We're all volunteers now!

I have returned from sunny Spain to a transformed UK that is rejoicing in Olympiad fellowship. With no internet where I was in the Costa de la Luz, I feel I have missed something vital those few weeks away. Stories abounded of visitors happily picking up the litter of others at the games, opening doors for the elderly, a spirit of shared goodwill and bonhomie unheard of in contemporary inner London. 

So as I donned a corporate branded polo shirt for our yachting sponsorship yesterday, I too transformed into a "volunteer", with tourists smiling and asking me the way to the ferry, public loos and ticket prices.  Maybe it's the idea of a uniform, especially a casual one for baristas and holiday reps, but it's now a jovial universal passport to a sort of Big Society anonymity.  So a bloke winked at me in the Kilburn High Road last night, but wearing a jacket with the words "Sailing Team" on the back can carry a different, even metro ironic tone the further you get from the Solent and the Isle of Wight. 

Thunderbirds are go!

Oh wow.  They've landed the space shuttle, with its mothership 747, in a corner of JFK airport in New York.  No one knows whether this is a resting space, a permanent fixture, a fair or a funeral.  And I gasped as mad Pepe wove his yellow cab (bald tyres and all) up the slipway towards Terminal 7.  The shuttle is big and clunky, full metal-jacketed and built in an age where rivets still commanded some authority.  Should the day come when our ipaded, soft electronic devices with their squishy compatibility go zap and burn out, I sense the shuttle will be wheeled out sedately to save the world.  It's sort of admirable, not beautfully designed like Concorde, but broad-shouldered.  A sort of Amtrak for the skies. 

A brief taste of Caribbean life

Thinnking back on it, there's no reason why bits of the Caribbean should not embrace the sort of fellow traveller one tries hard to avoid at Gibraltar and Gatwick airports. Both are near-seaside sorts of places. I think it must be the sea, or the ocean, but there was a dispiritng number of tattoed men with metal necklaces at the back of the plane to Antigua. They seem cash rich. And why not?  Didn't Long John Silver cavort much of his piratical life in that neck of the woods ("pieces of eight")?  And hasn't the Caribbean always been a smuggler's delight, from days of the US civil war, running blockades, to money centres of dubious repute in more recent times.

The Dominican Republic now caters for mainly a North American clientele; most of the Brits decamped our BA plane which docked briefly in Antigua and we carried on to Punta Cana (inbound flights galore from Miami, even Moscow).  I now understand the meaning of all-inclusive resort living,which first involves being awestruck by the bright photoshopped blue skies and white beaches on websites, trying to figure out where would be a nice place to stay.  Then the experience itself ends as a Truman Show of predictability, nice at first in a sticky cocktail way, like visiting Disney, no thinking is involved, just a vague mindlessness and safe for the kids. Eventually sand flies (which bite aggressively) are a reminder that it is no dream. It was not without relief to return to the wintry chill of a damp British Easter.

Gasping in all that Swiss mountain air

The "fumoirs" at Zurich airport are so elegant, glassy and alluring that I half-wanted to take up smoking again last week.  I have staggered past their British airport equivalents catching planes, those sad little pens of shame and have felt comfortable with my decision to quit seven years back.  Zurich almost tempted me back into the fold.

The relaxed Winston room (see left) looked as cool and fun as a London boutique hotel's cocktail bar.  The etching of the brand and the well-typset English health warning, "tobacco can seriously damage your health" on the glass frontage just added to an appetising feel that dragging at a Winston is not only cool, but somehow cleansing and healthy, sensual, minty even.  Why is it that the idea of smoking up in the snowy Swiss mountains or down on a sunny Mediterranean beach might seem somehow less injurious than puffing away in the damp cities of the Thames valley?  

 

I had almost forgotten how powerful smoking is as an idea - 'Cigarettes are not positively beautiful, but they are sublime by virtue of their charming power to propose what Kant would call "a negative pleasure": a darkly beautiful, inevitably painful pleasure that arises from some intimation of eternity; the taste of infinity in a cigarette resides precisely in the "bad" taste the smoker quickly learns to love. Being sublime, cigarettes, in principle, resist all arguments directed against them from the perspective of health and utility.'  Lovely.  Better to have loved and lost. 

