I was in Germany in April 2023, I’d been to Leipzig for the Bach 300 festival before catching a train for ten great days in Berlin. A city I last visited in the late 1990s, just a few years after Germany’s reunification and the city was still like a building construction site. Then it was possible to travel from the former Western Berlin through the Brandenburg Gate to the former East and see the immediate change from glitz to drab. This was all in the process of change. Twenty-five years ago, I was working on the English language dub of a film with my German colleague and friend from EuroArts, Bernd Hellthaler and the Hungarian film director, István Szabó. I was staying in a small hotel on the well-known and poetically-named street Unter den Linden (under the linden trees) that runs straight, East to West, through the centre of Berlin. I had the opportunity at that time to discuss, with these two intelligent, liberal-minded, and much more informed people than me, what was going to happen in Germany after the great change. Their mood was of cautious optimism. In 2023, I was interested to see how Berlin must have changed in those twenty-five years.

This time, I was happy to get an unexpected message from Bernd soon after my arrival in Berlin, and, as well as being pleased to see that he is still the same charming guy, and a key figure in music broadcasting, even though he has now retired, he is also still very much the pragmatist who answers political questions with his characteristic shrug. We had a convivial and still largely optimistic meeting with coffee and kuchen, but these days conversations about East and West are dominated by talk of Russia and Ukraine, but not without an opportunity grabbed to rib me about the UK’s unpopular decision over Brexit. I was happy this time to be able to wave my new Irish passport showing that I’m still very much in the EU.

I was staying here in ‘quirky,’ ‘arty,’ ‘gritty,’ ‘edgy,’ or just plain ‘trendy, Kreuzberg, a student quarter, south of the city centre, Mitte, in a ‘trendy’ and ‘arty’ apartment, next to a very cool bar on one side and a hipster restaurant on the other, with more down the street on both sides and Babylon Kino, an arthouse cinema at one end, in a district that has almost wall-to-wall graffiti.

Very soon, this bar became a kind of home – a place to go if you wanted to go out somewhere interesting but couldn’t be bothered to go far. Next-door was often far enough for me, especially when it was as pretty as this place.

It became the rendez-vous of choice when meeting up with family and friends, who also happened to be in Berlin, before moving on a few yards up the street for dinner. Max & Moritz was a really classy but informal ‘German’ restaurant, serving authentic, no really, German food.

And then, when it was time for bed, I only needed to stagger a few steps and I was there,

With the blinds open, I used to wake up in the morning to a leafy inner-courtyard view and, if I was lucky, a sighting or two of the local red squirrels, who might have been watching me.

Every morning, rain or no rain, I headed to the end of the street to a small square called Oranienplatz, an open space in this area of dense housing.

Oranienplatz supplied me with a gritty, in the literal sense, square for my martial arts practice…and so, yet again, I had found an ideal Kung-fu and tai-chi dojo. My audience, most mornings, was a trio of elderly Turkish women. One of them, on my last day, did a funny and unexpected imitation of my upper crane block.

If Kreuzberg is ‘edgy,’ it only seemed like that a couple of times at the entrance to the Kottbusser Tor metro station, when it was probably wise not to pay too much attention to the furtive huddles of young men rolling small polythene bags into silver foil. If we are talking about crime in Kreuzberg, the statistics tell us that serious crime is minimal here, with at worst, some drug peddling and drunken behaviour. I was careful, but not fearful in this vibrant part of the city.

Kottbusser Tor station was the quickest way to get into the city centre, so I went there a lot, excited, the first time, to be on my way to Berlin Alexanderplatz, the location of one of my favourite books. Alfred Döblin’s montage-style 1929 novel, Berlin Alexanderplatz. It is the story of Franz, an ex-con who is drawn back to crime in the working class districts around the famous Berlin square, in the closing days of the Weimar Republic and the beginnings of the rise of Nazism.

The novel was made into a masterly and, yes, unforgettable tv series in 1980 (now remastered) by film director Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Here is a short trailer for the remastered videos, sorry, but I could only find the version with French subtitles. It is still one of my very favourite TV series – all these years later.

When my train got into Alexanderplatz station, I knew that it would be a totally different experience to the novel, the series, and even the historical Alexanderplatz, which was destroyed by bombing in World War 2.

The station is beautiful – colourful, bright and clean…

…and up on street level, it has gained in shopping mall convenience what it has lost of its, yes, ‘edgy’ reputation. And, I forgot to tell you, it rained a lot during most of my stay. Apparently, it really can rain in Berlin.

Nothing, though, can rob me of my inner image of Alexanderplatz, even if, I have to admit, I am more that a little bit disappointed by its rebuild.

These days Alexanderplatz mostly exists indoors, like here in the giant Galeria Kaufhof – but if nothing else, it makes a welcome refuge from the rain.

I was a brave and often rather a damp sight-seer around Berlin city centre, but that didn’t stop me appreciating the mammoth changes that have happened since I was last here twenty-five years ago. I had often wondered how the city would handle its reconstruction, or maybe I should say series of reconstructions, since the long tale of the war and its consequences took its toll on what was once a handsome city with a long history of welcoming people from other countries and cultures.

I was intrigued to see what the new architects had been doing to replace the shattered centre of Berlin – there are some wonderful new buildings by innovative architects, but not maybe, in the very middle of town, the so-called Island of Museums, where they have gone for rebuilding replicas of the originals. It was a marathon job, of course, and one to admire, but, I couldn’t help feeling that the soul of those buildings has been lost in the replications. It is not really for me to say, but I would have liked to have seen a new cathedral built here instead of the monumental duplicate that they built in its place.

I love a lot of the new buildings and admire the way Berlin, and Germany in general, has become a modern culture not afraid to recognise its past, even the most distressing aspects of it. The well-known British comedy series, Fawlty Towers, had a running gag where the Brits are repeatedly told ‘don’t mention the war’. I never felt that I had to pretend when I was in Berlin. I was especially impressed by the number of open spaces, bomb sites, that instead of being simply built over to make a white-washed new city centre, a few prime sites, where the Wehrmacht had its centre, have been left either untouched or dedicated to a grieving and dignified form of remembrance as in the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (Denkmal für die ermodeten Juden Europas), designed by Peter Eisenman and Buro Happold (2005) where 4.7 acres of valuable real estate in the centre of Berlin has been covered in a maze of 2,711 concrete slabs with an underground Ort der Information (Place of Information) that holds the names of approximately 3 million Jewish Holocaust victims.

