The universal Village

In a land where geography has meant that news journalism tends to be strictly parochial - though in the best sense of the word - New York's Village Voice is not so much a newspaper as a national institution.  To be sure, it is claimed first and foremost by Manhattanites and dwellers in the surrounding suburbs; but its strengths and qualities ensure that its significance transcends local, and even international, boundaries.

For New Yorkers, it is a guide and gadfly to that feisty city.  It reflects the inhabitants' amazing multifariousness, their cultural and ethnic diversity.  While its chunky format suggests the plenitude of NY, and the snappy layout the pizzazz, its carefully structured contents map and match the daily pre-occupations of its yuppie readers. 

Aptly enough for a city built on ruthless commerce, almost half of the paper is given over to classified ads. They present a distillation of the essence of New York, with all its hopes and fears, aspirations and trepidation.  There are the endless courses offering self-improvement; the dizzyingly priced mid-town condos; the vacations to distant but English-speaking lands; and there are the personal ads.  As you might expect from a monitor of one of the brashest societies on earth, these are open and unembarrassed in their demands.  Every permutation is sought or offered, though in the end this richness begins to look like surfeit.

The editorial is a mix of culture, politics - and style: Village Voice is one of its handbooks.  Culture means television and video, as you might expect in this switched-on and wired-up society, followed by cinema, and trailed rather distantly by music, theatre and the other visual arts.  Politics comes after the 'funnies' at the front, but its grim-faced reports of scandals, corruption and abuses in the city set the tone for the whole magazine, which is studiedly right-on.

This is partly what endears it to the thousands of non-New Yorkers who subscribe.  It presents them with a heterodox viewpoint almost unique in America; it is the nearest thing that country has to a respectable left-wing journal.  A more escapist reason for reading it is that it offers a glimpse of life at the sharp end, from the sharp end.  Socially and culturally, if it happens, it happens in New York first, and reading the Voice gives many exiles in the backwoods a delicious and safely vicarious frisson from the avantgarde, together with a smug glow of prescience. 

I too read it for this element of watching the future, though given London's own cultural richness, it forms a counterpoint rather than a substitute.  And as non-American, I find it provides an interesting if distorted view onto the whole transatlantic world.  But mostly I read it because Village Voice offers some of the best journalism in the English language.  Each writer is an individual, every article is meticulously researched and immaculately crafted.  I know that however surprising its contents, an issue will always be passionate and urbane; witty and moving; dazzling and lucid.  In the last analysis, I read Village Voice because opening its coarse, rough pages each week and entering its special world is one of the most intellectually exciting experiences I know.

(5.8.87)

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Hip hop

Hip hop is the ultimate urban music of the late twentieth century.  It was born in New York, in the Bronx.  Just as New York is the definitive modern city, so the Bronx is in some sense the most representative of its areas.  It is the new Harlem, where fires rage and where the rule of law does not necessarily operate.  It is a marginalised land colonised by those whom society has marginalised.  Hip hop is the music of those people.

Like the string quartet, hip hop is a direct outgrowth of the resources available at a certain time.  It does not require a complex array of instruments like a band, nor many people to create it.  It is pre- 
eminently a tool of the individual.  It is no accident that most of the best hip hop crews adopt precisely the same kind of extravagant, hermetic nicknames as the subway graffiti artists.  Just as the spray can art represented the culturally disenfranchised's chance to create their own personal visual images which at the same time asserted their existence and their differentness, so hip hop is a revolt against previous and particularly white culture, and also a way out for young blacks.

Words play a crucial role.  They are not lyrics, but the nearest that this unsentimental society will allow itself to get to poetry.  By using crude and obvious rhymes, hip hop seeks to undercut any pretensions.  As with oral formulaic verse, the rigid forms provide a handy structure, especially for the improvisatory rappers, who, like their ancient counterparts, hold a store of ready-made phrases.  The exiguousness of the music allows the words their full force.  Many of hip hop's concerns are social, sometimes implicitly political.  This partly explains its success.  As well as appealing to the feet with its insistent beat, it speaks to the head.  Hip hop is an urban articulacy for the hitherto inarticulate. 

Although the music may be reduced to a bare drum machine track with a few musical punctuations, its message is always the same as the words.  Its very spareness is a comment on the indulgent opulence of commercial recordings.  It eschews fancy effects produced by technology.  Instead, by means of the crudely effective scratching, it uses ready-made elements in its strange fragmented collage.

