Where there’s Light, there’s Hope

December 14, 2025 / Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Room 402, TOC Hostel Madrid. 17.32.

It is categorically impossible to be down at heart in Madrid. Whatever my thoughts and feelings were, they were altogether altered the moment my feet were back on Spanish soil as I left the plane at Barajas last night. It’s not as though I need reminding that Spain is always the answer to my lonely heart, but it is good to know that its medicine is none the weaker for every visit – especially as this is my *fourth* visit this year (though if you count my sorties to and from the Canaries and Gibraltar, it would be my sixth). Anyone would have thought I had an itch that needed scratching…

Ah, Madrid. Like the girl next door in every American romcom, I have come to regret dismissing you so lightly when first we met, now that you have captured my heart. There is something undeniably homely about La Capital, which neither London nor Paris nor Berlin can match. Even now, bustling as it always is in the run-up to Christmas, it still feels more like a large town than a capital city.

From my vantage point in the hostel, overlooking the glittering Calle del Arenal, the hubbub below is a merry melange of conversation, villancicos, far-off snatches of song and the intermittent underground rumble of the metro. The near-constant snapping of chasquibumes (bang snaps) makes the city sound like a crackling fire.

I don’t say this often, but here is a city I wouldn’t mind living in.

Merry-go-rounds, ice rinks and various Christmas-themed stalls have been set up in the various squares and open spaces throughout the city. Traditionally, it’s the Reyes Magos (the Three Wise Men) who bring children presents in Spain – which has always struck me as a much more logical excuse to celebrate the giving of gifts – but that doesn’t seem to have stopped the Spaniards from starting the festivities several weeks prior. And why not? Any excuse for a celebration will do.

By far the brightest lights can be found on the walls of Callao’s Corte Inglés, which draws a constant stream of shoppers into the night (it was still heaving at half past nine when I passed by en route to the hostel last night). Wherever there’s a crowd, there’s usually a ragtag bunch of pedlars clinging remora-like to its underbelly. Sure enough, I found three manteros hawking the usual array of glasses, handbags and Yamine Lamal shirts outside the main entrance, the strings of their cloth blankets twitching in their nervous hands at every distant blast of a police car. Their location of choice – beneath the three wise men – seemed almost poetic.

I don’t suppose the Baby Jesus would have had any more call for a Barcelona tee-shirt than he did for frankincense. Neither, it seems, did the madrileños. But who’s to say that these three wise men didn’t follow a star of sorts to Europe?

Down the street in the Puerta del Sol, the Real Casa de Correos is lit up like an advent calendar – though in its technicolour array it looks more like a dollhouse – and the usual conical tree of lights stands between Carlos III’s smug smile and the oso y madroño statue on the other side of the square.

Could you call La Puerta del Sol a square? It functions like one, more so than the nearby Plaza Mayor (which really is a square) but it’s really more of a semicircle – a giant protractor radiating in multiple directions from Kilómetro Cero at the feet of the Casa de Correos. At least, it would be, if the centre of the semicircle were just a few yards to the left.

I’m only here for a couple of nights. Extremadura is calling. It has been too long since I last laid eyes on the corner of Spain that well and truly stole my heart all those years ago, and since then, it’s been nothing more than a beautiful word on my lips. I’ve already had my fair share of nostalgia trips this year to Finisterre, Gibraltar and El Rocío, but one more won’t hurt. Holidays are for healing, and that’s exactly what I intend to do. BB x

The Jolly Company

December 13, 2025 / Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Gate 23, Bristol Airport. 16.20.

I can’t remember the last time I flew Ryanair. It’s definitely pre-Covid, but it might be even as far back as 2017, which isn’t that far off a decade ago. If memory serves, that last flight under the sign of Brian Boru’s harp was so dreadfully delayed out of Toulouse that my flatmate had to pick me up well after midnight from Sevilla Santa Justa airport – back when Sevilla was a conduit rather than a destination, nearly a lifetime ago.

But, at £15 for a flight to Madrid, I could hardly say no. It isn’t often that I can escape to Spain for less than it costs me to get to the airport. My grandfather’s country has become something of an elixir of late, and one upon which I have become heavily reliant… So here I am, once again, hightailing it out of the country less than twenty-four hours after the end of term, in search of peace, joy and healing – and three blissfully Teams-free weeks.

The train up from Taunton was absolutely packed with revellers, cackling and guffawing and generally reeking of booze, weed or the cheap, sickly stink of vape smoke. A new party seemed to jump on board at every station en route to Bristol, before the 13.18 stopped in its tracks at Weston-super-Mare and, at a signal from the station manager, disgorged the contents of its swollen stomach onto a smaller Great Western train on the opposite platform.

I tried to zone out with a copy of Samantha Harvey’s The Western Wind which I had swiped off my bookshelf before I left – a hasty decision, admittedly, as I don’t tend to return the books I take on holiday, so it needed to be fiction. I got about a hundred pages in before losing interest in the plot when I realised it was marching backwards in time. I’m not the easiest to please when it comes to fiction, but I do tend to blanch pretty quickly at any kind of narrative structure that deviates from a logical chronology.

Here’s hoping my fallback, S.J. Deas’ The Royalist, is a little easier to read. Failing that, I’ve downloaded the audiobook for Dune – and there’s always Madrid’s Casa del Libro.

It’s going to be a rather full flight. There’s a large and boisterous throng now gathered here at Gate 23, most of them under the age of twenty. Either Bristol’s entire population of Spaniards are riding this flight home, or several school trips are coming back for Christmas (though I can’t see any teachers). Either way, it’s a good thing I’ve packed light, as I don’t imagine there’s going to be much room on the plane.

