A NOD TO BASEL’S TINGUELY AND HIS TEDDY BEAR ON HIS TRAVELS MAL ROGERS
SWISS PEAK
BASEL, the northerly Swiss city, has a reputation for being a little stuffy. But not, perhaps, as conservative as you might think. Because in this outwardly puritan city, psychedelia and philosophy have long enjoyed a prominent role.
Picture, if you will, a dreary Friday afternoon in 1943 in one of Basel’s major pharmaceutical companies. Dr Albert Hoffman is experimenting on fungus, hoping to extract a cure for migraine. Feeling a bit odd, he decides to call it a day.
He makes his way across the fast-flowing Rhine, which makes a lazy right hand-turn here. He heads into the Old Town, through the 700-year-old Spalentor gate tower, and past the elegant 16thcentury Town Hall. But he sees none of these architectural delights. Instead his eyes are assailed by ‘an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures... a kaleidoscopic play of colours.’ And that’s just the good bits.
Because what our Albert had discovered wasn’t a cure for migraine after all, but LSD.
Don’t try this one at home folks.
One man in Basel who may well not have needed any hallucinogenic drugs to see the world at a skewed angle was Jean Tinguely. His eponymous museum is situated on Paul Sacher-Anlage (www.tinguely.ch)
On entering, your first reaction may well be that here was a man of unfathomable imagination. Unbelievably complex machines equipped with huge pulleys, pistons, cogs and coiled springs do nothing more than, for instance, wave a feather or make a mechanical teddy bear nod his head. Whether the almost comically rude box office staff are part of the exhibition I never quite worked out.
But don’t miss it if you’re in that neck of the woods.
MORE ON MUSEUMS
RECENTLY, a British newspaper came clean about a museum blooper they’d made. The correction read: ‘In our visit to Antwerp on Pages 8 and 9 we mistakenly identified the statue outside the National Maritime Museum, as Gulliver. It actually represents the legendary prankster Lange Wapper.’ Well! Could any practical joker have wished for more?
Meanwhile in New York, the New York’s Museum of Modern Art managed to hang Matisse’s Le Bateau upside down, and it remained that way for six weeks before a visitor spotted the mistake.
Still, as I know from long experience, anybody can make one mistake – after another.
LICENSED TO BUILD
TRADITION has it that there only three arts – painting, music, and ornamental pastry-making. The last, pastry-making, also includes the sub-division of architecture.
There can be fewer better examples of that than the huge and elaborate unfinished work of Antonio Gaudi, the Templo Expatrio de la Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. The spires of the cathedral are the extreme of artifice. If you’re into flying buttresses, this is the place for you.
But last month it emerged that more than a century after work started on Gaudi’s masterpiece, back in 1882, no building licence has ever been applied for.
If a building licence wasn’t forthcoming, it’s not clear what the outcome would have been. Local health and safety authorities threatened to come down on them like a ton of bricks – until someone pointed out that if this happened, they would probably have to be investigated by another health and safety outfit. But all has been settled now, and it’s expected that the church will be finished in the next thirty years or so, snagging and all.
ART OF PERSUASION
IN the Lionel Shriver book Ordinary Decent Criminals, set in Belfast, the novelist writes that a local Ardoyne man went on holiday to Spain. When a waiter asked him if he wanted a coffee, he said no. The Belfast gentleman was then annoyed that the waiter didn’t bring him one. At the very least he could have tried to cajole him into having one. But the Spanish have no ethos of saying, ‘Ah c’mon, just have a wee one. . . ..’ Apparently the word for this social habit is accismus – the dictionary definition is ‘a form of irony in which a person feigns a lack of interest in something that he or she actually desires.’
The habit is by no means confined to Ireland. Many traditions around the world have their own version of Mrs Doyle’s ‘Go on, go on, go on, ah ye will’.
In Ireland accismus appears to have flourished when society valued appearance and reputation yet was grindingly poor.
A host would typically offer food, drink, only to be refused wholeheartedly by the guest. A vigorous tussle and feigning of gestures would ensue, until either host or guest capitulated with ‘well, if you’re sure’ or ‘OK, if you insist.’
The charade was enacted for the very best of reasons – the guest, in straitened times, would in no way have wanted to take advantage of the generosity of the host. So an elaborate exchange took place in which subtle indicators would be trailed so that everyone was clear about what was available and what was desired.
Of course a modern side-effect of this, in these much more affluent times, is that ‘if you insist’ – used in bygone days accismusly – now merely means ‘Thanks very much, I don’t mind if I do’, and the guests help themselves to whatever is going.
NOT THE FOGGIEST
THIS week sees the 231th anniversary of the worst British maritime disaster in naval history – but one that had a direct effect on those of us who like to travel.
The commander-in-chief of the British war fleet, the splendidly named Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell, was in charge of the fleet returning from the War of Spanish Succession.
But due to fog in the English Channel they got lost. Fearing they might founder on coastal rocks, the admiral summoned his officers. The consensus was that the fleet was safely west of Brittany. But they misjudged badly and within hours had foundered on rocks near the Scilly Isles. All the boats were lost, and only two men were washed ashore alive. One was the admiral, who collapsed on the foreshore. As he lay there, he would have had time to contemplate events of the previous 24 hours. Legend has it that while the fleet was underway Admiral Shovell had been approached by a sailor who told him that according to his dead-reckoning they were headed for the rocks and not safety. The man was promptly hanged.
As Shovell lay on the shore no doubt ruminating on this, legend further has it that a local woman approached. She instantly fell in love with an emerald ring on his finger, and promptly cut his throat, then removed the bling. The woman reportedly confessed to the murder 30 years later on her deathbed, producing the ring.
Much doubt has been directed on this story, but it has endured.
At any rate the public was shocked. It duly precipitated the Longitudinal Act in which the Admiralty offered a reward of £20,000 to anyone who could find a new way to accurately determine position at sea. A clockmaker called Edward Harrison won the prize with his chronometer. A true chart-topper.