The Expat's Home

“The World. That place you call home.”

So said the BBC advert that coolly asked the viewer to learn more about their world. But it was right. The world was the place that I called home. Of course my real home is my town. The small unimpressive town of Maidenhead that slinks off the River Thames. The house, my house, almost unchanged, for 28 years. Berkshire, my green county, stuffed with small villages, grand houses and fields and fields and fields. That is the home of my history. But maybe, Madrid is my home, or Moscow, or, as purred by the BBC, the World…

Read more

For the memory of food. A review.

How far would you go just for the memory of food?

How much would you spend?

Is it worth trying to reconnect with that meal or let the tastes disappear into history?

 

I have never been to a Michelin Star restaurant; at least not knowingly or that I knew about. Yes, I have had great meals – including some which tipped into words like ‘fancy’ or ‘pretentious’. Few of them have been of a quality or showmanship that really stayed with me.

 

I was, and am, lucky to have parents who both enjoy food, who cook it, and value the important and tasty role it serves in society and among friends. If I have ever been at a fancy restaurant it would have been with them. I may well have had some perfectly cooked medallion of steak with a fine port reduction served on a bed of something or other, but I never had a foam. Worryingly few of these have ever seared – or flash-fried – themselves into my memory banks. If going to restaurants gave me an appreciation of food, then watching my mother cook stirred my imagination.

 

As it stands I can hold my own in the kitchen and I do derive a focussed zen when I cook. Living alone does also means that I all too often resort to simple salads or ‘throw in whatever is in the fridge’ pastas. But still, the act of preparation is key. The process of turning raw into cooked. It’s magic as far as I’m concerned; even though it’s chemistry.

 

As was the case when I was small, restaurants themselves rarely stick in my mind. The food, yes, the place, no. Restaurants and bars must work hard to earn a place in my heart. There is a silent list of requisites.

  1. Food quality – paramount
  2. Price to quantity ratio – important for a glutton such as myself
  3. Atmosphere and design – it has to have character
  4. Capturing a moment

 

That last is – perhaps unfairly – the hardest to fulfil. When everything falls into place and you get that happy tingle that there, in that moment and in that restaurant, the world is perfect. Nothing could be improved. Like a BBQ with friends on a sunny summer’s day in a flowery English garden or a perfect tapas bar with friends in the throbbing heart of a Spanish city’s historic quarter. Having friends there is a must. For without them what’s the point? The food itself tastes lonely.

 

I’ve had a few such moments:

  • Any Christmas Day lunch at home
  • A rustic Galician seafood restaurant in Madrid – plates of shellfish finished with a queimada: a large bowl of coffee and alcohol set on fire and poured from a height
  • A paella eaten at the little village of El Palmar, near Valencia, on the Albufera lake bursting with rice paddies
  • My first currywurst in a little tavern in Hamburg when visiting my German cousins
  • Pie ‘n’ mash and ale at The Raven in Bath on a snowy day with my university colleagues (the whole pub smelled of damp socks and gravy)
  • A bizarre all-you-eat Brazilian buffet during the height of summer in Singapore
  • A gorgonzola and speck pizza in the tiny Piemonte village of Grinzane Cavour at the end of a week of filming

 

Not so many. One recently stuck with me.

 

Segovia – that UNESCO riddled Roman city of Spain – has long drawn my affections, with its grand monuments linked together with that usual web of winding streets all seemingly hewn out of honey. Three years ago I went there with two friends. An innocent and uncomplicated enough premise. After gorging on the sights it was time to do the same but with food. Along some tiny street we found an unassuming place – despite its varied selection of award-winning tapas – with a few tables outside it. Lunch was eaten, happiness was fostered, and that was that.

 

Segovia and its vegetable patches

Segovia and its vegetable patches

I had been back to Segovia a couple of times but had never been able to relocate the restaurant, nor could I recall its name. A few weeks ago I was visited by my friend Ken – a brilliant social entrepreneur trying to essentially solve Africa by utilising young African businessmen and women. Our relationship has been marked by sporadic meetings usually occurring every couple of years. Houston Airport, Lago Atitlán in Guatemala, Barcelona, Bath, Westminster Palace – it reads like the filming locations for a James Bond film. And so the time came for Madrid and the obligatory day tip. Segovia.

