HOME IS WHERE THE HUT IS
BACK IN THE 1920s, my grandparents used to go walking hut-tohut in Austria. Slightly surprising, given that only 10 years earlier Britain had been in a life-or-death struggle with Austria in World War One. And a few years before that, Austria had been an empire, the principal power of mainland Europe. The country of Mozart, Beethoven and Sigmund Freud; the country of a hundred baroque cathedrals, each decorated like an inside-out wedding cake; the country of cakes, each decorated like a baroque cathedral.
Austria’s prosperous and civilised citizens liked nothing better than to pick up a pointy-ended stick and stride up into the mountains, to a little wooden hut at the edge of the glacier where they’d be offered fresh baked apple strudel by a maiden with blonde hair in plaits wound around her head. Probably.
Some things have changed: the huts are bigger; the glaciers, sadly, are quite a bit smaller. But a lot of it has stayed the same. The mountains, of course, and also the apple strudel. The wooden sleeping platforms
