Food on trains

The great days of train travel are gone, I think. In the 1970s train food was sometimes fantastic - except, of course, in England, where it was vile. In many capitals, the restaurant at the station was your best, most reliable place to eat; I remember a fantastic goulash at Zagreb station.

Few trains now have such good food. I rather like German sleeper trains for their quality breakfasts - a big warm roll with butter and honey, and strong bitter coffee. The plastic packaged croissant offered on the Paris-Rome train doesn't even come close.

And a few years ago I had a marvellous meal on a Hungarian/Austrian connection (we were travelling from Linz to Vienna but I think the service had actually started in Budapest). I forget what we ate, but there was a choice of a really good Spatlese wine and 5-puttonyos Tokaj, so we had both... no wonder I've forgotten the food!

Many German  trains still offer a very reasonably priced and well cooked hot meal (or at least did two years ago when I last travelled there). One of my favourites is the garlic soup - the garlic is roasted and then cooked in milk, so it's like a very gentle white onion soup, not aggressively flavoured.

GNER now does good food on the London-Edinburgh run, but at a horrible price - £35 for one person and that wasn't pushing the boat out, just a normal meal with a small bottle of beer.  Worth it if the boss is paying (he was). Anglian Railways did a lovely restaurant meal on many of their trains from London to Norwich, which you could wash down with local beer (Adnams, fortunately, not Greene King). But now One has taken over the route the  service seems to be less regular than it was.

Few French trains have  anything decent. Some just have vending machines. My technique in France is to find a good kebab or sandwich shop near the station (not in it) and grab something for the train. A few TGVs, apparently, are now offering a sort of packaged lunch you can order, but it's cold, and it's costly.

Italy is also  rather poorly served, at least on the trains I've been on. (I discovered a little trick last time I was in Milan, though - look for the restaurant where the off duty train drivers are eating!) By the way, as a part-time French resident, I am mystified as to why the Italians call croissants 'brioche'. It's like calling bread cake!
When I compare the various European rail networks, it's Germany, Austria and Hungary that seem to win the competition. The UK is too pricey - the English seem to have an idea that good food is only for the wealthy - and France and Italy too poor.

And that's odd.  I would have thought that the French would always beat the Germans  when it came to food, but when it's on a train, the Germans win hands down!

Tired of the city?

I used to travel a lot on business and often ended up with a 'spare' weekend in one of the cities I was visiting. Third or fourth time out, I got a bit fed up with Prague and Budapest. I was tired of the big city, and I wanted to see something a bit different. So I thumbed through a couple of guidebooks, and found a couple of side trips.

Most cities have some great escapes. Here are a few thoughts for how to escape the smoke and the traffic for the day:

• Paris. Take the pedestrian way from the Bastille out to the Chateau de Vincennes and its park. It's just a few kilometres mainly along the top of an old railway viaduct and it's a world away from the busy boulevards. Or take the metro to Saint Denis - the first work of the Gothic age in Paris, and the mausoleum of French kings, located in a gritty northern suburb near the gleaming arena of the Stade de France.


• Budapest - take the rail or bus to Szentendre - a little Serbian village on the Danube dominated by the fine spires of its orthodox churches. It was an artists' colony for years and still feels like it.


• Hamburg - an hour's train journey gets you into Lubeck, probably the most beautiful of all the Hanseatic towns of north Germany with its fine Gothic brick architecture.


• Florence - take a trip uphill on the bus to Fiesole, with its amphitheatre, old church, and fine views over the countryside. It couldn't be more different from busy, commercial Florence.


• Venice - get the boat that goes furthest out in the lagoon, to Murano, Burano and, eventually, Torcello. Torcello's fine Byzantine cathedral and baptistery are better known than they were, but if you wander round the island you can still find solitude in the moody marshes.


• Barcelona - take the train for about an hour to Girona, a pretty town on a hillside overlooking its river. The Gothic cathedral, 'Arab baths' and old Jewish quarter are attractive and you can still wander out into the country, though the city has grown recently.


• London has some fine country walks in Epping Forest, at the far eastern end of the central line (that's the red one on the tube map). Or at the other extreme, take a trip out west by train to Hampton Court, Cardinal Wolsey's fine Tudor palace stolen off him by King Henry VIII and used by the royals ever since. If you fancy a longer walk you can get lost in the famous Hampton Court maze.


• Frankfurt. Although it's a major financial centre, full of skyscrapers, Frankfurt has some decent medieval buildings and fine museums - and great cycle lanes! But if you're bored, then you can easily get to Mainz, with its marvellous Romanesque cathedral and fine baroque streets.


• Paris (again) - take a train to Chartres, with the cathedral and city on its hill over the river Eure.  Probably the best cathedral in the world, to steal a phrase from Carlsberg.

I'd be interested to see what other people can come up with. The idea is to find side trips that don't involve a car, that don't take up more than an hour travel each way and can be done easily in a day, so you're 'back home' in time for dinner.

Manhole covers and paving tiles

Sometimes the best stuff lies under your feet.

I'm not talking about underground sights, though some of those are fine - the Catacombs of Rome, the Moscow Metro, the Etruscan wells and shafts of Orvieto.

I'm talking about boring street engineering - the manhole covers, the tiles.

