In this strange complex of time and space anything can happen

This one I learnt of at the Polidori conference I went to in April (the one I never wrote up but did upload some pictures from). It was mentioned in a paper about Byronic vampire narratives of the 1960s, and although the speaker said quite explicitly that it wasn't a very good film, they also said that it featured a character going off to Greece and becoming involved in occultism, Peter Cushing, a scathing speech about reactionary Oxbridge academia, and a random psychedelic orgy scene which had clearly been tagged onto the rest of the movie in a desperate attempt to attract audiences. Though I like a good horror film as much as anyone, I also have a lot of time for brilliantly inept horror films, especially ones made in the 1960s and '70s, so this sounded fantastic to me. Luckily, lady_lugosi1313 agreed and had a copy, so we watched it.

It was indeed gloriously terrible. Not even the combined forces of Peter Cushing, Patrick Macnee and Edward Woodward could save it. The plot was confusing, most of the acting was dreadful, there were all sorts of continuity errors (like a lady going out of her apartment without any jacket on, but miraculously having acquired one as she stepped out into the street), and the dialogue was clearly written by someone who knew the sexual revolution had occurred but hadn't had any direct personal involvement and furthermore absolutely insisted on 'no homo'. lady_lugosi1313 actually wrote down some of the choicest examples of this at the time, which included:

• "I'm not a homosexual, you know."
• "Now let's skip the rather special case of the homosexual vampire."
• "You have your voyeurs, transvestites, narcissists, bestialists..."
• "Vampirism is a sado-masochistic sexual perversion affecting frigid women and impotent men."
• "Are you trying to tell me that a girl sucking blood from a man's neck can induce an orgasm?"
• "Some men can only make love in a coffin."

Somewhat oddly, it also made pretty good use of location footage in Oxford and (I was surprised to realise half-way though) both Kyrenia and Salamis in Cyprus, which I visited with rosamicula two years ago. A nice collection of shots of both from the film is visible here, but I'm afraid I did the same with the Cyprus trip as the Polidori conference - uploaded pictures here, but never wrote a post to put them into. I guess I may as well at least drop a couple of the ones which match up best with the film in here:




All in all, we had a mightily enjoyable evening watching this, eased along by the good offices of a couple of vampire cocktails apiece. Our only disappointment was that the shoe-horned psychedelic orgy scene turned out to have been excised from the cut of the film we watched - but luckily it was included as an extra on the DVD. Marvellous.

Obviously I’ve seen this before, but I wanted to revisit it because I am going on this Dracula Society trip organised around its locations, studios and director in May / June (excite!), and lady_lugosi1313 was very happy to join me in the enterprise. We found a nicely-restored version online, which was beautifully crisp and also contained several scenes neither of us could remember seeing before – e.g. the escape and pursuit of a prisoner from the asylum called Knock. It looks like quite a lot has been rediscovered and reinserted into the film since I last saw it, as the version we watched was about 1h30 long, whereas I’m pretty sure I only remember it being just over an hour previously. And it has gained a great deal in the process, with more time to establish the story at the beginning and all of the characters and the relationships between them coming across as better developed and more convincing.

We also attempted to match it up with lady_lugosi1313’s blood-red vinyl copy of the soundtrack which Hammer composer James Bernard wrote for the film in the 1990s, but since that was about 50 minutes long and the film more like 90, it was never going to be a perfect match! Periodically we either paused the record or went back a bit, but most of the time they were well out of sync. It didn’t really matter, though, as both were just so amazing and while the music was clearly designed in the first place to match the tone of particular scenes, it was all broadly Gothic and atmospheric, so it was never really at odds with the action.

