April 2012 – Stepping off the Treadmill

Dipping into Scotland

Tim has a lot of family in the U.K., cousins who he didn’t know when he was growing up. One of the driving forces of our trip has been to connect with family, to visit with them whenever possible and see where their lives have taken them.

Cousin Victor and his wife Ayleen live in Edinburgh, one of the great capital cities of the world. During the Enlightenment, the city spawned some of the world’s most influential thinkers. It continues to be a mecca for artists and scientists and is sometimes described as “The Athens of the North”. Apparently, Robert Louis Stevenson said “Edinburgh is what Paris ought to be.”

The protective Edinburgh castle, perched atop an extinct volcanic crag, guards the city.

The Royal Mile, the main pedestrian thoroughfare, stretches from the Castle to Holyrood Palace, nestled under the ancient volcano of Arthur’s Seat, “a hill for magnitude, a mountain in virtue of its bold design” (Robert Louis Stevenson).

Our first destination was Holyrood Palace, one of 9 royal residences in the U.K. “Treasures from the Queen’s Palaces”, is a special exhibit at the palace, celebrating Queen Elizabeth’s Diamond Jubilee. There are Jubilee events throughout the U.K. this year, and we were lucky to catch this one in Edinburgh.

The Treasures have been selected from vast collections that have been assembled by various monarchs over the centuries. There were exquisite paintings, manuscripts and sculptures, but I think one of the things that most impressed me was a Faberge Egg, made of a delicate wire grid filled with a mosaic of tiny jewels. In the egg was a miniature with portraits of the Russian Imperial family. I’ve only ever seen Faberge Eggs in photographs and this was a stunning piece of art, although to my way of thinking it was also a frivolity symbolizing excessive Royal wealth. The kind that starts revolutions.

Directly across from the Palace is the new Scottish Parliament building. Built in 2007, it aims to reflect a union of the natural landscape and the urban city. It sits just at the confluence of the two, nestled at the base of the Royal Mile, under the shadow of Arthur’s Seat.

It’s a striking piece of architecture that I think looks much better in the photos than it does in real life. The Scotland Act of 1998 brought in a devolved Scottish Parliament (the English and Scottish parliaments had been merged in 1707), and this building represents a pride in Scottish representation.

We had happened to arrive in Edinburgh on cousin Alistair’s birthday. Alistair is Victor and Ayleen’s son, a bright young man who had recently run in a bi-election and had an insider’s view of many facets of the Scottish electoral system. (“Alistair Hodgson: A New Voice for Edinburgh”) Although he didn’t win his seat this time, I fully expect he will the next time around. We celebrated his 28th birthday in style at restaurant eating fabulous Scottish beef and “Cullen Skink”, a smoked Haddock chowder.

We had been to Edinburgh briefly before, but I had never been outside the city. We were thrilled when Victor and Ayleen took us out to explore the countryside and some of the historical towns. Our first stop was South Queensferry on the shore of the Firth of Forth.

The Firth of Forth — Looking across the Firth of Forth, from South Queensferry, to the Kingdom of Fife

As the name implies, South Queensferry was the location of the ferry going across the estuary (the firth) of the River Forth.

It is a picturesque little village that has a long history of drying herring, bottling whiskey, pirates and smuggling.

There seem to be castles in every corner of Scotland. On our way toward the Highlands, we passed Doune Castle, a 14^thcentury courtyard castle that looks down protectively on the surrounding countryside. The 100 foot high gatehouse inspired its use as the castle in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”.

We made a brief pilgrimage around the walls, imagining the Trojan Rabbit.

We lunched in the town of Callander, “a place where Lowland meets Highland”. Just beyond the town are the Tossachs, a beautiful area of locks, mountains and rivers. Dorothy and William Wordsworth stayed in Callander in 1803, and in the centuries since it has been frequented by many writers, taking inspiration from the landscape. Sir Walter Scott set his poem “The Lady of the Lake” in the Loch Katrine in the Trossachs, ensuring the area’s population as a tourist destination.

There is, apparently, the remains of a Roman Fort just outside Callander. Armed with a town map and guidance from the tourist office (“It is hard to see. It’s mostly overgrown”) we set off on a little walk along the River Teith in search of Rome. We found something that might, or might not, be a piece of the wall. But we had to turn back quickly as the weather began to change.

Within moments we were deluged by a downfall of rain and hail and had to race to the car.

