We live in a kingdom of rains

More of Molly Whuppie

2011-02-24T09:44:00.000Z

"Go away, because if you don't you'll be sorry when my husband comes home."
Molly looked at the ogre's wife, standing in the doorway, and said,
"We won't go away, because if we do, we'll freeze to death in the forest. And anyway, my name's Molly Whuppie and I'm a right good 'un and your husband will soon see that."
The ogre's wife opened the door a little wider,
"Alright then, come in, but remember what I said.
When he comes home, my husband will be hungry and he won't think twice before wringing your necks and adding your bones to our stock-pot."
Molly swallowed hard and grabbed her sisters' hands tightly before they could pull away from her and run back into the forest.
"Thankyou," she said. "We'd love to come in."
And she dragged her silent, trembling sisters over the threshold and into the ogre's house.
"What now?" Sally whispered.
Amy said, "Have you got a plan, Molly?"
"I don't know, and no," Molly answered.
"But we're all three together and it's warm and, look, there are children here already, so it can't be all that bad."
She pointed to a doll and a rocking-horse across the hall.
"We're very hungry, do you have anything that we could eat?" Molly said boldly to the ogre's wife.
"Hmmmm," said the ogress. "I'll find something, no doubt. You look as if you haven't much meat on your bones at all, and that's a pity."
In just a few minutes Molly, Sally and Amy were sitting near the fire, gnawing at pieces of old, hard cheese helped down with hot bitter tea.
The ogre's daughters, Sowthistle, Henbit and Marestail, appeared from somewhere deep inside the mansion, and now they stood with their mother, looking down at the three hungry girls.
"Such poor, wet things," Henbit said.
"So thin," whispered Sowthistle.
"Can we play with them?" asked Marestail.
The ogress shook her head.
"Wait until your father comes home."

Molly Whuppie 5

2011-02-15T17:49:00.001Z

It was a long while before Molly's sisters said anything, and when they did it was to complain.
"Where are we going, Molly?"
"We're lost aren't we!"

All three girls were soaked to the skin now, from pushing through the deep snow, and they were hungry, too, but Molly wasn't ready to stop.
"You're right, I don't know where we're going, but we're no more lost than we were when we woke up this morning," said Molly.
"If we can keep walking while there's daylight, we might find home, or someone else's home or the edge of the forest, but if we sit down here now, and just wait, we're just going to freeze in the snow."
" I don't care," said Sally, tears running down her cheeks. "I'm tired and I want to stop."
She planted herself down in the snow and looked up at Amy and Molly, her face wet with snow and tears.
"Just a short rest, then," said Molly.
"You two sit here a while and I'll carry on. Follow my footprints when you're ready, but don't wait long!"
And so Molly pushed on alone.
She carried on for a good long way before she noticed that the ground was becoming more rocky and broken, and the trees were thinning a little, and she became aware of a steady rumble, or a roar, ahead of her. It was not an animal. It sounded more, Molly thought, like the noise the packed snow made when it fell off their shack's roof in the thaw.
She walked further, careful now.
When Amy and Sally caught up with her, Molly was standing still, looking ahead.
Twenty yards away, on both sides, a boiling rock-filled river roared behind the trees.
To their left they were looking downstream, while on their right, after making a tight, dizzy curve somewhere ahead, the river turned back on itself and so they were looking upstream. The air was filled with spray and the trees and boulders hung with grey beards of frozen lichen. Great twisted icicles hung from the trees, some of them so big that glittering columns of ice had grown joining the branches with the ground.
Directly ahead of the three girls was a gate and beyond, fixed to the rocks and surrounded on three sides by the torrent, a wooden mansion loomed, dim and unclear in the foggy dusk.
"Come on," Molly said. "Let's knock on the door."
Amy and Sally were not convinced.

Molly Whuppie again.

2011-02-11T17:36:00.000Z

Under the tarpaulin in the forest it was dark, and Molly, waking first, couldn’t understand why it was so hard to move about. She pushed her hands upwards and felt cold dampness. It moved a little as she pushed, so she pushed harder, and the whole canvas shelter fell to one side. Suddenly there was light and she was covered in stinging, cold, powdery snow. The freezing shower fell on her sisters, too, and all three children, Amy, Sally and Molly, screamed and then jumped up, brushing the icy wetness off their clothes and faces.

Amy and Sally were not happy as they listened to Molly explaining that their father had most probably gone off and left them in the forest on purpose because there was not enough food for them all at home, and when she told them that she knew this because she’d overheard their mother and father talking about it, Amy said, or rather shouted,

“And you didn’t tell us! Why didn’t you tell us?”

Molly cupped her hands and blew between them to warm them, and then she said,

“Amy, it wouldn’t have made any difference. If I had told you, you and Sally would only have been upset, and then, perhaps, something worse might have happened.”

“But we’re lost in the forest,” Sally chipped in. “What could be worse than that?”

Molly looked at her.

“Being cooked alive, or stabbed through the heart?”

Amy and Sally looked shocked.

“What, do you really think that our mother and father would ...”

“Listen,” Molly replied, “you used to sit and listen to the stories just like I did. Don’t you remember Hansel and Gretel, or Snow White?”

That was enough for Amy and Sally. The two girls could take no more. First their lips began to quiver, then tears began to sting their eyes and run down their cheeks and very soon they were clinging to one another and sobbing.

Molly looked at them, blowing on her hands again.

“I may be the youngest, and I may be small,” she thought, “but at least I’m a right good ‘un.”

She felt frightened, but she didn’t feel helpless, and she knew that, if she didn’t do something useful, all three of them would end up freezing to death where they stood, because her sisters clearly didn’t have any intention of being practical.

And so, even though she had no idea which was the right direction to take, Molly grasped each of her sisters by the hand and led them purposefully out of the clearing and into the trees.

... her course was true, for he was an able seaman through and through ...

2011-02-03T19:15:00.003Z

In a recent blog entry, "Singing Madrigals", my sister-in-law (Alison Hobbs) mentions the double-entendres sometimes to be found in madrigals. Our current usage of the expression double-entendre tends to be a derogatory one, often applied to short, smutty sexual allusions of the: If I said you have a beautiful body, would you hold it against me? kind.

I wonder if the term does justice to what are often, in madrigals and folk songs at least, considerably well-crafted extended metaphors.

I don't have anything more than a passing acquaintance with the texts of madrigals (Never weather-beaten sail more willing bent to shore than I, when I sang madrigals no more), but I am on friendlier terms with English folk songs,.

A great number of folk-songs are about a man gaining sexual conquest over a woman, where the "hero" of the song is frequently a soldier (I drilled her into the sentry-box, wrapped up in a soldier's cloak) or a sailor (So Jack became master of that craft-o, and she was well-found both fore and aft-o).

Just recently, I have been listening to a song called I will put my ship in order. The story line runs: a sailor tries to persuade a girl to come down from her bed and let him in so that they can lie together; the girl is hesitant and, by the time she has plucked up courage to go downstairs, the sailor has lost patience and gone to find another conquest.

At first listening, the song seems to be in the typical "sailor seduces girl" mould, a variant of a song that I know well Jack the Jolly Tar. A little odd perhaps that, in this version, he does not get her maidenhead, but maybe it's a warning to all those girls out there that they should not delay in acquiescing to a lusty lover, or they may die old maids ...

... but wait.

Part of the song is clearly metaphor. The sailor didn't just walk up to his girl's house, he drew his ship across the harbour, close to her bedroom window to hear what she would say.

What, then, if we assume that there's more to the song than meets the eye, and that, perhaps, the presumed narrative text, is not what it seems to be at all:

O who is that at my bower window,

That raps so loudly and would be in?

It is your true love that loves you dearly,

So rise, dear love, and let him in.

Then slowly, slowly rose she up,

And slowly, slowly came she down,

But before she had the door unlocked

Her true love had both come and gone.

Come back, come back my own true love,

Come back, come back, come, ease my pain.

The fish shall fly love, the seas run dry, love

Before that I'll return again.

 The imagery is clear; we are not

witnessing a maiden jilted by a petulant

seducer, but a woman disappointed

at the hand of a prematurely spent fumbler.

This is not double-entendre but

poetic complaint.

Molly Whuppie 3

2011-02-01T19:00:00.001Z

Father and daughters worked hard together all day. He selected saplings to fell, ash mainly, and then cut the fallen wood into logs. The girls trimmed and corded the brushwood into bundles for carrying and stacked them tightly to keep them as dry as possible. Near the end of the afternoon, to hold back the gathering cold for a while, their father made a fire and sat them around it under cover of a tarpaulin. In their damp clothes, the girls huddled close to rub their aching, white fingers back to life. They whispered together and listened to the sounds of the forest in the half-light, and laid their heads on one another’s arms in the fire’s delicious warmth as new snow began to drift out of the darkening clouds.

And all the while their father worked on. The sound of his axe, biting wood, echoed among the trees. Thwack! Thwack! and always, it seemed, a little farther away. By the time it had faded quite out of earshot, the girls were already asleep, tricked by the stuffy warmth of their smoky den.

For a time the fire kept the night away, but outside the slowly shrinking ring of brightness and heat, the darkness edged closer and eased the sisters deeper into sleep . As they will, searching for the last scraps of wood, the flames eventually lost their strength and, long before the morning, the fire had died. But the snow continued to fall, covering the sleeping bundles that were Molly and her sisters and softly wiping away all trace of paths and tracks and signs.

Not all of the children asleep under the clouds that night shared such a cold bed as Molly and her sisters. An ogre lived in the forest, with his wife and his own three daughters, in a wooden mansion on a great rock in a loop of the river, where the forest was deepest. Now, although they are monsters, ogres are not creatures that are born stupid, like trolls or giants. Just like people, some ogres are cunning and clever, some rough and dangerous and others are good and helpful. This ogre was both cunning and dangerous and not good or helpful at all, but his daughters were all his treasure and his delight, and they knew it well. Because of this, and because of his own weakness, they ruled their father, asking him for all sorts of treats and gifts, and this night it was gold that they asked for.

“ Pa, will you bring a gold necklace for each of us?” the youngest asked.

“Yes, do, Pa” said the middle daughter, and clapped her hands like shovels.

“You know how we love gold, and how happy it will make us,” finished the eldest, and winked at her sisters.

The ogre smiled a broad smile and kissed each of his daughters wetly on her greasy cheek.

“ Go up to bed now Sowthistle, Henbit and Marestail, my darlings, and tomorrow I’ll bring back treasure enough for you all,” he said.

The ogre's wife, busy in the kitchen, snarled as she listened to him, and hacked a chop from the spine of a long-dead lost traveller.

“Treasure indeed! Your time's better spent hunting, mooncalf. The meat-safe’s near empty and even this one smells like it’s past its best.”

Molly Whuppie 2

2011-01-28T09:54:00.001Z

Morning crept up on the cabin from the forest that spread around it like the sea. The land was so flat, and the forest so wide, that the light seemed to leak from the trees to fill the world. At first it coloured the sky a cold grey, pinching out the stars, and then it lapped at the edge of the dark clearing that Molly’s father had hacked out of the woods in those first days of building the cabin. Slowly it poured on in, filling up the space between the living tree-trunks and the dead wood of the cabin’s walls, and, as it came, it revealed the hiding places of the shadows in their deep corners and their little ditches, and it brought the shadows with it, even through the window into the cabin itself.

Inside, Molly’s mother moved about busily. She stacked five used bowls at the end of the table; she laid out thread and a long needle; she fussed over the tiny glow in the embers of last night’s fire. She pulled back the curtain that hung between her and her daughters’ empty bed and paused to take in what little of their warmth and sleepy scent remained. It would soon fade, and later, much later, she would be able to begin to forget them.

But for now, she would clean the five bowls that were stacked at the end of the table, and then pick up the needle and thread, and see which clothes needed mending, and all the while she would coax and care for the small flames struggling in the hearth, feeding them with continual gifts of tear-damp wood.

In the slowly brightening forest, the three girls followed their father’s tall, spare figure as he trod a path for them. The night had laid a crust on top of the snow and so, as he walked, he would raise one foot high, balancing for a second before the crust cracked under his weight and sent him plunging up to his knees in the freezing powder underneath. Lift, crack, plunge, lift, crack, plunge, he ploughed forward. Behind him, the girls had to stretch out their legs to follow in his footsteps.

Their route was not a familiar one, but they had worked in the forest often with their father, and this morning they had eaten an unusually good breakfast – there had been hot porridge as well as a little coffee - and so the two older girls laughed, and pushed at one another when they fell occasionally in the deep snow. But Molly was quiet, and thought, “I wonder how it’s going to happen?”

Molly Whuppie: Part 1.

2011-01-27T10:17:00.002Z

At first she hadn’t been able to hear

words, for it was only the swish and sigh of their talk that crept into her sleep like a breeze and, slowly, teased her awake. The speakers were clearly sitting together, close to the still-warm hearth on the other side of the one room that the whole family shared but, even though only a curtain screened off her bed, it was not easy for Molly to make out anything of what her father and mother were saying to one another. Lying with her eyes open to the darkness, she held her breath and listened hard.

There were mumbles and pauses, sounds and silences, but she couldn’t make sense of them. She strained her ears and thought she’d caught some words but then, quite suddenly, those words turned into weeping. It was her mother, but her father’s voice was there, too, making quiet sounds, trying to give comfort, to stop the crying. Molly couldn’t bear that sound, but it happened more and more often these days. The unusually long, cold winter had made it hard to stretch out food and firewood, the snow blocked paths, ice walled off the streams and birds and animals had fled, or buried themselves deep inside the drifts. Molly knew herself that there hadn’t been enough to eat for weeks, and they were never warm, inside the cabin or outside. But what was this latest calamity? She would have to find out, and so she sat up and folded back the blanket quietly. She was about to swing her feet out into the cold when she clearly heard her father say,

“Tomorrow, then; I’ll take all three out to the forest. I’ll come back alone. It will be for the best.” Molly stopped dead and bit her lip hard to stop herself from calling out. She sat very still, and gripped the rough edge of the blanket hard. Her clenched fingers ached and her heart pounded, but she forced herself to carry on listening.

The talking had stopped, though, and now only the familiar sounds of night in the small house were left. She heard her mother and father undressing, and then climbing into their creaking bed. Silence fell, punctuated by quiet sobs that died away into deep uneasy breathing. Later still, Molly heard the twitching of their small cabin as it cooled in the frosty night, and the small, urgent sounds of mice in the shingles. And all the time, and all around her, she was wrapped in the long, slow, regular breathing of her two sleeping sisters in the bed beside her. She lay back between them and she wondered what to do, but sleep found her before she had managed to find an answer.

Run away from the inside of a book.

2010-12-11T18:18:00.006Z

There's not a lot of call for books among our 15 year-olds in Wales, it seems. Almost half of them will tell you that they only read if they have to, and nearly two thirds never borrow library books to read for pleasure.

The source of these figures is the 2009 PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) report, which has just informed us that Wales is below all of the other countries in the UK as far as our teenagers' performance in reading is concerned.

The response from the Welsh Assembly government has been predictable and hands, and necks, are being wrung.

The previous PISA report took place in 2006 and, although Wales did slightly better then, it certainly did not shine. So what has changed in four years that might lead us to expect that we ought to have improved? The answer, at least for the educational experience that our current sixteen year-olds will have received, is, "Not much yet."

Since 2006, the lion's share of Welsh government support and training has gone to the exciting, but still developing, Foundation Phase (the education of 3 - 7 year-olds), while in Key Stages 2 and 3 (8 to 14 year-olds) a fundamental re-structuring of the curriculum and its assessment is taking place with far fewer resources. The simple truth, anyway, is that it's too early yet for any of these developments to have had a positive impact on the education of pupils who may have been included in the 2009 PISA assessments.

And so, what about PISA 2012? The pupils who will take part are already 13 years old, still too old to have experienced substantially the changes that are being wrought around them in the education system in Wales, and so perhaps it isn't likely that we will see results that are tremendously different from those we've seen already. I suppose this is what is called an inconvenient truth.

There is a more fundamental issue than mere curriculum-design to be addressed here, however. The love of reading, and its corresponding facility to understand and to engage with the written word, is not something that is simply the responsibility of schools to ignite. A learner's whole community, and especially parents and grandparents, must play their part.

Through others, we become ourselves

said Lev Vygotsky .

We must look to ways in which we should support, and expect, every child's parents or carers to acknowledge that they are its first teachers, not the school. This is not an easy responsibility to bear, nor would it be popular with some.
And so it is more likely that what will take place is more adjustment to the curriculum, with an attendant "searchlight on literacy" .

But we have tried that before and, as Michael Rosen, erstwhile Children's Laureate, observed,

The government has allowed a situation to develop where the word "reading" has come to mean something narrow and functional, no more than evidence that a child can read. This is an abdication of what education is about.

Is there are an alternative?

Well, he also says

I have always thought that teachers can think. In the particular segment of education where I mostly work, with literature and language for primary age children, I’ve come to the conclusion that literature and reading have become so reduced, dissected, cross-examined, abridged, chopped-up and tested that the most subversive, exciting and political thing to do now is to rush about creating moments in schools where the children will know for certain that all that they’ll have to do with a book, a poem, a story or a play is enjoy it. No questions, no tests, no learning outcomes.

Mind it!

I'm just going outside ...

2010-11-26T18:22:00.003Z

When the snow begins to fall in this part of the world otherwise normal and well-balanced individuals trip their switches and begin to operate in unusual and outlandish ways. Ours is a landscape where, not so very long ago, many of the hills were topped with the black drifts of coal waste-tips and on washing days, when clean white sheets were hung out to dry, they would, if the wind blew from those tips, turn into weird, dark canvases. The more artistically inclined voters among the populace would stand, then, and stare at them because the sooty bed-linen would become uncomfortably reminiscent of the works of Dore or Goya. Eventually the starers would move off, pensive and talking quietly amongst themselves, to add a kind of morose rive gauche quality to the general gloom of the valley. Perhaps it is this racial memory of creeping blackness that triggers brains around here to regard white flakes falling from a low grey sky as some kind of heavenly sign that an apocalypse is near.

The first flurries of snow began to fall around midday. By 2 p.m. the world is turned upside down.

In the supermarket all of the tills have lines that stretch back well into the aisles and every trolley in those lines is stocked with bread, potatoes, milk and, among the more far-sighted, a certain amount of alcohol.

There is a worrying buzz in the store, too. It is like the sound that you hear when you've opened a long-neglected garden-shed to find that a colony of assertive wasps has moved in during your absence. For the shoppers are uneasy; outside the snow is falling, and inside stocks are running low.

The white sliced-bread is already gone and some elements, strangers to the vocabulary, are being driven to make hopeful, but ultimately uninformed, choices between pain rustique, coppia ferrarese and bauernbrot. Others, only previously familiar with smooth plastic-wrapped loaves, stare helplessly at the knobbly, naked splendour of stacked sourdoughs, or pick in a distracted way at the organic bloomers' golden crusts. Among the vegetables, too, circumstance forces hands. With the potatoes running low, shoppers scrabble for the last tubers remaining. A small and determined group of toothless, grey-haired women forms up into a phalanx and drives forward through a wall of surprised shoppers to snatch bags of Maris Piper and King Edwards; then, hot with victory, the wiry testudo heads off to hunt out the small remaining reserves of teabags and Hobnobs.

I decide that I am not equal to the ordeal of entering the lists for the single pack of cat-food that was to be my only purchase, for trolleys are stacked six-deep, and, tempers frayed, normal people threaten to become zombies. The buzz in the aisles is a guttural growl at the tills. A young woman deftly slips her basket on a belt, just in front of a family already unpacking their load of shopping. "Don't mind, do you, love!" she brays loudly, in the direction of the mother.

Deciding that I am not suitably armed for this battle, I guiltily put the cat-food down amongst some aubergines in a display and slink out of the store.

There are big snowflakes falling on the car park. Two drivers threaten one another over a single parking-space, and a crawling line of cars stretches towards the petrol station where, no doubt, the pumps will soon be empty. I start my own car quietly and, with great caution, ease it away from the store and out onto the dual carriageway.

The traffic is reduced to a single line in the white gloom as we feel our way down the valley, headlights and wipers working overtime ... except for a young lady in the sporty little Fiesta, who flies by in the outside lane at 70 mph, car-horn defiantly blaring 'La Cucaracha'. Perhaps she's a zombie already.

What's in a name?

2010-11-21T11:43:00.003Z

A couple of weeks ago, to escape from the early darkness that descends upon our little village at this time of year, we went for a walk through the woodland behind our house, and up onto the track that leads to the broad, flat, sunny whaleback of the Garth.
As you climb the path, both a geography and a history lesson unfold before your eyes.

The valley floors are overcrowded; roads, railways, the old canals thread and interwine south to north and they are lapped by untidy waves of houses and trading estates. This is a legacy of the century before last, when coal and iron were mined and extracted from the valleys, and settlements grew up around the works and the collieries to house and supply the immigrant workers. For the populations in those valley towns were, and are, cosmopolitan; in the valley where I grew up, family names included Hartshorn, Courtney, Greening, Walbeoff, Szymanski, and Minoli, as well as Evans, Gronw and Morgan. Before the nineteenth century, the deep-cut, damp, valleys were hardly populated at all.

