Snails galore at Cluis

I thought that was weird right away. The central green of this little Berrichon town is decorated with three big stone snails.

But then I thought if La Chatre had bronze sheep, and Rouen had concrete cows, then Cluis having snails wasn't quite so strange.

I went into the little microbrewery on the square and was invited to have a glass of snail slime. That was very weird.

("La Bave du Luma" turns out to be a quite acceptable strong bitter, brewed by an expatriate Brit who knows his stuff.)

And then found out that every year has a Fete du Luma, or Snail Feast, with a huge motorised snail leading the procession. (Luma is local dialect for the edible snail, 'escargot' everywhere else in France.)

Someone's back garden has a little traffic sign, a triangular red bordered sign with a little black snail - 'warning! snails!'

Someone else has curtains with little snails drawn on them.

Everywhere you look - snails!

Apart from the snails, Cluis turned out to be a fascinating little town. The splendid old manor house has been turned into the Mairie, there's an ancient church with some nice glass, a splendid medieval timber covered market, and a huge old fortress in the valley below whose pinkish walls are impressive even in their state of ruin. The town was a stop on the pilgrim route to Santiago de Compostela, so you see a couple of scallop shells contesting the snails' hegemony.

But it's the snails I'll remember!

FOMO vs really missing out

After YOLO comes FOMO. Nasty little abbreviations, but FOMO is definitely nastier than YOLO. Fear Of Missing Out is insidious. It's a distant cousin to the deadly sin of Envy; it's anti-Zen, anti-spontaneity, anti-life.

I see FOMO travellers all the time. They want to pack the whole of India into three weeks. They end up seeing nothing but tout-infested tourist traps. They see the Taj Mahal at dawn and they're out of there by lunchtime; they never get as far as the Himalayas, and they miss out on the delights of small town India.

FOMO travellers get bored when they're somewhere like Luang Prabang. They say 'There's nothing more here for me to see', or 'It's not Bangkok', or 'too many temples'. They don't talk to the monks, they don't go along to chat to the Laos learning English at Big Brother Mouse, they don't get to know one special Sandwich Lady on the market.

I admit to having some of the characteristics of FOMO travellers. I always want to do too much. I always want to see everything. But I've learned to take my time. (And okay, I have time, since I made travelling a priority and rented my house out to do it.)

Because if you're always afraid of missing out, you will miss out.

• Your schedule will be too full for you to decide to stay for a week in that place that really speaks to you. It will be too full for you to tiptoe into a music class and decide that playing dulcimer is something that's worth missing the hill tribe visit out of your Thai  itinerary. It will be to full to have lunch with a nice Burmese history teacher in a little cafe near Shwedagon Pagoda, instead of eating in the tourist place with everyone else.
• You'll miss the thing you didn't know was happening. At Palitana, I so nearly missed the great mela - its date changes from year to year; I decided at the last minute to stay for another two days and walk the great pilgrimage with thousands of Jain devotees. I ended up being water-pistolled cool, given rose-scented towels, and entertained to some of the best Indian cooking I've ever had.
• You'll miss the delight of becoming a temporary local. At Orchha I was invited to play karrom with Ram Babu and his sons, to become the official photographer for a local wedding, and to join a family picnic for a little boy's birthday. I even got a personal brazier and massage from grandma when I came back wet and cold from an expedition to Gwalior that turned into an out-of-season monsoon.
• You'll miss being able to sit down and just soak in the spirit of the place. There's a stand of ancient trees somewhere in Ladakh where I sat for two hours, just because it made me happy.

Okay, you may not have six months to travel around India, as I did last time. But leave yourself some space for the special things to happen. Get to know one small area well, or get open tickets so you can change your plans on the fly, and above all, know that the guide books and the '100 things to see before you die' (or 300 things, or 1000 things) are not meant specifically for you - and that what you love may be very different from what's in the guidebook.

