Clive Doucet

Today, I tramped across the 12th arrondissement from Place de la Bastille to Varenne-Saint-Maur on an old, abandoned rail line. About half of it is elevated on stone arches, the other half takes up the centre of streets, tunnels under most and bridges the rest and generally makes its independent way.

In 1987, two Parisians, Philippe Mathieux and Jacques Veregley had the wacky idea to convert this eyesore, the entire route, arches, bridges, tunnels, streets into an urban park. City Council bought the idea and by 2,000 the conversion was completed and the ribbon cut. It now contains 6.5 hectares of greenspace and the bench I am writing this from is so buried in green, only a small glimpse of the sky peaks through the canopy. From here, it’s impossible to know you’re in one of the world’s larger city surrounded by buildings and streets.

The park itself is filled with joggers, cyclists, boulists (people who play boules), sun tanners and of course children. The adjacent streets seem to have been infected with the green virus for I notice balconies are awash in plants and the city has lined many of the streets there with trees. The canopy over the park itself is so thick in some places that the city has had to cut a viewing area so walkers, can stop and peer out at the buildings and see the life of the city itself.

Clearly, Parisians have made a mistake here. They already have a good number of parks, the Jardins de Luxembourg, the Tuileries, the Champs de Mars just to name some of the better known ones. They could have converted the old rail line into a wonderful new shopping area as we are doing in Ottawa with Lansdowne Park. Unfortunately, I think, they’ve lost the opportunity. The park is so well used now that the city is putting in signal lights for the cyclists this fall and the range of green investments, fountains, waterfalls, children’s play areas is such that I can’t see them rolling the clock back.

The long and the short of it is Parisians have their priorities in a different place than we do. You can see this everywhere. On one of the city sign boards in the park, I read a notification printed on official looking paper that Parisians were invited to a city wide event called Park(ing) Day. On October 16^th, with the support of city hall, Parisians are encouraged to occupy a surface parking lot and replace the cars with a human activity – eating, drinking, dance, art work, child play and so on. Interested people are asked to register and describe their project at www.parkingday.fr

This is more sad news from Paris as clearly the greening of Paris is not slowing down. There are going to be more cyclists than ever, more pedestrians, more parks, trees. The fear is, of course that tourists may begin to turn off and stop coming for fear of growing roots themselves. It hasn’t happened yet but the day may not be far off. Tourists do have choices. There are other cities to visit (Baltimore, home of one of my favourite T.V. shows, comes to mind) and parking will be a consideration for people when they are making their plans and thinking ‘to Paris or not to Paris?’

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You quickly begin to recognize European Palaeolithic country. It’s high. There are cliffs rising straight up from a deep river valley. There is lots of water and deep verdant vegetation. For at least thirty thousand years this is the kind of environment where early men and women prospered. When you visit you can immediately see why.

I had previously had a cartoon image of Palaeolithic life – big ugly brutes sitting around a fire at a cave mouth with a couple of wall paintings at the back of the cave. The grotto near the village of Tautaval where one of our ancestors craniums was found that has been dated at 35,000 year ago overlooks a broad, high walled valley that served as a natural pasture and migratory route for animals. From the front ‘door’ of the cavern, Palaeo men and women would have had much the same view as we have today, except it would be teaming with wild animals, horses, wild cattle, deer, mountain goats. At the base of the hillside would have been the same beautiful river and swimming that people enjoy today, except it would have been better, cleaner, wider, more verdant.

When you see children frolicking in the water and flying easily up the hillside to visit the archaeological work with their parents, it doesn’t take much imagination to realize for children this was always a wonderful environment.

We’re now in the Perigord and have just visited Lascaux and the grotte de Gaume which is literally in the village. The quality of the art work is staggering in its placement as well as its form. Palaeolithic man didn’t decorate the caverns where families actually lived. The great caverns that he painted were used exclusively for art and they were as extraordinary as any modern gallery I have visited.

You can’t visit Lascaux without a feeling of profound awe. This is the Sistine Chapel of the Palaeolithic world. The paintings cover the entire arc of the cave from ceiling to eyelevel. They are beautiful. There are few artists who could create such art today. Picasso is one that comes to mind because it must take incredible fluidity of hand to carve out in one broad stroke the arc of the representation which is how it was done. These paintings are the absolute antithesis of paint by numbers. The artists knew how to read the rock perfectly and used the shape of the rock to highlight every part of their painting from haunch to head. By the light of a candle flame, the paintings seem to dance before your eyes and the colours become deeper, the detail sharper for this is the way they were painted and meant to be seen. Under electric lights, over the internet, they are nothing but pale imitations.

