1990 Toronto

28.10.90

I sit in Tim Hortons, a fast-food place alongside the CN Tower.  It is empty but for me.  I have a huge coffee, a blueberry muffin and an apple muffin.  Melancholy rock plays.  The sun is bright and hot, the air clear and freezing.  Beside me, waiting, stands the huge CN Tower, concrete rearing up greyly.  It opens at 10; it is now 9.30am.

An unusual start to this journal: no Gatwick thoughts, nothing of the flight, of yesterday, yet.  But this is an unusual trip in itself.  I am staying with family.  After Greece, I must confess I had some qualms about this kind of thing.  No Gatwick thoughts partly because I don't want to get trapped into re-enacting past trips – and novels, even.  Of the flight – in a 767 – I will only say how short it seemed, how tiny this world is getting.  Things were exacerbated by a phone call on Sunday: mother ringing.  Since I spoke to her on Saturday (in the UK), speaking to her again felt as if we were only a few miles apart – a feeling aided by the excellent telecoms.

Saturday night was spent in.  The drive from the airport (the latter rather crowded and pandemoniacal) gave a great view of the city.  The house is beautifully situated by the lake.  An interesting, contrapuntal house, rooms and staircases everywhere.  My bedroom smells of pine – reminds me of my childhood home.  I sleep on a sofa bed, happily, like a stone [blueberry muffin – dough soft and stained purple like a bruise, an edible contusion].

Sunday spent with friends of the family.  We went out to their country pad, calling in on the McMaster Gallery on the way.  Good display of works by the "Group of Seven" – the defining artists of Canadians' self-imagining.  Exclusively (almost) landscapes.  The best definitely Thomson: a thick, almost impasto style, very intense response to the season, the rocks and the trees.  Others more derivative, especially of French Impressionists, and of Thomson.  Other displays were of Native American art – some quite delicate – and of Inuit – good stuff.  Nice setting amid pines, with windows opening out onto views quite cognate with many of the images.

Then on to the friends.  Their pad – in four acres – looking quite small from the outside, but it has four bedrooms.  It is all designer decorated inside – interesting use of striated colours – à la Seurat.  Very effective – and presumably expensive too.  Simple but good fare for lunch, served on an impeccably stylish country dining table with dried flowers, chunky glasses, elegant plates etc.  A stroll out to the adjacent church and graveyard, spoilt only by me putting my foot in it – literally.  Bloody dogs…

A drive back through the dusk showed Toronto at its best – as it does for many North American cities.  Contrariwise, driving in daylight the land is flat and dull.  North America does not connect: there is too much space.  Darkness joins things up, leaving only the million lights like galaxies.

Sunday morning I was up at 6am, and read Saturday's multi-part newspaper from cover to cover.  Incredibly parochial, ultimately rather trivial.  Journalism rather poor, design messy (ditto for the "City Limits" of Toronto).  What did emerge was how Canada was stuck in a slough: the land of opportunity was in recession, the economy screwed, and big political problems – especially re Quebec – brewing.  One interesting thing the bloke said on Sunday was how the verticalisation of Canada across to the US was taking precedence over the horizontal nationalism – hence Quebec. 

I woke at 6.30am today, then came into town.  Brilliant weather.  Walked around for hours, and now await the opening of the tower to get my bearings.  As ever, the skyscrapers look stunning in this weather, all glinting glass against the hard sky.

I am now at the observation level, facing north.  How can you do justice to these kind of experiences, ones which have no real equals?  Below me (sic), mid-town is spread out.  Steam emerges from their roofs like cotton wool (and from grills in the street – à la New York.)  Up to the space deck.  Interesting that even though you can lean out over space – over glass – it is not as vertiginous as you would expect.  Clearly it has to do with security, not just height – hence some people's fear of even ladders.  On the glass: "laminated riot shields: burglary resisting glass".  Looking down on the main floor: the roof the points of the compass marked.  And two men trolling around.

However, some pain (and sweaty palms) induced on the lower deck, looking down the concrete faces.  I think this is because there are steel ropes starting here and visibly going all the way, which means you can relate to the distance.  Yikes.

Back on earth.  I am now in the Boulevard Café on Harbord Street – Peruvian.  After the CN Tower, to Roy Thomson Hall for a ticket to tonight's concert – Toronto Mendelssohn Choir (Ralph Vaughan Williams' Dona Nobis Pacem, couple of Canadian pieces).  Slow service – computers again [fish chowder has arrived – great smell.  Yup, was utterly delicious – picante.]

Then a long walk in the perfect walking weather – bracing air, warm sunshine.  Out along Queen Street, towards Chinatown.  Bustly.  Up to Grange Park – autumnal mood.  Then past the Art Gallery – with one of the chunkiest Moores I've ever seen – truly monumental – up to the university, along College Street, up to here.  Quiet tired, warm (especially with the soup now). [Great salsa in the background; quiet, intimate restaurant – really cute little waitress – Peruvian]. Tamal verde nice, but not so good as the soup.  Lovely buzz here now.  This is my idea of a hol.  It is interesting how Toronto reminds me of Boston – especially last night when we drove through the city on the way back.  Toronto looked good then.

Well, big gap.  I'm now in the Roy Thomson Hall, having been back to the house.  After lunch, out along to Honest Ed's emporium – wild.  Inside, totally over the top – mirrors, lights – and wisecracks out of Christmas crackers.  I notice that most of the clientele are lower class and ethnic, and that some of the goods are made in Romania…

Then along Bloor Street, very picturesque.  Subway: rather dull but cheap – very tiny subway cars.  Along to the "World's Largest Bookshop" – stuff I must buy.  Walk down to St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts, visiting Mazzoleni Hall along the way – little doing.  St. Lawrence also rather quiet.  It seems there isn't a BAC/ICA/Almeida centre with bustle.  Out to the New Front Street – checking the opera (Monteverdi's "Poppea"), then a street car (cheap at $1.20) to "home".  Wine and snatched meal, cab (Indian driver – preferred Brits running India) to Roy Thomson Hall.  Quite nice inside.  Old people here.  

