A living theme park

Last time on here, I talked about our trip to Paris to see the Olympics and soak up the atmosphere on the streets of the City of Light, but that was slightly out of order when it comes to recounting our peregrinations over the summer.

Our trip, which followed a weekend away to Verona and a magical Barber of Seville in the Arena, actually began much further south in France, and at much higher altitude.

Ever since I met a friend at university who spent his teen years there, I have been fascinated to visit the lakeside town of Annecy. Known as the Alpine Venice owing to its profusion of canals, it is a mediaeval gem replete with an imposing castle and a charming old town, all overlooked by an austere, if impressive, basilique.

Throw in the alpine cuisine, a gorgeous lake and plenty of mountains to explore, as well as the opportunity to escape from the stifling heat of the Côte d’Azur, and we were more than happy to head along the winding roads from Nice, deciding on this occasion to avoid the motorways and toll booths and indulge in a spot of slow travel via Sisteron.

It took us a fair few hours longer than it would have done if we had driven along the tedious and largely monochrome main routes but we got to enjoy the countryside in a way that would have been impossible otherwise, and had a truer sense of the distance that we had travelled.

Annecy is, of course, as lovely as advertised, although that loveliness drops off sharply as soon as you leave the old town and head just a few yards into the surrounding neighbourhoods.

However, the main problem is that one’s experience of fine and ancient centre is somewhat marred by the sheer number of tourists that throng the streets day and night. We managed to enjoy a relatively peaceful breakfast one morning at an excellent bakery, but otherwise there were so many people jostling for space in the narrow streets and lanes that it reminded me of trying to push from one stage to another at a busy festival.

We also quickly realised that many of the huge number of restaurants in Annecy are simply tourists traps offering average-quality food at best, and that it’s impossible to choose between them. It all gave impression that the place has become a sort of living theme park to France’s Alpine past.

I did moan a little about the neighbourhood where we had booked our AirBnB, as it lacked a sense of charm, but our eccentric positioning relative to the centre meant that we were a few steps from La Table d’Ebène, an excellent African fusion restaurant that should be on anyone’s itinerary if they are in the area.

Another advantage of visiting Annecy is that if having one lake at your disposal is not enough, you have another just a short drive away; one that is comparatively devoid of tourists and all the more enjoyable as a result.

More than that, Lac du Bourget allowed me to indulge in a passion that I have spoken about several times on here: my love of ferries.

The destination of the boat trip was the Abbaye d’Hautcombe, a monastery that was also the burial place of the members of the House of Savoy. After a long history stretching back into the 12th century, interrupted by a less glamorous period in the 18th century when it was turned into a porcelain factory, it was rebuilt in an extravagant Gothic-Romantic style during the 19th century and restored to the Cistercian Order, before benedictine monks took over.

It is a curious place, and has a slightly hollow ring about it, but the real pleasure was chugging steadily back and forth across the huge lake, with a well informed captain handing out tidbits of wildlife and geological trivia over the tannoy like a children’s entertainer with a bag of sweets.

(How different was his patter from that we had to endure while on a steam boat on the Norfolk Broads last year, when the captain informed us about the price and purchase history of every notable abode along the banks, putting me in mind of Oscar Wilde’s definition of a cynic.)

Compared with the bustle and noise of Lac d’Annecy, the near-silence of this vast watery expansive just a few miles away was a balm to the soul, and underlined that the idea of ‘getting away from it all’ during a holiday is not simply about taking a break from work and the daily routine.

Especially for those living in a city, the constant hum and vibration, the separation from wildlife and the horizon, and the relentlessness of a life running to a mechanical beat, means that spending time in the countryside is all the more important. Essential, in fact, if one is to properly disconnect and slow down enough to sense the eternal rhythm of the natural world.

Quite by chance, I happened upon a rather curious and charming museum while wandering around Aix-les-Bains (I have to admit that I tend not to do much research about a place before I visit it and prefer instead to leave myself open to discovery).

Musée Faure was shut the day that I first spotted a sign pointing up the hill from the Église paroissiale Notre-Dame, but the unusual Italian-style villa, perched on a mound at the top of a steep hill, was inviting. In addition, I was intrigued by a sentence that appears on its Wikipedia entry:

“The Faure Museum possesses the second collection in France of works by Rodin and the second collection of impressionist paintings of France.”

The “second collection”? In terms of what? Number? Artistic importance?

Add in that it was originally based on the personal collection of a certain Dr Faure, and there was no way around it: I vowed there and then that I would return before we left at the end of the week. I wasn’t to be disappointed.

The ground floor contained a student exhibition of works on the theme of Impressionistic Perceptions (until 29 September, 2024), which contained some works of great promise, stretching far beyond the idea of simply creating a modern-day version of a work of art from the 19th century.