Drenched, but invigorated, we headed to “Loch Lomond and the Trossachs National Park” for a quick peek at Loch Katrine, the setting of Scott’s poem. This was our first view of the Highlands, and it was exquisite. You can easily tell why it so profoundly affected Scott and others. A century old steamboat can take you around the loch while giving you bits of history and recitations from the poem. “Each purple peak, each flinty spire  /Was bathed in floods of living fire” Definitely a place we hope to return to and explore in more depth. Perhaps do a bit of fishing…

It was getting late. We were about 50 miles from Edinburgh, yet it felt as though we were in an entirely different world. The sun came out as we headed back toward the Forth and the bustle of Edinburgh, thinking how lucky we were to have family to open up new worlds for us.

Tim & Amanda overlooking the Forth bridges

Feasting on the arts in London

It was a bit of a jolt to come back into the press of people in London after our calm days in Devon. But we had several major events to look forward to, and we dove in, hearts first.

David Hockney has taken London by storm, and tickets for the show at the Royal Academy were being scalped at outrageous prices. Thankfully, we had booked our tickets before we left for Devon, and it was one of the first places that we headed when we got back.

hocneysmall_2091328b — Winter Timber. The painting takes up a whole wall of the gallery.

A Bigger Picture is one of the most vibrant shows I have ever seen. Hockney attacks landscapes. He spends years working on the same view at different seasons, different weathers. His colours are like no one else’s. When this show opened in February, Londoners flocked to it as to a vacation in the sun. You are viserally hit with almost impossible colour juxtapositions. And these pictures are huge. Really, really huge. He does full wall landscapes using grid sections, so that he can paint each section almost life size.

In one room, he displays a series of 51 framed prints of work that he did on an iPad. I hadn’t expected to like these, but I found them totally compelling. The way he uses the iPad is revolutionary. It is a medium that allows him to “work rapidly with a stylus to capture the changing light and conditions of a scene. The effect is significantly different to that achieved with a brush in other mediums.”

David-Hockney-iPad-Art — Hockney iPad art.

The 51 iPad prints record the transition from winter through to late spring on one small road. The work culminates in “The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011”, a 32 canvas painting that takes over a huge wall of the gallery. “The deliberate sense of theatricality in this gallery reflects Hockney’s many decades of experience designing sets for the opera: the view is placed centre-stage with the drama of the approaching spring played out on all sides.” (copy from the program) I guess it is no wonder that I loved it.

From landscapes we went to portraits. The Lucien Freud show at the National Portrait Gallery changed our focus from the changing colours of landscape to the changing minutiae of skin tone — small brush manipulations that reflect a complex life. “I’ve always wanted to create drama in my pictures, which is why I paint people. It’s people who have brought drama to pictures from the beginning. The simplest human gestures tell stories.” Lucien Freud.

reflection(self-portrait) 1985 — Freud self portrait 1985

These are stories that you dig deeply into. Like our layers of skin, and the layering of our experiences, the paintings pull your eyes through layers of paint to reveal the soul within. These are raw portraits, reminding me of how little we really know of people, of how hard it is to go beneath the layers.

From visuals to sound. I was desperate for complex sounds to wash through me. I wanted to hear music that was as full of contrasting colours as the Hockney show, as personal as the Lucien Freud. It didn’t take long to find a perfect concert. Chick Corea and Gary Burton on their “Hot House” tour. Two brilliant, percussive artists who have been playing together for over 40 years. They come together almost as one. Chick Corea on piano and Gary Burton on vibes, they played a range that included original pieces, Miles, Dizzy, Monk, Mozart, Bartok, Antonio Carlos Joabim and Lennon & McCartney. These are musicians at the top of their game, playing, having fun and sharing that fun with an audience. And because it was so percussive, the sound came into my body just as the light vibrations from the Hockney paintings had.

From sound to words and thought. Lucy Prebble is a young and successful British playwright. She wrote, amongst other things, Enron, about the financial scandal of 2001. “It’s always useful to remember that free market economics – capitalism if you prefer – brought us the slave trade, the stock market crash of 1929, the Great Depression, as well as more recent events such as the near meltdown of the entire global financial system.” (from the London Theatre review of Enron.) Enron was a big hit on the West End and a magnificent failure on Broadway. “I think Americans don’t like ambiguity,” said Lucy. She gave an entertaining and engaging talk at the Haymarket Theatre as a part of their Masterclass Series. She prefaced the talk by saying that anything that she said about her past was, like all memory, a “retrospective rationalization”. In other words, we all make up our lives as we chose to tell them. Her talk was personal, honest and revealing, much like the Freud portraits. It is good to know that all artists are just working from one project to the next, trying to grow, to find ways of challenging themselves, and sometimes just trying to survive.

