Tom Hall: travel, London, other things

There are doors, and there are doors.

One of the great doors of the world is the unassuming entrance to the South End Rowing Club, standing in the middle of Fisherman’s Wharf and North Beach overtourism. Hundreds and possibly thousands pass the door of this and neighbouring Dolphin Club each day without stopping to read the sign that proclaims it is open to non-members, with the implication being that all you have to do is work out how to pass through the portal to the other side.

I’ve done so twice now, and both times it was a similar experience. Like the first time, I stood at the door for a moment, which rattled when pushed but did not open, then rang the bell and waited. And waited. And wondered if I should give up and/or run for the hills. San Francisco has lots of hills. Eventually someone let me in, I introduced myself and declared I was hoping for a swim. I was beckoned inside. Sign up, pay your $10 and you’re in. And as soon as I was it became clear that I had passed into an extraordinary place. A clubbified Men’s Pond for all genders, its bottom floor is a boathouse, home to a collection of beautiful rowing boats that give the club its name.

Upstairs, as shown by the chap who opened the door and who had immediately taken on the role of host and guide, a rag-tag changing room with space for hundreds to change. I made my excuses when he offered for me to join a collection of very laid-back swimmers lounging on big chairs who, I suspected, would swim for miles once in the water, and headed off by myself.

South End has its own access to a small beach, quiet and calm where a few yards away is crowds and chaos from the late-summer visitors to the city. I was still slightly (very) jetlagged, and had had a pretty stressful day, and after pausing to speak to a lady warming up for her own swim walked straight into the cold water. It took a while to get the measure of the water, pulling me this way and that, and to take in the mighty ships moored to my right and the long line of buoys running parallel to Aquatic Bay. The idea is you swim all the way along, then back, or around the Bay, or out to the mouth and back, or whatever. I aim for ten minutes, which is quite enough for me in my state. It is a marvellously solitary experience. The bay is home to old ships, a beach and distant view of the Golden Gate Bridge, with the fog rolling onto and over its northern end and across the high points of Marin County. What a lovely place for a swim.

The shower afterwards induces shivers, but as much as anything I rejoice in the sense of quiet privacy of being left alone in the club. Though I’m tempted to go back to the guys in their armchairs I don’t linger but head off straight uphill, which in this city means great stupidly steep gradients, and continue on another San Francisco institution, the seemingly unnecessarily yet also inevitable long and hilly walk back to my own neighbourhood.

In the still green silence of Northumberland, England’s biggest sky, we find fragments of the past at every turn.

A tiny road heads dead straight, almost due north, from somewhere small and not known to an equal point. The road is pitted and bumpy. It ends at a t-junction that is, in fact, a crossroads, for the road continues ahead. The Devil’s Causeway is still here. It’s not hidden, it runs for 50 miles or more, and is marked on maps. Here it runs through a grassy field. I put my hand into the grass – clumps of stone, roughly shaped. A Roman Road, but north of Hadrian’s Wall. Perhaps someone can explain to me how that worked.

Later it becomes clear the village we turned right at existed as a crossroad between the roman road and the path that monks travelled between Holy Island and Durham. And Iona too? A junction of obscurity. Were they the only traffic? Was it a highway of celebrity monks, Aidan, Cuthbert and their like? Just up the road is Ancroft, with a sign pointing to an 11th century church. Remarking that we’ve never stopped there despite driving past 20 times we do, and discover something. Squat and ageless, it predates Eleanor of Aquitaine, the Crusades, and is barely younger than England itself. Ancroft. Aidan’s Croft. The strange monkish atmosphere. It may account for all the silence.

On another day we go looking for the road again, further south, near Chillingham’s haunted castle. We find a ford, crossed also by a wonderful wooden bridge, and a standing stone, marked out presumably to stop a farmer ploughing into it. Winnie tells us here that ‘the Romans used wee to wash their hair’. After a mile or more the countryside drops away towards the Cheviot Hills, and a dramatic bridge carries the causeway away again.

It is hot and it is a strange sensation to be seeking ways to cool down in a place where you can look south to Scotland. We are wedged up against the border but free to wander over, usually via the Union Bridge. Once across there is the lovely River Tweed, and the chance to swim. The water is perfect and the river is broad. The kids splash in the shallows while Imogen and I take turns to swim part-way across, never quite brave enough to complete the international swim, but enough into disputed waters to be able to say we’ve done it.