The special effects deployed in the grand finale, when Count Orlok fades into nothing in the morning sunlight, are famous – not least because this scene first introduced the notion that sunlight is fatal to vampires. Orlok rising up in his coffin on the Demeter, presumably done by putting him on a board which could be pushed up using some kind of hidden mechanism, is almost as well-known. But over the years that had meant I’d come to assume they were the only two special effects shots in the film, and actually on rewatching I was struck by how much more widely they are used. Others I noticed included Orlok opening a door without needing to touch it in his castle, similarly unrolling a tarpaulin without needing to touch it on the ship, suddenly appearing sitting on his coffin in the ship and passing through the door of the warehouse in Wisborg without needing to open it at all. Speeded up film was also used at several points to show the supernatural speed of his movements, and negative image when his carriage is thundering through the woods. This is all just one particularly good example of why film showed itself so early as a medium well-suited to fantastic stories. Even the simplest special effects can do such a lot to convey supernatural activity, and Murnau was right there on front line of the technology.

Though Nosferatu was famously pulled after Florence Stoker sued its producers for copyright infringement, and was supposed to have been entirely destroyed, it had already been distributed overseas before this happened, and as a consequence never really ‘disappeared’ in the way you might expect in those circumstances. Rather, bootleg copies continued to circulate in both the UK and the US (I would link to pages explaining this, but between how fiddly that is on my tablet and how shonky the train wifi is, I’ve given up – just Google Nosferatu bootleg if you want to read about it). With that in mind, I’m now pretty sure after having rewatched it that at least somebody involved in the production of Hammer’s Dracula (1958) had seen it. The destruction-by-sunlight ending is almost enough to guarantee that (and indeed the wider impact of that scene also shows how the film continued to influence storytellers despite Florence’s efforts), but in addition to that there are also scenes of Hutter (the Jonathan Harker character) looking at the bite marks on his neck in a mirror which match up well with Hammer, as does Orlok conceiving a desire for his wife (Ellen, the Mina character) after seeing a framed picture of her amongst Hutter's possessions in the castle. Dracula being able to open doors without needing to touch them crops up later in Hammer’s Scars (1970), as well. Love me an inter-text.

Anyway, I’m now very excited indeed for my holiday and will be sure to take many pictures when I am there!

Just over a week ago I went on a five-day holiday to Scotland with DracSoc. As usual, there was a particular Gothic literature-related theme to our trip: in this case, that our main destination, Cruden Bay, was also Bram Stoker's favourite holiday spot, where he spent the month of August at least twelve time from 1893 onwards. But, while we were in the area, we also took the opportunity to visit its best castles and various other local attractions. I'm going to write up the experience in those two parts - first the stuff directly related to Bram Stoker, and then everything else.

Cruden Bay is a tiny fishing village on the east coast of Scotland. According to local Stoker expert Mike Shepherd (on whom more below), Bram discovered it after walking down the coast from holiday accommodation in the larger town of Peterhead, and decided that its quiet character, beautiful beach and coastal walks were more to his taste. Thereafter, it became his regular holiday destination, and importantly for us he stayed there for the first time in 1893 - half-way through the period of 1890-97 when he was slowly writing Dracula. Since he was so busy as Henry Irving's theatre manager throughout the rest of those years, he must have written most of the novel during his summer holidays in Cruden Bay.

The first two years, he stayed in the Kilmarnock Hotel, where we were lucky enough to be able to see his signature in the guest-book from his second visit in 1894:




After that, he began renting out a local cottage, now called Hilton, which has a garden with views over the surrounding bay. Again according to Mike, his own conversations with the current owners of the cottage, plus interviews which a journalist conducted in the 1960s, both brought up local memories of people regularly seeing Bram seated at a table in the garden writing - which of course would have included him finishing off Dracula during his first couple of years there.


Obviously, as many DracSoc members as possible stayed in the Kilmarnock Arms, but as they only had a limited number of available rooms, I was amongst a group of five who stayed up the road in the Cruden Bay Bed & Breakfast instead. I had absolutely no complaints about that, though - it was a very comfortable place with a genial host called Ian who enjoyed hearing all about our exploits and regaling us with his anecdotes, and bless him had gone to the trouble to make us feel welcome by decking the place out with vampire-related tat finery and even leaving a copy of Dracula out for us in the reception area in case we needed to refresh our memories!




Later on in life, Bram obviously came to find Cruden Bay too busy and bustling for his tastes, and instead began staying in a cottage at the even smaller village of Whinnyfold.


