Sensible · Marks · of · Ideas

No, I'm not having a swearing fit; I'm thinking about how culture-specific many swear words are, and whether I was right to use the word "sod" in the novel. It's in tune with our narrator's character to say "sod" or "bugger", but "sod" comes from "Sodomite" and "bugger" from "Bogomil", and I'm not sure I want characters in this world to be dropping references to religious history. On the other hand, SF swear words tend to sound comic or strained, or at least not quite natural. There are some notable exceptions, such as Ursula LeGuin's wonderful "Meshe's tits!" but in that case, it's the tits that provide the profanity, not Meshe, so it doesn't count.

I've just signed an online petition to protest at Sarkozy, Berlusconi and Harper's reneging on their promise to raise development funds to 0.7% of total revenue. Unbelievably, these sleazeballs think that tithing 0.7% is too much! A tithe was originally a tenth of your income, so that isn't even a tithe of a tithe. OK, they also have their own poor to think of, the kind who are not just always with us but also turning up at polling stations. But there's poor as in Canadian poor and poor as in Somali poor, and that's a hell of a difference.

There is a wide range of opinion on how much of your resources should be devoted to helping others, from Jesus, who said you should sell everything you have and give the money to the poor, through Cicero, who had a sliding scale ending with "strangers" (i.e. not fellow Romans) whose only claim was to resources that were in effect free (e.g. water from your well) to the kind of reptilian libertarians who protest loudly that we have no obligations to our fellow humans unless we've signed a written contract. So how do we say that 0.7% is stingy? Beats me, but as Justice Potter Stewart notoriously said of obscenity, I know it when I see it.

I am taking ozarque's advice and trying to write a page a day. I probably won't manage it, but it's a good target. So here is the first page. The frequent blanks are because I don't want to put in any names before I can at least sketch out a language for this world—the "Old Speech" I mentioned, which most people don't speak, but will be used for names of characters, creatures and places to avoid the kind of thing I was complaining about in my last post.

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I have no experience with autobiography (in fact I only learnt the word recently) but then I suppose few people have when they write one, unless they lead lives so long and interesting as to need a second volume. I have only read a few of these tedious works, since books are hard to come by here, but I gather the way to do it is to start at the moment of one's birth (or even before, with an account of one's illustrious forebears) and write down everything in chronological order and minute detail. Maybe the boy who cleans my house and hangs on my words will one day write an official account of my life, complete with every colour I shat as a baby, but my main purpose is to recount certain events that I had a part in, and these did not take place until I was already forty years old, so I think it best, and kindest to the reader, to pass through the first half of my life as briefly as possible.

I was born in the summer of __________ in the village of ___________ in the province of __________, the child of ________ by her second husband. The birth of a neuter is usually cause for celebration, especially if there is already a wise daughter to inherit the land and strong sons to till it or, as in our case, to work down the mine. There was copper in the mountains, and so our village was wealthy; no young men had to leave to seek work elsewhere. With neuters, it was a different matter. If a village already had a chief and a doctor, there was not much else for us to do, but even a neuter who left was a source of pride, for they could spread the family's name and influence wherever they went. So it was that at the age of fourteen, I was apprenticed to a sorcerer in the town of ________. I spent two years learning to recite the Old Speech and to care for sorcerous devices, both skills that served me well later, but I had little talent for the former and less for the latter. I could use the devices well enough, especially the weapons, but the bond I had with them was erratic: I was as likely to harm a device as to heal it, and eventually, after I nearly burned down my master's house with a flame-wand, it decided that my affinity for destruction would be better put to use in the army.

Gaining a commission was easy, for neuters are much sought after as officer material. Men make good fighters, but they have a tendency toward anger and fear, those two enemies of a soldier, so it is better for them to be commanded by neuters. (Of course only a fool or a barbarian would squander women on military adventures.) I served in two campaigns with competence but no particular glory to my name. The first was one of the formal affairs with the _________ that used to spring up every ten years or so, usually on the pretext that we were persecuting their coreligionists here, even though we are a practical people who would think twice about persecution for profit, and not dream of persecuting people over a point of theology. The real reason is that once in a while their king or our triumvirate needed to impress their people and give the army something to do. As a result, few died in battle and fewer cities were conquered; by ancient custom, sorcerous weapons were limited to small arms that stunned or bewitched rather than laying waste. The second campaign was against the pirates of the ________ , whose raids had become too much for the triumvirate to tolerate. That was a nasty business: it was there that I got my scars and killed my first man. The boy listens to my stories of these wars open-mouthed; that is why I haven't told him that as well as the man I killed with my sword, I also torched a ship full of women and children. Here I should write that their dying screams still haunt my dreams, but they don't: it was an honest mistake, and besides, I couldn't hear their screams because the blast had deafened me.