A friend puts in our heads seeking out Twizell Bridge, a mighty medieval span which carried English and Scottish soldiers across the Till. Just down the road, Wark Castle guarded a section of the Tweed. Today it’s a pile of rubble that appears to sit in a few people’s back gardens who aren’t that happy to see us drive into their bit of town. It may be the place where Edward III first got the idea of the order of the garter, greeting hooting partygoers who mocked a lady who’d removed hers by putting it on and saying ‘honi soit qui mal y pense’ (‘evil be to him that evil thinks’. This phrase is so famous now it appears on the Royal coat of arms of the United Kingdom. And here’s Wark Castle, a forgotten pile of old stones. Perhaps it wasn’t here. No-one knows to say it wasn’t. We all make remains and words and gestures live on.

On our last night thunder and lightning cracks the weather open, as if we’ve started something with what we’ve turned up.

There is this place where the water is shallow and cold, having flowed off the mountainside, where it pauses in a weir before flowing onwards towards Windermere. I swam here early one Monday morning, with not a soul around, and I had to hop over a gate to get here and back out again. Having been in, and coming out cold and feeling alive I trot back to the car, shaking my head at how lucky I am to do some of these things.

Amsterdam’s easy. Day trip, overnight, plane or train, whatever. It’s so easy I once took the ferry home just to liven things up. Yesterday therefore came as something of a shock. What felt like a routine January visit for work – I come here a couple of times a year to visit Booking.com, who have a vast workforce here – started to unravel the night before.

Upon checking in an advisory of a storm over northern Europe on Thursday warned of delays and all other manner of horrors. I don’t normally need an excuse to book a train instead, and as I could reclaim for the flight I swiftly switched to rail.

On Thursday morning as this revised plan was uneventfully put in place. The new-edition Eurostars are a pretty swish proposition and we reached Brussels without drama. And despite the tannoy warnings that all trains on the German network had been suspended my Thalys to Amsterdam was in situ and showing as an on-time departure. As if by magic, with only a few minutes before departure and with no-one on board, the indicators suddenly showed the train was cancelled. ‘Train 9193 will not run today’ mewled the Brussels Midi tannoy. (The same tannoy that once noted in a blasé fashion that my sleeper to Hamburg was going to be 4 and a half hours late, and you can sleep on a bench until then. I hate that tannoy.) Seconds later, that audible right hook was followed by the bone-chilling ‘all trains on the Dutch network are suspended until further notice.’ A late afternoon museum, a stroll along the canals, maybe dinner in a brown cafe. All disappeared into the ether.

I’m not one of those buffoons who says Belgium is boring. Quite the opposite. But I am not devoted to the appreciation of its capital and have particular numbness towards the charmless zone around Midi station. In mitigation there is a Sunday market where you can buy Moroccan pancakes so all is not completely lost. So I found a hotel on the other side of the city and took a walk there, arriving as night was falling and receiving notices from friends of bad weather in Utrecht, Rotterdam and other Dutch cities. That night Brussels grew placid to the point of silence. I walked to the Grand Place, one of Europe’s great squares, and had an early night before an equally early start.

By now it was Friday, and with all my pent-up spare time gone, I had to start making progress to Amsterdam. Trains were running at ‘an almost normal service’ but I was cautious of yesterday’s demand for Thalys trains spilling over into long queues at hateful Midi, so I opted for a slower IC service from Nord, just by my hotel. The curse struck again – seconds before my train to Rottedam was due to leave a notice appeared saying it would depart from Antwerp. Antwerp: 60 miles away. Antwerp: where I was not! So I had to make my way first to Antwerp Central. Again, no great hardship. This is a breathtaking station and very much worth detouring to. The slow stopping service through places of little consequence stirred up some nerves of a slow-slow journey. I need not have feared. After a little looksy around this wonderful station, and some time meditating on WG Sebald’s bleak visit to a silent bar near here the Rotterdam train rolled in. With a greater sense of purpose than before we moved north, first across the border through flat farmland and birch forest and then across great estuaries and canals, past windmills and vast tulip fields, and via a change of stations and a spin of the Wedding Present’s ‘Rotterdam’ I found myself finally and somewhat stubbornly arriving in Amsterdam.

Despite all these delays, my original plan to work from Amsterdam for the best part of 24 hours meant I still had a few hours spare before giving the talk. Somewhere in the back of my head I had stored the thought that I was addressing a hall of 2000 people as I think I’d been told, but I had repeatedly dismissed that as invented fiction. On arriving at the Excel-style arena, to the south of the Amsterdam you’re probably thinking of, the thought that that number may in fact be correct after all came more prominently to mind. This fun-looking event was vast, with two huge halls seemingly dedicated to feeding the hordes of 20 and 30 somethings who work here. After some time I made it to the speaker’s area, a near-empty green room. An hour or so later I was ushered in front of a crowd that did indeed match the attendance at the 1872 FA Cup Final. I was the last speaker before an address from the CEO, and then a rather large party. It seemed that entertaining was the order of the day, and I whizzed through the potted history of my employer and my own very average holiday snaps without dwelling on anything too serious, then fleeing from the stage before popping anyone’s balloon including my own. Doing something like that can rather make you float.

