Creating still life – art in process

I live in a very small flat – with one Other Half and three cats – and this really is the main space that I have in which to create art. It’s essentially why I aim to produce original, small art for small homes – I know what living in a small space actually means!

And that’s also why my process for still life paintings is to photograph the subjects – and then paint from the screen you see here: I simply don’t have the room to set up a still life and then paint from ‘life’.

The roll of felt is used as my background because it absorbs the light rather than reflecting it back, as black card does, for instance, and I like painting modern subjects in a way that nods toward a more classical look. I love Rembrandt’s dramatic use of light and dark for a reason.

I do, however, have a plastic crate in which I keep basics with which I can create still life works. After seeing Matisse in the Studio at the Royal Academy last year, I realised that I was doing what he had done, collecting bits and pieces and then using them in photos, paintings or drawings.

For that reason, I call it my Matisse Box, because it echoes how one of my personal household gods carried ceramics and fabrics and more around with him to set dress paintings. Indeed, it inspired me to put these odds and ends together and to collect more.

This is a time-lapse of creating a still life for a painting.

The resulting painting hasn’t been done yet, but when it has been, it – together with others – will be available to buy at www.etsy.com/uk/shop/SmARTartByAmanda.

Would you trust G4S with a van Gogh?

Who wants to trust G4S with this?

It’s amazing what constitutes ‘public services’. We might be used to thinking in terms of the likes of emptying the bins and education and health care, but many more things that we take for granted come under that label too.

And many of them are increasingly under threat.

But amid the ongoing, ideological rush to sell off anything and everything – even at a cut price, as the Royal Mail debacle showed – it’s easy to forget that our culture is a public service, and it’s also under threat.

Libraries have been facing cuts for years, with politicians revealing an utter lack of understanding about the service by suggesting that volunteers could run them.

When I was doing my ’O and ’A levels at girls grammar schools in the 1970s and into the ’80s, becoming a librarian was something that was considered a good career, requiring a proper degree.

When did that morph into, ‘oh, some local volunteer can do it’?

Now that’s not an attack on volunteers, but it begs – or should beg – the question of when and how running a library ceased to need the level of education, training and skills that it did previously.

Is the writing on the wall for quality of visitor experience?

Inevitably, such an approach doesn’t simply deskill, but in doing so, it reduces the actual service. And that illustrates how little the service is understood and valued in the first place.

Now, it seems, plans are well under way to privatise visitor services – including security – at London’s National Gallery.

The gallery – just one of many such institutions that helps draw millions of tourists to the capital every year – points out that funding from government is falling, and that it needs to increase retail and commercial activities, including opening for some groups outside normal hours.

Even accepting all that, it’s difficult to see how privatisation will help – all it does is involve a private company that needs to make a profit. And one of the first things to happen when that’s the case is that wages are hit.

Claims that terms and conditions will be protected are meaningless, as has been illustrated in Doncaster, where venture capital company-owned Care UK made the right noises before taking over a contract for the care of vulnerable people with learning disabilities – and then, when the ink was barely dry on the contract, decided to slash the pay of the people who do the actual work of caring, start employing any new staff on minimum wage and deskill the workforce by, among other things, ordering staff to stop dealing with medical or violent situations and call 999 instead.

In other words, the profit is privatised and the debt socialised.

Should gallery staff know about the exhibits?

And then, of course, there’s the issue of slashed pay leading to more people needing in-work benefits – so the taxpayer is forking out to subsidise the profits of the private company.

The deskilling of the Doncaster workforce will be replicated at the National Gallery, as the Ministry of Curiosity blog, an “insider’s guide to London’s museum-centric life” explains that a lower-paid workforce will mean, “for the gallery and public, a transient workforce with less knowledge and expertise”.

The blog also makes a very interesting link between the recent decision to allowphotography in the gallery and the plans for privatisation.

According to the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS), similar privatisation processesat the Imperial War Museum has led to experienced staff leaving, and anincrease in the use of zero-hours contracts.

The nation's favourite painting – left to the nation by Turner

The idea of putting security for some of the world’s greatest art treasures in the hands of the likes of G4S should be enough to horrify any sentient being.

What could possibly go wrong?

After all, the likes of G4S, Serco and others have great form on all manner of things, from security itself, to proving incapable of organising a piss-up in a brewery (or the 2012 Olympics, as they were known), to overcharging and false charging for services provided (or not).

