Road warrior

The aphorism “home is where the heart is” might sometimes more accurately be stated as home is where the heart should be.  For 15 years, I spent more time travelling than at home and I once calculated that it was over twelve months since I’d slept more than three consecutive nights in my own bed.  It is a common conceit of consultants, stated in a regretful tone but with implicit pride, that Heathrow is their real home.

For the road warrior, hotels become second homes, and one becomes highly attuned to their nuances and imperfections.  Occasionally during my travels I suffered the intruded hotel room.  Not the scenario beloved of romcoms where a fey beauty inadvertently enters the wrong room (same number, different floor) with predictable results.  Less dramatically, after checking in and interrogating reception to ensure that the allocated room meets my requirements (no smoking, high floor, away from the elevators) I open the door to find the room, although empty, has not been serviced.  Used towels on the floor, bedclothes rumpled, chairs askew, I retreat in horror.  The disjunction between the expectation and the squalid reality jangles more than is justified merely by the sight of an unmade bed.  Such a scene in a friend’s flat would elicit no reaction beyond the silent observation that their domestic habits betray divergence from their public persona.  But the success of a hotel depends upon sustaining the illusion that what is essentially a public place has all the attributes of a private space, so that it is acceptable to perform there the intimate behaviours normally confined to home.  The recreation of a pristine environment is an essential component in constructing the fantasy that you are the first and only person ever to occupy your room and it must be flawlessly executed to mask the knowledge that you are, in fact, a passing guest, that someone else slept there last night and that there will be a new incumbent tomorrow.  Any evidence of previous occupation punctures this facade and even erodes faith in the wider competency of the institution.  This is why hotels have rigorous inspection regimes to detect cleaning transgressions, trivial in themselves, such as the odd hair in the shower.  Canny travellers know how to milk any shortcomings in their experience.  Managers keen to retain the goodwill of regular guests are empowered to rectify disappointments by offering minor privileges normally reserved for more distinguished clients: a complimentary bottle of wine, a room upgrade or access to the executive lounge. Lubricated by a top tier loyalty card, I was once offered a free weekend at a Hilton in Brussels.  On redeeming the offer, I was shown to a tiny room which could have passed for a converted broom cupboard.  After I pointed out that this exacerbated, rather than compensated for, the previous disappointment, I was immediately moved to the best suite. 

When my business travel days ceased, the status of my London flat subtly changed.  Instead of being a fleeting stopover to collect mail and do laundry, it became my permanent residence, punctuated only by holidays and occasional visits to friends’ houses. In other words, the normal position for most of the population.  With no early morning flights, my body clock gradually recovered equilibrium.  I no longer routinely carried a passport and my suitcases were relegated to the loft.  Successive letters from hotel chains and airlines signalled my demotion down the ranks of valued customer.  Eventually they gave up completely; for the purveyors of travel facilities I might just as well have died. 

As a transit lounge, my flat was ideally located: midway between the office and London City Airport.  But as David Lodge remarks in Changing Places, praising a location because it’s easy to get away from is at best a backhanded compliment.  Minor inconveniences in the flat, which I hadn’t noticed or simply overlooked during my itinerant days, erupted into irritations. Why were the legs on that chair perpetually falling out, how come all my plates were scratched or chipped?  Even the furniture seemed to be in the wrong place to make the most of the flat’s only substantial asset, the river view. The outside environment came under scrutiny too.  Certainly the flat’s location guaranteed relative peace and my regular three mile evening walk around the deserted docks was an enduring pleasure, but otherwise the neighbourhood had severe limitations.  Where were the pavement cafes and street markets which enliven most European cities, and even other parts of London?   

Learning to live in a flat which had been selected primarily to function as a pied a terre has been a voyage of discovery.  Now I lounge by the window in the newly positioned chair, sip my coffee and watch the aircraft arriving and leaving London City, the ascending planes rising in tandem with those landing, as though linked by an invisible thread passing along the runway.  The Thames is corrugated by a quickening wind and the horizon is defined by the breast of Shooters Hill, nippled by the disused water tower at its summit, its profile uninterrupted since the demolition of the Tate refinery.  

Anchored in Docklands, it seems the heart has tentatively taken up residence in the home.

