lou salome writing to rilke 20/03/1904 on the occasion of the Russo-Japanese war

Dear Rainer,  What a comfort it is to hear you speak of our war in this way... no one understands that Russia, however involuntarily, stands in for Europe against Asia in this conflict - always forced into this middle position where it must endure the collision of East and West on behalf of all, as it did earlier in the time of the Mongols.... but what is truly tragic seems to me that its own deepest destiny... is almost exactly the opposite, namely, to fight through towards a synthesis, towards a spiritually fruitful union between Eastern and Western culture, instead of prolonging that fierce uncomprehending split which, for the rest of Europe, will probably last forever...

Bicester Village

Extract from a guidebook to Britain, 2018

It takes no more than 45 minutes to arrive at Bicester Village by train from London. Marylebone Station offers information about the village in Chinese and Arabic. This is the post-European world. Once you arrive at Bicester Village, there are more signs in various languages. The station is neat and modern. It backs on to a carpark and the defining feature is a tax-reclaim office. The path to the village itself has been landscaped with due diligence. Given the season we visited there are traditional representations of the British reindeer in the parks, wearing woolly jumpers due to the time of year. These representations will alternate with the seasons. In the Summer there is a depiction of the famous British band The Beatles, wearing traditional 1960’s costumes. As you walk to the village, skirting another carpark, there’s a view of fields in the distance and an Anglo-Saxon church spire. These details are kept at a respectful distance from the village itself, as a homage to old England. The church might even have been constructed at the same time as the village, in order to provide suitable views for the visitors. Bicester Village is laid out in the traditional grid system. Its half-dozen streets are narrow, with gabled buildings. It is architecturally perfect. This perfection is enhanced by the fact that no-one lives here. Each of the one-story buildings contains a shop of some kind. Only the most respected, long-standing brands are present. The ones that are most associated with the timeless beauty of the classic British village. Swarovski, Polo, Hugo Boss, etcetera. This village is in so many ways perfect. It delivers the authentic British village experience whilst allowing you to purchase your favourite shopping items, safe in the knowledge that before you leave the village you can already claim back VAT tax on all purchased goods. There are many cafes where you can purchase traditional croissant for breakfast or other classic British dishes for lunch. Some eating establishments remain open until 8pm. They are staffed by kind-hearted European young people who have come from afar afield as Slovakia or Ireland to enjoy the experience of being working British villagers. These young people are kind and spend all of the day practicing their smiles. As you shop, do not forget to enjoy the experience of promenading through the old-world streets of Bicester Village which have been designed to enhance your pleasure of the shopping experience in a traditional British village, allowing you to experience both the excellence of the British consuming experience and the quiet pleasures of traditional Britain, the land of Stonehenge, smurfs, kings and queens and the opium wars. 

where are the europeans? (brexit and the british stage)

For all the gnashing of teeth from the literati, it’s not as though the British theatre world has done much to embrace Europe over the course of the past 3 decades. Whilst many a US author (Shinn, Shawn, Mamet, Norris etcetera) has had their day in the sun, the roll call of living European writers who aren’t Irish who have had successful productions is pitiable. It’s a struggle to think of a single playwright who has broken out. The odd play is staged, but Europe’s most celebrated contemporary playwrights remain unknown by the average British theatre practitioner. Noren, Fosse, Lagarce, Bernhard,  Koltes, Bebel, Loher… Ask most theatre practitioners and it’s doubtful they will have come across any of them. For most, Europe still means Brecht, Chekhov and not much more. Any attempt to open cultural vistas, to effect an exchange between the UK and its continental European colleagues has been negligible. Is this because these writers and many more are not much kop? Of course not. It’s probably due to a combination of imaginative and commercial reasons, due to a reluctance to seek out a horizon that doesn’t offer a backstage pass to Hollywood and its rewards. The introspection of the British cultural world, with the privileged linguistic space it believes it occupies, is no more than a reflection of mainstream political practices which have helped to create the circumstances under which the vote of 23 June was effected. 

It’s perhaps worth trying to focus on a couple of the great success stories of British theatre over this period. Firstly, take Sam Mendes, an Oxbridge contemporary of the Cameron gang. Mendes, on the back of his Oxbridge productions, broke through as the great white hope of British theatre in the late 80s. His take on the classics was seen as fresh and invigorating. He soon became the heir apparent to the generation of Hall and Nunn (a generation which it might be said entertained rather more intellectual curiosity). In 1990, Mendes took over the Donmar in Covent Garden. The Donmar had all the trappings of a fringe theatre, subversively planted in the heart of a booming new commercial area, Covent Garden. It had the potential to become one of the most radical, exciting theatre venues in Europe. Instead, it became a space dedicated to astute commercial practice. A thriving ‘boutique’ theatre evolved appealing to an elitist audience. Mendes maintained his reworking of the classics whilst also starting to mine the hyper-lucrative medium of the musical. As a creative theatre space, the Donmar never really got going. Mendes left and ended up directing Bond movies, whilst forming his own transatlantic company which does - you guessed it - classic texts with well-known stars. A more conservative approach to theatre would be hard to imagine. Theatre is always a trade-off between artistic and commercial instincts; Mendes’ career shows where the British emphasis has lain. Texts which might be seen as ‘difficult’ need to wait however many decades is required before they can get the imprimatur of ‘classics’ and be sold to the public on that basis. The notion of theatre as a process of intellectual investigation, an investigation which includes a dialogue with an audience, has been shelved. 

