South African summer

I spent a couple of weeks this summer in South Africa. If you'd like to read some of my thoughts about the country, click here.

48 hours in Barcelona

I spent most of last week in Catalonia, the first few days rather wonderfully in the country near Banyoles (about which I’ll be writing very soon) and the last two in Barcelona. I don’t know how large the real city of Barcelona is, the city where people live and work and conduct their daily business, but the part of it that gets visited - the old city, the area to each side of La Rambla, the Boqueria, the Picasso museum, the port - is soon covered. Indeed, although this may seem parochial and Anglocentric, we found ourselves returning, over and over again, in what began to feel like wilful homage, to Placa de George Orwell, a neatly paved area slipped in among the streets of the old city, lined like everywhere else with bars and various other eating opportunities, from traditional three-course meals to macrobiotic platters, with the usual range of bocadillos de jamon and tapas in between. The square, which is actually a triangle, hosts at its entrance – if you’re coming from La Rambla – a large modernistic sculpture, a twist of iron rising high above the heads of passers-by, at the apex of which is threaded a massive wooden ball, a nicely dialectic interplay of what the world has to offer, as both material and form, and, unlike much modern sub-Serra sculpture, not even an eyesore. It’s a triangle that seems to attract more than its fair share of dropouts, people who, at what must be considerable cost, have turned their backs on the rest of us, with our mobiles and guidebooks, and take their comfort from the company of large, scuffed, infinitely patient dogs and, to a lesser degree, from one another until a scuffle breaks out. Orwell, if he felt at home anywhere, would surely never have felt at home here, among this colony of winos and worse, with their elaborate skin-obliterating ‘tribal’ tattoos and white-boy dreadlocks. Down and out was for Paris and London; Catalonia was, or should have been, for sterner homage-worthy stuff. In fact, much as I like the city and enjoy what it has to offer, not least the best sandwich in the world (Café Viena, La Rambla del Estudis 115), there’s something about the Barcelona that’s on show that leaves me unconvinced, in the same way that Covent Garden and parts of Trastevere do; as though the transgression that ought to stand for creativity doesn’t go much beyond the litany of living statues along the main tourist drag, which briefly startle, and then amuse, and then seem tawdry and dispiriting, part of a world in which work can be reduced to stifling immobility on the off-chance of a handful of coins in a hat. I started this year in Madrid, a city that struck me as being more or less what a city should be, busily about the infinite variety of its own affairs, absorbing the transient rest of us without much fuss. The part of Barcelona that’s available to tourists has a different feel to it, like a naughtily disrespectful child on the look-out for attention. It’s no surprise that the artists this side of the city seems most proud of – or most eager to transform into souvenirs - are Gaudi and Dali, masters of the unfinished and the showy.

Book-loving in Catalonia

No, I'm not dead, in case you were wondering, and I haven't been resting either, in the Thespian sense or otherwise. As we say here in Italy, when struck by wistful longing, magari (to the latter, obviously: I mean, not death, of which I've had already had more than enough these past few months). To be honest, it's been a period of unrelenting distress and confusion and now we're getting the builders in for three weeks just to finish us off completely. I say three weeks. I must be mad.

Which means that I'm looking forward even more to spending a few days in northern Spain this summer in the company of people who write books and people who love them, and possibly write them too. I've been invited by an organisation called 7 Day Wonder to take part in their book-lovers' holiday near Girona, from 3 to 10 September. The other authors will be Ann Cleeves, Claire Dudman and Adam Nevill, so it's a pretty varied and exciting line-up. Plus, I've been told, the food is fantastic, so you'd be crazy not to sign up this very minute.

Girona, too, is a wonderful place to visit. We went there years before Ryanair started pretending it was a suburb of Barcelona, and loved the high sunlit square in front of the cathedral, the balconies dripping spider plants, the river weirdly packed with fish and some rather interesting chicken rissoley things we ate in a bar. We were travelling with a very complete guidebook, which even told us where the town's red-light district used to be. But we still weren't prepared for the sight of a middle-aged woman in a doorway, black beret tipped teasingly to one side, slit skirt and lightly swinging handbag, looking for all the world like a provincial Marlene Dietrich.

