by A. A. Gill
The city has a deep, abiding rhythm. Gypsy violinists lurk wherever two tables are gathered. The ancient syncopated extortionists of Middle Europe, they stalk the alleys of restaurants and cafés with the insouciant mission of mafia hit-men. I watched one large, gold-incisored grinning fiddler intimidate a Japanese tourist with lightning bow work flicked past the poor man’s head like a samurai sword. His victim reached into his pocket and handed over his wallet. The violinist picked out three or four of the juiciest notes and bowed before shimmering off like a hungry shark, trailing Mendelssohn behind him.
I went to an afternoon concert in an Art Nouveau hall where Liszt had once played. The audience was immensely knowledgeable. There is a distinct pleasure in sharing music with people who know a lot more about it than you do. The orchestra knows it, they try harder and the conductor appreciates the applause more. And in the interval, they all trooped out and ate proper tiny opera sandwiches of smoked pig and hard cheese with gherkins and cocktail onions. I noticed that Joe Cocker was playing next month.
I’m haunted by Budapest now, its beauty, its sense of itself. Its café life, the music and the light on the Danube. In between Vienna and Budapest is Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia. It was closed. That’s not a joke. Really, it was closed. I was there for two days, and everything I wanted to see, from the Jewish Museum to the Hall of Mirrors where the treaty after the Battle of Austerlitz was signed, to the UFO Restaurant, a hideous communist manifestation that hovers over the ugliest bridge in the world, everything was closed. It was caught in that malaise of disconnected inertia that’s so often the legacy of communist countries. Places that sit and wait for someone to bulldoze them or give them a doughnut.
Bratislava has not got many tourists, but it does get the odd English stag party. My guide said that Slovakians tried to ignore them. ‘The English are the worst. There was a bad incident. An Englishman masturbated into the fountain in the main square, in front of everybody.’ Really? How awful. But I sort of know where he was coming from. You have to make your own entertainment in Bratislava, and hats off for managing to raise that much excitement.
Excess baggage
When it comes to travel, you are what you carry, or – more tellingly – what you leave behind.
One of the great mysteries of a traveller’s life is why is it that the amount of luggage carried is in inverse proportion to the net worth of the traveller. The richest people travel with the least. The first-class queue is made up of passengers holding nothing more than a thin watch. Business, they’ll be holding one of those hybrid cabin bags with a telescopic handle and detachable computer satchel.
Tourist is made up of families and students shoving vast suitcases, like slaves building a Samsonite pyramid. The most chaotic baggage hall I ever arrived at was Islamabad. The carousel was a revolving jumble sale, taller than a man. The wait and the exhaustion, the sitting in the frozen dark to get halfway around the world, had made most of the luggage give up the effort at being functional – it split its zips, broke straps, popped locks and vomited, eviscerated its contents into the steamy Pakistani afternoon. There were cooking pots and packets of spices and baby milk. Slithering intestines of wire that went with collapsed cardboard boxes and cheap electronics. Hair rollers, Teasmades, music centres and microwaves. There were the disembowelled paper parcels of meat. A collection of bar stools. Bundles of bras and big knickers. Children’s nylon bedtime animals. All spinning past a crowd of shrieking, shoving Pakistanis who were finally home after journeys of tortuous inconvenience.
In the most basic markets in Africa, there is always a stall selling large plastic carrier bags. They come in either blue or green tartan and look as if they’re made of recycled twine. I work with a photographer who calls them refugee Vuitton. You see them in every airport in the world slumped in corners, lost and separated, often impounded for the 101 infractions that are put there to stop the poor from being poor anywhere but at home. These plastic cases more than anything else mark them out as the globe’s slowest, most hopeful and fearful journeyers.
The answer to the conundrum, ‘why do the rich have least and the poor most’, is that the rich travel with nothing because they own everything. The poor travel with everything because that’s all they own. The rich man gets what he needs at the other end. The poor leave nothing behind.
