RosieBell

Sofia Previsited

James Lee-Milne on Sofia (1979)

Extremely clean cobbled streets which are hosed at night and even during the day by stalwart women wielding heavy hose-pipes. First thing one sees in early morning is these women sweeping up ends. Heavy fines for throwing litter. The buildings are colour-washed, tawny yellows and orange. We watched the jeunesse doree strolling arm-in-arm in front of the hotel, facing the statue of Alexander II which had been allowed to survive. Bulgarians just as well-dressed as the English plebeian young. City full of parks and gardens, densely tree’d and freshly green. Archaic Roman fragments in the under passes, Roman bas-reliefs. Imagine how they would be vandalised in London.

From Deep Romantic Chasm

I got exactly the same impression – the women sweeping the streets clean, the youth out in the parks and the Roman remains unmolested in the underpasses – to my astonishment and chagrin. I don't know if the police are as heavy as they were during the Communist regime, or whether this is a culture more respectful of its public space than we are.

 

 

I have a right because I have

 I’d been having thoughts about the “right” to own a car and a place to park it. Two things I’d observed:-

1. A friend who loves to do up classic cars– ahh if the only car owners were those who really did love automobiles.
2. Loki the Scottish rapper, winner of the Orwell prize for his book, Poverty Safari. He tweets sense normally and engages civilly with Unionists. This has made the madder Nats accuse of him of being a sell out with subsequent abuse, which he meets robustly.  However, when he started to complain about the lack of parking in his area, he stopped tweeting on the subject– he didn’t know he’d get such a furious response from the sustainable transport gang. He, who had seen his childhood poverty in a larger social context, could not see his car in the same way. 

I was slowly formulating, “Cars as luxuries for hobbyists or the rich would be like Lear jets or private helicopters. You may object about how they are obtained by unequal wealth but the damage they do is limited. It was when cars became necessities for mass transport that they turned into the barbarian hordes of city destroyers that they have become.”  Health, education, sewerage systems, electricity, postal delivery, even broadband, they should be distributed and available and affordable, when they are not free, to all.  Cars, and the infrastructure they require – no.

Yesterday I posted on Facebook a link to an article about the conflicts between cyclists and pedestrians in shared space.  I got this comment:-

SC:- - More cyclists wanting every stretch of tar to themselves.

Cyclists asking for the kind of safe, connected space that motorists and pedestrians take pretty much for granted get furious reactions. It is the Bounderby fury that workers petitioning for a half day off on Saturday and a work day of 12 instead of 14 hours are sybarites, calling insolently for a life of leisure. It is the anger of the unthinkingly privileged being challenged. 

The comment thread then followed the path familiar to cycling activists, with the mythical road tax being evoked.  SC’s last comment is:-

“Yes local taxes pay towards the roads but the car drivers tops it up massively with the extra tax imposed on them compared to a cyclist. And not every car in a city only transports one person. It's a human right to have a choice to drive cycle walk or run and should be bullied out of driving because of higher and higher taxes and insurance only drivers pay . As for space a car uses its the same as a cyclist because the highway code is give a cyclist the space of a car.”

He has been asked to consider the space taken by 10 cycles parking vs 10 cars, 10 cycles pulled up at the lights vs 10 cars and has not yet responded.  The “human right to have a choice to drive” phrase is a marvel, equating car ownership with the right not to be tortured or subject to arbitrary arrest. It is a wonderful demonstration of a privilege being perceived as a right – which is why debates between drivers vs sustainable transport types are so bitter and angry.  Drivers aren’t just put out that they may not have it all their way in the future – they view themselves as victims of a gross injustice, like women denied the franchise.  

This essay by Andre Gorz eloquently said it all back in 1973.

The worst thing about cars is that they are like castles or villas by the sea: luxury goods invented for the exclusive pleasure of a very rich minority, and which in conception and nature were never intended for the people. Unlike the vacuum cleaner, the radio, or the bicycle, which retain their use value when everyone has one, the car, like a villa by the sea, is only desirable and useful insofar as the masses don’t have one.…

This is pretty much common knowledge in the case of the seaside villas. No politico has yet dared to claim that to democratize the right to vacation would mean a villa with private beach for every family. Everyone understands that if each of 13 or 14 million families were to use only 10 meters of the coast, it would take 140,000km of beach in order for all of them to have their share! To give everyone his or her share would be to cut up the beaches in such little strips—or to squeeze the villas so tightly together—that their use value would be nil and their advantage over a hotel complex would disappear. In short, democratization of access to the beaches point to only one solution—the collectivist one...

