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.

The shape of a hill

For some people, the attraction of a mountain lies in its height.

(Interestingly enough, manufacturers of fountain pens subscribe to this school. So Montblanc nibs are inscribed 4810, Platinum has a 3776 series celebrating the height of Mount Fuji, and a Taiwanese company has 3952 for Yushan.)

But for me, the shape of a mountain is more important. I don't just mean its shape as you look at it, but as you walk it, too. In fact, some mere hills are for me more delightful than any mountain because of the shape of the terrain.

Take the Malvern Hills, for instance. Walk along the Malverns and you're walking along a dragon's back, up and down and along, on a ridge with flat land both sides - one side looking over the Severn Valley all the way to the distant Cotswolds, and the other looking over to Wales and the Brecon Beacons, and the assertive blunt nose of Hay Bluff.

Pen-y-Ghent is one of my favourites, with a snub nose and a long tail. If you're walking the Pennine Way you can climb up the steep face almost like a staircase and then yomp joyfully down the other side. Ingleborough, with its tiered, stepped profile, is almost like a Mayan pyramid or a slumping ziggurat. Seen from another angle, it's a sleeping lion with its head on its paws.

Out of the three Yorkshire peaks, it's Whernside I find disappointing - though it's the highest; it just seems to be a long sprawl of rock.

Even Munro-bagging, not all peaks are equal. (Let's aside discussion about which peaks are actually Munros and which are subsidiary peaks, which quite often appears to be a discussion about aesthetics rather than height.) Schiehallion's big bulging cone of rock gave me more pleasure than many much higher mountains. Loch Tay's horseshoe - Beinn Ghlas, Ben Lawers -  arches away from you as you walk it; not only are the views over the loch particularly fine, but the view seems to keep organising itself so that you always enjoy the vision of that outswept ridge with the peaks strung out along it.

Higher mountains often come in several stages. You're only aware of the part you're on; a glacier, a scree slope, a subsidiary peak. Hills, on the other hand, are often simpler; you can appreciate them as a whole. A tiddler like Glastonbury Tor has a more sharply defined and readily identified character than many full scale mountains.

And so, of all the mountains I can think of, Fuji is the one I really want to climb. Fuji with its simple conical shape, the icon that appears in the prints of Hokusai and Hiroshige, the mountain so recognisable that Hokusai sometimes seems to hide it away in a kind of ukiyo-e 'Where's Wally?', seen through a trough of waves or a haze of cherry blossom.

Why I hate the bucket list

The bucket list is, in essence, an admirable thing. If you knew you had six months to live, what would be the things you'd really want to do in that time?

Would you read War and Peace, or Ulysses? Visit the Galapagos, or climb Everest? Or make peace with the family of that auntie your side of the family never speak to, and no one can remember why?

However, most bucket lists don't look like that. They look like this:

• Macchu Picchu
• Taj Mahal
• Everest
• Eiffel Tower
• Venice

And I have a problem with that. Several problems in fact.

First problem: it's not personal. It's just another consumer list, like '1000 places to go before you die,' which, if you think about it, is itselfa depersonalised bucket list.

A personal bucket list might have some of these sites on it. But it's more likely to have a theme, or a number of themes, depending on the person. For me, it would include a couple of deserts and some far off the beaten track Buddhist monasteries in Ladakh, Lahaul, and Arunachal Pradesh. For one of my friends, it would include a couple of Formula One racing tracks and two Belgian breweries. For another, it would be filled with places he'd visited through the years and wanted to see one more time.

Second problem: it devalues everything else. In particular, it devalues spontaneity. (I've just seen a bucket list template which includes 'got married' and 'got divorced' on it. Frankly, if I had six months to live, I wouldn't go out and find someone to marry just so I could divorce them within the timeframe and tick the items off. But the creator of the list obviously thinks I should.)

I once sat for an hour watching a Buddhist monk create butter sculptures in a room in Spituk monastery, hearing the song of the ploughmen drifting up from the fields in the Indus valley below. That memory still fills me with joy; the Taj Mahal, on the other hand, was just a building. That's the problem with bucket lists.

