Bookpacking’s Blog

Yesterday evening found Bookpacking playing with a new toy in the woodland of Wimbledon Common. Sometimes the simplest of things can bring hours of enjoyment, and for £4 or so, we bought a sturdy looking compass from the local Aladaddin’s Cave that is Lidl, and headed off into the bush. The little boy inside takes very little prompting to appear, and with our new low-tech gadget, childhood memories came rushing back of family camping holidays with mysterious forests that had to be explored and hills that had to be conquered.

As people look for cheaper leisure activities – eg not buying a few rounds in a pub and waving goodbye to £50 in a couple of happily hazy hours – Bookpacking is predicting an upswing in activities like hiking and camping. Already surfing a festival wave, more and more people are discovering the joys of life under canvas. There’s nothing like that first cup of tea (remember the slogan: “Tea; best drink of the day”?). Especially when you’ve faffed on for a half-hour to make it – this the very definition of deferred gratification.

And the great outdoors is, well, great. Last night, surrounded by birdsong and devoid of people, it was hard to believe this was Zone 3, well inside the M25. If travel is often about escape, maybe we don’t always need to spend a  huge amount on airfares to find such solicitous solitude if we look harder at home.

And best of all, some sharp compass work brought us right to the final waypoint of the evening, the Fox & Grapes. A cute pint (served only a few degrees below room temperature), we aren’t being obtuse when we say this angle is our favourite segment of the hiking experience; the very apex of this little Boys Own adventure.*

Hi-Tec walking boots from £40; Karrimor boots similar at Field & Trek sale; compass £4 Lidl; OS map typically £7; Berghaus waterproof from £50 online, or c. £150 for Gore-Tex lined; walking trousers c. £30 from Blacks.

* apologies, but what’s the point in having your own blog if you can’t insert the occasional awful pun?

Every cloud has a silver lining, and for the ever-frugal Bookpacking that means that there are some cracking deals to be found as the overextended find themselves making new holes in those ever-tightening belts, and even the well-placed cut their outgoings as they monitor the uncertain economy.

Sipping a delicious 80p cup of “Flat Broke” (8 oz. of filter topped with hot milk, doncha know) in Brick Lane Coffee, we might use that caffeine to suppress our appetite for a few hours. But even then, Marks and Spencer are at hand to offer the £2 meal deal (sandwich, drink, crisps).

And falling upon a couple of hidden-gem hostelries amongst the mews of Marylebone, we were reminded that Samuel Smith’s pubs are more common than you might think in central London. They are uniformly cheap; £1.88 for a delicious pint of bitter? Now that’s t’ good Yorkshire thrift lad.

AKA Leffe-Lovers’ Left Bank Lunacy

Bookpacking had the good fortune to find ourselves at a loose end in Paris this Monday evening with a partner in crime; having serendipitously bumped into a fellow vagabond, from the same part of the globe as ourselves, that we see every year or so in France through work. After a suitably literary event at Shakespeare & Co, we hit the bars of Rue Descartes where the lure of Leffe at only €4 per pint was to prove our undoing. We made our way unceremoniously up Rue Mouffetard to savour the Kwak in The Mayflower, as the full force of Belgian brewing was unleashed on our unsuspecting British bodies.

We were following in the footsteps of some of the biggest names in western literature; such as Papa Hemingway himself. The big man was scathing of F Scott Fitzgerald’s lack of drinking prowess, shamelessly shaming him in his famous Lost Generation memoirs A Moveable Feast. Despite writing the classic ‘Gatsby’, for anyone who’s done a bit of digging, Fitzgerald is publicly pilloried for eternity – thanks to the jugular-targeting judgments found in his competitive ‘friend’s’ diary. We can only be glad that the sole epistolary witness to Monday’s over-hydration is a little more discreet.

Leaving the high street and stepping into a great period piece pub like the Palace Bar, there’s a sense of time stood still. Patrick Kavanagh, Brendan Beehan and Flann O’Brien must have enjoyed the same sensation when they nursed their pints among the hacks in Fleet Street.

The tide of conversation ebbs and flows; groups come and go. Movement, yet rest. A laugh in one corner, a dispute in another. It’s all here: lovers; friends; colleagues; strangers; tolerated drunks. There’s stilted conversation with a visiting boss and the fizzy flirtation of the newly courting.