Now, why is it that what is perfectly obvious in the case of the beaches is not generally acknowledged to be the case for transportation? Like the beach house, doesn’t a car occupy scarce space? Doesn’t it deprive the others who use the roads (pedestrians, cyclists, streetcar and bus drivers)? Doesn’t it lose its use value when everyone uses his or her own? And yet there are plenty of politicians who insist that every family has the right to at least one car and that it’s up to the “government” to make it possible for everyone to park conveniently, drive easily in the city, and go on holiday at the same time as everyone else, going 70 mph on the roads to vacation spots.

Andre Gorz goes on to make a variety of points that are now commonplaces among sustainable transport campaigners:- 

• car ownership has turned cities into sprawls with increasing distances between shopping, work and schools, which reinforces the reliance on the car;
• mass ownership of cars jams up cities so that the car goes no faster than the bicycle at rush hours (observable any commuting day);
• that cities made hellish by cars have to be escaped from by cars;
• highways have been developed at the expense of public transport;
• oil magnates have seized much power in producing car dependency;
• there is a paradox in that while cars give a sense of independence their owners are far more dependent on third parties like garages and mechanics than with earlier means of transport, and the workings of car are a mystery to most. (That last point I think specious – you were dependent on wheelwrights and blacksmiths in horse-owning days, and in my youth every young bloke tinkered with an engine.) 

His solution is the green Utopian one of local neighbourhoods growing their own food that are so fully integrated and agreeable that no-one wants to leave them –a radical and unlikely reshaping of our cities, which have always had districts – whether tanning and copper beating in other times, or these days, finance and the “old town” i.e. the tourist area.  Variety and specialisation within a city are a city’s strength.  As so often, someone who can forcefully express a problem, may sound weak when expressing a solution.

But that’s a cavil – Gorz wrote this in 1973 when city centres were still getting knocked down for ring roads. His point is that you cannot talk about transport in isolation – that when considering transport you have to consider what kind of city people should inhabit, and how they should relate to each other.

And better a green Utopia than the Divine Right of the status quo.  

DISTINGUISH carefully between the two,
This thing is yours, the other thing is mine.
You have a shirt, a brimless hat, a shoe
And half a coat. I am the Lord benign
Of fifty hundred acres of fat land
To which I have a right. You understand?

I have a right because I have, because,
Because I have—because I have a right.
Now be quite calm and good, obey the laws,
Remember your low station, do not fight
Against the goad, because, you know, it pricks
Whenever the uncleanly demos kicks.

I do not envy you your hat, or shoe.
Why should you envy me my small estate?
It’s fearfully illogical in you
To fight with economic force and fate.
Moreover, I have got the upper hand,
And mean to keep it. Do you understand?

The Justice of the Peace
Hilaire Belloc: in “Sonnets and Verse.”

Clare Chambers

I took Learning to Swim on holiday. A good novel, witty, clever, sharp characterisation. Some excellent scenes eg the party where the heroine Blush totters painfully on her high heels, and her spangly dress starts unravelling. Falling in love with a family is an old theme of course eg Brideshead Revisited, and the family is well realised. "Old theme" isn’t a put down, any more than courtship would be. Seeing that other families aren’t like yours for good or ill is part of growing up.

She does the Jane Austen trick of establishing a character, in this case, the fantasist Mr Radley, and then making waspish remarks referring to them, which are funny and apt because the character has been firmly established. Denouement not well handled and the in the wrong key to harmonise the rest of the novel, and the happy ending has a tacked on feeling.

Then read The Editor’s Wife, theme adultery, again well done, again some excellent characterisation especially the ex-wife, who is monstrously selfish and self- centred yet you can see that she is good company and likable, and the hero is quite right to keep her in his life. Again, the ending is in a different key, the plot key point outrageously improbable, especially in the Google era. The ending has too much of things coming right, implausibly.

Will read more of her. She doesn’t go on and on as many novelists do. She’s economical and elegant.

Checker and the Derailleurs

Don’t jump your red tonight,
You big yellow Checker,
I’m coming through light
At its last yellow flicker.
Show your bulging brights
Rights into my reflectors.
Listen close and you might
Here my freewheel ticker-ticker.
Hey city slickers:

Lay perpendicular grates!
Check those rectangular plates!
One pothole on Sixth Avenue
Goes all the way to China.