And the third problem? They're such good vehicles for marketing. The places you have to see "before you die". (Well, put it this way, I'd be extremely interested if any PR sent me a story with places to see after I was dead.) And as always, they'll be places where someone has a luxury tour, a package holiday, or a resort - a way of neatly ticking off these items without actually learning anything or being challenged.

Oh, and the fourth problem. Why wait until you're diagnosed with something life-threatening to find the time to travel? (And then of course you probably can't, because you won't be able to get travel insurance.) Do it now!

I think, really, it's time to kick the bucket list.

Damn fine coffee, and why I like Thais

Sometimes the nicest little things are tucked down back streets, and it's just luck that you find them.

I found the loveliest little coffee shop purely by chance last time I headed into Bangkok by train. The train from Chumphon arrived at silly o'clock in the morning, far too early to check into my hotel, so I decided I'd walk from Hualamphong station to Marine Department dock, and take a leisurely boat up to Phra Arthit pier.

Just as I got to Si Phraya I saw a little coffee shop, Set Up, and thought: I could really do with an iced coffee. It would indeed Set me Up.

Now, iced coffee in Thailand comes in many varieties. Some is just Nescaff granules mixed up with evaporated milk and ice. Some is espresso with ice. And some is really damn fine coffee on ice cubes.

This one gave me a hit of pure arabica - those rich, chocolatey, almost sweet flavours combined with the slight dryness of roasty-toasty not-quite-burned beans. A wonderful aroma, too. All this for, if I remember correctly, 45 baht, which is a bit more than a euro and a bit less than a pound.

Anyway... I like to let people know they're appreciated, so I mentioned to the woman behind the counter that it was the best coffee I'd ever had in Thailand, except one - and that was on a coffee farm...

She clapped her hands, squealed, and leapt in the air with joy.

Now, that's why I love Thais. They are not cool. They don't do English understatement, or a Gallic raised eyebrow.

Yes, there are sulky Thais, and dour Thais, and I'm sure there are a few Thai curmudgeons. But Thai culture seems to encourage spontaneity and a sense of joy and fun. (A blog post brings Buddhist mindfulness into the equation as well in discussing what exactly Thais mean by 'sanuk', usually translated as 'fun'... https://talk.xpat.life/23509-what-does-sanuk-really-mean-in-thai-culture/.)

As well as delivering the best coffee I'd had for a long, long time, that encounter was a source of pure joy.

The Belgian carnivals

This year I attended my second Belgian carnival, Aalst. It's a bit different from Binche.

Binche is all about the Gilles. Yes, there's a children's day, and a carnival parade, but it's the Gilles with their stuffed straw bellies and hunchbacks, their ostrich feather headdresses, green-spectacled masks, and clogs and bells, who are the heart of the carnival. Hear the snare drum, the stamp of sabots on cobbles, the tangling hollow sound of the bells, and the plaintive clarinet tune of the early morning as the Gilles assemble, one by one, and you feel something primitive and bloodstirring. There's nothing quite like that at Aalst.

Aalst is carnival as show. One local described it to me as "The Rio of Europe". Well, no samba bands, but I understood what he meant. The definition for a small carnival group here is "fewer than a hundred members". Some of the biggest ones have three or four floats as well as marching and dancing members.

Some of the small groups are genuinely small. We saw a couple of solo participants and a number of groups of only five or six, including the 'Gay Farmers' Group' on their pink tractors, 'Hell's Grannies' on souped-up mobility scooters, and the 'Allahschnackbar'. (Tastefulness and political correctness are very much not part of the Aalst carnival. To be honest, I wasn't very happy with the 'African' contingents. I doubt those would be allowed in Britain. On the other hand, blackface in Aalst is generally smudgy griminess and you couldn't confuse it with any attempt to look 'African' - it's simply dirt.)

