betwixteurope

The walking out of Strasbourg dismantles the theories of “tiny” spatial differences somewhat, but only because I can’t knock on doors and check out the Biedermanns in their many forms in the massive mansion blocks. But, things change again long before I’ve left the old town canals. There’s the “plage” boat cafe disco things that complement the canal cruises I’ve stayed well clear of.

The University, loving it’s students, proclaims a large poster. Big wide Haussmann streets, shops not so frequent, shiny cars; then the Council of Europe and all those flags, quiet today, Saturday. Warm too. I zig through the Orangerie, pass the roller skaters and couples and boaters, and a lakeside cafe with a battalion of purple pool tables, as though in wait of the artist now known as Prince again

The other side of the park; suburbia, a turn and I am on the canal – well the Rhine, actually. Houseboats, swans, powerboats, and the inkling of heavy industry. A few wrong turnings and I’m peeing under a bridge at a dead end, a hidden spot, with a large Che graffiti and half a dozen beer cans.

Scramble back, and the industry starts riverside. Large wide low barges. A tow path for bikers. But first a long stretch of Berlin-style Checkpoint Charley wasteland – it is the route – that I walk in the sun alone. The Spy Who Came in from the Hot.

To my left a park with huge warnings about toxic waste and nuclear power, so maybe not. Then the walk. Five hours, straight. By the river, jealous of the power boats; even the container barges. The cyclists pass in singles, pairs and groups. I smile at each. But five hours later I am very tired, and Lichtenau, my destination, seems hours away yet. At one of those border restaurants (with added tourist office) I slump to be entertained by a waiter who speaks about a hundred languages. The tourist office says that Lichtenau is out of her jurisdiction, and books me into Ziegelhof – still Germany. Only two hours walk, she says – though she phones to warn the hotel I’ll be, er, late.

Across the river; an autobahn, and a pit stop at a petrol station for ice-tea and chocolate reserves for later. Lost path, lost river. IPAD says go sort of 45 degrees. I ask: down there, past the lake and then the side of the village. Easy after that.

Long shadows now, and a punishing day already. I walk past a cement factory, and then the lake. The cars above are crashing past at German speeds. Into a small forest. A picnic, 20 people.

It isn’t a picnic. It is three of four sets of Roma families, cooking rough. Out in the wild. They don’t look at me, don’t acknowledge. It is like a scene from a war; a scene of exile. I wonder if they have come over from France because of the French government laws. I feel terrible.

I take the village cut though. Past the factory with the long low wire fences. At about 6.30 as the sun is beginning to set and the shadows grow ever longer I turn to see two alsatian dogs, one black, one white, running at me from 200 metres. I genuinely think I am going to die. In a somewhat pathetic manner I cower.

They don’t jump. Just go insane about four feet from me.

I turn around and walk through the village, and then another; fields playing Van Gogh tricks; Kiefer tricks. Rain. Lost. IPAD not helpful. Great sunset, another village, but not Ziebelhof. Nobody’s heard of it.

A village, deserted, dead. And at its centre, The Pussy Cat Strip Club. Last used 450 millennia ago, it seems. Out of the mists along a track a 15 year old girl on roller skates. Ziebelhof, I say. Never heard of it. I’ll go look.

She zooms off, a vision of wonder. Twenty heavy minutes later she returns. I’ve found it, keep going, not so far, stay to the road.

And with a sweet smile she is gone. The Gods have smiled on me for liking roller skaters, ever since early Switzerland. The visions have been wonderful today; the industry lurking just outside Strasbourg, Basel-esquely. The long stretches of river, very like, only far longer, that stretch of the Thames at Richmond which Turner and Wordsworth loved. I wonder if Tom, who knew that part of the Thames what with one John Dee or King or Queen or Prince – or another, thought the same thing. There’s no doubting that we talked, Tom and I, for a minute during that part of the walk.

Dark now and Ziebelhof, five miles (now the signs tell me) from Lichtenau, where Tom stayed. The town is actually a motel, and two houses. Inside the motel there’s a bunch of domestic bikers having dinner. Dieter, the owner, is an ex East German policeman, 28 years. “And then I had to start working,” he says. He loves my IPAD; shows me his IPhone apps – the favourite? An app for streaming country music.

German country music from the 1970s.

