-pens, so from the perspective of sustainability you would think it would get a hefty thumbs up. Especially as we are supposed to eat oily fish, reduce meat consumption and support a sustainable protein source with no methane emissions. In the US, partly thanks to the ubiquity of farmed salmon in sushi, the annual consumption per head is over 3 pounds of salmon. That sounds a tiny amount from a European perspective, but you have to remember vast swathes of the US eat zero fish, ever. European per capita consumption of just farmed fish production was 6.7 kilos in 2021, the last year data was available. Farmed salmon divides opinion sharply, in fact in some quarters it is demonized. When I lived in California I could choose to only eat wild salmon and its depth of flavor and color is like night and day, but in France we get one choice of Salmon, farmed. There are by contrast a plethora of options of other fish even in supermarkets and my fish guy on the market (a long-suffering PSG fan), has 2-3 whole different types of fish, 6-8 filleted fish plus shellfish of various hue, seafood preparations like quenelles, fish moussaka and preserved fish like herrings, smoked salmon and kippers. But salmon he does not sell, as he cannot compete with supermarkets and their farmed Norwegian salmon. The concern with the farmed salmon, particularly that emanating from Norway, Scotland and Chile, is that it’s raised in poor conditions of health and hygiene for the fish. The fish meal used to feed them together with insufficient water filtration means that the farms cause real destruction around them and have effectively killed off the wild varieties of salmon that gave the original reputation to those fish origins. There are efforts to identify those sources that do play by the rules, but it’s not always that easy on markets or where wet fish is sold to identify whether you are buying good or evil salmon. Being marked as Organic is also a false friend, as that can refer to the food on which they are raised rather than the overall farming regime.
I once went wild salmon fishing off Morro Bay on the Central Coast of California. A friend won a prize at a private school fund-raiser that his kid went to. Another parent was a salmon fisherman, so he, and a plus one, got to go out on his commercial fishing boat. I was roped into being the plus one and at 6.00 am one Saturday morning was picked up to go and fish. My friend forced down me some disgusting anti-seasickness med with coffee, despite my protestations that as a semi-experienced sailor, it didn’t bother me. Off we sailed on a small fishing boat on a pretty flat, sunny morning sea while the Dramamine fucked with me. I felt like death for the first 45 minutes as we headed out to sea, finally the mate cooked us a fried breakfast – part of the prize thank god – and finally the nausea disappeared. We were using sonar to find the shoal of King Salmon the captain was in search of. This was definitely not Ahab and the beast, this was technology provided mastery of our domain. The visual clues were dolphins and seabirds, the dolphins smash into the shoal, which for safety swim in giant spherical shapes. The dolphin impact stuns and breaks off the salmon swimming on the perimeter of the ball, and they float up, stunned, to be gobbled up by the dolphins or the diving seabirds. The ball shape shows up clearly on the sonar, and we let out the fishing lines. Again, no romance here, just large hooks with shiny reflective aluminum lures on lines 800 yards long get trailed off the back of the boat as we slowly drift over the battered ball below us. We haul the lines back in and every 6-8 feet there is a large king salmon flailing on a hook, some of these are immense, the size of small sheep, 30-40 pounds in weight. Friend and I help with the hauling-in of the lines but the Mate and the skipper do the execution work, the gift to the school ensures we don’t have to bludgeon our way to our prize. An hour or so later we putt-putted back into Morro Bay, the catch nicely snuggled in the chiller hold covered in ice. We were each given one cleaned King Salmon as our bounty-come souvenir of our morning’s adventure on the high sea.
I am, as the regular reader will have spotted, quite fascinated by the daily saint’s days that the baker’s shop writes on the chalk board each day. So last Tuesday the 9th of April was in honor of St Gaultier. He should be the patron saint of reluctant labors, like my salmon fishing, and is in fact I was delighted to discover invoked in case of work related stress. He is also patron saint of Vintners, which is a good cause. St Gaultier was a professor of philosophy and rhetoric which was so exciting he became a Benedictine monk near Meaux, of mustard fame. He was appointed by the king, Philip 1st, abbot of a new foundation at Pontoise. The discipline at this new Abbey was lax, and he ran away several times to avoid the responsibility of making it less lax. He gave up completely and went to Cluny, which is actually not far from us at Charolles and was at the time the biggest and richest abbey in Eastern France. They sent him back to Pontoise. He tried to escape to Tourraine and hid himself on an island in the Loire, before yet again being led back to the abbey. He also escaped to an oratory near Tours before being recognized by a fellow pilgrim, who grassed him up.
After being forced to return yet again to Pontoise, this time he decided to go to Rome to appeal directly to Pope Gregory and gave him his written resignation. Gregory instead ordered him to resume his responsibilities as abbot and never leave again. Accepting his fate, he campaigned against the abuses and corruptions of his fellow Benedictines, and was beaten and imprisoned for his troubles, which may have been why he was not so keen on the job in the first place. He resumed his work after being released and died in 1099.
St Gaultier or St Walter as he is known in English, was buried in the abbey at Pontoise, the place he had strived so hard to avoid. He was canonized by Hugh, Archbishop of Rouen in 1153, and was the last saint in Western Europe to have been canonized by an authority other than the pope. He did finally escape Pontoise, as they managed to lose his body during the Revolution.
I have escaped the city life of Lyon this week by taking a late break to ski with Dan in the Val D’Iseres, staying with a friend in Tignes 1800. It’s typical spring skiing so today we had sun, sleet, snow and rain. It is by coincidence the last week of the Easter school break for Paris so the resorts, although not full as it is late, are awash in Parisians. Some are gloriously old school in terms of spring skiing means one thing and one thing only, working on your tan. There are great examples of people at each bar and restaurant with pine yellow tans, working hard to get them to the full dark oak tan that some of the older French ski-instructors sport. It was a sunny day yesterday and there were folks laying out in deck chairs at 10.30 in the morning at 2500 meters above sea level. If I hadn’t watched him play badly against Villa later that day, I would not have been surprised to spot Ben White of Arsenal fame laying out there too. He is a young man who seems to have taken upon himself the curation of a serious tan all winter and with his odd goatee, looks more and more like a pantomime Captain Hook, grease paint and all.