© David Thompson 2014

Capital Ring: Woolwich to Falconwood

January is not the most auspicious month to undertake a long distance walk in the UK, even one as mundane as the Capital Ring.  The winter of 2013/14 saw legendary rainfall: London endured half its typical annual quota in three weeks, with the upshot that unpaved ground everywhere is sodden.  A few years previously, in a fit of rookie enthusiasm, I embarked on my first long distance walk, the South Downs Way over four weekends in February and March. Each weekend was wetter and windier than the last, culminating in a downpour so penetrating that the final weekend, undertaken with my son Leon, was abandoned on Saturday night.  Meteorology punished us for our timidity: resuming in June we encountered the hottest day of the year.

The Capital Ring is the kind of enterprise on which my father, a walker of the same metal as myself, might have embarked.  In his youth, I’m told he was a serious Lake District walker, clad in woollen clothes and hauling the canvas rucksack I discovered years later in his loft. In the leisure afforded to him after 40 years of teaching and research, before the modern craze for walking generated the plethora of urban and rural routes we enjoy today, he would take the Underground to its uttermost tips and explore the plangent suburbs.

After resolving to embark on the walk, it was a while before I took any action. The weather was uninviting with periods of seductive blue skies interrupted by unpredictable and torrential showers. Sitting snugly at home and gazing out of the window at the Thames it was easy to delay setting off.  After all, there was no deadline and one day was as good as the next. Eventually I opened the guidebook. The 75 mile route starts at Woolwich on the south side of the Thames, proceeds clockwise and ends on the north shore.  The venerable Woolwich Free Ferry joins the dots. The prospect of that eventual celebratory river crossing did little to inspire starting. The walk could, I guess, equally well have been designed to start at the westerly Thames crossing point, surely a more enticing prospect, especially as I had recently walked the Woolwich environs with the Ramblesiders and it’s not an area which improves with familiarity.  But I will take every precaution to minimise the chance of getting lost so I resolved to start at the official beginning and moreover printed the online directions to the first section as back up to the published guide which, absurdly, shows the route superimposed on OS maps, rather than the more suitable A-Z scale. My print cartridges were almost exhausted so the map emerged in pallid brown, and could have passed for an ancient manuscript recently disinterred after centuries in a vault.  It did not seem an auspicious sign.

The Isle of Dogs is a peninsula so every journey away from the island, as locals call it, begins with the DLR train and passes through the portals of Canary Wharf.  When I moved to the area in 2000, its glittering towers were an anomaly in the post industrial wasteland of docklands, as though a kink in spacetime had allowed a fragment of Manhattan or Hong Kong to penetrate the tumbleweed and deserted shipyards.  Now, with the relentless eastwards expansion of the financial centre and the encroachment on its surroundings of the attendant infrastructure – apartment buildings, shops, transport hubs –the opposite seems true with memories of the east end’s proud manufacturing past confined to a few listed buildings, plaques for tourists and a local museum, an outpost of the Museum of London.

The start of the walk was a mile from Woolwich DLR station, which was adorned with posters exhorting passengers to celebrate its fifth birthday, a reminder of the inexorable growth of the DLR network which originally comprised a single line (Tower Gateway to Beckton, since you ask) and constructed for a niggardly £75m by the London Docklands Development Corporation, a quango charged with regenerating the area.

From its start, the Capital Ring is waymarked to within an inch of its life.  The satisfaction I derive from walking is the simple rhythmical pleasure of putting one foot in front of the other.  I like maps, but wearily consulting gradually shredding paper in steady drizzle and biting winds is a challenge I can resist.  (Sometimes I think that I should simply occupy a treadmill in the gym for the day; a steady 3 miles an hour in warmth and comfort with entertainment and hot drinks on tap would be an easy swap for wrestling with unreliable trains and inclement weather.)  The signs were not only plentiful but also comprehensive.  As well as the Capital Ring, the Green Chain Way and other local routes featured on many of the signs. Charlton, I noticed, was vigorously advertising its own walks; I guess it’s logical that the least appealing areas have to work the hardest to promote their attractions.  With signs appearing regularly, I switched off my GPS.  Predictably, within five minutes I had lost the path.  The hazard of following signage is that you only need to miss a single cue to be completely at sea.  A helpful dog walker redirected me and thereafter I paid more attention.

I was peeved to realised that after Charlton, the route swings resolutely south, evading the gravitational pull of Blackheath and Greenwich, surely the most notable open spaces in the area but presumably not at the requisite radial distance to qualify for the Capital Ring   I anticipate other notable parks, such as Battersea, will fall foul of the same cartographical stricture. We'll see.