In which spirit, things I'm glad I've seen and experienced, but that were never in the books:

• the cats of the book bazaar in Istanbul, and their special cat drinking fountain,
• the Japanese chanting monk at Rajgir who invited me to chant Nam-myoho-ren-ge-kyo along with him,
• the box of kittens in a cafe in Meknes, and the brothers we met who look after 22 cats between them and scrounge offal from the butchers to feed them,
• Buddha's birthday celebrations at Temisgam, Ladakh, with traditional dancing, spicy lunch, and the chance to scramble around some very steep scree,
• dancing and singing with a brass band at Shivatri Mela in Pachmarhi,
• visiting a goat farm on the Sentier Cathare and seeing kittens and kids playing together in the hay,
• lying on a comfortable big boulder on the Way of St James in the Massif Central, watching the infinitely deep blue of the sky and feeling happily lazy,
• seeing a flock of goldfinches on teasel, somewhere near Nasbinals,
• finding the Mestre rowing club outing on Torcello and getting a ride in a gondolino over to Burano,
• talking to 'Mr Heatwave' in Asbyrgi and finding out why Icelanders don't wear shorts in April,
• getting invited up to the organ loft in Saint-Bertrand-de-Comminges and staying there till midnight,
• spending all morning with a friend of my landlady's quartering Sofia in search of a gaida (Bulgarian bagpipe) - and just as we'd given up hope, finding one to buy,
• talking someone at the Buddhist Photo Archive in Luang Prabang and finding out there's a picture of him as a young monk in the exhibition,
• marching on a French Musicians' Union demo (and finding my partner in the process).

 

Two churches in Berry - Gargilesse, Le Menoux

I'm just back from a music festival, Le Son Continu at Chateau d'Ars, near La Chatre, in Berry - the heart of George Sand country.

Just getting up on Monday and driving home seemed an anticlimax. We needed some gentle meandering around Berry first, and fortunately the good people of the Berry tourist office (that's two departments, Cher and Indre, working together) were at the festival with lots of information and a splendid fuchsia pink 2CV. That gave us a couple of ideas for a day out; two interesting churches, and a bit of scenery en route.

So off we went, through Neuvy Saint Sepulchre with its wonderful round church (UNIQUE EN FRANCE as the sign on the main road proudly claims, in big capitals) round which the houses and towers huddle for protection from the truck-plagued main road, and by small lanes through the countryside. This is bocage, where every lane runs between hedges, and mature trees shelter lazy cattle from the sun, and even though the wheat is now golden and ready to harvest, the landscape still swims with green.

Gargilesse is a pretty village; church and chateau top the slope above the Gargilesse river, and small houses cluster around them, tucked into tiny declivities or straggling along the road. In the dusty square in front of the chateau gates, someone has made a delightful fern garden under a spreading tree. The tourist office has been installed in an ancient dovecote, the nesting slots patterning the inside walls starkly with light and shadow.

It's hot outside. As soon as I step into the church I feel the chill, and I see the green and black streaks of humidity on the walls. A huge painted Christ looks down at me from the apse vault. I look at the finely carved capitals of the crossing and I see Saint Peter - at first, anyway, I think it's St Peter holding up his key - then I realise he has a little fiddle in one hand., and when I look at the next figure, he's the same... and the next one... Then I realise, there are three of these fiddle players on each of the capitals, and there are four capitals on the inside and four on the outside, which makes twelve plus twelve... these are the Twenty-Four Elders of the Apocalypse, shown on the great doorway at Santiago de Compostela, but here, they guard the centre of the building.

Then I find dark steps leading downwards. The walls each side are slick and wet, and the wooden handrail feels vaguely sweaty. It's a mini-pilgrimage through the dark dankness, and then out into the blazing light and colour of the crypt. Almost every surface is painted; three great windows on the river side of the church, where the ground falls away, light the narthex.

A huge Christ of the Apocalypse biting a sword between his teeth scowls down on the sanctuary; the three Kings have crowns and neatly curled beards like Henry III of England on his tomb in Westminster Abbey (and he died in  1272, so perhaps that gives a date for the painting?). The dead wriggle and clamber out of their tombs as angels blow horns to announce the Last Judgment. This is terrifying stuff, nothing pretty about it; the later paintings, perhaps fifteenth century, show the instruments of the passion - the spear, the nails, the cross. Somehow the painters at Gargilesse always seem to have been concerned with the tough side of life, the torturer's art, the destructive and awesome.

When I came out of the church at Gargilesse I was struck blind by the glare of the afternoon sun. I felt I'd emerged from a strange undersea world of gloom and damp, from the subterranean folds of a grotesque brain.

 The church at Le Menoux couldn't be more different. From the outside it looks like one of those identikit small nineteenth century churches you find all over France; neo-Romanesque detailing, a slim central spire, all done in crisp and clinical white stone, with as little life in it as a technical drawing of a building.