What about the Pussy Cat Club? I ask Dieter. Ach, closed forever.
“Open, in fact,” says a man who lives two weeks a month here, doing something with the electricity. “Even the coffee starts at 8 Euros.”

I turn on the television and doze over wifi. Then some channel launches Help, by The Beatles. In German. I burst uncontrollably into tears. Then, in the post-modern way, post this fact on Facebook.

In the morning Dieter tells me about the “community”. But that really is for tomorrow’s walk; and my first real full day with German signage. Or indeed, its absence.

There’s a courtyard view from my hotel room; not looking towards the cathedral but away to another space I’ve not been. Leaving by the front entrance is a confrontational experience, fighting the many who sit in the cafes and restaurants, those fleeing the cathedral, the lost, the hawkers with head-umbrellas: they cluster. And eat cheese. Buy hats.

But here from my window is an almost empty courtyard below. In fact, as I GPS, it’s in between the cathedral square and the street I’ve temporarily named rue de Aldolfo Domingez, as his fashion is sold there, Hermes is just up that street. It is in fact the Rue de Veil L’hopital.

I wind to the courtyard, and find a brasserie. The customers are different, local, tied up with reading the local paper, or a book, gossiping about something. We are twenty metres from the storming of the Cathedral and we could be in another country. It is a Friday; school’s out by lunchtime and there are lots of kids smooching canal side, hanging outside the school gates. But here is contentment, of the local kind.

It is a very different mood in term time; I assume this only increases when the undergraduates, Erasmuses (more on them later), and politicians return for duty. At each turn away the alleys and streets and boulevards – but mostly the alleys – bring a new and more variegated community. The longer I travel the easier, perhaps, to sense difference. We are certainly, if temporarily, back in France. Though Strasbourg is “particularly” French, in the same way that Rennes and Cassis are particular. There is a sense of hermetic openness. Roman once, of course. Alsace now, more than most.

It seems, thus, ironic, that next week the Strasbourg parliament will debate, with vigour, the position of the French government in relation to its “Roma”. The newspapers here – and all over the world – are full of the story. The sniff of exile, of the Rhine trail, of Guttenberg, who worked here, is all about. What is absent is the sense of the political; the people who make Human Rights Law. Who fight governments over Roma deportations. “They all live in the big apartments around the Orangerie,” Jim – or Jules – said last night. “You don’t see them.” And it is true that the old part of town, which can seem many things, never feels like Brussels sur mer; or Westminster. Because it is Friday, perhaps, the shops and every cafe and bar hum from midday, at the centre, at the periphery, along the canals and tucked away in courtyards. Hum with locality. Not tourism.

There is a lot of middle aged snogging – tongues and all. This seems quite strange to an Englander. Especially at my hideaway local brasserie where a couple not so much younger than me, let’s say maximum ten years, are nipple-tweaking and tongue-wrestling over a couple of espressos. This doesn’t happen in the Columbus Circle Starbucks. My protestant puritanism, had I got any, would be shaken.

Later I ask the actresses about this. Binoche 1 says: “If you have it, you flaunt it, it’s common here.” What I’m – distantly – getting closer to is a sense of the smallness that cities once possessed, not exactly the smallness of Tom’s Strasbourg, but the idea of the feet – metres – that change the social construction of “place”. Interesting as I think back to those amazing north Italian towns, the Cremonas and Mantuas of the first trip, that I didn’t think in this way: I thought about towns as entities, with commonalities. Now I begin to think about multiple entities with overlapping communities. This may be wrong; but no wronger, I suspect than the the lazy Baslers are different from Zurich people discussions of a few nights ago. I eat well for lunch, cordon bleu veal: tomorrow and the next day are country walking towards Baden Baden, and I don’t know what to expect. France to Germany too…

At the roof top cafe of the modern art gallery I am feeling a little underwhelmed, though the nineteenth century landscapes I’ve seen, betwixt a bunch of sculptural installations that revealed not much, make sense. In fact I’ve found my entire art aesthetic, other than Barney, growing old and non-Italianate, northern in fact. There is plenty of torture and pain in the cathedral museum. It does increasingly make sense.

