Re-reading Lord of the Flies

 

This will be the last book in my 2020 re-reading challenge, and I believe it was the greatest positive surprise. I first read it when I was 20-ish and had never re-read it. A fellow student lent me her paperback that someone else had probably lent her. Remember that in Russia of my youth all foreign books that crossed the Iron Curtain were random. We didn’t know anything about the book or its author. By that time I had heard of, if not read The Lord of the Rings and was struck by the similarity of titles.

For inexplicable reasons this novel has been on school syllabi in many countries for years and years. Inexplicable because although the existential message is transparent, it is, I would claim, of little relevance for young readers, now as much as then. The adventurous plot is slow, and a significant portion of the book is exquisite nature descriptions that, as research shows, young readers skip. I am sure I did, even if at that time I regarded myself a sophisticated reader. If the novel had been subjected to the same kind of adaptation as Robinson Crusoe there wouldn’t be much left. (What most people remember or know by hearsay in Robinson is his encounter with Friday which is a minor episode toward the very end of the book).

I remembered most of the plot, although misremembered some details. For instance in my memory (spoiler!) Piggy was brutally murdered, while it was in fact Simon. I had forgotten the paratrooper. Knowing the plot, what I enjoyed most was the language, these beautiful, poetic, vivid descriptions of the island, the sea, the sky. For their sake, I will probably re-read the book again. And if you decide to re-read it (or read it for the first time – it’s one of those so called classics that people have heard of but never actually read unless they were forced to in school), take your time. You know what happens, but make sure you notice how it happens, how the tiny change in tone is rendered, and of course the elaborate setting that brings you right in the middle of this terrifying paradise.

Re-reading The Pickwick Papers

 

I chose The Pickwick Papers because I had re-read most other Dickens’s novels in the past fifty years, some quite recently, and Dickens was an important author back then, one that everybody read, even my snobbish mother. Bleak House was my favourite when I was twelve. The Pickwick Papers was supposed to be funny, and as I re-read it now, which was painful, I kept asking myself what we possibly could consider funny. Was it simply exotic and incomprehensibly British? I am thinking about Three Men in a Boat, that is very British and hilarious, then as now (I re-read it just a few years ago with great pleasure). Pickwick has a vague plot, mostly sketches of upper-class life full of ways and habits totally alien to me – I wonder how today’s British readers view it. There are no characters to like or dislike, and their concerns don’t engage me. A few phrases were witty, but mostly the language was flat. Perhaps when the book was first published, in instalments as was the practice, readers were kept in suspense about some minor quirks of the plot. Definitely there was more for them to recognise, and yes, I understand that it is all satire. But it was lost on me. I won’t bore you, dear reader, with more details.  

Re-reading The Power and the Glory

Yet another book that I was sure I had read, but as it turned out didn’t remember a word of. I think I remember the cover of the paperback I borrowed from a friend of my mother, but I could not find it on the web. Could it be that I started reading it, age 16, and gave up? There isn’t much of interest in the novel for a sixteen-year-old without any religious background. Extremely dense text, no action, scarce dialogue, no romance, alien setting, totally incomprehensible historical circumstances. Of Greene’s novels, two were translated and published in Russia in the 1960s, Our Man in Havana and The Quiet American, apparently because they depicted “the decay of capitalism”, which was the standard wording in Russian literary criticism of the time. The Power and the Glory could not be translated because of its theme. Religion was banned in Russia, and priests had been persecuted and shot, just as in Greene’s novel, but the author’s sympathy is not on Red Shirts’ side, and even a skilful foreword writer wouldn’t be able to explain it to the Soviet reader. 

I didn’t know anything about Mexico’s history then, as it wasn’t part of our history curriculum, and I must admit that I had to look it up now as well. Parallels to Soviet history are striking. But there is, as far as I know, no Russian novel portraying a persecuted Russian priest, at least not in the same poignant way. Greene’s protagonist is not a helpless and innocent victim; he is not particularly likable, and yet I kept falling into the unforgivable reader fallacy of yelling at him: Don’t do this, can’t you see it’s a trap? Which I think is the intention.

The Power and the Glory is perhaps the strongest impression of my 2020 re-reading challenge. Several books proved better on re-reading, but this is superior by far. I will read it again in a couple of years or maybe even sooner.

Re-reading Homo Faber

Max Frisch’s novel was not on my re-reading list, and I cannot remember why and how I decided to re-read it, but I know that it was an important book when I was young so it should have been on the list.

