Holiday In The Algarve (2): That's A Lot of Entertainment for Fifty Euros

Okay. I locked my keys in the boot of my rental car. On the westbound side of the A22 at the Lagos service station. That was me. I was That Guy.

I am getting a smartphone next time round. This is because someone had one and looked up Budget's number with it. Thank you very much sir. I got a number for their operations people and after a call in simple English to them, I had call from someone at the local Budget office in Lagos. Fifteen minutes after that, a rental rep was with me and after looking at the car - which was securely locked and window-closed - decided it needed a replacement key. The spare keys for Budget's cars are held in their Lisbon office. Mine would be down the next morning. In the meantime they let me take another car and I kinda got on with my day. Did I mention that all the personal clutter I needed was in the boot? No. Okay. It was.

The next morning, I met them at the service station, bright and early about 09:45. The Budget rep had the key, slid it into the lock, turned, and .... nothing. After a few more tries and phone calls they found out that, actually, there was a problem with the tumbler: it was busted. Mmmm. Time to call the professionals. Twenty minutes later, the Man With the Motorway Service Van arrives. There's some discussion, much arranging of coat hangers, and then he produced two small inflatable air bags, an old glove and a screwrdriver.

Put the glove over the gap between the door and the roof at the corner, and slide the screwdriver down gently no more than a couple of millimeters. In the tiny gap thus created, insert the edge of the first air bag as far as it will go. Pump up the airbag. In the larger gap thus created, slide in the next airbag and pump that up. In the even larger gap thus created, shuffle more of the first air bag in and pump it up again. You will now have a surprisingly large gap between the door and the bodywork through which you can put those coat hangers and attempt to poke or pull something. Oh, and no dents or scratched paintwork.

You don't want to be trying to prod at buttons with a coat hanger. It's one of those fiddly, muscle-control things that makes an on-looker feel twitchy. Eventually the two of them managed to pull the door handle up and presto! We're in! Key in ignition...vrooom. Boot open and we're all on our way. It cost me fifty euros for cash - but then there was an ATM in the service station - and for my money that was a lot of entertainment for fifty euros.

What struck me was that the Budget rep knew the supervisor of the motorway service station, so there was no problem about leaving the car there overnight. He had been to school with the man who owned the company that came along to break in to the car. What's that like? To work somewhere you've been to schoool with the guy who does this and the gal who does that? I don't think I have ever met another graduate of Exeter University since I left, let alone anyone from my many schools and colleges.

Now for the endoresement. If you're going to Portugal, rent Budget. They were utterly helpful, didn't once look at me like I was some kind of idiot, and didn't mention extra charges for their service. And quick. They were quick.

Holiday In The Algarve (1)

The holiday was eight days in the Algarve, on the south-west tip of Portugal. BA scheduled flight from Gatwick to Faro, rental car (Budget) from Faro to Silves. Clothes, books, Bose headphones, laptop, camera and other junk packed into one piece of hand luggage and a small courier bag. I stayed outside Silves in a village called Santo Estevao - turn left briskly across the N124 up a single-lane track just before a fairly blind corner - in a farmhouse run by Les and Mary Cave, who were excellent hosts. The room looked like this...

and the views from my window and breakfast table looked like this...

I had a minor adventure (positive spin time) which is the subject of another post, and then spent most of the time on various beaches. I went to Praia de Luz, because it was a name I knew and on the south coast, but I stayed there long enough to a) walk around, b) buy some water, bread and cheese from a supermarket, c) get an espresso in a beach-front cafe, d) leave. It's where the crowds go.

It was week two of an official heatwave, which I brought back with me to the UK (did you believe the Easter weekend?), and the sun down there is hot enough to tan you pretty thoroughly without too many hours in it. Various other posts about beaches, food and other stuff will follow.

Christopher Christian - R.I.P.

My friend Chris Christian died on Easter Saturday. He had been suffering from the complications of a cancer that was first diagnosed and treated in late 2003, and for which he had been taking various drugs and chemotherapy since.

