Travel Blog

Before we leave Patrick Leigh Fermor, who turned 94 yesterday, a taste of his brilliance:

"The link between journeys and painting, especially this sort of journey, is very close. There was plenty to think about as I made my way through the snow-bound monastic orchards; and it occurred to me, in the silent fields that followed, and for the hundredth time since my landing in Holland, that so far one painter had presided over every stage of this Winterreise. When no buildings were in sight, I was back in the Dark Ages. But the moment a farmhouse or a village impinged, I was in the world of Peter Brueghel. The white flakes falling beside the Waal - or the Rhine or the Neckar or the Danube - and the zigzag gables and the muffled roofs, were all his. ...When the children with woollen hoods and satchels burst out of a village school with a sudden scamper of miniature clogs, I knew in advance that in a moment they would be flapping their arms and blowing on mittened fingers and clearing a space to beat a top in, or galloping down a lane to slide on the nearest brook, with everyone - children, grown-ups, cattle and dogs - moving about in the wake of their own cloudy breath."