Location

Catalonia

A story about a postman

postman

It was coming up to one o’clock in the afternoon. At such a time, even in the narrow streets that wind through the village, the sun casts little shadow.

Here, there is a rather large and expensive house with high walls. I’m told its home to the ‘Countess’, although the translation is hazy. To me, it looks like a castle. The only people I’ve seen coming in and out are the gardener and a man with numerous tattoos, whom my eight-year-old (not really mine) stared at until he’d left our sight and then told me was not a man to be trusted.

There was a drugs raid in this middle class commuter village the other week, and there is a guy who I occasionally see hunting through the bins, but the typical resident here sends their children to piano classes and hires a cleaner to do their household chores. Appearances are important. The houses whose balconies and windows look down onto the pavement are decorated with the yellow and red striped flag of Catalonia, often with the addition of a blue triangle and white star inspired by the Cuban/Puerto Rico flags. Independence is the battle being fought. I’m reminded of the streets of flags in Northern Ireland which made me feel ever so uncomfortable.

I have deviated into politics. Back to the narrow street where, at the hour of one, causing a traffic jam on a one-way street, sat a young girl. She was screaming and waving her clenched fists, in a rather unsociable fashion, without showing respect for the locals. Her face was all knotted together like a wrung out dish cloth, slightly damp.

Further along loitered the eight-year-old. Undoubtedly a contributor to the tantrum but having witness such tantrums many times before and being certain of the righteousness of his own actions, he appeared unfazed.  A car manoeuvred around us to make a parallel park. The postman zipped by on his yellow motorbike.

I frowned and sighed, wondering what it is that one is supposed to do in such a situation. A few weeks earlier I would have been highly vexed, but whilst I was frustrated, I counted my blessings that neither child was in any great danger and we had plenty of time before they needed to be back at school.

Reasoning would be my first thought, but reasoning is not plausible when two people can only communicate in simple games, like playing ‘I spy’ in colours and ‘what time is it Mr Wolf’; or with simple instructions, like ‘sit down’; or questions such as ‘Water?’, ‘Bread?’. Plus, there’s no point talking if nobody is listening and being temporarily possessed by a demon, the young girl had no intention of listening to me.

Without a common language, and nothing but a water bottle, distraction wasn’t an easy option either. I admit considering pouring the bottle of water on her to see if it would make any difference. It worked on the Wicked Witch of the West and I was running out of options. Dragging her kicking and screaming down the street was never going to work. The Spanish might be lax about health and safety and child protection compared to the UK, but I already have enough bruises on my legs.

Which is when, like a knight in shining armour, the postman intervened.

Now you might think that it’s a terribly embarrassing situation to be in, requiring the postman persuade the child you’re meant to be walking home with to go home with you. All I can say is children are children, and this one wasn’t even mine and if ever I am in such a situation again then I honestly don’t care who it is who solves the problem.

The magic was this. It started with “¿Qué pasa?”, a typical greeting meaning something along the lines of ‘what’s up’. Negotiations proceeded in Catalan and then from his motorbike his produced ten elastic bands. This amazingly stopped the crying and transformed the sprawled mess of child into something vertical. Persuading her to walk home took longer. He took the keys out of the motorbike and helped her up into the seat, whilst continuing reciting his spell. Her brother, not wanting to be left out, came and squeezed himself onto the seat with her.

Like the audience watching the magician, I didn’t understand more than a handful of words, but that didn’t matter, for after climbing off his motorbike, the children walked home without a fuss.

The village postman – my hero.

Two women enter a bar…

Two young women enter a bar.

It’s ten past nine on a Saturday night. One woman is blonde. She typically wears liquid eyeliner with a flourish and the wrong shoes for the occasion. Tonight though, her skin is bare and she’s wearing her feet relax inside an old pair of trainers. The other woman has brown hair. She rarely wears make-up, but tonight it’s her with the liquid eyeliner.

“Sorry I’m late,” says the blonde German woman.

They sit down at a table and the waiter comes over, followed a short while later by another waiter who helps them through the Spanish menu. They each order a can of Fanta and a bite size sandwich. The blonde orders a dish of fries.

On the TV screen at the back of the room Valentino Rossi is shown winning his pole position for the Mugello race the following day. It’s still too early for the bar or restaurant to be busy. As the women chat more people arrive and order food. This is the biggest place in the village you can gather for a beer or glass of wine in the village.

