What’s your line on co-respondent shoes?
Fine, if you are watching tap dancing in The Black and White Minstrel Show , The Great Gatsby or the Godfather franchise. But these days they are only worn by dissolute Baronets. The only sympathetic portrayal I remember is in the film version of Riddle of the Sands (1979) when Carruthers wears them when boarding Dulcibella. In a brief shot it shows his unpreparedness for the great adventure ahead.
I have been your Special Correspondent reporting from Ireland, Spain, Italy, Russia, France, Norway, Germany, Moldova, Ukraine, Belarus, Wales and Harrogate for almost seven years. A pity I wasn’t blogging in 2013 when I went by rail from Barons Court to Shanghai.
I followed in the railway tracks of Peter Fleming and, gosh, is he a good writer.
“The days seemed all the same ; the hours shared with the horizon a quality of remote monotony. But of course every day was different, internally or externally. The first, for instance, was uncomfortably hot; but on the second morning the platform at Sverdlovsk, where they shot the Tsar, was whipped by a raw wind. For two days thereafter it was as if we had run into November over-night.
The Urals were left behind and we crawled across the Black Soil Belt, where on the hedgeless and forlorn plains man and his beasts were dwarfed to the merest microscopic toys, and each little group of figures seemed a pathetic, unavailing protest against the tyrant solitude. The skies were dark. Rain lashed the streaky windows, and when we stopped at a station the wind made a desolate supplicating sound in the ventilators. In the villages very old, very hairy men, standing in thick black mud, stared up at us, from force of habit, without curiosity. Usually it is difficult to stop looking out of the windows of a train, however monotonous the landscape. You think ‘I will read now’, but for a long time you cannot take your eyes away from the window … At any moment those dull empty miles may show you something that it would be a pity to have missed. But here it was not like that; here there could be nothing worth waiting for. A grey cold blight had fallen on the world.”
Peter Fleming, almost ninety years ago, evokes Russia today. Here are some of my rather dull pictures from 2013.
If the world becomes safe to circumnavigate I’d like to do the trip again but in winter.