And then it was back out onto the streets of the Dutch capital. After a few visits here recently I am both more familiar and completely hooked on the city’s canals and small streets, ringing with tilling alarm bells and, if you get it right, offering a step back in time that takes the breath away. I found just such a street on a long, half-lost walk back to Centraal. It was perfect – cobbled, lined with thin houses each of a different colour, and each with a winch at the top, gable pointing to the sky, and a cluster of Dutch bikes outside each house. A canal at each end. I wanted to stay here for a while, even though around the corner were another bunch of pot-smoking likely lads, and I still had Schiphol to get through to get home. I couldn’t help it, there’s nowhere better to wander until your feet are sore, by the still waters with a chill blowing off them.

January sinks too slowly into February, an altogether more sprightly proposition. With it the succession of drab, mild days is shoved out of the way and replaced with clear, sharp cold mornings, a north-east wind with extra chill and bursts of sunshine to be grabbed when the moment arises. It feels like winter, and the end of winter. The snowdrops and crocuses on the corner of Merton Lane and West Hill are asserting themselves. Daffodils and birthday cards are not far away. First there is ice.

Because all this is happening I have to swim with a little more frequency. So on a Wednesday I escape to the pond. Swimming during the working week is like being on the outer reaches of the tube. It’s quiet, a little dreamlike, with unexpected space and silence. Two lifeguards look out over the water. The water lurks around 4c. The sun feels closer than it does during the darkest months, but the bright air, matching the frigid depths, doesn’t do much for the chills.

Once in, and whooping as usual, there’s the sky to enjoy. It’s huge and blue. Or white. Or grey. A giant A380 climbs drowsily out of Heathrow and flies silently above my head. The sun half-shines down on the green-black water. I can see my fingers slowly turning a shade of pink. The diving board, marked by birdshit, throws me back in again, and then that’s that.

While I’m getting changed a fellow swimmer notes my enthusiasm, smiles and says ‘So, you really like the deep cold. Ha!’

I find on leaving that I can’t quite do what I planned, which was to run back up to Highgate. A combination of legs and lungs won’t go that far today. So I walk-run, looking at everything so familiar yet so often seen through different eyes. I’ll be back twice more this week, chasing the depths, the deep cold.

Friday’s scheduled swim arrives. I wake up to the insistent thumping of rain on the skylight, and run out slightly reluctantly into the rain and the cold, but not as cold as earlier in the week. It’s dry exiting Highgate tube, and I fool myself into thinking things are milder generally, but the tell-tale 4c on the board posts a warning I don’t really heed. Below 5c things get a step harder. I decide to plough on and do what I usually do. At the mid-point of the swim I feel a long way from the jetty. The heron is hunched over in the far distance. No-one else is here while I swim. As I leave the water someone I know arrives. He’s got a great booming laugh and reminds me to smile about life and laugh along with him. It’s funny to keep bumping into him.

Come Saturday the sun is shining bright and clear but the air is even colder. Imogen suggests I take the tube to the pond rather than fuss and stress over getting to kids out of the house. The kids beam at this information and I feign hurt feelings. Maybe I arrive warm. I cross the matting which covered in rime and turn to face the water. My feet feel like they’re slipping in off the icy sideboards and I dive in more slowly than usual. The water feels fantastic all the way round. And then that’s it. Come Sunday the spell is broken for now for a few days. On Thursday, back again, another gent remarks, grinning, that February is ‘the coldest, the hardest. March is pretty bad too.’

The water, the weather, the air, the cold. Winter is blasted away this way.

This piece is posted in the hope someone might read it and help me make it better. I am sure there are missing elements and inaccuracies…if you can help, leave a comment or drop me a line…TH

Wir laufen ein in Düsseldorf City
Und treffen Iggy Pop und David Bowie
Trans-Europa Express
Kraftwerk, Trans Europa Express

A fragment of a great life. David Bowie, in between concerts in 1976, travelled from Zurich in Switzerland to Moscow by train, then on to Leningrad and Helsinki. He was with Iggy Pop and other associates of his. Photographs survive, showing Bowie in his pomp, seemingly relishing this Soviet journey that would have seemed impossibly exotic, deep in the Cold War. The video to Kraftwerk’s minimalist tribute to the smooth international rail services of the time, Trans Europe Express, homages and unites Bowie, European rail travel and the retro-futuristic rhythms of electric trains clicking over continental railway lines.

