I’ve always liked ferries. There’s something romantic about a ferry trip.  When on a ferry you’re not just messing about in boats, you’re connecting with an old mode of travel on ancient routes, crossing a physical and psychological divide, taking a journey to the other side.

Some of my favourite holidays have featured ferry rides: the Scottish Islands, the Isles of Scilly, the Cyclades, Thailand. The closest I have ever come to a near death experience occurred on an illegal ‘ferry’ - travelling to an island off the coast of Malaysia in a badly stabilised converted fishing vessel crammed with young backpackers - in shark infested waters, in a tropical storm. *We really thought we were all going to die. A few years later a similar vessel went down in much the same circumstances with the loss of most on board. On the other hand, part of my honeymoon was celebrated on a ferry, from Plymouth to Santander. One day, I’d love to do the Hudson Bay area, ferry hopping.

Perhaps my fondness for ferries goes back to childhood. There are lots of them around here: the King Harry Ferry, the Bodinnick Ferry, the St Mawes/Falmouth Ferry, Torpoint.  I grew up in an area where the two largest centres of population were divided by an estuary and joined by ferries. Ferry journeys involve tide tables, timetables, waiting, huddling, the smell of the sea, the taste of salt, feeling the wind on your skin… that ferry rides are unpredictable adds to their appeal.

Until recently, though, I’d never taken the Cremyll Ferry.

It runs from Stonehouse in Plymouth (where a friend lives), across the Tamar river, to a ‘forgotten corner’ of Cornwall on the edge of the Mount Edgcumbe Estate.

Here’s the history:

….records of a crossing date back to the Norman Conquest, and Cornish mail flowed through here until 1794. The turn pike ran up the hill to Crafthole and on to Liskeard, and the toll house still stands beside the road, now, the Cremyll car park. The Edgcumbe family owned the ferry rights from 1493 until 1944, and built the Earl’s Waiting Room in the mid-19th century.

This quiet bay has witnessed Viking ships at anchor, the wrecking of the Catherine von Fleshier in 1786, and the embarkation of American troops for the D-Day invasion of 1944.

The Italianate Tower House which stood beside the boatyard was reduced to rubble by german bombers in March 1941, the same night that Mount Edgcumbe House went up in flames. Three residents died in the attack, including the ferry skipper and the engineer; after this the Millbrook Steamboat Company stepped in to help with the crossing.

On the other side, you can stroll through the grand estate grounds - where lady walkers might fancy themselves as characters in a Jane Austen novel - follow that with a cream tea in the charming Orangery -

before striking out for the wooded Rame peninsula - full of copper beech leaves at this time of year - past the fantastic Gothic folly on the point,

along the edge of the estuary beaches

to the picturesque twin villages of Cawsand and Kingsand, with pubs - for fortification - and a bus back to Cremyll for the return ferry ride.

A perfect winter day out.

Soundtrack? Cripple Creek Ferry by Neil Young, of course.

———————————————

* Ed: What is it with you? Always the sex and death thing…

As Henry James said,

It is difficult to speak adequately, or justly, of London. It is not a pleasant place; it is not agreeable, or easy, or exempt from reproach. It is only magnificent.

The magnificence of London is a daily assault on the psyche and the senses. I lived there in my twenties and had a magnificent time, but just as I loved London, I hated it almost as fiercely. The two impulses were rarely reconciled. Eventually, when I was able to sustain such a tempestuous relationship no longer - the torrent of contradictions was too much for me - London and I became estranged.

I worked my way westwards, back towards the sea, *where the air is clean, the people are friendly, and everybody is in love.

But the pull of London is still there, like weak elastic. Sometimes it snaps me back. I went there last week. Here, in no particular order, are some of the things I saw.

Annie Leibovitz exhibition at The National Portrait Gallery:

Some of Leibovitz’s photographs - like the Vanity Fair cover of pregnant Demi Moore with bling, like the shot of Brad Pitt in Vegas - I find gimmicky, but this composition is arresting on several levels.