This overlooks a bay with dramatic rock formations, where seals were resting and calling out eerily when we visited. Apparently, it features heavily in one of his later novels, The Mystery of the Sea, which is entirely based in the local area, and features the ghosts of centuries' worth of sailors who have drowned on the rocks emerging from the mist and climbing, zombie-like, up the zig-zag path to the top of the cliffs.


Between Cruden Bay and Whinnyfold is a beautiful curving golden sand beach, along which Bram used to like to walk, either with his wife Florence, or on his own with one hand behind his back and his head bowed, deep in thought as he worked out the next stages of his latest story.


Here you can see Mike Shepherd (on the right holding a sheaf of paper) guiding a select handful of DracSoc members along the beach, talking to us about the local landscape, what we know of Bram Stoker's visits there, and the various ways in which it inspired his writing.


One such feature, at the Cruden Bay end of the beach, is this little cove, known as the Watter's Mou', about which he wrote a short story of the same name.


Just as we got to this, three deer, who had been startled by a man nearby walking his dog, came bounding past within a few metres of us, over a fence and off across a beautiful big green field of ripening wheat.

The biggest and most Gothic attraction, though, was Slains Castle, which stands on the cliffs just beyond the Watter's Mou' at the north end of the bay, and can be seen from almost anywhere within the village. Today, it is a ruin, having been de-roofed and partially demolished by an owner who no longer wished either to live in or pay taxes on it in the 1920s, but in Bram's day it was a splendid stately home, which he may well have visited. Certainly, it has two particular features which have their counterparts in Dracula's castle, which itself is clearly perfectly habitable with only a few partially-ruined features (the chapel, the battlements) in the novel. One is a tower perched right over a cliff-edge, which I struggled to really capture with my phone camera, but in real life very much lives up to the following description from chapter 3 of Dracula: "The castle is on the very edge of a terrific precipice. A stone falling from the window would fall a thousand feet without touching anything!"




The other is an internal octagonal room which may well have been the inspiration for these sentences from chapter 2: "The Count halted, putting down my bags, closed the door, and crossing the room, opened another door, which led into a small octagonal room lit by a single lamp, and seemingly without a window of any sort. Passing through this, he opened another door, and motioned me to enter." Obviously, octagonalness is likewise difficult to capture in a single shot, but anyway this is the room in question - though unlike the Count's equivalent, clearly it did have windows:


With or without those two features, though, Slains Castle is a very splendid place to explore, offering all the fun of ruination but also a largely-intact structure which means you can get a good look at the architecture underneath the original decorative facade, almost as though the outer finery had been peeled away, and also means that there are lots of enticing spaces to poke noses into and discover. Since it is still privately-owned and not maintained as a tourist attraction by Historic Scotland or the like, there are no health-and-safety features, it's all entirely at your own risk, and indeed a local woman called Jill who is campaigning to get the castle preserved and protected pointed out to us how one doorway lintel had collapsed since her own last visit only two weeks earlier. So, I join her in hoping that the remaining structure will be bought up by the Scottish government, stabilised and made safe for visitors in the near future. But at the same time, in its current state it makes for a wonderful playground to explore, so long as you pay due care and attention, and I'm very glad I got to see it this way.

I haven't caught up on unwritten film reviews yet, but this evening I feel like taking on a book. I read this particular book while on holiday in Cyprus last April with the lovely rosamicula, and enjoyed it so much that I quickly started having to ration it out, as I had only brought one other book with me and was afraid of running out of reading material altogether. It is a collection of what its author referred to as 'strange stories', and the full table of contents runs like this:

'The Swords'
'The Real Road to the Church'
'Niemandswasser'
'Pages from a Young Girl's Journal'
'The Hospice'
'The Same Dog'
'Meeting Mr Millar'
'The Clock Watcher'

All are excellent. They generally feature unexplained and possibly supernatural events, as experienced by a character who either speaks in the first person or whose experiences are the primary focus of the narration. As such, the reader isn't usually given any authoritative 'explanation' of what has happened, and thus gets to feel the same pleasant thrills of mystery and unease as the main character. The difference, of course, is that unlike the character (who is trapped in the story), the reader can choose to succumb to its strangeness, reject it entirely, mull over multiple possible explanations or home in one of their preference. Most are set in what seems broadly to be the UK at the time of writing (some are specific about it, others less so), but 'The Real Road to the Church' takes us to rural France, 'Niemandswasser' to the 19th-century Austrian Empire and 'Pages from a Young Girl's Journal' to northern Italy c. 1820.