Then you go inside, and psychedelia breaks loose. Not what you were expecting, at all. (Unless, of course, you had that useful little booklet from the Berry tourism people.)

 When Bolivian artist Jorge Carrasco arrived here in the 1960s it was a dull whitewashed space. By the time he'd finished with it, it was a glorious chaos of colour. Only the slender ribs of the vault and the arches of the windows and side chapels are left white, both emphasising the lines of the architecture and bringing a little spaciousness and light to the design.

Amazingly, despite the psychedelia and bad trip imagery that would have suited Hunter S Thompson, the church breathes a spirit of contented peace. Light pinks, pale spun gold yellow, the intense blue of a twilight sky, come to life as the sun comes out from behind a cloud. In Le Menoux, nothing stirs, except two gardeners working on a strip of lawn, and there's not even a breath of wind; in the church, colours swirl, the universe is made and remade over and over.

 

It's difficult to imagine two churches so different. But Le Menoux is just what a medieval church would have been like - an explosion of colour and imagery. The frescoes at Gargilesse have faded; would their colours originally have been as saturated and as shocking as Carrasco's?

Watching the stained glass

We spent tonight at a concert in Saint Pere, Chartres, given by the Instrumentarium of Chartres. The Instrumentarium has commissioned luthiers to create musical instruments modelled on the sculptures and paintings in the cathedral, and the concert brought together the different sonorities of instruments and voices in this medieval church.

What fascinated me was the change in the stained glass. When we went into the church just before nine in the evening, the sun was golden, and the yellow stain and deep red of the windows glowed like flame. Even the roof was gilded with the light.

Half an hour later, the same windows seemed bleached, huge areas of white predominating, and the cool blues more prominent than the red or yellow. It was as if the temperature had dropped.

Later, Chartres en lumiere saw the glass lit from the inside. (The photo below is from a few years back. Chartres en lumiere sees the city lit up at night from April to October, until midnight, when the fairy cathedral turns back to stone.)

Most of the time, when we go to look at stained glass, we see it for five minutes. (Even worse, we see it in a museum, with a standardised, level light behind it.) But when you sit beneath a stained glass window for an hour or more, during a service or a concert, you begin to understand how its moods change; how the colours shift and shuffle, according to the sun and the weather. It's like the difference between meeting someone once, and knowing them so well you can tell what they're thinking just by looking at their face.

I think there's a message here for any traveller: take your time. Stay in a place long enough to see its different moods; the way a town wakes up, gets going, spends the long tired hours of a hot and dusty afternoon, prepared for night. See it in different lights; sunrise, sunset, the lurid stormy light of a sudden squall, or the slanting tearful light of a moist evening. You can hit five temples a day in India, but you'll never understand as much from that kind of travel as you will from spending a whole day in one of the great temples, like Meenakshi's in Madurai, or the Vipaksha temple in Hampi.

And when you take your time, you'll find one time when you get through the tourist appearances and see the place for what it is. Like the early morning in Pushkar, when I saw the sweet sellers stirring their cauldrons of halwa and heard shopkeepers singing 'Hari Krishna, Hari hari' on their way to work, or the indie concert I heard in a little cafe in Malang, Indonesia, which ended up with my being introduced to the artists and taught how to make 'rempah indo' spice tea.

Travelling in bookshops

Bookshops sell travel books, and in the case of some (Daunt's, on the Marylebone Road in London, or Stamford's in Long Acre) specialise in them. But this isn't a post about buying travel books.

Rather, I've been fascinated by how we can use bookshops to travel in time and space.

For instance: I had an hour to waste at Hualamphong Station in Bangkok before my train to Nong Khai could be boarded. So I did what I so often do when I'm waiting for a train at home - headed to the station press kiosk and bookshop, and browsed the magazine racks.

I don't happen to read Thai. Fortunately most of the titles are in English, even when the rest of the magazine is in Thai only (some have the occasional page in English, probably advertising). The pictures on the cover also give you an idea of what's inside.

And what a fascinating little journey I was on! Here were no fewer than three magazines addressing that little known (to farangs, anyway) niche market, the Thai Cowboy. On some future tour, I have to identify and visit some of these Thai Cowboys; I can't think of anywhere less like the Wild West, and Thais are not exactly ringers for the lonesome, rugged heroes of the western, but somewhere, on the trail of the lonesome banyan, a Thai cowboy waits for me.