The wide shopping boulevards, pedestrian normally, do have a transcendent blandness, but where do they not? It is the average cafes and bars you judge, by attempting a kind of process that absents first rich tourists, then other tourists, bikers-by, then…well, whoever else doesn’t seem appropriate. I’m trying a kind of unrecognizing. I think about Jim last night, his returning to the scenes of a broken love affair, trying to ignite a new one. As though, what? As though it is geography that creates the right environment. I think too of Barney’s show, the “lines of restraint” he feels are embeddied and embodied in us all.

I met a black kid last night somewhere between Il Cherche Tourjours and Jules et Jim’s Most Horrible Date. He had the most fantastic English accent, somewhere between a BBC newscaster and, say, the mottled mockney of Tony Balir. He looks like a young Hendrix and rides a mountain bike. He’s started speaking because he heard me, and he “loves speaking English.”

Where did you live in England? I ask, expecting a narrative of embassies and fee-paying schools and bitter nights on the training field. Instead: “I was just talking to English people, online, voice-chat, when I was gaming. Such a cool accent. No, not World of Warcraft, but Counterstrike.” He’s a musician too, but “it’s really hard to be a professional musician these days.” Later it becomes clear he’s studying at the most prestigious place – well I think it was Environmental science and how to save the world, or something similar. He looks like he might.

It’s mid afternoon, I’ve trekked my culture, and realised that the first leg, three years ago, in which I covered everything each city or town had created, was a Tom Trip in my pursuit of the constructed, which took me over kilometres of urban spaces but often left me exhausted for the “walks” and so these were often “augmented” by – no cars – transport, was a very different affair. Now I’ve walked as much as Tom, for two weeks, and he, despite his five week break in Venice (come on, he must have been a spy), was really pounding it out and doing his churchgoing – and in the intellectual centres, having the conversations. We’ve lost a little of curiosity stamina, I think.

This morning my hotel front-desk Penelope has written me an Odyssean list of cafes and bars that locals use. BTW only in France could the monthly glossy travel magazine be named Odysse. So I’ve checked out a coffee shop, and the old Irish bar, but it was blazer-heavy even if only metaphorically. I’m double-expresso-ing at the Bar Exile, on Rue de L’Air and I’m thinking, not nodal like the behemoths of Petty France, or the Cafe Broglie; the machines of the Cathedral square. Yet it is local.

Later still, but early enough, Jeannette et les Cycleux. I almost missed it. This is a cafe right opposite Le Cloche au Fromage where we’ve eaten cheese in spectacular lunches, I mean spectacular. This is a city of cycles and limos, I write. Because fifteen feet from Le Cloche, Jeanette’s is another canton – with everything that this means. Unless you miss it, and its meaning. Which is easy to do. Here pearls and neck-tatts, crown-jewel fingers and harem pants all sit happily. I am beginning to see in other ways, perhaps.

I’m talking to one of chefs, who has just finished for the day. She’s telling me about the local products she’s sourced for the charcuterie, and about the Alsace bio-tech valley, from here to Basel is like a biological Silicon valley. She’s helping to shape ideas about Alsace in relation to France, and German; suggesting the traditions and the laws are different from both. Her boyfriend, who will appear soon, is metis, mixed raced. A man, a DJ, from the Caribbean, French father, Caribbean mother. He wants to talk string and big bang and a new unifying theory called “E8” – I still haven’t looked it up. “The spirit is different when it is white fathers, black mothers; rather than the other way around…” Mahta says, the tiny differences that mean a lot.

In Germany it will be easier to meet people Mahta says, “image is not so important.” She’s stopped going skiing – it is far too dangerous, I’d rather walk the mountains. And Florian just didn’t get the snow ski climb thing.

I’ve learnt in Chur that, of course the English invented all that alpine adventure stuff in the nineteenth century, but that’s another story. Although one that tells an interesting story about us – English – and our confused relationship to the Alps; to Germany too. Not so long ago it was a favoured tourist destination.

Mahta’s father, a Swiss, loves the ritual of the ski.

