The modern ice age

There's a zone of excitement, of not-knowing, where adventures and learning take place. Not exactly comfortable, but somehow safe-enough for you to proceed. Everyone has this zone but at different degrees of risk. Perhaps it stems from earliest childhood; it's where and how we all learn whatever it is we know. I am not a very risky person, so my zone probably looks tame and dull to more adventurous types... so, you have found me travelling within very civilised countries, where there are timetables and policemen and shops... The unknown element is basically language.   I am not knocking myself here. Millions of people take their holidays in specially built resorts or on self-contained cruise ships, and choose to eat food they completely recognise... It's a global characteristic and has led to whole industries – normalisation.  But I do recognise that these travel journals are not about derring-do. More to do with observing how things are done in other places, what people say, how it feels.

Since my reading material for this trip is the huge heavy paperback book called After the Ice, by Stephen Mechin, devoted to charting how people around the world moved from the old stone age into the modern world... the domestication of cereals and other plants, dogs, goats, sheep; the use of different kinds of stone (flint, obsidian); colonisation of new lands; the shape and construction of buildings; some attempt to describe the spiritual or ritual lives of the different groups.... so while we are here looking at modern 'Austria' I am also (in my mind) looking at the landscape, wondering who could walk where, and when did they. The museum information on show here pretty well starts with the Romans (far too late), though it touches on salt mining, and copper, and trade along the rivers. Their big obsession of course is the archbishop-princes, whose vanity and worldliness resulted in palaces, ornament and ostentation.

However, the call of the ice was strong... Having met a delightful Scottish implant dentist and his wife on our first morning here, who were here for the skiing but had come down into Salzburg for a couple of days because the weather was inclement up there on the slopes, we were inspired to seek out the snow for ourselves and with bright sunshine and cold air we set off on the train. Everything is spick and span.

  
Amazing scenery!

    

How swift and smooth, how well-managed! Up we went through the (O-level Geography, thank you!) U-shaped glaciated valleys, and out at St Johann im Pongau. (Austrian station names are just as amusing as any that Britain can fling at you, even if you can't speak German).

There we found a handsome young man with skis talking to a taxi driver and they agreed to let us share the ride up to the gondola. The full price was €30, so we travelled for 10 each. Out at the bottom of a lift called Flying Mozart.... Andrew asked if there was a price for seniors and the man said 'Nice try!' (I think he added 'Grandpa!') 

 

We shared our lift up with two glowing older Austrian ladies with their skis. Then up and up, bumping 20 or 30 metres above the rocky snows, not as high as the spindly pine-tree tops, and with a stependous view appearing as we climbed. Up and up, five, ten minutes. I was thinking – the Austrians are great engineers, this cable is NOT going to snap. We hurtled towards the mid-station, FAR TOO FAST, but at the last moment the gondola slowed to a near stop. Then up again...

The Austrian ladies were – frankly – astonished that we had never been skiing. They questioned us quite deeply – what about our children? Did they not ski? We had to say no. Lamely I said we didn't have many mountains in the UK, and our children went swimming, sailing, travelling.... The ladies were politely silent. They were radiant with health... one had been born up there, skiied all the time in winter and went hiking and cycling in the summer. I thought maybe this is how the Ice Age people were, unexpectedly radiant. (Probably not, but who can say? Stephen Mechin's book is already out of date regarding attitudes, as far as I am concerned. He allocates duties to men and women in a consistently depressing way, and ignores any such ideas as matriarchy.... ).

Up to the top, where we took stock, standing on the metal grille, listening to the thumping music, watching the hundreds of people dotting about skiing, or strolling or … what does a happy crowd of people do? 

   

I was terrified my Skechers shoes would slip me over, but gingerly we made our way out onto the crispy granular snow … We did not fall. We went very slowly to the cafe/resto where people were sunbathing – something I knew about but had never seen or quite fully understood – but the sunshine was HOT and the air clear. 

  

We ordered lunch which came swiftly and hot. (How do they get all the stuff up there – in the gondolas? We fantasised about a normal road leading up the other side of the hill....) I made some paintings, the music was thumping, the views were distant and shining. This was my first experience of the world of skiing.

photobombed by the Flying Mozart sticker on the gondola

  

After a while we went back down – solitary of course as everyone else was careering down the hill on those broad smooth causeways, swish swish, from side to side, evidently having a fantastically good time. Am I too old to take up skiing? It looks such fun.

A bus and a taxi and a stopping train took us back to Salzburg... a very irritating man was on his phone laughing and laughing all the way – for an hour. He chatted and sniggered for at least an hour. What on earth can be funny for that long? Who on earth was he talking to? Not a girl... his mum? a bloke? a colleague? He was in his late 30s, fat. Impervious. At what age do we decide how we are going to laugh? I think it's a learned thing, we copy someone we know, or what we think adds something to our status. (Back to that zone of learning.....).

We are already getting familiar with the city... the zone of learning has widened around our sense of belonging... 

          

So we adventure through a sunny gateway and find a beautiful formal garden with huge swags of box hedges and recently planted swirls of colour – pansies, mostly, and bellis. It is the garden of the Mirabell Palace (the archbishop-princes again), and it has a stupendous staircase leading up to The Marble Hall where they hold concerts nowadays and weddings. 

    

The grandeur is almost unbelievable, but this time, rather pretty..... (What does this have to do with Christianity?)

There's a huge old aviary in the gardens, with a massive wire dome on the top – now all converted to a useful little art gallery (dome not visible from inside). Rather an amusing show of work by a radical artist called Peter Fritzenwallner with iron 'figures' looking at his own paintings, and a video purporting to show businessmen objecting to art works in public places because it makes a mess.

Among many rather fine statues there's a larger-than-life marble of Copernicus who challenged the orthodox with the idea that the earth moves around the sun and not vice versa. He was born in an area which was once part of Germany but is now part of Poland, and this accident of geography led the Nazis to take him as an excuse or hero of re-conquest... they wanted this towering figure of mathematics to adorn their thinking, so they commissioned a complaisant sculptor called Joseph Thorak to make him in marble.... It's a workaday thing, and tellingly located behind a huge wall, near the toilets. Four other stone statues near the gate on the town side seem to depict a fierce argument about who has the best deodorant.

We took a quiet drink in a little square near the river called Platzl. We have been watching the workmen lift and re-lay the thick heavy flagstones over the last few days. 

  

They use a little digger-crane with a marvellous battery-powered vacuum-suction lifter on it. It's hard to see why they are doing it, but the standard of workmanship is superb. In fact the whole city is teeming with repair and restoration projects – statues and fountains being uncovered after the snows, churches being buffed up, pavements remade. Obviously the massive flow of tourists pays for all this, but the outcome is a gleaming city, and everyone benefits. People expect higher standards, it seems, than we do at home. Alas.

Differences like these were also true in the Ice Age, apparently. Ways of doing things.

But every single person we spoke to – the coffee waiter on the train up to tht mountains, the young man from Stuttgart who shared his taxi with us, the ladies in the ski lift, the taxi driver taking us back to the station, the waiter bringing the spritzer at Platzl, they all talked about Brexit and what a disaster it is. A unifying theme.