Not far from there is a small inner city carpark which is the unmarked site of Hitler’s bunker, and not much further away, one of the last Nazi era constructions, once the largest office building in Europe, built in 1936, as the headquarters of the Hermann Göring’s Luftwaffe, then the House of Ministries during the Democratic Republic and now, bizarrely, it is the headquarters of the German Finance Ministry.

Running along the side of the indestructible building, are some of the remains of the Berlin Wall, now a memorial too, for all those who died trying to cross it into West Germany during the DDR, or GDR (German Democratic Republic). The derelict land in front of the wall, still a kind of No-Man’s Land, it is, I was told, the site of the Gestapo and SS Headquarters. It seems that the land, like the Biblical Potter’s Field is just too contaminated to have any use other than one for mourning the dead.

Thinking about the Berlin Wall and the days of East Germany, the DDR, I visited the DDR Museum, a brilliantly designed and curated record of what ordinary life would have been like during that era. Sure, the repression and autocracy is there, some dreams too, but it is also a museum to a world which was temptingly so much less materialistic than ours is today.

Life for that mystical tribe known as ‘ordinary people’ had its ambitions restricted, certainly, but looking round the museum, I couldn’t help feeling that those who didn’t become victims of the Stasi, were freed from the negative effects of too many choices – what kind of deodorant, washing powder, or kitchen units? Does it really matter? I thought. Maybe they had something there.

Then, of course, there was the dead hand and chilly smile of autocratic bureaucracy, and my mild envy for those people disappeared like a short-lived daydream.

A strong desire for the new in 1968 is unsurprising. In those years, the new often meant building on bomb sites. Berlin had been given, not as a gift, a rubble-covered tabula rasa for building on. The Neue Nationalgalerie building was one of those masterpieces, designed by the famous Modernist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe as a vast ground floor exhibition space with a lower floor for the permanent collection (Picasso, Munch, Mondriaan and Calder among others). It was closed for six years in 2015 because the design led to many technical problems, especially cracking glass and condensation. The British architect, David Chipperfield, undertook the major renovation and the gallery was opened again in 2021.

The main new exhibition here on my visit was the series Birkenau (2014) by the German artist Gerhard Richter. The works are based on four photographs taken in the concentration camp that Richter has gradually transposed with charcoal and oil paint until they became abstracts with the original drawings invisible. They are positioned in front of four matching mirrors that add to their own level of transposition. Other parts of the exhibition show over-painted photographs in Richter’s long exploration of how to represent the Holocaust in art.

Another brave new 1960’s building in Berlin is the Philharmonie, opened in 1963, with Herbert von Karajan conducting the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in Beethovens 9th Symphony, the Choral – a hot ticket, I should imagine. The old Philharmonie building was destroyed by British bombs in World War 2, but there can be few complains about its wonderful replacement. The Berlin Philharmonic were away on tour when I was in Berlin, but I managed to get tickets for a concert at the Philharmonie with Berlin’s other world-class orchestra, the Rundfunk Sinfonieorchester Berlin (the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra), with their principal conductor Vladimir Jurowski. They were playing Shostakovich’s excitingly modern Symphony No. 4 in a performance that is still playing in my head over a year later.

Before the symphony, there was the German premiere of a new work by the Russian composer Elena Firsova. Her Piano Concerto for the pianist Yefim Bronfman, is, she says ‘very personal and reflected my meditations about the mystery and meaning of Death.’ She quotes a phrase from Beethoven’s late String Quartet op. 135, over which Beethoven had written: ‘Muss es sein?’ (Does it have to be?). Born in St Petersburg and a student in Moscow, Elena Firsova now lives in London, but before she left Russia, she, like Shostakovich, was condemned by the authorities for her modernist tendencies. The Congress of the Composers’ Union in 1979 attacked her and two other composers of her generation: ‘Elena Firsova, Dmitri Smirnov (her late husband) and Sofia Gubaidulina compose pointless and noisy mud…..they should be denied the right to represent Soviet music abroad.’

We were not denied the chance to hear this thought-provoking new work with its very human struggle for meaning in life and, also, maybe death. I don’t think Stalin would have liked it, but Beethoven, and I think, Shostakovich would have approved.

Unsurprisingly she is dismayed by the war against Ukraine; it ‘fills me with deep shame, I count myself lucky I left Russia thirty years ago and was last there seventeen years ago.’

Here is a video taken at that performance of the Firsova Piano Concerto in Berlin on 18 April 2023

Shostakovich’s fourth symphony was composed in 1935/6 and has had a dramatic history as it is the last work that Shostakovich wrote unfettered by the rules imposed on creative artists during Stalin’s reign in the Soviet Union. Pravda, the official newspaper was instructed by Stalin to write a critique which was a barely veiled personal attack on Shostakovich, who was at that time the brilliant enfant terrible among Soviet composers. His opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsenisk, which shared a lot of musical material with the fourth symphony, was called ‘muddle instead of music.’ Rehearsals had started for the premiere when it was announced that Shostakovich had withdrawn the work – probably to save the orchestra from Stalin’s wrath – and the symphony wasn’t premiered until 1961, long after Stalin’s death. Something died in Shostakovich after this….the fiery and dangerously challenging part of his creative genius was at least partially paralysed if not killed outright. He certainly never wrote anything like this symphony again.

At the Philharmonie last April it was definitely music instead of muddle – we heard the voice of a radical young man shouting out loud for his freedom from oppression. Berlin felt like the right place to hear him, having walked round the remains of Hitler’s Reich and the last remains of Berlin’s Soviet wall.

I looked to see if there was a recording of that performance but couldn’t find anything, so here is a short except of it played by the Berlin Philharmonic, in the same hall, conducted by Simon Rattle.