We are this week in the former land of Savoy, Italy is just over the mountain to our East, and so much cheese, ham and pasta is consumed. They have basically exhausted any way of cooking cheese, ham and potatoes and all combinations are sold for lunch and dinner. Tartiflette, raclette, baked whole Mont D’or and Rebluchon. Pasta with cheese, pasta with ham and cheese, pasta with cheese, ham and potatoes dominate the menus. The good news is that the local wines from Savoie are good accompaniments and great value, we had a Chignin Bergeron last night which was a bright pretty white without being floral. If you are spring skiing, you oscillate between being cold, wind swept and needing staunch hearty food and being hot and sun burned and wanting salads and bottles of rosé at lunch. Happily, the quality of food at French ski resorts puts to shame the rarefied efforts, at what is basically fast food, that masquerades as $45 lunches at any US ski resort. We are surrounded by valleys that in summer provide pasture for cows that deliver the milk for the Beaufort, the Abondance, the Raclette and the various Tomme de Savoies that enrich the local dishes. The other local drink owes much to St Gaultier’s fellow Benedictines, Chartreuse. In both Green and Yellow forms, the bottles are behind every bar, in every restaurant, in every shop. Here in the Alps they also have local Jenepé liqueurs which compete taste wise with Chartreuse and both the original and the local versions turn up in ice-cream and deserts. Lyon celebrates its affinity to Chartreuse like San Francisco does to Fernet, but for some reason our local wine shop on Felix Faure cannot seem to secure regular supplies. I am going to have a Chartreuse with a coffee one morning this week, just because it seems to be the done thing, and maybe I bring a bottle home.
When does the constant climactic chaos convince the conservative pols that this shit is real? I was reading an interesting post by the Ruffian Ian Leslie where he made the following point using an old quote from G.K Chesterton: “…the world was dividing into Conservatives and Progressives: “The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.” The divide I think that is most apparent now is those who accept that the climate is fucked, and we need to do something about it, and those who don’t think we need to change anything. Either you think it’s an ongoing catastrophe, and we must do something, everything, to stop it getting worse, or you think it’s just more liberal, woke, green garbage, and you are not going to do a thing to change your gas guzzling, methane spewing lifestyle. That we continue to pump oil, burn coal and let methane vent into the atmosphere without limit is a mistake. There is no debate on the science of the climate crisis, outside of certain tin-hat wearing conspiracy groups. There have been and continue to be massive misinformation campaigns on behalf of the fossil fuel-committed, but you would think at some point even the hard core petrol heads have to accept that the consequences of extreme weather are getting in the way of them having fun.
The French endured their worst nightmares this week with the return of Nelson. Not happy with the mass destruction of Bonaparte’s navy over 200 years ago this week, Tempête Nelson ravaged the French coast. Record wind speeds of 187 kmh hit the Finisterre peninsula, followed by flooding and rain across most of the rest of France other than the very south. To the east of Lyon in the Alps 150kmh winds kept resorts closed for two days and on the peak of Chamrousse near Grenoble 200kmh gusts were recorded. This is not normal. Lyon was an odd twilight world on Friday night, t-shirt warm with crazy cold intermittent gusts and lit up by pre-thunderstorm yellow tones. The streets around the apartment are more Kiev-chic than France suburban as they are torn up, piles of concrete, pipes and barriers everywhere. The sewers and electrical conduits are all being replaced around Rue Garibaldi. This is a superb piece of joined up thinking that the French excel at; the reason they are doing this upgrade all at once is that they are taking half of the roadways on Garibaldi, Felix Faure and other major routes and planting trees. Lyon is planting 56,000 trees this winter, part of the national ‘Canopy Plan’ which targets 30% of urban surface areas to be tree covered by planting 3 million trees. They will create major gardens and tree lined pedestrian and bike paths completely separated from the cars. Having done all that work, they want to avoid then disturbing the roots and digging them up to upgrade someone’s fiber, so first steps, get the pipework done. The city has its own incredible Tree Charter which covers every aspect of the incorporation of trees as a critical element of the city’s landscape from choosing the right trees, diversity of trees for various uses, pollen issues, creating tree surgeon and maintenance skilled jobs, it’s here in French but just skim it to get a sense of how thoroughly thought through this approach is. The key benefit is that the trees reduce the temperature by 4-5 degrees C and have been shown in some situations in Lyon to drop it by 10C in mid-summer. So instead of causing more carbon by allowing A/C systems to proliferate, the window-mounted A/C typical of a New York apartment block are banned and Lyon is instead going to use trees, and lots of terraces and cold beer.
Today is Easter Sunday, so I thought I would give you a break from yet another pious rich woman getting a sainthood and would share some French Easter traditions. Every pâtisserie and chocolatier is chockablock with chocolate Easter baskets and chocolate animals full of treats and little eggs. Unlike in the UK or the US, the animal of choice is not the rabbit. The French quite correctly from a physiological perspective prefer the Chicken as the animal to bear the chocolate eggs. So chocolate chickens, chocolate frogs, chocolate shrimp, chocolate hippos, even lots of chocolate fish but not many bunnykins in sight. So if the Easter Rabbit is not delivering the Easter eggs, who is? Well of course here in France the Bells are. Bells? This is a deeply Catholic tradition. From Maundy Thursday until Easter Sunday, the church bells are stilled. To explain the absence of the bells ringing, they decided to tell the children the bells were going to Rome and the Pope would bless them before their return. Then Easter Saturday night and Sunday morning the bells ring again, bringing treats back from Rome and hey presto chocolate fish, eggs, chickens, hippos are strewn around. In eastern France, to replace the bells “gone to Rome” during Holy Week, children rang rattles in the streets to announce services. The altar boys got a starring role in those 3 days too, as they would announce the services several times during the day. The first time they shouted: ‘Réveillez-vous’ “Wake up”. The second time: ‘Préparez vous!’ “Get ready.” The third: “Hurry up”, ‘Dépêchez-vous’. We woke up, got ourselves ready, and then hurried over to La Garibaldine to line up in the rain and secure a chocolate chicken.
