A sculpture is a sculpture, marmelade is marmelade...

Obvious, yes? Maybe not - especially if the sculpture is either made of marmelade, or of marmelade. What they hell am I talking about? To find out you'll have to read my review of SJ Esau and The Wave Pictures @ Club Neu! last Saturday
http://www.the-fly.co.uk/words/reviews/live-reviews/4704/the-wave-pictures-&-sj-esau

We had spent the afternoon before hanging out with Mr Esau himself - Sam - as he's an old friend from Bristol and had very kindly played at our wedding; his songs had sound-tracked much of our journey around Europe last year. We showed him Plaza Major and the St Gines Chocolateria (a must!) and then met him later before the gig. Along with his Italian friend Nadia (who now lives in Segovia) we were about the only people at the gig who knew who he was, but he seemed to go down very well!

After the gig, it was our Spanish friend Jaime's birthday party; he's a busy boy and this was actually the first time we had managed to see him since the Pueblo Ingles week last year, so it was great to hang out with him again and meet his lovely wife Teresa. Belen, another Pueblo Ingles friend was there with our lovely Venezuelan friends David and Natalie in tow, so much fun was had in the little underground bar Jaime had booked for the occasion. A very lazy Sunday followed as a result!

all quiet on the Spanish front...

We haven't been writing much recently.

This is a plain lie. Actually Kate and I have been writing a lot recently; it's one of the reasons this blog has been so quiet!

A few months ago we were looking through "In Madrid", a monthly English-language newspaper/what's on magazine, when we both came across little advertisements in the classifieds that interested us. For Kate it was the guitarist looking for fellow musicians and song-writers for musical get-togethers; for me it was the advertisement for a Madrid writers' group.

Both organisations were slow to get off the ground - with both of us working evenings, weekend get-togethers are a necessity - but they seem to have really hit their stride recently. As a result much of our creative energy has been devoted to producing material for or during these sessions; Kate with her bluesy paens to Madrid's unattractive canine community and me a film script for an allegorical coming of age film.

It's been great to be doing something creative again; but it hasn't left much time for blogging!

Flamenco Fiesta

Last Saturday our flatmate Alex, who has just got back from Mexico, threw a party for some his friends, which - after Kate had got her guitar out and played a few enthusiastically-received songs - turned into an improvised Flamenco show in our kitchen. We filmed a little bit of it:

http//www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmXJnD6K95k

No idea what he's singing about, but it sounded pretty rude and clearly had the crowd in hysterics.

Totally Hooked

After successfully giving up alcohol (temporarily, anyhow), quitting cigarettes (ten years ago) and limiting my coffee intake to a maximum two cups per day, my addiction-free lifestyle has hit the rocks rather badly. I blame my flat-mate Alex. Ever since we've lived here, we've been enjoying free entry to Club Alex, a handbag-house spectacular staged regularly in our kitchen by Pedro Alejandro and his trusty laptop. Many's the time I have wiggled my hips and performed abominably cheesy dance moves over the simmering pasta, little suspecting the ambush that lay ahead.

A moment of geeky interest in the source of Alex's extensive gay disco repertoire produced an enthusiastic response from Alex. "It's Spotify!" He told me "You should try it".

The only previous reference to Spotify I'd come across was in an online news article, which I'd downloaded purely for teaching purposes because it had so many excellent examples of the Passive Voice ("to be" plus past participle, example sentence: I was arrested for apalling dance moves by the Disco Police).

So, seeking a little music while at my mum's in France and needing a change from our over-familiar CD and MacBook collection, I Facebooked Alex in Mexico (really, this has become very geeky all of a sudden, I do apologise) and asked for a link and invite to the Spotify site. Alex obliged almost immediately, so I registered, downloaded the software and before you could say "gay disco" I was clicking my way merrily through a forest of tracks.

Being a slightly obsessive music lover anyway, I was instantly hooked. Loads and loads of tracks from a huge variety of genres and eras just a double-click away. Because the audio is streamed rather than downloaded, all you need is a half-decent internet connection to rampage through the available catalogue at will.

