Great Continental Railway Journeys - Vienna to Trieste

Sorry, Portillo's off again. Still clutching no other luggage than his battered Bradshaw's. Still wearing neon clothes. Still seeing the very best Europe has to offer.

Heldenplatz, where Hitler gave his speech
announcing the Anscluss of Germany and Austria

First stop this series - Vienna. City of coffee, waltzes and the original croissant. At the time of the 1913 edition of Bradshaw's, Franz Ferdinand was still alive, just. As was the Austro-Hungarian Empire, just. By then it was ruling a ridiculous number of countries, but cracks were definitely appearing at the seams. Rebels in Vienna's midst were clamouring to transform its medieval society model into a vibrant, modern city. Russian spies were blackmailing the military, Freud was analysing the soul. Secession architects and Klimt were doing amazing things with gold leaf. Schiele, Schnitzler and Schoenberg were revolutionising cultural life. Exciting times, but with dark threats in murky corners. Jews were dominating the middle classes, but anti-Semitic feeling was rife. Adolf Hitler, amongst them, was failing to be an art student and acquiring beliefs that - as we all know - would have catastrophic consequences.

The Secessionsgebaeude

The Ringstrasse, commissioned by Emperor Franz Josef after he ordered the razing of the slums, is looking magnificent on our screens. So very white and pristine. It's just one pompous edifice after another. Theatre, opera, museum, parliament, palace. But all conveniently connected by tram.

Rathaus

But what's this? Uh-oh, I hear a zither. Michael, please don't do the Third Man thing. Orson Welles did it so much better. Oh no, here it comes. Sipping coffee, those large lips curling upwards in a sneer. Glancing sideways through bad sunglasses, looking furtive. As if anyone in a pink shirt could ever look furtive. It's all an excuse for Portillo to go on the Big Wheel in the Prater. His car is set up to dine.

I once spent a week in Vienna, the house guest of a flautist who played in one of the city's orchestras. He lived round the corner from the Schoenbrunn Palace, whose garden at the time was bursting with spring flowers. The apartment block was full of musicians, and the sounds drifting up the stairwell as they all practised in their separate abodes was mesmering, yet as cacophonous as Schoenberg. The flautist slept on a chaise longue, bought us McDonald's to eat each evening and had his life ruled by his mother. He also got us free tickets for a box at the ballet on the Ringstrasse, where - as an interrailing student - I have never felt so underdressed in my life.

It was a busy week. A homage to Beethoven in the city cemetery. My first chance to brush against Klimt's Kiss, where his pencil drafts were still visible below that wonderful gold leaf. A wall of lace at the Museum of Applied Art. Wine at a Heurige. And a Melange coffee which kept me shaking for days.

Karlskirche

Vienna has a brand spanking new Hauptbahnhof, from where it's finally possible to go East, South, North and West from a single station and stressful U-Bahn transfers are no longer required. Look and learn, London. Portillo heads off to the Semmering Pass, dressed in purple and orange. After a spot of sledging and a visit to Graz, he carries on to Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, which I still find impossible to spell without Googling. At the time of Bradshaw's it still had a German name - Laibach.

Llubljana

Ljubljana is beautiful. It has a vast array of colourful Secession facades, since half its buildings were lost in an earthquake on Easter Sunday in 1895, giving Viennese architects ample opportunity to show off their talent. It's a city where I ate mushroom soup out of a bread bun and cauliflower on a pizza. One was good, the other not so much. Portillo spends his time sharing fruit liqueurs with the ladies. Behind him is the V-shaped bridge and the pharmacy where I had to buy ear plugs as our hotel was so noisy at night.

Secession facades

A building painted in the colours of the Slovenian flag

We spent a week in Slovenia and I would rate it as one of my favourite countries to visit, ever. Such diversity within a tiny geographical area - Alps, meadows, waterfalls, castles, karst, coast. Venetian ports, Viennese cities. Warm, clean, friendly. My grumpy husband on a grumpier horse. A boat captain who brewed brandy-strength wine, sailed us to Trieste and gave me the worst hangover of my life. That should never be repeated, but a return visit to the country - one I day, I hope.

Alps, meadows...

Waterfalls...

Castles

Karst...

Coast

Nigel Slater's Icing On The Cake

Yesterday's lemon & pistachio cake. Just because.

I have long been a fan of Nigel Slater's food writing. He can make the mundane utterly sublime. He can be eating sardines on toast yet give such an evocative description of every crumb that I instantly have to leap up and raid my larder to make some for myself. Well, I don't really have a larder per se. That's a bit posh. But I do have a few tins in a cupboard. When I've been organised about my online shopping.

