Technology

There's a chain of shoe-shops in Europe called Foot Locker, which were once (hilariously) called Athlete's Foot. We shrieked every time we saw their outlet in Calais. Eventually someone must have told their board of directors so they renamed it. It's a superb example of how dangerous it is to use a foreign language to market your brand. We have seen a couple more examples in Salzburg: ultra-smart boutiques selling very glossy stuff. One says 'You know it's impossible' on the window. The other is actually called Second Hand. Er, I hope not, at those prices.

At the art galleries yesterday I found I was just not able to take everything in. I had to stride through various suites of rooms, even though I wanted to stop and read and study the artefacts... I was aware of consciousness overload. There is just too much. I had to focus on just a very few things, and those were identified very quickly and almost randomly, a gut reaction. I was weighing up the price of entry (so much to see!) against my ability to appreciate it all. The same thing is happening with my holiday reading.

My study book on this trip is a very weighty volume called After the Ice, by Stephen Methin, published in 2003. I find I can't read it for more than a short stretch, partly because it's so heavy, and partly because there's so much to think about as you go through it. It is really carving into my deep and wide lack of understanding of how modern humans came to live the way we do. … It starts about 20,000 BC and moves forward to the present day.... I was gobsmacked to learn that the origins of farming were not, as I believed in the Fertile Crescent as bounded by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, but in what the author calls West Asia, and I would call the Eastern Mediterranean – modern Israel, Jordan, Negev, Syria. The ancient tells and mounds, the story of Jericho (who knew?), the villages buried under the sea, the differences between wild and domesticated cereals (and later goats and dogs), the way archaeologists have found their evidence and made their deductions, it is rivetting stuff. One message comes out so clearly – the planet's see-saw into and out of hot and cold periods must make us look at the current global warming scenario in a savvy light. It's also fascinating that the rampaging excavations by 19^th century researchers – the grand old men of archaeology who dug so enthusiastically into the ground – did so much damage and was in some ways no better than the looters who often followed them. They did not have access to the radiocarbon dating, the pollen analysis and microscopy that we have now.. and we have to wonder what techniques will come along in future. The main message is that those 'stone age savages' were as ingenious, devious, violent, lyrical and organised as we are ourselves. I doubt we could do as well as they did, given their resources and how dependent we have become on (say) electricty, plastic, transport, money, etc. You can't go back.

Today we are going up to the mountains to see the snow. Train, bus, gondola. I hope we have warm enough clothing, but the sun is shining.