Once again, I know it was important, but I had rather vague memories of it. The strongest memory was of the final call at the airport, which, in my memory, was the final scene in the novel, while it actually happens right in the beginning. I remembered it contained incest, which was disturbing and fascinating. I remembered a particular reflection on human reproductive act that I could have sworn came from the girl, while it actually is Faber’s. That’s it. A general theme and two details, both wrong.

I did not remember at all the Conradesque adventure in the jungle. I did not remember Faber’s betrayal of his girlfriend, and I didn’t remember that he meets her again under dramatic circumstances. I winced at a casual remark by the narrator early in the novel, “if… then Sabeth would be alive”. I did not remember that she dies, still less how she dies, which right now strikes me as implausible, something from a TV thriller rather than a highbrow novel. When I was young I probably thought it was romantic. I didn’t reflect on why male authors always need to sacrifice female characters to redeem their male protagonists.

I don’t think I had read Lolita before I read Homo Faber, but now I see similarities, although Sabeth is twenty and not a minor. The similarity is in the narrator who is trying hard to exculpate himself, repeating again and again that he didn’t know, that he couldn’t resist, that it was Sabeth who seduced him, that it wasn’t his fault at all that he abandoned Sabeth’s mother, that they had agreed that she would get an abortion… and so on, over and over again.  And he is confident that he is objective - the novel's subtitle is "Report". I am sure I didn’t understand this fifty years ago, any more than I understood that Humbert Humbert was trying to acquit himself. But today I find such unreliable, self-delusive narrators one of the most interesting features of contemporary fiction. (I keep saying “contemporary” about books published seventy years ago because they were contemporary back then. By now, they are vintage if not classics).

Another thing that I enjoyed about Homo Faber is that it didn’t feel as translation. I am sure I could have read it in German, but I didn’t, and not once did I stop to consider that I was reading a translated book, which otherwise is for me a good reason to put a book aside. Fifty years ago I read it in Russian, and apparently that was a good translation too.

I strongly recommend this book if you haven’t read it – or if you have, but like me have forgotten.

Re-reading Margaret Drabble

Similar to Muriel Spark, I had a Margaret Drabble period when I read everything I could get hold of, which wasn’t easy behind the Iron Curtain – it wasn’t just the matter of popping into the nearest book shop. I had The Summer Bird-Cage on my 2020 re-reading list, but it wasn’t available on Kindle, so I chose The Millstone instead although I am not sure I read it back then. I know I read The Garrick Year and Needle’s Eye. Anyway, it doesn’t matter, because The Summer Bird-Cage and The Millstone are thematically similar, and since both are Drabble’s early novels I would guess they are similar in other ways too. And I only have a vague memory of the former.

I can see what was attractive to me in Drabble’s novels then. They are set in a time almost contemporary with mine, in a place I was curious about. They have female characters of a background similar to mine: educated, intellectual, high aspiring women. At the time I read them, I was a single mother, but I never experienced the shaming Rosamund in The Millstone went through. She and I shared some human – female – experience, but otherwise lived on different planets. And I think mine was nicer.

I finished the book because it was part of the challenge, but otherwise I would have stopped early. I guess it wouldn’t be labeled chic lit because it is Great Literature, but then I am not well read in chic lit. I found Rosamund repulsive, which perhaps was intentional, but if so why would the novel be praised as feminist? When she finds herself pregnant after her first and only casual sexual experience – isn’t it one of the most banal plots in literature? - she first tries to get rid of the baby, and failing spectacularly with the totally inefficient method of hard liquor and a hot bath (another literary cliché) decides that she will keep the baby and love it beyond measure. I think the narrator is trying to convey her emotions, but it is mostly external events of a most trivial kind. Which in itself can be interesting as documentation of its time, but I was mainly irritated. The ending is pathetic, but I believe it is exactly a tear-jerker that I would have liked fifty years ago.

I will definitely not re-read any of Drabble’s early novels that I enjoyed then, but I may try one of her latest to see whether she has become more to my current taste.

Annual report

Typically, annual reports are written at the end of a calendar year. I have done so myself repeatedly in this blog. But today is a year since I retired, and I feel it's a good moment to look back at my long and winding road from there.

I came back to Sweden after eleven years in Cambridge without a permanent home, with unsold property in the UK, not knowing exactly what my financial situation was, and uncertain about reconnecting with my old networks. I wasn't even sure I would feel at home in Sweden. I won't enumerate the various health issues I had, but there were a few.