From words to movement. One of the most exciting young London dance artists is Maddy Wynne-Jones. While I might have a personal bias, I have to say that it has been a huge thrill to watch Maddy’s work evolve, even in the short time we’ve been here. We went to a scratch performance (a work-in-progress performance that encourages dialogue and discussion) of the new Tempered Body Dance Theatre piece under development. “Stand-By” is a piece about dependency. On people, on substances. It asks the questions, “Are we really saying these two categories of dependence are similarly devastating? When is independence destructive?” The scratch performance featured about 15 minutes of the piece, and we were moved to tears by the work. Big gulping, shaking sobs. But also smiles of self-knowledge.

P1020739 — Tempered Body Dance Theatre in rehearsal

I went to the studio this week to watch further rehearsals and was deeply impressed by the cohesiveness of the company, and by their open and generous exploration of these questions. They are dancers with amazing skill and integrity. Maddy’s choreography and direction guides them to movements that are honest and resonant. We’ll see another scratch performance next month. It is a privilege to watch this work in development.

P1020707 — Tempered Body Dance Theatre in rehearsal for Stand-By.

It is a constant river of inspiration here. Sometimes we need to stand outside, on the banks to catch our breath. But knowing that our time in London is limited, we are diving in as often as we can.

Saying Goodbye to Devon

Yes, all good things must end. Our last week in Salcombe was full of many bittersweet lasts.

We had one last dinner party, with Jan’s nephew and his wife, which included a reprisal of the Umeboshi salad. Jan had to leave the next day, which made all of us sad as we could feel it was the beginning of the end. Jan missed out on our last walk to North Sands beach, which we went on with Tim and Jennifer’s cousin Pip, her husband Steven and wonderful Alfie, the dog (North Sands is the place to walk with dogs, so we were glad to have one with us). When we got back we had a perfect late lunch in the Devon sunshine, the last one out on our picnic table. We had delicious Devon cheeses and made our Salade Nicoise with our last container of hand-picked Salcombe crab. It was exquisite.

Tim and I spent most of our last days writing intensively. We wanted to make sure that we were both in solid places with our books, knowing that we were going to have to leave our writing for a while. Jennifer looked after us, cooking us delicious meals while we slaved over hot computers. But we always made sure to head out for walks at the end of the day.

On our very last day we decided to take the afternoon and go to see the gardens at Overbeck’s. Jennifer wanted to treat us to a Devon Cream Tea, and we knew we could get a good one at Overbeck’s.

Overbeck’s is a large Edwardian house that sits on 7 acres of terraced gardens high above the Salcombe Estuary. During the First World War, the original owners, having lost their son in the war, offered their home to the Red Cross Society to be used for the treatment of convalescent troops. The “Sharpitor V.A. Hospital” looked after over 1,000 men during the war, 15 of whom ended up marrying local Devon girls. Just like something out of Downton Abbey season 2.

Otto Overbeck took over the property in 1928 and lived there until his death in 1937. Overbeck made his millions on a device called “The Rejuvenator”, a machine that sent small electric currents through your body to restore health. He believed that many ailments could be cured by restoring the body’s electric balance. His “the theory of electric health” was widely read and he marketed the Rejuvenator throughout Europe. He died a bachelor and left his property to the National Trust, on the condition that it have his name on it and that it not be used as a brothel. The gardens and house are open to the public during the day and turned into a Youth Hostel in the evening. Mal and Elspeth said that they used to stay there in the summers because you had the run of the house and gardens for the evening.

The paths through the woods are incredibly calming and meditative.

There is a beautiful little sculpture garden, a small maze and acres of unusual trees, shrubs and flowers overlooking stunning views of the Salcombe Estuary.

The huge Magnolia tree, planted over 100 years ago, was in riotous bloom. The banana trees were not yet bearing fruit, but then it was just March. We were fascinated by unusual cactus trees, birds of paradise and the juxtapositions of colours and textures.

It was odd to think that we had walked the coastal path just below these gardens two weeks previously. Sharptor is wild and rugged (see “Devon Coastal paths, part 2”, the rocks of Sharp Tor) and sits directly below the Overbeck gardens, which are lush and lovingly maintained.

Half of Overbeck’s house is a museum filled with his collections. The rooms are steeped in the Edwardian fascination with the natural world. There are hundreds of birds eggs catalogued and on display, a practice that was common in his day but contributed to endangering many species in England. There are likewise hundreds of stuffed birds, small mammals, butterflies and shellfish.

Overbeck believed in the importance of Natural Science and wanted to make sure that his collections were used for furthering the education of young people. He also had an extensive collection of items about marine history, toys and a Polyphon — a huge Victorian music box.

