Joy Lo Dico
It’s the summer holidays again, and time for the annual British migration south, east and west. But this is 2009. We already watch television on the iPlayer, make new friends on Facebook, “work from home” over the internet. So the next logical step— bypass the hell of Heathrow and reduce your carbon footprint in one fell swoop by taking your holidays online too.
Google’s Street View, which merges photographs taken of streets in cities across the globe to produce a close likeness of the world in 3D, sparked off heated debates about privacy when launched in March. But as a “holiday” provider it’s matchless: go to Google Maps, zoom in, pick up a little orange avatar man and you can have London, New York, Paris, Rome or even Scunthorpe at your fingertips—all for the price of a broadband connection.
Literalists will argue that it’s not the same as going on a real holiday, and it isn’t. Sure, you can traipse over Florence’s Pontevecchio. (Streetview is so sharp that you can even go window-shopping in the little jewellery shops along the bridge.) But you can’t feel the Tuscan sun on your skin.
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Mary Fitzgerald
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A June survey by the website Holiday Rentals found that half of young Britons were considering holidaying with their parents this year—evidence, the company claimed, for a new fad among cash-strapped young professionals: the Homad, or Holiday on Mum and Dad.
Recession or not, I’ve been Homading all my adult life. This summer I’ll be decamping with my family, partner and about 70 distant cousins to the coast of North Carolina. And after consulting friends—especially those who’ve also opted for financially precarious professions like writing or standup comedy—I’ve found others who have been quietly Homading for years too.
For those less practiced in the art, here are the most important rules of engagement. Stick to them whether yours is a family of awkward silences or messy, aerobic brawls. Ignore them and you’ll wish you’d stayed at home.
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Alexander Fiske-Harrison
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The following events occurred on 19th April 2007, the second day of the Feria de Abril in Seville, in the Plaza de Toros de la Real Maestranza de Caballeria
The bull enters the ring at a trot, a fanfare of trumpets fading in the background. He seems tentative, his eyes sweeping the ring.
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Alasdair Palmer
Italy is famously the home of great food, glorious art—and lousy politics. I experienced all three a few weeks ago, as some Italian friends took me to see Monticchiello and Porano, two lovely medieval towns, one near Pienza in southern Tuscany, the other just a few minutes’ drive from Orvieto, in Umbria. The fragile beauty of both is now threatened with destruction by speculative building which the relevant political powers have endorsed.
Tuscany and Umbria have so far managed to preserve their beautiful medieval hilltop towns from the kind of disfiguring modern construction which has wrecked most places in Italy south of Rome. New building developments have been rare, and have usually been discreetly hidden: towns such as Arezzo, Siena and Orvieto all have their share of hideous new developments, but they have not damaged the old centres or the wonderful views.
That policy is now about to change. Local councils in Tuscany and Umbria have agreed to a rash of very visible schemes. A housing estate has just gone up outside the walls of Monticchiello. It wrecks one of the most glorious vistas in Tuscany. Initiative Toscane, the company responsible for it, claims the estate will provide much-needed housing for locals, but the prices guarantee that it won’t: the only people who will be able to afford to buy apartments will be rich people from outside the area. Comitati Toscani per la difesa del Territorio, a group formed to try to protect Tuscany’s heritage, has compiled a map of new developments in Tuscany—and there are hundreds of sites under threat from speculative building of the ugliest kind.
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Mark Kitto
Tourist crap
The tourist season has started. The obvious indicator, apart from the crowds of people, is the shit. It is everywhere. I am not using the four-letter word as a metaphor for litter. There’s plenty of that too. I mean real, steaming turds.
Squeamishness about bodily functions is low in China. The Chinese, who have few public toilets, think little of urinating or defecating in public—although it may now be considered uncouth in major towns and cities.