It was through this latter story that I first encountered Aickman, and it is the one which made me want to buy this book and read more of his work. I'm pleased to have done so, and may well want to explore further amongst his oeuvre in the future - but for the time being, this remains the stand-out story of the collection to me, and the one I want to focus in on here. It happens (of course!) to be a vampire story, and I read it first when I was about 12 or 13 years old in The Penguin Book of Vampire Stories (ed. Alan Ryan). As the title suggests, it presents a first-person narration, told in the form of diary entries written by a young girl while she is travelling around Italy with her parents on some sort of Grand Tour. We join them as they are arriving into Ravenna, where they stay with a contessa and her family, and the story finishes in Rimini, by which time our young narrator is in quite another world.

At face value, what happens is that the contessa holds a party in her English visitors' honour, where our narrator (who is never named) meets a mysterious man whom she considers "an Adonis! an Apollo!", who perceives great depths in her teenage soul, hints at strange and magical things and tells her they will meet again. Thereafter, he calls to her from afar or comes to her in dreams, speaking to her of love, while she begins displaying all the classic signs of being preyed upon by a vampire. By the end of the story she has become very weak and has a wound on her neck which never heals up, but she is only too eager to depart her mortal life, escape her stultifying parents and meet her destiny. Looking down from her bedroom balcony into the town-square at Rimini, filled with wolves gazing up at her, she records:

I smiled at the wolves. Then I crossed my hands on my little bosom and curtsied. They will be prominent among my new people. My blood will be theirs, and theirs mine.

So, she is about to become a vampire. The story ends at this point because, as she says, "I doubt if I shall write any more. I do not think I shall have any more to say."

That, at least, is how I read it as a 12 / 13-year-old, and believe me I was totally there for a story about a young girl saved from her tedious life by a mysterious and powerful vampire at that age. The face-value reading is very pleasant indeed, and quite a good enough story in its own right. Now that I'm an adult, though, I know about unreliable narrators, and I can see that there are at least four major possible readings of this story:

1. The face-value one: there was a man at the party, he really was a vampire, he really has been turning our narrator into his vampire bride throughout the course of the story, and after the last diary entry that process will be completed and she will go to join him and the wolves as the queen of his supernatural kingdom.
2. There was a man at the party and he talked to her for a while, but he wasn't a vampire. Everything supernatural is entirely in her head. Possibly she is using it to help her cope with any number of other traumatic experiences, including the onset of menstruation, her own sexual awakening more generally (if read this way this definitely includes same-sex attraction towards the contessa's daughter), sexual assault, physical illness and / or mental illness.
3. There wasn't even a man at the party at all. Literally everything was in her head.
4. There was a man all right, he was a vampire and he has been coming to her in her dreams or in a mist to drink her blood as she believes. But he isn't going to make her into his vampire bride. She is just going to die.

I also know a lot more about intertexts than I did when I was 12 / 13, and indeed rather a lot more about Lord Byron and his circle: especially thanks to the DracSoc trip to Lake Geneva in 2016 and some of the reading I did in preparation for it (LJ / DW). So I'm now in a much better position to appreciate the significance of the narrator's interest in Lord Byron. This crops up repeatedly in some of the earlier entries, where we learn that the narrator is very much excited to be in the town where Byron is currently living (he lived in Ravenna from 1819 to '21). We're left in no doubt as to how she feels about him, either:

How well I understand the universal ennui that possesses our neighbour, Lord Byron! I, a tiny slip of a girl, feel, at least in this particular, at one with the great poet!

