Bad men and bad baguettes

How pleasant – and unusual – to be drafting this piece in the garden, the temperature soaring towards 30 degrees, the sky relentlessly blue, and the only immediate negative the baguette at which I take the occasional half-hearted nibble. This Asda product, fancifully labelled a Parisienne Baguette – “chosen by you” (well, we can all make mistakes) – which I have stuffed with Camembert and cranberry sauce, has all the gustatory appeal of the cardboard inner tube of a toilet roll. Nasty indeed.

But not as nasty as some. As publication of “Tourist In Your Own Town” hovers uncertainly, I was again reminded by news stories this week of the chance factors leading to place creation, a theme from an earlier posting, and one for “Tourist”. San Francisco suffered a plane crash, fortunately not as serious as it might have been, and an event which will add nothing to the sense of place which the wonderful city by the Golden Gate already enjoys aplenty. No discernible effect there, then. Unlike Lac-Mégantic - on the other side of the North American continent in Québec province - a small community which, what’s left of it, will forever have its identity imprinted by a runaway train that caused many fatalities. Such are the random and accidental occurrences which may or may not give rise to, or modify, a sense of placefulness.

Maybe someone at Lac-Mégantic was crucially to blame, maybe not; that remains to be decided, but what of those places definitively linked with infamous people or dreadful deeds? We’re not just talking Asda bakery here. Places with evil subtitles, as it were. Recently I travelled on the partially completed high speed main line across Austria, and found my place-association muscles being activated in an unpleasant way more often than was good for them. “Wir erreichen jetzt Linz Hauptbahnhof”. Nice station, good connections, surprisingly large steelworks close by, but what does one really associate with Linz? Anything other than the Führer’s megalomanic plans for rebuilding, revisited repeatedly as the nightmare empire he had created crumbled about him? Anything else? I thought not, except – maybe - nearby Mauthausen and its diabolical quarry.

The train slowed momentarily from its cruising speed of around 135 mph to pass through Amstetten, which as far as I could recall has only one claim to notoriety, but a pretty big one, in the form of Josef Fritzl. One may recall that a few years ago it came to light that for 24 years Fritzl had imprisoned his daughter in the basement, raping her repeatedly and resulting in her producing seven children, one of whom died in infancy, the others remaining similarly incarcerated. Josef and his wife – in a sick-making hypocritical charade now in principle nauseatingly familiar (recent cases in Derby and New Addington, for instance) appeared on TV from time to time appealing for help in investigating the daughter’s “disappearance”.

Vienna has of course inflicted its own peculiar spin on psychology; one wonders how that subject might have developed if Sigmund Freud had been born in, say, Barcelona, Brisbane or Bristol, or anywhere less conspicuously knicker-twisted than the Austrian capital. For starters, we’d all be less afraid of rats, horses, and/or sex. Or, the other great what-if, if the aforementioned moustachioed one had succeeded as an artist there or, better still, been born half a century later in Dartford or Liverpool and picked up the guitar. Counterfactuals get you nowhere though, least of all Salzburg.

Upon arrival in Salzburg it was impossible to ignore (but effortless to resist) the announcement of an imminent train departure to Braunau-am-Inn, birthplace of the aforementioned ranting one. Not that he can be avoided entirely. The excellent Panorama tours, which operate out of Salzburg and specialise in “The Sound of Music” for those who like that kind of thing, do a Tour Number 4, to the Kehlsteinhaus, otherwise known as the Eagle’s Nest. Cryptically their leaflet refers to brass elevators of WW2 vintage and “a magnificent view of the surrounding snowcapped peaks of the Bavarian Alps and the surrounding countryside”. The blurb intriguingly makes no mention of whom one might have shared the view with some 70 years ago. In the unlikely event that one doesn’t know, I wonder if the sense of placefulness of this majestic alpine summit is diminished – or enhanced – as a consequence? Place creation, as I say, is all so chancy, so subjective.

Budapest: a lesson for us all

It was liberating last week to arrive in a “new” city, one that I had been looking forward to for a long time, and to see how it fared with respect to some of the principles of subjective geography that I have been describing in recent blogs, and which feature in “Tourist In Your Own Town”.

