C.S. Lewis Quote

If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come.

C.S. Lewis

Christmas in Coventry Garden, London

We Make Stuff

There is an innovative new project in Vancouver called WeMakeStuff. I was really surprised to be invited to be a part of it. My submission is based on my Saint Series that I am only just starting. It is a coffee table book featuring 100 innovators. The book launch is on October 30 which I will be in Vancouver for. Check it out below.

We Make Stuff Video

WeMakeStuff Volume 01 is a stunning book that will showcase one hundred artists and innovators from Vancouver exploring the collision of faith and creativity. It will be a historical document showcasing creative people expressing their process, intent and the tensions of their reality.

The one hundred are artists, innovators, inventors, engineers, architects, designers, film-makers, dancers, programmers, entrepreneurs, chefs and writers. For the first time, their collective voices are being recorded in one ground-breaking publication.

Late Night in the Studio and Brick Lane Bagels

It is another late night for me in my studio, but tonight while trying to keep warm in the unheated space I actually finish building my altar pieces. Thank goodness for that as the painting bit is going to take some time to complete.

The larger altar pieces are ready.

 

Above are the medium and small pieces each hand built by myself.

 

I accidentally give myself a stigmata with my screwdriver while working. Rather significant given I am painting saints, don't you think? 

I finish at 11pm. The tubes reach their last stops at about 1am so as long as I get on a tube by midnight I will make it home. I step on a double decker bus instead and head for Brick Lane.

Brick Lane is a small winding street that makes its way from Algate East Station to near Liverpool Station. A lot of artists live in this area and it is known for its curries, retro clothing shops and Indian fabric shops. It is heaving with Indian eateries that are still serving people.

 

A little further on I hit the night clubs and pub/outdoor grills. 

 

I forge on further down Brick Lane so aptly named after the brick cobbled streets. For the Olympics someone decided it should be paved despite protests from all the shop owners. And it was paved.

 

I reach what I am looking for: the famous 24 hour bagel shop. There is a winding queue inside. The bagels are made fresh in the back.

 

The place is packed. I get my £1 decadent cream cheese bagel. There is no need to think about Food Safe here because none is observed whatsoever. But whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger, right?

 

 I take a peek in the back where they are making bagels. They all invite me in to chat, take pictures and enthusiastically let me question them about their process. The weekends are their busiest times when they make about 2000 bagels a day. Whatever hour of the night or day I have come to this shop I have had to queue.

 

The process starts at the big mixer. Unfortunately there is nothing that gives reference in the photo to how big this mixer is. It is unusually wide and shallow and I could comfortably fit in it.

 

From there the dough gets cut into balls.

 

It is then fed into the rolling/donut shaping machine.

 

 You can see the dough going by in a blur. It rolled into a snake by the big metal paddle on the right which is then wrapped around the white round bit on the left to form the donut shape.

 

They then come out on the other end on a conveyer belt. These are stacked on wooden floured racks.

 

Next they are dumped into the boiling water and cooked for two minutes.  

 

In the draining sink beside the boiler the long wooden planks are laid out.

 

The boiled bagels are dumped out onto the boards and briefly hosed down to cool them off slightly or to stop them cooking perhaps.

 

The boards are then each slid length-wise into the deep oven and left there while the bagels bake on top. I am told this is a traditional Polish/Jewish method.

 

Once the top is a bit dry and crisp to the touch the boards are flipped over and removed while the bagels are left in the oven browning on the second side. To get all these bagels out a big piece of plywood is slid underneath them and pulled out.

 

There is a bit of tussle over how to pose for the photo and who is to be holding the tray. 

 

Okay, back up a little bit so I can get you both in.

 

Perfect. I am fed bagels in the back and given a bag of hot ones fresh out of the oven.

 

Then each tray is dumped into a big basket between the kitchen and the shop where the women out front cut them and fill them.

 

And finally the shop. 

At this point I look at my watch and it reads 12:15am. I say good bye and walk as fast as my expanding 3-bagel-belly will allow. As I approach the tube I notice a lot of other people walking very quickly there as well. But alas, there is an announcement that the last train has already departed from this station. It is now 12:35am. 

It is Night Bus time. London's Tube and day bus routes may shut down at night but you are never stranded. All through the night the night buses run. They run on different routes and times than the day ones. You can get places a lot faster at night on buses. From Trafalgar Square I can take Night Bus N87 all the way to my house in 30 minutes. This route just doesn't exist in the day and it actually takes longer on the tube. The buses seem to directly hook up all the outlying areas with the city centre. The roads are also quieter at this hour. 