Holy moly

This may resemble a sacred anatomical relic, like Saint Bartholomew's foreskin or the toe-clippings of some martyred Roman matron, but it's actually the central part of a chiropodist's window display in the Cortes quarter of Madrid. The rest of the window is devoted to corn plasters and diagrams of half-flayed feet (which also have an inadvertent religious air, portrayals of flaying being a popular theme in late 16th and early 17th century art - there's a particularly gruesome example of some unfortunate saint having his skin peeled off in Palazzo Corsini in Rome). All the putti are doing here, with their harps and whatever the other instrument is meant to be, is framing the chiropodist's skill with a recalcitrant bunion or two.

One of the best things about Madrid was the unobtrusiveness of its churches. In five days, the only one we went into was the cathedral, an unmatchably charmless building attached like a carbuncle to the side of the Palacio Real, where it no doubt brought comfort to generations of simple-minded Hapsburgs and their court of buffoons and dwarfs. It's now the home to some of the worst religious art I've ever seen, and I imagine that's true of all the other churches we didn't bother to enter, despoiled of their riches during the civil war, which are now to be found in the Prado and elsewhere, in grand and secular state.

The book I took with me to read during my stay was C.J. Sansom's Winter in Madrid, which looks like a failure of the imagination (mine) and, in some ways, was, as I plucked it from the pile of unread novels in my study at the very last minute, as much for its size as anything else. But it turned out to be an ideal choice. It's always a pleasure to read a novel set in a place you know, and it's even better when you're discovering the city as you read, in a game of real and virtual narrative mirrors. Gran Via, Plaza Mayor, Puerta del Sol - I shared them with Harry Brett, the novel's hero, as he struggled with poverty and corruption in post civil-war Spain and I, less manfully, with far too much to eat and drink in a much richer, and safer, city than the one the book describes. It's a well-researched novel and, I thought, thoroughly gripping on an intellectual and emotional level, its wilful flatness of tone reflecting the sort of austerity you find in films like Brief Encounter, an austerity, finally, of the heart. I don't know what Sansom's politics are, though I'm sure he's anything but extremist. Still, he spares few punches when he talks about the shameful collusion of the catholic church in the spirit-crushing destruction of Spain under Franco. There's a particularly appalling moment in the book - in the midst of the routine cruelty oppression feeds on - when some prehistoric cave paintings are found, only to be smashed to rubble and dust as pagan.

The photograph on the left is of a statue on the Gran Via, on the roof of one of the splendid 20th century pseudo-Baroque extravaganzas that line the street. When I took it, I thought of Icarus, but Icarus would have lost his wings well before hitting the ground, so now I assume it represents a fallen angel. It has a Gormley-like feel to it, as though the act of falling had stripped away the angelic qualities and left the bare man, upturned; even the wings look more like the leaves of a large succulent than aerial limbs, designed for flight. He's no more a creature of the spirit than the chubby gilded urchins are in the chiropodist's shop, entertaining their plaster foot with a tune or two.

Tourists

Decades ago now, I read a short story set in the future, when time travel was so common people chose eras rather than places for their holidays: Tudor Britain rather than the Maldives. The hero, for reasons I don't remember, decided to visit Judaea in the days leading up to the crucifixion of Christ. Naturally, the holidaymakers had to be prepared to play their part in whichever event they chose to visit, to blend in, and the hero, with the rest of his group, was dressed and coached appropriately, instructed in what to do and say. The tour organizers took them through the main scenes: Gethsemane, the Passover with Pontius Pilate addressing the crowd and asking them whether they wanted him to pardon Jesus or Barabbas, the stations of the cross, and so on. When the group was ready, the holiday began. Everything went as expected. Before long they were gathered in the square beneath the governor's palace and Pontius Pilate was talking to them, in Latin, with the two men – Jesus and Barabbas - standing by his side. The hero didn't understand what Pilate said, but he waited for his cue to shout Barabbas. Free Barabbas. It wasn't until he began to shout that he looked around and saw that everyone shouting Barabbas had come with him, from the future, and that all around the square, pushed to the edge, their voices drowned out by the tourists, were the actual inhabitants of the place, who were shouting Jesus. Free Jesus.