Much of the scenery comprised dreary suburbs epitomising middle class preoccupations with loft conversions and mock Victorian conservatories, interspersed with parks which were predominantly flat green fields and whose principal functions are to provide facilities for dog walking and football, pursuits which, in more ways than one, frequently conflict.

I was resigned to the monotony of alternating parks and between the wars semis when an unexpected sight greeted me at Stadium Road.  Here was Woolwich Common, an area of wilderness with scrubby bushes, clumps of trees and, best of all, not pancake flat.  It could have passed for Hampstead Heath.  The downside of this rure in urbs was an unpaved path which unremitting rain had turned into a quagmire which wouldn’t have shamed some of the Pennine Way bogs I had encountered in 2012.  I was grateful for my boots and began to wish for my walking pole.  After a short stretch, tarmac resumed and with it a prospect of encircling grey tower blocks, windows glinting in the low sun.  Not Hampstead after all, then.  All the same, it did feel remote enough for me to indulge in a favourite test.  I ventured a ”good afternoon” to an approaching dog walker and was rewarded with a smile and a reply.  Ha, perhaps this is an island of pseudo-countryside after all: no one responds favourably to an unsolicited greeting on city streets or in urban parks.

This small idyll was bordered by the South Circular, the vehicular equivalent of the Capital Ring and its predecessor by several decades.  Crossing Shooters Hill Road the path enters Oxleas Wood preserved as part of Britain’s ancient woodland dating back 8,000 years.  A steady climb took me to the dizzying altitude of 400 feet, a pimple in Lake District terms but affording a worthwhile view over London, most of which sits close to sea level in the Thames floodplain.  The woods are alive with birds, notably ring-necked parakeets, descendants of escaped exotic pets, whose squawking drowns out the more sedate native species.

I reached the café on the far side of Shooters Hill just before it closed at 4pm.  My request for cappuccino was stonily refused. Studiously ignoring a shiny coffee machine the size of small nuclear reactor, the proprietor offered indifferent coffee, which I drank, shuddering to imagine Seymour’s verdict. 

The remainder of the walk was continuous mud and I nearly slipped on several occasions so I resolved to bring my walking pole on the next walk and risk the ridicule.  It might be a good defence against aggressive dogs, too.  I encountered one in the final section of the wood, called to heel by its owner who shouted the usual unconvincing platitude “eewonurcher”.  By the time I reached Falconwood, the sun had set and it was civil twilight (the sun was between 0 and 6 degrees below the horizon) so I determined to bring my beloved headtorch on future sorties.

My expectations of the Capital Ring had been modest but were pleasantly exceeded by my experience. More than threequarters of the walk was indeed in green spaces, the remainder was along tolerably pleasant quiet roads and the plentiful waymarking and convenient transport connections made for a relaxing half day excursion. I'm a  convert!





© David Thompson 2014

Retirement

The least likely utterance of primitive man must be “I’m bored”.   In between hunting for food, fending off predators and finding protection from the elements he can have had little time to indulge in existential angst. Likewise it is unlikely he ever suffered from the state we refer to as stress.   The status quo was all he knew or could aspire to, whereas stress requires experiencing deviation from expectation.

Ironically, having evolved into what we flatter ourselves is the state of civilisation, boredom and stress are ever present.  Although working can be stressful, not working, I have discovered, is both stressful and boring since, annoyingly, one does not cancel out the other.

Cursed by a company pension which is adequate to sustain me but insufficient to allow any spectacular indulgence, I am deprived of the necessity of seeking work and obliged to conjure inventive ways of using endless time.  I can muster no interest in the four Gs (golf, gardening, grandchildren and god) which sustain the stereotypical retiree. Yes, I recognise thatI am luckier than many and much luckier than most, yet relative good fortune is no fortification to the disconsolate.  Analogously, little more than half a century ago, practically nobody owned a television; nevertheless, nowadays anyone who can’t afford one is deemed to be in poverty.

When everything is possible, nothing seems worthwhile.  In the 1970s, a friend of my first wife had somehow obtained a round the world plane ticket, an unheard of treat in the days before budget airlines.  He had made it from his native New York as far as London, he where spent a week cross-legged on the floor of our Hampstead flat paralyzed by indecision, eventually simply returning home.  A perfect illustration of the tyranny of choice. The comforting corollary of lack of choice is absence of responsibility and maybe this explains the otherwise incomprehensible appeal of coach holidays where choice is willingly surrendered in return for transfer of responsibility.