We also celebrated Easter on Friday night over on the banks of the Saone in the old town at Grive. The narrow streets gave us some protection from the gusts, and the chalk board menu of small dishes never disappoints. We had not been for a while, so every dish was new to us. Small plates work great for a couple or as we were 3, but for 4 they can be a pain as no dish comes with more than 3 items and if you order 2 plates it’s still odd with 6 items for 4 people. The veggie dishes were superb, white asparagus is just in season, and you cannot go wrong with roast celeriac. The pulled pork on a bed of roast mashed parsnip was a winner too. There were 3 fish dishes, monk fish wrapped in cabbage and confit of cod on a squid ink sauce as well as bulots with miso mayo. Bulots are sea snails, they are rarely seen on a menu in England and never in the US but the French rightly love them, as do I. Less chewy than clams but more substantial than mussels they are often served as part of a large seafood platter, the ‘Sélection de Fruits De Mer’ served up on a stand at coastal sea-food places in Province and the Cote L’Atlantique. For the squeamish, pulling them from the shell can be off-putting, but they were served here already shelled. Monday is Poisson d’Avril but that is a fish tale for another day.
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There was a recent article in the storied business journal, the Harvard Business Review, on the tactical genius of the French Boulanger. Through a study of the bakers in Lyon, the three learned professors “analyzed the location strategies of 177 bakeries within the city of Lyon, from the beginning of 1998 to the end of 2017”. They were surprised that Traditionalist bakeries (in the food capital of France) had survived. Bread making in France is a relatively simple business and is regulated in part. The ‘baguette traditionnelle’ specifically by law, can contain only flour, water, salt, and yeast. By their name, the Traditionalists don’t use a variety of “time- and cost-saving practices (such as the use of mixes and frozen dough), which are more or less invisible to consumers”. My emphasis in bold. What does not appear once in the research paper is the word or even the concept of taste. I could be snarky and make the case that as 2 of the three researchers are Dutch and the third Swiss that we should not be surprised. But really? The authors of the article were shocked, that despite these disadvantages, the Traditionalists have maintained a strong majority share of the French bread market despite modernist competitors using the cheaper efficient production tricks. They came to the mystifying conclusion that there was a logic defying trick by the Traditionalists, who instead of shunning being next to or nearby a modernist bakery, actually more often than not, set up right under their modernist competitors noses. So you make something you love making, in a time honored traditional way using natural ingredients and as sure as shit, tastes better than the bland cheaper option, and you are in business in a country that loves bread, in a city that worships at the altar of nourriture every day. Unsurprisingly, you are successful. In other news, wine is wet.
Other bread loving nations include the English and the Irish. Ireland has one of the highest natural incidences of celiac disease, yet you will not find a lot of gluten-free options. It seems the Irish have made a conscious decision that if they are to suffer, it will not be for a lack of bread. Nor for a lack of Guinness, although I was surprised to see the UK drinks more of the foamy browny-black stuff than its country of origin, closely behind Ireland is Nigeria. In a hot, sticky, equatorial humid climate the last thing I would be craving is Guinness, but that’s why I am not running a global drinks business like Diageo. Where you will not find cans of Guinness for sale publicly is the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The Kingdom is dry and has been since 1952 when King Abdulaziz banned it after one of his sons got drunk at a diplomatic function and killed the British Consul with his sword.
This Thursday, continuing our own swordless tradition, we celebrated the saint’s day of Sainte Clemence. Yet another German widow of nobility who when her hubbie, Menginard I, Count of Sponhiem (a minor kingdom yet again in the Holy Roman Empire) went toes up, goes into a convent, does some good work and then mysteriously ends up beatified. If you are born on this day, the French refer to you as a Clementine, which could be confusing if you became so ridiculously successful in business to the point you are dubbed a mandarin.
Wednesday through this weekend was the “Le Temps Est Bon” (Good Weather) food festival which, although it’s the third week of March, was prophetic in its timing. It was 22 yesterday, and everyone is behaving like it’s spring. We went to one of the events, a dinner with the Mich 1 starred chef Vivien Durand from Lormont, near Bordeaux was invited to take over the kitchen by Florian Remont of the Bistrot du Potager, which is in the 7th, the Gerland area. Remont’s place is known for his South Western Pays-Basque style cuisine, so it was obviously a meeting of the minds. In a small world coincidence, we drove so many times across the Pont d’Aquitaine to and from Bordeaux airport to the cottage in Duras. On the headland to the south of the bridge’s entrance was a ruined château that in its day, i.e. before they built a 6 lane suspension bridge at the bottom of the garden, it must have had great views over the Garronne estuary. For all those years it was a graffitied husk of its former greatness, but in the latter few years of our journeys it was being refurbished, and it just so happens that Durand’s Black Prince restaurant is situated in the château’s former stable block.
The menu was a 5 course tour de force. Brussels, young and fried whole like a flower with a syrupy dressing of shitaki mushrooms kicked it off. Followed by sea-bass carpaccio, then a glorious sous-vide prepared monkfish dish. I think sous-vide is generally preposterous, but this was ‘melt in the mouth’ so I get it was worth the faff.
