Author Archives: The Chronicler

Stravaig + TheCats

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A sliced-open sachet of pet food, a yogurt carton filled with water, pushed into a street’s corner, tucked under a bush, placed behind the storm wall in full view of a North Atlantic swell. Evidence that somebody, and invariably it will be a little old lady, is feeding the strays. That was then, this is now and I’m seeing the same scenario, only, there’s the taint of organised officialdom.

Need to know. Time to interview brainrot.com. I type… “gatos España”, to find myself sucked off in an unintended direction. Transpires that the residents of Madrid, amongst other terms can be known as ‘Gatos’…Cats. Some might be hairy, but as far as I can see most have two legs.

Back in 1085, with the Christians on the outside and the Moors on the inside, a soldier climbed over the town walls. He used a dagger as a clamber-pick, struck the Moor’s flag and replaced it with King Alfoso’s, so inspiring a successful attack. He might also have opened a gate. Supposedly. Either way, they named him ‘el Gato’ a cognomen that with hereditary expansion, spread through the local populace. However, not every Madrileño can claim the feline monicker; you need a complete set of grandparents with the capital on their birth certificates. Not a problem for the hairy, four-legged Gatos of Madrid.

All terribly interesting, but it doesn’t get me any closer to an answer. Time to change the search parameters.

Britons have always deluded themselves into believing they are the world leaders when it comes to pet loving.

Because we don’t eat pony or donkey, but are quite content to feed it to our dogs and cats; because we don’t eat white veal but are happy to ignore the export of the unwanted calves, makes for hypocritical pet lovers. We term ourselves ‘intrepid travelers’ when we find a stall selling guinea pig in the Andes, only to feed the pigeons then call them ‘flying rats’, whilst eating a tub of chicken nuggets.

We do have a convoluted relationship with food and the sentient beings we allow into and around our homes.

Our guardian angel, manifesting as David, the taxi driver who helped us on our retreat back to Burgos, was incredulous that someone would require a house sitter for their cats. Surely cats can look after themselves?
To which the obvious answer is yes, very successfully. They also very successfully breed, catch fleas, kill birds and become road-kill. Many ending up feral, then forming feline colonies that attract both well-wishers and detractors.

In most towns, it’s not uncommon to find a derelict building, an abandoned plot, a dark broken iron vent out of which four yellow eyes warily watch you as you pass by. Look further, there will be an official notice attached to a wall or on a post; indications of a ‘sanctioned feline colony’. Glance through the broken window, over esplanade’s wall and there will be that scatter of cat food, that water bowl, maybe a pile of blankets. You might on occasions even see a cat.

Jungle gym of Cádiz

Two years ago the national government enacted animal welfare legislation, which in relation to cats created a licensing system for their control. Previously some would have used strychnine baited food, or the local authorities would react to complaints, by sending out the vermin controller to collect and exterminate.

As what always happens with these types of controls, a vacuum is created, which only sucks in more new recruits for the colony. It’s now a legal requirement to chip and snip, to neuter all kittens, illegal to buy them from shops and to feed them on the street unless licensed to do so. Effectively the local authorities have passed control to animal shelters, to the concerned groups who operate a policy of CES (trans: trap, neuter, release).

An old goat byre

We’ve seen the results from two differing perspectives on this journey. Gone the shop windows displaying baskets of mewing kitten; now you’re more likely to see a sleek sunbather under a plaza bush than a fleabitten mangy-moggy slinking around corners, huddling under cars in the guise of decrepitude. Our second meeting with the Spanish Street Cat was of a more protracted encounter.

People own dogs; cats own people. It’s a cliche that holds a modicum of truth. Our house-sit in Madrid was to offer the full butlering services to two ex-street felines. Auto correct keeps wanting me to use the term ‘felons’, possibly prophetic as our ersatz employers have been released on parole, escaped from the street after two years in a colony. Snipped, chipped and discharged into house custody, there to become reformed, transformed house cats.

Still, our relationship with the domestic pet is convoluted. They’ve been melded, manipulated, defanged, we’ve emasculated all their natural instincts; to hunt, to replicate, to socialise. Selected for traits that correlate with the latest fashion, no matter the century. From the Egyptian Mau to the Canadian Sphinx, we’ve consistently fiddled around with their genetic code, often to the detriment of the pet. Witness the squitten, or kangaroo cat: that has to hop on its rear legs because its front legs are reduced to shrunken paddles.

Brotherly love – sibling rivalry

Yet the biggest hypocrites are of course ourselves. Without the domesticated feline we wouldn’t have had a fortnight of free accommodation in central Madrid at peak holiday time. All for the less than onerous task of litter-tray cleaning and topping up the food bowl.

Street junkie and the kitty-crack

PostScript. Just for curiosity’s sake: the way to gender sex a street-cat is to checkout their ear tips. If there’s a nick in the left ear it was a ‘Molly’, if on the other side it was a ‘Tom’. Now, if they’ve been apprehended, they’re all ‘its’.