The dissected plateaux rolling high above are a different story. This is farmland and moorland, and here, settlements, though fewer and smaller than down below, have a pedigree. There are farms, typically they are old farms, whose byres were old even before the acts of union. Blood-lines are older up here; there are Vaughans and Lewises, Pritchards and Prices. Coughlins, Joneses and Contis, if they have found their way up to the sunlight at all, have done so only recently, and by way of the high-altitude council estates that were the successors to the earlier TB hospitals (situated alike, to clear the diseased lungs of the poorer working folk) or the newer dormitory villages and terracotta-roofed houses that sprang up in the affluent years of the beginning of the present century.

Up on the Garth, then, it should have been no surprise to see the local hunt, the Pentyrch, gathered on the sky-line with its horses and hounds. Behind them, beyond the farms of the Vale of Glamorgan, and across the Severn Channel, was Exmoor, and in front, to the North, the high moorland of the Brecon Beacons. Atop their impressive horses, and dressed in jackets of black or brown velvet, the riders and followers are probably a more substantial link to the long-view of the history of this landscape than the damp, patchwork citizenry in the stone streets below. Even they are not immune from infiltration, though, because, as we passed, their whipper-in, after sounding the horn, and shouting: "Get down Dancer!" at one over-eager dog, called to us, "Oi, you 'aven' seen three dogs down by there 'ave you? We carn' find 'em."

Don't step on my blue serge suit!

2010-11-14T21:40:00.012Z

Gwyn Thomas was a writer, raconteur, wit and schoolmaster and, while he once had a cult-following in the United States, his work has never become popular in Britain, outside Wales. Perhaps it is because, while drawing on universal themes, his context is a parochial one; he confines his plots almost entirely to the South Welsh industrial valleys in the early and middle years of the last century. Even within Wales his audience did not extend to the Welsh-speaking heartland, or to most of the more rarified pundits of Welsh literature. This was because he was an example of that strangest of all birds, a Welsh author writing in English about the condition of living in Wales. Today, undeservedly, his work is almost forgotten, whether in Wales or the world.

It was a pleasant shock, then, when in Cardiff recently, to discover a flyer for a new drama, based on a collection of Gwyn Thomas' short stories "The Dark Philosophers", to be staged in a theatre in Newport. I bought tickets and on Friday last we set off for that city to see a performance.

View from Cymmer Hill

Newport is an interesting phenomenon. It juggles the awkward facts that it is, geographically, closer to Chepstow than to Cymmer, historically, nearer to Monmouth than Glamorgan and, realistically, it is a bit of a cat in a kipper-box. An interesting place to choose, then, to stage a performance of a play based upon the work of a writer who said himself , "as soon as I get to Chepstow I feel very frightened."

The Riverfront (Glan yr afon) Arts Centre houses the theatre, and we arrived early enough to buy some supper for ourselves. The menu was international; chicken fajitas and spaghetti bolognese clamoured for our attention beside brie-filled baguettes and "mouth-watering" panini. Adding to this heady cosmopolitan ambience were the many spruced-up and well turned-out socialites, bon-viveurs and theatre-crowd types who, like so many gazelles or show-birds, disposed themselves around the foyer in elegant knots or careless agglomerations of chatter and self-assuredness.

We decided upon spicy (is there another kind?) chick-pea curry and yellow rice and moved to a bistro-style table in the foyer to await its delivery. Gwyn Thomas described his writing as "Chekhov with chips", and so perhaps this multi-cultural start to the evening was some sort of a portent.

Hardly had we begun to eat when a young woman, a little flustered and distracted, and talking urgently into her mobile phone, asked if she might join us at our little table. There were two empty seats, and so, of course, we agreed. As happens on these social occasions, we fell to talking and we discovered that she was the partner of the playwright and was, at this very moment, talking him in from the railway station to the theatre. Our little group of three was soon joined by a fourth (still not the playwright), a theatre director. He exhibited a healthy, and self-confessed, "south-west glow" and had travelled over from Bristol to see the play, for he and the playwright were colleagues.

Soon, we were all, severally of course, tucking into a serving of spicy chick-pea curry, and listening carefully for updates on the playwright's progress through Newport. The man himself arrived at length. He was a sunny-looking young fellow, quite ruddy, with a satchel and a green combat jacket, and he was clearly anxious for the play to get started. He thanked us for welcoming his partner to our table and was interested that I knew Gwyn Thomas' own play, "The Keep". He asked if I'd ever met Gwyn Thomas. I said that I hadn't, and he looked disappointed, but his partner smiled and ventured that she was sure I'd enjoy the play immensely. With a cheery, "Break a leg" we left his little party to find our seats in the auditorium.

The set was very effective. A dark space, the stage was occupied by a towering hill of old-fashioned wooden wardrobes, desks and chests of drawers. These became, at different times in the play, terraces of valleys-houses, hillsides, coffins and portals, and, too, they symbolised quite beautifully the domestic setting of Gwyn Thomas' work and the skeletons in closets that he often hangs out to air.

The play began ....

... and we left our seats furtively at the end, trying very hard to avoid meeting again with the playwright and his party, for it would probably have been embarrassing had we done so.

Quite how an ensemble can so thoroughly misinterpret and, therefore, misrepresent the genius of a writer is breathtaking. On this stage, Simeon is no longer a complex, brooding, enigma but a straightforward incestuous ram; Oscar is still vile, but the dark corners in the lives of those he squashes have been swept clean, and their own sinister cobwebs quietly disposed of. The result is that the pathos and wry humour of life's "big, sad, beautiful joke", bitter and sweet as the darkest chocolate, are overcome by sweet and sticky bathos and slapstick, and life is no longer funny.

A Commedia dell'Arte character, masked, stalks the set throughout. As the action progresses, he walks among the characters, sometimes listening, sometimes teasing, sometimes telling them what they must say. That this Arleccino is intended to be the writer himself is undeniable, for he wears the unmistakable signature trilby hat and suit, but his purpose, other than to provide the glue that sticks the pastiche together, is unclear. He provides the suitably monstrous puppet-Oscar with its voice and takes part in an unnecessarily supercilious re-enactment of one of Gwyn Thomas' frequent television appearances. Maybe a theatrical metaphor is being dangled here. If so, we are, alas, either too short-sighted to see it, or too dull to understand it; perhaps both.

And, finally, what of Walter, Ben and Arthur, the Dark Philosophers themselves? Perhaps they were too busy on this cold night, arguing over strong tea in the back room of Idomeneo's cafe, to make the complicated journey from Porth to Newport. Oh, but wasn't there a fourth among them? Ah yes, I remember, so there was ... and perhaps he was at Idomeneo's too, for though we searched, we could not find him at the Riverfront.

The sun also rises.

2010-11-06T15:53:00.016Z

There are very many places whose names describe the beautiful or fortunate aspects of their location. Honeycombe Leaze, Otter Ferry and Combe Florey make you want to throw everything in and set off to share the sheer joy that their inhabitants must feel in saying, quite simply, "Oh yes, I live in Honeycombe Leaze," or, "Visiting Combe Florey? No, I live here." Other places hint of drama or dismay; Battle, Bleak Hey Nook and Lower Slaughter would be worth a drink bought for a local in any of their, undoubtedly atmospheric, hostelries in return for a story or two.

We live in a place whose name is just as descriptive and evocative of its location, but whose first fathers must have been of a much more modest and practical frame of mind than the worthy founders of Chew Magna or Rickinghall Superior. Gwaelod y Garth is what its name describes, the Bottom of the Hill, and being at the bottom, and facing east, we are accustomed to the dusky shadow that creeps down upon our little houses once the sun has passed over the top of the mountain.
In the summer, this personal sun-screen can be very welcome. We're often to be seen sitting outside our doors drinking cocoa in the cool shade while the unfortunate elements on the other side of the valley are still sweating and toiling in evening sunlight. We save pounds and pounds through this, not being forced to buy parasols, for example, or any of the more exotic garden furniture such as gazebos. Barbecues, too, are an unnecessary expense that we are fortunate to be spared. In winter time, however, if truth be told, the sun's early disappearance is something of a trial. For, what with the naturally damp disposition of the climate hereabouts, and the lush and over-exuberant ambitions of some of the lower flora, we are forced to wage a continual war against creeping green. By November - January at the latest - some of the older and more sedentary inhabitants of the village begin to take on a distinctly mossy appearance, and those of us who are of a comptemplative nature and who stop often, therefore, to peruse or to cogitate as we go about our daily business, are careful to rub our heads and to pat our shoulders often, lest the invisible yet ubiquitous fern-spores that fill the darkling air should gain a foot-hold.
We are all very used to this, of course, and newer elements in the village, like ourselves, soon pick up the necessary habits to keep the cryptogams at bay, and we quickly learn to move about regularly and, from time to time, to seek out those places roundabout where the sunlight lingers a little longer and where, as a result, the visitor will find small, sociable groups of us villagers, gathered together like those sea-lions one sees sometimes on the better kind of natural history programmes.
Very occasionally, I have been told, a villager will succumb to the advancing green-ness and, seeing the attraction of becoming fully vegetised, will seek out a dark and shady spot and sit down there as autumn approaches to mossify. By all accounts it is a gentle and painless process and, apart from the irritations of woodlice and millipedes, uncomplicated. Some voters, in days gone by, so one of the local wags tells me, took it into their heads to visit the National Botanic of Wales in this state, and are now, even to this day, feted in the temperate green-house there and make a tidy income for themselves through occasional walk-on parts, as exotic alien lfe-forms, in programmes such as Doctor Who and Pobol y Cwm.

Trouble is my business

2010-10-31T20:11:00.006Z

We inched into the city along a choked highway where cars moved slower than the dead-cert I'd bet on the day before.
From the passenger seat, the woman looked across at me. She was short, neat and quick, like a tap to the back of the head.
"Park down there," she snapped, pointing to a closed-off road by the riverside.
"I can't do that, it's a one way road," I replied. "We'll have to drive round."
"You better not be stalling, Mo."
Her small, wrinkled hand reached inside her bag. I sneaked a peek out of the corner of my eye as we waited at the lights. I was right, the bag was loaded. If she tickled me with that one I'd have a lump on my noggin the size of a politician's expense-account.
"Listen," I said. "I know these streets. Believe me, some of them you wouldn't want to walk down, even with your granny."
She didn't buy it, though, "Funny, wise guy. But this is one old lady who can take care of herself. Now find a parking slot before I introduce you to the sharp end of my walking-pole."
The Market is a covered district where all kinds of people buy all kinds of merchandise. It isn't a pretty place, a bit fishy if you ask me, and a lot of faggots, too, but she knew who she wanted.
"Where's the Stick-man?" she asked quietly, looking right at a guy selling hot rolls.
"For why?" he growled, and I could tell by looking at her that he'd soon wish he hadn't.
The little lady looked up at him and smiled, slowly, " I want, to buy, a stick. Do you sell, sticks?"
He'd tried to brush her off, but she had him pat.
"I'm sorry. I didn't mean no harm, lady," the sap blurted out. "He's over there, on a stall behind ... the Book-man."
Her precise, "Thankyou" hit him like a glass of ice-water and left him shivering over his little pastries.
He looked at me.
"You with her?"
I nodded.
"Jeez," he said.
"What kind you want darlin'," the stick-man asked. " I got canes, poles, swaggers, wood, metal, plastic, plain, fancy ... "
"I want folding," she said.
He looked her up and down; it didn't take long.
"You sure, doll?" he said. "Folding sticks ain't cheap."
"My last one was. The guy I bought it from was glad to sell it to me ... without VAT."
I watched the words hang in the air between them, like spiders on silk.
"Try this one."
He reached across and pulled down a small package from the side-wall. He flipped it open, snapped his wrist and, with three sharp well-oiled clicks, a full-length stick was in his hand.
It was quicker than any stick-up I'd ever seen, but the she wasn't impressed.
"It looks heavy," she said.
"Lady, this is the latest, lightest, four-section fold-up on the market. Anything else is just tubing."
He caught her eye.
"Listen, rube, I can see you're no tenderfoot. OK. I'll throw in a tooled leather wrist-loop."
She looked a little interested. He leered. She pulled his lead.
"I want it sawn-off."
The Stick-man paled and eyed the passing crowds nervously. He swallowed like a big scared frog and gulped out,
"Jeez, lady, don't tell the world, you'll get my licence revoked. Sawn-off? You know what that means?"
"Yeah, you might make a sale," she shot back, quicker than a hen off a nest.
"OK, OK, sawn-off it is, but keep it down."
"Deal. I'll pay cash," she said. "Don't trust electronic card machines. They never work anyhow."
I followed her as she trotted out of the market. It was raining and the pavements were wet and we had a long walk in front of us.
"Danged if he hasn't cut it too long," she said,
I winced in anticipation, but she smiled.
"Hey, never mind, Mo. I think you've earned a cup of coffee. I'll buy."
I nodded my head. I knew it was not the time to say a word.

No country for old (wo)men

2010-10-31T10:38:00.012Z

Time for an entry to the blog, after another very long pause.

It is very inconvenient when you lose a bespoke walking-stick. Even if losing things is something that you are very good at. And so, when I heard that my wife's mother (call her Dorothy) had lost hers, and being a dutiful son-in-law, I offered to take her to buy a replacement. She had, after all, gone to the trouble of finding out that her local supplier of such things no longer stocked "her brand", but that a similar establishment in a different, though nearby, part of the city, did.
I duly picked up Dorothy on the appointed morning, and drove her to Canton. Don't be alarmed, it was not a long journey, for that is merely the name of the suburb where the stick-purveyor was to be found. Thinking about it for a moment, though, and with the undoubted benefit of hind-sight, the whole coming experience was to resemble being press-ganged or Shanghaied.
I parked the car in the spacious and usefully sign-posted "Customer's car park" a little nervously. There was another car already standing in a space and, if its driver was, in fact, a customer, then, morally at least, I would be double-parked.
There was a back entrance to the shop from the car park. It was a small, battered metal door with one of those fish-eye peepholes that you encounter in a certain sort of hotel. There was a bell-push. A sign told us to "Push for assistance". I pushed. I am an aficionado of the kind of film where pushing a bell like that triggers a long period in which one hears, ever more clearly, a limping tread and a dragging foot that herald the approach of a hooded and hump-backed Igor. And so I stepped well back. Dorothy, who does not watch films, has no such prejudices, and so she held her ground close to the door. This was a little unfortunate because it opened outwards and so, for a moment, she disappeared from view and I was left to face the denizen of the shop alone. Hooded and hunch-backed only metaphorically, it was a female, and she eyed me, an apparently healthy middle-aged man, with suspicion. I hastily reached my wife's mother out from behind the door and stood behind her, beaming as conciliatory a smile as I could muster, and pushed her forward.
"She wants a stick." I said.
"Indeed." the female snorted. "This way."
And she melted into the darkness of the shop.
It smelled a little damp inside, and the carpeted floor felt unaccountably "sticky" as we walked along a short corridor into the showroom. Here, in a large, low-ceilinged chamber, all manner of "living-aids" were ranged about, displayed on walls and shelves and on the dubious floor itself.
Some I recognised: wheelchairs, powered and otherwise; walking-frames; commodes; and bathroom aids. Others were strange to me, and I kept close to Dorothy for fear of them. On one shelf, soft bundles, faintly phosphorescent, and reminiscent of fungoid growths, bore the inscription "Foam Ring Cushions". Nearby, "Luxury Stocking Aids" cunningly twisted into a chthonic tower, of unfamiliar and nauseous geometry, cast an eldritch shadow in the wan light of the shop's fluorescent fittings.
The sticks, such as they were, cowered in a corner, far from the light, and the denizen, smiling at the prospect of a conquest, waved her hand expansively,
"Many sticks. Choose."
My wife's mother, as I've said, is not party to the protocols of the horror and mystery genres and, unaffected by that which she could not, therefore, perceive, dealt the "assistant" a blow that was as effective as a crucifix in a crypt,
"Which are the cheapest ones?" she asked.
There followed an extended cosmic battle between the forces of light and reason and the armies of chaos. I merely watched, trembling, as the "Igor" fawned over the qualities of the most expensively crafted sticks on the stand.
"Look," she said, "how they fold. See, see the pretty flowers on the stock."
"Too heavy," Dorothy snapped back.
"Feel the handle, it is orthopaedic."
With a delight that was not quite healthy, the denizen stroked a horrid, weirdly carved lump atop one of the sticks.
"I want a simple handle," my wife's mother countered, "and, besides, they're all too tall."
The denizen winced, and cast a sideways glance towards the till.
"Can you cut them to size? The man who sold me my last one could."
The Igor ket out a strangled,
"N-no."
Defeat.
The denizen betrayed it in every gesture. One shoulder raised higher than the other, an eye twitching, she acknowledged the greater skill of her adversary and led us to the door regretfully.
As we approached it, I heard a malicious giggle and then,
"I know a man who sells sticks. In the market, in the CENTRE of the town. He might help."
Snatching meagre comfort from abject defeat, the female leered in my direction and, as she heard Drothy ask, rhetorically, "Will you be able to park near the market?", she smiled and closed the door upon us.

2008-05-28T18:05:00.005+01:00

Much water has flowed under many bridges since the beginning of this blog in 2006. Then, the blog title was a warcry (albeit pinched from Bruce Robinson)
"We live in a kingdom of rains ... where royalty comes in gangs. Come on, lads. Let's get home. The sky is beginning to bruise. Night must fall, and we shall be forced to camp."
Now, though, we really do live in a kingdom of rains. We're back in Wales and learning to love the wet. Wales, too, has changed. We have a degree of autonomy; a parliament; a civil service. But you don't just pick up a hat and become a cowboy. Our little government has got the big picture alright but the details are very hazy indeed. Two baby blue-tits appeared outside our house today, in the pouring rain. Out of the nest early, they tried hard to fly, but the rain beat them back, so instead they made a lot of noise and their parents scooted to and fro feeding them grubs and watching out for cats. I put out a flowerpot for the fledglings to shelter in, but they preferred to get wet. Silly birds. Eventually, fed up with their ineffectual peep-peep-peeping, I picked them up and hid them in the hedge across the road. I'm sure they are just as noisy over there, but now only their parents have to listen.

And on the second day

2007-08-16T21:48:00.000+01:00

Surprisingly, we were not totally unable to function on the morning following the wedding. Faith and I were up first, and we had our breakfast outside the hotel in the sunshine, surrounded by the Sunday crowd of bikers and motorcyclists. Once again, the atmosphere was one of friendliness and back-slapping. The girls joined us as they surfaced and eventually we got ourselves together and headed back down the hill towards Arsicci where, today, the Manentes are hosting a carnival - a gathering of all the families, on home ground.
It is a fine affair. There are tables set in the sun and the shade, there is abundant food and drink and everyone is comfortable. As the day progresses, friendships occur and gentle teasing takes place. There is time to talk, to eat, to go for walks, to swim. As the night draws on, we five eventually return to the hotel where faith and I have a nightcap and the girls decide to stay up just a little later ...

Anghiari and afterwards

2007-07-15T18:23:00.000+01:00

The wedding ceremony itself is an informal and a good-humoured affair, set in a mediaeval (I'm having to use that word a lot!) chamber upstairs in the town hall. As we enter, the string trio, Helen and Dan's friends, are playing, and there's the customary confusion about who sits next to whom, whether we leave the front row empty and, "Whose idea was it to wear THAT hat?" The bridesmaids look more nervous than the bride and groom, and Fabio and Alun most nervous of all. The mayor, with a dashing red, green and white sash across his chest, conducts the business smartly in Italian, and Fabio provides a running translation into English. They make a good double-act, and I get the distinct impression that the Mayor is milking it for all he's worth, while Fabio does a good line in patter at his side; he two of them laugh and quip as the proceedings move on. The vows are given in Italian, and taken in English, the two mothers give readings, Sue's is from Louis de Berniere, while Sian reads a poem that she's written for the day (I notice a lot of Middle Earth imagery, which Helen loves). When, at last, the first married kiss comes, the Mayor has a wide grin, Fabio and he shake hands, and there,s general happiness all around. It's outside now, for photographs and posing and more chatter, before parading back up the hill and onto the coach for .... Castello di Sorci and the wedding meal. By now, it's warm early evening and in the courtyard there are two rows of beautifully set tables just waiting for our attention. The meal is gargantuan but, thankfully, staged into many courses, and there's plenty of wine to keep the conversation flowing. Just for the record, we ate: cold meats, gnocchi, soup, pasta, steak, duck, chicken, sausages, salad, sweet cake, wedding cake .... and fruit salad. By 11:00 p.m. we are enjoying happyand wide-ranging conversation (though I doubt if any of us can remember now what we are talking about), and at midnight Helen and Dan begin the dancing, to a Shostakovich waltz ..... and after that, it's every man for himself!

