Meetings with remarkable people in Venice (Italy) and Chelsea (London)

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Every year until I was 17, I used to accompany my parents to Venice. There, we stayed at the Pensione La Calcina in the Zattere district. This accommodation, where the nineteenth century cultural guru John Ruskin (1819-1900) used to stay, was next to the large Giudecca Canal. And each time we stayed there, we met other regular visitors, whom we got to know quite well …

We always took demi-pension at the Calcina – room, breakfast (such as it was), and one main meal. Usually, we ate lunch there and had our evening meals elsewhere. The dining room was L-shaped. Most of the clientele sat in the long and larger part of the dining room but regular guests, such as us, sat in the shorter section at right angles to its longer section. There were 5 tables in this part. Our family occupied a table at the end of it and next to a window that looked out towards the Giudecca Canal from which we could watch its gently undulating waves glistening and glinting in the bright midday sun.

Every summer, we dined with the same guests who, like us, stayed at the Calcina year after year. Each party occupied the same table each year. Behind and next to us, there were two elderly Russian men. They were, my mother once explained, ‘Whites’ not ‘Reds’ – they had fled the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. Although she was not sure, she felt that they were homosexuals. They never said much at lunch except once when one of them expressed the opinion that the paintings in the Accademia Gallery had been ruined by cleaning. He thought that the old masters had looked far better before the restorers had removed layers of yellowing varnish to reveal the bright colours had been hidden beneath them.

Each of two tables facing each other and close to ours were occupied by two Polish composers and their respective wives. One of these musicians was named Horowitz. He was not related to the famous pianist as far as I know. The other was named Tansman.  I did not realise it at the time, but he was none other than the composer Alexander Tansman (1897-1986). Although he might not be as well known to the public as some of his contemporaries, he was, and still is, highly regarded by musical cognoscenti. The two composers spent much of their lunchtimes glaring at each other. They appeared to disagree about most things except one. And that was the appalling quality of the food that used to be served in the Calcina. As soon as the main course arrived at table, everyone in the regulars’ section of the dining room looked at each other, raising their eyebrows knowingly.

The food was served to the regulars by a friendly waiter, who was at the Calcina year after year. Along with the ladies, the owner Ms Scolozzi and her manager, Miss Steiner, he was a permanent fixture at the pensione.  I often felt that he sympathised with us. I am sure that he knew that what he was serving was probably unenjoyable, but that was his job. At the end of lunch, fruit would be served. This always included grapes, which he pronounced as ‘greeps’.

There was one more regular who lunched with us. A well-built elderly American, he remained an enigma for years. He beamed at us in a friendly way, but said nothing during our meals. It was not until one morning in the early 1970s that we learned more about him. For some reason we left the Calcina later than usual: at 11 o’clock instead of the usual 10 or half-past. We were standing waiting outside the pensione when my mother noticed a gondola draped with green cloths pulling up at the corner where the nearby small side canal, which ran alongside the Pensione Seguso, next door to La Calcina, met the much larger Giudecca Canal. The gondolier, a young man, was dressed in green livery that matched the drapes on his highly polished black boat.

Soon after this gondola had moored, we noticed our elderly American fellow diner emerging from the main entrance of the Calcina. He headed straight for the recently arrived gondola, and then boarded it. Next, he sat down, and then started reading a newspaper whilst the gondolier began to row him across the Giudecca Canal. We watched his gondola crossing the water, before it disappeared into one of the small canals that traversed the Giudecca Island before reaching the lagoon. We were fascinated and intrigued. After he disappeared, we began our morning’s activity.

My mother was never shy when she needed to know something. So, after lunch that day, she stopped our mysterious American lunch neighbour and asked him about the gondola and its liveried oarsman. He explained that every day, he was ferried out into the lagoon in the gondola. When he reached the lagoon, he took over the oar and rowed around the waters of the lagoon for an hour before handing the oar back to the gondolier, who then rowed him back to the Calcina in time for lunch. Remarkable as it was that a non-Venetian could row a gondola competently, what he told us next was even more amazing.