Postscript 2.0. Observational intelligence of Cádiz’ colonies suggests an apartheid policy is operating. Whether that discrimination is based on kindred allegiances, fur pigmentation or prejudice I can’t tell, for all appear to be matriarchal in nature. Yet all the black felines are segregated from the gingers by a jungle-gym of jumbled concrete blocks that they could easily negotiate.

Stravaig + TheDon

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Poser: Shakespeare and Cervantes died on the same date but not on the same day. Discuss.

Along Princes Street, up the Bridges, down the Mile and listen for ‘the tat’. Renditions of Dumbarton’s Drums and Scotland the Brave, with Highland Cathedral and the more saccharine Skye Boat Song announcing the presence of yet another retail opportunity. There to purchase a fly-weight bri-nylon kilt so you’re properly attired to walk the West Highland Way, possibly with the satirically sartorial addition of a tartan tammie to blend in with the locals, or a hairy heilan’ coo and its close relative, the stuffed green Nessie. Not to forget the inevitable Braveheart rubber duck and the omnipresent unicorn. All ‘real, genuinely authentic, 100% pure’ Scotch souvenirs that have sailed in a steel container halfway around the planet. Geegaws garnering a pestilence of emissions all to perpetuate a mystical myth of Scotch-land.

Scotch-land’s second National animal? The monohorn pig.

Never fear, you’re not alone Edinboorg, the same manufactory has despatched all the blades that adorn the tat-emporia of Toledo, the trinkets of fridge magnets in Segovia, the pottery glazed bulls of Madrid and the Quixotic paraphernalia of La Mancha.

The density of knickknack stores in any European city would serve as a useful barometer for measuring levels of visitor visibility. More accurate than counting tour guides’ umbrellas, totalling accommodation’s key-safes or decibel reading the rumble of castor-shod suitcases.

Toledo has its own raison d’être; the sword, historically renowned for their production since Roman times.
Once its narrow pasajes were befouled by equines’ by-products as they hauled charcoal and metal ores up through the convoluted, narrow passages and into to the reek-filled foundries. There to be mixed in a secret, near alchemic, recipe to create the sharpest, strongest blades known to Western Europe.

Today there’s only two artisanal families left, supported by the interests of re-enactors and the Netflix industry’s lust for historical bloodfests. In direct contrast to the many employed in the sale of repro-BLS… reproduction, blade-like-substances. Samurai, claymore, gladius, machete, falcara, rapier, falchon. Arranged in fan displays, at prices that say no local craftsperson has come anywhere near their authenticity. The knives in serried ranks, filling whole frontages of shops’ windowpanes. Pare, clasp, carve, cleave, bowie, bougia, navaja, fillet, falcón. All come with a backdrop of plate-armoured mannequins, designer chain mail, embattlements of shields, schildrons of pikes and lances. Unfortunately, I can find no evidence of a windmill.

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, tax collector, soldier, convict, slave, scrivener; the man with the credit for writing the first modern novel. More importantly, the mind that conceived a memoria of iterations, that of an emaciated melancholic knight and his portly side-kick, one on a knackered nag the other on an ass. Chasing knight-errantry and long departed causes, chivalristic jousting with a giant’s familiar: the windmills of La Mancha. Don Quijote astride Rocinante, with squire Sancho Panza as his foil and voice of reason. (Forbye mistaking windmills, he confused sheep for advancing troop reinforcements. Easy to do; Edward II did the same at Bannockburn)

Today, that conception has led to assemblies of marble monuments in plazas, musters of models in shops and a euro coin-crusher in every Spanish railway station. Every city has a street named for him, every property he was associated with is credited with a ‘slept here’, the universities he might possibly have attended claim an ownership. Such that Sn. de Cervantes and his creation ‘The Don’ have evolved in the popular imagination into a near single identity. Yet most will not have completed part one of his eponymous book, many don’t even get past page 79.

Cervantes ponders his creations

So did the bard of Stratford meet the ‘el autor primero Latino’? Did they share the same space? Why any might want to ask such a question is a wonder, but take a wander through brainrot.com to find some who find it a compelling possibility. But, one was a propagandist for a Protestant Queen, the other a struggling civil servant to a Catholic administration. So to that question: highly unlikely, verging on totally improbable. However, they did manage to share an equally problematic death date.

That posed question: First consider the history of the Julian and Gregorian calendars. Forget the present day one hour difference between Europe and Britain, back then it was eleven days. Why? It wasn’t Brexit, but it was a similar sentiment. Instead of blaming Brussels, it was Rome, and a devilish papist plot to tinker with sovereignty and defraud The Great British Worker, to remove eleven days from their lives. That deep-thinker, ‘The Will of the People’, voted by rioting. When in reality it was a scientific correction, for up to this point there was a recognition that a year was actually six hours and 365 days long. What was missing was a puckle of minutes. (0.0025hr). The calendar had got out of kilter with planetary reality.
It would need a bit of fiddling around with that extra day in February and then a further seventeen decades before Britain would admit its error. Probably a sobering reminder for Brexit ‘remainers’; the memory lifespan of an egregious error.

