Salatheel

Speed Tourists

Today we were speed tourists. It might have been somewhat more leisurely had I remembered to turn left. But on we sailed until twenty minutes to the station became forty-five minutes. We arrived just as the train from Seville to Cadiz glided smoothly out of Santa Justa Estacion. We passed an hour in a frivolous manner and finally set out, to arrive at 12.30pm.

Was it going to be possible to research Puerta Real and Cadiz before the train back at 6.40pm? The gods were with us and there was the bus to take us over the harbour bridge. Now I am wandering in places that have not yet appeared in my novel, contemplating events that have not yet happened. My characters start showing me how they arrive and what they see. Are they orange trees in the square, they look like it. Here is the house where the officers stay, here is the house where my heroine hides.

We sit in a cafe and eat empanadas and I drink my friend’s Americana by accident, as she ploughs into my cappuccino. The crema was so thick it masqueraded as milk – too late to swap, I have poured sugar into it in vast quantities. I look idly up the street and remember the swamp we have passed. I knew it was there, but now I have seen it – and suddenly I know what will happen. I scribble a few notes and we walk down to the harbour. Cadiz is a slim outline so very far away across the water. But the sea is calm – could you swim across? Not me, but then a fit young man might.

We find the bus stop and the bus arrives as if sent by the very same gods. Back past the swamps that this time merit photographs and into Cadiz. ‘There’s a Tourist Information, why don’t you try it,’ my friend advises. More to please her than with any expectation of help, I take a short diversion. She was obviously channelling the gods, I am handed a book that outlines a walk celebrating the two hundred years since the Constitution. Joy! Cadiz in 1812, complete with more details than you could shake a stick at, including the house Lord Wellington himself occupied.

We route-march the defensive ramparts overlooking the harbour and yes, it is possible to dive into the sea and not kill yourself. Divine providence! Cheer him on as the young man swims for freedom. Down here, snap, snap, snap round there, snap, snap snap, up this street, snap, snap snap – the camera does the work. We are racing the clock. My friend can go no further without a beer.

‘Oh look, it says here in the guide that Tertulia is the right spelling, not Tertulla as I had thought.’ ‘What’s a Tertulia?’ she asks. ‘It’s a salon – as in, “holding a salon”. Oh wow, have you seen this, there’s a scale model of Cadiz in the late 18C, in the museum – look there’s a picture.’ I am now in raptures. ‘No really, we do have time…’

Cross the square, down this street, turn left, ‘Look there’s the museum – oh 😦 The Museum is closed on Monday. The gods, it seems have got bored and gone to the Tertulia of Señora Larrea to discuss the Enlightenment. Really; how much help did we think we were entitled to?

When we finally sit down to eat back at the little table in our Seville apartment, it is 10pm. Well, how Spanish we have become.

Going Somewhere

Apologies for the delay, finally, we have found some free wi-fi in Seville!

The Sevillanas are going somewhere. They walk with swinging steps and an air of purpose. Hands in pockets, head down solitary wanderers, or couples stepping it out whilst managing to be deep in conversation. Even in small groups, gathered to chat, young men ease from foot to foot as though eager to be getting on to the real business of the evening, which is?

We meander down the narrow cobbled streets that pattern the old town. Woe betides the unfortunate foreigner who has not thought to take a map: destined to wander the lanes and alleyways forever in search of home. An endless parade of three storey buildings whose neat plaster walls are regularly studded with tall windows and tiny wrought-iron balconies on which miniature gardens hang precariously. Each house nuanced with slight differences that give it a stamp of individuality and provide the eye with novelty at every step. The new is built in sympathy with the old, to form a seamless vista with no ugly gaps to break the spell.

Then suddenly, an open door reveals the glimpse of an inner courtyard, bright in the sun with coloured tiles and perhaps a stone fountain surrounded by comfy chairs that just invite you in.

The shops cluster in the small irregularly shaped squares that open out in front of you, created to serve the church that almost invariably occupies one side. Sometimes baroque magnificence, sometimes plain, warm, sixteenth century sandstone, but always with a saint painted in a square of tiles on the wall.