And yet I was determined not to let any external circumstances interfere with the new phase of my life in which I had decided, well in advance, to be contented, physically and mentally active, to pursue new interests and enjoy the time-left.

I joined a walking club, signed up for Pilates classes, got a subscription for Stockholm Concert Hall, reached out to old friends who were remarkably responsive and nice. I started a small business.

By December, I had a home of my own, the UK property was sold, my financial situation was stable, and in January I was adopted by two charming cats. I was invited to a miniature-making club, attended classes, joined another gym, met more friends, took my grandchildren to theatre. I did 10-12 km walks several times a week – I firmly believe I have walked myself back to sanity.

We all know what happened next. I am ashamed to admit that I wasn't as drastically affected as most other people. Unlike many other countries, Sweden never went into total lockdown, and most restrictions concerned people over 70, but I decided to play it safe and self-isolated. Concerts and theatre shows were cancelled, cinemas were closed. In mid-March I was supposed to participate in a miniature show. My dream holiday, walking Camino de Santiago de Compostella, planned for May, was postponed more or less indefinitely. My Cambridge friends who were supposed to visit in April… and so on.

But I am grateful to be alive and in good health, to have a home and not worry about where my next meal is coming from.

Just before everything closed, I had a garden designer start my balcony garden, and every morning I go out into my tiny garden full of colours and fragrances.

By mid-May, Swedish grandparents were permitted to meet their grandchildren outdoors. I am blessed with grandchildren who happily came over for walks and picnics.

By mid-June, I started cautiously to use public transport to go and visit friends and family. I also decided it was safe to let friends with cars take me for walks and swims. It would have been practical right now to have a car, but on the other hand I decided a year ago that I would never drive a car again. I became friends with a neighbour, and we have made many pleasurable excursions together.

Summer is a quiet time in Sweden as most people go away to their summer cottages. By now, they are back, and it feels safe to start meeting again. Cinemas have reopened, and I have already been once. There were just seven people in there.

I am not sure about gyms; I am not sure about how the Concert Hall is going to organise the concerts, but I have renewed my subscription, and I have already attended a concert with fifty people in the audience, which was weird, especially when it came to clapping. Fifty people clapping in a large hall is a strange experience. Otherwise, there are streamed concerts almost every day.

My walking club has resumed the walks twice a week, and although I have enjoyed walking on my own, the sense of community is great after a long forced break. I have even signed up to become a leader! 

Similarly, the miniature club is meeting regularly. All miniature shows are cancelled until further notice, but there are some online activities.

I have organised walking seminars of my own, built around some famous children’s books set in Stockholm. To my surprise and joy they proved to be popular. All were booked up within hours of announcements, and there are long waiting lists. In this way, I combine my passion for walking with my professional qualifications. And I am leaning a lot about my home city.

The current situation is not going away any time soon, so everybody will have to adjust. It is weird that the first year of the new phase of my life coincided with such a major global change.

Re-reading The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

 

Curiouser and curiouser! I will never again claim that I have read a book if I read it more than three months ago. I know for sure that I had a Muriel Spark period in my early twenties, meaning that I read as many of her books as I could get hold of. Looking at the Wikipedia entry, I recognise the titles The Ballad of Peckham Rye and The Abbess of Crewe, but couldn’t say what they are about, and I have a vague memory that The Mandelbaum Gate takes place in Jerusalem and the main character has doubts about her Jewish identity. I chose The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie for my re-reading challenge because I thought I remembered it well, and I didn’t. I didn’t remember it at all so, as with some other books on my list, I now wonder whether I had read it back then. Maybe yet another book I thought I had read because it is one of Spark’s best known. Sometimes I made a point of not reading an author’s most famous book that everybody else read.

Anyway, I read this novel as if for the first time or perhaps indeed for the first time, and I enjoyed it very much, certainly much more than I would have when I was young. If I did read it, it's unlikely I was familiar with the concept of flashforward, which is its most prominent narrative trait, alongside omission. I first got a bit concerned when the narrative was told predominantly through one schoolgirl’s point of view: I have read far too many girl school novels. But of course it is not a girl school novel; if anything, it is a parody on a girl school novel, and fifty years ago I wouldn’t have recognised it as such. The irony and sarcasm would have been lost on the young me.

So if you like stories elegantly told, with all characters equally horrible, but each in their own way, give this novel a chance. It has aged well.