Arsicci

2007-07-14T10:46:00.001+01:00

Saturday is the day of Helen and Dan's wedding, but we don't need to hurry because the ceremony isn't until 5:00p.m.. So, we decide on a leisurely breakfast downstairs in the bar. It's buzzing now, with cyclists and motorcyclists. We have discovered that the hotel is well known anong the alpine touring cogniscenti as a stop-over on the Passo di Viamaggio. There are thin, wiry, bright-lycra painted cycle-fiends, mincing around in their strange pedal-gripping shoes that make them walk like storks. Around them are the motorcyclists; leather-clad, wild-eyed, rakish and oozing a miasma of testosterone. But the bonhommie, as well as the hormones, is palpable. There's a lot of laughing, hugging, joking, comparing of machines and careful assessment of cool. We settle happily on an inside table, munching panini of local cheese and ham. Outside the bikes roar by occasionally, the people chatter, cicada whirr and the sky is blue. We spend the rest of the morning doing not much else than sitting outside watching and enjoying.
By early afternoon, though, it's time to make the short drive over the pass and down the narrow road to Arsicci, where the rest of the families are staying. The Manentes have a villa here and the Williamses have rented two villas in the same tiny village - an interesting Ibero-Gallic melange results. The road down to Arsicci is lovely. We're driving through mountain pastures heavy with wild flowers and there are white alpine cows, a local breed (one of whose friends Faith and I had eaten the night before). I'm still cautious in the hire car as we nose around the tight bends on the single track road and so, when I see Arsicci it's a sudden surprise. On a left turn, there's a small group of houses, very reminiscent of the buildings in Languedoc - local stone, ochre roof tiles, old sun-dried wood. This was a village once, but now it's a cluster of second homes. Off the road, they all open onto what was once the small village square. There is shade, birdsong, sunlight, and white ribbons tied on the fences of gates in anticipation of the wedding. The Manentes are occupying their own villa; my mother, Auntie Joyce (her sister) and Margaret (a friend of the Manentes') have a small house at the end of a row that was once a nunnery and, later, the village school; the rest of the Williams clan - and other attendants - are lodged in Fattoria di Arsicci, an enormous, seven bedroomed house that had belonged to the landowner in the days when this was an agricultural settlement. The Fattoria is impressive. It swallows up the 15 or so people who are staying there, without any trouble at all, and hides them away among its reading room, bedrooms, cool patios, games room, arboretum and garden. We take our places with the melee who are preparing themselves for 3:30 p.m., when a coach will come to carry us off to Anghiari and the wedding. The hairdresser is here, set up in a laundry room, coiffuring bride, bridesmaids and others, there is last-minute pressing and ironing, cleaning of infants, panic over speeches, worries about Dan's older brother, who has become ill and won't now be able to attend the wedding, confusion as I spend two minutes talking to Dan's twin, Marco, under the impression that I'm talking to Dan. When the coach arrives outside, Fabio, Dan's father takes over. Suddenly he's become a drover! He shoos and cajoles and begs, but we are like cats and won't be herded, until he warns that others are waiting to join us in Anghiari. With counting and double-counting and a final cheer, we crawl off down the mountain towards the town. Fabio is sitting by me. I discover that he's not from this part of Italy, but from Venice. He bought the villa a couple of years ago and has been renovating it. He's obviously proud of becoming part of this area, though, and gives a running commentary about the landscape and the history until we are close to Anghiari, which now speaks for itself, and silences all of us with its beauty.
Walking down the hill from the piazza at the top of the hill, to the town hall, we make a procession that must have been repeated many times before. Our bouquets and suits, tiaras and gowns weave among the gabled houses and the steep, paved street. A few local people are sitting in their doorways, under awnings or in tiny gardens; there are some smiles and waves, and then we are outside the town hall and waiting for the bride to arrive! We talk in small groups, ogle the views, chatter and wait, but it isn't for long. Onlookers gather, we can hear the string trio warming up inside and Fabio, who's going to have to translate the Italian wedding ceremony into English, so that we visitors can follow it, is in conversation with the mayor, who's just arrived. There's a hush and an appreciative sigh and suddenly, Helen is here. She's welcomed by Marco, now the Best Man, who steals a kiss, and then, not needing to be ushered this time, we all move indoors.

Hotel Imperatore

2007-07-13T20:59:00.000+01:00

And so, here we are, at the end of a day's driving. The scenery is not what I'd imagined, We're 1000 m above sea-level, there are cows and cowbells, alpine pastures. And here's our hotel; the Imperatore, at the top of the Passo Viamaggio. There are a few powerful motorcycles outside, and we park our touristique hire-car among them. Inside the old hotel, all is wooden. There's a small counter, the inevitable postcard stand, hints of a restaurant behind, and a large display of cheese and hams at the far end of the room. No-one speaks English, but we launch in, "Familie Williams" we announce. "Ah si! Due camera - uno per due, e uno per tre." I may not have spelled the Italian correctly, or captured the grammar, but the gist is there. We hand over our passports for registration, and, as the girls are signed in, there's a smile and a question, "Tre gemella?". "Three twins?" I think. But Elen, Bethan and Rhiannon are ready for this, and smile. "Si," they say and, to us, "We've got used to this. There's no Italian word for 'triplets' so they say 'three twins'". We're led up two floors to our rooms - delightfully old-fashioned, with big beds and massy furniture. It's wonderful. A little later we come down and order beers, sitting outside to enjoy the late evening sunshine on the meadows. This is so like earlier holidays, when we've all been together in places like Braunwald or Roquebrun or the Algonquin. These occasions fill me with nostalgia, and I don't mind admitting to it. They're rosy and poignant; very romantic. It's a heady mix and, tasted all the more infrequently now, intoxicating. Eventually, as the light fades, we go inside to eat. A light meal, we think, but, oh dear, it doesn't turn out that way. The hotel specialises in MOUNTAIN FOOD. There's pasta, gnocchi and mounds of meat from the wood fire outside. The girls enjoy the pasta and salads and cheese. Faith and I tuck into smoky-tasting roasted meats, too. There's local wine, too, and grappa to finish. Around midnight, we amble contendedly to our beds but, as we're about to settle in, I open our window and look outside into the mountain darkness. There, in the black, tiny lights are dancing. We call the girls in to see, and our first day ends with fireflies.

Pisa, anyone?

2007-07-12T17:55:00.000+01:00

The Leaning Tower of Pisa isn't easy to see when your eyes are glued to side and rear mirrors in a desperate attempt to avoid collision with the motor-scooter riders who cut in from left and right. We had picked up our hire car - a wide, high, left-hand drive Lancia - moments before, and now here we were, tired after leaving home in Wales 6 hours earlier, at 5:00 a.m., weaving through the Italian traffic. We circled the Campo dei Miracolo - clockwise and anti-clockwise - drove past it and around it, but failed to close in. Faith barked desperate directions; Mel just barked. Suddenly, and unexpectedly, we were driving OUT of the city. Never mind, the tower would have to wait; we were on our way towards Arezzo, at last, to pick up the girls .... weren't we? Well, no, we were on our way towards Lucca, north instead of east! I won't share the scene that followed. Enough to say that we eventually glimpsed the tower from the city's ring-road, and began to talk to each other once more soon after we found the road to Florence and, by extrapolation, Arezzo. before all of this peregrinatory drama, though, we had arrived safely in Pisa International Airport, walked smartly off the plane and out into the terminal, because, for once we were travelling with cabin baggage only. We needed coffee, and so, while Faith found a table in the morning sun, Mel went off in search of sustenance. Buying coffee and pastries was a curious experience. I eventually deduced that you couldn't buy your wares from the pastry counter and the coffee bar, but had to go across the hall to the confectionery stand. There you place your order, paid and received a receipt. Taking this back across the hall, you jostled the other voyagers, waving the receipt, and, when you got to the front, placed your order. I swear that I walked between the two counters five times, memorising my order in Italian. At least I tried, unlike the woman in front of me who said to the classy young girl serving her, "No dear, I don't want tomato, Jessica doesn't like it. No, No. You don't understand, no tomato, please take it out. What? No. No tomato." She eventually bleated, "Oh never mind, leave it in, I'll give it to my husband." But by that time the girl had pointedly dropped the panini and turned away, to serve another customer.
We sat in the sunshine, munching our pastries and sipping our coffee, while the varied inhabitants of the airport milled around us. Many were overseas travellers like ourselves, but there was a good smattering of Italians, too, because the terrace opened out onto the town as well as in to the airport. We looked and listened; yes, the Italians were every bit as stylish and as voluble as we'd thought they'd be. The airport is a small one, with grassy waiting areas and "art", and many people were enjoying a mid-morning break.
By the time we drove into Arezzo, I'd begun to get the feel of the car and, parked safely behind the railway station, we left it to mee tup with the girls, who'd arrived in Italy the week before, to do some travelling on their own. We stood on a piazza and phoned them up. "We can see you"" they said and, in a few minutes, there they were, three seasoned voyagers by now, coming to meet us. We stayed long enough to buy some lunch and to talk about their visit to Florence. They'd even managed to buy a very nostalgic souvenir - a little bottle-stopper with a Pinocchio head on it. Very tacky, you might say, but Pinocchio had played an important in our earlier travels together, often protesting loudly from the luggage, or from the car boot, if he was neglected. It was good to see him, and he, too, was happy to be home ... he told us so!

Travelling without moving ...

2006-09-10T14:07:00.000+01:00

Around six hours ago we left George and Maryam at the domestic terminal in Perth while we headed for International Departures. Now we're in Singapore! We flew over the site of the wreck of the Batavia and, what's more, the route that the beleagured captain would have sailed in his open boat to Jakarta, where he raised the alarm - it was all open, blue sea.

As we approach home, it's beginning to sink in ... this has been quite an experience ... in all sorts of ways. As we stepped off the plane in Singapore, for example, there was the unmistakeable, warm, earthy smell of the rainforest; Before now, I couldn't have used the word "unmistakeable" to describe it, and close on its heels came a host of other sensations: recollectoins of Khao Sok arising from the smell itself, and of the desert in places like Uluru and mount Magnet, arising from the contrast between this damp smell and the dry, flinty air of that place.

There's much left to describe - the desert, our trip to Adelaide from Alice, the meal with the momks in New Norcia ... please keep watching!

U3AHA?

2006-09-07T13:31:00.000+01:00

Down in the deep south of WA we've stayed in a couple of youth"hostels". The truth is, though, that while these are still hostels, they no longer serving the younger voters. Although the hostels are perfectly adequate and comfortable, the buildings are old, and often have cold, distant ablutions rather than the en suite or close proximity suites that the modern young traveller craves. By staying in some of these places, our little group has succeeded in reducing the average age of the hostellers by a significant amount. Nevertheless, they're good value (the hostels), and we're continuing our travels and adventures.

The weather down here (we're in Walpole, near Albany on the south coast of WA) is decidedly raw, and we've been put off snorkelling by that and the many "blue bottles" in the water. Undaunted, we've taken to the forests, and spent much of this morning 40 m above the ground among the tingle-tree canopy. Here we saw black cockatoos and parrakeets while the walkway swayed alarmingly in the breeze. Sea-sickness isn't confined to sailors!

Evenings are spent playing pool (George and Maryam are surprisingly good) or trying to find restaurants that are still open for business later than 7:30 p.m. , and yesterday George surprised us all by eating a wobbegong - or at least part of one - in a local restaurant.

There are only a few days left before we fly home, and so we plan to make our way back up to Perth tomorrow and the day after, possibly taking in Busselton en route.

The beautiful south

2006-09-03T13:22:00.000+01:00

It's 8:00 pm and we've just finished supper in the New Norcia monastery guest refectory; the only sound is a small bell ringing outside in the darkness, and this probably means that the monks have finished mass. At 8:00 pm last night "Bad to the Bone" was thumping through the Mount Magnet Hotel as the four of us played pool in the bar at the Mount Magnet Hotel; it was quieter than the previous night, when a fight started because because the bar staff wouldn't serve an under- age aboriginal girl (though her family were in the hotel the following morning, and a full reconciliation seemed to be going on). Mount Magnet is less than 400 km from New Norcia, but a world away!

We left Denham (Shark Bay) and the sea on Thursday, to drive down the west coast as far as Geraldton, and then to turn east and inland. On our last day in Denham we found a very well-recommended beach for snorkelling, Eagle Bluff. We hadn't been in the water long, though, before we met up with two sea-snakes. Now, all the guide-books tell you that they're not aggressive, just curious, "they will even lick a diver's face-mask" and may wrap themselves around your arm or leg in a friendly hug. The guides also say that they VERY rarely bite, and even then, may not inject venom. The trouble is that their venom is extremely potent, and so we decided to leave the water "with some expedition, and a little fluttered". After we'd dressed we walked up to the top of the cliff to watch the sharks swimming around a bit further out from the shore, and felt much safer.

The drive south was uneventful, until we reached Northampton, where Maryam discovered that the backpackers' hostel is an ex-convent. There was no going further - we had to spend the night. And so the four of us shared the big old building (which still has crosses etched into the glass above each bedroom) with Rowland, an itinerant artist from Fremantle, who was on a painting expedition aboard his Hell's Angel style motor cycle.

The next day we headed on to Geraldton and then turned east for Mount Magnet. By this time, we'd discovered Monsignor Hawes, a Roman Catholic priest who built eccentric churches in the outback, and we saw his handiwork in Geraldton, Northampton, Mullewa and Yalgoo! By mid afternoon we'd arrived at Mount Magnet. It's a remote gold-mining town in the depths of the desert, but one of the friendliest places we've found. We met and talked to all kinds of people here, including, for the first time, aboriginals. After our first night, we decided to stay an extra day to explore the area, which included an abandoned town-site, hills and caves in the desert, aboriginal art inside a hollow rock and lonely graves out in the mulga-scrub. Very poignant.

We left Mount Magnet this morning reluctantly, getting a friendly send-off from the hotel owner - who made us bacon and eggs to see us on our way - and the volunteer lady that we'd talked to in the tourist information office (the old tin shed where the town ambulance used to be kept) the day before. Driving south again, we passed through Payne's Find and finally left the red-ochre desert behind us to enter the green, gentler, wheat belt. Suddenly roads were busier and less straight, fellow drivers didn't wave back any more and the little towns along the way didn't look as frayed as they did earlier in the day. New Norcia greeted us with grand church buildings, imposing monastic archiecture and fine trees. It's left us feeling a little displaced; comfortable, yes, but hankering a little for the red dust and the big smile that you get in a rough and ready desert town that doesn't see many visitors and so wants to make them as feel as much at home as it possibly can.

(By the way, I'm sorry there are no links or pics in this post. It's a free connection, but it'll only handle one internet site at a time, so I can't search for sites.)

Shark Bay WA ... harrrrrr!

2006-08-30T03:18:00.000+01:00

"Treat Tiger Sharks with great respect" it says on the information board just outside the internet cafe in Denham, where I'm posting this entry. As if anyone needs telling. Actually, we haven't seen one yet, but a bottle-nosed dolphin did surprise George while we snorkelling off the beach at Monkey Mia yesterday afternoon! It swam between him and me, though I didn't see it. George swallowed a great mouthful of saltwater in his surprise!

We joined up with george and maryam as planned in perth and we've driven here via Bagingarra, Billabong and Geraldton. People here on the mid west coast live life at a fairly slow pace, and it revolves around fishing, it seems. Also the night-life is limited. We went out to watch people catching squid on the jetty last night and, in doing so, seem to have missed a community "singing circle" that happened in the hall. A lady has just come in and said to the attendant here,
"There were 10 of us! And we sang mostly the old songs. Next week may have some dancing, too."
So you see, it may be worth us staying here a little longer.

Oh, by the way, I haven't forgotten about Uluru, but time presses.

Katatjuta

2006-08-25T11:33:00.000+01:00

When we arrived at Katatjuta it was mid-morning. This was a good thing. Many tourist companies bus people in to see daybreak at Uluru and Katatjuta. They were leaving as we arrived. and so we had the fortunate experience of walking for several kilometres in the mountain and desert almost alone. There are sacred Aboriginal places in the Katatjuta mountains, but, unlike Uluru, where the path goes close to them, here it stays well away and they don't tell you where they are, or anything about their story. What I CAN report is that Katatjuta is a very beautiful place. The rock here is red sandstone, weathered into domes; where the rainwater runs off the surface, wet gullies and flushes allow plants to grow, so imagine red rock and occasional green smears and smudges. Deeper in there is water; we found a waterfall trickling over a rock slab, small waterholes and a trickle of a brook, with dragonflies and kingfishers. the most noticeable sound is the birds (tzee tzee of Zebra finches wherever there is any moisture to be had, whistling of the honeyeaters, echoing scream of desert hawks) and the wind that blows gently and constantly through the valley. When we walked out onto the desert (which is scrubby, not bare sand), we saw camel tracks and spotted our first reptile, a tiny dragon sunning itself on a rock. By mid afternoon we were emerging again into the carpark, and evening visits were arriving ....
.. later the same evening, at the Yulara camp site, we watched from a distance as the sun set on Uluru, and then watched the stars in the darkness.

Meanwhile in Cervantes, we've explored Mount Leseur National Park - more than 800 different species of plant exist here, the diversity is similar to raiforests, but this in Mediterranean heath. It is a remote area, only recently opened up for visits, and the walking is really exciting. In the late afternoon we went snorkelling at Dynamite Bay. The visibilty wasn't great - too much sand and seaweed, but we saw sponges, tubeworms, a toadfish and many violet crabs. It's raining tonight.

Now, where were we?

2006-08-24T10:59:00.000+01:00

Yesterday, we picked up a hire car from the nice man at AVIS in Perth, and drove around 350 km northwards to Cervantes. It's a cray-fishing settlement that has a very good hostel (we've now discovered), wonderful beaches, very few people and the Pinnacles Desert! In the evening we wandered among the scattered limestone pillars as the sun sank into the Indian Ocean. We saw kangaroo and emu tracks in the sand and a celebrity chef being filmed cooking a meal on location(a dessert I presume, sa Molesworth, hem, hem!). We ate in the local tavern, discussed religion with a local and walked back along the beach in the dark. We saw the Magellanic clouds VERY CLEARLY, and the best shooting star I've ever seen - visible for at least 5 seconds, falling from NW to SE. Today we've swum, (almost, with a wild sea-lion - it appeared in the water where we'd been just a moment before; I don't know who was more surprised, it or us), explored a huge sand dune complex, seen two blue-tongues and visited Lake Thetis with its STROMATOLITES. What a day. We're staying here for another two nights, and we're off to look for stingrays in the light of the jetty tonight.

But what's happening as you drive to Uluru, I hear you cry. Fear not, the story unfolds ....
It's truewhat they say about driving in the desert, all the drivers wave to one another - well you never know when you might need to be remembered! We rattled along to Erldunda at a great turn of speed and managed to pick up petrol and beer there (both essential over the next few days). We also wondered at the Giant Echidna that was safely caged up outside. The, a right turn, and on to Curtin Springs! The road is edged by red, red desert and plants that are either irridescently green or luminously glaucous. It's a ravishing combination with the blue sky above. We weren't taken in by Mount Connor, which many mistake for Uluru as they approach, but it did signal that we were close to our overnight camping place. There's motel-style accommodation at Curtin Springs, and a restaurant, too, but we chose to use their free camping space (2$ for a hot shower, placed in an honesty box). So we pulled in among the few 4WDs, the caravans and the tents and slept soundly till morning.....

Red kangaroo and red centre

2006-08-22T11:54:00.000+01:00

Although I'm writing this entry in the YHA in Perth (a quite grand ex St John's Ambulance HQ), it's the time in the centre that i want to continue with (or I'll forget). For now though, just let me say that sleeping horizontally tonight is something that i'm looking forward to a lot after two nights attempting to sleep on a "red kangaroo day-nighter seat" that must have been designed by an engineer with the bodily proportions of a mountain gorilla - too short in the leg and too long in the torso!

... back to Alice Springs.

We spent the afternoon exploring the town - mainly the centre (Todd Mall) and Anzac Hill. As the shoppers disappeared from the mall, aboriginals stayed behind and some began selling small pieces of art, or asking for money to buy food,
"Brother and sister, help me with 5 dollars for some food."
We handed over some money to the middle-aged couple sitting on the edge of the walkway. The man's speech was slurred, but the woman quickly took the cash and said, "That's good, that's 'nuff to buy flour and meat. I'm gonna get a kangaroo tail with that."
As the sun set we walked up Anzac Hill, the memorial to the Australian fallen in the 20th century wars. There's a good view from there; out over the twon to the MacDonells and the desert. The place is doubly poignant because the hill is also a significant site in the local Aboriginal dreaming stories. ust for completeness, the local Macdonalds now stands guard over the Dog Rock, on of the most sacred Aboriginal landmarks in the area.
We walked back along the Todd River bank to the hostel in the gathering darkness. All through the stands of gum trees small groups of Aboriginals were sitting around fires, or wandering between them. They were noisy, and called to each other aggressively, but we'd been told that this was nothing to be too worried about so we carried on. There was probably a lot of drinking going on (and petrol-sniffing is a problem, too), but we weren't close enough to find out. The voices and smoke in the darkness were evocative, though. No point of contact seemed to exist between us and them. The groups that noticed us ignored us; individuals walking past either did the same or veered away. A strange and unsettling experience, but, like Bill Bryson, we found that when we got back to our own concerns - in our case joining in the barbecue at the hostel - the Aboriginals faded away.

The following day we collected our campervan and headed out for the desert!

The plan: drive south to Curtin Springs and camp there overnight; next day go on to Kata Tjuta (the Olgas) and then camp at Yulara to visit Uluru (Ayers Rock) the next day; camp in the desert somewhere between Yulara and Erldunda; return to Alice Springs briefly before driving out to the East Macdonnells to camp at Trephina Gorge for a night; return the campervan.

Driving off southwards down the Stuart Highway, we soon left the township behind. Next stop would be to re-fuel at Erldunda, 225 km south, and then a right turn along the Lasseter Highway for Curtin Springs.