I obsess about luggage, about bags and rucksacks, money belts and secret pockets, steamer trunks and water-tight compartments, camping equipment. When my flight is delayed and I have to wait four hours, I while away the time designing luggage in my head. In fact, I often try to imagine my head as luggage and wonder if I can pack it any more efficiently and what I’d leave behind if it didn’t fit in the overhead locker. Did you really need to take detailed knowledge of a Peninsular war campaign and how to skin and joint a rabbit to Malaysia? And you only need one anecdote about prostitutes and diarrhoea.
I collect bags and smuggle them home. I have to hide them. Usually I hide them in other bags. I have an irrational fear of being separated from my bag in transit. I only carry hand luggage. Hand luggage is in an endless Darwinian war of attrition with people who man aeroplanes. It’s a fight between passengers who want to carry as much as possible and an airline who wants to put as much as possible in the lost luggage pile at Schiphol.
I travel with another photographer who is equally exacting about packing. Most photographers are, because their kit is so delicate, provocative and plainly valuable. Once on a long flight of excruciating boredom we were whiling away the hours doing shadow packing and he said you’ve got to think outside the box. What do you mean? Well, what is a suitcase but a box. Think outside it. Outside it? It’s laundry. Outside the box it’s dirty washing. No, he said. What would you call a case with arms and a belt? You’d call it a coat. How many coats are you allowed to take onboard? I don’t think there’s a limit on coats. Exactly. Instead of thinking about small cases, we should consider bigger pockets. I reckon I could pack everything I need into a purpose-built coat.
He had a point. But wouldn’t you mind being intimately and thoroughly searched by every customs officer in every flea-bitten airport we stop at? Because walking through customs wearing a lumpy duvet like the hunchback drug smuggler of Amsterdam may save you 20 minutes waiting by the carousel but it’ll add an hour whilst rough men examine your secret places with a Maglite. But it’s not a bad idea.
I have one bag that has been to pretty much every continent with me. It’s leather, about the size of two rugby balls. It has a zip and handle and nothing clever or designed inside it. One thing you want to avoid in cases are designated or pre-assigned pockets and flaps, compartments. Think of a bag like a body and the stuff in it like organs. They keep themselves in place. I could travel indefinitely out of this bag. It’s like Noah’s bag – I take two of everything. Two trousers, two shirts, two jackets, two pairs of shoes, two books. Usually I’m going to countries that are hotter than London. Most places are. And I can wash as I go.
I like everything to be the same. Identical shirts and trousers and T-shirts. Every foreign correspondent I know is in a constant search for the perfect travelling kit. Exactly the right pair of trousers, the best shirt. Paring down and adding up the multiples of use. We travel with Tabasco and chewing gum and short-wave radios, Moleskine notebook, space pen. Silk sleeping-bag liners – essential for cheap hotels. A small light that will attach to your head, a stash of dollars. The interesting things are the small comforts that correspondents take. Comforts can become incredibly important. I once travelled with a guy who’d eat one jelly bean every night at 10 o’clock. He’d just put it in his mouth and sit very still until it dissolved. Personally I can’t travel with pictures of my family – they make me homesick and worried. But I always take a tiny goosedown pillow, which squeezes into nothing.
And one of my books will always be Herodotus, the father of history and travel writing. The collection of observation, prejudice, analysis, lies, supposition and brilliant colo
urful narrative, it has in it the essence and joy of discovery. And although we’re separated by two-and-a-half millennia he reminds me of the purpose and the excitement of travel. I also wonder what he travelled with. What did Ancient Greek suitcases look like? You never see them on the pottery or in the sculptures. They’re never standing there with suitcases or big packets of stuff tied up with baler twine. There’s never a man with a rucksack. The Trojan War happened without suitcases.
The Swede life
Civilised and attractive, yes, but there’s a contrariness at the heart of Sweden which is deeply alluring.
Paris in the spring, Gstaad in the snow, St Tropez in the sun, Roppongi in the dark. Everywhere has its season, its time. Except London. London only has one look. It’s always London in the rain. For people from drier climes I know that sounds a bit like boasting, but I thought you might like to share a moment’s precipitation porn because what’s damply suicidal for me might be a bit of a wet dream for you. It’s been incontinent here for weeks. Grey, feeble rain. Not strident, monsoonal, hard-arsed rain, but wimpy, prostate-dribbling double-wet fat drizzle, with the occasional bucket-load. Constantly. Everything’s overflowing: gutters, rivers, cellars and a lot of homes in the south-west.