On reading Carol Devine writing briefly about this journey on Calvert Journal, inspired by a comment on the YouTube video for Trans Europe Express, then reading some more on Alan Paul’s site, where there are also some fantastic photographs by Andrew Kent, I became curious as to the logistics of it. Here’s one of the world’s most famous men, albeit one whose reluctance to fly had led him to take the Trans Siberian Railway home from Japan to London in 1973, finding a few days spare in his diary and taking a few mates on a mad railway jaunt into and through the Soviet Union. This wasn’t really the done thing. So how did he do it?

In fact, it was possible to travel to – or more easily through –  the Soviet Union. Both entry visas and transit visas were free, and it seems that Bowie was aware he could get visas for a through journey to Helsinki which involved stopping in the two great metropolises of Russia. So while he’s not around to ask, Bowie could in theory (I think) have bought a ticket to Moscow in Zurich, and travelled north and east from there. The details of the journey suggests that he did just that. The connection entailed hints at a deeper piece of planning, a cunning adventure squeezed in, or possibly a concert itinerary designed on purpose to allow for such a jaunt.

Trying further to tie together Trans Europe Express and this journey, I picked up an old copy of Thomas Cook’s Continental Timetable. I couldn’t find one from 1976, but did get one from 1974. It’s little different in format from the European Timetable published today in many ways, so it is also safe to assume that the information didn’t change that much in two years.

As well as the striking abundance of car-carrying trains across Western Europe – now largely extinct – the other big change since then is the growth of high-speed services since the 1970s replacing the flagship trains of European rail, the Trans Europ Express (TEE) services. These first class only trains at one point comprised 45 services, connecting 130 cities.

Of course, crusty inter-railers would have had to pay a supplement (forever to be said in a French accent with memories of summer de-training incidents: ‘il est necessaire de payer un sooplemon’ ‘je n’avez pas le monnaie.’ ‘au revoir, stinkies!’ (thud onto platform, bags following). Gradually in the 80s and 90s the TEE network contracted, as more trains carrying second class carriages were added, before being disbanded in 1995. In 1976 however it was the way to travel. Did Bowie, Iggy and co hop on the TEE service from Zurich to Vienna? From there, they would certainly have aimed for Warsaw, and picked up the Ost-West Express on to Brest, Belarus – then of course part of the Soviet Union – and then into Moscow.

Alan Paul’s entry on this trip details the briefest of stopovers in Moscow before continuing on to Helsinki, where Bowie arrived a day later than expected. The picture that emerges of Bowie the traveller is of someone who squeezed in adventure where he could, and therefore had to plan quite specifically. Whatever and however, it seems unlikely this trip was made in error.

Was I really here?

On landing, with the Danube glowing soft rich orange in the evening, and into a taxi and the darkening day.

And the traffic so bad I was considering getting out and running ten miles, and did five, or less, or more, much of it along three-lane roads clogged with buses and military vehicles.

‘Most? Marakana? Marakana?’

Over a river, the Sava, across a vast suspension bridge, and into the city, and through a park whooping at the exhilarating daftness, the absurdity a kind of rebellion and release. You go your ways, this is my thing to do, my wonderful way of life.

A hill too long and steep and traffic-ridden to run up. Past columns of soldiers marching away, then down quiet alleyways, and then I hear it, the noise of the Marakana, the sustained roar at kick-off, the ups and down like a flock of birds, a hive mind of sound. The floodlights glowing first distant, the closer.

The dash to the turnstiles, and removed of half my stuff by a zealous bag search, some understandable and some strange. And then into the ground, where a match plays out like it’s the most normal thing in the world.

The banner at the start of the second half. Byzantium in Belgrade. A sending off. A goal. A goal! So that’s what we’re here for. Great goal by the way.

The final whistle and the RSB fans staying behind for an hour to continue with their choreography, their songs, flags and dancing, drums and chanting, hankerchiefs and shirts being waves. After 90 minutes we are released to, and Dad and I slip between coaches ferrying fans back into the city and walk through quiet streets back to our hotel, past the Partizan floodlights.

The next morning we are to leave and I know I will see almost nothing of the city. Itself a further act of nose-thumbing at myself. I wake up with sore legs and groggy from lack of food. The taxi is here. The day is bright and the colours on the motorway to the airport are autumnal oranges, yellows and reds. At one point the Pannonian Plain opens up to the north, an endless bread basket for thousands of years.

There isn’t any more for now but there doesn’t have to be.