Mendes’ career is only one strand in recent British theatre history. It could be argued that the Donmar has an obligation to meet the bottom line and to put on shows that please the punters. However, it might also be suggested that this is to miss the point of culture, which is not to be a merely commercial vehicle, but a means whereby societies can begin to define themselves and also interact with other cultures. The Royal Court is a theatre which has ostensibly sought to embrace this point of view. Over the past three decades it has consolidated its position as the leading new writing venue in the country, not just for British writers, but also for writers all over the world. Indeed, the Royal Court runs its own “international” department. The exact brief of this department is sometimes hard to gauge. At times it seems like a post-colonial enterprise, as ambassadors from the British writing establishment are sent out to help “develop” playwrights in other countries. On the other hand, it could also be argued that it offers a point of cultural exchange, allowing British audiences to get an insight into what’s going on theatrically in the wider world. 

There are two major problems with the Royal Court’s approach towards international writing. Firstly, as part of its remit is to “develop” writers, this means it tends to work with writers who are still at a formative point in their careers. Much as the idea of Thomas Bernhard attending the Royal Court’s international residency tickles the fancy, the conditions under which the residency is run mean it would never have happened. Great writers don’t require “development”. They need their plays to be staged. However, the Court is more inclined to use the gaps in its scheduling for international writing to promote those writers it has invested in via its international outreach work. This leads to the second problem: that in its avowed mission of ‘development’. The Royal Court has effectively turned its back on the most important plays and playwrights currently writing. It doesn’t want to show the best; it wants to showcase its own good intentions. As a result, one of the few theatre spaces in the capital which might have had the energy to tackle the work of the major contemporary playwrights of Europe and beyond, has failed to do so. Look at the list of plays staged in the main house over the past thirty years and the number of plays from Europe is negligible. The greatest opportunity for dialogue theatre offers - staging plays of significance by great writers - has been forfeited. 

The writer understands that it is unfair to condemn the lack of European theatre within our (European) theatres at the door of either the Royal Court or Sam Mendes. Rather, these two examples have been cited as indicative of how our theatres would appear to have turned their backs on the continent long before 52% of the British population chose to follow suit. This only matters in so far as we choose to believe that culture matters. Had the Court and other British theatres been awash with productions of European playwrights it might not have made the slightest of differences to the political climate. However, if one chooses to believe that culture can have an effect, for better or for worse, on a nation’s consciousness, then it might be reasonable to suggest that the introspective, anglophone attitude of British theatre, regarding itself more as the 51st state of the United States than an active player within a European community, might be at the very least worthy of quiet reflection on the part of our theatre practitioners at a time when the cultural value of belonging to Europe has been so bitterly rejected. 

groucho club writing exercise

There are 17 people seated at a long walnut table in the Georgian room which looks out over Dean Street. At the head of the table is the writing tutor. On either side of the long table, her students. It’s Wednesday, half way through the week-long course. The course contains many writing exercises: dialogue and its framing; the historical novel; the use of images as a writing prompt; etcetera.  For this session the chosen topic is time. How the writer conveys time within their writing. The tutor hands out a postcard to each of us. The exercise will be to write a brief piece which incorporates two timelines, one of which could be a memory. We will be given approximately ten minutes to write. 

My postcard is a photograph of a man, cut off at the waist, wearing walking boots, striding down a road. I turn the postcard over and discover that the postcard is promotional material for a shop called the Natural Shoe Store. A shop which is five minutes walk from where we are. Down the stairs, onto Dean Street, turn left at Old Compton Street, cross Shaftesbury Avenue, take the street that leads to Seven Dials, then walk up Neal Street. I know this because I used to work in the Natural Shoe Store. For the best part of a year. Over twenty years ago. The summer of the Italy World Cup; the summer when Annie Lennox and Pavarotti and that bloke from Eastenders and a hundred others came through the shop. When I met Arita and Steve. When Sedley and I began our shirt business. When I’d stay in Sedley’s father’s flat the other side of Oxford Street. A time when you could still drive into town and park round the back for free. All of that and a thousand other memories, stacking up, vertiginous. 