The Old National Gallery (Alte Nationalgalerie) sits in a prime spot on Berlin’s Museum Island and I could have spent my whole holiday here. It was founded to exhibit the works of major German artists, but later it was expanded to include many major 19th century French and Dutch artists….worth a visit in itself. You can see Cezanne, Corot, Courbet, Daubigny, Daumier, Fantin-Latour, Jongkind, Manet, Monet, Renoir, Rodin, Signat and Van Gogh. I shall ignore them, love them as I do, for the purposes of this blog, because a lot the German artists were new to me and I want to share them. I have long admired Friedrich, Böcklin, Klinger and Beckmann, but the others mentioned here, and many more, changed my perspective about German art in the 19th century, so dominated, for me at least, by the great French schools of Romanticism, Neo-Classicism, Realism, Impressionism and Expressionism.

And then I came to the pictures of King Frederick the Great of Prussia (1712 – 1786), painted with a propagandist brush by Adolph Menzel in his days as a history painter. Frederick was the sensitive and artistic son of an autocratic father, Frederick William I, the ‘Soldier King.’ Frederick, the unlikely heir, was first admired, or sneered at, for his interest in music and philosophy who, later in life, became interested in armies and soldiers and consequently, war. He modernised Prussian bureaucracy, reformed the justice system, and favoured the freedom of the press. Here in Menzel’s picture, he is seen as Old Fritz (der Alter Fritz), friend of the poor, who is going to be way-laid by a poor couple about to present him with a petition.

He was all of those things, but we would be getting him wrong if we really beleive he was a man of the people, an honest Joe. He was, for all his liberal ideas, a firm believer in Enlightened Absolutism and, whatever else he thought he was, he was certain that he was the number one guy in the country – the first servant of the state.

Is was tough being the lord of all you survey, so, I suppose it was understandable that sensitive and artistic Frederick, needed a beautiful summer palace to escape to when he needed some rest and refreshment. I had a long-held wish to see the place, romantically named Sanssouci (without worry) his version of Dun Roamin’, a kind of mini-Versailles, where, like Northern France, some of the gilt feels a bit washed out by the rain.

He was, as far as I know, happy here. He made the place just as he liked it….a bit camp, gilded and glittering, but also small in terms of other palaces, private too and, in his inner sanctum, simple and unpretentious.

The glitz was mostly reserved for the main reception rooms like this, his music room, where JS Bach’s son C P E Bach, played for him on the harpsichord and also accompanied the musical king’s flute. It was at Frederick’s other palace, the one at Potsdam, (bombed and destroyed during World War 2), that he persuaded CPE Bach to bring his father, Johann Sebastian along to play for him. The result, now famous, was that JS improvised multiple fugues on a tune composed by Frederick and later elaborated them further into what became A Musical Offering ( Das Musikalische Opfer, BWV 1079), one of the composers late and greatest masterpieces.

I suspect Frederick the Great was happiest though, later in his reign, to be alone in his study, reading, writing and practising his flute, and, from time-to-time, gazing out of the window at his favourite statue, placed there perfectly framed by his window.

It was here, in his armchair, in his seventies, crippled by asthma and gout, that he died in 1786, leaving instructions to be buried at Sanssouci next to his beloved greyhounds.

Unlikely but apt, somehow, I thought when I came across this framed screen-print of the old king, by Andy Warhol (1968). Weary, paranoid, camped up, and slightly ridiculous, the old man seems weighed down by monarchy and the impossibilities of finding happiness as an enlightened absolutist, or even here, sans souci – without worry. I’m sorry about all those wars, about the Partition of Poland, and for Frederick’s cruel treatment by his father, who had Frederick’s closest, and much loved, male friend beheaded in front of him after they’d tried to run away together. But, if for nothing else, I’m happy that Frederick invited Johann Sebastian Bach – the main reason for my trip to Germany – to come to Potsdam and to write one last masterpiece.

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The hot days of the summer lockdown here in the UK have passed but now it’s second time round for the covid-19 precautions and, in classic English autumn style, it has been raining and, more importantly, it has got cold. No excuse to stop my fitness regime though. Back in July I started doing 25 pressups a day and I have carried on ever since – rain or shine.

I do a different variation on the basic pressup every day each week – now I have seven favourites which target different muscles. I plan to do a blog about these some time soon. For now, just let me say that pressups are perfect for daily no-nonsense fitness-training and I can really feel the difference since I’ve been doing them.

I’m a member of a martial arts club here in Lewes, White Crane Fighting Arts http://www.whitecranefightingarts.com/ but the club has had to close down during lockdown. At home, I have continued my daily 66-moves Tai-chi practice which in our White Crane form is really a soft form of kungfu known as Shuang Yang Bai Hè Rou Ruan Quan or White Crane Soft Boxing. The aim is not just to look gracefully elegant (unlikely in my case) but also to use the soft martial techniques not just for self-defence but for fitness. It is a method I have been doing for a long time now and, hopefully, I will be able to carry on (and improve) for the rest of my life, even into extreme old age.

I am not allowed to do Kungfu full-contact sparring any longer because of the brain haemorrhage I suffered 12 years ago, but I have continued to practice my four White Crane Kungfu patterns and hope, one day, to learn a few more. I go through them every morning after Tai-chi and my 25 pressups. I have never been much good at it, but I have done it and enjoyed it for so long now, that it is a permanent part of my self-image. It is still useful too – a few years ago, I used a lower crane block to dispatch a pick-pocket on the Pont du Nord bridge in Paris.

I end my morning sessions with a set of fourteen moving-meditation exercises said to have been invented by a 5th or 6th century Buddhist monk known as Da Mo (or Bodhidharma) who is said to have brought Buddhism and martial arts from India to China. These exercises, are a bit like Tai-chi in that they are supposed to look calm and gentle but they are, in fact, really difficult and what your muscles would recognise as hard work. The fourteen exercises involve doing various stretches and moves which use the whole body, in horse stance, knees bent, whilst regulating the breath and letting the mind focus on abstraction. I’m far from getting the posture right, but I’m still trying. One day, I might get to the abstraction bit, but, for now, it’s enough to get through them in a state of calm while those leg muscles are screaming stop this madness now.

These morning exercises are a supplement to my two hour-long personal trainer sessions a week with Gyles Abbott of Soul Fit in Lewes who has been putting me through a custom-built fitness routine which has grown incrementally now for nearly three years as I have got fitter. https://www.wearesoulfit.com/personal-training During lockdown we are meeting either in the park or on Zoom. It is really enjoyable if you like to feel your body performing in the way it was designed. I am getting there, I think.