But in this case, the atmosphere has been sullied further by union reps being hit witha gagging clause by the gallery – even though named reps were quoted in the press during disputes at the gallery in 2010 and 2012, with no apparent problem.

Of course, this isn’t the only bit of the “family silver” that is being primed for sell-off – the country’s entire road network couldbe threatened too.

And the National Gallery it’s far from being an isolated case of how our culture is being dumbed-down, devalued and sold off.

In Manchester, for example, funding has been cut to the People’s History Museum – the only museum in the country dedicated to the history of ordinary, working people.

Profit fodder?

On a more general basis, moving further and further toward a low-wage economy is neither good nor sustainable for the economy, as shown by recent figures from the Office for Budget Responsibility, which revealed that, in spite of record levels of employment, tax revenues are down, and theneed for in-work benefits (including housing benefit) is up.

There may come a point when museums and galleries have to look at charging for entry – again.

But our history and our culture should not be seen as commodities, existing for the financial of the few, but unavailable to the many.

Plans to privatise huge numbers of jobs at the National Gallery are, at best, short sighted.

At their worst, its yet more evidence of an ideologically-based knowledge of the price of everything – and the value of nothing.

• 38 Degrees currently has two petitions running related to this topic:

No privatisation at the National Gallery

Restore funding to the People’s History Museum

Mona Lisa smile – please!

Have you ever wanted to take a photograph in a gallery – and found that you couldn’t?

While many museums and galleries do ban any photography, others don’t. Still others allow some – Tate Modern, for instance, will allow visitors to snap the permanent exhibits, but not the special exhibitions.

But the announcement that, in future, the National Gallery in London is to allow photography has inspired indignation from some visitors, and allowed the Telegraph to provoke a small measure of ire, as well as agreement, in an opinion piece on the decision.

In one sense, it’s quite amusing that publicising a quiet decision – made in part because it’s increasingly difficult for staff to know whether a visitor is using an electronic device to photograph an exhibit or look for information about it – might actually increase the likelihood of people now taking pictures in the gallery by raising awareness of it.

The issue, however, is not really about photographing exhibits, but in many ways, about what galleries are for and how we look at art and what we expect or want from art.

There’s nothing wrong per se with photography in a gallery. Allowing photography doesn’t suddenly mean that every painting is going to be obscured by people taking snaps of it – with or without the added ‘selfie’ element.

Some might ask why you’d photograph anything in a gallery.  

I do so on occasion – almost always for later reference. Many galleries don’t have general catalogues or postcards of every single work. And that’s particularly true of smaller galleries outside major cities.

Sometimes I might make notes – on my phone or even (say it quietly) in a little, old-fashioned notebook. With a pen.

But sometimes, when it’s less likely that you’ll be able to find a reproduction online, a might take a snap.

As an interesting contrast, in Paris, photography is banned in the Orangerie and the Orsay, but not in the Pompidou.

On a personal level, it was helpful in July, in the latter, to be able to take a few photos – and I didn’t get in the way of anybody else and nobody got in my way.

I don’t think it made any difference not to be able to in the Orsay, but in the Orangerie, where there’s a specific effort to create a peaceful, almost meditative space around Monet’s vast Nymphéas canvases, it would have been totally out of place.

There is an element of snobbery involved in at least some of the complaints. Nobody, I suspect, grouches about a visitor sitting quietly in a gallery and sketching a work.

That, of course, has a sort of discipline about it – it was one aspect of a traditional art education, so has a certain ‘legitimacy’.

The big problem in major galleries, though, is not photography, but overcrowding. And I mean when it’s 10 deep near a famous work.

Scrum at The Night Watch

Then, as I’ve said before, I do start feeling irritated by the ‘selfie with Rembrandt’ syndrome, as it occurred when we were visiting the Rijksmuseum last year and you had no chance of really seeing The Night Watch and a bloody struggle to get near any Vermeer.

I actually had to get rather rude myself and push through a crowd, pulling The Other Half behind, so that he could actually get to see The Milkmaid, which he loves.

Equally, when visiting the Courtauld in London last year, I was revelling in being alone in the gallery of gothic and medieval works, when the door opened and a group of tourists flooded in and I was pushed out of the way so that people could start snapping the exhibits.