It is an eccentric and eclectic museum. His love of nature is manifested in his wonderful gardens, lovingly maintained to this day.

A tearoom is connected to the house. We sat outside in the spring sunshine, eating locally made scones with jam and huge dollops of Devon Double Cream, our last chance to enjoy this particular local delicacy. It was peaceful and so very, very English.

After the trip to Overbeck’s there was just enough time for me to have one last late afternoon visit to Snape’s Point. I sat looking out over the harbour, and made sure to leave a small, hidden mark on a bench. Moll assured me that leaving a magic mark will ensure my return. I hope she is right. Being in Devon changed us, and I know we all want that experience again.

The Mysteries of Torcross

Travelling without a car has given us very different sense of time and distance. We think nothing of walking for an hour to get somewhere that, back home, we would have hopped into a car to reach. When we decide to take a bus somewhere, it is a thrill. And if it is a double decker bus we race to the top.

The number and variety of beaches within walking distance of Salcombe is amazing. But there are also great beaches and walks that require a bit of extra travel. Jan had a couple of relatives visiting, and we all wanted to take an excursion to Torcross, in Start Bay. Six is too many for most cars, so Tim and I headed out on a local bus and we arranged to rendezvous for a pub lunch.

Getting to Torcross by bus was not difficult, but arriving there felt like stepping into an entirely different world.

The village of Torcross is on Slapton Sands in Start Bay, a beautiful long, long pebbly beach, with gently crashing waves.

The area is known for its unspoilt beauty, but also for a unique geographical oddity and an important historical mystery.

Directly beside Slapton Sands is Slapton Ley, the largest freshwater lake in South West England. There is an entirely different ecology on the lake, as freshwater fish inspire different flora and fauna.

The ocean and the lake are separated by a narrow strip of land, only wide enough for a small road and footpath. On one side there is crashing surf, on the other, gently paddling swans and ducks.

During WW2, this section of Devon coast was selected as a training ground for Allied Troops to practice for the D-Day invasion. Over 3,000 residents were evacuated and the area was redeveloped to recreate Utah Beach in Normandy. “Exercise Tiger” is credited for the major success of that invasion.

What is less known is that the training runs used live ammunition. As a result, 308 American soldiers were killed here, practicing for the real invasion. Friendly fire. Their numbers were counted among the dead in Normandy until recent information came to light to acknowledge that their deaths actually occurred in England.

The second part of this story took place on April 28, 1944. A convoy of ships was travelling from the Isle of Portland to Slapton Sands as part of the training exercise. They were unexpectedly intercepted by German E-boats, who bombed two Tank Landing Ships, killing 749 American servicemen. They were ill-prepared, as their focus was on practicing the invasion, not on meeting other ships at sea, and many of the servicemen drowned. The story was kept secret, either as a direct cover-up or just “conveniently forgotten” until an amphibious tank was found in the bay in the early 1970s, by Devon resident Ken Small. He spearheaded the creation of a memorial to honour those men killed in Exercise Tiger. In actual fact, many more men died in Devon, in Exercise Tiger, than in the actual D-Day invasion in Normandy.

The tank and memorial sit just beside Slapton Ley.

On the day that we were on Slapton Sands, there was a light Devon mist and peace in the air. The beach is filled with beautifully polished rocks, which made walking a bit more work than usual but allowed us to find some of the most exquisite rocks we have seen on our journey.

By the time we rendezvoused for lunch, our pockets were weighing us down with rock ballast.

The tourist area of Torcross is right on the beach. There are a few cottages, a post office and a couple of places to eat. It was surprisingly uncluttered and free of tourist marketing, although there was a hefty line up for Salcombe dairy ice cream cones. Local fish is the specialty of the Start Bay Inn, and we sat outside with full plates of crab, monkfish, plaice and cod. There were also sandwiches of exquisite local ham and cheese. And most importantly some very good local ales.

Lunch inspired a further walk. Tim and I headed up over the hill to the next bay and the village of Beesands. Beesands sits on a long shingle beach and has a small collection of cottages and, by the look of it, some good places to eat.

Beesands was a prominent fishing village in its day, but in 1979 it was almost wiped out by a violent storm. A large retaining wall was constructed in the late 1980s, separating the cottages from the view of the ocean. The wall clearly saves and protects the tiny village, but detracts from the beauty of the environment.

It was time to head back to catch our bus. We didn’t have enough time to travel any further on the coastal path. We had wanted to push on to the deserted village Hallsands, a village that was completely wiped out by a storm in 1917. Next time.

There are stories around ever corner. But there is never enough time to get to all of the corners.

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