Budapest enjoys a strong sense of place, due in no small way to its location at the point where the Danube breaks free from the hills to the north and enters the great flat Hungarian plain. It celebrates its mighty river and makes the most of it, the same mythic Blue Danube which its upstream neighbour Vienna so churlishly turns its back on, to its loss, and which last week – after a long period of heavy rains – was greyish-green in colour, swollen, littered with uprooted trees, and flowing fast. As the capital of a country with a language that offers few clues to a non-speaker I was surprised at how easy Budapest was to use, at its eagerness to adopt Western values, and at the frequency and competence with which English was spoken. I found the city welcoming and friendly, fun to be in. It’s somewhere that wants to have a good time and knows how to go about it.

First impressions, when arriving at Keleti station off the RailJet from Vienna, were of a frisson of “foreignness”, of Eastern Europeanness, a feeling exacerbated by the presence of dodgy-looking taxi touts and of the disorder caused by the closure of the main station frontage and its surrounding by construction works for metro Line 4. The strangeness quickly dissipated upon approaching the city centre, and I soon realised I was in one of the great European capitals.

Pest includes the commercial heart of the city, while Buda is more relaxed and touristy, with features reflecting a long history. Subjectively, there is no obvious single central place, although conventionally it would be Deák Ferenc Square, where the three metro lines intersect, a location marked by a big wheel and a tourist information office. However, there is a considerable surrounding area where one feels a strong sense of being close to the centre of things. The Danube acts as a focus through the central area, especially in the vicinity of the chain bridge, near where tour guides congregate.

Navigability is easy, aided on the Pest side of the Danube by broad radial avenues and roughly semicircular connectors, and sometimes by views towards the river and the hills to the west, and on the Buda side by the very obvious topographies of the castle area and of Gellert hill. Many parts of the central city provide a satisfying sense of enclosure, with a high information content in terms of street furniture and activity, the visual and aural effects of the ubiquitous yellow trams, a solid, chunky, dense and stylish urbanity, yet with a skyline free from the visual blight of ugly modern highrise that disfigures so many cities, not least London. Budapest is a city that enjoys itself, knows what it has got, appreciates it and – one hopes – doesn’t want to spoil it by pursuing the dreary diktats of “progress”, as understood by egotistical architects, unimaginative financiers and corporate drones. In terms of subjective similarity to other places, Paris is the most obvious candidate, surely not a bad thing. Many of the major thoroughfares are treelined; the variety in the detail of the vernacular architecture is astonishing.

In an earlier blog I commented on the plaque on the bridge across the Thames at Marlow which declares – in English and Magyar – how that Buckinghamshire town is “bridged” with Budapest, thanks to the work of William Tierney Clark and his (unrelated) successor Adam Clark. I was hoping to find a plaque on the Szchenyi chain bridge across the Danube referring to Marlow but, despite the difficulty of deciphering the inscription in Hungarian at the south western corner of the bridge, I don’t think Marlow gets a mention, although both Clarks are cited. But it’s a such a lovely bridge that I attach a photograph.

Finally, I encountered something so strange and wonderful that afterwards I wondered if I had dreamt it. Having explored the delightful city park in the north east of the city I took Line 1 of the metro downtown. This is the Földalatti, the line dating from the 1890s, the first such system in continental Europe. The station at Hösök tere, aka Heroes’ Square, adjacent to the city park, really is the stuff of dreams, and consequently my description may be a little exaggerated or distorted. Entering the station via a stairwell I went to a tardis-like kiosk and bought a block of tickets, the size of one’s little finger, and had to validate one in a machine, under the eye of guards, before entering the platform area proper which – surreally – appeared not much larger than your average bathmat. The train was already in, and seemed to have a capacity for about eight people, all of them tourists. I’m sure this can’t really be true. At each beautifully tiled station, door-closing and departure were announced by an elaborate sequence of chimes. The whole experience was a dreamlike delight.

However, it occurred to me later that much of the line follows the route of Andrassy Street, the straight radial sometimes compared (unreasonably) with the Champs Elysées, and therefore must run close to the hideous basement of Number 60, the House of Terror. Here, the crimes of the Nazi and the Soviet occupiers are recorded in grim detail, along with some of the more gruesome artefacts of repression, and offer a stern message applicable to this day to all those – businessmen and politicians in particular - who toady to nasty regimes that still practise exactly the same kinds of thing. Budapest has found its freedom, values and enjoys it, and understands how precious it is. We should take note.