Introducing Alice

2006-08-20T03:28:00.000+01:00

Alice Springs is everything and nothing. It's everything that you've read it will be, and nothing like you expect!
First impressions are always dangerous, but the airport is a spic and span bush airstrip, gone modern; a brightpiece of shiny chrome and glass air-conditioned technology planted in an awful lot of red ochre emptiness. It was fresh and friendlyand, after our walk across the sunny tarmac, we were picked up quickly and efficiently by the bouncy girl from Toddy's Backpacker Resort.
"Throw your luggage in the trailer, guys, it's all open over there," she said, "I'll be along in a jiffy, no worries." So we did, and she was.
There were a few other people on the bus - a group of three backpackers, two girls and a boy, comparing travel in a mixture of Spanish and English, a pair of Asian girls and a lone, quiet middle-aged woman traveller wearing a straw hat held on by a scarf. We talked to one another a little, but mainly as acknowledgement that we were all in the same bus, and anyway, the driver was giving us snippets of local information as we rolled along.
"Not much to see on this stretch of road, guys."
"This is Heavitree Gap, guys," pointing to the break in the hills where the road ran into town, "used to be that Aboriginal law only allowed men to come into town through here; women had to walk to a gap 7 km further around. Tough for the women, eh guys!"
"That sandy track's the Todd River, guys. It's full of water, guys, but you can't see it 'cos up here Mother Nature's been kinda clever, guys, and made the rivers upside down so the river bed protects the water from the heat. Neat, eh."
This phenomenon of tour guides and drivers using the word "guys" addressed to males and females during any kind of organised delivery or instructions is ubiquitous. It's interesting, though, that once you're talking to them on a one-to-one basis, it doesn't happen any more. Must be part of the uniform, along with the beanie and the khaki cargo pants.
The lone woman traveller was dropped off at the up-market Desert Palms resort while we trundled on to Toddy's on the other side of town. It's a big, friendly concern - something like Hotel Ali in Marrakech - dorms, double rooms, family suites, plenty of open areas, and lots of help to book on tours and spend your tourist-dollar! We left our rucksacs in our neat and tidy room and set off to eplore ...The Alice.
It's not a beautiful town. Functional describes it better. Mainly single-storey buildings line wide, sealed roads that intersect at right-angles to one another. There's a tired, run down atmosphere on much of the main drag and business is obviously not good for all of the entrepreneurs who've tried to ride on the back of the town's iconic image for tourists and travellers. Vacant units are scattered throughout the shopping areas. What is impressive, though, is the setting. The town sits in a huge shallow basin, with the MacDonnell Ranges running east to west and the Stuart Highway north to south. Heavitree Gap is the only way through the MacDonnells, to the south, and it's this gap that the road uses. What our driver hadn't told us is that the gap played an important in the local Arrernte people dreaming stories a long time before the town arrived. Men's business was carried out there, and that was why the women kept away.
Here, in Alice Springs we found Aboriginal people in evidence for the first time. If you read "Down Under" by Bill Bryson, you'll find a very accurate description. Some move through the streets as though they inhabit a different space from the white Australians and the visitors. Some are drunk or intoxicated on other substances than alcohol. Sometimes battered, they congregate in groups on corners and greens, or sit and talk loudly in family groups as shoppers and sightseers flow around them.
(more later)

From Orange to Red Ochre

2006-08-18T00:46:00.000+01:00

The road from Forbes to Orange is isolated and winding, and passes through the little township of Eugowra. It was near here that the Gardiner Gang (including Ben Hall) held up the gold escort coach and made of with the loot. We wandered off the modern road and managed to find the remains of the old trackway, where we could still see ruts made in the rocky surface by wagons. There, below a bluff covered with boulders and gun trees, we found Escort Rock, the spot where the hold-up took place! On to Orange, famous for wines and Banjo Paterson. It was dusk when we arrived there and so there was nothing much else to do but book into the Parkview Hotel and enjoy an unfeasibly large supper. And so we arrived back in Sydney the next day ... to find, in due time, that our departure for the Red Centre was one day earlier than we'd remembered! The next stage of our journey, by air to Alice Springs, and then in a BRITZ campervan to the desert follows asap!

I'm actually writing this (real-time) in Kangaroo Island. Yes, that's how far behind I am with the blog. Here we've seen seals, sea lions, koalas, wallabies and many fairy penguins. Last night, judging by the footprints, they tried to hijack our car from outside our room at the Penneshaw YHA - they certainly serenaded us to sleep, and awake, and to sleep ... all night!!

Listen, time passes.

2006-08-13T13:55:00.000+01:00

Here we are in Adelaide, weeks after the last blog entry, winding down after a hard day's wine tasting in the Barossa valley! Not only that, we've spent a gorgeous weekend on a houseboat on the Murray River, stroked a possum's tail and watched SouthernRight Whales lolling 50 metres offshore with their calves. All this thanks to the hospitality of family that we've hardly met over the years but who are, nevertheless, welcoming us into their homes and treating us like the closest of friends. But, I hear you say, "You're my eyes and ears there, what's happened, give me details." Well, dear reader (if indeed anyone still bothers to log on to this sadly neglected site), it's been thrills and spills all the way.
Let me enlarge ...

The Streets of Forbes.
Forbes is a small town in New South Wales, not a million miles away from Parkes where the famous radio telescope is housed. People in Parkes will tell you that Forbes is a rough sort of town, the kind of place that your in-laws might come from, but not a place to be born in yourself. I'll have none of that. Forbes is a fine place that deserves at least one whole day of any traveller's time. We started at the tourist information office where we were able to pick up plenty of information about Ben Hall(of whom more in a moment) and also some of the more interesting souvenirs that I've found since we've been here. For example, the women's institute here seem to turn out not only the usual woollen dolls, painted plant pots and padded clothes hangers, they also have a sideline of very tasteful dinky lingerie bags decorated with applique Victorian foundation wear. We bought one and were mightily delighted. Across the way from the tourist information centre is the Forbes Olympic Swimming Pool. Sadly, this fine facility was closed and so we made our way directly to the cemetery, a mile or so out of town, where we found the graves of Ned Kelly's sister, Captain Cook's great great grandniece and Ben Hall. A walk back into town took us past the Gaggin Oval (we'd seen the Gaggin graves in the cemetery, incidentally) and the to the splendidly veranda'd Albion Hotelwhere we had lunch. As we ate, the police surrounded the table next to us and quizzed the man sitting there. As they walked away he muttered, "You'll never take me alive!", but they heard him and told him that if he didn't come to the station with some haste, he'd be in trouble! A notice told us that the Albion Hotel was the venue for a Hall family gathering some years ago; still some of them around by the sound of things. The Forbes museum is a magpie's nest of all sorts of memorabilia and bric-a-brac, housed in the old town theatre (the bordello actually, so the curator told us). Here we found a display about Ben Hall, a collecion of Victorian ladies' underwear, a piece of a space vehicle that had landed in a local garden and a photo of Mrs Onions, one of the earliest female settlers of the Lachlan River hereabouts and not a woman you'd like to cross. Back at the car park outside the visitors' centre there's a wishing well that seemed to make the final statement about the legacy of Ben Hall in the town. A notice said, "Due to constant thieving, please make a wish at the store across the the road."
So then, who is this Ben Hall?
What better way to tell the story than in song:
Come all you Lachlan men and a sorrowful tale I'll tell,
The story of a decent man who through misfortune fell,
His name it was Ben Hall, a man of high renown,
Who was hunted from his station, and was like a dog shot down.
For years he roamed the roads, and he showed the traps some fun,
One thousand pounds was on his head, with Gilbert and John Dunn.
Ben parted from his comrades, the outlaws did agree,
To give away bushranging and to cross the briny sea.
Ben went to Goobang Creek, and that was his downfall
For riddled like a sieve was the valiant Ben Hall,
'Twas early in the morning upon the fifth of May
That the seven police surrounded him as fast asleep they lay.
Billy Dargin he was chosen to shoot the outlaw dead,
The troopers then fired madly and they filled him full of lead,
They rolled him in his blanket and strapped him to prad,
And they led him through the streets of Forbes, to show the prize they had.

Tragic stuff, you'll agree!

It's later than you think!

2006-07-25T12:41:00.000+01:00

There was a moment yesterday when a small voice from downstairs said a very expressive word and Faith came running up to announce that our flight to Alice Springs was one day earlier than we'd remembered. The result is that we're here in the Red Centre now instead of .. well, tomorrow. If you want to know more about Alice Springs you'll need to do a search because I'm typing against the clock in a public internet booth with a queue developing behind me. First impressions:
red desert; frontier feel; similarities with Khaosan Road, aboriginal people - on the streets and in the surrounding countryside.
More later, if possible, and I've still got to tell everyone about the TRUE centre of Australia ... Forbes.

Moving seaward silently, at a snail's pace

2006-07-13T01:41:00.000+01:00

I really need to begin this post with a piece of news from the Sydney Weekend Telegraph. It's about a week old, but you might be interested.

"Three strange shapes (pictured here), viewed at Shelly Beach, Manly last weekend, have still to be positively identified. Seemingly human-like, they shocked local residents who were out enjoying the unseasonal winter sunshine.

"At first glance," said Tommo 'Schooner' Riley, veteran sticky-beak, " they looked just like you and me, but when you got closer, Jeez."

This reporter pressed Mister Riley for more information - What were they, mate - mermaids, dragons, ghosts?
"Nothing at all like that, blue," insisted Mr Riley, adding that they seemed to be a queer sort of
mongrel he'd never seen before, not even on TV!
"Not true blue at all," he said.
Despite the growing crowd, nobody who was present is able to agree on a clear description of the creepy creatures, though all agreed that each one was different from the others even though they all moved together.
"Marvellous to look at," said Mrs Kazza Bungle, a Cabbage Tree Bay sunnie entrepreneur.
Asked to describe just one of them, Mrs Bungle's reply was a chilling,
'It's beyond me, darling.'
Others, though, were more forthcoming. Ibrahim Boticelli, proprietor of the nearby Bella Kebab Hot Ice Cream restaurant said,
"It was a Saturday, so there were a lot of people around to see the things. It was warm, too, for July, and business was slow because nobody wants to buy our tasty gelato and red onion pitta-pockets when the sun shines. I remember that the three things moved down the beach slowly - all together, though - and went into the sea, you know, carefully."
When quizzed as to whetheri anybody tried to talk with them, or if the creatures talked among themselves, Mr Boticelli became definite.
No, he said, they didn't talk, but the noises they made were not disturbing, more like muffled squeals, particularly as they moved towards the deeper water."

What do you think?

I'm interested because Faith, George and I went snorkelling in Manly the same weekend and we didn't see anything strange. Maryam stayed on the beach, too, but even she missed the spectacle! Faith's had a lifelong fear of putting her face underwater, so it was a real surprise to turn around and see her paddling about with us. She'd been so thrilled to see fishes swimming about at her feet that she braved all and found that snorkelling is not at all like trying to keep on your feet and in your depth. Now, there's no holding her back. We've had to go on a trip to the Sydney Aquarium to identify what we saw - mostly Gropers, Leatherjackets and Toadfish - and she can't wait to go back to Shelly Beach at least once more before we leave Sydney for the much less marine Alice Springs (though I did suggest that she could try snorkelling in the Todd River).

Our next adventure is an excursion to Parkes to see THE DISH. George has gone on ahead to do his stint searching the sky for pulsars, but he reports that there are lots of dead kangaroos along the road. This is a worry because I've just read the following report on the MSN (Au) website:

SYDNEY, Australia - Forget cute, cuddly marsupials. Paleontologists say they have found the remains of a fanged killer kangaroo and what they describe as a "demon duck of doom."
Professor Michael Archer said Wednesday that the remains of a meat-eating kangaroo with wolflike fangs were found, as well as a galloping kangaroo with long forearms that could not hop like a modern kangaroo.
"Because they didn't hop, these were galloping kangaroos, with big, powerful forelimbs. Some of them had long canines (fangs) like wolves," Archer told Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio.The species found had "well muscled-in teeth, not for grazing. These things had slicing crests that could have crunched through bone and sliced off flesh," Hand said.

The team also found large ducklike birds.

"Very big birds ... more like ducks, earned the name 'demon duck of doom', some at least may have been carnivorous as well," Hand told ABC radio.

Let's hope that the demon ducks and the killer kangaroos fight it out among themselves and leave us timid travellers to slip across the Woop Woop unnoticed.

Finally, the Mexicans have arrived in town, by way of this splendid tall ship here, called Cuautemoc. By chance, we were there to see them tie up and make fast, which they did to rousing Latin American music. Maryam shyly waved at one of the matelots, who was reefing a capstan or splicing a yarn or some such task, and got a flashing smile in return. Since then we've seen groups of the crew wandering about in the city in immaculate nautical uniform and Faith and Maryam have needed to be physically restrained on a number of occasions.

The Long Way Round

2006-07-07T03:59:00.002+01:00

The day before yesterday it took Faith and me four hours to walk to the nearest railway station (in Epping!), a trip that usually takes about half an hour. The reason? We didn't follow the customary route along the road, but took the path through part of the Lane Cove National Park that starts just down the road. It's just one of the fingers of bush that run through the suburbs and extend deep into the city, and it follows the course of a creek - called Terry's Creek, or Devlin's Creek depending on which bit of it you're walking along. To find the path, we went to the end of Vimiera Road (which looks just like it sounds) and passed under the M2 motorway through a grey-painted culvert; there on the other side we were among gum trees and smooth, weather-worn sandstone outcrops. Although we could hear the rumble of the motorway behind us, the most noticeable sounds were the creek below and the squawking cockatoos. A little way in I left the main track to climb onto a boulder for a better view of what was ahead and there, just down the hill, was an echidna! It trundled out from under the low vegetation, crossed the path and waddled off into the rocks and fallen wood on the other side! That sealed our fate, and for the rest of the way, we stopped so often to look around that a man who passed us on his way into Epping passed us on his way back an hour or so later, and we'd covered about 1 km of the 4 km route. We didn't see any more echidnas, but it was obvious that the birds have decided Spring is on the way. Galahs, cockatoos and rainbow lorikeets were paired up and hacking nestholes in the gum trees. Near the end of the track we emerged, unexpectedly, onto a street.
"Can we get to Epping Station from here?" we asked a couple of burly builders who were lightheartedly hurling huge chunks of concrete into a skip.
They looked at each other for a second.
"Yeah, your best bet is to take the track again, mate."
"Thankyou," we said.
"No worries," they answered together, "Whooah but look out, it gets thin!"
We hurried back into the bush to find the thin path.
From Epping we caught the train to the nearest ferry pier (Meadowbank) and so into Circular Quay along the same Parramatta River route that we took with George and Maryam on our first day here. We passed by the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Opera House in a glorious sunset. Cameras were clicking all around, people in shirt-sleeves were eating ice creams and burgers, ibises flew overhead, startlingly white in a blue, blue sky ... and they call this winter! The free local paper this week has an article about how to beat the winter blues, "Sniffles, weight gain, lethargy and depression can all get us down at this time of year," it says, and goes on to encourage readers to start the day with hot porridge, and to eat lots of casseroles. What's more, I've just discovered that the coldest sea temperatures around Sydney match the warmest sea temperatures available in the UK. This is comforting because George and I plan to go snorkelling on Saturday.
So, after the walk around the outside of the Opera House, on through the Botanic Gardens to meet George and Maryam at the Art Gallery. Here we saw a marvellous collection of Japanese art and calligraphy, some grand nineteenth century Australian landscape paintings - just a few of which were painted by artists more used to depicting Dawn in the Dales or Stormy Weather on the Ouse, and who were obviously daunted by trying to capture scenes such as One Cow in 300 square miles of Emptiness and Natives in a Rock Shelter a Very Long Way Off Because I'm a Bit Nervous of Those Sharp Sticks They're Carrying.

The evening ended with the very bizarre experience of eating a Uighur meal in a restaurant in Chinatown. This little adventure whisked us away from Sydney along the Silk Road to the yurts and untamed horsemen of North West China. We drank pots and pots of tea (kok cay) because the restaurant serves no alcohol (being Muslim) and consumed awesome helpings of dishes such as hoxang (dumplings filled savoury meat), uighur polo (rice with lamb), kavab ( grilled lamb on skewers) and nan (onion bread).
Sadly, neither Faith nor Maryam would agree to to entertain us with wild and provocative Uyghurian dancing (see picture) of the kind that George assures us he experienced on trip to China's north west fontier.

Never mind, we're going to a karaoke club with Xiaopeng (one of George's students) next week.

Around the traps in Sydney.

2006-07-05T00:40:00.000+01:00

Odd contradictions abound here, and just as you think you're getting on top of things, something happens that throws out your perspective again. let me give you a few examples.

Imagine a cute, sandy bay, lined with gum trees, palms and very plush houses. The sun is bright, people are on the rocks having picnics, children are paddling in the gentle waves. It's just a mite too cold to swim, but , gosh, you really want to. There's a very prominent sign on the beach that says the waters are polluted after heavy rain and you should wait for 24 hours before bathing; there hasn't been heavy rain for ages, though, and the water is crystal clear. You think, just a quick dip, it would be chilly, but fun. Then you see, out of the corner of your eye, the net that's enclosing a portion of the beach. No-one seems to be paying much attention to it. "What's the net?" you ask. "It keeps the sharks out." WHAT? THERE ARE SHARKS? Nowhere is there a sign saying, "There may be a little pollution sometimes but, hey, never mind, you could get eaten!"

It's winter here (equivalent to January in UK), but the weather is mild, and the skies often bright blue, and there are swallows. However, it gets dark by 5:00 pm and people shuffle about on their way home from work in the dusk wearing scarves and woolly hats while multi-coloured parrots fly around and the greenery is alive with chirping frogs and tropical vegetation. Yet, the posties all stride around wearing VERY short shorts. Is it to ensure that they move briskly and deliver the mail with sufficient Australian vim and vigour?

The Ranch is a very popular restaurant near where we're staying. It gets full and you have to be prepared to wait for a table. Can you book? NO! The Ranch is an aircraft hangar or the biggest school canteen you've ever seen. tables of huge surface area are laid out in awesome banks, with fixed benches alongside. The way it works is this: stake a claim on a table (or a portion of a table if you have to); leave a scent marker or some other token of your occupation; join the queue of people laughing and joking as they shuffle past the food displays and order your meal (note, order your food, not collect it); collect a number on a stick and return to your table (if you can find your way back through the crowded hall); now go to the bar and buy your drinks, you can carry these back through the melee yourself, slopping foam and bestowing blessings of wine upon your fellow diners as you go; wait for your food to arrive (by which time you've finished your drinks and have to scrum your way back to the bar again). But here's the ting; it's really enjoyable. There are all sorts here - families, people on their way home from work, gangs in cocktail dresses and smart evening wear because they're eating here before going clubbing - and the whole thing sound likes a penguin colony. Fair dinkum, though, it's bonzer tucker, my steak was the ridgy-didge!

Finally, being in the suburbs, things look a lot like home. Three-lane traffic in both directions, driving on the correct (ie British) side of the road, regular buses, people looking glum and carrying plastic bags of shopping home, kids on school holiday jumping all over everything. And then, "What's that thing lying in the roadside ahead, is it some poor cat that's been run over?"
NO, it's a bloody huge fruit bat that's the size of a hang-gliding bedlington terrier. And they're not just road-kill either, they're in the trees - heavy, leathery, chirping bundles of bat, like little pterodactyls, waiting for dusk so that they can fly off and feast on someone's peach trees.

It's going to take a while to acclimatise!

Being and introduction to Sydney

2006-07-03T01:49:00.000+01:00

Our first three days in Australia ....

Day1: Arrived at 0610. Lady Bay is where the nudists go, although when we walked past on a day of cold wind and drizzle, there were only two nudists to be seen, and both were demonstrably male.

Day 2: Manly Bay is where EVERYONE goes and, the weather being warm and mild, it was full of energetic, radiant, golden-skinned Sydneyans. They bowled aong the walkways, bounced into and out of ice-cream parlours and fish and chip shops, jogged along the beach, were talkative and social, ate enormous picnics and surfed the Pacific waves confidently.

Day 3: Undercliff-Overcliff is what the hardy types (but again, that's everyone) do on a Sunday in the Blue Mountains where they brave airy heights and dizzying depths, wearing training shoes and skimpy vests in the winter weather, to view waterfalls and eat Lilly-Pilly flavoured ice-cream.

Next year, new name: Fawlty Towers in the Jungle. Tell your friends

2006-06-29T10:38:00.000+01:00

These words faded into the distance as the pick-up truck took our luggage and us down the track from Our Jungle House towards the bus stop a couple miles away. Faith wrote in one of her emails that "this is the kind of place you miss afterwards" and she's right. The six days that we spent in Khao Sok have been an interesting, amusing and heartwarming experience of how a community survives and prospers at the edge of what we call civilisation. There's no lack of any creature comforts at all, at a price, in fact the visitors demand them. For example, a family booked out of Our Jungle House after less than 24 hours because it has no air-conditioning in the houses. Most of the local people, though, live simply; they have satellite tv, electricity and running water, but their homes are small and simly furnished, most have smallholdings and grow fruit and vegetables, many make an income from the tourists.
Iat is a good example. He picked us up at SuratThani station on our arrival and drove us the 100 km or so to Khao Sok. On the way we learned that he was born and lived in the next village to khao Sok, went to the local primary school (walking the 6km each way along the developing Highway 401). He pointed out all the different crops growing around us - rubber, rambutans, papayas, durian, oil palm, and served us our supper in the restaurant that night. We saw him quite a lot on other days, too. He led a "night safari" for tourists, did some local driving and spent time with his friends and family in the village itself.
There's only one street, so it wasn't easy to miss people. The main thing that he pointed out in his conversation about how things have changed is that now most children go to and from school by motorcycle. This is true; every day the little fleet set off in the morning and returned in the evening.
We also became friends with a young man who's a deaf mute. We met when we were looking for a path to local wat. We managed to explain what we were looking for and he managed to explain how we could find it. After that we saw him most days, either in the plantations, the shops or passing on his motorcycle. He always waved exuberantly at us, and we even got to have a sort of discussion about whether a brightly coloured bird that we'd all been looking at was a kingfisher or not. He signed kingfisher by waving his hand like a fish swimming while dropping the other hand down to it very fast like a diving bird.
So you see, it was a very fascinating place - and that's even without the plants and animals!
We're in Bangkok airport now, just about to go through immigration and boarding for Sydney. We shared the sleeper train from SuratThani with many people, boxes of cured eggs, crates of live crabs etc. and spent this morning exploring the maze that is Chinatown.
Now I know exactly where to go if I want someone to mend ANYTHING I own that's broken.