Failing beautifully in Bible studies

Myles Coverdale's English version of the bible apparently pre-dates the King James Version by one hundred years.

He knew no Latin, Greek nor Hebrew, had a little German but was undeterred in his translation ambitions.  The Etymologicon (2011) says he produced a psalter that is still used in Church of England services today.

In it, Coverdale has the line:  "The strange children shall fail: and be afraid out of their prisons."

As the Etymologicon explains, '[the line] is beautiful and mysterious.  Who are the strange children?  What's so strange about them?  And what on earth are they doing in prison?'

The answer is that the line should have been more properly translated as:

"The foreign-born shall obey: and come trembling from their strongholds."'

Coverdale's mistranslation however seems rather more post-modern, filmic even.   Oddly I could imagine myself just nodding along to hearing it in a reading in church without even wondering what it means.

"Always keep hold of nurse, for fear of holding something worse"

The economics of the eurozone condition at tonight’s seminar spun my head in circles, the sheer vastness of the billions swilling about, the slipping macro-economic charts of many countries, the decline of the "garlic" nations and the messy interdependency of "butter" nations.  But the subject line above raised a laugh at the seminar.   "Always keep hold of nurse, for fear of holding something worse."

 We were reminded of Hilaire Belloc's nonsense verse which seemed a neat summing up of behaviours surrounding the state of the euro.  (I am kindly reminded that the line comes from "Jim, who ran away from his Nurse, and was eaten by a Lion".)

Aha.  Nurses, not nannies, I thought - and the playfulness of English Edwardian verse. Both one step away from natural affection I suspect, but neat at explaining authority in distress.  Do the British prefer their austerity politicians as nannies or nurses?   Would Germany eventually accept higher inflation as a way out of the mess?  Are  we back to the 1930s where the countries that will come out best are those most easily able to devalue currencies?

Our speaker was rather mesmeric. And I reeled with the thought of it all. The bells of Bow Bell's church tolled for at least fifteen minutes as the seminar got into its prime.  Ask not, for "it tolls for thee.”  Brits quite like "moody" I think.

Variously moulded and often differently handled

After re-reading this, it's hard not to blush about internet shopping.  And e-bay.  Hmm.

"Though it may be unessential to the imagination, travel is necessary to an understanding of men.  Only with long experience and the opening of his wares on many a beach where his language is not spoken, will the merchant come to know the worth of what he carries, and what is parochial and what is universal in his choice.  Such delicate goods as justice, love and honour, courtesy, and indeed all the things we care for, are valid everywhere; but they are variously moulded and often differently handled, and sometimes nearly unrecognizable if you meet them in a foreign land; and the art of learning fundamental common values is perhaps the greatest gain of travel to those who wish to live at ease among their fellows." 

Freya Stark, Perseus in the Wind, retold by John Julius Norwich in "A Christmas Cracker" in 2007.

Guessing what is at “the other side of the hill”

“All the business of war, and indeed all the business of life, is to endeavour to find out what you don’t know by what you do; that’s what I called ‘guessing what was at the other side of the hill.’”  

So said the Duke of Wellington.  I have misquoted this so often that I am finally at pains to write it down properly.  I have mistakenly used the “other side of the hill” analogy to counter the business challenge that there lies a squadron of enthusiastic buyers of one’s products, all waiting out there, but they remain annoyingly unidentified and unapproached.    

Yet no matter how many missions are sent galloping over the proverbial hill, sometimes there just aren’t more mystery buyers to unearth.  Beyond the hill is sometimes just more uninhabited land.  

The proper quotation is more profound than my misreading of it.  I do like the Duke for acknowledging we use what we know to find out what don’t – a pretty fragile basis but it is all that we poor humans have.   Past knowledge might be the only guide to the future, to paraphrase.