Nigel Slater always strikes me as painfully shy on television. He sounds so exuberant on paper, but seems slightly awkward on screen. But his excitement over the food he has cooked for his plate is still infectious, and it always looks amazing, but makeable. And I also love his "food history" programmes, like this one about cake. I should call them "food nostalgia", because he has retained his childlike enthusiasm for the (probably actually not terribly inspiring) food of his youth despite the pretty miserable time his autobiography recounts him having. In this programme, the wicked gleam in his eye when he laughs as he bites into a fondant fancy is a telling image of the wonderful effect of food and how powerfully the senses of taste and smell recreate memories.

He starts in Konditor & Cook just behind Waterloo station, home of the most incredible lemon cake I have ever eaten. Nigel says he would just as happily buy a cake from a shop as eat a home-made one by Auntie Marjorie.(When did he meet my grandmother?) He stresses cake's universal appeal. It is the ultimate in comfort food in times of need. It doesn't have to meet Mary Berry's perfection. It just needs to be naughty but nice. But what makes a cake truly a cake?

There's a history bit. It all started with compacted porridge. There's a science bit. Why eggs bring the magic, originally whisked in by twigs. There's the religious affrontery and the banning of buns. There's why we have an innate liking for sweetness. There's a Home Economics lesson that teaches us that dropping cakes fresh out of the oven is actually good for them. There's what rationing did to cakes. Then there are just lots of glorious regional cakes with silly names - lardy, parkin, Rutland plum shuttles, Selkirk bannock, Norfolk vinegar, and Cumberland courting. (Never got one of those out of my husband.) There's the exceedingly crap ones we buy from Mr Kipling and Lyons - the aforementioned fondant fancies, Jamaica Ginger cake and a slice of Battenberg. Cake is what we do in this country to be sociable and make us smile. Or it was until we discovered binge-drinking.

Then Jenny Eclair comes on and tells Nigel why, despite being named after one, she hates cake. It's a throwback to her anorexic days at drama school. She claims cupcakes are the most evil of all - so disappointing and dishonest, so bad for you, as unnecessary and harmful as high-heeled shoes. Much as I personally love cake, I have to admit she does have a point. Cupcakes, piled high with swirls of buttercream and sweetie toppings, usually look so much better than they taste. The insurmountable icing invariably swamps a tiny morsel of dry sponge, and tips off onto the floor at the first bite.

Evil cupcakery

Finally, there's roadkill cake. (Yes, you did read that correctly.) There's cigarette butts on a cake. There's a fondant brains cake to teach people anatomy and fairy cakes decorated with chlamydia icing to educate teenagers about sexual health. And then a giant recreation of Nigel Slater's head. Not sure what he made of that.

But what makes a cake a cake? For Nigel Slater, it's the spirit behind it. The love that creates it. And the fact that we always share it.

It's impossible to deny that wherever I go, I eat cake. Grasmere Gingerbread in the Lake District,  Fat Rascals and macaroons from Betty's all over Yorkshire, Bara Brith in Pembrokeshire, Bakewell pudding in Derbyshire, brownies in Baltimore, Sachertorte in Vienna, tartes aux fraises in Paris, and pink-frosted cupcakes from a bakery on Bleecker Street in New York just like the ones Sarah Jessica Parker ate on Sex And The City (wearing stupid high-heeled shoes).

The winners will always be the Germans, however. Bakeries were the only shops open on a Sunday when I went to university in Heidelberg. Cake was the only thing that made me truly happy in a rather difficult year. There is much to be said for the healing powers of a bite of Apfelstrudel or a slice of Mohnkuchen or Streuselkuchen. Stollen at Christmas, washed down with Gluehwein from the Christkindlmarkt. But my favourite always - the simple baked Quark Kaesekuchen from the students cafe in Heidelberg's Marstallhof. It just about made up for the fact that everything else that the Mensa served was inedible - greasy gravy stodge with a side of cold fruit soup dolloped on to a metal tray. You weren't even allowed a plate. It was all stupidly cheap but utterly revolting. I still feel nauseous thinking about it. But the cheesecake was in another league.

Heidelberg,. The Marstallhof Mensa and Cafe is the building on the right

Oodles of Boodles

Whilst my husband was out running last night, I indulged my inner girl and watched a programme about jewellery. The making of a million pound necklace, to be precise. And then, because diamonds are apparently a girl’s best friend, I carried on my millionaire’s fantasy and watched a programme about the making of a diamond-studded Rolls Royce.