“I didn’t want to go to Barcelona tonight.”

“Me neither. It’s just too exhausting.”

“Yeah, my family think I’m so boring when I don’t want to make anything.”

“Mine too.”

“The last au pair went into Barcelona every night drinking and making party.”

“The last au pair at my place drank wine every night.”

It’s a quiet, steady conversation. ‘Clumby’ is corrected to ‘clumsy’ and an acknowledgement of how difficult it is to know if something is ‘stronger’ or ‘more strong’. It echoes back to an early conversation debating ‘shyer’ and ‘more shy’. Great amusement is found at the idea that ‘kitchen roll’ is practically the same word in German, ‘Küchenrolle’.

They both explain the make-up discrepancy. The blonde explains she was too tired and had been crying a lot during the day  because her friend who had been visiting had left to go home.

“I need the war paint to hide the fact I look like a zombie,” says the other woman.

They both laugh. The blonde woman orders another Fanta.

After a few hours talking, the blonde woman is blinking more frequently than normal trying desperately to get some moisture to her contact lenses whilst her companion is trying her best not to yawn. They both decide it’s time to leave and go home.

A mutual friend sends a message, “Are you at the bar yet?”

Where I write (And why it matters)

Where I write

Where I write today

The bright Spanish sun that forces me to wear the children’s factor 50 sun cream on my face when I leave the house, and which has made the left side of my legs darken a little from where I sit on the balcony to read but has so far been ineffective on the right side which typically faces away from the glare, this sun is not present today.

Instead, I sit inside, on my sofa, in my room below the main house, peeping out from behind barred windows, past the palm tree that stands in the front garden and a lamp post which feels it could belong in Narnia. Most days, I can see the tops of the mountains, and a statue of Jesus with his arms outspread as if he were blessing the village in the valley below, but today the trees of the hillside hide behind the mist. It might be May in Spain, but the rain is Welsh-like, moving left to right across my window in great sheets like a GCSE textbook diagram of a sound wave.

To compensate, I’ve wrapped myself in a huge thick fleecy blanket and nestled within the cushions. There are four, two for this sofa, two for the bed with elephants embroidered on them in what looks like an Indian design which I can’t help thinking doesn’t fit with their pastel yellow and purple colours. It’s a fabric haven in a room without carpets or curtains.

Pulled up, right against the sofa is a little black metal table, which rocks precariously as I type. I mustn’t stand too quickly or my mug of tea, made using a microwave and UHT milk, will splash and end up flooding the floor, again.

The temporary nature of the situation is further exaggerated by the music playing out of the tiny tinny speakers on my phone. Spotify has decided I’m Spanish and its recommendations are for playlists of mostly Spanish songs. Occasionally something familiar pops on and my memories drag me to a different place, a club in my home town when I was eighteen, sunbathing in the garden at university whilst mentally chastising myself for not revising, or an argument about my distinctly bland taste in music with a friend who’s own taste involves pirate songs.

Bland music though suits me when I write. Anything too rich can be too much of a distraction and writing requires my concentration. It does not involve hoisting the sail on the Jolly Roger.

The importance of variety

The best advice on writing is always to write more and read more. But is it really all that simple? I’m reading How We Learn by Benedict Carey.  It’s a book I wish I’d read before doing a degree, for it has taught me that I never learnt how to learn efficiently. Surprise, surprise but practice, practice, practice isn’t the quickest way to get better at a task. And almost more startling, it’s better not to have a single dedicated quiet study space. Variety promotes learning too.

The idea runs like this. If you study the same material in multiple environments, with different background noises, if you’re mixing up working inside and outside, switch between the bedroom, the study, the dining room table and the coffee shop, you’re somehow providing your brain with more context to the information, which makes finding a way back to it easier. Or at least according to my understanding of Carey’s analysis of the scientific studies on the effect of context.

The same goes for mood. Only studying when you are in a single mood limits the moods that your brain associates with that information. Cleverly they tested this with people who are bipolar and people who were under the influence of mind-altering drugs. Mock exams are important because they train your brain to work in the environment in which you’ll have to regurgitate the same information. Laying on the beach after months of stressed revising and exams, your brain probably still contains the same information, but without the cue of mood struggles to know where it went.

A tangent on sleep

I wonder if the idea can be transferred to sleep. Do people who regularly switch beds have an easier time finding the path to content sleep in a new environment?