This story came back to me a few days ago when I was in Madrid. It's a shallow comparison, I know, but I was standing in Puerta del Sol, at the heart of the city, and enjoying that feeling of being both part of, and isolated from, a place, a feeling that's probably the essence of being a tourist. And then it dawned on me that all the voices I could hear around me, in what should have been a ferment of movida madrilena, a ferment I'd travelled over eight hundred miles to experience, were Italian. I might as well have been in Piazza Navona. We went to eat in a place called La Taurina, surrounded by the severed heads of bulls and matadors' capes, framed like fans, and every table was occupied by Italians, calling for paella and sangria and for Barabbas to be freed.I looked round, wondering where the real Madrilenos were hiding, waiting for the moment to reclaim their city.

Fortunately, I didn't have to wait long. They were packed like bocquerones (anchovies - don't worry, I'm just showing off) in the Museo del Jamon just round the corner, queueing in deceptively ordered fashion for rolls of exquisitely scented cured ham and something to wash them down with. The floor was covered with crumpled paper napkins, crumbs, the occasional abandoned glass; the noise around us was exclusively, exhilaratingly, intimidatingly Spanish. It felt like the real thing, which, of course, is what we were after, however much our presence contaminated it. Even the prices were foreign, as if we'd also time-travelled to an age in which a glass of decent wine and a ham roll could be had for a couple of euros.

The evidence

What I did on my holidays

I'm tempted to make this a photographic record but there is a limit to the number of atmospheric shots - shingle beaches, empty oyster shells (empty because you always remember the camera after the oyster has been slurped down), half-timbered facades with the date displayed in ornate stucco arrangements, charity shops, general quaintness punctuated by austere Caspar David Friedrich-like seascapes and unusual views of Canterbury cathedral - that people are prepared to stomach, and I'm worried that I might not know exactly what it is. I'd put on a video or two, made with our new camcorder, of places we've seen and stayed at, but I learnt - alas too late - two cardinal no-no's in the amateur video business. One: Don't whizz round like a dervish because it makes people dizzy. Two: a picture really is worth a thousand words, which means that a moving picture tends to obviate the need for any commentary at all, and particularly commentary along the lines of '...and this is the very attractive and well-equipped bathroom...'. So I'll keep them to myself (and maybe YouTube, where I can pretend to be anonymous). 

Which leaves me with moments. My first taste of samphire, and wondering if its gathering is still a dreadful trade. Using the predictive whatsit on my mobile to tell my sister we're eating at the Crab and Winkle in Whitstable (where I had the samphire, as it happens, as part of an excellent meal - I recommend it) and only realised as I was about to send it that my phone had predicted Arab and Winkle, two words that don't often go together. Wondering on the bus to Faversham what the woman with a baseball cap and ankh earrings was writing feverishly over dozens of pages of a spiral notebook and finally reading the words: 'I wish to let go of the past - with love' on each line of each page. The luck of finding a Donna Karan suit for men (I didn't know she did stuff for men) in a charity shop - in what will be my size after a fortnight's semi-serious dieting - for a tenner. An exquisitely detailed latex seed, sprouting from latex earth and wrapped in a strip of paper with a fish printed on it, the whole thing no bigger than an eggcup. Wind, water, rain, the scent of asphalt. A pyramid of cockle shells constantly fed by a rolling strip of rubber crankily emerging from the side of a building. The sheer variety of fishermens' huts. A security guard at Canterbury who, when asked which building was the Archbishop's Palace, said, with a hostile leer, 'I do know, of course, but I can't tell you.' People having time to talk.

Be warned. Photographs will follow.

Croatia. The Mediterranean as it once was?

Thinking of going to Croatia on holiday? Read this piece by Diamond Walid and see if you fit into the rather narrow range of sexual and racial acceptability demanded by Croatian youths on the lookout for victims (you know, the kind that 'ask for it'). If you do, think about whether you want to have a holiday in a place where the range matters.  If you don't, think twice.

Croatia is 90% catholic. Nice one, Ratzy.