Leonardo DiCaprio is depicted as - what? - a beautiful Greek God? Zeus? Fledged ugly duckling? Or is he Leda - part of a gender reversed tableau from Leda and the Swan? - raped by fame?  The swan is a question mark asking, ‘What will the child/man become?’ Does he love the swan, or has he killed it? Is it drugged? Or dead?

Close up, the texture of Leo’s hair looks like reeds in the wind.

Those shots of Marilyn Monroe on the slab were exploitative; this photograph of Susan Sontag, deceased, is different.  It is permissible (in my view) because of the lifelong connection between the subject and the artist. Susan Sontag died as a result of complications following breast cancer treatment. Leibovitz chose this glamorous Fortuny dress and shrouded Sontag in it for the picture. The image is disturbing, startling in its intimacy.

In her book On Photography, Sontag states,

“picture-taking is an event in itself, and one with ever more peremptory rights - to interfere with, to invade, or to ignore whatever is going on”.

In the light of her comment, for her lover, a photographer, the deathbed portrait becomes almost obligatory.

Time for a stiff drink:

Loungelover: Ladykiller: 42 Below Feijoa vodka and Arette Blanco tequila muddled with mint and fresh lime and crowned with a Rosé Champagne float.  Served tall and frappé.

On the way, I saw this advert:

‘Someone sneezed nearby.

Their germs will be with you shortly. Boost your immune system with Echinabrand.

Text ‘GERMS’ + ‘YOUR NAME’ to get a free information pack today.’

Fran Lebowitz said London is,

‘a place you go to get bronchitis.’

On the tube, this poem by Robert Graves:

She Tells Her Love While Half Asleep

She tells her love while half asleep,
In the dark hours,
With half-words whispered low:
As Earth stirs in her winter sleep
And puts out grass and flowers
Despite the snow,
Despite the falling snow.

Everywhere, headlines about ‘Baby P’:

Beside me, a few seats up, I saw a schoolgirl with a baby on her lap. The cream-coloured baby-gro was really grubby. I looked closer. The baby was a doll. She was a bit old for a doll. I looked again. The doll had no head. There were wires coming out of its chest leading to an I-Pod.

When we stood to leave the carriage, the girl frowned irritably and held the baby by the toe of its garment. It dangled there, headless, upside down.

It was one of those simulation babies given to girls ‘at risk’. They’re supposed to act as a contraceptive/deterrent.

Sarah Lucas: Penetralia:

I’ve blogged about Sarah Lucas before, she’s one of my favourite Brit Artists, so when I read about this current exhibition, a visit was on the cards. The exhibition was billed as:

a series of objects assembled from plaster casts of penises and flint…. to pose a challenge to ideas of gender stereotypes and sexual allegory…. in some of the sculptures bits have snapped off and been stuck back on…. a performance between artist and model.

The exhibits work as artefacts from an archeological dig, as objects from museum cabinets, or evocations of ritual and fetish, as funny bones.

I rather enjoyed the sunny morning walk through Mayfair to the exhibition, as well.

What else?

Bacon at Tate Britain. Rothko at Tate Modern.

Both very good. There was a display at the Rothko using UV light analysis to demonstrate the artist’s layering technique. Illuminating.

Oh, and some woman called me a cunt.

Why?

After seeing her aggressive and badly behaved small child whack a wobbly old man on the hip as he passed in the aisle on the train, I had the temerity, when same child grabbed the edge of my coat with every appearance of hanging on forever, to look him in the eye and - gently, mind you, nicely - ask him to please let go…

Snap!

* Frank Zappa : The Lost Episodes

Anyhow - I’m deviating - back to hobbies, obsessions and mania.

A few miles from here there is a small roadside house, the otherwise modest frontage of which has been covered entirely in shells. Around fifty years ago, the owner seized on the heinous notion of pebble dash, munged it up with traditional mosaic design, went beachcombing, and came home armed to make a statement. This house is different from the others in the terrace; the owner even spelled it out. Above the door jamb, although the colours of the shells have faded and weathered, if you look closely between the muted browns and greys, as with an Ishihara Colour Blindness Test, you can still pick out the words, ‘The House of Shells’.