So, our narrator is of a strongly romantic bent. More specifically, she is clearly familiar with Byron's The Giaour, since she refers to him as such as one point, and thus must know about literary vampires through that at least, if not also through Polidori's The Vampyre (though this isn't mentioned specifically). In other words, I see now that Aickman is playing in that same world, has by doing so provided all the material needed to support the 'it's all in her head' readings, and has certainly left the story open to them quite deliberately by stopping it when he does and not confirming the face-value, vampire queen reading.

This is a story which has grown with me, then. I already loved it when I first read it and the face-value reading was all I saw - enough for it to stay with me and niggle at me and prompt me to look it up again and find more by the same author. But it has rewarded that instinct many times over by proving to have so much more to it when I returned as an adult reader. There are many, many vampire short stories, and I have read a lot of them, but I'm pretty sure I will name this unhestitatingly as my favourite whenever I am asked in the future.

One further note: having read Tom Holland's The Vampyre: the secret history of Lord Byron (LJ / DW), it naturally occurred to me to wonder whether the mysterious man at the party actually was Lord Byron at his most Lord Ruthven-esque. In fact, though, that is one of the few possibilities Aickman explicitly rules out, by having his narrator encounter Lord Byron (and Shelley with him) out riding their horses a few days after the party. She is still quite star-struck at seeing him, but she also notes that both looked "considerably older than I had expected and Lord Byron considerably more corpulent (as well as being quite grey-headed, though I believe only at the start of his life's fourth decade)." So, not the Adonis-like, Apollo-like mysterious secret lover she had met at the party, then; and of course the real human poet falls far short of the romantic image she has constructed for him. Of course.

This is the second in a series of photo posts, aimed at sharing the highlights of my Romania holiday. I've written an overview of the holiday itself here.

Bram Stoker never visited Romania, drawing his descriptions of the country and its history entirely from library-based research. But that doesn't mean you can't trace the footsteps of his characters through the actual landscape if you do go there - and that, of course, is exactly what the Dracula Society likes to do. The relevant parts of our holiday are shown below, in the order in which they occur in Stoker's novel (though that wasn't the order we did them in).

The novel begins with Jonathan Harker in Bistritz (nowadays more usually spelt Bistrița), writing up his diary from the Golden Crown hotel, where he is staying overnight before travelling up the Borgo Pass to meet Dracula's carriage. The Golden Crown is an invention of Stoker's, but in the early 1970s, an enterprising local businessman built ( his own 'Coroana de Aur' to capitalise on the western interest in Dracula tourism )

Bistritz is Bistritz, though, and we had plenty of time to wander around it before our lunch. ( This is what it actually looks like )

In order to reach Castle Dracula, Harker travels up the Borgo Pass from Bistritz in a stage-coach, through "a green sloping land full of forests and woods, with here and there steep hills, crowned with clumps of trees or with farmhouses, the blank gable end to the road". Stage-coaches weren't available to us, but from time to time Harker's coach also passes "a leiter-wagon - the ordinary peasants' cart - with its long, snakelike vertebra, calculated to suit the inequalities of the road". These are still in common use in Romania, and enterprising local farmers are very happy indeed to earn extra money transporting parties of Dracula-obsessed tourists through the Borgo Pass, just like Jonathan Harker. Thus it was that on our seventh day, we did this:

( More horseyness )

Dracula failed to meet us at the top of the pass, no doubt because it was still daylight, but his castle awaited:

( More castleyness )

Stoker's novel ends with a wild chase back to Dracula's castle, which sees the party of vampire hunters catching up with the gypsy cart carrying the count back home just as the sun sets. As Mina puts it in her journal:

The sun was almost down on the mountain tops, and the shadows of the whole group fell upon the snow. I saw the Count lying within the box upon the earth, some of which the rude falling from the cart had scattered over him. He was deathly pale, just like a waxen image, and the red eyes glared with the horrible vindictive look which I knew so well. As I looked, the eyes saw the sinking sun, and the look of hate in them turned to triumph.

The count's triumph is short-lived, of course, but still there was something about watching the sun set over the Borgo Pass from the terrace of the Hotel Castle Dracula which momentarily brought him back to life, and will stay with me forever:



Click here if you would like view this entry in light text on a dark background.