When each morning session is over, I promise you, breakfast and coffee taste better than you can imagine. And I don’t feel so guilty about spending so much time writing at my computer these days…the other advantage of lockdown, is that there are few distractions from getting on with the 5th draft of my fourth novel.

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In July this year, while the UK was still locked down, I was challenged by a friend on Facebook to do the 25 Day Pushup Challenge and, because I can’t resist challenges, I did it.

The idea was to do 25 pushups every day for 25 days, to film the process and to post it on Facebook in a campaign to help raise awareness about the growing cases of people, often young, and mostly male, who are suffering from depression, anxiety and PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). A condition which contributes to, again, mostly young male, suicides in this country.

I am no athlete but after leaving the hell that was my compulsory school sports experiences behind me, I have always tried to stay fit and, yes, to challenge myself by doing what has never come naturally to me. Like going to the gym or even roller-blading along the promenade at Brighton or in Hyde Park, London, where people, wisely, dodged out of my way.

I thought if I took part in the pushup challenge, I could be more encouraging as an example to others than elite sportsmen and women who can inspire by their skills but also, maybe, put the rest of us off with their unachievable brilliance and those rows of medals, silver cups and champagne showers that we will never win. Very nice to watch, of course, and great for them, but they can leave the rest of us feeling like, well, also-rans.

Talking about these issues is good, of course, but also, there is just a chance that regular exercise, no matter how athletic or not you are, can raise your endorphin levels and significantly effect, to use a modern catch-phrase, your mental well-being.

There have been difficult times in my life (as with many people) and I can talk first-hand about the effects of fitness-training when life gets tough.

I was lucky with some of my physical challenges when I was definitely old enough to know better. I found Kungfu, and an excellent instructor, the world-class martial artist, Neil Johnson. http://www.whitecranefightingarts.com/

Neil is also a brilliant and patient teacher who challenged my lack of co-ordination and lack of natural talent, into doing things that I would never have believed possible. Like training with kungfu masters in China, for example. Amazing!

I got fitter than I had ever been and even learnt how to win, at least a few times, in combat. The feeling was unbelievably exhilarating.

I trained hard and saw and felt the results of working the body to its limits. It was really good fun. I did kungfu weapons-training too….the seven and a half foot staff…

and the straight sword. Martial patterns I could practice wherever I was on holiday, like this rooftop in Santorini, Greece where an old broom handle made a good weapon.

Even the smallest spaces – like home – have space for martial arts training and, of course, for push-ups. So no excuse not to practise.

In the last ten years I had two life-threatening illnesses which challenged not just my life and my fitness but also, yes, that phrase again, my mental well-being. Doctors told me that I probably survived from the brain haemorrhage because I was very fit.

So I have continued in my efforts to stay that way, with a lot of help from my kungfu instructor, Neil, even though I was told I would have to give up full-contact kungfu sparring.

I also owe my gradual return to fitness to two personal trainers too. First, Ritxar Magee Atxukarro, whom I trained with on my doctor’s referral – UK prime minister Gordon Brown’s initiative which died with the change of government. Ritxar got me back into the gym here in Lewes and gave me the confidence to push back against illness and to get me going again.

For the last two years I have had a new trainer, Gyles Abbott, at Soulfit, http://wearesoulfit who has taken me back to fitness a second time after my recovery from a second illness, pulmonary embolism, when even walking up a hill was a struggle…now I can run up that hill.

My fitness has returned, or is returning, thanks to these three gentlemen and, yes, by a lot of personal effort. I have often felt down about health problems but I found that pushing back really helps. Exercise really does make you feel good about yourself.

Most of us usually discover pushups as a kind of school punishment, but, hey, they are a great form of exercise. You don’t need any equipment, just your body and a bit of will-power. I can vouch for the fact that doing them on a regular basis, why not every day, will really make you feel better. Honestly, if I can do them, so can you. Good luck!

Here’s the short movie I edited to show you how I did it.

I didn’t stop at 25 days – this morning, day 41, I am still going strong and hope to keep it going with new variations.

One last thing, if you don’t believe I did all 25 pushups on those 25 days, the full film is available on Youtube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-hFwwf5QDc

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With only one day to go before the Autumn Equinox when we have an equal balance between lightness and darkness, I have been trying to focus on balance and equilibrium. After a few weeks now of muscle pains and viral infection, my body is yearning to move again. More than that, I would like to achieve some physical and mental balance in the spirit of these inspiring photographs of men and women supreme in martial arts, gymnastics, yoga and dance. It isn’t difficult to feel our need for natural balance at this time of year, late September every year speaks to me of getting this into order and restoring my equilibrium.

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As I have remarked before on these pages, on a good drying day, our uniforms hang confrontationally on neighbouring washing lines.

One day we will gather our forces for that great scene from martial arts movies when opposing clubs compete for supremacy. The result won’t be just black and white I suspect.

In truth, we respect each other’s traditions and, when Harvey asked me to write a poem for Liz’s birthday, I decided that I would try to use a martial arts theme whilst attempting a portrait of Liz herself.

I hope she likes it but I would be pleased if it has some resonance for others too. here it is:

Oh yes, that For Sale sign is still there across the road on Ron’s shop but, Oakleys, the respected Lewes estate agents have promised that it will be down by tomorrow and I just have to believe them – they promised.

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I was determined not to let this early departure spoil my holiday so I looked at the twenty four hours in Santorini as a new adventure and boarded the ferry for the three and a half hour voyage through The Cyclades archipelago as an enjoyable part of the expedition.



On board, I found a seat with a view and watched as we sailed away from Paros keeping our distance from the infamous Portes Islets where the ferry Express Samina sunk ten years ago with the loss of 82 lives. The captain is still in prison charged with manslaughter and negligence after the ship crashed into these distinctive rocks just outside Pirakia harbour whilst the crew were watching a football match on television.

The ship still lies at the bottom of the sea but I am told that lessons have been learnt and no ferries are now allowed to go anywhere near these rocks and, for certain, none of the crew were going to be watching the World Cup matches on board.

I am enough of a pessimist though to have kept my eye on the safety equipment just in case and I always sit near the life boats.

My voyage was uneventful and enjoyable as we chugged slowly through the Aegean in the heat of a very sunny Greek afternoon.