After sniping at fantasy writers so much, I have decided it is high time that I started to write the fantasy novle I've been kicking around my head for the last couple of years. Well, I say "fantasy", but it's actually one of those hybrid novels that look like fantasy at first sight but have a scientific (or pseudoscientific) underpinning, like some of Sheri S. Tepper's or Gene Wolfe's books. The backdrop is pretty vague and, I might add, unoriginal: there's a world which resembles to a large extent your typical medieval-level-technology fantasy world, but there are all these magical objects and weapons which make the reader think "Ah, a lost civilisation." Following Clarke's dictum that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, the characters see these as really magical, but they could be just very sophisticated machines with a machine-mind interface. Or they could really be magical—I'm leaving it open. A possible scenario is a planet that was settled by members of an advanced civilisation who descended into barbarism after some convenient unexplained catastrophe and worked their way back up to a roughly medieval level—again, I want to leave those details up to the reader.

Another unoriginal idea is having three sexes: the population is 50% male, 40% female and 10% hermaphrodite, and our hero comes from the third sex. No genitals and, more importantly, not much in the way of sexual hormones, so non-standard emotions. Actually, I say it's unoriginal, but although I've come across a fair number of SF novels with non-standard sexes, I've yet to find one where the main character comes from one of these.

Some other ideas.

• It's in the Southern hemisphere, just for the hell of it. As Sara Douglas points out, even Australian fantasy authors make the North cold and the South hot, so I wanted to be different. (Gene Wolfe is a worthy exception—some have speculated that Nessus is a future Buenos Aires.)
• The main characters are brown-skinned; the evil invaders are pale and, just to annoy the Celt wannabees, red-heads. Again, not an original idea; I pinched it from Ursula LeGuin's Earthsea books, where the Archipelagans are described as copper-coloured and the Kargs look pretty much like Vikings.
• Polyandry is sometimes practiced because of the surplus of men. Land is held by women and worked by men; neuters tend to hold professional, military or governmental positions.
• Because of the three sexes, the number three pervades the whole culture: they have three deities (except for the neighbouring monotheists), the land is ruled by a triumvirate and so on.
• The existence of magical weapons means that warfare is conducted according to chivalrous conventions, like not vaporising city walls—at least until the Evil Celts turn up.
• There are nomadic barbarians riding creatures not entirely unlike wargs, just because barbarians riding wargs are cool.
• The hero is not going to be some gawky teenager; he/she will be middle aged, partly because I'm middle aged and partly because I want to screw up Campbell's Hero's Journey as much as I can.

Now all I need is the time to write the damned thing.

I've posted before about things I think fantasy writers really ought not to do, but one I missed was mangling common names to make them seem more exotic, such as George R.R. Martin's "Ser" for "Sir" (cassielsander picked up on that one). I've just started Robert Jordan's The Eye of the World and nearly put it down twice. The first reason was Shai'tan, who as you probably guessed is some kind of Big Bad Evil. And how, gentle reader, did we guess this? Because it sounds remarkably like some other name … hmmm, let's see, could it possibly be Satan? And, by an amazing etymological coincidence, the Arabic for Satan is Shaitan. An author so lazy that all he can do to is add a gratuitous apostrophe does not endear himself to me. But I waded through the mythological preface to find myself in a reassuringly familiar world of medieval country bumpkins, trundling their apple brandy to sell to the innkeeper in time for the festival. But wait, the festival is called Bel Tine. And it's a Spring festival, complete with Maypole, so could it possibly have anything to do with that other festival called, um, what was it … Beltane?

Still, I've had enough of tech support, getting a new English course off the ground, and trying to fix my broken MP3 player to make me seriously need a fantasy epic, so I'm not taking the book back to the library just yet. But, Mr. Jordan, three strikes and you're out.