Mr Milliken, as he identified himself, was, as my father – a keen amateur art historian – was most excited to learn, none other than the director of the well-respected Cleveland Art Museum in the USA. The liveried gondolier, whom we had observed, was the grandson of his late mother’s personal gondolier. She used to accompany Mr Millikan on his annual visits to Venice before WW2, and employed her own gondolier during her stays.

Later that day, we asked Miss Steiner about Milliken. She told us that he visited the Calcina every year on the anniversary of either the birth or the death of his mother – I cannot remember which. He occupied the room in which she used to stay. It would be furnished exactly as it was when she was alive, and was kept decked with fresh flowers – not the plastic ones that adorned so many Italian hotels. We were most interested to learn this, but I did not think about it much until years later when I looked up Milliken on the internet and discovered that he had published a book about Venice called “Unfamiliar Venice”. I obtained a copy of this from a second-hand bookseller. It is a beautifully written and illustrated book, clearly the work of one who knew the city intimately. However, nowhere except in his dedicatory words does he make any reference to his own very personal connection with the place. He wrote: “To my mother, ‘The lady who loved Venice,’ and Bernard Berenson, who encouraged me to write these impressions.” The biographical note on the book’s endpaper added that Milliken had spent several months in Venice each year since 1921, when he was aged 32, but not during WW2. In his autobiography, “Born under the Sign of Libra”, I discovered that his mother’s gondolier was a member of the Fabris family. I also learnt that his mother, like mine, had a fear of small boats, but made an exception of the gondola.

We were not yet on speaking terms with our fellow diner Mr Milliken in 1960 when the Olympic Games were held in Rome during the height of summer. However, he and the other regular lunch diners including my father used to crowd around the Calcina’s only TV set after lunch during the Games. It was a small black and white receiver situated in the sitting room that adjoined the dining room. All the diners from the regulars’ section used to cluster around it to check on the latest Olympic results. Each time one of the Soviet Bloc countries won a medal, everyone booed. When a non-Soviet Bloc nation won, it was usually West Germany or the USA, they cheered. One thing apart from the awful food served in the pensione united those who sat near us at lunch in the Calcina, and that was a dislike of Communism. This was hardly surprising as the regulars included Russian émigrés, Poles, and an American; and the Games were being held during the height of the so-called Cold War.

A few years before my last visit to Venice with my parents, I met a couple who were destined to play a prominent role in my social life during the late 1960s and the early 1970s.

One evening whilst we were standing in front of the Calcina, my father greeted an elderly lady who was walking hand in hand with an equally elderly, but taller, man. It was touching to see them as they were clearly very much in love. The woman was a colleague of my father at the London School of Economics (‘LSE’). Her name was Kit Russell, and she was until her retirement in 1973 an academic member of the School’s Department of Social Administration. Her husband Sheridan was an almoner by profession. They used to stay at the Seguso which was next door to the Calcina. After that first encounter, we used to bump into them often whenever we visited Venice. As far as I know, the Russells were not part of my parents’ social circle; I had never heard of them before we met them in Venice.

One evening in Venice before August 1970 that is when I was still a secondary school student, Kit asked me whether I enjoyed listening to classical music. When I answered affirmatively, she said that she would be sure to invite me to one of the musical evenings that she and Sheridan held at their home. So it was that I turned up one Saturday evening at the Russell’s ground floor flat in Lindsey House in Cheyne Walk close to the River Thames. It dated back to the 17th century, but the ground floor flat occupied by the Russels resulted from an 18th century modification of the building. Separated from the river only by its front garden and a street, it is now maintained by the National Trust.

I attended many musical evenings at the Russell’s place. They all followed the same pattern, but always differed in detail. On arrival at the flat, the 30 or so guests would mingle and help themselves to what Kit called the ‘Stones of Venice’. These were almonds covered by a sugary coating that was coloured to make them resemble washed pebbles. The Russells used to buy them in bulk when they visited Venice. When everyone including the guest musicians had arrived, the audience would sit on a variety of objects ranging from sofas to cushions on the floor. After my first musical soirée, Kit used to ask me to sit on a chair near the windowsill upon which the telephone was perched. My job was to answer the telephone should it ring during the music, and I was to say: “We are having a party. Please ring again tomorrow,” and then to replace the receiver quickly. Fortunately, I never ever had to do this because it never rang.