I fled upstairs, only to be interrupted by them again as their guide nearly sprinted them around the place, barely allowing enough time to cast more than a cursory glance at anything – oh, apart from taking pictures of each other in front of Cranach the Elder’s Adam and Eve, making crass gestures at the picture.

This is not a question of expecting people to genuflect toward works of art, but of basic good manners and a little bit of respect for the others you’re sharing a gallery space with.

In the Courtauld, I eventually sat it out in the Cézanne room. There are worse things in life.

But it begged a question that why people visit galleries – particularly in those sort of groups – and what art is for.

Is art simply another commodity – an attraction to boost tourism, for instance? Or does it have a value beyond that? In our price-of-everything-value-of-nothing world, I suggest that there is clash between these two.

If, as Picasso said, “art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life”, then that implies the need for some sort of contemplation. In the Orangerie, with those Monets, it could hardly be truer.

I get the sense that, with the likes of that Courtauld group – and others I’ve seen being dragged around cities on tours, led by bored individuals carrying a brolly or a plastic flower aloft to identify themselves – this is tick-box tourism and has nothing to do with really seeing or experiencing what they’re looking at.

At the heart of this, ultimately, is the gross over-commercialisation of our society, with its attitude of instant gratification and the dumbing down that goes with that.

These are problems that spread across all sorts of realms of life, not just art, but one small illustration of it is the use of ‘selfie’ to describe a self-portrait by someone like Rembrandt, effectively removing any appreciation of the skill involved or even what self-portraiture is really about.

Not that this should be any surprise. After all, concentration camps are on tourists trails these days, while visitors stand grinning as they’re photographed next to the statue of Anne Frank outside the Westerkerk in Amsterdam.

And all this works in combination with the technical/digital revolution, leading to a world in which people visit cultural icons – not to look at them and wonder at what made them such, but, in effect, to digitally play a version of I spy, before moving rapidly to the next one.

There is another problem with that. Let’s shrug our shoulders and say that, well, if someone wants to race around a gallery and merely glance at stuff, then that’s up to them and they are free to do so.

Which is entirely true, of course.

But at what point does the sort of behaviour and crowd chaos outlined above become unacceptable where it impinges on the experience of other visitors?

You can ask the same question another way: why should someone have the right to play their music so loudly that all their neighbours have no choice but to hear it too?

Those are the problems: not photographing the exhibits in galleries.

Another chance to examine the modern

Landscape of the Moon's Last Phase, Paul Nash

In between work commitments in Liverpool at the weekend, there was enough time to pop into two of the city’s galleries for an injection of art.

First up was the Walker Gallery, which is currently hosting a small exhibition of early work by David Hockney alongside its permanent collections.

Those collections include some real gems – my own highlights were a vast portrait of Henry VIII from the studio of Hans Holbein, The Viaduct at Arcueil (1898-1900), which is a very early Matisse, and Interior at Paddington (1950-51) by Lucian Freud.

Then there was Landscape of the Moon’s Last Phase (1944) by Paul Nash, which has a really haunting quality, Rembrandt’s Self-portrait as a young man (1629-31) and St John the Evangelist (about 1610-1614) by El Greco.

St John the Evangelist, El Greco

The latter is, I think, the first El Greco I’ve really looked at, and what strikes you so strongly is the modernity of it.

Cézanne’s The Murder (1867-68) was fascinating – like the Matisse, it was an early work and offers you a fresh perspective on the later, more famous paintings.

We’ll skate over the Pre-Raphelites as rapidly as I scooted past them: technically brilliant, but mawkish and overly fond of pictures of dying or dead women.

On the other hand, the gallery has a particularly large collection of modern art – partly because of links with the John Moores art prize.

On the train up north, I’d finished reading Will Gompertz’s What Are You Looking At?, a history of modern art from the 19^th century right up to Banksy.

It’s an excellent read – chatty and witty, and making some complex ideas seem really simple.

Interior at Paddington, Lucian Freud

And the Walker offered the opportunity to look at some modern works against the background of what I’d learned from that book.

A fair amount of modern art is, in essence, patterns, geometric or otherwise. Generally, I find these quite easy to view – what was interesting was later noting the piece on the wall in my hotel room: simple stripes, but pleasing and soothing sea greens, with just two pencil thin stripes of a gentle pink.