I am a midtown
Pedal pusher.
I am a traffic
Bushwhacker.
My brakes are clogged
With little children.
Greasy strays
Keep my gears workin’.

Diggers, watch your tails;
Old ladies, hold your bladders.
Scarvy starlets, trim your sails
Or choke on Isadora tatters.
Better step back to the curb-
Enough women are batters.
Brave Lolitas, round the curve,
You don’t want to be flatter.
Hey hard-hatters:

Lay perpendicular grates!
Check those rectangular plates!
One pothole on Sixth Avenue
Goes all the way to China.

I am a midtown
Pedal pusher.
I am a traffic
Bushwhacker.
My brakes are clogged
With little children.
Greasy strays
Keep my gears workin’.

From Lionel Shriver’s Checker and the Derailleurs. Checker is a bicycle courier; he’s also a song writer and drummer for a rock band. That’s a pretty good lyric Shriver has written for him, though a bit clever and complicated to work as a rock lyric.
Anyway, nice to have a novel about a rock band, and also a bicycle courier, who loves his bicycle, Zefal, loves being a master of risky urban cycling. Shriver wrote it when she was 30, and it’s full of zest. Schematic, like all her novels. Bounces along – she can set up a strong situation that keeps you following – ending not well done (she’s not good at endings – it’s the hardest part of a novel. You want to hear of what happened to everyone but not in great detail. The ending is the judge handing out sentences.)

Urban life in an area where you don’t have to be rich to live, where there are dives and spaces for the talented to meet and create – she gets that, and shows it. Bridges are climbing cliffs, you find your cave, your shelter, your tribe, your shaman's chants, your dancing. She gets that.

More James Lees Milne

James Lees-Milne, who was Secretary to the National Trust in its early days, did have an enviable job of going about the country looking at properties and deciding if the Trust would take them on.  He is constantly meeting decayed aristocrats in collapsing damp buildings of great beauty. He gives the impression of being a charming, likable, witty man, with a love of art and an appreciation of human beings. I imagine he was ideal for his job.  I caught 3 very good Radio 4 plays about him (only Radio 4 would do 3 plays about such a man), which got me interested in his diaries.

Wednesday, 26^th July 1944

After lunching in Salisbury we drove to Trafalgar. This great red-brick house lies beyond Longford, in the same valley, on the same river, surrounded by beech trees. It was built in 1733 by John Wood, with a Grecian portico added by Revett in 1760, as were the two connecting pavilions. A niece with a distinctly off-centre accent welcomed us. Presently there was a hurried puffing sound, and in bustled Lord Nelson. He is 187, the great-nephew of ‘the Admiral’ as he refers to his forebear, as small as Nelson, with white flowing hair and a large mouth. His spare build, peculiar shape of head and features are identical to the Admiral’s. With a little mutilation, an eye out here, an arm off there, he would be the very incarnation.

Lees-Milne on Churchill

From James Lees-Milne’s Ancestral Voices & Prophesying Peace: Diaries 1942-1945

Lees-Milne detested Churchill, who he thought proto-Fascist.

Wednesday, 5th July 1944

Lee-Milne has “luncheon” with the editor of the Sunday Pictorial.

“He despairs over the future for, he says, no plans are being worked out by the Government. Except as a fighter, Churchill is a disaster. He lives for war and killing Germans, as though they were pigeons. He is a man of no ideals, no principles; is an opportunist surrounded by yes-men, most of them insincere and of little integrity. Aneurin Bevan he thinks one of the few men in the Commons of undoubted integrity, and he is too temperamental. Eden is flabby, middle-aged man, unhappy with the Prime Minister. .. He says no naval battle takes place that is not directed by the Prime Minister personally from the Admiralty, whether he ruses the moment there is an engagement. I said, “Churchill may not be a good man, but surely he is a great man?” He said, “Not a great man in the way Lloyd George was; but undeniably a great personality, which is another matter.” Lloyd George cared passionately for good causes, but alas, today, he is becoming senile and he forgets things.

C. Stuart [the editor] said he often has to attend press conferences in Downing Street, and these invariably end in a flaming row. Churchill loses his temper and dismisses the press, who no longer can resist the temptation of baiting him. They taunt him by inferring that he cares nothing about the future, and enjoys the war like a game of chess. He fears Churchill will certainly try to remain Prime Minister when the war is over and the country will re-elect him. He does not foresee a swing over to Socialism after the war, but a tempered form of dictatorship. All Churchill’s closest associates are unscrupulous, opportunist, fascist, crooked or vicious men; and he went through the list.”