After a few pretty stressful weeks, it looks like nearly all the glitches have been ironed out of our new Moodle installation (which is awesome because it is integrated with the university's database, enabling almost automatic creation of courses and registration of students). A remaining glitch is that it doesn't play nice with some versions of Internet Explorer and in particular it won't display Powerpoint documents in IE. I was tempted to dive in to the tide of e-mails flooding the Moodle admin list to say

Moodle is wise. Moodle knows that:
  (a) Internet Explorer is evil;
  (b) Powerpoint is evil. Powerpoint was responsible for the invasion of Iraq.

OK, I exaggerate a little, but apparently the dumbing down of presidential briefings to get them into a Powerpoint presentation (and, I presume, to make them comprehensible to the president) meant that Saddam's WMD capability was blown out of proportion.

This is my attempt to create a meme: answer the questions in your own journal, spread the meme and help make LJers horribly style-conscious.

How aware are you of your writing style when you are blogging?
Painfully. This is probably a sign that I should stop pissing around on the Internet and write a proper book.

Do you ever go back and edit an entry, not simply to correct a typo but because you've just thought of a more elegant turn of phrase?
Sometimes. The problem is that I spend so long thinking about whether the new phrase really is more elegant that I then get bored with writing and go and watch TV.

Do you ever switch styles?
Like many of us, I sometimes imitate illiterate Internet writing just for fun, and of course there is my alter-ego Teri, who writes like that all the time. I also once, for no good reason, wrote an entry in the style of William Burroughs (“Spaminator!”). Sometimes my style gets close to Dinosaur Comics, but that's usually unintentional.

Have any published writers influenced your style?
My ideal is to write like a cross between Dave Barry and Montaigne.

Are you a published writer?
Not to speak of. The first piece I ever put on the web (“‘Male Logic’ and ‘Women's Intuition’”) was reprinted in a Composition textbook; the rest is just academic stuff like conference papers, so not really relevant.

Do you dream of publication?
Yes, though I haven't written much that I would actually like to see published.

Do any of your LJ friends write in a way that fills you with envy?
several_bees

I just posted the following to the Second Life Educators' list:

So I think what distinguishes virtual worlds is not so much the medium as the fact that they are simulacra of already-existing worlds. The VW may be a nigh-on complete simulacrum like the Matrix, or it may simulate some aspects of an existing world and create others anew, like SL or WoW. If a computer-mediated environment were to attempt to create a totally original world then it probably would not count as virtual, but then it would be hard to identify it as a world either. "It's Second Life, Jim, but not as we know it."

I was most disappointed to find, after a quick search, that I am not the first person to coin that phrase: someone called 2E Leven came up with it first. There's nothing new under the web. [Quick Google check. Yes, that one's been done too. This is getting like the South Park episode "The Simpsons Already Did It."]

I am a great believer in coincidence. Many of my friends, from old-time occultists to newly-arrived New Agers like to say "There is no such thing as coincidence," but I am deeply convinced that if, for example, I turn out to have the same birthday as one of my students, this is a coincidence. We aren't soul-mates, we don't necessarily have anything else in common other than the usual things that go with being human … we just happen to have been born on the same date, about thirty years apart.

However, I am starting to see more than coincidence in the fact that so many times when I switch on BBC World to watch Click, I am frustrated because there is Breaking News. I don't know if it's synchronicity or conspiracy, but the universe, or at least the BBC seems to be trying to stop me watching my favourite tech programme. In this case, Click was cancelled because the jury in some terrorism case had just reached a verdict. Some guys had been convicted of trying to blow up planes, and another one had been acquitted. And this, which would only merit a few minutes on the main news, gets stretched out to half an hour because they've over-run the break between the news programme and Click, so rather than, God forbid, starting the next news programme five minutes late, they have to find something to fill the space in between. They do this largely by asking the man on the ground inane questions like, "Can you explain for us again what is meant by 'conspiracy to murder persons unknown'?" For God's sake, you moron, it means that they plotted to kill some people, but we don't know who the people are, because in this case even the plotters don't know who they are.