The first floor was focused on that “second collection of impressionist paintings of France,” and did contain a profusion of works by artists major and minor from the period, including some real gems and notable pieces by Very Famous Artists (although there was plenty of chaff in there).

The concern I had, however, was that the galleries, which had clearly not been renovated for several decades, were a tad hot in the sweltering summer, and the heady aroma of paint oils filled the air, making me wonder if the collection, second or otherwise, would last much longer in its current state.

The final flight of stairs took me up to works by François Auguste René Rodin. While not being particularly enthusiastic about sculpture in general, and having not connected with Rodin in the past, I have to confess to experiencing something of a revelation.

Perhaps it was having so many of his works in one room or having nothing else to look at, as opposed to them being mixed up with other types of artworks as they would be normally in a gallery, but whatever the reason I was profoundly struck by the depth of his creativity and his ability to capture movement and emotion in a way that spoke to me in an entirely visceral manner.

Yes, the subjects of the pieces were often old-fashioned or perhaps even trite on occasion, and it has to be borne in mind that these were all small, domestic-scale works that have little relationship with the far vaster works for which he is famous. I am also not sure how much meaning one could draw from what he was trying to do with his sculptures, but the power of his connection to the human soul was self-evident.

I had the impression that he could have sculpted almost anyone or any human action and it would have spoken to me.

I have recently been troubled, or at least turned over and over in my mind, an article in Grazia by Polly Vernon. (God bless Apple News+ for bringing me stories I would not otherwise have read.)

She tackles a topic that I have mused upon on and off for many years, and has occasionally bubbled up to the surface of my consciousness with an unpleasant, acrid smell that smarts the eyes and leaves one with a slight sense of disgust.

Vernon talks about something called the Male Ear, which she defines as “society’s inclination to take men’s music, and men’s taste in music, more seriously than it does that of women and girls.”

She gives the example of the different way in which the mega-success of Taylor Swift and the enormous energy that surrounds her current Eras tour is received, often in critical or demeaning terms, compared with the “reverence” that was afford to Coldplay’s recent Glastonbury set.

“That, IMO, is all because of The Male Ear. It’s about decades of music criticism, written almost uniquely by male critics, which have set us – all of us! Men and women – up to value… oh, the timbre of men’s singing voices over women’s; the lyrical preoccupations towards which male songwriters tend, over those of women. And male arrangements, male performances, male costume choices, male marketing… All of it.”

I couldn’t agree more, and it irritates me every time I hear a male friend belittling the achievements of a woman artist as almost entirely thanks to the obligatory help of a man, while heaping all the praise possible on music made by men, suggesting that they did it all by themselves, even if there is plenty of evidence to the contrary.

While watching M.I.A. performing a frankly dazzling set on the West Holts stage at Glastonbury festival in 2014, an otherwise sane friend of mine leaned over and said M.I.A. wouldn’t be anything without her “male producer” turning her ideas into “proper” music (he couldn’t remember the person’s name, and neither could I, although I knew who he was talking about).

The first thought that popped into my mind is unprintable, and the second was that no one tries to diminish the music of David Bowie, Paul McCartney or Damon Albarn, to name three respected male artists almost at random, simply because they worked with producers who helped them to shape their ideas into a coherent whole.

Other male friends, again of outwardly sound mind, have said that they “don’t like the sound” of female singers, as if they can all be characterised or lumped to together as one, or that they do not like female music, if that’s even a thing. (I would wager that, on a blind ear test, music cannot be reliably identified as ‘male’ or ‘female’.)

Back to my fellow festival attendee at Glastonbury. Sometimes, I wish I had remonstrated with him and told him he was talking nonsense, but I was trying to be in the moment to witness a concert of a such power and force that it would stay with me for the rest of my life. As it was, I spent the rest of M.I.A.’s set fuming gently, like a factory chimney stack on a cold winter’s day.

Afterwards, as we walked towards Shangri La together for a spot of late-night festivities, I asked my friend whether he had enjoyed the gig, and didn’t he think she was the most incredible performer? He begrudgingly acknowledged that she was “pretty good” but I could see that he was struggling with the idea of admitting that she was anything more than that.

I couldn’t understand it, and recollecting the conversation now makes me sad.

My suspicion is that the Male Ear is merely a symptom of the wider, ongoing ‘problem’ that men have with women. To me, it all seems like a sign of deep insecurity.

I have often wondered if many men aren’t secretly afraid of women, as if they are scared of being bewitched by them or of being shown up as weak, behind all the bicep-flexing, high-fivin’ chauvinism and all that ‘bants’. Or maybe it’s a hangover of the toxic tribalism that dominated cultural life for so many decades.

But one thing is for sure: men aren’t going to change their attitudes until they truly see women as not separate and distant objects but finally accept that they are fellow humans, equal but different, and should be celebrated as such.