There is a genuine satirical element to the carnival, too. I spotted at least 26 Angela Merkels, mostly considerably more buxom than the original, plus three Vladimir Putins and a couple of Obamas, (David Cameron was refreshingly absent, unless I just missed him.) The Belgian police starred with an example of how to get a police horse to go faster - put him in a jeep. (I got the impression this might actually have been the Belgian police taking the piss out of themselves, given that there was a real police car detectable under its disguise in that carnival group.)

As soon as we arrived, we saw a crowd of identically arrayed Carnival Princes. Now, there's only supposed to be one carnival prince - this year, Prins Dennis, whose spectacles became one of the leitmotifs of the carnival. But another contender for the position had threatened legal action - he was passed over because his exam paper was wrongly marked, he said. These Princes were of the view that anyone could be a prince; one told me they thought the whole idea of suing was one of the best practical jokes he'd ever seen.

Unfortunately for outsiders, a lot of the satire is expressed in Oilsjt (the local name for Aalst) dialect - even basic Flemish isn't going to help you. The message of the smoke-belching, grimy Volkswagen corporate limo, though, was easy to understand. The Spar cashiers with plastic penises on their noses remain a mystery.

***

The heart of Aalst, though, is the 'Voil Jeannette' or 'Dirty Janet'. Big Flemish men from below the age of legal drinking up to grandfathers, wearing women's clothing.

This isn't a transvestite or drag festival. Several of the Jeannettes were carrying banners that said (excuse me if my Flemish isn't up to the mark) 'Een voil Jeannet is geen travestie'.

The tradition stems from the fact that Aalst is an industrial town. It had a big brewing trade and a lot of factories, and a lot of factory workers, who weren't all that well paid. (A hero of Aalst is the catholic priest and socialist Daens who worked to improve workers' conditions.) No spare cash for carnival costumes. So they simply borrowed their wives' old dresses and anything else hanging around the house. And so the Jeannette costume has come to include:

• fur coats (preferably but not exclusively fake)
• big wigs
• bird cages
• herrings, often in the bird cages but sometimes in a pram or on the end of a fhsing line
• saucepans
• toilet brushes (one official carnival float had a massed band of drummers playing on bedpans with toilet brushes)
• lampshades, worn as hats
• big boobs, sometimes naked
• umbrellas, preferably lacy
• perambulators.

One Jeannet we met not only had the pram, s/he had a baby dangling from one tit. What was in the pram, then, we asked?

"Jupiler," she told us. "Want one?"

(Aalst used to have its own beer, Safir. That brewery was bought by a bigger brewery and closed down, though a few bars still show its name proudly above their doors. Jupiler is the big-brewery replacement.)

***

 Poor Jacques. He's game, I'll say that for him. But in the space of three days, he was given a dressing down for dressing down, and then liberally made up with bright red lipstick; kissed by a number of Voil Jeanettes; smacked with a very smelly herring; and given a garlic salt dressing for his hair "to get him in the party spirit".

I escaped most of this, though not the herring, nor the garlic salt. (It didn't wash off in the shower, either; I drove all the way to Tournai smelling like a failed culinary experiment.)



***

The Gilles may not be the centre of the carnival, as they are at Binche. But Aalst does have its Gilles. The story is an interesting one.

Once upon a time, back in the 1930s I think, there was a bunch of Aalst locals who had been to Binche and thought what a good idea the Gilles would be for a carnival costume. They could have picked Hawaiians, or cowboys, or chimney sweeps, or characters from Mother Goose, but they just happened to pick Gilles - nothing traditional about it. They won a prize. They thought hey, that turns out to have been a good idea, why not do it again next year? (I imagine that economising by not having to buy another costume next year might also have been a motive.) And eventually, the Gilles did become an Aalst tradition.

And in Aalst, they have women as Gilles. Progressive.

***

On my way back, I visited Tournai, and found to my surprise another tale of one Belgian city pinching a festival tradition from another.

