Self-Winding · A Sort of Progression

It has been a bit of task to process all the Barcelona pictures - I went a bit mad and took over a hundred. I have put a set with lots of notes added to the pictures over at Flickr. I hope you might enjoy them.

Sandra and I covered a lot of ground in 4 days. The country bumpkins found the pace of the city quite startling, but got into the swing quite quickly. Our room was tiny (move-the-bed-to-open-the-wardrobe-tiny) - in a cheap, yet quite stylish apartment "hostel" in Sarriá-St. Gervasi. And, hell, it was noisy, we slept only intermittently. On the third night when the dustcart collection woke us forever at 2.30 am, we played I spy in the dark and made up limericks about Spanish place names. I will not tell you what the lady from Madrid found clinging under a lid. But our backs are broad and we didn't complain.

We thought it odd, the first day, that everyone in our street was either clutching one eye, or had a patch over it. We speculated about agressive bartenders, until we walked a way along and found the city's main opthalmic hospital there. It ensured endless taxi & ambulance traffic all night as the ocularly-challenged arrived for treatment.

I had a job orienting myself this time, kept holding the map upside down; a fairly important road to help us find base was the Diagonal. Could I remember this? No: I kept looking for the Avenida Vertical, or Horizontal. I only came into my own with my usual brilliant grasp of getting about by Metro. I'm a whizz at this - years of the London version, I suppose. Barcelona's was easy, but broiling hot.

Another daft move was climbing hundreds of steps to a gallery because we thought the up-escalators weren't working. We didn't realise they had sensors to start them as you approached. The effort neary killed us. Idiots.

I secured the useful affection of two very young Moroccan waiters, delighted to have someone to talk French to; we got extra tidbits, three clean napkins per meal and new plates every five minutes - just so they could get in another family anecdote from back home. They were going back to marry Moroccan girls soon, then come back to earn more money. "Pas Espagnoles, non, les filles de chez nous, c'est mieux." "Why?" I asked. "More obedient," they said. To my "Vous etes petits chauvinists, tous les deux," they solemnly agreed as if I had bestowed on them an accolade.

Enough anecdote, I'll leave you to visit the visuals.

I want take you home, wee bear,
Safe and sound, away from rain,
But leaving you, appealing, there
May join you with your child again.

Aged four, I lost a small grey bear
On winter streets, I missed him so;
When we went back he wasn't there,
So stay and wait. Don't watch me go.

(Sorry)

Wow 1: I am flying, with broadband download at twice the speed of sound, playing DVD's, listening to missed radio programmes, finding daft music tracks like this one that has been driving me mad for weeks, whizzing through photographic sites. The little white hub is flashing in the corner and I am in heaven. I've joined you all in the 21st century.

Wow2: my new PC with all the trimmings; the guy built it for me and was generous with the software, all cleanly installed and purring under my fingers. I'm busy customising it now.

Wow 3: 4 days in Barcelona now filed under cracking visits, my brain's filled with sunny images of that fabulous city, of which more anon. The one bad feature about it, its unending noise and horrific traffic, leads me to ....

Wow 4: the peace of night at home. The impact, after being bathed in orange neon light, of walking out into darkness and a sky full of stars. Of silence after waking to crashing dustbin collections at 2 a.m. each night. Of the call of the Tawny instead of the wail of ambulances. Byebye city.

Wow 5: English autumn; vivid green fields of winter wheat and ploughed black earth sprinkled with seagulls. Beech trees burning themselves out in blazes of copper, acid yellow lime leaves, hedgerows crammed with rosehips and hawthorn berries. Slanting sunlight casting shadows of the round towers of little churches. Robin song. Frosted cobwebs on the firs. Bonfire smoke and the click of spades against stones. Skeins of geese flying in. Primrose light before dusk. Deer eyes in the dark.

Wow 6: sex on legs. I've never been much interested in 007, but I'm certainly off to see Casino Royal to indulge a penchant for blond hair, blue eyes and a certain froideur. D. Craig certainly does it for me. He's filming as Lord Asriel in Pullman's His Dark Materials - rich expectations.

From Tuesday, I will be away for a few days in Barcelona with a friend, our second European city this year. I haven't seen it since my twenties and the monumental changes to both the city and me will make it a whole new experience. I'm looking forward to Gaudi, visiting Foodie Heaven and generally mopping up the atmosphere and the tapas.

It must be eight years ago now that I first met my best mate on the web. I set up a site based on an old diary by a British railway worker in Rancagua, Chile. Because Robert, world traveller, writer, motorcycle adventurer and passionate explorer of southern South America had friends in that town, he came across a reference to my site. He gave me topographical help, pictures, explanations of Spanish mechanical terms and general encouragement.

To find a man who wrote elegant emails from a mountain home in Colorado, from Korea, Chile and Patagonia was something of a gift. As happens in such correspondences, pasts emerged, preferences, politics (polar opposites) and photographs. Later, I mentioned that I was fifty-five and expected a silence that did not come. The agenda was friendship and it has grown over time into a solid thing.

Now Robert, after adjusting his home circumstances and building a barn from scratch as a home base in the USA is planning an eventual move to Chilean Patagonia. He has land and is starting to build on the site of a small house in Puerto Bories, a hamlet on the banks of the Ultima Esperanza sound with magnificent views of the sea and the Balmaceda glacier.

He wrote several years ago '...it is possible to imagine one of these places in new trim, with double-pane glass and a little cupola room, an enclosed porch addition with windows to drink in the austral summer days when light streams in for twenty hours at a time during the solstice. There would be a keyboard and a kettle and shelves of lenga wood and the wind would plaster salt spray on the glass and the building would shudder briefly with the worst gusts. But the writer would only momentarily notice, warm and property surrounded, inside the cupola at the end of the world.'

The place of that romantic imagining is becoming real. Now the stories are about site clearance and water supply as the thing takes shape. Because it is so interesting to follow his journey, I would like to share it with you through Robert's website, Patagoniax, where he traces his latest visit to the end of the world.

Over at Witty Comics you can effortlessly enjoy making your own comic strips & cartoons. (Link via drD)

There are a couple of big cardboard files on my desk stuffed full of cuttings, drawings, notes, pictures and all manner of odds and sods that I have collected over time. They are all that remain of four space-guzzling folders, the rest is outside in the bin. I've been in the mood lately to jettison all manner of stuff that I have held on to for years, in fact these two files will also go, but I might put bits from them to use here first. I'll call them Jumble and share a few before they hit the shredder.

Number one, because it was the first one pulled out, is a scribbled list of "Musical Food"; as I remember, someone asked for ideas on this topic for a word-play game and this was my best shot, please do suggest some more:

Songs of the Oven
Osso Nabucco
Pickled Gershwins
Ole Man Liver
Cantata Sauce
Alban Bergers
Brucholli
Grilled Hallebut
Caviare Rusticana
Hand of Pork and Gravy
Choux Bert
Ketchpturian
Baton Toast
Brahms' Syllabub
Pear Gynt
A Dry Tartini
Nymphs & Shepherds' Pie
Four Seasonings