Still, like Florida cheerleaders, London looks best when wet. The glinting granite and Portland stone has a rubber beauty: streets of swaying umbrellas under yellow afternoon neon. The city doesn’t look right in the sun. It’s like seeing your gran on the beach. The new bits that are revealed you’d really rather wish weren’t. But there is a lot to be said for visiting a place when you’re not expected.
I think the most magical time to see Venice is actually in the autumn, when the tourists have left. The domes and campaniles float in the mist, and the city becomes a quiet, morbid and mysterious place. The sounds of footsteps in alleys are muffled and there is the incipient sense of ancient guilt and troubled secrets. I always like seaside towns out of season. The gull-blown promenade, the shuttered amusement arcade, the terminal depressives walking sad dogs on the muddy strand, and old people in plastic macs with thermoses in the shelters watching the distant oil tankers.
By chance, I was once in Cannes when it snowed. I was there in December. December in the south of France can be beautiful. Chilly, but bright and clear. (In fact, the worst time to be in the Côte d’Azur is in August. Not just because everyone else in the world is there, but because the air is muggy, thick and tastes like a million Germans’ bad breath.) I went to a restaurant on the quay, and when I came out it had snowed and the whole town was pristinely dusted with a fine layer, like a magic confectioner’s final touch. The Croisette sparkled, the palm trees looked strangely biblical. It was a mixture of Victorian Holy Land and gothic Christmas carol.
And in the streets ran a horde of shrieking, ecstatic little North African boys. None of whom had ever seen snow before. To see something this familiar in the company of someone for whom it is astonishingly singular is one of the small pleasures of the world. The icing on the icing of the snow in Cannes was that only me and a handful of Algerian boys were there to see it. And that’s the other thing about turning up out of season. Everyone else has gone. If it had snowed during the film festival, it would’ve been slush before it hit the ground.
I’ve just been to Stockholm. Now, everyone, even the locals, said you should really come back in the summer when it’s hot and everyone’s in the water in boats and canoes and you can swim if you’re fast and hardy. Even in the summer it’s still the Baltic. And they all go to merry little islands in the archipelago and sweat and eat herring in a hundred different ways in the never-setting sun. And have saunas and spend their summer naked without ever staring at each other’s reproductive bits. That’s when you should come, they said.
December is not yet white, but the sun is only let out, like a prisoner on death row, for a couple of hours. It’s cold, and the wind whips off the water and ricochets through the narrow streets of the old town, eddying off the cobbles and buffeting the secure doors and shutters. But it’s this very pearly grey light and the sprightly coldness of the pewter sea and the occasional moments of pale golden sun slanting off the windows that make this city in a country of 14 bite-sized islands so memorably enchanting in the sense of having come up and caught it unaware, resting. The place is at home with itself and the natives go about their pre-Christmas business with their collars up and their guards down.
Sweden and the Swedes are such a well-defined global brand. The capable hands that feel out the lie or the boast in inanimate things make beautiful design. The people who are in many ways a social paragon, the class swots at the top of the world. Like St Augustine, who prayed to God to make him good, but not yet, we might all aspire to be Swedish. But please, God, not yet. They all have a utilitarian beauty and a thoughtful, measured fairness. They care for the details of life. Every knife and fork is perfectly balanced. Clothes fit well and do their job with a sturdy confidence. Things have straight edges, their latches latch, their catches catch. It is the meeting of the worthy man-made with the smooth and efficient man who rarely sticks at the joints.
The Swedes are the form that follow function. But just under the surface is a bright, very uncool hand-knitted kitsch, a thigh-slapping land of peasant superstition and goblin folklore. Sweden’s history is as hard, violent and unremitting as any in the world. Remarkably, they have created an enviably liberal state, but it sits like the crust on a pie. Scandinavians all seem to live with these binary contradictions. Empiricism with superstition. A sober rectitude and a fearsome drunkenness. Immense moral probity combined with a blush-making sexual liberty. There is a contrariness at the heart of Sweden that is deeply attractive. The balance of competing imperatives. It’s their success in maintaining both without either overwhelming the other that makes Stockholm such a very civilised and attractive city. It’s built on a human scale with human motives of trade, culture, inebriation, adventure and folk dancing.
