Carole's Livejournal

Home, sweet home

Mon, 07 Aug 2006 20:21:11 GMT

I've been at my parents' house for just over a week now, and am starting to emerge from exhaustion to anxiety. But I'm slowly tying up some loose ends, which feels good.

Off to Vienna on Friday (a mere 23 hour bus journey) to stay with some of my internet friends, before going on to Slovakia to see Martin and Magda. I'm looking forward to seeing where they live - and seeing them, too, away from the stresses of JVC. We ended that as well as we could have, I think, so hopefully we'll be able to have a good time together.

Dad and I worked out that I was last in Vienna 27 years ago. It'll be interesting to see if anything is familiar!

That film

Fri, 02 Jun 2006 20:17:42 GMT

Martin and I went to see The Da Vinci Code on Wednesday - it seemed like an easier way to satisfy my curiousity than wading my way though the book, which I've heard is very badly written.

I was pleasantly surprised by the film - it was rather better than the very sniffy reviews in most of the church newspapers would suggest. Cinematography and music have a big impact on me in a film, and both were nicely done, especially the throbbing strings of the soundtrack (perhaps tapping my foot to it wasn't quite the reaction they were looking for, but it was very enjoyable!)

As for the plot - well, it's utterly silly of course (I couldn't stop giggling in places), but no more so than a lot of other movies. Roger Ebert's review says it best, in my opinion:

I know there are people who believe Brown's fantasies about the Holy Grail, the descendants of Jesus, the Knights Templar, Opus Dei and the true story of Mary Magdalene. This has the advantage of distracting them from the theory that the Pentagon was not hit by an airplane.

I've read a few reviews of the film that complained it cut the characterisation - mainly from fans, I think; most professional reviews said that the book had precious little characterisation to begin with. Still, there were enough intriguing character moments to make me want to read the book, particularly as I won't have to pay for the privilege. Apparently there are 45 reserves on it in the library, but 63 copies on the system, so I shouldn't have to wait for too long.

I hope not being mortally offended doesn't make me a bad Catholic...

In search of joy

Tue, 10 Jan 2006 17:43:59 GMT

A while ago, I decided that after spending rather a lot of time exploring the depths, perhaps it was time to explore the heights and learn more about joy. Lisa, one of my friends from the 'Living Druidry' course, is a very 'sunny' person and I often felt she was just on a different wavelength, accessing something that I could not.

Part of the problem is that 'happiness' often seems very shallow - from the social expectation to party-party at New Year to the requirement of some New Age and Christian groups that their members be (or at least act) 'nice'. I do occasionally experience the depth or intensity in happiness - but rarely for more than a moment or two at a time.

One or two of those moments came on Sunday night, and it struck me then that maybe 'happiness' might come about differently for introverts? So many of the indicators of happiness in our society are extravert characteristics, but parties and dancing are generally something I can take or leave. On New Years night I was with the JVC people and a few of them were very insistent that we all got up and dance. And I did, for a bit, but while some folk there were obviously riding high on it I wasn't the only one who was pretty neutral. To me, the kind of happiness I feel when dancing is like a flame - bright and brief but requiring energy to sustain. Whereas my moments of happiness have come out of stillness, born of an awareness of connection with nature, with a good friend, with my deep self.

The other thing I realised is how difficult it is to find happiness in a culture driven by false images of it. It's easy enough to deride the adverts that claim money and beauty and fast cars and flash holidays to be the way to achieve joy, and perhaps not so difficult to imagine an alternative rooted in conviviality and spirituality, but very difficult - in my experience - to throw off the cultural conditioning that produces a thrill of excitement at the idea of a big salary increase, a new gadget or the opportunity for a dinner or holiday in posher surroundings than usual. It's not that I think there's anything inherently wrong with good food or new things, but my desire for them doesn't feel entirely... clean, if that makes any sense. Not the product of consolation, of putting God at the centre, I suppose.

It feels awfully facile to say that aiming to accumulate material things doesn't bring happiness - how many times have we heard something similar? But to see those things as glittering mirages made the familar truth take on a much deeper feel.

*

On a more mundane level, the rash on my forehead seems to be clearing up - so looks like Mum might have been right about it being due to my hat. Which is a pity, because other than its rash-inducing tendency it really is a comfortable bit of headgear.