As well as mixing pre-existing records together, the use of simple samplers allows phrases to be interpolated and manipulated.  This is junk music in the best sense; it picks among the debris of our times, and takes what it can use.  Apart from the similarity of style, there is also a continuity engendered by the constant borrowings of rhythms, phrases and even chords, some of which have entered the vocabulary as independent elements like drum sounds.

Inevitably some of this music has crossed over, with hip hop hits riding high in the mainstream charts.  Of course, once they lose their context, and become part of the music industry machine, they are severed from the source of their power.  Just like punk, hip hop is in danger of being hijacked, assimilated and nullified.  This is worse than it sounds.  In hip hop the silenced blacks have learnt to speak.  Saying pain makes it less.  Without hip hop, they have only their silent rage.
 
(7.10.86)

See also Moody Sonnets - Sixty-eight Quartets

Index

Harlem whispers

One of the characteristic elements of jazz is its venues.  Jazz was born in the bars and brothels of New Orleans, and grew up in the Harlem clubs, and much of its greatest music has been produced through the audible participation of audiences egging on soloists.  As a result, the live recording is far commoner in jazz than in traditional classical music, where the audience is regarded as something of an intrusion, however much it may play the same role in stimulating supreme performances.

Because the atmosphere of a typical jazz set in a club or bar is anything but solemn, the audience generally feels more at ease, and is therefore more relaxed than its stuffy classical equivalent would be about carrying on ancillary social activities like drinking and talking during a performance.  This lends the best of the live recordings a busy, companionable hubbub, a kind of extra player adding a subtly shaded background texture.

As more and more old recordings are remastered for CD, the other ambient noises found on vinyl - the clicks and pops, the general obscuring susurration - are swept away, leaving only the real atmosphere of those Harlem nights to come through with a new and striking clarity.  Sometimes, especially between numbers when the glasses start to chink more and the voices are raised slightly as quick comments are made to companions and orders are placed with waiters, you almost feel that you are there.

Imagine, then, one of these typical hot sessions, recorded somewhere small and intimate like the Village Vanguard, with all the music removed.  Imagine being able to eavesdrop on what the first few tables were saying, to hear what that woman was shouting at the back of the hall, to find out what exactly the pianist whispered to the bass player to make him laugh softly and contentedly as they continued playing. 

A ridiculous if tantalising prospect?  Not really: the technology is there.  Witness the latest spate of specialist reissues that, not content simply with cleaning off the LP's surface hiss, simulating stereo effects or even subtly rebalancing the band, have gone one step further and re-recorded certain parts.  For example, some rare discs of Louis Armstrong have been treated electronically to remove all the other players - their sound was too poorly registered - leaving only Satchmo to front some newly-added phantom band. The other parts were transcribed and recorded by modern session players, and then fitted underneath Armstrong's line.  The result - or so the recording company doubtless claims - is the best of both worlds: the unique, unadulterated sound of a great soloist with a properly recorded supporting band. 

Whatever the aesthetic and ethical issues surrounding this kind of repackaging, the fact remains that it can be done.  And if all of the band except one player can be magicked away like this, why not remove everyone - and leave only that tantalising background buzz?  If nothing else, finally to hear their voices would be a fitting tribute to the unseen heroes and heroines of the audience who, probably without realising it, have contributed down the years so much to the form and feel of jazz. 

(26.12.91)

Index

Being there - again

There are two main classes of pleasure to be derived from travelling. The first is visiting cities and lands for the first time. The second and more subtle pleasure arises from going there again.

No one can forget the first sight of the Venice, with the water shimmering between the crumbling and delicately-faded palazzi.  The first glimpse of New York, all futuristic towers reaching high into heaven, is breathtaking and indelible.  To walk along the silk road to China in Samarkand, passing the great ruined madressehs with their glistening tiles, is to take footsteps in time, and ones that will remain forever in the memory.

That first shock is understandable enough.  As you stand there, repeating to yourself that you are really in Leningrad, Florence, Cabourg, that this is the place you have read about, imagined, and that there is no other; this huge bridging of expectation and reality is itself such an experience that inevitably it remains with you for ever.

