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Irish Times
7 days ago
- General
- Irish Times
Summer fiction: Sackville Place by Maggie Armstrong
I was coming back from lunch when I thought a pint would be the best idea. Anyway, it was too hot to work. Days of loping around, exhausted, climbing stairs, swatting flies with newspapers and novels at the rented desk. I feared I'd smash a window in the process. I was getting air. But the streets were baked, forgotten, thirsty. I felt sorry for the world. There was a pub so I pushed the door and slipped inside. It was the first pub I'd seen, right next to a betting shop, along Marlborough Street or into Summerhill, I don't know where. I've never found the place again, it's gone. What you had was a plain roomful of men, seated in pairs or drinking alone. No modern touches, just the horse racing on two small televisions. No sunshine had come near this place or ever would. It seemed like somewhere you could safely disappear, or at least, until 6.25pm. Then I had to take the tram so I could be home for seven. An old man was bent over the bar, one hand on his walking frame, his face drawn up towards the leaping horses. I asked the barman for a pint and stood there loosening my shirt. The fabric couldn't handle the sweat under my arms and I had a very grimy feeling. I stank. My hair was sticking to my face. What I wanted was to climb up to some jutting rock and jump into the sea in all my clothes. Plunge and splash around the water until sunset. I'd stand under a sprinkler just to get wet. READ MORE I was doing summer wrong, all over again. It happened every year. As a person I had failed and I felt it strongly, regularly, but then, who cared. It didn't matter if you weren't delighted with your life, I had to keep remembering that. The barman put a pint of beer into my hand, and the cold glass seemed to touch me to my depths. I carried it to a table, pretending to know the place. A young guy coming towards me nodded, lifting his pint. It was comradely, the way he did it. He took the next table. I knew I'd come to the wrong place but that it hardly mattered. The walls were covered with faded pictures of Italia '90, framed jerseys, the football manager Jack Charlton pouring himself a pint. Young Paul McGrath, and Packie Bonner, all ecstatic for the camera. I cooled my cheek a moment with the beaded glass, and it almost slid out of my hand. Then my first big sip. It tasted delicious. I wished it could go on forever, this moment here, alone. Underneath me a piece of foam burst through a rip in the flowery brown sofa. I sat back, brushing a few scattered crisps on to the floor. A scratch card poked out of the arm crevice, the green and gold one that costs €2, with half of it torn off. The first column was intact, a €5000, a €5000 and – I assumed it was a €50, but the way it was torn it could have been the winning €5000, accidentally discarded. The guy at the next table had caught me examining a scratch card so I stuck it back into the seat. I took out my laptop. The heatwave had been arranged around my most appalling deadline. An unending document, call it a piece of writing. Weird, irrelevant, incomprehensible the more I messed with it. My work was very badly paid. When you added in the rent and overheads, the transport, coffees, salad lunches, the odd shopping indiscretion, it turned out I was emptying my wallet every month just so I could sit around, cutting and pasting paragraphs. It did nothing for me in the long run. I worried about terminal physical decline. My skin was suffering. My poor back. The life of my mind, gone. Not to think about the city where I was supposed to live, the people the world was passing by. Could you even call us a society? I wondered this in flashes of despair. And how could I be part of it? If I couldn't let go of my outrageous tribulations. My bourgeois troubles. I'd always assumed that I'd contribute something. Get off my backside, maybe start by volunteering. These days it seemed highly inappropriate that I should even try and get involved. Too often, I wished I could sever ties with my own self, and start again, but I had no idea how. 'Hard at it there?' It was the guy at the next table. I knew how eccentric I must look. Fingers crouched like frightened spiders on the greasy keys. I stretched my arms. 'Oh yeah, deadlines.' A lanyard hung from a mustard ribbon around his neck. His hands were stained at the cracks with an inky substance. His fingernails too. He had a tabloid open on his raised knee. SISTER TAKES BITE FROM CHEATING LOVER'S ARM. Across the page a woman on a white throne, surrounded by puppy dogs. I smiled tightly and resumed looking at my document. A tram dinged outside and clanged along. It had to be before seven and not after when I got inside. I'd been late before, and it was never worth it. The way the atmosphere would change. Chaos would erupt and the consequences would take days to deal with. I took a luxurious sip, glancing sidelong. He was drumming with his fingers on his right knee, looking without interest at his phone. The paper was now folded at the edge of the table. FEARED GANGLAND BOSS STEPS IN AS FATHER OF BRIDE SHOT. I wondered if I should plan something for later. Ice cream, surely. Everyone was at the Forty Foot I guessed, or lighting up their barbecues. Or in the South of France. There had been too much talk and pictures lately of the South of France. 