So, I went to Romania. And it was completely amazing! Too amazing for one LJ post, actually, so what I am going to do is type up a sort of overview here, and then follow that up over the next few days and weeks with a series of themed posts, complete with pictures, about particular aspects of the holiday. Those will cover roughly:

• The historical Dracula
• Bram Stoker's Dracula
• Hammeresque architecture and scenery
• Health and safety gone (not 'gone mad' - just... gone)
• Flora, fauna and topography
• People
• Misc other awesomeness

I think those are the main categories, but if I think of anything else I will add it in.

Anyway, the holiday came about in the manner which I have described here. Basically, I noticed that a London-based group called The Dracula Society which I'd been following on Twitter for a while was planning pretty much my dream trip to Romania, calculated that I should just about be able to fit it in time-wise even during the exam-marking season, and so joined up, paid my deposit and waited excitedly. As I said in the linked post, it was obviously a calculated risk committing to a 12-day holiday with a bunch of people I didn't know, but I'm very glad to say that my calculations were correct. On the basis of their website, I'd concluded that they were "a bunch of moderately-eccentric middle-class people having fun being a bit geeky - exactly like me", and this was confirmed when I arrived at the airport to meet them, and found one of them carrying the same Hammer Dracula bag as me. They were also extremely generous and welcoming to a stranger in their midst, which I felt very touched by and which made it easy to slot smoothly into the group dynamic. So it was lovely to be part of this vibrant and enthusiastic team pursuing excitement and adventure through the Carpathian mountains, and I have come back glad to have acquired a new circle of friends.

One thing I hadn't actually quite realised before I set off is that travel is actually the true raison d'être of the Dracula Society. I'd assumed they had grown towards that from a foundation based on monthly talks and meetings, but actually I discovered on chatting to some of the longer-standing members that the group had come together in 1973 precisely so that they could travel together to Romania - obviously not something that you could very readily do as an ordinary tourist at the time. They went for the first time in 1974, and again in 1975, and although they have since broadened out their travelling interests to include a range of other places of Gothic interest, they still return there on a roughly 6 or 7 year cycle. This is great news for me, because basically it means that I have now discovered an awesome bunch of people who organise holidays to awesome places on a regular basis, and will be very happy for me to join them on future ventures. Next year, they're planning a trip to Geneva to hang out in the general area of the Villa Diodati and celebrate the bicentenary of the famous wet weekend which gave rise to Frankenstein and The Vampyre - and assuming the timing fits in OK with my work commitments, I am totally going to join them!

The exact itinerary for our holiday can be seen here, and was basically generated by members of the Dracula Society sketching out all the places they wanted to visit, and then a company called Travel Counsellors pricing it up and handling all the logistics. We had a dedicated bus, driver and guide for the duration of the holiday, and toured around from location to location, staying in 8 different hotels over 11 nights (so no more than two nights in any one location). That made for a very busy holiday, especially since we packed a lot into every day, and some of what we did was quite physically demanding too - especially climbing hills to castles and steps inside medieval bell-towers, both of which we did a lot! So it was not exactly a chill-out holiday. In fact, it was so busy that I genuinely struggled to find the time to buy postcards or stamps, and at least twice we didn't arrive at our intended accommodation for the night until 10pm. But then again there was plenty of time spent sitting on the coach gazing out over beautiful mountainous landscapes, and the occasional morning or afternoon free for wandering round lovely medieval towns, sitting in cafes, or simply curling up in our rooms. Maybe it was just the sheer excitement of being there, but I never felt as tired out as I'd feared I might, especially after the rather epic efforts required to get my dissertations marked before leaving, and certainly arrived home feeling refreshed and invigorated - which I think is rather the point of holidays, isn't it?

