Old man river

‘What are you training for?’

‘I'm suffering.’

‘But what are you training for?’

I took the music out of my wet ears.

‘I'm training for a marathon.’ I lied.

‘When?’

‘Sometime this year.’

‘You have to have started your training regime!’

‘Yes.’

I was stretching out my right thigh at the traffic lights. The morning in Madrid was warm and dry and the sky had forgotten about clouds. I could taste the salt in my mouth.

‘I've done nine marathons in this city.’

‘Really?’

‘Oh yes, and we came all down along here. Over Segovia bridge.’

He was in his seventies and was on a bicycle. He wore all over blue spandex, a helmet and dark sunglasses.

‘So, you’re training then?’

‘Yes. More or less.’ My face was hot and covered in sweat. ‘I'm trying to lose my belly.’

‘Hah. Very good young man.’

The lights turned green.

‘Well, good luck. Adios.’

He cycled off slowly and I trailed him, embarrassed to catch up. He slowed down and again I removed my headphones.

‘You must go steadily. Every day.’

‘I don’t know if I’ll be able to do a full marathon.’ I puffed. He turned his wheels slowly, the giant orb of the sun glinting off his spokes.

‘Start with a half. Don’t push.’ He smiled widely. ‘Poco a poco, young man.’

‘Yes.’

‘OK. I’ll leave you.’

Poco a poco the old man gathered speed and put more and more metres between us. Then I lost sight of him. The Madrid river park snaked left and right, up and down for kilometres.

I had lied.

Five kilometres later, dodging lazy families, leash-less disobedient dogs and determined skaters, I reached another bridge. An old man on his morning constitutional smiled broadly at me and extended a thumbs up in encouragement. Why?

At my flat, halfway up a long hill topped by one of the city’s old gates, I steamed by ancient women stepping into yawning pastry shops, children playing on the street while mother and father shared vermouth aperitifs in open-fronted bars, and swarthy Andalusian gypsies selling strawberries out of cardboard boxes.

A look at the mirror gave away the old codgers by the river. My face was deep crimson, smacking of exertion and sun-fatigue. I looked as if I had run for hours. The sad reality, with my shoddy knee and Rioja-fatted stomach, was that I had hauled myself around for less than thirty minutes.

I showered, spent some time on trains with Paul Theroux, and went to eat and drink far too much on some unknown terrace. Next time I would run the whole thirty minutes.

La tierra con nombre de vino

‘The vines are sleeping.’

Elvira had picked me up at Santo Domingo de la Calzada after a three and a half hour bus ride from Madrid and was driving me to Haro, the wine-capital of the La Rioja region.

It had withered from the effects of winter. Brown, weak greens and dusty beige filled up the land between naked grapevines. Occasionally the sun burst out from the clouds and morning mists and illuminated the rugged snow-topped mountains that enclose the province.

‘Pedro has been called to a meeting in Logroño.’

I waited with a complimentary glass of the 1991 Gran Reserva white wine at the López de Heredia bodega – in business since 1877. I flicked through the little menu and saw that the bottle cost fifty-two euros. I drank it slowly and squished the liquid through my teeth and over my tongue. These were not muck about drinks.

Finding myself at a loss, I bid my leave and walked around the countryside for an hour. The wind was harsh and between gusts the air was frosty and carried the hint of wet soil and bark. Minutes from the town little hillocks appeared. From the top of one vine-covered hump I surveyed La Rioja in its wintry grandeur. Coiling down away from me and bumping away in all directions were scruffy brown and clay-red fields lined with trellises and gnarled stumps that were awaiting the coming spring. They looked like shrunken versions of the fairytale trees you’d find in an evil forest.

Resting at the bottom of the mountains, at the bends in the Ebro river or on bumps in the plain were the villages. Names like Briones, Briñas, Bastida toyed with the upper alphabet, while Casalarreina, Ollauri and Cihuri made you look twice. Cold little churches of immense age braved the winds as functional houses and cobbled streets clung to them for warmth. The view made me thirsty and I longed for a bottle of red and a log-fire. But I wasn't here for the wine this time. I had come to see the birthplace of the Spanish language.

‘Luke, I’m so sorry. Forgive me!’ Pedro arrived, neat and honest, clutching folders and notebooks. ‘Vamos. We’ll head straight to San Millán. Directo!’

The blue skies that had returned to warm the dormant fields disappeared again as our little car climbed up through valley folds and long hilly arms into the Sierra de Demanda mountain range. Suddenly the road stopped. At the end of it was a small village – all silent lanes and pastel-coloured houses – and a gigantic honey-coloured Benedictine Monastery. A wide horseshoe of forested domes surrounded the area under a gloomy lid of cloud. Coupled with another tiny monastery on a nearby slope, this collective of peaks and churches had been recognised by UNESCO.

The old and atmospheric Suso – from the Latin susum meaning ‘upwards’ – monastery hid up in the hills while the palatial Yuso – from the Latin deorsum, meaning ‘downwards’ – sat at the bottom like a bored lion. It was here that the Spanish language first emerged to the outside world.

Enter the Emilian Glosses. The language of Spain in the 10^th century was Latin, but in La Rioja something strange was happening. First of all, the remote villagers of the mountains, unimaginably distant from the great cities of Spain, had started a process of irrevocable bastardisation of their language. The "Latin" they spoke was almost unintelligible. Furthermore La Rioja bordered the Basque Country, so many of the people in that zone didn’t even speak Latin in the first place. It was getting increasingly harder and harder and presumably more pointless to preach to the local populous in Latin. I can imagine, in that dank but pretty little hillside church a priest at the end of his tether as the inhabitants stared blankly back at him, picking their ears and wondering when he would get to the communion wine.

One day an enterprising preacher started to make annotations above some of the Latin words: translations. But new words do not a new language make. Sometime, in the year 964, this smart priest decided to translate whole texts into the local languages. One was Basque and the other was Old Spanish: the first instance on record of Spanish in action with its own grammar playing out on paper.

In that cold and silent monastery it was easy to imagine a local population far removed from the modernising world around it, trussed up in cloaks and with cheeks red from raw local wine; false protection against the fierce mountain air. They nattered to each other on uncomfortable wooden pews and stone benches.

‘What’s the man in the big white dress saying Jorge?’

‘Who knows Elena? Who knows?’

Until one day everything changed and Spanish flourished through the land.

In the evening we joined some of Pedro’s friends in a bar in Santo Domingo and proceeded to get through an unhealthy number of bottles of red Rioja while stuffing our glowing faces with squidgy ham croquettes, chunks of moist chorizo cooked in cider, and slices of Spanish jamón and oily manchego cheese. The air was thick with the headiness of garlic and wine and the sounds of chatter and clinking glasses.

‘People forget Spanish was born here.’ Said a jolly-faced lady dipping a hunk of crusty bread into the sweet cider. ‘You must remember that the heart of Spain is Riojan!’

Hamburg for Goethe

The theme I set this young man was to describe Hamburg as if he had just returned to it. The thread of ideas he followed from the start was the sentimental one of his mother, his friends, their love, patience and help. The Elbe remained a stream of silver, the anchorage and the town counted for nothing, he did not even mention the swarming crowds – one might as easily have been visiting Naumburg or Merseburg. I told him this quite candidly; he could do something really good, if he could give a panorama of a great northern city as well as his feelings for his home and family. - Goethe

'Apparently the people from Hamburg are unfriendly and cold, but those are just lies spread by the Bavarians.' Said Laura matter-of-factly.

We were sat around the table in a lovely wooden family house in the suburban district of Sasel in north Hamburg. Quadrants of big attractive houses with triangular sloped roofs nestled amongst small pockets of extant forest and plots of land where sheds clustered next to tidy lawns. It was winter and the trees were naked. In spring and summer the Hamburgers would escape at the weekend to these sheds, sit out on their lawns, tend to flowers, eat, stay a night or more. Like a small German version of the popular Russian dacha. Now though they sat silent and wet. My cousins filled up my

glass of wine. Red, and slightly sweet.

'So, what do you want to see in Hamburg?'

Hamburg is a big and wealthy port. Jogging around the outer Alster lake, where the mist clung to the water and only permitted milky grey visions of ghosts, I saw the money. Huge lavish houses and embassies set on the waterfront. Dormant bars and restaurants peppered the lapping shores and little barges and boats drifted silently. It was Stygian and I could only imagine its seven-kilometre circumference. Only a handful of plucky runners passed me by. There were no nods of acknowledgment. There were dogs too. The people looked happy and comfortable. The inner Alster, split from the outer by a road, is far smaller. It lies at the feet of the famous skyline. Spires prodded into a sky that was slowly succumbing to a December sunset. The lake became a liquid mirror. A Christmas tree in the centre of it was surrounded by rowers. After the lakes, feet take the visitor into the centre. And it is grand. The Rathaus – town hall – stands gothic and fun. The Hamburgers are proud of the claim that it has six more rooms than Buckingham Palace. Even if it didn't it is far more attractive. Greens and creams and frills in lieu of dull grey blocks. It looked religious. At its base was a Christmas market. Every road had one. Wooden huts, steaming with the heat of cooking. Sausages and mulled wine. Nuts and molten chocolate. The air was a maelstrom of smells and temperatures. It is not the most beautiful city centre – it doesn't hold up against the Madrids or St Petersburgs of the world – but not one corner was unattractive. The whole city was pleasing. Old and new sat side by side like friends. It reminded me of London. Christmas lights twinkled along the streets and candles were suspended in the trees. Legions of overcoats and scarves were huddling around, clutching hot Glühwein and laughing. Here and there a canal would cut up the road and smart flats or old north European style houses would trail off along them with cafés selling Kaffee und Kuchen. Every bridge was confettied with colourful padlocks bearing names; engagement promises. Hamburg is the second largest port on the continent and there is a sense that the city is a slave to water.

Water has been the catalyst that gave the city some of its distinct neighbourhoods. The most infamous is the Reeperbahn, proudly proclaimed as a red light district far larger than Amsterdam's. In the 1930s sailors would come to shore seeking to enjoy land. As well as drink and rest they wanted the flesh of a woman. The Reeperbahn, like many similar districts have, grew out of a need for sex. Today the seediness has somewhat disappeared and a Las Vegian theme park atmosphere has taken hold. Streets are lined with brightly coloured shop fronts: sex shops full of inappropriate toys, blue cinemas, lap dancing bars, peep shows, brothels. In the sky above and on the doorframes neon lights entice the visitor. 'Paradise point of sex! Welcome: open 24 hours' 'kino sex' 'Dollhouse table dance' 'Safari'. It was blinding. The sailors stood no chance. And neither did the girls. One street – Herbertstrasse – is boarded off at both ends. Women and children can't enter. It has been like this since the days of the Nazis who, instead of banning the practice of prostitution, were happy to be nominally blind to it. It is a 30m meat market. Women sit on plush chairs in little booths. Many sit on their phones or talk to their bikini-clad colleagues. The fronts are all large glass windows and doors that swing open so they can talk prices. A few drunken twenty-year olds giggle and flirt with a blonde woman hanging out of the opening. They rap on the glass and call 'hey, halo'. They’re often more beautiful than words. Magazine covers that have fallen into trade. I say hello back.

'Don't talk them!' Hissed my cousin Chris. 'Don't be so English.'

'Why not?'

'You'll only get into trouble.'

I believed him. I made eye contact for only seconds. We returned to the real world again.

'What did you think?' Asked Laura.

'Confusing.'

You want to look but you know you shouldn't. It is depressing to see them there.

The lumbering waters brought sailors to the streets of Hamburg, but it also brought ships to the harbour. From the top of the St Michel cathedral you can see the extent of the city's industry. About a third of the city is port. In the wintry waning of the day huge container cranes stood like spectral ribs of some wasted giant's skeleton; the controversial new opera house loomed blue and black like the prow of some ship looking out onto the kilometres and kilometres of docklands. The old docks, the Speicherstadt – storage city – lines the waterways with tall terracotta shipyard buildings that are grand and topped with gothic flare. An industrial Venice, Hanseatic style. Now the quiet roads and cobbled streets house boutique furniture shops, flashy apartments and tourist attractions. Above the entrances large cargo hooks still swing. Driving through the new docklands, Germany’s ‘gateway to the world’, one gets a   sense of the post-apocalyptic. There were no cars there. A few whizzed past as if fleeing an invasion, but the weekend was dead. The only life could be found on the city-sized behemoths sitting motionless in the Elbe waiting for their boxes to be taken away.

