Mention the Doors’ song titles Riders on the Storm or Light My Fire and the chances are that Ray Manzarek’s keyboard riffs will be the first thing to come to mind. Manzarek, who died a few days ago at the unreasonably young age of 74, remained an active and productive musician after lead singer Jim Morrison’s death in a Parisian bathtub in 1971, but he couldn’t escape the long shadow of the Doors period. The Doors (the group’s name was taken from Aldous Huxley’s mescaline-fueled The Doors of Perception) were very much a product of their time, but the all-important Morrison-Manzarek tandem and the characteristic music it generated was, Manzarek claimed, the product of a chance encounter on Venice Beach, Los Angeles. Manzarek was meditating. Morrison appeared, told him he had written a few songs and started to sing one of them to the sea. On the spot the two men agreed to form a band. What Morrison had sung became the basis for the song, Moonlight Drive. This all might be apocryphal. I’ve read somewhere that Morrison knew what he was doing and had already decided Manzarek was his man – and so, in any case, he proved to be.

Tonight we watched Margarethe von Trotta’s 2012 ‘biopic’, Hannah Arendt. It is an intellectually courageous film about an intellectually (and morally) courageous woman at a key point in her thinking and her life. Barbara Sukowa’s chain-smoking portrayal of Arendt is utterly believable. This is somebody who is constitutionally unable to compromise with the truth as she sees it. Flash-backs cover her sentimental relationship with Martin Heidegger and the moral dilemma this came to represent (the subsequently stable figure in her emotional life, second husband Heinrich Blücher, is beautifully played by Axel Milberg). Von Trotta splices in authentic footage of the 1961 Eichman trial, which Arendt covered for the New Yorker. Arendt’s reactions and her evolving reflections on the nature of evil form the core of the film. Arendt famously argued that she was a political theorist and not a philosopher because “men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world.” It cannot be easy to craft a film about a philosopher and her philosophising, but Hannah Arendt undoubtedly works. The film also provides affectionate portraits of Arendt’s friendships (with Mary McCarthy and William Shawn, for example) and of the small, New York-based , German-speaking community of intellectuals that is portrayed almost as though it were the common room of a university in exile.

One of the challenges Odysseus has to contend with in Homer’s Odyssey is an encounter with the lotus eaters – harmless people on an African island rendered apathetic and sleepy through the consumption of narcotic lotus fruits and flowers. Could the opposite of lotus eaters be banana eaters, I wonder? In any case, at the beginning of a long walk in blustery conditions we met these three young people, each in the process of eating a banana as they walked energetically into the wind. It was such a comical scene, as they acknowledged, that they graciously allowed me to take my little picture.

This year’s weather is getting everybody down. It’s cold. It’s wet. Spring was late and never really sprung and it looks as though we won’t be able to count on a good summer either (something to do with the ocean currents and the winds, someone said). So this morning, as we set off for an in-law’s eightieth birthday party in the Ardennes, we were thrilled to see blue skies and, yes, the sun shining. It was perfect timing for the party. But we had thought too soon. On the other side of the Meuse at Namur the weather closed in, and by the time we got to the Famennes it was raining. Worse, the rain got heavier and heavier. It was a disaster, or so we thought, especially since the caterer was roasting a suckling pig on an outdoors barbecue. In the end, contrary to expectations, it simply didn’t matter. Spirits were so good and the occasion was so happy that the damp weather proved to be an irrelevance. Tents and shelters were improvised. Umbrellas produced, coats worn. Evelyn Waugh once explained that the easiest way to infuse a scene with sadness was to make it rain. Well, we weren’t Singing in the Rain, but our spirits were certainly not dampened. On the basis of today’s example, by-the-way, eighty is definitely the new seventy!

This morning the brotherhood went out to the north London suburb where we all grew up. We visited a surving aunt and then set off to call on our old neighbours, an Irish couple, who were very dear and kind to our parents, especially near the end, and who still tend their grave. We hadn’t warned them we were coming. We just called on the off-chance. They were at home. We were welcomed in and hugged and kissed and shown to the ‘back room’ and a new bottle of whisky was produced and the reminiscences began and we were not allowed to leave until the bottle was empty. The Colemans knew us when we were nippers and watched us growing up. We went out into their garden and looked at the house next door that had been home to us for so long. Every part of it triggered endless anecdotes. I looked up at the small toilet window that I used to climb out of when we played hide-and-seek, shinnying down a drainpipe to the garage roof, and wondered how on earth I had done it. Back inside, we went through a list of the old neighbours – all were characters in their different ways and all were now gone. And then, sadly, we started to go through a list of local pubs that had disappeared: the Alma, the Box Tree, the Red Lion, the Case is Altered (both!), the Goodwill to All, the Tythe Farm, the Queen’s Arms, the Railway Hotel, the Duke of Wellington, the Kings Arms… This isn’t the first time I have blogged about the neighbourhood’s disappearing pubs, but I realise that the names are also links with history – most obviously the references to the Alma and the Duke of Wellington. (For any Spanish Head of a SSG Unit who might happen to read this, the Case is Altered is particularly interesting. It may be an apocryphal explanation but, during the Pennisular War, the Middlesex regiment spent a long time quartered at La Casa Alta, and the Case is Altered would be a corruption of that. Sadly, both pubs of that name are now gone.) Still, the visit to our neighbours was a wonderful trip down Memory Lane and an extraordinary example of spontaneous Irish hospitality at its best.