Travels with my aunt ;)

Mon, 11 Jul 2005 07:53:03 GMT

Well, for the sake of actually having an entry besides the 'welcome' post, here's some thoughts on my holiday last month....

Flying is a dislocating way to travel - I really wish the trains were cheaper. Sitting on the bus across rainy Monday afternoon Edinburgh, the sunny corner of Milan's Duomo roof where I'd sat that morning seemed... unreal. But I always have problems with time; I don't expect travel experiences to last, of course, but at the time they feel real, natural, and it's 'home' that I can't grasp. While canoeing down the Yukon last summer I knew I'd have to return to work, but I couldn't grasp that the reality of a river trip would give way to the luxuries of showers and flushing toilets and the practicalities of navigating the interlaced networks of modern transport systems. And now it's memory, whatever that is. Does it make a difference that I was there at all?

So I should have written this on the road, really, so it would be my travelling self and not my scared-of-the-world self writing. Still...

When Marie said that some friends of hers had guest rooms in Geneva we could use for a couple of days, I was not expecting to have free run of a three-bedroom top-floor apartment just behind the UNHCR offices, complete with treed balconies with views of stars, Mont Blanc (on smog-free days) and the top of the jet d'eau. But heck, who am I to complain? ;) Our hosts (located in the flat next door) were extremely hospitable (the one day they didn't invite us to share their excellent cooking they insisted on paying for dinner) and we had some really interesting conversations about their work (for a human rights related NGO), Europe (in the wake of the French referendum) and differing concepts of national identities (in anticipation of the Swiss vote to join Schengen, of which I was completely unaware before. I really wish we got better coverage of European issues in the UK - I hadn't known it was possible to join Schengen without being in the EU. (Actually, having looked it up, I hadn't even known that it had been expanding beyond the original countries. Shameful I know, but then I haven't done much cross-border travel on the mainland in several years.)

It's a long time since I've travelled on the Continent in the Summer. (I was in Spain for a few weeks around this time of year in 2000, but Spain was different - unfamiliar, a bit wild, on a peninsula guarded by mountains without the myriad cross-linkages of the more central countries.) And oh, it was glorious to be warm, and to know that at the end of the valley there was another country, and over the mountains there was another, and that just by getting on a train for an hour the language and the coinage and the architecture would be different, and that to so many people swimming in that sea of overlapping cultures is just part of daily life.

I tend to exist in an uneasy equilibrium between the centre and the periphery - in where I want to live as much as in social groups. Last time I was doing any significant crossing of European borders, back in 1996, I felt the call back to the wild damp Scottish edge more keenly, even while I envied the people who could say 'We'll drop by to see you in Berlin next time we have a meeting in Poland'. But speaking to our Belgian (Wallonian) host shed some more light on the question of European identity for me. "Being Swiss," he said, "is firstly about belonging to a canton." Of course, I knew that Swiss politics is very locally based, but I'd never really connected it to my curiosity about national identity in countries with a recent history of shifting borders. And I was aware that regional identity is more significant on the mainland than it is in England, but I hadn't appreciated just what a difference that can make in terms of attitude to the EU.

I once offended a German friend of mine by asking her about her sense of 'Germany': what, I wondered, did it mean to her to be 'German' when the country's borders have changed so much, when unification (as brought about by Bismarck) was so recent? Her reply - that Germany was much older than I was implying - made me realise the extent to which I define my country by its geographical area (rather than, say, common racial or cultutal heritage, or a common system of government). Even my patriotism is based on love of the land. But if Britain is primarily defined by her borders, by the proud boast that we haven't been invaded since 1066, then no wonder the English (or the London-centric media) are so uneasy about diluting that border, or are bemused by countries that legislate for linguistic purity, or base citizenship requirements on race or regional allegiance. (I use 'English' intentionally - from my experience the Scots have a rather different view for obvious historical reasons, and I can't speak at all for the Welsh or Irish.)

Um. Back to Geneva, then. We went to the Red Cross museum which was interesting but not interested in serving us food after 2pm (finding somewhere to eat during allotted dining hours proved to be an ongoing struggle during the trip), but never did make it to the UN (I find it hard to get used to the concept of having to carry my passport everywhere when it usually stays at home in a Safe Place). And we went on a trip round the lake which was scenic (especially the village of Yvoire, where I managed to buy our soul-of-generosity host an ice-cream) but fairly uneventful.