It is in Lascaux and Niaux and Mas d’Azil in the Pyreenes where I began to realize the transformative power of art and spirituality. For you cannot walk in these magnificent cathedrals of the Palaeolithic and not believe that the impetus for their creation was a deep and important sense of life larger than any individual. It is here that men and women began to differentiate themselves from the other species.

This art is not casual. The caverns are separated by hundreds of kilometers but the choice of species to paint and how to paint them clearly comes from the same vision and took the same kind of community effort. Scaffolding was necessary. Bowl lamps with wicks. The preparation of the red, black and yellow paints. The artists must have been carefully chosen for just as today, you can’t imagine these talents emerged casually from the community.

I’m always interested in sustainability. How do communities endure? What makes them fail? And it is clear Palaeolithic man never failed, but after thousands of years, (longer than our lifestyle will endure) his own lifestyle changed. He moved down to the river bottoms and began to cut trees and farm next to the rivers. The caverns along the hill tops became places for summer shepherds and herders to shelter their animals and it was forgotten that there were great paintings hidden in their deepest recesses.

To our good fortune, they have been restored to us and something of their magic can be felt again.

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When I was first elected to city council, I knew absolutely nothing about politics and looked around for someone from whom I might learn. I settled on two Toronto city councillors, Joe Mihevc and Jack Layton and travelled to Toronto to talk to them. They were both of great help. At one point Joe and I even exchanged assistants so that my staff could bring back new ways of doing things.

One of many large tulips commissioned for the City of Ottawa - Photo by dugspr CC - some rights reserved

Jack helped us get Ottawa’s pilot light rail (O-Train) started and we became friends as he did with so many people he met in his travels. When he finished his term as President of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM), I presented him with a monster Ottawa tulip – to make him smile. I was on the FCM board; we worked hard and we had fun. His last words to me, on leaving, were, ‘we’ve got to have a beer at the Rainbow again, Clive.’

The curious thing is once he was Leader of the NDP, I saw much less of him even though he worked within shouting distance of Ottawa City Hall. I missed his presence on the municipal scene. At one meeting of the FCM, we had formed a coalition of progressive councillors and sure enough, Jack was there, giving advice, helping out. He was like leaven in the municipal bread, making it lighter, faster, better.

I learned much from him. The first and most important was that whatever you did had to be anchored in hope. Forget about your opponents. Run on principle and the hope you will have the chance to make those principles real. This is what I did and never regretted a moment of my municipal career. One of the very best parts was Jack Layton.

Limoux, France

August 15 is the Acadian National Celebration Day. It’s also a great religious day in the Catholic church, the celebration of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary. In Paris, it is a civic holiday and a day of pilgrimage at Notre Dame where thousands gather to worship. It is also the apogee of summer. To be in Paris at any time is fine, to be in Paris on August 15 is a wonder of the world. The great city is as quiet and gentle as country village.

If the quiet of the street doesn’t alert you. Nor does the desultory way the café is being opened, you know something is up the moment you board the bus. It’s not the same. There are no businessmen with briefcases, no grim faced shoppers headed off to do commercial damage. Yet, the bus is crowded. Every seat is taken and people are talking merrily. Yacking away at each other across the aisle and between seats as if everyone knows each other, as if this is a village bus. There’s laughter and ease and you think, this is strange. Where’s the tension? Where’s the city that never sleeps? And then you remember, it’s la Fete de l’Assumption and everyone’s off to the park.

Ahh, the parks of Paris. If Renoir were alive today, he would hasten down to the Luxembourg Gardens where thousands loll about under plane trees drinking tea and sodas, and eating, eating, eating, mountains of sugared crepes, ice cream and café leigeois. Oh! The sinning that goes on at the Luxembourg Gardens as people pretend they have no cares at all and dangle about on chairs, provocatively tilted back to make snoozing easier. It takes a little time to find one for yourself as they are all comfortably occupied by people sunning and reading and staring off into the distant treed sky.

There are children playing with boats in the pond as children have always done and squealing when the boat sails too close to the jets of water from the fountain. There’s a man dressed as a painter or perhaps a sculptor, anyway he’s dressed specially for the occasion as he declaims with the bell tones of the trained actor some rich lines from Moliere. Several people clap and he bows grandly. This seems sufficient payment.

Two formidably armed police officers clip clop on horses through the park with the serious look of the Republican Guard about them. They are deep in conversation and ignore the children who gaze up at them admiringly; but it is good to know if crime should break out that we ‘the citizens’ are protected.