The pattern is wonky, the arrangement rather amateurish and the shells are decidedly grubby now, but in its own way, this is a frontage which says, ‘I am a piece of outsider art, love me or hate me, here I am‘.

I love it - and I hope they don’t knock it down. It’s a testament to freedom of expression and eccentricity, and there are many other equally bizarre and individually unique pockets of human endeavour up and down the land. But even as you pass them and smile, don’t you ask yourself if what lies behind the choice and positioning of the hundredth gnome is not simply a channelling of excess time and energy, but something more disturbing?

Imagine the spouse. A hobby?

‘At last. Now you’re done with those bloody shells you can wipe your feet and come in for your tea.’

An obsession?

‘Shells, shells, shells, that’s all it is with him. He’s up there again, on his bloody ladder with his tub of grout, swinging his bucket of shells without another thought in his head.’

Or mania?

‘It’s a bit short notice, mother, but she wants to move again. No, she’s not pregnant. It’s the shells. Yes. We’ve found a house with a nice flat frontage, twice the size of the old one, we just need…’

Which reminds me of the Coral Castle.

As you know, I like quirky museums. When we were in Miami a few years ago, I read about a lesser known attraction on the outskirts of the city on the way to the Everglades - The Coral Castle - and one hot afternoon I decided we had to go there.

Although it draws small numbers nowadays - what’s to see? - a bunch of old rock? - where’s the shop? - the Coral Castle has been compared in scale to another testament to lost love, the Taj Mahal.

When he was twenty-six, and his sweetheart just sixteen, Lithuanian immigrant, Ed Leedskalnin, was engaged to be married. The day before the wedding, his child-bride, Agnes, called it all off. Ed never recovered from the loss. His love had turned to stone.

It is said that Ed staked a claim on his unusual coral-coloured patch of America years later, in 1936, and single-handedly spent the rest of his life sculpting and refining the entire structure of the peculiar, other-worldly habitation of the Coral Castle in almost total isolation.

The afternoon we visited, the sky was cloudless, there was no wind, and we were able to explore it virtually on our own. There were: thrones, one for him, one for her; sundials and little gardens; shaded arbours and corners which caught the sun at the perfect time; baths and grottos; it was a fortress but also a prison, open, yet oddly claustrophobic. The sculptures reminded me of the paintings of Marc Chagall - primitive representations of suns and moons - strange and haunting - and clearly echoed back to the myths and fairytales of Ed Leedskalnins childhood. It also felt oddly lifeless, like a salt mine.

Ed had dissected the chassis and mechanism of a model-T Ford to create an impressive array of levers and bits of equipment, including an oven. What struck me most forcibly, though, were two areas in particular; Ed’s living quarters, which were austere in the extreme, and an area set aside called - if I remember correctly - ‘punishment corner’ - with seats facing the wall - for his imaginary wife and child.

In some contexts, unrelenting sunshine can be as bleak as moorland gloom, and as I moved through the spaces inside the Coral Castle, it became more and more clear to me they had been created by a man in the grip of a deep, unheathly, but utterly compelling mania. Whatever else it did, the Castle saved and sustained him.

A psychologist would have a field day at the Coral Castle; to be inside it was a fascinating and moving experience.

What sparked all this off, then? Remembering stone carving? Recalling the Minack Theatre, I think. The woman who built it, Rowena Cade, was another driven obsessive with a fragmented, troubled family background. There’s something in that.

This weekend I went to visit an old friend. We’ve kept in touch since we were knee-high and there’s not much she doesn’t know about me, or I about her. Usually, when I visit and we have somewhere to go in the car, I drive. If I travel up by train, she’ll just hand me her car keys. We don’t explore the reason. We both know it. She’s a terrible driver (she failed her test four times). I’m a bad passenger (I cannot remain calm).