Vampires of the Jungle

2006-06-27T11:51:00.000+01:00

Leeches are interesting creatures. They spend most of their time (up to six months at a time) hanging around on a leaf waiting for a meal to come along, and then, wouldn't you know it, two meals come along at once! We've been feeding leeches pretty successfully for the past few days. They make undemanding guests; you hardly know they're there until you're bleeding all over your shirt, and when you pick them off and throw them away, they are so very eager to come back that it's touching. However, we are in the rainforest, as Klaus, "our friendly manager" tells us, and this seems to account for everything that happens, both good and bad.

The people we're meeting here are of three types - locals, expats of various nations and visitors. We're firmly in the third category, you'ld think, but wait; our stay here is about three times longer than the usual visitors, who use the area as a one or two day stopover between Phuket and Kho Samui, or vice versa. The upshot is that people are beginning to recognise us as we amble about looking like something out of an Edgar Wallace story (or maybe it's because we wander about looking like ..... ).

In addition, Khao Sok village is VERY seasonal, and we're out of season. so the few vistors who are here are important to the local community. In the dry season (December - March) the place must be heaving, and there's a move to have Paradise Parties in the Jungle, Full Moon Parties etc. You can see the different factions as you walk around the village - some places have Bob Marley Posters, Che pictures and so on, and names like "Rasta Bar", "Freedom House", "Far Out Bungalows"; others have neat foliage, Thai flags and topiary and names like "Deep Forest Hideaway", "At Home with Nature" and "Green Mountain View". I'll leave you to decide where "Our Jungle House" fits into the picture, but a clue might be found in Klaus' house rule that the bar closes at 2100.

Today is our last full day here, and I'm making this entry in the village's tiny internet cafe, where the other computers are being used by local children doing their homework and Klaus doing his administration. In spite of the seasonal tourism, the village is still agricultural, and all those who run bungalow enterprises, guiding etc also have smallholdings where they grow bananas, papayas and rambutans and keep a few chickens, or work on the rubber plantations hereabouts. At this time of year, many of the little restaurants and shops are closed up.

Tomorrow we go back to Surat Thani and on to Bangkok by overnight train, but in the meantime, we're still taking in the fact that we saw Langurs (leaf monkeys) and Great Hornbills today!

Next post will likely be Bangkok or Sydney.

No suit, no life!

2006-06-23T13:02:00.000+01:00

Down most of the sidestreets that we found in Bangkok there were small tailors-shops, and often a tout standing outside would press a card in my hand and say that he could have a good suit ready for me in a day or so. How this would help me, a hot sweaty sightseer, I'm not sure. On our last morning, as we found our way to the river pier to catch a water taxi to Hualamphong Station and the overnight train to Suratthani the usual thing happened - tailors-shop; tout; card. I was carrying a rucsack, a smaller canvas shoulder bag and I must have looked very sweaty indeed, but I still managed to refuse politely, " Mai, khap khun khrap." I even managed a half-hearted wai (you'll have to look that one up if you don't know). He smiled a big smile and, with oodles of sincerity replied, " No suit, no life!"
If only you knew, I thought smugly.
So, then, more impressions.
Walking from the river pier to Hualamphong through Chinatown. We passed through the mechanics' soi (quarter). Store after store filled with reclaimed car-parts - whole shops full of gleaming cog-wheeels, others piled high with hubcaps or oiled drive-shafts, and everywhere the smell of mineral oil and diesel.
Hualamphong itself. Blessedly cool because it's air-conditioned, crowds of people - Thais, backpackers, seated around on the floor watching advertisements on a huge plasma screen while monks in orange robes mingled among them. ALL stood up to attention while the National anthem played at 6 pm!
The train was an experience. Imagine "Some like it Hot" played in a sauna and you'll have a good idea. We had our beds made up for us and we were plunged into darkness when the train-dude closed the blinds on the windows. Outside, Bangkok slid away and, before we fell asleep we glimpsed fireflies in the trees.
Just outside Surathani we were woken and our beds disappeared to become seats again! Lots of tired bemused travellers - we were, worryingly, easily twice the age of any other non-Thais in the train. The train disgorged us onto the platform where the touts homed in - "Koh Samui?" "Where you go?" "Best deal, honest" (you can decide on that last one for yourself). But we were being met, and so we looked for a sign with our names on it. There it was - a big smile, a handshake and Iat (we think that's how it's spelled) took us to the car, loaded our bags, bought us coffee and whisked us away from the chugging coaches and pick-ups.
Along Highway 401 and into the mountains. Iat pointed out rubber plantations (the price is good, apparently), his old school where he used to walk 4 kms from his village each day, "But now all have motorcycle." We saw lots of these - it was school run time as we drove along. The best I counted was a parent and four children (all in immaculate school uniform, and with school bags) on one motorcycle.
At Khao sok we turned off the road and down a track into the forest - plantations of banana, oil palm, rambutan. "Our Jungle House"was just as we'd imagined; a claearing in the plantations and low thatched buildings by the side of a river flowing beneath an immense cliff. Klaus, the manager met us and explained that we were welcome. He was, he said, trying to create a kind of Fawlty Towers in the Jungle. We'll see! Our tree house is charming - set about 4 metres above the ground, it looks out over the river and onto the limestone cliff where there is a nest of wild bees among the tropical vegetation. We immediately set off for a gentle walk in the national park where we were comprehensively mossied and leeched - but no harm came to us except for the bleeding. We heard gibbons! We heard gibbons! We heard gibbons!
We met a Canadian from Saskatchewan in the evening, and were entertained with a giant toad.
Internet is fickle here in the jungle, so I'm not sure when the next post will happen. Marjoribanks says that this is only to be expected, but we must keep a stiff upper.

Tuk-tuk boss? This you first time Bangkok?

2006-06-20T14:00:00.000+01:00

I woke suddenly at 6:00 a.m. this morning and, after Faith made it clear that she wasn't quite ready to get up yet, I went out for a walk in the early morning cool. The street outside was almost deserted, except for some ladyboys who were clustered around a derelict old hippy who was sat in the gutter - exactly where we saw himlast night. They were behaving very like kittens with a mother cat, just sitting around him and stroking his hair, putting their arms around his shoulders (which were very bony) and smiling together. He seemed to be happy about it, too. Across the road, the area of Banglamphu leads down to the river by the side of a wat (temple) and I wandered down there among crowds of children going to school, a few monks moving quietly between the temple buildings, noisy cockerels and bewildering bird-sound from the trees. The children were buying street-food from vendors outside the school gate - deep fried fruit, noodles, juice and slush-puppies. By the time I returned to the hotel, Faith was up and we were both ready for our breakfast ... and out into Bangkok.
After I'd dragged Faith over my early morning route (both ladyboys and school children had gone by now), we went down to the river and turned to follow a khlong and narrow alleys to the impressive Rama Bridge. It was a fascinating walk: wooden houses along the khlong-side, bo trees with scarves around them, and shrines at their feet, a fish hung up in abush to try, food satls on every corner, and many, many smiles.
Finally, bathed in sweat, we took an exhilirating river taxi rde to Wat Pho pier to find the Reclining Buddha Temple. I'm afraid to say that we gave in to a "friendly" shop owner (see title) who explained in great detail how to tell good tuk-tuk driver from bad, and "helped" us to get one. We went to see the Temple of the Black Buddha first, which was very interesting (with an old Buddha statue that had been almost black because people kept taking the gold-leaf for luck) and a guide who first told us the stories about the temple and then, yes, you guessed, said how lucky we were to be able to go to see the Siam Export House, today of all days - it's included in your fare, he said helpfully! Well, well, we said, what (or wat?) a surprise. We told the tuk-tuk driver that we'd be a VERY SHORT time in the Export House, "ten minute?" he offered. We were thirty seconds. " No-one ever come here before and buy nothing, " said the smart woman. "We're the first of many," I replied, as we smiled and left. The tuk-tuk driver looked relieved when we came back to him, and whizzed us back to Wat Pho along and across streets, by a khlong and through a market. So, he got his commission for delivering us to the Export House, and we got a scenic tour for only 40 baht (about 55p).
Wat Pho is every bit as impressive as the guidebooks say, and the reclining buddha is gargantuan. Little details pleased, though, as always. There's a school in the temple grounds, and it was brass-band-practice day. The children, were outside practising such fine old Thai tunes as Colonel Bogey and American Patrol. We felt sorry for the girl who was only allowed to play the mouthpiece of a saxophone. Perhaps one day, she'll improve enough enough to merit the rest of it, but it did lend an air of eldritch wildness to Marching through Georgia. We eavesdropped on a temple ceremony where monks in orange robes were chanting as monks are meant to, and then made our way back to Banglamphu through the University - where the students demonstrated for Thai democracy and freedom on a number ovccasions between the 1970s and 1990s. Back at our hotel, an American businessman who was swimming with 2 Thai women yesterday, was looking mightily pleased as he swam with 4 of them today. "I found a fourth for bridge," he said loudly.

2006-06-19T16:24:00.000+01:00

First post from the second leg of the journey, and it's from an internet cafe just off Khaosan Road in Bangkok. I have 8 minutes, and counting! So what are the first impressions? Well, it's more like Tangier than Marrakech. Working buildings, glass and steel offices, crumbling concrete tenements that are, nevertheless, attractive, big old cars. There are many trees, and we've just eaten under one of them, a bo tree in the yard of Ranee's restaurant. Here we saw our first long-standing hippy resident, sitting at a table, wearing fisherman's trousers, a striped shirt and fearsome dreads. The Khaosan road is fascinating - very international in many ways. Tomorrow we'll explore; tonight we sleep in the snug wood-lined room in Buddyhotel with the a/c on "high". It's all very amazing!!

No crime in the mountains

2006-05-14T18:34:00.000+01:00

It's Sunday, May 14th and we're back home but I'll post the blog entries as they were written over the past few days. Thankyou to Tricia and gang (and everyone else) for your encouraging comments. I'm glad you've enjoyed reading - it's been great fun writing down the highlights. Future posts will happen, and there are some more pics and links to add to earlier posts, too.
Today, Wednesday, May 10th, we've driven from Spain's deep south to Madrid, very near its geographical centre. We left Cortijo La Joya in thick mist and watched the cloud rolling off the mountain tops in a huge standing wave as we drove down into Antequera and the motorway. We've spent a very happy month at the cortijo with its little community of friendly residents and travellers. It's been a great base for our explorations and a warm and welcoming home to return to at the end of a day. Antequera was sunny, and we took a last opportunity to photograph its police station that looks like a film-set for Zorro! Our lunch stop was at the extreme northern end of Andulacia, where the road crosses a steep mountain pass and emerges in Castilla La Mancha, which stretches out, flat as a tortilla, for mile upon mile, although the monotony is relieved occasionally by gigantic black bulls standing by the roadside. In earlier times, the pass was the holdout of an Andalucian bandit who "escorted" travellers safely through the dangerous landscape. They weren't allowed to refuse the offer of an escort; if they did, the landscape was likely to become much more dangerous very quickly. We've ensconced in a Formule Hotel in a commercial area on the outskirts of Madrid and had our supper in a truckers' restaurant. Here we got a good 3 course meal with wine and coffee for 17 Euros (total), joining the other customers watching Seville playing Middlesborough in football in UEFA Cup Final. The young and efficient waiter here worked out straight away that we're British from our stumbling order in Spanish, and so he served us in carefully pronounced Spanish himself, listening out for our mistakes and correcting us gently as we struggled along. The other diners meanwhile, truckers to a man, were relishing their own supper, one man to a table, being served just as thoughtfully. Having said that, one of them really got under the waiter's skin. He had convex ears (always a bad sign, I've found) and continually asked for more of everything, holding up a hand like a child at school to catch the waiter's attention. When he got to the dessert he changed his mind repeatedly about what he wanted. Finally he decided that he wanted a peach; the waiter said he thought there weren't any, but that he'd go and look. Meanwhile the diner got up and wandered around, looking for a peach, too. Finally, he found a bowl of fruit, including two peaches, on a high shelf above the dessert display cabinet. With a huge grin, he took first one, then the second, and helped himself to a plate and knife before going back to the table. When the waiter returned to report that there were, indeed, no peaches, the man pointed delightedly at his plate and began to tuck in. For the rest of the time he sat there munching and slurping them as loudly as he could, turning around occasionally to let everyone see that he had TWO peaches, not just ONE. Just before we left, a big friendly giant, just like Mongo in the film Blazing Saddles, came in to eat. he got a seat at the front, right by the television, and the biggest salad I've ever seen, served super-quick. While everyone else was drinking wine or small glasses of beer, he got a huge glassful of beer that must have been about three quarters of a litre. We could have done with his help later (read on). By the way, Seville are 1-0 in the lead as I write. On the short walk back to the hotel, two very nice young men in a swish-looking car asked the way out of the trading complex (well, actually, one was in the car, the other looked as if he'd just got back from asking directions). We stopped and said that we didn't know the area - we should have known better, it was such an obvious set-up - and things got exciting very quickly. The man on the side of the road grabbed Faith's bag and tried to make off with it into the car. She held on very tight, though, and pulled back, yelling at him at the top of her voice. I grabbed the bag, too, and buffeted, trying to push him away. His accomplice in the car turned and shouted to him, and our attacker put his hand inside his jacket as if to pull out a weapon. I don't know whether or not he had one - or was simply going through the motions so that we'd let go - because I managed to land a good high kick in his ribs (bless you, Berkshire Bedlam!) on top of Faith's efforts, and he gave up; we were making a lot of noise! I yelled to Faith to run, which she did surprisingly quickly, and I was close behind. The guy had bundled himself in to the car, though, and was gone in a flash. Back at the hotel, wobbly but in one piece, and with all our belongings still intact, we reported what we could to a passing security patrol. It's appalling how little we'd been able to take in, though; a newish sporty black car, possibly a Mercedes, possibly a BMW; two young men, one black - the driver, one white - the attacker. Seville has just won the game, 4-0 (3 more goals scored in about 10 minutes near the end), and, knowing Seville, there'll be no sleep there tonight!
Thursday, May 11th. The TV news at breakfast showed Seville's celebrations. The whole city out in the streets cheering, crying, singing - and they've only just finished a week of Semana Santa followed by a week of Feria! The news headline was 'Trabajar sin dormir!' - work wothout sleep - and they interviewed a number of very bleary office workers, restaurateurs etc who were convinced that they would survive the day on good, strong coffee. So did we; the next section of the journey took us across the most fearsomely flat country that I've ever seen until, at last, we arrived in the Pays Basque and the Cantabrian Mountains. Here, we could well have been in the Alps. Chalets, green mountain fields and forests of fir trees on steep valley sides.
We stayed in an Etap Hotel this time, in the hilly Bilbao suburb of Arrigorriaga. The whole area is bilingual - Basque (Euskara - all K's and X's) and Spanish. We went for a walk and saw the whole town (more or less) collecting the children from school, had a quick drink in Cafe Coyote - themed on Wile E. Coyote, even down to the light fittings shaped like bundles of ACME TNT, and then had a meal in Restaurant Capitaine Utzigaine (who he?). Meanwhile, outside, it thundered and rained. A good, honest mountain storm. Just before bed, we checked the news. Seville is still partying!
Friday, May 12th. We' as marvelled at Bilbao's transporter bridge (they do say it's even older than the one in Newport, the scurvy knaves) and now, hearties, we is safely aboard ye good ship Pride of Bilbao, bound for Portsmouth, aye. Biscay (o), is fair calm, and ' tis hardly a wobble we's feelin' as she ploughs her way north'ard. We ' as seen 'ordes o' dolphins (common an' striped, dam'yer eyes!), fin whales an' a sei whale. I 'is 'ardly able to keep me trusty 'arpoon from a'quiverin'! We 'is finishin' the day eatin' our supper in the ship's Carvery as the sun is settin' an' 'dolphins is bow-ridin' ahead o' us. I is wipin' a salty tear from my (good) eye jus' thinkin' on it - but don't 'ee think I is goin' soft mind!
By the way: a bottle of wine to the first reader who correctly identifies the source of this post's title.

Who is Juan Gonsales?

2006-05-09T20:07:00.000+01:00

The broad beans saga has reached a conclusion at last! A couple of days ago, Faith and I went for a walk through the fields nearby, which are bursting with them, in spite of everyone here saying they're over now, and it was all we could do to hold back from contributing to the well-known phenomenon of "edge-effect" in crops. Instead, we discovered that there's a local market in Antequera ( a little late, I know) and drove down there this morning. En route, we passed our Romanians busy picking the next harvest in the very field we'd walked past; our hopes were raised! The market turned out to be a pretty typical one, mainly shoes, - being Spain, terrifyingly architectural women's underwear, thin clothing, sunglasses and tablecloths (though they might have been mantillas, depending on your viewpoint cf Picasso), but there were also four different traders selling fruit and vegetables. At first there was no sign of broad beans, though plenty of flat, green ones, and then, on one stall, we noticed a few crates of broad beans stacked at the back, but not on sale. We loitered and, in God's good time,a box came to the front, and, lo, broad beans were being sold! We had to wait our turn, though, local fabaphiles were at the front of the queue; small, assertive local housewives who know that the best way to tease their man's jaded ardour is to present him with a plateful of freshly cooked broad beans. We bought rather more than we'd intended, largely through a misunderstanding of the term "medio", as applied to market trading. Whenever I' ve encountered the word before, its meaning has been "half", as in "medio racione", which is the eminently sensible way that you can buy a half portion of something in a venta, and get to taste two things instead of one. I went ahead and applied the logic to buying the beans (I'd heard some of the women do the same, so I felt I was on safe ground). HOWEVER, in this context, medio is taken to mean half of the usual quantity (apparently 4 Kg) in which the item is sold. We have plenty of beans now. We checked the other vegetable stalls out of curiosity; none of them had "habas".On Sunday night we got to a concert in Antequera. Musicians from the New Cologne Philharmonia played a programme of Bach, Mozart, Vivaldi, Albinoni and others. We heard Mozart's 3rd Violin Concerto played on 3 violins, a viola, a cello and a double bass - a curious and intimate experience. There was a piccolo concerto by Vivaldi with similar instrumentation, the very good soloist looking as though he'd parked his Harley Davidson in the street outside; a Brandenburg concerto featured a big, Arnold Scwarzennegger look-alike playing a tiny trumpet shaped like a French Horn!Our last venture has been to return to El Torcal, more or less where we began our meanderings here a month ago, for a final walk exploring some of the paths that are on the large scale map that we brought, but are not indicated on the information boards. The path that we chose led us to a glorious valley where there is a deserted quarry. Abandoned blocks of stone, each about 1.5 metres square, lay around and, further along the track, we found some millstones of different sizes, including some that were still only partly cut out of the rock. The track had been paved with rough, riven stone at some point in its life. Beside it, beyond the quarry, were a small meadow enclosed by a dry-stone wall, a stone hut and a stone dog kennel. We crept inside the hut (who wouldn't?). It's obviously been used as a bothy - it'd be quite effective, but you'd need a good camping mat on the stone sleeping bench (it had a shallow depression carved in it, roughly body-sized; obviously to contain a straw matress). On one end of the bench, apparently written with white correction fluid was: 10/01/2003, Pancho, Salvi, Madera. Muy buena. -3 deg C. Mucha nieve. Back outside, shading our eyes as we were accustoming ourselves to the glaring sunlight, we noticed something else. Down on one of the road-slabs, something was carved. It was faded and worn, but finally we managed to trace out what it said. There was a date, 1787 (the same year that Mozart composed Don Giovanni), a crucifix, and the name JVAN GONSALES. Who was he? Was this his hut? His quarry, originally? Or is what remains of Juan Gonsales resting quietly under the slab? Take your choice! The trackway wound on down to Antequera, gleaming white in the flat valley below, but we turned upwards and, walking over Camorro de Siete Mesas - Torcal's highest point - we emerged at the roadway near the visitor centre. The car park was full of cars and coaches; we'd met no-one all day (just an ibex, and it wasn't bothered about us at all). Over the past weekend, Heino (the owner) has returned with his wife (Iris), and there have been a couple of long and pleasant evenings where all of our little cortijo community has met together at the end of our separate days to compare notes and discuss those things that one discusses when on holiday and the conversation is lubricated by several glasses of wine. This will probably be the last post from Spain because it's not likely that we'll have access to the internet on the long journey home that begins tomorrow. We plan to leave La Joya in the morning to drive to Madrid for an overnight stop in a Formule Hotel on the southern outskirts of the city, and then on to Bilbao for a similar night, before taking the ferry at 1:15 pm on Friday. Next post, May 14th, deo volente!