For some people this is enough.  The terrible cry of "I have seen Paris" and therefore lived sates the desire to travel, to see.  For others this is all that they must expect.  After all, there can be no greater folly, and no greater disappointment than returning in the hope of reliving those first pristine experiences.  If you do, you instead become aware of only the flies, or the rain, or the chemical works on the horizon - all things which were present before, but which were swept aside in that first burning vision.

But for those willing to take the risk and persevere in the acquisition of a new travelling skill, the return to a loved and remembered site has its own special rewards.

There is again that unreality of the experience: it is hard to believe that you are really where you are, so outside mundane experience does it lie.  But allied to this there is a strange haunting familiarity, a familiarity deeper than the knowledge acquired passively from books or friends.  It is the fruit of the seeds of that first trip.  A fruit that can only be enjoyed by those who return.  It enables you to see a city or valley with eyes which are wiser for their previous knowledge, and which allow you to seek out those loved aspects, the better to latch on to them, cherish them; or alternatively, to find new depths in half-familiar surroundings, to expand on that first knowledge.

Such were my feelings on returning recently to Aldeburgh.  To see the neat main street, the houses along the sea-front, the pebble beach; all of them were at once old friends but strange.  Strange because I had not seen them for so long, and yet they had an inevitability about them that was striking.  I allowed myself - my memories allowed me - the luxury of wandering at once without direction, and at the same time in the sure knowledge that nothing had changed.  The cinema was still there, the Moot Hall, the fishing boats on the beach.  And as I passed slowly round the town, I felt that I was walking through my own past. And like that past, the town seemed out of time, both old and new.

(21.6.86)

See also Moody Sonnets - To A Poet A Thousand Years Hence (After James Elroy Flecker) 

Index

Thank you, fug

Much as I hate smoking, there have been occasions when despite my cherished prejudices I have found myself succumbing to the romance of a situation in which smoke formed a crucial element.

I recall a night - part of a night and more of a morning - spent at the Brixton Academy where a mixture of dead smoke, stale sweat and other, sweeter fragrances, was stabbed through with lasers, or burst into garish blotches of colour from the throbbing light system high above us.  And as the exhausted but manic figures bobbed around in this miasma, the atmosphere became almost palpable, as if the kilowatts of repetitive sound energy had cooked and congealed that strange airy confection into a wispy candy-floss veil which wrapped these ghostly presences like a shroud.

In a more intimate context I recall a late-night jazz set, buried deep in the cosy, claustrophobic space of the Village Vanguard in New York.  A hot young band was playing - the Harper Brothers - and the place was packed.  It was a cold March night outside, and the heating was turned up full in there, mixing its almost liquid warmth with copious tobacco smoke and the faint smell of alcoholic drinks.  I could barely breathe, but as I sat there, literally under the bell of Michael Harper's trumpet, I found a sense of authenticity in all this that kept me riveted.

I also recall with amazed fondness the same ostinato olfactory sensation of smoke during one of several long journeys in Egyptian taxis.  The driver puffed away continuously, lighting the next cigarette from the chewed and stained stump of its predecessor.  As before, there was music: a wailing female voice sang on the car's music system, punctuated by tape jams cleared by thumps from the driver, who also tried to use crumpled cigarette packs to wedge in the tape as the car swayed drunkenly about the road. Outside, the sun scorched the endlessly unrolling desert.

Against these memories, the locale of my latest smoke-filled experience was far more prosaic, taking place in a tiny, airless basement of no distinction, I had gone there for a two-day business meeting, and found myself surrounded by two French, one Italian and three Spanish chain smokers.  I was soon conscious of the foulness of the air I was breathing, of the burning soreness of my eyes.

But something miraculous happened.  The more I suffered, the less I consciously paid attention to what was going on around me, though part of my brain was still aware of it.  And what that part still engaged externally saw was, naturally enough, a business meeting.  Nothing extraordinary in that: people spoke, I listened; I occasionally added a comment while they listened.  Nothing extraordinary except that I realised with a sudden excitement that this meeting was being conducted entirely in French, a language I had hitherto been quite hesitant in using, certainly for business discussions like these.  My preoccupation with the smoke and discomfort had freed other parts of my mind simply to forget about details like translating or language, and enabled it to transcend the situation completely.  As the fug descended, I was granted the nearest I shall probably get to a Pentecostal experience 

(26.12.91)

Index

Going back

One of the biggest mistakes I ever made was going to the Villa d'Este just outside Rome.  I arrived there one spring afternoon, taking the local train from the capital. I strolled out into the beautiful warming sunshine, and walked down to the Villa.  As I entered, I passed through into a magic kingdom that seemed other-worldly in its beauty and perfection: the steep downward slope with its terraces, each filled with ever more artful fountains whose jets played in the wind, and whose drops caught and fragmented the sun's rays; the huge dark cypresses, swaying slowly, their black greenness a counterpoise to the fountains’ brilliant transparency.  I could readily understand why Liszt was so moved here that he wrote not just one but two of his greatest pianistic masterpieces in an attempt to capture and hold those fountains and those cypresses.