 

I was determined to get back to that damned restaurant once and for all. Cutting a very tedious story very short, after extensive use of Google streetview I managed – even though it was half cut off by the camera and blurry – to locate it.

 

El Fogón Sefardí – Calle de la Juderia Vieja, 17

I was elated. Ken was hungry. And my little food memory didn’t disappoint. It excelled itself. Opposite the facade of the bar – an uncomplicated red awning protecting tartan tablecloths – a small street descended to a view of the horizon. Segovia is built on a bluff so its flanks open to sweeping vistas. At the bottom of the street was a little arch leading out of the city. The view’s foreground was taken up by a small hill topped with a little white chapel and some Calvaryesque crosses. Behind that, the gentle humps of the ancient Guadarrama Mountains. This is what you have while you eat.

 

And the food? Well Ken and I ordered the same from a typical set menu of 11.90€. I wasn’t sure but the result was astonishing.

Starter: Milhoja de Berenjena con Cordero al Curry y Verduritas de la Huerta del Puente de la Estrella – a 2008 award-winning open sandwich of aubergine mille feuille with curried lamb and vegetables from the palace gardens. It was a sensation and seemed to have a kind of delightfully sticky apricot reduction over the top. This came with my carafe of wine.

 

Main course: Añojo de Choto Asado con salsa Pedro Ximénez y con flores de patatas – Roast veal with a Pedro Ximénez sauce and potato flowers. A generous number of slices of meat covered in that sweet and smoky sauce complemented unfussily with little mini jacket potatoes. It was flawless.

 

Desert: Tarta Charlota. A huge slab of sweet and bouncy sponge cake topped with a raspberry coulis and a slightly overt quantity of Chantilly cream.

 

Was it food heaven? Perhaps not. But the sheer audacity of the place to offer so much for so little, the presence of Ken, the jug of wine…and that view made sure it easily garnered a place on my list.

 

I don’t do restaurant reviews but sometimes one has to say something. If you go to Segovia go to El Fogón Sefardí. Go.

 

It was only after this little memory jogging food trip that my friend from that jaunt three years ago said to me quite casually ‘yeah, I remember where that is. You could have just asked me.’

Wanderlust: Why do we travel?

A lot of people put 'travelling' under their hobbies and interests. Sometimes I ask these people where they've been. They sometimes shock me with far-flung corners of the globe that I could only hope to one day be able to afford. More often they are the same wonderful but hackneyed places: Paris, Barcelona, New York, Sydney, Bangkok. Accompanying their exploits are Facebook albums of average photos often with boyfriend or girlfriend in tow in a variety of identifiable locations. Good on them, they've got out. They've had a holiday. Were they travelling? In the etymological sense, of course they were. They took a train or a bus or a plane to go somewhere. But were they really travelling because they 'love travelling' or because, more possibly, they like getting away somewhere new. Is there a distinction? Maybe not. But maybe there is. I wanted to set my mind to thinking about why we travel.

 

I love travelling. That same sentence proclaimed by many. And yes, sometimes I hop on a bus to the mountains near Madrid in order to escape the city – as wonderful as it is – and breathe the clear air and empty my head. But spending day after day on the beach? No. Travelling to a city to check off the monuments and galleries from the list? No. Well, maybe a couple. I like playing computer games now and then. I like to go jogging by the river. Photography is a passion of mine. I supremely enjoy reading a good book. These are all things I like to do. But none of them are so vital to me as food and travel. If I'm not travelling – wherever it may be – or sampling some new food I get restless and antsy. I start to feel trapped, the weight of life and its inherently real but unnecessary requirements covering me layer by layer. To travel is as important to me as breath. 'I love travelling'. No. I need to travel. It forms an intrinsic part of who I am and I can't live without it. To see a new city, drive though the landscapes of an unvisited country, to sample its food and its wine, especially its wine, and to let one's eyes and camera lens fall upon its people, is a happiness that I presume is only rivalled by the feeling of being in love – and I have yet to encounter that. Therefore travelling remains a sensation of utmost importance and profundity. When I say 'I love travelling', its understatement must be viewed on a galactic scale.