Beware of standing back to admire the façade because the approaching car will hurtle through the square at all of fifteen Ks, before it disappears down one of the narrow streets, just wide enough to take it and maybe a pedestrian pressed back against the wall. A one-way system that only those inducted into the inner circle can fathom. And it appears that the inner circle is mostly young, male and replete with bravado and a cool pair of shades.

We are going somewhere, like all the Sevillanos. But where? Unexpectedly we stumble into the Alameda de Hercules, complete with Roman columns (don?t wildly imagine a whole Roman Forum, there are four columns supporting statues, two at each end.) It is full of people, lots of them, but most it seems are going somewhere.

Now it is Sunday morning, 9.30am and the church bell clangs out its call to mass. But the streets are silent, the blinds are down and the Sevillanos are still sleeping, they are going nowhere.

Yorkshire curd tarts and soft oven bottoms

P4132401 What is it about food that builds its reputation in your memory into a yearning? It’s pretty much possible to get most things English in Australia, where I now live – Marmite, McVities chocolate digestives, red Leicester cheese … But Yorkshire curd tarts, oven cakes (or soft oven bottoms as they are traditionally known) and Atora suet remain elusive. It’s not that the suet itself is the thing – it’s the fluffy, gooey dumplings that I love. And although I have not sourced it myself, I understand that it is available – when I get back I’ll have to seek it out, as it will be the depths of winter by then and I can curl up in front of my wood burning stove and eat thick, chewy stews on top of which suet dumplings ooze.

However, here I am back in Leeds and the hunt for the Yorkshire curd tart was on. (One has to be particularly careful not to accidentally fall into a spoonerism with its name …) The best tarts were always sold by Ainsley’s, so I walked to all the places where Ainsley’s used to be, to find that Ainsley’s was no longer there. It was the best local chain, but that doesn’t mean you can survive – quality it seems is not enough, business acumen is all.

Gregs was always second choice, but even they have stopped doing Yorkshire curd tarts – “Not the demand, love.” I should never have left, I could have kept up the demand single handedly.

Imagine my delight then, when an unplanned amble through Leeds Market turns up not only a Yorkshire curd tart, but that other delicacy, a soft oven bottom. How eagerly, you may imagine, did I purchase said items and carry them home. How I salivated as I laid them out to photograph them for this blog and waited for the kettle to boil for a cuppa.

Cut carefully into quarters, I sat down with my friend and with great anticipation raised the delicious morsel to my lips. Oh, the disappointment… Not enough nutmeg. What’s the point of a Yorkshire curd tart if you can’t taste the nutmeg? Come back Ainsley’s and show them the way!

I looked at the soft oven bottom. Really, it’s just a bread roll. A nice bread roll, but just a bread roll after all. Dare I have the dumplings when I get home…

Taking the high roads

It cannot be denied that the banks of Loch Lomond are very bonny indeed. As you head up out of Glasgow to the highlands of Scotland, the road along the side of the loch is a taste of things to come. A combination of muted browns, burnt oranges and the deep plum of the silver birch branches reflected in the blue of the water.

As you climb towards the mountains, the rocky outcrops still cradle snow in their clefts and on their northern slopes, even though the temperature is scratching tentatively at the twenties, and T shirts and hairy legs are the order of the day.

The road twists and winds around and sudden vistas open up before you that literally take your breath away. The scenery exudes majesty and grandeur and there is a sense that we are merely supplicants visiting the halls of the Mountain King. The broad valley of Glencoe sweeps up to either side in towering walls of granite and the road is an alien line, on which cars scurry like cockroaches, a buzzing irrelevance in the immutable landscape.

Two days later, I am fulfilling a desire I have had for twenty years or more. I take the train from Carlisle to Settle through the high moorlands of North West England. Here the grandeur is of a different order. Formed by glaciers, the long flat tops and rounded sides, flow in long and lazy waves around you. They are punctuated by deep green valleys in which dry stone walls meander with the sheep. We reach the highest station in England and I look down the steep fell-side to the River Dent sparkling, hundreds of feet below me in the sun.

Rattling across the Ribblehead Viaduct we reach Horton-in-Ribblesdale and the rocky promontory of Pen-y-Ghent stands so familiarly proud above the railway line. We stop at Settle and the train fills with walkers clutching rucksacks and waterproofs. Indeed, it was a grand day for tramping the fells.