I stop to gaze at the fountain of the Medici, named after Marie di Medici and built in the early part of the 17^th century. People have been building fountains and pools of water like this since the days of the Roman Republic. The Romans called them Nymphaeum and they looked much the same, even in a ruined state they have remembered elegance. The purpose of the Roman Nymphaeum was exactly the same as Marie di Medici’s fountain. It was for people to admire, to remind the citizens their city had so much water they could spend it on nothing more than entertainment.

Nothing has changed. We the citizens are impressed as ever and stroll about Marie di Medici’s fountain framed with great plane trees. We lean thoughtfully against flower pots; sit and gaze at the cascading water as it falls and bangs and tingles over the muscular statues glistening under the sun dappled trees – and think to ourselves, there is something beautiful here. There is something eternal here and I am part of it.

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There is an old fig tree in the garden of the house we are renting. It is an old, powerful tree with a gnarled, thick girth and a densely branched canopy. On the hottest summer night, it is cool sitting beneath its many layers of broad green leaves. I would like to say I am reading Saint-Exupéry’s magical book, Le Petit Prince but that would be an exaggeration of my effort on this summer afternoon.

Rather, I am contemplating Le Petit Prince and thinking to myself, did Saint-Exupéry know he was creating a children’s story that would be read and celebrated the world over? Did Michelangelo know when he carved the ‘David’ out of a monster block of white marble that it would be admired for a long as people could get themselves to Florence to gaze up at it? My guess is that was their intention for every artist in the boot box of his heart hopes that one day he might paint or write or carve something that will endure.

I’ll leave the debate over the qualities of the ‘David’ and Michelangelo to the sculptors, but not ‘Le Petit Prince’, for Saint-Exupéry is of my tribe and trade. Le Petit Prince is a master work that will endure as long as people read. It is not the limpidity of the prose that makes it great, although this helps. Nor is it the brilliant surreal quality of a boy prince living alone on a planet so small it can only support a single rose and a single sheep. It’s the humanity of the story that it makes it great for it goes to the heart of what makes every human being, human. How do we share?

For we cannot live as human beings if we do not share. It is through sharing our talents, our food, our roses, our friendship that human life becomes possible. This is what makes the murders in Norway so anti-human. They are the anti-thesis of the Le Petit Prince. They are about building walls and protecting yourself, but without sharing we are just like any other omnivore on the planet. It is through the complex ‘business’ of sharing the fruits of our lives that art and commerce are created and civilization is born.

It’s a fragile concept easily fractured. Just what is the right balance between sharing and protecting what you have? What is the right balance between the Prince wanting to save his rose from the sheep’s teeth and the sheep wanting and needing to eat it? The story of Le Petit Prince is more important than ever because it is increasingly clear that if humans don’t start getting that balance right we’re going to lose both our roses and our sheep.

Twenty-six years ago, I worked on the Ethiopian Famine Relief project with David Macdonald. Canadians made a superlative effort donating more than 50 million dollars in food and medical relief. We sent so much wheat with Canada stamped on the bags that ‘Canada’ became the name for wheat in parts of Ethiopia. Twenty-six years ago the population of Ethiopia was about 45 million, it’s now over 90 million and there’s another famine underway in the same region. Is there not something out of balance here?

Canada started out as an agricultural country of small towns and small farms and we Canadians have always had a lively understanding of the importance of sharing, but we are no longer rural. We’re the most urbanized nation on the planet and I’m beginning to wonder if we’re also losing the sense of what that right balance between sharing and protecting wealth should be.

One percent of Americans now have more wealth than 90 per cent and we’re quickly following the American model, having accepted the thought that the rich deserve to be taxed less than the poor because they create jobs. The reality is a favoured tax position for the American rich hasn’t created more jobs, it’s just made the rich, richer, but that shouldn’t be the point. The point should be the same as the one the Little Prince was trying to find an answer for – ‘what is fair?’

It wasn’t an easy question for the Prince to answer and it isn’t for us today. As I write this, I’m staying in a little French village of about 3,000 people. It has a large community centre, a library, two schools where children start at three years old, (yes, that’s right, three), a seniors home, a market, stores, cafes, national medical and dental care, cheap buses to a nearby town and the beach – all that civilized life requires. It has these because France never abandoned its village and country life. A village with one classroom can receive a national teacher.