In using stripes, it reminded me of a Bridget Riley I’d seen in the Walker, which used apparently simple stripes to convey something quite different – in that case, a sense of optical illusion.

Gompertz says, 'no, modern art is not art that your five-year-old could do’. And that is a pretty good illustration of just why.

Some of the exhibits still left me rather cold and/or bemused – a collection of step ladders from Yoko Ono is just one example.

But there are other works that I liked very much.

Mirage, Michael Raedecker

Mirage by Michael Raedecker, for instance, won the John Moores in 1999. Raedecker incorporates different materials in his works, such as thread where you might otherwise expect paint.

This is a piece that draws you into to a fascinating landscape that seems to hark back slightly to Dalí, but without the figures.

Emin's Bed, The Little Artists

I really liked Automobilia (1972-73) by Peter Phillips, which is a collage of super-real details of various classic cars – and I have long been a sucker for the gloss and superb technique of super realism.

And then there was the Lego version of Emin’s Bed by The Little Artists, John Cake and Darren Neave, which isn’t simply amusing, but begs questions about just what constitutes art.

The Hockney exhibition was interesting – a series of etchings provide a fascinating insight not only into the artist’s early work, but also into a world before the decriminalisation of homosexuality.

Automobilia, Peter Phillips

And it’s also interesting to see early examples of Hockney’s famous swimming pool paintings, including Peter Getting Out of Nick’s Pool from 1966, which won the John Moores competition the following year.

The following day, after work, I had a small window of opportunity in which to nip into the Tate Liverpool to see the Art Looking Left exhibition.

Given time and a certain tiredness, it was very much a dive around, but if nothing else, I was determined to see David’s The Death of Marat (although it’s one of the copies he had his studio staff make).

Peter Getting Out of Nick's Pool, David Hockney

It’s not an exhibition to run around, but demands the time to read some extensive exhibit notes and even do a spot of participation. It does, however, seem to be dominated by block-printed posters and there are only so many I can take.

On the other hand, there’s some Rodchenko’s Constructivist works and some Bauhaus exhibits, which were all worth seeing.

After that, I toddled off back to the hotel to slump.

But these had been two interesting gallery visits – albeit brief.

I would note that, if you're in Liverpool, the Walker Gallery is well wroth a visit – there's something for everyone.

And in combination with Gompertz’s excellent book – and I really recommend it, especially with Christmas on the horizon (but even without) – these two visits had offered a chance to improve my understanding of modern and contemporary art.

A changing Dutch interior

Still life with asparagus.

The forecast for Friday involved rain, so one of the big set-piece visits of my entire trip – to the newly-re-opened Rijksmuseum – had been scheduled for our last day in Amsterdam.

The mock-gothic building was designed by Pierre Cuypers and originally opened in 1885.

Ten years ago, it was closed for a major refurbishment and redesign, with a limited amount of the collection temporarily housed in a smaller part of the building.

On 13 April, it was finally reopened by Queen Beatrix – her last public engagement before her planned abdication and the inauguration of her son, Willem-Alexander, at the end of this month.

We’d visited before – both prior to the refurbishment was begun and since.

It has a collection of treasures that is always worth taking a look at – and not least of these is the collection of paintings from the Dutch Golden Age, a period that covered the 17th century and came at a time of huge growth for the Netherlands as a whole, in a variety of walks of life.

But the day started with breakfast at Cobra, the café near the Rijksmuseum on Museumplein: coffee and a plate each of poffertjes.

Poffertjes – not health food.

Now, let’s be clear: by no stretch of the imagination could poffertjes ever be described as health food.

These delightful pancake pillows are served warm, drenched in icing sugar and melting butter. And oh, they’re gorgeous.

It was the perfect way to set yourself up for some serious culture vultury.

I had – in a fit of sensible behaviour – booked tickets online beforehand so that we could avoid the queues that were gathering early.

Since the re-opening, the Rijksmuseum is looking as popular as the Louvre – certainly on the basis of the coach parties that are heading to it.

Medieval chalice.

On our first visit, we’d started with the gallery of painting of Dutch naval might. By the time we got to the best stuff, I was both knackered and deeply bored.

Today, the ground floor has, on one side, a collection of medieval art and objects, and the Asian collection. We headed to the former.

This isn’t just a shuffling around of exhibits, but a groundbreaking decision to display objects and paintings and sculpture together.