A few days off

I'll be leaving the insufferable heat of central Italy tomorrow for a week in the more temperate climes of the English Midlands. I can't wait. The blissful vacancy of travel. M&S duck à l'orange and Jeremy Kyle (my guilty secret, alas no longer), Thornton's chocolate gingers, traditional pork pie from Kirk's, my mother's (and her mother's) favourite butcher's, the Guardian and the Independent actually printed on paper, my favourite Chinese all-you-can-eat-for-£4.99 buffet on School Street. Yes. Yes.

And you know what? I'm worth it.

Adlestrop

Edward Thomas was right. There are few places more evocative than a small country station in the summer, and those countries that still have them (stations and summers) should count their blessings. Not all stations possess the magic, of course. They need a few details to make them perfect. There should be a bar with a blind made of faded plastic strips at the door to keep out flies. The blind, though, should be knotted a little back on itself, so that one or two flies do penetrate the semi-darkness to buzz around the scuffed plastic dome protecting the last third of a crumbling sponge cake. There should be no other food of any consequence - it's too hot to eat. The light outside the bar will be intense.

Animals should be present. Ideally, a dog of indeterminate breed will be lying somewhere inconvenient, across the doormat or halfway beneath one of the three zinc-topped tables squeezed under the shelter of the station eaves, each with its plastic ashtray advertising Crodino or Dubonnet. If the dog's small enough, it will be curled up, nose to arsehole, on one of the chairs, ear cocked, pelt marked by the odd feeding tick. It will have a collar, but no name tag, and behave as though it belongs to no one. Failing that, a cat.

There will be no announcements, but the barman, a middle-aged man in pressed black trousers and a vest, will have all the information you need. The coffee will not be very good, but may come ready sugared. You will drink it slowly, staring out to where you have left your cases, drunkenly heaped against the base of a cast-iron lamppost. There will be two platforms, the one you use when you leave and the one you will be brought to when you return. The only way to get from one platform to the other is to cross the track or to take the train and let it bring you back. Sometimes, if you're very lucky indeed, you will need to shoo chickens away as you do so. The train will always be late, sometimes by hours, and you will be angry, but deep-down you won't care because you have already arrived, without knowing it, and no other place on your holiday will stay with you for as long as this station does.

Hot sex in San Francisco

David Isaak has recently said that the mere mention of sex in a title can increase the number of hits a blog gets exponentially. The title to this post is thus intended to lure unwitting sex fiends, particularly those based in San Francisco, to my blog and to the neat little Amazon widget to the right of this post, which magically makes it possible to order my book. Subtle? Of course it is. It's all anyone deserves who has nothing else to do with his time than type hot sex into a search engine.

A great place to enjoy the sunset from (updated)

Sedona is extraordinary. We arrived mid-afternoon, driving up from Phoenix, and saw the light play with form and volume and colour, with the road some way below us and the rocks, that hopeless, inadequate word, above. Down to our left, roadworks were in progress, and other kinds of building, which will almost certainly transform the place for the worse, but it will take an awful lot of spiritual merchandising and motels and whatever else takes place here to destroy the absolute indifference of the geography. Photographs don't do it justice, and neither do words.

Between one butte and the next, we stopped at a place that sold all kinds of local, and not so local, artefacts: skulls, native American jewellery, odd cast iron sculptures, cowboy hats, signs like the ones in the photograph, postcards, roughly made vases from China. While I was looking for a present for my sister, Tyla asked if there was some place we could go to enjoy the sunset. The colours of Sedona - ochre, orange, red - are sunset colours. What we wanted was a place above the valley, with Margaritas and Corona beer and silence. The woman who ran the shop knew exactly where to send us.

Maybe it was because I hadn't bought anything and her retailer's instinct told her I wasn't going to. Maybe she didn't like us, or was innately wicked, or didn't understand what two foreign men were doing with one American woman and thought we needed some mild sort of punishment, nothing too taxing or permanent, a warning for future memory. Maybe she had a dark, sardonic sense of humour. Maybe she had no taste, or aesthetic sense, at all.

We followed her directions and ended up at Sedona airport. We ordered our drinks and waited, staring across the car park, and the wire fence, and the air field, with its clutter of tiny private planes. What we'd imagined was the whole inhuman splendour of the landscape in the dying light of day. What we got was the homely squalor of a small commercial airport, appalling service, the smell of fuel.