'Are you not having another?' It was your man, talking to me again. 'Oh no. I'm only having one.' I gripped my glass. 'One?' he said. 'Just the one.' 'Grand so.' But it wasn't grand. I had to explain myself. 'Another would get me – locked. We can't drink as much as you.' 'How do you mean, we ?' 'Girls. Women.' He smiled awkwardly, as if I'd told a bad joke. The word women had embarrassed him. I caught myself looking pleased in the streaked mirror of the laptop screen. 'I don't normally drink during the day, by the way,' I told him. 'It's the heat.' 'I'm not judging. Sorry.' He told me his name. So it was my turn. 'Arabella,' I spoofed. 'Ar-a-bell-er,' he said, carefully mispronouncing it. 'Yeah. Okay, fair enough.' We drank, flicking away the flies. 'Sounds like a made-up name,' he said. I laughed, but hated giving him attention, because he was so good looking. Of course I'd noticed it. Not that I found this kind of thing important, but I could see that other people would. And it had aroused, I'd also noticed, resentment in me, jealousy too. His brown hair was thick and long around the sides, so that when a tiny gold stud glinted from his left ear lobe, he struck me as a genius. The back of his neck was tanned. He wore a light blue T-shirt with vague holes around the collar, and those hard-wearing work trousers lined with dusty pockets and holsters. He probably kept nails and screwdrivers in those, all kinds of tools, and cigarettes or loose change. I finished my beer in two ugly gulps and it tasted great. 'What are you up to anyway?' he asked, nodding at the laptop. 'In the pub like?' 'Oh. That's nothing.' 'Let me guess, you're a student.' I gave him a stern look. 'Thanks. No, I'm a journalist.' 'Like a crime journalist?' 'No, I don't do much crime.' I found myself opening the buttons of my sleeves for no reason. 'Business, economics. Lots of business.' I faced him. 'I've just been up in the financial quarter. Interviewing a billionaire lady. This oligarch who's bought the big hotel at Grand Canal. She had a security detail.' 'Fair play, financial quarter,' he nodded, musing. We looked at the horses galloping on the screen above. The commentator was blaring out the names in an accelerated frenzy. Desert Spring. Boundless Joy. Heart Star. Let's Get Lucky. Bout de Souffle. Follower of Fashion. Brandy Snap. Bet Your Ass. Some race I had no knowledge of, no clue how to follow as the gloss of thundering legs and bouncing jockeys whipped towards the finish. I guessed I should have put a bet on Boundless Joy, who came first. 'Do you want a drink anyway?' my pub friend asked and I regarded him a moment. His ease and restfulness. His face was a deep tanned pink, from too much sun, or maybe daytime drinking. 'Go on then.' He got up. And why not, I thought. Why. Not. We had all afternoon. I heard the bright horn of the tram and tried not to worry as it gasped along without me. I tried to master a single clear thought about the situation. To set aside the dread. Because here was the problem. Going home. The worst moment in my day was arriving home. It was walking up the driveway, putting my key in the door, hearing the metal cut the metal, opening the lock. I just never knew what I was going to find. I didn't want to live this way much longer. I lacked insight, clairvoyance, but I imagined this could be compared to great unhappiness. This fear. These nerves that nestled in me. You could not continue in this vein forever. Pub friend came back with two pints, his laden, chalky swagger. He paused over the table. 'Would I join you there?' 'Okay.' 'Well. What are you doing in the pub on your own then?' he asked, taking the further end of the sofa. 'Do I have to have a reason?' 'It's just that you seem like a very civilised lady.' I laughed loudly. 'That's nice of you. I'm meeting my husband.' He tilted his head towards the doorway. 'But he won't be here for a while. We're not actually married yet. What are you doing here?' 'I was passing through. It's the end of the month isn't it? I got paid today.' I closed up my laptop and put it in my bag. 'What do you do?' 'I'm an electrician. Working in a data centre the past year.' I sipped as he explained what a data centre is, because I'd gone this long without really knowing. I knew they were some way bad , maybe very bad, but that not everybody thought so. Like iPhones; some people loved their iPhone. The beer was heavy in my hand. If I drank it all I would be useless to the world. Another race had finished and the tired horses were being led away. Sugar Coat. No Tomorrow. Runaway Bridle. The old man at the bar got up and slowly rolled his walking frame along the floor, out the door, on to the street. Pub friend didn't trust the place he worked in, but then, the money. Work started at 7am, he was up at six. He pulled off his lanyard, ruffling the back of his hair. 