I stayed there for hours, unwilling to leave this extraordinary creation. But eventually I dragged myself away, casting a last glance over my shoulder.  I walked round the town, still dazed from the experience. I remember I bought an ice-cream, real Italian ice-cream, and something about eating it suddenly made me want to see those gardens again.  I gobbled down the rest, and rushed back; it was nearly closing time.  But the gods of the place appeared to be on my side; I paid for the second time, and hurried through to this lost world regained.  As I did so, and began to savour once more the unique sights, something terrible happened: they turned off the water. Before my very eyes the huge and glorious fountains sank down into the ground like deflating balloons.  I was devastated, and left with only the dead husk of my vision.

I learnt from that mistake never to return to somewhere that has provided a perfect experience of this kind.  Or rather never to return soon afterwards.  Because attempting to repeat exactly is bound to fail, bound to disappoint. And yet the urge to return is still there, as it should be for sights really worth seeing. The resolution of this apparent paradox is to wait.  In doing so you can return, and can recapture something - not the same experience, certainly, but a cognate one.

I have now learnt that one of the greatest pleasures is that of returning after some time to places that are rich enough to sustain several visions of themselves.  Visiting New York again, say, you recognise your favourite features - the elegant Chrysler Building, the Citicorp slab, the treasures of the museums, the view from the Windows on the World restaurant - but each trip with its different seasons and circumstances adds something new, provides a different perspective of this city's constant metamorphosis. Staying in Venice again is even richer, a constant re-encounter with your memories, themselves many-layered products of other visits.

And so it is that each fresh view builds these special places in time as well as in space.  In a sense they are made of a special, infinitely absorbent material that can hold each of your key experiences without mixing or vitiating them.  But as I learnt that afternoon outside Rome, this material requires a further special ingredient, which cannot be omitted or skimped: time.  Going back to a place is always safe provided we and the place itself also go back - preferably a long way.

(22.2.92)

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Start the day: write

I rise at 6 am.  It is cold and dark, and the only sound is of the wind and the rain outside.  Normally I enjoy this darkness and silence only when I am about to set off on a long journey, and need to start early; which is perhaps what I am doing.  The hour also puts me in mind of dawn walks I have taken through foreign cities, my body clock out of kilter, or simply ignored for the sake of experience – Venice, New York, Torino, San Francisco – where initially I met no one, and then later encounter the reluctant first workers of the day, the ones we rarely see – the cleaners, the security guards, the milk train drivers.  I feel a kinship with them.

I sit at my desk, drinking coffee, my word-processor dark, but my mind beginning to fire.  Ideas bubble up, fall back, sometimes link with others, coalesce.  I try not to be too conscious of the process.  After all, how do we wake up in the first place?  Our minds are – what? Somewhere else? Switched off? Silently and blindly processing?  I try to lean into the quickening flow of ideas as a swimmer leans into the water: lazily and languorously, without effort or anxiety.

Then, washed and dressed, I turn on the word-processor.  As it whirrs and flickers into action, the first shot of adrenaline hits my system.  The enormity of what I am about to attempt clutches at my accelerating heart.  I replace the word-processor disc with one nearly empty, holding a few of my previous essays.  A blank screen comes up and I am faced once more with the apparently impossible task of creating something from nothing, of building a bridge across a huge yawning chasm without the use of scaffolding.

I know from experience that the only way to proceed is to emulate those cartoon characters who run out blindly beyond the precipice: they keep running in a straight line as long as they remain oblivious of the fact that there is nothing beneath them.  Reflection is fatal: as soon as they perceive the untenability of their aerial situation, they plummet instantly like a stone, as if to make up for their tardy plunge.  So now I too simply charge in, the opening line clear in my head as if written in neon, but the rest is darkness.  I know – I hope – that once started the momentum will carry me forward until I attain the haven of the page’s end.