A television shows Man Utd v Inter Milan with the volume set low, while a fan revolves slowly far above, like a drone surveilling the friendly mob. Wars happen elsewhere and economic woes become abstract; any relationship problems recede as rounds arrive. The foetal familiarity of a welcoming pub keeps a bad world at bay; the only clue to any external environment is the TV’s gentle roar of a football crowd.

Old leather seats are ranged against the back walls, like a doctor’s surgery. A surprising amount of light makes its way to the back, silhouetting ornaments on the semi-partition: a horse and jockey are suspended over a hedge. The next obstacle for this frozen pair would be a hurling stick: not cod, for once.

Contrasting conversations swirl into one generic river of noise that lulls me into a pleasant lassitude. Then a raucous laugh cuts through the bar, jarring me wide awake – the crack of the craic. A gesticulating man on a mobile stands half-hidden by the partition’s opaque glass. His right side casts a large shadow on it, creating a bizarre mismatch with his exposed life-sized left.

Streams of chatter come from the islands of conversation spread across the lounge, pooling around me in a rich reservoir of dialogue. Two professors discuss the merits of a certain girl: presumably a pretty protégé. Fighting over teaching rights, perhaps? A serious tourist couple map out their mini-break over Lonely Planet. Endless variations of the same themes: X had a baby, Y passed away, Z’s stressed at work.

All the planet’s a stage, but tonight I’m an observer not a player. Alone in a crowd, the vignettes keep flowing, as I become one with the walls and fade into the Palace’s furniture.

Poland; Krakow; Kazimierz

Sometimes when you’re on the road you find yourself with a ‘favourite bar’ within a day or two of arriving. Cult bar Alchemia has been the hit that our Polish recommender said it would be, but joint top is Mlecvarnia. Very impressed they were too, when we mentioned we’d found this arty little hangout.

In a side street in the bohemian Krakow quarter of Kazimierz, it takes its name from the place where the farmers would take their produce to sell to the state. Or not, depending on how well the shambolic communist system was working that day. Accounts from those days tell how, despite the food shortages, a farmer could arrive to (reluctantly, because he could get more selling it privately) sell his allocation to the state only to find the official buyer hadn’t shown up.

Like one of the writers featured in the book “Beautiful Kazimierz” we’re lingering over a strong cup of coffee during another lazy start to the day. After last week’s snowboarding in Zakopane, it’s nice not to be doing too much. Good coffee in the morning is one of those smells which reminds you it’s good to be alive. We’ve not always been the best at good coffee in the UK (putting it kindly) but maybe we’re catching it up. Black gold when it’s good, fools gold when you are given a bad cup.

Last night we sampled the delicious Krupnic (pronounced as it looks) in here, which is honey-flavoured vodka, washed down with the locals’ favourite lager Zywiec (pronounced Ziv-eets). Travelling hand-luggage only means no space for bottles, but with so many Poles in the UK it shouldn’t be too hard to find some back in London.

One thing was very clear tonight: Winston Churchill drank an inordinate amount of  booze. Whisky in the morning, champagne in the afternoon and evening, and a little brandy to top it off. Carrying on the best traditions of the eccentric upper classes, he is supposed to have supped his way through 42,000 bottles of champers. Never in the field of human boozing had so much been drunk by so few.

At Notting Hill pub The Churchill Arms they were celebrating the big man’s birthday, complete with wartime uniforms and memorabilia. An impersonator with an uncanny resemblance gave one of the speeches that Churchill delivered so effectively. The right man at the time for the job of leading Britain against the Nazis, he was actually loathed in some parts of the UK.

Bookpacking mentioned his name to an elderly relative who remembered the Depression and the General Strike of 1926. She remembered her husband walking for an hour in the dark to get to a job he hated – crawling underground in precarious 18-inch high tunnels, with the constant threat of accident or explosion.

And when Churchill ordered the troops in, to deal with Welsh miners in 1926, she remembered his instructions to send “the rats back down their holes”. He also advocated the use of poison gas against Kurds and other troublesome ‘colonials’ around 1917. So while Bookpacking enjoyed the bonhomie tonight, we were understandably reluctant to carried away toasting the man himself, rather than his (WW2) achievements.

What really stuck in our mind tonight was a minor detail: a song playing in the background. A song ignored in the hubbub of beer-fuelled banter, as khaki-clad barmen with Sam Browne belts squeezed through the throng collecting glasses; young lads who’d have been called up in 1940. A song that – despite its cheery tone – was laden with pathos. A song that might be the last one you ever heard: “Wish me luck as you wave me goodbye…not a tear but a cheer…goodbye everybody, I’ll do my best for ye.”