Canada has gone down a different route. We have closed down dozens of schools with hundreds of students just in my hometown because they are considered too small. Sixty per cent of Canadians live in just seven city metropolises. This is regarded as efficient and we’re growing those seven metropolises faster than any other part of the country. Our national medical system is under so much pressure, people wonder if it can survive. There’s zero talk of dental care or fast inter-city rail service. This is also regarded as unaffordable.

I’ve frequently heard British, American and Australian politicians make disparaging remarks about France’s economic policies. The complaint is the French spend too much money on public services. The unions are too strong etc. Better to invest your money in nations that put profits first and so on. But what is the point of these profits and efficiencies if your country is running out of pleasant places to live?

France is full of wealthy expatriate Brits, Americans and Canadians who don’t chose to live in their country of origin any longer. When I ask why they respond, ‘we like the life here’, as if ‘life here’ occurred by some magic mixture of wine and the village square. Life in France is better because the French haven’t forgotten the story of Le Petit Prince. They’re willing to share more and invest more in their community and national life. It’s a choice, not an accident.

Saint Quentin-La-Poterie, France

It is difficult to know which I dislike the most the manipulative, political right or the gutless, political left.  The right’s reaction to the global collision of cultures has been to return to the call of the tribe.  In the name of protecting the tribe, Homeland Security was born and even more jails for a nation that already has more people behind bars than any other; and an increasingly xenophobic, violent, public discourse, much of which the Oslo murderer appropriated to justify shooting defenceless children.

The left’s reaction has been to cut and run.  It refuses to defend even the most fundamental of its values such as the equality of men and women or the separation of church and state. It is assumed that the majority of the electorate understand these values and so will the majority of immigrants.  Well, they don’t.  Most of the electorate don’t understand what left politicians stand for except they are against the right.

For democracy to work, the electorate, (you and me) have to have some idea of what the issues are and how their politicians stand on them. People have neither today.  They have neither because neither the right or the left will acknowledge even the most commonly held beliefs and you can’t have a political position on something you won’t admit exists. A simple one that I see every day is that people are different.  We all walk, talk, think and worry about much the same things, but cultures are different.  It is this refusal to admit that cultures are different which is the basis of the right simplistic response to global conflict, ‘keep-em out and put-em in jail’ and the left’s mealy mouthed, ‘everything is going to be okay, but everyone has to be nice’.

Well, guess what, everything’s not going to be okay.  There are dead children all  over an island in Norway that will testify to this.  So what do we do?  We start by telling people the truth. The first is that every country and every  culture is not the same.  There are enormous differences. Turkey outlawed the veil in the 1920s, uses the Roman not the Arabic alphabet, and is the cradle of western civilization.  It’s also a devout Muslim country that has more mosques per square kilometer than any Arab nation.  Trying to slot all Muslims into the Saudi, fundamentalist model is sick, and this is what the right’s violent, protective discourse ultimately does.  Can I be clearer?

On the other hand, refusing to inform those that emigrate to any western democracy that the equality of men and women is non-negotiable or veils will be acceptable borders on the criminal.  Another non-negotiable principle is the separation of state and church. It is cast in the blood of centuries of religious war and should not be questioned. Fair, progressive taxation is another pillar of western democracy. Without it a descent into feudalism is inevitable.   Why can’t the left simply stand up and defend these fundamental pillars of their own society – and which they helped to create?

We need children to have confidence in the future, but it’s clear until adults start behaving like adults, it’s not going to happen.  The paranoid violence of the right must be abjured by the right and the left must stand up for the rights, freedoms and traditions of the people they aspire to represent.

There are two Tours de France. The one that takes place in France for French audiences and the one that happens on the sports networks for fans and the worldwide audience. I’ve been a cyclist ever since I can remember and a keen fan of the Tour from outside France.

Who can forget the great Greg LeMond-Laurent Fignon duel? I watched it like millions of others with amazement as LeMond went into the last stage of the Tour almost a minute behind Fignon.

2011 Course - click to display in new window

Fignon was all but crowned as the winner as of the last day. The race should have been over, but Lemond refused to quit. He strapped an aerobar on his handlebars. At that time, those aerodynamic extensions were not yet in wide use and it wasn’t even sure that they were legal. LeMond treated the last stage, not as comfortable stroll, but as a time trial against the clock and began the unthinkable slowly but steadily reeling in Fignon’s lead. When Fignon realized what was happening, he slammed into high gear also, but too late. He wasn’t prepared psychologically or physically, and the American LeMond beat him by 8 seconds!

Wow! What a race! The battles of the Pyrenees, the Alps, the long, hot, fast flat stages, several thousand kilometers and to win by eight seconds. What drama.

