nature

The Lost City

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Cerro del Sol, Granada. 12.56pm.

They call it the Cerro del Sol, but the sun is hidden behind a white haze of cloud. It covers the snowy peaks of the Sierra Nevada so indistinctly that it’s hard to see where the snow stops and the clouds begin.

It’s pretty quiet up here. There’s a general soar of traffic on the road up to the skiing station of Pradollano in the Genil valley below, but beyond that – and the occasional rev and growl of some larger engine – it’s just me, the butterflies and the birdsong up here. Mostly fritillaries, coppers and marbled whites, though I did see a beautiful swallowtail float by a moment ago, before I put my cardigan over my head to shield my eyes from the white glare of the sun. It shines brighter than the garden Star-of-Bethlehem at my feet. Such a beautiful flower – I’m not sure why I never noticed them before.

I’ve come up here to write – and to heal. I didn’t sleep well last night. Some wounds, it seems, take a long time to mend. So I’m up in the quiet of the dehesa, in the hills east of Granada, soaking in the best palliative that nature can offer. Herself.

The occasional buzz of a fly. The twitter of a pair of pallid swifts racing by. The summery buzz of a grasshopper and the chuk-chuk-chukar of a partridge somewhere in the scrub far below.

A couple of Sardinian warblers are engaged in a territorial dispute in the broom bushes below, rattling off their warnings like Gatling guns. And always and everywhere, I can hear the song of blackbirds – an ever-present symbol of Granada.

This is the Dehesa del Generalife. I suspect the Moorish sultan of old must have come hunting here with his retinue in the days of al-Andalus, as these hills are teeming with small game: wood pigeons, partridge and rabbits (I didn’t see the latter, but this is absolutely their kind of terrain). What a sight that must have been: the Moorish sultan and his hawks, looking up at the snowy peaks of the Sierra Nevada and across the Vega of Granada.

It’s far too easy to see why this place bewitched the Romantics and scores of travelers back in the day, before the modern tourist trade sank its teeth into the place. Well, here’s a corner of Granada they haven’t spoiled: quiet, ancient, magical. Sure, it’s an hour’s hike from the Alhambra, but some things are worth the trek.

On my way up here this morning, I paid a visit to the Capilla Real to see the tombs of Fernando and Isabel, the Reyes Católicos. I figured I’d made the voyage to El Escorial to see the other kings and queens of Spain, so I ought to pay my respects to the ones who started it all.

A surly security guard at the door gave me a long, hard look as he waved me in and warned me not to take any photos. I indicated the notebook and pencil in my hands and asked if I could sketch. He didn’t reply. His stoney expression might have been cast in the same marble as the sarcophagus behind him. I guess he didn’t see the joke.

It’s funny how some people get so uppity about tourists taking photos, but nobody ever seems to mind a sketchbook. I’ve stood on street corners for up to an hour sketching and nobody bats an eyelid, but whip your phone out in some places and there’s hell to pay.

I bought a couple books in the gift shop (I needed some reading material and they were relatively cheap, by Spanish standards) and climbed back up the Carretera Empedrada through the Alhambra forest, where I stopped to check in my flight for next week and sort out tomorrow’s bus to El Rocío. An enormous tour group of German pensioners ambled by. There must have been at least sixty of them, perhaps more. They were followed not too far behind by two outings from a Spanish private school – recognisable by the distinctive shade of blue uniform that is so popular with colegios privados out here.

That figure of eight thousand a day I heard yesterday really does seem more believable when you stop for a while and watch the tourist traffic.

A short amount of time in the wilderness was enough, so around midday I dusted myself down, left the swallowtails to their games and headed back the way I came. When I came to the Alhambra, I took the right fork this time, following the Cuesta del Rey Chico down along the Acequía Real. It’s a steep descent (and an even less forgiving ascent) but it follows one of the main water channels right down to the Darro, so you’re accompanied all the way down (or up) by the most beautiful sound of running water. The Alhambra’s watchtowers serve as waymarkers: the Tower of the Captive, the Tower of the Judge, the Tower of the Peaks, and the Tower of Comares, the seat of the Sultan of old. The Sultan and his family may be long gone, but their waterworks are still running as they did then, six hundred years ago.

As I came down the hill, a thought came to me that had come several times now since I arrived in Granada. Who would not defy the world for such a place? Who would not have fought off the very hordes of Hell itself to defend this paradise on Earth? And what greater heartbreak can there be than to be banished forever from a place that was more than just a home, to know in the very depths of your heart that you had lost the keys to Heaven itself?

It’s not hyperbole. I’m merely paraphrasing the laments of the Andalusian poets of old when Granada fell to the Christians in 1492. It puts my own petty broken heart into a much-needed broader context. There was a sense of loss here far greater than anything a single heart can withstand. I have felt the tremors of it before in Sevilla and Córdoba, but nowhere stronger than here, the last bastion of the Muslims in Spain. Such a raw outpouring of emotion leaves a mark. Ghost stories would spring from it in more credulous parts of the world. Here, it is an indistinct melancholy – something in the air that once was, and is lost forever in all but memory.

Writing two hundred years before Granada’s demise, al-Rundi’s lament for the fate of Sevilla captures the grief:

A pretty lady, splendid as sunlight,
Her beauty just like coral and jewels bright,
Dragged off by infidel for rape most vile,
Her heart perplexed, she’s crying all the while.

Abu al Baqa’ Al-Rundi, Ritha al–Andalus

I wonder how the Muslim tourists to the Alhambra feel upon seeing such a place? There do not seem to be as many as I remember.