Re-reading The Sound and the Fury

My re-reading project is getting more and more revealing. I chose The Sound and the Fury of all Faulkner novels we read fifty years ago because it is perhaps his most famous, and I have referred to it repeatedly in my research as an example of mission impossible: giving verbal expression to something that a character cannot express by words. Benjy as this impossible narrator features in every work on narratology, and I wonder whether I have done the unforgivable: cited someone else rather than going to the source. For I hadn’t re-read the source when I was referring to it, and now I wonder whether I have read it at all. Maybe it is one of those books you believe you have read, but actually haven’t. I cannot be sure, because this re-reading exercise has clearly demonstrated that I had no memory whatsoever of books I had definitely read. So maybe I did read The Sound and the Fury fifty years ago and not only pretended I understood it, but pretended I liked it and went on pretending, to the degree that I gave it five stars on Goodreads when I was building my shelf about twelve years ago (it was called Shelfari then). Maybe I did read it, but I am totally confident after re-reading it now, that I could not have understood much of it. Not just because of Benjy, since all other narrators are just as incoherent, and although this time I was reading slowly and carefully, I cannot claim that I was able to reconstruct the course of events. I didn’t enjoy the language enough to ignore the plot, and I wasn’t too engaged with the characters. If I hadn’t been reading for my challenge I think I would have given up, just as I have repeatedly given up on Ulysses.

Re-reading A Clockwork Orange

 

I am resuming my re-reading challenge after a long break as I was reading Hilary Mantel's The Mirror and the Light – slow read of many, many pages that took me over two months. Goodreads points out to me that I am behind schedule.

I included A Clockwork Orange in my list because it seemed an obvious choice, and now I cannot remember whether I read it before I saw the movie or after. I saw the movie in 1975 at the very earliest (a pirate black-and-white copy), and I haven't watched it since so I have just glimpses of episodes and no memory of whether the movie follows the novel. Not unexpectedly, what I remember is the worst scenes of violence and the worst scenes of Alex's therapy. I don't remember how the film ends, actually don't remember the rest of the plot after therapy. Likewise, my memory of the novel was extremely vague.

My current copy has a foreword, from which I learned that the novel was published in the USA without the final chapter and that the film was based on the American version.

Since I was prepared for the violence, it didn't shock me, and it is possibly less shocking because it is narrated by Alex matter-of-factly in his idiosyncratic language. I was much more disturbed by the moral and political messages which I find far two explicit and therefore less effective. Maybe it is the spirit of the early 1960s.

The most fascinating aspect of the novel is the language, much of which is obviously missing in the film. I haven't counted, but I would guess at 5 to 10 slang words per sentence, and I wonder how many make sense unless you know Russian. You can always figure out the meaning, but for me part of the joy of reading was recognising the Russian words cleverly disguised by English spelling and grammar. I am not referring to “gulliver” and “horrowshow”, but to much more subtle and imaginative usage. In some cases it took a few instances before I got it - “oddy knocky” was one, not straightforward to get from the context.

What Burgess and his critics perhaps didn't know is that at the time the novel was written, Russian nadsats, or teens, were actively using a similar kind of jargon where you not only needed the knowledge of English, but also a good deal of creativity. So you could hear phrases such as: “Я митингую с герлой в восемь клоков” (I am meeting a girl at 8 o'clock), ”У меня трузера штатские” (My trousers are from the USA) or ”Чилдренята, напутонивайте шузы” (Children, put on your shoes”), which is exactly the way Alex uses language. I have tested these examples on some Slavic scholars, and they didn't pass the test. I wonder whether Burgess would have passed it.

I got curious about how the novel was translated into Russian, and the translator used this very same kind of slang, spelling – and misspelling – English words in Cyrillic and inflecting them by Russian grammar. So Alex's droogy becomes his frendy, mesto becomes pleis, litso becomes feis, and deng becomes mani. No Russian reader today would have problems with this language, it is common currency.

In terms of language, A Clockwork Orange is compared to Finnegans Wake and Ridley Walker. I never got past the first page of Ridley Walker because I am not a native speaker, but in Finnegans Wake it helps to be multilingual.

Memories of Orkney, part 2

Read the beginning of this story.