Now I admit that this is newsworthy. After all, it's not every day that people try to blow up planes. But this interruption of our normal viewing rests on two illusions. The first is that it is essential for us to get the details of every news story the minute they are available. Now obviously we like our news to be reasonably up to date, otherwise it isn't news, it's history, and it is on the whole a good thing that news media have progressed beyond the point where we received news of battles after the war had finished. But would it really hurt people to wait thirty minutes to get the full story? Would it be abandoning journalistic ethics for them to say: "The verdict is out in the British plane-bombers trial; one defendant has been acquitted, the others found guilty of one or more charges; tune in to the five o'clock news for the full story"?

The second illusion is that tech news is not real news, whereas people trying to kill each other is. This is odd, given that news is supposed to be new. A robot controlled by artificially-grown rat neurons is new. People trying to kill each other for religious reasons is about two thousand years old. News is also supposed to be about events that effect large numbers of people. This event did indeed affect a lot of people, but only because it meant that airport security was tightened, it took longer to get on a plane, and passengers risked their tubes of face cream exploding in the hold because they couldn't take them in their hand luggage. In contrast, OLED technology (which I'm guessing would have been a major story in the missing Click) will affect far more people, not simply because it will provide better quality pictures than LCD; it will use less energy, and thus play a small part in preventing the Apocalypse. Tech news is important news; even gaming news is important (and at least as important as all that sports news) because gaming technology drives IT in general.

I wait in hope for the day when I hear "We now interrupt this broadcast of the opening of parliament to bring you breaking news of the latest Ubuntu release."

Having arrived in Greece, I relaxed a bit, since it seemed more likely that we would make it home before our interrail passes ran out. We would have liked to spend an extra day or two in Greece and at least see Athens, but time pressed, and all we saw of Athens was the station before we sped on to Thessaloniki, which was where we had entered Europe.

Thessaloniki is a pleasant place. My Turkish friends say it's like Izmir before that city was swollen by migration from the East. Like many Greek towns, the coastal strip is full of cafes frequented by young women with expensive shoes, short skirts and long legs (or maybe it's the shoes and skirts that make their legs look long, like the optical illusion with the pillars of the Parthenon), while the less expensive places are full of cafes frequented by old men.

As I said, the women of Thessaloniki like to dress up. "Athenian women are all frumps," said the assistant in the shoe shop. Ah yes, another shoe shop. Our quest in Greece was to find Nalan a pair of gladiator sandals, and after traversing Thessaloniki from end to end, we found them. This meant that pretty much everything had been crossed off the European shopping list, so we could relax and reward ourselves with some first-rate sea food.

From Thessaloniki, the journey home was easy. The night train between Thessaloniki and Istanbul is the most comfortable I know. Normally I won't pay extra for a sleeping car, since most sleeping cars are like moving barracks, but the Philia-Dostluk Express has proper sleeping compartments for two, ideal for couples who want to act out their steamy train fantasies or just break the no-smoking rules. In typically Turkish fashion, after showing us how the beds unfolded, the guard said "Oh, and if you want to smoke, just close the door and open the window."

I should conclude with a description of majesty of Istanbul, gateway to Asia, complete with references to the Orient Express, bazaars and mosques, but I don't have it in me. Istanbul is home, or pretty near home. The exotic has become the familiar and vice versa: the quiet orderliness of Vienna is now more exotic to me than the noisy chaos of Istanbul. Travel may indeed broaden the mind, but migration turns it inside out and back to front.

While we felt rather silly spending most of our time in Vienna shopping, this was not the case in Milan. Milan is where you go to shop, whether it be for the latest Versace collection or a key-ring with one of those funny Italian pepper charms. The point is not what you are buying; it is that you are shopping in Milan. Now shopping is not something I am terribly fond of (a study of men out shopping with their wives showed levels of stress hormones equal to riot police facing an angry mob) but the vicarious satisfaction I got from Nalan's shopping delight made it worth visiting Milan.

Of course there are other reasons for visiting Milan, such as the Duomo, which is like a cross between Notre Dame and La Sagrada Familia (and probably bigger than both of them put together). As Mark Twain said, "What a wonder it is! So grand, so solemn, so vast! And yet so delicate, so airy, so graceful!"

Milan has been called "the Paris of Italy," which is not a fair comparison because Milan is clean, efficient and does not smell of urine. It's not much like Paris, and not much like the rest of Italy either. The only places it even vaguely reminded me of were Barcelona and Leeds, the latter because in the 1980s, the City Council embarked on an ambitious and not entirely successful project called "the Milanisation of Leeds". This is reminiscent of the way much of the English countryside looks a little like Umbria or Tuscany simply because aristocrats returning from the Grand Tour did their best to make it so, despite the handicap that while you can copy Italian architecture or landscaping, you can't copy the light.