Most tourists do know about Thai amulets. If you're a Buddhist you'll have been given a few. But I was taken aback to find a whole shelf of magazines devoted to amulet collecting. (Imagine someone took over your local WH Smiths and replaced all the home and garden and interior decorating section by magazines about crucifixes and St Christopher medallions - which one to buy, which are the most effective, how to spot fakes, how much to pay... That's the size of section I'm talking about.) It seems that Thai men don't do DIY, don't collect stamps, don't have model railways; they have amulet collections. (I say men: it's usually been men I've seen haggling at the amulet markets. I may be wrong.)

I was also pleased to see that Hello Kitty thrives in Thailand. Given the national love of pink, and the national love of cute, I should have expected it, but it was still nice when Thai ladies came over to admire my Hello Kitty watch (100 baht from MBK), and nicer still to see Hello Kitty stationery. Stationery shopping being, of course, just as good a way into a nation as bookshopping.

India is quite different. Station bookstores in India show you very well how this country has evolved into a masterly agglomeration of cultures, taking in influences and conquerors alike and popping them into the pot where they simmer down and, in their turn, become Indian. First of all you get a mix of languages from English (US version), English (UK version) and English (Indian version) through Hindi to the 'local' languages whether Gujarati, Bengali, Telegu, Malayalam, Tamil...

And you get a weird cultural mix. Lots of management magazines - India is in some ways a technocracy, where business schools have immense pull on the imagination and Chetan Bhagat's clever novels of a modern India of callcentre workers and computer geeks are to be found everywhere - jostle for space with devotional texts or the Mahabharata told for children, cool white shirts and office blocks with technicolour pastels of dancing gopis, and warlike Shivas in electric blue. There are railway timetable books that look as if they've arrived from the 1950s with typography and paper quality to match, though alas there are no steam trains in their pages any more, and local papers for which Dilli door ast* might be a suitable motto.

And travelling in time? For that you need a secondhand bookshop, like Poor Richard's, in Felixstowe. There  are fewer of them than there used to be, even on the Charing Cross Road, the name of which used to be synonymous with secondhand bookshops, but a good one will still take you back through time, and teaches an interesting lesson in humility if you have the patience for it.

Secondhand bookshops give us glimpses of what was fashionable once. The date of that 'once' varies from shop to shop. In some, you find the earlier 20th century; no Joyce, not much Woolf, but huge piles of Hugh Walpole, Maurice Baring, Somerset Maugham. In others, the 60s and 70s; lots of Roots, Fear of Flying, Valley of the Dolls. (And once, gloriously, an original Whole Earth Cookbook which I snapped up for a quid.) If you wanted to compile a piece on popular culture of a particular date - or rather, middlebrow culture, not the pulp fiction or the Mills and Boon - you couldn't do better than to start with a good secondhand bookshop.

The humility? When I look at all these books, and when I consider how very few of them are still regarded - how very few have anything much to say to us now, and how many have sunk without trace - it makes me feel very humble as a writer. It makes me, almost, despair.

It's the antithesis of the great library. A great college or royal or museum library is like a heaven for books; a great illuminated psalter, a Newton or Blake manuscript, first editions of Scott or Tennyson or Beckett, can make us all dream. The signature in the front of a neat little Aldine printed text, 'Sum Erasmi', suddenly brings you close to that great humanist. But a secondhand bookshop is the purgatory of books, where they wait in fear and trembling, destined perhaps, eventually, for heaven... but more than likely for the yawning gates of hell and its eternal fires (or more probably the slow mouldering of landfill).

Of course the reductio ad absurdum of all this is the plethora of copies of Fifty Shades of Grey now to be found in charity shops, replacing How to Dress which was the charity shop book of five years ago and the rag rolling paint books and Kaffe Fasset knitting and embroidery books ten years back. I did enjoy Oxfam's wonderful idea of turning all those copies of Fifty Shades into a fort.




* Dilli door ast - 'Delhi is far away': the words of Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya, 

A few hours spare... in Bangkok

I used to hate that last day of travelling - a day when I have to check out of my hotel, when I have a bit of spare time before going to the airport, but not really much, when I don't know what to do with myself. Just a few hours spare. Or the little bit of a day after I've checked in, and before I have to do anything or go to the trade show... What on earth to do with that bit of spare time?

