Jeremy Atiyah on a babble of Judaism and Christianity

Our history is reduced to a laser- and pyrotechnic-enhanced babble of Judaism and Christianity

Published: 28 January 2001

Our history is reduced to a laser- and pyrotechnic-enhanced babble of Judaism and Christianity

I've never been a fan of theme parks. Aren't there enough real places in the world, not to need to invent new ones? In fact I'd probably rather join a tour of, say, a defunct nuclear power station in Ukraine than go to Disneyland, on the grounds that it would be less artificial. There'd be less danger of running into giant mice with mutated ears.

At least a place such as Chernobyl might offer the potential of changing your life; of inspiring you to go out and do some good in the world afterwards. (To the credit of Disneyland, I have never heard it claimed that Mickey Mouse has made the world a better, nobler, more beautiful or more meaningful place.)

But as of now, I've decided that Disneyland is a great benefactor to this world. Thank God for Goofy, I say, and thank God for bringing this beacon of good taste, of reality, responsibility and meaning, into our children's lives. For the sake of their souls, I now want them to spend as much time as possible being sick on scary roller-coasters.

Why? Well, to save them from the latest theme park opening in Orlando, Florida, in a week's time. It's to be called - wait for it - the Holy Land Experience.

Sorry, but this has to take the biscuit as the biggest chunder-inducing exercise in the history of tourism. No roller-coaster can touch it. I haven't been there (nor am I planning a visit), but I am going to pontificate anyway: after all, pontification is what this park is going to be about.

Visitors, I am told, will be able to enter a replica of Jesus's tomb, climb the stairs of a copy of Herod's Temple and travel down a re-creation of Jerusalem's Via Dolorosa. Presumably they'll be able to queue for tickets and stop off for refreshments of Coca-you-know-what whenever they need to, as well, before buying souvenir T-shirts in the gift shop.

Apparently the Jews of Florida are already outraged by this latest attraction, since its owner, they claim, is a man who may have an interest in converting Jews to Christianity.

And without getting technical, I think I can see their point. By all accounts the park reduces thousands of years of human thought and experience into a laser-and pyrotechnic-enhanced babble of Judaism and Christianity (You know the kind of thing: "Moses. Jesus. The greatest story ever told ... Say, we could get all those biblical guys in!".)

The mere thought of overweight kids puffing down a fake Via Dolorosa having "shaloms" said to them by women in "biblical era" robes is almost turning me into a religious fanatic as well, in order to be outraged by it.

As far as I am aware there is only one Holy Land in the world, and funnily enough it's not in America. It's in a part of the world that those Coke-guzzling, burger-gobbling folk may never have heard of, but let's call it the eastern Mediterranean, and what's more it is currently being fought over by competing groups of unfortunate people whose livelihoods are at stake.

If you want to go on a holiday to learn something about the meaning of life, I suggest that there is where you should go.

Otherwise by all means go to Disney. But do yourself a favour. Just don't go to a theme park called the Holy Land Experience.

Some Russians see St Petersburg as a cancer in their midst

Some Russians see St Petersburg as a cancer in their midst, as an insult against God

Jeremy Atiyah

Published: 21 January 2001

I'm in St Petersburg, being shown around by a gloomy intellectual in a tweedy, threadbare old coat. Just what I need.

A few people are out under the lamp-light, trudging the snow-clogged banks and bridges of the canals. Beneath a row of white columns, fronting a long wall of yellow stucco, my appointed guide, Slava, stops and lights a cigarette. "Yellow is the colour of St Petersburg," he sighs, staring straight ahead for approximately 8,000 miles. "It is the colour of bile. It symbolises total alienation. St Petersburg is an artificial European city, which was built where no city should have been built. Some Russians see it as a cancer in their midst, as the insult against God, which was the cause of so many disasters in their country."

Er, well, gosh. To acknowledge this, I join Slava in staring over a bridge at the ice-dead Moika Canal. "The Russian Soul," say I, with a dainty little post-modern laugh. "How does it feel?"
I am assuming that "soul" does not exist - except that this is Russia. "It is the nightmare claustrophobic experience of imperial St Petersburg," Slava replies seriously, glancing this way and that, as though in fear of the Tsar's uniformed officers. "But it is worse than that. It is a sense of eternal sameness. You see, Russia is our mother. And sometimes she ignores our cries." I am wondering if this is the official policy of the St Petersburg tourist authority: posting characterful depressives on the streets, as a ploy to increase airport arrivals.