When we were all seated, Sheridan, an accomplished ‘cello player, would introduce the guest musicians. Most of them were well-known professional players. Maria Lidka (1914-2013), a highly accomplished violinist who had fled from Nazi Germany, appeared frequently at these soirées. One evening, the famous pianist Louis Kentner (1905-1987) joined Sheridan’s ensemble. Kit persuaded him to give me a lift part of the way home in his car. He did so, but very reluctantly.

In addition to Sheridan, there would be up to 5 other musicians, but more usually 2 or 3. They were usually string players and pianists, but on one occasion there was a clarinettist. It was at this party that I first heard the beautiful clarinet quintet by Brahms. Sheridan explained to me that the members of his ensembles were different for each soirée. No musician would ever be invited to play with the same group of musicians more than once. And also none of his guest musicians would play the same composition more than once. Further, the Russells varied the composition of the audience so that everyone had a chance to meet someone new.

The guest musicians had no idea what they would be asked to play until they arrived. Sheridan had rehearsed the pieces in advance, but his musician guests had not. They played each work either from memory or by sight-reading. The performances were truly impromptu, but that did not matter because all the players were of the highest calibre. Kit and Sheridan made sure that none of the audience, many of whom were regular attendees, ever heard the same pieces more than once. Apart from being highly enjoyable, each of the soirées was a masterpiece of planning.

Once, Maria Lidka’s son, the then young ‘cellist Marius May, was invited to play for us. All went well for a while until suddenly one of his instrument’s strings snapped noisily. It sounded like a gunshot. Marius had to stop playing. One of his fingers had begun to swell horribly having just been assaulted by the broken string.  Fortunately, this did not put an end to his promising career as a professional musician.

The lights were turned down and, if it was summer, the curtains were drawn. Then, the first piece of the evening was performed. The Russell’s living room was the perfect setting for chamber music, much of which had been written soon before or just after the room had been built. Its acoustics were second to none. Sheridan always played with his back to the audience. Kit used to sit a short distance away from his right hand, beaming lovingly at him. I will never forget her sweet smile and her obvious care and affection for him. As he grew older, Sheridan used to wear gloves even during the performance. He would remove them only when he had to play. During the intervals in which he was counting bars without playing, he used to slip his aging shaky hands back into his gloves. I used to be saddened seeing my elderly friend having to do this.

During the interval that followed the first piece of music, we were allowed to mingle whilst we enjoyed the refreshments that Kit brought out from her kitchen. These were always the same: savoury biscuits upon which there were small pieces of a yellow hard cheese that was studded with caraway seeds. Glasses of red wine were served with this snack. After the interval, the second piece of the evening was performed. When that was over, we all bade farewell to our hosts and went our own ways. I used to love attending these evening chamber concerts. It was wonderful hearing Brahms, Beethoven, and Mozart, performed in such a perfect environment.

Sheridan, who was born in 1900, married Kit when he was 57. He told me once during an interval at one of his soirées that marrying her allowed him to do something that he had always wanted to do, but was unable to do so as a bachelor. And that was to become a marriage guidance councillor.

The encounters described above are amongst my fond memories of Venice – a place I still enjoy visiting. And had it not been for meeting Kit and Sheridan on a warm summer night in Venice, I might never have been able to experience the magical musical occasions at their home in London.

A village of tents in the heart of London

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EUSTON ROAD IS a busy dual carriageway. Where it runs near Warren Street Underground station, there is a central divider, a few feet wide.

There are twenty to forty small tents pitched on the narrow divider strip. They have been there for several years, maybe since 2020. These tents house homeless people. They are these peoples’ homes. Some of the tents contain no more than simple bedding – mattresses and blankets. Others are more elaborately furnished with domestic equipment in addition to bedding. None of the tents could be described as desirable residences. Yet they are home to people hailing from a variety of places including Ukraine, Bulgaria, Romania, elsewhere in Europe, and Britain.