One week remains. Tomorrow, I make for a place that has always been close to my heart: my Granada, my Jannah, my paradise on Earth. It looks like it will be a rainy weekend. But nothing could put a damper on the thought that I will see that place again, after all this time: El Rocío. BB x

Black Sand and Starlight

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Caserío los Partidos, Tenerife. 8.19am.

Well, if that wasn’t the best sleep I’ve had in a week, I don’t know what a good sleep is. The four-hundred-year old stone walls of my room might not look like the cosiest setup, but it couldn’t be more enchanting: a log-burning stove in the corner, a skylight above the bed so you can see the stars from the comfort of your bed, and a warm shower… I’d have settled for less, especially after several hours’ hiking around the ash flow of Chinyero, but it was nothing short of heaven on my return.

Chinyero is the reason I’m here. This is the site of the last eruption in 1909, Chinyero being one of the vents of Teide, which looms over everything to the west. This is also Teide’s best side: from here, it is perfectly conical, like a child’s drawing of a volcano, and at this time of year you can still see the last traces of snow and ice in the deep gulleys running down its peak. Sure, the Roque Cinchado may have been a worthy candidate for one of the Top Ten sights of this trip, but what I really wanted to see here in Tenerife was the black sand forest: a natural marvel growing out of the destruction wrought by Teide over a hundred years ago. I was not to be disappointed.

It’s a two and a half hour circular hike from Caserío up into the ash fields, most of it very well signposted and all over well-trodden paths, though the hardened basalt and steep climbs make for slow going at times. I saw three or four cyclists and one other hiker far off, but compared to Teide National Park, it’s a much more personal experience of the mountain on this side of the island. Most of the hike takes place in the shade of the Corona Forestal, the crown of pine trees that ring the mountain (but especially its fertile north face). Some of the trees look like they still bear the scars and scorch marks of the fires that raged through here when Chinyero erupted, long ago.

Did you ever see Fantasia 2000 as a kid? This place reminds me of the Firebird sequence, which plays Stravinsky’s masterpiece as the backdrop to the eruption and rebirth of a volcano. It also gives off major Primeval and Walking with Dinosaurs vibes, which is true for at least one of those TV shows, as the final episode of the first season of Primeval was filmed on the almost identical ash fields of Gran Canaria. All three creations draw on an ancient force in an even older setting, and the black sands of Chinyero really do feel like a walk back in time – if not on the surface of another planet.

There are very few mammals native to Tenerife, as is often the case with island fauna, which usually specialises in creatures with fins or wings (or those that had wings, once upon a time). I saw a couple of rabbits during my hike, which accounts for the presence of buzzards in these forests, but besides that, the ash fields seem almost deserted, unless you listen closely. The island’s canaries were singing away in the treetops, along with a few goldcrests, treecreepers, chiffchaffs and the local Canarian race of great tits. I counted at least three woodpeckers drumming at different frequencies on the descent, though I only saw one. Best of all was a brief encounter with a blue chaffinch, a special bird found only on the islands of Tenerife and Gran Canaria and only above the tree line. Tracking it by its call, I tried imitating it to get its attention, and it came to have a look. I got pretty close, but it must have thought me a very strange chaffinch indeed.

Meanwhile, to the north, the island seems to fall away into the sea, disappearing beneath the clouds. We really are very high up here.

The views on the climb back down to Caserío are breathtaking, especially at the end of the day when the sun is beginning to sink into the Atlantic to the west. Stand at just the right spot and you can see the neighbouring islands of La Gomera and La Palma, flanking the Teno mountains on the westernmost point of Tenerife. I don’t know much about La Palma, but La Gomera harbours an otherworldly rainforest in its centre, the Garajonay National Park, full of gnarled and twisted trees and trailing beards of moss and lichen. If I should return, that would be near the top of my list.

I had a well-earned dinner and a glass of wine back at Caserío, the last of which very nearly knocked me out – perhaps that explains the long sleep. But I did hold on to my senses long enough to properly appreciate the other thing I came all the way out here to see (not just to Chinyero, but the Canaries as a whole): the night sky. The English fixation with security and LED lighting means it’s hard to get an unpolluted view of the stars anywhere in the country (outside of Northumberland, anyway), since we seem to delight in stringing glaring yellow street lamps along our roads like fairy lights, and filling our towns and cities with floodlights.

Out here, however, the lighting is less pervasive and restricted to the larger cities. And up here in the mountains, there’s almost no lighting at all, so the stargazing is spectacular.

I didn’t see any shooting stars this time, but I’d be willing to bet that this is an incredible place to be at the peak of the Perseid meteor shower in the summer. I did count a number of constellations I haven’t properly seen before, blinking dimly behind the belt of Orion: Leo, Cancer, mighty Hercules and the Corona Borealis. And, of course, the full body of Ursa Major, not just the twinkling torso of the Plough.

My SLR would have struggled, but the iPhone did a remarkable job in the twilight. It may not be able to perform a quality zoom to save its life, but it does handle low light incredibly well.

Tomorrow is another day. Since I made it up to Chinyero a day early, I’ll take it easy. If I can, I’ll try to navigate round the south of the island to Santa Cruz for a change of scenery. I can’t say it’s the side of the island with the most appeal to me, being by far the more resort-heavy side, but that might make for something to write about in itself. But first, I have to find a bus to take me out of here – and that might be easier said than done! BB x

Devils of Fire and Dust

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Capsule 19, Atypicap, Puerto de la Cruz. 19.02.