I will not account for the trip day by day because it will be repetitive, but I will point out some highlights. To begin with, I was, as mentioned earlier, a bit anxious about sharing a room with a stranger, but I decided to be positive and proactive, so the moment my roommate Shelley and I stepped into the room, I offered to make tea, and while we had tea, we chatted and told each other about what we did when we didn't go on walking tours. Shelley's luggage got lost at her connecting airport, which is always a good conversation starter. It turned out she was a retired lawyer with specialism in children's rights so we even had some common point of interest. She was from Arizona and had lived in Canada. At dinner that night we all introduced ourselves more properly: a couple from Oxford (non-academic), a father and a pregnant daughter from Denver, a lady from Texas, another from the UK. All nice, all eager and experienced travellers. This was what I had hoped for: people my age or older (except the pregnant daughter) who go on walking holidays and can afford relatively expensive trips are the kind of people I can deal with. There are certain unwritten rules for such travel, for instance, rotating seats in the van. When someone's luggage is lost everyone supports and shares whatever can be shared. And it was an interesting and diverse bunch of people so there were no problems finding subjects to talk about. Shelley had brought her flute! She and I got along well: we conversed a bit, then opened our iPads and let each other be; we had no arguments about who would shower first, and we didn't mind seeing each other walk about the room in pyjamas. If I ever travel again, I would prefer a single room, but I now know that I can share with a stranger if necessary. I think it helped that four of us were elderly single ladies, and three other people were also at the same stage in life. Everybody hinted at high blood pressure, and nobody was concerned about other people farting. 

The days were intensive. We had early breakfasts and sat in the van by 8, to drive or to take a ferry to one of the islands. We had packed lunch: the horrible triangular sandwiches, but I hadn't expected anything else. At least there was a variety of them, and you could choose the evening before. Dinners were exquisite, but very late for me; some were in our hotel, some in local pubs. Maybe other people stayed up for a while, but I collapsed directly after dinner.

Most walks were coastal and highly enjoyable. The trip was ”grade 2”, or easy, and I had no problems keeping pace. The weather changed dramatically, but we were all well equipped, and when it started raining – and once even hailing – we simply put on our waterproof trousers and walked on. 

Some days, or portions of days, were warm enough to wear three layers of clothes rather than six. So you had to carry stuff for all occasions. On walks like this, you always come to a point, some time in the afternoon, especially if you are wet and walking uphill for ages, when you start asking yourself why you are doing this, voluntarily and at high cost. When you no longer are able to appreciate anything around you and just keep putting one foot in front of the other. There isn't much else you can do, because you cannot lie down on wet ground and have a tantrum, and you are also pressed for time because you need to catch the last ferry. Then suddenly it goes over, and life is great again. For me at that time, worrying about where to put my foot meant I had no time worrying about other things, which was exactly what I needed. And it was good to know, as we compared notes during evening meals, that everybody was dead tired – in a good way. 

As I said, I had not done my homework properly, but even if I had, Orkney is full of surprises. I have travelled a lot, and Orkney is not like any other place. It was much larger than I had anticipated. All islands are different, and none is like Mainland – that has a fresh-water lake and marshes! The scenery is stunning everywhere, with stone arches and other remarkable stone formations, like the Old Man of Hoy. Wildlife is abundant. All those thousands of birds on the cliffs – precisely like an Attenborough film. We did see puffins. We also saw all kinds of cultural stuff: Neolithic, Iron Age, Vikings, standing stones, WWII. I didn't know Orkney was so important strategically.

 

Even in a really tiny area – Orkney has a population of 22,000 – there is a competition between the capital, Kirkwall, and the next largest city, Stromness, that boasts of being more cultural. My Orcadian friend is born in Stromness so when we met in Kirkwall she immediately drove me

to Stromness because it was more interesting. It had a book store that carried local children's authors. I bought a few. And suddenly Farewell to Stromness made sense.

Already by reading Orkney Tapestry I realised how close it was to Norse culture, most tangible in place names. Kirk is obviously the same word as church, but closer to Nordic kirke/kyrka. Ay in many island names: Rousay, Birsay - is Nordic ö or øy. Brogh is borg, castle. And so on. I was perhaps the only one in our group who appreciated it. On another matter, my travel companions thought it weird that it was still full daylight at ten in the evening, while for me it is of course perfectly natural. 

 

All walks were remarkable, although Hoy was probably the highlight for me. Generally, I felt I got good value for my money, and I also got precisely what I needed most at that point: total break and peace of mind. Our guide was nice and knowledgeable, and he very cleverly planned our walks and visits to cultural sites to avoid crowds (there were huge cruise ships coming in every day). And I got role models in single female travellers!

Whenever I travel I typically get enthusiastic about the place and determined to come back. There is a lot more to explore in Orkney, and I even had an idea for a walking seminar, but I knew even then that I would probably never go back. Today, as the world has changed, I definitely know it will never happen. Therefore I am incredibly lucky to have done this trip, getting everything I had hoped out of it tenfold.