'I need one of these to open every single door. Can you imagine the power? They are hiding everything.' 'Like what?' 'All our information. State security. I don't know. Everything. You must know, you're the journalist. Do you do like, investigations?' 'Always chipping away, yeah.' I gulped my beer. 'So where do you live?' With his parents, he said. Swords. 'Swords, wow!' This made him laugh. 'Shocking, right? Swords. You've never been to Swords, have you?' 'Never in my life.' 'You should. I'll show you Swords.' I looked at my feet, and he shifted around and sighed. 'It's all right you know. There's nature there, and history. We have a medieval castle. A river. The airport! Why, what have you heard?' He had no time these days anyway, working Monday to Friday for the company. On Saturdays, he helped his dad, a painter decorator, and sometimes Sundays. He put up with it because he was saving for a mortgage. 'Mortgage,' I said, from a dream space. I was woozier than ever, listening to him, in love with beer, excited by the possibility of feeling this tremendous all the time. I wanted to come back again tomorrow and do it again, and then the next day and live life under the influence of such an enhancing nectar. 'I'll start off with a one-bed apartment, get a foot in,' he went on. 'I can do it up, sell it on quick. And then who knows, I might buy a nice house. I might plant some trees, and flowers.' He mimed a sprinkling action with his fingertips. 'Stranger things have happened. I only have to meet the right woman.' He rested his head back and looked at me. His eyes were icy blue, like two sweet lozenges. 'I live in a house,' I said. 'And I have three children. And I'm married – or, I have a fiance.' 'Oh. A fiance .' He said it in a quiet but outlandish, mocking voice. 'We met when I was young.' A papery black fly was crawling around my wallet. It paused, turned left and right, and rubbed two scheming front legs together. The back of a hand crashed on to the table just as it took off. Pub friend cursed. 'You don't look old,' he said. I told him my real age and he made a good show of surprise. He was 26, he said. And it was pay-day. 'How about a last beer?' 'Absolutely not. My husband – he's coming.' He looked at the doorway. 'Now she tells me.' 'Not immediately. But in the next hour, he'll be here.' Pub friend went off. More people had come in. A thin guy in a dark, wide-brimmed hat who didn't look well, a blonde woman with bagged eyes. Four older guys sitting around a table. Pub friend had a pint in each hand when he came back. 'You don't have to drink that. I just thought you might want it. So. Is it a date?' 'A date?' 'Like, is he bringing you out?' 'I don't know. He might surprise me. There's a new rooftop bar in Ranelagh. Nothing too fancy.' 'I'd like to go on a date with you,' pub friend said. The beer filled the back of my throat in a needling ball. I swallowed and laughed out a lame titter. Had anybody noticed what was going on here? The barman was impervious, pulling at the taps. Today had got completely out of hand. I couldn't remember why I'd done a thing like come in here. Refreshment, initially. One of the old guys was telling a story now. Another was talking over him, with pointing, and something in this knot of bonhomie made me want to leave. Drink was stupid. Pub friend was annoying. 'Okay, just because you have some kind of fetish,' I told him. 'I have responsibilities. And I'm getting married.' 'Oh yeah. I forgot about that. I forget anything I don't like the sound of.' 'And anyway you should be going out with some foxy 26-year-old. Hey, show me.' I thought he might deny me the pleasure, but he handed me his phone. 'I need your passcode, please.' Raising an eyebrow, he punched it in. I pressed on the first app I could find. Women named Denise, Lauren, Benedicta, Katelynn. They wore multiple lavish earrings. A crystal pendant winked from a bust. 'Beauty's only skin deep, you better go deeper,' read Lauren's caption. 'Headcase,' he said. 'Have to get away from her.' 'How about Lily, look there's a knockout. Wow. And a degree in pharmacy. Ask her out. Let's message her.' 'But what could be better,' he said, facing me, 'than a woman with a bit of experience?' I told him he had lost his mind and gathered up my stuff and downed my drink. It was good to get back outside, though the day had barely cooled. A sunburned, shirtless guy came along the path, looking desperately for something. Pub friend beckoned me aside. He nodded up the road. I followed him. We stood at the corner of a narrow laneway of black industrial bins with their lids raised high over puffy rubbish bags. 'I'd take your number, but I don't know that someone wouldn't come and try and kill me,' he said. I chuckled. Really, though, it meant the world. We were somewhere. Sackville Row, or Sackville Place, who could tell. We were so close it would have taken nothing. Scandal. A torrid love affair, I saw it. It was all I wanted and how good it would have felt. I raised a hand in goodbye. He patted his pockets. 'Got your key card?' I asked him, my voice a husk. 'I do,' he said. 'Nice one. And goodbye, eh.' 