The tents can be seen clearly from the west bound bus stop near Warren Street station. Behind these barely adequate dwellings are recently constructed high-rise office blocks as well as luxury apartment blocks.

Seeing these inelegant tents and their inhabitants, whose impoverished circumstances can easily be imagined, reminded me of street dwellers I have seen on the pavements in prosperous districts of large cities in India.

What is to be done about these tents and their inhabitants? I have no idea and it seems that our politicians are also without ideas about them.

From pallet to palette: art of Jack White

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JACK WHITE (born 1975) IS not only a noted American musician, but also an upholsterer and creator of sculptural artworks.

At an exhibition being held at the London’s Newport Street Gallery until 13 September 2026, one room is dedicated to freight loading pallets that have been repurposed as artworks,

Used pallets are frequently discarded and destroyed. What Jack White has done is to rescue discarded pallets and has used them as the basis for a set of imaginative artworks.

So, instead of consigning the pallets to the rubbish dump or bonfire, where they do nothing to improve the environment, White has transformed them with paint from a palette and found objects into creations of aesthetic interest that can brighten up or enhance the world around us.

The distasteful history of a fishing village in India

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In January 2025, while visiting the extensive remains of Golconda, which is near Hyderabad in Telangana, I noticed an old artillery piece that bore the letters ‘VOC’, the initials of the Dutch East India Company. This got me curious about possible Dutch connections with Golconda, and I began researching on the Internet. While doing this, I became aware of Pulicat, which is on the coast of the Bay of Bengal, about 70 miles north of Chennai. This small place was under the control of the Dutch for most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Apart from learning about Pulicat for the first time, I discovered that this now sleepy place was formerly involved in the trafficking of human beings.

Just as the Portuguese had done before them, the Dutch were involved with trading slaves along the Coromandel Coast including at Pulicat. Apart from generating revenues, slaves were needed to provide labour in the Dutch colonies including Sri Lanka and the East Indies. They also exported these poor individuals to the West Indies. Pulicat was a significant centre of the Dutch Coromandel slave trade. An important source of these slaves were boats from the Burmese kingdom of Arakan. These vessels raided Bengal and captured many Indians from that area. They were then shipped to Pulicat (and other Dutch trading posts), where they were bought and trans-shipped to be sent on to places where labour was needed. It was big business. For example, between 1659 and 1661, between 8000 and 10000 slaves were shipped from Coromandel ports including Pulicat. During the heyday of the Dutch occupation of Pulicat, slaves sometimes made up from between 25% to 66% of its population.

Prior to visiting Pulicat in January 2025, I did not know about the slave trading that occurred along the east coast of India. Also, naively, I had not realised that the Dutch had been so deeply involved in the despicable trading of human beings. In July 2023, an Indian publication, ThePrint, noted that the royal house of the Netherlands:

“… had directly earned at least €500 million from the slave trade in modern currency.”

It continued:

“This weekend, King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands formally apologised for the role of the Orange-Nassau dynasty in enabling the slave trade. The Dutch East India Company slave traders, the King said, had turned individuals into commodities, a kind of oppression that is ‘the most hurtful, the most humiliating, the most degrading’.”

When the British took over Pulicat in 1814, it was a shadow of its former self. This was partly because by then Chennai was becoming a major port. Whereas Pulicat’s population had reached at least 50,000 in the early 16th century, by 1889, it was about 5,000. Under British rule, Pulicat was a fishing village and a British seaside resort and picnic spot. Although its lighthouse was rebuilt in the 1890s, it served not as a beacon to guide traders into Pulicat, but merely to warn mariners of the hazardous shoals near to the place.

In 2011, Pulicat had about 18,000 inhabitants. We saw plenty of them as we drove slowly though the town’s narrow, congested streets. The main road from Chennai runs through the centre of Pulicat and then along a bridge that traverses the mouth of the Kosasthathalaiyar River next to which the town lies. After discovering the town’s poorly marked, not too pleasant, public toilets, we turned down a road that leads past the Dutch Cemetery and a modern school named Dutch Academy Nursery and Primary School, and reached the AARDE Pulicat Museum. This very basic, small museum is housed in what must have once been a small shop. Its walls have some interesting informative panels attached to them. These outline the history of Pulicat. There were also some reproductions of old plans of Fort Geldria built by the Dutch. As for the exhibits, they are a rather shambolic assembly of unlabelled odds and ends. In one glass fronted cabinet, there were some fragments of ceramic vessels. I wondered whether these were bits of things left behind by the Dutch. On close examination, I noticed one of these broken pieces was labelled “made in Japan”.

