Heathrow Airport, London, UK, October 2015 - A lifetime's involvement

I have lived with Heathrow Airport almost all my life.  My first visit was as a young child, shortly after the tunnel into the central area was completed, but when, if you turned right shortly after coming out of the tunnel, you came to a cinder compound with a few children’s amusements from which the movements of the aircraft – Vickers Vikings, Airspeed Ambassadors, and Lockheed Constellations, could be watched from behind nothing more than a 4 foot high wire fence.

I should explain that I was brought up almost directly under one of the eastern flight paths into Heathrow – indeed my primary school was directly under that path.  Not that it mattered that much – our lessons were not disturbed by turboprop planes that came in every few minutes. It was when the early jets started that things got a bit worse – with the worst of all being the Trident, a British-built plane unfortunately. 

Instead of going off collecting train numbers I could sit in our back garden, with my father’s old wartime binoculars, and note down plane numbers. And that, of course, led into the question of where the planes had come from.  When my father retired he got hold of the airline timetables every few months and made up a schedule that enabled him to identify exactly where any plane that came over had originated: it could probably all be sorted easily by computer now, but he did it all by hand.   For my part I used to cycle to Heathrow in school holidays – starting when I was only about 11 – to watch the planes and record their numbers, returning home to underline them in the plane-spotters catalogues.  The cycle tunnels into the airport I used then have been converted to car and taxi lanes – I don’t suppose anyone cycles to Heathrow Central now.

Living near Heathrow had some interesting social geographical dimensions to it.  Protests about aircraft noise and campaigns against night flying were launched further away from the airport than where we lived – in Kew and Richmond.  The reason why no one in our street would have joined such protest movements was simple – a lot of people around us either worked at Heathrow (a father and two sons three doors from us who were all fitters for British European Airways (as it then was), or were dependent on the airport for employment (the Hertz rent-a-car man who lived next door).  Even the jobbing plasterer and the jobbing builder further along got occasional work at Heathrow or at firms connected with it.

My daughter lives in the house that I was brought up in near the flight path.  Today the planes come over at 80 second intervals, but since Concorde was taken out of service there is nothing that interrupts normal conversation.  Family life goes on irrespective of the noise of planes.  When I was a child, though, I had difficulties in getting to sleep in relations’ houses where all was quiet, without the regular thrum of a plane coming in.  (Throughout this piece I have talked about planes coming in to land.  When planes take off in an easterly direction they turn off the line before reaching the house: it is only when they fly in via central London – which they do most of the time because of the prevailing wind – that they fly over.)  

I have been at Heathrow today for a flight to Hong Kong, and I am actually writing this whilst over Russia on that flight.  I have just left Terminal 5 – a construction that would be unimaginable to anyone standing on that piece of cinder ground near the north runway in the mid 1950s.  Perhaps because I grew up with Heathrow as a constant presence in my life it seems quite natural to fly from there.  Many people from Sheffield, where I now live, would rather walk to Manchester than fly from Heathrow – saying that the airport is chaotic, crowded, unlovable and to be avoided at all costs.  But the UK’s provincial airports such as Manchester and Birmingham have few long-haul flights (Birmingham virtually none) and are rapidly becoming the preserve of budget carriers. And whilst it is certainly possible to fly from both of them to virtually anywhere in the eastern hemisphere via Dubai or Helsinki, I would much prefer a direct long-haul flight than changing planes in the middle of the night somewhere that I don’t want to be (not that I’ve got anything against Helsinki – a lovely city).  British Airways should perhaps be renamed ‘London Airways’ now since its service for cities other than London is now virtually non-existent.  At one time or another I have flown from Manchester, Birmingham (or even Sheffield) to cities as varied as New York, Berlin, Paris, and Düsseldorf: now the only BA destination from Manchester is London.

I don’t know how many flights I have made in my life – probably well over 200.  But flying still has an element of romance to it, and there is always a little bit of excitement in arriving to catch a plane at Heathrow, just as there was for me when I cycled there to collect plane numbers and watch aircraft from all over the world when I was a child.