Santorini is the most southerly of the Cycladic islands and the only one to have an international airport. It is also a pretty spectacular place with its very own volcano which is still active even if it has been dormant since the 1950s when it last erupted. The island however shows all the signs of volcanic activity with its black sandy beaches and dark volcanic rock formations aping the movement of those dramatic lava flows of earlier times.

In fact the Santorini volcanic eruption that occurred some time around 1500 BC was the second largest since the evolution of man. It transformed the geography of the Aegean Sea and may well have put an end to the Minoan empire when its huge tsunamis devastated islands throughout the area. It also made Santorini towns the most alarmingly perched centres of civilisation that I have ever visited. Many of the buildings quite literally sit on the cliff edges defying the fates to topple them over into the sea.

Ferry disasters and volcanic eruptions were on my mind when I arrived in this extraordinary place which also saw a devastating earthquake in 1956 which destroyed most of the capital, Fira, where I had a room for the night.

Fira is altogether different to anything I had encountered on Paros. It is busier, brasher and unembarrassed about its role as a tourist centre.

The streets are lined with everything you could possibly want if your interests centre round souvenirs or t-shirts and the clubs only really get going between 1.00 and 6.00 am. I wasn’t sure that I was going to succeed in enjoying this place.

I was booked into the San Giorgio Hotel which was hidden away down a side street but which I discovered was only a couple of minutes walk from the heart of the town. I was prepared to have a quiet time in advance of my flight home to England so I was happy to check into my room with its balcony over-looking some residential houses and what sounded like a music school where some very industrious students were playing Bach violin sonatas whilst an old lady was hanging out a long line of men’s clothes on her balcony’s washing line. Sitting there in the evening sunlight and listening to the music of Bach, I decided that this was going to be fun.

It was all helped enormously by the enthusiastic hospitality of the hotel’s owner Yourgos, who had picked me up from the harbour and went to a lot of trouble drawing maps of where I could go and what I should do. He even struggled to stop me lifting my very heavy case. He could charm even the gloomiest soul away from thoughts of earthquakes, volcanoes and shipwrecks.

He also told me that I could use his roof for my kung-fu practice. Suddenly I was at home again and my spirits rose even further when the late afternoon light added its clear blue to a geometrical composition of architecture and washing that just had to be photographed.

He must have been a martial arts sympathiser because on the staircase up to the roof was a mural of Ancient Greek boxers just to put me into the mood.

Up on the roof, that evening and the following morning, I did my martial arts exercises, White Crane Kung-fu – here a straight sword pattern –  feeling that I was on top of the world…and, judging by the view, I think I really was up on a level with Mount Olympus. 

All I had to do now was to decide what to do with my one evening on Santorini. You have probably already guessed that it involved dinner and alcohol and you would be right but where to indulge was the question.

I had not expected though that the bars would be quite so spectacular or quite such a challenge to anyone with even the slightest sense of vertigo.

Look one way and it is a classic Greek cocktail bar with dutiful waiters and an absorbing drinks menu but turn the other way and you are sitting with one of the most sensational views any restaurant in the world could offer.

Eventually, after a couple of glasses of ice cold Greek beer, I even looked down at the sea below and managed to resist the urge to jump.

Luckily my mind was diverted from diving by a Greco-American couple at the next table. Costas and Diane Touliatos-Miles are fellow website publishers (http://www.hellenicnest.com) and we soon got talking about Greek’s place in the modern world now that the euro crisis was calling for change.

Diane is a professor of musicology at the Missouri-St Louis University specialising, as you do, in Fourteenth Century Byzantine music and her husband, Costas is an economist and evangelist for all things Hellenic in his now native United States. They were my last travelling companions on this adventure in Greece and they were excellent sound boards for my early impressions of this absorbing country. They had plenty of far from obvious things to say about the relationship between Greece and America and Britain. I shall be visiting their website in the now natural way that travelers who meet in strange places can stay in touch in the much smaller virtual world.

After dinner I walked up the steps to the highest point in Fira not really realising that what I had considered to be high up was only really the beginning of a climb that seemed to take me up above the clouds, if there had been any, just as darkness fell.

That night I dreamt of, yes I am afraid so, earthquakes, volcanoes, shipwrecks and plane crashes
but none of the disasters came my way and, just maybe, it was all due to reading too much Homer and his epic about man as the plaything of the gods. I am now safely at home, away from Zeus’ unpredictably pointing finger and Poseidon’s watery wrath. Here in leafy but not nearly so sun-drenched England, my little rose garden has gone quietly wild in my absence but my love affair with Greece has only just begun. Was that a roll of thunder I heard just then?

The post Don’t Look Down, You Are On Santorini appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

We went down to the school and got there ten minutes early. That was good because I could spend more time doing stretches and ironing out that hip problem as much as possible. It was really exciting reaching this final hurdle but I did wonder if I would actually get all the way through. I knew I would feel bad if I had to step out because of the injury.

We have learnt quite a few really excellent stretches over here and even though I have always done it, I have really seen the benefits of it since being in China. My hip actually calmed down and I felt relaxed and elated.

We got on with recapping the final moves of the pattern and then…with video camera there to add permanency to my humiliation, we ran through the whole thing for the final time.

The Wolf made it folks…probably the best I have done!

Well there were a few odd moments in those rolls but they happened and I stayed in synch with the others…. actually, since looking back at it, we looked pretty damn cool – all things considered!

We then went on to repeat the dog style grappling techniques that we had learnt yesterday…. and we were all pretty good at it because it is so similar to the stuff we do at home. It was great getting into the rhythm of it and, dare I say it, really pushing the Shaolin monk guy off his balance…he flexed every muscle in his body but conceded his ground. Where he is such a great person is that he laughed broadly and seemed really pleased.

We moved on…. more floor work. This time we were going to learn some ground grappling techniques.

Nice, I thought, having a little lie down perhaps.

No such luck, with no rolls left in my arsenal, I prayed that I could spare my hip but we were about to learn a truly cool manoeuvre where you slide to the floor and then take out your opponent with a variety of moves which included sliding along the floor on your hip.

It was difficult, fun, instructive and felt like having a filling at the dentist’s without an injection. Don’t you just love nerve pain! Well, my body told me to avoid the hip so I slid in on the other leg for the second attempt…that, of course, would not do so I earned myself some truly unwanted repetitions. Good to have learnt it though. Recovery can come later.