Yours, for €3,682.

Stravaig + TheChurroPorras

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“I like mine crispier”, to quote TheNavigator.


We’re standing in a line surrounded by children, considering the offerings of the chocolatería across the way.
Churros y Porras. The former I know as a deep fried, oil soaked extruded dough of no determinable food value and a calorific score that shatters the scales. They’re forever ingrained as a memory from an earlier journey through Al-Andaluz. We must have wild-camped, as we were cycling in the early dawn. We were certainly cold. A giant lenticular cloud like a pink UFO hung over the village chapel and the bright spectral glow from the bar’s door and the churro stand the only animation of life’s colour. An order of churros is placed, the brandy-laced hot chocolate rejected. Maybe because it was a Sunday, a fiesta day. What arrived was not as expected. Not the half dozen bread-stick like workaday churros depicted on the board, but a caracol, a snail’s spiral that fills a pizza box. Freshly cooked and hot. The memory is of that hot, that sweet, that instant gratification. Remarkable what hot oil and melting sugar can do for your soul.


The hot chocolate and brandy combination that we forsook has its own PB lexical name: ‘holy cow’. A ‘mondogreen’, a mis-hearing of ‘cola cao’, the patriotically branded Spanish equivalent to Cadbury’s offering.

That was ‘churros’, but what are ‘porras’? The Navigator hunts through brainrot. com, and I’m grateful that audio diction is disabled, given our present circumstances; surrounded by parents with clear eared children. Transpires that she inadvertently retrieves the Portuguese translation: slang for ‘sexual congress of an intimate nature’. The Spanish is only slightly less problematic: a joint or spliff. (In Italian it’s visually similar, only more prosaic, that member of the allium family; the leek).


But what are ‘Porras’, apart from being a bit risqué and verging on innuendo?
The answer seems to be a modification on a theme of deep-fried dough. It’s a Madrileños’ modified churro, only a bit fatter and more flaccid. Hence TheNavigator’s unintended double-entendre.

Graphically explicit double-entendre.

Stravaig + TheMagi

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It was really rather easy to track down the Kings. Just follow the reverberating noise down the narrow calles, the echoing stot of boys with lightweight footballs. The girls with gender-stereotypical pink stuffed toys. The local worthies have dressed up and located to the plaza to distribute presents, although there seems to be a degree of ‘dressing-up box’ confusion. I’m sure Saint Nick has donned a plastic crown to disguise his assemblage from ten days earlier.
It’s twelfth night give or take a couple of days, the traditional gift-giving day. (Given the number of new cycles being ridden around the park on Christmas morning, it’s the alternative, additional, traditional gift-giving day). Parents are striding through the plaza, rolls of wrapping paper under one arm, the other balancing at least one cake box. The Roscón or Rosca de Reyes; Three Kings bread, a soft, orange, sweet confection sprinkled with lurid red and green candied fruits, shaped as a large round doughnut or a small lifebelt. They’ve been on sale for weeks, even the ones that purport to contain ‘cream’, and a shelf life that could cover next year’s epiphany.

Tradition extends to the contents, I still have a small ceramic ‘king’ from a previous travel, but not the ‘bean’. Find the wizened haricot in your wedge and it’s your turn to buy the cake next year.

That was Córdoba yesterday, tonight we’ve taken the bus to Úbeda. On the way into town, passing the local tractor dealer’s yard I spot a row of decorated floats and wondered; as it’s Sunday could they have had their parade last night? Going from the bus station to our accommodation was a surreal experience after the ‘over tourism’ and stagnating pedestrian congestion of Córdoba, for there were more street barriers than people. Even the fly poster of seasonal events in an empty window held out no more hope. Those barriers were the sole indication that a ‘happening’ might indeed happen.

Checked in through the anonymity of reception-free door codes, we head out to find the one and only store that might just still be open.

They’re loading the projectiles onto Balthasar’s float: ten boxes, each with forty litres of dental caries, four hundred litres of boiled sweets, and that’s just one magus’ float. That would be one of those wise men who followed the star from the east on John Deere tractors.

I’m not entirely sure how long the parade route was, what I do know; it took at least a half hour just to get moving. We followed it for over two hours, left to get a resupply of food, an event that always takes longer than intended, only to rejoin the spectacle long before the tail-end came to pass.

