After much internal debate over where to go on holiday this year, I've finally made up my mind. I've ruled out travelling to America by freighter due to cost and time constraints and instead will travel to Syria by train. Why Syria? Well, it's part of a classic overland route: London to Baghdad, itself part of a much longer route all the way to China. Sadly Iraq is obviously a no go area these days, but Syria is still a safe and friendly place to visit.
So what's the route? Well, unlike my trip to Shanghai which consisted of a few really long train journies, this will be made up of a number of shorter ones. Back in the days of TE Lawrence and Agatha Christie you could do most of the journey from London to Istanbul on the Orient Express, but sadly the Cold War put a stop to that and so you have to travel on a number of different trains now. I'm stopping overnight in a number of cities on the way too. This is partly just to see some sights, but mainly because the stress of needing the train to be on time every day to catch my connection would mean my holiday wouldn't be much fun. So, the journey will be as follows...
Sheffield to London - I'll be staying overnight in London.
London to Paris - on the Eurostar. Stopover in Paris.
Paris to Vienna - on the "Orient Express". This isn't the same Orient Express from Agatha Christie's day (which used to run via Venice and Belgrade), nor is a train made up of plush Pullman coaches. It is simply the name given to the sleeper train between Paris and Vienna. I don't know why. Overnight in Vienna.
Viennna to Budapest - a relatively short journey.
Budapest to Bucharest - overnight train, and then I'll stay overnight in Bucharest.
Bucharest to Istanbul - this is a sleeper train too.I'll spend a day or two in Istanbul.
Istanbul to Allepo - sleeper train. Allepo is across the border in Syria. I'll spend two or three days here.
Allepo to Damascus - my final destination where I'll spend a couple of days before flying home.
The journey is booked as far as Vienna. I leave on September 6th as I'm going to London that day anyway for a Prom concert.
Wednesday, June 28, 2006 10:12 PM
Oh, this is quite funny. We were at Phil Nichols's leaving do a couple of months back and in the curry house there was a track playing which Conrad said was from a movie he was an extra in when he travelled to India last year. He couldn't remember the title of the movie and had never seen it, so he asked one of the waiters what it was (the waiter was impressed to be in the presence of a Bollywood movie star but not so impressed that he gave us all free food). The next day, thanks to the magic of Bit Torrent, Conrad was in possesion of the movie. I've seen it. It's hilarious. It's not supposed to funny but that the fact that it's a big budget Bollywood movie with occasional shots of Conrad staring right at the camera makes it hilarious.
You can see a couple of pictures
here and
here. If you've never met Conrad before, he's the one in the background staring right at you. What's even funnier, and I promise this isn't Photoshopped in any way, is that one of his travelling companions, sporting one of those "I'm travelling and therefore don't have to shave" type beards was doing the exact same thing, and was
even more obvious.
Tuesday, June 27, 2006 9:46 PM
So, Jim & Charlotte got married. Was a great spread. My best man gig seemed to go OK. Was quite nice not to have a heavy camera around my neck all day, although the down side is I have no photos of the day, other than a few I took on my mobile (if you were there and have pictures, I'd love to see them).
9:40 PM
By the way, can you guess what Jim does for a living?
Saturday, June 24, 2006 8:43 PM
Jim is getting married tomorrow. Weird innit.
6:40 PM
It's like the dark ages here down south, what with their steam powered cars.
2:55 PM
I just came on here to make a post about something but got distracted (probably by something shiny) and now can't remember what I was going to say. Oh well. I know, I'll tell you about my weekend. I went down to London to see a dose of opera (a double bill of Duke Bluebeard's Castle by Bartok and some Schoenburg shit). London was quite busy and hot so I found a great little pub in Bloomsbury that sold great beer and was quiet and cool and had the footy on a little unobtrusive telly in the corner and I read a book and watched Portugal V Iran. It was great.
I had thought about going to Hyde Park and sitting under a tree to read my book. What I didn't realise was that plan would have been thwarted due to Motorhead playing there. On the plus side, I might have bumped in to Phil and Jane who were apparantly
there too which would have been cool.