I do.  Then I am confronted by what I have perpetrated.  Those words are mine, and no one else’s; I bear full responsibility.  Like someone who has inexplicably committed some terrible crime, I go back over everything, searching the tiniest details, trying to make it better, trying to make it right.  Sometimes I find comfort in replacing one gawky phrase with another less angular.  But it is a crumb cast to a starveling.

However, there is one real consolation which is independent of what I have produced: it is that I have produced.  Already I have won from the day some tiny attempt at order; whatever else happens to me, I have added a grain of sand to the sandcastle.  As I leave home for my other work, it is with a spring in my step, and with smug self-satisfaction in my heart.  I know that I almost redeemed this day of my life, and justified my existence, however poorly and feebly, by starting aright.

(21.10.89)

See also Moody Sonnets - AI’s Secret

Index

A week in Gourmandy

One of the pleasures of travel is the sampling of local cuisine.  Even the simplest of fare is imbued with subtle local characteristics which raise it far above its nominal station.  So the mind retains forever the salty sensation of fresh oysters in Bayeux, the baked barracuda in the Gambia, the freshly-slaughtered lobster in Loggos, the tuna fish bap in the canteen of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.  In their savours and smells they become neat parcels of memory: just add water and bring to the boil and your various vacations rise up before you.

But it is by no means necessary to travel to distant climes to sample these culinary delights.  An interesting indication of the level of yuppification of London is the number of restaurants which have sprung up in recent years.  In this, of course, London is merely aping New York, a city where rich hedonistic professionals seem to live to eat rather than eat to live. When I first moved to Abbeville Road, there were two restaurants.  Today there are five, with a sixth opening in two days.

Normally you restrain yourself.  However much eating may degenerate into excess, it is important to ration the experience itself.  In the last week I have broken this cardinal rule, though not always through my own greed.

Take last Monday and Tuesday, for example.  At lunchtime on both days, I had business lunches; in the evening, social engagements.  On Monday I was regaled with stockbroker’s fare.  To be precise, I was entertained by a pair of analysts in their modest but acceptable directors’ dining room.  After aperitifs, we went straight into the Beef Olive, followed simply by cheese and mints.  In contrast, Monday evening was a get-together chez Ahmed’s, with a fine hotchpotch of some ten or twelve dishes, not forgetting nans, raitas, parathas and dals.

Tuesday lunchtime was more directors’ dining rooms, this time on home ground.  We began with smoked salmon, proceeded to chicken in a rich sauce, and finished with lethal profiteroles.  Tuesday evening was American, with a fine clam chowder, then a pork kebab, rounded off with – but already the gourmand’s curse has struck: I cannot for the life of me remember what I did round it off with.

Friday lunchtime is easier to recall, because quite idiosyncratic – The Bombay Brasserie, reputed to be the best Indian in the land.  And the buffet-style food, placed by ourselves on quite the largest plates I have ever eaten off, was equally memorable, if not nameable.

And from there we begin the long haul of the Bank Holiday weekend.  That Friday it was the Metro, the first but not the last of the Clapham wine bars.  Sunday was Just Williams for the evening – just another wine bar.  Monday saw us at the fine new Pizza Express Clapham Junction for lunch, and in an atmospheric hamburger emporium opposite the ABC in Fulham Road in the evening.  But now the gourmand’s curse has done its worst: in the maelstrom of overeating out, not only can I not remember the details of the food, but even the name of the venue has gone.  Voyages in the land of Gourmandy, if too frequent, lead to the River Lethe.

(6.5.86)

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Outer London

First I must declare an interest.  I am a fanatical Londoner, convinced that there is no more exciting, civilised, beautiful spot on earth; there is nowhere I would rather live.  But I hope that I would feel the same if I were a Cornishman, Scouser, Scot or Lancastrian.  The fact that the rest of Britain seems increasingly to be as besotted with London as Londoners is a disturbing trend.

In part it is understandable. Government is becoming more and more centralised; attempts to spread cultural facilities more evenly throughout the country have been wishful thinking at best, and window-dressing at worst.  As all the remaining bright young things move to the capital, drawn by the seductive charms of a high-tech, highly-paid, high society, London is turning into a total Yuppiopolis, which feeds the process yet more.  London is where the action is.  Which is good for us, bad for the rest of the country, and ultimately bad for everybody.