Four bands, some with over fifty brass instruments and a percussion of drummers who won’t cease all night. Now add the inflated pirate ship that’s mizzen mast is punctured by a street tree, the shoal of dancing sea creatures, a ghostly jazz combo, several casts of characters from the Disney empire. Stilt-walking hang-gliders, a remnant of Santa’s happy helpers and a walking biplane. Not to forget the ‘woke alert’ of a blacked-up band of Bedouinos. The other big band were toga-draped Romans, whose players could render a tuba into a cornum and the gladiatorial march into the coliseum.

As well as Gasper and Melchior’s boiled sweetie distribution service.

Most are here to watch the spectacle, the small boys to fill a plastic carrier bag with ‘pic an’ mix’. The more enterprising have recruited a father to increase the yield of distributed largesse, an upturned umbrella held upon high.

The bagpipe might be a UN-sanctioned instrument of war, but it’s the drum that has the impact to drive life into a battle and into this parade. Stand at a particular spot with the throng on the edge to feel the reverberations driven through your chest, to understand why Napoleon’s infantry columns were so feared. Wellington’s instructions to his riflemen: eliminate the sergeant and the drummer boys. The brains and the engine. Emasculate the advance.

Still the bands plays on, still the boilings rain down, still all scrabble for sweets, nothing is still, nothing is silent this night.

An evening’s free entertainment to punctuate a shopping trip. And as always; a conundrum. Is the regional bank in league with the dentists, that they have own branded boiled sweets?

Stravaig + TheVignettes # 2.0

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‘Dia de los Santos Inocente’ whose comparable day in an Anglo-Saxon world might be April Fools’ Day. A day for tricks and jokes. The 28th December, the day King Herod ordered his troops to hunt down and slaughter all male children under two years. Only the Holy Family were already in Egypt, hence the black humour ‘joke’ was on Herod.
BrainRot.com suggests looking out for paper men stuck on your back, silly hats on the street and checking the newspapers. The flour bombing and egg fights are elsewhere, the headwear is ubiquitous, but only strung along the gutter line of the traders’ stalls. Which leaves the broadsheets. Where I find a footballing story with the incendiary revelation that PSG’s Mbappé intends transferring to FC Barcelona and not Real Madrid. A Scot’s equivalent would be a ‘Daily Record’ report that Celtic and Rangers were to amalgamate. Or in UK political equivalence, would be like Westminster unilaterally declaring Glasgow the new capital of Scotland.
So as the Spanish day of tricks and jokes, it has much the same relevance as April Fools’ Day, yet it poses the thought as to how the darkest element of the Christmas story got such a flippant adjunct.

For that, it’s relevant to remember that the Christian church was young and insecure, competing for relevance against the Roman pantheon of deities, and in particular the ten-day festival of Saturnalia. The winter bacchanalia of revels, that with perseverance would be syncretically subsumed, to reappear as Christmas. Still, there would have been a need for a ‘safety valve’, a way to let off steam, to slowly smother that pagan festival. Enter the ‘Lords of Misrule’, or as in Scotland, ‘The Abbot of Unreason’. Where a peasant, one of the little people, was elevated to kinghood and all had to obey his edicts for a day. For the elite, the endurance was short and their memories were long. From there it’s a short step to a day dedicated to japes, jokes and egg bombing.

Once spotted; scribed in purple on a portaloo – portapotty – thunderbox*…. ‘A Regal Experience’.
*delete as appropriate.

Design is everything. Your brief is to modernise a railway station for the modern age. A station that just happens to be the busiest in the nation. A brief that emphasises handling both people and as trains. (Listening Euston? You have a problem). As well as allowing for the ‘facilitation of the retail opportunity’.
All the re-construction work operates as intended; that is until another creative designs the wheeled suitcase. Why it took Him so long will be for future generations to ponder. (actually She did the drawing several decades ago, only it got lost in His in-tray).
They’re passing through the station’s x-ray channel, (aka the Security Theatre), the first roller case is retrieved, set down, where upon it does what gravity insists and rolls off. A loose unattended bagatelle bouncing off legs and heading for the highest score pocket and the gate to the platform.
That unfortunate architect had prescribed a highly polished two-degree sloping floor, but hadn’t allowed for gravity’s discovery and the invention of the wheel.
The afflicted cart’s owner, a pin-ball wizard, reacts by placing the second larger, presumably heavier cart on its wheels and takes off to retrieve the wander-bout piece. The result: Charlie Chaplin would have been proud.

Mission statement penned outside a toilet:
“At One Hundred Restrooms we believe that every toilet visit should be a five minute well-being boost, a moment to relax and recover in a safe and hygienic environment. Enjoy your break”. Note; no mention of the charge to spend a ‘penny-euro’ or the sloth-like queue.

On finding the Guinness-confirmed ‘world’s smallest window’ and pondering how to explain its scale, without resorting to a selfie posed hand. I’d considered a plane tree’s leaf, but that would have swamped its embrasure. A cola can, but that would have constituted product placement. An orange, but the supermarket won’t open today. Then I find inspiration lying in the gutter.