The main event was kid goat from the Basque Country, spit roasted and served in an unctuous sauce with girolles and perfect roast potato. It was then followed with a selection of spring veggies – roast baby leeks and roast white asparagus on a bed of fried kale and spinach with pea-shoots garnish. It would have pleased Popeye and my Olive Oyl thought it the best dish of the night. Dessert was a bit of a mess with some crispy chocolatey sticks that were nearly inedible, on top of hazelnut cream and a bread flavored sorbet that just didn’t work together. Otherwise, pretty great food in quite a cool space.
The other oddity of the night was the total fail on the music. As well as the French do food, they do music as badly sometimes. We dined with a soundtrack of electronic disco at a volume that was just annoying enough that you noticed it, yet too low so all you really heard was the tinny repetitive beat. The music that if played loud while the young bucks were doing prep in the open kitchen would have been fine, but not dining music, never, ever. In the loos downstairs they seemed to have replaced the ceiling speakers with former earpiece speakers from old telephones so the tinny beat was something otherworldly, laughable even. It’s a shame as the French can do dance music – Justice, Daft Punk, Cassius, Laurent Garnier but this was just crap. This is what good French dance music sounds like.
There was a rumour that my grandfather, Arthur Harris, was part Chinese. His grandmother was Irish who arrived via the port of Liverpool. According to the legend had been left, with child, by a Laskar sailor, she moved to London, married Arthur’s grandfather and life moved on. Looking at pictures of my grandfather and our mutual lack of body hair supported this bizarre legend right up until ’23 and Me’ burst that bubble to reveal the more prosaic fact that I am mainly English and Irish, genetically, with a 6% smattering of French, probably via Huguenots arriving in East London in the 18th century.
I first went to China in 1992, a quick and unremarkable business trip to Beijing which was cut short after a day when I was sent packing, for the unforgettable business crime of being found out that I was about to jump ship to the competition. I think at the time we still referred to it mostly as Peking. In the intervening 30 years I have been often to China, mainly in the south of what is an immense country, so I would not in any way consider myself an expert or even a Sinophile. I have had offices under my direction in Shanghai on three occasions, one of which was actually on the Bundt in the old Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank Building. Now occupied by some regional minor Chinese bank, its insanely large single-piece 50′ green marble pillars hold up the domed roof of the grand foyer with its mural of the centers of global trade, as of the time of construction in the 1930’s. Our office was accessed from an unassuming side door around the corner but there was definitely a sense of Shanghai as this global city of trade. The Bundt was that symbol, colonial grandeur on a grandiose scale, replete with expensive restaurants and bars and the view of the burgeoning Pudong business district with its Soviet style Sputnik inspired radio tower overshadowing all else. Since then, I have had two depressingly small and modern offices in unassuming buildings back from the main drag and that has been mostly due to Shanghai’s rise, its massive building boom and the inflation in office rents.
I had a gap in visiting China from the middle of 1999 until 2005, and on my first trip back I can vividly recall the long grey drive from the airport into the city and seeing all the factories, that you were used to seeing, being knocked down and office parks being built. The offices were for banks and insurance companies as Shanghai pivoted to try and become the Asian financial hub and compete with Hong Kong. This was the start of the rise of China’s middle class, the domestic market for houses, apartments and appliances was taking off. There were of course still factories and a trip to Shenzhen the next year, where we held a sales meeting at a golf resort reminded you of where that growth was fueled. Western golf resorts have one championship course designed by famous old white golfer dude, maybe two. This place had 18 courses, each 18 holes, each designed by a different old golfer dude. I could run first thing around the various fairways but only that early. By coffee break at 10.00 the air was acidic and metallic, by the lunch break it was visible and by the evening it was plainly toxic.
In 2005 Shanghai was booming, the old houses of the French concession held small boutiques and restaurants, and it was popular with tourists. I like many visitors brought back imitation luxury handbags and watches, if you paid a bit more you went to rooms in the back of shops where the quality knock-offs were found, probably copied directly on the production line of the main western brands, but if you just wanted a Louis Vuitton copy handbag there were hundreds of street sellers who would sell you one for $10 in hard green currency.
I took another break from visiting between 2009 and 2015 and when I came back next the change had accelerated again. The Chinese financial and property development companies were trying to out-do each other with more and more ornate, flashier towers overlooking the Bundt from Pudong. The radio tower is now completely overshadowed by these new and ever taller skyscrapers of modernist style that would not look out of place in Hong Kong or New York and in a uniquely Chinese touch, each of these large glass monuments to commerce is completely covered with moving light displays, mainly high-tech ads for cars and air conditioners but on a scale that makes Time Square seem like Piccadilly Circus in the 1950’s.
The cheap knock offs had gone, and the reason was self-evident, in every shopping mall that had popped up the western luxury good shops were wall to wall. Xintiandi had become Beverly Hills. There was an odd irony as in the middle of the district is the hallowed site of the first national congress of the Chinese Communist party and around that much lauded and revered former school is surrounded now by some of the most expensive real estate on earth. I visited other cities like Xiamen and Quanzhou and back to Shenzhen. The acrid air had completely gone, as had the factories producing running shoes, sneakers and plastics. They had been shipped off to cheaper labor markets in Vietnam and Thailand. The riverside locations which had been convenient to load finished goods in boxes into boats to go down river to the ports of the Pearl River delta were now apartment buildings and parks. President Xi’s mother lived there, of course the air was clean. If you were a resident of Guangdong province, you had unfettered access to Hong Kong, partly to allow residents to work in Hong Kong. If you were mega-rich it was worthwhile having a property in Guangdong and make that your official residence to get that access to Hong Kong and the freedom to travel when you wanted without visa issues and if something went sour between you and the increasingly doctrinaire government, you could get out of the country easily.
