Tag Archives: solden

Neither Shaken Nor Stirred

When I was sent by my employer as a business systems consultant to Hungary in the summer of 1987, the more mischievous amongst my friends put it about that I’d been dispatched on Her Majesty’s Secret Service to bring an end to Communism in the Eastern Bloc. It’s true that a manufacturing control system, properly implemented, is a formidable weapon, and perhaps it really was the efficiency that our system brought to the Videoton Television Factory in Szekesfehervar that was the last straw to break the Soviet camel’s back. In any case the unpredicted revolutions of 1989, which I witnessed merely as a bystander, did little to dispel the myth of my clandestine involvement.

In fact I possess most of the qualifications you need to be a British secret agent: ten years of private boarding-school education; three years at Oxford (the Uni not the Poly); an unwavering faith in democracy and the Rights of Man (and of Women, too, if absolutely necessary), tempered, of course, with a sense of the majesty of monarchy; a superb physique; a sneering disdain for oligarchs and other kinds of villain; a complete indifference to personal discomfort, tempered with an occasional taste for luxury, especially if enjoyed at others’ expense; a dapper manner in a dinner suit; enormous physical courage;  a sneering contempt for aggressive tax avoidance and its evil twin sister, evasion; a dislike of petting on the football field; a laconic wit; and a capacity for sudden and explosive violence. I could go on, but these are surely qualifications enough. Perhaps I fall a little short in the ‘Bond girl’ department, but I understand that’s never been an impediment in the Service. Far from it.

I’m not a fan of the vodka Martini either, my tipple being tea, as long as it’s not Darjeeling. So if we need a little catchphrase it’s more likely to be ‘neither one lump nor two, my dear’ than ‘shaken not stirred.’

Sadly the call has never come, though I did once fall under suspicion on a train between Budapest and Bucharest, and was questioned at length by a sneering man from the Romanian securitate. He was as eccentric and villainous a villain as you’ve ever seen in a Bond film  I threw him out of the window.

So where would be a more appropriate place to ski, this year, for a secret agent manqué, than Sölden, where parts of Spectre, the last James Bond film, were made last January. In retrospect I’m sorry I missed the chance, a year ago, when I was last here, to make progress with my project of putting the timesheet at the centre of the next Bond film. If you remember, I wrote to Barbara Broccoli, the producer of the Bond franchise, last summer, with an offer of a product placement for time@work, and I included some snappy dialogue to make our timesheets feel natural, free of charge. I thought it an imaginative and generous offer, but I’ve yet to receive a reply (see Bond, Where is that Timesheet?!).

Sölden is completely Bond mad this year, and you can even buy a Bond-branded ski-suit, complete with replica handgun, at the better sports outfitters in the town. I couldn’t resist the temptation. Here I am, in action.

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I enjoyed Spectre, though I felt it lacked the sentimental realism and emotional pathos of Skyfall. I particularly enjoyed the larger part that Q played in the drama. It’s more about brain than brawn these days, when it comes to thwarting arch-villains bent on global conquest, so I shan’t really mind in the least if Ben Whishaw manages gradually to steal the limelight from Daniel Craig.

Daniel Craig as Bond

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Ben Whishaw as Q. (He’s the nerd for me!)

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And just a quick note, Ms Broccoli, in case you’re reading this. If you’ve a bit part for another action hero (with brains) in the next Bond film, then you may well find that I’m available. I’ll await your call.

Crossing the Alps

One of the most daunting stage directions of the 20th Century comes in Peter Shaffer’s 1964 play, The Royal Hunt of the Sun. It reads simply, ‘They cross the Andes.’ I knew the designer of the original production, Michael Annals, and I regret that I never asked him, before his death in 1990, how he turned that simple direction into a stage full of Spanish conquistadores struggling through high altitude snow and ice. Probably, he didn’t. When faced with the impossible, it’s usually best to leave almost everything to the imagination, as with Shakespeare’s most famous stage direction from The Winter’s Tale, ‘Exit, pursued by a bear.’ A man in a fur coat just doesn’t do the business.

Crossing a mountain range must be a messy and dangerous pursuit. Pizarro crossed the Andes to reach Peru with fewer than 200 men. It was a daring military manoeuvre but pales into insignificance beside Hannibal’s great crossing of the Alps in 218 BC, with nearly 30,000 soldiers, horsemen, and elephants. And yet, ever since, controversy has raged about the route Hannibal and his Carthaginian army took. You would think that such an enormous mass of men and beasts would leave their mark on the landscape.

But, in fact, it’s the mess they left behind that may be about to decide the issue. Archaeologists working in a high pass above Bourg-St-Maurice –  Col de la Traversette – have found layers of bog that appear to have been churned by the passage of thousands of men and animals,. They’ve also found bacteria and parasites that live in the guts of horses. These layers have been carbon-dated to 200 BC, lending more credibility to the theory. It will only take the finding of some coins, bus tickets, buckles or weapons to decide the issue once and for all. The problem, I suppose, is that most of what men carried two thousand years ago, was perishable.

Turner’s version of ‘They cross the Alps’.

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The pass is close to the ski resorts of Val d’Isere and Tignes. When you’re skiing in the Alps, as I am this week, surrounded by all the paraphernalia of the sport – the lifts, the high-altitude restaurants, the emergency helicopters, the easy access roads – pretending to yourself that you’re doing something effortful and daring, you have no sense at all of how these mountains must have appeared to Hannibal’s men and of how impossible an obstacle they must have seemed.

Archaeologists of the future, though, will have far more to go on, most of it plastic or metal. What will they make of the Elvis I see from my bedroom window?

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I’m close, in Solden, in the Otztal valley in Austria, to the pass where Otzi the Iceman, Europe’s oldest mummified man, was found in 1991. Otzi probably died from a blow to the head in a skirmish with his enemies whilst crossing the Alps nearly 5,300 years ago. His body and the arrows he carried bear the DNA of several other humans. It must have been a nasty encounter. Crossing the Alps was a dangerous game.

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