Stravaig + TheCathedrals

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I like to look for themes to tag our travels to. Whilst other travellers might interrogate the guide book, decide on their interests then go wandering. I, on the other hand, play the contrarian. Wander first – theme-thread second.

The cities’ trademarks of age: castles, cathedrals and city walls. Churches chime a preemptive toll before calling the hours. The chilled bite of wind in the next deep labyrinthine lane, brackets the sunlit basilica’s crown dome. Turn around and the next city cañon frames a sliver of yet another ecclesiastical roofscape.

Light Beacons. Theme-thread search suggested.

Segovia

Cathedrals will fit neatly into this conceit. Burgos set the tone; Valladolid, Salamanca’s two, Segovia and now Madrid follow on. All have their archi-ecclesiastical extravaganzas; from the relatively subdued Romanesque of Salamanca’s cathedral Vieja (they started the new second one in 1533), to the uberesque, ultra-gothic of the later seventeenth century builds.

I’m not of a particularly religious persuasion, in fact I’m often left with an ambiguous discomposure as I walk out from these monumental interiors and through the leaves of their vast wooden doors. The acres of gold leaf, the icons of silver bullion, the unimaginable wealth that has been invested at a time when the greater populace was exposed to pox, plague and poverty. Yet to have the imagination, to conceive a project that’s known will take centuries to complete. The skill-sets that had to be mastered, the construction problems requiring solutions often in a time of war and political instability, whilst maintaining an unimpeachable God faith. Concepts that in my secularist’s world feels like an alienating dislocation.

Both Salamanca’s and Segovia’s cathedrals have collections of religious art, in paint as well as fabric; in the latter’s instance curated in a low-ceilinged undercroft. These collections have the feel of obligation, the remainders from rural deconsecrated churches, now of necessity held in perpetuity. “We hold them… now you’re going to see them… all of them… all at once”.

In the main they’re imagery of the Christ crucifixion, which would originally have been placed on high as solitary entities, telling its message for a largely illiterate audience. However, in this restrictive, sterile space and at these concentrations the effect is a dilution, rendered down to inertness and impotency. Of graphic brutality, the morbidity of gore in the dark gloom of illustration, that reduces the Christian message exclusively to one of ‘misery and pain’.

We glance to each other, silently agree a retreat and leave. Stealthily. Guilty.

As what seems to happen on these occasions, I find myself retiring from this macro exposure to hunting the micro-detail. The particulars of a lock’s escutcheon plate or the design of a latch key. The shadow of the rood screen’s railings or the rainbow frieze thrown by the sun lancing through stained glass windows. Questioning the necessity of a padlock on a baptismal font or encountering the revelation of electronic votive candles. That iron hinge on the half foot thick door is seven centuries old and it still works, yet we can’t put a roof on a school gym and expect it to last fifty years.

The font was locked – to stop the theft of holy water to make ‘hocus-pocus’
Sad – but does prevent smoke and wax damage, or worse.
Hinge, at 700 years old.

Cathedrals; places to ask questions and be questioned. Even if I have no answers.

Burgos

I wander out into a stark winter sun-glare to watch how this city interacts with its cathedral. In Burgos its basilica sat in a seat of aloof reverence, in Valladolid maybe not so. City has marched up unto its Cathedral, a confrontation, as if two pugilistic protagonists are squaring up. More ‘town and frock’ than ‘town and gown’.

Valladolid

Fanciful maybe, but….

Lincoln

PostScript: stand on the transept passage of Lincoln cathedral, high up in the roof space and look along the line of sconces, the apex shields at the convergences of the ceiling’s rib vaulting. The alignment of the early works are out of kilter, then slowly as the perspective recedes and time passes, straightens to true east . It’s a time line of construction, a chronology of learning corrections.

Post-PostScript: Far be it from myself to city-brag my home town Glasgow, but it does have ‘The Dali’. Christ of St. John of the Cross; £8,200-worth of ‘preposterous spending’, to quote The Glasgow Herald. It was 1952; still, long live the Philistines. Today it’s the premier icon in the city’s collections. More important is its setting: the solitary occupant of its own gallery, hung in solitude with diffused low slung lighting, no distraction. Concentrated solution. Try to visit when all others are preoccupied by the gaudy neon pop-art Elvis along the corridor.

In that silent simplicity the impression is mesmeric, it quite simply works. Less is always More.

The thumb plate is modelled on a scallop shell, the symbol of St. James.
Not a scallop shell, but the same idea – a huge clam shell pressed into service as a holy water stoup in Madrid cathedral.

Stravaig + TheYearTurn

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It’s the morning of the Night Before.
The cleansing department are sweeping away the detritus of celebration, as the celebrators coagulate at the taxi rank. Or fuel up at the ‘golden arch’ and the ‘regal beef-patty’.