The last post went off on a tangent about guaguas – so much so that I didn’t even get on to talking about the purpose of my voyage: to hike in the caldera of Spain’s tallest mountain and the symbol of Tenerife itself: Teide National Park.

Ignore the ads plastered across bus stations and billboards: Teide, not the widely advertised Loro Parque, is the true ‘must’ of Tenerife. There is so much about Teide that is worthy of a story. It is an active volcano, erupting most recently in 1909. It was sacred to the Guanche people (the native peoples of the Canaries before the Spanish conquest), who saw it as both a holy mountain and the jail of the fire demon Guayota, interred within the mountain by their supreme deity, Achamán.

What did Guayota do to deserve such a fate? He kidnapped Magec, the Guanche sun god, and trapped them inside the mountain, plunging the world into darkness. Despairing for their future, the islanders prayed to Achamán, who fought a fierce battle with Guayota and imprisoned him within the mountain forever.

Teide itself is a mighty thing indeed. Even from the caldera – which, it must be said, is not the mountain’s most beautiful side – it towers above everything else, dwarfing not just the high cliffs and mountains around Tenerife’s rim but the surrounding islands as well. One can only imagine the terror the islanders must have felt when it caused the earth to roar and spewed fire and fury out of its peak.

It was said that Teide’s eruptions were a sign of Guayota’s fury at his imprisonment, and that his children, in the form of demonic dogs known as tibicenas, haunted the mountainside by night.

I didn’t see any hellhounds on my lap of the park, but I did see a dust devil as I set out from El Portillo. I used to see these quite frequently when I lived in Jordan, but outside of desert environments they are quite rare.

Scattered around the caldera floor are a number of unfinished or ruined dwellings built out of the scattered basalt rocks. These present a mystery to the casual hiker: what were they? The ancient dwellings of the Guanches? An initiative by the park authorities? Hunting refuges? In truth, they are none of these things: the caldera was far too hostile an environment for settlement by the Guanches, construction within the national park is tightly restricted, and hunting – naturally outlawed – would net a poor return, as the largest birds within the park are kestrels and the odd buzzard, and the only native mammals are bats.

No – they are actually the remains of a German attempt to build a sanatorium within the caldera in the early 20th century. A lack of funding, the eventual creation of the National park and, of course, two world wars put a bullet in the head of the project and now all that remains are the foundations of these houses, which now provide shelter for the enigmatic blue-bellied lizards that can only be found here on Tenerife.

These creatures are everywhere in the caldera, darting across the path and into the numerous crevices in the boulder-strewn ash field as you pass. There are two other species endemic reptiles within the park – the Tenerife skink and the Tenerife gecko – but the casual observer is much more likely to cross paths with the Tenerife lizard, especially around the Parador car park where they have become quite fearless.

The Canary Islands – curiously, named not for the species of finch that calls the islands home, but for the large population of monk seals (or sea dogs) that once lived here – are home to a large number of endemic reptiles, some of them textbook cases of island gigantism: that is, where a species has fewer natural predators and can thus grow to a size far greater than its mainland relatives. The largest of these, the El Hierro giant lizard, is a relic of precolonial times, when giant lizards were much more common in these islands, as well as much larger: fossils indicate that some could exceed a metre in length, right up until the arrival of the Spanish in the 1490s.

No visit to Teide would be complete without taking in the Roques de García, the roots of an ancient mountain even older than Teide itself. The most well-known of these has to be the Roque Cinchado, also known as ‘el árbol de piedra’ – the stone tree. Standing on the footpath a few paces from the car park provides you with one of the most famous views in all of Spain: the Roque Cinchado with Teide as its backdrop. The old man of the mountain and its son. I had to wait for a family testing out their drone to get a clear shot, but it was worth it.

It’s not the only impressive rock formation in the caldera: there’s a mighty organ-like basalt structure down in the valley floor, and the largest of the Roques de García seems to have become – of all things – a beauty spot. Three Italian men sat at the top of the steps, sporting designer sunglasses and expensive shoes. A Ukrainian girl dressed in pink with her hair tied back in a high ponytail occupied one of the lower peaks for the best part of twenty minutes, turning her head this way and that while her friend took photographs. As a matter of fact, I was the odd one out for not wearing my best: it seems whole busloads of well-dressed teens and students come up here for the ultimate profile picture.

I wonder if they spared a thought for the ancient fire demon trapped with the mountain behind them – or whether they thought to learn about the Guanches, the true Canarians, whose fire was extinguished many hundreds of years ago. They were crushed as a mere prelude to the conquest of the Americas, and I don’t remember their story featuring much in my history classes in Spain. If there are any left, their bloodline had long since mingled with the Spanish to the point where it has all but faded away. Perhaps it is fate that they too, like the fire demon Guayota, now lie buried deep within the mountain.

Tomorrow I strike out west for the peace and quiet of Chinyero. It’s been a long time coming. BB x

When the Whales Came

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

As Escaselas. 12.01pm.

Rain. It started early this morning, while I was still fast asleep, but it’s coming down quite hard now. The bus has just climbed the hill north of As Escaselas and is rolling towards Sardiñeiro, its windscreen wipers working overtime. Lichen-coated hórreos, a symbol of the Galician countryside, stand shoulder to shoulder with new-build white houses with wide garages. That strange mix of ancient and modern is ubiquitous along the pilgrim road: here is a wizened fisherman in blue overalls mending his lobster creels in the shelter of an awning, above which a sign advertises (in English only) “hippie/chill-out/goa fashion”. The lady on the bus behind me talks down the phone in a Galician accent so thick it could be Portuguese, while a couple of free-spirited Germans discuss their next steps. My German is rudimentary at best, but I catch the words “Mallorca”, “Sontag” and “yogi”.

