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Positive identification

I was excited when somebody told me that the bronze statue of Enver Hoxha, the late dictator of Albania, still existed in Tirana, preserved in the Monuments Factory where it had been cast. Not so long before it had been the very centrepiece of the capital, dominating Skanderbeg Square until the rebellious populace toppled it–and him. In a flash I was there, accompanied by a young Albanian engineer of my acquaintance. A watchman directed us to a windowless warehouse, apparently sealed off for ever. ‘Enver's in there,' he said.

We circled this gloomy mausoleum until I found a spy-hole between the bricks, and there Enver was, recumbent in the shadows, just his bronze thigh to be glimpsed. It was enough. My engineer positively identified the old monster, and he should know. As a student he had been in the fore-front of the rejoicing crowd when the statue was pulled down in Skanderbeg Square. ‘I pissed on it,' he complacently recalled, and you can't get more positive than that.

Last post

Even in the very last days of British Hong Kong one could occasionally see an imperial exhibition of the old kind, bands and sergeant majors shouting, every plume out of its box, judges in wigs and red robes, medals jangling on officers' breasts, swords, white gloves and His Excellency the Governor in full fig. I watched such a parade one Armistice Sunday, from a balcony above Statue Square, and all was as it always was. The commands were barked. The sad old hymns were sung. Trumpets trumpeted. Salutes were saluted.

Around the Cenotaph a handful of Europeans, mostly tourists I suspect, stood watching in twos and threes. Just behind them the Sunday multitude of Filipino women was settling down to its weekly jollities, spreading themselves happily on the ground, chattering, laughing, fussing about with paper bags, and beyond them again the life of the great city proceeded altogether oblivious of the few score imperialists, with guards and musicians, pursuing their rituals at the war memorial.

Breakfast Cokes

At breakfast in my Lithuanian hotel a long, long table covered with brown velveteen cloth is occupied by twenty young Russian males, while at the end of the dim-lit room there sits alone in silence at her victuals a woman who might be type-cast as a lady commissar: severe, spectacled, muscular, her hair in a bun and her skirts long and heavy. A solitary waiter in shirtsleeves serves us–thick black coffee (they're out of milk), fried eggs with peas, black bread and very good cheese. Halfway through the meal we are each given a bottle of Coca-Cola. Most of the men drink theirs there and then, in tandem with the coffee, but I notice that as the lady commissar leaves the room, wiping her mouth carefully with her paper napkin and studiously not looking anyone on the face, she takes hers with her.

Grand cru

Being a crude islander, and an iconoclast at that, I decided to cock a snook. I bought for the first and probably the last time in my life a grand cru Montrachet–Marquis de Laguiche, vintage 1993. I got a kindly waitress in a cafe to uncork it for me, and picked up a hefty ham and cheese baguette to eat with it. ‘Kindly direct me', I said to a viniculturist who happened to arrive at that moment in his Range Rover, ‘to the exact patch of soil that has produced this bottle of wine.' He raised his eyebrows slightly when he saw its label and the napkin-wrapped sandwich in my hand. It was not much of a day for a picnic, he said, but perhaps the wine
would help–and with a wonderfully subtle suggestion of disapproval he pointed me the way to Montrachet. ‘
Bon appétit
,' he brought himself to say, for your Burgundy wine man is nothing if not gentlemanly.

Through a hole in the wall

I looked through a big hole just hammered in the Berlin Wall, and saw into the patch of no-man's-land beyond. It was littered with rolls of discarded barbed wire, surrounded by ruined buildings and floored with the dismal mixture of sand, gravel and rubble that had resulted from three decades of herbicide–for nothing was allowed to soften the allegory of the Wall. Three East German soldiers were in there, one tilted back on a kitchen chair with his cap over his eyes, the others kicking an old steel helmet around in the dust.

Homesickness

In Moscow I made the acquaintance of Guy Burgess, a renegade British diplomat who had been a Soviet agent for some years but was by then sadly nostalgic for England and his mother. I could not help feeling sorry for him, and we agreed to go together one evening to the Bolshoi. We arranged to meet outside the theatre door, and when I got there I saw him waiting for me on the steps. I waved a greeting as I approached him through the crowd, and he waved a response, but by the time I reached the door he had vanished. I never saw him again.