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Ian Rankin
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Ian Rankin
The art of holiday reading
I always take a slew of books with me on holiday. Some I will have read before—Bleak House or Heart of Darkness, for example. Some will be recent non-fiction, like Simon Gray’s The Last Cigarette (Granta). There may be a biography of a maverick rock singer such as Tom Waits, or a psychedelic group such as Hawkwind. I’ll take a few contemporary thrillers—such as Romanno Bridge by Andrew Greig (Quercus) and crime novels by the likes of Allan Guthrie, James Lee Burke and mercurial French author Fred Vargas. Poetry? I’ve been meaning to re-read TS Eliot’s Four Quartets this past year or more. There are also books I haven’t finished yet, such as the latest from Kate Atkinson, When Will There Be Good News? (Doubleday). I’m doing an Open University course, so the coursework will also be coming. How many will I read? That depends on the weather. And I won’t take any books I see as “worthy” or “hard work.” It is supposed to be a holiday, after all.
Ian Rankin is a novelist
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Tom Chatfield
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Mogwai is cutting down the time he spends playing World of Warcraft. Twenty hours a week or less now, compared to a peak of over 70. It’s not that he has lost interest—just that he’s no longer working his way up the greasy pole. He’s got to the top. He heads his own guild, has 20,000 gold pieces in the bank and wields the Twin Blades of Azzinoth; weapons so powerful and difficult to acquire that other players often (virtually) follow Mogwai around just to look at them. In his own words, he’s “e-famous.” He was recently offered $8,000 for his Warcraft account, a sum he only briefly considered accepting. Given that he has clocked up over 4,500 hours of play, the prospective buyers were hardly making it worth his while. Plus, more sentimentally, he feels his character is not his alone to sell: “The strange thing about this character is that he doesn’t just belong to me. Every item he has he got through the hard work of 20 or more other people. Selling him would be a slap in their faces.” As in many modern online games, co-operation is the only way to progress, with the most challenging encounters manageable only with the collaboration of other experienced players. Hence the need for leaders, guilds—in-game collectives, sometimes containing hundreds of players—and online friendships measured in years. “When I started, I didn’t care about the other people. Now they are the only reason I continue.”
When Mogwai isn’t online, he’s called Adam Brouwer, and works as a civil servant for the British government modelling crisis scenarios of hypothetical veterinary disease outbreaks. I point out to him a recent article in the Harvard Business Review, billed under the line “The best sign that someone’s qualified to run an internet startup may not be an MBA degree, but level 70 guild leader status.” Is there anything to this? “Absolutely,” he says, “but if you tried to argue that within the traditional business market you would get laughed out of the interview.” How, then, does he explain his willingness to invest so much in something that has little value for his career? He disputes this claim. “In Warcraft I’ve developed confidence; a lack of fear about entering difficult situations; I’ve enhanced my presentation skills and debating. Then there are more subtle things: judging people’s intentions from conversations, learning to tell people what they want to hear. I am certainly more manipulative, more Machiavellian. I love being in charge of a group of people, leading them to succeed in a task.”
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Kate Saunders
By the time I made my first visit to a real Dutch dope café, they had been around for quite a while and even provincial stag parties were starting to get rather tired of them. This did not matter. I thought I was doing something incredibly daring and cool.
I was in my early forties, and finding the onset of middle age as bewildering as a second puberty. In some ways, the two states are uncannily similar. There’s the same haunting of mirrors, because your face keeps changing and you never know what shape your nose is going to be from one day to the next. And there is the same desire to pilfer from the cupboard marked “forbidden”—in the case of the 40 year olds, before it is too late. In the blink of an eye, you will become your parents. You have one last chance to do all of the naughty things you didn’t get around to when you were genuinely young. As a lifelong square, I had a lot of catching up to do.
I happened to be staying in the quiet Belgian town of Liège. I was there with my then eight-year-old son, visiting his father. My ex-husband told me, in passing, that he had visited one of the famous Dutch cafés in which dope was smoked openly and semi-legally. It was not in the fleshpots of Amsterdam, but in the town of Maastricht (the one that gave its name to the treaty) just across the border and about 20 minutes away by car. Seeing my fascination, he offered to take me there.