Apparently there have been complaints – someone wanting to see all the cabinets together, for instance. However, this arrangement gives a far rounder sense of a period than simply seeing things according to individual discipline.

On a personal level, I would probably not, for instance, have gone somewhere to look at bishops’ crosiers, but because they were in a display case in a room with paintings I looked at them, and they added to my knowledge and appreciation and experience.

And that was repeated over and over, in a whole range of periods.

The Annunciation by Tilman Riemenschneider.

If you’d told me, 10-15 years ago, that I’d be interested in matters medieval, I’d have laughed as much as if you’d told me that I’d pay to see a silent film.

The breakthrough was probably a visit to the Louvre a few years ago.

We were among the first through the doors, but the mass rush toward the Mona Lisa sent us scurrying in the opposite direction.

And this led to a magnificent collection, and names such as Rogier van der Weyden that I hadn’t thought of since my days studying art at school.

The Virgin as Mater Doloroso.

And there was hardly anyone else there, making it even more enjoyable.

Last year’s trip to Bruges hardly damaged my interest and, of course, the trip to Lübeck had involved matters medieval.

Here, there was plenty to be astonished by.

The Annunciation by Tilman Riemenschneider in Würzburg (c1485-87) is regarded as unusual because, while it shows Mary receiving the news that she is to bear the Christ child in a subdued, shocked fashion – which seems a tad heretical, to be honest.

The Virgin as Mater Doloroso, (1507-10) attributed to Pietro Torrigiano – an Italian who lived in Bruges – struck me as looking particularly naturalistic for its era: it's also an example of the excellent new lighting in the museum.

The Rijksmuseum’s collection has a number of works by Dürer – the first I’d seen ‘in the flesh’, and they are marvellous – and there was plenty more to fascinate.

There were other works that delighted me too. 

The Shop of Bookdealer Pieter Meijer.

The Shop of the Bookdealer Pieter Meijer, by Johannes Jelgerhuis, from 1820, is a delightful take on the Dutch interior.

Parts of a surtout de table, in gilt bronze, made by Karl Friederich Schinkel in 1820-25 for Friedrich Wilhelm II of Prussia was yet another example of the sort of object that I would not otherwise have gone out of my way to look at had the exhibits been displayed in a more traditional manner.

There were also a number of Adriaen Coorte's still life paintings of food, including Still life with asparagus from 1696.

There were other pictures that featured food too – but we'll look at that another time.

The Other Half particularly wanted to see The Milkmaid again, Johannes Vermeer’s masterpiece from around 1658.

This was the juncture at which I got a bit thrusting. Crowds were milling around, shoving; people demanding to have their friends take a picture of them next to X or Y work, and The Other Half was about to turn away.

Surtout – Prussian eagle detail.

I pretty much waded through as gaps fleetingly appeared, summoning him behind until he could get an unobscured view – at least for a few seconds; just long enough to admire the brush work and observe (I’d not noticed it before) the Delft-style tile detail on the skirting board of the room.

But the most important reason of all for another visit – from my perspective – was the chance to view, yet again, some of the extraordinary work of Rembrandt van Rijn.

We barely bothered with The Night Watch: over a decade ago, I sat down on a bench some way back from it, able to get lost in this huge canvas. There was no chance of anything like that on this visit, as a scrum some half a dozen people deep at least had formed at that end of the room.

Is it snobbery to wish that you could have a little more space to be able to view a work?

Just to be clear: I fully believe that culture should be accessible to everybody; not an exclusive thing.

Scrum at The Night Watch.

I also believe that it can enrich lives and teach us all sorts of things. We know, for instance, that teaching children a musical instrument can help them to develop other skills, including concentration – never mind introducing them to aspects of our culture.

But if you’re racing through a gallery or museum, in large parties, squealing and paying little more attention than wanting a tick-box record of your visit on your smartphone, what is the point?

And for clarity, this is not a matter of generations: the problem occurs with people of all ages.

Fortunately, the gallery containing some of Rembrandt’s less well-known works was far less packed, and here you did indeed have time to stand and look and take in what you were seeing – as did other visitors.

Born in 1606 and dead by the end of 1669, Rembrandt produced a staggering body of work in those 63 years.

Jeremiah lamenting the destruction of Jerusalem.