There are few places I struggle to sleep. It’s not that silence and comfort aren’t extremely valuable to me, but that their absence doesn’t prevent me resting. For years I slept to the not quite audible drown of Stephen Fry reading Harry Potter in the room next door. I hate sleeping with music on, but sometimes it’s not worth the argument to get it turned off. (Although I admit there is occasionally some music or radio adverts are too aggravating for even me.) I have slept soundly in tents beside loud and drunken festivities and in the centre of London with sirens sounding all times of the night. Hostel rooms aren’t my favourite but their cheap beds and the sound of cheerful chatter at 3am have never stopped me sleeping.

Ideally I sleep in silence on my super soft foam covered mattress snuggled under my own cosy warm duvet. Here in Spain I play a game with the blanket and the window, trying to gauge whether it is going to be a warm night or a cold night. Tonight, will surely be cold after all this rain, but it is a continuous guessing game.

Tomorrow

I switch beds and desks with ease. Travel forces me to keep adapting, for I must write and sleep anywhere. When the children are at school I’ll move my computer out to the dining room, or upstairs to the living room sofa or, should that bright Spanish sun change its mind, I’ll be out in the balcony frantically scribbling into my notebook or down on the high street beneath the parasol of a little coffee shop. And just a few weeks ago, I’d never seen any of these places, and in a few weeks time I’ll take my last look at them. Where I write changes, and that, I hope, gives the end product a little more richness.

The Tortoise and the Turtle of the Sagrada Familia

tortoise

I’m standing staring at a tortoise that represents the land. It’s squished by, or holding up, a column. The column’s symmetrical partner is held up by a turtle representing the sea.

turtle

Now, I’m not very good at understanding Christianity, and much of my knowledge of Catholicism comes from reading historical fiction (the Borgia books by Kate Quinn or the Tudor books by Philippa Gregory) or that one time I went to a Catholic mass and got told off for crossing my legs. So when I looked at the ‘minor basilica’ (it’s not a cathedral because no bishop sits there) and I saw a Christmas tree, I wondered why.

I consulted Wikipedia on my phone and a friend consulted a guidebook.

Turns out, the whole scene at that wall of the fancy church is the story of the Nativity and Jesus’ early life, tortoise and turtle included. There are babies being slaughtered, shepherds with their lambs, some rich men and a cow and a horse looking surprised to see a newborn baby. To the side are scenes of Mary and Joseph escaping to Egypt on a donkey, the precocious child Jesus lecturing the priests on how to be good, and a young man practising his carpentry skills.

My strongest memories of learning and writing about the Christmas story are from primary school. First, there was the day that I was ill from school and my three best friends all volunteered to be wise men. I ended up as a star. Second, the teacher spent the first ten minutes of the lesson talking about angles instead of angels and saying how we were all certain to spell it wrong, so much so that when I finally came to describe dear Gabriel I was convinced that my spelling ‘angel’ must be wrong that I went through my work and carefully changed my angels to angles.

The same teacher had criticized my work on the turnip story four years earlier. I’m not bitter much.

three-wise-men

Having seemingly missed out on the real religious meaning behind Christmas, I went on to study the Victorians, who I discovered introduced the idea of the Christmas tree to England. This is also apparently wrong, as according to Wikipedia Victoria already had Christmas trees as a child. The tradition it seems did however come from Germany which since the royal family were German makes sense.

In any case, for Gaudi, who took over designing the church in 1883, to have thought to put a Christmas tree on the facade seems to me forward thinking. And yet, maybe this is because it isn’t quite a Christmas tree. According to the Sagrada Familia website:

The cypress, a long-lived evergreen associated with hallowed ground since ancient times, symbolizes the eternal love of Christ. In Catalonia, the cypress is planted as a sign of welcome in local farmhouses.

I want to know if in Catalonia they really do plant trees inside farmhouses, or they plant them by farmhouses, or what they mean is at Christmastime they have a Christmas tree.

killing-babies

I don’t yet feel enlightened.

School trips and not staring at the Sagrada Familia for long enough

Landscape view of Sagrada Familia Navitity Scene

On Tuesday afternoon, after catching the train in from the mountain village where I live, I found myself staring up at the Sagrada Familia. Back when I was seventeen I came to Barcelona on a school trip. At that time I know my impression was that after the beauty of Parc Guell, the supposedly impressive church was ugly.