Now and then I recognise a patch of road from that summer two years ago, when Simas and I pushed on together for the Cape, in warmer days when the wind blew west and America still seemed like a land full of hope. Now, the news is full of fury as Trump’s tariffs threaten a global trade war, and the US government tells its citizens to “trust in Trump”. Americans, it should be noted, have been notably absent from the pilgrim trail over the last few days.

Three pilgrims return home on foot in coats that cover their backpacks, and one pilgrim comes back the other way, striking out for the last stage of her journey. The Camino is eternal.

Spooky by Dusty Springfield plays over my earphones as the bus pulls into the former whaling town of Cee. A crude iron sculpture on the seafront is all that remains of that heritage, besides its name, though there are honorary clues all over the place: Restaurante As Balenas, a number of whale-themed hotels, a couple of whale-shaped hobby horses in the play park and even a friendly mural on a wall near the bus station, offering a whimsical nod to that monstrous practice.

Whaling has been outlawed here since 1986. Spain was slow to adopt the ban and Galicia was one of the regions hit hardest, though by that point most of the whales had long since been driven to local extinction. Lately, however, these majestic creatures have been sighted off the coast again, after an absence of nearly forty years, including the greatest of them all, the blue whale – the largest creature ever to grace this planet.

Perhaps they’ve been driven here by the depleting of their feeding grounds further south. Or perhaps – and this is what some scientists believe – it is an ancestral memory that has brought them home, in spite of the knowledge they must have of their kind’s slaughter at the hands of man. Something stronger than fear has called them back, the same compulsion that makes the tiny swallow travel around the half world twice a year. The same compulsion, perhaps, that leads pilgrims of all stripes to seek the end of the world here, as they had done long before the legend of Santiago washed up on these shores over a thousand years ago.

There’s a small bust-up in Muros, where the bus stops for a change of drivers. The two German pilgrims get off for a smoke and return with their rucksacks. The driver tells them they’ll have to leave their bags underneath if they’re headed for Santiago, as the bus will fill up when we reach Noia. One of the two – the one who speaks Spanish – argues the toss, asking if they can keep them at their feet. This annoys the driver, who points out that other passengers will need the seats more than their bags. Keeping my rucksack on me nearly got me out of a nasty scrape when I was backpacking around Morocco, but here in Spain, there’s no need to be quite so defensive. ALSA, Spain’s largest bus company, actually gives you the option to buy up the seat next to you, which seems a bit selfish. Monbus – a smaller corporate creature by far – is a lot more democratic.

There’s an enormous queue for the bus when it reaches Santiago, almost all of them under the age of thirty. It only dawns on me then that the only young people I saw out and about in Fisterra were pilgrims, and few of them under thirty at that. Spain is much like the rest of the world in that regard: its youth abandon the towns and villages for the bright lights of the city in pursuit of opportunities in work or love, returning home only to see friends and family, or once they have a family of their own.

My digs for the night are within a stone’s throw of the cathedral – quite literally. I can hear the bells chime every half hour from my room. I made a flying visit to some of the local bookstores, but wound up returning to my old haunt in Casa del libro in search of a couple of histories on Tartessos, a current fixation of mine. So far, my specialist areas include:

  • Bandit legends and narratives
  • Spain’s founding myths (esp. Pedro del Corral’s Crónica sarracina)
  • El Cid & Frontier Epics
  • Al-Andalus & Spain’s Islamic heritage
  • Extremadura
  • 17th Century Spain (Under Felipe IV)
  • Gypsy culture and narratives
  • Spanish wildlife (esp. concerning Doñana)

Once I’ve consumed these two new acquisitions, hopefully I can add Tartessos to that list!

I did make it to Mass this evening, but that’s worth a separate blog post, I think. So keep your eyes peeled! BB x

The Shell Thief

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Pensión Doña Lubina, Fisterra. 21.20.

First Dates is on TV. I can never find the equivalent in the UK, but in Spain it seems like it’s always on. Tonight’s couples include a pensioner from Sevilla, a rocker in his fifties and a Colombian male model whose dealbreakers in a would-be partner include the term “vergón”. Spanish TV, like Spanish music, certainly doesn’t deal in subtlety.

I woke up around six this morning to the sound of the waves breaking on the shore outside – the same gentle woosh that I can hear as I write.

The sun crested the jagged bluff of Monte Pindo shortly after 8.15, so I slipped down to the beach to catch the light. A couple of dog walkers were out and about and a single pilgrim sat reading in the dunes, but otherwise the long curved bay of Playa Langosteira was empty. The tide had come in during the night, leaving a breadcrumb trail of seashells all along the tidal maximum. A beautiful sight, to be sure.

Or, at least, it should have been. Only, the only shells left on the beach were broken. It looked as though the sea had kept the best ones to itself and spat out the rest. As it turns out, the truth wasn’t far off.

A barefoot pilgrim stood a hundred metres or so ahead of me, turning something over in her hand. Satisfied with whatever it was, she moved further along the beach, stopped, and stooped to pick something up. Clearly, she was looking for seashells. She must have repeated the exercise about eight or nine times before I overtook her. I didn’t turn to see if she had more to find, but I did catch a glimpse of a large collection of seashells in the crook of her arm as I passed.

I’m not really one for calling people out. Anyone who knows me even in passing will know the last thing I ever want to do is to risk upsetting anyone, even when the matter seems ridiculously trivial. It’s a people-pleasing tendency of mine that I’ve never been particularly good at quashing. However, if there’s a line in the sand, it’s when I see someone doing something that threatens the natural world in some way. And this definitely constitutes a transgression in my book.