(I had the impression Churchill did have a lot of respect for the Parliamentary tradition, and this would have impeded any dictatorship thoughts. Of course he wasn’t returned in 1945.)

Lees-Milne detested Churchill for having authorised bombing of Rome, Churchill being indifferent to architecture, and Lees-Milne caring more for fine buildings than their inhabitants. I have to say news of Rome being bombed would have caused me more pain than yet another industrial city and its citizens getting incendiarised.

Monday, 22nd November 1943

“Tom Jones [private secretary to Lloyd George, Bonar Law and Stanley Baldwin] ..told him if Winston Churchill had been born ten years later he would, in the 1930s, have made England a fascist state, ranged with other fascist powers; but he was too old a man with roots too firmly placed in the Victorian aristocratic traditions to adopt so alien a philosophy.”

Not the Netherlands

When cycling activists suggest making a city friendlier to cyclists, we are told, "this is not the Netherlands." That's true in Edinburgh, and every other city.  I stopped at a ceramics shop in Sofia to buy one of their mugs. I asked the shop owner about cycling in Sofia.  I'd seen painted outlines of paths ending and dumping you into traffic.  "We would like it to be better, but we are told this is not the Netherlands." "But Sofia is almost flat," I said. (There's a small gentle hill in the centre.)  "But it's not the Netherlands."

 

Sofia, Bulgaria

Sofia, Bulgaria. Not as charming as Plovdiv, but still pretty nice, in its centre anyway. Again, a variety of architecture. What impressed me most was the underpass under the Boulevard Kniaz Aleksandar Dondukov. There is the Roman street of big slabs – seems you can’t strike a spade in the Balkans without digging up something that the Romans built – but also the underpass is an agreeable space with shops, totally unvandalized and very clean. As well as the Roman bricks there are portions of a painted interior of an orthodox church with a few offerings on the little altar – can you imagine how long that would last here?

Also a view of a hefty, rebarbative building of the communist period from the underpass.

Byzantine. Under Communism churches were often concealed by other buildings. Lenin’s statue has been replaced by Saint Sophia, as in Tbilisi he’s been replaced by Saint George.

Bulgaria makes a lot of products from rose petals. These are popular with tourists, and they waft rose scent in the streets and underpasses.

City gardens. Civilisation is a public space, where even the beggars can beg unmolested, the buskers busk, the limping and swollen old sit in the sun, the eccentrics flaunt their off-beatedness, and friends take a selfie of themselves with the bride at her modest wedding.

Bric-a-brac market in Sofia, Bulgaria, near Alexander Nevsky Cathedral. I sneaked these photos of one stall. Most stalls had Nazi stuff - postcards and busts of Hitler and swastikas on drinks flasks. Very unsettling seeing casual heaps of images which are taboo in our culture. My sister picked up an army shoe cleaning kit in excellent condition. Leather case with swastika stamp and shoe horn and brushes inside. She shuddered and wiped her prints off the case.

 

The 365 tour of Sofia was excellent, the guide an actor with colloquial English and an actor’s instinct of audience. I asked him about the Nazi stuff at the bric-a-brac stalls and he said that it was mostly repro. Talked about Bulgaria’s involvement WWII – either allying with Germany or be invaded by them as a route to Greece; stalled the transport of the Jews eastwards to death. Some bombing by the Allies of the city centre.

Bathhouse from 1900s, now museum

He also spoke with pleased anticipation that Ryanair and other cheap carriers were flying to Sofia. I shuddered at that of course. The beer here is cheap.

Sitting in Sofia airport on the way home I could hear a chorus of flat voices, “It’s coming home, it’s coming home.” It was Friday and I wondered if the first stag parties were on their way.

Sofia, Plovdiv, Kavala – waiting for the tourist euro – economic salvation meaning the spoiling of their cities.

Kavala

You know the walk across hot tarmac, the wave of heat that hits you that shows the Brits they are on holiday? I had that at Glasgow airport in our astonishing summer. When I arrived in Thessaloniki it was pelting with rain. It was after 10 at night and I had pre-ordered a taxi for my late arrival. The bloke who picked me up was a guide, who wanted to point out the beauties of Thessaloniki in the rain and darkness. Then he pulled up a screen on the dashboard and showed me pictures instead, taking both hands off the wheel to gesture his points. He was an agreeable fellow – most Greeks are – so I concealed my fear and asked interested questions.