'Arabella.' I walked quickly towards the river, past the Abbey Theatre, Earl Place, Old Abbey Street. On the pavement, arid stumps of dogshit, a litter of pistachio nuts. I breathed in pleasant drifts of hash. Then a kind of smorgasbord of leftovers and takeaway boxes, a ring of seagulls feasting, with eager, disapproving eyes, beaks plucking greedily around the shreds and spoils. Across the road, a mother in a black headscarf pushed a sleeping boy in a pram, two more children trailing along behind her. The only other people left. The sky was brilliant blue with just two airy streaks of cloud where a plane had been. I threw my head back and looked straight into the wicked gold coin of the sun. My lies should have been a worry to me, instead they were exhilarating, soothing as tea or nightfall. I'd just never thought of an alternative to being this way. The powerful wind of saltwater blew, and the river rippled by in vast majestic threads. Seagulls keened in heavy flocks, drowning out everything. I'd missed the tram. It was the perfect evening for a stroll. Author Maggie Armstrong photographed along the Grand Canal in Dublin. Photograph: Laura Hutton Maggie Armstrong's debut collection, Old Romantics was published by Tramp Press in 2024 and in Canada by Biblioasiss in 2025. She has been shortlisted at the Irish Book Awards for Short Story of the Year and Newcomer of the Year, and shortlisted for the Kate O'Brien Award.
New York Times
08-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Let's get old: 5 NHL offseason things I miss from days of yore
It's mid-July. It's too hot, my neighbor isn't keeping his lawn in shape, they don't make smart summer movies anymore and all these kids who are off school should be out doing something productive instead of staring at screens all day. In related news, I am old. How old? Old enough to have a bunch of opinions about things I miss from the ancient days. And you're going to hear a few of them, because it's time for the return of Let's Get Old, the column where I (blows out entire lumbar region by sneezing wrong) … ah, you'll figure it out. Advertisement To be clear, this isn't even the typical 'old man yells at cloud' thing where I think things were better back then. I'll fully acknowledge that the NHL and the sport of hockey have improved over the decades. But that doesn't mean I can't miss stuff like faceoffs in random locations and officials climbing the glass, or baggy nets and big moments punctuated by flash photography. Was it better back then? Not really, but also sort of, which is the type of confusion you should expect from an old man like me. Today, we're going to focus on the offseason. Here are five things that my old and deteriorating sports fan brain misses about how things used to work. How it used to be: Believe it or not, kids, there was a time when we evaluated the moves our teams made based almost entirely on the quality of players moving in and out, without any thought to how much anyone was making. Good players were good players, and if they made a little bit too much money, that was the owner's problem. In a lot of cases, we didn't even know who was signed for what length of time until you'd just sort of hear in passing that a player you liked needed a new contract. Then someone would sign somewhere, we'd see the dollar amount and all agree that was too much, and that was it for the financial analysis. We'd already moved on to thinking about how they'd fit into the lineup and which power-play unit they'd be on. If you're really old, you remember a time when we didn't know any player salaries. Up until the early '90s, player salaries were closely guarded information because owners realized that they could get away with paying less if nobody knew what their colleagues were making. So you'd hear that your favorite team had acquired a player, and you had absolutely no idea what that meant financially. It wasn't even a consideration, as far as we were concerned. Advertisement Why it changed: The NHLPA forced visibility on player salaries in the early '90s, which was when it became common to see dollar signs showing up in transaction stories. Player salaries started to feel more important as the '90s went on and some teams struggled financially, since you knew there were certain numbers teams like the New York Rangers and Detroit Red Wings could pay that the Edmonton Oilers or Hartford Whalers couldn't. But the big change is obviously the arrival of the salary cap in 2005. Once there was a hard cap, salaries went from secondary information at best to the most important thing you could know about a new player. Why I miss it: It was just simpler, you know? And I say that as someone who doesn't hate having a salary cap, and doesn't even mind the way it's rewired our hockey fan brains. Fitting the pieces under a hard cap adds an element of strategy that can be more interesting than just watching the same few teams acquire every veteran star. But we've all been in the situation where we find ourselves recoiling when a player we love just got too much money and term, because now that's a lot more than an owner