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Tim King
In summer, France profonde changes. From a dwindling winter population of 60, my village, lost in the hills, swells to many times that number as families trek down from the cities to their résidence secondaire—the house where dad or grandad grew up, then left at 18, desperate for work. The shopkeepers in small rural towns depend on these two months as the wage-earning natives return and feed their memories with local gastronomic delicacies. Oh the joys of country living! The children amuse themselves with their cousins, trawling the river or popping beetles with a magnifying glass, but what about the jeunes? For years the elders in each village organised a fête, tailor-made, so they thought, to what the world-weary jeune was supposed to like. So during four successive nights, a weird assortment of fifth- rate rock groups would perform increasingly unrecognisable cover versions of Anglo-Saxon songs of the 1970s to a dozen pissed paysans propping up the trestle-table bar—with not a jeune in sight.
But thankfully, that’s all changing. Now, throughout rural France, there are festivals in the true, celebratory sense. Les Vieilles Charrues de Carhaix in central Brittany is emblematic of the new and hugely successful rural festival. In 1992, a group of jeunes from Brest, fed up that large towns always monopolised major events, organised a four-day party near Carhaix, in Bretagne profonde: country games, barbecues and a bit of live music. 500 turned up that first year and had a good time. Now some of the best European and American bands come to this town of 8,000 inhabitants, while 200,000 people come to listen. Les Vieilles Charrues has become a major international rock festival, hosting more than 80 bands over four days, but it’s still put together by the same group of friends. This year Peter Gabriel, Charles Aznavour, Bryan Ferry and Sinéad O’Connor top a bill so eccentric it could never have been dreamed up by a slick city promoter. And even more remarkable than the quality of the music is the way the festival is run: 6,000 volunteers work day and night to make it happen in a clean, friendly way; for as well as the music, the emphasis, as one would expect, is on the environment—the festival is run by locals for the benefit of their neighbours, not to alienate them all.
Further south, lost in the sparsely populated Massif Central, Aurillac is two things: the coldest town in France and the centre of the French umbrella business—not obvious tourist attractions. So in 1986 it created a festival of street theatre which has gradually brought this small country town world status. Five hundred groups and performers converge on it for four days every August. The town becomes the stage, set and often subject for a limitless variety of work: clowning, Shakespeare, children’s storytelling, rhythmic juggling, police thriller (”Murder at the Umbrella Factory”), puppets, magie burlesque. In addition, 20 invited companies are given board and lodging for a couple of months while they create a new work. For the 100,000 visitors, almost all of it is free.
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David Flusfeder
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I was at the Gutshot poker club in Clerkenwell in January on the day that Derek Kelly lost his court case. That afternoon the jury had decided that Kelly, then chairman of Gutshot Poker, had profited from a game of chance without holding a gaming licence, in contravention of the Gaming Act of 1968. Kelly, a stocky middle-aged Irishman who has the energy and charisma to turn most things his way, had failed to persuade the court that poker should be regarded in law as a game of skill rather than chance. At the club, before the night’s tournament began, he made a short, bullish speech. “The casinos won today,” he said. “Big money won today.” At this, all the much littler money in the room booed the casinos and cheered the Gutshot; then the evening’s business—and pleasure—began.
Today, despite Kelly’s prosecution, the Gutshot continues to be open for business. Its premises are half the size they were before the case, but it has retained its core, new-generation clientele: the twentysomethings in their sunglasses and baseball caps, who sit at the tables wired into their iPods, riffling their chips and trying fancy moves, and sometimes (to the annoyance of the older players) bursting into testosterone-rush posturing—punching the air when they get a bit of luck, or shouting “Get in,” as if a Tuesday night £5 rebuy tournament in Clerkenwell were only a flop away from the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas.
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