They may be noisy, but their language is a lot sweeter on the ear than the F-bomb-littered slurring speech of the revellers on the train. The older I get, the more I feel the sands of time slipping through my fingers. Destiny is calling me back to Spain – I must not turn my head from her. I cannot. BB x

Home Again

July 22, 2022 / Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

I’m back home in England. It’s a lot noisier than it was in Bayeux, but then, the summer school kids are still here. It’s a Friday night, which means an end-of-week party, curated by the team leaders. That’s what we always used to do. You can tell because the music pumping out of the hall is almost entirely hits from the 2010’s. Twenty-somethings revelling in university nostalgia at a party ostensibly for children. Every once in a while a track comes on that they all seem to know: Freed from Desire, Mme Pavoshko, the Macarena. I’m almost nostalgic for Sur ma route, ever the anthem of my summer school days. Almost.

Blimey, but it’s a long ferry ride from Caen, though. As I caught the overnight ferry on my way out on Monday, I slept through most of the journey, but this time I watched the whole thing from the seats. At first you’re riding parallel to the sloping French coast to the east, and the seabirds follow you out: pairs of scoters, heavyset black-backed gulls, solitary gannets and the odd fulmar. Then it’s nothing but sea in all directions. England, on the horizon, hides behind a wall of cloud and mist, and the sea seems to fade into the sky. There’s always at least one or two shopping containers in the distance, the lettering on their hulls so vast you can read it from miles away. In a trick of the light, an Evergreen tanker seems to float in the void between the sea and the sky.

More than once, I tried to imagine what it must have been like for the soldiers crossing the Channel. The Allies riding into the jaws of death on the beaches of Normandy; and the Normans themselves, some nine hundred years prior, setting out to rewrite the history of a nation. The Conquered liberating the land of the Conqueror. There’s a poetic symmetry to that. Perhaps that’s why Normandy felt so special. It really is a history fanatic’s paradise and I couldn’t recommend the place more highly.

I really enjoyed being back in France. Toulouse was OK and Bordeaux pleasant enough, but there’s a magic in the north I’d never noticed before. It was also a pleasant reminder that I can handle myself just as capably in French as I can in Spanish, and I needed that. I should get to know that beautiful country some more over the years. Normandy was especially beautiful and I may well be back someday.

But for now, my legs could use a rest. And I could do with the sun making a return, since my feet, having been in sandals for four days, look like something you might find in a Bernard Matthew’s packet in the frozen food aisle in Tesco’s. BB x

William the Conqueror’s Invincible Thigh

July 19, 2022 / Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

I woke up on a boat this morning. That happened. Originally I was inclined to arrive later today and save on the expense of booking a cabin on the overnight ferry, but how often do you get to sleep on a boat? I’m glad I did – the long faces on most of the other foot passengers spoke volumes of a long, sleepless night on deck. I just caught the sunrise as I went up on deck, by which point we had almost arrived. No dolphins or whales on this journey – maybe next time!

Attention, mes amis! The ferry serves Caen, but it docks in at Ouistreham, a small village some 17km north of Caen. The shuttle bus into Caen was a little deceptive, since despite saying CAEN in block capitals it only went as far as passport control. The real bus stop for Caen (Ouistreham Port) is a few minutes’ walk into Ouistreham from the port. Easy enough to find but worth knowing. The price is (at the time of writing) 1.80€ for a one-way trip. It’s also completely incompatible with the early ferry, arriving some twenty minutes after it departs, so I guess I’ll have to shell out for a taxi on Friday.

Check-in at my hostel in Bayeux wasn’t open until 4 in the afternoon, so with that early start I had quite a few hours to kill – on what was gearing up to be the hottest day, not just of the year, but in living memory. It was already pushing thirty by 10 o’clock. I took refuge in the shadow of Caen’s Abbaye aux Hommes, where William the Conqueror was laid to rest a little under nine hundred years ago. I thought I’d picked a good spot, and I pretty much had the shade to myself for the best part of an hour until a window cleaner turned up in a monstrous contraption spitting and whirring and grinding and clunking. It took him and his two companions all of five minutes to calibrate the machine into the right spot so he could start cleaning, by which point all the office workers within had long since pulled down the blinds. Why a ladder couldn’t get the job done beats me.

William wasn’t in the Abbaye itself. The 5€ entry fee through the Hotel de Ville revealed a beautiful cloister and an interesting exhibition on the Allied liberation of Caen (after nearly levelling the place first), but no William. A mini-map within showed he was in the adjacent cathedral (go figure), which is free to enter.

But, as it turns out, he wasn’t there either. Well – not all of him. During the French Wars of Religion in the 1560s, the abbey was sacked and William’s bones were exhumed and scattered. Only his thigh bone remains, and that in itself a miracle: less than two hundred years after his tomb was restored, it was sacked again by the unscrupulous revolutionaries. Napoleon’s generation certainly didn’t seem to hold heritage in high regard: you may have heard of Bonaparte’s foiled attempt to blow up the Pyramids, but he also ordered the demolition of various ancient wonders in Spain, including the Alhambra. Even the mighty CID’s tomb was ransacked by Napoleon’s men, and though more of his bones ultimately came home than poor William, some of them traveled a very long way. One apparently ended up in Russia, where it must have been carried as a trophy of war by a soldier with an eye for relics…!

William’s tombstone reads ‘here lies the Invincible William the Conqueror’. Somewhere under that slab is an invincible thigh bone. It’s definitely more invincible than my thighs, which are feeling very vincible in this heat… if that’s even a word.