Before you think me a busybody, I feel I need to point out that this isn’t just high-handedness on my part. The law is on my side here. In 2017, faced with a surge in tourists in coastal areas (still a major problem today), the Spanish government passed the Ley de costas, which – to the official letter of the law – “forbids the extraction of any element of the public littoral domain, such as sand, shells or stones”. This makes it illegal to beach-comb in any part of the Spanish territory, from Galicia and the Costa Brava to the Balearics and the Canary Islands. Period.

If my experience of this country and its people is anything to go by, I’d be surprised if the Spanish police actually enforce this law, but the consequences of falling foul of it can be severe: the fines for collecting seashells range from 500 to 3,000 euros. The Mediterranean island of Sardinia is even stricter: taking large quantities of sand from its famous beaches can lead to a prison sentence.

There’s a very good reason for all of this. It’s easy to say that if we all took five or six shells from the beach on our holidays, soon there’d be nothing left to take. But there’s more to it than that.

Seashells are a fundamental part of the littoral ecosystem. The continual pounding of the waves eventually grinds them into fragments – the same fragments that make up the sand beneath your feet. In a way, your average beach is actually an enormous marine graveyard. Without the shells, there’d be less sand to go around, seriously threatening the thousands of creatures that make their home in the littoral zone and the birds that rely on them as a food source.

Discarded shells serve a second purpose. Nothing goes to waste in the ocean. Besides the obvious hermit crabs, who literally depend upon seashells to survive, an abandoned shell provides a much-needed shelter for smaller creatures like shrimps and fish fry, who use these temporary refuges until they are large enough to avoid some of their former predators, as well as a holdfast for barnacles, limpets and chitons. Larger shells may even harbour an octopus, a creature perfectly adapted to squeezing into the most awkward of spots to escape from predators.

Which they definitely need to do on the regular in these waters, given the Galician obsession with octopus as a delicacy.

Sorry… I got up on my pulpit there. In truth, I was mulling all of this over in my head as I read a signboard by the beach exit which detailed some of the above, while the beachcombing pilgrim stood washing every single shell she’d collected under the outdoor shower. I didn’t want to challenge her, but I couldn’t just let her take all those shells away. She laid them out in three rows along the wall as she washed them. She must have amassed around thirty in all, from scallops to periwinkles and everything in between.

When it looked like she had finished with the ablutions, I got her attention and told her politely to take one if she had to, but to leave the rest behind. She looked confused. I repeated myself in Spanish, but that didn’t seem to work either. She looked like she might have been Thai or Malay, so Spanish wouldn’t have been much use. I tried French. I pointed at the sign and tried to indicate that taking the shells was wrong – not that it would have done much good, as the sign was in Galician and Spanish and faded in places due to the ravages of sun, sand and surf, and thus presumably illegible to the average tourist. Nothing.

I even tried mimicking handcuffs and paying a fine. She just stared at me and held out one of her shells for me to take, presumably thinking I wanted one. I shook my head and said “illegal” a couple of times. She said “OK” and wandered off. I didn’t see where she went, or if she left the shells behind. She didn’t return to the beach, at any rate.

When I was a kid I got walloped for trying to stop a couple of older boys from stealing a frog. They had caught one in a bucket and were taking it away to put in their garden. In a fit of fury I still can’t explain, I snatched the bucket and legged it to the river to release the creature. I was pushed into the water for my insolence and given a couple of kicks for good measure, but I had achieved what I set out to do: the frog got away.

Was it my place to give that girl a ticking off? Probably not. But we have to stand up for the things we believe in. Without principles, we are merely waiting out our time on this earth. Our core beliefs give us grounding, a rock to stand on, which no wind or waves or wickedness can wear away.

I’ve got back onto the pulpit again. I’d better get off before I end up considering a career in the clergy. BB x

At the End of the World

/ Benjamin Barnabas / 1 Comment

Cape Finisterre, 20.11.

Galicia provides. Happiness writes white but the white light is brilliant, like the sands that run along the length of the bay beneath my window. Like the feathers of the gannets and terns that dance above the face of the water. Like the sparkling reflection of the sun as it sinks below the horizon along the 42nd parallel north, disappearing beyond the Atlantic, beyond Chicago, beyond the end of the world.

Madrid feels a world away. I caught the early AVLO train from Chamartín and joined a modest number of passengers on the three hour journey to Spain’s north-westernmost region. The railway line tunnels under the snowy peaks of the Guadarrama before racing across the featureless plains of Zamora and then, slowly, climbing into the wooded hills and craggy moors west of Astorga before rolling through the deep valleys of Galicia proper. Spain is one of those countries that alters radically as you travel through it, and the Madrid-A Coruña train is a very good way to prove that point.

I arrived in Santiago de Compostela with a couple of hours to kill before the bus to Fisterra, so I wandered into town and sat in the main square in front of the cathedral for a while. A few school groups posed noisily in front of the cathedral, while exhausted pilgrims sat at the feet of the pillars, soaking up the sunlight to recharge their batteries. There aren’t as many now as there were during the summer. I guess that’s to be expected. The year I made the trek, 2023, was also a delayed holy year, the first since the COVID-19 pandemic shut the Camino down, so the numbers were especially high.

I wonder how far these bold pilgrims had come this year. What friends did they make on their journey? What memories will they take away with them forever? Did somebody watching from the sidelines wonder that about me, years ago?