The Bundt and the dome of HSB Building
I always loved Hong Kong. Its energy was stimulating, the variety of food and shopping was more interesting than the mainland generally, and as I was fortunate to have friends living there I would by default weekend in Hong Kong rather than Shanghai. If you stayed in a western primarily tourist hotel in Shanghai or Beijing you still had reasonable internet access to the west, CNN was on the TV together with BBC World and Al Jazeera. If you stayed in Hong Kong, you were still in the democratic world, both figuratively and spiritually, basic western norms of censorship, freedom of the press, freedom of expression. It was the only place anywhere in China where you could even mention Tiananmen Square, they even commemorated it every year.
Since the ascendance of Xi and the shift from politician to God-like figurehead, the new Mao in the Chinese consciousness, things had been going generally well on any measure. GDP growth was the envy of the world year-on-year, even if we all knew they massaged the numbers. They had been successful at bringing a billion people out of poverty. They also seemed to be making massive strides in technology, what the Chinese people used their phones for, on a day-to-day basis, was 3–4 years ahead of the west. Their on-phone gaming, entertainment sites and combinations of what in the west are several distinct activities was impressive and world leading. The reason was simple, they had a massive domestic market, and they were pretty good at keeping foreign well-funded competition out. They had done that across many sectors, but the phone-based consumer economy really stood out.
Then they decided they didn’t like a China copy that didn’t have the same restrictions as the motherland, as it might give people ideas about their Xi-thought based controlled existence, if they saw another way for Chinese people to be governed. Unsurprisingly then Hong Kong got shut down, freedom of press gone, right to protest gone, right of assembly gone, right to criticize the government gone. The local government does not just kowtow to Beijing it actively worships the direction and instructions handed down. They also quietly closed that escape route for the rich and successful out of Guangdong.
Then they gave the world Covid-19, either directly through a lab escape or indirectly by continuing to turn a blind eye to live wild animal ‘wet’ meat markets to mix pathogens and species. In a country with an infallible God-like leader massive uncontrolled pandemics are embarrassing, so the Chinese government went by the standard authoritarian playbook. Denial, punishment of anyone who has the temerity to report that shit is out of control, belated and limited steps to lock it down, refusal to cooperate with all the multilateral medical treaties put in place to speed sharing of vital data. As China prides itself as a technological global leader it would be equally embarrassing to admit that it cannot make a truly effective vaccine, so they continued to ignore Western offers of assistance and continued to promote the myth of their great scientific hegemony by donating millions of doses of Sinovac’s vaccine to the emerging economies in Africa, Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa, even though it had very limited efficacy and had issues with younger patients and limited testing data was shared. The elite in Beijing were of course protected and their limitations experienced daily were mild. The rest of China however enjoyed Orwellian levels of control; months locked inside their apartments with food delivered to the housing compounds while geriatric male local wardens enjoyed the power of an official armband on the sleeve to enforce an iron like lock on daily life. Shanghai had the temerity to suggest the rules were overdone and after the first wave of infection abated tried to move back to some sense of normalcy. Beijing always has a beef with Shanghai, it’s always seen as too uppity, too open to the outside world and their heretical views. So, while the rest of the world actually went through various waves and built up a general herd immunity over the two years of the main pandemic China isolated itself. The government recommended traditional herbal remedies, partly because their health system is spotty at best and if you are in the boonies your local ‘health care’ is a partially trained nurse in the next village over and you are hundreds of miles from a real hospital. They spread good news stories through the media about their medical heroes, how everyone was happy and at home. Chinese social life is set up around very small living spaces, generally shared with multiple generations, leaving for work 6 days a week and eating out a lot. Not as great a place to be locked in for months at a time. Unsurprisingly at the end of 2021 the wheels started to come off so overnight it seemed, the government gave up and let it rip through the population. They still publish death figures, but according to the official data very few people were able to die in front of someone having just been tested positive for covid to qualify under their byzantine rules as a ‘covid related’ death. However, the crematoria data told a different story. The data was leaked then quickly disappeared, as is their way.
Technically Chinese residents have been able to travel, as in request an exit visa, since January 1st, 2022. Very few did in 2022 as they faced a 4-week, later reduced to a 2-week, government sponsored and controlled quarantine upon return. As of this January the requirement for quarantine is only in the case of a resident arriving in an infected state, although they have a declaration requirement for entry into China which generally prevents you entering back into China, resident or not, if you are ill with Covid. Chinese tourism to Europe and the US is still very low this summer, the large number of Chinese tour groups with their flags, obsessive photographing anything and everything will not be missed other than by the tourism industry. We did a tour of the Vatican and Sistine Chapel in 2018 and it felt like getting on the Kowloon Ferry at rush hour, all you could hear was the sound of the cash register and the fact that every piece of elaborately ornate art bore the legend of how someone or other had gifted it, Jean Calvin would be surprised to hear they are still selling indulgences it seems.