issue. In today's NHL, a good player with a bad contract isn't a good player. That makes sense. But part of me misses the days when good players were good and that was the end of it, and we'd leave the rest up to their accountants. How it used to be: Your team would sign a guy that you'd been watching on other teams for a decade. In passing, it would be briefly mentioned that he's 33. And your only thought would be 'Cool, it's going to be fun to watch that guy play for my team,' instead of 'He's so old, I wonder if he makes it to training camp.' Why it changed: A few things happened. First, the game got faster, tilting the balance toward younger players. Second, and relatedly, analytics got better, which both reinforced the shift toward youth and provided pretty compelling evidence against the 'but his veteran smarts!' counterpoints. And third, the cap made contract term a scary thing, especially for veterans. Advertisement A few decades ago, if your team signed an old guy who ended up being cooked, it was a disappointment, but it didn't ruin your team's payroll for years to come. And you at least got to be happy about it on signing day, instead of immediately having someone lecture you that nobody with grey hair in their beard can ever be useful because only 21-year-olds can be good at hockey anymore. Why I miss it: Partly because I'm also old, and I don't like being reminded that all sports are now this tweet. But more than that, it's just cool when a big-name player winds up on your team. Seeing a star in your team's uniform is neat. But in a league where teams control most players through the age of 27 or so, there isn't much room for finding a star in his prime. It was easier back when we thought a 'prime' took you through your early 30s, even if we were probably wrong then and would definitely be wrong now. How it used to be: When something happened, you didn't have a phone in your pocket to ping you right away. There weren't many TVs tuned to sports coverage, and even those channels didn't have tickers running at all times. It all added up to frequent situations where something important broke and you just wouldn't know about it — maybe even for hours at a time. And when you did find out, there's a good chance it was a friend or a family member or even some random stranger on a subway who'd break the news to you. That was cool. Why it changed: Because sports coverage is way better now. As a fan, I'd much rather live in today's world, where news breaks right away and we get instant analysis, theoretically from smart people. I wouldn't want to go back to the days when you just floated through your sports fan life with next to no idea of whether anything important was happening. Except … well, obviously today's world of constant coverage can get to be a little much, right? I like finding out about news when it happens, but there are times when it feels like trying to sip from a firehose. I realize I'm the last person in the last place who should be complaining about what the online world did to sports coverage, but when it comes to knowing things, maybe Pete Holmes was right. Why I miss it: I remember my dad coming home from work one day and asking if I'd heard about the Leafs' new coach. It was Pat Burns, which was surprising given that he'd been the Habs coach as recently as that morning. It turns out there had been an entire day of drama, with Burns resigning in Montreal and then showing up later that afternoon in Toronto for a surprise press conference. It's the kind of day that we look back on now and make jokes about it breaking Twitter, which it absolutely would have. Advertisement But back then, I missed all of it, even though I was a sports-obsessed kid who wanted to know everything I could about my favorite teams. I just hadn't heard. So my dad told me, and we immediately launched into one of those sports fan debates about the move. Those debates are still around, but they were different when everyone involved hadn't already seen a half-dozen takes establishing what they were supposed to think. Even more fun than hearing about a move from somebody was getting to be the one who told somebody. When was the last time you did that without the other person saying they already knew? You still get that moment occasionally, but it used to be the norm. OK, this is getting a little too wistful. Let's lock in on a specific thing we could actually bring back. How it used to be: Back in the 1980s and 1990s, the NHL already had the concept of the offer sheet. But for a while, instead of the salary-based draft pick compensation charts we all know and love today, the league did things differently. If a team signed an offer sheet with one of your players and you didn't match, both sides would have to propose a player-based trade, with an arbitrator picking one or the other. It's how we got 'trades' like Scott Stevens for Brendan Shanahan. I'll admit St. Louis Blues fans may not enjoy that example, but the rest of us can agree a forced blockbuster like that kind of rules. Why it changed: You've seen how NHL GMs react to making a trade they actually want to make, so you can imagine