I felt distress. I had no inclination to write but I felt as though I was obliged to write. I picked up my pen and wrote.

There’s a room full of people. They’re writing. They’re dispensing. Letter by letter, thought by thought. A youth walks through the room. In his hand he holds a pair of shoes. The morning light catches the wooden shelves. Neal Street dust flickers with its invisible energy. Daylight. The youth kneels. He holds out the shoes, black sandals, leather strapped, cork soled. He says: If you treat them well they will last you twenty years. Twenty years later he is one of the writers, whittling time like a stick. Marks on a page. Memories collapse in on him like an imploding house. Dust flies. Emptiness is all that is left. A blank space. The client looks at the youth. The client tells him: I don’t need to try them on. I know they fit. I’ll take them.

It didn’t take me long. I’d started after everyone else and finished first. I stared out of the window. Women in a third floor room on the other side of Dean Street were applying make-up to each other’s faces. They gazed at themselves in mirrors which I couldn’t see. 

The tutor stopped the exercise. She asked people for their reactions. I wanted to share mine with the group. I made an attempt to speak. I used words like ‘weird’ and ‘freaky’. The tutor said the exercise had more to do with the image on the card than anything written on the back. I wanted to explain that I knew that but that the biographical connection of the card which she had given me in order to do an exercise about time was too strong to ignore. One of the other students, about my age, understood. The class moved on. Some people read their pieces out. I didn’t. Soon enough we would be given the next writing exercise to perform. 

memorial to #71

We got back from Berlin at around 2pm. It had been one of those trips. Getting to the airport at 8am only to find that the flight was delayed an hour and a half. Getting to Luton and buying bus tickets only to find that the bus was delayed by half an hour. Traffic. A grumpy bus driver. A tiff. Rain. The typical comeback comedown.

When I got home I checked my mails or something. Within twenty minutes there was a knock at the door. Two women from the tenancy company asking if I’d seen my neighbour. It’s been about six weeks now I’ve been back in the flat and I haven’t seen head nor hide of him. A few weeks ago my former tenant came round to pick up his post and asked if I’d run into him. When I said I hadn’t he said he must have gone away for a bit. It’s been years since I lived in this flat and I have a vague memory of a man who was quite kindly but who I never got to know. 

I explained to the women that I hadn’t seen him. They started shouting through the letterbox. There was no reply. They seemed concerned. About half an hour later, C told me that the police had arrived. I looked through the peephole at the very moment that a policeman kicked the door in, surprisingly easily. It was, indeed, like a cop show, seen through a fish eye lens. A little later I opened the door. There were four policemen and the two women. The most senior policeman said that, unfortunately, he had to inform me that my neighbour was now deceased. Again, he asked if I’d seen anything and again I explained that I hadn’t been living here long and hadn’t seen my neighbour since I’d been back. 

About an hour later I looked through the peephole again. Two men were lugging a body-bag out of the flat. They were struggling and telling each other off, like angry removal men. 

When we left the flat later to watch the football, the smell coming from next door was overpowering. The sickly smell of death. The smell we read about in the papers when they talk about massacres; in countries gripped by war; when planes fall from the sky and crash on the earth. This smell, the most universal of smells, the smell that unifies all mankind, from babe to veteran, was completely alien. As though to show how us how inured we have been to that which it means to be alive, which is to die. Inured through the accident of history, through luck, through the privilege of living in times when death is a stranger.

I wondered how long my erstwhile neighbour had been dead. It was presumably weeks. As we left the building, Jose, the Spanish concierge, made a comment that they only find out you’ve died when you haven’t paid your rent. It’s true. This is the anonymous city, where no-one notices your absence, where your death will go unheralded, if you haven’t managed to convince people it’s worth something. Death has a currency like everything else. 

I trust he rests in peace, the unknown neighbour who has now moved on.

beneath the plough and the stars

It’s seven in the morning and for some reason I am awake. The night ended in Doyle’s about four hours ago. Young people were falling over each other dancing to James Brown whilst we finally wrapped up the conversation and decided to head for home.

Dublin has a lot of bars and my friend promised we’d end up in one of them. He promised a quiet nook somewhere, in a beautiful bar. There’s nothing wrong with Doyle’s but it’s neither quiet nor beautiful. Which given the context of the occasion is probably far more appropriate. 

My friend is called Sean Holmes. He’s a theatre director. I’ve known him for many years and seen many of his shows, although less of late. Last year, he came to give a workshop in the city were I live, Montevideo, Uruguay. At the end of the last night of the week, in the Plaza Independencia on the way back to the hotel, he said: “Why don’t you come to Dublin? The Abbey’s doing the centenary of the 1916 Uprising and for some reason they’re inviting lots of English directors over for it. I’m going to do The Plough and the Stars.” Standing in the plaza, Dublin and next year seemed a long way away. Nevertheless, a few months later here I am for one night, in time to catch the show’s first preview.