Travel home turned out to be a nightmare, but I won't tell you about it. 

 

Memories of Orkney

Facebook has been reminding me of my trip to Orkney last year, and I have realised that I never wrote up this story although I shared pictures on the go. Staying at home with slim chances of travel in the observable future, it may be a good idea to re-live the experience. I will use my travel diary, but inevitably add reflections from today's vantage point.

It all started five years ago when I made acquaintance with an Orcadian at a conference. Of course I knew vaguely about the existence of remote islands off the northern shores of Scotland, but they hadn't really been on my list of places to visit. Talking to this colleague got me fascinated, particularly as she mentioned Island Studies. Imagine, there was a discipline called Island Studies! I have always been intrigued by islands of all kinds and sizes, although I don't perceive Great Britain as an island. Many years ago when I studied Scandinavian languages I considered specialising in Faeroe Islands and becoming a unique expert in all things Faeroese: language, history, culture, even politics. It didn't happen, but some twenty years ago I was invited to Faeroe Islands to lecture – sadly it clashed with another commitment. In Sweden, I have been to many islands, large and small. I went to Iceland twice. I visited Madagascar some years ago. I wandered on Inis Mor off Ireland's west coast when I was at a conference in Galway. There is something special about islands – I have written an academic paper on the topic.

Listening to my new colleague triggered my imagination, and of course like you do at conferences she invited me to come and give a talk. Then we forgot about it. Or almost. Every now and then I looked up Orkney and considered a self-guided trip, but it always felt intimidating, and there was always something in the way. Two years ago there was a conference in Orkney that I wanted to attend, but it clashed with another conference I was running. Last spring I realised that I would be moving away from the UK soon, and it was now or never. Self-guided still felt daunting, and I checked travel agents for small-group walking tours with reasonable comfort. All trips were unsurprisingly fully booked except one space in the end of May and a couple in September. September seemed too far away, and I am glad I didn't opt for that since by September I had already moved back to Sweden. End of May is still term time, and I was not supposed to be away from Cambridge during term time, but I decided that if I told my students discreetly that I wouldn't be able to meet them for supervisions for a week we could keep it between ourselves. I booked the trip, paying in full since it was less than a month in advance. I wanted a single room, but it wasn't available, and I had to accept it, booking last-minute. That last space seemed like destiny.

As I have mentioned some times before, I am not good at preparing for travel when it comes to reading guidebooks, but this time I wanted to make the most of it so I started, as you do, by trying amazon and getting 600 hits. It felt hopeless so I asked my Orcadian friend for recommendations. The best was The Orkney Tapestry, by George Mackey Brown, a book worth reading regardless. It provided more or less everything essential I needed to know about my destination, while also being deeply personal and engaging.

I read the travel agent's brochure and studied various maps. Orkney consists of seventy islands, and we were supposed to visit several. It was exciting. It was right in the middle of a very difficult period in my life, and I was looking forward to a break far, far away from everything and offline. I was tremendously anxious about travelling on my own, among strangers. I had done it dozens of times in the past, but recently I had preferred company, just to be on the safe side. I do have a condition, and I am not young anymore. I was, however, confident that I was in good physical shape after extensive power walking.

The trip started in Inverness, and I first considered taking the night train, but I didn't want to run a risk of not sleeping properly and be tired in the morning. So I booked a B&B in Inverness, arriving in the evening and having a good rest. In the morning I walked to the station, worrying that I wouldn't find my guide. I always worry about silly things like that. I was hugely worried about the crossing because guidebooks said it could be rough, and I have bad experience of rough seas.

I found the guide and my travel companions, just eight of us. I was going to share a room with one of them, and while we drove up to John O'Groats, I looked at them, hoping that my roommate would be nice. People going on demanding walking holidays are usually nice.

To be continued. 

Re-reading Catch 22

I had no memory of this novel at all, although I know I read it all those years and years ago. Of course I know what “catch 22” means, and I had some vague memories of pilots having to fly more and more missions, but I am not sure whether I remembered it from the book or from the film. I know for sure that I remembered the most gory detail from the film and was waiting for it to turn up in the book. It did, at the very end. I don't know whether the knowledge spoiled my reading experience.