Lisbon, Portugal, September 2015 - Favourite City?

When people find out that part of my claim to some sort of academic reputation lies in the research I have carried out on European cities, they often go on to ask which is my favourite among them.  Over the years my view has changed.  At one time my answer would be 'outside the UK I have three favourites - Berlin, Lisbon and Paris.'  I am wondering whether in fact that should be narrowed down to one - Lisbon.  Perhaps that's because I am there as I write this.

I came to Lisbon, and to Portugal, relatively late in my career.  It is less than 20 years since I first visited.  But since then I find it difficult to count the times I have disembarked at Portela airport and got a taxi into the city, or been met by a colleague with a car.  (Since my last visit the metro has at last reached the airport, but I've not used that to reach the city centre yet.)  I have been fortunate to be involved in some significant research projects with colleagues in various Portuguese universities, particularly in Lisbon, and have got to know the city and its surroundings in part through their eyes.  That also involves going to places that other visitors would not find, being taken to authentic fado evenings, visiting buildings not open to the public, and meeting a variety of interesting people.  On this visit I have caught up with a number of colleagues and we have talked over plans for possible further collaborations.

But part of the time I have been here has been just to relax for a weekend before my meetings, and later in the day after they have concluded.  So why do I like Lisbon so much?  Here's a brief list of highlights of my current visit - most not being tourist-oriented activities.  

• Travelling the buses, seeing how people get up for the elderly and infirm, despite the press of people (most buses seem to have twice or three times as many passengers as they have seats for).  There is also a wonderful iPhone app that accurately lets me know when the next bus is due at any stop in the city.
• Travelling the 12 tram up above the Baixa district.  The 28 tram appears as a 'must' in every guidebook - and is always jam-packed with tourists.  But the humble 12 which does a one-way circular route carries ordinary residents, many of them elderly, up the narrow streets to their tiny houses and apartments on the side of the castle hill and in Alfama.  This is a more authentic Lisbon experience.
• Eating at the A Travessa restaurant, with tables around the cloister of an old convent.  There is no menu for starters: instead the chef sends out small dishes prepared from whatever has been freshest or most interesting in the markets of the city that day.  And although the restaurant appears in all the international guidebooks, there are many Portuguese eating there on the evening I visit.
• Catching up with emails while sitting in a little shaded square near the back of the Open University (the Praca Flores, or Flower Square), accompanied by small children playing, old men reading newspapers, and old women knitting and talking together.
• Taking the train out to Estoril on a sunny Sunday morning, along with hundreds of other Lisbon residents, and strolling along the seawall promenade to Cascais, followed by a plate of grilled prawns in garlic at a beachside restaurant - and a glass of white wine from Setubal.
• Taking a short cut from the Santa Apolonia station back to the city centre, cutting through the Alfama district, an area of few roads but criss-crossed by a dense network of stepped alleyways lying against a steep hill.  Ever since I first arrived in Lisbon I have watched the gentrification of the Alfama neighbourhood - an old Moorish district that lay outside the walls of the medieval city and whose name, with the Arabic 'Al-', reflects its history (as do the names of other Lisbon districts).  People have lamented the loss of the old - but gentrification in Alfama is a very slow process.  Families that have lived in the tiny and inadequately provided houses here are inclined to stay on and there are still many long-standing residents.  Yet I accept that there are signs of change - some houses with new tiled roofs, painted walls and well-fitting windows; and in the lower part of the neighbourhood there is a rash of small restaurants offering a tourist menu in five languages, with a fado performance included.  But the saddest sight in Alfama today occurs where the chaos, irregularity, and hidden and secret delights and corners of the neighbourhood confront the quays of the Tagus river: there the massive monolithic cruse liners moor for their few hours in the city, creating a wall of uniformity to close Alfama in from the rest of the world.
• Being taken to a horse riding centre just a few steps from the University of Lisbon and the stadium of Sporting Lisboa football club.  I had previously not known of the existence of this green space, surrounded by stables for numerous horses, right in the middle of the built-up area.  And nor had I known of the excellent restaurant, open to everyone and not just to those coming to exercise their horses.
• Taking the metro, which is spacious, clean and efficient.
• Eating pasteis de nata de Belem (custard tarts, which should be coated with cinnamon before eating), or indeed any other Portuguese cakes and confectionary.  