Guided bus tours can be hit and miss, of course. I haven't been on many, actually, but I learnt enough about both historically ill-informed and boring guides on an eastern Mediterranean holiday with my sister in my early 20s to be aware of the dangers. Happily, though, the guide we had on this holiday was absolutely excellent. He was cheerful and enthusiastic, incredibly well-organised, unfailingly helpful and patient, really knew his stuff and was a delight to listen to and talk to. His name was Stefan, and he was so central to the success of the holiday that although this isn't really a picture post (that's what the follow-ups are for), I'm going to include a couple of pictures of him in action here, telling us all about the the baroque Banffy Castle in Bonțida to (as you can see) rapt attention:


The pictures encapsulate pretty accurately both the weather we enjoyed and the types of sites we visited, too. Beautiful early summer sunshine for the most part, though with occasional wind, rain or oppressive heat, and an endless succession of incredibly interesting and beautiful historical monuments and landscapes. The monuments in particular would be difficult to visit in the way we did without an experienced local guide, because a lot of them weren't open on any kind of regular schedule - you had to know who the local key-holder was, and Stefan spent a lot of his time while we were travelling phoning ahead to arrange meeting up with that person to collect the key and let us in. But from our point of view it was impressively seamless, sweeping up in our coach and straight in through the gates to discover the wonders behind - and that is of course the real benefit of going on an organised tour. There are some places which weren't on the itinerary for this holiday which I'd like to visit (mainly sites in Wallachia connected with the historical Dracula), and I think now that I'm familiar with the country I would feel happy enough to do those myself, equipped with a hire car and a willing friend, and probably on a rather more leisurely schedule than the DracSoc tour. But I'm really glad I got started this way, with such incredible privileged access to the absolute best places Romania has to offer in the areas we visited.

As for the particular places we went to on this holiday, though, they were absolutely stupendous and consistently surpassed my expectations. I knew I would find the Dracula-related locations exciting, of course, as well as the general feeling of being in the real landscape which inspired both Stoker and so many of my favourite films - and I did. But although I was quite willing to mosey about the various fortified churches, monasteries, non-Dracula-related castles, towns, villages and landscapes also featured on our itinerary, I didn't expect them to be quite as spectacular as they were - or so easily relatable to the wider imaginative world of the Dracula story, either. More or less every medieval tower, every mountain valley and every local person walking by in traditional costume could be related back to one of the Draculas (historical, Stoker's or Hammer's) somehow or other. And all of them were just beautiful and awesome and exciting in their own right anyway. I'll save the details for my photo posts, since they're better shown than told, but in summary I cannot praise Romania's sites and landscapes highly enough.

Indeed, I would now recommend Romania very strongly to anyone as a holiday destination. I found all the people we encountered extremely polite, friendly and helpful, and in the contexts where we were operating (hotels, cafes, restaurants, tourist sites) they almost all spoke very good English - though they also patiently appreciated my halting attempts at phrase-book Romanian too! Those two classic tourist banes - pushy traders and pick-pockets - were utterly absent (though we didn't go to Bucharest, so I wouldn't want to offer a guarantee against pick-pocketing there, any more than I would in any other capital city). And though once or twice I was approached by plaintive-looking gypsy children whose parents watched from a short distance away, they weren't pushy either - and hey, begging also happens in the UK. A lot. Meanwhile, by UK standards everything there from a cup of coffee to a hotel room is incredibly cheap, costing typically I would say about 1/4 of what it costs here. The entire 12-day holiday, including flights from Luton, entry to all the sites we visited, the dedicated service of our bus, driver and guide, at least two meals a day, and accommodation in what were clearly the best hotels in each location cost me £1,376 in total - i.e. about £100 a day once you take out the cost of the flights. You just couldn't begin to get what we got for that money as a tourist anywhere in western Europe.

Obviously, countries which come across as cheap to western European tourists are also those with comparatively weak economies. Many parts of Romania are still barely touched by mechanised agriculture, many of the city apartment blocks put up in the Communist era are in serious need of structural repair work, and the country definitely took a hit during the credit crunch. But it's also very obvious that life has changed a great deal in Romania from what my parents experienced when they visited in 1987 - everything falling apart, barely anything in the shops and children begging for biros in the street because they had nothing to draw with. Standing at the top of a medieval tower in Sibiu, I could see around me three very distinct rings of construction - a sizeable medieval / early modern market town, an actually relatively narrow band of Communist-era blocks, and a vast explosion of post-Communist construction beyond:


