My life on this, and other, enchanted isles
Like many Romanian cities, in Oradea the atmosphere is relaxed and the economy is on the up. But Oradea’s ghosts at the table are the Synagogues. Recent travels in central and eastern Europe have brought home the holocaust in a way that somehow I wasn’t expecting. You know about the camps but visiting cities where […]
Read More Oradea Part ThreeIf you are visiting Oradea you can stay at the (very) faded original Art Nouveau ‘Park Hotel’ for a handful of lei…
Read More Oradea Part TwoThe city of Oradea in Northern Romania has the most exuberent and extensive surviving Art Nouveau cityscape in the former Austro-Hungarian empire. This last extravagent flourish of belle epoque has survived not just in the main square but out into the side streets. The anti-glamour of the eastern bloc flat blocks mass and glower at […]
Read More Oradea Part OneBus station cafes are not renowned for their imagination or attention to detail – and they don’t usually make many design concessions to the mode of transport their customers departed and arrived on (unless its some faux references to Greyhound buses). However in Szekelyudvarhely (Ordorheiu Secuiesc) which is in Szekely Land in Translyvania in Northern […]
Read More Cool bus station cafes of Central and Eastern Europe: an occasional monographBradford once had its own car industry…not only that but its products were Class winners at Le Mans and featured in Raymond Chandler. And only in Yorkshire would vehicles be be named a Curlew or a Weasel (pictured below outside Bradford Town Hall)! The company was established in 1902 in Bradford before moving to the […]
Read More I want to go Jowetting…!Something I wrote a while back… 1. BARKING The London Borough of Barking and Dagenham was, he thought, London’s answer to East Berlin. An unremarked workers state. Part of a vast metropolis of public housing that accelerated away from the City before running out of energy and finally losing itself, ten miles out, in the […]
Read More The Dagenham IdolWatched Richard Linklater’s ‘Waking Life’ on the laptop on an evening train from Euston to Liverpool tonight. I’d seen it before so I knew broadly what to expect and let the animated talking heads undulate and philosophise as my eyes drifted from the screen to the views out of the window, and back again. The train was quiet and the landscape seemed […]
Read More Waking life‘The angels are uncertain if they are living among the living or the dead” In 1999 the Euston Tower (a 1970, standard issue, office tower block) was being refurbished. Deborah Warner took the opportunity to put in the Tower Project installation. You took the lift to where she had taken three floors near the summit […]
Read More The Tower Project – EustonThe Pennine Way is famous as the first English long distance path. The path was the idea of the journalist and rambler Tom Stephenson inspired by similar trails in the United States of America, particularly the Appalachian Trail. Stephenson proposed the concept in an article for the Daily Herald in 1935 but it wasn’t until […]
Read More The Pennine WayMy favorite portraits of Tilda Swinton – by Kim Andreolli The blessed Tilda is now better known after winning an Oscar…and how cool is this for a morning after winning an Oscar pic? She’s also been attracting more attention recently for her domestic arrangements in the far North of Scotland. Her husband John Byrne was […]
Read More Some Tilda Swinton sites and connections
Enchanted Isle 