Rosalind sits down and asks about media jobs in London. I am trying to work out why. In fact her story is the story of travel and love. She was in New York a while back, on her own. There was a boy in a (famous) book shop, the (ah ha) section. She saw; two days later they kissed; two more no need for the Harry/Sally Thesis…and then she must come home, on Thursday. That day Eyjafjallajökull went up in Iceland. Thus: two more weeks in Brooklyn….Now they are moving to London…

Rosalind tells the story of the cafe’s name. In Alsace in the 1960s when boys didn’t have cars, they had motorbikes, then as now, there was always The Girl. To try and impress her they would buff and customise their machines, so that in the coffee bar, the cafe, The Girl would notice. They would be The One. Except for one thing: The Girl is in love with Elvis Presley, and wants to move to America. (There was, I feel, a similar mythos around Julie Christie’s character in Billy Liar. And didn’t she end up on the train to London…)

Thus, the iconography of the rooms inside, bikes half embedded in the walls, photo images of French girls in cowboy shirts. It’s very fine. “And that,” I ask Rosalind, “is the story of Alsace girls in the 1960s?”

“No, that’s the story of France now.”

Mahta asks me to remember that the Swiss are famous for mercenary armies; the Swiss guard at the Vatican…but I can’t now remember why. Also the toleration that allowed for Dominicans, and Jews to settle. (I note that I must check my history here; though later walking through the newer town closer to the EU buildings on a Friday night, I see a lot of Jewish families on their way to a sabbath service, or a Shabbas dinner).

Mahta and Florian are laid-back; bereft of the anxiety that can surround some here, those that critique the il cherche tourjours mentality. Those that get over-Proustian and weepy in old bars. There’s a conversation going on behind me in English, though none of participants are English, it ranges over albums, tracks, computer games, festivals, arenas, DVDs.

When I was a teenager, travelling europe, the lingua-franca was the cod conversation about liking Pink Floyd; twenty five years later in Eastern Europe this had evolved to Radiohead. I wondered if I was in the midst of one of this meme’s new pan-European moments. But when their dates, The Binoches, arrive I suspect I’ve stumbled onto a Jean Luc Godard casting, circa 1962. The roll-up cigarettes, the leather, the conversations about Moliere, Marivaux; learning about the word beuark. The hard years in the conservatoire, making it or not as an actress; the curiously interlinked world of the three French film production companies that get grants from the French government. Beart’s botox – she now looks like a duck (there are other allegations, but the English laws of libel, even online)…. The Cigogne, the Bird of Alsace, “if you don’t see one flying just go to the tourist shops and ask to see a plate. The drink of the evening: rose pamplemousse. A local speciality.

A Strasbourg girl with a perfect English accent, who’s dating the bass player of a local band – more Hives than Strokes, very Arktik Munkee – that just toured the Baltics, and also did a gig in the Hawley Arms in London, maybe. but certainly after a Chinese punk act that all wore dresses, starts talking to me about translation. She looks like a young Wuthering Heights Kate Bush. “But I don’t av the ears,” she says.I mean perfect Nrf lundon. Where were you born?

Here.

The accent is amazing.

I met an old Etonian on my Erasmus year in Berlin. His family had the whole thing, the “cottage” next to the main house, the chapel, the Porsche in the drive but no money, the strict no-tears rule when the dog died. They hated me, obviously. ‘He’ asked to delete me from his Facebook friends recently, because “he didn’t like reading French in his news feed.” The Binoches are rehearsing for a play, Sunday. Fables, Marivaux…will be fun. Binoche 1 played a punk on TV; Binoche 2 has done a film and dates a harpist, Binoche 3 is going to Brussels to study Arts Administration.

And then the casting is over. The lights are killed. The cathedral is still there. And in about six hours I have to walk into Germany, to Lichtenau – which is currently foxing the GMApp on the IPAD.

I’ll get there. I’m just not sure how to edit tonight’s movie to make it look like Band a Part.

For my research work at UCL I’ve been reading this year a lot of late sixteenth and early seventeenth century religious texts, protestant and catholic. This is post-reformation media, as it were. It looks to justify, frighten, unify, inspire, confirm or explain. Much is highly intellectual; some is pure propaganda.

And there are the illustrations. In very general terms, for this is a blog entry written on the caffeine-heavy hoof, not a footnoted research paper, the florid religious art of the Italian part of Tom’s trip is not what we’re talking about; this art speaks to the harsher, increasingly realistic imagery – of pain, death, martyrdom, evisceration. Revenge and punishment.

Divine.

