SNOW!

Too excited to write, must wish for white Christmas that is not so white that we get stuck in Spain.

Beatriz, not Biarritz

When we went to the Melbourne Cup thing I ended up talking to a very nice young man about biscuits (these are the sorts of wild nights we've been having). I was telling him about some very nice biscuits I'd had from a shop in the Calle Estafeta, and he one-upped me by rhapsodising about some really, really nice biscuits he'd had in Biarritz. Or so I thought. I'd had a couple of beers, and it was quite noisy in the pub and these old ears are not what they were. Eventually I worked out that the nice young man wasn't talking about Biarritz, the city in France. He was talking about Beatriz, the same biscuit shop I was talking about. The conversation went around in circles for quite some time before we realised we were talking about the same biscuit shop. Oh, how we laughed.

But Beatriz is officially the Happiest Place on Earth.

 

That box of biscuits lasted about three days. Three days of blissful, sugary semi-diabetic near coma. My next post will be about zombies, I'm just trying to work up the nerve to look at the photos again. For now, though, happy thoughts of biscuits.

New napisan extremist, for all your soiled political activist needs

I know I really shouldn't laugh at ETA graffiti. For one thing, making fun of political activists who have been known to blow stuff up is probably not a good idea. Also, there are genuine grievances here, and they don't need idiots like me not taking them seriously. But whatevs. Make sure you soak your political activists well before washing them. 

Translation: Free Basque political prisoners. So, not actually funny at all.

Sort of about my trip to Logrono, but it gets lowbrow pretty fast

Potential employers should probably not read this post, because in it I reveal myself to be not only crap with technology, but also as someone with the sense of humour of a twelve year old boy. If you think that maybe one day you’d like to hire me, maybe you should go and read my post about... oh. I don’t have any posts that reflect well on me. If you are a potential employer, I swear I’m actually a fairly competent human being most of the time. Some of the time. I have been known to fill out my own tax return forms and  I always remember to buy toilet paper when it looks like we’re running out. Does that count?

Anyway.

I went to Logrono last week, which was quite nice. In fact, it was one of those cities that is only really possible to describe as ‘quite nice’. Clean, prosperous, seems like a quite nice place to live. But it didn’t make that much of an impression on me. 

But the coach trip to Logrono from Pamplona is lovely, though it takes what is coyly called a ‘semi-direct’ route, which basically means that it trawls through about half a dozen little towns between Pamplona and Logrono and takes about twice as long as it would if it just went straight down the highway. If I’d had some particular reason to get to Logrono it would have driven me insane, but as it was I was happy just to sit on the bus and admire the scenery. It’s always nice to have an outing. 

I took a bunch of photos, but managed to delete them all and haven’t been able to figure out how to bring them back from the ether, probably because I am a dimwitted luddite  I was recalibrating the feedback on my partition drive to facilitate faster bit acceleration rates when my computer went into a advanced forced failure (yes, that sounds plausible...)

I’m mostly OK with that as it was just pictures of streets, trees, rivers, the usual. How many pictures of churches can any one person possibly need? But there were two pictures that I am very that sad I can’t present to you. They were going to be part of my critically acclaimed series on graffiti. One was a picture of a wicked cool flying horse that was breathing fire. The other was a much more minimalist effort on the back of the cathedral. It took the form of black, two foot-high letters that said 

CANT YOU SEE THAT I LOVE MY COCK?

I love it for the obvious and childish reason that I loved seeing a swear word painted on a church – not out of any specific anti-religious feeling, you understand, but just because I imagine that whoever put it there thought they were being terribly anarchic and clever, when graffiti really is the one of the most predictably conformist-rebellious things you can do. Oooh, you painted ‘cock’ on a church. That will show everyone. You’re dangerous. 

But I also loved it because it offers so many different interpretations. It seems to me that it was written by someone whose first language is not English, and who had managed to slightly muff the inflection and intent of the question, leaving it open to all sorts of interpretations. Go on, imagine all the different moods you could imbue it with, all of which render it utterly ridiculous, and nowhere nearly as naughty as the artist intended. Stanley Kowalski screaming it under Blanche's window in A Streetcar Named Desire. An arch Noel Coward character with a martini in one hand and a cigarette in the other, lingering over a piano. William Shatner in just about any context.

Or maybe I’m misinterpreting the whole thing, and this is actually quite a sweet declaration of love for someone with the unfortunate name of Mycock.   

I don’t know. Maybe the fact that I was so amused by it means that I need to get out more. 

Permit me a moment of more self indulgence than usual

It has well and truly settled into winter here, and it tends to rain more often than it doesn’t. The chestnut sellers are out in force, the churro cafes are packed, and the evenings have started to take on a slightly subdued air as the streets and squares empty of dawdlers and drinkers.

I love this weather. I’ve come to the conclusion that I am just not built for summer. I don’t like the beach, and I’m appalled at the thought that actual humans might see me in a swimsuit. In fact, I’ve realised that don’t really know how to dress myself in the heat in general. A figure like mine requires some serious scaffolding, and as much as I’d love to wear those floaty, wispy little summer dresses, the underpinnings I require make it all but impossible. 

