Reading the woods and the water

A few years ago, I followed a blog written by a man called Nick Hunt. The blog was about a journey he was undertaking across Europe; this, though, was not just any journey but a walk, from the Hook of Holland to Istanbul, which he was doing as a result of having been inspired by the late, great Patrick Leigh Fermor, who had walked the same route as a young man and who later wrote about it in three books, A Time of Gifts, Between the Woods and the Water and The Broken Road, the last of which he did not live to conplete and which was published posthumously.

After Nick completed his walk, it wasn't long before a publisher got in touch. The blog became a book, and last year (not long after the publication of The Broken Road, in fact), it hit the bookshops under the title Walking the Woods and the Water. Having enjoyed the blog, I was looking forward to the book and I am happy to report that I was not disappointed.

This book gives us what could be described as a behind-the-scenes view of modern-day Europe; the continent may appear to be somewhat homogenised nowadays, but the Europe that he walked through was anything but. He stayed with people he'd met online via a couch-surfing website, and later is amazed when people he stays with offer to call their friends in the next village to get them to offer him a bed for the next night; on an individual level, the people he encounters are for the most part generous and friendly.

Groups of people are perhaps less so; Slovaks are rude about Hungarians, Romanians are rude about Hungarians and Bulgarians, while Hungarians are rude about just about everyone who isn't Hungarian. These are old forces at work.

Indeed, we see in this book a continent still reeling from the ravages of history - not just the Second World War and the Cold War (which hang over Paddy's books like storm-clouds on the distant horizon) but centuries of it. The bit where he crosses the border between Austria and Slovakia is particularly good; once he's across, everything - even the smell - is different, for this is not only the old Cold War frontier but also the even older boundary between the Germanic and Slavic worlds.

Modernisation is there too, as shown with the Dutch and German cities that were flattened in the War and whose old medieval centres that Paddy saw are long gone, replaced by pedestrianised shopping-precincts. Elsewhere, the Danube has been tamed by the building of vast hydroelectric dams and the Bulgarian coast has become a line of concrete holiday-resorts. The author does not enjoy walking through seemingly endless suburbs either.

But that is only a part of the story. This, rather like a book I read a couple of years ago about another writer's walk between the 1066 battlefields, is about taking things at a slower pace than much of modern life allows, about allowing oneself to gradually absorb the changing atmosphere on the journey from place to place. It's not all pleasant but it can be vivid (his description of the aridity of the huge, empty horizons of the Great Hungarian Plain remained long in the memory after I'd finished the book) and it is never dull.

Being inspired by the journey someone else took decades previously, the concept itself is not original but that doesn't matter so much; many fine travel-books are all about following a journey first made by someone else. I once read somewhere that the age of discovery is never over when you are the discoverer, and I heard somewhere else that every journey is new to the person making it for the first time. Nick Hunt was fortunate to be in a position where he could walk in Paddy's footsteps, and we armchair travellers are just as fortunate to be able to read about his journey.

Cocktail hour (part one)

I don’t go in for cocktails very often, and when I do I usually opt for a whisky-based one like a rusty nail, but my current preferences are gin-based.

We have recently come into ownership of a bottle of Cointreau, which in turn prompted us to wonder what cocktails we could make to use it up. This, by the way, has happened before in our flat, where we sometimes end up owning fairly random liqueurs which we then have to use up by figuring out what cocktails they go in. Shortly after moving into our flat we had to Google crème de cacao in order to find something to put it in, which we then served to guests at a house-party. It’s a hard life.

As for Cointreau, I found an answer by way of the works of one of my favourite writers, the late Patrick Leigh Fermor. By happy coincidence, Tom Sawford, the man whose website is a great online source of all things related to the great man who everyone (even those of us who never had the pleasure of meeting him) simply calls Paddy, was thinking recently of what fans could have to drink while reading Artemis Cooper’s biography. Paddy could drink most men under the table even after his ninetieth birthday and his natural curiosity about so many things extended to alcohol, so there would be much to choose from based on references to drinks in his books.

Tom’s choice presented itself when he travelled to Cluj in Transylvania to meet with Nick Hunt while the latter was quite literally following in Paddy’s footsteps by walking across Europe from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople (as Paddy, ever the philhellene, always called it). Obviously they had to toast Paddy’s memory, but where should Tom and Nick go for that drink? And, more crucially, what should they drink? They decided to consult Between the Woods and the Water to see what Paddy had done when he was in Cluj. Here’s what he had experienced in 1934:

“An hotel at the end of the main square, called the New York – a great meeting place in the winter season – drew my companions like a magnet. István said the barman had invented an amazing cocktail – only surpassed by the one called ‘Flying’ in the Vier Jahreszeiten bar in Munich – which would be criminal to miss. He stalked in, waved the all-clear from the top of some steps, and we settled in a strategic corner while the demon-barman went mad with his shaker.”

The cocktail that Paddy and his friends enjoyed in Cluj remains unknown as he did not actually mention what it was (and the New York Hotel, now the InterContinental, was closed when Tom and Nick visited so they couldn’t go inside to find out). However, Tom was able to contact the Vier Jahreszeiten, which still exists, and obtain the recipe for the flying – two parts gin, one part Cointreau and one part lemon juice (in fact, a white lady) topped with champagne – which he duly posted on his blog.

The happy result of this here in East Finchley over the past couple of weeks has been several very satisfied dinner-guests who were greeted with a flying cocktail on entry.

Further research has shown that one of what David A. Embury defined as the six basic cocktail recipes – the sidecar, to be precise – contains Cointreau too, this time mixed with Cognac or Armagnac. So we’re not short of ideas.