Which is exactly what I've been doing at every conceivable opportunity. After a year without my previous favoured provider of new and half-forgotten music, BBC 6Music, it's been bliss to feast my ears on a host of fresh stuff. In the days of yore I was a dedicated user of the Napster website (before it got legalised) and although I downloaded loads of tracks without paying for them, my monthly CD bill went through the roof as my discoveries fuelled my desire to possess more and more tunes. On balance, I'd say the record industry gained much more from me than it lost in those Napster days. I was bereft when it had to close down and none of the other file-sharing, peer-to-peer, thoroughly lawless internet data sharing processes have ever quite done it for me in the same way.

The beauty of this one is that it's perfectly legal, as well as being free (if you don't mind putting up with the occasional advert - you can pay for a commercial-free service if you want) and although it's all streaming audio, you can grab the tracks you like and stick them in playlists rather like the ones on iTunes, so you can find them for instant gratification whenever you need to.

My only worry is if something happens to our internet connection. Without my constant supply of new music I think there might be serious repercussions to my health. Cold turkey, the lot. I'd probably get the shakes and start gibbering or something. It's all getting rather worrying, actually.

Finally!

We finally did something we've been meaning to do, and saying we were going to do, ever since we moved to Madrid - we went to the Prado.

The most visited museum in the world - or so I read somewhere - is right in the very heart of Madrid, backing onto the Retiro and housed in a sumptuous neo-Georgian building. It's free in the evenings, including Sundays from 5 til 8pm, so we wandered over on what was another pleasant Spanish afternoon. (The weather has since turned rather April-ish - lots of mizzle)

It's huge. Naturally we only looked at a fraction of the permanent collection, the rather ghostly, noir Goyas - his black phase - and the utterly mental flights of religious fancy by Mr H Bosch. There was also a temporary exhibit of Pre-Raphaelites on loan from, of all places, the MAP institute in Puerto Rico. I can't really imagine what resonance the people of that American colony find in 12ft by 40 ft paintings of the sleep of King Arthur or Leighton's marvelously sensuous "Flaming June". But anyway, we're pleased they came to Madrid.

We must go back.

it's a conspiracy....

Driving back from Kate's mother's house near Montcuq to Madrid, a lazy 12 hour stretch, we narrowly avoided getting sucked into the hellish outskirts of Bilbao (again).

There is a clearly a conspiracy, probably hatched by an unholy trinity of freemasons, anarchists and opus dei members, to direct all traffic between San Sebastian and Burgos via Bilbao - there are clearly vested interests at work here. Somebody is getting a big pay off somewhere from all the lost tourists and travellers who end up stranded in Bilbao's claustrophobic valleys when they were seeking the wide open plains of Castille y Leon.

There are at least 3 motorway routes that will take you from San Sebastian to Burgos (and probably numerous A-road routes). However, only the longest way - via Bilbao - is actually signposted 'Burgos'. It was the same story heading too France, trying to follow 'Francia' signs. Both of the other routes involve going via Vitoria Gasteiz, which mysteriously disappears from road signs and thus you plunge relentlessly towards Bilbao, drawn by roadsigns evilly leading you off course with false promises of a quick, easy route.

Don't get me wrong, I quite like Bilbao - I just hate driving there.

happy holidays!

It's Semana Santa (Holy Week aka Easter) in Spain so we're both on holiday along with the vast majority of the Spanish population! Hurrah!

Today we're going to meet up with some friends and then tomorrow we're off to France for the week, staying at our favorite luxury resort, Chez Cathy & Jean, where the full-board menu is mouth-wateringly good and the laundry facilities second to none! We'll be there for the week, then we're going to call in to San Sebastian on the Basque coast on the way back and hopefully meet a friend there.

Happy Easter!