 

I work, among other ventures, as a food tour guide in the beautiful Spanish city of Madrid. The clients I receive are travelling for myriad reasons: to get away from everything; 'here on business'; honeymoons and romantic getaways; it forms part of a larger European or Spain tour; 'I always wanted to come'; 'our child is studying here'; and, with the nature of my job, the odd foodie who heard Madrid was the best in the land. These are all valid reasons. They are all different; yet at the same time the same. For whatever reason all these people have ended up in the same place, often doing the same tour with the same red-faced Englishman. No matter what the eventual reason – unless forced by one's business, really it seemed, to a greater or lesser extent, to boil down to the same thing: Wanderlust, no matter how distilled.

 

Stereotypes. Whether it’s the middle-class student somehow annoyingly backpacking across South America and returning with stories of how they felt in touch with the impoverished and sporting new multicoloured linen trousers and necklaces; or the plucky pink working class bloke who has escaped to the Costa del Sol to soak up some sun with his equally sunburnt wife in Benidorm; or the young writer who quits his job in order to walk across a country, or get away from anywhere known to deeper understand a place and have fodder to scribble down; or whether it’s the honeymooners off to spend far too much money in Paris celebrating a wedding where they also spent too much money; or maybe the businessman on his boat in the Côte d'Azur or the teenagers camping in the woods in Canada. It's all different and all the same. Something in their genes, in their inherited sapiens biology is making them travel. Making them – whatever the reason they think it is - need to be on the move in some way. Rare and sad is the person who never travels, or wants to. And I genuinely pity and fail in understanding them.

 

Why do we travel? Maybe I haven't got an answer. I don't know; there's an answer. Or maybe it's as simple and inane as 'well, because some of us want to'. But I can't believe that. I like to think that we have to. Wanderlust: A deep desire to travel. Part of what makes Homo sapiens sapiens.

I'd coin wandermust if it didn't sound so truly awful.

Madrid is burning

Africa starts south of the Pyrenees, or so said Napoleon of Spain. Two months of hell for ten months of heaven say the locals. The sun at its summer zenith recreates that hot continent and mocks skin. The body is fraught with sensations: the air is thick and tangible and weighs heavy on arms and foreheads; the pressure is palpable and the prickles are cells cooking; the face, taking the full brunt of that cosmic heater, glows, and the eyes, resting helpless in their sockets, are dry and itchy by day but all but glued shut by morning. A natural adhesive caused by heat. That same morning, after that night where you barely slept, bereft of dreams for the rise in degrees, you feel as though you are melded to the mattress. You can never get away. You are part of it. Thoughts drift to the idea of removing one's skin to shed a layer of warmth. Alcohol will help in lieu of this. Alcohol, that gains extra potency in those African months. The mind flutters with the bees after only a couple of glasses. Amid this nuance you simply sweat. You sweat in places you never knew could sweat. Like knees.

 

That July and August that do their best mimicry of some Dantean circle also play havoc with everyday life. They change you. They make you reanalyse and rethink and re-plan. Any journey out of the house you hug shadows, you choose your colours wisely, you apply sun cream as a matter of routine, you slow your pace, you use any breeze possible: the passing car or the arriving train; diet changes to cold soups, the body yearns for juice and swimming pools.

 

General life is affected too: personal wardrobes change – the concept of trousers makes you physically sick; there is a dramatic rise in the number of opportunities to study the feet and varicose veins of other human beings; the amount of clothing worn by both men and women enjoys a distinction of being in short supply; the glad result is that the tired old eyes of men linger for longer on the exposed bodies of women. The world shines like a concussion; gleaming pastels and coloured walls instead of stars and budgies.

 

As you struggle to do even the most average of exercises you ponder at the disappearing act the heat haze has played on the mountains. At home you deliberate over the merits of setting the cheap fan you bought to stationary or left and right mode. You turn off electrical goods for fear their whirrings and bleepings contribute to the rise in temperature. In the streets you notice a heightening of smells, an intensity bought about by a collective of molecules trapped in an embrace of warmth. You see the dogs, too much hair for this climate, panting and with dripping tongues. Your only escape a bar, a cafe, a shopping centre, a shadow.

 

Madrid burns, it burns beautifully and cruelly, and you pray for Apollo to be kind.