From Milan we travelled the length of Italy to Bari, which is remarkable only as a place Interraillers congregate to get the ferry to Greece. If there is anything worth seeing or doing in Bari, we were prevented from seeing or doing it by our luggage, which had doubled in size over the previous weeks. We were going to leave it in the station as we normally do, but realised after checking it in that we were going to pay €5 per item rather than for the lot. We returned immediately and checked it out, then had an argument about paying. We grabbed our bags and did a runner, Nalan calling over her shoulder "No fuck tourist!" (Her grammar tends to go when she's having fun.) Hampered by our luggage, all we could do was sit in a park until the ferry was due, sleeping in shifts because of the profusion of suspicious characters. Our suspicion was justified. While trying not to doze off, I was jerked back to alertness by some shouting, which at first I assumed to be just another Italian altercation, but turned out to be the classic Italian Job: two kids on a Vespa trying to lift a bag out of a car that had stopped at traffic lights. My first reaction was to sprint across the road and try to knock them off their bike with a side kick, but fortunately I was too tired to react—knocking someone off a bike is easy; doing it without injuring yourself isn't. Fortunately the driver was stronger than the paninari, and they sped off empty-handed.

Touring Europe on anything between a shoestring and a corporate expense account means alternating luxury and discomfort. Our hotel in Milan was sumptious (official price €395; our price €70). The train journey should have been comfortable but was not, largely due to long-legged passengers sitting opposite us, and Bari was the pits. But then we got on the ferry and it was like boarding a five-star floating hotel. I'd only been on modest ferries around Britain and the Greek islands before, and was not expecting a disco, several bars and restaurants, shops, a casino, a games room and a swimming pool. OK, the pool was small and closed most of the time, so we didn't actually swim in it, but it was there. Lots of food, beer and Greek coffee later, we arrived in Patras, relaxed, refreshed and grateful we had shelled out a bit extra for a comfy seat downstairs rather than roughing it on the deck with the other Interrailers. Hard seats and cold sea air aside, in my exhausted state I couldn't have handled the noisy Australians.

I don't really have a lot to say about Barcelona, which is surprising, considering that it is a beautiful city. Because of time considerations, our experience of Barcelona was limited to a tour of the Gaudis. La Sagrada Familia was impressive from an architectural point of view, but somehow smaller than we'd expected, and they still haven't finished it. Maybe they don't actually want to finish it, because they're worried that people will look at it and say, "Hmm, it's not as big as it looks in the photos."

Personally, I preferred the Guelles Park, which is Gaudi at his most whimsical.

Perhaps one reason I didn't appreciate Barcelona to the full was that my mind was on other things, notably planning how to get home to Turkey before our rail passes ran out. We were, after all, talking about getting from one end of Europe to the other. Air travel may seem to have shrunk the globe, but stay on land (or sea) and you remember that the world is very, very big. Europe may be small compared to the Crab Nebula, but travelling across it still isn't like popping out for a curry.

We worked out that we could take a train from Barcelona in the morning, change at Marseilles and be in Verona by nightfall. Unfortunately, it was nearing nightfall by the time we reached Marseilles, and there were No More Trains. We sat outside the station in another McCafe and chatted to a McEmployee from Madagascar, who told us at length how much he didn't like France. Night fell. Our Madagascan friend advised us to go inside the station, as it wasn't safe outside. "Lot of crazy Arabs," he said, ominously. The station was already locked, but after we waved our tickets at the security guards, they let us in. The scene was like a zombie movie, with surviving humans huddled on the floor behind the barricades. What was worse, it was a zombie movie with no toilets. As soon as one of us got up and wandered around, the security guards would rush over to make sure we hadn't turned into zombies. "No toilet! Will open 5 a.m.!"

Eventually dawn broke, the zombies retreated and although the toilet remained obstinately closed, a train arrived, which provided the same function. We headed for Nice, where we swam, sunbathed and admired the statuary. It was like night and day. Probably because it was night and day.

As asides from travelogue, I'd just like to say the following.