Boodles the jeweller’s is full of women who are not very much like me. They might also technically be described as housewives, but they are the sort of housewife who is in fact a lady of total leisure. A lady who doesn’t do a scrap of cleaning, cooking or child care, yet takes an unlimited salary out of her husband’s bank account and gets so bored that she feels the need to go into town to drink champagne with a jeweller who is trying to get her to spend £87,000 on a necklace. Now, I too generally avoid doing much cleaning. With two cats and a three-year-old in the house, there is nothing less rewarding than making the effort to find half an hour to hoover one night, only to have your carpet knee-deep in fur, Cheerios and train sets by eight o’clock the following morning. But I do partake in a lot of cooking and child care, even if I have no great skill at either. However, I only go out and spend my husband’s money on food for us all to eat, and things for our daughter (most of which are second-hand). But I never spend a penny on myself. Which is one of the things I find hardest about full-time parenting – with the loss of our child benefit (don’t get me started, you bastard coalition), I am now entirely without income. I was very used to paying my own way before I had to stop work. So I now feel unable to buy myself a new pair of shoes, or a jumper or a book that isn’t from a charity shop, because I haven’t earned the money to do so. (And I didn't spend our child benefit on these things either, for the record.) I don’t wish to give the impression that my husband is an old meanie – he never spends any of his money on himself and would gladly let me buy something for me (provided it wasn’t an £87,000 necklace) if I asked. But that’s just it - I hate to ask. I detest being financially dependent on someone. Therefore, however much I like shopping, I find it hard to relate to people who just see spending their husband’s money as a hobby. Especially that much money. And especially when they don’t do anything else with their lives.

Trying to look like I belong in Monaco

Casino in Monte Carlo

The people buying from Boodles and Rolls Royce also inhabit a world I cannot relate to. I’m not sure that many of us can. They inhabit places where I have never felt less at home – Monaco, the shops on 5^th Avenue in New York City, the ballroom scene in Vienna. In Monaco, I spent a lot of time trudging past roadworks and ate lunch from a portside shack. I’d paid 1 Euro on a bus from Nice to get there. In Boodles’ world, the people have arrived by helicopter, luxury yacht or racing car, and are hosting a glamorous party high up on the skyline, looking down on the casino in Monte Carlo. For me the casino was a long hike up a ton of steps and when I got to the top, I didn’t dare go inside. Not even to use the loo. I did go inside Tiffany’s in New York, and possibly wasn’t even the shabbiest tourist in there, but there was no way I was going to buy anything. Thankfully most of it wasn’t to my taste. I did once have a box at the ballet in Vienna, but it was a freebie from a flautist in the orchestra that I happened to be staying with, and I have never (given that I was in the middle of a student Interrailing trip) genuinely had nothing to wear more in my life. 

The only jewellery shopping I have ever done was to buy my engagement ring. After feeling very awkward in a number of establishments on Bond Street in London where the assistants made it all too plain we were giving off whiffs of “we can’t afford it in here”, we ended up at Arlington’s in Hatton Garden. It certainly wasn’t Boodles, awash with champagne and perfectly manicured coffee and petits fours, but they were helpful and cared, and didn’t make us feel like we shouldn’t be there. And when we finally found the “one”, which was of course so perfect and beautiful and slipped on my finger like something out of Cinderella (no comments about ugly sisters, please), but was also an awful lot over budget, they gave us a massive discount if we paid for it then and there. My husband said that the look on my face made it worth every penny. Ah, we were so in love.

The only time I have been driven in Rolls Royce was on our wedding day. It was vintage and a shade of brown that was very close to my school uniform, and I was too nervous to appreciate it properly on the way to the church. On leaving the church, several Japanese tourists (we were getting married in the heart of the Lake District) tried to climb in there with us.

Me and a Rolls

But these giant oil tankers of a car that Rolls currently manufacture look like my idea of driving hell. Try parallel parking one of those on our narrow York street. They’re not exactly nippy either. But hey, they all come with an umbrella hidden away inside one of the front wings, so that’s OK. Not much use in Abu Dhabi though, where most Rolls owners live. The diamond studded Celestrial car also came with a picnic set of uniquely designed plates worth 20,000 pounds. The owner will probably never even use it. (Sand in sandwiches is, after all, never particularly pleasant.)

The images of no expense spared in both programmes was really quite disturbing – the poor goldsmith had to redo the diamond panels for the Rolls Royce about three times, thanks to tiny flaws no one would probably have ever noticed. No doubt he was being paid handsomely, but it seemed so extraordinarily reckless, that they could just repeat and repeat any process with no cost limitations. Because someone out there would eventually buy the end product, no matter how extortionate the price, and see them recoup their losses. And the luxurious launch parties and car shows were jaw-dropping in terms of extravagance and show. And yet a lot of the people the companies employed seemed fairly normal. Quite posh at the top, but down on the factory floor, you could still feel a connection with them.

Though the team at Boodles trying to think of a name for the emerald million-pound necklace was a farce. You could just see Siobhan Sharpe from Twenty Twelve and W1A in the corner shuffling the yellow Post-Its around before announcing. “Here’s the thing, the thing is, the thing is, here’s the things, yah, the thing is, it’s green, yah? And it’s so like fiery. So let’s call it greenfire, dude, yah?” And that’s exactly what they did.