I will close this paean to Lisbon with mention of one specific set of artefacts in a museum: I try to go to see them as often as I can when I am in the city.  The Portuguese were the first to reach Japan by sea, and in the Museum of Old Art (the Museu de Arte Antigua) there are a set of screens painted by Japanese artists depicting the arrival of these people from an equal but different culture.  They were produced within the lifetimes of those who could bear witness to the reactions of both groups involved.  And they are a wonderful insight into the initial contact of civilisations, as well as being beautifully designed and executed works of art.  I recommend anyone to go to seek out the 'Namban Screens' - and the districts around the museum (Lapa and Santos) are some of the most relaxing in the city as well.

Concarneau, Brittany, France, August 2015 - Summer and Smokers

In some ways it is unfair to give the title 'Summer and Smokers' to a blog started in Concarneau, but there it is.  I'd like to make it very clear at the outset that I have nothing against Concarneau - indeed, rather the reverse.  What I have got something against is smokers - or at least, some smokers. I will explain shortly.  But let me start by extolling Concarneau, and then make the relevant link.

Concarneau is a delightful town in southern Brittany - a real mix of a working place and a tourist resort.  It is at the head of a gulf festooned with myriad small islands and reefs, and has been a major fishing centre for many decades - one of France's largest ports in terms of the tonnage of fish landed.  On one side of the harbour are rows of storehouses, chandlers, boatyards and repair shops for engines.  On the other side is the old town, surrounded by ramparts built by Vauban to defend the site against invasion (which generally, in Brittany, means by the English).  Seven-eighths of the ramparts drop straight into the sea, with the eighth part opening onto land via a bridge.  This old town - the ville close or 'enclosed town' - is now little more than a tourist attraction with lines of shops selling tourist goods (which generally means stuff that one doesn't need) along with bars and restaurants, but it has a very relaxed atmosphere with no one hustling aggressively for custom.  Outside the ville close, and on the other side of the harbour from the fish quays, lies the 'normal' town with its banks, regular shops, big square holding a major market on Fridays, and car parks.  And beyond that, along the indented coast to the west and north-west there are beaches, large and small, of clean white sand, swept by the tide twice a day and allowing anyone access to either the sand or the rock pools.  There is a broad promenade with sign boards providing interesting details on the history of Concarneau and of the various localities.  One of the earliest marine research facilities in the world is still operating here, and another sign tells of a Russian ship carrying cement that capsized in the bay and permitted the extension of the promenade using the solidified and otherwise unusable cement barrels as a foundation.  So I have very much enjoyed visiting Concarneau.

But on a fine day when everyone wants to outdoors Concarneau has the same problem as many many places around the world - or certainly around Europe.  Smokers.

Sitting in bright sunshine outside a bar for a coffee on market day, with tables close together, a family of four came to sit at the next table: two children - perhaps 2 and 5 years old - with their parents.  Before they had ordered their drinks the mother lit up a cigarette, and the father followed suit a few minutes later - with the smoke blowing directly away from their table towards the one at which I was seated.