Outside, it’s sweltering. It felt like walking into a wall of heat. By the time I reached Bayeux around midday I didn’t have the energy to anything beyond finding a shaded spot and collapsing. Fortunately Bayeux was spared the inferno enveloping most of Europe, and a nearby nature reserve afforded both shade, a cooling river and a bird-hide to lay down in relative comfort. I must have passed out several times, I think.

Thank God the worst of it is over. Rain is forecast for tomorrow. It couldn’t be more welcome. BB x

For Whom the Bell Tolls

July 18, 2022July 18, 2022 / Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

My provisional license arrived in the post yesterday. My second, I should say, since after a very thorough summer holiday shakedown of the flat I’m convinced I must have accidentally thrown my first one out with the trash months ago. It’s put a major stopper on the whole learning-to-drive this summer by holding up the theory stage, but now that it’s here I’ve got no excuses. I should get booking.

But first, I’m getting out of here for a few days. I’m done with scrolling, hoping for contact from the outside world and turning off the WiFi for a bit of enforced internet downtime. Summer holidays just drag on and on when you have nothing to do, so I’ve decided to get out there and do something.

So here I am in the ferry terminal in Portsmouth, waiting for the 22.45 to Caen. The overhead telescreens keep alternating between the blue departures board and the vivid blue and yellow banner of Ukraine. The BBC News app remains focused on the heatwave, though the magic number 40 has disappeared from the headlines – “temperature tops 38C and likely to rise”. Five stories down, Tugendhat is eliminated from the running for Tory leader.

It certainly was hot today, but it didn’t feel much like that blisteringly hot summer holiday in Jerez almost twenty years ago. Despite the threat of 40°C heat, the breeze rolling in across the Weald kept the school grounds pleasantly cool. Even so, the signs that this has been an unseasonably hot few days are clear. When I went out to do a little reading in the morning, the summer soundscape was there: the echoing whack of a tennis racket, the ceaseless chatter of the house martins, grasshoppers chirping lazily in the meadow. A few hours later, the whole place was silent. Only a lone crow broke the stillness, and that was just the once.

I thought the train journey would be problematic due to the hysteria in the news, but despite the grovelling apologies over the Southern Rail tannoy, the train was only ten minutes late pulling into Portsmouth – which is remarkable, given how prone to delays they can be outside of a national crisis.

It’s a beautiful train ride, the route from Crawley to Portsmouth – one of those British rail journeys you should tick off the list, like the one from Darlington to Edinburgh. I never get tired of passing Arundel Castle and the fens at its feet. A childhood spent in and out of various salt-marshes around Kent has left me rather fond of their bleak serenity. Herons stalking the water’s edge. Egrets bedecking the bushes like so many plastic bags snagged on the branches.

Suddenly, an intensive greenhouse-farm appears, concealed from the outside by a thick growth of trees. A ravenous human hand clawing the depths of the earth to satisfy a hungry world. And then it’s gone, the train is hurtling forwards and I’m back in the marshes. I could be looking into the past or the future. I remember the fate of El Acebuche, its silent reeds swaying in the wind, and I’m not sure I want to.

The French family in the seats behind me must be headed for the ferry port, too. At least, I guess they are – I’ve caught the word “bateau” often enough. The children swap in and out of French and English without much of an accent overlay in either. The father speaks only on French, until he stops the ticket inspector to ask if she can turn off the air conditioning. “Don’t you think it’s rather nice, as it’s so hot out there?” – “For five minutes is nice, but it’s freezing.” – “If I were you I’d enjoy it.” At the next stop, the father gets out to soak up the sun. His daughter only just coaxes him back on as the doors close. Before he returns to his seat, he steps into the next carriage, remarks that it’s warmer, and moves. Within minutes the rest of his children have followed suit. It seems petty, but they have a point – the air con was turned up so high I had goose-flesh for half the journey.

I haven’t been to Portsmouth before. The last time I caught a ferry in this neck of the woods was from Southampton, but that was many years ago and we didn’t stop. I had four hours to kill and not a lot to do, so I picked a spot in Victoria Park and watched the world go by. The bells of St John’s sounded for seven. They sounded strangely mournful, but though I hummed the melody back a couple of times, I couldn’t work out why. Two handsome women wander by, their accent West African and intensely musical. Three kids hurtle past, one on a scooter, two on skateboards. One wears a red-and-black chequered shirt tied around his waist (did everybody own one of those shirts at some point?). A family of cockatiels screeched from an aviary in the centre of the park, stolen away from their home far beyond the sea to entertain the fancy of the British public. An ancient Chinese bell stands nearby and seems to serve a similar function, pilfered – it says so in almost as many words on the plinth – during a campaign in Taku. A cryptically-worded message daubed above reads “Perpetual Felicity Achieved” in austere capitals. A breeze blows and the bell moves a little, but it makes no noise. Some cage birds stop singing after a while, too.

As the sun sets, I head to the port. The heat and the hysteria have driven everyone indoors. The high street is virtually empty. Just a couple of kids with drinks they’re nowhere near old enough to drink and a level of delirium to match, and a weatherbeaten gentleman sleeping in the shadow entrance to an Ann Summers store. A grey mannequin in turquoise lingerie poses suggestively through the window at him, blowing a kiss. He wipes his nose, shakes his head violently and turns the page in the book he’s reading.

There’s plenty of folk driving here and there, but nobody on foot. For several minutes I feel like the only human in the city. A couple of Deliveroo me go by on their bikes. A bearded man in a red-and-black chequered shirt worn over his t-shirt, bent over almost double. I pass an outpost of the Redeemed Christian Church of God in a backstreet, and later, the house where Charles Dickens was born. Everything is shut. The high rasp of a motorbike going by, the evening heat and the strangeness of a new place… It almost feels like I’m abroad already.