The bus from Santiago to Fisterra is almost as long as the train from Madrid, but it does travel along one of the most scenic routes in the whole country. To reach the famous cape, it first has to pass through all the towns and villages along the coast, fording the great rías that weave through the cliffs on their way to the sea. The sun came out from behind the clouds just as the cape came into sight, and the whole coast seemed to come to life: the yellow flowers of the gorse shone like gold, the sand beneath the shallows glittered like jade. My heart did a similar leap once when I saw the silhouette of Olvera, my old hometown, for the first time in seven years. It made me smile to think that this place had joined that pantheon.

I arrived early, so I went down to the beach to soak up the sea air for a while. Fisterra is so special to me because it combines the two sides of my heart: the sounds and smells of the sea from my childhood in England, and the language, cliffs and mountains of my adult love for Spain. Mountains take my breath away (especially the craggy limestone kind) and marshes hold a special kind of rapture for me, but I think I will always come back to the sea when I need to feel whole again.

As I watched, a sandwich tern flapped into the little bay and started diving for fish. It was a beautiful sight to see, for the waters are so clear here that I could see the bird’s brilliant white form beneath the water after it had dived, moving like a living arrow. After five attempts it speared a shining silver fish and took off to the south with its catch in its beak. I realised the path on Google Maps didn’t actually exist and beat a quick retreat to the hotel for check-in.

The last time I was here, I only saw the town’s fishery out of hours. I got lucky this afternoon: on my way to the cape I dropped in and caught the daily auction (or lonxa) in full flight. Crates of hake, mackerel, red gurnard and more than a dozen other species I learned to identify as a kid went to the highest bidder in one of the mildest mannered auctions I’ve ever seen (though, to be fair, I haven’t seen that many auctions). Some of the larger fish had QR codes slapped on the sides linking them to the fishermen who caught them, I suppose – my camera didn’t reach far enough to tell.

On one side of the room, crates of sea urchins were stacked fifteen high. I didn’t see any percebes (the region’s famous goose barnacles), but then, the manner by which they are collected is very different indeed, so that’s hardly surprising.

I left before the giant anglerfish went under the hammer. I’d have been curious to know how much that went for.

I called home from the cape and said I’d be back before sunset. It’s now fifteen minutes to sunset and I’m still here, but I’m glad I stayed. The weather here is so changeable and this might be my only chance to watch the sunset from the cape, as it was rained off the last time I was here. A small cohort of like-minded pilgrims and locals have come out here with the same idea. A couple of noisy Spaniards made a pig’s ear of taking a highly choreographed selfie nearby, much to everyone’s frustration, but they’ve gone now, and it’s been nothing but the sound of the waves for the last twenty minutes.

I’m going to stop writing now. The sun will be sinking below the horizon soon and I want to appreciate every second as it does. See you on the other side. BB x

The Hall of the Dead

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

San Lorenzo de El Escorial, 13.45

A shadow lies upon his tomb, in Moria, in Khazad-dûm. The Company stood silent beside the tombs of the kings of old. There were many recesses cut in the rock of the walls, and in them were large iron-bound sarcophagi of black marble. Frodo and the Company stood in awe, but Pippin felt a compulsive urge to reach for his iPhone so that he might share the spectacle on Instagram. He held it aloft, and for a moment it glimmered, faint as a rising star struggling in heavy earthward mists, and then it issued forth a minute heart of dazzling light, as though Eärendil had himself come down from the high sunset paths with the last Silmaril upon his brow.

“No photos!” barked the security guard, gesturing wildly in Pippin’s directions, before muttering a loaded “turistas” under her breath.

In the year 1563, Felipe II ordered the construction of an enormous palace in the foothills of Monte Abantos, partly to commemorate his victory over the French at the Battle of San Quintín, partly as a country retreat where he could hunt big game, but perhaps most importantly as a necropolis for the Hapsburg line. Here, entombed within the bowels of the largest Renaissance building on Earth, lie the remains of almost every king and queen of Spain of the Hapsburg and Bourbon lines.

To get here from Madrid, you have to catch a bus from Moncloa. Spain is steadily catching up to the rest of the world as a cashless country, but most of the local bus companies are still coin-operated. I was delayed by an hour because my first attempt to board was a flop: the driver thought I said “puedo cobrar” instead of “comprar” and wagged a finger at me, saying “yo cobro, tú pagas”. Granted, I had a cold, but I’m pretty sure I made myself clear. I was honestly so ruffled by his wagging humour that I forgot I did actually have a ten euro note on me, so I got off the bus and went in search of breakfast and a cash machine – and a few plasters for my wounded ego.

The next bus driver wasn’t a wisecrack, so I had a very enjoyable ride across the dehesa. To the north of the road to El Escorial, the snowbound peaks of the Guadarrama rise up out of the plain, its mantle pure and unspoilt by the ski-lifts and stations that criss-cross similar ranges in Central Europe. At one point, the road crosses the Valdemayor reservoir, and on a cloudless day such as this, the mountains rise again into the mirrored surface of the blue waters.

The centrepiece of El Escorial – as is so often the way with Spain’s grandest architectural treasures – is an enormous basilica, featuring a collection of saintly portraits, painted ceilings and a gilded reredos of jasper and red granite that stands an eye-watering 92 ft tall. As if that weren’t enough, the high altar is watched by the sentinel eyes of life-size bronze sculptures of Felipe II and his father, Carlos V, and their respective families, eternally offering their prayers to God above the crypt where their bodies are interred. It’s no great leap of the imagination to compare El Escorial to the Valley of the Kings: should it fade into memory someday, the discovery of the altarpiece alone would be an archaeologist’s field day.