Eating Malaga

‘…the oldest and most famous Spanish seaport on the Mediterranean, is picturesquely situated on the last spurs of the mountain-ranges…and at the foot of this hill is the beautiful harbour on which lies the city with its 12,580 inhabitants’

‘Malaga seems at first an uninviting place. It’s the second city of the south (after Seville), with a population of half a million, and is also one of the poorest. Though the clusters of high-rises look pretty grim as you approach, the city does have some compelling attractions.’

Malaga then and now. The first quote taken from my 114 yr-old Baedecker guide to Spain and Portugal and the second from a recent Rough Guide. The century that separates the books has clearly altered the city somewhat. Not only in the enormous population – modern Malaga is now forty times fuller – but also in the visual aesthetic and the city’s reputation. From the quiet old seaport that was hoping to become a winter resort to the giant Costa del Sol behemoth of today, the city has undergone a huge transformation – and not necessarily a good one.

I was unperturbed. I had been in similar cities on the coasts – Alicante, Barcelona, Cartagena – and even when the stereotypes of drunken English holidaymakers crisping under an Iberian sun whilst hunting out tapas in the form of fish and chips were present, there was always a part that forever remained Spanish. I wanted to find that in Malaga. What I discovered was that Malaga itself still remains a rather charming and well-to-do Spanish city with fine monuments, beautiful people and delightful cuisine.

The old town was singularly charming, well kept and full of welcoming

tascas

and restaurants. The streets curled away from the bay through warm early-summer corners that would often lap the shores of ancient buildings or flirt with the ugly new town. Fine town flats with embossed glass balconies shone under a cloudless sky and yanked the viewer’s eyes here, to the vast and imposing but unfinished cathedral, and there, to a mossy mountain at whose base was a Roman theatre and at whose middle and top were Moorish fortress and castles.

Palm trees lined the promenades and seafront where wealthy locals and tourists sauntered, stopping now and again to admire a colourful nook or an extravagant square. A flurry of photogenic streets than knotted behind the Picasso Museum also hid some wonderful food and cutesy tapas bars. This was not the grim and depressing pub-ridden Costa del Sol I had been expecting. But I was here to eat. What of the food?

Three gastronomic moments endeared Malaga to me in a way that only food can. Food, that universal peacemaker, that instigator of human evolution, always helped lift any place to a position higher than it may have otherwise have deserved.

1.

Malaga wine at Casa de la Antigua Guardia

– sat on a main thoroughfare, though inconspicuous with its simple wooden front door, this little bar was the type of place that always called out to me. The oldest tavern in Malaga; a headline I couldn’t ignore. Opened in 1840 they have been serving sweet Malaga wines at knock down prices ever since. Inside was a long wooden counter behind which, and along whose length, numerous rotund barrels ran. The place was musty with the smell of wine and oak and it was narrow. A couple of glasses of

semi-seco

were ordered and the old boy in his white shirt clipped a ‘

vale chico!

’ and about turned to twist the little tap on one of the barrels. Golden, tart, slightly fiery but with an inescapable sweetness, this was a wine to make good friends with. He wrote the order down on the counter with an old piece of chalk. I smiled and ordered another. I would have been very happy to have tried each one of the many wines, or at the very least have had a stab at finishing a barrel, but the call of the

tapeo

stole me away.

2.

Malaga Feria de Tapas

– There is nothing I like more than when a city gets together with a regional beer and promotes local produce and bars with appealing prices at a tapas festival. Fun and financially viable. Under a large tent in the handsome old bullring the San Miguel beer company was plugging its drink as well as the city’s food. Around 25 bars were present fr

membrillo

and some

jamón

. The way Spain rallies around its cuisine at every given moment is something the rest of world needs to pay attention to. A local is never prouder than when exalting his gastronomy.

om around town, each offering a variety of three tasty morsels. The range was bewildering and intoxicating. I settled – for the sake of my ever-waxing belly – on a small plate of slow cooked pork cheek in red wine and a green gazpacho served with melon caviar, Malaga cheese with

3.

Seafood at Pedregalejo

– A day that initially started as an attempt to escape the city to a suburb village and sit on the beach quickly descended into a hedonistic afternoon of consuming quite the finest seafood, drinking an unnecessary amount of wine and gawping dumbly at both the women and the natural, and base, beauty of the moment we were sharing. Once an unassuming fishing village Pedregalejo has long since been consumed by the broad arms of Malaga, yet it is still distant enough to have retained its feel of separateness. In essence it is a long and unbroken stretch of small square houses that comprise dinky little flats. All the doors are different colours and the walls are a limited range of hues from peaches to lemons and whites. Where there isn’t a flat there is a restaurant. These dribble out from the buildings, onto the promenade’s terraces and then often over onto the sand itself.

