OIW Writers' "Retreat" 2014

Why do we call it a retreat when it’s an advance? My advance at the Writers’ Retreat last weekend was impressive, thanks to Phil Jenkins’ stimulating impact on my aging, sluggish brain. I went to this retreat more for the collegiality of a gathering of writers, ten of us altogether, than to transform myself into a new Dickens. I’d not have been disappointed if I’d experienced no benefit. In fact the story I’ve been working on for the past few weeks shows significant improvements that resulted from Phil’s suggestions. These were non-specific suggestions directed at all of us, not me in particular, but I felt that I was the main beneficiary. I came home from the retreat/advance with renewed enthusiasm. The first thing I did when I got home was to sit at the keyboard for an hour or so, moving text around. The story now pulls the reader in with the first sentence, and my long-winded original opening which sets up the time, place, characters, atmosphere, and hints at what is to come, is moved on into the body of the story.

Aside from my personal gain, the experience was delightful in every way: excellent company, fine weather, good food and a lovely setting, the Galilee Centre at Arnprior. I recommend future versions of this experience unreservedly to other writers.

So much to read, so little time...

From an e-letter to Jeff House, my former editor at Oxford University Press:

Catching up with magazines.. Ah, yes. I glance guiltily over my shoulder at the growing pile of back issues of the New York Review of Books on the little coffee table in my office. There are times when I'm reminded of life as it was years ago when our home was in danger of sinking into its own basement under the weight of back issues of the National Geographic which we got in those days under the mistaken belief that they were helpful in advancing our children's knowledge of the world they lived in. I'd feel even more guilty if I passed on this pile of NYRBs to my son-in-law before I've read everything in them that I ought to read. Yet I feel guilty also at clinging to them for so long when he's waiting to read them too. Once in a while I blitz the pile, or try to. But usually I find that after an hour or two of reading, the pile has gone down by only one or at most two issues. I'm glad I resisted the tempting offer to subscribe as well to the London Review of Books.

The brutal truth is that I'll never catch up. There's a law of physics that covers this situation; Newton's 5th law of motion I think, which states that no matter how hard you try, you can never catch up with the accumulated back issues of magazines you subscribe to. In fact, you fall into arrears at a rate which is the square (or maybe square root) of the number of magazines to which you subscribe. It was all spelt out in a learned article in the Christmas issue of the Lancet about 30-40 years ago if my memory is reliable.

A few words of praise for the elite

A popular conservative canard is to describe an adversary as elitist. It is often said with a dismissive sneer, seemingly the ultimate put-down when the adversary is demonstrably intelligent, or has accomplished notable feats by using brains rather than brawn. Those who speak pejoratively of the elite apparently believe it’s perfectly OK to excel at sport but it is somehow shameful to excel intellectually. To such people, the more thuggish the behavior of their sporting hero, the greater is their admiration for him. This inversion of values is as despicable as it is revealing of the shallow and meretricious minds of those who behave this way.

Getting around

I have moved about a lot. Some of this moving has been under my own power, on foot or on bicycles. A tiny bit has been on horseback, in the Australian outback and in the Canadian Rockies. I’d like to have had more time on horseback but I never had a convenient opportunity and I don’t suppose I ever will now. Most of my moving about has been aided by trains, planes, including helicopters as well as jets and propeller driven aircraft; and in automobiles. Some has been on board ships, boats, ferries, hovercraft, hydrofoils, speedboats, yachts, canoes, once a Greek caique off the Ionian island of Corfu, and once a Chinese junk that took us around Hong Kong (the Star Ferries were more fun). In Cancun, Mexico, Wendy and I went under the sea surface in a little submarine with big watertight windows to see colorful corals and tropical fish. On St Valentine’s Day 1997, Wendy wanted to surprise me on our 40^th wedding anniversary with a hot air balloon ride but it began to rain heavily when we were on our way to the field where the balloon was to ascend, so we never got off the ground, because hot air balloons don’t fly in the rain. As for petrol-driven vehicles, those that have carried me range all the way from Rolls Royces and Bentleys to tuk-tuks and jinties, even the odd motor bike. I shudder when I recall my first motor bike ride, through the Adelaide hills in 1950, without either goggles to protect my eyes or a helmet to protect my cranium and its contents.