The comparisons don’t end there. Much like the triumphal engravings of Ramses’ victory at Kadesh in Abu Simbel and Trajan’s Column in Rome, El Escorial’s “Sala de Batallas” (Hall of Battles) testifies to the martial prowess of the Habsburg line, depicting the greatest victories over the French, Moors and other enemies of the dynasty across over a hundred metres of fresco. That’s ten times the length of my mega drawing and eight times the height. I clearly missed my calling by four and a half centuries.

As well as a hoarding place for countless royal artefacts (including one of the largest collections of holy relics in the world, numbering around 7,500), El Escorial is most widely known as the final resting place of Spain’s monarchy from the early modern period on. These most haunting treasures of the royal palace can be found in the innermost depths of the palace complex, entombed within vaulted marble sarcophagi that contain the remains of princes, consorts, bastard sons and daughters and other high-ranking members of the Hapsburg line, right the way up to the present. The blank headstones above the sarcophagi in the last rooms sit waiting for Juan Carlos’ relatives and their progeny.

If that weren’t chilling enough, one of the rooms features an enormous marble monument to those of royal blood who perished before puberty, marked with A or B to differentiate between the Austria and Bourbon clans. With their famous predilection for morganatic marriages, it’s perhaps no surprise that so many infantes never made it to adulthood.

In the deepest reaches of all, far below the palace itself, is a golden chamber called the Panteón de los Reyes. This is the Habsburg Holy of Holies, where the bodies of the kings and queens were laid to rest: from Carlos V, who oversaw the conquest of the America’s and the birth of the Spanish Empire, all the way up to Alfonso XIII, exiled in 1931 by the short-lived Spanish Second Republic. In a single 360° turn you can see them all. There can be few places in the world quite like this, where you are quite literally encircled by the tombs of the kings of the past.

In such a sacred space, photos are, quite naturally, forbidden – but that didn’t stop a couple of Korean and American tourists from trying. I just carried out a quick sketch in my journal and was done with it. Nobody ever seems to mind the sketching. I wonder why that is?

Outside, the air is a lot less oppressive. A number of articles describe the location as “austere”, and I can imagine that in the grip of winter it may well be, but under the warm spring sunshine it is anything but. A cool wind blows down from the snowy mountains, but it is accompanied by a warmth in the air, sweeter with the scent of cherry blossom. Crag martins and wagtails twitter merrily over the pool, and in the dehesa beyond, I saw (and heard) a family of one of Spain’s most beautiful birds of all, the Iberian magpie, a relic of the Ice Age whose nearest living relatives can be found in eastern China. As I watched them hopping around in the branches of the nearest tree, a little owl flew into sight, calling to its partner in the valley below.

Finally, the greatest sight of all. As I made my way back to the bus station, a lonely black shadow came down from the mountains, casting an unmistakeable silhouette against the intense blue of the Spanish sky: a griffon vulture, the true king of these mountains. They were here long before the Hapsburgs and will be haunting these hills long after they have been forgotten.

I have been fascinated with vultures since the first time I saw one. That boyish glee I get when I see that shape in the ether hasn’t gone away after twenty years. I don’t think it ever will.

Austere? The building, perhaps, in true counter-reformation style, but the location? Hardly. I don’t think Felipe needed much convincing. If I had all that Habsburg money floating around, I’d have wanted to end my days here, too. BB x

A Parting Gift

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

A loud knocking at my door woke me this morning. It was only Łukasz checking I was up and about, but it caught me off guard all the same. I must have passed out the night before. I guess I was more worn out than I thought. My phone was on about 18% battery and the bathroom light was on. I sheepishly turned it off, threw on some clothes and all but inhaled a cup of green tea so as not to hold the others up any longer. Talk about a bad start.

I needn’t have been so flustered. It was absolutely miserable outside, the earth damp from a night of rain and melted snow and the sky dark with the threat of more. The temperature had risen by about six degrees, which was something, but it was hardly what you’d call perfect wildlife watching conditions.

Nature, however, is and always has been fickle, and we were in for more than one surprise before we bade farewell to Białowieża.

We agreed to try for the bison once again, after our lucky encounter with the wolves the day before. We found the herd even faster than on the first morning, grazing in a field just outside Narewka. They seemed unapproachable at first, but Łukasz had a better idea.

A hidden track ran through the forest on the other side, allowing us to get a lot closer than we’d managed on the previous occasion. Of course, the conditions were awful for photography. The focus assist light on my camera kept blinking in its struggle to focus on the dark shapes which Łukasz admonished me for, fearing it might spook the herd. I gave up pretty quickly and contented myself with watching the bison through my binoculars. I did manage a grab shot through them with my phone again, though.

A squall came in and we backed down. Łukasz concluded it was not the herd we’d seen before, which had numbered some thirty-nine individuals and hadn’t featured the bull with the twisted horn. Hoping to show us more in the time we had left, he took us back to the last place we’d seen the larger herd. He offered to go out and run to the spot where we’d left them. I volunteered to go with him. We had barely gone more than a few yards when he suddenly stopped in his tracks, held up his hand and said ‘Wolf!’.

I dropped to my knees and followed his line of sight. And there it was, standing on a rise at the edge of the forest: a white wolf, its winter coat lightly flecked with grey and brown. Like an echo from yesterday, it soon got wind of our attention and slinked back into the trees and out of sight. Łukasz tried calling after it, but there was no response.