Grecian collusion

I had taken a room in a private house on the outskirts of Monemvasia, and in the evening I walked a mile or so to a taverna for my supper. It was very full and very lively–local people mostly, with some merry Americans. We drank large amounts of furiously resinated retsina out of metal mugs, and I seldom had a happier evening. In the small hours I staggered up the road again to my lodgings, and my landlady, in a flowered housecoat over her nightdress, pulled back the bars and undid the chains of her front door to let me in. I expected her to be tight lipped and disapproving; instead she greeted me with a sly and knowing smile of collusion, as if she had been enjoyably up to no good herself. I went to bed incoherently whistling, and awoke in the morning fresh as a daisy.

Nothing to say

In the bad times of communism a Polish colleague drove me out to a writers' retreat near Zakopane in the southern mountains, and on the way we were stopped by the police. My friend, a man of great charm and intelligence, did not speak when the policeman tapped on his window. He merely took his driving licence from his inside pocket, tucked a banknote into it and handed it out. The policeman did not speak, either. He had no need to. He just took the note, handed the licence back and walked away. My friend drove on without a word to me. There was nothing to say.

Who cared?

It was midnight, and wartime. Sarajevo, pitted all over with bullet marks, was dark and shuttered, and the airport was closed, but I got a seat on a minibus going down to the coast. There were four other passengers–a Swede, a Finn, a Croat and an Englishman. Behind us a second busload was following us through the night. The snow was deep, every now and then we were stopped at road blocks, sometimes we clattered across a temporary bridge beside a blown-up original. Scattered ruins passed dismally by–house after house gaping in the darkness, with no sign of life but for a single dim light, perhaps, on a ground floor, or a fire burning in a brazier. The awful gorges through the mountains loomed around us, dark and dangerous. At about two in the morning we stopped, and our driver got out and peered rather helplessly into the black emptiness behind him, up the highway banked with snow-drifts. ‘What's happening?' said the Englishman in front of me. ‘What have we stopped for?' The driver explained that the other bus seemed to be lost: there was no sign of its lights, and he was worried that it might have got into trouble back there. The Englishman stretched, pulled his coat more tightly round his shoulders, and settled down to sleep again. ‘Who cares?' he said, but he may have been joking.

Too late

Long ago I came across the ruin of one of the great Anglo-Irish mansions of the old Ascendancy, and paused to imagine all the blithe existence it had once known–hunt balls
and elegant dowagers and Etonians larking about with girls in the rose gardens. I remarked to a passing Irishman that it seemed a shame all the festive and colourful life of the house should have come to an end, but he replied, ‘Oh, wouldn't you think it was too late for that kind of fandango?' He was right, of course, and years later I came across that ruin again, and found I could no longer hear the hunting horns, or glimpse Lady W's ancestral pearls, still less imagine those young English toffs living it up among the bushes.

City of Art and Culture

So enamoured were the Nazis of Weimar that they erected there one of their most celebrated and characteristic monuments. The site they chose was the lovely hill of Ettersberg, just outside the city, which Goethe had long before made famous–he loved to sit and meditate beneath an oak tree there. On my last day in Weimar I paid a visit to this place, now a popular tourist site well publicized in the town. My taxi driver, a gregarious soul, chatted cheerfully to me all the way. Had I enjoyed my stay in Weimar? Did I visit the Goethehaus? What did I think of the food? Did I know that Weimar was to be the European City of Culture in 1999, at the end of the millennium? Congratulations, I said. Recognition once more for the City of Art and Music. ‘Exactly,' replied the taxi driver, and just then we turned off the highway up to Buchenwald.

God bless Swissness!

Halfway through my stay at Weggis I cracked my head open entering the lake for a swim, and had to have it stitched. How glad I was of Swissness then! Calmly and steadily the Herr Doktor worked, assisted by Frau Doktor and by their son the computer specialist, and delicate was his technique, and state-of-the-art his equipment, and whenever I opened my eyes I saw through the spotless windows of his surgery the glistening lake, streaked with leisurely waves and ringed with green hills, like a visual tranquillizer.

