what you get here

This is not a blog which opines on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers to muse about our social endeavours.
So old posts are as good as new! And lots of useful links!

The Bucegi mountains - the range I see from the front balcony of my mountain house - are almost 120 kms from Bucharest and cannot normally be seen from the capital but some extraordinary weather conditions allowed this pic to be taken from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel in late Feb 2020

Wednesday, June 11, 2014

Let the trumpet sound!

My guide/anthology on Romania is now ready – number four on my website - its called “Mapping Romania – notes from an unfinished journey” and can actually be accessed directly on the link embedded in the title
As far as I’m aware, it’s a unique guide and not only for Romania! I’m actually not aware of any other E-book which tries to penetrate a country’s soul (as it were) by giving such immediate access (through hyperlinks – 400 of them) to books, blogs, paintings, music, photographs, for example.
Not that I’m an expert on E-books – in fact, truth be told, I;ve never even looked at one!! Up until now I thought they were just (rather bad) substitutes for the real thing – but I can now see their potential…
To complete the guide in time for my daughter’s arrival I had to leave unread about 30 books which had arrived since I started the work some 4 weeks ago. One of the first I picked up at the weekend was Paddy Leigh-Fermour’s The Broken Road - the last part of the famous trilogy of a walk through Germany, Austria, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria in the early 1930s which was, however, transcribed into two books in the 1970s and 1980s and finished posthumously just a year or so ago. I had waited for the paperback version to be published and eagerly picked it up from Bucharest's English Bookshop in April.
Yesterday I reached his chapter on Bucharest – so moving to see the city and some of the characters he bumps into painted in such a vivid manner 80 years later – but as fresh as he had just written it (which in a sense he had!). By coincidence, the New York Review of Books arrived in my (electronic) mail this very morning and with an article assessing Paddy’s writings as a whole and posing the question whether he is our greatest travel writer.

Overnight I had realised that I had forgotten to put Nick Hunt’s occasional blogposts during his journey following in Paddy’s footprints  into the list of “goodies” which I had given recently as a “taster” for the guide. 
I have noticed, however, that this hyperlink does not appear to be working in the pdf file. My apologies – I clearly need to check them all – and put a final version online – in a few weeks!
In the meantime Nick Hunt’s After the Woods and Water blogposts can be read here. Obviously someone who is walking several thousand kilometres is not hugging a laptop with him but, somehow, he was able to post a few thoughts. Only one, however, in Romania - and that in the Retezat mountain peaks

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