how they'd handle being pushed into one. By the time the cap era started, the NHL had already ditched the mandatory trades and gone to something closer to the system we're used to today. Why I miss it: It just added a fascinating element to offseason maneuvering. If you were thinking of using an offer sheet, you had to be careful because you could end up 'losing' the exchange, like the Blues did with Stevens. But it also made offer sheets more likely to work, exactly because the compensation was theoretically guaranteed to be something worthwhile. Advertisement And best of all, we'd get to hear about both offers, meaning you basically had a situation where there were two trades for the same player on the table, and one had to go through. For example, in the Stevens/Shanahan swap, the Blues' offer had been Curtis Joseph and Rod Brind'Amour, two kids just entering their prime. How's that for a hockey 'what if?' How it used to be: The offseason would play out, and you'd occasionally hear rumors about various star players being unhappy with their contracts. You didn't pay much attention because it was the summer and most of that stuff ended up getting worked out before training camp. But then September would arrive, and you'd hear that a couple of those situations were still lingering. Then you'd read about concern over whether the player would report to camp. And then, in at least one or two spots around the league, you'd hear the dreaded h-word: 'Holdout.' For you kids out there, I'll explain: A holdout was when a player who had a valid contract just decided they didn't want to play under it. So they just … wouldn't. They'd refuse to show up to training camp, staying away until their team agreed to rip up their deal and give them a new one. Sometimes, even that wasn't enough, and the relationship would be so badly damaged that the player would insist on being traded. Often, they'd end up missing weeks or even months of the season, sitting at home until a trade happened. In rare cases, they might miss the entire season. Try to imagine that happening today, with Quinn Hughes or Nikita Kucherov or Brady Tkachuk or whoever else deciding that they're underpaid on their existing contract and/or didn't want to play for their team anymore, even if it meant sitting out a huge chunk of a season in their prime. It would be a jaw-dropping story, one that would have fans around the league feeling furious or fascinated or both. But this used to happen all the time in the 1990s, with star players like Pavel Bure, Paul Coffey, Alexei Yashin, Eric Lindros, Mike Peca or Steve Larmer all ultimately forcing trades. And that's not counting guys like Sergei Fedorov or Scott Niedermayer, who went well into the season without any contract at all, or names like Mark Messier who threatened to stay home before ultimately getting new deals, or even guys like Doug Gilmour who'd walk out on their teams in the middle of a season. Why it changed: Among other seismic changes, the 2004 CBA removed any ability to renegotiate an active contract. That all but eliminated the impetus behind most true holdouts, and these days, when you hear the word, it's typically being misapplied to rare RFA cases like Jacob Trouba or William Nylander, where a player goes into the season without any deal at all in place. (Those guys aren't technically holding out, because they don't have contracts to hold out from.) Why I miss it: I don't. It was awful. Imagine seeing your favorite player refuse to honor his signed contract, a deal he'd agreed to and signed in good faith. A poorly timed holdout could spell doom for a contending team and was a miserable experience for a fan base. We should all be glad we don't see these stories anymore. Except … Well, I mean, if it wasn't happening to your team, then it was kind of fun. At the very least, you'd get some good trade rumors out of the whole thing, and could even talk yourself into your team being the one to land a star player at a discount. Sure, the star player usually just wound up signing with one of the New York teams, which is when you'd go back to being annoyed by the whole thing. But even then, you'd usually get a major trade to chew on. And in a modern era where it's exceedingly rare to see a star traded in anything other than a short-term rental deal, I have to admit I kind of miss when holdouts would force GMs into taking major swings. (Just not when it's your team. Your team is wonderful and anyone who doesn't want to play there is just greedy.) (Top photo of Steve Larmer: Lou Capozzola / USA Today Network)
Times
27-06-2025
- Times
The captivating European country that's still off-radar
