My friends called Bamberg “biertown”, and I would soon discover why. We took the high speed ICE train down to this beautiful town in northern Franconia a couple weeks ago. It’s less than four hours from Berlin-Südkreuz to Bamberg, but I’d never been to Bavaria before. My good friend Coach Helder Gomes was giving a seminar that weekend, which gave me an excuse to spend a few days exploring the...
In 1982, Jonathan Raban bought a wooden two-masted sailing boat and circumnavigated England in a slow, wandering, unhurried way. He called this manner of travel “coasting”: moving along with the tide, letting the wind decide the direction of travel, and living “on the shifting frontier where the land meets the water and the water shades into the land.” According to his childhood schoolmaster...
My last London day was a short one. We had a flight to catch that evening, but there was still time to shift the scope of my trip back to books. Our first stop was Exmouth Market, and a late breakfast with Barnaby Rogerson, the publisher of Eland Books. I wanted to get his thoughts on travel literature. But that’s the focus of my next Adrift on the Continent column in Outpost, so you’ll have to...
The centrepiece of this packed London weekend I’ve been telling you about was two days of music with The Church at Bush Hall. I travelled by thought with The Church long before I ever set out on the road for real. I still remember where I was when I first heard their music. “Under the Milky Way” was rising up the North American charts in 1988. I was 16 years old, and sitting in my dad’s car...
We had a packed agenda on this 3-day London trip, but as luck would have it, there was a two hour window of free time on Saturday morning. It was just enough time to hop a Hammersmith & City Line train at Shepherd’s Bush Market, next to our hotel, and ride it to Hammersmith, where we picked up the bus to Mortlake. I wanted to visit the grave of one of my travel heroes, the explorer Richard...
I flew over to London last weekend for a packed 3 days of events. It was good to be back in one of the world’s truly great cities. My last visit was in 2016. I’ve often wondered if I could live in London. It’s such a fascinating city, with so much history packed into every single block and alley. I’m most attracted by the overwhelming opportunity to attend literary events, to make connections in...
I haven’t written a new blog in ages. Working on a book has kept me close to home this past year. But I took an afternoon away from my desk last week to check out an exhibit on the painter Max Beckmann at Potsdam’s Barberini museum. I was interested in Beckmann because of his influence on Die Brücke, that group of German Expressionist painters whose bold lines and strange colours remind me of...
My other reason for visiting Dresden was the art. We stopped at the Albertinum on our first day in town to immerse ourselves in contemporary art, from the Romantic period to the present. As we entered the cavernous main hall, past the staring heads of fragmented sculptures, I learned of two special exhibitions. The first was on a German Expressionist painter I’d never heard of: Carl Lohse. His...
I took the train down to Dresden a couple weeks ago. It was very clean there, and at first this unnerved me. There wasn’t any litter or graffiti around the main station either, or in the old town. A very un-Berlin sense of order reigns. I really didn’t know much about this city before my visit, apart from the devastating Allied incendiary bombing on February 13, 1945, so vividly described in Kurt...
“It must be up here somewhere,” I said, struggling through undergrowth that clung to my knees and shins. “The satellite photos showed a path running off to the left…” I could hear Tomoko crashing through the trees somewhere behind me, her progress punctuated by the occasional pause, followed by the click of the camera’s shutter. We had just passed a cemetery where the dull clink of the...
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