Perhaps it is time to move the conversation along a little. But only while racking my brains for more optimistic gambits. "Yes but now you have home-delivery pizzas!" Of course, I have conveniently forgotten about the 70 years of Communism, not to mention the 900-day Nazi siege of the city.
I try the subject of Moscow. If the Europeanness of St Petersburg is so disturbing, I suggest to Slava, then the swirling domes of the old Khanate of Muscovy might be more appealing to him. "Moscow?" he echoes, with sadness in his eyes. "The Third Rome, you mean? But I have not been there for many years."

Next I try asking him which century he prefers, the 19th or the 20th. He replies: "Each century is worse than the one before. The 21st century will be the worst of all. Siberia will be sold to China. We will work as slaves for the West. But let's not talk about that. I don't want to get depressed." Instead we discuss for a while the relative merits of the different 19th-century Tsars, which is still a surprisingly hot subject in this city (as a rule of thumb, any Tsar called Alexander seems to have been nice, while those called Nicholas were either cruel or stupid).

Meanwhile we are passing Moika 12, Pushkin's house - yet another pale yellow mansion fronted by fake fluted pilasters. Slava gasps, in the grip of more emotion. "Do you realise that not a single beautiful woman of his age was not courted by that genius? Can you imagine that even Pushkin had to be killed to become a true Russian hero?"

Hmm, I mumble, stamping my feet against the cold. All I am really wondering at this moment is: how do normal countries cope, which can't offer tour guides with Russian souls?

The British pioneers of overseas travel

The British pioneers of overseas travel deserve a medal for braving the roads, the heat and, of course, the tea

Published: 14 January 2001

Are British holiday-makers heroes? That was the only conclusion I could draw from ITV's series Some Liked It Hot, shown over the past two weeks. How brave we have been, it seems, to go abroad at all, considering how parochial we were when it started, back in the days when we were all going on away-days from Sunderland and taking mouthfuls of sewage and catching polio.

I loved the couple, for example, who spoke of solemnly drawing up their will before going on a driving tour of France, "just in case". None of their neighbours, the woman said, believed that they were going to come back alive. Taking a motor car abroad did take courage, in the days when nobody knew if the British were genetically capable of driving on the right. They even had drive-on air services across the channel; cars were driven into the plane's hold through its nose.

And don't imagine that your generation was the first to suffer airport delays. If you are less than 50 years old, your parents certainly got there before you. The boss of the endearingly named Gaytours Ltd, an early mass-market package holiday company, admitted on the programme that what was described to passengers as a "12-hour delay" could easily mean a wait of up to two days.

And aircraft safety? Again our parents seem to have been the guinea pigs. One woman recalled sitting on the runway at Majorca in the early 1960s and being informed by the pilot that he had been unable to find a spanner to tighten up something in the engine and would the passengers please get into the crash position for a trial take-off?

"Going abroad made me feel that important," said one woman. "I thought: 'This is heaven. I'm a movie star.'" She then went and got blistered and had sun stroke and was horribly ill after just the first day on the beach.

I cannot quite imagine the humiliation of being the first British people after the Second World War to set foot on the beaches of St Tropez. "We were like milk-bottles," said a woman on the programme. "Everyone else was brown all over. We felt inferior, ridiculous."

The first British woman on holiday in Greece to fall disastrously in love with a man named Adonis; the first British people to attempt to make a mess of eating spaghetti in Italy; the first British man to complain that "you were lucky if you could get a good pot of tea" at breakfast in Spain: they did it for us.

So when we jet off to the Mediterranean this summer, let's raise a glass to the men and women of years gone by, who made it all possible.

Planning your travels by the colours of the seasons

This is the season of drab colours, a time of year when you want to pack up and escape to the 'bright red south'