I met Chris through a university friend, when he was living in the same flat in St Margarets, in south-west London, as my friend's older brother. Chris was tall, slim, with a beard and a slightly wicked smile. He was into trains, buses and many other things nerdy, and oddly into jazz-funk-and-soul. He made a number of trips to India to travel on its railways, and when younger and single was not averse to a weekend of track-bashing. I had no idea there were people who hung around military airports monitoring the flights in and out and publishing the results until one dinner party in the mid-80's.

He had a long career as a chartered company secretary in the bluest of blue-chip companies, and as the lawyers moved into the company secretary's role, Chris studied for and passed a law degree at evening college. Like everyone else, he suffered a short period of redundancy in the nineties before joining EMI, where he stayed until the end.

Chris is survived by his wife Sandra and son Peter. Everyone who knew him will miss him.

The Art of Philosophical Name-Dropping

One of the books I was reading on holiday was A N Whitehead’s Process and Reality. It’s part of my catching-up-with-metaphysics reading program. There was a really neat quote I liked and wanted to use. It then struck me that quoting A N Whitehead (unless it’s the “western philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato” quote which everyone knows) is one of those ways you scare people with the implied level of your erudition.

The first rule is: leave the Big Names alone. Say you're reading Aristotle, Plato, St Thomas Aquinas, Locke, Hume, Kant, Descartes, Russell and that ilk, and you will just look like someone who hasn't got past the starting line. If anything, admit to never having got past the first fifty pages of e.g. The Critique of Pure Reason or the Prior Analytics. This makes it look like you don't need to try that hard.

The second rule is: you need to be careful with the attempt-to-impress-with-erudition. Dropping Whitehead’s name can mean you’re slightly cranky or working in a backwater. Hegel is a real danger zone. More people speak reasonably fluent Hegel than you might think. Very, very few people now speak Schelling or Fitche. Lots of people speak Sartre, quite a few speak Heidegger, and to judge by the availability of The Phenomenology of Perception in cheap paperback, quite a few speak Merleu-Ponty as well. Jaspers and Husserl are and will remain safely and impressively obscure.

Here are some simple but effective substitutions: instead of John Stuart Mill, mention William Whewell; Norwood Russell Hanson instead of Karl Popper; Henri Bergson instead of William James; Spinoza for Descartes; W V O Quine for A J Ayer and Michael Polyani for Paul Feyerabend.

Mention F H Bradley and someone may attempt to blow the dust off you. Mention Lucretius to anyone under sixty and they won’t know who you’re talking about, anyone over sixty may well have translated passages in Greek classes at school. Leave Nietzsche and Schopenhauer alone: they attract a fanatical following. Don’t go near Marx – he wrote a lot and you will be expected to know every line. Engels is okay – especially as you can plausibly restrict your reading plausibly to the classic Condition of the Working Class in England. People who name-drop J L Austin are Americans trying to look clever. Quite a few people speak fairly fluent Wittgenstein and he’s not much fun to read. If you really have read Charles Saunders Pierce, you will never need to prove yourself as a philosopher in any other way.

My personal bombs to drop? Michael Polyani and Gaston Bachelard. You can safely say that “everything interesting and true about post-modernism is in Polyani” and Bachelard is charming and interesting to read. The Poetics of Space is a classic – everybody’s heard of it, very few have read it.

Holidays - The Departure

I don't really do holidays. My idea of the perfect holiday is to arrive at the hotel, be put to sleep by the gas that knocks Patrick McGoohan out at the start of The Prisoner, sleep for thirty-six hours straight and spend the next week lying in the sun getting less groggy. I don't think Kirker do that.

What I really can't do is the flights. Now, there's a huge difference between travelling on business and travelling on your own dime. On business, if anything goes wrong, you just make other arrangements and expense it. I have done that a few times. Also, you tend to travel on flexible tickets, so it doesn't matter if you miss the flight. On your own dime, that flexibility runs to, what, maybe half your monthly disposable income? Plus, holiday destinations usually don't have five or six flights a day like Paris or Berlin.

Which means that the most stressful part is getting to the airport. If anything goes wrong, you're stuck at the airport with nowhere to go for a long while and that's assuming there's a spare seat on the next plane. Plus you're out the fare. Travel insurance might cover that, but it can't get you a seat on a full plane or fly a plane on Wednesday when the next flight is Saturday.