I arrived in Pudong airport two weeks ago for the first time since 2019. I scanned my QR code of my health declaration entered through the ubiquitous WeChat app and was let in. It had a whole performative quality to it as no-one really took the code check seriously. A Polish acquaintance on the same trip had struggled to get the QR code so instead, in frustration, photographed an Amazon return label’s QR code and brandished it noisily rather than scanning it and was waved through. Very few people wore masks. In fact, I saw more masks in San Francisco on hipsters walking their dogs in the Spring. There are 42 desks for passport checks at Pudong. I have been through on prior trips and all 42 are in use, its massive but historically they are set up to handle very large volumes, over half are for returning residents. They had 8 open for residents and 4 for ‘Foreigners’. The airport is cavernous and empty of people now, for a long boring reason I ended up arriving and leaving China twice in 5 days. I decided to get some exercise after a long flight from London and walked up the half mile long terminal away from the gates that were active and after a couple hundred yards it got super sticky as they had turned off the AC for that half as it was just not getting any traffic, the retail outlets are shut down at that end. Shanghai was busy, it is holiday season and I was attending a trade show, one of several that were going on. The majority of visitors though are Chinese. The hotel we use near the office is a Marriott Renaissance but it has now pivoted to Chinese domestic tourists as the foreigners are obviously not numerous enough to support the hotel. So now on the hotel WIFI you cannot access Google, you can access the sanitized Bing (thanks Microsoft, still helping Big Brother!). The TV only shows Chinese TV, 32 channels of sanitized approved messaging consistent with President Xi Jinping Thought. There is an English language new channel, China International News Television. We were served up some scripted version of global news by their versions of William Joyce, a big bluff American anchor in suit and tie straight out of CNN in 2005 and supported by a couple of Aussies. The ticker across the bottom was displaying headlines about US aggression and Chinese good works. Looking out of my hotel window the building site across the road where they cleared the old style Shikumen houses is still scrub and debris. The cranes across the cityscape can still be seen but you can count them now, a fools’ errand in 2015. The electric scooters have mysteriously disappeared. They had competing app-based young startups fighting for share and Unicorn valuations when I was last here. They have conquered the world although Paris just banned them and San Francisco have limited them but in the homeland they have been completely excised as if they never existed. When I first visited Shanghai, the streets were full of bicycles, old big wheel city bikes. The cars were revamped older models of Volkswagen and Buicks, Toyotas and Renaults. Then the bikes were replaced by motor bikes and the cars started to get more diverse. Then the motor bikes were all changed for electric, silent death for unwary pedestrians, the e-scooters were all over the pavements and the cars were all BMW’s and Audis. Years pass and the bikes are back, but they are rental bicycles, the e-scooters are gone. The cars are now 50% electric with Tesla the market leader but most of the brands are local. The models are futuristic and slightly alien, the diversity of car brands you have never heard of is odd. The strangest one is “Build Your Dreams’, yes that is the company name and it’s not a shake-based diet, the badge is on the car rear in all three words not BYD, which I guarantee is how it will be marketed in the west; they are serious, and Berkshire Hathaway is an investor. Zeekr, Wuling, Xpeng and Nio are all fighting for share and all looking to export. I have been involved with purchasing lots of stuff from China over the years and its low tech in general but their predilection for cutting any corner they possibly can to save a nickel does not make me rush to buy something as serious as an electric car. In fact, I pull my hair out over how a garden hose cannot make it through the summer so a potentially very fast lethal device built around a lithium battery that can and do explode does not fill me full of hope.
Rental bikes in SoHo
Overall Shanghai looked tired and worn around the edges. The Beverly Hills style shopping malls with Carrara marble entryways are now all chipped and any fine work is broken or uneven, probably was not Carrara marble after all. The exhibition center which was built for the World Expo in 2010 has seen better days. It has a leaking roof, I have seen toilets in better condition at an English football ground, and the main hawser cables holding the curved sail shaped roof are all corroded. It does have shiny new facial recognition cameras at the entry gates, but they only work on the locals and even then, we get funneled into one of the 10 gates that are lit up as if working because the process is we show our badge, look at the camera then the young lady presses the button to let us through. The other people at the vacant gates are just there to direct us to the one where the gatekeeper is working. We then get patted down and bags X-rayed but all the beeps of the hand scanner of our phones and keys etc. are just ignored, as long as we have been scanned, that seems to be the important point, not that they investigate anything the scanner finds.
In 2016 it really felt like they were winning, that China was the most vibrant growing economy on earth, they owned the West. Since then, it has slid sideways and backwards as Xi’s thirst for control has pushed all the resources into a centralized Communist Party-controlled state sector. That only goes so far especially as the building boom is bust, regardless of how many aircraft carriers you build, there is a limit to state sponsored infrastructure. I met with a State-owned shipping line exec and on his card, he proudly states he is Party rep as well as CEO. They have been locking up the tech entrepreneurs, banning games, restricting hours that children can be on devices for pleasure. As much as the elderly curmudgeon in me thinks limited access hours is not a bad thing it should not be a state dictate. It sure as shit destroyed the blooming tech sector. They are publishing economics guidance for the coming year and finally they are making noises about the need for the Private Sector to grow as well as the state sector. However, they also at the same time released notes and guidance for private companies about the need for them to foster Party behavior, structures and Party practices, that should do wonders for entrepreneurialism, having some more committees to vet the next steps. China has graduate unemployment at 20% currently. So, the loyal members of society who stuck by the one child choice, scrimped and saved to pay for the private tuition to make sure little Lian or Lue get into the best schools, then do it again paying for tutors so that they get into the best University and after all that 1 in 5 cannot find a job. President Xi’s grand plan is that they should go and work in the fields, to develop character.
They had successfully managed to take the shine off the tech sector and its growth and jobs by 2019 and then Covid 19 and their heavy-handed approach, especially the serial shutdowns has taken the wind out of the economy. It has quietly kick-started a brain drain, which is just what you need for a country with a declining birth rate already below replacement levels. Everyone I met who has built a business up and is successful has moved their family offshore and commute back. Australia, Canada but mostly Singapore. Hong Kong is no longer safe so they cannot even take the half measure of moving there. Hong Kong’s brightest have moved to the same destinations, the less gifted have made it to Taiwan and Malaysia, Cantonese restaurants turning up everywhere. All things have a natural cycle, especially economies. What the Chinese have done since the death of Mao is incredible, especially in comparison with Russia. They have lifted the majority of their people from absolute poverty and enduring short unpleasant lives. In the 90’s it looked like the ‘End of History’, that capitalism would level everything, if you gave everyone blue jeans and an I-phone democracy would follow. Xi obviously saw that as a threat to the Party and to China’s future and has done what he can to preserve a sense of Chinese destiny and control. However, with all authoritarians the world has a habit of coming up with levels of complexity beyond the ken of a single man, regardless of how deified his very thoughts are. Democracies greatest strength is that it allows discourse and different opinions and solving big issues sometimes needs that debate. As much as we can get annoyed by the stupid decisions that democratic countries make, like Brexit, BoJo and Truss as Prime Minister and Trump’s election to the Presidency, regardless of the not so hidden hand of Putin in all of that, it is so much better to have that choice to be stupid as a society. One guy does not have the answer to everything, and history has a way of sticking that reality up their ass in the end.