Because of the Passat debacle, currently I’m only insured as a named driver on one vehicle. This time, I decided to go by train. No driving for me, then…

Saturday went something like this:

Her: Er, which lane should I be in here?
Me: Left. That one. Left. [jabs finger at windscreen] That one.
Her: Which lane?
Me: Left. Left… THAT ONE… back there.

I needed something to take my mind off such exciting urban adventures, so I ended up day-dreaming about maps.

I’ve always found maps interesting.

When you can read them, maps reveal vivid stories about the lay (and the lie) of the land, its upheavals and settlements. I remembered two of my favourite maps: 1) the Mappa Mundi, tracing an early understanding of the wider world, and 2) Grayson Perry’s imaginary psychogeographical map, Map of An Englishman. I’m a big fan of Google Earth, too.

At one point, when my life flashed before me on a particularly tricky junction, I thought it might be fun to recreate a personal map evoking all the criss-crossing journeys I’ve taken across the U.K. I imagined a holographic version of the Tube map with separate yellow, blue or red lines (happy, sad, angry trips) and all the major landmarks and intersections raised in 3-D. The lilliput journeys of childhood, (Look, a bee! The sweetshop! A flat deadsquirrel!) would appear as tight little scribbles; adolescent forays (London, the Colston Hall… Wookey Hole - ‘lots to do whatever the weather!’ - yeah, right) would spread outwards in tentative loops. Finally, dull daily commutes, the duty visits of adulthood, trips out to ‘get stuff’, to Tesco or IKEA, would unskein in spaghetti strands, some tracking the same boring-but-necessary routes over and over again, others, the bids for escape, the holiday trips, would look like lassoes flung out across the globe in hope of snaring some sunshine.

Her: Aaaargh, I’m in the wrong lane.
Me: It’s okay, just indicate and pull across.
Her: There’s a lorry coming.
Me: Just indicate. Indicate now. Then pull… I would… [covers eyes] INDICATE!’

Maps are generally a very western thing, they signify an empirical understanding of the known universe, a secular interpretation of one’s place in it, order and control. Perhaps it was a practical joke, but I heard that one summer in York, the tourist maps were muddled up. The German version was slipped by mistake into the English speaking slots and vice versa. Tourist chaos ensued.

Her: [Car scrapes kerb] What was that? Was that the kerb?
Me: [Whitefaced, gripping the car door handle. Thinks: YES! LET ME OUT HERE] Maybe. Anyway. We’re nearly there now…

In places where maps have less meaning, like Thailand, if you try showing someone off the beaten track a map, hoping for directions, you’ll end up holding your map limply in your hand, feeling foolish, and going nowhere. The Aboriginal way of making a journey relied on songlines, or the oral retelling of important events and features on that landscape, passed down through the generations. The vast, inhospitable, uncharted Red Heart of Australia killed many a colonial explorer before the continent was finally mapped in the western way. Evidently, you can rely too heavily on maps.

My friend thinks maps are overrated.

She has her own way of getting around. Hers is a tried and tested method which has evolved over time. It involves going via parts of the city where she has lived previously, past her old places of work. The trouble with this mapless mundi is, often these landmark routes take us to our destination via places that could not remotely be considered to be en route. I might not know the city as well as I used to, but I do have enough of an overall picture in my head to sense that not everywhere can be reached via Easton and the Ashley Road. The hours she must spend…

Still, although some journeys might have taken a little longer than they could have in the most perfect of all possible universes, we weren’t in a hurry. The traffic lights gave us time for a good natter. There were some sticky moments here and there, for sure, but we reached our destinations eventually, and unscathed.

Far from driving our friendship to the edge, we managed to have a laugh about our respective batty foibles and failings, and a good time was had by all.

Other tenuous connections:

1. My friend’s husband came back from his didgeridoo weekend pleased at having won a new didge in the raffle… we were given a… er… generous demonstration of its tone…

2. I bought a moleskine notebook in the Arnolfini. The moleskine was the notebook favoured by Bruce Chatwin, author of Songlines. Apparently he swooped up a hundred of them before they ceased production.