We go for supper before the event In a restaurant called The Winding Stair which overlooks the Liffey. Sean seems relaxed. The first preview is the moment the play finally confronts its audience. It’s opening night by any other name. He tells me that O’Casey’s play is “their Hamlet.” On the fourth night of the show’s opening run, in 1926, there was a riot. The rioters were widows of men who’d died in the 1916 uprising, who didn’t like what O’Casey had to say about it. With Jon Bausor, the designer, we speculate about what it would take to provoke a riot in a theatre today and decide it’s probably never going to happen again. 

In Montevideo, Sean had been giving a workshop with the playwright, Simon Stephens. Collectively, they were tackling the big issues of why people write plays and why they then choose to stage them. One of the exercises that Sean did involved investigating how you transform the theatrical space so that it feels as though the play being staged is actually happening in the same room, or physical space, as the audience. A great deal of theatre looks to separate the audience and the play; Sean was looking at how to integrate them. 

The Plough and the Stars is a play rooted in the geography of Dublin. Dublin’s not the most complex city, geographically. Within a single afternoon, I’d begun to get a handle on it. When O’Casey’s play talks about O’Connell Street, even I know where that is. For the audience, the play has some of the criteria of a video diary. The way in which people mercilessly film or photograph their lives, documenting their actuality. The Plough and the Stars is set in the actuality of Dublin’s geography. A local audience watches it with their own images of this world to hand. It’s not remote, it’s tangible. The only thing distancing the audience from the play is that it’s set in the past. 

Plays set in the past run the risk of being museum pieces. Audiences sometimes prefer this. They enjoy watching a play and feeling as though it belongs to another time; that they are cultural tourists. This might be a valid approach but it doesn’t have much to do with Sean’s exercise about making the audience feel part of the space. In order to achieve this, the director has to find a way to ‘de-museum’ the play. To make it feel contemporary.

We get to the theatre around 7pm. The theatre is sold out. The audience is a mix of young and old. There are several school parties. The doors are not opened until 7.20, ten minutes before the show is due to open. The spectators are crammed into the lobby by the bar. The Abbey is a gloriously unreconstructed seventies space. It wears its heritage lightly on its sleeve. This doesn’t feel like an audience which has come in a spirit of veneration. 

The first image in the production is a girl, aged about 14, wearing a Man Utd top. She approaches a microphone and sings, in Gaelic, what I later learn is the national anthem. The girl is of Pakistani descent. She speaks with a clear Irish accent. She’s the child of immigrants. The audience applaud her as she coughs her way through the song. Dublin, like many a contemporary European city, is a melting pot. One of the languages that I heard recurrently walking around was Portuguese Brazilian. Everyone’s here, on the edge of Europe. Dublin is no longer the white, classically Celtic city of O’Casey’s day. The production reflects this from the off. 

Having said which, modern dress is not the most radical of devices. The play uses costume wittily throughout, but the key tools in the director’s unlocking of the text are song and surprise. The character of Jack, Nora’s husband, might be said to be underwritten. Jack has one big scene before he goes off to join the militia and another midway through the battle of the Easter Uprising, the backdrop of the play’s second half. This is all the actor is given to convey what kind of man the husband of the play’s tragic heroine really is. The first scene between him and Nora has to communicate their passion. The scene begins naturalistically, then, suddenly, the actor grabs a mike. Hang on, you think, what’s the microphone doing on stage? This might be modern dress, but no-one has a microphone sitting around in their living room. The actor leaps out of naturalism. He sings a vivacious, sexy love song. Everything about their relationship, their desire, comes to life. The audience aren’t looking at a character from a great play. They’re looking at a man showing off for the woman he loves. 

This play between naturalism and non-naturalism creates the space that Holmes uses to remind the audience: we’re all in this theatre together. This theatre in this city. Which is the city of the past and the city of the future and the city, crucially, of the now. The rupture takes the audience out of the bubble of history and lands them in the here-and-now. The play isn’t talking about long-lost figures. It’s talking about the audience’s contemporaries. Music, humour, and the courage to break the moment, help to release the power of a play which is describing things that happened a hundred years ago. It makes them happen now, upon the stage, in Dublin, all over again.

In the interval I step outside for some air. Young people walk past, talking and laughing. They look like they’ve stepped out of The Plough and the Stars. 