It's golden hour in the mountain town of Dilijan in Armenia. I have wandered into the steep back streets, which are lined with traditional houses, all wooden fretwork balconies and walls of multi-pane glass, the softening sunshine turning the latter into a more benign variety of disco ball. Most of these places look picturesquely ramshackle, like something from a fairy tale or Miss Havisham's house. A good number of them may — or may not, it can be difficult to tell — be uninhabited. Like Georgia, from which I have just arrived, the country has been suffering from population decline since declaring independence from Russia in 1991, many young people leaving to work abroad. The residence I find myself lingering in front of admiringly, however, a pale pink doll's house of a place, is definitely lived in. The building is only just keeping it together but the front garden is immaculately tended, a ravishment of peonies. After a couple of minutes an old man appears from nowhere with a bunch of his flowers and thrusts them into my hand. His wife, I then see, is watching and smiling from a window. He doesn't speak English. I don't, needless to say, speak Armenian. Thanks to the vagaries of geopolitics we are from different worlds — different eras, almost. His clothes look as ancient as he does; as his house does. Ditto the car parked nearby, a so-called Zap, short for Zaporozhets, a Russian creation which famously, another Armenian later tells me, has a hatch in the floor next to the driver to enable them to fish on a frozen lake without leaving the car. (He also tells me the Zap is execrable. 'Everyone knows the transmission goes after 10,000km, the engine after 30,000.') It's my first evening in Armenia, the third country stop on a two-week tour of the Caucasus that started in Azerbaijan, moved on to Georgia and will end here. It's been fascinating, this zigzagging between the outer reaches of Asia and Europe respectively, where the influences of the west, of Russia and of the east, are felt slightly differently depending on where you are and who you are talking to. Even our accommodation has fed into the cross-referencing, with Georgia and Armenia consistently offering contemporary boutique hotel experiences, and Azerbaijan a couple of places all too familiar to anyone who travelled during the days of the Soviet Union. Armenia and Azerbaijan share borders with Iran, but despite the hostilities between that country and Israel, there is no Foreign Office advice against travelling to either (though do keep an eye on it). I have been moving most days for a week and a half so by this point, to be blunt, I am knackered. I have had to force myself to foray out from my hotel. Thank heavens I did. Because here it is, rearing its head unexpectedly, as it tends to do: one of the reasons that I travel. Connection. Otherness turned into oneness. Something — or, as is most often the case, someone — who may be alien to you but reaches out to you. That nameless man and his flowers like miniature ballgowns are spine-tingling stuff. I would say the same of Armenia more generally. This is a remarkable country, from the beauteous, ever-shifting mountainous landscape that can take you, during the course of a few hours' drive, from Switzerland to Arizona by way of Scotland, to the simple yet delicious food. What isn't a mountain seems to be a vegetable patch or an orchard, and the fruit — a rainbow of different cherries, black and white mulberries, apricots, peaches, strawberries — is particularly noteworthy. Every meal comes accompanied by a plate piled with fresh herbs and there's a whole world of different dairy products going on. Ask the difference between one yoghurty-looking thing and another (and another!) at breakfast, and you will find yourself there for some time as your interlocutor does their best to explain. And then, of course, there is the reason the country is famous: its churches, or, to be more precise, its multi-building monastery complexes. I had been blown away by the churches and monasteries of Georgia in the preceding days, which also have towers topped with roofs like witches' hats. But this is something else. Many of the Georgian interiors still bear magical traces of the rich frescoes that the Russians set out to whitewash away. I loved the seraphims peeping out from behind their six wings at Nekresi, a complex that dates back to as early as the 6th century, making it one of the oldest in the country. Another artwork that stood out there for me, as fashion director of The Times, was a stone carving that covered an exterior wall of Ananuri, a 17th-century castle complex in a stunning location on rocks above a reservoir. It showed two angels, one barefoot, the other wearing not just shoes but heels. The message, our guide told us, was that everyone is welcome in heaven. The Angel Wears Prada? With a shoe collection such as mine, I am very much here for that. As for the walk up through wildflower meadows and pine forests to the 14th-century Gergeti Trinity Church, perched on a 2,170m peak, with its mural of a wide-eyed Jesus who looks to be on the hippy trail, and the snow-covered 5,054m Mount Kazbek towering above — that was one of the highlights of the entire trip. Yet, even so, Armenia. There's something about its churches that puts them, for me, in another league altogether. They aren't about murals but stone carvings, Armenian Christians traditionally believing the razzle-dazzle of paintings to be a distraction from the serious business of prayer. Stone crosses known as khachkars cover the walls inside and out, some intricately carved and integral to the