Inside the hall – very sober – greys everywhere, very spacious.  A design fault – very wide one of the seats, the middle ones of which are attainable only from the sides.  Wonderful glass reflector mushrooms à la Royal Albert Hall – but (sensibly) transparent.  And reflective: so in each a top-down view of the orchestra – looking like ants on a watchglass.  Toronto-Mendelssohn Choir (remember that Prom?) neatly turned out in grey and DJs.  Everyone with poppies (Remembrance Sunday soon).  Interesting programme: ex-Latvians Arvids Purvs and Imants Raminsh, plus Vaughan Williams.  Still very few attractive women.  Pretty full hall, especially for a Monday.

30.10.90

The cafeteria, Royal Ontario Museum.  Disaster, disasters at work – you turn your back for a moment…

Last night quite nice.  I nodded off for a while in the first half – rather characterless modal sub-Britten pieces.  Vaughan-Williams rather better – and the choir rather punchier – but still surprisingly lacking in electricity.  Odd start: five military chaps marched on and stood throughout the performance.

Long, full ride in a street car, then transferring to the subway.  Not too much walking today: my knee and hip (right) are playing up.  Having looked long and hard for a Thai restaurant (which I found) in Elm Street, I decided instead to try Csardes – Hungarian – instead.  Thai is too common an experience for me.  Cold cherry soup, pork goulash.  Former with whole cherries, cinnamon and lemon.  Taking the subway here, I'm vaguely aware of my name being called.  I ignore it, of course, but turn later to see the bloke I met on Sunday.  Excellent pork and sauerkraut goulash: rich, creamy and spicy.  Now trying palacsinta – apricot crêpe, and Hungarian coffee.

On to the Royal Ontario Museum, working through galleries of ancient civilisations; of evolution; of space.  The latter particularly impressive: I suddenly felt the full presence of those other planets, and of our kindred to them.  As ever, the whole business of stargazing got to me.  Frightening.  Lots of schoolparties – and indeed the place felt like an extension to school.

Then I walked up round Yorkville – nothing much here – then subway down to here.  Toronto just does connect sadly.  And it is so small.  Meeting the only Torontonian I know in the subway only seemed to confirm this.

31.10.90

The days are getting stranger and fragmented here – perhaps a reflection of the city and my reaction to it.  In to the city, then on to Druxy's ("my withers unwrung" springs to mind for no reason.)

Yesterday.  After my meal to the bookshop, where I buy some jazz books – Hentoff and Schuller.  Then back, and out for a quick meal before the opera.  Talking to the waitress afterwards, I find out that she lived for a while in Kingston, in London.  Strange: Toronto feels like Kingston writ large.

To the Canadian Opera Company, to see Monteverdi's "Poppea" (in English).  Small, intimate space with excellent acoustics.  Singers variable, but generally better than I expected.  A long (three hours) performance.  Quite raunchy – nice symbolism at the end for the great duet: Poppea bends down and blows out a ring of candles…

From Druxy's down to the City Hall.  The ice-levelling machine  is out on the skating rink. Unusual job. Then in to the Municipal Library reading a few Canadian mags – the Toronto mag quite good.  Nice ideas: best of (100s), and also "My Favourite Street".  Then up to Art Gallery of Ontario, a short wait for opening (at 11am – why?), then in.  Home, basically.  It is such a relief to find texture, depth, racination.  Walking in to the Impressionists hall is like diving into a cool bath of colour.  The sights, the names, the intent.  Wonderful.  Makes me long for Europe.  Then upstairs to "Group of Seven" – I still think Thomson was the best.  Other stuff quite good, though.  Also here is one of my fave Chagalls – "Over Vitebsk".  It always sends a shiver down my spine – it seems to capture that lost world of ancient Jewish Russia.  I hear Prokofiev's "Overture on Jewish Themes".

This trip has such light and dark in it; I wonder what I will do tomorrow?

Interesting hearing the French Canadian – very rough clipped – not musical a la Paris.  I am in the At Gallery of Ontario restaurant, having eaten avocado and crab, waiting for grilled salmon.  Reminds me very much of Boston's Museum of Fine Arts – same blue-rinse set, same type of menu.  Along to the Moores – a huge cool roomful of them – just like the Himalayas out of Kashmir.  Looking back along the main gallery, everything so still – only the people moving.  Amazing collection – mostly of original plasters given by Henry Moore himself.  The off-white reveals the organic nature of the forms – huge, gnarled bones.  Also in a side cabinet a collection of natural bits and bobs – homologous with his work.

Another exhibit: Durer – which speaks very directly to me with all its signs and symbols.  Plus a Victorian Canadian artist, colonising Canada with images.  A quick look round other parts – revisiting the yummy Utrillo "Maison de Berlioz", then round to the Grange – the original gallery.  Where I am greeted by a little old lady dressed up in servants' clothes – as all of the attendants are.  Quite nice – real  fires burning, real bread baked in the kitchen.  Do you like visiting old buildings? One asked me – ha!

I am now sitting beside the boardwalk at The Beaches, ancient joggers pounding by.  The lake – I was going to say "sea" – rolls in.  It reminds me of Venice, California, and Bali near Alit's Beach Bungalows.  The sun low to my right, brilliant clear sky.  Leaves everywhere.  Very peaceful.  Back to my home here, where two bedders are in full flow.  Call me unreasonable, but not only do I dislike the quotidian acts, but I hate seeing them done by others.  I flee to buy several newspapers – Globe, Star, Sun and mags.