It’s only the first preview. The play isn’t “finished’ yet. There’s more work to be done. Only today, Sean and Jon decided to rip out most of the set’s backdrop, locating the scenes on a larger, emptier stage. There are discussions about the speed at which a tower falls, whether a pram would be better as a shopping trolley; how to stage the final scene. These discussions carry on in Doyle’s until gone 2 in the morning. Director, designer, associate director, all thrashing it out. The play is still coalescing. The various aspects of stagecraft - acting, sound, lights, design, language, music - are being honed and refined. I will never see the finished version. But I have already seen enough. To feel as though O’Casey’s complex vision of the seminal Irish revolution is alive and kicking, as relevant to the Abbey’s audience today as it was when it was first produced in this theatre, ninety years ago. Enough to see that the audience and the actors are, indeed, sharing a common space as they explore the play together.

+++

At the curtain call, the actor playing Jack brings on an Irish flag and drapes it over the scenery. He has not been asked to do this. Sean is not too sure what to make of it. Given the importance of symbols in the play, it's not a negligible action. It’s reminiscent of the way a footballer might drape himself in his nation’s flag after having won an international tournament with his European club. There’s a pride in origins at play, a pride which is reflected in a kind of benign nationalism, which reminds me of my other adopted home, Uruguay, where this kind of gesture might also occur. On the other hand, were it to happen on a British stage, the semiotics of an actor bringing on a Union Jack for the curtain call might be perceived to be less innocent. With the audience having left the theatre and the stage bare, someone observes: nice to see us celebrating the role of the Ivory Coast in the Easter Uprising. The actor has placed the flag the wrong way round. The Irish flag, placed the wrong way round, becomes the flag of the Ivory Coast. 

Thursday, 10.03.16

london notes

Feb/ March 2016

• London air on a February morning: slices like an unseen dagger.
• Black kid being picked up by 7 cops at London Bridge.
• Latino having serious skype chat with novia on overland.
• I keep expecting to run into people i know. #montevideohead
• In the imperial war museum there is an interactive sub-Schwitters political photomontage workshop. Giant cut outs of  Obama/ Trump/ Merkel/ Blair & co are available for pre-teens to rebrand with their slogans. War is evil. Peace is good. Trite speakthought in a proto-libertarian brainwash. There are no anti-monarchy or pro-putinist options. The language of protest is reduced to a child's dribble.
• The Romanian busker on the tube is so angry he shouts at his two younger companions. He plays his sax like it’s a machine gun. People cringe before his anger. No one gives money.
• 2 Argentines at the bar in the Ritzy being told by the waitress that uni in the UK is very expensive. She asks how much it costs in Argentina. The young man looks at her and says...ah, it's free -
• In Punta Arenas, towards the end of the world, we came across the story of Ernest Shackleton, intrepid and vanquished arctic explorer. Walking down the hill from my sister's obscure corner of London to Sydenham station, I pass one of those big old houses with a blue plaque. The man who lived there was the explorer himself. A world so big and small all at the same time.
• 2 pubs face one another at the Limehouse end of Commercial Road. One is The Royal Duke. The other The Royal Duchess. Both duke and duchess are shut now. The guillotine has fallen.
• My friends move into a new house. Bought by her stepfather. To get them on the property ladder. Shortly after, the stepfather starts receiving letters. 3 or 4 a week. Demanding that the sender is paid the full value of the house, which is legally his. He threatens to have my friends evicted. They report this to the police. The sender now lives in a psychiatric hospital. 20 years ago he lived in the house, which he lost in a messy divorce. He keeps an eye on land registry records. Every time someone new buys it, he tries to claim his old house back.
• Big man in homburg on train, looks a bit like Churchill: "Damascus would have us." His companion: "I bet they would." Later in the conversation I realise they are talking about weapons sales. The last thing I hear is the other man, younger, looks ex-services: "You weren't there for the meeting with King Abdullah, were you? I thought he was jolly good."
• T is an actor. He was hired to do an advert for Italian cornflakes. He was flown to Nepal for the shoot. Himself and a girl eating cornflakes against the backdrop of Everest. the Italians treat the Nepalese like servants. They spend a couple of days setting up. The morning scheduled to film the wide with the mountain it's foggy. The next day too. The next as well. The mountain refuses to cooperate. The following day they get out the green screen. Everest will be added in in post.
• Sitting in the window at Curzon Soho, a portly figure on a bike goes by. There is something familiar about him. It is the mayor himself. Five minutes later the cafe space is swathed in the irrefutable odour of shit.

mariátegui on rilke

Este juicio es fundamentalmente romántico e individualista. Supone que la obra del poeta se alimenta exclusivamente de su experiencia personal. De la riqueza y extension de esta depende el valor de aquella. El poeta es concebido como un mundo cerrado en el que se va sedimentando, poco a poco, lo bello. Pero este juicio tiene el defecto de que no nos explica sino un parte de la poesía. No abarca la totalidad del fenómeno… El poeta sumo no es solo el que, quintaesenciados, guarda sus recuerdos, convierte el individual en universal. Es también, y ante todo, el que recose un minuto, por un golpe milagroso de intuición, la experiencia o el emoción del mundo. En los periodos tempestuosos, es la antena que condensa todo la electricidad de una atmósfera henchida. 