Comparatively few tourists come to Hamburg in December. Sometimes I felt like I had the city to myself. Most, it has to be said, cling to the guidebook lists or gravitate like satellites to the markets. My cousins took me to Schanze. Laura’s boyfriend Tim flung the car into a parking spot on a sleepy road and we headed for a coffee.

‘In Germany Sunday is still really sacred, that’s why nobody’s about. Hopefully we can find an open café. Usually everything shuts down all day.’

Schanze is the Camden Town of Hamburg. It’s hip and trendy and its once handsome streets are now lined with bars and cafés and foreign restaurants. It is also very expensive to live there. This modernity and style is visually somewhat at odds with the surroundings. At ground level all the walls are coloured with graffiti and fat with posters. Schanze is a left-wing political base where demonstrations and clashes with the police are commonplace. I believe my cousin once punched an officer there. By an old theatre, stickered with advertising and political slogans, a community of homeless people, or political activists, have hidden themselves away from the world. On a gate hangs a sheet with the words ‘Fck the SPD’ – Germany’s Social Democratic Party. It was a period of elections in Germany and you could see the divisions on the walls of the buildings.

'What do you want for dinner? We have the Portuguese quarter, there are lots of Italian places, maybe Thai?'

'German. I want German food. Only German.'

Germany is a place where you put food in your face and grumble like a contented bear. It is to cakes what Britain is to desserts. Sweet Stollens and Marzipanzopf mit Rosinen marbled with floral marzipan and juicy raisins are piled high on shop counters. Bratwurst are cooked on outdoor grills and served in simple rolls 'only with mustard'. Currywurst changes my life; a sausage drenched in a piquant curried ketchup and served with Bratkartoffeln – fried potatoes with bacon and parsley – or simple chopped up and given to cold hands in a cardboard tray. Glühwein fills the markets with clouds of wine and spice and is divvied up with warm bags of Schmalzkuchen, little pillowy dough balls dusted with the finest icing sugar.

Many centuries ago some Norwegian peoples left a legacy in the city of Liverpool. A stew of bashed up meat and vegetables called Lapskaus. This is why Liverpudlians are called scousers. Locals ate a dish called scouse, derived from lobscouse, and the nickname stuck. During the age of the boat, mariners from Britain who travelled to Hamburg might sometimes take their food with them. A legacy of which is one of the German city's signature dishes, Labskaus: where the stew is blended a little and served with fried eggs and rollmops. Little bakeries serve all manner of breads and put England to shame: Pumpernickel (devil’s farts), rye bead, Zwiebelbrot (onion bread), Dinkel-Kürbis Brot (spelt and pumpkin loaves), sometimes sliced and toasted and covered in Gänseschmalz – rendered goose fat filled with peppers and onions that luxuriously sticks to your teeth. In the millionaire district of Blankenese, where Beverly Hills mansions and twee English cottages crowd around a leafy headland like cold penguins, I sat in a café drinking a perfect coffee and eating a Franzbrötchen, a gooey cinnamon croissant where the sugar has gone crunchy.

Then there's the fish. Early on the Sunday morning we shuffled of our hangovers and drove to the Fishmarkt. It was 8:30 and it was fish for breakfast. A heavy sky hovered proudly over the harbour as wind and rain lashed us. Little stalls, some enormous, some as big as an ice-cream van, filled the Landungsbrücken – the old landing stages. A man, ruddy faced and wearing a red apron, called out to passers by to come and try his eels. Apparently he has become a minor celebrity. Others stood and waited patiently. Windows hid shrimp and smoked mackerel, slabs of tuna and fruit bowls. The champion of Hamburg however is the herring. I opted for a Bismarck – pickled in salt and then vinegar – while Christopher ordered Backfisch.

'It's like fish and chips in a roll, but without the chips.'

The kiosks and fish vans were the only light and sources of cover there. The Baltic Sea was churning and unhappy. Seagulls twirled about overhead like drunken ballerinas and sang hopefully to us.

To leave the north of Germany having only seen Hamburg would have left me happy but not satisfied. It is surrounded by history, filling pockets of woods and lining the rivers that filter out into the wet plains. Driving west through a world of dormant apple trees one reaches the town of Stade, which looks like a child's drawing of a German town out alone in the Altes Land. Hansel and Gretel buildings and half-timbered houses ran around a small rise: brown and yellow and red and pink and green and gingerbready. The old town was encircled by a river that entered to a beautiful plaza. There, a mini harbour sat next to the ubiquitous Christmas market stalls. Festive decorations and lights filled the skyline and twinkled fittingly alongside brick churches. It was a fairytale.

Due north of Hamburg lies the UNESCO recognised pocket-sized city of Lübeck. The whole place was a flurry of more Grimm Brothers chocolate box houses and cobbled lanes, but all seemed pulled inexorably skywards by a confusingly large number of very tall green spires atop muscular brick churches. Once again bridges and water cut you off from the rest of the world. If its city centre recalled a Germanic Oxford then the riverside echoed memories of Henley-Upon-Thames.

Before the sun had time to set there was still an opportunity to surge north to the beaches of the Baltic. Travemünde: where East Germany met West over a thin line of water you could shout over. A line of smart houses, spas for the elderly, woods and fine sands lent a Victorian elegance to a resort where one pays to go on the beach. I ate a Brathering – a fried and marinated herring in a bun with lettuce and raw onion – kicked leaves at Chris and Tim, drank a beer in the warm and headed back to the city. We were lucky to catch the last fires of the day’s end burning up the sky above the Arthurian castle of Ahrensburg.

‘So, in England we have Shakespeare. Who’s your main figure here?’

‘You know Goethe?’

Whether Germany’s great writer would be happy at my attempts to paint a portrait of this city I couldn't be sure. I only had seven days. Ultimately it didn't matter. It was an organic, open, imposing, racy, beautiful, scruffy, calm and all together harmonious city. I went in a period of brutal wind and rain and heady Christmas markets and I loved it.

The Darracott Way of St James

As the warmth still struggles to remember its place in Madrid, and the rain Gods continue their campaign to drown the city I find myself planning a walk. This time it isn't some jolly through the local mountains or traipsing through twee villages. On the 6th of April I will be taking a train to the handsome city of Santander on the frayed north coast of Spain. The day of arrival I will mosey around, eat some tapas, gaze at the beach, meet up with some friends who hosted me on couchsurfing and stay with them again. On the 7th of April I shall wake up, put on my backpack and walk for about 50 days.

The Camino de Santiago is the famous pilgrim route in Spain and France that has been leading travellers to the city of Santiago de Compostela since the first few decades of the first millennium. I shall spare you the history otherwise I shall have nothing to write about in my next book, but safe to say that over the last few hundreds of years the pilgrimage has changed a lot. It is no longer only for the religious. People of all creeds do it, fitness freaks do it, people like me do it, gap year students do it. This is what I have been told. I intend to walk all of it and more in an effort to experience another side of the country in which I live. I also want to experience the people; why do they do it? Who does it? Questions like these.

I will be doing three different legs (using the recommended stages), as follows:
1. Santander to Irun (13 days) followed by a rest day stopover in Bayonne
2. Saint-Jean-Pied-Du-Pont to Santiago de Compostela (31 days with a rest day in Logroño to visit some friends in Haro and maybe another day in Burgos to visit the prehistoric site of Atapuerca)
3. Santiago de Compostela to Muxia via Finisterre (4 days)

In total I will walk 1,186km. Whether or not I experience something life changing or spritiual I don't know. I fear that I won't. Either why I intend to document my trip via my YouTube channel as well as jotting down with ink my thoughts. Every couple of days I intend to post a video to show what happens on the camino, what I feel, what I find. Here is the link: http://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4Q_FNBBV813OtMClRc43BQ.
I ask you to join me on this Camino. Subscribe to the YouTube channel if you could. That would be amazing.

This blog is now officially sleeping until I return, so the next two months shall be a case of All Quiet on the Iberian Front.

Tally Pip. See you on the Way.

  

Vultures, Monks and Meat.

Burgos Province. The high meseta. Little scruffy villages in the middle of patchwork fields hidden far from the world at 800m. Bruised reds and browns, dirty greens and yellows. Snow whipping around and wind buffeting the car. A surprise hill range and a craggy mountain pass, all slate grey and rusty orange hid Griffon vultures that circled near me as I clambered up the moist earth, wheeling through the white with rats and rodents in their mouths; their families huddled in the caves and nooks. I laughed as they passed within metres. Roque was at the bottom by the car with his video camera and little dogs.
'Don't move! Stay there!'
Numb hands covered in mud and blood. My inadequate shoes falling apart.
'YA?'
'No, wait!'
The big brown birds, with their white tufty roughs and bald heads hit some imperceptible thermals and drifted up to the heavens.
'OK! Come down!'
Through some man made tunnel in the gorge and then out into gloopy brown fields and an oddly handsome honey-coloured pueblo surrounded by snow-dusted hills. Santo Domingo de Silos, the great secret of Burgos.

What is the secret? Out there in the middle of nowhere, 200km from Madrid, is an inconspicuous region of holiness with a variety of minuscule and muscular buildings, including one of the great masterpieces of Romanesque art: the 7th/10th century Monasterio de Santo Domingo de Silos...actually an abbey. Ancient pilgrims on the Camino de Santiago would take the 60km diversion south of Burgos just to visit it. Monks dressed in black shuffled about the impressive two-storey tiered cloister and at every corner stonework sculpturing was etched into the walls and pillars. In the garden in the middle an enormous cypress tree shoots up towards the heavens at the same height as the bell-tower and church spire and despite the tour group and clearly bored guide the place had a sense of faraway peace.
'Is that a gallego accent Roque? I notice it dips at the end.'
'I think it's actually the accent of somebody who's given this speech too many times.'
Away from the protection of the heraldic ceiling the rain had started to pound the town.
Taberna. Wine. Olives. The sky leaking life onto the meseta and a flurry of umbrellas glimpsed through a dribbling window.
Just time to buy some home-made Silos honey and take a few photos before God apparently decided he just had to go. We headed back. Back through the gorge, passed the carrion-eaters, up into the high flats again. The rain had turned to snow, with a vengeance.
'I don't have chains man!'
'You won't need chains, it's not that much snow!'
'I'm from Murcia! This is like the third time I've seen snow!'
'We'll be fine. Just take it slow and pretend it's just white rain!'
'Maybe we should find another road.'
'It's fine.'
'I don't have any chains.'
'We don't need chains.'
And then Madrid greets us with its grand snowy peaks and proud sun and the wild Burgosian fields are but a recent memory. Some bizarre kilometre of monasteries severed from the real world by a sheet of white.

To finish the day. Hedonism, pure and simple, in El Molar; one of Madrid's unremarkable satellites to the north on a low rise towards the base of the Sierra de Guadarrama. Up on a cleft of hill with a view to the sunset over the capital's skyline, is the cave quarter. Bodegas and storehouses carved out in the earth, metres underground, all converted into rustic restaurants. Bodegon los Olivares: hefty prices and fairly solid prices. 35 euros each and sitting in barely lit alcoves. A bottle of Navarra wine. A plate of migas (chunky bread crumbs fried up with meat, garlic and grapes), productos de matanza (little chistorras, chorizos, picadillo - fried sausage meat - and a fat morcilla) all sizzling on a hot plate and divvied up with a home-made wheel of bread. Then the star of the show, the Villagordo. An enormous slab of prime ox-meat served seared and sliced with salt. To accompany, another hot plate on which you fry to your own tastes. Hands down the best meat I've ever had in Spain.

Then two bottles of licor: pacharan (sloe-gin) and hierbas (thyme, rosemary and aniseed) with coffee. Then another bottle of pacharan... A walk to a plateau park with the dogs helped excuse the feeling of gluttony before the clouds descended and we retreated to a cafe for a carajillo (a small Irish coffee). It was an afternoon of hearty abundance. An afternoon that the Vikings would have been proud of. If only we had tankards to slam down onto the wooden tables and hogs with apple-stuffed mouths.

What you can do in a day with a car and an appetite still surprises me.

Tapas: A snapshot.

