Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
waste paper. And finally they have to promise to shoot Ronald. When these conditions are met, McDonald's
should be allowed to operate in Europe, but not until.
The main square in Salzburg, the Mozartplatz, was quite astonishingly ugly for a city that prides itself on
its beauty - a big expanse of asphalt, as charming as a Tesco car park, one extraordinarily begrimed
statue of the great man, and a few half-broken benches, around every one of which was crowded a noisy
cluster of thirteen-year-old Italians in whom the hormonal imbalances of adolescence were clearly having a
deleterious effect. It was awful.
What surprised me was that I remembered Salzburg as being a beautiful place. It was in Salzburg that
Katz and I met Gerhard and Thomas, in a bar around the corner from the Mozartplatz, and it was such a thrill
to have someone to dilute Katz's company that I think my enthusiasm may have coloured my memory of the
city. In any case, I could find nothing now in the old town but these wretched souvenir shops and restaurants
and bars whose trade was overwhelmingly non-local and thus offered about as much charm and local colour
as a Pizza Hut on Carnaby Street.
When I crossed the river to the more modern right bank, I found I liked Salzburg much better. A long,
quiet street of big houses stood overlooking the Salzach and the views across to the old town were
splendid: the ancient roofs, the three domed spires of the cathedral and the vast, immensely heavy-looking
Hohensalzburg fortress sinking into the low mountain-top at its back. The shopping streets of the modern
town were to my mind much more interesting and appealing and certainly more real than their historic
counterparts across the river. I had a coffee in a Konditorei on Linzer Gasse, where every entering customer
got a hearty 'Grss Gott!' from every member of the staff. It was like on
Cheers
when Norm comes in, only
they did it for everybody, including me, which I thought was wonderful. Afterwards I had a good dinner, a
couple of beers and a long evening walk along the river and felt that Salzburg wasn't such a bad place at all.
But it wasn't the Salzburg that most people come to see.
Vienna is a little under 200 miles east of Salzburg and it took all morning and half the afternoon to get
there. There is this curiously durable myth that European trains are wonderfully swift and smooth and a
dream to travel on. The trains in Europe are in fact often tediously slow and for the most part the railways
persist in the antiquated system of dividing the carriages into compartments. I used to think this was rather
jolly and friendly, but you soon discover that it is like spending seven hours in a waiting-room waiting for a
doctor who never arrives. You are forced into an awkward intimacy with strangers, which I always find
unsettling. If you do anything at all - take something from your pocket, stifle a yawn, rummage in your
rucksack - everyone looks over to see what you're up to. There is no scope for privacy and of course there
is nothing like being trapped in a train compartment on a long journey to bring all those unassuageable little
frailties of the human body crowding to the front of your mind - the withheld fart, the three and a half square
yards of boxer short that have somehow become concertinaed between your buttocks, the Kellogg's
cornflake that is teasingly and unaccountably lodged deep in your left nostril. It was the cornflake that I ached
to get at. The itch was all-consuming. I longed to thrust a finger so far up my nose that it would look as if I
were scratching the top of my head from the inside, but of course I was as powerless to deal with it as a
man with no arms.
You even have to watch your thoughts. For no reason I can explain, except perhaps that I was
inordinately preoccupied with bodily matters, I began to think of a sub-editor I used to work with on the
business section of
The Times.
I shall call him Edward, since that was his name. Edward was crazy as fuck,
which in those palmy pre-Murdoch days was no impediment to employment, or even promotion to high
office, on the paper, and he had a number of striking peculiarities, but the one I particularly remember was
that late at night, after the New York markets had shut and there was nothing much to do, he would
straighten out half a dozen paper clips and probe his ears with them. And I don't mean delicate little
scratchings. He would really jam those paper clips home and then twirl them between two fingers, as if
tuning in a radio station. It looked excruciating, but Edward seemed to derive immense satisfaction from it.
Sometimes his eyes would roll up into his head and he would make ecstatic little gurgling noises. I suppose
he thought no one was watching, but we all sat there fascinated. Once, during a particularly intensive
session, when the paper clip went deeper and deeper and looked as if it might be stuck, John Price, the
chief sub-editor, called out, 'Would it help, Edward, if one of us pulled from the other side?'