1. McCain really does think women are stupid. "Hey, there are a load of women who voted for Hillary Clinton just because she's a broad, so if I get some no-name dame for VP, the suckers'll vote for us!"

2. Every so often, you encounter a popular intellectual programme about something you happen to have studied intensely, and the experience makes you distrust all popular science/history/art programming. The new series of Visionaries is the BBC's version of American Idol for the world of classical music. OK, cheesy but educational. But then, in their stand-off for the baroque era, the contestants are Bach and Handel. Both of them were great composers, but neither of them were musical visionaries. Bach, in particular, was a musical conservative, so much so that most people ignored his music as hopelessly old-fashioned, preferring the visionary (but crappy) music of his sons. What's more, they have a series about musical visionaries without including Schönberg. This man had vision in spades. His vision was music liberated from tonality; in place of the crippling bourgeois-feudal system of major and minor keys, he proposed a new twelve-tone system where all tones were equal. It was a great vision. It was also totally stupid and helped screw up music for a whole century, but it should have been included in the series.

3. I am experimenting with not smoking. Note that I am not giving up smoking; giving up is for quitters. I am just playing around. But it is very interesting. In the past week, my daily cigarette consumption has ranged between eight and zero (the eight was because of panic after I lost an essential bureaucratic document; the zero is yesterday and this much of today). The problem is that nicotine withdrawal makes me emotional. Not just ordinary-emotional but downright-silly-emotional. Last night I was reduced to tears by the recollection that I had taken Nalan to a cafe in Paris and she wanted to eat chips and they didn't have any. That is how bad nicotine withdrawal gets, and from a Stoic point of view, that means I should not give up smoking, since grief is a vice, but lung cancer is merely a dispreferred indifferent. In case any of my readers are considering giving up smoking, I should mention that two things are very good: alcohol and Buffy DVDs. Buffy makes everything OK.

A long time ago I had a French student who was less than happy about going back to Paris for the summer. "Jean-Do," I asked, "How can you possibly not like Paris?" "Because it ees ferl of fercking Parisiennes!" (I am not exaggerating the accent; this is the guy who said he didn't want to improve his pronunciation because "ze English gurrlz, zey jerst leerrv ze Fronsh accon.") This attitude of the rest of France to Paris goes some way towards explaining the complex feelings we Britons have towards France as a whole. Calling it a love-hate relationship would be oversimplifying a little. It's also an inferiority-superiority complex, approach-avoidance, self-other, and just about every conflicted thingummy imaginable. We despise the poncy Frogs, we've fought a dozen wars with them (although in the last two we were technically on the same side), we believe, with an insularity that goes way beyond racism, that "wogs begin at Calais," yet deep down, a part of us secretly wants to be French, which is why so many Brits are pushing up house prices in Provence. We want the food, the wine, the sexy language and the whole je ne sais de vivre just like the Goths and Vandals wanted to speak Latin and live in villas with hypocausts. I imagine this is pretty much how normal French people feel about Parisiennes. I don't know if there any exalted beings that inspire these feelings in Parisiennes—if so, they probably live on Mt. Olympus, and their main worry in life is deciding which vintage of ambrosia would go best with the camembert.

Anyway, I was all for skipping France, just like I wanted to skip Germany (and pretty much did). But you can't take your wife on a tour of Europe and not take her to Paris, even if it is full of fercking Parisiennes. Paris is the City of Lovers, remember? That means if you don't take your significant other to Paris, it means you don't love her. Erfurt, you can safely skip; skip Paris at your peril. (That last sentence had anastrophe, anadiplosis and double alliteration, so you should take it seriously.)

As usual, there was the frantic search for a hotel. We found one online, then found it physically, and found it just about acceptable. It was a tiny room with the normal noisy French plumbing, but it was forty Euros for a place near the Gar de Nord, so we couldn't complain. We then had to find something to eat and drink, which was less successful; we sat in a cafe in our street, where I had a chewy chicken sandwich and a glass of wine, but Nalan didn't like the look of anything on the menu and just had a bottle of water. My wine cost me €3.00, which was a little on the pricy side; her water cost €3.50, which a fellow customer informed us was normal. "In Paris, you don't drink water," he explained with a smug smile. "If you're thirsty, drink wine or beer." Fercking Parisiennes.