But no. I’m still here in the terminal. Boarding starts in ten minutes, so I suppose I’d better close there. A demain, mes amis. France is calling! BB x

A Semitone Out of Line

January 1, 2022January 1, 2022 / Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

How did your 2022 start? Mine began with a miracle. Not a major one – at least, nothing that brought about anything new in my life. Just the restoration of my hearing.

Since the first day of the Christmas holidays, I’ve been plagued by the after effects of a bad head cold that went to my left ear and decided to wreak havoc there. My first week off was spent largely deaf on one side with a tinnitus so fierce it kept me up at night. It’s not often that an illness gets me down – I’m lucky enough to have a rather robust constitution that withstands most things, bar the seasonal pollen allergies that come around every summer. Personally, I thought I’d done pretty well to make it to the end of term without testing positive for COVID once, despite working in a school where children come and go every week. Perhaps this was the man upstairs showing his fickle hand, where fickleness is another word for fairness.

The tinnitus wasn’t so bad, after I got used to it. But it was what happened once the antibiotics had done their job that was the killer. For the best part of two weeks, everything sounded wrong. It took me a couple of days to realise what it was: the ear infection I had been through had left me with a case of diplacusis dysharmonica, a condition that warps the sounds that you perceive. In my case, while my right ear operated normally, my left ear perceived all sounds a semitone higher. For the musicians out there, I’ll let the ramifications of that sink for in a moment.

In most cases, this is a minor inconvenience and can be ignored a great deal more easily than any tinnitus. That is, unless you have perfect pitch.

It’s hard to talk about the uncanny ability to pluck exact notes and tunes out of the air without prompt without coming across as boasting at worst, or false modesty at best, so I won’t labour the point. What I will say is that, for somebody who notices the instant a piece of music is played in a key in which it was not originally played – even if the pitch has been shifted by a hair – hearing the world in two tones at once for a fortnight was nothing short of maddening. A quick browse of the internet will tell you that diplacusis dysharmonica seems to be especially painful for musicians.

What does it sound like? Try to imagine one of those cassettes you might have had when you were younger, after you rewound them once too often, or somebody (possibly a child) had played around with the spools. The sound eventually warped, keys were bent out of place and voices got the Alvin and the Chipmunks treatment. Now imagine that weird, unnatural effect playing alongside a perfectly functional version of the same audio. A long-winded analogy, but the first one that came to mind – chiefly because of the sheer number of cassettes I must have destroyed as a child before the era of Spotify and the repeat button.

Earphones and headphones were out, as they just exacerbated the problem; higher frequencies seemed to be the biggest triggers. I got into a habit of humming to myself in the morning, just to check, and each time I heard two notes come back to me instead of one. I’d give myself a pat on the back for being one of the few humans capable of singing a chord if I knew it wasn’t a) all in my head and b) an exceedingly ill-chosen chord consisting of two notes barely a semitone apart.

Like many of us, I imagine, I woke up this morning apprehensive about the new year ahead. 2021 was a rough year with just a few golden moments that made it one to remember: spending the summer with a dear friend in Edinburgh and a week in October with my beloved family in La Mancha rank right at the top. But with the sun in the morning comes hope, and hope is what I come back to when the world is dark.

By midday today, the distortion in my left ear had dimmed so much that it was hardly noticeable. By tomorrow, God willing, it may be gone altogether. I can’t begin to describe the feeling of putting a pair of headphones on and hearing music as it should be again, after two weeks of dissonance without resolution. I’ve had album after album of sevillanas by Raya Real on repeat ever since. There’s nothing quite like a sevillana to express reckless joy, and that’s exactly what I’m feeling right now. To quote Sweeney Todd: my arm is complete again.

It’s a shame it had to last from the first day of the holidays right up until the last, but I’m not complaining. I can hear the world again, as it should be. That’s more than enough for me.

BB x

NB. It’s been a while since I flexed my writing muscles. This year, I’m going to blow the dust off the blog and get back into a reasonably regular writing habit again. It’s been too long. Until then!

Winter in Madrid

January 11, 2016January 11, 2016 / Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

I’m spent. Completely and utterly spent, in heart and body and mind. Ready to drop to my knees and sleep for a thousand years like some twenty-first century Rip van Winkle. I’m back in Spain, I’m back home, and I’m back in bed, and if it weren’t for the sake of this blog, I’d be fast asleep by now. But that can wait.

I’ve dropped enough hints over the last few months for you to guess what I’ve been up to. I’m back from three days in Madrid with my dear friend Ali, who has stuck with me through thick and thin over the last few months and been a most valiant and enduring friend, putting up with more of my less-than-perfect Spanish than she deserves. As a way of saying thank you, and as a birthday present, I took her to the capital (a long-term dream of hers) to see El Rey León, or The Lion King (a long-term dream of mine). And since Madrid’s a long way from both of us, we decided to make a weekend of it.

First things first, The Lion King. Oh. My. God. Words fail me. I’m normally fairly speechless when I leave a theatre or cinema, but Friday night’s performance had me tongue-tied for a record half an hour. It being almost entirely in Spanish – but for the Zulu and Xhosa lyrics – had absolutely no effect on the impact whatsoever. Shadowland and He Lives in You had me welling up like a new father and it’s nothing short of a miracle that I didn’t lose all control and burst into tears completely. There’s even a few fitting modifications to the Spanish version that make it – dare I say it – even better than the original in places. Timon in especial, and he’s not normally one of my favourites, was pure gold in Spanish, and a lot of the puns translate brilliantly. I know, I know, I’m late to the party as ever, but I’ll recklessly advertise it to you as its been advertised to me. You’ll simply have to see it for yourself if you haven’t already. It’s a once in a lifetime experience, and with seats on the first row of the platform, it could hardly have been better.