ensayos literarios, Jose Carlos Mariátegui, 1927, Lima

PATAGONIA NOTES

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PUNTA ARENAS 1

The world changes depending on where you are. This overly-obvious truth never the less feels more true than ever here, in Punta Arenas. Next stop South is the South Pole. The tip of the continent of Antarctica reaches out so that it looks like it’s trying to touch Patagonia. Punta Arenas has been the base for many of the great Polar expeditions. In front of the port there are boards which include Scott, Peary, Admunson and Shackleton. Not to mention a whole host of other names from other countries whose fame hasn’t made it to the Anglo-Saxon world. It’s the middle of Summer and it feels like the edge of Winter, which is the permanent state of this outpost. If Summer is like this, you can’t help thinking, shivering in the biting wind, how can they survive Winter. You look South and realise the icecaps are almost within reach. The official name of the district is Región de Magallanes y Antártica Chilena. Legally speaking, we’re there, in amongst the icebergs, in a land of immense, dazzling whiteness.

Due East, more or less, are the Falkland Islands. Our taxi driver used to be a sailor and spent time there. He says there are two big islands and hundreds of little ones. On every one of these little islands there lives a British couple, who fly the flag and share their island with lots of sheep. He says the pubs open at ten in the morning and shut at eleven at night and the police fine you if they catch you drunk at 11.30. There’s nothing else to do there, so everyone drinks all day, but god help you if you’re caught drinking after closing time.

On the roof of Punta Arenas fire station, there’s a Croatian flag. The fire brigade was founded by Croatians in 1902. There’s also a Croatian club called Sokol. The immigration to this part of the world was diverse. The cemetery contains a Scottish quarter, an English quarter and a host of Eastern European sectors. Croats, Slovenians, Slovaks and more in amongst the more typical Spanish and Italian stock. A sign in town celebrates the Slovak novelist Mateo Bencur, who ended up going back to live in Croatia, where he wrote two nostalgic novels called Patagonian Travels and The Call of the Mother Country. Patagonia is as good a place as any to start over. You can imagine a whole load of Croatians arriving at the end of the world at the start of the last century, thinking, you know what, this town really need a fire brigade. Later we come across another fire station, founded by Germans. There’s probably one for every nationality that ever emigrated here.

===

TIERRA DEL FUEGO

We leave Punta Arenas around 8 in the morning, driving North East to take the ferry at Punto Delgado, the mouth of the Magellan Strait.. The wind is getting up and the guide is worried that the crossing will shut, as he later finds out happens around 1pm. The crossing takes no more than a breezy 20 minutes: this is the narrowest point in the Magellan Straits. The approach on the other side is cluttered with Argentine lorries taking petrol from the Argentine part of Tierra del Fuego north. They have to cross Chilean territory in order to return to Argentina. When the ferry shuts down due the to strong winds which are typical of the Summer months, the backlog of lorries trying to cross builds up incrementally.

Tierra del Fuego is an island, separated from the continent by the Magellan Straights, named after the man who found a passage through them in 1520. He never landed on the inhospitable island. He first named it Tierra del Humo, having seen smoke from native indian fires. When he got back to Spain, the king decided the name Tierra del Fuego was more evocative. The Chilean half of the island is far from beautiful. It’s low, flat, scrubby.. Further south, the cordillera continues its march towards Antartica and there are forests, but here it’s a bleak Lear-like heath. The wind sweeps the land like a lawnmower. The few, sparse trees are stunted and the grass sways in a vast, hypnotic emptiness.

After being driven for almost 2 hours, seeing little, we arrive at the Western coast in a Bay called the Useless Bay (Bahia Inutil), as it’s too shallow for boats and therefore good for nothing. [Wikipedia: “The bay was named in 1827 by Captain Phillip Parker King, because it afforded "neither anchorage nor shelter, nor any other advantage for the navigator.””] We’ve come to see a colony of King Penguins. There used to be a lot of King Penguins on Tierra del Fuego, but like the indigenous population, they were exterminated. About a decade ago, an enterprising fellow decided to bring them back. He set up a penguin colony, which is protected and thriving. It’s funded by the £12 every tourist has to pay to visit.

When we step out of the van, the wind is challenging. As we walk down to the coast it becomes even more so. The penguins stand around, an odd mix of noble and gawky, observing us. The wind does not appear to affect them. For us, the wind is a scourge. Never have I known a wind quite like it. It makes standing up a challenge. Not an intermittent challenge; it’s a constant one. Relax for a second and you’re in danger of flying off the earth’s handle. The wind whips its way off the coast, announcing without any doubt that this is not a place meant for human inhabitation. It’s probably the closest I’ll ever get to knowing what it feels like to be at the Pole. Or Mars, come to that.