The three hours raced away ending with some speeches…. all about diligence and perseverance and that sort of thing and then we were all presented with a framed certificate commending, would you believe it, “excellent performance” in Shaolin Dog Boxing.

Pictures were taken and the Wolf was truly proud.

It has all been fantastic. I came here to China expecting a completely new experience but also knowing that I was going to be training in all the things that I find most difficult.

We spent the afternoon at Fuzhou’s main Buddhist temple which is a truly inspiring place with hundreds of worshipping Chinese somehow chanting in the main hall and others milling about smiling and welcoming us with a joyfulness of spirit which seems to have coloured this trip from the beginning.

It was a suitable way to snatch a few moments of contemplation before the beginning of the journey home.

I stood in the door of the temple watching the congregation bowing and rising to the chants in a kind of Mexican wave. A woman turned round and smiled…she signalled for me to come in and instantly I had joined that wave of fellowship.

Later, we went out for a farewell dinner with Master Lin and his family.

The dinner was posh and formal in one of those upper rooms but this time, the ice melted and we were all relaxed and humourous. We consumed loads of food and drink and many toasts, which is the custom here. We all proposed and experienced toasts…. heart warming stuff with more than a touch of the irony that we Brits think nobody else understands.

We then said our final goodbyes and ended up in the Last Drop Pub, which is down the road from our hotel and which, I had always assumed was a sad British look-alike establishment filled with a few solitaries taking shorts at the bar.

Actually it was heaving with Chinese twenty-some things who might have come here for the mock oak beams and English feel but probably saw it as dangerously Western in a subversive degenerate kind of way. Its charm was actually in its innocence. The resident band was a two-some performing Merseybeat covers and other stuff with an unembarrassed charm and musicianship that defied cynicism. Oddly, they also accompanied the karaoke performances of the customers…helping them out when ever they lost the melody line and encouraging them even after they had completely lost the plot.

The guest band was from The Philippines…two men – baggy tea shirts and goatee beards – and a woman – little black dress, boots, plunging neckline and come-on manner. They did pop classics and Spanish disco numbers in Spanish that plunged the whole scene into a bizarre pastiche of East meets West, past meets present.

Sixties classics would not have been performed so innocently or so passionately for forty years.

I hope that this new generation of Chinese maintain that innocence in the onslaught of Western “culture” and I hope that we can learn something from them: maybe to enjoy life a bit more and to learn to like other people more too.

We toasted the whole experience in a number of beverages and I found much relief for my battle-wounded hip by sitting on one buttock rather than two.
Luckily we escaped the advances of a very large and mature Thai prostitute whose pimp was a small grinning man who kept dancing in a bizarre fashion behind her. She offered us all loads of drinks…obviously some self-knowledge there…assuming that the only way she would get any custom was getting some gullible victim blindly drunk.
It was time for bed…alone…I thought.

This country is endlessly fascinating and I can’t wait to return. As far as the Kungfu is concerned, I may not have become the greatest martial artist in the world but I have certainly confronted many nightmares and I feel really pleased to have kept with it right to the end.

So thanks to everyone here….

…. the masters themselves who showed just how civilised, caring and impressive martial artists can be…

Chen, our interpreter and, I felt, friend, who has made so many things possible…

…. and also to my fellow travelling companions and co-students, Dave, Pete and Bryan. We are amazingly different to each other but we became a single unit and achieved much more than anyone, who wasn’t there, will ever really understand…. we’ve had a lot of fun together too.

Special thanks I guess must go to our instructor, Neil…. who sorted it, trained us up for it and talked me, in particular, through a lot of those nightmares.
Tomorrow we begin the long, twenty-seven hour, journey home – half a World away and a suitably epic ending to an unforgettable experience.

The post Saturday 23 February 2008 appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

I woke up feeling pretty battered but full of that feeling that if I was ever going to crack this thing called Dog Style then I would have to survive today.

We had the special luxury of a 15-minute lie-in before meeting up to go to the park again for Da Mo meditation exercises followed by our taichi form.

As usual the park was full of people doing their early morning exercises…backward walking, hand clapping, fan patterns, Taichi swords…. including one woman doing twin Taichi swords.

The park smelt of marigolds this morning as we made our way to what seemed like our spot by the lake.

The Da Mo was accomplished with that same sense of shared energy that we had experienced before. Looking out over the lake we cold see fish jumping and swallows skimming the water for insects.

Our Taichi fitted into the ambiance perfectly…that cockerel that had accompanied our move called The Golden Cockerel Stands on One Leg, came in on cue again and when we got to The Lion Opens Its Mouth, a lion from the zoo across the water, started to roar. You couldn’t invent things like this.

When we got to the school for our second to last class with Master Lin, the building was transformed from an empty space into the lively, mildly chaotic world of school time…. with sounds that are the same in every country of the world. Kids really will be kids.

We caused that look that we had seen before when passing children in Fuzhou…. open mouthed amazement with a totally unembarrassed stare.

The class took place in a different room…. this time on a stage in what looked like an assembly hall…. thankfully this meant exchanging the hard floor of our usual venue for a stage with a threadbare but very welcome carpet.

Then followed one of the most challenging three hours of my life. With the pattern as far as we had got repeated together and separately several times complete with all its rolls and tumbles.

My struggle was helped somehow by the canned upbeat military music that was broadcast throughout the school between lessons. Meant to motivate the children, it certainly kept me going…funny thing music.

When Master Lin was satisfied with us, we moved on to the final section…. and we actually learnt its basic shape really quickly.

I could now drop into a gentle coma, I thought and pick up the finer points of the pattern back in England.

Nothing could have been further from the truth. Once we had sorted these movements we returned to the dreaded middle section that is full of all the movements that God decided I was not meant to do. Sadly, Master Lin disagreed.

We kept repeating a short section that began and ended with a roll and which was mostly spent spinning legs backwards and forwards with arched back on the ground.

I had taken the sensible precaution of wearing three pairs of boxer shorts on top of my comfortable but thin Sloggi briefs to protect my injured hip but it was so hot in the room that one pair had to be jettisoned to cool the mini sauna in my pants.

Anyway it made my bum look big.