It rained all night – too wet to walk around the streets near the hotel and find dinner – taxi to the bus station the next morning and bus to Kavala, a couple of hours away through a pleasant landscape of small holdings, olives and coast.

I was meeting my travel companion, TC, who was attending a tourism conference (she’s an academic). We had a little apartment for a few nights, up a steep hill. In the evening she went to the opening reception for the conference, and I to the waterfront for a meal. Thunder, lightning, the waiters running about drying to find dry seats and pulling the restaurant umbrellas around to give us shelter. It was so wet I took a taxi back to the apartment.

TC had meanwhile been addressed at the conference by the mayor, a woman who had made a very good speech – the municipality wants to encourage tourism in Kavala. Then they had an hour’s guided walk. In what would have been a ridiculed plot point in a comedy, the guided tour was pelted on with rain, everyone poking each other with umbrellas and the noise of the water from the sky and rushing in rivers down the streets so loud you couldn’t hear the guide.

I can see why the mayor sees It has possibilities. It has a population of around 50,000, is nicely situated on hills and by the sea, and has an interesting Ottoman old town including an eighteenth century merchant's house you can visit, with a beautiful panelled interior, and the sense of a life lived turned towards inside – women’s quarters set up so they never see the men. It was the house of Mehmet Ali, the founder of a dynasty that ruled Egypt up to Farouk.

 

 

Byzantine Castle

Imaret

 

 

View from castle

There are only a few souvenir shops, some selling attractive ceramics and olive wood spoons and bowls. We bought some sponges and the woman we bought them from pre-haggled – i.e. offered us bargains before she needed to. I assumed she had been on a haggling course and was keen to practice.

Ottoman houses

Kavala Museum suited me. It’s air-conditioned, on one floor, small, choice collection including some coloured busts of women, a style of artefact which I’ve never seen before. Only two visitors when I was there.

The finest structure is an aqueduct built under Suleyman the Magnificent. It is very grand.

You can have an outing to Thassos, an island nearby, with a history of pirates kidnapping the citizens and a monastery beautifully tended by grumpy nuns. 

Archangel Michael Monastery

The most felt history is a memory of a 400 year occupation by the Turks.

Of course we were congratulating ourselves for staying somewhere not full of tourists, or at least not foreign ones, as the cafes were full of holidaying Greeks watching a noisy air show, and like all tourists we hoped that the place would not become too touristy. Greeks need the money though and if their resource is history, buildings, cheap drink and their people's agreeable manner, so be it.

Main square, Thessaloniki

Thessaloniki, where we stayed one night before heading to Bulgaria, was jam-packed and very hot. It has a brilliant Byzantine museum and a waterfront lined with busy cafes. Quite expensive compared to Kavala.

Plovdiv Pedestrianised - Bulgaria

Underpasses – yes I groan how a busy road bisects the old town. The cars get the right of way. And we the pedestrians are forced in the underpass. An underpass conjures up urban menace of urine stench and graffiti and dodgy characters.

Busy road through Old Town

The underpass under the road that cuts up the old town at Plovdiv is beautiful.

 

Attractive façade, ramps so you can push a cycle or buggy or wheelchair, and then shops, Roman paving of large slabs that they discovered when digging the subway, and a fine little museum of Roman mosaics and glass.

Roman slabs in underpass

Then onto the longest pedestrianized area in Europe, longer than Copenhagen. A busy, lively place, where you can stroll and shop and eat at cafes. Also nicely designed with ramps as well as steps.

A Roman stadium was dug up from an earlier level of the city.  It is in excellent nick, being covered so long and pleasantly incorporated into the street, with a cafe on a mezzanine level and views from above.

Plovdiv is Europe’s City of Culture in 2019. It’s a lovely little city, with a mixture of architectural styles, highly walkable and a lively creative quarter. Keep the cars out, make the city live.

The National Revival style of architecture is very attractive.  It was a bourgeois style of national self-assertion against the dominant Ottoman empire (400 years of Turkish occupation).

I'd never heard of Plovdiv until going for a few days to Bulgaria, chosen because the border is close to Thessaloniki. The delightful family hotel we stayed in showed two deeds of ownership - one from 1878 in Turkish script, the other a few years later in Cyrillic, after the liberation.  The Turkish occupation weighs here, like Britain in Ireland.