End of Winter Musings: Cold Nice

A series of warm sunny days and it feels as though the year is struggling towards the warmth.   My year seems divided into hoping for a hot summer and hoping for a cold winter, which is why perhaps I am constantly surprised by my own pleasure in autumn and especially spring.

In March 2005 we spent a few days in a thawing Nice.  The streets were narrow and cold and sharply, crisply, divided between bright sunshine and dense shadow.  The hotels on the way up to the Villa Matisse and the Musee Chagall seemed half empty and the streets seemed full of real Nicois; walking babies, exercising dogs in a tiny gravel park reminiscent of one of the more densely packed areas of Paris.  In the old town the sunlight was thin on the facades, a soft uncertain light picking up on the faded pinks and blues.  The churches were cold and smelled of old incense; the ice cream stall was doing a half-hearted trade, but down on the shingle there were American girls sunbathing.   We made the most of our few days and went out to Vence and St Paul de Vence to see Chagall's grave and Matisse's chapel.  In these Provencal foothills it was appreciably warmer.  

These memories seem quintessentially Mediterranean to me, recalling a time of thin sunlight and cold shadow, of the land turning towards summer, of the light sparkling on the sea.  

End of Winter Musings: Ionia

I have been reading Freya Stark's book Ionia, about her journeys and explorations on the Turkish coast of the Aegean.  She uses Herodotus as a guide and describes a landscape of abandoned cities and intense heat; herds of goats wander through buried streets, shepherds sit on carved friezes in the shade.  She sits on dry grass headlands next to ruined stumps of temples and gazes out to sea. Very appropriate for early spring reading, this evocation of heat, dust, the blue sea, Greek and Turkish history, lost and forgotten empires.  

But the book was written in the early 1950s and is itself now evocative of a vanished world. There are rumbles of present history in the book, the removal of Greek people from Turkey and the arrival of Muslim Macedonians to the towns.  And now much of this quiet pastoral landscape is buried again, beneath Turkey's holiday industry; I would like to overlay Stark's map of Ionian and Greek towns with a modern one of roads and holiday destinations.  This is the first book I have stopped halfway through and started again, so powerful are her evocations of small journeys to hot and abandoned cities.  

End of Winter Musings: Virginia

In a doctor's waiting room at the end of last year I found a copy of an American railway magazine and an article about railway lines in Virginia.  The article was illustrated with some good photographs which placed the railway in a broader landscape, so that the train was a tiny element in the huge wooded valleys.    The article was about the lines in winter and especially at night, so on the pictures the trains sent a small weak beam of light into a vast impenetrable snowy American night; the writer spoke of abandoned branch lines and ghost towns abandoned when the coal ran out; of towns abandoned by the railway which runs through them but never stops; of great loops of railway running up into the hills to derelict mining towns.  And all under a deep blanket of midwinter snow.  The writer conjured a time of winter darkness, cold, empty forests, closed towns, a weak train light getting stronger, the mournful blast of an air horn...

There is a magic and a poetry in lost railway lines; we have a railway spur here which has been closed since the 1960s; a summer walk, I think.