The Ironies of Progress

“What ideas individuals attach to the word “Millennium” I know not; but I know that society may be formed so as to exist without crime, without poverty, with health greatly improved, with little if any misery and with intelligence and happiness improved an hundredfold; and no obstacle intervenes at this moment except ignorance to prevent such a state of society becoming universal.”

Robert Owen, ‘Address to the Inhabitants of New Lanark‘, New Year’s day, 1816.

There is a sense in which this might have been spoken yesterday by one of the politicians currently vying for air-time in the British general election campaign, where the Conservatives have promised to fund the Health Service with ‘whatever it takes’ (isn’t that just a promise begging to be broken). In fact it was spoken two hundred years ago by a forward thinking man whose social experiment now properly merits the badge of a World Heritage Site.

He was the Executive Partner at New Lanark Mills, yet the conditions he created for his workers would hardly compare favourably with the sweatshops of Asia. What, one is forced to think, were the conditions existing at the time, that twelve hour days for 10 year-olds was considered an improvement.

But within the context of his time he was a radical and extraordinary man. He established a crèche for children as soon as they could walk, thus enabling their mothers to return to work. One might be cynical about the motives of such a move, but one cannot be cynical about the establishment of the world’s first infant school, where all children attended for free for the duration of the working day. At the time, only affluent men were properly educated, their sisters’ education consisting of languages and domestic arts if they were lucky. So to spend mill profits on the education of the female children of the working classes would have appeared absurd and profligate in the extreme.

He also provided free health care for his workers and a shop where cheap goods could be purchased. The experiment drew a constant stream of visitors then as it does now, but his ideas were way ahead of their time, and like all such innovators, society in general does not approve their boldness.

The mill produced cotton, the must-have fabric of the time, which had elbowed linen and silk out of the way and thrust itself boldly into the marketplace. Originally cotton had come from Egypt or India, but in the early nineteenth century demand exploded and ironically, this bold experiment in social improvement most probably sourced its cotton from the slave fields of southern America.

However, let us not judge, for we in our turn will be judged by those who, in two hundred year’s time will look back and wonder.

A Celtic View

Visiting the Celtic countries is always a sobering experience for an English woman interested in history. The long and bloody past of the Irish has always hung heavy on me. I came to understand quite clearly, with the instinct that a teenager has for bull-shit, the meaning of the word propaganda. I knew I was only getting one side of the troubles that raged just across the Irish Sea, but no-one in school taught me about the history that had created them. That I had to find out for myself.

Now I have travelled to another country with a chequered history of dispute with the English: Scotland. At least geography and perhaps a wild ferocity was on their side. Even the Romans feared to tread and built a wall beyond which, as my Scottish friend commented, dragons be.

Stirling Castle is the northern point of a triangle made with Edinburgh and Glasgow. It sits on a rocky promontory above the plain through which the River Forth meanders. Seen from the motorway its craggy heights scream defensive position and indeed, it was fought over no less that thirteen times in its history. Take Stirling and you take Scotland.

Now it is regularly taken by a host of unarmed (except for ice-creams) visitors who mingle with ladies and gentlemen dressed in period costumes composed of cheap synthetics and no petticoats. (No, I didn’t say fur coats and no knickers.) Indeed my friend and I had an in-depth conversation with Bishop David (long pause whilst the name continues to elude me) regarding the intrigue at the Stewart court.

Out in the Queen Ann Garden, a man displays his birds of prey. They sit on their perches regarding us with the steady watchfulness of accomplished hunters. Yes, he says to a little girl, you can stroke the birds, but in return the cute little falcon will demand payment of a lump of your flesh. She doesn’t quite understand and her face takes on the confusion and wariness of the hunted. He continues to expound enthusiastically upon the nature of of his beasts, pecking out his sentences with a ferocity that almost draws blood.

We stand next to cannons dated from 1810 which have been emasculated and painted in a beautiful uniform glossy black, and stare out at the hills and mountains rising around us. Snow capped and dressed in their winter colours, a reminder of the terrain which the Scots warriors used so skilfully to their advantage. And in which, the treachery of Glencoe, still leaves a winter chill.

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