3. We made it to IKEA and I bought four new mugs and a dish-scrubber with a sucker on the end of it. How about that?

Other Highlights

1. Saturday: 5:30 am: Stanton Drew: A B&B south of the airport, trying to make tea quietly, layering up, putting on walking boots to go and see these standing stones at dawn, before the flight to Spain. Frost and a beautiful sunrise.

stanton drew standing stones,

‘Folklore of Somerset’ by Alan Holt (1992):
“Local people will tell you that the stones known as ‘The Cove’ near the ‘Druids Arms’ are the parson, bride and groom; the larger circle, [pictured above] the dancers; and the small circle, the musicians, who had returned to hear the fiddler.” (The fiddler in this story was the devil, who, it is said, ossified the revellers.)

2. Monday: Casa Batlló

Gaudi’s masterpiece of Modernism - a bizarre confection of a building, also known as ‘The House of Bones’. Otherworldly - like something imagined by Tolkien.

gaudi staircase,

3. Musea d’Art Contemporani (MACBA):

A 22 minute short by Pasolini - Che cosa sono le nuvole - the title given in English was What are clouds? - this was a lurid, hilarious and thought-provoking take on Othello enacted in the style of Commedia Dell’Arte.

Each of the grotesquely made-up actors was attached to strings and moved like a puppet. In the scene where Desdemona is strangled by Othello, the audience revolt, jump on stage, attack Iago and Othello and spoil the puppets for future performances. They are thrown into a refuse truck, dumped on a pile of landfill, and end up staring up at the sky, asking ‘What are clouds?’ Brilliant.

There were also a series of fantastic installations by Joan Jonas, my favourite was The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things, exploring universal narratives and featuring, among others, Tilda Swinton, as a kind of ice-elf sitting on a pile of tundra, and lots of wolves.

4. Seeing Robert Redford in the Museo Picasso

Yep. There I was, chewing on the end of my sunglasses, a little hungover, staring at a painting and in swept a group of expensively dressed Americans, evidently on a whistle-stop tour of Barcelona. RR and his glamorous entourage of tanned young PAs. As one of the rare Hollywood actors who has held out against the knife, he looks bloody good for his age. It was all I could do not to gawp - the stripey beanie I thought he could do without - and then he was gone.

The art was not bad at all.

5. Wednesday: Montjuïc

The area was swarming with global reps attending a GSM Mobile Phone conference, all of them walking and talking, constantly, on their… mobile phones. The organisers had cordoned off a whole area of ‘public’ space between the Palau Nacional and the Placa Espanya - outrageous - such a thing wouldn’t be allowed in the U.K. - but I suppose it’s all revenue…

We did see this though - a computerised water-fountain light show set to music.

magic fountain,

6. Too much to list. Olives. Sunshine. Red Wine. Giant soap bubbles floating across the terrace at the Park Güell. Buskers. Markets. Tapas. Catholic iconography. Angels. Gargoyles. Margaritas. Miro. Music. Being chased out of the Cathedral Santa Maria Del Mar by a priest jangling keys, wanting to close up for lunch.

Sunset at Chew Valley Lake,

7. Half asleep and frozen, I had left my walking boots at the B&B. We had to go back to collect them on our way home…

…………………………………….

* Title of a painting by Dorothea Tanning in the MACBA

Pictures by J.

…

You can tell a lot about a country from the way it does death.

The world’s largest collection of funeral carriages and hearses - The Museu de Carrosses Fúnebres - is in Barcelona.

You won’t find this museum listed on the photocopied sheet of opening hours handed out by the tourist board, owing, probably, to its limited general appeal, but when I travel I like nothing more than a quick visit to a graveyard or mausoleum.

Eating, drinking, art and architecture, even window-shopping, are all very well, but for me, they need seasoning, a balancing sprinkle of salt - and nothing serves better than a taste of how the culture deals with death - death is the anchovy in the salmagundi* of life.