La Latina is part of the throbbing old heart of Madrid. A befuddling web of old colourful streets, packed to bursting with tabernas and bars whose occupants spill out into the February sun. La Latina is tapas land. Not so much the free buy-a-beer-plate-of-greasy tortilla tapas but the get-your-bloody-wallet -and-buy-something-lush tapas. Settled noisily out from the lower belly of Plaza Mayor, the area is also home to Madrid's humongous but, for me anyway, intolerable market "El Rastro". If you like flea markets it's heaven. I don't. Too many people. Too many tourists. Too much tat. However, it's all too easy to forget the joy of wandering off into the side streets. The quieter little tributaries. Jettison any plans for the tapeo (tapas bar crawl) and let your nose and your eyes pull you around.

First to El Buho and their tortillas. As big as a child's birthday cake and for only 8/9 euros they sit on a plate that struggles under the weight of them. Varieties: garlic prawns, tuna and red pepper, roasted pepper, caramelised onion and goat's cheese. Why constrain yourself to egg, egg, egg with onion and egg. Then wobble out, gassing heartily and penguin walk to the Rastro.

Then the decision. Join the throngs or splinter off.

Always splinter. To Calle Mira el Río Bajo. 'Look the low river!' And its tributaries. Here is the real Rastro. Little workshops and second hand shops and antiques stores displaying their wares out on the streets, preening themselves at you in the light. Little withered books from bygone ages. Chairs and drawers. A little handmade table with a chess board in it. Lanterns. Paintings in stocky frames. Everything wood and smelling of age. You wonder how long these things stay here before some romantic soul gets his money out.

Then onto Calle Rodas, a street that warbles with the soundtrack of tiny birds singing their hearts out. Pet shops, little canaries and budgies. A parrot or two. The windows present a hopping blur of colours; reds and yellows. A tiny wine shop punctures the avian air and then you're out onto another street. Calle Embajadores; ancient and lined with pastel hues and ecclesiastical monoliths. A tiny plazuela, two trees, some wine and fried sardines. Farther still you push on; the alcohol turning the spongy afternoon into some delirious daydream. Down to Calle Casino where Cafe Lusi resides. A round of Albariños that are somehow cheaper than everything else, some olives bobbing in vinaigrette and stuffed with gherkins. The winter sun leaving us in jumpers and the little waiter has to use a bench to reach the bar and shout for the croquetas. Round our feet multitudinous bags and crap that has wafted over from Curtidores street and the now dormant market. Drunkenness slowly starts to enter and speech becomes sloppy.

And finally to the Ronda de Toledo and its grand old archway; the old south entrance to Madrid. El Pescador sits innocently enough on one 'corner' of the roundabout and provides the tapeo-ites with a final resting place to wet their mouths. A round of wines and some torreznos (giant crinkly pork scratchings). On the wall, a little cut out from a national newspaper. It proclaims the bar's calamari rolls as kingly. More wine and a bap.

'A knife to cut please?'

A bread knife is handed over by Paco, the friendly but shy owner.

'Don't give him that butter knife, cut it with a kitchen knife!' Barks an old lady in stripy blue and white nightie style clothes that all silvery ones don.

The walk back is full and jaunty. Softened up with the jammy comfort of Rioja and good food. The Madrid mountains are blue and snow-capped off behind a horizon of pleasing flats. You return home blasted with a happy fatigue and slump to the sofa proclaiming for the umpteenth time that you should do this more often.

Wild South Showdown!

I love people. Honest human people. Little evolved apes who imagined and learned how things work. I also hate people. People annoy me more than anything. Last night I saw a drunken chav smash in the video screen of an intercom with his empty bottle. Why? Who knows. I also despair when I see the sleep walkers.  People somnambulating through life, happy with the basic and uninterested in the wonderful. Little boring people with little boring lives. Maybe I'm jealous. The girlfriend and boyfriend of eight years. The constant to and fro from the local village where they don't do anything but just eat with their families. The sphere of interests: football, going out with friends, attending family get togethers. Status Quo. I'm probably jealous but it can sometimes make finding people to connect with a chore. I mean really connect with, not just pleasant toleration or friendship. People who don't do things. Repetition. Repetition. Repetition. Wasting the shining lives that they've been lucky to have received from the great lottery of genetics. This is not to say you can't just have a weekend lazing about at home with your friends. Good griefing God no, that's wonderful too. But why not savour other fruits. The big burly beautiful world, hell, this country, has so much to offer that it ignites me into a froth that Thaddeus Stevens would be proud of when people choose to ignore it, or worse don't think to enjoy it. Spain has problems: financial corruption, political ineptitude, bureaucratic dopeyness, a slacker than optimal work ethic; but it really has the potential to be the 'best' country in the world if it can sort its act out. Spain is an ever-refilling glass of quite the finest wine.

Hilltops and White Walls

 Almeria is an odd province of Andalucia. It can be found hiding down in the south east, near Murcia, and is only really buzzing in the summer months. It's dry and the land is only really useful for greenhouses and sunbathing. It's useful having a friend whose family decided to buy a house somewhere warm. It is as underrated as Barcelona is overrated. It deserved some attention.

Lying about 550km from Madrid is the strangely disjointed area of Mojacar and its environs. The sun rises over the sleepy silvery Mediterranean and lights up the first port of call - Mojacar Playa. It's a strange, pleasingly brash artificial construct of holiday villas, restaurants, retired English people, golf courses and a long beach. Mostly everything is in English. Benidorm - minus the clientèle - came to mind. About 1km back from that area Mojacar Pueblo (the old town) covers a little moutainette like a white cubist marmalade with orange groves at its base. Despite the ever present underlying hum of English-pandering it was refreshingly more authentic then the beach area. Little winding streets with ivory walls leaking bougainvillea.

'Oh you two speak Spanish very well!'

'Well thank you.'

'You're not from here then?'

'We live in Madrid.'

'Ah, yes.'

Pop, a bottle of cold Navarran Rose wine and tapas looking over the huge terraced central plaza; one side town, the other side a view to the expansive plains between the Sierra Cabrera, that acts as home for Mojacar Pueblo and other little settlements, and the Sierra de los Filabres further inland. 

The Sierra Cabrera is a smashing little mountain range. Rarely has such a 'small' little fin of rock had so much character. Before climbing into its peaks, a scruffy little information board underwhelmingly informs you that a few parts of Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade were filmed here. Up past the wide-reaching views (even the snow-capped Sierra Nevada of Granada was visible) and multitudinous abandoned shepherds' huts the walker is slowly swallowed up by dry scrubby humps. Mother Nature's vegetation is functioning at a bare minimum and the paths are dusty orange. Indiana chose a good location. It is a fierce landscape even in winter. Parched. Wild Western even...

At a kink in the mountain range is another oddity, the village/residential community/Star Wars colony of Cabrera. A small colony established by a Briitsh eccentric called Peter Grosscurth on the heights just over twenty years ago. He had a vision of rejuvenating the whole Cabrera area; an area inhabited since the neolithic times. It was his brainchild and although he died in 1993, the area has continued according to his original vision. Every building, from small house to hilltop palace, has been designed in a particular cubist/Moorish way - with complimentary mosaicked onion domes, and all painted in a terracotta colour. The result is a bizarre and alien town, half-populated and full of 'to-be-finished' places. The crisis has hit the village hard, as has its odd location. The sensation is one of tragic but grandiose dreams and passion for a place. Portmeirion a la Española. 

The Cape of Agate and its Cowboys

Strung out along the coast and seeping inland in a series of dry, fuzzy valleys, is the UNESCO biosphere, Cabo de Gata. It's another less than normal area of the country. Three types of built-up area are present: little white fishing villages or agricultural towns, newly constructed beach/golf towns, and abandoned or partly built ventures that have ceased because of the massive financial crash. The driving in winter, sweeping up and down through sea-vistas or open plains with shoddy farmyards, is lonely and private. A national park just for you.

La Isleta is one of the aforementioned villages. It leans out into the sedate Mediterranean on a narrow low-lying spit. The houses are built to the shore. The walls of rock that backdrop the settlement are sandstone coloured and look like Morocco. A tiny restaurant - La Ola - sits next to a minute harbour where boats bob up and down. The menus have a Quality Street style map of the fish that are available in the area. Next to it a handwritten sheet of the fish that have been caught that day. As happy jaws clacked down on fresh squid, tuna, sardines, prawns and all manner of fish not available in the UK, the sound of Spanish was mixed in with German. Further down the cabo is the lively little villa town of San Jose, curling around its two beaches. Dead in the winter; the sand still soft and the sun still bright in the sky but lacking its summer power, this, in my eyes, was the place to be in January.

Leapfrogging the Sierra de los Filabres and the ocean of shimmering greenhouses that can be seen from space, Almeria City raises his bulky head. The six and a half hour bus slinks first through the Tabernas Desert - the most famous of Spain's three. A wavy badlands of cream-coloured sandy terrain, it was this area that played host to the cracking six-shooters and jingling boot spurs of Clint Eastwood and his fellow actors in the sixties when Spain was ground zero for the filming of the brilliant Spaghetti Westerns. Here and there are dotted little 'villages': Western Leone, Texas Hollywood and Mini Hollywood. Sets and settlements constructed for filming; they were thought of so fondly that, in the case of Mini Hollywood for example, lots of local extras clubbed together and bought it and ran it as an attraction. Either way, it is a strange place that I intend to revisit in the summer for the full effect.

Three years later and there's always something else, always something new. A new town. A new mountain. A new sea. A new taste. No more sleepwalking. Open your eyes.

The Coast of Light

Why do we travel? Is it because we are desperately trying to escape whatever little life we are living; escaping work and people and problems...the real world? Or is it the other way. Do we simply have a searing desire to see new places, to drown our eyes in newness, regardless of what awaits back home? Maybe one, maybe the other, maybe both. The point is we do it. The country you live in makes it easier or harder to do this. Russia is unwieldy. The UK is expensive. The USA is too full. China is too difficult. New Zealand, too far. Spain, time and time again, has proved to welcome the budding, itchy-footed traveller with sunny open arms. It's so easy, so tempting to hop on some bus or train and high-tail it to a far-off village. So I did, again.

Deep down, right down, in the south of the country is the Costa de Luz (the Coast of Light). The area of Cadiz and Huelva west along the coast from the heavily built-up and ruined Malaga part of the Spanish Med is a land of monstrous beaches of golden sand, little white towns and long evenings. Further inland the Cadiz province houses other delights: tiny postcard-perfect pueblos blancos that pepper the mountains and hills for miles around - mirroring the Alpujarras on the other side of Andalucia; and finally the quaint city of Jerez de la Frontera and all its sherry.

Hidden in the hills.

An hour east of Jerez de la Frontera the parched yellowing Andaluz plains give way to a humped horizon of deep viridian. As one climbs the world gets greener. First the road passes Arcos de la Frontera, an old fortress town placed prominently on a wedge of rock; its old quarter perched on a cliff face. From the aptly named El Bosque the drive is windier and reaches Benamahoma sitting in a mossy crux between two hills. Spiralling up away from the world, along an ever rising arm of valley, the whole green tapestry of grand forested and craggy lumps of mountain opened up for us. Then the road shot right, over a verge and dropped into Grazalema.

Grazalema is a shining example of a pueblo blanco. Sitting up in a nook, surrounded by peaks on three sides and one facing a low-set plain, Grazalema is a perfect little village of narrow cobbled streets and orange-tiled roofs and churches. The little towns like this only really subsist on the tourism trade, however the village still has a lively industry in cakes and artisan shops of different types. After Grazalema the road then climbs to its zenith at the Las Palomas pass, 1357m. It then descends and the view explodes away. Kilometres over nothing.

Hills and gargantuan mounds of earth that from the bottom up would appear monstrous, there seemed to be small eruptions of brown or far-off beached ships covered in olive groves. The white towns dotted the panorama like some giant had clumsily dropped paint drops on the planet; and the lakes looked like the sky had clumsily formed puddles that hadn't been mopped up yet. And then finally past Zahara de la Sierra that sat proudly like some white king cobra coiled up around a rocky outpost, topped with a castle looking out over its lake.

A Roman and his sand.

A similar distance south of Jerez de la Frontera, sailing past salt-marshes, house-sized heaps of sodium chloride, and sporadically ugly new development, one eventually hits the coast. Playa de Bolonia is a massive beach without a town; just a spattering of summer villas. It is backed by a cleft of hill that essentially cuts it off from over-development and Andalucia behind it. Standing on the the beach, Africa and its mountains can be seen lurking off in a haze, daring you to jump on a boat.