Chirinquitos

.

We chose one where the far off rises of the Sierra de Mijas could be seen shimmering under a hot sky, wedged between the duck-egg blue of the heavens and the glittering turquoise of the Mediterranean. Between us and the sea and sands was something particular to the region – an

espeto

. Under a little hut providing shade was an old propped up rowing boat; the kind you’d find in a boating lake. It was filled to the brim with sand and on it was a fire with lots of ash. A man, dressed as they always are in Spain in a smart white shirt, was taking fresh fish and skewering them. He then stuck the skewers into the sand upright and roasted the fish on either side.

The

espeto

-cooked sardines were perfect; juicy and smoky and with that always-welcome factor that you

know

it was just cooked fresh for you. Next came plates loaded with breaded

calamares

and

rosada en adobo

– the former being pleasingly muscly rings of fried squid and the latter being small chunks of kingklip marinated in a sweet vinegar with cumin and paprika, breaded and fried. Another glass of white Barbadillo wine. Then a dish of

salmonetes

– absurdly delicious and sweet-fleshed little red mullets, cooked whole like the sardines; followed by another plate of

chanquetes

- tiny little whitebait that were deep-fried and eaten by the handful. Another glass of white wine. And a coffee. Paradise, I decided right there and then, is a beach under the sun with a selection of marine life cooked quick and shovelled into the face with something alcoholic in a glass.

Malaga had won me over. The Costa del Sol’s largest city still acted like an old Spanish town.

Oh, Portugal!

Portugal is a country that many know for its famous cities – Porto and Lisbon – or for its resort-infested southern coast in the Algarve region. I had a few days to get to know Portugal by car and what I saw changed my relationship with the Iberian Peninsula forever. Portugal is an under-populated, generous, picturesque and affordable Mediterranean paradise.

Day One: The Wild West and wine valleys…




Trás-os-montes. The land behind the hills. The northwest region of Portugal that connects with Spain and where the great Duoro River leaks out into Castilla to become the Duero. A land of drought and cacti. A land of poverty and dusty little towns forgotten by tourism and unknown to the world. It is also a place of rugged canyonlands and old medieval towns from where the young have emigrated. At the little hilltop town of Torre de Moncorvo no English is spoken and smashing up some Spanish I am able to order coffees and a bun. No smiles. The famous trasmontano hospitality. Not rude. Just old and rural.


Then over a high pass where vineyards had sprung and the world fell away to greener pastures. We had entered the Duoro wine valley. A UNESCO wonderland of steep river-canyon walls tickertaped with vine terraces covering 41,700 hectares. Away from the motorways tiny roads slinked up into the heights affording views that painters would drool at. Here and there a Quinta – estate – would sit primly with a whole tapestry of wine wrapped around it; bone white amongst the green.


Under nebulous spitting clouds Pinhão – a scruffy village at the heart of the wine region and on the bend of the river – offered a brief refuge. Safe from a violent rainstorm I sipped some homemade ‘vinho generoso’ at a local bar where they didn't bother to put the lights on and which had walls covered in small bottles and panels of keyrings and postcards lining the doorway. Past walls covered in beautiful duck blue and china white tiles called azulejos we crept out of the valley, away from its bursting verdancy and its little roadside markets where old ladies sold cherries from their cars.


Before reaching the last, fast corridor of motorway that shot to Porto there was time for a brief stop in Amarante – an odd town sunk in a shallow valley and gracefully straddling the Tâmega River. Visually there were a few attractive streets but nothing much else until the eye chances upon the rebuilt medieval São Gonçalo Bridge that jumps high from one bank to another. On the other side is a striking white monastery with a theatrical terracotta tiled roof and just set behind it on a little clump of hill, another small church with bumpy cobbles streets whispering around it.

Day Two: Porto the pearl of Portugal…


Where to begin with this most romantic of cities?

