At the age of 18, Patrick Leigh Fermor set out to walk from Rotterdam to Istanbul, equipped only with a stick, a rucksack, a notebook and a gift for languages. This is the first of the two retrospective volumes in which he recounted his adventures. It’s a ravishing book, which has made me revisit my own memories of various places on the Continent where he passed through in the 1930s. I lived and worked in Holland for a year in the 1970s, for example, and have loved the country ever since, so his summary resonated with me:

“I was astonished … at the impressive, clear beauty of the country and its variety, the amazing light and the sway of its healing and collusive charm. No wonder it had produced so many painters! And the Dutch themselves? Although we were reciprocally tongue-tied, the contact was not as light as these pages must suggest. On foot, unlike other forms of travel, it is impossible to be out of touch; and our exchanges were enough, during this brief journey, to leave a deposit of liking and admiration which has lasted ever since.”

He’s very perceptive about the Dutch landscape and its eerie, consoling familiarity — the product of centuries of painterly mastery. I lived in the East of the country, near the German border, but often drove to Amsterdam by myself on Saturday afternoons, and I remember vividly how oddly familiar the landscape seemed as I neared the coast, especially in the winter.

“If there is a foreign landscape familiar to English eyes by proxy, it is this one; by the time they see the original, a hundred morning and afternoons in museums and picture galleries and country houses have done their work. These confrontations and recognition-scenes filled the journey with excitement and delight. The nature of the landscape itself, the colour, the light, the openness, the expanse and the detail of the towns and the villages are leagued together in the weaving of a miraculously consoling and healing spell. Melancholy is exorcised, chaos chased away and wellbeing, alacrity of spirit and a thoughtful calm take their place.”

I’ve always thought that if I were deported from the UK as an undesirable alien, Holland is where I would settle.

Hah! NYTimes piece about Mail Goggles — a new service available only to Gmail users,

The experimental program requires any user who enables the function to perform five simple math problems in 60 seconds before sending e-mails between 10 p.m. and 4 a.m. on weekends. That time frame apparently corresponds to the gap between cocktail No. 1 and cocktail No. 4, when tapping out an e-mail message to an ex or a co-worker can seem like the equivalent of bungee jumping without a cord.

Some time ago I picked up on a terrific LRB article on ‘Cityphilia’ by John Lanchester. Well, now he’s written the companion piece, ‘Cityphobia’. Here’s how it opens:

Byron wrote that ‘I think it great affectation not to quote oneself.’ On that basis, I’d like to quote what I wrote in a piece about the City of London, in the aftermath of the Northern Rock fiasco: ‘If our laws are not extended to control the new kinds of super-powerful, super-complex and potentially super-risky investment vehicles, they will one day cause a financial disaster of global-systemic proportions.’

Lovely stuff.

Typically astute column by Simon Caulkin…

As Martin Wolf wrote in that well-known socialist organ the Financial Times, ‘either banking should be treated as a utility, with regulated returns, or it should be viewed as a profit-seeking industry that operates in accordance with the laws of the market, including, if necessary, mass redundancies’. Since the latter is unacceptable, he concluded, we have to move towards the former – and regulation must include pay above all.

In this context, the dire warnings from the free-market champions about the perils of interfering with today’s pay-setting methods take on a surreal air. If companies and shareholders really are ‘better at setting salaries than bureaucrats’, as The Economist affirms, given that ‘better’ has resulted in the almost complete meltdown of the global financial system, what, please, would ‘worse’ look like?

I’m glad he picked up the absurdity of the Economist’s frantic attempt to straddle the chasm between admitting the colossal screw-up that the banks have managed and avoiding the inescapable conclusions to be drawn from it.