It's now later that same day.  We are on the terrace of an idyllic restaurant looking over the sea; our table is one row back from the balustrade beyond which is a 5 metre drop to the beach.  Thirty minutes after we arrive a couple of well-dressed women take the table next to the balustrade diagonally across from ours (fortunately not the one next to ours).  Over the next two-and-a-half hours (it's a good, long French meal, taking all evening) one of the women proceeds to smoke 8 cigarettes, but her companion (perhaps a bit of a  lightweight) can only manage 6.  The light breeze blowing in from the sea spreads the smoke over a good part of the restaurant - although there are one or two other smokers at these outside tables, adding to the haze.  Nevertheless, the majority of diners are non-smokers who are affected by the actions of these women.  How can a non-smoker  avoid the pall of cigarette smoke?  Only by asking for a table inside in the otherwise deserted restaurant from which the setting sun and the rising moon, wonderful sights from the outdoor tables, would both be invisible.

The pollution of outdoor eating and drinking spaces by smoke is not, of course, confined to Concarneau: it happens everywhere.  With smoking bans indoors in most European countries outdoor seating has become the refuge or preserve of the smokers.  Perhaps us non-smokers should leave them to it and stay inside, but that would deprive us of the chance of fresh air (I say 'chance' for obvious reasons) and enjoyment of the scenery.  And in even the countries with the heaviest smoking rates non-smokers are in the majority.

Years ago I remember being asked by a student why life expectancies at birth for women in some European countries were no longer increasing (the normal circumstance elsewhere).   When I looked into it, the answer was the increased smoking rate among women, leading to the familiar range of smoking-related diseases.  According to the latest data, smoking rates are generally dropping but in some cases the levels are still remarkably high - and particularly for women.  I have sometimes joked that according to my observation of what happens there, in Greece it seems to be compulsory for women to smoke - so when I looked the most recent data up I wasn't surprised to find that in 2007 Greece actually topped the world league table for the average number of cigarettes smoked each year per adult - over 2700.  (In the present circumstances it might seem nice for the Greeks to be top of something, but this surely can't be a record to be proud of.)  I remember when Greece introduced a smoking ban in restaurants, but then declared that it would not be enforced because bar-owners and restaurateurs complained that they would go out of business if their clients couldn't smoke indoors.  The awful atmosphere in some cafes, restaurants and bars is one reason for non-smokers not to go to Greece.

It's over 30 years since France required bars to identify a zone for non-smokers (general initially close to the toilets) and later that extended to a total ban on indoor smoking.  The UK has banned smoking inside pubs and restaurants for some years.  It's interesting that in Switzerland it was the Italian-speaking Ticino canton that first introduced an indoor smoking ban, rather than the German or French speaking cantons.  Switzerland still has much higher cigarette consumption than either France or the UK, where average cigarette use is around one quarter that of the Greeks.

But what I am arguing for here, albeit in a small way, is the extension of indoor bans on smoking to outdoor areas of restaurants, bars and cafes.  Let's not have the air of the majority polluted by the habits of the minority.  Everywhere: not just in Concarneau.

  

Alfriston, Sussex, UK, July 2015 - The Changing Village

The first courses I taught when I became a lecturer were on ways of life in the countryside.  My doctoral thesis had considered how the growth of tourism affected village life, using areas in Switzerland and Italy as exemplars.  When it came to looking at what was happening in the English countryside I was impressed by a number of in-depth studies of particular villages, showing how rapidly change was occurring in the 1970s.  One book, by Peter Ambrose, was entitled The Quiet Revolution and looked at change in the Sussex village of Ringmer over a 100 year period.  Another was The End of Tradition by John Connell, dealing with communities in central Surrey.  The theme of these, and other, books (for example on communities in Lincolnshire, Hertfordshire, Suffolk, and in the Lake District) was that ways of life that had endured for decades or even centuries were coming to an end.



Two particular tendencies were apparent in these studies.  Firstly, where in the past a small number of landowners had held sway over most aspects of village life, there was now a form of 'democratisation' bringing a wider set of interests into play.  This, of course, was in large part brought about by the reduction in the scale of agricultural employment.  But the second tendency was for an increasing influx of residents who had no prior connection with the village, or with the land, and who were predominantly urban in their backgrounds, their employment and their social lives.  I heard Peter Ambrose lecture about his book, and in that he argeud that the pace of change had been greater in the 40 years from the 1930s to the 1970s than at any other period, but that things were now stabilising with a new regime.