On the east end of the beach is a blob of land constituting a little mountainette and on the other is a thirty-metre high dune, ever-growing, that is slowly, bit by silica bit, eating a forest of beach pine trees. The azure Mediterranean, the straw-coloured sand, and the mossy intensity of the drowning forest forms a perfect natural tricolour. The real flag of the south.

Set back behind the sands, posing venerably in the shrubby grass are the remains of what was once probably the most scenic Roman settlement in the Empire. The ruins of Baelo Claudia, from the second century, show us that this distant outpost was in reality a thriving fishing town that was key in the production of a important and sought after fish sauce, garum. A fishy Roman Worcestershire sauce basically. They loved a condiment. It's less appetizing when you think that it was, and still is, made from fish guts.

To watch the sun drop into the sea, we saw off the day at another beach - El Palmar. It was longer than your focus could manage and was utterly undeveloped except for a single string of chiringuitos - little bars and restaurants - of one or two floors that ran along for a couple of kilometres. It all felt very 'surfer'; chilled out but with a buzz.

Uncle Pepe and his sherry.

After filling up on the delights of Manolo, Lucia's father's, cooking - acedias (a dab-like flatfish), gallo a la plancha (grilled plaice), ensalada de huevas (fish roe salad), pechuga de pollo al Jerez (chicken breasts fried in sherry), home-made alioli, all served with copious amounts of fino; and after sampling the somewhat limited nightlife of the city, it was time, with fuzzy heads, to explore the old town of Jerez de la Frontera.

Jerez de la Frontera is essentially a blown-up pueblo blanco that has got too big for its boots and spilled out into the modern age. The outskirts are mostly unattractive flats and shops, like everywhere in Spain. The centre, however, is a joy. White cobbled streets that slink off to nowhere and hide little churches; twee shops that show you that you are still in a provincial town really; floppy palm trees to remind you how close Africa is; old men sitting in the shade whilst beautiful young couples have morning paseos; a colourful flea-market buzzing at the base of the city's fortress, the Alcazaba; the haughty grand and Gothic cathedral, which stands oddly next to the Gonzalez Byass sherry factory; and a whole Andalucian sky of blue. To throw away a few hours Jerez is a perfect place, and it tastes nice too.

You can't not taste the town. The town called Jerez...sherry. The place is littered with bodegas that produce the finest tipple this side of the continent: Tio Pepe, Gonzalez Byass, Williams & Humbert, Garvey, Osborne; they're all there, getting drunk with each other when no one is looking.

That lingering hope is that this wonderful place never succumbs to the spoils of tourism and its merry band of pirates. May it never turn into another Malaga of Valencia coast. Good luck to it.

Old Hellos

Summer in Spain is often a time for lying on beaches inactive and crisping or a time for piling into the family's village flat near the coast and existing as a unit. With the distinct lack of a family here my Spanish summer holidays became more of a collection of rendezvous with old friends, some not seen for years.

First La Mancha, with Alfonso and Alfredo, two years absent from my life. Characters from my book. To visit his family again in the tiny wine-producing town Villanueva del Alcardete with its overblown church and quiet dusty streets. 38 degrees and as dry as the desert. Lunch, eleven of us, manchegan style. Moje manchego (a cold refreshing bowl of tomatoes, tuna, oil, and occasionally olives and eggs) followed by the mother's signature dish, chicken cooked in ham and juice. And wine. Dusty bottles from the family caves, from the house, from the family bodega that used to produce. The father happy with his 37-yr old bottles, the children wincing at the vinegar. And we leave through Belmonte, past shining fields of sunflowers and copper-red lands, a town with a huge castle that overlooks the flats. Some windmills too, for it is La Mancha.

James visits for a second time. The heat, 42 degrees. We flee to Manzanares el Real, a village up in the mountains of Madrid. There we eat tortilla and sandwiches and bathe in the cool, cold, freezing actually, waters of the Manzanares river. Other people, sexy young things, families, kids, also find a space, find a depth and kill time by doing nothing.

Then the wet air of Valencia, its old streets, river-bed park and colourful buildings dripping in the humidity, swimming pool air. The beach, glazed with a veil of throbbing heat, shimmering, mountains and industry off to the north, offers a sandy Mediterranean respite. Covered in bodies. Stationary, moving? Irrelevant. The body just leaks. Hideous. All the prettiness sullied by stickiness. And Imogen and Isobel. Blasts from the past. Imogen, another character from my book, whose happiness and effervescence is now, pleasingly, tinged with a little cynicism and bitchiness. And the Benimaclet district, an old village swallowed up. Little flats and little houses and little churches all bursting with pastel colours. But the heat, intolerable, sends us to terraces. It breeds inactivity.

Then the New Forest with friends of home, with purpled heather and wild ponies covering the flats and bumps. First sun, then cloud, then sun again and burnt noses. Beers and ciders fill us as we cycle. Stretches of green pastures and heathland sail away to a fringe of woods and cows. And a BBQ in the fog at night followed by a morning of blistering heat that makes us sit at a stream and lazily throw a Frisbee. Time walks on slowly.

Then Devon, glorious Devon, for a pilgrimage to the ancestral homeland of the Darracotts. To the south and the broad ruddy beaches of Torquay and Paington, all sunning themselves. Then to Brixham and Dartmouth, those picture-perfect harbour towns, pregnant with crab pots and crab sandwiches, smelling of fish and with old-coloured houses lining the bay. Past the secret huge beaches at Slapton to Plymouth, grand old Plymouth with its bizarre mix of Old Sea Shanty town, maritime grandeur, posh marina and ugly modern city. Through the heart of the county, past Dartmoor and field-buried Launceston, to little farms and villages of Darracott, touching Cornwall, and then on more to the wild north with the blustery cragginess of Hartland Point. Barnstaple, normal but nice; Clovelly, the prettiest thing, cascading steep down a hillside, donkeys to help, ruled by cats and looking onto what could be the Caribbean Sea, the beach is all rocks, seagulls and washed up dogfish. And finally over the high plateaus, with their views over golden wheat to the distant waters, to Ilfracombe, English seaside jewel nestled in between torn up but oh so green headlands.

And finally Buitrago de Lozoya, far in the north of Madrid, near Castilla y Leon. A medieval walled-town, sitting in a flat, surrounded by hills and with a river curling round it. A walk through the pine forests, skirting the water. The air is warm and thick with the cloying but attractive smell of cones and fat with gnats and butterflies. The wrong turn earlier taken means a diversion away from the water north, to the hamlet of Gandullas, which nobody knows, and back along the road for kilometres and kilometres in the sun. Stupid but interesting.

And back to work and humdrumity.

All the small places.

Spain, by all accounts, is a pretty large mass of country. At 506,000 kilometres squared it's no shrinking violet. The United Kingdom is smaller but also has about 20 million more people. What my small, wet, wind-beaten island also has is an incredibly widespread transport network. It's not really that hard to visit anywhere, just expensive. OK, maybe a Scottish Highland hamlet or some black-roofed Snowdonian village curled up in a valley is tricky, but generally everywhere's covered. Some regions of Spain are very remote, with only one bus a day visiting it from a particular nearby town, and sometimes only in the afternoon; the return bus being the following morning. The vast expanses of Aragon, Castilla and Extremadura are guilty of this. In the busy coastal regions in the East and South the buses flow fluidly like silverfish darting red, crisp foreigners along with anglo-battered Spaniards to homes and beaches. In the mountain-crumpled north one finds a bit of both. The North is quite industrial so due to this historically the hubs have been well connected. From Vigo in Galicia up to A Coruña and along to Oviedo, Santander, Bilbao and San Sebastian, the larger places, like everywhere else, are 'connected'. However, due to the imposing nature of the countryside - craggy mountains in Cantabria and Asturias and steep gorges, estuaries and valleys in Galicia - the transport to smaller towns is not only sporadic but also slow-going.

With a car you essentially unlock the country. Cantabria, Asturias and Galicia are no longer cut off mountain strongholds but glorious scenic swathes peppered with twee little villages that you can dip into slowly but with ease. Here I present a snapshot of each of the regions as I recently saw them.

Cantabria
Santillana del Mar sits in a plump pastoral verdancy, dripping with grubby clouds and fat cows, its medieval heart a duvet of cobbles and honey-coloured antiquity. San Vicente de la Barquera and Llanes sit on a lacerated northerly coastline, fisherman towns and wet beaches, seagulls shouting at the waves as the set-back mountains threaten to stomp into the sea; protected by fields.

The Cantabrian Picos hide coyly in those grey spongy cumuli. A fairytale gorge, all scraped steep sides and defiant undergrowth, allows one little road to slip through to Potes; another olde worlde ancient blip of a town, surrounded by heights and full of food, canals, bridges, and remoteness. The vast Vega Valley slinks up into the heights and the road slips into Castilla y Leon. The sun remembers what it must do and burns away the clouds. Truly far from anywhere tiny villages rest up against unfairly gorgeous countryside. Riaño, with its seat of the Gods, stands on its perch and spends its days looking across the embalse towards a child's drawing of mountains.

Asturias
Those mountains again hide secrets, caves and cheese. Arenas de Cabrales, a one horse town, steeps on all sides. One thing here, cabrales cheese. Matured for months and years in dank caves the cheeses are sometimes so strong they leave the taste buds fried and the mouth numb. Oviedo - a city - poises elegantly with its pretty streets and clean walls as all around the low sheet of vapour ensconces the Elysium.

Gijon - a gloomy port - stands firm against the northern whiplashes of the wind and provides a sense of determination to be better. A weeny old town - cute alleys and little coloured buildings - and an enormous beach that, in better weather, would be riddled with bodies. It's good, as is the fish, merluza a la sidra, hake cooked in cider with clams, and the local girls outside, stocky, and pouring their trademark boozy apple drink from a height into a glass and spilling it on the floor. Escanciar. Luarca, Asturias' Polperro, a cute cove fishing port, built into the cliff, is a farrago of roads, flaky boats bobbing in the still and jumper-wearing fisherman twittering on about their catch and the size of fish. 

Galicia
A strange Celtic land where the coastline rips itself into a torn carpet of luxurious fjords and frayed sandy islands. The land, greener than anywhere and fat with trees, pines and wine. Crispy white Albariño in the estuary towns of the azure Rias Baixas and Ribeira Sacra, punchbowl fruity red, from the steep terraced canyon walls along the river Sil, hidden from the world but getting it drunker.

Bumpy and wild Galicia is a clutter of fishing villages - Cambados with its alcohol, Combarro and its waterfront granaries, Vilagarcia and its lively mussel boats and the Ila de Arousa perched on one side of the island of the same name, the other end all Caribbean sands and laced with cockle pickers.

Fishing villages and also a patchwork of large towns: classy Pontevedra, industrial Vigo, enchanting Santiago, frisky A Coruña, quiet Ourense and walled Lugo, all connected by a capillary network of remote villages drowning in viridian. At the bottom of the pagan oddness a citadel town, Tui, stands on one side of a bridge. Across the Miño, Valenca do Minho sits primly on a hill in the fields of Portugal locked up in a star-shaped fortress. Strolling through borders Galicia shines in the sun.

Ernest and his bulls.

Spain is a country often divided by two sharp horns, a sparkly suit and a swollen pair of taurine testicles. Bullfighting is a contentious issue all year round but the spotlight shines most heavily on it during the new heat of May, for the San Isidro festival: a month-long celebration of all things bull. Everyday, bullfights, corridas, are held in the Las Ventas bullring, the home of the fight. Although it hails primarily from Andalucia, the 'sport' has found its home in Madrid. Every May little dusty shops - their walls covered with old fight calendars - flutter open and offer tickets to see the bullfight. The little old men inside gargle out instructions as to which are the best seats in the house. Its opponents denounce it as nothing more than bloody torture. Hemingway loved it. Hemingway and taurine art brought me to the bulls. It was a snowball effect and it all started in a bar.

Matadors toast before the kill; toast a friend, toast another torero. Hemingway was toasted. Hemingway loved the bulls. Hemingway also loved a drink. A few traces of him are scattered over the city: the Cerveceria Alemana, the little Central ticket office and, where I drink sherry and eat cheese bathing in an unchanged wooden enclave, La Venencia bar. A bar where I decided to learn about the bulls.

Hemingway once wrote:

As to all arts the enjoyment increases with the knowledge of the art, but people will know the first time they go, if they go open-mindedly and only feel those things they actually feel and not the things they think they should feel, whether they will care for the bullfights or not.