With the food? There were hunks of cod cooked slow with roasted red peppers, sweet onions and olives and served Bragança style with fried potatoes; plates of melted azeitão cheese and azaruja sausage; sweet egg custard tarts called pastéis de nata; slow baked veal with saffron rice and roast potatoes; sardines served in piquant oil; delicate presunto ham; line-caught whole roasted sea bass…

With the drinks? Port wines that range from warm, sweet and blackcurrant-coloured Rubies to smoky ochre Tawnies and cold, chip dries and that are best served at the hillside Taylors winery; the ever so slightly fizzy and refreshing vinho verde from the northern Minho region; fruity reds from the Duoro that are best drunk with cooked meats; or fiery homemade aguardente spirit that sets flame to your chest and lifts you up after dinner…


With the city’s visual appeal? Porto is a town whose beauty is as postcard-perfect as it is ramshackle. Hugging the Duoro River a staggered layer of multicoloured tiled walls rise up onto a hillside. Scarlets and pastel lemons; Wedgwood blues and creams; Cadbury’s browns and bright peaches and pinks; a Technicolor wall of civilization sitting under orange terracotta. Viewed from afar, from the Gaia district over the enormous wrought-iron bridge on the other side of the water, the city seems carved by the eye of a Venetian artist. Up close the smashed windows, faded paintwork and scarred doors tell the story of a poor country. 

What hasn’t left this area, the Ribeira district, is the romance. Little alleys snaking away up and around, plump with cobbles, hide tiny family-run restaurants bursting with seafood and super-chic wine bars proffering little known cheeses. The waters of the Duoro always feel nearby. The cathedral looks over everything; a kaleidoscopic explosion of hues and spires. And over the water, over that giant bridge, a large monastery beams back, with the Port lodges at its base and little boats, barcos robelos, bobbing with barrels. Stray cats own the old town and little old ladies in pinnies dust their doorsteps as the occasional tourist bent on exploring peers up and down with a lens.


With its variety? Tiring of city life – such as that is in central Porto – the beach is just a short bus ride west. Foz do Duoro. Clean sands try to find space between a lively coastline studded with boulders and seaweed. Little bars take advantage of their slots and throw tables and chairs onto the shore. A stubby lighthouse stands proudly at the end of a pier covered with fisherman catching sea bass as the Atlantic pummels the city for all its worth. Little old trams occasionally float past and tiny fishing boats covered in gulls turn slowly in the estuary while churches and forts draw the eye.
Where to begin with Porto? Where to end?

Day Three: Universities and Monasteries…

The drive down to Sintra warrants as many stops as could fill an entire holiday. To choose but two is heartbreaking. But the call of that southern fairytale town meant we couldn’t bear to arrive too late.


Through a landscape reminiscent of a sun-soaked Galicia – furry hills covered in eucalyptus forests and more green than you knew existed – we arrived at Coimbra: Portugal’s answer to Oxford. A hill on a river in the coastal Beira region. A dense web of attractive but impoverished streets covered in graffiti produced a charismatic hub of lanes that would be horrible for the elderly or invalid. At the peak of this steep warren of cafes and religious buildings sits one of the oldest universities in the world, and the oldest in Portugal. The nobility of its scholastic centre is matched by the beauty of the buildings themselves. Bright cream coloured and bedecked with turrets and flags, the main university building sits like a fort on the summit of the hill. Students walk around in long cloaks while red-faced visitors snap away. Back in town a local festival is taking place. Coimbrans in local dress play guitars and drums, sing folk songs and sell traditional pastries. It is a busy and buzzing place.


Deep into the Estremadura region we reach Tomar, a pleasant village surrounded by a horseshoe of gentle peaks, upon one of which sits an enormous monastery-fortress once owned by the Templars. The Convent of Christ could be central Portugal’s Alhambra. It is a silly and overblown complex of churches, cloisters, spiral staircases, stuccowork and gardens all surrounded by a crenellated wall. Other giant UNESCO-listed monuments were nearby – Batalha, Alcobaça – but the call of Sintra snagged us and so we once again joined the empty motorways and headed south towards Lisbon.

Day Four: Medieval Fairytales…


Sintra spread over an afternoon and a morning and included a night. It was…like nowhere else I had ever been. The closest thing resembling it is the mad but brilliant lunacy of Portmeirion. The only difference being that that eccentric Welsh resort was designed by one man trying to create a Portofino in Britain, whereas Sintra is the result of a history of one-upmanship by a cadre of wealthy Portuguese.