And eating is no fun in the heat. All you ever want in the middle of summer is to pick languidly at a salad, even when you’re hungry enough to require a three course meal with matched wines and cheese to follow. 

No, I am not a summer person. 

Now, winter. Winter is great. The clothes are far more fun; boots, jackets, scarves, cardigans, woolly hats. There’s nothing better than getting properly rugged up before going outside – yet another thing winter has over summer; you can choose how cold or warm you wish to be simply by adding or subtracting items of clothing. How perfectly civilised.

And, of course, the food is so much better; stews, roasts, buckets of pasta, melted cheese on everything, and of course, the aforementioned churros with hot chocolate;

But I think my favourite thing about winter is the landscape. You can keep your rainforests, your tropical beaches. The countryside in winter is far more interesting. I’ve been doing a lot of walking while we’ve been here, and as the weather has been getting colder, the landscape has become more and more arresting;

 

It reminds me of a passage from The Wind in the Willows (one of the best books ever written in my humble opinion, for adults or children, and Kenneth Grahame is surely one of the saddest figures in literary history);

Copses, dells, quarries, and all hidden places, which had been mysterious mines for exploration in leafy summer, now exposed themselves pathetically, and seemed to ask him to overlook their shabby poverty for a while, til they could riot in rich masquerade as before, and trick and entice him with old deceptions. It was pitiful in a way, and yet cheering – even exhilarating. He was glad that he liked the country undecorated, hard, and stripped of its finery, He had got down to the bare bones of it, and they were fine and strong and simple.

PS. I finally saw the swan! Pity that it seems to have no head and only one leg, but I suppose I'm just being picky.

Graffiti III

Translation: There are a thousand ravens for every swan

I am wrong about something and also homicidal about something

Some of you may remember me talking a while back about how admirable I find the attitude towards drinking in Spain. No?

Well, I was basically gushing about how wonderfully restrained they are here, and how there is a general disdain for public drunkenness. This is sort of not true. 

At all. 

It depends really on where you go, and at what time. Being old and married, we tend to get our drunk on, eat ice creams and be home by about 1a.m., which is shamefully early in this country, as 1a.m. is when the young folk are really just getting started. 

Anyway, so there are lots of drunken idiots in this country too, and we have been woken up by them several times a week for the last few weeks at around 4a.m. But only during the week, for some reason, not on the weekends. 

I actually wouldn’t mind if it was the weekend, but on a Tuesday morning it just seems unreasonable (I say that as if they’re waking me up and I’m pissed off because I have to get up early in the morning to go to work or to uni, or to do something constructive, when the reality is that the next day I have to get up at some point before mid-morning, then spend the day crumbling biscuits down the front of my pyjamas while I read novels, but my point remains valid).

And if it was just people talking loudly I wouldn’t mid. Just because I’m a biscuit-eating recluse doesn’t mean I expect everyone else to be one too. 

No, what I object to is that the people who awaken me from my hard-earned slumber are the kind of knuckle-dragging mouth breathers whose family trees probably go sideways rather than up and down, and who think that the height of sophisticated comedy is kicking roller doors and hitting dumpsters with sticks. 

On an average night, this is what we hear;

Dipshit #1: Hombre! Ver el que, me tiene un palo!*

CLANG CLANG CLANG

Hur hur hur

Dipshit #2 Eso no es nada, me peuden expulsar esta puerta muy bien**

THUD THUD THUD

I have considered retaliation, perhaps by keeping some water balloons handy. Or maybe some tomatoes. Though we are on the third floor here, and the cans might actually kill them, when all I really want is to maim them horribly. 

Luckily, the intent of the phrase ‘fuck off, you brain dead morons’ is clear enough in any language. 

*Hey man, look at me, I’ve got me a stick!

** That’s nothing, I can kick this door real good

Cappadocia IV

My final morning in Goreme;

The only thing that marred it was the knowledge that I had to go back to Istanbul that day. Oh, and that a bird shat in my hair, and I got chased by a pack of wild dogs ( I never thought I'd have to say that again). But going back to Istanbul was still worse. I think it speaks volumes about how I felt about Istanbul and Goreme that I have a couple of dozen photos of Istanbul from the first couple of days I was there, hundreds of photos of Goreme, and absolutely none from the last day I spent in Istanbul.

Cappadocia III

The third day I was in Cappadocia I went to the Goreme Open Air Museum, a collection of rock-carved buildings.

Just before you get to the actual churches and houses, there is this;

I’m sure it is. 

The various buildings are quite impressive;

but I had a hard time imagining people actually living in them, until I saw the refectory;

It’s always the most mundane things that make it easy to imagine what it must have been like. I can’t imagine what it would have been like to live in a monastery as a Medieval nun, but I can imagine what it would have been like to sit around a table with a bunch of other people and eat lunch. 

In the afternoon I went horse riding, and we saw the sunset over the Rose Valley;

Then one of the guys in our group fell off his horse, we saw some goats

and we galloped across the valley floor. I feel like if I try and describe it, I’ll just end up sounding incoherently pretentious, so I won’t.