Out to Tarragon Theatre to see "Lion in the Streets".  Alas, another unassigned show, which means I must get there early – about 7.30pm – and so no proper dinner.  After a pleasant chat with my Iranian taxi driver, I am early.  I decide to get a take-out pizza.  15 minutes becomes 25.  I eat hurriedly, burn my tongue, and am disgruntled.  Ah, life.  Theatre is typically fringe, lots of young people.

1.11.90

November, huh?  In a café at the corner of Bay and Edward, planning to go to a concert.  Orange and date muffin (reminds me of Christchurch Art Centre).  General poppy muzak in the background – I realise how it lacks that deep melancholy of Greek music – that I heard in my own melancholy travelling around Euboea.

Theatre last night was most enjoyable – even though the play itself was unsatisfactory and rather unachieved.  There was some good acting – and this is always a joy.  I hope that I too will write plays – I must start ramping up my intake.  Then last night's has got me fizzing with ideas.  

Lovely walking weather now.  CN Tower occasionally lost in clouds – a salutary reminder of its height.  Wandering here, looking in cafés and restaurants, I never feel – as I do all the time in New York – that something is happening, that matters of great import are being hatched or decided.  This is Toronto.

In front of me, a red-haired mannequin, moves its repetitive way, advertising the baking.  I am reminded of "The Language of Cranes"...and of Sacks' "Seeing Voices".  To Holy Trinity Church where the St Lawrence (ha!) String Quartet is playing, with baritone Braun, Coulthard, Ravel and Faure.  The church typical Victorian Gothic – Morris ceiling, wood everywhere – makes it feel like a village hall – or Aldeburgh's Jubilee Hall.  Strange, my mirror image across the aisle (I am second row back) is also scribbling away in a notebook – perhaps saying that I am scribbling away...Audience mostly geriatric.  Music making OK – acoustics too hard, echo too obfuscating.  Coulthard vaguely modal and old-fashioned, Ravel a little heavy, Fauré nice – beautiful stuff, complementing Verlaine's outpourings well.

Eat in the café downstairs.  Nice, old-world atmosphere – reminds me of St Alban's Cathedral café,  even though it looks nothing like.  I suppose it is the small city feeling – à la Kingston – these are the homologues (why do I keep using this word? - I know where I got it – the Evolution section of Royal Ontario Museum).  Situation of church interesting: hemmed in on all sides by huge office blocks – like Trinity in New York at Wall Street.

I sit in the Café of the Bay, that is, the Hudson's Bay Company – still going after all these years.  Now a mega emporium – reminds me of Macy's – it nonetheless possesses a continuity which is surprising.
Very pleasant – though I've done little today – partly because we should have jazz this evening.  I started the Hentoff book yesterday – excellent.  I feel that I'm really going to get into it.

[The cycle ride to Hatshepsut: was it really only nine months ago?  What a holiday – one that this, for all its interesting aspects, threw sharply into relief in terms of density of incident.  I just hope I can capture part of it.  And San Francisco – the hotel lobby – was I really there six months ago?  What a busy bee I have been – and a lucky one too.]

Looking at this book, it is clear that I have been shirking somewhat – nothing like the cascades of words.  But it has been very pleasant – though a pity that work has been blowing up at home.  Everyone seems terribly well-brought up here: they all have this irresistible urge to take back their crockery (ah! Grantchester, no more, no more…).

On the Boardwalk, out on a jetty (Zattere), looking back west.  A fuzzy, orange sun rolling down towards the Torontonian minaret of the CN Tower.  I hope they build that even bigger one in the Midlands…

2.11.90

At my Toronto "home", a routine - so beloved by me abroad – beginning to emerge.  Up, coffee, toast, apricot marmalade, read the papers.  The latter seem to me a crucial windows on the world they report on.  Out to Bathurst Street, to look at the Factory Theatre.  Back through the garment district, up Spadina Avenue (where we ate yesterday), then along Dundas Street to the Art Gallery of Ontario for coffee and muffin. 

Last night was good.  To a Chinese restaurant for buckets of hot and sour, then fine chicken, beef and prawns, then to "Top of the Senator", a jazz club on Victoria Street.  Long room, nice atmosphere – and, mirabile dictu, some attractive young women.  There with family until about 11pm.  Star turn Molly Johnson, sultry Billy Holiday type – best when belting – though inappropriately when dining so – "Summertime".  Combo (quintet) rather hard-driven – I already feel drawn into jazz.  Have announced that I have four years to master it.  We shall see.  Certainly I aim to visit a jazz club in London.

Round the galleries, re-informing.  Then down to Honest Ed's restaurants – if only to re-pay him for his salvation of the Old Vic.  The Italian looks dull, the seafood closed, so in to "Old" Ed's.  Looks a bit like an old run-down Dublin pub from the outside.  Inside is both spectacularly over the top, and quite full, many business people.  Mirrors; Tiffany lamps, coloured glass, singed portraits of minor (a few major – Patrick Macnee, no less, and B. B. King) stars – and everywhere red – screaming scarlet.  Gilt candelabra.  Food uninspired – monotonous stuff, but with better ambience.  Reminds me of that stop I made in the deep south of New Zealand, past Fox Glacier.  What a hol and a half; and only a year ago.  

