During this second covidian Christmas period we have been passing where eating in restaurants, going to the cinema, attending the theatre and even shopping have become potentially dangerous activities it’s natural that one relies more on household pastimes such as playing games or watching films and going for walks on some of the mildest winter days on record.

From ‘Casablanca ‘ to ‘West Side Story’ we have enjoyed a fair share of classic films on the ‘telly’ which today, with its ever larger screens and HD vision, is a far cry from the 405 liners I was brought up on.

Did I have a favourite film during the festivities? Yes I did and, amusingly enough, it was a film that I had never wanted to see because I thought its subject twee and its music plain ‘square’. ‘The Sound of Music’ continues to dazzle fifty five years later. From its epically panoramic opening on the magical Salzkammergut landscape, through its enchantingly choreographed musical numbers to its tellingly topical ending the film had me fully in its lovingly affirmative grip.

‘The Sound of Music’ not only reminded me of how far my mind was from it in those hippiesque university days but also of the entrancing times I had spent in and around Mozart’s birthplace.

My first visit to Salzburg was on a camping holiday with my scout troop. I had just discovered classical music and to visit the town where the composer of so much godlike music was born, to hike from the Untersberg to Saint Gilgen, and to munch through delectable chocolate cakes was a teenage dream.

I revisited Salzburg with my wife on our return from Italy many years later but it was the time I spent in that fabulous region at the turn of the new millennium that was particularly memorable. As part of an Erasmus project during those happy times when Britain had not yet shut itself off from Europe I taught at a technical college near my former scout camp site. The snow-laden landscapes, the Christkindlmarkt, the substantial soups served to us, the beer at the Augustiner Braugasthof, the quartet of hunting horns sounding out from the cathedral tower on New Year’s eve, the Mirabell gardens and the walk up to the dominating Hohensalzburg fortress all came to me while watching this formerly despised film.

it would be so nice to return to this gorgeous part of the world! Let’s hope this year may make this possible and to ‘climb every mountain’ again.

LEOPOLDSKRON

This is a Christmas time of gifts
and amber smell of fir,
of snow upon dusk statue’s breasts
and healing scent of myrrh.

Along the frozen lake strange cries
weep through a glaciered copse
as falling pellicles enshroud
the tracks of silver fox.

Across the whiteness a faint light
seduces my numbed face
while in the palace windows flames
leap up through shades of lace.

Blanched deserts of the mind enfold
a fabled valley’s shape;
the path has stopped, the flakes still fall,
my fingers stroke your conjured nape.

They hold a raven braided hair,
they gaze through endless eyes,
they touch red holly-berry lips
and one more kiss expands and dies.

flp.