I’m not making this sound like the most exciting place on earth. And it is a long way to go from almost anywhere you choose to get a lesson in civics. But it’s often the subtlest harmonies that stay with you the longest. The taste of Stockholm lingers. A Swede told me the city was planning to get rid of all its petrol stations. Isn’t that going to be jolly inconvenient, I asked. Well, a little, he admitted, but it’s a precaution against terrorism. Petrol stations might be targets for suicide bombers. He looked surprised when I burst out laughing, mentioning perhaps Swedes were not top of Al Qaeda’s devil-list. You think we’re not worth blowing up, he asked, hurt. It was a very Swedish concern.
At last, supper
People love to talk about what they would eat for their last meal, but it’s actually far more rewarding to consider one’s favourite cuisine.
Two double-cheeseburgers, two large servings of French fries, half a gallon of vanilla fudge ripple ice-cream. Or perhaps cheese pizza, cheese omelette, green peppers and onions, white cake with white icing. Now these probably aren’t anyone’s choice for a last meal, ever – except they were for John Schmitt and David Dawson, two executed American murderers.
Reading through the last-meal requests from death row is one of the most gastronomically and socially depressing things you can do. I really don’t recommend it. Rubbish food. Yards of enchiladas. Stacks of well-done steaks. Towers of pizza and buckets and buckets of fried chicken. Swimming pools of ice-cream, root beer, Coca-Cola and fruit juice. Tenements of pies and peach cobblers and vast ranges of chocolate cake.
Very occasionally you come across something out of the ordinary. Farley Matchett asked for four olives and wild-berry flavoured water. Arthur Rutherford had fried catfish and green tomatoes. Unusually for a last meal, he had it twice. The first time he was reprieved. The second time, not.
Philip Workman asked that a vegetarian pizza be delivered to a homeless person. The prison refused. On the day of his execution, Nashville’s Rescue Mission received 170 pizza deliveries.
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sp; These meals are small windows into the lives that led to their consumption. Almost everything in them, you could get from convenience chains or diners. This is food without grace, without joy, without hospitality.
Johnathan Bryant Moore’s life culminated in the self-inflicted dinner of Kraft cheese and macaroni and beef-flavoured Rice-A-Roni. Obviously, junk food doesn’t necessarily make a drug-addled premeditated murderer, but it’s an inescapable truth that with every last meal ordered at all executions over three years, not one of them was what you’d call home-cooked.
At the moment when a man might be expected to reach for comfort and a final taste of hearth and a family kitchen, something that his mother made, they only have franchised convenience food available. Almost all of it can be eaten with their fingers.
Only Sedley Alley, with an infantile pathos, asked for milk and oatmeal cookies. I was interested in this because ‘What would your last meal be?’ is one of the most common questions asked of food critics and chefs. Keen young home economists are always looking to turn out a celebrity cookbook of last suppers.
If your last supper includes something that isn’t fried or you need to eat with a knife and fork and it doesn’t come with ketchup or barbecue sauce or chilli, then it’s almost certain you won’t ever be asked to make the choice for real. Asking for a napkin to go with that would probably be grounds for a retrial. Bad food doesn’t lead to bad lives, but rotten lives eat rotten dinners.
I always dodge the last-supper question because I think it’s in bad taste. It’s one of those things like ‘Make up a list of the 10 sexiest women ever.’ You have all the anxiety of the choice but none of the pleasure of the execution. You’re never going to get a date with Uma Thurman and, in fact, your last meal will probably be an uneaten cold tomato soup.
Much more interesting from a foodie point of view is the question ‘Which food would you choose for the rest of your life, if you had to live with one other people’s national cuisine?’ You can’t choose your childhood food or a neighbour’s that’s too similar to make no odds. So if you’re Irish, you can’t say Scot. And you can’t just say Italian because everybody just says Italian and there really isn’t such a thing as Italian food: you have to specify a region.