Suddenly this kind of art is everywhere; in Basel it’s part of the cultural landscape. I have dropped myself into the dark recesses of the “northern” imagination. This afternoon I will see one of the more remarkable (visceral) art installations of my life. By a contemporary artist whose work I know, who, through a brilliant collaboration with a New York based curator, has produced a show that illuminates not only his work, but also these bloody post- and pre- Reformation images. It is the imaginative landscape that can give us Lear or Bosch. And even today, in an era of SAW 9, or whatever, both the new and old art seem truly shocking.

But first the cathedral. First-first the frustuck, in a cavern with a better brand of suit than I’ve seen to date, and thus a tiny more froideur in the “good mornings”. I wander the stairs of the Rathaus, then cross the Rhine to coffee on the far bank in order to get a little perspective in the landscapes of Basel. Where the spires sit with the map, the GMAP app, the basic old town. There’s a steep, narrow road, first turn on the left, back on my bank, close to the market square and the Rathaus. It climbs: and each building is taking me back towards Tom, the dates are early, some of these buildings were already well established when Tom came through. This is a Rhine-side ascent towards a famous cathedral where it’s not impossible to say some of the fault-lines of Western Europe collide. One building is now a bookshop, or publishers, with less is more editions of proper big intellectual books, those of Jean Bodin, Cervantes, Kafka…The next building is a very posh dildo store, with elegant glass models, or carved wooden with Dutch-cheese holes.

The Basel Munster started catholic, but was at the very centre of the protestant movements that follow Luther, Zwingli and the reformers who believed the catholic church had come a long and the wrong way from the church of Christ. They went back to The Word – and the images in the churches suffered. But there were other images, those of the pain, often almost sadomasochistic, inherent in belief. it’s just a more cruel world. I stress this is not the academic take, just that of a visitor: I sit for a long time in the Munster, not really doing anything but trying to unlearn. I don’t and can’t share Tom’s passion for tombstones, so instead I savour the sense of quiet. I know that in Strasbourg, another famous cathedral city, the cathedral mood is a cross between The Ministry of Sound Nightclub, and – at night – a Queen concert. So, here, before the crowds arrive, I’m happy to just sit. Outside in the square the boys are beginning to dismantle the seating and the screen used for outdoor showing of movies, sponsored by Orange phones. One guy in black t-shirt has the word “Help” in that famous Orange type. It is the end of summer; school has started, college soon enough. The tourists change, thin down. Perhaps that’s why there is some peace; it is still very early. The dildo shop isn’t even open.

Around the nave a great series of glass-cased manuscripts and even better explication. Tom could have done with history written this well. I learn, for instance, about the initiation rituals of the new university students in the late 1590s: they were forced to dress as wild animals. The academic regimes were tough. This is a very different world from ours, entitlement was worlds away. But death seemed vey close. Erasmus was here; is buried here. I read a little of his In Praise of Folly sitting watching the gentle movements of the morning. It’s more interesting than the BBC news app.

The suffering, that’s the hardest thing to begin to conceptualise. the plague-fears, the intellectual bravery. What people actually did to help create what we might call Europe’s Promise. A promise that lost its way, but whose ideas fissured, and went global, and still do, despite the Twentieth Century it still means something, there are inspirations buried, here – and not here.

Tomorrow in the history museum I’ll see the Basel “Dance of Death”. It tells a compelling imaginative story – of our temporal being. Sometimes, often, when I’m riffing on how I am a European, I’ll define this state through a relationship or series to culture, or a rough understanding of the histories, the Risk Game of it all, the alliances and the battles. The juxtapositions: Milan or Zurich; Paris or Strasbourg; Barcelona or London. But there’s a geographic thing that comes with the walking, a sense of lost things, lost connections. A sense of difference, that in Strasbourg revealed itself as really just another way of looking at things – more closely, I guess. More slowly.

These dark religious images are the counter-culture to the formal portraits, the Holbeins and the Durers. Seen in museums they are very powerful, but of course they were not created for museums – so first I must take the Kunsthaus out of their meaning. And locate them where…?

The number 11 tram stops in the Market square. Soon I am past the barnhof and off out past a mini “Canary Wharf” of modernity. The gallery I am visiting, the Schaulager, is the stop. I wonder how far I will go? As far as the Gehry Vitra museum…?

The tram stops. 100 feet away a gorgeous white rectangle. Something is very cool here.