The Bullfight/La Corrida

Wet, broiling black sky, lightning, ominous, arena sand dark and wet. 'Es como una pradera.' Sat shivering in the heavy lines of rain. Sea of multi-coloured raincoats and umbrellas. Plastic water bottles, emptied, filled with red wine. Cigars hiding ready in metal tubes. Little hired cushions to protect the buttocks. Fifteen minutes delay as the dark storm rips the sky. Two men on horseback. Frilly and silly, the alguacils, saluting the president and taking the key for the corral where the bulls are waiting and snorting in the calmness.

A trumpet.
A little man in blue waves to someone, perhaps the first matador, across the ring. He opens a gate. Out trots a huge, muscular, black shadow, head flicking left and right. Learning the land. The first part of any bullfight is testing the animal. Testing its bravery and ferocity, seeing which horn it favours (his ear which flicks the same side as his preferred horn), checking for cowardice. The first matador (for there are three) and his cuadrilla - team of four - all stand in the ring with large capes, the capote, and let the bull charge them. Next, a gate opens and two horses, blindfolded, covered in golden fabric padding, come out. On top a yellow man holding a long pole ending in a spike. These are the picadores. This part was not as appealing to the eye. After a couple of cape passes the bull is coaxed near the picador whereupon it launches an attack. The bull, intensely powerful, slams into the padded right flank of the horse. The horse is protected from penetration but I would be shocked if it wasn't winded or at the very least terrified. All the same the animal, instead, looked begrudgingly patient. The horses were punched off the ground but were saved by the rider. At the first impact the picador drives his spike into the bulls neck. A good picador will spìke the necessary area and then, with the help of a nearby cape-wielding torero, disconnect the bull from the horse's side and return it to the ring. The picador is usually attacked twice or more.

Another trumpet.
Next is a stage that is frankly impressive from a spectacle point of view, but still is queried in the stomach. The banderilleros. The men from the cuadrilñla. They have to run towards the bull, arms outstretched, holding in each a decorated spear called a banderilla (translated as little flags). Within striking distance of the beast's headgear the toreros straighten their bodies and their arms rigid and bring them down straight so they puncture the hide and stick. When the bull has been stuck and the four bullfighters have no more spears another trumpet call signifies the third and final stage.

The ring clears and all that is left is the bullfighter, the matador, and the hot bulk; blood shining down his back. The first hour passed like some Hadean surrealist nightmare. Sat shivering on the little cushion, wet to the marrow, drinking good wine with frozen hands, saving the cigar, the sky, dark with electric flashes and growling thunder; the stands, a colour spattered wall of rain-protectors; the muddy lagoon, hooves sloshing around while one man, all alone, attempts to pass the bull around him. He stands proud and straight and brings the now smaller cape, muleta, out in front of him by his front leg. The bull twitches and has enough energy to snort. The man flicks the cape and it ripples. The bull charges. The man shouts and leads the beast round his chest trying to have the animal come as close to him as possible and have the pass, the veronica, last as long as possible. He will do a few of these.

He then walks to the barrier, head held up, and swaps his show sword for the killing sword. This second one is metal, sharp, tipped downwards at the end so it finds a home in the heart, and has channels along it that allow air to enter, killing the bull quicker. He lines up the animal after another couple of passes, cocks his forward leg and brings the sword up to his face and aims it at the stationary, heaving mass of sinew and anger in front of him, its head lowered by the viciously sharp banderillas sticking in it. He steps at the bull and after a small flick of the cape releases and drives his flimsy looking weapon into him, through the spine and to the beating heart within.

On this day only once did the sword enter a bull first time – young Ruben Pinar, during the estocada. The others suffered through multiple matador-led attempts. When time runs out the rest of the cuadrilla come out to disorientate the dying bull, wheezing blood from its lungs, by standing either side and twirling their capes alternatively to ruin its neck. Another heavier sword is brought out – the verdugo – to kill the animal and bring it down, and then a dagger, a puntillero, is brought down on the head to kill the brain.

Trumpet.

Horses drag out the now eerily vacant looking corpse. One bull lived. Weak on his knees but still charging the cuadrilla. El Fundi couldn’t kill him. The bull is brave. He is ‘free’. Other non-fighting bulls enter the sloppy arena with a shepherd and the toro bravo, after half-charging these new entities in a blood-confused stupor, leaves. The fighters are done. The bulls are dead. The blood, dark, has twirled sanguine marble in the water or pooled scarlet in the hoof-prints. Much of the crowd has left, the rest applauds. No ears and no tails are awarded. The veteran fans know which bulls did well and when the bullfighters succeeded and failed. They whistled the bad and cheered the good, shaking white tissues. A dance of death and not a bloody scrap. The bulls, whether cowardly or brave, will be made into meat or cooked. Nothing is wasted. The matadores salute the president and public with their hats, monteras the day is done.

Hemingway also wrote:

You went to a bullfight? How was it?...

How did it seem to you? I was simply bored to death. All right. You get the hell out of here.

Morality

It is a tricky business and not a simple issue. I don’t like to deal in black and white. There are parameters and other concepts in play. Many lump bullfighting in with fox hunting as nothing more than a simple blood sport. This is folly and stupid. It is not the same. The only similarity is that something beautiful and alive dies. Fox hunting is a sport. A blood sport. Bullfighting is a bloody tragedy.

Fox hunting leaves a nasty taste in the mouth for two reasons. One: it is a cruel hobby of a select few members of the countryside pompous elite. Two: statistically the fox hasn’t got a chance unless its little orange legs speed it to safety. Bullfighting opposes both of these ideas. One: bullfighting – though less popular with the current young generation – is tightly woven into the social fabric of Spain. From the hooray-Enriques to the teacher and the street cleaner, bullfighting is a largely classless pursuit. Two: despite the pummelling and unfair intrusions from the cuadrilla, the bull still has its chance to ‘win’. It will die anyway. All cows and bulls in the civilized world are bred to die, through slaughterhouse or fight.

This is not pro-bullfighting. It is an attempt to recognise that, despite the black and white brigade’s protests, the bullfight is not just some frivolous game. It has existed since the Romans. I wrestle with my own opinions. Of course I wince at the stabbings and I loathed the actions the picadors - I love animals for God's sake, but everything else was, it must be said, beautiful and highly artistic. Not a cruel, crazed blood sport, but a highly tortuous but practised art.

I was asked ‘did you like it?’ It’s a more difficult verb that it seems, ‘like’. I would say it was supremely fascinating and undeniably impressive and impacting. It was as terrible as it was glorious and as insightful as it was cruel. I may go again and I’ll still turn away. It helps me understand the country more.

The defenders say that one way or another the male bovine will be killed, either in a gruesome abattoir – some of them are truly devilish – or a heroic fight. Better the second option no? They say. More honourable. Maybe. It is also true that up to the final tragic day the bulls live the proverbial life of Riley. Across Spain the bulls’ land covers thousands and thousands of hectares of grazing ground. They have women too. Plenty. They are left undisturbed also. Near to no human contact – so that in the ring the bull hasn’t learned the real target is the humanoid shape. I was told by an anti-bullfighting Spaniard that despite his disgust at his country’s bloody tradition it was true that so much land is protected, like the English Green Belt, because of the bulls. And also, that if the bulls went, so would a fair chunk of the beloved Spanish countryside.

All this being said I still have no black or white final view. No ultimate opinion for the casual questioner. For the moment, for me, I must remain the bullfighting agnostic. The complexity is so great. I would have some parts banned by royal decree, yet some I would feel sad to have lost. The taurine posters on my bedroom walls and all those old little bull bars in the city would become strange vigils of some hokey old tradition. But the animals suffer and this is harsh and cruel. My decision will have to wait. Maybe bullfighting will slowly evolve like Portugal where the bulls aren't stabbed and killed, or maybe it'll receive a full ban like in Barcelona. Who knows? Time will test that. All I can say is that you must see one if you can. This is not to support it. This is to learn about it and help validate or confirm your opinion. Or not, in my case.

Sueños Andaluces

Those who have read my book will realise and those have read my blogs will have an inkling and those who haven't may not realise exactly how diverse Spain really is. Take the North; wet, comparatively cold and windy, mountainous and full of mountains and lakes and rivers. Take the East; plains of rice and dry land give way to beaches and cheap resort development while traditional Spain buzzes around it. Take the West; barren but immensely fertile lands of forgotten and unknown towns and cities and natural zones where many of the famous ingredients that make Spain so famous come from. Take the South; the most Spanish of Spains.

It was to the South that my last adventure took me. Me and my friend James from UK. Me and James and our little hired car, Peggy Sue. A trip that took us from Madrid, through La Mancha to Granada via Jaen, then down to the sea at Nerja and finally through the twisty turny roads of the Alpujarras. 

One - Cities

After passing through the immediately attractive but finally monotonous slab of flat that comprises La Mancha south of Madrid - speeding through Valdepeñas for wine and Ciudad Real because it's there - you fly through the dramatic Despeñaperros gorge and burst into the first of Andalucia's provinces, Jaen. It's an alien land where thick forests of moody green and laden olive trees coat the thirteen thousand square kilometre region. It's a fairly, or unfairly, unknown province. Understandable if you're not keen on olives or have already visited its two pearls Ubeda and Baeza. I had. Jaen city waited though, sitting pert and confident and surrounded by the aggressive Santa Catalina peaks. As a city Jaen is mostly unappealing but does sport two outstanding monuments. After James heroically pulled Peggy Sue through Jaen's minimalist narrow streets - only incurring one scraping along a wall during which I directed like a father and invited bemused locals to come out and watch in their doorways - we drove uphill to the Santa Catalina Castle. As a building it is grand. As a viewpoint in the area it is insurmountable. The carpet of olive groves, the bouncy and jagged mountains around which Jaen curls like a white cat and the city's gargantuan cathedral taking up all the skyline, was quite something.

Granada is...Spain. Granada is...basically perfect. The city is drowning in history, monuments and areas to visit; from the Alhambra to the old quarter. The city is backed by the highest mountains in the country, the Sierra Nevada. The azure waters of the Mediterranean sea are but an hour away. Drinks come with free food; tapas of the order of paninis with rice and olives. In the evening you have the choice to drink and eat Spanish or to wallow in the Arabic quarter, sip tea and puff cachimbas - James and I did both. The women are spectacular and dark. The people are happy and relaxed. I shall not say much more on the place as I have previously done so in another post. If you haven't visited you must. If not Madrid or Barcelona, Granada - tied with San Sebastian - is the most necessary of Spanish cities to see.

Two - Coast

After skirting the snow-capped Sierra Nevada and almost crashing due to preferring the view of lofty heights to that of the road and due to seeing the 120kmph speed limit and open roads as permission for 140/150kmph, you slide along the south coast through Almuñecar and Salobreña before arriving at Nerja. It rests, hanging over low cliffs and looking out over the sea, a jumble of villas and white pedestrian streets, sparkling between the blue of the water and the set back Sierra.

Nerja's 'atmosphere' is odd. It is both very Spanish but also inescapably touristy. On the one hand we were swimming in the sea, watching serious Easter processions, eating boquerones fritos (fried anchovies) and drinking glasses of manzanilla with free tapas, but on the other hand 60% of the voices we heard were foreign, the shops and menus all wielded the English language with pride and retailers were bursting with colourful tat. At least it was the middle-class bought ourselves a villa on the costa tourist and not the beach and booze Benidorm variety.

Three - Mountains

The famous high-rises of the south of Spain, and of Granada province, are the Sierra Nevada mountains. Big, white and covered in skiers they are easy to visit and are a popular destination for locals and tourists alike. The 'foothills' of the Sierra Nevada - still higher than anything in the UK - are the Alpujarras hills. Long an area of comparative poverty and remoteness, the range is becoming more well known thanks to an influx of alternative lifestyle foreigners setting up shop there and also through the popular writings of both Gerald Brenan in 'South from Granada' and Chris Stewart's 'Driving Over Lemons'.

The alternativitiy can be seen at O Sel Ling, a Tibetan Buddhist Monastery up a heart-in-mouth shoddy dirt track. A place of windy, serene beauty where the only sound are the bells and squeak from the prayer wheel. Apparently this was the place where the next in line for Lama-dom stopped and felt the enlightenment in the air.