I woke early. Our bargain hotel turned out to be next to a building site. What was bizarre was that I was woken by the sound of labourers shouting to each other in Turkish. In my befuddled state, I wondered if this whole holiday thing had been a dream and I was actually still in Ankara. But the day got better from there; it was time to treat Nalan to the condensed one-day Paris tour I had discovered the last time I visited this beautiful city in 1990.

First stop: the Seine. You can do a good tour of Paris without going far from the Seine, and you could probably get a pretty good sense of the city without even leaving its banks. The Seine is Paris.

You don't need to take the boat trip (unless you want to recreate that scene from Kiss of the Dragon). Just toddle along the bank, looking at the sculptures, the bridges and the houseboats that remind you of Anais Nin. (Well, they do if you're into literary gossip and erotica. If you don't know Nin, let me put it this way: she was the first celebrity blogger.) The Seine will take you to Notre Dame, which does not disappoint. Notre Dame is totally Notre Damey.

From there, I was tempted to go to the Louvre, just so I could feel like I was in Tomb Raider or The Da Vinci Code, but we didn't have a week to spare. Nalan was dodging security guards to spend a few more minutes in the Van Gogh Museum, so God knows what she would be like in the Louvre. Instead, I took her to the Pompidou Centre, which is the Mecca of modern art. The conversation went something like "Omigod, Matisse. Omigod, Braque. Omigod, Picasso. Omigod Kandinsky. Hmmm, a Dada room. Not too keen on Dada. Omigod, Dali."

After Nalan had recovered from her multiple orgasms, there was not much time left, so we had to walk briskly back along the Seine to catch the train to Barcelona. But it was this hurried walk that summed up what is great about Paris. The banks of the Seine were full of people. Most of them were sitting, chatting, eating bread and cheese and drinking wine. Some were waltzing. Some were tangoing. Some were even doing capoeira. Maybe the fercking Parisiennes aren't so bad after all.

I don't know why, but I've never found Germany very interesting. It has produced some great writers and composers, but never filled me with a desire to visit, so I was all for skipping Germany and going straight from Austria to Holland. Nalan, on the other hand, was keen to visit, having heard all about Germany from her father, who lived there for about a decade well before the whole Gastarbeiter thing started, and thus had a fairly positive view of the place. In particular, she wanted to see Köln and Berlin. We compromised by agreeing to spend the night in Erfurt (which was recommended by some fellow travellers) and having a quick look round Munich while we changed trains.

What little we saw of Munich was pleasant enough, but Erfurt proved to be a disappointment. Specifically, we were disappointed by the fact that the gasthaus we had booked was closed by the time we arrived—11.30 p.m., which I suppose is frightfully late for Germans. Worse, their telephone was not working. So much for German efficiency. After ringing doorbells and throwing stones at windows to no avail, we went back to the station where we sat in a cafe waiting for the trains to start, listening to the guttural Thuringian dialect and wondering if the fellow drunkenly babbling about his "vadderland" was likely to pick a fight with us for being English or Turkish. Fortunately the only problem we encountered was hypercaffeination, and after an uneventful five hours we hopped on the train to Göttingen, a name Nalan found hilarious because "göt" is Turkish for "arse" (to be fair, she was sleepless and hypercaffeinated). From there it was just another short hop to Hannover, where we intercepted the train to Amsterdam.

It did not take much to convince Nalan that Amsterdam was where she'd really wanted to go all the time. In fact, all it took was the public library. It was large, it was comfortable, it had Turkish magazines, it had a cafe selling excellent cheap sandwiches and cakes, and most importantly for travellers arriving with no hotel booked, it had a load of computers with free Internet access. Oh yes, it had a polar bear, too.

After finding a hotel, I went off foraging and, like a good hunter, returned to present my woman with food and an itinerary for the following day. Here we again turned out to have different plans: I proposed visiting the Van Gogh Museum and the Rijksmuseum; Nalan wanted coffee shops and the Red Light District. It turned out that we were each basing our plans on what we thought the other's priorities were. We compromised on the Van Gogh Museum and the Red Light District, which, as you can see, really is red.

