Happy Christmas!

 

I’m hopelessly late with my conventional Christmas Cards so this is a feeble attempt to compensate. I hope some people will tune in here on purpose and some by accident and that everyone will accept my greetings and best wishes and the hope that you’ll have a wonderful festive season. My wife, Penny, and I are taking up the amazing deals offered by French railways and are taking a week out in Avignon. We thought a Christmas away from everyone and everything would make a change. We’re looking forward to it and although away from friends and family I shall be thinking of everyone with, mostly, lots of love.

 

Penny thinks I may have misjudged this website because I whinge too much which is bad PR. I disagree. I know that I’m lucky and privileged but at the same time the life of the freelance hack is a contra mundum sort of deal in which one is constantly battling against organisations, establishments and the faceless ones. H.L. Mencken once said famously that the role of the journalist was “to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable”. One way of doing this, I think, is to share a bit of one’s experience and that means exulting in the goods and grumping at the bads.

 

So I thought I’d begin with a down and end with an up. The down is that I almost exempt banks from my Christmas message of love and good will. Banks seem to me to be a potent symbol of the world’s ills. The other day at Crewe Junction I was running short of cash and tried to get some out of the bank’s hole in the wall. No luck. Insufficient funds. Or something. On limping home I remonstrated feebly with my so-called bank manager. Ah yes he explained. I was over my over-draft limit and despite our earlier conversation about contracts and outstanding unpaid monies (why do they always say ‘monies’ and not ‘money’?”) the ‘lending department’ wouldn’t accept my word and needed copies of my book contracts. So I spent much of yesterday trying to fax pages and pages of garbage about such things as my subsidiary rights in territories from Antigua to Zimbabwe. I hope it’s helpful. This is the fourth time in the past year that the bank have not believed me when I said that there was “a cheque in the post” And I have been a customer of the bank for over forty years.

 

Nevertheless Happy Christmas everyone, including bankers. But I include bankers reluctantly and only out of deference to my Christian upbringing. Perhaps bankers are lovely people. Banks, however are…well…Happy Christmas bankers.

 

And here, on an altogether more uplifting note, is the piece I wrote after Penny and I went to Venice. It’s an ode to joy I think and therefore an appropriate Christmas message. Enjoy it; act on it; Happy Christmas!

 

 “It is a hundred years since the birth of J.G. Links.

 

Not many people know this and, alas, not many people have even heard of Links. I say ‘alas’ because he was, in his day, one of the great life-enhancing figures and he has left behind one enduring legacy which deserves a place in every intelligent person’s intellectual armoury. This is a little book called “Venice for Pleasure” which authorities such as Bernard Levin and Jan Morris thought the best guide book to any city ever written. They should know and  I’d be amazed to see them proved wrong.

 

Links was born in Cricklewood and christened “Joe”, both of which rather embarrassed him. His father died young so J.G. had to leave school early and take over the family fur company. He was a good furrier. In fact he must have been very good because he eventually came to hold the Royal Warrant as furrier to the Queen. This brought him prosperity and the opportunity to indulge a number of mostly short-lived crazes and enthusiasms. Before the war he was a champion water-skier, ski-ing around the Mediterranean. After it he took up flying. Together with the prolific and successful popular novelist Dennis Wheatley he decided that crime novels were terrific apart from the dense passages of prose. Accordingly the two of them compiled a series of crime ‘dossiers’ with nothing but incriminating telegrams, dodgy photographs and blood-stained paper-clips. One of them, “Murder off Miami” sold 250,000 copies.

 

For years he and his wife Mary Lutyens, daughter of the great architect and a leading authority on Ruskin and Venice lived in a mildly sepulchral flat just north of London’s Hyde Park. There Links dispensed charm, erudition and industrial-strength dry martinis. In “Venice for Pleasure” he tells us that “Curiously enough, the late Giuseppe Cipriani, founder of Harry’s Bar, revealed that no vermouth at all was used for its dry martinis, but dry Italian white wine”.

 

The other day my wife and I put this to the test. Sitting in the rather pokey, even drab, downstairs of Harry’s Bar hard by the spot where the flying boats used to land, we ordered a couple of dry martinis which came in what one would have to describe, depending on whether one was an optimist or a pessimist, as tiny tumblers or enormous shot glasses. They seemed to have emerged straight from the freezer, uncomplicated by ice, olive or a twist and almost entirely composed of gin. The only other ingredient, however, definitely tasted like Vermouth not “Italian dry white wine”.

 

We taxed the waiter with the Links-Cipriani diktat. He scoffed. What;’s more he produced a memoir by Giuseppe  as proof that Links got it wrong. Maybe so. I firmly believe, however, that Links didn’t get things wrong. I think Giuseppe did indeed tell him that he made his dry martinis without martini and that it was a sort of leg-pull. Cipriania was rather given to such things and wonderful though J.G. was, one has to admit that, especially where his beloved Venice was concerned, he did rather invite one to pull his leg.

 

I digress. Digression is allowable in Linksland. It is one of the aspects of his book which makes it so attractive. The attention span is short. The focus is the Serenissima but within that canvas the gaze is often distracted and darts hither and thither. The book is, after all, called ‘Venice for Pleasure’ and ‘pleasure’ implies a certain butterfly-like lightness of touch, a fondness for being distracted by alternative entertainment.

