“Jonathan Meades travels from the flatlands of Flanders and Holland, to Germany's spectacular Baltic coast in an attempt to decipher exactly what northernness entails.” Opmerkelijke serie over het gevoel van ‘Noorderlijkheid’.
"Arras is the start of his journey, the line in the terroirs where beer replaces wine to wash down the humble herring that runs as a staple up the North Sea coast. Northern art, he argues, is all about detail and finer brush strokes than the sun-bathing southern impressionists. From beer he's on to schnapps, vodka and Geneva; shortened to Gin in London, where it was the society-wrecking crack cocaine of the 18th Century.
"Intoxication is an elemental human need," Meades tells us in his Flanders-flat phonics, but he has a point to make in his cups - fruit festers and ferments off its own bat. These resourceful Northerners had to work to fullfil their elemental piss-up needs, which is, perhaps, why they love it so much.
Gothic architecture is more vulgar and human than the Classical; the well regulated proportions beloved of tyrants. Bosch, Vermeer and Holbein have their modern heirs, producing photo-realistic, warts-and-all portraits of, among others, our host.
He finds in the North, the birth of modern secular religion, where the free-trading Hansa cities cared for no God but Mammon, and were thus tolerant of trade, be it in weapons for the religious wars of those pesky southerners, or sex or herring."
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