Sintra is a frilly selection of absurd by undeniably beautiful palaces and mansions rising up from the cutesy town to pepper the small and singular mountain range that sits immediately next-door. All manner of styles and colours are present, so trying to describe the place is futile. Standing guard over the town are two very different buildings that top two neighbouring peaks of the Serra do Sintra. One is the fine remnant of an old Moorish castle and the other is the over the top Pena Palace.


The Moorish castle is low walled and looks like it has been drawn by a child. The views it commands are wide-reaching – the sea, the villages, the fields, the mountain range. Everything is visible. The Pena Palace is a ridiculous and gargantuan mish-mash of different styles all comprising one large complex perched precariously on one of the highest points of the range. A yellow, red, grey, mustard and cream hodgepodge of Neo-Gothic, Neo-Manueline, Neo-Islamic and Neo-Renaissance styles all clumped together in the 19th century. It is a wonderful sight.


Before being swallowed up by Spain there is time left of a day to visit the large sandy arms of beach that hug the Atlantic coast near Sintra before hitting the motorway again to stop in Evora – the jewel of the Alentejo region. Sheltered by a large medieval wall Evora is a yellow and white town of a homogenous beauty that wouldn’t look out of place in Andalucia.


A settlement of grand churches, isolated cobbled streets, an abbey with a cave of bones, of hearty roasted meat dishes served with heavy red wines, of Roman temples and of panoramas disappearing off to rumbling plains speckled by farmsteads. The old city is hot and sits reflective under a powerful blue sky. The asymmetrical cathedral looks like an old thin cat that lives in a town famous but retiring calmly in its old age. Evora: a place to write a poem with a glass of something red and then move on to headier climes.


Portugal showed itself to me and left me wanting more. The Algarve, the forgotten villages of the inland Beira region, those great old cities of northern Minho, the canals of Aveiro and the castle of Obidos. So much more to see. And of course there is always the sensual pull of Porto or the thrill of Lisbon to invite me back. Portugal: the close friend who you knew nothing about.

Gastro-Galicia Pilgrimage

One doesn't simply visit Galicia. One feels it. One experiences it. One eats and drinks it. A wet and windy region in the northwest of Spain, it has more in common with the moist hills of Ireland than the stereotypes of Castile. To leave it is to carry with you a sickness and longing in your heart called morriña. To leave it is to carry with you a few extra pounds. For maybe nowhere else in Spain is the fish so fresh, the meat so hearty and the wine so varied. Galicia is Celts, witches, elves, white faces and light hair. Galicia is food.

I was up on a trip with some friends and I had grand designs on the local gastronomy. The honey-coloured streets and glowing squares of Pontevedra’s old town sat brightly under an enthusiastically blue sky. Praza de Leña, Praza de Santa Maria, Praza de Verdura, Praza Herrería; musical squares that invited the visitor to sit and eat and drink. And I did. Over the three nights in Pontevedra my stomach was never empty and my mind was always cloudy with the tantalising wisps of well-meaning alcohol abuse.


From the seas came large prawns, scalded orange and grilled with salt; calamari so fresh they were almost sweet; and navajas – razor clams – landed on the tables, grilled and doused with lemon juice. More marine delights arrived in the form of bite-sized scallops called, rather deliciously, zamburiñas; their taste meaty and slightly nutty. And another bubbling terracotta pot, this time with red peppers, roasted and stuffed with a gooey mix of salt cod, garlic, pepper and cream.

Even for the toughest belly that might be enough. But then the lords of the land arrive, served up hot on the platters. Fresh pimentón sausage served up hellishly: chorizo al infierno – a hefty raw tube of meat that crackles and pops over a dish of flaming aguardiente. This is followed succinctly by zorza, an odd piecemeal dish of churned up loin pork fried in garlic, paprika and oregano and served with chips. Breathe.


The belly whines and curses you, though secretly revelling in its filling, but is silenced as cheese shows up. Tetilla – the little tit. A creamy cow’s milk cheese in the form of a lady’s breast. And then pimientos de Padrón, little green peppers of which the occasional one is spicy, sidle up quietly on a salty plate. You eat, plucking the juicy flesh from the storks, and then lean back in your chair wondering if your heart can take it.