We all sway about a bit. The penguins, who are on the other side of a stream, continue to observe the humans’ pathetic attempt to incorporate themselves into this ferocious landscape. Finally, having taken about a million photos each, we retreat back to the safety of the van and head towards the Chilean capital of Tierra del Fuego, Porvenir. Porvenir has a population of 5000. It is categorically not a tourist town. We’re taken to a cheap and cheerful place where we’re served sizeable guanaco sandwiches. The return ferry has been delayed an hour, which gives us time to walk around the town. However, this is a town where walking is a feat not to be approached lightly. The wind is a little less fierce than at the coast, but not a lot. We stagger around the low-rise streets, with houses made out of prettily-painted corrugated iron. There is a seaside promenade, but you’d need a constitution much stronger than mine to enjoy it. Places like Bridlington or Scarborough seem tropical in comparison with Porvenir.

The guide takes us to the museum. We learn about the two different native tribes who used to occupy this land. The Yahgan lived off the sea, using their canoes as second homes. The Selk’nam lived off the land, hunting guanaco. There’s a statue depicting them in a  small park. Four figures walk barefoot, wrapped in animal hides. These people occupied the land for over ten thousand years. There is a way of living in the wild nature of Tierra del Fuego, but the secrets have vanished with the tribes. They were hunted in the early twentieth century, when the land was given over to sheep farming. The sheep drove out the natives’ traditional food supply, the guanaco, so they started hunting sheep instead. As a result, the sheep barons paid people to hunt them. Hunters were paid at first upon presenting a pair of ears, but later they had to supply a head. The most famous hunter was s a Scot, Alex McLennan (nicknamed Red Pig), whose fitting fate is described in Chatwin’s In Patagonia. Chatwin also writes about another Brit, Thomas Bridges, a missionary who later become a landowner himself. Only Bridges, far from hunting the Selk’nam and the Yahgan, did all he could to preserve their culture. He complied extensive dictionaries of their languages and sought to offer them a safe haven on his land. It may have been a doomed endeavour, but the contrasting stories of Bridges and McLennan say a lot about what it is to be British. No matter how far you go, travel always seems to take you back to where you came from.

The ferry was due to leave at 7pm but ended up leaving at 8.30. This included a twenty minute wait in the biting cold as not one but two broken down cars were towed off. The towing involved a four wheel drive driving onto the ferry extremely quickly, executing a neat three point turn on deck, a rope being attached and the breakdown towed off. Except that the second time this happened, the  rope broke. Then, as if by magic, the broken down car started working again. We stood around in the wind, once again, watching the pantomime. Finally we boarded and the ferry headed off. The ferry was packed. A British man started telling a Dutchman about how terrible the Piccadilly Line was. As it got out into the current, the ferry began to pitch and yarl more and more impressively. Apparently, when sailors finally discovered the way round Cape Horn, the Southernmost tip of the Americas, they preferred going that way as the Magellan Strait seemed even more dangerous. I’m sure the minor paranoia which more than one person on board was experiencing as the ferry fought against the current would have seemed absurd to a hardened sailor, but the crossing helped to give some idea of what the early navigators faced as they tried to find their passage around the Americas, through to the Pacific, in this cruel but astonishing part of the world.

{Thought: a visit to Tierra del Fuego is a kind of anti-tourism}

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PUNTA ARENAS 2

There’s a woman speaking English in reception. I’m upstairs eating breakfast. I can hear her but I can’t see her. Her accent is weird. It’s fluent English with an accent I’ve never heard before. A kind of rarefied posh (Lady Di) mixed with Kiwi mixed with something coarser or earthier. The woman starts telling the receptionist about how many Chileans there are working in the islands. I realise she’s from the Falklands. The thought crosses my mind that the Falkland Islanders are like the King Penguins. A breed you hear a lot about but never see, unless you travel to the most inhospitable places on earth. She asks the receptionist if he’d like to visit the Falklands. The reply is ambivalent.

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FUERTE BULNES

The first stop, an hour or so South of Punta Arenas, is Puerto Hambre. Port Hunger. In 1584 a group of 300 settlers arrived here. Their objective was to establish a community that would safeguard the territory for the Spanish crown. On a mild Summer’s day, it’s a beautiful, if chilly spot. The settlers arrived in March. Every month the hours of daylight change radically. At high summer dawn arrives at 4am and night around 11pm. In midwinter, dawn arrives at 11am and night falls around 3.30 pm. Within weeks, the hours of daylight would have begun to evaporate. The settlers, trying to build a home in a land where nothing grows, must have felt as though the night was closing in on them. The wind and the cold and the darkness and the emptiness. The odd glimpse of distant mountains through rainclouds. Dolphins and whales passing by like freemen in the Straits whilst they were trapped like lifers. By the time the British adventurer Thomas Cavendish arrived, three years later, all that was left of Puerto Hambre were the fresh ruins of a failed endeavour.