Next stop was Chambery, where it was HOT and humid and exhausting. Chambery is apparently the birthplace of the chocolate truffle, but I never did get to try one. :( We made a too-brief trip into the mountains around Chartreuse, which was awe-inspiring - definitely an area I want to go back to. The last day we were there, we went to the village my great-grandmother came from, and got talking to a woman who'd moved to the village a few years previously. As we were leaving, a couple of workmen came up, and she told them why we were there. 'Oh,' said one of them (in French, of course, so I'm not even going to try to reproduce the exact wording), 'my wife was from that family.' So the woman got in her car and led us up to their house. The look on her face when the wife opened the door and we were introduced to her as possible cousins was priceless! And it was pretty exciting for us as well, as up to then the only family members we'd found in the area were those in the cemetery. In the end, we couldn't establish a definite link, but it gives something more to go on - and it was great to see her house, which had been in the family for generations, particularly as we'd just been bemoaning the fact that we didn't even know whether our ancestors had lived in the village or outside it. So even if it wasn't her branch of the family, there's a fair chance that my great-grandmother had set foot in the place.

One of the nice things about being in France was discovering that my French hadn't withered away entirely after 7 years of neglect; the trip in general made me want to get down to language learning again - I find it really irritating being monoglot. :)

More gorgeous mountain scenery as we took the train through the Alps to Milan. There was a little excitement just before we went through the Frejus tunnel when the customs folk got on with some very cute looking sniffer dogs, and proceeded to have a good look through several people's bags, much to the not-so-suppressed curiosity of the rest of the passengers. I've no idea what they were looking for, or whether they found it, but we had to show our passports to get off the platform at Milan so there was obviously something going on.

I spent most of the journey (when I wasn't gawping at the scenery) reading about the fire in the Frejus road tunnel, which had happened a few days earlier - for some reason, this did not make our dark journey through the rail version a particularly relaxing experience. It was interesting reading the local take on things though - the story was three days old at the time so perhaps there'd been more sorrow expressed earlier at the two deaths, but by this time the policking had begun in earnest - the timing was perfect for the group trying to wring moneyn from the European Commission for a new Lyon-Turin railfrieght link, local freight companies were trying to get exemptions from a propsed weight limit on the over-the-mountains route so they wouldn't have to go via Mont Blanc, and Chamonix was getting worried about the increased traffic through their tunnel. I was surprised, when I got home, to see that the BBC website had only a brief page about the incident - there are surely tourists and (more to the point) freight companies for which the closure of one of the major transalpine routes is pretty significant event.

So, Milan. We hadn't planned to stop in Milan, but it wasn't possible to do the journey to Castelraimondo in one day. My main job on the trip had been to find us a hotel, so of course that was the part that screwed up...

It started okay; had a bit of trouble finding the place (Note to Milan Metro - 'you are here' maps would be very useful at stations with a dozen exits), and the receptionist had a bit of trouble finding the booking, but we got our room. Oh, except there wasn't any hot water, so using the shower wasn't going to be a [pleasant] option. But what the heck, we were only staying one night and the room was shaded and opened onto a lovely breakfast garden from whence wafted a cool breeze perfumed with flowers from the fruit trees.
Except that, as we discovered later that evening, the lack of hot water meant there would be no breakfast, either. At least their internet terminal was working; I used it to book a different hotel for when I passed through on my way home. While I was doing so Marie came down to report that she'd fallen through her bed.

Anyhow, I knew nothing about Milan before I went, apart from failing to get tickets to see The Last Supper and a friend telling me that the central station was an impressive Fascist monument. (He wasn't kidding - it was truly awe inspiring, complete with fountains gushing out of the stonework facing the piazza, and oversized horse statues. They could have done with some signs to the ticket machines though.) But sometimes it's better that way - it's difficult to travel without preconceptions when there's a big emotional investment in seeing something. What impressed me about Milan was the quiet dignity of the architecture, and the less quiet Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, where I made my small contribution to the dent in the mosaic of the bull's testicles. My fertility is allegedly now assured, should I ever be in a position to take advantage of it.