In an effort to burn off at least some of the Galician countryside now residing in my belly I headed to the Islas Cíes for a walk. These islands (there are three: two connected by a spit of land and one, a bird sanctuary, floating off on its own) are part-national park, part-untarnished paradise. The only civilization to blight these islands is a cafeteria by the quay and a campsite.


Away from the stony churches and bagpipes of the city the eucalyptus and ferny forests that bobble the Cíes Island seemed to be something of another time. A piece of driftwood from some forgotten chunk of Pangaea. To walk over it was to transcend. It was to redefine the notion of beauty. Fine white sands curled around water that radiated out from crystal, through cyan to cerulean. Boats swam around while locals took their flesh out for the sun and thousands of yellow-legged seagulls provided a laughing soundtrack. 

          
The land was a tapestry of flowers and plants: sand reeds and sea daffodils, sea fennel and Angelica pachycarpa with its aniseed headiness, gorse, pink daphne, white rockrose, and the screaming bright yellow Cytisus insluaris broom. Cíes leaves the visitor an awestruck amateur botanist.


After a homemade sandwich of pork loin and heat-wilted cheese; after gawping stupidly at the views from the island’s lighthouse; and after swimming in the breath-stealingly cold water (but that on seeing your revelry, also entices the locals to join); after all this you stroll through the pines and acacias and return to the world of the real and the living and leave behind the stories of pirates and the secrets of the park. Back to Cangas, a town of ferries and fishermen, where small wooden boats bob colourfully in a small harbour bereft of movement but for the tide.


Cambados, a town twice previously visited, offered a charming fisherman’s atmosphere under a bubbly grey sky. Its hardy coastline shanties led off into a clutch of cobbled streets, stuffed with bougainvillea and flowerpots. Food was Galician octopus – pulpo a la gallega, boiled and cut up and coated in olive oil and pimentón, and almejas a la marinera – fat local clams stewed in a liquor of garlic, shallot, parsley and white wine. This, and every other dish in Cambados, was washed down with copious glasses, and eventually bottles, of cold, crisp Albariño wine. Cambados is the ‘capital’ of the Rías Baixas wine region, and Albariño is its powerhouse grape variety. Tart, acidic and full of fruit, it was destined to always sit comfortably by seafood. And it did. Lots of it.


A walk through the lanes and dirt tracks: through vineyards protected by dogs or tended by lone farmers with umbrellas; past heavy stone huts and along streams and the Umia River. The clouds hung low on the surrounding hills and the still naked vines provided a starburst of green that promised fruit-gold in autumn. Still hungry.


And so the odyssey, nay, the pilgrimage into Galicia and its food led me, for a fourth time, to the Celtic stronghold and Christian centre of Santiago de Compostela, where the remains of a patron saint lie in a box under the most beautiful cathedral imaginable. Tulips filled the gardens around palaces and churches older and grander than Madrid and my stomach grumbled.


In the Abastos Market men cut up fresh octopus and sold potatoes and turnip tips called grelos. Old ladies with creased faces sat by bottles of homemade liquors and baskets of eggs and wild mushrooms. Modern Galicians lined the old market walls drinking white wine and eating empanada – that juicy galego pasty. We ate mussels in a secret spicy sauce (tigres rabiosos) and then moved to an old wooden tavern to give our stomachs their final missions. San Simon cheese (a lightly smoked tetilla) was swiftly seconded by chorizos cooked in wine and xoubas (battered and fried sardines).


The food onslaught continued with more cheese: Cebreiro, a light and soft cow’s cheese originally pertaining from the village of the same name that perches precariously on a windswept hilltop in the Galician hills. Then heaps of meats, potatoes, cooked peppers and glasses of local red wines: Ribeira Sacra and Bierzo – meaty and fruity and made from the Mencía grape. Finally, to quash all sense of decency, slices of Tarta de Santiago (a jam-free Bakewell) were forked into the mouth with shots of crema de Orujo (pomace brandy cream) and pacharán (a blood-red sloe gin).



If you have any functioning taste buds you will love Galicia. If your eyes still work in any way Galicia is a place that will find its way through your optic nerve and straight to your heart. Galicia is an Eden where you eat the apple and everything else. 

Note: For food shots head to Instagram - lukedarracott

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 10th 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.