I have two buses to catch as I am not quite in the city centre. I am standing in East London. The buses and streets are very busy despite the hour. The seats are all taken on the first bus and there are many people standing. London is a 24 hour city. 

I make it to my transfer bus depot and get on the N87. Somewhere along the line we pick up a group of inebriated friends. One vomits on the bus and we are all kicked off. All of us! The entire bus. Thankfully another bus comes shortly and I am home at 2:30am. Excellent! Another good day.

C. S. Lewis Quote

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.

C. S. Lewis

Test 2

This time it will be dictated by the microphone. Not bad.

Testing

This is a test from a new device.

Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?

Who's afraid of hte big bad wolf? (2011-2012) by Adel Abdessemed has gone on display at the Pompidou Centre in Paris as part of a retrospective of the French Algerian-born artist's work. the piece, built to the dimensions of Picasso's Guernica (12 x 26 ft), features 500 densley packed, taxidermied animals such as wolves and foxes.
(News item on www.bbc.co.uk)

Illustrator Raymond Briggs

Raymond Briggs grew up in a terrace house just like mine just around the corner from me in London it turns out.

 

 The name didn't ring a bell for me until someone said he wrote and animated the famous book and film short, The Snowman (pictured above). Of course! 

It was about a boy who flies through the air with a snowman.

 When I googled him I realised I had read his books when I was young. The above book was one of my favourites. I loved comic books and was into Asterix, Tintin, Archie and Raymond Briggs.

 Ethel & Ernest is a lovely book that my neighbour has just lent me about Briggs's parents whom he grew up with at the end of our road in a house matching ours. It is a touching story about his parents, his mother a Lady's maid and his father a milkman, in comic book form spanning from the 1930's to the 1970's. It covers the war and the bombing in London (along with the child evactuations) to new inventions like gas cookers and television. It is a great and sad read (spoiler: they do die in the end having lived their whole married life in the one house).

Page 10 is when they first come to the house they buy. Lovely.

Day 11: Cinque Terre

Here we are half way through our trip and starting to head back up towards the Netherlands.

Our last stop in Italy is Cinque Terre. Our whole trip sort of started when I was reading out my 101 Things to do in My Life list that I wrote in 2006 to Nigel. One of them was to hike the 5 medieval villages in northern Italy. I had missed out on this when I lived in Italy.

  

We camp at a coastal town slightly further up the coast called Deiva Marina. From here a coastal train runs right through all the villages including these five. You can extend your walk to include a number of other towns on either end, but these are the main five. To hike these 5 you need to purchase the Cinque Terre Card for 5 Euros at the start of your journey (or actually at any number of booths along the way that check for your card). We take the train to our first town called Riomaggiore (pictured above) very early in the morning to use as much of the cool of the day as possible.

 

Above is the town map of Riomaggiore. It is always handy to find this as soon as you enter a town to have some notion of whether or not you are in the main bit. 

 

The first thing I notice in the town are the murals. Mostly done by Mario Andreoli (pictured above).  

 

Apparentley this first town is the easiest to get to by road making it the most crowded. But at this early hour it certainly isn't busy at all. Although before long a few tour buses start to arrive.

 

The harbour is really nice and we wander around since the office to buy our passes has not yet opened.

 

This town was settled in the 8th century by Greek settlers fleeing persecution in Byzantium.

 

The view with the harbour.

The first walk between the villages is the shortest and easiest. Named Via dell'Amore (Lover's Path), it is a gentle and paved 20 minute walk. Somehow we delude ourselves into thinking that the rest of our journey will be relatively the same. In fact, before I came I always thought the towns were so far apart that you had to spend a day hiking between each with your tent and sleeping bag on your back, finding a campsite each night to bed down. Very Canadian thoughts, I now realise. Nigel on the other hand thought it was a nice easy stroll on paved ground between each and even said he expected to be back at our campsite just after noon. Well, the reality was somewhere in between those. Or another option that a lot of tourists choose is to get a day train pass between all the towns and just train it to each. As we arrive after hiking between each town we repeatedly note the same young American couple sitting at a new restuarant in each town. Clearly someone is not walking those trails!