Two works from that particular gallery stand out for me.

First, there’s the picture of Jeremiah lamenting the destruction of Jerusalem, from 1630.

Like so many of Rembrandt’s pictures, the lighting is stunning.

The background is minimal and all the concentration is on the figure of Jeremiah and the treasures that give him no comfort. The detail on the clothing is extraordinary – as is that on the face.

This is not heroic or idealised painting of a Bible scene, but something far more down-to-earth; more recognisably real and human.

The composition, the way the main subject and background create a curve, again takes us away from the formal arrangements of so much that had gone before.

My second pick of the bunch is the Self portrait as the apostle Paul, from 1661.

Self-portrait as the apostle Paul.

The apostle that Rembrandt painted himself as can be identified by the hilt of the sword and the manuscript that the subject/artist is holding in the picture.

But although he painted a number of other people in the guise of Biblical characters, it seems quite an extraordinary act of ego to portray yourself in such a role.

Yet at the same time, the portrait is brutally honest. There is nothing glamorous here – the face is lined, the nose enlarged and with a blackhead visible, the hair grey and disordered.

And look at the eyes – a combination of questions and challenge.

In the 18th century, a taste for Dutch painting was viewed, in England, as being ‘a Whig’ one, and in France it was associated with the Enlightenment and desires for political reform.

William II of the Netherlands.

When you see how Rembrandt painted real human beings – and how others of the age painted scenes from real lives (Vermeer’s Milkmaid is just one example) – then you can see why it became associated with such ideas.

As a slight diversion on this theme, one of the paintings we saw as we wandered around was a very informal picture of William II of the Netherlands  (1792-1849), painted by Jan Adam Kruseman in 1840.

It’s an extraordinarily informal pose when we consider pictures of British monarchs, both then and right up to the present.

This was the Dutch king who, in 1848, saw what the future held as revolutionary turmoil affected the continent – and decided that the best way to avoid such unrest in Amsterdam was to initiate moves to draw up a constitution.

“I changed from conservative to liberal in one night,” he apparently said at the time.

In the process, he quite possible saved his own house.

And Beatrix herself seems to continue with that certain relaxation.

A different sort of art – salmon.

In a bookshop window, I spotted this cover. But remove the print and you’re left with an intriguing portrait.

In the light and very limited palette, it could be harking back to Rembrandt. But as with Kruseman’s portrait of her ancestor, she appears relaxed and, in this case, almost shy.

Anyway, that – in a nutshell – was the Rijksmuseum.

Chocolate mousse.

To say that it's worth a visit is an understatement. The refurbishment is a superb job – the building as a whole is now so much lighter and more pleasant to spend time in.

But if you do, then I suggest that you get your ticket online (it doesn't limit you to any one day or time).

Get there for that day's opening and head right to the second floor and The Night Watch before the coach parties arrive. Once you've seen that, then you can take a little more time to wander in the less popular galleries.

We headed back to the hotel, needing food – a late lunch. And finally, the Café Americain properly came up trumps.

Salmon, with a crusty topping, the apparently obligatory trio of cherry tomatoes and a very nice buttery sauce.

It came with more handcut chips and a bowl of salad – and was by far the best thing we’d eaten there during this short stay, and we both followed it with a chocolate mousse that came covered in piped cream that had had a torch passed over it, and sitting in a 'fruits of the forest' compote.

Cheaper when alive (Rodin's Eve next to it)

And very pleasant it was too.

So that was pretty much that for our trip.

Later, we took an evening wander, where we spotted art shops that were selling a real Bruegel, a doubly signed print by Picasso and some bronzes (second castings) of Adam and Eve by Rodin.

Which really rather left me astounded – I always assume that every single such work is already in a museum or gallery – or in a private collection certainly not likely to be spotted in the window of a gallery on a street in Amsterdam.

Or anywhere else I happen to be strolling, for that matter. 

And that’s without mentioning the work by modern, living artists that was also on display in the shops on, some of which was absolutely delightful – and, in one shop, work by living artists had a nice discount.

And then we hit Café Hevel.

But if this trip illustrated one thing, it is that it is a nonsense to claim that Amsterdam is only sex and drugs and that you cannot visit without encountering both.

And as a final note: Eurostar – your food may not be 'disgusting', but Thalys rather left you in the shade on our return. And the fare cost less.