The Dutch Cemetery, which is a few yards away from the museum, is fascinating. The stone archway at its entrance is flanked by a pair of carved stone skeletons. One of them has on its head a spindle-shaped object that looks like a double-sided tabla with a wasp-waist. Actually, it is an hourglass (see below). The other appears to be resting its head on its raised right hand while placing its left hand on a skull. Like many other colonial cemeteries that we have visited in India, there are several obelisks to be seen. However, what makes the Dutch Cemetery extremely fascinating is that the lettering on almost all the gravestones and monuments is crystal clear, easy to read. Hardly affected by centuries of weathering, the inscriptions look as if they were carved yesterday. In “List Of Inscriptions On Tombs Or Monuments Madras Vol 2” by Julian James Cotton (published 1946), I found the following:

“The old Dutch cemetery is perhaps the most interesting of its kind in India; and the artistic merit of the coats of arms carved on the tombstones is such that it has been suggested that they were sent out from Holland, though no authority is known for the statement.”

Regarding the gateway, this source related:

“In front of each of the two gateposts stands a sculptured stone skeleton, almost life size. These figures are said to be male and female. One has a hourglass on his head and the other supports a skull on a column. The native legend is that the former figure holds an eggshell and represents a Dutch Governor who, during a terrible famine, doled out eggshells of rice to the starving poor and made a fortune out of their sufferings. His memory was so execrated that every passer-by used to spit at the effigy…”

This same book also lists the graves and quotes the inscriptions on them, as well as those in a second Dutch cemetery, which we did not see. One of the oldest graves that I spotted was of Dirk Maes van Rees, who had died in 1662. Many of the graves were of people who died in the 18th century. A great number of gravestones had family crests carved above the inscriptions. At the far end of the cemetery, we found two graves of people with British names: Henry Forton, who died at Pulicat in 1864, aged 52 years; and Elizabeth Catherine, wife of Mr William Lodge, who died in 1862, aged 56 years. The Dutch cemetery is a reminder that not every Dutch person, who came to India to make a fortune, returned home. What it does not recall is the vast numbers of Indians who were exported by the Dutch as slaves, and had no hope of ever seeing their homes again. Today, the cemetery is visited by tourists: we met a group of Indian students. And it is populated with goats which graze on the vegetation growing amongst the funerary monuments. Apparently, there had been a Portuguese cemetery, but this was either destroyed by the Dutch when they took over Pulicat or, like the Dutch fort, neglected and left to disintegrate.

The coast of India is dotted with tiny places that were once ruled by Europeans. Before viewing Pulicat, we had already visited Daman, Diu, Goa, Mahe, Karaikal, Tranquebar, and Pondicherry. These are all places that have to some extent become unimportant. Some other former European trading posts have flourished and become great cities, such as Mumbai, Kolkata, Surat, and Chennai. We have visited these places several times and enjoyed spotting relics of their colonial eras. Pulicat, which was once an important trading centre is now a peaceful fishing port – a case of ‘Sic transit gloria mundi’.

Much of the above is a slightly modified excerpt from my book “88 DAYS IN INDIA: A JOURNEY OF MEMORY AND DISCOVERY“, which is available from Amazon:.

It has been in use in this church for over 800 years

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Almost every old parish church in England contains at the very least one object of great interest. Usually, the older the church, the more remarkable are the discoveries within them. Recently, I visited a church in a small village in Cambridgeshire, and saw something that made me think.

The object I saw in the Church of St Peter in the village of Coton has been in use for at least 800 years because it was constructed in the twelfth century – some time between 1100 and 1200 AD. It stands on four modern stone supports at the west end of the nave of the gothic church, whose construction commenced in the twelfth century.