Now, I find that most cities offer interesting small delights that can make a few spare hours into an intriguing voyage. So I've started writing up a few of the "side dishes" for cities I know reasonably well.

I'm kicking off with Bangkok. It's a city you're more than likely to have a bit of spare time in, since it's an airport hub for much of South-East Asia, not just Thailand. What can you do with not much time?

• Take a trip to Suan Pakkad Palace museum. It's a sweet little museum which makes its home in a number of old wooden Thai houses around a lawn, in the shadow of the skyscrapers. You can watch a battle from the Ramayana played by miniature dolls of Thai actors in their traditional masks, or be dazzled by the reflections in the lacquered pavilion. It's just enough of a museum to fill an hour or two, with a nicely relaxed atmosphere and friendly curators. It's not too far from Phaya Thai station, so quite easy to reach.
•  Feed the turtles and koi carp at Wat Prayoon.  The Wat is on the Thonburi side of the Memorial Bridge, a brisk ten minute walk over the bridge from the boat station. The pond surrounds a miniature mountain, a little mound built up as a landscape with tiny temples and Buddha statues in niches, and despite the traffic roaring by outside always seems peaceful and secluded. There's also a fascinating Buddha museum and a huge white stupa like a wedding cake, which can be climbed up (and into; on the way out, you have to crawl through a tiny doorway).
• Another really strange stupa is the Loha Prasat, just off Ratchadamnoen Road. This construction's metal spires give it a prickly, spiky outline quite different from anything else in Bangkok, but it's the inside that is really weird, with its maze of vaulted passages and spiral stairway. 
• Take the boat up to Nonthaburi and back. Nothaburi has a huge, sprawling wooden museum (originally a public school) that's one of Bangkok's great unsung architectural wonders, a garish Chinese temple on the waterfront, and huge numbers of seafood stalls on the riverside promenade.
• Visit Wat Kalayanamit over in Thonburi (there's a cross-river ferry from the Ratchinee boat station). The courtyards are filled with Chinese pagodas and statues  - originally ballast in Chinese trading ships, but adopted as objets d'art by the Thais - and the oversize Buddha has almost outgrown the temple.
  
•  If you're based anywhere near Khao San Road, make your way to Wat Bowoniwet and stroll through the grounds. This is one of my favourite temples in Bangkok; it's a packed site, and there's always something happening (the first time I was there, people were visiting to pay their respects to the Supreme Patriarch, presiding in his funeral urn; he wasn't cremated till two years later), yet it never seems crowded. and I often have the chance to chat to one of the monks or caretakers.

In praise of small museums: the Whipple, Cambridge

It's a steampunk dream: cases full of clocks, regulators, astrolabes, pocket sundials, clockwork models of the universe, and even, upstairs in a plush little Victorian parlour, old children's toys like the zoetrope.

I don't think the Whipple Museum was really intended for aesthetic appreciation. It's a serious museum dedicated to exploring the history of science, and its collection of scientific instrumentation is intended to show the development of scientific thinking and practice; it's not an art gallery or an amusement arcade. But then, on the other hand, there's nothing stopping you from regarding it as either.

One of the great things about the Whipple is that it's a museum that positively encourages different approaches. For instance, in one room there are 'high density' displays - chests of drawers devoted to particular topics - and you're welcome to pull the drawers out and peruse the objects inside. If you want to take your time studying one particular subject, you can. I spent nearly half an hour looking at antique sundials, many of them incredibly elegant little works illustrated with wind-puffing cherubs or Biblical stories. There were pillar sundials, folding sundials, polyhedron sundials, sundials ranging from very simple to terrifically complex, even nocturnal dials. They are utterly fascinating.

Or there's the 'Victorian parlour' which shows how scientific ideas were manifested in children's toys and parlour amusements - the zoetrope, magic lantern, stereoscopic viewer...

Or you can sit down and read a book, or one of the many information cards scattered around the museum. This isn't just a museum for looking at things; you can read up on a subject, peruse the catalogue, or look at a theoretical text which explains the science behind the object in the case. That information isn't restricted to paper - you can look up objects on the museum's database, too.

I hadn't expected to enjoy my visit nearly as much as I did. I wish more museums would offer visitors the range of interactions that the Whipple does. This isn't a glitzy museum with lots of videos and push-button interactive displays - it's quite simply laid out in a fairly traditional style - but someone has applied serious thought to enhancing visitors' experience and helping them to investigate and understand the exhibits.