I was also struck by how many property plots in the predominantly rural area of Maramureș had new-build houses either recently completed or under construction next to what was clearly the old cottage / farm-house, and how marked the upgrade was from the one to the other. Basically, people are replacing their 3-4 room traditional houses with 8+ room palaces - according to Stefan, partly on the basis of the local agriculture but also by going to do seasonal work in the construction industry in Italy. Good for them. Meanwhile, the shops and markets are bustling, the food (bar one or two disappointments) is good, and people seem to be really enjoying their lives. All in all, then, Romania comes across as a busy and growing country, and I'm not surprised to see from Wikipedia that, recent blip aside, they are doing pretty well on the whole. It's just that these things are relative, and of course an economy can grow a lot when it starts from a very low bar and experiences vastly improved access to prosperous neighbouring markets over a short period. Still, what can western European tourists like me do to help Romania keep on moving upwards? Go there, spend money, and have a brilliant time. I was happy to do my bit!

Click here if you would like view this entry in light text on a dark background.

I'm starting to despair a little of ever getting time to write up my recent holiday spent touring around Wicker Man filming locations in Scotland with thanatos_kalos. It's partly busy-ness, and partly of course the fact that such things are rather more fun to do than to write about. But maybe I can get the juices flowing a bit by writing up my impressions on watching the film at the start and end of the holiday?

( 3a. Before - moustaches and world-building )

( 3b. After - location scouts and the hazy line between fiction and reality )

I promise that I'll put up some of the pictures from our holiday shortly in their own post, but for now I will just share my own favourite photo of the week, taken by the lovely thanatos_kalos. I am sitting on the wall outside Anwoth Old Kirk in bright sunshine, just like the musicians in the may-pole scene from the film. I think it very well captures how vivid the experience of going to these places is - and how much the weather did to contribute to the requisite summery atmosphere! Do feel free to compare it to the Youtube video of the relevant scene, below:

Watch on YouTube

Click here if you would like view this entry in light text on a dark background.

There will be no research leave updates this week, because the master plan advises that May is 'probably a good point at which to take a clear, structured week off'. And this week I am taking that advice.

Holiday Tiems actually started late on Friday afternoon, when I set off for the station to catch a train to Tunbridge Wells for the wedding of swisstone and ladymoonray. I'd never been there before (and of course its reactionary reputation precedes it), but it is all very idyllic and leafy and Edwardian-looking. I stayed at The Royal Wells hotel, where allegedly Queen Victoria liked to go in her youth, but I expect her room was a little bit bigger than mine.

( The setting and the ceremony )

( The people )

As for the rest of the week, I have spent today busy doing nothing at all. Well, no - I have caught up on LJ, Facebook, emails and the weekend's TV, in between watching the snooker. That is still going on now, and looks like it could go on until about 2 in the morning. Both players are clearly very tense, and playing quite scrappily as a result. At the time of writing I think all of about 6 points have been scored in the last half-hour - or that's how it feels, anyway. But I do not care! I am on holiday, and can stay up as late as I like!

( Snooker spoiler under here )

My main goal for the rest of the week is to de-blue my kitchen. Currently, it has duck-egg blue units, bright blue tiles, a pale sparkly blue floor, pale blue doors and blue walls. Even if I liked blue, that would be a bit much. Meanwhile, for some reason, someone has at some point chosen to paint the door-frames and skirting-boards a shade which the half-empty tin left behind in the shed reveals is called 'urban grey'. It's about as attractive as it sounds. So the blue walls and the grey woodwork are going, in favour of pale creams of the type which will complement the remaining blues without overwhelming the room.

I'm also having some local chums round for an election 2010 all-nighter on Thursday, in honour of which I shall be popping into town tomorrow to buy an assortment of red, blue and yellow sweets for consumption when the relevant parties win seats. It should be a good night - clearly it's going to be a very close-run election, and probably also one which has a major long-lasting effect on the political landscape in this country. It's not like the snooker, of course - it's our collective future at stake, not a shiny trophy. But all the more reason to go through it in the company of friends, I think.

Click here to view this entry with minimal formatting.

Right - it's time we had this canal holiday in pictures, then.

( Warning - there are 86 of them )