 

The book is essentially constructed as a series of walks. Dawdling through Venice with this guide in your hand is like being shown round his estate by a favourite uncle. Links knew what he was writing about. Every year he and Mary stayed at the Danieli Hotel. They came three or four times a year and they spent a week or two on very visit. For years they paid the full price, then one day he saw a special offer which meant that the Danieli could be enjoyed for significantly less than he usually paid. After much wrestling with his conscience he succumbed and took the cut-rate. When the Linkses arrived they were greeted by their friend the general manager with the words “We are all so glad that you have at last taken advantage of our  special offer. We could never understand why you insisted on paying the full price when it was not necessary”. It was a story Links enjoyed telling.

 

The choice of the Danieli is significant. J.G. may have chosen it because his hero Ruskin used to stay in Room 32. Everyone stayed there. However I suspect it was chosen because it can claim to be the most luxurious hotel in town and in one of the best positions overlooking the lagoon on the Riva degli Schiavoni just down from San Marco and the Doge’s Palace. The Linkses did not slum. “Venice for Pleasure” is not a Rough Guide. J.G. was not a “Lonely Planet” man.

 

For this reason, according to one of his former publishers, some travellers today resent the tone of his book. They find it condescending, patronising and unduly knowledgeable. I personally am not bothered by any of these, not least because most of the pleasures described are completely free, being enjoyed simply by walking along the public thoroughfare, or within the compass of even the badly off, namely the contents of churches and art galleries. But there’s no escaping the fact that Links enjoys a touch of luxury and is not that keen on the common herd.

 

My wife and I stayed almost next door to the Danieli in the recently refurbished Londra Palace. It has almost the same view as the Danieli and we were given a magnificent room overlooking the water and three floors up from the one in which Tschaikovsky composed his fourth symphony. We felt suitably pampered which is desirable, if not essential, if you’re going to do Venice with J.G.L.

 

The bulk of the book is arranged as a series of four walks. “This”, he tells us as the beginning of the first, “will suffice to include almost everything most desirable that the city itself offers”.

 

You get a sense of the man’s style very early on when we (he always writes “we”) arrive outside the Academia, one of the world’s great galleries. “One of the most interesting things about the Academia is that just outside it lies the only café on the lower reaches of the Grand Canal. A visit would therefore be essential even if the Academia were not there”. This does not mean that he fails to describe the Academia and spend some worthwhile time inside, Nevertheless a balance needs to be struck between the pleasures sitting about, eating, drinking and people-watching and the more serious business of art-apprecation. A little later in another café contemplating one of le Corbusier’s favourite views he considers, with us, whether or not to go and see the Tintorettos in the Scuola S. Rocco which Ruskin considered one of the three most precious buildings in the world. He lets us make up our own mind – he always does – but he advises: “We may well be asked on our return what we thought of these Tintorettos and it would be unthinkable to visit Venice without seeing them. Never let it be said that I suggested such a thing. I only point out that the stairs are steep, the pictures , though wonderful, profuse and that they will still be there tomorrow, and indeed, on our next visit to Venice”.

 

This is one of the many things I like about the book but which others apparently find “elitist”. It assumes that we will return. If it were a once-in-a-life-time experience we would have to see everything and there would be less pleasure. This is a guide for recidivists.

 

On this occasion we did not have the time to follow each one of the four walks step by step and so, as he says is allowable, we took little pieces from each one. I included one of two absolute musts which I (and I suspect he) could not leave Venice without experiencing. We went to the Frari and I sat and gazed at that magnificent Titian Assumption behind the High Altar. We also went to the little Scuola di S Georgio degli Schiavoni and contemplated the exquisite nine Carpaccios of St. George and the Dragon and St. Jerome and the Lion. On a more sybaritic level apart from the martinis at Harry’s Bar we sat outside Florian like good Venetians and listened to their little orchestra pump out Vivaldi while across the square the Quadri quartet belted out the Radetsky March just as their Austrian predecessors did in the days of the Austro-Hungarian occupation.

 

Sometimes we digressed from the master’s footsteps for although much seems never to change some things do and there is stuff that even he never knew. One lunch time we chanced on a firmly closed restaurant door. The sign said “Zanzi” and when we went in we found just three local suits enjoying a long business lunch. We ate delicious shrimps and polenta and the freshest crabs. And one evening we tried a newish place so fashionable and over booked that I won’t even give its name. They were full but the proprietor phoned his cousin Claudio who ran Il Nuevo Galeon ten minutes away on the Via Garibaldi so we went there instead and Claudio gave us a greeting of Bellinis and followed with more of the freshest of fish and I felt that this was the sort of serendipitous pleasure that J.G. Links would have approved.

 

Perhaps he is not now to everyone’s taste but to walk round the greatest walking city I know with J.G. Links remains one of the world’s true pleasures. Even a hundred years after his birth – and almost forty years after his book was first published you could not ask for a more knowledgeable and entertaining guide. All the same I think he may have been wrong about Giuseppe Cipriani’s dry martinis. I like to think he would have smiled wryly and asked for another.

 

I can think of no better Christmas gift in this, his centenary year, than a weekend break in Venice with J.G. Links for company. Even if you can’t make the break and are confined to armchair travel then Links is your man.

 

"Vicarious Venice is better than no Venice at all.”

 

So Happy Christmas! Drink a toast to the memory of J.G. Links, to Venice, and to all of us for, as the Scots say, none’s like us.