Along to Spadina Avenue, then down to the waterfront.  No sense of either: the scale all wrong – huge flats rearing up, cut off from the city.  Incongruously, a US Naval ship (on the lake? Why?).  Happen upon the Power Plant, contemporary art place.  Pick up probably the most pretentious and incomprehensible blurb I have ever seen (on Tunga – Brazilian).  For example: "The paradox, however, is that there is no actual duality here, but rather a unique statement articulating the complexity of living in a world of dominant codes yet one where there is also fragmentation." Blimey.  It's this kind of thing gets pseuds bad names.  The work itself is daft but nice: using thousands of magnets to produce a metallic fungus – covered in iron filings at one point – like hairy sea anemones.  [Reminds me of the music machine when I was trapped in Hawaii – if only because of its amusing singularity.]

Ever one for symmetry, up to the CN Tower (upper deck closed because of high winds).  Interesting to see the same sight as Monday, but overlaid now with knowledge.  I recognise the places I've been to, the structure of the city.

On the way to the gallery, a group of young women with camera, mike and intent to interview.  "May I ask you a question?" one asks.  Trapped, I say: "You can try".  And ask she does: "What are you waiting for?"  Is god trying to tell me something?  I make the only possible response: "Godot?"  She clearly has no idea what I am talking about.  I pass on, a ship crossing in the night…

Back home, then out to the Factory Theatre – rather like Tarragon, Fringey, very busy, young, even – yes again – attractive women.  Stivell-like stuff in the background.  Large spacious hall, comfortable seats.  The play: "The Arab's Mouth" by Anne-Marie MacDonald.  I hope there are no Islamic fundamentalists around.

3.11.90

Still no wiser about yesterday's play – OK, "1001 Nights" – but "mouth"?

4.11.90

Whoops – not much written yesterday – for reasons that will be explained.  So, to return to "The Arab's Mouth" – enjoyable, though far too long (a third off would have made it a third better).  It changed tone rather abruptly – light to begin with, rather more serious at the end.  Also, various strands were not clear to me – one of the problems with drama is that you cannot go back and re-read – it has to be obvious the first time, and to most people.  This could be a problem for me.  Nice theatre, though, young crowd.

So to Saturday.  Overslept (through the alarm – aargh), then up and along to St Lawrence Market to shop for the evening meal – huge prawns, obscene steaks, and buckets of fruit.  Wine: white Zinfandel and Californian Cabernet Sauvignon.  Yum-mee.  Bacon sarnie at the market – lovely soft bread, sweet meat (stuff like this makes me glad I'm carnivorous).  Lovely morning – archetypal yuppy stuff.

Then along to Dundas to buy some Inuit stone carving.  Quite nice stuff – very tactile, crying out to be felt – but this is a dangerous game to start playing – you need plenty of dosh to do it.  Most interesting thing for me is the Inuit script.  Looks like logical propositions.  A chart shows how 15 or so basic shapes are rotated through 90 degrees according to the vowel sound of the syllable they represent.  Neat.

Finally on the road, first to Niagara-on-the-Lake.  The drive dull except for the view over Hamilton, a huge Pittsburgh-like steelworks dominating the skyline with its jaggednesses (and the right, on the way back, this looks like the opening of "Blade Runner").   Niagara-on-the-Lake pretty, tending to twee.  Looking like Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Then to Niagara itself, some way away.  I am not very impressed: no huge roar of an angry, primitive god.  The drop really quite short – about 100 feet – so no sense of huge careening masses.  Staring down into the water, going over in a barrel looks eminently survivable.  We go down behind the falls – what larks.  We are given bright yellow plastic (biodegradable) sou'westers, which sussurate noisily.  The hundreds of tourists look like some strange masonic lodge in their ritual robes.  Lovely smell of damp rock.  To the end, then standing sprayed by the water.  A vertiginous sight as the sheets of whiteness fall like powder, the eye drawn instantly down and down.  It feels like being in an eternally ascending lift.  Back and then out to the observation terrace.  Interesting effect watching a segment of water fall and shatter from top to bottom.  Still no thunder, no god.

A CD of Mozart we hear on tape in the car – Lucia Popp soaring in "Il re Pastore" (with violin obbligato), and Zaide – must get to know it.  Home to mega eats, and a very pleasant evening.  Up this morning at 6am, trying to pull back my clock a little (I shall be dead on Monday – and what a week ahead – HP Awards, OS Show, Munich…)

Long, lazy day.  A 6 km run along the boardwalk.  Lunch, and then out to the airport.  After take-off, the standard necklace below me, the CN Tower glinting like a stick insect in the night...

More destinations:

1989 New York

1997 Seattle

2019 Reykjavik

Moody's Black Notebook Travels

1987 Isle of Man

Maughold

If there are terrestrial visions of heaven, one of them must be the village and church of Maughold, the easternmost point of the Isle of Man.  The tiny hamlet, with its neat white houses looking as if they were built and painted yesterday, seems imbued with the architectural equivalent of moral wholesomeness.  It forms a kind of secular antechamber – as a good life in this world does to the next – to the sacred splendour which lies beyond.  The church itself is simple in the extreme: a short nave, and bare walls inside and out; simple like heaven itself, perhaps.  In a sense, the church and village exists as the concentrated focus of the paradisaical setting which enfolds them.

With the soft contours of Maughold Head at your back, the land slopes gently away before rising up again to the successive hills and distant mountains: North Barrule and the Snaefell itself.  As the sun swings round low from the south, its rays light up the grass from within, making the landscape glow with a preternatural greenness.  The tree and bushes case long, more than real shadows.  Over the fields, white biblical sheep seem to hover; and above them the pale blue dome of sky stretches from the mountains to the sea.  Nestling amidst it all is the village, the church and its circumscribed and circumspect graveyard.  In its primary colours and schematic perfection, it could be a scene painted by a child.