There’s so much to see and do in Madrid – too much for a single day’s sightseeing – but we made good of the following day, taking in the Palacio Real, the Egyptian Temple of Dagón, the gorgeous Parque del Retiro with its street musicians and its Crystal Palace and, last of all, the Prado, home to some of my all-time favourite works of art, like Velazquez’s study of the Conde-Duque de Olivares and Goya’s Maja Vestida and Maja Desnuda, as well as the über-famous Las Meninas. If photos were allowed in the Prado, I’d have gone berserk. Naturally, they’re not. So you’ll have to look them up. We were herded out with the rest by the guards before we had the chance to find the equally famous Dos de Mayo, which is a shame, but that’s what you get for being thrifty and waiting until the 6pm free entry, giving you, and everyone else who’s in on the secret – which seems to be most of Madrid – just under two hours to appreciate it all. Fear not, Goya. I’ll be back.

This weekend has also done one system a world of good, and that’s the thrifty-gifty BlaBlaCar operation that so screwed me over in December (or maybe it was me that screwed up…?). Getting to and from Madrid from our respective backwater neck-o’-the-woods could hardly have been easier, faster and more enjoyable. This year I will try to use it much more often, if not all the time. It requires a little bravery and certainly more social skills than simply hopping on a bus, of course, but I do believe I’m getting there. Consider me, then, a willing convert. And if you’re reading this, Mr Oulad Berhil taxi driver, you could learn a lot from BlaBlaCar. It’s all about the conversation, at the end of the day, and these can be worth their weight in gold, though it’s mere pennies you’re paying. Truly.

Post script. Madrid is a capital city. By all rights, it should have scared the living day lights out of me. But with Ali by my side, it didn’t occur to me even for a second. I’d even go so far as to say that it was one of the best adventures yet. A lot of auxiliares living and working here use Spain as a launch-pad to other European destinations, but I maintain that there’s enough to do here to last you not just a year, but a lifetime. Oh Spain, how cruelly you play with my heart…

Well, I guess it’s finally time to pack up the festivities, dust off the schoolbooks and get back to work. I’m none too keen to do so, but at the same time I really need to. The wind is howling outside and winter, it seems, has finally arrived. And long has it been in coming. BB x

No Going Back

September 20, 2015September 20, 2015 / Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Saying goodbye is never an easy thing to do. I’m certainly not particularly good at it. In fact, there are quite a few goodbyes I’d like the chance to go over again, given the opportunity. You know the kind: the ones where it was all too fleeting, or maybe you didn’t quite say everything you wanted to say, or maybe the real goodbye never came around and you were left with a last meeting that wasn’t really a send-off at all. Most likely you’ve encountered that oh-so-very British awkward goodbye at least once in your lifetime: the one where you say goodbye to somebody, only to bump into them a few minutes later. Don’t you find that situation crops up a lot? It certainly does in Durham, anyway…

For a chatty gossip like me (you’ll just have to imagine the deep sarcasm there), I don’t suppose there’s much point in an elaborate farewell. It’s only really an issue if you’re going to be out of contact for an extended period of time, like stepping off the plane into the abyss and severing all connections with the outside world. Which is essentially what I do every time I step off the train at Three Bridges. I have a phone, true, but I rarely use it. I think I sent a grand total of three texts over the last three months, and all three of them last Sunday. Radio silence on my part doesn’t necessarily mean I’m traveling – I’m probably a lot more talkative when I’m on the road – but it doesn’t mean I’m inactive, either. I simply enjoy going for long periods of radio silence. Anything that needs saying can surely be said best face-to-face, and anything that’s worth saying is always worth waiting for. That makes me quite a distant person, I guess – and not the easiest to track down. For somebody who spent almost all of two years on teenage texting tenterhooks, it’s a policy I’ve guarded jealously for some time now. So in that sense, setting off on another long adventure isn’t really all that different from any other end of term break, as far as contact is concerned.

I’m going off topic. I suppose I’d better come out with it. I’m heading off to Spain in two days’ time – less – to spend nine months working in a secondary school… and I’m not coming back in between.

The idea first came to me when I had a look at the Spanish school calendar for the coming year. That projected end of term date on the twenty-second of December shocked me at first, despite having been schooled in Spain at Christmastime before. It’s all about the reyes magos out there, and that’s not until January. I must have got it into my head early on, but it wasn’t until saying farewell (successfully, mind!) to Andrew at Gatwick Airport that it hit me: I want to be out there for the long haul. Taking a year abroad isn’t just about honing your language skills to fluency, it’s about growing up – and Lord knows I’ve still so much more of that to do. What better way than to strike out on your own for an entire year? Because that’s what it’s set to be, with my second Arabic stint in Morocco striking up almost as soon as I’m done in Extremadura at the end of May, meaning I won’t see the green hills of England again until August 2016, at the very earliest. That doesn’t trouble me as much as it should.

I’m going to miss autumn in England. No, I’m really, really, really going to miss it

The last few days have been wonderful for a last taste of England. I consider myself extremely lucky to live in one of the most charming spots in West Sussex, overlooking a dream-sequence of rolling hills as far as the eye can see, right up to the point when they tumble into the sea to the south. Autumn’s in the air, the forest is full of mushrooms and the buzzards that nest deep in the woods are cartwheeling noisily through the skies as usual. Morpurgo described them ‘mewing’ in one of his books and I can’t think of a better way of putting it. This is England, and I’m going to miss it. But there’s something in the air, telling me it’s time I should be moving on. Maybe that’s autumn. The signs are everywhere. The leaves on the oak trees are going a gorgeous golden colour. Out on the school rugby pitches the odd wheatear sits taking a breather, whilst flycatchers and warblers hurry on through the hedgerows snatching a quick meal on their way home. But most telling of all are the great flocks of swallows and the martins streaming on southwards overhead, and in a couple of days I’ll be following them. Maybe I’ll even see some of the same individuals swooping by from Villafranca. Who knows?