Manarola is the second town and squeezed up into a ravine up the hill while also teetering over the rock face cliff above.

 The town map shows the one main street winding up a steep slope and little passages and stairs surrounding it.

Hey, let's do the tourist thing and pose with the town behind me.

Nigel too.

Just on the outskirts altars are randomly placed in rock cliffs.

Manarola has a lovely main square with an amazing stone mosaic.

A detail.

The next stretch between Manrola and Corniglia is closed. Thankfully (I think) there are alternative foot paths. Each of the Cinque Terre villages is associated with a sanctuary perched high on the cliff-sides above the Mediterranian. According to the Lonely Planet, reaching these religious retreats used to be part of a hefty Catholic penance, but these days the walks through terraced vineyards and across view-splayed hills are a lot less onerous. Hmmm. Really?

My main aim when I read up on the area is to hike between each town and up to each sanctuary. But the first alternative route up to Volastra (associated with Manarola) was tough as we scale 340 metres in the growing heat.

First we climb and climb through row upon row of olive trees.

There is a stern warning to bring both a hat and a lot of water.

The olive trees often have netting tied up under them for harvest time.

We finally reach the tiny village of Volastra high up on the mountain, the only mountain sanctuary we plan to go to.

It is indeed a sanctuary. You can tell not as many tourists make it up this far as it is quite quiet and peaceful. Neither are there trains running this high. Santuario della Madonna delle Salute is pictured above, a beautiful and simple church inside.

Perhaps we delude ourselves again at this point in thinking we are heading down hill to the next coastal town. But no, we are climbing for a while from peak to peak.

We walk through endless vineyards. What I like about Italy is it hasn't yet been caught up with the Health and Safety regulations that the rest of the West has. It is hard to photograph the tiny eroding paths that we cross with cliffs on one side. It is frightening to pass someone going the other way. Often one person has to cling to the cliff while the other holds on to them and places one foot at a time on the other side.

It is an amazing view and astonishing to see people working the vineyards at such a great height.

Every so often we pass a tiny town no bigger than a few houses in the tops of the mountains.

Thankfully we have shade some of the time.

We can't figure out why the majority of the people on the trails and in the towns are Americans when we haven't run into many Americans in the rest of our Italian journey.

In fact, we start chatting to one couple as I notice her shirt is from the Vancouver store, Lulu Lemon. I ask her if she is from Vancouver. No, she says. Lulu Lemon has now reached the States. I ask her why there are so many Americans on the trail. They have no idea but like me also thought it was going to be a vigorous hike taking a day between each village. Some sort of North American myth perhaps?

Finally we reach Corniglia, the smallest and most remote of the 5 villages. It clings to a high cliff 90m above sea level. Above is the oddest statue in the main square. Sort of Vampire meets Zombie.

The little Gothic church of San Pietro there is beautiful in the interior.

And features a marble rose window. We sit down and pull out our lunch to eat.

Here we can finally see a view of the village as we leave it.

A further view that shows how high it actually is. In fact the train station is way down below at sea level and the only access to the village from there is a mighty long flight of stairs. I suppose whichever way you enter this town you look pretty winded.

A view from the top showing not only Corniglia, but the last village of Manarola behind it. The walk between those two villages turns out to be the hardest of all of them. The rest are by no means easy but are less than the last 2 hours.

More olive groves as we descend and make our way towards the 4th village of Vernazza. On our way we notice a bundle of black plastic pipes (no bigger than 2 inches) tied together heading down a ravine. Nigel jokes that it is the towns water supply coming from a spring uphill. We realise as we enter town he is probably right.

We descend from above it.

In honour of our plumber, Les Ward, we take a picture of what looks like a medieval town who at some point decided to put in a water system but didn't want to disturb anything to do it.

Here we have the town's water supply heading to various locations.

And, oh, that house wants water...just stretch a pipe directly to the house through the air. Job done.

The guide books tout Vernazza as the prettiest of the 5 villages and as soon as I enter I agree. The main drag, Via Roma, leads down through the town, is large and feels like one long piazza. There are cafes and restaurants lining it the whole of the way and the town is bustling with activity and tourists even in the end season of September.

We wander around and spot the same young American couple at a table. We left them last as we headed off to this village and presume that like most of the people roaming around they caught the train here.

The harbour is amazing. It is large and all sorts of activity is going on. There is a wall and walkway that runs out in a protective arm (photo from that spot) including a small beach that people are swimming at. We sit in the harbour for a rest and snack and watch all the activity going on.