I first visited Alfriston in Sussex at the age of 10 on a 'school journey' that had my class staying nearby.  I have become reacquainted with it over the last three years or so.  Coincidentally it is very near Ringmer - the village of Peter Ambrose's book.  And it seems to me that Ambrose did not foresee the continued rapid evolution of a number of English villages over the ensuing period.  Where Ambrose (and others) were describing places as adding a commuter function to their long-standing bases in agricultural and related sectors, the last 40 years have added a very significant 'leisure' function.  And in some respects that has become the dominant sector in many villages.    Castleton, in the Peak District, is an extreme case where there is now no shop selling ordinary foodstuffs, but instead every commercial premises caters to the tourist and day-trip market.



Alfriston is not so extreme.  It is certainly one of the prettiest villages I know anywhere in the UK, with a narrow village street lined with half-timbered buildings, a flint-built church set on a large green (the 'Tye'), a small tidal river (the Cuckmere) bordered by well-marked footpaths and trails, and the South Downs cutting the horizon in most directions.  Alfriston does still have a handful of shops catering for the neesds of local residents - a small newsagents, a ladies' hairdresser, and a general store cum post office.  But the last of these stocks a range of produce (at prices) that are in large part aimed at the day visitor wanting a souvenir of their visit to the countryside.  Beyond these three shops the other dozen or so must primarily be aimed at visitors - a specialist music shop, a second hand bookstroe with a specialism in books about the Bloomsbury Set, the headquarters of the sort of kitchen gadget shop where one scratches one's head as to what many of the items could possibly be used for, a couple of art galleries, a shop / display relating to a local vineyard, and a veritable cake-stand of tea shops.  Of the three pubs, the two which  offer accommodation are more frequented by visitors or those in search of 'gastro' meals.  And the commercial activities of the village are rounded off by a 'restaurant-with-rooms' listed in the Good Food Guide, and a 'Good Hotel Guide' hotel.

It is a charming combination - for a visitor.  After starting this note I saw that Alfriston was featured in the travel guide of the Guardian newspaper last Saturday (18th July 2015).  But I'm not sure what it must be like for a local resident.  I watched one of the local 'youths' in one of the pubs one evening - standing at the bar talking for an hour into a mobile phone because there was no one else to talk to: all the other customers were visitors eating fancy meals.


I guess many visitors would see Alfriston as an ideal place to live - as indeed it probably is for many of its residents: those with a good income, personal means of transport and so on.  Yet in the overall ranking in 2010 of deprivation levels across over 32000 local areas throughout England there were 20163 areas that were more deprived than Alfriston - but that meant that 12319 were less deprived.  In the 2011 census 55.5% of Alfriston households displayed some element of relative poverty against 52.3% for the south-east of England as a whole.  The dimensions of deprivation or poverty show up clearly in the national data: Alfriston has an admirably low crime level, and high levels of overall education and health.  But as in many rural areas access to services is very poor, and there are a perhaps surprising number of houses that lack central heating or are of poor quality in some other way.  These are not things that affect the middle class commuters, or the leisure retirees, with their high levels of car ownership (37% of Alfriston households had two or more cars), but they do influence the life experiences of the 13% of households without a car and with dependence on an infrequent bus service to Eastbourne and Seaford.


I am not trying to 'knock' Alfriston - far from it: I think it is a delightful place.  But the charms of Alfriston, and a thousand villages like it, mask some of the difficulties of rural living for a whole group of people - often those who have the longest roots in the locality. 


Those studies of village life made 40 years ago could now be brought up to date.  I suspect the period of democratization of village life those studies described has been overtaken by the strength of inward movement of newcomers, many of them of middle years or above and from reasonably well-off backgrounds.  They are the new leisured class and indeed it is to the tune of leisure activities that Alfriston and other similar villages throughout England now dances.