Monday, June 19, 2006 5:38 PM
I heard about a new version of Coke today - Coke Zero. Heading to
cokezero.com I learnt that it apparantly has zero calories but learnt little else. A look at
Wikipedia reveals the ingrediants, including everyone's favourite poison -
Aspartame. So basically, it's Diet Coke, but by not calling it Diet Coke they hope to appeal to a
younger male demographic who consider themselves to hard for "diet" products.
Thursday, June 15, 2006 1:28 PM
I keep meaning to post about Tim Howson's
blog. He's currently on a round the world trip with an extended tour of South East Asia. The blog is well worth checking in on as there's some great photos and it's all well written.
1:23 PM
I hope my speech at Jim's wedding turns out a bit better than this one:
“I was thinking on the airplane ride here about what I was going to say today about Danny and Joyce,” the best man began.
“And all I could think at first was what a happy day today is.
And I realized that what I really want to talk about this afternoon is jury duty. Now, I don’t know how many of you have ever served on a jury, but it’s a fascinating process. I was just on a jury last year for the first time in my life, and I learned a lot about myself and about the legal system. It was a pretty serious case, too. It was actually a murder trial. It was very tragic. It was this old man who got killed, very sad. He was getting money out of an ATM machine in the middle of the day, and some gang kids came up and robbed him and shot him right in the face.
It was a cut-and-dry case, really. There were plenty of witnesses, and the forensic evidence pointed straight to one kid as the shooter. The kid was definitely guilty. But here’s the thing – it was actually a capital offense. And my jury had to decide whether or not to give this kid the death penalty. Now, I don’t know if any of you have ever had to decide whether somebody should live or die, but it’s emotionally intense. We all knew the kid was guilty, but the death penalty is nothing to take lightly. In the end, though, we decided, ‘Yes, this kid needs to die.’ And we sent him to his death.
That was probably the worst day of my life. And I got to thinking about it on the plane because that day was nothing like today, which is a happy day. A really happy day! So here’s to Danny and Joyce!”
12:13 AM
I had a great run last night on a new route from my house out towards Lodge Moor. The scenery was fantastic, one point in particular after scrambling up a really steep hill by a brook the trees suddenly cleared and I had a fantastic view across the Rivelin Reservoir out across the Peak District to my left and Northern Sheffield to my right. I really should start taking my camera out on these runs like I used to do.
The real point of this post is to point out a great new site I've discovered (via jane via Jo) called
MapMyRun.com. Basically it uses the Google Maps API to allow you to, quite literally, map your run. What is really useful is the ability to switch to the satellite view as obviously when you are running along tracks in the Peak District, these aren't shown on the street map view, so being able to see the paths is a great bonus. Another great feature is the ability to upload GPS data of your run and have the route plotted automatically. Time to dig out my GPS watch.
Other features include but are not limited to:
View mile markers on the route.
Display the elevation for the run.
View your run stats, such as avg. speed and calories burned.
Make your runs publically available. This feature is particularly cool, as it also means that you can search for other runs in your area.
So, from now on, everytime I go for a run, I'll make sure I'll either plot with my GPS watch, or manually enter it into this site and therefore share all the great running routes there are around Sheffield.
Yesterday's route is
here.
Sunday, June 11, 2006 11:58 AM
Chris at work has been trying to come up with schemes to make lots of money on the internet.
Looking at this site I reckon he's been over-thinking the problem.
Saturday, June 10, 2006 9:10 AM
Here are some things that are too boring to have a post of their own:
I feel like I've been beaten up. Which in a way I have because I played football on Monday and football to Ian "Wild Man" Wild is an opportunity to try and break every bone in everybody's body. Plus I've started running again and my trainers were a bit old, so that has worn my joints a bit too.
I've started running because I'm doing a half marathon in the Highlands of Scotland in October with
Hodge, Vance and
Kemp. Plus I'm doing one third of a trialthlon in Hathersage next month. A "monathlon" if you will. Basically rather than doing the full triathlon like everyone else, you can enter a relay version where one person each does one of the disciplines. So I'll be doing the running, natch.