The driving through the hills is both gratifying long - as there are but a couple of roads that wind round the hillside - and absurdly scenic. The 'high Alpujarras' road that we chose skirts one side of the valley wall, providing near constant vistas down to the dappled green and gold fields and opposing mountain range. Little whitewashed villages, cut off from the rest of the country, are dotted around the valley. Some nestle in the valley floor, but most cling precariously to the slopes, with their Berber village-style boxey houses and flat roofs. The names were fantastic: Soportujar, Pampaneira, Bubion, Capileira, Busquistar, Valor, Laroles, Yegen, Bayareales...

After a plato alpujarreño - a carnivorous plate of chorizo, morcilla, jamon, some other chunk of meat, fried egg and papas a lo pobre (potatoes sliced and fried up with peppers) - we burst out of the north of the range and down into the grandest view imaginable towards plains and the two towns of La Calahorra, which sports 800 people but a vast hilltop castle backed by mountains, and Guadix, an odd place with an overblown church, a fort, and a district where people live in modern cave houses.

Spain isn't Andalucia, but Andalucia is Spain. Go.

Lisbon

There are places near Spain that I am to this day ashamed that I haven’t yet visited. Italy, Austria, the South of France, to name but a few. Another place was Portugal. This country in particular left me with no excuse. It is stuck on the side of Spain and its cities are no further away than many in Spain itself. So, one bank holiday, and with a Scottish friend in tow, I offed to the capital of Lisbon.

At the risk of presenting a twee ‘oooh, this is what I did on my holiday’ look at Lisbon, I will instead present the city to the reader via its varied barrios as I saw them.

Baixa

Essentially the ‘centre’, Baixa is the area where you find the principal squares, the tourists and their symbiotic touts, the cleanest streets, the drug-dealers, the tat-sellers, and the city’s grandest buildings. The best place to start is the large open space of the Praça do Comercio: a square, centred with a statue of King Jose I on a horse and hugged by the striking mustard-yellow apartments. It looks out onto the water and across the Tejo’s estuary to the banks on the other side. Despite the few tourists and odd guitarist hoping for some cents it is a truly peaceful place. The vast waters have not yet become sea so they lap at your feet quite gently.

North from this place handsome parallel streets – all feeling like Bath had been made Mediterranean – shoot up like bamboo shoots and hit a variety of squares. The first, smallest, and oddest, was Praça Figueira, housing another statue – this time King John I on a horse – and, oddly for a warm March, an ice-rink. Seagulls cooed and squawked and the Castelo São Jorge – St. George Castle – glowed amber in the failing light up on its hill. The second, and finest, square was the Praça Rossio, lined by pretty cafés, headed by the national theatre and this time housing a column and a fountain. The third, and least spectacular, was the Praça dos Restauradores. Wider and more open, this square was only notably for its London Ritzy style, pastel-coloured hotels and modernist style cinema.

Baixa was a funny old district. It combined very Portuguese Portugal with utter tourist trappy tourism. On the positive hand you had the opportunity to eat some of the finest fish – in particular bacalhau (cod) and my favourite bacalhau com natas (creamy cod) – and sample local liquors like Ginjinja (a fortified sour cherry wine) from tiny little bars that only serve that particular drink. On the other hand if you’re not careful at restaurants waiters may leave little ‘tapas’ on the table at the start of your meal so that the visitors munch away thinking they’re free, only to be slammed with a fortified bill at the end. Similarly we were often badgered by tat-sellers and quite the politest drug-dealers.

‘You guys want hash or coco?’

‘No thanks.’

‘OK guys, no worries, have a good night.’

Bizarre.

Alfama

This is the magical postcard area of Lisbon that causes the visitor to ooh and ahh at the views. It’s a jumble of streets and hills and trams and architecture styles and churches and accordion views – one minute claustrophobic, the next minute utterly wide-reaching to sea and sky. This is the old zone and is built up around a hill on which sits the castle. Lisbon’s city planners cleverly created various miradouros, viewpoints, that open the city and allow you to contemplate how it sits. The lay of the land. Like some white tortoise with a terracotta shell, the Alfama is full with flats, churches and monasteries and photographers.

As with all these places there exists the large, gleaming, double-edged sword. On the one hand tourists naturally veer towards somewhere worth snapping, worth seeing, somewhere that the book says you should see. On the other hand however, they also tend to veer towards whatever star of the show may be present. In the Alfama this was the castle. It’s a tasty entry fee of €7.50 so we desisted. The advantage of having a star of the show means that the tourists are sucked away from the other, less ‘things-to-see’ streets. The atmosphere in the Alfama is warm and cosy; little bars spilling out into cobbled streets, sun dripping into the lanes and birds in cages tweeting merrily as old ladies lean out of their stable-style front doors.

Barrio Alto/Chiado

This area, alto because it straddles the hill opposite the one topped with the castle is a mess of slightly scruffier streets bulging with more bohemian shops and little restaurants and bars. It was likened to Madrid’s La Latina tapas district, bursting with life. We hit the area at around nine o’clock and it was, for a city with a population that varies between 540,000 and 3 million depending on how you count it, dead. It was quiet and not how it was publicized. Perhaps we went too late.

During the day Barrio Alto is similar in texture to the Alfama, but a little better kept. All throughout streets dip over the edge and offer views to the city. Always views. Little parks and little cafes. Not much traffic. Lisbon is very quiet.

Chiado is the way an old quarter like Barrio Alto evolves into a smarter more modern one like Baixa. It’s seamless and attractive. One interesting part of Chiado is the Elevador de Santa Justa, a towering neo-Gothic lift in the middle of an unassuming street that stands 45m high and has stood for one hundred and ten years. The views – again with the views – are glorious. This was one of many lifts that were part of a plan by the Lisbon council to improve turn of the century Lisbonians’ movement around the city. Then the trams came. Trams are snazzier. It was a no-brainer.

Belem

The final area, ‘the second day area’, is the old village of Belem – long since absorbed into the city limits but still retaining a disconnected feel. We walked there, crisping and bubbling in the beautiful heat, but a tram can be taken too. The path follows the water west towards where it swims with salt and becomes sea. There are essentially four things to see. The first is the quite breathtaking bridge – the Ponte 25 de Abril – that is essentially the twin of the Golden Gate Bridge. Indeed, the same company built it. At 2.2km in length – the 21^st largest suspension bridge in the world – it launches over the water to the southern banks where a statue of Christ the Redeemer stands, arms outstretched. Under it nestles an area of lovely restaurants by a glittering marina. Good place to stop for a while.

The second, third and fourth items are collected together on the far tip of the land. The Padrao dos Descobrimentos is a hefty 52m high, blockish statue at who’s base can be found 33 larger-than-life sized characters from the annuls of the great period of Portuguese imperial Age of Discovery including everyone’s favourite, Vasco de Gama.

The third is one of the more spectacular religious behemoths that I’ve ever seen: the Monasterio dos Jeronimos. An absurd building, long and floridly built in the hard to find Manueline style, the UNESCO monument is quite lovely. Its cousin is the Torre de Belem – the fourth item on the menu – that is plonked at the furthest point a tourist would go. Another 16^th century Manueline style building, it was useful for two reasons. 1. To see off the ships on their expeditions to discover things for the Empire and 2. To protect Lisbon militarily at its entrance. It is frilly and grey and fortified and quite, apologies for the lame word, cool.

The sun set shimmering and shining over the Atlantic and Lisbon was put to bed. Visit it, you buggers, visit it.

New Ceremonies.

When you're single and bored you look for diversion and/or inspiration wherever it is. Be it with friends or alone you always look for something to do. Weeks get filled from Monday and days are spent either doing far too much, cramming every bit of socialising or appointments into free space, or mysteriously excusing oneself from exercise under the lying guise of 'tiredness' and wasting an evening in front of the telly watching complete shite.

This is where the city sometimes comes to the rescue. My mountains have often been a source of release for me and my friends in the post-festive funk. Last weekend we dominated some of the highest peaks during the hardest walk possible to do. La Maliciosa and La Bola del Mundo - 2227m and 2258m respectively - sit oppressively, still topped with a fat film of white snow and offer views south to the community of Madrid and north to Castilla y Leon where you could even see Segovia. It is always sad to leave the firmament and return to ground zero and urbanity. People have wasted their days at home, bored, hungover, or monging, but you touched the realm of the Gods and had to leave it. But needs must, as they say.

Another entertaining pursuit is to people watch at a football match. Spain, much like England, is a football nation. Unlike England, however, the teams here are quite political. Madrid has a few, but the principal two are Real Madrid and Atletico de Madrid. The former, and by far the better team, is considered both pijo and chulo, that is to say posh and cocky - the conservative team. Atletico is more the working class team. The everyman team. The sometimes chavvy team. People watching is quite fun in the Vicente Calderon stadium. It is also one of the few stadiums of the world from where you can see churches and a sunset from your seat. Amongst the crowds were all the typical people: chanting scarf-swingers, dads with sons, pierced chonis (chavs), die-hard vehement fans, newbies like me, and the foreign supporters. The whole stadium is a turbulent sea of red, white, and whatever other colours are visiting that day.

On the 8th of March Atletico played Besiktas, a Turkish team. I had a ticket, and a cheap Atleti scarf, and joined my friends at a riverside bar before the game to sup on a couple of cold cañas. Then the police arrived, some on horses, some in heavy duty gear. Then the armoured vans arrived. We weren't particularly sure what was going on but our lounging was gruffly interrupted by some overly anxious officers.
'Get in the bar please.'
We shared glances, not understanding what was happening.
'Let's just wait it out and play the English card.'
'Get in the bar now please, it's for your safety!'
'Right, we should move in then.'

We all - drinkers, old men and women, passersby - crammed into the small bar. Horses clopped past  as well as police cars. These were followed and joined by a large column of Turkish football fans. I was stuck by the window, the waiters rushing to bring in the last of the glasses and chairs, next to a plate of sun-warmed torreznos (pork scratchings), next to an old man moaning about the horses crapping on the pavement. Often rowdy, the Turks passed by peacefully. Tables were scattered again and more drinks were bought. Despite the build up the only violence during the match was a very fat angry man complaining about a sandwich and trying to fight some little hair-styled-pierced-ear chav. We couldn't work out what happened. We think the chav knocked the tubby fellow's bocata out of his hand but didn't seem to care. Blows were thrown but caught by friends and the crowd told them to put a sock in it. 3-1 in the end. Well done Madrid.

And so that ended. And so it always ends and life begs you to treat it to some more fun. And you consult your imagination; maybe strapping on your boots or flashing your cash at a waiter. Don't get stuck. Don't get boring. The greatest sin in life is to be boring. Make your minutes interesting. Fill them to bursting with joy and love and pastimes and people. Don't vegetate. Play.

Chilly Pedestrian Rage

First of all I want to take this opportunity for a good old-fashioned rant. I haven't had one in quite a while so I've pent up a fairly unhealthy level of aggression. That being said I shall try to make my venom spit educatively and not spitefully. Can't promise anything though.
The target for today's grump is Spanish pedestrians; on the one hand because I want to highlight them with a hope of changing them, and on the other because they are rubbish.
Their behaviour, after two and a bit years of analysis, can be split into various problematic areas.

1. Speed: They are slow. So achingly slow. Slow to the point that if you walk at the same pace as them you feel as though you are obviously taking the piss. This I believe I can attribute to the weather. Hotter countries maybe have slower walkers. This is certainly true of Spain and Italy. Conversely British people walk faster, and Russians faster still. Very slow.

2. Spatial awareness: Non-existent. This is a two-fold problem. Firstly, they seem utterly incapable of keeping in a straight line. They strafe as if their legs have minds or they are tired or drunk. The second thing is their 'in-the-clouds' behaviour. They aren't aware of what's happening around them. They - often gaggles of girls - rarely look before crossing the road then shout 'ay, Maria, cuidado!' when a car honks past. Similarly they will leave shops without looking, resulting once in me receiving an opening umbrella to the face. Or they will see a friend and stop in the middle of a busy street kissing and hugging and talking and forcing others to stop and siphon round them.

3. Line-walking: On a Sunday afternoon the Spanish love to pasear, stroll. This is good. In fact it's lovely. The problem is that when the numbers increase the intelligence evaporates. They walk in lines, like approaching redcoats. If you're behind them you can't get past them and if you're in front of them, approaching, you have to break them up or, more commonly, are forced into the road. Along the river I once counted a line of eleven people. Eleven. Arm in arm and waddling along merrily.