Compare the situation in the U.S.  There, everyone is proud to be American, but even more proud of their local city. Hence we see a tremendous number of centres of economic, social and cultural activity.  This richness provides much of the motive power which fuels American society.  Some cities like New York, Washington and Los Angeles may have particular pulling power, and represent especial concentrations of activity and facilities.  But this is in addition to the countless Clevelands, Denvers, Seattles and Austins, all of which are busy pulling themselves up by their bootstraps to national, and in some cases, international eminence.

The effect is multiplicative.  Just as London’s cuckoo-like growth is sapping the will and energy of regional centres, so the pullulation of such concentrations in the U.S. promotes a healthy spirit of competition, engendering more of the same.  The cumulative richness also goes some way to explain the dominance of American television, language and culture in the Western world.

Consider television.  The most popular and populist TV series are almost invariably rooted in a particular location – Dallas, Miami Vice, Hawaii-Five-O and so on.  Although given the shallowness of such series the backdrop is vestigial, and rarely plays an important role, it does nonetheless promote a sense of civic differentiation.  Compare the situation in the U.K.  Both Crossroads and Coronation Street are dinosaurs; most other series, either of soaps or action, are set in London, or at best deracinated.  If attempts are made to use specific non-London locations, the results are either half-hearted or failures.

The same goes for language.  In the U.S. there is a constant competition to enrich the general language with local words and phrases.  In the U.K., it is mainly London media who determine what new words will become current.  It is an uneven contest, fifty or a hundred against one.  As a result, American English, especially in its more colourful and flamboyant forms, is pouring into world English, together with its culture. Despite this, I maintain that London is best; but I wish others disagreed.

(28.12.86)

Index

Quick, quick, Oslo

I went to Oslo today.  This is not a metaphor.  I drove to Heathrow at five o’clock in the morning, and arrived at six; I checked in at seven, and flew off at eight; I arrived in Oslo at eleven, and left again at six in the evening, arriving back in England at seven.  I was in Oslo for six hours, and travelled for around the same length.  But the question is, was I really in Oslo?

The physical facts are clear; but the mind is not so impressed with the mundane.  It possesses a kind of deep continuity, an in-built resistance to change.  I was at home this morning, and this evening too; therefore, the mind would argue, what seemed to be Oslo in-between was in fact something else – a dream, an illusion, a fantasy.  This effect might be called a kind of mental momentum.

And yet the aerial view of the green land, the thousands of sparkling inlets, the tiny settlements and the fragile network of roads seemed real enough; as did the airport and the drive through central Oslo.  Though even then I felt disoriented: how could I possibly be in Oslo?  Nor was this the first time I had had this difficulty with travel.

Of Oslo I had no pre-conceptions, nor would I have had any chance to test them since my visit was cursory and perfunctory.  But visiting say Venice for the first time is quite different.  There you are encountering your dreams face to face; you meet the reality behind a thousand conjectures.  Perhaps even more so than for the flying visit to Oslo, that crucial first sight of Venice is not of this world.  It is almost impossible to come to terms with the fact that you are in Venice, the Venice.  I distinctly remember saying to myself “this is Venice” in an attempt to locate myself in that new and fabulous landscape.

The problem is that we carry around within us a very strong map with a large sign marked “you are here”.  Changing that map is not easy.  When we are in Venice, the map is still marked London.  The same is true when we are in Samarkand or Delhi or New York.  It seems so incredible that we are there that it is easier to believe instead that it is a kind of heightened and extraordinary vision granted in ordinary but invisible surroundings.

So travel begins to require a real effort on the part of the sensitive traveller.  They must practise gaining a sense of a new place, of being somewhere other.  They must learn to use the expected and unexpected features of a topography as handholds which allow them to clamber – however unsteadily – onto the moonscape of fresh experience.

There are ironies here.  The best traveller always retains a sense of how a place is different.  To do that they must measure against the yardstick of their home environment.  And yet to be truly in another place, they must shift maps, and so lose that yardstick.  Furthermore, we only truly know a place when it is literally familiar to us; but at that stage it is no longer strange, no longer special.  So the end result is that we cannot for the life us think why we wanted to go there.  At least I still want to go to Oslo – or rather, to go to Oslo really.

(13.8.87)

See also Moody's Black Notebook Travels - 1989 Oslo

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