Interesting cities are best explored on foot. I was going to say that interesting cities can only be explored on foot but then I remembered that Wendy and I explored New York very thoroughly on our bikes. For 14 months in 1978-79 we lived on the upper west side of Manhattan in an 18^th floor apartment on the corner of 123^rd Street and Amsterdam Avenue. On many weekends during that year we biked south through Central Park and on through the hotel and theatre district, all the way down to the Battery, about 11 miles as the crow flies but usually much more because of all our zigging and zagging. Occasionally we biked north, past George Washington Bridge to the Cloisters. These bike rides weren’t just bike riding for its own sake. We always had a plan and a target to aim for: a street fair, a festival, a gallery or book shop, an interesting restaurant or sidewalk cafe for a champagne brunch. Manhattan Island is 13 miles long and 3 miles wide. Almost all of it is interesting, much is absolutely fascinating.  It’s much too much to cover on foot, so getting about on bikes is a more efficient way to explore it and discover its innumerable charms.  Wendy filled two fat scrap books with anecdotes beside pasted in theater programs, gallery catalogues and other memorabilia.  I’ll try to distill those scrap books into a chapter of my memoirs.

Bikes would be a good way to explore London, Paris, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Delhi, Shanghai, Beijing, Singapore, Hong Kong, Sydney, Washington, New Orleans, San Francisco and many other European and American cities.   I’ve explored all of these named above and a dozen or more other European cities and a few in Asia on foot and public transport, buses, trams, the Underground, Metro, BART, Subway, the T and others. In Europe there are trams. When I first lived in Edinburgh for four months in 1952 they had double-decker trams. These had gone when we lived there in the 1960s but have been reborn in the 21st century. I had to go to Hong Kong to ride on a double-decker tram.  Oh, and ferries too, especially in Sydney of course, and the irrepressible Star Ferries in Hong Kong and ferries in Istanbul. Subways? It can be a big help if you know where you want to go, to be able to descend to a clearly sign-posted platform and move, usually noisily, from where you are to an interesting district that is too far away to walk in the available time.  You miss surface landmarks of course but unless you’re fortunate enough, as we’ve been, to have a year or more in one of the world’s great and worthwhile cities, it’s a necessary trade-off. Wendy and I got about partly on the underground to save limited time on our only visits to Berlin and Budapest, and our first of several visits to Stockholm. When I first went to Paris in 1952, the Metro had an 'electric' smell and the trains were very slow and very noisy, and often very crowded.  Some rolling stock was very old too; it looked pre-war, pre-1914-1918 war I mean. That added to the glamour if anything. But they improved greatly. The last few times I was in Paris, there were protective barriers at many of the busiest stations to prevent access to the platforms  until the train arrived, so jilted lovers and other people who wanted to end it all couldn't throw themselves in front of an approaching train. I've remarked elsewhere on the astonishing diversity of humanity, on variations of facial bone and cartilage structure, skin colour and hair texture, as seen in carriages on the London Underground.  There's even more diversity on the Paris Metro, and the New York subways. All students of humanity would do well to spend lots of time in any of these underground railway systems.