The Museu de Carrosses Fúnebres lies deep inside a government building in an unappealing modern suburb of the city. To see the collection, you have to find your way to the department reception desk (not made easy), make a specific request, and be escorted there by a security guard. Death, in Spain, is an especially solemn business.

Our guard was tall and stout with a huge mop of jet black curly hair - he looked like a gigantic, lugubrious version of Chico Marx. He also had a limp, a pair of handcuffs clipped to the back of his belt and a minimalist take on human interaction. The three of us tramped through a maze of marble-lined corridors, squeezed uncomfortably into a small service lift and descended to the dark, airless basement where the museum display is to be found.

He flicked on the fluorescent lights to illuminate an entire ground floor of immobile vehicles and mannequins frozen in traditional funeral dress. Sepia photographs of dead dignitaries from the last century lined the walls. We walked among all this as the guard stood in the centre of the room, like a bystander watching an imaginary cortège, gently jangling his keys.

The vehicles were magnificent; they ranged from plush, gold-on-black baroque carriages with black velvet trimmings and ostrich plumes from the the 18th century, which looked like heavy work for the horses, designed to make time slow further on the final slowest march, to a Studebaker, a Hispano-Suiza and a sleek, leaden-silver 1950’s Buick; all very fine.

Black horse-drawn Landau’s were fitted with layers of leaf-sprung sub-chassis suspension to furnish the dear departed with the smoothest journey to the other side. There was a selection of eerie, delicate, white carriages with pale leather harnesses (to be drawn by a team of white horses) reflecting the Catholic notion of the purity and innocence of those carried within; children and virgins who had died young.

There were elevated glass enclosures to allow sight of the open casket arrangements of the wealthiest worthies and one interesting example which had no windows at all. It was a mourning carriage entirely draped in black curtains; whoever was to ride in there would not be visible to the family and friends of the deceased. That carriage was intended solely for the mistress, sealed off, alone in her misery.

After saying our farewells, and offering the guard a tip, which he declined, but which caused him to break out into a frenzy of backslapping bonhomie (much more disturbing than his other persona), we emerged blinking, into the sunlight and city hubbub, feeling completely dazed. Head-spinning stuff.

There was only one thing for it. The antidote; the Museu de l’Erotica.

I won’t go into detail, suffice to say that the 1870 English gentleman’s walking cane was quite something to behold - reminded me of the imagery Judy Chicago aimed to reclaim in The Dinner Party.

After that, we went in search of some chocolate covered cherries we’d seen in the window of a chocolatier - earlier in the week - up some tantalisingly close side-street, and - ooh, frustrating - failed to find.

Fortunately however, happenstance, as it often does, yielded some other kind of wonderful instead - a cool bar doing a special - 2 fresh oysters and a glass of cava! (At a very reasonable price.)

An interesting journey all round.

And how did it end, this recent Barcelona Valentines Day?

With Diablo black absinthe, of course.

…………………………………….

* Note: salmagundi: this word was on one of those strange translation menus - along with ‘Fuet of Vic’ (especially funny if you’ve known someone called Vic) - it was such a weird one I didn’t believe it to be real. But it is - and now it’s become something of a favourite - a corruption of, or reference to, the tale of Solomon Grundy. How fitting is that? (Don’t worry, I’ll use wisely, in small, infrequent doses.)

It is difficult not to romanticise happy past experiences, not to re-view them through a pair of dusty, rose-tinted spectacles. When I left teaching and went travelling, that’s what one of my classes bought me for a leaving gift; a pair of rose-tinted sunglasses.

I’m not sure if they were making a comment about my style (it was around the time of ‘grunge’), how they thought I looked at life, that ‘Miss’ was a little naive (bless), or the exact opposite; perhaps they believed I needed some help to look on the bright side.

So - anyway - back to viewing the past through rose-tinted glasses.