Okay, I am going to be honest with you. I sort of like the idea of the older man with the skimpy speedo and tanned body/pot belly that you get so much of in Europe. I really do. This man above was the busiest water taxi in the harbour as we sat there. You couldn't help but notice him driving to and fro in his neon yellow skimps. We saw a sign at some pool in Italy along the way that said "No Shorts Allowed. Proper Swimming Briefs Only." There you go, men!

Each town has a main water fountain and many people, including us, fill our bottles at each stop.

Another altar randomly built into the underside of some stairs.

I didn't find this town map right away, but here it is.

We wander a bit back up the hill through the narrow streets to find the trail again.

We decided not to swim this time but to carry on as it has been burning hot for some time and the sooner we get to the last town, the better. We are counting on a beach there.

Vernazza has recently had some terrible flooding and landslides in the town and as we exit the town a nearby house in the hills seems to have recently dropped away into the river bed. You can still see things in the cupboards.

We begin another ascent again. In the burning sun. Centuries old stairs. One step at a time. The blue route which doesn't include all the sanctuaries is 12 km long. We can add to that since one of the stretches was closed and the alternate route (the red route) is at least double that section.

You can just see Vernazza from the height we climb in a short space of time. During this stretch a couple walk by Nigel, read his shirt, and say "Whistler! Hey, I am from Whiterock". Nigel calls out, "my wife is from Canada." A bit later we are hiking right behind them and start up a conversation about Vancouver where I tell them I am from. Somewhere into talking they stop and ask me, "so, how long did you say you visited Vancouver?". I understood them to believe I was British. This stunned me. "I grew up there!" I said. "I have only been in Britain for 7 years! Do I sound British?" "Yes." What?! Nigel said that my accent changes quite a bit when I go back home and he phones me from Britain. He thinks I then sound totally Canadian again. I am stunned. I just can't believe I sound that British. Although when I hear their accents I know I don't sound like them either. But my family has a much milder accent.

We round the corner and catch site of the last of the villages, Monterosso. We are almost at the end, although Nigel has mentioned hiking a further hour up to the mountain beyond for the perfect view of all 5 villages looking down the coast.

After 8 hours of hard climbing in the hot sun we head for the beach, change right there (it is Europe, after all), and head into the water as fast as our tender feet can carry us over the rocks. Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! Ahhhhhhhhhhh!

Monterosso is the oldest of the villages and was founded in AD 643 when the beleaguered hill dwellers moved down to the coast to escape from invading barbarians. The trail we hiked (blue trail) dates back to the early days of Republic of Genoa in the 12th and 13th centuries and, until the opening of the railway line in 1874, was the only practical means of getting from village to village. The Azzuro (blue trail) is a "narrow, precipitous hike, though people of all shapes and sizes complete it every day" (Lonely Planet). And sure enough there are all shapes, ages and sizes on the trail at even the hardest points. It is quite unbelievable really, but it is a walk that, like me, is on people's list to do in their lifetime.

Monteresso is the chief village of the Cinque Terre and it is not hard to see why. It is the largest with a population of 1800 and the most developed. It has the feel of a seaside resort with the charm of the old. Note the painted stripes on the building above. There is a great amount of trompe l'oeil painting on the buildings that give the illusion of grand arches and sculpted fascades.

The busy town centre.

From Monterosso we catch the train just two stops further up to our campground which we can see the moment we step off the train. Hidden behind the pink house in the olive orchard.

It is one of the best campsites so far and not part of our ACSI camping membership. It is a bit pricier at 25 Euros a night, but well worth it given its location (50 metres from the beach, from the town, and right next to the train station). Beware if you come to Deiva Marina that there are other campsites that are terrible. You will see a sign for 3 campsites across a small bridge in the town along the waterfront that crosses a dry river bed (with an ostrich wandering randomly in it). AVOID the other two campsites unless you want the Shanty Town feel or the Blinding HOT Unshaded Gravel Plot feel. Instead turn left and go to the smallest little campsite nestled into an olive grove called Camping degli Ulivi.

The site seems designed by an architect with its round toilet block hidden in the hill and the sites spiraling out from it. Each site, which is quite large and spacious and on a different level tier, has a sink and draining board. How can you go wrong? There is also free wifi, clean bathrooms, and bidets.