Oh, get this, at work today I bought a packet of Beef & Onion crisps (which are vegetarian friendly) from the vending machine, and they contained no flavouring. I was upset. I went and bought another package and they didn't have any flavouring either. I was even more upset. I ate some of the not beef & not onion crisps and sent the rest of the two flavourless packets to Gary Linekers at Walkers in the hope that they will shower me with free crisps by way of an apology for the upset caused.
See what I mean? What a load of bloody boring bollocks. If I think of anything interesting to write on this blog, I'll be sure to mention it.
Wednesday, June 07, 2006 5:37 PM
I went down to London today and had a couple of hours to kill so I paid a visit to the British Library to see their Newspaper Front Page exhibition. I also had a quick scoot around the "Treasures of the British Library" exhibition which I've blogged about here before.
There was something there that caught my eye relating to a film I watched recently called Regeneration. In the film, and indeed in the book on which it is based there is a rather clumsy scene between poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon.
Actually, I'll back up a bit in case you don't know who they are. Sassoon and Owen are two of the best known of the "War Poets". Sassoon was perhaps the foremost poet during the war, though it is his protégé Wilfred Owen who wrote some of the more enduring and resonant work. In the current era where war has been reduced to a TV show and the First World War is often reduced to "Yeah, we thrashed them Krauts" rather than the devastating slaughter of an entire generation that it was, Owen's Dulce et Decorum Est remains as bitter a truth now as it was when first written.
Owen was to meet Sassoon in Craiglockhart Hospital, Edinburgh.The hospital catered for victims of shell shock. Owen ended up there as a result of his experiences in The Somme. He once described Serre, the hamlet I visited earlier this year on the trail of the Sheffield City Battalion, as "Seventh Hell" and that is where the seeds of his condition were planted.
Sassoon on the other hand was at Craiglockhart because of his anti-war "Declaration" which had been delivered to Parliament, in which he had accused the powers that be of deliberately prolonging the war to serve ends that went far beyond the original intention. Brushing the Declaration aside as the product of a man scared by war was the easiest escape route for the government, the army, and it has to be said for Sasson himself.
Sassoon was, it seems to me, a fairly arrogant and cynical individual, and was very much a product of his class and his time. To Owen though, he was a God. Owen worshipped him. He was utterly infatuated with him. He devoured Sassoon's poetry and yet hesitated to emulate it. Poetry served a different purpose to Owen. It was an expression of the beautiful in the world and so how could one therefore write about the war, which was unremittingly ugly.
This was at odds with Sassoon's view that poetry should give voice to your thoughts and experiences, and so how could one therefore not write about the war? To avoid the subject would be a dereliction of the duty of a poet. This was a point of view that Sassoon successfully impressed on the impressionable Wilfred Owen.
Which brings me back to that clunky scene in Regeneration. It is fairly standard for films that deal with artists to at some stage attempt to depict the artistic process. In Oliver Stone's The Doors for example, you have the rather absurd scene where Ray Manzerek is writing the opening riff to Light My Fire. He gets the first few notes and after a bit of trial and error gets the fourth, and after some further Les Dawson style playing finds the fifth and so on. Because, yeah, that's how you write a pop song, just play random notes until you find one you like.
This is largely how the scene in Regeneration plays out. The awe struck and love struck Owen brings Sassoon a draft of his poem "Anthem for Doomed Youth" and together they work on it, trying out different words and phrases until they find one they like.
It would be easy to dismiss the scene but for the fact that in a dark corner of the British Library is the actual manuscript depicted in the film. Owen's verse is laid out in quiet and understated handwriting drawn with a soft pencil. Over the top in dark, bold ink is sprawled Sassoon's corrections, obliterating certain words and replacing them with his own. It is a fitting representation of the art of poetry, the poetry of war, and above all of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon's relationship.
Friday, June 02, 2006 2:47 AM