On a scale from zero to 10, walking or biking almost always scores 9 or 10.  What comes next?  It’s those freighters that carried 12 passengers on which I hitched rides across the world in the 1950s and early 1960s, cruising free as the ship’s surgeon, taking my family as passengers with deeply discounted fares. No other way to cover great distances pleasurably comes anywhere close to that kind of sea voyage, which I’m sad to say is almost extinct now that freighters have been superseded by container ships. My sea voyage in 1954 from Tilbury Docks in London to Tenerife in the Canary Islands, then on round the Cape of Good Hope, across the Southern Ocean to landfall off Kangaroo Island, South Australia, was undoubtedly one of the highlights of my life. Ten years later, with Wendy, Rebecca, David and Jonathan, the voyage from Sydney across the Pacific, through the Panama Canal to Kingston, Jamaica, Vera Cruz, Mexico, and on up the eastern seaboard of the USA with interesting ports of call, Charleston, South Carolina, Norfolk, Virginia, Philadelphia and Boston, was another.  On my 10-point scale, both of those voyages rate 9.5. Voyages from Australia to England in 1961, and back again in 1962 on Danish ships that carried 12 passengers don’t score quite so high, despite some exciting ports of call; maybe 8 or 8.5 is a fair score for those two journeys.

Trains come next in my hierarchy of pleasurable ways to travel. Not all trains, but a few particular journeys by rail. At the top by a wide margin is a 36-hour rail trip from Guanchou (a half-hour flight from Hong Kong) to Hanchou, a city of about a million on the picturesque West Lake, near Shanghai.  That journey scores 9.5 on my 10-point scale. It had a magical quality. It was 1981, China was just beginning to open to the western world, and I was traveling alone. At times I felt a bit like a traveller to another planet, it was all so very different from anything I’d ever experienced before.  The only other European, a German, son of missionaries, who was returning to the city where he’d been born, got off at dawn of the second day, and after that I was the sole representative of my race. I spoke no Chinese but conversed volubly in body language during our many stops. Some stops were lengthy, and we all got off the train while we waited for a train in the other direction to pass us at a place where the track was doubled for a couple of kilometers. I said more about that train journey in a post on this blog on June 18, 2012.

Some British trains are quite glamorous. The Flying Scot didn’t fly when I took it during the years that we lived in Edinburgh. It was better when Wendy and I went back to Edinburgh for a meeting of the International Epidemiological Association in 1984, even though I might have choked to death in the dining car if Wendy hadn’t done a Heimlich manouvre on me. But that’s another story. The Eurostar that went from Waterloo in my days, now goes from Euston through Kent to the Channel Tunnel, then picks up speed when it reaches the better engineered French rail tracks, arrives at Gare du Nord about 4 hours after leaving London, a much better alternative than flying from Heathrow to  Charles de Gaulle Aeroport. The Eurostar deserves 8.5 or 9 on my 10-point scale.

From the mid 1980s until 1999 then once more in 2007 I was often in Geneva and sometimes in Stockholm at someone else's expense, WHO, CIOMS, the Nobel Foundation, etc. At suitable times of the year, Wendy came with me, or flew over to join me at the end of my mission if it was a long one. We used EurailPasses to explore many parts of Europe during those years. We saw a great deal of Switzerland, the Austrian and German Tyrol, Vienna, Salzburg, Munich, the Italian Alps, as well as Prague, Budapest, Provence, Rome, Florence, Sienna, Naples (actually, Pompeii); visited Paris a dozen times or more, exploring different museums and galleries each time, as well as returning again and again to our favourites, the Musee D'Orsay and the Picasso Museum. We had favourite rail journeys too, especially the train between Lugano in the Italian Swiss canton of Ticino, and Como in the Italian Lake District. That is one of the great railway journeys of the world, through the St Gotthard Pass, where a spectacular corkscrew tunnel ascends about 1000 meters. The only other rail journey that comes close to this for sheer spectacle in my experience is the Rocky Mountaineer between Kamloops and Banff, where another corkscrew tunnel negotiates Kicking Horse Pass. The corkscrew tunnel on the Como-Lugano journey "comes up for air" several times, allowing passengers spectacular views, first looking a long way up at a church and its steeple, then directly at it from the same level, and finally down on it from far above. The corkscrew tunnel that negotiates Kicking Horse Pass doesn't have anything comparable.  The trains alongside the Rhine are splendid too. I once gazed at the view from my solitary seat in the dining car, sipping a good Reinwein as we glided past the fortified stretch between Koblenz and Bingen. For sheer spectacle, another memorable train journey is the one from Edinburgh to Aberdeen, across the Firth of Forth railway bridge, past Dundee and the Tay River bridge, then culminating in a spectacular coastal run via Stonehaven to Aberdeen.  Another spectacular train trip is the part of the Columbo to Kandy train journey that goes up the escarpment, ascending about 500 meters; there's a special scenic car with rear-facing seats at the back of the train, where a handful of lucky people can recline and gaze at the spectacular views as the train ascends this steep part of the journey. 