4. Standing where they shouldn't: I use the example of escalators. If you're going up an escalator you stand on the right-hand side, not the left talking to your friend in a bubble of ignorance. It's rude, but not specific to Spain. This happens everywhere. A tactic I was taught by a student was to walk up behind the felon and lead in near their ear saying sternly, 'permiso!'.

5. Queues: Non-existent. The concept of queuing here is fluid. In England it's law. George Mikes famously said 'An Englishman, even if he is alone, forms an orderly queue of one', and it's true. Here it isn't. People waiting for a bus mill about in a cloud of 'expectancy'. Others join at different places, smoking, reading timetables, choosing where they want to be. The silver-haired brigade are the worst. They bustle and push to the front, to get on first. I always want to say 'listen dear, well done for not dying and all that but bugger off down the line, I was here first'. Instead I must bite my tongue and let them do what they like. Bloody old people.

There is one salient point though; they never do any of this maliciously. It's dopeyness. Pure, simple, undistilled dopeyness. It's hard to hate them for it, even when I'm raging.


****

'Buscarviejos?'
'No! Not looking for old people. Bustarviejo!'
'Ah, right, that makes more sense.'
Spain is not all grandiose cities and imposing buildings. It is mostly tiny, hidden and unknown towns and villages without much to offer past a local church and a main square. Bustarviejo is one such miniscule town hidden high up in the mountains of Madrid. It was a cold day when I visited. Tiptoeing around the zero. There was enough wind to topple an elephant and it arrived in intermittent pulses that buffered walkers and knocked over shop signs. The Ruta de la Mina de Plata - the Silver Mine Route - lead out from the white-walled, but plain, village and up through a deep cleft between the hills; a sort of high-plain valley. Sharply turning right, it then rose steeply up the side of a mountain, its flanks covered by pine forests, bulbous rock extrusions, multicoloured meseta-grasses - all reds and burnt yellows, and fine layers of snow ever thicker on the way up.

Snowflakes whipped through the air and the clouds were low, skirting the peaks, touching distance. From the summit, the Pozo Maestro, at 1500m everything was laid out. It was me, Nikki, some old mine shafts and equipment and land and nothing and solitude. It was quite special.

The cold has seeped into the capital too. One morning was -7. Crisp and fresh and dry, the cold is as penetrating as it is invigorating. My hands are dry and look a little eczema tainted. The snow has left us disappointed. It has capped the far off sierra, but hasn't visited the city. The trick now is to delve further into the bumps of the sierra and find where the white is really living.

All that's New.

The man with the microphone screamed,

'Here come the next few runners! They'll be really wanting to cross the line before the hour is up!!!'

Somehow I had agreed to do another mini-marathon in Guadalajara. Back in 2010 it was the fairly easy 6km run. This time I had for some reason nodded yes to the 11km rompepiernas 'Leg-breaker' run. I flickered over the line with a time of 58:20. Under an hour. Leaking like a heffa in the Sahara.

Not to let down my 'reputation' as a traveller I seized the opportunity to visit a town the day before the run. Sigüenza lies deep in the Castillian plains, built on a small and subtle bump of ground, surrounded by low hills. It is small, has a few cobbled streets, some attractive old flats and a frankly absurd collection of monuments. Given the fact you can cross the town in about thirty minutes, it is fat and plump with more historic buildings than you would presume normal. Guadalajara, despite being the provincial capital and a far larger city, lost out on getting the cathedral. On the left flank of wee little Sigüenza you can find a most wonderful pinky-orange cathedral squatting beside a porticoed square. Continuing up the little windy avenues, passed churches and artesenal shops, the visitor is spat out grandly into an open area that is unremarkable apart from the massive castle plonked on it, topped with fluttering flags. Therefore, I suppose you could say, it is remarkable. I left Sigüena purring into the night, the sky hurling deeps reds with christmas lights twinkling into life and out on the Manchegan plains more stars that you have ever seen. Delightful.

* * * *

Christmas passed in a haze of surreality. The traditional English Christmas, those days of the ho-ho fat man, were spent, grumpily and ever so slightly Scrooge-ily, in Madrid. Such is the evil of the holiday period at my academy. Christmas Eve was a happy affair. The lemon-stuffed chicken that I crammed into the oven roasted up a treat. Matt and I devoured it with potatoes, garlic carrots, cauliflower, peas, gravy and some defrosted sprouts fried up with walnuts, pancetta and balsamic vinegar. After the feast we lugged our weightier haunches over to Matt's to watch Home Alone and Die Hard with mince pies. Classic. Christ's birthday was where the weirdness arrived. Matt and Rakel used my oven in the morning and we played Trivial Pursuit on an ipad. They left. I gathered leftovers. With my pungent tupperware of goodies, a bottle of artesan beer and a christmas cake sent to me by my friend James at home, I was off to Ed and Niall's house. We ate the leftovers. We ordered a curry. We drank the beer. A couple of others arrived. We opened wine. We watched The Great Escape - everyone being assigned a character. I got drunk. Everyone got drunk. Most fell asleep. I went home and then had the flu for a week and a half. Christmas.

Then it was the turn of the Spanish Christmas. Reyes. I think God-heads call the period Epiphany, on the 5th/6th of January. Concerned that I wasn't going to have a proper Christmas with my family, Elena's parents effusively invited me to spend the festive period with them. I had woken up at 5 o'clock in the morning on the 5th to catch my plane from England to Madrid. In the afternoon of the same day I was in a car blasting through the dusk towards an orange sky, sliding through the wide plains between the Sierra de Gredos and the Sierra de Guadalupe.

We arrived just in time to catch the small town's Cabalgata, the procession of the Three Kings. In Spain, in place of the ol' fat, port-breathed hedonist Saint Nick, the young of the country are brought their presents by the three wise men; Baltasar, Gaspar and Melchior. They arrived on the last three of a wide selection of colourful floats, covered in local schoolchildren throwing sweets to the crowds while dressed up as various themed characters. Post sweet-parade we handed out our gifts back at an aunt's house. I was very grateful to receive a shirt from Elena and her boyfriend and a selection of Spanish food and drink from 'la familia'. We ate, a lot. Ham, cured meats, cheese, bacalao, snails in a spiced tomato sauce and other tapas. As soon as we arrived and had visited one family, we ferried ourselves off to another large house when I met the rest of the family. It was a surreal wine-tippled experience where I was introduced to about twenty boisterous and felicitous Extremadurans as they got on with their Christmas. It is typical in this period to eat roscon after basically every meal. It is a large, bread-like circular cake with a hole punched in the middle, topped with sugar and candied fruits. Sounds nice. It's a bit bland actually, but you can find some decked out with cream, chocolate or crema catalana if you're lucky. The tradition is that inside the cake are two 'gifts'. One is good, usually a little king, and one is bad, usually a nut. If you get the nut you are supposed to pay for the roscon. I got the nut. Much laughter and ribbing. 'You'll have to come back next year and pay for it!!'

The following day I was driven around 'la ruta de los embalses' in the Badajoz province.
'People say that Extremadura is so dry,' said Angel, Elena's father, from the driver's seat, 'but that's because they don't know...'
A single road takes the vehicle through the village of Orellana la Vieja to an enormous area of small green hills that shelter three gigantic reservoirs: Orellana, Serena and Zujar. This whole area of Extremadura is where the productive magic happens. Murcia Community (over by the east of Andalucia) is the huerta, vegetable patch, of Spain, while Extremadura is called the despensa, the larder. The whole zone is covered in vast farms and fruit and veg producers. The reservoirs provide the water.
The only problem was that the day was foggier than any I've seen and so the majesty was all but hidden.

We finished a little deflated at the lakes and drove to the minuscule village of Guadalperales; a Franco-era grid-formation planned collectivist town. The family had booked into a family-style restaurant called Los Jamones. In its air-hanger sized dining hall we ate cochinillo (suckling pig) and cabrito (kid [goat]), sozzling ourselves on local wine. The day ended in another surreal haze of family fun, this time bingo.

The last day, well, day of any real consequence, was a burning blue day.
'Today is the matanza, do you want to see it?'
'Matanza...the killing?'
'Well yes, but don't worry, the farmers kill the pigs. It's the day my family makes chorizos and sausages'
I entered a room, was handed cheese and wine, and witnessed two burly, but light-hearted, men, sleeves rolled up, standing over a huge blue bowl filled with fresh mincemeat. One was turning it over with his hands while the other added oil and spices.

Later, the women of the family sat at a long table at proceeded to tie up the sausages that slid out of the meat grinder and into cleaned skins. Once tied, one of the burly, but light-hearted, gents - with a cheeky penchant for calling me Simon or Robinson - would hang them in a side-room where they would hang for the next month. During this process another aunt, matronly wielding a gargantuan saucepan, cooked migas - essentially breadcrumbs fried in oil and paprika and liberally sprinkled with garlic and smoked meat.

So that was that. And this is this. There are things I have forgotten. Things I'll want to have put in. Things about society, about food, about life, but haven't. This is the 'what I've been up to' blog. If you didn't enjoy it, I suggest you drown yourself in a bowl of cottage cheese. If you stuck with it, thank you, and we'll be running normally forthwith.

Gambas Olorosas

'Do you want a bag to take the rest of this stuff home then?'
'No, no! It's all for you!'
Lucia had returned from her home-town of Jerez de la Frontera (where sherry comes from) and had brought me gifts. She bustled in with a bag of Payoyo cheese from Cadiz, a bottle of sherry, a box of cooked prawns she had bought from her local market the day before, and another box of some fresh, peeled prawns. It was promising to be a great evening.

They say that on nights of a full moon, the fishing is especially good. Prawn-lovers also argue over where the best ones come from. It seems to be a tie between the waters off Cataluña, Valencia, Denia, Garrucha (in the Almeria province of Andalucia) and Sanlucar de Barrameda, the latter being about 30mins from Jerez. She cooked gambas al ajillo. First she fried the prawns in lots of oil, with a healthy dose of garlic and some little guindillas - dry chillis. After the prawns had taken on some colour, and shrivelled a little, she tossed in a double shot of sherry, allowing it to reduce slightly. The resulting earthenware-contained mix was sweet and fragrant. The blend of wine, seafood and garlic danced surprisingly daintily on the palate. Having cooed sufficiently we proceeded to blast away the flavour with the parmigianaesque nutty strength of the curado cheese and some glasses of the amontillado.

In Henry IV, part II that fat jollyite Falstaff bellowed:
'If I had a thousand sons, the first human principle I would teach them should be, to forswear thin potations and to addict themselves to sack.'
In short, to stop drinking lady-liquor like beer and wine and get stuck in with the big boy's drink, sherry.
It is a drink that has been in production for more than three thousand years. In 1587 - the year Mary Queen of Scot's head was lopped off - dear old Francis Drake had a dalliance to the south of Spain pre-armada and attacked Cadiz. In the raid he smashed up around thirty ships and labelled the mission 'singeing the King of Spain's beard'. As well as spanking the old port town he also managed to pilfer 2,900 barrels of the region's favourite tipple. From that time on, our dear British ships have sailed southwards to get our hands and throats on the stuff.

Regarding sherry, there are seven main types.
1. Fino - a light liquor, dry, and with a clear golden colour. It is slightly floral and has wispy nuances of almonds. It is the classic aperitif, often found in a grandma's clutches before Christmas lunch.
2. Manzanilla - also light, it is clear in colour and very dry. It is grown uniquely in the Sanlucar area (that of the prawns) due to the Atlantic micro-climate and as a result is quite sharp and has faint hints of salty sea air.
3. Amontillado - this is what comes out when you let fino stay in the barrel longer. The wine oxidises, darkens and intensifies in flavour, as if the fino is relaxing more, letting its hair down. Due to its time 'inside' it's generally a little more potent too, slightly bitter and nutty on the nose. Great for cooking and marinading white meats with garlic and salt.
4. Oloroso - this a sherry allowed to oxidise against the air, eschewing it's yeasty protective layer - the 'flor' - that covers the chemical processes of its cousins. The end product is a dark wine with heaps of body, abundant and strong aromas - oloroso means fragrant - of nuts and a flavour that is a little sweet.
5. Pale Cream and Cream - dessert style sherries. They are both sweet. Pale Cream is lightly-coloured  and made from Palomino grapes whereas Cream is very sweet, dark, intense and is made from oloroso wine.
6. Pale Cortado - this is a mahogany-coloured wine that sits between amontillado and oloroso. It is produced without the flor and is nice and dark. In short, not to spurn it in any real personal attack, you can live without it.
7. Pedro Ximenez - this is a velvety sweet sherry, similar to Moscatel (also produced in Malaga), that is a guilty little pleasure with puddings and smacks of raisins on the tongue.