I wikipedia from the IPAD:

The Schaulager in Münchenstein/Basel

The Schaulager is a museum in Newmünchenstein, a sub-district of Münchenstein in the canton of Basel-Country, Switzerland.

Built in 2002/2003 under commission of the Laurenz Foundation, is was designed by the renowned architectural office of Herzog & de Meuron, the Schaulager was opened in 2003. The Schaulager was conceived as an open warehouse that provides the optimal spatial and climatic conditions for the preservation of works of art.

The institution functions as a mix between public museum, art storage facility and art research institute. It is primarily directed at a specialist audience but is also open to the general public for special events and the annual exhibitions.

—

This is amazing. The Schlaulager opens at midday; my Swiss tram was, of course, on time. There is 30 minutes to wait. There is no problem, the artist who has inhabited the space has two video installations playing outside. Surreal narrative based video pieces, in one a young girl first seems to be burying something, then she takes a tram to somewhere. Then we realise she is coming here…we see her enter the Schlaugen, and then begin to climb. She is (as in reality) an amazing climber. She navigates the walls of this Herzog & de Meuron space. And then she falls….falls into some primordial goo, falls, as it were, off the page, and out of the canvas.

In the other video a man – The “Artist”, somebody – is arranging the installation of the “piece”. By the time we’ve watched both videos there is a small crown, French, elderly, Swiss Capellio-glasses Men.

And then the show. After ten minutes I have to stop, go back to the bookshop and buy “Matthew Barney – Prayer Sheet with the Wound and the Nail.” I read it cover to cover. And then I start again.

In his great essay, the curator Neville Wakefield, explains how he worked with Barney to create the show, a juxtaposition of Barney’s “Drawing Restraint” series, with some of the mini-masterpieces of post-Reformation Christian iconography. Corneiius Cort, Crispjin de Passe, Jan Luyken…Durer’s Ecce Homo.

Two floors, a ground and a crypt-like basement. Video, drawings, stuff: Barney’s complex, allusive work is beyond blogging. Certainly my own. But his work succeeds, for me, that day, in taking the Kunsthaus out of these old classics. In demonstrating the restraints, and the physical sufferings, of ritualised, what, behaviour? The whole show – and a truly amazing two hour film set on board a Japanese Whale hunting ship at whose conclusion Barney and his wife, Bjork, eat each other…yes, I know, on paper it sounds gruesome. IT is, and the elderly French walk out of the cinema with a “bouffe” of displeasure. But it does make sense.

Just go see. Mortgage the dog. It is an amazing show.

Barney/Wakefield’s vision changes the way I see Basel. The next day the history museum and the classical section – no Warhol for me – of the Kunsthaus make total sense. Art as a very close encounter with death; art as the eternal opposite to the Warhol-thesis of fame for 15 MegaBytes. Art viscerally unabstracted, and yet somehow universalising.

During the summer the courtyard of the Kunsthaus in Basel is turned into a cafe cum live radio station. At night, moody lights and that rap-jazz-funk thing that screams Euro-Sophistry. I talk to a chemist from Dresden. He’s taking the midnight bus for Zurich, but he wanted to hang out for a bit. You know of the “Hexenhammer” of course?” Peter tells me about the last witch burnt in Europe, Anna Goldin. Wow.

In the Kunstmuseum there’s a great Hans Bock painting of the Baths at Leuk. It is dated 1597. Near enough to Tom’s time. It is sensuous in this northern way: all known vices included, but none of that intoxicating Italian colour. In other paintings Death Meets the Maiden. And the Christ in the Tomb, a Hans Holbein, the younger, masterpiece obsessed Dostoievski. It’s funny, all these dances with death are so utterly life affirming. a new way of seeing.

Tomorrow a gay Englishman’s book launch, explaining “The Swiss.”

Hmm.

If there are typos, it is because it is sunny outside the Cafe in Basel I’m posting from. And the IPAD screen is not perfect. Will sort out from Strasbourg.