The dayglo staff are pressure-washing the plaza, hosing before them the naked stalks and cellophane wrappers that contained the twelve grapes that are the essential accompaniment to the midnight-struck hour. However, they have a problem: freezing fog. That sheet of watering has created a glacial armour, one that requires the deployment of the council gritter.

They’re in a race against time.
The first tour buses are already disgorging their phalanxes of day-visitors down in the valley at the bottom of the hill. Who are being herded onto the flights of escalators, thence to be carried effortlessly up and into a freshly scrubbed-up town.
The frost-fog burns back, first to partial inversion, leaving the rootless spires and domes floating in a soft focus. Then suddenly to a warm, innocent morning of crystal-cut clarity, sun-rays of blinding enthusiasm that still can’t quite dislodge those remnants of hoar lurking in their secluded corners.

It’s a fleeting commentary from a city’s life, that transformation from the revels of the evening before to the sobriety of today.

Stravaig + TheVignettes

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The collective noun for a succession of buskers is an ear-worm. In Retiro park it’s the Saxophonists who lead the table followed by guitarist and accordion, violin and wineglasses. For the latter, one family sit cross-legged as if at the front of the stalls, for a performance of The Sugar Plum Fairy. Most stick to a seasonal score of carols; however one Galician piper plays ‘Flower o’ Scotland’ as a slow lament, one verging on a dirge. The Murrayfield crowd would have finished, the game kicked off before he got to Edward having to think again. A magician stabs playing cards, a cartoonist draws caricatures, whilst break dancers attract the larger crowd. All have the begging bowl out.
But which of the following odes that float through the park is the odd one out? ‘Silent Night’, ‘Feliz Navidad’, ‘Joy to the World’, or ‘Jingle Bells’?
*Answers on a postcard to: brainrot.com

Waiting on the platform of the circular line, the train rumbles out of the tunnel and a ticker-tape of carriages scrolls past. On offer is a trumpeter in the first, a charango player around the middle and as our chosen door slides open, Peruvian pipes.

Poster at the bus stop: ’The Titanic Immersive Experience’.

We never attempt to understand the vagaries of the television, I never master the microwave and as for the central heating controls, we never entertain any intention of touching them for fear of an upsetting their countenance. They’re all part of the ‘house-sitting’ rituals. The introduction to each home’s unique personality and its idiosyncratic quirks. But the true ‘bête noire’ is always the keys. I thought I might have encountered every possible permutation, only for a new one to turn up. Three locked entrances to get to the front door. To gain entry, turn anti-clock twice then clockwise a few degrees to release the parrot beaks, what on any other assemblage would be the latch or deadbolt. Which is interesting, but the killer instruction is to not lock from the outside if there’s anybody inside; there will be no escape from within.

TheNavigator maintains that Madrid’s public loos have the coldest seats in Christendom. They’re also the cleanest coldest seats.

Having fulfilled the dictionary definition of ‘serendipity’, the chanced-upon encounter with one great, and one good, sonido y luz, light and sound show, we make plans for Madrid’s production. Climbing the stairs out from the metro into a plaza that’s thronged. Clots of populace attract clots of populace to form bigger clots of populace. Families pose in front of the city’s iconic motif of Bear and Tree. (It’s reproduced on every municipal van, drain cover and litter bin). Selfieists and Instagramists do what they do, whilst Santa jingles for alms. Corrals of encircled prams restrain toddlers, and we defend our stance, backs to the wall. All the ingredients are in place, and there’s a general air of happening. But plans kill spontaneity. The thought ‘why did they bother?’ is closely followed by ‘oversell, then underdeliver’. A three minute anthem on a seasonal theme, with some pastel coloured lighting illuminating the municipality’s palace window frames that flicker from off to on and back again. That’s it. Missed it? Don’t worry, it’s repeated in quarter of an hour. Every quarter hour all the way up to twelfth night.
You win some…. you lose some.

Navigating the sandstone’d depths of Salamanca, the windowless slabbed cliffs of academia’s high blank walls, passing the Casa de Concha, now the central library, and its three hundred carved stone shells, we round a corner to chance upon three children playing. She has a draped kerchief in hand whilst her brother tries to grab it, another is counting the seconds. Three kids just mucking around. That is, until walking through the Plaza de Campillo we chance upon two sculptures. One is a bronzed Leap-frog and the other a stasis rendition of what we had seen earlier.
Pañuelito; the handkerchief game.

Icebergs floating in the fountain, sparrow tracks in a hoar frost, the last star retreating out of a clear sky. Threw a double six to escape from the labyrinthine multi-modal transport hub and into the Spanish capital’s vast green lung. Casa del Campo. We wander around the lake, watched cormorants hung out to dry, dodged the pelotons of analog road cyclists and electric mono-wheelers, wondered at the sanity of the rowing sculls, then noted the empty canoe polo pools. Gave thought to the fact that it would be interesting to watch a match, assuming we would need to return in a few months. Continued our peregrinations which eventually returned to that lake and a polo match. With another just warming up, as a third team float a set of goals into place. Still there’s a grunge of ice tucked into one corner.