You can't forget anything either. You can just make it through a normal working day if you forget your wallet or entry card or train ticket. Then you have to turn back. But you can turn back. Forget your passport, check-in card, itinerary, taxi reservation, driver's licence, credit cards... and you can't get through the airport. You might just bluff your way without the credit card by calling your bank at the other end, but if you fail, you're not going to be eating for the trip. Do you have any idea how often I check that I have these things? When I pack. An hour after I pack. In the taxi, witing for the train, in the departure lounge. It's as if I do not at that point believe in the permemance of objects: paperwork can vanish, just on its own. Even if you never opened the case.

Which is followed by the bit where you go through the airport. My airport experience has been getting better, but only because 1) I check-in online, and 2) I don't carry a large suitcase anymore. All that security theatre doesn't take up as much time as I keep thinking it might. European flights are manageable.

So now we're inside. And there's the bit where your plane is delayed on the inward journey, and the bit where you queue to get on the plane. To walk down a zig-zag chute to take a bus to a plane parked in a far distant corner of the airport. And the pilot tells you there isn't a runway slot for half-an-hour. And the child cries or yells for two hours straight, or the asshole in front of you slams their seat back into recline before the seat belt sign has even faded. I'm tall-ish, I have long legs, and a thirty-two inch seat pitch is too short for you to recline and me to feel comfortable.

On arrival there's the question of the weather. A country that used to be known for unbroken sunshine and gentle breezes has a week of gales and showers, weather they have not seen since old Uncle Jose married Aunt Maria, and that was before television. Yeah. Right. Everywhere I've been, they haven't seen weather like that since Uncle Jose married Aunt Maria. I'm the Wolfgang Pauli of weather?

And then, finally, I'm there and unpacked. And there's me. And a place I don't know, where I know no-one. For a week. I still haven't worked out exactly what state of mind I'm in when I do that. Some of it is a presence-in-the-place, and some of it is denial-that-this-is-all-there-is. Because where I really am is with-me-in-a-different-place. And that's only half a holiday.

The other half is where you get to be someone else for a week.

It's The Pianists That Made The Jazz Great

For me, the high period of jazz was between about 1945 and 1970 - roughly between Charlie Parker's first be-bop album and Miles Davis' Bitches Brew. I'd like to sing the praises of the pianists, all of whom I can't name, but some of whom I can. Wynton Kelly, McCoy Tyner, Bill Evans, Chick Corea, Joe Zawinul, Herbie Hancock, Bobby Timmons, Cecil Taylor, John Hicks, Thelonious Monk and Horace Silver. To name but maybe a third of them.

I'm going to frame this. Think about when, say, Miles or Coltrane or Cannonball or Shorter or any of the other superstar virtuoso frontmen stop and the pianist takes a solo. Do you notice any real change in the quality of music? McCoy Tyner could complement Coltrane's fierce soloing, just as Wynton Kelly could swing with his very own joy, contrasting Miles' more brooding, intense playing. You notice the difference in style, in voice, but not in quality. Or to put it another way - these guys could keep up with the best extemporising musicians of the twentieth century. You and I and your music teacher and the kid who won the Leeds Piano competition would not have a chance. Some were composers in their own right: Zawinul, Timmons, Taylor, Monk. Some had the technical skill and background to head all the way over to European avant-garde music: Taylor, Hancock, Corea.

I'm actually going to say this: without these pianists and others, the jazz of that period would have been good and sometime great. With them, it was great and sometimes timeless.

Would Kind of Blue have been the same without Bill Evans' floating chords? Here they are in Blue In Green.


Would You Gotta Have Freedom be what it is without John Hicks' piano?


Would My Favourite Things be one of my favourite things without Tyner's chords?


And here's Cecil Taylor being, well, pretty mid-Twentieth century avant-garde, except with a touch of swing and blues...

Things I Saw Where I Lived and Walked: Part 15

Bushy Park in winter, a gravel-pit yacht club one summer Saturday afternoon, a beach in Devon name unknown, the backyard of a friend's house in Topsham. All 1980's except the back yard, late 1970's.