Excerpt:
Spartan accommodation has the advantage of not being a distraction. It also turns you outwards rather than inwards. The film Lost in Translation featured Americans stranded in a luxury hotel in Tokyo. Much of their alienation might have disappeared if the characters played by Scarlett Johansson and Bill Murray had moved to more modest quarters, forcing them to go out on to the streets and mingle with Japanese people, rather than viewing them as comical aliens.
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A spartan Shangri-La
By Harry Eyres
Published: July 10 2010 00:20 | Last updated: July 10 2010 00:20
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| A rundown house in the Sierra de los Filabres in the Andalucía region of Spain |
When I was a child, we always went on holiday to Scotland. These were not the kind of holidays advertised in contemporary travel brochures; no waving palms, cocktails on the beach, warm southern seas, mild Thai curries served by girls in sarongs. Instead we were headed for a land where people sprinkle salt on their porridge, where sheep nibble the grass on windy golf courses, where, if the rain does not fall, the sea-mist rolls in off the North Sea. I could not wait to get there. The sleeper train up to Inverness could not have been aiming for a more desirable destination if the carriages had been marked Shangri-La.
As an adult, I travelled often to Greek archipelagoes, taking the ferry from Piraeus to whichever island beckoned, knowing there would be somewhere simple to stay, hills to walk, the wine-dark, briny Aegean to swim in. Then I discovered a remote corner of Spain where I could rent a whitewashed house with a small garden of hibiscus and fruit trees and no mod cons for weeks on end at a peppercorn price.
One thing all these holiday destinations had in common, I recently reflected, was spartan accommodation. In Scotland the floors were linoleum and the water from the bath taps came out brown and peaty. In Spain I shivered taking cold showers on winter mornings. I sometimes shivered on winter afternoons, huddling round the estufa with a blanket on my knee.
I don’t suppose that spartan accommodation was something I consciously chose – rather, it was something that came with the territory, and the budget. But spartan or quasi-monastic accommodation has its advantages. The point of going to Scotland, or the Greek islands, or Spain, was not to rest one’s head on the most expensive pillow imaginable, to use exotic bathroom unguents or to loll on scented cushions but to be outside, to walk on springy turf or heather, to take in the incomparable views, the richness of bird life in places where the balance of life and species had not been tilted too far in the human direction.
Spartan accommodation has the advantage of not being a distraction. It also turns you outwards rather than inwards. The film Lost in Translation featured Americans stranded in a luxury hotel in Tokyo. Much of their alienation might have disappeared if the characters played by Scarlett Johansson and Bill Murray had moved to more modest quarters, forcing them to go out on to the streets and mingle with Japanese people, rather than viewing them as comical aliens.
I recently spent a few days in the Dordogne at a music festival organised by the Johann Hummel fanatic Ian Christians, under the banner of the travel, music and wine company Orpheus and Bacchus. It was also an exercise in spartan sleeping. As Ian’s charmingly low-key but high-powered wife Sharon put it: “There is a monastic aspect to the accommodation because the emphasis is on intellectual and social richness.”
The rooms at Le Faure are not uncomfortable but they are simple. I didn’t hear anyone complain about the absence of telephones or TVs or cushions. Quite the opposite; a South African doctor, who had flown all the way from San Diego to be immersed in Hummel and gently marinated in St Emilion, described the place as “an island of sanity”.
The guests didn’t complain because they were the kind of people who would rather be active than passive. Being active meant listening to live chamber music, performed with passion by artists such as the Chilingirian Quartet, the great Mozartian and Hummel exponent Howard Shelley and the excellent group The Chamber Players; and not just knocking back goblets of local wine but going to châteaux and the cool limestone cellars of St Emilion to see how it is made. Above all, it meant convivial meals marked by animated discussion.
Conversation was delightfully lubricated by both the music and the wine – although I was rather disconcerted the first evening to be instructed to open a bottle of champagne to toast the “new Conservative government”. Levon Chilingirian deftly rephrased the toast as one to the people of England, for not having given a majority to any party. Later there were conversations about the poetry of WB Yeats, the Knights Templar and abstruse forms of psychotherapy.
Much discussion centred on Hummel, presiding genius of the festival. Hummel had the misfortune to be a contemporary of Beethoven but to aspire to a Mozartian grace that was going out of fashion. I feel he was best when not trying too hard; the criticism levelled at Mozart by Emperor Joseph II – too many notes – applies more to Hummel. Meanwhile, nightingales, orioles and warblers sang in the woods behind the house, and a cuckoo produced his two-note call – spartan, economical, just right.
More columns at www.ft.com/eyres
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