‘Tis supremely gratifying to know that other nations can conjure up such improbably, garishly, sticky baked goods as any Scots bakery. “Whars yer fancy scran, yer Mediterranean diet noo?”

“I’m sorry sir but I think you have a knife”.
We’re on the third leg of a short journey into the city, required to pass through security at the railway station. The x-ray machine has picked up on a pair of scissors that have acquired more travel-miles than a politician’s campaign trail. Wasn’t aware, nor can we see any prohibition notices against the transportation of dangerous goods on the high-speed railway service. It transpires that their crime is to be longer than 6cm and presumably have a point, as the serrated knife with its bull-nose, that travels in the same cutlery roll, which will happily hack the top of your finger when slicing a tomato, passes muster. Not to worry, it makes for a quirky story, that and they were blunt anyway.

He’s standing guarding the Mexican embassy, in full view of the national parliament across the road, cradling his Heckler & Koch in one hand and a surreptitious cigarette in the other. Again.

How do you spot the local from the visitor? Stand at the street crossing and observe. The former steps off from the kerb as the semaphore for cars turns to amber. Which seems somewhat problematic, as the car considers a yellow to be an advisory and the red light to be negotiable. Why contemplate an imminent demise? Just in a hurry, or to have more time to greet your friend coming towards you, to exchange kisses and Christmas greetings? In the middle of the road. So how does the local acquire this plus one sense, the ability to second guess a driver’s intention? As the visitor I don’t hold with Darwinism and remain rooted to the kerb until a suitable sacrificial local makes the first move.

TheNavigator has interrogated the net, consulted Atlas Obscura for some ideas and plotted a wandering path that, with luck, should join up some dropped pins. A sculpture park underneath an autopista’s flyover, a relocated lucky frog, an artisanal market and an animatronic installation . Four waypoints that in themselves are not overly important, oft’ it’s what lies in between that has the interest. The first two could be flagged as “aye… right” ticks, the third has ‘alternative motive’ written all over it and as for the installation, I wasn’t even sure if we had found it.

One hundred and thirty-two stalls sell the creations of creatives. All of it is inspiring, if in no part because you know there is absolutely no question that any of it has come out of a container from China. Eleven dozen stalls and TheNavigator has found her way, inevitably back to just one. A homing instinct for an earring habit. An unerring ability to find the exquisite, individualistic, syncretic pieces. An incurable condition that needs little encouragement.

An animatronic timepiece translates into a string of eighteen bells hung on a wall. Not what I had anticipated, erroneously envisioning the possibility of an animated character hammer striking a bell, like those we’ve seen elsewhere. The clock strikes twelve and then nothing, not even a mouse that ran down. I had already started to wander off, muttering incantations along the lines of ‘overselling and underdelivering’, when that carillon launches into ‘Jingle Bells’, a window opens and a cast of caricatures come out to grace the balcony. They gyrate and the flamenco dancer wafts her abanico, her fan, wafting away the cloud of stone dust billowing up from the mason who’s cutting a slab for the dug-up plaza.

*Odd carol out: ‘jingle bells’, not just because French supermarkets have a predilection for playing it in the middle of June, but because its original outing was either in Mitford (Mass) or Savannah (Ga) for a US Thanksgiving service.

Stravaig + TheEvidence

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Popular mythology has it that a solitary snowflake landing on the London-centric Met Office’s roof at midday on the 25th constitutes a White Christmas. Now I understood that there might be a degree of ambiguity involved here. I’m referring specifically to a frozen piece of water and not to a certain denigrated generation crafted from the fever dreams of the tabloid press and certain prominent political figures.

To help assuage any thoughts of jealousy, Madrid this morning is three degrees colder than home in Haddington. The sun is shining and by early afternoon we will be in the park under a cloudless sky squirrelling rays and Vitamin D. So no jealousy please, this house-sitting lark is onerous.

On checking the morning papers I note that October’s promising prediction for snow on ‘the day’ has yet to materialise. This could be because there’s the white stuff in central Madrid.

Here is the totally and incontestably verifiable evidence.

Possibly not enough for a snow angle. That is, until a skater comes over the crash rail.

To those who celebrated last night, I trust the dishes are now finished. To those who are preparing for later today: did you remember to start cooking the ‘sprouts last Monday?

To one and all have Happy Christmas.

TheNavigator + TheChronicler.

Stravaig + TheQueue

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See a queue, and know that it can only have one of two destinations.