On Friday, J and I are off to Spain whilst Jnr goes snowboarding with the school. I’ve been to Spain many times, but in the last few days select snippets of some of those trips have been returning…

Inter-rail at 18: Three girls, just finished A Levels. We waitressed, saved up and set off to explore Europe for five weeks, city to city, with some beaches in between.

Spain seemed an alien land. Hot and dusty. Relentless sunshine. Toledo; we stared open mouthed at the imposing El Greco’s, all those vivid colours and the long, long, painted faces, their expressions yearning towards heaven. Incense and incantations in the dark churches where we went to escape the midday heat. Sleeping on the trains overnight to save money, sharing carriages with nuns and deep-wrinkled widows dressed all in black. Our young bare arms and legs were frowned on. We had no idea.

We worried about handing over our passports at the seedy pensiones where we could afford to stay. The police carried sub machine guns. (Those were the days before Spain joined the E.U. It was poor then, and old-fashioned, still held back by the deprivations and conflicts of the Franco years and the iron grip of Catholicism. Then, you couldn’t ‘drink the water’.)

And Salvador Dali’s house in Cadaqués - crystal sea and white sand - the cool mistral on that beautiful beach.

Years later: Basque Spain: Rolling off the ferry in Santander, riding pillion on a big old first-generation super-bike loaded down with panniers and a tank bag, heading for the Pyrenees. Drinking Patxaran (a kind of sloe gin) in the Basque heavy-metal bars.

We sped towards the plains inland until we were tired and ended up at a rough and ready road-side hostel, with a yard full of yapping dogs, where the superb menú del día (including plenty of red wine) cost the equivalent of three quid. The overhead fan had a squeak, the bed had a dip in the middle, and although we were eaten alive that night by mosquitos, we were happy and felt free.

1999: Valencia: a houseswap holiday with another couple. A cramped flat with a red-tiled yard. Hemmed in by the ancient city walls and narrow streets. Hot nights fuelled by Agua de Valencia (cava, vodka and orange juice) and the sound of mating cats. The other couple were going through a ‘bad patch’, they rowed with each other endlessly, threw ultimatums, expletives and underwear. One would stomp off into the airless city, the other would sit with us, awkward, rocking back on his/her chair, clacking down on the tiles, restless, the prickly corner of a tense threesome. We hired a car and left them to it.

Except for that one day. All of us crammed into the too-small Seat and took a mystery tour out into the hills. By midday we were thirsty. We ended up in a little town, in a dusty bar. Even now, I don’t know its name. There was something in the air. Tension? Excitement? It was hard to pin. Then the bar owner began fixing iron grilles across all the windows. Like Pamplona, the barman said. Toros in the streets. Young men running, girlfriends cheering. Blood. You couldn’t have planned it. Not that we would have; too squeamish, or scrupled. But the testosterone was palpable. We all got high on it. So much so, that we two women, we Lady Macbeths, for entirely different individual reasons, looking back now (recklessness? revenge?), egged our men on,

‘Go on, why not? You can do it. It’ll be fun…’

And they nearly did. For five minutes, J loitered at the barricade, tempted, puffed up by Spanish machismo, poised to vault the railing and run before the bulls, in spite of the odds, in spite of an endearing lack of athleticism. We’d all lost our reason by then.

Later again: Bilbao: The billowing spectacle of the Guggenheim Museum. Jeff Koon’s abominable kitsch ‘Puppy’. (Love it.)

Rising slowly, high above the city in the funicular. Being turned out at the entrance to an odd, ornamental garden, edged with old-fashioned boxed privet hedges. Older, smartly dressed Spanish couples perambulating through the cool ambience of the place. The air was resinous with pine oil and eucalyptus. It was restful, like a graveyard.

Evenings in that splendid baroque bar - with its chandeliers, high ceilings, mirrored tiles and textured, arsenic walls - I was enchanted by all the detail, the gold, green and black. The waiter liked us, or so it seemed. We had a tab. Upstairs there were tango classes. We could hear the stamping feet and the distant sound of the music. I would have loved to take part.

Who knows what Barcelona will bring.

……………………………………….