A summer time drama is, of course, what the tour is about each year. The terrible crashes, the dramatic head to head sprints, the courageous breakaway by lesser upcoming stars and give it all end of the line racers. Who will forget the many serious crashes this year? One racer smashed into by a media car and the great Kazakhstan rider Vinkourov breaking his femur on his last Tour.

This is what the fans outside of France see but the ones inside France see a very different race. For the French, the Tour starts with a show called, ‘Village Depart’, (the Start Village) the village where each race begins. It’s live from the village’s main square. There’s a cooking competition between two amateur cooks preparing a regional speciality. Sometimes, there’s a children’s bike race. There’s always several, popular singers. The village is profiled for its literary and artistic history, part of which, of course, includes local wines.

A few days ago at the village of Limoux, there was a feature on its famous product, the ‘Blanquette de Limoux’ sparkling wine that monks learned how to make 200 years before the Champagneof northern France. In Limoux, champagne is a new kid on the block. Blanquette is older and better.

Inside France, the Tour is less a bike race than a summertime promenade from village to town to village again. Except for the mountain stages which are regarded as sacred, the race itself is interrupted with tours of monasteries and chateaux of note that the Tour passes by. The race itself goes through UNESCO World Heritage sites like Carcassonne, not around them, all the while the long history of the city getting full play. There’s even a ‘Geology of the Tour’ segment which gives a brief, professional explanation of how the landscape came to be mountainous or flat or crumpled into valleys.

Finally, of course, the Tour finishes with ‘Après Tour’ which gives interviews with the the winners but also a bookend segment on the finish line village or Alpine landscape. In between there is some racing with the knowledgeable Laurent Jalabert giving excellent commentary. This year, there was a Frenchman Thomas Voeckler leading the Tour and more interest in the race itself than when Lance Armstrong was shepherding the Tour around France.

What I now understand is that the Tour will go on for as long as France is France because drug scandals and terrible accidents notwithstanding – the Tour is first and foremost about it being summertime in France. ‘Where will I go for my holidays?’ ‘What should I do?’ ‘What should I eat and drink?’ The race is well – just a race. As the headline in ‘L’Equipe’ said years ago and which I didn’t fully understand at the time. “QUE L’ETE COMMENCE!” “Let the Summer Begin!”

Dante Alighieri, author of the ‘Inferno’ is buried in Ravenna. Unlike his book, it is a beautiful and extremely peaceful place. It’s on a quiet back street, to the right there is a small park and trees. The tomb itself is impressive, but he needs little physical memorial. His life and work have become part of civilization’s ground floor. The importance of not ‘yielding to evil’ is part of his coinage and often crosses my mind. Dante had good reason to be preoccupied with this thought or he lived in difficult, violent times.

Dante's Tomb

If there is one thing the last five thousand years have taught us it is this, it is not gold mines, it is cities which are humanity’s greatest generators of wealth and where there is wealth, there will be a battle over who will control it.

In Renaissance Italy, princes, the church and the local elected assemblies waged constant war for control of all cities – especially the ones in the north, Florence, Siena, Bologna, Verona. Get on the wrong side of one of the ascendant, princes, bishops or assemblies and you could end up in someone’s torture chamber as Niccole Machiavelli found out. Dante’s Inferno was never far away.

It is the immense wealth of modern cities which now powers the nation state. Who controls the nation controls the cities and who controls the cities controls their taxes and disposition. Canada is no different. More than eighty per cent of the nation’s taxes come from cities, 50% of those billions go to federal government, 42% go to provincial governments and the cities themselves limp by on the remaining 8%.

I suspect if it were possible to do a similar analysis in Dante’s day, we would find that the division of wealth between the princes, the church and city hall would have been about the same. This is why the Medici’s and the Pope could build immense palaces and commission stunning works of art that amaze us to this day. It is why the federal government can afford to spend more on a single fighter jet than the largest cities do on their entire public transit system.

Dante's Tomb

I sat in the quiet church contemplating these things. Thinking how complex life has become since Dante’s day but how the questions he posed and dilemmas he faced have not changed much. Dante struggled with a civic version of Job’s burden. ‘What do you do when the world is not just?

Who has not faced, in his or her own way, the despair contemplation of this question brings? For it is clear that the world is not just, the daily newspapers are filled with stories from Dante’s various levels of hell. But if I’ve learned anything from 14 years in civic politics it’s that injustice in far away places is much easier to deal with than the stuff that happens in your own city and your own neighbourhood. You don’t need a front page to be aware of local injustice.