But while I am using the metaphor of music I should also confess why I visit Alfriston every year.  As part of that class valuing leisure activities I am here using the village as a base to attend the opera festival at nearby Glyndebourne.  And I know that means that I am part of the cause of change in the village.

Manchester, UK, June 2015 - An Equivocal View

Given that the city is only 35 miles from my home in Sheffield, it is perhaps inevitable that I visit Manchester quite a lot. Almost always my purpose takes me to the city centre, and I really don't know the suburbs at all well. So what follows is about the centre and the Oxford Road corridor past the universities.  And there is something of the provisional about this - but to tell the truth I really don't feel I 'get' Manchester or have (yet) managed to experience and display a sense of affection for it. And it's not just the fact that it was in the Granada studios in Manchester where my ambitions to be on a winning University Challenge team came to naught. (We won both our rehearsal matches but then lost the real match once the audience arrived and the cameras whirred.)

There are many individual elements to central Manchester that I greatly like - some of the restaurants in Chinatown, the Bridgwater Hall, the Manchester City Art Gallery. I have enjoyed visiting Castlefields, and Salford Quays (although I know they are in a different place administratively). I (perhaps surprisingly) appreciate the bustle and organisation of Piccadilly Station. And I am looking forward to visiting the recently reopened Whitworth Gallery.

But I still find the city centre difficult to 'read'. Streets lined with imposing buildings end in wasteland car parks.  Parts of the street grid around Portland Street are repetitious and anonymous. And despite having what I believe to be a very good innate sense of direction, I am too often surprised when I find where I actually am.  I don't feel 'at home' or at ease in Manchester in the way that I do in, say, Newcastle where the line of Pilgrim Street (the old A1) and the curve of Grey Street define whole related areas of the inner city.

There are certainly many fine Victorian buildings in central Manchester, vying with Glasgow in that respect. The western side of Princess Street provides a wonderful example of the variety of such architecture. But that is in a location where all the buildings are fully occupied and maintained.  Elsewhere what must surely be listed buildings have trees growing on the roofs and grass in their gutters; upper windows appear to have empty rooms behind them; and there is a generally scruffy appearance at ground level.  In the city centre only the Gay Village seems to display care and attention devoted to the built environment. Yet Manchester is undoubtedly one of the wealthier provincial cities of England - I assume that is the reason why there seem to be more street beggars and signs of homelessness here than elsewhere. But it's not those elements that give what I feel to be more of an 'edge' to the city after dark - perhaps there's more hard drinking here than elsewhere (although I feel the same sense of risk in Leeds late at night).

One Mancunian street, however, must be among the most learned in the world. I am talking about Oxford Road running out past two universities (Manchester Met and the University of Manchester) as well as the Royal Northern College of Music and also being the location of the Manchester Museum and the Whitworth Art Gallery. Yet Oxford Road is a broad and busy thoroughfare with very little of note for the public realm, and at its northern end, near the station, it betrays the low-level retailing and untidy appearance I experience elsewhere in the inner city. 

But today, at a meeting in Manchester, I've learned two related things about future plans for Oxford Road.  Firstly they are planning to narrow it, landscape it and create a greater sense of place and belonging for it.  That should reduce its anonymity and give it some character.  And secondly all the educational and cultural establishments along the road are going to produce a joint map and location boards instead of, as today, providing information only for their own institutions and ignoring the existence of others.  The Oxford Road corridor could take on a real identity.

Perhaps then my opinion of central Msnchester will become more definitely positive and less equivocal.

Wengen, Kanton Bern, Switzerland, May 2015 - Guidebooks

If I were to undertake another PhD I think I would like to study the ways in which guide books determine the views that foreign visitors have of the places and countries they visit.  It would need to be a comparative study, looking at guides written for a wide variety of national groups, because it seems to me that there must be huge differences in what is suggested as worth visiting, and in the presentation of places, to different tourist constituencies.