For instance in the Passeig de Gracia, Barcelona, all the paving tiles are copied from designs by Gaudi, with spirals and sea shells.

And in Reims, the town hall ordered special gratings with a fine wavy pattern, which have been used all over the city.

I wouldn't go a hundred miles to see them - but these little things often make me smile. And they do contribute to the feel of a place. And sometimes, as with the Gaudi design, they tell you something about the history of the place, too.

And some people take them much more seriously than me. Dan Heller takes pictures of manhole covers. Nice photos. Nice manhole covers. Worth a look.

http://www.danheller.com/manholes.html

Podtours

I've just launched a few more Podtours on my site. We already have Paris Sainte-Chapelle (shortly to be expanded to include the rest of the Ile de la Cité); Norwich, Salisbury, and Chichester cathedrals; Rouen and Chartres; Florence, Venice and Rome (baroque, medieval, and the Imperial forums).

I'm just adding Gloucester and Winchester Cathedrals, Gothic Barcelona, and Modernisme Barcelona. And I'm writing up Reims and Laon cathedrals for recording over the next few weeks.

Further out I'm going to be working on tours of Ghent and Bruges, and a drive-tour of "Norfolk 1450" focusing on the late medieval heritage of the county.

A challenge

There's a plaque on the city gate at Laon stating the distances to different places. Paris is 135 km away; Reims, 45; Chartres, 235. Rome is 1661 km.

And the real challenge? 4,300 km to Jerusalem.

"Vous  êtes à la porte de toutes vos randonnées" says the plaque - you are at the start of all your travels.

And so I am... thinking... 4,300 km at 30 km a day, let's say, is 143 days. Five months. Without allowing for rest days. And assuming I walked the lot; but I might take ship for part of it, as the medieval pilgrims did... And the route could go through Constantinople.

So, I might be at the start of a journey.  Next year in Jerusalem... But I'm going to need a lot of help to make it work!

Little brothers

Just back from a weekend visiting Reims and Laon - two fantastic Gothic cathedrals.

What's interesting is that each has a 'little brother'.

At Reims, Saint Jacques has just the same three storey elevation to the cathedral. But it's dumpy instead of breathtakingly tall, and that ruins the proportions.

At Laon, the former abbey church of Saint-Martin has two towers that aim at transparency in the same way as the towers of the cathedral. It doesn't quite manage the amazing lightness of construction though - the towers just look as if the windows were made too big.

It's interesting to see these 'little brothers', even though they're not great works of architecture. It's easy to walk into a cathedral like Laon and take it for granted. When you see Saint-Martin, you realise just how revolutionary, just how amazingly original and complex, was the cathedral mason's vision.

And I think, rich as Reims is, Laon is probably my favourite Gothic cathedral in France. It's full of light, spacious, transparent. It has the famous sixteen oxen that sit at the top of the towers, commemorating a miraculous ox that appeared when those pulling the blocks of stone up the hill to the cathedral couldn't manage.

And the towers have a secret. From below you can already see how complex is the design, with an octagonal top stage on top of a square tower, and square transparent turrets angled out from the octagon. But if you climb the towers (the local tourist office arranges ascents occasionally, and we were lucky) you'll see that the mason included a transparent round spiral staircase within one of those square turrets, creating yet another layer of complexity.

Laon is one of the earliest of the Gothic cathedrals. And yet here is a complete vision - a mason who knew exactly what he wanted, how to manage space and light, how to manage geometry.

And in the middle of the nave is his other secret - the shiny black stone which gave him all his measurements, a lozenge divided into rectangles whose measurements reflect the Golden Section. There must have been such stones in many other churches but I'm not aware of others surviving. And it's in roughly the same place as the maze at Chartres, which can in one sense be interpreted as a builder's claim on our memory (Daedalus, who made the original Cretan labyrinth, was the first of architects).

The price of bread

Visit a supermarket in England and it's the price of petrol which is usually proudly displayed outside.

Visit a French supermarket, though, and there's always a board outside with 'prix du pain' - the price of bread.

I think that reflects something about the French character. Not just the central place that food has in French culture, but importance of bread itself. After all, the rest of the world calls the baguette the 'French stick'.

Visit a French village anywhere and you'll find it has a boulanger - a baker's shop, and importantly,  one that's making its own bread. There's no 'Hovis' or 'Mother's Pride' here - bread is a local product, not a branded one.

Every meal comes with bread. Eat with a French family and you'll find the plates are already clean when they go to be washed up, because everyone has wiped the plate down with a piece of bread to enjoy the last of the sauce, gravy or salad dressing. (I have been told, though, that this is not polite behaviour - best not to do it at the Crillon or the British Embassy.)

Most foreigners think the French eat croissants for breakfast. In fact, they're more likely to have a 'tartine' - baguette with butter and, if you fancy real luxury, jam.

It's anathema to eat bread that was baked two days ago. Part of French life is that you should be close enough to the boulanger that you always have fresh bread. Of course, that raises problems when the baker goes on holiday - but in my local village, they have a nice little deal with the supermarket, which doesn't sell bread except when the baker's away.

And it still leaves the problem of what you do on Monday, when like all good local French businesses, the boulanger is closed.