I found out about it when I saw a delightful wrought iron shop sign, on which was written in gold 'Au siecle de Louis XIV'. This turned out to be where cabinetmaker Edouard Trehoux set up his shop.  But as a plaque on the facade told me, that wasn't his real claim to fame.


Making furniture was not enough to satisfy his artist's soul. After he visited his sister, a nun in Ath, and saw the giants there, he decided that Tournai needed its own giants, and he started work. In 1932, Reine Tournai danced in the streets for the first time, to be joined over the years by crusaders Lethalde and Englebert, the Princesse d'Espinoy, Louis XIV, Childeric ... and more recently, M Trehoux himself.



As a final twist in the story, M Trehoux has now been immortalised among the Tournai giants. And in a spirit of friendly rivalry, a few years ago the Tournaisiens decided to take him to the festival at Ath.

Deep vs broad travel

Travel broadens the mind, they say.

But I'm more interested in whether it deepens it.

It's easy to travel 'broad'. To keep travelling, to add country after country to the ticked off list, to "do the circuit". I was going to do that in Laos: Vientiane, Luang Prabang, Phonsavan, Champaner, the islands. It got cut short by a traffic accident which destroyed a small area of me, and more annoyingly (though less painfully) my camera, necessitating a trip back to Bangkok...

But I digress. That's travelling widely, and fast. At its worst, it becomes "If it's Tuesday this must be Paris." At its best, it gives an appreciation of different cultures and landscapes, contrasted, compared, tasted and savoured. If you spend a week in France, and move on to Italy, you quickly get a feeling for the different national characters. Or if you spend a few days in Venice, a few days in Florence, a day each in Siena and (say) Viterbo, and three or four days in Rome, you get a feeling for the very different periods of Italian history, and the different forms of art and architecture, though maybe not for regional cuisine or landscape.

Travelling deep is more difficult, particularly for people who have only two or three weeks to fit travel into their year. (I'm always amazed by affluent retired people who still stick to the format of the once a year, three week holiday. Why not set off on a real exploration?) But it can be done, and perhaps it should be done every so often.

Travelling deep is, for instance, just deciding to stay put in a small town for a week, or two, or four.  Get to know people. Walk around. Find the small places no one visits, or wander out into the fields. It helps, in fact, if you have a bit of work to do, so that if you have to stay in the whole morning and do a bit of technical writing or fire off a couple of emails, it automatically limits your ambitions.

When you first travel to a country you spend your time getting your bearings. For instance in Thailand, you get a feeling for how a temple is laid out; the outside wall, the ordination hall, the prayer hall; the way the roofs are stacked, the kind of ornament you see (mother of pearl, or lacquer, in red-and-gold or black-and-gold), the sort of chedis that you see, the way the monastic day is scheduled. And that's quite different, for instance, from the way a Burmese pagoda is often organised, with one very large chedi at the centre, and the other buildings laid out in a square or a ring around it.

But when you travel deep, you start feeling the difference between temples that at first would have looked quite similar to you. You feel the differences in atmosphere - the reclining Buddha of Wat Pho is elegant and sqweet and mystical, the Buddha at Wat Kalanayamit is impressive and crammed into a temple far too small for him, the passageways of the Loha Prasat are strangely severe and resonant. You start getting little obsessions - I ended up adoring the little Chinese grey stone sculptures that turned up in Bangkok as ballast in Chinese ships, but struck a chord with the Thai sensibility (or perhaps Thais are just too economical to waste things), and trying to track down more and more of them.

At some point, of course, travelling deep becomes a permanent second home. A year in Provence becomes half a lifetime in Provence, if you let it. But then, that's not really travelling, any more.

Travelling broad gives us writers like Bill Bryson or Paul Theroux or Isabella Bird.

Travelling deep gives us writers like Norman Douglas or Freya Stark or Alexandre David-Neel.

Patrick Leigh-Fermor seems to be both, at the same time.