So we soldiered on…. when we had done this section ten times at least, we moved on to spend some time learning ground fighting movements which, as I’m sure you’ve guessed, began and ended with those dreaded rolls.

So my leg went numb and the rolls kept on coming…. they got wilder and wilder as I got more and more exhausted.

Master Lin, his son and the Shaolin Monk student, were unendingly enthusiastic and encouraging. Clapping every success and then showing me what I was doing wrong…leading to the inevitable repetition of the movements all over again.

With only an hour and a half left to go, we broke off to learn some Dog Style grappling techniques that were all, mercifully done from a standing position. I think I surprised Master Lin by finding my feet in these movements that, in reality are quite similar to stuff that we already do in our normal classes.

Just when it all seemed to be calming down, we moved on to, yup, more ground work exercises which began with a forward roll and ended with a backwards one. I cannot remember how many I did but I was beginning to wander if I would survive the afternoon.

Somehow I did. With a half hour to go, we started going through the whole pattern again. In pairs and then individually…when I did my final demonstration of it, I slowed down the tempo and, with a few wild moments, actually got through the whole thing with only a few blips. The three teachers applauded and gave me the thumbs up. I felt really good.

Then in the last twenty minutes all we had to do was repeat, several times, those ground exercises. I think by this stage we were all just throwing ourselves onto the floor in a battle against tiredness.

The amazing thing is that it was all really exhilarating. I may not have been very elegant, I may have incurred a whole lot of new bruises but I had learnt that pattern and done stuff that I had never thought I would do in my life.

At the end of the session, I felt sore but energised…. Master Lin gave me some of his magic bruise cure that has to be rubbed on after a shower. Then you have to wash your hands so that you don’t poison yourself. If you get it in your mouth, apparently, you can lose your voice – Master Lin’s version of kill or cure.

The moral of the day was that the better you mastered the techniques the less you hurt yourself. When, if, I get better at it, I should be able to do it on any surface without injury. At the moment I am one of the walking/limping wounded.

The annoying thing was that our instructor, you’d hate him if he weren’t also a good laugh, waltzed through the whole thing making it look like a walk in the park. Master Lin, rubbed it in, by saying that it was an honour to meet him and that “luck has brought us together.”

I suppose that is true all round.

All that was left to do was to go off to a Chinese tea ceremony followed by an oily massage from the best masseuse in our favourite establishment. I changed into a rather fetching pair of silk boxers…pants seem to have been the theme of the day…and then got rubbed all over in the most delightful way…even receiving enthusiastic complements and a thumbs up for my abdominal muscles. She certainly knows how to say what a man wants to hear after a rough day on the floor.

Dinner (beef and peppers, sweet and sour pork, egg rice, steamed green vegetables and very recently deceased fish and a fried doughy thing with red things in the middle), was followed by a speedy taxi ride home to the faithful lap top and in a few moments, bed.

Tomorrow will be our last Kungfu class…. I can’t believe it has all gone so quickly. Let’s hope that the old body survives.

The post Friday 22 February 2008 appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

We did our bit for the celebrations by buying our own box of fireworks which, because we are not living in P.C. Land, we could just take out to the lakeside in front of the hotel and let off to the applause of passing Chinese with their illuminated lanterns and small children with sparklers. Next to us a group of enthusiastic teenagers spread a long line of firecrackers in front of us and let them off to ear piercing effect.

I don’t know about the rest of China but Fuzhou certainly knows how to have fun. Ever since we arrived there has been a sense of joy in the air. “Gong sie gong sie!” they say…good luck and good fortune”…that is exactly what I am wishing these impressive people.

The morning started with our, by now usual, three hour session with Kungfu Dog Style Master Lin. I woke up with an attractively blackened bruise on my hip and I dragged my way to a hot shower with one leg dragging behind the other…. like Igor in Count Dracula’s castle. Smothered in some muscle medicine that I had bought at the Southern Shaolin Temple, I thought it might just go away before the class began.

Limping down the road towards the school, I saw Master Lin waiting at the gate so I quickly disguised my limp and soon all of us had made our way up those dreaded twelve flights of stairs.

It came as a wonderful relief to do a prolonged stretching session…Master Lin showed me a leg stretch with foot on the bar, diaphragm in, arms outstretched with fingers pointed beyond the toes. My hip said thanks as it also did when he showed us how to do a forward splits…. actually I did not get all the way down but I got much further than I thought possible. With a bit of effort and a gradually increasing stretch, I think I shall achieve it before one of my feet gets into that grave.

Then we were off…the pattern up to move No. 40. All together and then one by one…certainly there was no hiding place; even when reaching those rolls and twists which had caused my hip problem yesterday.

What do they yell in cartoons when something hurts? Ouch! Ow! Aaaargh! Whatever you say, I felt it…. my hip said no but the rest of me said yes. So I continued and hoped the tears in my eyes didn’t show.

We were on target as far as Master Lin was concerned and we went on to the next moves that contained, yup, you’ve guessed it, more rolls and twisting hip movements…just what the doctor definitely didn’t order. Well I carried on doing it until my instructor…who irritatingly always does know best in these things, said I should tell Master Lin.

He, of course, was full of wisdom and consideration. I described my symptoms…. slightly under playing the pain but I told him that my leg had started to go numb…. actually I was now numb right down to everything except my big toe.

He told me that it would get better and I should not worry…all I had to do was to carry on with less force and not to do anything that really hurt. He is, apparently, a master masseuse like his son and makes his own medicinal cures that he has promised to bring in for me tomorrow.

I carried on…. my rolls getting wilder and wilder and the pain getting worse until I started ghosting the worst bits. Apologising to him through our interpreter, Chen, saying some of my moves were like a madman’s. He said not to worry many of his students begin in ignorance then go on to the stage that I am at now where nothing is clear. Then they reach the stage when things become easier before reaching the final stage: Enlightenment. A long way away for me I think.

By the time the session finished we have learnt the next section of the pattern and now have only two more new moves before the final section that repeats the opening. So, even if I have to be carried to class in the morning, I am certain that I will learn the whole pattern and some cool new ground fighting techniques.

It all ended with the Shaolin monk, known as Coach E, who has been helping out with our class, giving me the thumbs up and some really encouraging words about how impressed he was by my sticking at it. Master Lin was repeated the thumbs up and I felt truly chuffed.