Rachel and I went to Vienna. Inspired partly by the German TV Show “Sisi” which has been a reasonable hit across Europe on Netflix and which Vienna is milking for all its worth, the Sisi Museum, the Sisi Tour, the Sisi Ticket, which we did buy. We also agreed to meet old friends for a shared 3 days waltzing around the city. Rachel wanted palaces, interiors and palaces, furniture in palaces and if time permitted some palaces and then a little bit of vintage shopping. Our friends wanted to see Freud’s home but as you can guess as much as our friend had a professional interest in where Siggy hung out we were still too focused on where Sisi hung out.
Vienna is a capital city but it was the capital of an Empire so there are lots of very large imperial buildings as well as the numerous palaces. To make sure the empire was celebrated with the correct degree of awe and reverence, there are statues everywhere. Unlike your common or garden statue as are found in Paris or London, Vienna does statues in an 18th century version of Godzilla-scale. Immense and towering and just for good measure lots of gratuitous gold, not just sprinkled on top but gilded to within an inch of their lives on porticoes 300 feet up on the roof. They fall into two distinct camps, Greco-Roman allegorical, some guy wrestling a lion with his bare hands in 6 times life-size scale, or one of the Emperors or Empresses. As the peak of wealth and large building occurred in the last 18th century, early 19th, they are mostly Franz or Franz Joseph. The history of Austria is complicated and mainly unknown to the Brits, we were too busy fighting the French and the Spanish or each other. Meanwhile, in Austria, one family, the Habsburgs, ruled in one form or another from 1270 until 1922. They ruled at times, what was known at the time as the Duchy of Austria, through to basically most of Eastern Central Europe: Austria and Slovenia, with adjoining bits of Bavaria and Italy thrown in, Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia: most of today’s Czechia and southwest Poland, Hungary: but not just today’s Hungary, but also Slovakia, Romania, and northern parts of ex-Yugoslavia. They even controlled through marriage what is Belgium and Holland during the time of Rubens, Van Dyck and Brueghel. One of the younger Hapsburg brothers who was there, acting as Prince-Protector of Austrian Netherlands took a shine to this art and returned with 2000 pictures which explains why they have the largest collection of Flemish masters in the world in the Art History Museum in Vienna.
We have a view in the West, especially the US, that there was a Fall of Rome and that was the end. In fact the Roman Empire moved its base to Constantinople, as in Istanbul, and continued with the whole Empire business, changing its name thanks to its recent conversion to Christianity and monotheism, to the Holy Roman Empire. Fast-forward 600 years and the Habsburgs, running Austria and most fertile lands to the East, become Holy Roman Emperors with Frederick III in 1452. So even though their lands are just a part of the Empire, the Habsburgs remain Emperors until Napoleon abolishes the Holy Roman Empire in 1806 and Franz the 2nd of the HRE becomes Franz the 1st, Emperor of Austria. So that is why they have all the imperial stuff and unlike the British or Spanish empire, this was not built on colonial conquest and slavery, rather the removal of money from good old-fashioned subjects and land held by fealty to one of the numerous titles. Franz Joseph had a few of those: by the Grace of God Emperor of Austria, Apostolic King of Hungary, King of Bohemia, King of Dalmatia, Croatia, Slavonia, Galicia and Lodomeria and Illyria; King of Jerusalem, Archduke of Austria; Grand Duke of Tuscany and Cracow, Duke of Lorraine, of Salzburg, Styria, Carinthia, Carniola and of Bukovina; Grand Prince of Transylvania; Margrave of Moravia; Duke of Upper and Lower Silesia, of Modena, Parma, Piacenza and Guastalla, of Oświęcim, Zator and Ćeszyn, Friuli, Dubrovnik and Zara; Princely Count of Habsburg and Tyrol, of Kyburg, Gorizia and Gradisca; Prince of Trento and Brixen; Margrave of Upper and Lower Lusatia and in Istria; Count of Hohenems, Feldkirch, Bregenz, Sonnenberg; Lord of Trieste, of Cattaro , and over the Windic march; Grand Voivode of the Voivodship of Serbia. Fun fact the German word for Emperor is Kaiser, which, like Tsar, is a localization of the Latin term Caesar. So, lots of people to give to Caesar what is due him and that what paid for the palaces, museums and Ferris Wheel.
Austria having bolted on Hungary in the 1860’s is now the Austro-Hungarian Empire but by the time the First World War rolls around it’s referred to as the ‘Sick Man of Europe’. Which was tough on Franz Joseph as he was hanging in there as an old man and his nephew, Franz Ferdinand and heir apparent, was shot in Sarajevo to kick the whole thing off. He dies finally in 1916 after 70 years on the throne, the great Sisi was stabbed to death by an Italian anarchist in 1898. He had some other struggles in his long life. The Mexicans executed his brother, Maximilian, in 1867. He lost his only son, Crown Prince Rudolf, in 1889. At his death the Empire is handed over to his other Nephew Karl but two years later after the defeat of the German and Austro-Hungarian armies, Karl oversees the official end of the Austrian Empire and creation of the Republic of Austria. He refuses to abdicate, so goes into exile in Madeira and dies in exile in 1922. His wife, Empress Zita, lives until 1989 and is buried in Vienna in the Habsburg crypt with full honours as the last Empress of Austria.