I travel deep in Bangkok, now. Every time I pass through, I find a new place to go. Last time I was there, I visited a little flute-making workshop in Thonburi and bought myself a rather lovely flute in beautifully figured hardwood - and got given refreshment, and a lift on the back of a motorbike to Wat Kalayamanit. I've bought stationery and hunted down old pens in Chinatown's stores and flea markets, I've visited the delightful little museum of Suan Pakkad, where delicate lacquered pavilions shelter in the shadow of skyscrapers and automatons play out scenes from the Ramayana; I've chatted to the Marine Department pier worker who told me about the Englishman who was the first head of department, and about Princess Sirindhorn whose birthday he was celebrating, and who showed me pictures of his travels around the country, while I waited for a much delayed boat; I've found tiny Chinese temples, and helped feed the turtles at Wat Prayoon with a little girl on her seventh birthday. I've also explored the Korean and Japanese restaurants of Banglamphu and Siam - you may be in Bangkok but you don't have to stay in Thailand, culinarily speaking.

I haven't yet got round to the Emerald Buddha or the Royal Palace. There's time.

And that's the thing about traveling deep. It does take time. And I haven't always got time. I'm hoping to head to South America next year and even though I hope I'll be able to spend a bit of extra time in some places if I like them a lot, I'm going to be striking out on some long journeys, because with the exception of Colombia, it's all new to me, and I want to get an idea of the length and breadth and size and spirit of that half-continent. There is a place for travelling broad.

It's just nice being able to choose.

In search of the perfect ice cream

Proust had his madeleine. I had a wonderful amarena gelato.

It sat in its dish with four dark, evil cherries in their liqueur. White ice cream rippled with the nearly black cherry syrup.

In the mouth, the cream was cut with alcoholic sharpness, the sweetness of syrup countered by the sourness of the cherries. It was a delight.

I started remembering all the great ice creams I've had on my travels.

The Turks make great ice cream. There was a salon near the pier on Buyuk Ada, one of the Princes' Islands, which served up visne (sour cherry) and chestnut ice creams; wonderful on one of those hot and golden summer afternoons.

Is it something to do with islands? There were great ice creams on Paros, too - and I remember a lovely gelateria on the Isola Tiberina, the little island in the middle of Rome.

Sometimes, in my memories, the ice cream glows in brighter colours than the rest of the memory. Of one stay in Siena, I remember the chants of the Palio winners - I'd arrived too late to catch the race - and the landlady's collection of owls, and a wonderful gelateria close to the main piazza, where I ate gelato stuffed with candied fruit that seemed almost an ice cream version of the famous panforte.

In a little town in Brittany I found a boulangerie which served up home made ice creams, including one with caramel salted with the local sel de Guerande I'd seen being raked from the salt pans earlier that day. Salt and caramel is a typical French flavour - the salt doesn't contradict but rather seems to sharpen and intensify the sweetness, and there's always a slightly buttery taste and feel to the concoction.

Then there are ice cream concoctions. I have no idea how Hello To The Queen got its memorable and rather odd name, but the mixture of bananas, chocolate and cream together with crumbled biscuits is always munchworthy and seems typical of backpacker India; I've never found it elsewhere. No one's even sure where it came from: a lot of people tell you it's Israeli, but Israelis say not, and it's not English, either.

Iceland has ice cream - which it should, given its name (and the ready availability of ice), though on a typical day as the rain lashes the grey Reyjavik streets you're not expecting a queue at the Valdis ice cream parlour. But a queue is what you'll find, none the less. And some weird ice creams: "Turkish pepper" is a favourite - licorice flavoured with pepper, threateningly off-black in colour, reminding me of some of the less inviting geological features I'd seen on my hikes around Iceland. Berries are at a premium, too - blueberries, crowberries, bilberries, are all popular.

Strange, though: almost everywhere else in the world I've had wonderful ice creams. But South-East Asia seems rather deprived. There's the occasional rather nice coconut ice cream, but for the most part, it's cakes that get the Thais, Laos, and Burmese going. I wonder why?