The church retains its intimacy because many of the most potent religious artefacts are found outside.  In a simple wooden pavilion stands a forest of old crosses and stones dating back to the earliest Christianity.  Some are simple cruciform, others more ornately decorated with typically Celtic motifs; others bear images and inscriptions.  Surrounded by them, there is a feeling of the weight of ages, together with a sense of durability.  These fragile, incised slabs of rock have endured all the centuries and their changes; they are proof of one kind of immanence.

The also bear eloquent witness to the ebb and flow of cultures which have swept over the island, and added to the rich racial mix.  As well as the early Christian crosses there are remnants of the Vikings.  Gone are the neatly ordered Ogham letters: instead, the stones are cut with jagged Futhark runes, an alphabet of swords and spears, and with images from the saga of Sigurd the Volsung.  It is an extraordinary experience to find the same story that Wagner took as the basis of his huge tetralogy, hidden away in the windswept corner of a churchyard on a forgotten isle.

In an area rich with so many histories, it is perhaps appropriate that the island's national badge, the three legs of Man, first made its appearance here.  The Maughold Village Cross stands without advertisement or ceremony alongside the church, a simple stone column surmounted by a crucifix and the characteristic design.  And it is unsurprising that folk tales abound in the parish.  For example, Berrey, the most famous of the many Manx witches, lived here.  On stormy nights, her coven would disappear under the side of North Barrule, from where their fearsome shrieks rose on the wind; and it is recorded that they danced around Maughold Church, trying to raise the eponymous saint from his grave.  It seems unlikely that they succeeded, surrounded as they were by such heavenly, overmastering beauty.

Point of Ayre

If Maughold is heaven, Point of Ayre is the Isle of Man's hell.  Its most natural approach is via Ramsey, a kind of encampment on the route to Hades, filled with a premonitory sense of doom and despair.  As you drive down from Maughold, it looks real enough with its long pier and empty, out of season beach; but close up it seems a sham.  The Manx Electric Railway stops here suddenly, as if it has made a mistake; the buildings feel too low, the streets too unconnected: as a town, it does not convince.  Instead, it looks like feeble window-dressing to hide what lies beyond.

What lies beyond is nothing, or the Manx equivalent of it.  From Ramsey to Point of Ayre the land is almost totally flat.  The contrast with the folded and bunched foothills around Snaefell is extreme.  For a region where everything seems to grow organically out of everything else, there is a sense of isolation here found nowhere else on the island.  As you look south to the misty outlines of the central mountains, it is hard to believe they lie in the same country.

In a sense, they do not.  That pervasive air of abundance found elsewhere on the island is absent in the north.  It is as if the land has been cursed and cast out from the tribe.  And yet, at first glance, the spreading countryside is as familiar and fertile as Norfolk.  But where Norfolk's rich earth seems to tremble with fecundity, here it lies inert and exhausted.  Paradoxically, too, this flatness hides rather than reveals: the roads huddle down between high hedges, as if afraid to look over the tops at the vacancy of what surrounds them.

Before reaching the Point of Ayre itself, you pass through the small village of Bride.  By the turning to the Point there is an unexpectedly large church.  It stands like the lonely Gothic house in a Hitchcock film; it seems to demand a leaden sky and forks of lightning licking around its dark silhouette.  Perhaps it stands there as a final call to repentance.

Thereafter the road begins to lose its gentle waywardness; as it straightens, it manifests its inflexible sense of purpose more nakedly.  And then, in a final gesture of contempt, it bends gratuitously through ninety degrees, hard by the ominously named village of Phurt.  It is a name to stand beside that other inhuman monosyllable, Dis, which Dante, that expert in damnation, uses of the same place.  It shares its sneering malevolence, its stamp of inexorable finality.

And then, without climax or resolution, the road just peters out.  This is the Point of Ayre.  Around about, there is nondescript wasteland; scrub and low bushes grow hither and thither in the poor sandy soil.  Rubble and twisted pieces of rusting scrap lie everywhere like a desecration.

As with any hell, the worst torture is to be tantalised.  Gazing east from the characterless shore, across a waveless ocean as blank as the land it laps and which infected it, you can see hover in the distance the soft velvety forms of the Cumbrian hills, a celestial vision of another, greater island paradise.  Juxtaposed with such desolation, it is enough to drive the devil himself mad with longing.

Across the heart of Man

 
From Douglas to Peel there runs a valley which cuts the Isle of Man in two.  Locally it is known as the Plains of Heaven.  It is not hard to see why: it represents a vale of tranquillity strangely disjoint from the brooding spirit of the rest of the island.  Perhaps this is simply geography.  Everywhere else on Man is coastal: you are confronted constantly with the sea; it exhausts you with its daily tirelessness, its infinitely subtle gradations of colour, its endless horizon.  Here, at the heart of the island, there is no sea; here is the negation of the Isle of Man's crabbing circumspection; here is a sense of space and peace.

Through the valley runs a road; on the maps it is called the A1.  This knowledge induces a curious kind of dissonance; the A1, after all, is the backbone of Britain, a name and a road which is woven into modern consciousness like a bright thread running through the weave of mainland history.  But this A1 is a small, tidy road; it carries no fleets of lorries, no hordes of car-borne travellers. It is a quiet country road winding its unhurried way through idyllic villages and farms.  It could be anywhere – or nowhere.

It is the same with the "A" roads which run across the island like a fine mesh of capillaries.  Each one bears a name already charged with deep associations: so the A3 is no longer the artery which pumps south-west London's suburbanites in and out of town as great diurnal gouts of traffic; instead it is a fragile link which runs the length of the isle from Ramsey in the north to Castletown in the south, with barely a car to be seen.

