Post-modern railway architecture: Liege
Two weeks ago Kraftwerk played a week long residency at the Tate Modern. Tickets were much sought-after. It encouraged me to revisit their music. Normally this would have meant digging out tapes and my tape recorder from the basement, dusting them down and connecting them up the hi-fi. These days we have Spotify (more about them later). I enjoyed a whole evening of synth-driven Krautrock and realised how much I liked them – especially their songs about motorways and train journeys.
A propos of this I found myself on a long train journey last week – when I actually went past a rather dated set of train carriages shunted into a siding with the immortal words Trans-Europe Express emblazoned on the side – (and I thought the TEE was apocryphal). These days we have ICE, Thalys and Fyra (the less said about that the better). They are comfortable fast and modern. The only draw back is that they are far more expensive than cheap airlines.
My journey from Brussels to Nuremburg (and back) was fast and comfortable (though with too many changes – one of them with a four minute turn around at Frankfurt – which was kind of tight). Previously my travels to Nuremburg have taken me over the Eiffel, a hilly area on the Belgian border. But this time, coming from a different place I had the joy of travelling along the banks of the Rhine for I guess an hour and a half– from Koln to Bonn, Koblenz and most of the way to Mainz. We also passed through Liege and Aachen.
It was a beautiful journey passing through many places I still intend to visit. This is a historic trade route. I have long wanted to travel it - on a slow boat, preferably a goods barge plying its way from Rotterdam up river. Still the view from the train gives a good impression. Very wealthy mansions along the riverside, castles on the tops of bluffs to protect the trade routes and vineyards planted at impossibly steep angles up the hillsides. Contrary to everything I know about agriculture they plant in vertical lines as opposed to horizontal ones – which should help reduce soil erosion – still what do I know compared to hundreds of years of practical experience. It would be a photographer’s delight – if one weren’t travelling at 150+ km/h + and it wasn’t raining.
I was hoping to buy a good novel for the journey home. German bookstores – even those at train stations- have a surprisingly wide selection of English language books – and at competitive prices. Often Murikami is well-represented. He has a big following in Europe – I even saw a Dutch (or was it German?) language Murikami diary last year. I hadn’t read his latest opus yet and was half hoping to find it. I like his magical realism based in a post industrial society: all the other magical realists I know seem write about pre-modern societies, so its good to feel that something ‘magical’ can still happen in our over-planned technological societies. But the last book of his that I read ‘felt a bit like all the others’ and I was hesitant to go buy the new one – but everyone I have spoken to says it is really good. Turned out that the book store at Nuremburg BH didn’t have any books that interested me (crime and romance mostly), so from Nuremburg to Koln I sat down to read the latest annual edition of the 200 page guide to the world of organic farming, produced by FiBL and IFOAM . I’m a sucker for stats. There’s plenty of those here – and reports and analysis of developments in the world of organics over the past year. Some of the reports I have seen before (we previewed them in Ecology and Farming over the past year) – but there’s still much that I didn’t know:
The US eclipsed the EU as the largest market for organic produce in 2010
The UK and Ireland are the only two EU countries where the recession has led to a dip in organic sales
Overall sales of organic produce in the EU rose by 9% in 2010-11- despite the recession
Scandinavian and Germanic counties continue to be the leaders in terms of market share
The share of organic land in Belgium rose by 20% last year (now there’s an interesting story line worthy of investigation) and in Ireland it went up by 13%. It's always interesting to find out whether such changes are led by subsidies or markets. While subsidies are important (to compensate for – temporary -yield losses) they tend not to be sustainable.
I do find a copy of IQ84 at the bookstore at Koln station, but by that time I am so engrossed in the world of organic statistics that I decide to save it save it for a rainy day.
Industrial railway architecture: Koln
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