We stay low in Baden, leave the youth hostel and wander around the grand, sometimes faded, hotels and baths. Last night we have heard that the business is failing, the hotels not doing so well. We wander in and out of places, they are reminiscent of some lost dream of European something. The only parallel I can give is that it feels like an episode in that French novel, Le Grand Meuaulnes. Something lost and present simultaneously. Hidden, fine dining rooms. Flower-strewn atriums. The baths. The “Inhalatorium”. Like a mid 90s nightclub designed by Damien Hirst. Steep paths and modern elevators. It is hard to say if this is a failing industry, or if baths always feel like this. Whatever Tom’s state of arousal when witnessing the Bath-Antics; and however C19th Zurich men treated Baden as Protestant Release Mechanism; it feels new age enema-healthy. A man tells Norbert that there’s been big new investments. Things are moving.

We move on.

Slowly.

For the other novel I could mention would be the magic mountain, Thomas Mann’s consumption hotel classic. My pan-European smoking experiences of the pervious night have rendered me Mann-esque. At an apothke close to the barnhof, hey, I buy Nicorette. And water at the station while we wait for Roli on the 11.20 from Zurich. He’s the third musketeer for today.

You know that those smoking gums are owned by the cigarette companies, don’t you, Norbert says. They like to make money at every stage of the consumption process.

Roli arrives at 11.20, just as the time-table said. At a book-launch in Basel a few days later I’ll hear that, amazingly, not all Swiss trains run on time. But the failure rate is ridiculously low.

It’s a short walk today, 12 kilometres or so to Brugg. Bridge. Tom called it Brucke. We set off and detour after about eight seconds when Roli sees a poster for an art show in Baden. PipiLotti Rist at the Museum Langmatt. Off we go.

Classically the museum holds a fantastic collection of impressionist art; the usual suspects and unusually, less well known, so. The rooms are preserved from a fin de siecle time and are suitably grand. Pipilotti has installed herself into these rooms with lights, videos, sounds. More than installed, she has immersed new technology with the old, it is like a small version of the Frick in New York being populated with arty YouTube. A woman suddenly screams across a dining table; bookcases become living things, lamps sing, a woman swims across a river that is cascading across a wall-full of Impressionist Gems.

The curator said it took four weeks of intensive build. And months and months of conceptualising as PipiLotti decided what pieces to make, and where they would fit in the domestic arrangements of the Museum Langmatt. It’s fantastic; brings a smile to us all and a touch of aesthetic rigour as well. Good work Pipilotti.

The sun is out when we leave.

We stick to the Limmat-side, until other rivers arrive and conspire to confuse us. We use male logic; it fails, of course. We see Keifer-style burnt landscapes, discuss turnips, bird hides. Roli’s art pieces, when he’s not teaching graphic design, emphasise the physical change if our environment. He talks about a oiece in Holland which used light and form to show us air “moving”.

At Thurgli most of the restaurants are closed, we sandwich and soft-drink with old guys and their dogs. Down the road Roli has pointed out a shop specialising in hair-straightener for black hair. There are Beyonce wigs too. Semiotically this is spectacularly unlikely. But there it is. There is not a black person anywhere to be seen.

There is also a palimpsest of new music posters (all these things are photographed and captured on my Facebook page, btw). First for 70s Prog Rockers, Barclay James Harvest. Playing soon.

We try to remember their Hit.

Did they have a hit?

Then, 40 Years After, Ten Years After. Alvin Lee, right?

We muse on these new digital tablets, as I email. Why glass? When will they be material, cloth? Why can’t we write onto them? Isn’t there a built in hand-writing function? Handwriting to text? Ten years ago when I was paid to think about things like this, by Mcirosoft, for a short while, the handwriting part was a given. Part of the holistic whole. Right now we’re not there. And I’ll write about my IPAD life in a few days. It does change the way you see the world. Saved my Bacon on the rocky road to Rhinefelden.

Rivers take us all over the place, soon they will go federal and become the Rhine. But not yet. Norbert’s having a bit of Day Two Syndrome, and we’re content to follow the cycle routes to Brugg. The boys will take the train back from there, and be in Zurich within 30 minutes. I book into the Youth hostel, again excellent, and old this time. Then I find a corner in the HAvanna cafe, close to the river and the southernmost tower. I finish writing up a day towards Zurich just as a House-remix of One Nation Under A Groove announces that this is Saturday night and while the kids of Brugg should be out, I should be asleep. It is an early start, I have 25K to walk. And a Roman remian and a monastery first.

Except it will be 50K tomorrow. But I not smoking, a slave to my new walking injury. Nicorette Jaw.