By Jeremy Atiyah

Published: 07 January 2001

It's winter again, the eternal cycle of the seasons and all that. I always see this change as a violent switch from black to white, so that the new year invariably begins in a drab, unlovely colourlessness. This lasts through to February. Not until March will a vague whiff of colour touch this nothingness panorama - a watery green, perhaps.
It's winter again, the eternal cycle of the seasons and all that. I always see this change as a violent switch from black to white, so that the new year invariably begins in a drab, unlovely colourlessness. This lasts through to February. Not until March will a vague whiff of colour touch this nothingness panorama - a watery green, perhaps.
By May things are moving on. A strong yellow-blue patina will have formed, which progresses to something nearer red by mid-July. But from then on, colours fade ominously: first to a purple, in turn leeching colour rapidly to a pale brown, then to a grey then, by late November, to pretty much a solid, featureless black, all the way through winter.
So what does this colour-calender prove? Nothing much. But it does seem to tell a story about which parts of the world we ought to be visiting at which times of the year. Think about flying to the bright red southern hemisphere during the drab white month of January for example. Plenty do. But have they ever really told what an extraordinary sensation this is? Walking the streets of Cape Town, Canberra or Santiago de Chile while your home is in the grip of a northern winter will enable you to see hot skies and smell dry grasses as you never, ever imagined them before. I liken the experience to savouring a perfect cold drink which you knew existed, but had not drunk until now.
Following on from that, the insipidly pale-greenish month of March is the time, without a doubt, to get down to the southern Mediterranean, when everything will already be happening in bold colours: big storms, green hills, rich brown earth in the vineyards. And this is not the artificial, jet-flight-aided experience of someone else's climate. This is your own hemisphere. It is a preview performance of your own spring.
Coming up to the yellow-blue time of year is when I want to be in Scandinavia, travelling endlessly northwards. It's a mystical thing: some primeval search for the land of eternal sunlight. But the second the red time of year arrives in the UK is the second I want to get back home: July and August are without doubt the best months of the year to be in the UK (and how unfortunate it is that this is also the time of year when the majority of us have to take our holidays abroad).
The pale-brown month is time to get moving south again, preferably back to the Mediterranean where the bright-red season will still be in full swing, as though nothing has happened. But that phase doesn't last long. I see no fun in discos down on the beach, when the leaves up on the trees are wounded and dying.
My response upon entering the grey months is instantly to develop an appetite for extreme colourlessness, that is to say for Poland, or the Baltic, or Russia. It is as though, by anticipating my own winter, I can get it out of the way faster.
It is possible to truncate the whole autumn into a couple of weeks by a judicious north-eastward journey at the start of October, beginning with brown leaves in Berlin and ending in the snow-fields of Siberia.
That, then, leaves the black month of December, which can be dealt with by a tropical antidote: Bali, perhaps, or the Seychelles. Enjoy the last dying days of the year in some hallucinatory place, with fantasy downpours of steaming rain, and jabbering birds leaping about on rocks where the moss grows in front of your eyes.
There is no better way of busting up the illusion of the eternal cycle of the seasons than this.
It's winter again, the eternal cycle of the seasons and all that. I always see this change as a violent switch from black to white, so that the new year invariably begins in a drab, unlovely colourlessness. This lasts through to February. Not until March will a vague whiff of colour touch this nothingness panorama - a watery green, perhaps.


By May things are moving on. A strong yellow-blue patina will have formed, which progresses to something nearer red by mid-July. But from then on, colours fade ominously: first to a purple, in turn leeching colour rapidly to a pale brown, then to a grey then, by late November, to pretty much a solid, featureless black, all the way through winter.


So what does this colour-calender prove? Nothing much. But it does seem to tell a story about which parts of the world we ought to be visiting at which times of the year. Think about flying to the bright red southern hemisphere during the drab white month of January for example. Plenty do. But have they ever really told what an extraordinary sensation this is? Walking the streets of Cape Town, Canberra or Santiago de Chile while your home is in the grip of a northern winter will enable you to see hot skies and smell dry grasses as you never, ever imagined them before. I liken the experience to savouring a perfect cold drink which you knew existed, but had not drunk until now.


Following on from that, the insipidly pale-greenish month of March is the time, without a doubt, to get down to the southern Mediterranean, when everything will already be happening in bold colours: big storms, green hills, rich brown earth in the vineyards. And this is not the artificial, jet-flight-aided experience of someone else's climate. This is your own hemisphere. It is a preview performance of your own spring.


Coming up to the yellow-blue time of year is when I want to be in Scandinavia, travelling endlessly northwards. It's a mystical thing: some primeval search for the land of eternal sunlight. But the second the red time of year arrives in the UK is the second I want to get back home: July and August are without doubt the best months of the year to be in the UK (and how unfortunate it is that this is also the time of year when the majority of us have to take our holidays abroad).


The pale-brown month is time to get moving south again, preferably back to the Mediterranean where the bright-red season will still be in full swing, as though nothing has happened. But that phase doesn't last long. I see no fun in discos down on the beach, when the leaves up on the trees are wounded and dying.


My response upon entering the grey months is instantly to develop an appetite for extreme colourlessness, that is to say for Poland, or the Baltic, or Russia. It is as though, by anticipating my own winter, I can get it out of the way faster.


It is possible to truncate the whole autumn into a couple of weeks by a judicious north-eastward journey at the start of October, beginning with brown leaves in Berlin and ending in the snow-fields of Siberia.


That, then, leaves the black month of December, which can be dealt with by a tropical antidote: Bali, perhaps, or the Seychelles. Enjoy the last dying days of the year in some hallucinatory place, with fantasy downpours of steaming rain, and jabbering birds leaping about on rocks where the moss grows in front of your eyes.


There is no better way of busting up the illusion of the eternal cycle of the seasons than this.