So the city we visit is the capital of Austria yet sits hard in the eastern corner less than 50 miles to Slovakia, but its heritage is the 1000 years of being the center of the Empire, the location is central to its former territories and its mix of languages, peoples and customs reflects that melting pot of Central Europe, yet sits slightly off its historical axis now that Austria is a much more modest place.
The key component to life in Vienna, apart from the miles and miles of grandiose museums and art galleries, are the cafés. At any time of day from morning until night, there are Austrians eating and drinking in cafés. The food is generally good if a little heavy, suited to long cold winters rather than sweaty summers, but it gets washed down with refreshing white wines which are cheap and excellent value. The Gruner Veltliner, even by the carafe is quaffably dry and fruity, their Sauvignon Blancs are good, certainly better than most South American versions and the Chardonnay, which is sold under the local grape name of Morillon, was also surprisingly good value. They do a really excellent version of Pinot Blanc called Weissburgunder, which is odd as ‘white burgundy’ should be Chardonnay. Anyway, post the whole glycol fiasco of the 80’s Austrian wine is high quality and great value. They suffer from the same lack of fish that German cuisine does, you have farmed trout, salmon or pikeperch, the ubiquitous ‘Zander’ but it’s a landlocked state that developed it culinary traditions before refrigeration and a river does run through it so unsurprisingly all they eat is river fish. Cafe food is remarkable, particularly in the quality and volumes of cake on offer. There is much standard high-turnover mass-catering fare for the lunches but breakfast and afternoon tea is based around hand prepared and baked cakes of many delicious varieties; bunt cakes, strudels, Sachertorte, cream cakes, layer cakes. Coffee is a big deal too, we didn’t explore the many complicated variations and just stuck with cappuccinos.
We had some good if not great food, including the best Weiner schnitzel ever. I had both turkey escalope version and the real veal deal, and they do something with the batter that I have never had before, even in Germany, a lighter fluffier coating would not be imaginable, definite yummy score. We had one Michelin guide Bib-gourmand meal that was the tasting-style over several courses, but they managed to keep our interest, partly because this place was known for its wine, and we did the pairings as recommended and even though they were the regulation 12ml they kept it flowing. Beer is good in Vienna and they have still stuck to the traditional measures of 25cl, 33 cl or 50cl, avoiding the French recent fascination with les pintes. It’s dominated by Viennese style lager but there are darker beers and the ubiquitous IPA is available, just as every bar has many gins for sale and the most common drink on a sunlit evening is an Aperol Spritz. It is indeed an Instagram world.
Rachel and I took a side jaunt to Graz in the south, very near the Slovenian border in Steiermark. Back in Franz Joseph’s day Styria, the region, encompassed much of what is now Slovenia and on the streets of Graz you heard a lot of Slovenian spoken. You don’t hear many American or British accents, but you do hear English spoken a lot, but with both parties having differing accents, it was very much the lingua franca for many people. Apart from the obvious gaff of thanking waiters with ‘Merci’ and wishing people in shops ‘Bonjour’ you can comfortably get by without any German, which of course is good news as none of us possess more than Danke! We did get into the habit of the spirited ‘Hallo’ when entering a place. Graz was smaller than the capital and in its own way more picturesque, spread under a fortress rock, spread around a river and parks. The Austrians of Graz withstood Napoleon’s efforts to take the fortress over several weeks and are very proud of this era of their history. More so than the goings on of the mid 20th century. As you walk along the riverbank there is a newly built synagogue, with some of the stones from the original synagogue which had been the religious center for 2000 Jews who lived in Graz. It was destroyed on Kristallnacht in November 1938. The old ground was left abandoned and only 150 Jews survived the war, some of the bricks were used to build a garage in the town center. When a suggestion in the mid 80s was made to clear the ground and rebuild, it was rejected due to fears that it would provoke an antisemitic reaction from city officials. Finally in 1998, probably when most of the old Nazis had died or retired, the city approved the construction of a new synagogue on the original site. Young local people from a couple of trade schools nearby helped clean nearly 10,000 bricks which were integrated into the new design. As I walked by each day, I could not help noticing how it still has armed police guards, quietly guarding the entrance on the leafy road by the banks of the river.
We got the train back to Vienna ahead of a morning flight home to Lyon the next day and stayed in town in the Neubau for our last night. It was a cute but trendy art deco hotel with a roof top bar, make it yourself cocktails in the room and condoms as part of the guest supplies next to the bed. We could not too excited about another Austrian meal, so we found a good Greek place and had food better suited to a hot summer’s eve and listened to an impromptu concert of guitar and bouzouki picking while the birthday party group on the next table sang along to the Greek songs. Whether they were the equivalent to Greek pop bangers from the 90’s or folk songs I have no idea, everyone seemed happy and occasionally one of the men, no longer able to contain his inner Zorba, would get up and do the dance, arms stretched out and little complicated tippy toe taps of his feet.
The hotel was so trendy they could not get breakfast served on a Saturday before 8 and we had to be out the door before then, so once we got through security we found ourselves with loads of time to have a bite. In another Presque-vu moment we had a rather nice breakfast in a Jamie Oliver’s ‘Jamie’s Italian’ surrounded by copies in German of his numerous cookbooks and bottles of his special Olive Oil. British fried breakfast in an Italian restaurant in Vienna airport, so much for Brexit. My one disappointment is that I did not try a local croissant, a kipfel, on the trip, Vienna is the creator of the little crescent of buttery pastry and they are known generically in France as Vienoisseries. The crescent is mocking the flag of Turkey as a celebration of the famous and critical victory over the Ottoman Empire at the gates of Vienna in 1683 that allowed Austria to blossom into its middle age before its later fall into senescence.
Anecdotes and Antidotes in Burgundy 