If you asked me to say what I miss most about London, the theatre, pubs, the river and the royal parks would be up there at the top. Having caught up on pubs and beer yesterday evening, this morning I got up at dawn and ran to the Regent’s Park and then all the way around it and Primrose Hill before heading back to our Euston hotel. The Park, especially at that hour, is such a beautiful place and I felt elated to be there. Running past the zoo (on the morning air you can smell the seals and sea lion enclosures a mile off!) brought back childhood memories of seeing Guy the Gorilla and the chimpanzees’ tea party but there are plenty of animals – especially birds – to be seen outside the zoo. Moreover, they are so used to unthreatening human beings that you can get really close to them. On my circuit I saw plenty of herons, tufted ducks, pochards, coots, moorhens, ruddy ducks, mallards, Canada and greylag geese and whooper and mute swans – and that was just the acquatic birdlife. The park was all-but deserted and, it being early on a Saturday, the city’s traffic was relatively quiet. It was just a great start to the day.

I took the Eurostar this afternoon to London for a rare meeting of the brotherhood. Although London-born and raised, we three brothers now live on the Isle of Skye and in Brussels and Prague respectively and we all lead busy lives, making it difficult to find mutually convenient dates and places to meet up. With our parents no longer alive to act as catalysts, such meetings have become infrequent, but they are all the more joyous and entertaining for that. This evening we started in a Bloomsbury pub (excellent ale) followed, as tradition dictates, by a curry and a long and enjoyable note-swapping session about family, friends, music and literature. We were also a little conscious, I think, of the family ghosts swirling around us: our father (Holborn), our mother (Islington), several grandparents (Bloomsbury). Tomorrow we’ll go back home – only it’s no longer our home.

To the Bozar this evening for a wonderful programme performed by the Rotterdam Philharmonic orchestra under the baton of Yannick Nézet-Séguin. A choreographic poem by Maurice Ravel, La valse, was followed by Claude Debussy’s La mer and, to cap it off, we were treated to a performance of Igor Stravinsky’s, The Rite of Spring. The Stravinsky is still thrilling today and the memorable accounts of reactions to that first performance are entirely believable (Ravel, in the audience, called out that it was a work of genius and then, of course, there were those riots). I can think of no other musical work which so effectively symbolised the dawn of a new era. To my Belgian better half, the music has a double significance, since she will forever associate it with Maurice Béjart’s choreography (Béjart and his company having enjoyed a seventeen-year residence at La Monnaie in Brussels). This is not to belittle the other works we heard this evening. (Listening closely to the Debussy, I realised that Ronald Binge had made sly reference to it in his 1963 Sailing By, a piece that came before the early morning BBC shipping forecast on the radio and therefore used to warn me when my writing activities had kept me up too late).

At a dinner table this evening we were talking about the importance of lists, but in a very specific context. Another guest had, like me, recently become an ‘orphan’ (that is, his sole surviving parent had passed away) and he had had to empty out the house and sort through his parents’ belongings. The value or significance of many of the objects was obvious or easy to establish – furniture, paintings, books. But there were others – photographs with unidentified people, for example – that would forever remain a mystery. I recounted that my sole surviving maternal aunt has started to draw up lists of objects and belongings of significance so as to help her children once she has passed away. Following her example, and with an attic full of objects inherited from my late parents, I have started to do something similar, indicating to my children what they might like to hold onto (and why) and what I felt obliged to hold onto but they can safely chuck away, if they wish. We segued onto objects with unexpected value – first editions of modern literature being a good example. And then the (Belgian) friend beside me told a little story. Her parents were in the habit of renting a summer villa in Le Coq. One summer, when she was eight years old, the villa next door was rented by a certain Georges Prosper Remi, better known as Hergé. Remi was invited to their villa when the family celebrated my friend’s ninth birthday. As a present, he gave her a complete set of Christmas greetings cards, each signed by the artist, and each featuring Tin Tin and Milou (Snowy). A few years later, the friend decided that it would be quite a novelty to send her friends Tin Tin and Milou Christmas cards, and so she sent them all off. Today, that complete, signed set would be worth a lot of money.

The dog was giving us a walk early this morning when, on an earthbank in a sunken lane, we came across the fellows in the picture. At first we weren’t sure, but a quick check on the internet told us we had stumbled on a late growth of morels. There were lots of them, into the bargain (and they made a delicious dish, braised with shallots and white wine). We got to playing the Noma game, which is to say what else could we find by foraging around to provide a complete meal? We had soon rustled up a hearty dinner as follows: nettle soup for starters (plenty of nettles about at the moment); morels for the main dish, accompanied by wild carrots and a dandelion leaf and wild sorrel salad, with wild strawberries for dessert, and all washed down with a dandelion and burdock cordial. I suppose the point is that we get brainwashed into believing that we can only obtain food by handing over money and receiving something wrapped up in return. We stumbled across the morels by chance (and, by-the-way, they would have been worth a tidy sum if we had sold them) but we will be more alert to the possibilities around us from now on. Indeed, it would probably do us all good to forage a little more and to shop a little less.