Over the hills, under the moon - and off the beaten path

Selling a house should be regarded as just a transaction. That, at least, is what one of our more unsentimental friends told us.  He is probably right, actually. Yet, as we packed up our now-sold townhouse in the mountain village of Antraigues-Sur-Volane in Southern France, we found that the cardboard boxes stacked in our living room were not really enough for the task. They were meant to transport objects, but we were trying to pack something else as well - almost twenty years of life lived in this place. The real estate listing described our house as "a charming two-bedroom property with traditional features." It was not wrong, exactly. But it also did not come close. This has not just been our vacation house. Over the years it became something more - a real home away from home, if that is not too strange a phrase.    The rhythm of returning each summer made us feel, somehow, that we belonged here, at least a little. Though we were never full-time residents, the vi...

Last night was our first night in Lisbon.  We had just arrived after a journey of about thirty hours, and we were sitting on the balcony of our apartment in Alfama, looking out over the terracotta rooftops that slide down the steep hill toward the Tagus. We were completely finished. Then, from somewhere in the alleyway below, fado started. We had chosen Alfama partly because of fado; the neighborhood is where the music comes from, and we have loved it for years. But knowing this and then actually hearing it drift up from the street on your first night, while you are sitting on a balcony in the dark looking at the river, is a different thing entirely. We went out to find it. A woman was standing in the doorway of a café a few streets away, eyes closed, singing to guests who had gone completely quiet. We stood outside and listened. We could not understand the words. It did not especially matter. Fado is mostly about loss; lo...

My main focus - just now - is to keep my lips sealed, while I lie, floating on my back, in the middle of the Canal St Martin in Paris. The place I just duck into is absolutely no azure swimming pool, but rather an industrial canal cut through the city center, where swimming for the last hundred years has been strictly forbidden And for good reasons! The river flowing through Paris has been severely polluted, making it possible to contract skin infections, or develop gastroenteritis if you ingest the water. Not speaking of leptospirosis, or rat disease, which is transmitted via rat corpses or urine!   In lieu of all this - why am I this Sunday splashing around in the canal with a happy group of Parisians? One thing is the heat, but the main reason is: Because we actually can! For the last hundred years wild swimming in Paris waters has been strictly forbidden under pain of a fine (or pain of sickness!), but this Sunday and in this small part of the Canal St Martin, it is allowed for...

While Michael is out roaming around Greater London, I spend a lot of time at the locks on Regents Canal, which runs just a block from the flat in Islington, where we are staying.  I often walk along the canal but mostly, I just sit, doing some reading or some knitting. There is always something to look at, ponder about, or be entertained by. Yesterday when I was sitting on my bench, a man set up his fishing gear, threw the line, and shortly after caught what turned out to be a perch.  It was a fight for him to get it ashore, but he put it immediately back into the canal.  When I asked him why, he told me he had been fishing at this bank since he was 12. In his younger days, he needed meals. Now he was just doing it for sport, and he showed me how and where to place oneself while fishing according to the stream, the noise, and the wind. The story of his life came after this information. He was a builder and told me he was quite relaxed. The only people he didn’t like...

Yesterday we embarked on a pilgrimage to London's White Cube Gallery to view the 'Finnegan's wake' - the new exhibition of work by German artist Anselm Kiefer.  Passing through the pristine antechamber of the White Cube, all glowing white plaster and polished concrete, felt like approaching some great cathedral.  Entering the first gallery space, we were plunged suddenly into an ashen underworld.  Kiefer's large-scale paintings hung on the walls like ancient tomb paintings, muted greys and blackened earth tones layered in his signature impasto style.  Moving through the exhibition, we wandered as if lost in a labyrinth made of fire and rubble. Images of scorched earth evoked the horrors of Europe's 20th-century history. Other canvases featured more vertiginous and vaulting imagery, but even these more aspirational paintings were rendered in ashen, elegiac tones as if any dream of transcendence was foreclosed.  Throughout, Kiefer's use...

  Is there actually a place more beautifully strange than Venice in the winter? The tourists have gone home. The streets are quiet in the way that streets in a city of this size are almost never quiet, and when we walk across the small bridges and along the alleys this weekend, the only sounds are rain on cobblestones and our own footsteps. We are doing the giro d'ombre this evening; moving between the small wine bars that serve cicchetti , the Venetian version of tapas, with an ombra , which is a glass of wine so small it feels like a suggestion. Baccalà on polenta. Calamares. The rain outside the window. We are in no hurry. Walking back along the canals later, the water goes completely flat and the lights from the old buildings sit in it perfectly, upside down, as if there is a second Venice below the surface going about its own business. A city built entirely for tourists turns out to be at its best when the tourists have left it in peace. We are, technically, tourists. But...