Departure lounge ramblings on music, places, climate change and stuff outdoors

RIP Leonard Cohen

Bloody hell – what a terrible week. RIP Leonard Cohen. It’s going to be a day of sad songs, but something’s a bit more uplifting have a listen to this incredible interview between Jarvis Cocker and Leonard Cohen just a few weeks ago, in which he seemed so full of life and ideas. There is also a transcript.

The Snow Leopard

It is the reader, I suspect, and not the author that determines what is the subject of Peter Mathieson’s captivating thirty-year old book, The Snow Leopard. It is variously a travelogue (on which the author accompanies a famed naturalist to study the Nepalese wild blue sheep), a tale of spiritual search (for Mathieson lost his wife to cancer shortly before setting off), or an exploration of the natural beauty of a last wildnerness. For markontour, it was all about the majesty of mountains and a certain kind of welcome solitude.

Festival No. 6 2016

This quirky, boutique festival is teetering on the brink of becoming too successful for its own good, but still has lots of charm and the wonderful Port Meirion setting keeping it extraordinary. And the food at Clough’s restaurant was almost worth the price of the ticket itself – not something you can say about most music festivals.

The Fat Mermaid, The Hague

Last night I was surprised by The Hague. Not just discovering that what I thought was just the dull home to international criminal courts is actually a thriving beach town, but also by a DJ at The Fat Mermaid who interspersed black-power tracks with Kim Wilde and the Beastie Boys.

Sapiens – A Brief History of Humankind

How do you write a 500 word review of a tome that surveys the entire history of the human race? It maybe holiday-induced laziness, but distracted by the early morning activity of fish plopping up for air, noisy geese swooping down to trim the grass in a farmers field, and a showy kingfisher wooshing past looking for breakfast, I have concluded that this is a task beyond markontour’s capabilities. Thus follows 16 interesting facts in chronological order, which I learned from Yuval Noah Harari’s highly thought provoking book, ‘Sapiens’.

Wild running, wild swimming, and tree climbing – Port Eliot 2016

When I say that swimming in the river, a talk about tree climbing, and dancing with mine and Ms markontour’s parents were the among the highlights of this year’s Port Eliot Festival, don’t think it wasn’t a vintage year for this little, eclectic Cornish festival. Almost everything we saw hit the spot. But for this big-city-hopper, you can’t beat combining great music with the lovely British outdoors, especially if your nearest and (wonderfully eccentric) dearest are in tow.