The Domesday Book of 1086 lists the existence of Coton. Before 1563, there were no records of the village’s population. In that year, 21 families lived in the place. Between 1800 and 1900, Coton’s population increased from 126 to 390 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coton%2C_Cambridgeshire). So, when the church was built and for a few centuries after its first stone was laid, Coton’s population must have been small, but not so tiny to have prevented the church from having been enlarged in stages between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries.

As the population increased, the twelfth century object, which attracted my attention in the church, was used each time a child was born. The item that interested me is the stone font. It is a square tank with each of its four stone sides carved with geometric patterns. No two sides have the same design.

What makes the font interesting is not merely its age and carvings, but the fact that is still in use. I wonder how many children have been baptised with water from this font during the last more than 800 years, and how many more will be blessed at this ancient water receptacle in the years to come.

In a world where so many things keep changing, often at an alarming rate, it is wonderful to find something that has remained unaltered for so long, and is still in use.  

The painter and poet Edward Lear and a railway in Greece

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Reading about a place sometimes makes one want to visit it. Such was the case with a picturesque valley in northern Greece, about which I had read in one of the travel journals written by Edward Lear (1812-1888). Here is what I wrote about the place that Lear had described when I visited it in the early 1970s with my PhD supervisor Robert Harkness and his wife Margaret. What follows is a slightly modified excerpt from my book “Between Olympus and Aegean”.

Halfway between Larissa and Platamon – both in northern Greece – the main road winds high above a deep gorge between the slopes of Mount Olympus and Mount Ossa. Passing through this place, the Vale of Tempe, our Land Rover laden with terracotta urns recently purchased in Larissa, brings to mind John Keats’ poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, which he wrote in 1819 and includes the words:

“What leaf-fring’d legend haunts about thy shape

Of deities or mortals, or of both,

In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?”

It was not through Keats’ words that I first heard of this place, but it was those of Edward Lear. In his “Journal of a Landscape Painter in Greece and Albania”, published in 1851, he wrote in his entry for the 9th of September 1848:

“To see the classic vale of Tempe, the sacred mountain of Athos and the romantic Yannina have always been among my wishes; and I had long ago determined on making, previously to returning to England, a large collection of sketches illustrative of the landscape of Greece.”

And so, it also became my wish to see the vale. I was already familiar with Lear’s sketches that I had seen in a huge album in one of the libraries at University College London. My friends, Robert and Margaret, with whom I was travelling in Greece, gave me a 19th century engraving based on one of his Balkan sketches for my 21st birthday. Lear’s drawings are at least as good as his nonsense rhymes, for which he is well known. 

            The main road between Larissa and Platamon ran high above Tempe. Even from its edge one could see little or nothing of the gorge far below it, and certainly not what Lear would have been able to see when he visited it. One afternoon, Robert and Margaret kindly drove me to the southern end of the Vale of Tempe, and left me by the roadside. Then, they drove to its northern end, where they said that they would wait for me as I tried to retrace Lear’s footsteps along the depths of the gorge.

            When my friends drove away, I looked around to see whether I could find a track or path that ran along the base of the gorge. I saw two rustic looking men sitting high on a slope above me. I climbed up to them and with a combination of miming, which involved pointing at my feet, and repeating the word ‘Tempe’ I managed to make them understand that I wanted to walk along the gorge. They pointed up at the railway track high above us, and I understood that I was to walk along this.

            Soon after I reached the single tracked railway, I heard a train approaching me from the south. I stepped aside to allow the Athens to Munich Express to rumble past me. When this long train had sped ahead, I followed it at my own pace. After a short distance the track entered a cutting between two walls of rock. When I was halfway along this, a diesel engine came hurtling towards me. In the nick of time, I flattened myself against the rocky wall to avoid being mowed down. I continued forward, somewhat shaken. Soon after the track emerged from the cutting, I saw the entrance to a tunnel not far ahead of me. It was dark; its far end was not visible. After my near miss in the cutting, I decided that I would not enter the tunnel.