Love and death

2006-05-07T13:00:00.000+01:00

"Eight brave bulls!" it says on the poster in Malaga. Well, the five that we saw certainly did their best, but each of them ended its twenty minutes or so in the ring dead, nevertheless.
For 15 Euros each, we buy our tickets (sol y sombre, which allow us to sit in a part of the bullring that's in full sun at the beginning of the corrida, but shaded by the time of the fourth bull) and join the crowd. It's made up mainly of enthusiastic, evidently well-informed, Spanish - mostly couples and families - and the merely curious like us. The Plaza de Torros is a circle of raked sand surrounded by stepped stone terraces where the "groundlings" sit and topped with covered galleries for the richer clientelle. It feels Roman. At 6:00 pm exactly, the wind-band, sitting high up in a covered part of the terraces, begins to play and two dignified old gentlemen dressed rather like musketeers and mounted on white horses, enter the ring. They ride across to the other side at a walk, followed by the rest of the equipage, mounted and on foot. There is polite applause from the crowd and some appreciative calls as the various matadors carry out practice passes with flamingo-coloured capes. Now a smaller band, of snare drums and trumpets, sounds a flourish and a horseman with a lance appears. He is splendidly dressed, hidalgo-style, and puts the horse through its paces, high-stepping, side-stepping and generally lording it. Great cheers from the crowd. Another fanfare from the trumpets, a gasp from the crowd this time, and the first bull bursts out of the pen and into view. The job of the unmounted matadors with their flamingo cloaks now becomes clear. They take turns to attract the bull's attention and to make passes before retreating behind wooden barricades; this performance evidently allows the main act to assess the bull's behaviour and stamina and to decide how much it needs to be slowed down before he can engage with it. This slowing down is done by picadores. Mounted on heavily padded and blindfolded horses, they come up alongside the bull and with heavy, short-pointed lances, stab at the hump of muscle between its shoulders as it tries to gore them. The crowd doesn't like the picadores very much; they know that they can take the fight out of a bull before things have even begun if they're too heavy handed. There's hissing and whistling as one of the picadores stands in the stirrups and bears down hard on the bull, turning the lance in the wound. The picadores retreat, and the bull is left panting and confused in the middle of the ring. Not for long; the solo rider returns armed with a light lance. A furious dance begins between the rider and the bull, accompanied by pasadobles from the wind band. The rider, trailing the reversed lance to draw the bull's attention, wheels and turns the horse around it at close quarters. The knowledgeable among the crowd applaud or shout "bien!", or simply "eehhh!" at passes that are particularly good. Eventually the band stops playing, the lance is abandoned and a second rider, who is the matador, enters the stage. He sticks the bull with successively smaller sets of banderillas, decorated barbs. Placing these requires the rider to move in closer and closer to the bull, and with each strike the crowd cheers and the bull starts as if bitten by a fly. For the final scene, the matador dismounts and chooses a scarlet cloak and a heavy sword with a curious cross-piece about 15 cms behind the point. The action takes place in silence. There are a few passes, raising quiet approval from the crowd, before the matador stands still, facing the bull. He takes sight along the sword, rises on tiptoe and falls forward, at attention, towards it. The sword is intended to enter immediately behind the skull, where it joins the neck, to cut the spinal cord. This will drop the bull instantly. But the thrust isn't accurate and the bull rears, turns away, and then faces the matador again, panting, angry, confused and very much alive. The crowd cheers the bull. What began as an elegant, formal final movement, though, has become a messier affair that takes two more attempts before the blade hits its target and the defeated animal falls onto the sand, suddenly onto the sand, suddenly dead. The matador turns away, the crowd applauds and a team of three white asses, with colourful bridles and jingling bells, trots into the ring. The bloody carcass is hitched by a chain to the bar they are carrying, and dragged off , to the sound of the merry bells, to be butchered. There it is then, our first, and likely to be only, experience of a bullfight.
As we walk back to the car, we pass through an enormous street party. Evidently, here in Malaga, Cruces de Mayo is celebrated differently from in Antequera. There is food and drink, anyone can join in, and most of the women and girls are wearing flamenco dresses. We stop and buy a beer and a tapa, listening to the women taking turns to sing flamenco love-songs while the children dance. Behind them, the excavated Roman amphitheatre glows rosy pink, its terraces empty, echoing the wailing music back into the square.

All the world's a stage

2006-05-06T10:27:00.000+01:00

It seems to me that the Spanish have a love of theatre in their everyday lives. We've seen this made evident in obvious ways: the Semana Santa celebrations, the Seville Feria, and the Cruces de Mayo, for example. And it's there in the passion for football and bullfighting. But it creeps into all kinds of other things, too; the occasional crazy driving, the fact that you'll sometimes see a farmer with a rod-straight back but a scruffy shirt and worn chaps, riding a fully caparisoned horse - all silver buckles, tooled saddle and plaited main - across a roundabout in the town. As we drove into the village the day before yesterday, we saw one of the Romanians (you remember that they're seasonal workers here), tearing down the street pursued by a man brandishing a broken bottle. They sped past us, but the boy had reached the safety of his house, and so the man hurled the glass into the gutter, where it shattered very effectively, and strode off. In a few moments a posse of women was heading up the street from the house in the direction of the bar. I don't hold out much hope for him.
Yesterday, we went for a walk in the Sierra de Grazalema National Park. It's an area of deep valleys and high mountains, more or less south of Ronda, which were the last stronghold of bandits such as Pasos Largos (Long Strides) and Jose Tragabuches, who survived by smuggling, preying on stagecoaches and living off the land! Maybe there's just a little of it left because all along the path, the National Park signs bore (very neatly written) grafitti like "Don't steal our water!", "Primitivism - yes! Free your soul; preserve the right to roam freely!" and "Not thieves, but Mafias are taking away the outdoors". The area has a microclimate that's wetter than the area further east, where we're based, and so it's greener, with many more trees, and rivers that actually have water in them rather than puddles or nothing.
We walked from one railway station (Benaojan) to another (Jimera de Libar). The railway runs from Algeciras to Ronda and was designed by an English engineer named Henderson. The gradient is ferocious, and in earlier times the train ran so slowly that contraband goods could be traded from the windows. The footpath is so achingly perfect that it must have been designed by the Ministry for the Picturesque, or some such government department. It wound along the mountainside, sometimes down at the level of the river, sometimes high above it, and all along, the banks and hillside were splendid with yellow wild chrysanthemums and red poppies. We passed a ruined farm called, of all things, Cortijo de Orija de Buro (Donkey-ears Farm!), where tiny pond turtles plopped about in a stream and a mummified goat carcass lay dramatically in a mouldering stall; we picnicked close by the river bank where unfeasible numbers of very big fish swam, annoyingly, just out of reach; nightingales sang in the thickets below us as we marched along the higher stretches, and colourful bee-eaters called to one another above.
At the end of the walk, the splendidly uniformed Jefe de Estacion operated the outdoor signalling levers with a flourish, to allow the train to enter the station. His assistant - not so splendidly dressed as you can see - still managed to get into the performance as Beano, the Humorous Clown!
We still haven't been able to buy any broad beans (habas)! We saw them in the market in Malaga earlier this week, but by the time we got back there to buy some, the market was all shut up for the day; we found a tiny grocer's shop in Antequera where we could see beans through the window - but it was closed, and we couldn't find our way back there later; for more than a week now, one of the supermarkets has had a shelf labelled "habas", but it's empty. Of course, the fields are full of them. Once again, you see, it's theatre; build up the tension, and keep them guessing.
I'm beginning to think that Jack struck a good bargain in getting not just one, but five beans for his cow. Cows are ten a penny hereabouts!

Pablito y las cabras felices

2006-05-03T21:01:00.000+01:00

Picasso was born in Malaga. In order to paint his tableau, La Joie de Vivre, Picasso divined the vital essence of "goat" by doing lots of studies, and represented it on canvas. Our village is in the centre of a shallow concave plateau in the mountains, about 2 kms in diameter. Around the rim of the plateau, and on the edge of the village itself, there are farms, and at least 5 of these have a goat-flock. Each flock numbers around 200 goats, so you can appreciate that, here in La Joya, goats make a big contribution to the local joie de vivre too. What's the point of this rambling? Well, yesterday, we went to Malaga to visit the very impressive and well-ordered Picasso Gallery - you get directed along from room to room by very attentive and polite curators who get quite agitated if you go back to look at a picture twice [comments overheard from a very British, blue-rinsed lady: looking at early, naturalistic paintings, "He must have done these in his VERY young period, it's not the real stuff."; looking at a pencil sketch of the artist's eyes, drawn realistically, "Of course, if he drew eyes like that in our art class, he wouldn't last long."]. Among other things, we saw his studies of goats, made to help him to paint the mythical creatures like satyrs and fauns, derived from goats, that are dancing with the pretty nymph in the tableau (I think he'd already done plenty of studies of women, so he didn't have any trouble getting the nymph right!). The gallery is on a site occupied since prehistoric times, and when you've seen all the Picassos - in the correct chronological order, by the way - you can go down to the cellar and see - again in the correct chronological order - the Phoenecian, Roman and Mediaeval buildings that they've excavated on the spot. On the way home, for the first time, we had to wait on the narrow road while one of the local goatherds drove his flock along towards us on their way back to their farm. It was on a long bend where the road has barriers on each side to help to stop you from driving over the verge and into the steep fields, and in that particular stretch of road there's only one point where the barrier opens onto a field path. So, llike Picasso, we mused on the goats - as they trotted, jumped or ambled before our eyes - all 200 of them!Malaga city is divided in two, North to South, by River Guadalhorce, or it would be if the riverbed wasn't so dry and sun-baked that it's covered with grass and bushes. On one stretch, near the centre of the city, they've installed a stainless steel false river bed about 30 metres long and 2 metres wide, with fountains and lights in an attempt to represent a river (or maybe its vital essence). It looked very attractive yesterday in the heat, and the sound of the water was refreshing, too. We joked that they could use the river bed as parking space, and so ease the acute parking problem they have in the city. As we settled down to bed last night there was an electrical storm. Lightning lit up the mountains and there was the rumble of distant thunder. By midnight, the thunder wasn't so distant, and by the small hours, the thunder had been replaced by a gale and driving rain that went on all night. It's been raining most of today, too, and so we stayed inside and have done things like reading, editing photos and drawing. At lunchtime, we went to the local farmers' bar, Venta Vargas, to eat and, lo, the big news is of the chaotic aftermath of the flooding in Malaga overnight! There were film reports of people mopping out their houses, retrieving their cars from flooded streets and one man was pointing proudly for the cameras to a scorched hole in his roof where the lightning had struck. In Venta Vargas, they had a log fire going in the huge open fireplace and the place was full. There was the distinct impression that people had put in a morning's work in the fields, against the elements, and were now ready to call it a day. We had to wait until we could get a table for our "Menu del dia". They have this every day, between 1:00 pm and 3:30, and it costs 7 Euros each. For that you get a Premier Plato (usually a choice of two different soups and another simple fish or meat dish), a Segundo Plato (today there was a choice from roast loin of pork, fried anchovies, fried cod, chicken, pork and bean stew etc), Postres (ice cream, homemade flan - creme-caramel, an orange or tinned peaches), bread and a drink (the default choice is a litre bottle of their house red wine put on the table for you to finish, or not, as you wish). All this is reeled off in very fast Spanish with a thick local accent, so what you get can be a bit of a lottery. Wherever we've been in the rural parts of the area, people stop for a lunch like this, taken in a local bar. They get back to work at about 4:00 pm and then finish at around 7:00 pm. Venta Vargas is typical. a single room with a corner counter, a small kitchen behind and a big open room that acts as dining room, bar and television room, depending on how they've laid out the tables and the time of day. It's run by two small, active, quiet men who might be brothers, or not. They've obviously worked together for a long, long time because they move around the space getting all the jobs done, keeping things moving, checking on the customers without getting in each other's way, and each knowing what the other is doing at any time.The weather forecast says more rain tomorrow, but clearing later. So maybe Malaga's river has returned today, filling the city's brave attempt to represent its vital essence with the joie de vivre of fishes.

Seville marmalade

2006-05-01T21:35:00.000+01:00

Being back in Cortijo La Joya after the visit to Morocco feels a little like coming home after a rowdy party! We travelled up to Bobadilla on the Algerciras/Granada train past storks' nests, ordered villages and well-watered fields. These things stand out precisely because of the contrast that Morocco affords. A school group got on the train part way home. They were infant school children with their teachers; they'd been on a school visit and were tired but happy. We were surrounded by excited and tired people. At Ronda they got out.Their parents were waiting for them on the platform; a familiar sight from another life! Since being back at La Joya (the spelling varies - sometimes La Joya, sometimes la Hoya), we've explored an enormous local limestone gorge and visited Seville. Seville - Don Juan's home, as well as Carmen's. We got there during the Spring Feria. In Easter Week the men get to carry Holy Images around the streets; during feria, the women get their revenge! They dress in Flamenco costume and parade themselves all over the city! Not only this; they dress up their children in Flamenco costume, too. Buses, trains, cars, horse-drawn carriages were all loaded with putative Carmens and their worried partners. To be fair, the enormous park where the Feria actually happens is nothing nor less than an excuse to see and be seen. There are carriages, temporary ventas (inns), some of which are private and some public. Added to this, there are squadrons of people riding horses. Not ordinary horses; not ordinary people. These are Hidalgos and their escorts. Men in tight trousers and leather chaps, with high boots and spurs and incredibly cool hats. They ride, holding the reins in one hand, with one hand on their hip and their signorita behind them. Faith was transported (not literally, unfortunately, she says)! We visited the Reale Alcazar, too. (What, more Moors?). It was spectacular, but we're all Alcazared out! Yesterday, Antequerra (the local town - you remember, a lovely place) was due to hold a grand display of Flamenco and Horsemanship in the bullring. We went down, but all was locked up. There was a handwritten notice that said, in effect, "Due to circumstances beyond our control ..." We found out what the cirumstances were. Cruces de Mayo. This is the Junior League Semana Santa (see earlier posts), when the children get to carry miniature versions of the Holy Images through the streets. Someone had made a major cock-up! The two dates coincided, and, quite reasonably, Cruces de Mayo won. The bullring organisers are probably galley slaves to a Barbary Corsair as we write. Today is May the First, people here seem to have a day off work. The Romanians are having a big friendly barbecue. I've taught them how to use the swimming pool here, in spite of its being only 68 degrees F in the water, but I've stayed clear of playing football with them so far - they are very fit (they pick broad beans in the fields all day). We tried to buy broad beans today, "Tiene usted habas?" Faith asked. "No. Hay muchos en los campos, pero nada aqui," was the reply. I bet Asda are bying them all up! The dry gorge today was spectatcular and quite scary (lots of plants and sheep bones and so on), but we did well! This evening we've eaten most of a bean stew (alubias rather than habas), but it defeated us in the end, and we'll have to tackle the rest tomorrow!

Stinging in the Rain

2006-04-30T14:36:00.000+01:00

At about 8:30 in the morning, the train stops among fields of straggly wheat. There is a distant road, telegraph poles and lots of prickly pear cactus. It's raining. After about fifteen minutes, the rain eases and stops; passengers begin to get out to wander up and down along the track beside the train. No-one, including the train crew, is absolutely sure what's wrong. Half an hour into the stop, a small band of angry businees-types decide to head across fields to the road, where occasional cars and lorries were passing. The ticket collector tries to reason with them, but they shout him down and march off. It begins to rain again, heavily now. We all clamber up the high steps back into the train and chat. A hyper-active yoga teacher from Camden, is travelling to Marrakech to find his space, and then on to the ocean to be cleansed. He's lived in Barcelona and Paris; likes living in London, but the energy gets to him, and every now and then he has to escape. Surprisingly, one of the travellers is a character we last saw sitting on the Terrace of the Cafe Tingis in Tangier. He looks like Oscar Wilde, or Augustus Carp, depending on your point of view (he's in the photo, immediately behind and to the left of the gentleman in the djellaba). He speaks Spanish very rapidly and he's swapping information about where you can get to from Casablanca with Nick and another passenger. It seems that you can fly cheaply to Zaire from there, if I understood him right. Eventually things start to happen. The train crew take the wooden chocks from behind the wheels and we see a locomotive speeding towards us from the direction of Marrakech. In a few minutes there's a jolt, and we begin to move ... slowly. There's mild pandemonium at the station. The train is an hour and a half late and there's nowhere for taxis to wait that long, so as the passengers crowd out of the station, they're pounced on by frazzled taxi-drivers. We hang back, not because we're wise, but because I decide that I have to have a pee before I can go anywhere! By the time we leave the station, the rush is over and get a petit taxi to take us to the Djema al-Fna, the central square in the old city. We haven't booked an hotel, but when the talkative driver asks us about this, and if we know anywhere, Faith jumps in quickly with, "We've made a reservation at Hotel Ali."! This blatant untruth, delivered with alarming sincerity, gets a nod and the reply, "Ahhh. Yes, everyone knows Ali's." And so we're dropped outside the hotel after having all the location of all the main 'must sees' pointed out by the driver. He's horrified that we're here for only a day and a half and warns us that we'll have to come back.Why Hotel Ali? No other reason than that it cropped up in the guide books as popular with backpackers, and Faith remembered the name. It looks promising, though. The dark hotel hallway opens onto the street where people are drinking soft drinks or tea, and there's a busy, open plan reception desk inside. It's surrounded by travellers, staff, locals exchanging handsful of Euros for Dirhams, piles of rucsacks and cases and the pedestrians who are using the lobby as a short-cut to the parallel street behing the hotel. There is room for us. Aziz, who seems to be the manager and maitre d'hotel, looks through his ledger book and a pile of keys, and eventually gives us Room 116. It's a triple, but he'll charge us the demi-pension rate of 170dH each (that's about 34 Euros in total for dinner, bed and breakfast, with use of the hammam thrown in). We don't argue. Once again it's a typical Moorish building. There are outside open spaces - terraces - and inside open spaces - cushioned communal eating and sitting areas. The whole thing is built around a central open quadrangle and goes up three floor to two further roof terraces where visitors can eat and, in the summer, sleep in the open air. Nobody'll be doing that today. There's water everywhere. It's still raining, and last night's storm obviously took people by surprise. Outdoor furniture is piled in covered corners under plastic sheets (does this mean that it's no longer outdoor furniture?), the cleaning women are busy mopping up puddles and there are basins and buckets all around, catching the water that's found its way from the outside to the inside of the hotel. In our room there are three single beds, a bathroom and toilet (WITH PAPER!), and that smell that causes parents to ask, "When did you last clean the rabbit's hutch?". Faith isn't concerned, but I am; I don't want to find any nasty surprises in dark
corners. The smell is stronger when I open the window and the door to try to blow it through, and I soon find out why. Two floors below us a miserably wet donkey, hitched to a flatbed cart, is steaming under a sheet of plastic.An umbrella is our only significant purchase in Marrakech! We buy it from the umbrella-dude (as seen in Lisbon, among other places) who appears from nowhere once the rain begins to fall. We bargain him down to 20dH from 30dH but he looks very happy, so he's certainly made a good profit on us. With the help of the umbrella, we avoid further umbrella-dudes and explore the twisty warren of streets and squares around the medina. A visit to a merchant's house, now a a museum, gives us an insight into the ubiquitous use of wood in Moroccan construction, and we see an interesting collection of "woollen tools", that is, tools for making wool, and not crocheted scewdrivers and the like. The rain continues to fall and it becomes hazardous avoiding speeding, wet donkey carts in the medina! Sheltering under stall awnings and communicating mutual surprise is a good way to get smiles from the locals. As evening falls, the traders begin to set up in the Djema al-Fna, though they're thin on the ground. There are snake charmers, a few musicians and lots of stands selling cooked food - tagine, brochettes, sausages, sheeps' heads, brains and snails. Unfortunately, we've already eaten a huge and delicious help-yourself-Moroccan-supper at Ali's, but we try some spiced tea and cake. It's very good. The tea contains cardamom, nutmeg and masses of ginger. The cake is very sweet, but delicious with the tea. There are a lot of locals drinking at the stall and there's constant patter bewteen the owner and his customers. A tourist couple, just finishing their tea as we arrive are teased with, "The virtue of the tea is that now you will be able to satisfy three wives!". The wife looks shocked; the man looks worried. There's lot of giggling among the other customers. We have two cups each, and sleep like babies.On our second day, the sun is shining and it's hot. We leave our luggage at Ali's and set off for the square ...
The Sting: I am taking a general photograph of the square, artfully including a group of snake charmers in the middle distance for effect. In a moment, Faith has a snake draped around her neck and we are being drawn into their midst. There's drumming, more snakes, "Arab luck!" You bet. One of the group smiles widely, takes the camera and photographs us, all be-serpented, and a growing group of onlookers watches appreciatively. The camera's returned with more smiles. Now we must pay. It's no good saying no - we've already taken part and have the photos in the camera. There's a crowd, too, and who wants to look as stupid and mean as they feel? So, we bargain the price down from 200dH to nearer 100dH, and we're allowed to go. A measure of their happiness with the deal is that we're allowed to take some more pictures for free and wished huge amounts of Arab luck. Ignominy! It was an uncomfortable and unexpected experience, but it teaches that, where photos are concerned, it is sometimes necessary to buy a small piece of someone's soul rather than to attempt to take it by stealth. We have two maps. They quickly help us to get lost. There are no road signs in the souks, they've all been taken down or painted out. This way, you have to stop to look at your map and this gives little boys the chance to offer to guide you, or men the opportunity to suggest that you'd do well to follow them to the very special display of Berber goods that, fortunately for you, is held today only! As in Tangier, women don't get involved in this business, though often there are women begging charity. All this aside, the whole thing is stupendously fascinating. We've seen these narrow streets in cities like Cordoba, Malaga and Avila, which used to have Moorish communities, but there, they're sanitised and regulated. Marrakech brings them to life. Here, in streets just wide enough for laden donkeys to pass, where you can't see the sky because of the high walls and the reed-mat awnings, trade is taking place at a hectic pace all around, woven into the life of the people living in the medina. In some parts of the souk, much of what's being sold is for tourists, of course, but wool and leather dyeing are still happening, and you find the skeins and skins hung or laid to dry in the sun; there are precarious piles of fresh vegetables, a stinking live-poultry souk and men carrying sacks of fresh flatbread. An old man, sitting on a box and holding out a bowl with a few coins inside, has his grey djellaba raised above his waist to show his grossly deformed and swollen stomach, like a huge pink cauliflower, over his trousers; children are coming home from school; cats prowl for scraps and kittens run for their lives from Mobilettes; a group of locals berates and pushes-about a man whose thin and mangy donkey, pulling a cart piled with wooden pallets, has ground to a halt, blocking their square.Three buildings stand out in our wanderings today: the Madrasa ben Youssef, because it demonstrates that student life in 16th century Marrakech would have been recognisable to students studying in Oxford or Cambridge colleges at the same time - even down to lodging-rooms arranged in staircases and opening onto a quadrangle; the 12th century Quobba al-ba'Adiyn, because it's the protoype for almost all of the Arab-Andalucie architecture that we've seen repeated time and again throughout Spain; and the Koutoubia mosque that dominates the Djema al-Fna, whose towering minaret has sisters in Rabat and Seville, and in whose shady, evening rose gardens locals court discreetly, one couple to a bench.It's almost time for us to collect our luggage and make our way back to the station, but we pay a last visit to the square as the sun sets behing the mosque. The western sky is the colour of brass and the air above the square is smoky and loud with the sound of drumming, bells shawms and fiddles. The food stalls have begun to do brisk business. Last night there was room to walk about between groups of people in the damp evening. Not tonight. Every inch is filling up. there are musicians, acrobats, stotytellers, card sharps, fortune tellers, snake charmers, dancing "girls", women who henna hands, a fishing-for-bottles man, men with apes, sweet sellers, tea sellers, water-men, dancers, jewellery sellers, soothsayers, beggars and many, many cats. We look and wonder a bit more, buy some fresh orange juice and a big bag of dates and make our way back to Hotel Ali, the train to Tangier and, tomorrow morning, the fast boat to Algeciras.