Back at the hotel, I lay on my bed and woke up a couple of hours later to the sound of Buddhist chanting that I had on repeat on the laptop. I felt really good after one of those sleeps of the righteous.

All that concentration and seriousness needed a bit of a holiday so an impulse after a shopping trip into town lead me to take a motorbike taxi back to the hotel.

Complete with crash helmet and a flimsy hold on the back of the bike, I speeded off into the chaos that is Fuzhou’s rush hour…it brought a new dimension to the wildness of the city’s traffic as lorries and cars perilously close. Great too were all the cries of Ni hau – hello – from fellow bikers when we all stopped at the traffic lights.

We were all well and truly exercised by this time so we ended up in the hotel’s sauna where muscles purred with delight as heat came to the rescue…. it was luxurious but monastic stuff…. men and women segregated but three pools of different temperatures: brass monkeys, boiling hot and boring. We alternated between the three, the sauna and the steam room and emerged much refreshed and pampered by the two uniformed attendants. We also found the opportunity to have a polite conversation with a naked Chinaman.

After our personal firework display we came back to the hotel for some practise…the babullion pattern from the first Master Lin and then the Dog style pattern up to where we have got. I left out the ones that really challenge my hip and, with a lot of encouragement from the others got nearer to mastering some of my rolling nightmares.

I cup of Jasmine tea and the thought of bed now drag me away from here after another mind expanding day.

The post Thursday 21 February 2008 appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

The fact that he and his son and student were so friendly and enthusiastic yesterday made all the difference as I climbed those dreaded stairs, all twelve flights, to the hall at the top of the school building.

After some stretches – including some new ones to me demonstrated by Master Lin which really opened me up, we went straight to the business of the day – learning more moves from the San Zhan Dog style pattern.

The moves are all supposedly based on stylised versions of dog’s moves and by the end of yesterday we had done the first 24 that were all done from various standing positions. We didn’t exactly look like dogs but you could see, in a very Chinese way, how canine movements had been studied to the point of abstraction to produce some pretty impressive Kungfu.

I survived yesterday thanks to the fantastic one to one tuition from three top martial artists and, of course, our instructor from England who is obviously highly regarded by the Kungfu masters here.

Today things were due to heat up or, as Master Lin said ominously and succinctly: “In the next lessons things will become more difficult.”

We were due to learn the next 12 moves today that I was dreading as they involved a lot of left, right co-ordination. Something the Wolf is notoriously bad at getting without a lot of practise. At least we weren’t going to do the rolls today, I thought. That is what I am most worried about…and have been for nearly three months now.

Everyone has been very kind; not only about some pretty dodgy co-ordination problems but also that I have only really been doing Kungfu for three years – a drop in the ocean for these guys.

Well we surpassed ourselves…. not only did we learn all these moves in the first two hours and that’s a lot of lower horse stance not counting all the other positions. Master Lin was so pleased that he said we could move on. No! Not to those rolls…I had been hoping to practise them some more in my room tonight.

There was now no hope for me…Master Lin’s son demonstrated the next four moves and, yup, there they were! A jumping forward roll and then a backward roll. Just the sort of thing Wolves don’t want to do. Well if it is dog style then maybe the Wolf will just have to grit his teeth and go for it.

In the past, I used to just turn off my mind and jump into the dark whenever required to do something that I feared. Today I realized just how well prepared we have been for this trip.

OK I may not ever be the acrobatic type but, admittedly after some comical moments, I managed to do all the moves -just. What was amazing was the support from these men. Master Lin took a close personal interest in my every move and even, astoundingly, belied his 65 years, as he span through the movements with the athleticism and grace of a young man.

Having just bashed my hip, he came over and showed me how to do the move without need for pain. I had always assumed that these floor jumps and rolls would hurt and you would just have to get used to the pain and sublimate it. Nothing could be further from the truth. With the right movements, this pattern can be done on concrete just as easily and painlessly as on a carpet. Pity I didn’t realise this a moment or two earlier.

The other three students and our instructor picked it all up a lot quicker than me and did it better than me too. I would have been perfectly happy – well maybe not – to have got on quietly on my own at the back. This was never an option. They watched me and adjusted my every mistake and when, miraculously, I got something right, they all called out and clapped. I even had to take a bow.

I am now so pleased to have got over this hurdle. This has always been one of my main reasons for taking up martial arts. The challenge of coming out of the comfort zone that so many of us hide in for too long in our lives.

So when the class came to the end of its three hours, I had rolled, crouched, squatted and jumped practically every minute of the time…and felt great…well a bit sore actually.

With the hour we do every evening with our instructor, this means that we have been doing four hours of strenuous exercise every day since coming to China. I am amazed that I don’t feel more wrecked…I have to thank my club training for that. Someone just coming to this without grinding in the basics and building up their strength would not survive the first hour.

After some croissants and chilled cans of Mr. Brown’s Coffee, we strolled through the park watching thousands of people enjoying the Spring Festival holiday. Spring-like it was too with a mad mixture of flowers which bloom in England right through the year all flowering together…. marigolds, tulips, daffodils, rhododendrons, magnolias, chrysanthemums and poinsettias, their colours adding to the riotous reds of the lanterns hanging from practically every tree.

We walked for three hours round the park, people watching. Couples with their regulation one child, young couples, groups of teenagers, groups of old men sitting round playing cards and some of the most attractive women you would see anywhere in the world celebrating their newly found ability to wear the sexiest clothes they could decently squeeze in to.

One child parenthood is noticeable everywhere you go. Mothers and fathers obviously treasure their one chance at reproduction and look after their offspring with ostentatious affection. Often really poor looking people walk around with beautifully dressed kids and small, frail women carry their valued children wrapped up in huge bundles of blankets often after the child has grown well beyond its infancy. It is a heart-warming sight to see such love but it is also poignant to see their obvious disappointment of not being able to have any more.

I cannot judge though when looking at a country that is so full of people. Travelling around Fujian province gives you just a taste of the vastness not only of the land mass but of its population which spreads out in front of you round every corner.

After a hot bath, a snooze and an hour of training to drum in our two new patterns, I have limped to my room for, I hope an early night.

That awkward bit of hip bashing has left me sore but still mobile – just. I hope it won’t hinder me tomorrow.

The post Wednesday 20 February 2008 appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.