original designs, others seemingly scratched in later, often in rows, like a spiritual take on tally counting. The necromancy is in part to do with the scale, I think, the juxtapositioning of their petite floorplans with a vertiginous verticality. Somehow you feel as if you are always looking up. Then there's their positioning in (for which read on top of) the landscape, as if decorations on a cake. They seem to have been not so much built as seeded, such is the connection they hold with their environment. It's almost as if, miraculously, they have sprouted up of their own accord. The 13th-century Noravank, situated at the top of a narrow gorge, is the same red-yellow as the cliffs, and especially breathtaking. But then again so is the grey — and thus more northern European-seeming — Tatev monastery, another cliff-clinger that you access by way of the world's longest nonstop double-track cable car, a spectacular albeit somewhat hair-raising ride. Allow me just one more monastery before I move on: Geghard, which, because it is so close to the charming, pink-stoned capital of Yerevan, was the only one we went to that was mobbed. Built into the mountain, part-church, part-cave, it had another wonderful stone carving, of a pair of chained-up lions on a lead and an eagle with a lamb in its claws. (Answers on a postcard if anyone can discern a lesson for me in that one.) It's also where we were lucky enough to bear witness to an impromptu performance of Armenian folk songs by four local singers, their chiaroscuro vocals — if you will allow me to get all synaesthetic for a moment, soaring up into the furthest crannies of the ceiling. The Armenians are rightly proud of their musical traditions, though they talk more about their brandy. The first thing I was told after I had crossed the border from Georgia is that 'Winston Churchill loved Armenian brandy'. In Georgia, in contrast, it's all about wine, of course. My twentysomething guide told me that everyone still produces their own; that BYO has a very literal meaning when you go to any social gathering; and that his friendship group keeps tabs — in the nicest possible way — on whose is best. (His wine was in at number two, he proffered, after some consideration.) No wonder there are vines crammed into even the tiniest corners in the capital of Tbilisi. • 15 of the best tours of Georgia Azerbaijan, on the other hand, is a land of tea drinkers, not to mention of Muslims. (How I love the way a multi-country trip like this allows one endlessly to compare and contrast.) The Azerbaijanis make the British appear to be not that into their brew. Everywhere we went there were samovars in the street being watched over as if they were small children, albeit ones that puffed away like steam engines. We would see people carrying home little bags of fresh rose petals that they had bought to add to their tea. Often they carried two colours — red and pink — in different bags. We were also introduced to the Azerbaijani take on 'tea and jam', a ritual in which you spoon a syrupy piece of fruit into your mouth, perhaps a medlar or a mulberry or two, and hold it there while you sip your tea. The results are, I can report, lip-smackingly good. In the pretty city of Sheki, which has a world-class monument of its own in the form of its Khan's Palace, an Islamic masterpiece of intricate wall paintings and stained glass, I witnessed what was clearly an emergency. An entire family had brought their samovar to a metalworker's shop near the market. They encircled it anxiously, as if around a hospital bed, awaiting diagnosis. The collective relief when the man told them he could stop it leaking! • Read more on Georgia That market in Sheki was another highlight of our trip. The women were explosions of print, their dresses, aprons and headscarves clashing gloriously. Large numbers of both them and the men sported two or three gold teeth, a status symbol in the Soviet era. The dried fruit and nut stalls were amazing. One man had six types of walnut and pumpkin seeds that were like nothing I had tasted before, plus at least a dozen different sultanas ranging from palest yellow to darkest black. Then there were the endless jars of pickled vegetables, some of them identifiable, some what might best be described as UFOs, or Unidentified Fermenting Objects. And the women peeling green walnuts so as to turn them into jam. Some people were selling huge wonky spheres of hand-churned butter — yellow from cow's milk, white from water buffalo's — others great wheels of the local halva, designed to be eaten as you drink your (yup) tea. For which there were endless teapots, samovars, flasks and those curvaceous glasses whose shape, I was told, was originally inspired by the pear. All this tea worship. It was almost enough to make an Englishwoman feel at home. Someone pass me the rose petals …Anna Murphy was a guest of Wild Frontiers ( which has 15 days' all-inclusive from £3,995pp on an Across the Caucasus group tour to Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. A tailormade private trip is from £4,790pp. Fly to Baku and back from Yerevan. For FCO travel advice see