I am confident that I didn't understand anything of the novel when I read it fifty years ago, and as with most books on my re-reading list, I wonder how much I bluffed then. The plot is non-existent, and at that time plot was more important than anything else. The book is exceptionally repetitive, and an inexperienced reader – as I was then – would certainly get bored, unaware that repetition is the most prominent and of course deliberate narrative device. It is used in conjunction with another powerful device: omission, or paralipsis, to use a fancy word. The same episode is told over and over again, each time slightly differently and each time omitting the most significant detail that would explain everything that is going on. How clever! It also employs an intricate temporality as events follow upon each other randomly, as deviations, by association, connected solely by a reminiscence, or even without any tangible connection at all. Each chapter seemingly focuses on a secondary or sometimes completely peripheral character, and only in hindsight do we understand why the story had to be told at all. If I were still an active academic I would write an article on this novel and include it in my courses. Not as a war novel, but as an example of exquisite storytelling.

However, the greatest surprise to me was that the novel is so wonderfully hilarious. Of course I remembered, more from criticism than from actual reading, that it was a satire on war. Yet a satire is not necessarily funny, and the novel is. I don't often laugh outloud when I read, but I did. Pity nobody was listening except my cats. I would almost claim that Catch 22 is the twentieth-century reply to Alice in Wonderland with its twisted logic and magnificent wordplay. Maybe this is the only possible way to write about the horrors of war.

Reflections on virtual travel

It is hard to believe that as recently as ten weeks ago I was still hoping to be able to travel to Spain and walk Camino del Norte in the second week of May.

The idea to do the walk virtually was spontaneous, so I hadn't prepared as thoroughly as I should have. To be fair, I don't always do my homework before travel which means I probably miss interesting things to see and do. This time, the focus was on walking the distance I would have walked on the Camino, even though I could not achieve the same climbs. But I also wanted some experience of the place, even though second-hand, so I re-watched The Way and watched some Youtube videos to get into the mood. The Way was what made me want to do the walk in the first place, and the reason I watched it some years ago was that I learned that a cousin of mine, who was the last person I would expect to go on search for spirituality, walked the whole of it at one go and has been doing it again and again ever since. I have no faith, so this aspect of the Camino does not mean anything to me, and until recently I wasn't a walker at all. I started walking with the Ramblers in Cambridge after I heard a friend of mine share her adventures with an international Rambler group somewhere in France, not the Camino. I discovered that walking was something that, next to gardening, was the best healing for body and mind, and since then I cannot imagine my life without regular walking. These days I am amused thinking back at how proud I was having walked 3 km in Milton Country Park. I have so far walked 540 km this year.

Back to Camino, the virtual Camino. I explored the route, planned my own daily walks, read some travel sites, watched videos. Of course, it is not the same as doing the real thing. But in the current situation, doing it virtually is still better than not doing it at all. And we may be doing more virtual travel in the future. I believe VR will be invaluable. I am surprised that it hasn't become more popular these days, although I have read some explanations why. But technology is developing at incredible pace, and I am sure more and more destinations will be available in satisfactory ways. I have cut down on travel substantially in the past few years, and I will be happy to keep it to a minimum if I can get a somewhat adequate experience of places I want to visit. I may even visit places I have never intended to visit, such a climbing Kilimanjaro or crossing Antarctica.

In other words, first lesson learned: even though it was not the real experience, it was interesting, valuable and exciting in itself, not just as poor compensation.

On my last day, I finally had company. A friend back in Cambridge suggested we walk-along, and here is how we did it. I knew where she would be walking, and I sent her a map of my nature reserve with my route marked. We connected on WhatsApp and started walking, exchanging photos and observations on the go. What we could have done, if we were emulating Camino, would be checking where we would have been up there and looking up facts and pictures, but it would probably be too much. In the evening, we cooked the same local meal. Once again, not the real thing, but better than nothing. I will certainly do it again, with or without a virtual route.

Cooking local food was a huge boost. I always like to try local food when I travel, even if it is jellied cockroach (in South Korea) so I would definitely be eating the exciting Basque and Cantabrian dishes. Learning the difference between tapas and pintxos was illuminating, and I think I will include pintxos in my habitual cooking. I like cooking, but I am rather conservative so it was liberating to try something completely different and find it palatable. It wasn't so much the ingredients as the methods, and I now want to learn more. So this was a side effect. Attending a cookery school was a part of my retirement visions, and now I see that I don't have to travel or even leave my home. I know this option has been available all along, but like with so many other things, you need a push.

Did I find what I was looking for? Since I have no idea what I would have found on the real trip, it's hard to say. If I was looking for a way to make up for the canceled trip, I believe I was highly successful.