            I stood on the track near to the tunnel’s entrance and looked around. To one side there was a steep slope leading upwards. On the other, there was a slightly less steeply inclined slope leading towards the narrow base of the gorge. Cautiously I made my way down the slippery slope, grabbing hold of shrubs to slow down my descent. Soon, I reached a level path running just above a stream that ran along the base of the gorge.  It was, I realised, the bed of a long since demolished railway track. This was the railway that my informants had intended that I follow. The railway track that I had been following was its modern replacement. Suddenly I was walking in an idyllic landscape that must have hardly changed since Lear visited it.

            After a while, I reached what must have once been a railway station, but was now a place, maybe with religious connections, where visitors were able to obtain refreshments and to drink from a spring that issued nearby. I have since learnt that this place was called Agia Paraskevi and that the old railway station was opened in 1910. The suspension bridge close to this, which I crossed, was built in about 1960, and was replaced a few years ago.

Soon after leaving this delightful place, I reached the car park at the northern end of the gorge, where Robert and Margaret were waiting for me. They listened with great interest as I related my adventures including my narrow escape in the railway cutting.

[My book “Between Olympus and Aegean” is available from Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Between-Olympus-Aegean-Adam-Yamey/dp/1291882685/ ].  About the book:

Ants, bacon, collagen, and chlorine. These are not the first words that usually spring to mind when thinking about summers in Greece. The holidays that Adam Yamey spent in this country in the 1970s and 1980s with the professor and his wife were far from ordinary. This book provides an affectionate portrait of two remarkable people with whom the author spent many unconventional vacations. It also describes how the author travelled with them through a Europe which has undergone many transformations since these trips were made. Adam’s book is richly illustrated with his own photographs, many of them showing places that time has changed beyond recognition.

Two chain smokers with whom I had been friendly

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I have had  two friends who were chain smokers. Each smoked in excess of 100 cigarettes per day. One was a man who lived in Yugoslavia,  and another, a lady, who lived in Wales.

Seen at Vapi in Gujarat

I used to travel around Yugoslavia with my Serbian friend, and we often shared hotel rooms. As soon as he woke in the morning,  he had his first cigarette, and last thing at night, after cleaning his teeth, he had to have another. One year when I  met him, he told me that his doctor had told him to give up smoking. He decided not to give up completely, but to limit himself to one cigarette per hour. While he did this, he was permanently distracted because every few minutes he had to look at his watch to discover how much longer he had to wait before he could light the next cigarette.  Eventually,  he abandoned the effort, and returned to chain smoking.

My Welsh friend, let us call her ‘F’, smoked at least as many cigarettes as my friend in Yugoslavia, if not more.  Each summer, we used to spend a few days with her at her home in Wales. When the windows were open, as they were often in summer, you could smell cigarette smoke as far away as 50 feet from the house. The place seemed to be surrounded by a cloud of cigarette fumes.

One year, F accompanied us on a long-haul flight. She knew that she would be unable to smoke during the 11 hours we were on board. Realising this, she quilted smoking overnight – she was a very determined woman. Within 24 hours, she went from smoking over 100 cigarettes per day to none at all.

To her credit, she never resumed smoking. She told us that one of the benefits of having given up was that she did not need to have the walls within her house repainted every year because they were no longer becoming discoloured by smoke from the cigarettes.

Both F and my Yugoslav friend are no more. Interestingly, neither of them suffered from, or died of lung cancer. I miss both of them.

Slow train to Darjeeling

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MY MOTHER’S FATHER, who died young in the early 1930s, was Mayor of Barkly East, a small town in the Eastern Cape (South Africa). He was the driving force in bringing the railway over the mountains from Lady Grey to Barkly East. This was the most expensive (in terms of cost per mile) stretch of railway ever built in South Africa. It included a series of switchback stretches to allow the trains to ascend or descend the steep mountain slopes. Another mountain railway with switchbacks can be found on India’s West Bengal. The narrow gauge railway links New Jalpaiguri in the plains with Darjeeling high up in the mountains. We travelled on this line on December 2019. Here is what I wrote soon after the ride.

The author and the train

Today we travelled on a narrow gauge mountain railway with at least 5 switchbacks. It is the so called ‘Toy Train’ that runs incredibly slowly between New Jalpaiguri and Darjeeling which is in the foothills of the Himalayas, more than 2000 metres above sea level.