You despise me don't you, Rick?

2006-04-28T21:57:00.000+01:00

I've never worked out whether that line from Casablanca is a plea or a statement of fact. The important thing for the moment is that Peter Lorre says it to Humphrey Bogart in "Rick's Cafe Americaine". We are on the terrace of the Cafe Tingis in the Petit Socco, drinking mint teas served by a waiter who looks disturbingly like him (Peter Lorre). He knows everyone local who passes by, and greets them; those he doesn't know, he invites in. He didn't know us. Now he does, and he's offered to take our photograph. The Petit Socco is a crossroads within the Tangier souks, and just across the road is the Cafe Central where William Burroughs found inspiration for "The Naked Lunch". As we sit drinking our tea, a group of people files past. They are led by a travel guide and look quite
frightened as they pass by, beset by a swarm of men and boys hawking everything from plastic camels to red fez hats, from watches to miniature derboukahs.
They disappear down the Rue el Mouahadine, following their guide's upraised brochure, and the buzzing swarm follows. The Petit Socco is definitely not beautiful; the cafe fronts are crumbling, the street is being dug up and the smell of drains and diesel fuel is strong, but it's every Grahame Greene story you've ever read! Better informed and more confident than yesterday, we spend the late morning exploring the tangled streets inside the medina. Jibali tribewomen have come in from the surrounding countryside because it's a Sunday market. They sell fresh vegetables, especially parsley and mint, and definitely don't want to be photographed. Africans are selling fish, and local Moroccans are doing everything from mending Mobilettes on the roadside to polishing shoes and cooking brochettes that smell deliciously through the whole street. We had breakfast at the hotel - finding it after negotiating a maze of stairs and corridors where bric a brac was stacked high - carved doors, lamps, ornate furniture - but by now we we're feeling hungry again and try Restaurant Hammadi in the kasbah, where we get live Berber music thrown in with our lunch because a tourist group is eating there, too. The rest of the day passes with us exploring or watching; the chaotic traffic is directed by a smartly dressed, armed, policeman who blows a whistle to signal who can move and who must wait. On a roundabout, he holds up traffic so that a group of pretty girls can photograph each other against the fountain that's in the middle. When things begin to move again he blows frantically at a driver who has accidentally turned left at the roundabout in his truck instead of going straight ahead. The driver stops and there is a lot of form-filling. Money changes hands and he drives on. A few moments later a smart car does the same illegal manoeuvre; there are smiles, a handshake, and no action is taken. Welcome to Tangier, it seems.Our train leaves Tangier at 9:30 pm, and we head to the station in plenty of time. Our way takes us along the beach, where new hotels are springing up. It's become showery by now, but there are still scattered groups of people here, playing football, eating picnics, courting. A tired man in a suit and cracked shoes walks up to us, "Wallet? Very soft, like a camel.(I swear this is what he said!) One Euro." We said no, and walked on; he followed. "A very good wallet. Two Euros. One Mark." He looked done in, but I don't need a wallet. We've seen so much of this kind of effort today. Men (usually) putting a huge amount of work into raising a tiny amount of money in a deal of some kind or other. How much do they need to make before they can say, "Enough!" and go home? Where's the line between a successful day and a failure?
The rain begins to fall hard and we hurry on to the station, shining brightly with its new promise in the distance. We're early, but it gives time to write some impressions down. Tangier has been fascinating, confusing and attractive, in spite of its ugliness and decay. There's far more happening here, at many levels, than we can hope to fathom in only 36 hours!
At 9:30 pm precisely we're allowed onto the platform and hurried into our coach by the conductor. It's separated from second class by a door that's chained shut. We're discover that we're sharing a compartment of 4 berths with a local woman and her daughter. They're both dressed in hybrid Moroccan/European style. It doesn't take us long to settle down, and we fall asleep to the sound of the rain pattering on the windows as we go.

Evening in Tangier

2006-04-28T11:27:00.000+01:00

There's a sandy bay about two miles west of Tangier . It's enclosed by steep rocky headlands and approached by a broad, flat-bottomed valley that opens out of the last tumbles of houses clinging to the steep hillsides that are the edge of city. A few thin cows and some nervous sheep graze among the dwarf palms, weeds and debris. You can't see the port or the city from the bay; it's just the place you'd choose to load contraband, or drop off a spy, if you wanted to avoid the port authorities and prying eyes. It was here that we found ourselves as dusk fell. This was a surprise. An hour or two earlier, we'd left the taxi at Place de France which is just at the point where the old city (mediaeval) begins to blend into the new (19th century) city.
We decided that we'd save the medina and the souk for the next day, but would skirt the medina walls and cut down northwards to our hotel for an early shower, supper and bed. Well, we'd been on the road since early morning, and Morocco-time is two hours behind Spanish time. We got lost ever so easily, but recognised that we were lost with much more difficulty. The broad avenue quickly gave way to steep, narrow streets, just wide enough to walk through, though we had to step aside pretty quickly when the ubiquitous Mobilettes clattered by. These may be loaded with anything from bundles of mint to two passengers, a microwave oven and a box of live hens and they negotiatethe twisting narrow alleys at surprising speed. The buildings are tall and narrow, so it's impossible to get any idea of where you are in relation to anywhere else you've already been. Every new street seems familiar, time after time! At one point we passed the same discarded sofa in a narrow street twice within half an hour.It was fascinating, though; all around we saw the same pattern of behaviour. Women, dressed very smartly in either western, hybrid or traditional style, going about their business purposefully, often in chattering groups, sometimes in dogged silence; men, unless they were stallholders or shopkeepers, seemed usually to be drifting, and at a loss as to what to do next. We got lots of eye contact, many smiles, some waves and only a very few unwanted approaches. We were, though, very obviously, off the tourist trail. Shops were dark rooms opening onto the street, their wooden shelves piled high with assorted stacks of goods, or stalls where fish lay in rows on a slab while their guts lay in mounds on the floor. But back to the bay ... "If we find the sea," Faith said, "we can follow the beach around to the port."
Leila was sitting alone on a rock, and said hello to us as we walked past her out onto the sand. She was about 9 years old and proudly showed us her newly henna'd hands. We agreed that they waere beautiful; they were. She was still there when we retraced our steps, having decided that we weren't good enough climbers to cross the rocky headland and follow Faith's plan. She walked with us along the valley back towards the houses. She was amused by our French, but we managed to chatter with her as we went. She was interested that we were such a long way from the city centre, and thought we must be camping. We found out that she's in Grade 5 at school, and lived nearby. She waved to some of her friends playing amongst the buildings, and we talked about the grazing animals, the beautiful plants and a group of children playing derboukahs (drums) high up on one the valley sides. We walked on together until we came to the bottom of the steep street where we had to turn left to begin to find our way back. Leila wanted us to go home with her, but we explained that we were bushed and really had to find our way back to our hotel. And so we all smiled, said goodbye to one another and, waving, set off on our separate ways.A surprised man under a makeshift shelter at the bottom of the hill pointed us in the right direction for Place de France; further on, a group of women added detail. They were very amused at where we'd been and said that we'd have to keep straight on, but had a climb, and then a descent and then another climb ahead of us. With their help, we passed the sofa a third time and, eventually, found ourselves back on the map.
By the time we reached the hotel, Faith was exhausted, and we'd walked about 5 miles since leaving the taxi. We showered, changed our clothes and went down to the hotel's restaurant for supper. Once again, it was high Moorish - arches, stucco, coloured glass and tiles everywhere. We ate chicken tagine and drank water (no alcohol for sale anywhere we'd seen all day), followed by soothing mint tea. We fell asleep to the sounds of the street and the port.

Sometime in the small hours, we heard the (very loud) call to prayer from the minaret just outside the window, but I'm afraid it didn't rouse us completely enough to compel us to rise up and join the devout of the city.

The Road to Morocco

2006-04-27T21:10:00.000+01:00

We weren't allowed into Tangier on our first try. At the douane, they stopped us and told us we'd need to get our passports franked with a numbered entry stamp. "Where?" we asked. "On the ship," they replied helpfully. We waited. Others joined us. We all waited. Passengers began to board for the crossing back to Algeciras. We feigned nonchalance. Time passed. Would the boat sail, with us, poor pressed sailors, trapped aboard to be sold to Barbary corsairs. Faith
was quite taken with that idea. The important man with the stamp appeared, though, and we presented ourselves for identification. In a few moments we were legitimate entrants.
Tangier! The Avenue d'Espagne. It's a big, dusty boulevard lined with colonial buildings, many of them now converted into cafes, where all manner of men sat drinking mint tea or small cups of black coffee. On the broken pavements and the crumbling steps more men, in greasy suits and grubby shirts, lounged or walked about in little animated groups. Deals were being done all around, bargains struck, compromises made. Into all of this walked Mel and Faith, eyes wide
and innocent as lambs. We had booked a room at the Continental Hotel before leaving Spain (used by Morocco newbies and ageing hippies, the guide said), and we knew vaguely how to find it. "Leave Avenue d'Espagne and bear right around the CTM building. Follow the edge of the medina and the frequent signs." We plunged in. Once we were out of the main Avenue d'Espagne we'd travelled back in time. A narrow street, tiny shops, dark inside, the smell of open drains mingling with the aroma of meat being cooked on charcoal, men and women in djellabas, craftsmen carving wood and cutting tiles for mosaics. The medina wall was on our right and we walked under an arch to a fork in the street. We couldn't see anything to our left or right but there, above our heads was an old sign that pointed to the right fork and read, "Hotel Continental 50 m". At a turn in the street a doorway appeared on the left and a gate on the right. From the doorway a man smiled. His invitation was warm and sincere in spite of his slightly distant gaze, "You want to buy a smoke?". On the right was a gateway. We chose the
gateway. Across a patio looking out over the port, we entered the Hotel Continental. The reception area was dark, cool and quiet. The Moroccan receptionist's French accent and his suit were impeccable, but both were of an earlier era. We looked around us at the mosaic walls and the Moorish arches. Ornate glass light fittings hung over the wide staircase and the corridors were lined wth cedarwood furniture, chests and paintings of the city as it might have been under French colonial control. The first thing we were asked for was the entry number on our passports. Only then were we allowed to book in.
Our room was furnished with an ornate wardrobe and bed, both with carved decoration and mirrors. The bathroom was enormous, and reached via a corridor in the room. All of this, though, was gloriously faded. The floor tiles were cracked, the furniture, though grand, was battered, rust was beginning to show through the bath enamel and the bedsheets, though clean and crisp, were well patched. Our window looked out over the port and the tumble of houses and roof terraces that cling to the edge of the medina. What a place! If you have a copy of "Casablanca", now is a good time to refer to it. We had two things to attend to immediately. Firstly, we needed cash to pay the hotel bill because they didn't accept cards; secondly, we needed to book our ticket for the overnight train to Marrakech next day. The Hotel couldn't help us with the train, and the receptionist wasn't sure where to find the station; we decided to find the Office de Tourisme and set off. A passing man asked us where we wanted, and we told him. "Follow me." He marched on ahead and , well, we followed. He led us by the most direct route (this included a brisk walk through some semi-derelict flat blocks where, once again, groups of men stood talking or waiting for something to develop). The Office de Tourisme was closed, but the man held out his hand and got a couple of Euros, which, we discovered later, he'd probably sell to someone leaving the country in exchange for their Dirhams. Because you're not allowed to take ANY dirhams out of Morocco. We found an ATM soon after this, and hailed a petit taxi to the railway station, which is about 3km from the city centre.
The station is impressive. It's brand new, all marble and chrome, floodlit and stands totally alone on a piece of wasteland where there's building rubble, discarded household goods, sheep and goats, shepherds and goatherds and a river whose grey water is almost solid enough to walk on. It was at the station that we discovered that no-one in Morocco accepts cards or anything but cash. We did a quick calculation and got enough money out of the ATM at the station (ATMs are everywhere;an interesting paradox) to buy First class sleeper returns from Tangier to Marrakech. These cost a total of 1114dH (about 111 Euros); rail travel is cheap in Morocco. We encountered a bustling local market on the way back into town. It was packed with people, all local, all wearing traditional dress. No visitors that we could see apart from us. We looked, mingled, bought icecream, felt confident we were getting to know Tangier, and set off to explore the medina like seasoned travellers. Somewhere out in the desert, laughter was heard as the djinns giggled at the credulity of these two presumptuous foreigners.

Un chien andalou

2006-04-21T16:00:00.000+01:00

There's a place just below the alcazar in Antequerra, where you can stand and look out over the river valley that's just alongside the town. There's obviously been some sort of industrial development there in the past; the remains of a water wheel and some attractively ruinous stone factory buildings that litter the place romantically. There are some edgy-looking streets and small-holdings down there. too. The day before yesterday, we were looking over the railings, watching what was happening below. By a triangular swimming pool in the gardens of a neglected villa, a terrier was wondering whether to end it all in the green, scum-filled water, or just to drown its sorrows in the puddles of beer from the spilt bottles on the side; a pale horse was running to and fro in a worried kind of way in a bone-dry makeshift paddock next door. Down at the bottom of the valley we could see activity around a small iron footbridge across the stream. A man in blue overalls was trying to clamber down the bank towards SOMETHING in the water. A hen-shaped woman and a few other voters were watching, and discussing, the events. We watched for quite a long time, too. Eventually man another joined them, from a house with a big garden full of dogs and desolation. He argued with the man in the blue overalls and, though we couldn't hear what was being said, he obviously considered himself an expert. Eventually the man in the blue overalls dragged a big golden retriever from the river by a rope around its neck. It was obvious that the dog was not well; its hind end was black with
mud and no longer worked, and it tried to pull itself along with its front legs only. For a good half hour, while the rescued dog sat and waited stoically, there was animated discussion among the people about what could be the next step. At one point the 'expert' returned and tried to convince the dog that, given a kick up the backside, all was possible. The dog was having none of it and at this point, the 'expert' gave up and went off in a huff to his own rowdy dogs, barking around his backyard. He'd obviously told the little crowd that if they kept their dog safe inside their own property. like he did, this sort of sorry affair wouldn't happen. In the fullness of time, the poor beast's owners brought a wheelbarrow and manhandled the helpless dog into it. It got out quickly, turning the wheel barrow over, and sat on the road as forlonly as before. Their second attempt worked and they all scooted off down the road, at which point we lost sight of them. Is this a metaphor for our condition; is a swift, debilitating dunk in the muddy brook of life, followed by a comical ride in the wheelbarrow of oblivion, the best that we
should hope for?
Well no, at least not if the Cordobans have anything to say in the matter.
Cordoba is a city that's been governed by the Visigoths, Romans, Moors, Christians and Mammon in quick succession. It seems to have made a good job of assimilating them all to produce a glorious dog's breakfast of a place that somehow, really works. The epicentre is the Mesquita, a mosque, built over a Roman villa, with a Christian cathedral grafted into its middle. When you walk around inside, you get the disorientating effect of seeing cherubs carved onto Muslim pillars and a staggeringly ornate Mirhab (where the Immam stands to say prayers) looking out over a row of chapels to various catholic saints. It's not just in the Mesquita that this happens, either; out in the Juderia, the Jewish quarter, we found a lttle, ruined synagogue where there was a menorah at one end and a crucifix at the other. The guide explained that, probably, the Jews had used the building on Saturdays and the Christians on Sundays! The woman who ran the Jewish craft centre next door was bemused. She'd lived here all her life, she said, and had never been into the synagogue. At the top end of the town, beyond the winding old streets and churches, is a huge, arcaded square (see Almagro!). The Christian rulers of Cordoba used to hold jolly affairs like inquisitions, book-burnings and executions here, but now it's home to cafes, children's games, showing off the results of your latest shopping-trip and the occasional rock concert.
We ate in the Comedor Andalus-Arabie in a little back street, where we squatted on low stools and ate maq'luba - rice with chicken and veal - and drank sangria followed by arabic coffee (with lots of cinnamon-tasting spice);if my eyes turn blue within blue over the next few days, I'll know why!
Tomorrow, we are planning to head for Morroco. The idea is to make for Algeciras by train, then cross to Tangier and get the next sleeper train to Marrakech, there to look for a sheltering sky, or at least a likely hostel!

Quite a lot of references to teeth!

2006-04-17T16:47:00.000+01:00

La Joya village isn't far off 700m above sea level, so it gets mountain weather. We experienced this the day before yesterday, when we left a breezy and slightly overcast La Joya to explore Malaga, down on the coast. It was hot down there!
We spent most of the day inside the Alcazaba, the Moorish fort and palaces that are built on a rising slope, above the remains of a 1st century A.D. Roman theatre, overlooking the estuary of the Guadalmedina river. This was the first time that Faith and I have visited Arabic buildings, and it was fascinating. As well as the moorish arches and decorations, all through the fort there are patios, fountains and ornamental water-courses, so even on a hot day like this, you could hear running water and smell orange blossom. Because it's on the Costa del Sol, I'd expected Malaga to be brash and loud, with high rise glass and steel offices and hotels, but it's quite different; a muddle of 18th and 19th century streets, like decaying teeth, gradually being renovated or demolished, newer suburban development and historical buildings. As well as the Alcazabar, there's second fort - the Gibralfaro, a neo-Moorish indoor market (like Cardiff Market a la Wilson, Keppel and Betty!), the bullring and an enormous 16th century cathedral. We'll need to go back to see more, including the Picasso collection.
There's quite a wind blowing outside, I can hear our bedroom window-shutter knocking against the wall, and the weather's turned cold this afternoon. Tom-Tom, the little black cortijo cat has curled herself up on the sofa and she's asleep with her head against Faith's canvas shoulder bag. A few minutes ago, I went up the road to the bottle bank and the bus was picking up the children for afternoon school, and so now the village is quieter than it's been almost since we got here. As long as the sun is shining, or the wind isn't up, people congregate in all sorts of places outside - on corners, in the square, in doorways or on the pavement - to talk together or just to watch things happening. Yesterday, on a walk just outside the village we saw an old man walking along the farm road next to our track; we said, "Buena, Signor," and got a huge, "Ho-o-o-la-a!" back in return. He then began talking to us delightedly, with lots of smiles and eloquent hand gestures. Unfortunately we couldn't understand a word. It wasn't just our Spanish this time, though; he had an enormous dearth of teeth, and the few that he did have were held together with bits of wire that kept them in his mouth, but didn't stop them moving about. Still, nobody seemed to mind. He seemed to be saying that everything was growing well, what with the sunny weather and the Spring showers and everything, and wasn't it marvellous that the swallows were back. On the other hand, he could have been complaining about his dentist. We (Faith and me, not the dental gentleman) carried on down our grassy track, turning over stones to look under them. We found that there are very many ants hereabouts, and some of the biggest woodlice I've ever seen. We found a Smooth Snake, too (harmless).
Perhaps the most surprising discovery was Scolopendra cingulatus, an enormous yellow and brown striped centipede. The book says they grow to 9cm, and I can vouch for it (that's my fingertip at the top of the pic.). The photo's not very good; Faith wasn't quick enough with the camera and I was too squeamish to grab at the beast as it scuttled - a good use of the word - off. Just as well, really, because we discovered later that it "possesses large fangs [and] its bite is painful and potentially dangerous".