I can think of no explanation other than guide books and the related offerings of travel companies for the fact that tourism in the Swiss village of Wengen and the surrounding Jungfrau region has a remarkable proportion of Indians.  I have never experienced such a preponderance of tourists from that origin anywhere else in Europe.  But then, thirty years ago when I first came to the Bernese Oberland, I was surprised to find, in Grindelwald, menus in Japanese for the first time in Europe.  I have since got used to seeing large parties of Japanese tourists in many other parts of the continent - along with increasing numbers of individual Japanese travellers who are not in groups.  But big Indian groups are a novelty to me.

Grindelwald, Wengen and the Jungfrau region certainly count as some of the top European destinations for tourism  - and I can willingly confess that I have been drawn back to the area many times over the years. The Jungfraujoch is the highest railway station in Europe, and a journey up to it on a fine day is a memorable experience (as is the hole burnt in the wallet by the price of a ticket). But something that surprises me (observing from a comfortable room next to the railway line in Wengen) is how on days of dismal weather Japanese and Indian groups still crowd the trains. They will see little other than snow at Kleine Scheidegg where they have to change trains for the last section; they will emerge into the observation tunnel cut half way up the north wall of the Eiger to be surrounded entirely by mist; and at the very top they will doubtless find themselves in freezing cloud, with no views down to the glaciers, and little to take their minds off the altitude sickness that a proportion of  them will feel.  Yet I guess their guidebooks have told them that this is an absolute 'must' in all circumstances.

Wengen is  perched on an alp, several hundred metres above Lauterbrunnental, and is accessible only on foot or by rail.  There are no cars in the village, which is almost entirely dependent on tourism. The importance of Japanese visitors is seen in the fact that they have their own tourist information office.  But is  this so surprising?  When tourism started in this region of Switzerland it was the British who led the way and were the predominant group right into the post-war period.  There is an English church in Wengen (and another down in Interlaken at the gateway to the Jungfrau region). And why did the British come here? Because the John Murray guide told them to.

What would also be interesting in a study of guidebooks would be an analysis of places they do not cover. A few years ago I was in the Dolomites in Italy and was surprised to find that my fellow hotel guests were dominated by Americans who hardly featured elsewhere in the region.  They all seemed to be following a similar itinerary and one evening I asked to look at their guidebook - by Rick Steves.  It purported to cover the whole of Italy.  Yet about 50 pages were devoted to five tiny villages in Liguria which Steves obviously regarded as a 'must see'. (I agree that these five - the cinque terre - are interesting, but 50 pages seemed rather a lot). The only place recommended in the Dolomites was the hotel I was staying in - apparently because the owner was very friendly and spoke good English. And Steves made no recommendations whatsoever for anywhere south of Rome.  For him, and those using his guide, Naples, Pompeii, Herculaneum, Vesuvius, Sicily, Sardinia, Apulia and so on didn't exist. (I note that his web site does now include mention of some of these - but the cinque terre still take up a remarkable amount of space.)

And Steves didn't exactly educate his readers either.  One evening I commented to one of  the American guests that the peacefulness of Castelrotto / Kastelreuth (the Dolomite village in the now-bilingual Alto Adige / Süd Tirol region where we were staying) was gratifying after the conflicts of the past.  She looked alarmed - "Has there been a war round here recently?" she asked.  It became clear that her guide book hadn't even led her to realise the language(s) used in the village, or anything of the fascinating cultural and political history of the area.  To her she was in a comfortable, safe environment where Rick Steves told her exactly what to do, and where she could live in an American bubble.

Yesterday I caught the Swiss postbus down from the Trümmelbach Falls to Lauterbrunnen - to then take the train back up to Wengen.  I would guess that about 90 of us jammed on to a bus designed to take around 30.  Most on the bus were Indian.  I asked the Swiss man next to me whether this was usual.  His answer - "Yes, it's always like this.  It must be something in their guidebooks."