We took almost two hours to travel the first about three miles. This was mainly because of a seemingly interminable wait for a signal man to arrive to allow our train to cross a river near Siliguri. Soon after we began moving, we passed tea gardens and began our several hour slow ascent towards Kurseong, Ghum, and Darjeeling.

The train follows the route of NH55, crossing over it frequently at unguarded level crossings. The serpentine course of the railway is designed to lengthen its route in order to reduce the gradients that need to be tackled.

The wheels squeal and shriek as the carriages wind around the tight curves of the tracks. The diesel engine’s horn blasts very frequently to clear the path for the train.

The views from the train are spectacular. The carriages pass extremely close to buildings, plants along the side of the track, and steep drops. Passing through towns on the route, sometimes we were so close to shops beside the track that it would have been easy to snatch goods from them. Leafy branches sprung through the open carriage windows, shedding leaves and flowers.

The flora along the route was very varied. We passed a multitude of colourful flowers including magnificently exuberant poinsettias.

Because of our slow start we travelled the last three and a half hours in darkness as the sun set long before we arrived at our destination. We arrived over three hours late.

Our enjoyment of this superb railway journey was enhanced by having conversations with a businessman from Bangalore and a couple from Lincolnshire in the UK.

Even though it is very slow, a trip on the Toy Train is thoroughly recommendable.

When we arrived at Darjeeling, it was dark and extremely cold. There were few people at the station apart from our fellow passengers. There were no taxis or autorickshaws, and we had no clue as to where our guest house was located, and how to reach it. Luckily, we had our host’s telephone number, and we rung him. The kind fellow, a Nepalese Buddhist cleric as we discovered later, came in his car to fetch us.

Although our host’s family were very hospitable, we would not stay at that place again. The main problem was that it could only be accessed from the street by a steep outdoor staircase without a handrail. One false step, and one of us might have fallen from the steps and then down the orecipitous slope into the ravine far below us.

I have yet to revisit Darjeeling, which I loved, but next time, I will choose a warmer time of year.

Two dishes separated by 1300 miles – one from Albania, the other from Kurdistan

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Today, 26 August 2026, a Tuesday, we ate lunch in a Kurdish/Iraqi restaurant, Arbil City, in north London’s Kilburn district. While perusing the menu, I noticed that included “Pachaa”, which was described as:

“Specially cooked lamb, head, legs, and tongue, served with tandoori bread.”

We could not order it because it is only available on Friday and Saturday.

Seeing its name reminded me of a breakfast we enjoyed in 2016 at a restaurant in Tirana, Albania – a city about 1300 miles away from the Kurdish city of Erbil. We were hosted by an Albanian friend, Shemsi. Here is an account of that breakfast as I recorded it in my book “Rediscovering Albania”:

We woke at the beginning of a hot sunny day. Promptly at the time we had agreed, Shemsi picked us up from our hotel, and drove us to a suburb close to the centre of Tirana. The day before, we had asked him what comprises a typical traditional Albanian breakfast. The restaurant to which he took us, which had no name visible on its frontage, was where we discovered the answer to our question. The 3 of us seemed to be the youngest customers in the eatery that morning.

The centrepiece of the breakfast was paçe soup. This is a breakfast soup (‘khash’ in Armenian, ‘pache’ in Persian) made from meat, in fact from just about every part of an animal, in our case veal. It had a slightly gelatinous texture, but was delicious. It was served with pilaf, a rice and meat dish. The soup was accompanied by bowls of condiments such as red chilli grains, sliced garlic marinated in vinegar, and wonderful thick ‘homemade’ yoghurt. Bread was also available, and we washed the breakfast down with glasses of raki. Albanian raki, made from fruit not grain, is not at all like the aniseed flavoured Turkish raki; it is more like the Italian Grappa or some of the Yugoslav hard spirits. We were also served wine with this filling meal.

I do not know for certain, but I imagine that the Albanian word ‘paçe’ is both etymologically and gastronomically related to the word ‘pachaa’ on the menu at Arbil City.