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.