The Plains of Heaven have a similar disconcerting sense of false familiarity.  To see them is to know them, because they are manifestly England, or rather an idealised, exile's vision of England.  The immaculate whitewashed houses, the quaint, chocolate box thatching, the lush green which surrounds them as rolling, comfortable hills: nothing out of place, no element jars.  It is the epitome of civilised country living, a kind of genteel, gentrified nirvana.

But like much on Man, it is only skin-deep, only one of those vital appearances.  Along the A1 those appearances are kept up well enough: you pass through places with comforting names like Union Mills, Glen Vine and Crosby – all of them sounding like retirement villages created by canny property speculators.  But scratch those appearances and the real Man keeps showing.  The farms which line the road have disconcerting, heathen names like Ballawilleykilly, Cooilingel and Kennaa; their uncouth clusters of vowels and consonants suggest primitive oaths or curses.  These are the words and the names which the white cottages and their picture book thatches try to hide.

Further along the A1, the pretence can be kept up no more.  Just by the innocuous-looking village of St John's, under the watchful eye of the tree-covered hill of Slieau Whallian – from whose top witches were once rolled down in barrels spiked with nails on the inside – lies blatantly, for all to see, the very heart of ancient Man: Tynwald Hill.

Tynwald Hill 

If the Ancient Greeks had colonised the Isle of Man along with all the Celts, English, Vikings, Normans and the rest, they would doubtless have called Tynwald Hill the omphalos or navel of that world.  The hill stands as the manifest centre of the island, its political, spiritual and social pivot.  And it is here that all the strands of its history lead.

The Tynwald comes from the Old Norse: thingvollr, the field of the Thing.  The Thing was the Viking form of open air parliament; it dates back a thousand years.  The Manx ceremony, which takes place on Tynwald Hill around noon on Old Midsummer's Day, July 5, may therefore be the earliest surviving formalised legislature in the world.  The time and the date, like the name and its origins, reach back effortlessly beyond history.

Like bees to a rich cultural honeypot, the arcane and mysterious officers of the land make a splendid and often unique appearance there, trailing with them the huge baggage of tradition implicit in their existence.  The coroners, or crown men, of the island's sheadings are there: each of the six sheadings subsume yet smaller Manx districts, from the parishes and their treens, to the lowly ballas.

The Vicar-General is there, a lawyer, despite his title.  So are the seventeen Captains of the Parishes, vestiges of a past ever-vigilant against further invaders.  Yn Lhaihder, the Reader, is there to transmute the crude iron of barbarous English into the Celtic electrum of Manx, while two Deemsters are present as interpreters of law.

The House of Keys is there, the main legislative body of the island, with its 24 members: some from the sheadings, the others from Douglas, Ramsey, Castletown and Peel.  And with them, the rest of the political, bureaucratic and clerical superstructure which the Isle of Man has accrued during a thousands years of independence and idiosyncrasy.

All of these gather at Tynwald Hill in due appointed order, characters in a pageant which disconcerts the stranger because it is real not factitious; they bear their titles and duties proudly, like weather-beaten monuments covered in patches of brightly-coloured lichen, badges of immemorial age.  They ascend the four-tiered mound of earth which is the hill itself, while the church of St John's looks on across the grass.  Dubiously, no doubt, since the first Tynwald Hill was probably an altar to Thor.  But the church, like everyone else on Man, has reached an accommodation with these tricky currents of the past.

It is part of the attraction and paradox of Man that this density of history can exist in such a disarming setting.  With the quiet country road running alongside, a couple of pubs, and the neat, well-kept church, it could almost be any village green; the land around seems agriculturally rich but otherwise unspectacular.  Instead, the area is charged with a sense of the living past which is probably unmatched anywhere on the mainland, for all its famous and cherished traditions.  Like the Midsummer Day ceremony itself, Man remains a secret island, known to few outsiders, and understood by even fewer.

Peel

The small town of Peel on the Western side of the island is like some mysterious negative double of the capital Douglas.  Superficially they are similar: both have impressive sweeping bays; both have extensive harbours – Peel is Douglas's only real rival for deep water anchorage.  But in spirit and detail they are as far apart as their physical disposition suggests, contraries repelled to opposite sides of the island by profound and irreconcilable differences.

Douglas greets the rising sun, and is best seen at dawn when the sea and the sands catch the early morning light.  It is an open and optimistic town which seems to tumble down from the hills to greet its visitors.  Peel waits for the setting sun; its special time is the night.  It turns its back on England, on the public face of Douglas, and sits brooding on its plain, meditating on the sea and the misty realm of Ireland beyond.

Like suspicious country folk, it makes no concessions to strangers.  Its streets are bent and narrow; new-fangled devices like cars can proceed only with difficulty.  The scenes here have barely changed for centuries.  Its history, and the way it is taken for granted – the ruined old church converted to a public garden – stand in further contrast to Douglas, that parvenu among Manx towns, an artefact of the holiday trade, a symbol of all that Peel shuns.

And whereas Douglas is all that it seems – or perhaps even less – Peel has a secret, one best shared at night.  Moving down through the maze of tiny lanes, past old and unwelcoming houses, you find yourself on the seafront; there is no helpful flow to the streets – as in Douglas – to take you there: you simply enter the warren and trust the town's wisdom.

The seafront is not grand; and by night, the sea comes as a shock.  Or rather, the open sky with the barely perceptible movement beneath it comes as a surprise: Peel has no hints of this immensity in its almost wilfully cramped scale.  As your eyes adjust to this new darkness, something tremendous happens.  Due east of the bay, a great brooding mass looms out of the night, even blacker than the heavens.  At first, it looks like a mountain; then it seems more like a great ship, moored by the harbour.  Gradually, you make out the majestic shape of an ancient castle.