The journey south - in a more-than-half-empty carriage - was pleasant, especially when the smoggy plain gave way to rolling hills on one side and beaches with rigidly regimented rows of umbrellas on the other. We ended up (one missed connection and a demonstation of the joys of communicating with gestures, keywords and a complete lack of prepositions later) in a converted barn my parents had rented in the hills of the Regione Marche, from where we could look out on quiet red-tiled hilltowns, snow-capped mountains, a china factory and an ongoing feud between the local cats and hens.

I'd hoped that the whole holiday was going to be that relaxed, to be honest, with more time to read than to rush around. I wish we'd been able to stay longer before turning north again.

We did take the time to visit Loreto, though, to where the house of the Virgin Mary is alleged to have been carried by angels (or more prosaically, brought by sea by a family called Angele, IIRC). This is apparantly the second-most-visited Marian site after Lourdes, which surprised me as I'd never heard of it. The basicila was suitably impressive, as was the piazza outside where pigeons flew lazily past marble towers shining white against a cloudless blue sky. But somehow I find that 'impressive' doesn't really work for me in churches. I find I feel more connection in plain stone walls and simple wooden statues - perhaps a reaction to the gaudy overconsumption of our age. I look on ornate gold frames and the like and feel tired, though I suppose when these places were built they would have been like nothing people would see elsewhere, inspiring awe and reverence. Or perhaps impressing the populace with the glory of God was deemed more suitable than evoking God as a still small voice within.

Tourists don't help, either (though there were blessedly few of those in Loreto); it really bugs me when people wander around a place of worship - whether it be cathedral or pagan circle - snapping photos. Not only does it prioritise the memory of the experience over the experience itself, but it objectifies the place, making interaction with it a relationship of object and observer rather than connection or inspiration. There are ways to make photography part of the connection, of course, an act of reverent creation, but that has nothing to do with 'I woz here' snapshots. I find that disturbing, embarrassing even. (In the Duomo in Milan I had just identified that unease within myself when a couple of young women asked me if I would take their picture in front of one of the statues. They were rather taken aback when I said 'No'.)

We took a day to drive north to the mountainous north of Toscana (stopping for a pizza in Siena), from which I escaped the next day to overnight in Milan (much better hotel this time, though no flowery garden) before flying back to Prestwick (one of the shabbier airports I've passed through, but it scores for the direct - and reduced fare - rail link).

The End. (you can wake up now)

Well, not quite. See, our train from France to Milan had been delayed (by the customs dudes), so although we were in time to get inside the Duomo, we didn't get up on the roof. And by all accounts, getting up on the roof was a must-do in Milan. So I figured if I could wake up early and get there right when it opened at 9am, I'd just about have time to see it before catching the bus to the airport. (I later questioned the wisdom of this when we got held up on the autostrada by an accident-induced queue, but it worked out okay and I even managed to fight my way to a window seat on the plane - I can be ruthlessly single-minded about such things. The traffic signs did, however give me one of those delightful language insight moments; the word used for the traffic jam was 'coda', a word familiar to anyone who reads music, which translates directly as 'tail' (I think). Which made me think of the French word for tail - 'queue'. I'd never thought about that connection before, even though we sometimes call motorway snarlups 'tail-backs'.)

Those of you who know me well will be shaking your heads at the thought that I could get up early enough to eat, pack, check out and be in the centre of town by 9 - and you'd be right. But I made it by 9:15, and the roof was almost empty. Except for the statues, and the young American woman imitating one for the camera.

They say that you can see the mountains from there on a good day. This wasn't, but perhaps it was better for it - there was nothing to distract the eye from the hundreds of gleaming white statues gazing blindly into the murky white haze, as if standing guard over the place, or the intricately carved swirls and saints on the buttresses and spires reaching for the heavens.

It wasn't just worthwhile to go up there, it was necessary - the other half of the place. The interior of the Duomo had reminded me of nothing so much of the vastness of Darrowdelf in the movie The Fellowship of the Ring, and I in no way mean that disrespectfully. The rows of heavy-set columns reaching up, up, up evoked the same quality of awe, a perfect setting for the banks of narrow white tapers, their tiny dancing flames making a living light in the darkness. I wasn't expecting it to be so... chthonic.
But that made sense when I was on the roof; it was bright, delicate, a perfect counterpoint: the glorious beauty of light meeting the nurturing darkness below.

People took pictures, of course. I would have liked to myself (for some reason it felt less inappropriate there), but perhaps it would have been a distraction. Some experiences can't be captured on film, and only perhaps hinted at in words.