Ten points if you can see the buzzard in this one

The hardest thing for me to leave behind – besides the monstrous tapestry, which is never going to be finished anytime soon – will be the growing mountain of books in my bedroom.

A year and a half, five metres in and still slaving away

A year and a half and still slaving away…

It’s pretty daft, but for an aspiring writer, I’m late into the fold as regards actually reading. I got it into my head once that if I never read any books that contained ideas similar to my own, I couldn’t get done for plagiarism, because I’d never have noticed the similarity. How very typically overcomplicated of me. The end result is that I haven’t read a decent book – besides Pavilions – in nigh on ten years. At least, one that hasn’t been prescribed by my course. Now I’m motoring through them at lightning speed, assisted by all the iBooks freebies, an immense library at home (courtesy of my equally bookish mother) that I never truly appreciated, and an all-too brief visit to a real bookshop over the weekend.

So many books, so little time…

I say real to distinguish it from your average WHSmith or Waterstones. Seriously, this place had everything. All the historical fiction you could shake a stick at. The entire Hornblower saga. Flashman in abundance. Sharpe, Iggulden and even the master of the art herself, M.M. Kaye. All beautifully spined, deliciously musty and lovingly second-hand. A new gadget may be a good thing, but there’s nothing better than an old book. Mum found a particularly beautiful pair of illustrated Arabic dictionaries – formerly the property of a military attaché, as stamped. Oh, I could have died and gone to heaven. I was in kid-at-Christmas mode. If I’d had this newfound book obsession just two years earlier, I might have given languages the boot and applied for an English degree. The only thing holding me back at the time was a general reading apathy…

Today’s been the downer of the month for no other reason than that every so often I have a lonely spell where it takes a lot to lift me up. Fortunately I’m in the best place for it: start of term or not, the grounds of Worth Abbey are no less than the finest place I’ve ever encountered for soul-healing. Alright, so the stone-pine copse along the Raya Real with its attendant black kites just comes up trumps, but that’s not on my doorstep every morning. Not yet, anyway. Besides, when the loneliness birds come flying in, the open world is always there. Nature’s an unpredictable lady at the best of times, but she’s never let me down. I’ve said that before, and I’ll say it as often as it takes to drive this funk of mine away. Everything will look better in the light of a new morning. It always does.

Waldeinsamkeit – the feeling of being alone in the woods!

These are curious things to dwell on when home will be so very far away for the next eleven months. But home is where the heart is, and mine has been in Spain for as long as I can remember, and that’s got to count for something. Maybe she’s out there, and maybe she’s not. That’s not for me to decide. If fate decides to cut me a break and give me a good turn, I’m ready to run with it. But one thing’s certain: I will leave Spain fluent. If I can leave the country at the end of the year as bilingual as the grandfather I never knew, I’ll have accomplished a dream two generations in the making. Being a quarter Spanish will mean so much more.

I will be fluent. And that’s a promise. BB x

The World’s Most Beautiful Women

September 5, 2015September 6, 2015 / Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Why am I doing this?

No, seriously. Why am I doing this? This isn’t Amman. This isn’t even vaguely Arabic. We’re halfway to Kiev on a bus that isn’t the Skybus that Google and Tripadvisor recommended. Come to think of it, I didn’t even ask the driver where we’re going. It might not even be Kiev. I’m going by the size of the city and the great big river we crossed earlier and assuming it is. Other than that, I really don’t know. I can’t read the alphabet. Any and all Russian I learned in those four after-school sessions has jumped clean out of my mind, except that the letter P becomes R and K, T and A stay the same. Ten points for effort for this worn-out linguist! I mean, there’s no escaping it this time: this is sheer lunacy, even by my standards.

‘We could be going anywhere right now,’ says Andrew. ‘We could literally be going anywhere.’

Well, this really isn’t Arabia anymore…

We really could. It all looks bleak and Soviet; pine forests, grey skies and grim skyscrapers with peeling walls. Even the hooded crows look seedy. But I do have £33 worth of Ukrainian hryvna in my wallet (or at least, I think I do) and I plan for us to be back at the airport for six o’clock at the latest. So there is some semblance of a plan beneath the anarchy. Blimey, but what I wouldn’t do to have fellow linguists and Russian speakers Shahnaz and Rosie here with me now, if just to have a vague idea of what’s going on.

Nope, I don’t understand any of this

If that whim decision to go for the twelve-hour layover bothered me slightly at four o’clock this morning, it was practically crucifying me by nine, when we’d touched down in Borispol Airport and navigated customs. Andrew managed a good couple of hours’ sleep on the journey from Amman; I did not, and it’s really beginning to kick in now, as I’m no longer constantly on the move. But fatigue is the smallest of barriers to the determined adventurer!

…once again I find myself picking up the mantle some two hours later. Two sentences later I woke up with the iPad slipping off my legs onto the floor of the bus. So I take that back. Apparently fatigue has other ideas.

I digress. After a minor financial confusion over the exchange rate of the Ukranian hryvna, Andrew and I made it to Kiev (it really was Kiev in the end) with six hours to kill. Cue at least half an hour of ‘wow’, ‘I can’t believe we’re doing this’ and ‘this is absolutely bonkers’ as Andrew patiently bears my childish enthusiasm. We took a wander into the old part in search of the Bessarabsky Market to grab a bite to eat. Every single stall inside, without exception, was manned by what can only be described as the stereotypical babuschka. And no, try as they might, Andrew and I didn’t understand a word of what they were saying. But an idea struck me at one of the aisles and I procured a tin of caviar from one of the stallholders who was anxious for us to try a spoonful of all of her wares, from sweet to tongue-zappingly salty, from lumpfish to Beluga sturgeon. And if you think I’m exaggerating, I point you towards the sequin-scaled monstrosity lying headless on a mound of ice near the market door, barbels removed. It hardly needs saying, but this is a world away from Amman. Period.

