A Time of gifts

My last (but one) blog was about Patrick Leigh Fermour, an English travel writer (and much more) from the 1930s. While researching the background for that article I found out that the third part of his trilogy of his epic journey by foot from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople in 1934-5 had been recently and posthumously published. I promptly went out and acquired a copy and have just finished reading it. It is perhaps the most compelling of the three books. Partly perhaps because he is travelling in more exotic lands (Romania and Bulgaria – turkey hardly gets a look-in – maybe he was suffering from travel fatigue by the end). During this part of the trip eh gets to stay with shepherds, charcoal burners, students, a British Consul and a ‘hotel de passe’. He visits the opera in Bucharest and nearly drowns when slipping off of a cliff path into a deep rocky pool on the Bulgarian coast. What a rich life he led. He culminates his diaries with a voyage to Greece (where he was to spend much of the rest of his life) and a ten day (or so) sojourn on Mount Athos. He only reclaimed the notebooks on which he based this book some thirty years after the event (he left them with a Romanian love, and they had no contact until the grip of the iron curtain was loosened). The book leaves me wanting to visit several of the villages he describes to see how much they have changed in the intervening eighty years.

Wageningen's arboretum

I recently had my own Time of Gifts (the title of the second book in this series) a long overdue trip back to Wageningen to visit friends and business associates. I came bearing gifts but embarrassingly returned with far more: vegetables and soft fruit from two different allotments, cherries from a local fruit grower, (nine different varieties of) beer from a friend who spends winter evenings brewing (bringing beer back to Belgium always feels like bringing coals to Newcastle) and an unwanted home brewing kit (alas too late for this year’s elderflower crop but good for next year’s). I even had to turn down a bread making machine as I feared cluttering up my kitchen with paraphernalia that would remain unused – although the offer did inspire me to bake bread after returning – for perhaps the first time in more than ten years. I had lunch and beers with several other entrepreneurs I used to hang out with several years ago – telling each other stories about our business plans and pain in the ass clients (those that don’t pay for three months or make unreasonable demands). All in all it was a wonderful few days- enhanced by being surrounded by tall stand of waving grasses and occasionally spotting a herd of laughing Amazonian blond Dutch women cycling through town or the wood, doubtless to some rendez-vous thy they had arranged several weeks ago . All in all a wonderful few days marred only by a falling out with someone I regard as one of my best friends whose hospitality and company I regularly enjoy on these trips. One hopes that that can be healed with the passage of time . It must have taken me an hour to unload all the gifts from my car when I got home – a week later I still haven’t fully unloaded the burden of the argument that we had.

My friend's 'prize-winning' allotment