Sherry is equally adept at being flame-fried with kidneys, simmered with parsley and clams, or sipped in front of some live flamenco with a little dish of olives. I think it's reputation as a favoured booze of the silvery haired generations should be depth-charged out of existence. Either that or the grandparents know real quality. I can see why Drake and Falstaff were so enamoured!

****

That's quite a lot about food.
In other news, my career as a Spanish television presenter is advancing further still. The format is generally decided - Roque wants to do a programme about literary 'routes' in Spain. For instance a programme presented, by me, in situ, in Pamplona, were that episode about Hemmingway's Death In The Afternoon.

Last Wednesday I had a photo-shoot of sorts in the garden of his house out in Aravaca - a rather wealthy residential suburb. He gave me some tips and cues in the fading light as a bouncy photographer called Ivan clicked and snapped about me and his pet cat and dog scurried around the flowerbeds. Rather surreal. I've seen the RAW format images so it's now just a matter of time, and finger-crossing, until I see the finished ones. He wants to make an advertising dossier about the potential programme. We'll see if his Photoshop is able to null the red in my cheeks a little first.

And the Christmas excesses have begun...

Madrid: The gift that keeps on giving.

"Just those five?" he chuckled with mock consternation, "You'll be left hungry with just those five!"

"OK, OK," I smiled, holding my hands up in defence, "put five more in."

The local fishmonger in his blue apron plopped another handful of fresh, shining little sardines into the newspaper cone and wrapped it up with a twirl.

"Vale, so that's €1.14 then," he said, leaning over a veritable marine cemetery of colours.

"Christ that's cheap," I hissed under my breath, "adios!"

Those little sardines were decapitated, gutted, splashed with lemon juice, rolled in flour and chunky salt, and laid in a boiling bed of olive oil for a couple of minutes either side. Golden and crispy. Bones and all and served with a lemon. The snack of all snacks.

*        *          *          *

“That’s a lot of tomato.”

“Yup, a whole perfect kilogram…sliced,” I surveyed my knife’s handiwork, “I don’t think your blender’s big enough.”

Salmorejo – the stockier but simpler cousin of the famous gazpacho – is an unexpectedly tasty cold tomato soup made from a whizzed up purée of tomatoes, a little garlic, crusty bread, oil and a dash of balsamic vinegar. To finish, when pooling nicely in a bowl, add chopped jamón serrano and some hard-boiled egg.

It bubbled over the lid of the little blender, unaccustomed to such a tomato fiasco.

“Right, I’m splitting it.”

Two batches, totted up with water for consistency and a little salt. Healthy, clean-tasting, and occasionally violent on the breath. Too much garlic.

*        *          *          *

So Roque was on the phone for me in the police department. Bureaucratic nonsense to get a case number before sitting down to meet a real human being.

“Sí, they took his bag. It had his jacket, some teaching materials, a copy of his book, keys for his flat, keys for his work, his ipod and his passport,” he rolled his eyes at me, “no the bag isn’t mine…it’s my friend’s…I’m speaking to avoid translation problems…fine…what’s your name please?..just what’s your name?” Roque hung up the phone on the officer. “It has to be ‘you’ phoning because it was your bag stolen.”

“Why did you ask for the person’s name?” I enquired.

“Now, when I ring back pretending to be you, if it’s the same person I’ll hang up!”

He repeated the process with more success.

“My name? Luke Darracott”

“My parents’ names?” He looked at me.

“BRIAN, ANN,” I mouthed silently.

“Brian and Ann”

A pause.

“My address?”

“CALLE DE LINNEO,” I mouthed again.

“Calle Pirineo,” he said confidently. I sniggered and sweated at the same time. That’s absolutely not my address. On a little chitty I wrote ‘If you have the chance again, it’s ‘de Linneo’ not ‘Pirineo’. Roque covered the receiver with his hand and almost, just almost, cracked up.

Then came some slightly less stressful ones: date of birth, occupation, what had happened to the bag. The pencil and paper system was useful.

Roque then snorted quite audibly, stopped himself and then ‘mmhmm-ed’ into the phone. He wedged the terminal between his shoulder and ear and started writing me a message:

She said, ‘either there’s a delay on the line or you are speaking strangely.’

It worked. We sat down for five minutes and were seen to by a very amiable policeman.

“Apart from your passport is there any identification in the bag, or anything with your name on it? I think a book was mentioned?”

“Oh yes. There’s a book I wrote”

“So you’re the author?”

“Yes, that’s right,” I paused to let my ego deflate, “would be funny if I got my stuff back because somebody found my book”

The policeman smiled.

Whoever has my bag is either going to learn about Spain or, depending on their tastes, get a free lesson in question formation.

*        *          *          *

“Cheers everyone. And to our victory!”

The glasses chinked as we pondered our prize with hungry intent. Four green bottles of cold amber Alhambra beers and a plate of tapas: piece of bread, covered in a tapenade-style paste and topped with a prawn. Some olives were gleefully scattered at their base.

“My arse hurts”

“Yeah, mine too,” I pondered the possible after-effects, “but it’ll be like steel covered in velvet in no time”

Our bikes were propped up against a little tree in a darling quiet square of Madrid. No locks. We had just ridden 40km and felt like kings. No one would dare steal a bike from such pantheon figures. We allowed the wet patches in the small of the back and armpits to cool and dry a little. Milky light was trickling down through the leaves leaving a dappled patchwork of dripped luminous puddles on the ground.

“Next time we should do the whole route…” somebody said with a weary confidence.

The anillo verde. The great cycle route around Madrid. 64km in total, adding another 10km for entry and exit. I could explain the route, but what would be the point unless you know the city. You pass suburbs and intriguing residential and business areas one minute and sweeping vistas to the mountains and hills the next.

Burnt faces. Burnt arses. Burnt calories. But interest and love for the city were both phoenixed by the experience. So much to offer.

“I’m going to need a long, long bath…”

*        *          *          *

SMS (sent 6 Nov 14:15): Mate. I am up La Pedriza mountain in Manzanares el Real. You like views…this would blow your mind. Mountains all around me and a view to Madrid!! Boom.

Despite my message lacking the apt floridity to put into words the genuine beauty of the place where I was sitting at that moment, I think Matt would have respected the frankness. 

As Manzanares the town ends, the mountains just begin. It sounds airy-fairy, but I say it literally. House, house, house, town, town, car park, barrier, mountains, paths, nature, eagles. The transition is instant. Little paths then snake off and filter into forests and up inclines as the tendrils for serious trekking and Sunday strolling spill away from civilization. Views that could kill you for their grandeur are mixed in with terrain that also can if you don’t give it enough respect. I didn’t. But I seem to be a pro at going ‘off-piste’. Ten minutes of grappling and rock climbing and skin-ripping later and I re-joined the ‘path’.

And then the summit. The reason for the text to Matt. Madrid sat far-off in its high-altitude plain; the four ‘torres’ poking up into the sky next to the distinctive and jauntily crooked Caixa towers. The town, nestled like a sleeping cat by the lake. And peaks and peaks and peaks. 

SMS (send 7 Nov 15:44): I’m sad I missed it. I’ve just bought spanking ‘North Face’ trainers, perfect for mountains.

Along with the purchase of a walking routes book it seems I’ll be back to the hills, this time not alone.

Madrid: The Layered Cebolla

Visitors are threatening brilliantly with visits. The sky has only clouded twice in a month and a bit. Love still evades. And the new timetable means I now see all the daily strata of Spanish life.

Morning.

After a metro and a bus I'm in the north of the city with either Rob or Amanda, poised, sticky-eyed, about to teach some yawny businesspeople. The approaching sunrise throws warm oranges, peaches and strips away the veil of black with a bruise of purple. It's a silly hour for bipeds to be waddling around the planet they evolved on, but such are our ways. Before attempting to pretend we're anywhere near awake we head to Bar Toñi for a quick milky coffee served in a small tumbler.
It's a tiny bar with wood panelling and a general hue that is all ochres and gnarled mahoganies. The barman, a slender and attractive fellow we name 'Big Tony', fills up the tumblers along the bar where they are lined up ready for the customers. Along the counter working men stand in tracksuit bottoms or overalls or t-shirts laughing and joking, watching the corner TV dribble out the morning news. Some businessmen sit around a table. Sometimes there's a woman. There are only three or four tables. The men notice the pretty businesswomen walk past. I do too. Amanda might tut. Rob would damn the world if he missed her. A few coins pass hands.

Afternoon.

Leaving the main artery my road, Linneo, hums quietly as the clocks tip-toe past five o'clock. Old men are playing petanque in the sand and the now mellowing sun in the park over the way. There's the flat up on the fifth or sixth floor that houses an aural rainforest of birds, which twitters and chatters and tweets out of sight. At the crossing with Moreno Nieto street (which oddly translates as 'Dark Skinned Grandchild' but is more likely - and hopefully - named after the writer and erudite Jose Moreno Nieto from Extremadura) the road bends up towards the towering neo-Mudejar seminary on the hill. Where the chemical Fosforo street passes through, my front door stands on a corner waiting. Mondays and Wednesdays a middle-aged man sits there in his blue flip flops and either listens to a radio or plays with his phone. Waiting for someone? Checking the football? Some days an ancient veteran of life sits in his chair with a carer or family member, oxygen tubes filtering out of his nose. Sometimes I get a smile. Dogs yap and a scooter will buzz past.

Evening.

Families are strolling. Everybody strolls. Why wouldn't you when it's warm. October is grilling and simmering, the sun is stroppy. Home is 12 degrees, Moscow is 6. October 12th was 34 degrees. Now the weather is fondling the mid-twenties. A terrace BBQ in the north, again, with a view to new flats and skyscrapers and a sun that drops into fire as the flaming coffee-punch-spectacle queimada is finished. On Linneo and its sisters the little bars fluster into life; chairs and people spilling out onto the pavements. I cook something. The salmorejo recipe from my student? Or just a salad? Then the bed and the closing of the eyes.

I'm getting a rhythm. This is what I wanted and needed. Now if only I can get some unassuming idiots to spend more money on my book!

The Selfish Spatula

The city is cooling off. It only occasionally tip-toes over 30 now. Walking is a pleasure again, not a perilous skin-troubling gauntlet. The shops are selling jumpers. No more shorts for the fashion-conscious.

The economy is dripping ever more into junk. This morning I read the news - among the Steve Jobs laments and the everyday war stories - that Spain's debt has been downgraded again. AA-, whatever that means. Joyless news. How to console oneself during these times?

Well, the ever-constants: walking/eating. They never get tired and they never require too much expenditure. Whether it is strolling up and down the grand 20th century ornate bombasity of Gran Via, through the meandering lanes of La Latina, or around the city's many parks, walking is always an option.

Food, as those who have read my blogs or have met me will know, is as important to me as breathing. The joy is as much in the cooking as in the eating. Last Sunday I made a caramelised onion chutney. It is sitting in the pantry, 600g of sludge, waiting to be opened at the start of December. I fear the sugar genuinely caramelised and what will appear in two months will resemble a hard block of black sugar-tar with bodies of sweet onions entombed within it. Then there are the garbanzos, chickpeas, which, when bubbled with chunks of chistorra and garlic, paddling in tomate frito and a blob of chilli bean paste, are quite delightful.

I make tortilla española now. The Spanish will say that the best tortilla is the simplest style: potatoes, eggs, salt and cooked in oil. I agree to a point. It's tasty. But served ad infinitum it does have the potential to bore the palate to the extreme. I actually cook tortilla paisana, which is the same but with tasty extras. I experimented first by adding red onion and red pepper. It was a success. I even flipped it well - a moment of intense personal triumph. For a friend's leaving party - ever with undercurrents of sombreness - I cooked a chorizo and black olive one as well as a spinach and cabrales cheese. The mm's and aah's are what makes cooking so lovely. The gooey smiles and sleepy eyes when nice food is masticated.

The next plan is to try my hand at the hearty and sphincterally windy Asturian stew fabadas and then, one day, the king of average-but-famous dishes, paella.

I can do this now. I have an early timetable. So I work 8-5pm. I have time for a life. Time for cooking, for shopping, for thought, for a girlfriend, for productivity and poetry.