The landscape here is very rugged. It's limestone, and so the mountains themselves are very jagged and dramatic, with steep faces or outcrops backed by long, sweeping saddles and big hanging plateaus. The villages are on the saddles and the plateaus, with fields around them as far as possible, growing cereal, peas and beans and olives; what can't be cultivated is grazed by flocks of goats that are driven out to nibble on different hillsides on different days. This may be why the wild flowers are so good, because the vegetation gets a chance to recover between goat-attacks.

Bitter tears of the Virgin

2006-04-16T18:53:00.000+01:00

The day before yesterday was Good Friday, and we went into Antequera in the evening to see the climax of the religious processions, when the images from three of the churches would be paraded through the dark, narrow streets. It was a cloudy evening, threatening rain, and as we walked into the Plaza del Portochuello, we felt the first drops ...

In this year, of all years, each day of the Semana Santa brought new heights of passion. There had never been more people in the streets. Many were strangers. They came to pretend that they, too, understood. They watched the Hermanacos sweating under the weight of the Trono. What did they know of the sorrow and the pride? But little Paco knew. His father would be the Hermano Mayor on Holy Friday; the leading man. Every other man of the district, trembling beneath the Tronos, the throne of the Virgen de los Dolores, would look to him for the word. His voice would raise the image to their shoulders. This thought alone caused Paco's chest to burn. It always did. He was small, but his father was strong, and he wanted to be like him. One day he, Paco, would be Hermano Mayor. But for now he would watch from the crowd. Being Good Friday, the Salida, the moment of carrying the Virgen from the church and out into the world, would happen late. Maybe not until darkness had fallen. Each church, each Cofrade guild, took its turn. Not until the Desfile des Armadilla arrived could the Hermano Mayor gather his disciples. All listened for their cornets and the muffled drums. There were always cornets and drums. At first the air in the narrow street vibrated only. But the Desfile approached and now stomachs and chests felt the throb of the drums. Paco looked up at his father. He felt his father's firm grip tighten on his small hand. "It's time now," his father said. "I must leave you with your mother, the others are ready." Above the church a sudden flash. Heavy drops of rain. A moan rose from the street; not this, not at this last moment! Paco watched his father across the square. A man among men, his father fought to hold his Cofrade to its task. Ignore the rain. All faces turned to the sky and then to the street. The cobbles glistened, and the moan became a silence. Paco's father walked apart from the crowd, ran his foot along the slick surface; he opened his hands to the falling rain and his thick fingers tested its wetness against calloused palms. The Virgen de los Dolores was a precious weight to bear; the rain changed everything. Alone now, he would decide between the danger of a fall, the shame of discomfiting the Virgen and staisfying the yearning of the crowd to see Her borne through the town. The rain changed everything. Paco watched his father turn to the people; saw the shrug and the lowered eyes.
The image would not leave the church this Holy Friday. Instead, the people would crowd inside to see her. They would wonder why She had decided to disappoint them.

Paco slipped away from his mother. Quietly he joined his father, who still stood in the plaza. Boy looked at man; man at boy. They became one, together sharing the burden of the Virgen de los Dolores in the rain that was still falling.

Enormous apologies to Ernest Hemingway, but the rain had just this effect! At some point in the proceedings, after the Desfile had entered the church of Santa Maria de Jesus, somebody made decision that the streets were too wet to risk the processions. Immediately everyone crammed into the church to see the images in situ, the drums and cornets played melancholy music, some people were crying and many took single carnations from the Tronos to give to the disappointed children who would have been Penitentes (wearing robes and conical hoods) taking part in the procession.

Faith and I walked through the slippery cobbled streets - they were emptying fast as people went home instead - and found a place where we could dry off and eat. We had a 'menu del dia'. I ate an interesting asparagus soup and fish; Faith had a salad of cod with orange followed by Huevos Flamenca! These were eggs, baked under a mixture of tomatoes, ham, peppers and chorizo sausage in a stoneware dish. It think it must have been called Flamenca because of its vivid rosy colour, because the rotund, dishevelled and slightly tipsy waiter certainly didn't look the dancing type. We had a bottle of wine and coffee and the whole lot came to only 12 Euros. Actually, I think the waiters just make up the amount on the bill according to what they think you'll pay, because almost every time we've eaten out, whether in restaurants or bars, eating full menus or single courses, we've paid around 12 Euros with drinks. We obviously don't look too well-heeled.
We drove back home just after midnight through a dramatic thunderstorm that lit up the mountains in brief flashes as we peered through the rain, looking for the
little sign that points to La Hoya, 7km!

Meandering in Andalucia

2006-04-14T11:52:00.000+01:00

Thank you Ali and Tricia for the comments. We tried waiting later before starting to eat, but still no-one came. I think that many people eat a big lunch (we've certainly seen this). As far as our car is concerned, when it comes to mountain roads we're considering hiring a donkey to add additional horsepower!
Now that it's April 14th, I've got to try to cram our first five days in Andalucia into one post if I can. Otherwise I'll never be able be able to catch up. We arrived at La Joya over a mountain road and drove right through the village before we'd realised what we'd done. At that point I had to confess to Faith that I hadn't printed out the map or address of the place we are staying, and we had to start up the laptop by the side of the road so that we could find our way in. La Joya village is small - a village centre with a fountain, a bakery and a smattering of little shops and bars. The shops are the typical Spanish ones, hidden behind door curtains and not looking like shops at all until you go inside. Down a pretty side-road, Calle de Almeda, behind whitewashed walls and a green gate, we found Cortijo la Joya. If you visit the website Apartamentos Andalucia, you'll get a good idea of what the place is like. It's a cortijo - a farmstead - over 300 years old, converted into apartments of different sizes, but all opening onto the courtyard in various ways, by doors or stairs or passageways. It still has the intimate "feel" of a building designed for an extended family. As in any place, the people are interesting to talk with, and our first evening included a lovely long session talking together with the some of the other residents and travellers heres. First among these, I guess, has to be Heino, the owner. He's German, though living in Eire, and running the ICT suite in Wexford College; he spends his time between there and La Joya. Heino's made us very welcome very quickly - he's avuncular, engaging and a good really good conversationalist. Other people who are permanent, or semi-permanent fixtures are: Dave, the quiet and helpful 'oiler of wheels'; Linn, the manageress, who lives in a nearby village, but works here part-time doing the business side of things very efficiently; and a bevy of local women who come in to clean and generally bustle about. And then there's us, the visitors: Faith and me, of course, in our little apartment, El Chaparral, with its cosy sitting room

and romantic balcony overlooking the mountains in the distance.

The bedroom opens onto the balcony, so we can leave the door open and hear the nightingales singing in the copse just across the road.

Across the courtyard is an English couple, oder than us, with a couple of friends sharing their apartment with them; and another couple with a grown-up daughter (who is in the apartment below ours). Finally, in the apartments upstairs, on the east side of the courtyard is a Romanian family (or families?) who may be semi-permanent rather than visiting. They're here for the seasonal work in the fields, picking beans and. later, peas. They're friendly and gregarious, and go out together as it's just getting light. That's our little community, and we mix and mingle among one another in a quite interesting way. Faith, for example, has just discovered that the woman across the way went to Durham and did botany, so they're now sitting together with a pile of books, identifying plants and talking about Faith's ex-boyfriend, who they both seem to know! Since arriving, we've shared our time between Antequera and the mountains. You can read about Antequera in guide books, but what's fascinated us has been its Semana Santa (Holy Week) celebrations. These involve the whole town cramming the streets over 5 days to watch enormous holy statues being paraded through the town from church to church. It sounds quite simple, but there layers of meaning and activity! For example, the day before yesterday, we stood in the square outside the looming church of San Sebastian as a crowd of excited children ran through the road ahead of a squad of very 'Mediterraneo' soldiers, who came past at a fast trot, flourishing rifles and cornets. The squad stood to rigid attention in the square as the graphic statue of the horribly flogged, crawling, Christ was carried from the church on the shoulders of six of their strongest and paraded in font of us to the sound of the soldiers singing a hymn, accompanied by cornets and muffled drums. Add to this the huge image of Mary, standing on a crescent moon and dressed in a glittering robe, that we saw in the parade on Palm Sunday, and you get an idea of the melange of cultures at work during Semana Santa.

The mountains around us are rocky and wild. There are plenty of farm roads to cortijos in the hills, but very few paths other than goat tracks once you wander off them. Any paths shown on maps are an indication of a possible route rather than a strict representation of a right of way. So, on Monday, when we decided to climb Camorro Alto, the local mountain, we spent a lot of our time picking our way amongst limestone pavement and outcrops, with lots of 'oohing' and 'aahing' over the plants as we went. The blue one here is a hedgehog plant, Erinacea anthyllis that we saw on the way down. The summit is up above to the left, and the flat area below is where we saw the scary shepherd .. read on. We hardly saw a soul; a farmer was burning his olive thinnings in one farm, and, further up the mountain a shaggy looking shepherd with a sun browned face and wild hair kept his distance from us as he watched the flocks (we wondered if he was some kind of Old Gregg of the mountain, but didn't get close enough to make an assessment). Yesterday we explored el Chorro where there is a mighty ravine, soaring Griffon Vultures and vertiginous mountain raods, but also evidence that if they don't get substantial rain soon, there are going to be some very dry reservoirs by the end of the Summer. Today we're staying close to home so that we can do things like this, getting the blog up to date and identifying plants.

Handgrenades are not the only fruit

2006-04-12T22:37:00.000+01:00

There comes a time in every young man's life when he knows that he will never play "the Dane"; Uncle Monty would like Almagro, and might even find his jaded
thespian ambitions revived by the place. We arrived there after driving across the relentless plain of la Mancha - no wonder Don Quixote was driven to wandering
about in search of uplifting experiences; oi gevaer, it's flat already (sorry, haven't quite recovered from the Hospederia la Sinagoga). The Hotel Almagro is just
outside the main town, so no searching this time, and it's a Neo-rustic Holiday Inn kind of place; all rush-woven chairs and hacienda-style rooms with hand-painted door numbers. The town itself is definitely authentic, though.We walked into the main square and gasped at what appeared to be a theatre-set. On each side of the broad open space is row of 19th century wood-and -glass-fronted arcades with small shops, bars and cafes incorporated. What's more, the square was teeming with people - schoolchildren, families, old people, visitors, but all chattering and milling about contendedly; and so, we joined them. Almagro's greatest claim to fame is its 17th century theatre, rediscovered in 1955 when the town council bought out an inn and began to demolish the courtyard. We signed up for the guided tour and were ushered off the square and through a big old door. Imagine walking through a completely nondescript street-door and finding yourself inside Shakespear's Globe or the Swan Theatre, and you'll have some idea of what we found. Three storeys from floor to "gods" and a small apron stage, all inside an area of about 20 metres square! The tour turned out to be quite exceptional. We were greeted by a glamorous Dona, in 17th century costume, who explained to the group where we could sit. She happened to come and talk to Faith and me, and we soon discovered that a) we were the only non Spanish people in the theatre, b) she was delighted to talk to us, c) she couldn't speak English any better than we can speak Spanish, c) she understood French, d) her French was slightly better than our Spanish! Nevertheless, I enjoyed the conversation, well it's not every day that a Dona chats you up (particularly at my age)! It turns out that we were going to have a taste of the theatre's history, through the gift of drama. Our friend told us that she was the daughter of one of the local noble families, and quite an afficionada of the theatre; though, it must be said, mainly because a lot of dashing caballeros gathered there too. We then met her maid, a typical Despina character, who helped her in her plans and demonstrated the way the theatre worked at the same time. Great fun - though we hardly understood a word, we did get a wave from the Dona as she came on stage!What could follow that?How about a meal in one of those arcade restaurants? Once again, we were the only two dining! The table was at the open window, looking over the busy square below. After the meal, we went to the bar to have coffee and an aguardiente, and one of the locals began a conversation with us. He was trying to improve his English, he said, and so we had a good time helping each other with vocabulary and trying to navigate our way around all sorts of topics, including how glad (though guarded) we were that ETA has declared a perpetual cease-fire. Our Collins Spanish Language Survival Guide coped surprisingly well.
The session ended with our new friend encouraging the bar-man (an old friend of his!) to have us correct his English version of the menu. He handed it over with a flourish; he'd prepared it himself, he said proudly, with the help of a dictionary and the internet. It all went swimmingly until we got to "Ice-cream with hand-grenade"; we both smirked, and the poor bar-man looked crestfallen, even after we'd agreed that a "granada" , the fruit (pomegranate), does look very like a "granada", the hand-grenade - actually, we only found out about the pomegranate later; we guessed pineapple from his explanations - but, come to think about it, that looks like a grenade, too.We ended the night happily, though, and still friends.
Tomorrow, Andalucia!

More about Avila and the lowdown on St Teresa

2006-04-11T21:28:00.000+01:00

When we'd had our fill of all this history and wildlife, we went in search of sustenance of a more
culinary kind.
By now, it was evening, and we know that the Spanish eat late, so we walked a bit more, aiming to get to somewhere suitable by around 10:00 p.m. On the way we encountered, in the darkness of the streets below the walls, a marching band. They were playing a wild tune in a minor key on cornets and drums, practising for the Semana Santa Easter Week processions that will happen from Palm Sunday to Good Friday. they may also have been thinking about St Teresa, Avila's most famous holy person. Well then, at last we found a likely looking place to eat, el Portalon ; there was a big family group already tucking into their meal and drinks at the back of the old fashioned wood-panelled bar/dining room.
We went in, we sat down, we asked if we could we could eat ...... we were led downstairs to the very formal and empty restaurant!
It took a good ten minutes, with the help of our phrase book and hand signals, to explain that we wanted to eat where there was more company and that we didn't mind if all that we could get
upstairs was tapas, rationes or combinationes; no 3 course meals up there. Once he understood, the waiter was fantastically helpful. He served us as he cooed over the toddler who was with the family party. Now that he had us weighed up. he avoided speaking English, but led us through the Spanish menu, making us repeat after him what it was we wanted after, and checking our pronunciation as we went. We had an excellent meal and a memorable evening. We returned to
our hotel where, to our amusement, the bedrooms turned out to be hardly soundproof at all!
April 7th. We checked out, smiling sweetly at the demure couple who passed us in the lobby, and went to the little cafe across the road for a breakfast of hot chocolate and churros. On the way back to the car, the waiter from last night passed us in the street; he stopped and asked us if we'd slept well, and Faith got a kiss on each cheek, while I got a manly handshake. Next stop, Almagro, home of Spanish theatre!
(By the way, thanks for adding comments, and no Glain and Mark - we weren't sick on the crossing!)

Lost in Spain!

2006-04-11T10:46:00.000+01:00

It's Tuesday, April 11th and this is the first time that there's been an opportunity to get to the blog because we've been travelling for 5 of the last 7 days, and finding our way about for the last 2. I don't know yet if it's going to be possible to upload pictures from here; it's a very slow connection. So for now, it's text only!
The doughty Pride of Bilbao took us safely across the Bay of Biscay but, oh best beloved, not a whale or dolphin did we see! The wind blew at a steady force 5 to 7 and there was heavy weather in the deep waters of the continental trough, so Captain Macfadian decided to keep us "close in the lee of France" as we steamed ever southward. Your intrepid travellers spent the whole of a day up on the open top observation deck. We saw many excellent gannets and a most
awesome sunset. No whales, though.
And so we arrived in Bilbao early on the morning of April 6th and began our drive south. The first night was to be the mediaeval city of Avila, where we would
stay in a hotel that's a converted Synagogue. With its 1.4 litre engine, this new car that we have is a mite underpowered for hurtling down Spanish motorways, so we smiled at the faster vehicles as they zipped by as we bowled along, and we got there just the same. Eventually ...., not because of our speed, but because the map that we'd downloaded showed our hotel on the opposite side of the town from its actual location! We learned a lot of basic Spanish asking passersby in the maze of mediaeval one way streets where we'd find, "Reyes Catolicos y el Hospederia la Sinagoga, por favor". All were helpful, some volubly so and we got engaged in some very long and, let's be honest, one way conversations before we finally found the hotel.
What an amazing city Avila is. It's surrounded by almost complete, and very hefty, mediaeval walls punctuated by narrow posterns. Inside the cathedral is home to pigeons, sparrows, lesser ketrels and storks. In fact, every church tower is topped by at least one great bundle of sticks, and storks fly around among the roof tops or stand on their nests clattering their beaks.

Meditation and water

2006-04-04T14:29:00.000+01:00

The nice young man from P and O Ferries just rang to check that we've remembered we're sailing this evening!

He assures me that winds are favourable (NE) and, anyway, the good ship Pride of Bilbao is a stabilised vessel.
This is a very good thing.
What's this, I hear you ask, surely that old salty dog isn't beginning to feel queasy? What happenned to the staunch piratical resolve, the grit, the sea-legs?

Nothing, nothing, I assure you, but I've just been re-reading the Voyage of the Beagle and it reminds me that when Charles Darwin wasn't chasing finches and fossicking on dry land, he was only able mumble raisins and dry biscuits between bouts of spewing over the side.

Just to be prepared, I'll go out now and buy some Kwells, ginger and those clever little acupuncture wristbands. England expects .....

Call me Ishmael

2006-03-29T20:47:00.000+01:00

Ahoy!
At 10:00 pm on April 4th, we sails for far Bilbao, by the Bay of Biscay, an' Faith is prognosticatin' that we is bein' sick as parrots an' confined to our swayin' standard class hammocks in the bilges on account o' the likely heavy seas an' fearsome gales.

But not me, mateys! Oh no, I is determined, come typhoon or tornado (well a bit o' wind, whatever!), to climb to the very t'gallants and go a-whale-spottin', dam' yer eyes!

What is it yo're blatherin' about Mel , you old scallywag, I is hearin' you mutter?
Has ye been at the rum (or, worse still, 'as ye been in the apple barrel again), or are ye jus' sailin' under too many years?
Nay lads,

I is no ancient mariner who stoppeth one of three.
Tho' I has a beard that's grey, 'tis true,
But that's nought to do with ye!

By the powers, the mighty great beasts be as thick as lice in a lighterman's vest in them thar waters, they say, an' I means to see me some o' the lubbers!
My informants is a'tellin' me that we's likely to see dolphins an' porpoises at least, and, if we's lucky, pilot whales and more besides, yoho.

O'course, I is also keepin' a close watch out for scurvy, morose peg-legged swabs, too, an' stayin' well clear o' them!

So, lads, don't be forgettin' yer old deck mate; wish 'im a calm sea or a strong stomach, an' 'ope that he can keep up this preposterous nautical-type talk long enough to reach the end o' this post without 'aving 'ad to ... oh bugger!!

This is better than shredding paper!

2006-03-22T17:01:00.000Z

In Spain, we'll be staying in an apartment at a converted cortijo near Antequera, a town about 40 km north of Malaga.

The closest natural attractions are El Torcal,
a limestone outcrop that's also a nature reserve
and El Chorro, a limestone gorge that's been cut by the Guadalhorce river.
Both of El Torcal and El Chorro have trails and footpaths to explore....

... so there's no excuse at all for staying unfit.

Of course, Faith is ecstatic about the botanising possibilities that will be right on our doorstep. By going at this time of year we're aiming to get plenty of spring flowers before they're burned off by the sun; last time we came to Spain, however, we had bitter winds and rain in May!

All the locals said that the previous weeks had been glorious, and the day that we left for home was pretty good, too. I'll pack the waterproofs, just in case!

With a month to play with, we also plan to cross over into Morocco, for a few days at least. This will be a chance to imagine what Andalucia might have been like under Arab rule. Chefchaouen, in the Rif mountains east of Tangiers, is one of the places that the Moors and Jews from Spain settled after they were expelled by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492.

"'Reality,' sa molesworth 2, 'is so unspeakably sordid it make me shudder.'"

2006-03-21T10:11:00.000Z

Less than two weeks of work left, and lots to do. I've begun clearing out the huge amount of paper that's accumulated over 4 years of working from home; the ideal of a paperless office is certainly no more than that.

I've decided that I'll dispose of at least one piece of material (responsibly of course, "hem, hem") every time I go downstairs from my office.

I've got two weeks' leave before I officially finish work on March 31st, but Faith carries on to the bitter end; this feels rather strange, but it does give time to think about tying loose ends. "They" will come to collect the company car tomorrow, and on March 31st all of my I.T. equipment has to be returned. No more broadband after that!

2006-03-18T19:30:00.000Z

We live in a land of weather forecasts and breakfasts that "set in".

Here we are (Mel and Faith) on the Portella Blanca pass, one foot in Languedoc and one foot in Cerdanya, at the crux of a 10 day backpacking trip through the Pyrenees last summer. We were walking the Route des Bonhommes (the Cathar Route) between Foix in France and Baga in Spain. Portella Blanca is one of the mountain passes that the last Cathar "good men" used, to cross between the two countries undetected among the annual migrations of shepherds and their livestock.

We've almost always taken holidays where our itinerary has been open 'till the last minute, but this trip was especially memorable, and so we decided that, before night begins to fall and we're forced to camp, we'd better do some more travelling. Shall it be Saga Holidays or independent travel?

We've chosen the second option.

And so, by the end of March we'll both have quit our jobs and set off on a journey that will take in Andalucia and Morocco in April and May, then Thailand and Australia between June and September. There is a theme - or at least a motive - that unites the two halves of the trip, and it involves satisfying an ambition to experience two mediterranean springtimes in the same year ... hmmm we shall see.