PS Tyla has posted this message below: "Oh the memories....Cold coffee, warm beer, weak margarita. But it was all worth the sexy image of Giuseppe silhouetted against the chain link fence, dressed in black, deep drag on his cigarette. The barbed wire coil on the top of the fence only added to the James Dean renegade-like feel of the moment."

I thought you'd like to see the image she mentions, so here it is.

Wholesale

This is one of those photographs that tourists in the States can't help but take, a glut of colours and brash cultural references that flatter the observer's eye while confirming distance, as though we lived in some other universe. The reason I took it though, honestly, is that I was intrigued by the yellow sign at the centre: the one labelled Canyon portraying a champagne glass with a stem like Japanese love beads. What caught my eye wasn't so much the glass as the writing beneath. PACKAGE GOODS and DANCING. Does the place double as a freighting agency of some kind? Or is the link more organic? I'm thinking white slave trade here; I'm imagining innocent jivers suddenly encased in bubble wrap and destined to foreign parts. The Turquoise Tepee may be involved. I'm anxious. Can anyone help?

Steve Jobby

I would love to be able to credit the creators of this romper suit (if that's what they're called; I suspect it isn't), but all I can say is that it was seen in the window of a shop in North Beach, San Francisco, at an ungodly hour of the morning. The shop was closed.

(Just in case you can't read the writing on the bit below - it says CHANGE ME.)

And no, I have nothing against Apple. Honestly. I was actually thrilled to be able to email from their store in Market St, SF. I had that frisson of belonging, without it costing me a cent.

Village police

This photograph doesn't even begin to capture the extent to which these two policemen, photographed in Sausalito, looked like refugees from one of those films with titles like Cop Shack or Hole Patrol.

Maybe they were between shots.

Big Daddy

It's a truism that everything in America is larger than anywhere else, even though, in two cases at least - pigeons and stock cubes - it's clearly false. Still, anyone who's familiar only with the modestly sized deodorants in European urinals will certainly be impressed by this sweetly-scented monster, occupying most of the porcelain bowl in the lavatory of the San Xavier mission outside Tucson and bearing its name with pride. Big Daddy.

Hmm. A reference to Cat on a Hot Tin Roof? (Why Brick...!) A gesture of affection towards the manufacturer's father? A less than subtle reminder that, however much worldly power we may possess, at the moment of urination, heads bowed, exposed, we are children of that great Big Daddy in the sky? A joke?

Who knows.

More holiday snaps

As welcome relief from the excitement of publication, let's get back to our US trip. Here's where we stayed in Williams, Arizona. It's the oldest motel in Williams, dating back to 1936, and possibly the cheapest. We paid $32 plus tax for a double room. Bob, a civil and widely-travelled man, was our host. Below is the view from outside, complete with snow. (Hours earlier, at Pane Bianco in Phoenix, it was too hot to eat in the sun.)

Oh yes, the motel wasn't just in Williams. It was on Route 66. Route 66. You may need to be me to understand how potent this is. You may need to have been a pre-adolescent in a farmhouse in middle England in the 1960s to understand exactly what Route 66, where you get your kicks, might represent. You may need to have imitated Mick Jagger to the anxious approval of adults, who aren't quite sure if approval is the appropriate response as you pout and preen and wave an imaginary maraca at the sofa and would rather be anywhere than where you are. I have a photograph to prove that I was actually there, all these years - and kicks - later. Here it is. Once again, in an entirely different context - Wow.

Charactus

I know we're not supposed to be anthropomorphic (yawn), but I can't think of any other plant that has so much sheer personality as the saguaro cactus, which populates the hills and desert round here. They do pretty much the whole range of human emotions, from cautious to belligerent, gregarious to cheeky. Take a look at these. (I love the thoughtful, slightly anxious mood of the one at the back of the last picture, just waiting to see what his livelier buddy in front is going to do.)

PS I had a dream in which a vulture plucked a rattlesnake from the ground and carried it off to its nest inside one of these cacti. How's that for total immersion in the local culture! And, no, don't tell me what it means. Let me enjoy it as it is.

Oxymoron

Mother! Oh God, mother! Blood! Blood!

We had to help Scout with this one, which comes from a film whose opening scenes are set in this very city.

Scout is a dog.