What can I recommend to a potential virtual traveler, based on my experience? Firstly, perhaps, consider what you want to get out of it. My objective was to emulate demanding and intensive walking, therefore everything else was a bonus. If your objective is to see a new city or museum you may do it without leaving your room. Secondly, don't be too ambitious. I could have enhanced my trip in many different ways, by reading some fiction and non-fiction, watching more videos, learning some basic Basque, making a virtual album of local plants, marking my progress on a map, keeping a journal and writing poetry. But it would probably have proved too stressful. Also, I cut the last day's walk because I had got tired. If you feel you've had enough, stop while you are still enjoying it. Thirdly, I missed sharing my experience. Next time, I will try to find a companion for the whole journey. There is an advantage with virtual travel: you can get offline if you don't want any more company that day. Like going up to your hotel room while the rest of the group is having drinks.

Anyway, I have enjoyed it, and maybe some of you will get inspired and go on a virtual trip of your own.

Mock Camino, Day 3

Today we deviated from the Camino route and walked along the coast, first to the fishing village of Getaria, then to Zumaja, 10 km. You can see the trail if you zoom on the map. I don't know why the travel agent chose this trail, but my guess is that they had a good deal with a lunch restaurant in Getaria. This is usually the reason for detours, and I don't mind. Also the main route goes a bit inland, and a coastal path is always attractive.

In real life, I took a 11 km walk with a 167 m climb. I thought I would ache all over after yesterday's walk, but it felt like a leisurely stroll. I climbed hills, walked on lake shores, had my coffee break on a hill top and my lunch by the lake. I saw fields of lillies-of-the-valley, not in bloom yet, but soon. I saw cranes. I felt good.

For dinner tonight, I am making salmon marmitako.

My mock Atlantic

Mock Camino, Day 2

Today real walking started. We walked 22 km along the coast from San Sebastian to Zarautz, with a total climb of 550 m, enjoying scenery of exceptional beauty. You can watch this video to get some sense of the place.

In practical terms, I planned a walk in my nature reserve that I know well by know, and I estimated it would be roughly 22 km. I was right, 21,68. Of course, my climb wasn't quite the same, only 323 meters, but I didn't take any extra climbs. The walk took me seven hours, with a half-hour lunch break and two short breaks. I had more stuff to carry than usual: more provisions, water and extra gear, such as waterproof trousers, having the recent hailstorm in mind. They say Camino del Norte is less crowded than the main route, and I didn't meet more than a handful of people on my walk. Did I get tired? You bet! Runkeeper says it was my longest walk since I started using the app. On a longer walk you come to a point, for me after about 15 km, when you stop noticing anything around you and just keep putting one foot in front of the other. At 17 km, knowing how much I still had to cover, I sat down by the lake, took off my boots and sank my feet into cold water. It was bliss, and after this I suddenly had more energy. Right now my whole body aches, in a pleasant way.

Yesterday evening, I re-watched The Way, to get into the mood. A question that goes through the whole story, that the characters ask each other, and that the Camino managers ask them at the end: Why are you doing this? Why did I want to walk the Camino? I have no faith, I don't believe in miracles. I have done three longish walks before: Norfolk Coast Path, Hadrian's Wall and the Orkney Islands. Why? Just because I could. Because, as the saying goes, they were there. Did I find whatever I was seeking on those walks? Possibly. I had good company, the scenery was stunning, and walking gives me a peace of mind like nothing else. I enjoy a good chat after a long day, but I don't want to talk while walking (and listening to music would be sacrilege). I want to be in that place, that space, engaging all my senses in the experience. I appreciate beautiful scenery, even though it isn't essential. But Camino was supposed to be exceptional.

I hadn't planned any travel this year because I wanted some quiet time after the recent turbulent period of my life, with retirement, move to Sweden, and more. But when my walking society offered a walking holiday on Camino del Norte, I signed up at once (first making sure I had cat-sitting covered). Like with the Orkneys last year, I was a bit anxious about being fit, so I have been walking a lot in my nature reserve. I have walked 500 km since January.

It was of course disappointing that the trip was cancelled, but hopefully it will still happen next year. But why, you may ask, am I pretence-walking now? What am I getting out of it? I kept asking myself this question today, and I don't have the answer. Maybe again, just because I can? Walking keeps me in good physical and mental shape, and staying healthy and fit is right now my highest priority and a full-time occupation. I am fortunate to have this nature reserve on my doorstep.

Anyway, I am extremely proud of myself for completing today's walk because now I know I can do it, even though the climb will be twice as high. But the scenery will be my reward.