I was there with some of the other art students in school  and two teachers, one of whom I swiftly concluded was a liability. I can’t remember who the other teacher was, but I remember her being very nice and wheeling me though Barcelona airport in a wheelchair when my leg made an objection to holding me upright. I remember liking her because she was calm and stayed still long enough without talking that you could ask questions. The other teacher I thought I liked, she was energetic and unlike many of the other worn down teachers at the school she talked about doing things.

Passion facade Sagrada Familia Jesus on the CrossBut we took on Barcelona like each of us had eaten a packet of Jelly Babies. We saw museums and galleries that I only remember standing outside waiting for. It felt like as soon as I’d settled in a place we were being dragged out. Go, make sketches, but do them so fast that you don’t have time to look at anything. We passed by the Olympic stadium and I wondered what the point was as we loitered around waiting for instruction. I managed to lose the teacher for long enough in the Picasso museum to actually appreciate the art, but at the Sagrada Familia all I remember was a lot of arm waving and frustrated voices.

Since 2008, the builders have been busy at work. The basilica has been enclosed, an organ installed, a pope consecrated the church (whatever that means) and they’ve begun having services there. From my memory, I figured I’d only seen it from the outside as we’d walked past and paused for photos. Yet, I recognised the museum part of the building beneath the main hall (I’m sure there’s a more precise name), where there are maquettes, architectural drawings and super clever inverted models made of string and small weights which map the tension distribution so the architects could get the forces on the building right before computers.

This time I made sure not to rush. Someone kindly began playing the organ as I meditated in one of the ‘chapel’ areas, and when we finally ventured down into the crypt, a woman was giving some sort of service.

Virgin Mary in Crypt at Sagrada Familia

Part of the difficulty I have with warming to God’s houses, is my huge religious blind spot. I struggled when I was eight years old with the idea that for the cub scout promise you had to believe in something (… to do my duty to God and the Queen). Having never had a god, I struggle with the concept. Plus, the religious ideas and practices of big organisations aren’t explained easily with logic that’s accessible for a non-believer with a scientific education. They come with a huge number of fancy words and hidden meanings that I’ll never understand because I can’t see the point.

This led to a minor amount of amusement with my Catholic German friend when she asked me to explain some of the English words on the plaques and labels.

“I’ve got no idea,” I said after staring at the word ‘liturgy’ for a few moments, knowing I’d come across the word before. I looked behind me at the wardrobes behind the glass wall and then back at the description.  “I think it’s trying to say this is the wardrobe they keep the clothes for special occasions.”

There are rituals and traditions and rights and wrongs and angels and saints and many other things that I can’t differentiate from the general guidance to ‘be kind; play nice’. I’ve got no idea if Catholics believe in dragons or not, because if they don’t what’s Sant Jordi (Saint George) really done? If we don’t believe in dragons then how can we believe in a dragon slayer?

Religion gives you a way to answer the question ‘How does Sally know she’s dead?’ without dealing with the more horrific truth that Sally no longer is. She probably didn’t know she was alive either.

Sally was a hamster.

As a motivator for work God just doesn’t click with me, but the Sagrada Familia is also the realisation of a great ambition and to me it’s a reminder that we need to have great ambitions. I might not be able to relate to God, but I do like that it’s different. Really different. I also like that the Sagrada Familia is paid for by the people who visit it and use it rather than by the richness of the Vatican or some other great wealthy donor and, for the artistic value of the building, I’m happy to have contributed my 15 euros.

It’s an impressive piece of art, and art I can relate to.

Sagrada FamiliaI decided I like Gaudi’s little saying that, “my client is not in a hurry.” I like the idea of doing a thorough job. I like the details in the doors. I love the colour and the contrasts. I like the shapes, the fact that it’s a merging of geometry and art with its hyperboloid structures, twisting curves and the way the columns change as they go upwards.

There’s a chameleon hiding by a door.

When I came to Barcelona the first time, on that crazy school trip, I was in a different state of mind. I was being told where to look and what to do. At the Sagrada Familia I recall being agitated by my lack of control of the situation. We moved so fast, covered so many things that we missed out on actually really looking at anything. Nowadays, I follow my own curiosity. I went to Barcelona for the sole purpose of visiting the Sagrada Familia and looking at it. I’d booked the tickets, knew what time we needed to be there. I knew what bus I needed to get, and which stop to hop off the train at. I wasn’t rushed or exhausted.

Art takes time to understand and the Sagrada Familia to me is some highly splendid art.