The concept of retirement as a cliff edge experience where the gold watch marks an almost palpable frontier, with work on one side and the sunlit uplands of unending leisure, on the other is an outdated notion.  The Guardian reported recently that the number of people working past state retirement age, out of choice or necessity, has almost tripled over the past 15 years.  l have dodged the question "Are you retired or still working" by becoming an independent consultant, a convenient cloak to wrap around occupational indecision, but little help in furnishing the tracts of time between occasional

contracts.

Satisfaction, i have discovered, can be derived from the least prepossessing of activities (decades of office work have reconciled me to this dismal reality) so the lesson is that doing almost anything is a better prospect than doing nothing. Such pragmatism does not guarantee fulfilment, retirement’s elusive promise, but as the aphorism reminds us, we shouldn’t allow the best to be the enemy of the good.  Or, as the stern injunction of the dogooder runs: keep yourself occupied. With this in mind I have resolved to tackle the Capital Ring, a modest 75 mile walk around London, taking in the wealth of parks and other green spaces which leaven the numbing dullness of the inner suburbs. None of the starting points is beyond the reach of the Underground, so that courtesy of my Freedom Pass, transport costs are zero, and the maximum altitude achieved is 400 feet. You may justifiably

remark that "modest" is a rather inadequate adjective to describe this enterprise. Nevertheless, it is a bona fide long distance walk, even though I plan to tackle it in daily chunks, always home in time for dinner.

© David Thompson 2014

Swedish culture (2)

Sweden is cold.  In summer temperatures rarely exceed the mid twenties while in winter snow and ice are welcomed as they lighten the otherwise depressing dark days.  So the corollary of testing temperatures is that Swedes have become masters of cosiness. Triple glazing is the practical route to comfort, but cosiness is the emotional bulwark against the wearying winter. The humblest cafe features candles on the tables, from breakfast time onwards.  Even our office canteen caught the mood in the run up to Christmas with tealights in red glass holders in robust defiance of the stern corporate injunction prohibiting candles at work.  So eager are Swedes to challenge the cold and darkness, that curtains are left open in the evening so the lamps glowing in every window flood the streets with illusory warmth.  Gatsby’s mansion can’t compete with a Swedish apartment building! 

The obsession with cosiness (the Swedish word is hyggelig, pronounced hoogly) is most vividly exemplified by the recent refurbishment of Gothenburg’s Landvetter airport.  The security scanning area, previously typically utilitarian and forbidding, has been tricked out with ceiling-hung curtains mimicking clouds and carpeting designed, according to the website, to create “an environment with a lounge feel, which will make a warm, pleasant impression on passengers.” The TSA officials at US airports, who seem to pride themselves on surliness, could take note.

 Something as pedestrian as a morning coffee break has an additional lustre in Swedish society.  Fika is the term for a coffee and a cake shared with friends in cafes or colleagues at work.  In the breaks leavening the two day workshop I attended, the Brazilian and Indian delegates stared in amazement as the normally health-conscious Swedes tucked into cinnamon buns and the elongated marzipan covered cakes, known locally as vacuum cleaners due to their cylindrical shape, an allusion lost on anyone unfamiliar with such ancient technology.

There is more to Swedish culture than a sharp eye for interior design and endearing sweet-toothed indulgence. The first time I went to a symphony concert in Gothenburg, I noticed curious behaviour when the bell sounded at the end of the interval.  Instead of resuming their seats, audience members clustered at the end of their rows like pedestrians waiting for a break in the traffic to cross the road.  Then I understood: people with seats near the ends of the row were waiting for those with middle seats to enter first to avoid the unseemly twisting which ensues when people struggle past seated patrons.  All right, you might expect a concert audience to have a more highly developed sense of consideration than the population at large (although this is not borne out by my experience of the boorish behaviour of New York concert goers who chomp and chat during performances and would doubtless get up to put the kettle on given half a chance).  But what about supermarket behaviour?  Swedish supermarkets, like their British counterparts, have deskilled the relative modest requirement for cashiers to be able to read and enter prices by introducing bar code scanners so that operatives merely need to wave items in front of a sensor to record the sale.  Standing in a queue, I noticed that, without fail, the customers in front of me, thoughtfully oriented their items on the belt so that the barcode would face the scanner when picked up so that the cashier did not need to rotate it to be scanned.  And one final example, Landvetter again.  Gothenburg’s international airport illustrates the aphorism that airports are simply shopping malls with planes parked outside. Wandering through during the pre Christmas period I ran the gauntlet of all the usual overpriced duty free outlets.  Just before reaching the passport control, I noticed a small table supporting a huge roll of wrapping paper, equipped with decorative ribbons, sellotape and scissors adorned by a notice inviting passengers to use these free facilities to wrap their Christmas gifts.   The facility was not operated by any particular shop and was so far beyond the retail zone as to be useless as an inducement to purchase.  It appeared to have been provided by the airport management purely as a helpful service to passengers hurrying to Christmas gatherings. 

