Different experiences

Our final day in Madrid started with breakfast at an excellent French-style patisserie, which we came across by chance as we took a new route towards the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza. As with almost all of our meals in Madrid, it was tasty, good value, and found pretty much by chance. Being in a group of six has, in principle, enormous risks when it comes to eating out unless everything has been planned, but the only meal out we booked was Saturday night. I say yay to Madrid for that.

For me, the Thyssen was the aesthetic highlight of the visit. I've been before with Mr A. It is less crowded than the Prado, the pictures are much better hung, and there is absolutely not one piece of indifferent art on the walls. It's all world class. It's the product of being one person's, or one couple's, collection. The product of the great wealth of private individuals, but at least now available for everyone to see at a reasonably modest cost.

Once again, you can see this day through other eyes, through the blips of hazelh, Ridgeback and Winsford. I perhaps did less shopping than some of the others, but I did come back with a few fridge magnets, some postcards, a pair of Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza socks, some coffee and the book of the Max Beckmann exhibition: Exile Figures.

It was great to be able to enjoy our wonderful AirBnB flat for a few hours before setting off to the airport for a late flight home. Although the wait at the airport seemed interminable, and the departure was quite late, in fact because of a considerable tailwind we arrived in Edinburgh on time. However, one of the many changes at Edinburgh airport that I don't like meant that we were bussed from Gate 2, where we arrived, to Gate 12 to the new arrivals facility. That worked well enough for most of us, except one of our number whose travel document seemed to need special scrutiny from the over eager border authorities. That meant that three of us were a little longer getting away from the airport than we hoped, but luckily there were taxis waiting, in abundance. Count my gob as smacked. But it was well into Monday before I got to sleep.

A long and fruitful day. A long and wonderful weekend. What a great book group this is!

And finally....of course, for most people yesterday has been about 'remembrance', as it is known in the UK. I read this article earlier in the week, which is partly about how 11.11 has different meanings depending up which part of Europe you are in. This time last year we were in Finland, where the end of the First World War has very different resonance, as it is totally wrapped up with independence (at that point from Russia/Soviet Union) which came at the beginning of December 1917. We saw the celebrations of 100 years of Finland. This year, 11.11 was Finnish (and indeed Swedish) Father's day, and that is marked in the many Finnish blips on here which talk about Father's Day. Others have marked in their own ways the 100th anniversary of the falling silent of the guns, but I commend to my readers above all the blip of Arachne, and the comments thereon, reminding us that many people just don't know what they are supposed to be 'remembering'. That struck a chord with me.

For me, visiting and thinking about the Max Beckmann exhibition was a really appropriate activity for this day, for Beckmann is a quintessentially European modernist painter of the early part of the 20th century, traumatised by his experiences in the First World War, and troubled too by what happened to him in the Second World War, when the German authorities tried to conscript him when they caught up with him in Amsterdam, after he had gone into exile from the Nazis, who despised him for producing 'degenerate art'. Although I know that some in our party visiting the exhibition didn't like his representations of women (a fair point), my feeling is that looking at the world through Beckmann's eyes reminds us that in the UK we have far too strong a public culture which tries to force us all to see things through a single set of eyes, probably those of how we imagine the Queen might see the world (the dominance of monarchy...), and not to adopt a critical stance, or a mindset that understands Europe as a multivalent and changing set of norms and conflicts.

And, since 1945 at least, relatively high levels of "peace", whatever that is, on the European continent.

I suspect I'll be returning to aspects of this theme between now and March 2019.