That's the great thing about Amsterdam: there is something for everyone—art, architecture, erotica, beer, drugs, cheeses, canals … in fact the only thing not to like is the language. I once read a theory that there are no direct emotional associations of the sounds of words; according to this linguist, we think French sounds romantic and German harsh because we think of the people who speak these languages as having those qualities, not because of anything inherent in the phonemes. Dutch is a striking disproof of this theory. When I think of Dutch people, words like "civilised", "good-humoured", "polite" and "modest" come to mind. If I were to imagine a language that would suit this charming race, it would be something restrained and melodious, with a lot of vowels, not Dutch, which sounds like a German trying to speak English while swallowing a painfully hot potato. When the National Geographic channel does one of its short features on languages facing extinction (usually it seems, because they are collapsing under the weight of their consonants), we always say "Let it be Dutch!" There again, maybe the reason the Dutch are so nice is because they were saddled with a language no one wants to learn that sounds offensive even to their ears, thus encouraging them to appreciate other languages and cultures. Contrast this with the French, whose love of their (admittedly beautiful) mother tongue has contributed greatly to the smugness that makes them so hard to tolerate. But more of France later …

I am fairly sure that I like Vienna a lot. I'm only fairly sure because nearly all the time we spent in Vienna was spent in shops, since we needed to get Nalan a rucksack to replace her broken suitcase and also ended up buying a digital camera and some decent walking boots for the both of us—in other words, things we should have had before we started our journey. Nalan, on the other hand, is absolutely certain that she loves Vienna, since she can judge a place on the basis of its shopping quality. She can even tell things about a place by its McDonalds. I'd assumed that they were all the same, in fact that the whole point of them was that they were all the same, so that you can eat in a McDonalds in Vladivostok and get the same McExperience that you would in Jakarta; it is partly for this that McDonalds attract so much scorn, and it is this that makes them useful in places where more authentic cuisine might give you dyssentery. But no, there are subtle differences that Nalan picks up on, like the way the arches of Italian McDonalds are bronze rather than yellow (apparently at the insistence of the Italian government). In Vienna we had our first sight of the McCafe, an attempt to up-market and glocalise McDonalds so that people (particularly Europeans) don't feel ashamed to be seen there. Thus it was that my first taste of Vienna's renowned pastries was actually an ersatz McDonalds one - something like a McApfeltortelschplitzen. Even so, it was damned fine cholesterol.

My desire for slightly more authentic Austrian cafe life was met in Salzburg in what we were told was its oldest cafe. The Kuchenpflischenstücken were wheeled round on a trolley creaking under their weight, but were so expensive that we stuck to the coffee, which was some of the finest I have ever drunk. The McCappuccino in Vienna was palatable, but the Salzburgers' verlangaerter was divine. Of course, the Austrians should be good at making coffee, since they were the first Europeans to do so, and the first people anywhere to make coffee without lots of grounds (go anywhere East of Austria and you're drinking some variant of Turkish coffee, despite the Greeks' insistence on calling it Greek coffee and the Macedonians' calling it—you guessed—Macedonian coffee).

Apart from the coffee, there are many other things that make Salzburg delightful. It is a fairy-tale town, the kind of place you'd film something like Heidi or The Sound of Music. Ah, wait—they did film The Sound of Music there. Not being a great fan of musicals, I wasn't aware of this fact until I visited Salzburg, but once there, you cannot escape it: Salzburg has only given the world two famous people: Mozart and Maria von Trapp, but boy do they let you know it. At first sight it looks like everything in Salzburg that isn't about Mozart is about The Sound of Music, but in fact this is not a fair impression. The town is actually stuffed full of culture: there are art galleries, sculptures all over the place, and the concert performed in the cathedral and broadcast in the town square that night wasn't Mozart but Puccini. Actually, I would have preferred Mozart, but I was pleased at their support of diversity.

In the end, though, what impressed us most about Austria was the Austrians. I've met fans of various nations—Francophiles, Turcophiles, Sinophiles and even Anglophiles—but I've never encountered an Austrophile, and I think this is unfair. OK, they gave us Adolf Hitler and Sigmund Freud, but they also gave us Mozart and, for those who like that kind of thing, Maria von Trapp. They are also the most polite people in the world. Austrian politeness, like Middle-Eastern hospitality, ranges from the impressive to the utterly humiliating. I felt myself wanting to bow to shop assistants. It may be the case that, if election statistics are anything to go by, a lot of Austrians are unrepentant Nazis, but at least they'd be too polite to let you know about it.