Badenweiler, Baden-Württemberg, Germany, May 2015 - Speaking German

I failed German O Level the first time I took it.  I think we all did - the whole class.  And that includes someone who went on to study German at Cambridge.

Our teacher, nearing retirement, had decided to adopt a new and untried way of teaching.  By the time of the exam we could recite by heart a long passage about two soldiers during the Second World War, but we couldn't either translate it or do anything else.  We were saved, in the first term of the sixth form, by a brilliant new teacher who got almost all of us through the resit exam in November of our first year sixth - and we then asked to continue being taught by him alongside our A levels, although we were not doing any further exams in German.

I have always been grateful to that teacher - for it is through him that I have become one of that small minority of people from the UK (a 2012 Eurobarometer Survey put it at 6%) who have the ability to have a simple conversation in German.  German is certainly not my best foreign language (without a doubt that would be French), but it also illustrates the law of comparative advantage.  That law states that it is better to do what you have the greatest advantage over other people in, rather than what you are best in.  Throughout my academic career I have been amongst a significant number of UK social scientists who speak French - but I believe that for some years I was the only UK geographer who spoke German.    Actually, I never exploited that as much as perhaps I should, although I did produce some research papers on Vienna and Berlin and had a research project with a German colleague comparing Japanese communities in Düsseldorf and London.  I also organised a couple of British-German seminars to bring students and researchers together from the two countries - and at one of them found myself having to give a speech in praise of the chef's cooking.

German is the mother tongue that is most spoken in Europe west of Russia, far more so than English.  Add Austrians and Swiss Germans in to the population of Germany and around 90 million Europeans speak German at home.  The figure for English is around 70 million.  Shortly after the Iron Curtain fell in 1989 it looked as if German might vie with English as the lingua franca for the continent as a whole.  I was at a migration conference in Vienna in the early 1990s where the official language was English but where a whole range of new colleagues from Eastern Europe, attending their first major international gathering, found it much easier to use German.   But the moment passed and English has become even more dominant.

The Eurobarometer survey I quoted earlier suggested that in contrast to the 6% of UK citizens who can hold a conversation in German, 56% of German citizens could chat to someone in English.    I am currently in south-west Germany - on the edge of the Black Forest - and those figures seem a little surprising to me. My experience over the last couple of weeks has been that a much higher proportion of Germans, even in occupations where they are likely to come into contact with foreign visitors, are monolingual than the data suggests.  The waitress in my present 4 star hotel, widely advertised in foreign guides; the train conductor on a tourist train; shopkeepers - none of these seemed to have any language other than German.

But tourist arrival statistics provide some reasons for this.  World Bank data show that, despite its size, Germany receives only about  one third as many foreign tourists each year as France - the world's premier foreign tourist destination - and is way behind Italy and Spain as well, and on a par with the UK.  Many of those tourist arrivals in Germany are from the Netherlands, simply passing through, and another significant group are from Switzerland and are German-speaking.  And by far the biggest tourist region in Germany is Bavaria - which I have not been visiting.  Finally, a lot of Germans holiday within their own country.

Badenweiler, where I am writing this, is a small spa town with no real equivalent in the UK.  The Romans knew the waters here, and there are superb remains of their bath house, wonderfully displayed. There are big hotels for those 'taking the cure', and a beautiful and well-managed park around an old castle which has views stretching across the Rhine into Alsace.  Chechov, dying of tuberculosis, came here but it was too late and he died here in 1904. Below the town there are vineyards with paths that invite a morning or evening stroll. All told it's a very German setting - and none the worse for that.

So I am enjoying being in parts of Germany that are surprisingly monolingual, and I am grateful to that teacher for enabling me to function here. But there is one interesting contrast between my monolingual hotel here and establishments of a similar level in the UK: in the latter a variety of languages are these days spoken - by the foreign staff they have to hire to overcome the shortages of trained British employees.