Concrete block for make unification of great Russian Power and Ukraine

The miracle of Kiev is that there is so much to see in so small an area. Like I said, a world away from Amman. In just under four hours we had covered almost everything there is to see. Beginning with St. Volodymyr’s Cathedral, an elaborate Orthodox affair in gold leaf and black-robed majesty, we set off an a tour of the old city. There’s something really special about Orthodox churches. At first glance it all looks a bit showy: giant crosses, bold block colours, gold used just about wherever there’s breathing space, not to mention all the icons. But it’s a great deal more complicated than that. It was Andrew who pointed it out to me. The congregation, outnumbering the sightseers by about nine to one, were mostly women, in varying states of dress, but the one thing they all had in common was the wearing of a headscarf. A kind of step-down for us from Jordan, perhaps.

‘Surely it doesn’t work like that,’ says Andrew, as a scarfed young woman in high heels leaves the cathedral after making the sign of the cross twice across her chest and bowing out, a lurid pink thong showing above the cut of her miniskirt. Apparently, it does. You know what they say about book covers…

Overloading on the blue, much…

One of the subjects that came up in conversation with Fahed and Massoud yesterday was the subject of Ukrainian women, whom Fahed believed, as ‘proved by science’, to be the most beautiful women in the world. I set out to test that theory today, both to conduct some kind of fair test in light of such a sweeping statement (especially when any suggestions of Spain and Colombia had been overruled just minutes before), and more so to justify this ridiculous little side-quest into Kiev at the end of our labours.

Or you could just cut out the middle man…

I’m going to surprise myself, but Fahed’s got a point. Ukrainian women are pretty stunning. They must be, or we wouldn’t have run into not one, not two, but a total of seven weddings in the course of our wanderings. There’s also a heck of a lot of them; more than the men, anyway, at least from my observations. A bit like Elvet Riverside, come to think of it. But seriously, those weddings we walked in on (there was hardly any avoiding them, they were all over the place…) Flowing white dresses everywhere on a backdrop of marble steps, spiralling turrets and Orthodox spires. My heart was on a serious flutter. Perhaps it’s the healthy skin tones, the raven hair, or the eyes that shelter a mixture of light and dark? Or even the fabulous dress sense? No, surely it’s the curled smiles most of them are wearing… (I wish Nizzar Qabbani could help me out here, I’m teetering on the edge of the villainy of objectivity)

Somebody stop me before I make a rash move!

Before I go too far, I’ll throw you the anecdote that tipped me over the scale of utter disbelief of Fahed’s claim to conceding a little ground to the guy. In the grounds of the St. Sophia Cathedral, Kiev’s jaw-droppingly beautiful UNESCO cathedral complex, Andrew and I stumbled upon an outdoor recital by a young Ukrainian student playing quite possibly the largest lute I have ever seen. I believe, if memory serves, that it is called a bandura? We still had a good three hours to kill so we stopped to listen, and am I glad we did! No sooner had she put her fingers to the strings than the girl began to sing, and in all my years as the son of two music teachers I have rarely heard a voice so magical. Like a siren, but sadder and more graceful. I was totally drawn in – so much so that it took me some time to realise that the bandurist and I had been staring at each other unflinchingly for almost a minute before I snapped awake, and she’d been singing all the way through.

‘You should have got her number or something,’ said Andrew, as we moved on to the Great Gates of Kiev twenty minutes later. ‘You haven’t got forever. Get them before they’re all gone, that’s what my godmother told me.’

I’m not running out of time yet – at least, I hope I’m not. Maybe I should have done or said something. As ever, I was lost in the music, I guess. Too lost to appreciate that we kept looking back at each other after her set was over. My obliviousness reigns supreme. At the very least I have a good three minutes of her set on video, so I can listen to that siren song again if ever the mood requires. And by that I mean, of course, sleep. Andrew fell asleep during her recital. If I hadn’t been so entranced, I guess I might have done so too.

It’s ok, as long as I have cats I’ll be just fine

Water under the bridge, hey? But what an adventure, and what a way to end my time in Jordan! It’s been a pleasure to live and work alongside you, Andrew, and I wish you all the best in France (knowing that you’ll be back in the comfort of your own home by the time you read this, and that Babette won’t have to check on how you’re getting on in this long-winded fashion anymore!) As for the rest of you, dear readers, I shall probably take a few days’ hiatus to catch up on sleep, as I’m dangerously behind, and to clear my head. Just a few minutes in one of Kiev’s parks was enough to recharge my batteries right the way up – green, green, GREEN, oh my God, the trees, the leaves, the grass and all of the GREEN – but I intend to set up stores for the winter, as it were. Villafranca’s not lacking in countryside, but I’ve learnt my lesson, and I’m not setting off into the open world without a well-supplied heart next time.

There’s still another hour to go until boarding begins for the flight back to London. Farewell, До свидания and I’ll catch you all later. Yours truly needs a well-deserved break from all this madness. Until the next time! BB x

Breathless in Paradise

August 31, 2015August 31, 2015 / Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Snorkeling is just about the best idea anybody ever had. The world underwater is singularly enchanting, whether you’re drifting over white sands, coal stacks or the open blue. If it weren’t for my breathing issues, and a nasty little demon called fire coral, I’d rank it right up at the top of my favourite things in life.