On the Coramandel Peninsula near Auckland, New Zealand, a potter has built a miniature railroad to take him from his pottery to a deposit of special clay. He takes a handful of passengers who squat uncomfortably in tiny ‘carriages’ as the little train bumps along past bizarre figures, amphorae and other unlikely baked clay objects nestled among the lush vegetation. That little train trip, only 2 or 3 Km, is worth 8.5 on my 10-point scale.

I've been very fortunate to have experienced all these and many more wonderful rail journeys.

Wendy talked in lyrical language about crossing Australia by rail from Perth to Adelaide and the old 'Ghan from Adelaide to Alice Springs. I envy her those trips. My brother Peter emailed recently to say he and Jenny, his wife, will shortly do both, better than Wendy's trips because the trains are much better, modern, air conditioned with good meals in the dining car. Peter writes of the books he will read on that journey. I'm trying to persuade him to enjoy the ever-changing panorama from his comfortable seat on the train, rather than fix his eyes on printed pages, which he can do somewhere else.

What about air travel and its discontents? Air travel was marginally glamorous when I first took to the air in 1942 on a Dakota in inland New South Wales, but it’s deteriorated very badly since the terrorist threat became a reality on September 11, 2001. At least now we fly in smoke-free aircraft but in every other way passenger flights have gotten steadily more unspeakably horrible. Once I flew across San Francisco bay in a helicopter. That was quite spectacular, although one of the other passengers got airsick and the odor of vomit detracted from the experience. Very few flights are worth more than 2 or 3 on my 10-point scale and I can think of many that could score in negative numbers. The only good thing about trans-Atlantic flights is that the westward flight is in the day time, and a window seat on the right hand side offers views of Greenland if there's no cloud cover.  I've seen Greenland from the air a dozen times or more, last time in early August 2011 when I was alarmed to see more water - melt-water - than glaciers: global climate change is having a very perceptible impact. I've crossed the Pacific too, more than 30 times in all. That's an endurance test rather than a sightseeing experience. These days the big jets fly nonstop from LAX or YVR to SYD, much of the time in darkness. Even in 1st class with fine wine and good food (which my stomach doesn't want at the times it's served) it isn't enjoyable.

Once I flew in a seaplane from Victoria, British Columbia to Seattle.  We flew along almost the whole length of Puget Sound, quite low and most of the time with excellent visibility.  But it was a misty day as it often is in the Pacific North-West, and there were a couple of brief rain squalls.  If it hadn't been for the mist and rain, that flight would have been worth at least 8 on my 10-point scale.

I’ve been up in a glider or sail plane only twice, and loved both flights. The only sound was of air rushing past the Perspex canopy and the views were splendid. My flights in a glider each score 8.5.  I think I’d enjoy flying in a derigible or motorized blimp but I’ve never had an opportunity.  

Usually I enjoy chatting to the person next to me on an airplane but once, flying from Idlewild (which became JFK a week or two later) I found it frustrating when I wanted to look out the window as we descended towards Burlington, Vermont and my seat-mate persisted in engaging me in inane and meaningless conversation, depriving me of my first sight of the city and university for which we had left Australia.