Transport tribulations on route to Valencia

We nearly didn't make it to Valencia at all.
The signs weren't good. When our Valenciana friend Amalia suggested a trip en masse by people from the Pueblo Ingles La Alberca programme end of October 2008, at least twelve people said they were interested in joining the party.
By the time we had got to the week before, everyone had dropped out (for a variety of understandable reasons) except Theo and me and Lynne, who was flying out from London. On Friday, I checked the weather forecast and guess what? After three weeks of unbroken warm sunshine across much of Spain, there were black clouds and big fat raindrops all over the map of Espana, especially the Valencia bit.
As it was, Theo and I had to curtail our visit a tad because of his timetable - rather than arrive very late after his classes on Friday night, we opted to take the train at a reasonable hour on Saturday morning - it was only a three-hour journey with Renfe and we would arrive early in the afternoon.
It all started very well. We arrived in plenty of time at Atocha station, which resembles an airport terminal with attendant baggage x-rays and check-in desks. "This is going to be a breeze," we thought, as we sat down for a cuppa before boarding the train.
Except it wasn't. A train, that is. As we handed our tickets ready to embark, the lady in the smart uniform said something in rapid Spanish which sounded suspiciously like "bus". Some Spanglish later, we had established that there was a problem on the train line and we would need to take a bus as far as Alcazar de San Juan - adding an extra hour to the journey. Great.
Ah well, we had sandwiches, books and backgammon with us, we could afford to be philosophical.
The journey began uneventfully. After we got out of the southern Madrileno suburbs, there wasn't a great deal to look at out of the window so Theo snoozed while I enjoyed myself reading the man in front's book over his shoulder and looking up all the words I didn't know in my Spanish/Ingles dictionary. Very educational.
After a couple of hours on the road, we made an unscheduled stop in a one-horse town off the motorway where the driver stopped and spoke to a passer-by. It looked suspiciously as if he was asking for directions. A few passengers exchanged glances, but apart from the group sitting behind us, who'd been complaining about the bus-replacement ever since we'd got on board, no one made a big deal of it.
A few more kilometres down the road and we were off the motorway again, round a couple of roundabouts and back on, this time travelling in the opposite direction. This didn't look good. There were a few rumbles of consternation.
Eventually we entered Alcazar de San Juan and started making our way to the town's railway station. At least, that was the intention. After he'd stopped twice to talk to passing pedestrians, it was clear our driver didn't have the faintest idea of where we were or where we were meant to be going.
Then he saw a policeman in a squad car and flagged him down. By now, all the passengers were watching the driver's progress through the town with a mixture of anxiety, irritation and amusement. So, with a police escort, our bus picked its way through the narrow streets, only just avoiding pinning several passing cars to the wall, or at least forcing them to drive over the pavement so they didn't hit us. We passengers had a moment of elation when we saw the railway line at the end of one of the streets, but it didn't last long. We drove on past. But it was clear, even with the policeman indicating the way to the station, our bus driver had other ideas. We got stuck in another small street, hemmed in by the traffic in front of us and the station still tantalisingly out of reach.
By this time, the passengers had decided to take matters into their own hands and with typical Spanish directness, they started shouting for the driver to open the doors. When he did so, everyone grumpily climbed off, pulled various bits of luggage out of the coach's cavernous hold and stomped off to the station on foot.
Thankfully, they held the connection or we would have had to wait until 4.30pm to catch the next one - well after we were supposed to have arrived in Valencia itself. So, we made it - late, but still in one piece.
When we told the story to our Valencia friends later, they unhesitatingly reached the conclusion that this was entirely typical of Spain. "You must write and complain!!" they said. We might do. After all, it would have been a lot cheaper to just get the coach the whole way - we would have arrived no later and saved ourselves a bunch of money.
Still. The rest of the stay was lovely. Yes, the weather was pretty rubbish, but the hotel Theo had booked as an anniversary surprise was lovely and only five minutes from Valencia's historic centre, which is a charming and interesting place. It was fun seeing Lynne again and Amalia, Juanvi, Jose and Maria proved, once more, to be excellent partying companions as we moved from one bar to another, then a tapas restaurant, then another bar, then a club.
We could have done with the extra hour the Spring clock-change stole, but we were up early enough on Sunday to get a personal guided tour around Valencia's beautiful streets and buildings from Amalia and her sister, Maria.
The visit was topped off with a long-promised Valencian special dish, paella, including a delicious veggie version for us sin pescado, sin carne types.Thankfully, the train going back didn't require any buses to help out and we made it back to Madrid Atocha without incident. Not as entertaining, sure, but by that time we were too tired for any kind of bonus cabaret.
Valencia, by the way, is lovely. But next time we go, we'll either drive ourselves or get the bus the whole way.