With school out for the end of summer – just like last year, I’ve been working all the way through it to the point where it feels like it never came at all – we’ve nothing but time on our hands until our Saturday morning flight. At Eloise’s suggestion, Andrew and I find ourselves back in Aqaba, two weeks after we popped by for a visit on our way back from Wadi Rum. By some curious stroke of luck, our hotel, the Bedouin Garden Village, happened to be the very same place we’d got our snorkeling gear from last time, so the manager, a carefree local who makes his living lounging about on the beach, smoking shisha and leading diving groups out into the reefs, already knew us and was pleased to see us again. It’s still intolerably hot – the midday sun peaks at a regular 42 degrees – but it’s cooler than it was, if you ask the locals.

The last time I wrote about snorkeling, I gave myself a paragraph. Looking back, that’s more than a little silly. It’s criminal. So this time I’ll put you inside my head, so you can see what I see:

I squeeze my feet into two giant flippers and waddle down to the water like a particularly incapable penguin, adjusting and readjusting my snorkel; there’ll be none of last time’s mistakes, or I’ll just have o March straight back to the hotel and ask – God forbid – for a demonstration. Walking forwards in the water isn’t easy in footwear more than three times the size of your feet, so I turn and start walking backwards, for all the good it will do. And what do you know? It’s a little easier. There’s a neat little life hack for you. Alternatively, you could just belly out and swim. And so I do.

For the first few metres it’s a long stretch of silver sand, dotted here and there with a buried cola bottle or lens cap. The first few fish are tiddlers, with the exception of a familiar school of silvery mullet that gawp their way along the shore. Up ahead, the reef looms. One more kick of the flippers and we’re over.

There’s only a small space between the reef and the surface, hardly enough for a man to swim over untouched, but temptation is a dangerous lady, and I can’t stop myself. Up on the reef it’s a sudden explosion of colour, and the coral has very little to do with that. It’s the fish that light up the place. There are canary yellow butterflyfish in twos and threes, flanked by dusky Arabian angelfish and solitary sergeant majors; the mottled form of a greasy grouper hugging the rocks while a triggerfish, resplendent in robes of blue and green, watches from the sand; dragonfish staring up in a stargazing torpor from the seabed whilst speckled white gobies dig their nests all about; clownfish weaving in and out of the multicoloured anemones they crave. Stranger denizens still, like the angular boxfish, the pipefish-through-photoshop cornetfish and the bizarre unicornfish, with what can only be described as a horn protruding an inch and more between its eyes, haunt the nooks of the reef, like the shady underbelly of this grand fashion show.

I’d like to say those are the thoughts going through my head right now, but it’s actually more of a constant stream of ‘ohh’, ‘wow’ and ‘ohmyGodthisissobeautiful’. Poetic to the last. And this time, my mask isn’t leaking and my snorkel is watertight, and I can enjoy this whole spectacle without hyperventilating. Further out, there’s a shipwreck that’s supposedly crawling with moray eels, and even a sunken tank. I’d love to swim out to see them for myself, but I don’t put much trust by the strength of my reserves. I may be a mean (if explosive) sprinter, but I’m not the strongest of swimmers, having been much too obstinate to ever learn to breathe properly. I’ll leave that adventure to Andrew and Mac. They already have a taste for exploring creepy wrecks from the abandoned hospital off Rainbow Street. I might try again this afternoon, but right now I’d rather continue to explore the reef.

Oh bummer, some seawater got into my snorkel. I have to surface to spit it out, but in the action a great wave pushes me under and I get an eyeful of Red Sea salt. By the time I’ve got my mask back on, it’s steamed up and I have to take it off again to clear it up. The vicious waves are making this little task impossible. I make a beeline for the buoy line that marks the edge of the reef and try holding on to that, but of course, it goes under the water, and it’s prickly to the touch from all the little reef creatures growing on it. So I make for a stack of brain coral and haul myself as gently as I can to sit on it and readjust my mask in peace. The wind’s really picking up; you can see the sand blowing across the beach back on the shore. The waves are equally relentless, but I’m holding my own here. I can see Andrew and Mac a fair way out. They’ve gone beyond the buoy that marks where the sunken tank is supposed to be, but they’ve drifted quite a way off course. If we’re not careful we’ll have a fair walk on our hands when we get back to the beach – or a harder swim, flippers or no.

Fwoosh! The giant wave comes out of nowhere and throws me back against the coral. No, not the coral, against the rock, and a stack of fire coral, which isn’t really coral at all, but a jellyfish-like creature with a nasty sting. I don’t have much time to think about that, because I’m back underwater without my mask. Pulling myself angrily back onto the brain coral and securing my mask back onto my head, I examine my arm. There’s an ugly red weal running up the length of it, scored with white. It could just as easily be leprosy. Not only that, there’s also a similarly nasty scar on my lower back and cut across my right hand from where I grabbed the reef as the wave took me under. Oh yeah, and the covered in salt water, too. Time, I think, to beat a hasty retreat.

The beach is no friend of mine today. Two seconds on my front in the sand and there’s a stinging sensation all along my right-hand side. It’s not even my reef scars; it’s the sand, whipped up by the wind to scour my skin. Talk about a full-body workout! We’re going to have to retreat further than just the shore. I’m heading back to the pool. I don’t think I’ve ever been more grateful for such a thing.

All the same, I don’t regret it for a second, even though the fire coral rash along my arm continues to pester me, some three days later. For another hour with the colorful denizens of the Red Sea, I’d do it all again. Tell me, though; is diving supposed to be such an ordeal every time, or is Butterfingers over here just as naive as ever? BB x