A little further up the coast is Fuerte Bulnes, founded 300 years or so later, in 1843. This is a classic Wild West fort, made out of timber, rebuilt in the 80s to the exact specification of the original plans. The guide points out that whilst the location is spectacular, offering commanding views of the strait, it was a grim place to be stationed, with the nearest fresh water 5 kms away as well as being brutally exposed to the elements. The fort has a history of mutiny and rebellion, eventually falling into disuse, before it was rebuilt a first time, as a historic monument, in the 1940s. Whilst the rest of the world was at war, the Chilean army made a historical reconstruction of a 19th century fort. Recently a state-of-the-art museum has been opened next to the fort; the juxtaposition of the high-tech museum with the bare-necessities fort feels like a fitting metaphor for the way in which the country has developed in the course of 150 years.

There’s a lookout at the far end of the fort. As ever, we were pressed for time. The tours try to squeeze more in than they can and you don’t get the time to savour the place. All the same, I managed to slip down to the waterfront. The Magellan Strait continued towards the Pacific. To the East lay Dawson Island, where the Pinochet regime sent its political prisoners. In the distance was the Darwin mountain range, the last, seismic gasp of the Andes. The water was calm and kind. Great tree trunks, deunuded of all flesh, lay scattered and whitened on the shore. Small birds, far too tame for their own good, flitted about just out of reach. Twenty kilometres further on, off-road, lay Cape Froward, the Southernmost point on the continental land mass of the Americas. It wasn’t the end of the world, quite, but it felt tantalising close, as close as the birds which continued to hop around as though man was as tame an animal as they were.

I reached down and picked up some flints as a momento. The craggy shore is slowly fragmenting , as it has for millions of years. The flints were sharp and felt comfortable in the hand. When I got back to the hotel, I placed them on the table. Hours later, I looked at them again. They looked like tools. Perfect tools. Tools which are as well designed as an iPhone or a Ferrari. And, in their heyday, far more valuable.

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LA VICTORIA & THE BEAGLE

If you go past the vast tax-free Zona Franca, past the garage and the statue to the Selk’nam on the road to Puerto Natales, you come to a small park where there’s a re-creation of Magellan’s ship, La Victoria, as well as Darwin’s Beagle (still in construction). The most striking thing about the Victoria is how small it is. Fifty sailors, at least, various animals, and captured natives crammed into a space not much bigger than a two bedroom flat, adrift on the ocean, heading into the waters which defined the word ‘uncharted’. When they got to the Magellan Straits, one of the Admiral’s other boats in the flotilla turned round and deserted, hot-footing it back to Spain. Bowie died last night, the news was there when I woke up this morning. If I was looking for a connection between his death and our visit to the ship today, it would be found in the lyrics of Major Tom. The only way you can begin to capture the sense of complete alienation the voyagers must have felt would be to imagine floating in a most peculiar way, in a blue planet earth, with the stars looking very different, each and every day.

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PUNTA ARENAS 3

An antiques shop in the middle of town has a sign outside, inviting tourists to come in and browse. The man working there is friendly. He tells us it’s his mother-in-law’s place. He’s a journalist by trade. He shows me his book of photos of Patagonia, illustrating all the things we’re not going to see. The nature shots look astonishing and it’s clear that you need to try and spend more time down here to get to know it better. Everyone asks us if we’re going to Torres del Paine, the vast natural park that’s a five hour drive away, but the truth is we don’t have time to go there for more than a day, which doesn’t seem enough. We mosey round the antiques shop, looking at an old wood burning stove and other curiosities. There’s a sizeable metallic object in a cabinet. The journalist gets it out for us to look at. It’s part of a British helicopter, which made a forced landing at Agua Fresca during the Falklands War. Chile supported the British, in a neutral sort of way, and allowed the helicopter, which was in trouble, to land. The story goes that the helicopter was destroyed, but not before a local got to it and cut off part of what might be a propeller. It’s for sale for a comely £90. I say only a crazy Brit would want to buy it, and the journalist adds - or a crazy Argentine. He’s happy to let me take photos of a little bit of lost history. He tells us he’s been to the Falklands, showing us the pictures in his book. There’s a weekly flight from Punta Arenas, which means you’re compelled to spend a week there before you can come back. He seemed to think that a week was plenty long enough.

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A professional type, North American, sits writing emails on his Macbook Air in the Cafe Chocolate Baeriswyl, the finest purveyor of hot chocolate in Punta Arenas. Taped over the camera on the laptop is a small strip, cut from a post-it note. On this strip is the following slogan, handwritten in biro: “It’s always right now’.

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