Two nights until the Christ’s mass and the streets are a clog of citizenry; the pavements might be wide but lane discipline is irrelevant. All wander amiably, absently; mendicants cadge euros, buskers play cellos, whilst the Doñas have retrieved their fur coats from the depository’s coldstore. In this throng you might not at first notice the stationary congregation forming up beside Kilometre Zero, the point from which all distances in Spain are counted. An edifice with history. Originally the headquarters for the postal service, it has a tower for the optical telegraphy line. Then it was the Francoist State Security Ministry with its infamous basement prison. Now it’s the Regional Government’s Presidential Palace.

Queues require investigation. It’s ‘FOMO syndrome’; something’s happening – don’t want to miss out.

I pace it out, but it passes into a ziggurat of crowd control barriers, goes around the corner and disappears into that government building. Well, at least it’s not a run on the bank.

Britons consider themselves as the quintessential proponents of the queue, masters of the social niceties of standing in line. But I suspect that your nominal Briton wouldn’t wait in a quarter-mile line to look at the Municipal Belén. A Spanish family most certainly would.

Turn a few more corners to find another stationary body of Madrileños, asking the same question: “fin de cola?”, “is this the tail-end of the queue?”. Again, I follow the near stationary phalanx around the corner to find two police officers watching this migration entering the State-owned lottery’s shop. Their dedication is remarkable, for this particular line has to thole the questionably odorous pleasures of being stuck outside a ‘Lush’ shop. (Emporia, that for the uninitiated, are always first encountered not visually but nasally, generally at a hundred steps).

The Belén and The Lotto both have Christmas roots but are on differing branches; one religion, the other governmental commerce – aka: voluntary tax collection.

Belénes: tableaux of The Nativity. The creations outside the ecclesiastical buildings are often from the Neapolitan baroque; antique depictions of the simple manger scene. The three principal participants, the only ones mentioned in the testaments as being there on that day; the kings several days away, generally just around the next corner. In the instance of the Belén at La Almudena Cathedral, the Kings and their camels are welded re-bar silhouettes etched in low voltage lights, traipsing along the wrong side of a verge, a street gutter that disappears down a tunnel and underneath the Royal Palace. The inference being that it took some time to extricate themselves, so offering an explanation for their twelve days of delay.

The various municipalities’ Belénes, on the other hand, attract the queues. They’re more of a pageant, dioramas of an animated Bethlehem or a local village’s life. Wood choppers and bread bakers; laundry hanging and sheet bleaching, cabbage growing and water drawing, as well as the other normal travails of life. The lightning-struck, flames-flickering church tower in Segovia; the stumbling wine-carter’s ass. Or the black vicissitudes of Herod’s troops hunting toddlers.

Out in the cluttered expanse of the Plaza Mayor, one trader sells cork bark, boxed moss, sprigs of heather and half a dozen sorry withering specimens that might pass for Christmas trees. The bark a neat substitute for limestone scarps, heather for scrub bush and the moss for tenacious weeds. I gave up counting when I got to ten stalls, all selling the figurines for augmenting your own home Belén. Ass, sheep, Magi, as well as the primary protagonists. Trees, cribs, camels, but no ‘caganer’, that squatting luck-inducing wee Catalonian defecating pooper. Simple answer: I’m in Madrid.

That equation of tree to figurine neatly encapsulates the place of the ‘arbol de Navidad’ in the Latin Christmas tradition. In spite of the Santa-suited motorbikers’ decibels of ego-enhancing horns and echoing rev’d up reverberations on the Gran Vía yesterday morning, Sn. Claus has little input into the general proceedings. It might not be gold, frankincense and myrrh, but it is The Kings who get to deliver the goods on Twelfth Night. Those sorry spindle-shank’d specimens would be long deceased, the presents swamped by their drifts of desiccated pine needles.

The Belén outplays the Tree.

The longer the queue, the better the Belén, or so I want to conclude. We’ve considered a visit on three occasions, but that long, lingering line appears both stationary and tucked deep into winter shadow. This, despite its address on the Plaza del Sol. Strategic planning is required, so we return early on the following Sunday morning.

Moments before opening, we’re very near the front, congratulating ourselves on our brilliant strategy. The snake has already grown, its tail disappearing into the plaza. Thoughts turn to the ouroboros, the serpent that swallows its own tail and what happens when this queue completes a circumnavigation of the block?

Shouldn’t have worried. The doors open and we progress… backwards. The diorama inside is the depiction of a miracle, outside we have a miraculous apparition. The manifestation of one set of parents, the attendant in-laws, their son’s football coach, the dog’s dog-walker and the daughter’s best friend’s family’s neighbours and all their fellow co-workers. The queue doesn’t so much stagnate as impregnate, swelling as the snake consumes a meal of line-jumpers.

The queue does eventually do what queues do, only this one has to first pass through this government building’s x-ray and security measures.

The black phantoms of General Franco and King Herod linger still.

PostScript: five minutes walk after we leave and that second queue, the lotto-line is still in place. The participants might change, but that entity called ‘Queue’ remains. Its tale is for another day, one when I can announce my spectacular winnings in the ‘el Gordo’.