These examples, and I could cite many more, reflect a very different relationship between strangers from that in many other western countries.  Perhaps this is a consequence of a small human population residing in a large, and largely untamed, country.  Moose, the largest landbased mammals in Europe are still common in Sweden even in the outskirts of cities.  Every autumn, newspapers carry stories of moose invading orchards getting tipsy on rotting apples and creating havoc in suburban gardens disoriented by alcohol.  In one celebrated case, an inebriated animal stumbled into an empty swimming pool, and needed to be rescued with a crane.  If moose stray on to roads, their hulk presents a major hazard and in close encounters with traffic, it’s often the car which comes off worse.  So maybe casual camaraderie is fostered by the harsh climate and close proximity to big animals.  Or perhaps it’s the cosy surroundings and culinary indulgence which nurture a more generous spirit. 

© David Thompson 2014

Swedish culture

Gothenburg is not a romantic city.  It lacks the charm of Paris and the novelty of Budapest.  Unlike Stockholm it can’t rely on the cachet of being a capital and it doesn’t have a medieval quarter.  On the other hand, as second cities go (think Birmingham!) it has plenty to recommend it.  Like Melbourne, another second fiddle city, it is characterised by its inhabitants as “liveable”, meaning that while it doesn’t have anything unmissable to lure tourists, it is a pleasant, if unremarkable, place to pass one’s life_.  And it punches above its weight: there’s a fine art gallery and an excellent opera house, for example, even though opera itself make only an occasional appearance, the bulk of the offering being somewhat more middlebrow.  

But what really gets this city’s inhabitants excited is the sea.  Were it not for their equal passion for landbased outdoor activities of almost any kind, you’d swear they have webbed feet.  Harmless amusement is guaranteed by murmuring thoughtfully in the vicinity of any Gothenburger, “You know, on balance I think the Stockholm archipelago just has the edge over the west coast” then standing back to enjoy the apoplexy.   Compared to the UK, where boat ownership is confined to the wealthy, Swedish statistics are extraordinary: one survey suggests that the ratio is 1.7 boats to every adult Swede and this is borne out by my anecdotal encounters.  Swedes are obsessed by boats: ordinary people who teach high school or sell white goods for a living build their own craft or decide to abandon a comfortable apartment to live in their sailing boat with barely more space than a garden shed.  Speaking of which, summerhouse ownership is similarly widespread and the fact that many are indeed little more than large sheds underlines their purpose for use and relaxation, not as status symbols.

 

Maybe its their appreciation of the outdoors which makes Swedes so environmentally alert.  Car drivers are not permitted to idle their engines while stationary and supermarkets offer deposits on plastic drinks bottles. Sophisticated machines by the checkouts where you can see your empty offerings whizzing through the sorting mechanism are a novel and educational amusement for small children.

Sweden is considerable less wealthy than the US with a GDP per capita of $40,304 compared to $51,704 coupled with legendary tax rates.  Yet the OECD Better Life index reports that Swedes are happier than Americans.  This disjunction might be explained by the Gini coefficient, a measure of wealth distribution where 0% signifies complete equality and 100% complete inequality.   At 25%, Sweden is the country with the second lowest value (beaten by Denmark at 24%) compared to the US at 45%.   While one is not necessarily the cause of the other, there is likely to be a correlation because of the general Swedish attitude to acquisitiveness.  This is epitomised by the word lagom meaning "just the right amount". The archetypical Swedish proverb "lagom är bäst" is translated as "enough is as good as a feast" and reflects the cultural disapproval of excess and its display.   Contentment arises from enjoyment of the natural world, in boat and summerhouse, not an endless competition to earn more money.

© David Thompson 2013