Justice is a human concept that comes straight out of city and civic life. Civic justice is all about ‘how we live’. There is nothing abstract about this at all. As soon as people began to live in cities, they began to create codes and laws for living together. We don’t know how successful the first Mesopotamian codes were, we only know that they existed and they were complex covering many of things the modern law does today, obligations to the State, the purchase of goods and services, marriage and divorce etc. Not just the codes, but letters describing legal actions have been preserved on baked clay.

But the first time we can get some idea of the over-all success and failure of the ‘law’ is with the Greeks and especially the Romans. Roman law and concepts of justice are still with us to this day. The rule of law today was for Cicero’s as it is today, for without the law there can be no fairness. Without fairness, government becomes the rule of more powerful over the less, which ultimately sinks to Libyan tyranny.

Mosaics in Ravena

In the church an organist happily interrupts my thoughts with great powerful surges of music which rise towards the roof above. A church or a mosque roof is as near as to closing off the sky, yet keeping the sense of wonder the sky gives that men have devised where an organ becomes the sound of the solar wind. My thoughts disperse for a while, but when the music stops they return to where they started.

In life’s essentials are things that different today than in Dante’s day? One percent of the American population now has more wealth than the other 90 per cent. This division of wealth is close to what existed in the pre-industrial age, in Dante’s age. The Libyan people want freedom, not tyranny as the citizens of Florence, Bologna and so on did. You could work your way around the world finding easy comparisons.

One of Dante’s response to injustice was to coin the phrase ‘yield not to evil’ and another was to create a complex hierarchy for hell. Socrates was to take the hemlock, but all these old stories are abstract to me. They are just stories. What isn’t abstract is what is happening in my own city – right now. I look upon the abrogation of Ottawa’s largest, oldest and most important public space, Lansdowne Park to the private sector for a commercial development as a fundamentally evil act, because it will damage the city economically, socially, environmentally for generations to come. The city doesn’t need another shopping centre. It needs a central park. I take it very personally. How could I not? It’s in the neighbourhood, I represented for 14 years.

Nor is it in my nature to ‘yield to evil’. But does there not come a point when refusing to cede becomes arrogance? I fought for the preservation of Lansdowne as a public space for many years as an elected official and the matter is now before the courts. I do not know what that resolution may be. Naturally, I hope it is in the favour of preserving the park, but what if it isn’t? What if giving 40 acres of land on the banks of a UNESCO World Heritage site to developers for more big box and housing wins before the judge? I presume there will a new level of hell devised for this, but that doesn’t help me in the here and now.

What I would like to ask Dante when he is sending me to my own level of hell is ‘does there not come a point when being right is not enough?’ Does there not come a point when the prayer of St. Francis takes precedence: To change what you can, to accept what you can’t and to have the wisdom to know the difference?

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Dear Felix,

I am in Italy right now and do I have a surprise for you! I met Thomas the Tank Engine. He was steaming down a country line in Italy, not far from the village where we are staying. He’s found a little country line that goes from to Fabriano to CastelRaimondo and a new friend, Bernardo. Bernardo is a hardworking country train who takes mothers and their children, students and businessmen to from CastelRaimondo all day long.

Everybody likes Bernardo and I am sending a couple of pictures of him for you. Sometimes Thomas takes a run for Bernardo to give him a rest and Bernardo goes over to the big station on the main line to see some of his friends there.

Bernardo is teaching Thomas to speak Italian and Thomas can already order coffee for his tank just by saying ‘café latte por favour’ and presto-presto a wonderful coffee arrives. Thomas says he really liked the island of Sodor but he find life without Mr. Topham-Hat telling him what to do just a little more peaceful.

Love Grandpa

Saw Romeo and Juliet at the Budapest Opera House last night. The ballet was so rich and textured in emotion, so brilliant in composition and visual effect that no little girl should be allowed to see it as she will be condemned to a lifetime of envy.
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If you want to experience what it was like to attend a performance at one of the great Roman theatres; not one that is a pile of battered seating stones and the shell of the stage with no roof, but one with magnificent statues, marble facing, mosaics, box seats, mechanical infrastructure, acoustics of wonder and shining embellishments of every description – go to the Budapest Opera House.
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Concert at St. Stephen’s basilica was so assured, so perfect in tone that the notes fell from the stage as naturally as a soft summer rain.

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La belle époque is alive and well in Budapest’s bathing establishments. It isn’t hard to see there why the Roman way of life appealed to so many for so long.