JAMES GALWAY
The world-renowned
flautist hates queueing, performing in South
America and French bureaucracy. On the other hand,
there are always New York
delis and Manchester
United...
When it comes to travel,
I've got one important piece of advice for everyone. Just make sure you've got
a book in your pocket at all times. Then you needn't waste a single minute in
all those queues. You read a couple more pages while you're kicking you bag
along.
I tour for about eight months of the year
then have the rest of the year free to water my garden in Switzerland . When I'm touring,
I just fly from one place to the next - arrive, practise, perform. That's not
as boring as it sounds though, because I have a lot of old friends everywhere.
Travelling with the orchestra is more fun because you get to stay a bit longer
in each place.
When I get to Ireland , of course, it's
like the prodigal son coming home. Everybody knows me. But in New York it's almost the
same. Last time I was there I went into one of those great Jewish delis and
asked for a coffee. "I'll have a kiss, Mr Galway, for that," said the
woman.
There are plenty of places round the world where people
recognise me but New York is the place where
I've got the most mothers. Boston , by the way, has a
totally different feel. There, it's much more of a university crowd.
I've never had any travel nightmares, but occasionally I've had
to travel without my passport. Once I was flying to Holland from Switzerland and the Swiss
police wanted to know how I planned to get through Dutch immigration without
any ID. So I took out a couple of my own CDs from my suitcase to show him.
"But wait a minute," the policeman objected, "anybody could get
these made up." "Maybe," I replied, "but not anybody could
play them." And I was all ready to get my flute out for a demonstration.
They decided to let me through.
Once I got to Holland the Dutch gave me a
piece of paper as a substitute passport, which I was told I would have to
surrender when leaving the country. This I eventually did, in some customs shed
on the border with Germany at 6am one morning. There were these four Dutch border-police
playing cards in the shed. I walked in and showed them my piece of paper. They
were fascinated. "Where d'you get this?" they asked. "We've
never seen one of these before." I had to resort to my trick with the CDs
again.
Places that I enjoy travelling to? Japan is always a good place
to visit. My wife and I went to have tea with the Empress on our last trip. She
speaks English extremely well.
"Do you mind if I call you Jeannie?"
she asked my wife. They were having a whale of time together. Later we played
together, the empress on the piano and me on the flute.
Believe it or not, Manchester is the other place
I like, and that's not just because my brother lives there. I recently did a
charity concert there with my old friend, the composer Phil Coulter. I've
sometimes done work for a few badly run Irish charities but this was great: we
raised pounds 35,000 in a single night, to build an annex for a home dedicated
to caring for terminally ill children. Phil has never got paid for any concert
he's done with me, though I did take him to a Manchester United match
afterwards.
There are some places I don't like going to. I don't go to South America anymore for
example, where they have a nasty habit of cancelling concerts at the last
minute which you had agreed to take part in two years before. When that happens
it ruins your schedule. Basically, I won't tour south of the Suez Canal unless I get paid
fully in advance!
I don't like travelling to France either. This is the
country that murdered two Greenpeace activists and got away with it. And anyway
you can't plan a holiday in France without having to
take the possibility of strikes into account. I was once flying out of Paris and found a
mile-long queue at customs. There was a single guy on duty reading every page
of every person's passport.
I finally got through to find that the late Lord Menuhin was
down there, too. He had switched flights because his first flight was delayed,
but then ended up watching the original flight leave earlier anyway. Another
time, I had a fully paid-up ticket for a Concorde flight out of Paris and still missed
the flight because the airport computer systems weren't working. You may think
that these things are all part of the charm of France , but I don't.
I've been living in a little village outside Lucerne in Switzerland for the past 23
years. We live in Switzerland because my wife is
Swiss, but wherever you live, you pay for what you get. In Switzerland everything works
and nobody goes on strike.
Ours is a lovely village. I've got three professional fishermen
and one professional farmer living in my street, and then there's the Russian
pianist and conductor Vladimir Ashkenazy just round the corner. It takes me two
hours to water my garden. What more could I ask for?
James Galway is starting a 60th-birthday nationwide tour of the UK on 12 May. He is
also performing on 30 June at the City of London Festival with the London
Mozart Players at the Guildhall (tel: 0171-638 8891).
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