Built at the end of the fourteenth century, Peel Castle is somehow small in scale yet magnificent in its proud indomitability.  It stands on St Patrick's Isle; as its name suggests, this is a spot dense with history: St Patrick himself, together with the traces of neolithic weapons, Bronze Age daggers, Celtic buildings, Norse defences, and a medieval cathedral.

Back in the heart of new Peel, a small, unremarkable café nestles at the main crossroads; as night draws on, its windows pour out a yellow light through the panes streaked with condensation.  Inside, tea and scones and coffee and toast are served to the silent townsfolk before they make their short way home.  Perhaps in memory of the rich tapestry of its past, and of its precious lurking secret, it is called – with perfect and apt ingenuousness – the Viking Café.  Peel's past lives on.

Port Erin

Port Erin lies on the margin of two great seas: the Irish Sea flowing in from the west, and the great waves of the high moors which roll down from the north-east.  The road from Peel, which winds its solitary way across these moors, is the best entrance to the town, especially when the low-lying mists cling to its surface.  As you swing round the brow of the hill and descend towards the coast, the whole of the south-west corner of the island is laid out before you like a map, with Port Erin nestling under the brooding hulk of Bradda Head.

The moors represent yet another face of the Isle of Man.  They could easily pass for one of the great English open places such as Dartmoor.  Unlike their English counterparts, they seem unconnected with the surrounding land.  From the tidy small village of Dalby, halfway down from Peel, the road suddenly rears up over smooth hills into the moor's high plateau, which swirls around the foot of the South Barrule mountain in gentle curves, featureless except for the odd plantation.

For its full effect, the moor needs thick-spun mist.  Then it is another world – as if you have passed through a secret portal into a limitless desolate plain quite at odds with the landscape you have left.  The moor is devoid of habitations, perhaps cursed.  The roads wind on unbroken by markers, human or natural.  The contrast between the bare emptiness and the tamed and populated feel of the coastal strips is stark.

As a result, Port Erin and its surrounding villages comes as a welcome relief.  But the context is vital: the town itself is exiguous and self-effacing to the point of vanishing.  It is as if it has been sandwiched between the sea and the moor, squeezed over the centuries to a paltry line or two of houses huddling around the bay.

Just as the moors reveal themselves best in the mist, so Port Erin can only really be seen out of season.  With people it is simply another mock Cornish fishing village, with families sitting on the beach alongside the boats.  Without them, the place cannot hide; its empty cafés stare back at the unblinking sea, which rolls in over the vacant sands.  At most you will find there the omnipresent beachcombers, their metal detectors wrapped in plastic as they scan and dig, scan and dig, like some obsessive, wintering seabird. It is never clear what they are looking for, or if they ever find it.  Perhaps it does not matter.

Even out of season, on a wet, cold Sunday in November, there are small signs of life in Port Erin.  A café remains open at the end of the promenade.  Inside, there is the same cosy order found elsewhere on the island.  The simple but neat tables and chairs, the ornaments, the fading pictures, the unmemorable knick-knacks; the snug warmth and sense of refuge from the elements, the relentless sea, the moors and the mist.

Dominating the bay is the great shoulder of Bradda Head.  It stands like a sentinel at the entrance to the harbour, and is a reminder, a synecdoche, of the rest of the island's topography.  But it stands aloof, leaving Port Erin to fend for itself between the two great seas.

The Calf of Man

The quiet Port Erin and its equally retiring sibling, Port St Mary, have the air of second-rank Cornish coves. Beyond them, in the extreme south-west of the island, lies a vision of Cornwall which surpasses even the original: both in the way its romantically charged landscape contains within it a deep and melancholy sense of abiding futility, and also through the ultimately redemptive power of that landscape's beauty.

The first sight intimates something of this.  As you pass beyond the two Ports, and gain the brow of the hill at Cregneish, all at once the end of the island's corner appears before you.  The road winds through green fields divided up by hedgerows, themselves an idealised version of the fertile Cornish landscape.  The path descends steadily and unerringly towards a gently curved mound which seems to hover above the silver sea: this is the Calf of Man, an island to an island.

Like the grandest parts of Cornwall's coast, the headland ends dramatically with cliffs which lour over the black sea hundreds of feet below.  Rather than simply ending, it is as if the land has been torn off by some maddened giant.  The multicoloured strata of the rocks seem to confirm this: they buck and twist along the face of the cliff, sometimes rising up vertically in defiance of gravity and the laws of nature.  Viewing their tortured lines along the coast is to read a record of frenzied defiance, a sage set in stone.

At the shorelines, the shattered cliff-wall follows that wheeling thread of stratification.  In some places great ledges have formed, hanging out over the water as they are slowly undermined; in others, the rocks split vertically, causing jagged mounds to rise up from the ground, each mound a bristling sheaf of razor-sharp stone blades.  Elsewhere, the layers of rock veer at impossible angles like broken hands of a demented geological clock.  In the face of such gigantic and impersonal struggles, despair can seem the only adequate response.

Untouched by the millennial savagery of the sea and the cliffs, the Calf of Man counterpoises its serenity like a saint in benediction.  It floats in the manner of those improbable beatific visions which are vouchsafed at unpredictable moments to the abject, the oppressed or to those who are simply innocent.  Its contours are smooth like a venerable forehead, its vegetation looks like the soft green cloth of an obscure religious order.  It seems to stand in the same relation to Man, as Man does to the mainland; you could almost imagine that behind the Calf there is another, smaller island, even more beautiful, and behind that yet another, and so on to an island vanishing size and infinite perfection.