Norway, 1950s

Norwegian writers still looked wonderfully writerly then, painters were like painters, middle-aged ladies properly middle aged and cardiganed. I happened in Oslo one night to see some members of a theatre cast assembling for a post-performance supper in a restaurant, and watching their meticulously staged arrivals, their accomplished greetings and their mastery of incidental business was almost as stimulating as seeing the play itself.

Welsh pride

In Argentinian Patagonia, long ago, Welsh people established a colony where they could speak their own language and live in their own way, far from the intrusive English. They called it simply Y Wladfa, The Colony, and a century and a half
later, when Welshness was fading there, in a farm on the outskirts of Trevelin I found a last archetype of its settlers. He was like the smile, as it were, on the face of the Cheshire Cat. Not a soul in his household understood Welsh besides himself, but they all clustered eagerly around us as we talked–a jolly Argentinian wife, diverse unidentified children and grandchildren, dogs and chickens and a horse tied to the fence; and with his cloth cap tilted on his head, his hands in his pockets, that Welshman of South America touched my heart not with melancholy at all, but with grateful pride to be Welsh myself.

‘Ai, ai, ai'

Several times during my stay in Rome I came across a couple of countrymen who seemed, in their quaint fustian clothes and peculiar shoes, to have stepped more or less out of the Middle Ages. They were like substantial fauns, haunting the city out of its remote rural past. These medieval figured seemed to me wonderfully exotic, until late one night I encountered the pair of them anxiously consulting a bus timetable beneath a streetlight in the Corso. Then I realized that in fact they piquantly illustrated the matter-of-factnesss of the city. Nobody took the slightest notice of them, as they huddled there; they looked up and asked me for advice about the best way to get home, but when I told them I was a foreigner, ‘
Ai, ai, ai
,' they said theatrically, like Italians in old movies.

The first of the Morgans

On the land of Mr Harold Childs, a horse breeder of Harolyn Hill in Vermont, is buried the stallion Justin Morgan, the only progenitor of that superb American creature the Morgan horse. Mr Childs kindly allowed me to visit the horse's grave, down the hill below his house, and when I walked back he was waiting for me with a present. It was a short piece of lead piping. ‘Now this is true,' he said. ‘Just here where we're standing there used to be the stables where Justin Morgan was kept, and when we was digging up there on the hill we found this old lead piping, came straight down the hill here, and a branch of that pipe it came right across the yard here and took the water to the stables. Now that's a fact.

‘Now I'm going to give you this bit of that pipe. You can say–and it's true–that Justin Morgan drank from the very water that came through this bit of pipe. You take it away with you, now.' I took it gratefully and I have treasured it ever since. ‘I shall mount it on wood,' I said as I started the car to leave, ‘and I'll have a card saying “From this pipe drank Justin Morgan, the first of all the Morgan horses”.' Mr Childs tipped his hat politely, in the old American way. ‘Good idea,' he said.

Hell's traffic

Nobody could be much less Neapolitan than I am, and when at last we reached the hotel, limp with excitement, amusement and exhaustion, and I had paid our driver his exorbitant but entirely justified fare, I told the hotel receptionist that I wanted to go home. ‘Don't say that,' he replied. ‘Wait till
you get up to your room, and everything will seem different.'

So it did. Dusk was falling by then, the harbour was speckled with small fishing boats, and in the distance Vesuvius loomed hazy in the half-light. The docks were full of white cruise liners, and even as I watched one of them slipped away from the quay towards the open sea. For a long time I could see her lights, fainter and fainter to the west–treading her way, I liked to imagine, towards calm realms of order. But it did not make me in the least homesick. The receptionist was right. I rang for a bottle of wine, and we sat there on our balcony in perfect contentment, while hell's traffic snarled convivially below.

Frenchness like a cloak

Nothing had changed in the corner restaurant, the one with the awnings and the menu in the polished brass frame. It remained quintessential France, as we islanders have loved and loathed it for several centuries. Madame remained the epitome of everything false, narrow-minded and unreliable. One waiter seemed, as ever, to be some sort of duke, the other was evidently the village idiot. At the table next to mine sat a prosperous local family out for Sunday dinner, well known to the proprietress and esteemed throughout the community–unsmiling, voluminously napkinned, serious and consistent eaters who sometimes, eyeing me out of the corners of their eyes, exchanged in undertones what were doubtless sly Anglophobics before returning sluggishly to their veal.