On the clifftop opposite the Calf, there is a simple café.  At first sight you might deplore this jarring note, this invasion of romantic grandeur by tawdry quotidian reality; and indeed, from the outside the café is as bland and unprepossessing as could be.  Yet with its dark, warm, and crowded interior, it stands as a tiny haven of humanity in this vast theatre of impressive but overwrought and uncaring nature; and it its peaceable hubbub, the quiet message of the Calf finds an echo.

Castletown

Castletown bears a grudge.  A century ago, it lost its position as capital of Man, ceding that title to the upstart Douglas.  It has not forgotten.  It cannot forget, because even in the tiny things, it is constantly reminded: Douglas is graced with a mayor, while Castletown, once home of the Lord of Mann himself, makes do with a chairman like any other place.

So now the town sulks at the end of the island, huddling away in its dowdy skirts like some dowager unwilling to mix with her social inferiors.  To see it at its most put upon and supercilious, visit it on a cold Sunday morning in November with only the wind and a fine drizzle for companions.

The main parade, for all the initial attractiveness of its unified yet varied architecture, is bleak and oppressive.  It looks unreal, as if the buildings were hollow shells, mere scenery for some long-forgotten drama.  Its empty streets are full of a tight-lipped, reproachful silence; the four-square Georgian windows gaze out of the intimidatingly neat house-fronts with unblinking stares of malice; the facades' original colours have turned into dull, unnameable hues: to look at them is like sucking lemons.  Everything says "go away".

All of the town has been touched by this bitterness.  The eponymous Castle Rushen is not grand and romantic like Peel's; instead it seems costive, unwilling to give even the time of day to the passer-by, and as hard and unbending as the edges of its steely-sharp masonry.  As if on purpose, it lacks Peel Castle's dramatic setting: it is content for the town's buildings to sidle up to it like old gossips, trading stories among themselves of the new and terrible insults offered by the outside world.

The harbour, too, is sullen.  You reach it meanly through an archway off the end of the parade; its appearance is unexpected and unwelcoming.  It looks like a huge muddy field, walled in for some inexplicable reason, with a few forlorn boats lying helplessly on their side, superannuated and inelegant sea monsters.  There is no apprehensible link to the sea beyond: the harbour, like all of Castletown, has simple disconnected itself.

Perhaps the town's position contributes to this overwhelming mood of desperate isolation.  It feels like the end of the island, just as Douglas is its natural beginning.  And as Isle of Man's most southerly point, it is easy to see it as the place where all that is black and heavy and bitter sinks down to, and settles, congealing slowly.

For there is a sadness about Man, a sadness which Castletown may pettishly exaggerate, but does not invent.  It is born of many things: the melancholy moods of the weather, the fretting relentlessness of the omnipresent sea, the subtle pain which is the inevitable concomitant of great natural beauty.  But above all, the deep sadness of the Isle of Man springs from its having seen and known so much, in such a little space and time, and from it now finding itself reduced – like Castletown – to almost nothing, to just a small, jewel-like island set in the grey, glinting sea, surrounded by four distant kingdoms and the swirl of memories.

The Isles of Man

The cartographers of the Ordnance Survey have a guilty secret: of all the lands they have charted, the Isle of Man is their favourite child.

Unfold Sheet 95 of the 1:50 000 Series and that secret is out: the map contains the Isle of Man exactly, both in length and width.  In effect, the whole of the great enterprise of the Ordnance Survey has been planned around this one necessity of scale.  No wonder, then, that the map itself should be a masterpiece of draughtsmanship, instinct with the grace and fine sensuous detail of a Henry Moore etching.  The contours shimmer over the surface like the glossy pelt of some noble animal; and such is the cartographer's art, that as your eyes pass over the loving delineation, your feel your body respond to the tug of the land's rise and fall.

This in part is the secret of Man's charm: it seems so knowable, so already known.  It is like one of the half-imaginary islands in some fantastic traveller's tale, whose paths you tread almost by instinct even while feeling uncomfortable with this unbidden knowledge.  Man seems to be one of those islands whose names – Tristan de Cunha, Ascension, Pitcairn – conjure up hazy images of familiarity combined with a haunting sense of otherness and distance.

It could almost be a textbook island – with its neatly ordered towns, roads, railways, airports, hills, lakes, plains and costs – got up for a child's edification.  Created to be easily graspable, it becomes a paradigm of islandness.  But the manifestly human scale of things is deceptive: paradoxically, this most compact of islands is one of the least immediately accessible, either intellectually or emotionally; it is simply too rich.  There are too many Isles of Man.

Man is the seaside spa-town of Douglas, the picturesque cove of Port Erin, the Cotswoldian verdancy of Maughold; it is Snaefell's Cumbrian beauty, the Norfolk wastes of the Point of Ayre, the Arthurian grandeur of the coast by the Calf, the Home Counties cosiness of the island's interior; it is the bitterness of Castletown, the aloofness of Peel, the mystery of Tynwald Hill; it is all and none of these.

Man is a land which flaunts and delights in its contradictions.  Travelling through it, it is clearly part of Britain; except that something terrible has happened to the names: the ballas and the gobs and the cronks cannot be reconciled with the almost military normality of the rest of visible society.  It is as if you have fallen into a parallel vision of the world: everything is exactly the same – almost…

It is this constant sense of dislocation which makes the Isle of Man such a rich experience.  It puts you back in touch with the pristine freshness of knowledge where nothing can be taken for granted.  The inhabitants of Man have always known this; a land conscious of the little people is a land which recognises layers of reality beyond the most obvious.  The island's motto says it all: quocunque jeceris, stabit – whichever way you throw it, it will stand.  It refers not just to the three-legged emblem of Man, but to the many-side land itself.

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Moody's Black Notebook Travels