After waiting for several minutes, we counted our stars for a second encounter with wolves in as many days and started heading back to the car. I must have been on high alert since being all but shaken out of bed this morning, because I saw it first: a second wolf, barely fifty metres away, watching us from the field adjacent to the track. This time it was me that gave the signal. I’d made the choice to leave my camera behind on this quick sortie, but I didn’t care. With only my binoculars to rely on, I was spared the frustration of staring through a viewfinder and getting poor results, and instead had the joy of watching the beautiful creature bounding away across the field as though it were only feet away.

I can’t show you what I saw. So let me describe it to you.

A tall and powerfully built creature, with the faintest of black lines down its legs. A warm buff colour lines its flanks, the colour of undercooked gingerbread, but its eyes – a lot more visible at such close range – are an amber so intense that not even the best of Warsaw’s jewellers could hope to replicate it. It runs as gracefully as though it were sailing across the field, and its body moves like a wave, arching and falling with every step. When it stops to look back – and it does this only once, and for just a moment – the black lips on its white muzzle are drawn into a grin. And then it turns away with a swish of its tail and lopes off into the forest.

This is Białowieża’s farewell: a final encounter with one of its most handsome creatures of all.

It is magnificent. I am lost for words.

The car is now flying through the vast flats of Eastern Poland. Scenery I remember seeing only in picture books of the East plays beyond the window like a zoetrope: stands of towering, limbless spruce trees, bending under the weight of the wind; lonely cabins and hunting hides in the fields; water towers and the bulbous spires of Orthodox churches rising out of the low-lying villages we pass.

It’s unlike any place I’ve ever been before – but then, I guess I haven’t ever traveled this far east. Go any further than Białowieża and you’ll run headlong into the Belarus border wall – a reminder that Iron Curtain of the previous century was, true to its name, only drawn back, and not ripped down for good.

One day, if the fates allow, I would love to see Siberia. I suspect that kind of adventure is absolutely off the cards for now, but until then, I can only hope things do not spiral out of control the way they did before.

There is too much that is beautiful in this part of the world, too much that has been done to save these treasures from the brink of oblivion. Too much to sacrifice on the altar of ambition. Well – that’s my ten cents on the matter, anyway. BB x

Forest of the Dead

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

I’m kneeling in the snow, staring down an arrow-straight road carved through the forest by the Russians more than a century ago. Our guide makes a signal and tells us to wait. We could be here for up to an hour. The fever that has followed me since stepping out of the plane in Warsaw has not broken yet: I’m still nursing a headache and a bad cough, my back hurts, and I’m starting to freeze from the feet up. But I’d suffer it all again to see what I just saw: a genuine forest spirit, a shadow of the ancient world, loping out of the trees and onto the road. A wild wolf.

When I woke up this morning, it was to a frozen world. The snow hadn’t started falling when I turned in around midnight, but there must have been quite a lot of it during the night, because there wasn’t a single track to be seen in the village. That may have more to do with the fact that we were up and gone by six thirty, a full hour before sunrise, and on a Sunday morning to boot.

After a short drive through the frozen forest, Łukasz brought the car to a sudden stop and jumped out to show us what he had seen: a single set of footprints in the snow, larger than those of any dog I’d ever seen. Following a tip-off from a friend of his, we set off into the forest to try our luck with one of the wolf packs that inhabit Białowieża Forest.

We didn’t have to go for before we found another set of prints. And another. And another. In all, we counted around eleven sets of prints in the snow. They had to be recent: the snow had only started in the early hours of the morning, and it was still very early. We pushed on to the crossroads, hoping to catch a glimpse of our quarry crossing the road in one of four possible directions.

We waited. A couple of red deer broke the cover of the trees, but they didn’t look particularly perturbed – not a good sign when you’re tracking a creature that puts the fear of God into nearly everything that moves in the forest. Łukasz tried calling out to them – and a bloody convincing mimic he is, too – but the forest was silent. Wherever the wolves were, they were doing what they done since we first crossed paths as a species hundreds of thousands of years ago: giving us a very wide berth.

We moved on, taking a chance on the left road. A couple of minutes into the walk, we came to a sudden halt at the sign of a dark shadow in the road at the top of the rise. On closer inspection through the binoculars, it was another tracker and his party staring right back at us through a pair of binoculars of his own.

We met halfway. Łukasz and the other guide swapped information. They’d come from the other side of the quadrant and had found tracks on the road leading into the woods, but nothing on the forest trail, meaning the pack of eleven had to be in there still. They might well have been watching us all the while, invisible between the thousand arms of the trees within.

Well, some of them, anyway. One of the women from the other party suddenly pointed back down the road and said something. My head turned so quick it might have snapped – and then I saw it. A lone wolf standing in the road, staring straight at us. Łukasz gave a signal and we all dropped to the ground, some on their bellies, since wolves are more likely to be spooked by a standing human silhouette than a prone one.

It didn’t hang around. Before my companions could get their cameras ready, it had loped off into the cover of the trees on the other side and was gone.

We waited there for quite some time. Where there was one, the other ten were sure to be nearby. Just as we were getting restless, three red deer came hurtling through the trees to our right, from the part of the forest where the wolves were hiding. Had they been spooked by the pack? The others were momentarily distracted and in that moment I had my eyes on the road, and that’s when I saw it: a second wolf, emerging right where the first had come and gone. Unlike the first, this one didn’t cross the road in one go, but instead came trotting towards us. I motioned to the others and tried a few photos, but my poor camera was struggling in the low light, so I contented myself with the binoculars instead.

Nothing quite prepares you for the size of the wolf. You expect a dog, or something like it, but it is so much more. Bigger. Stronger. A restless hunger in its yellow eyes. An untamed purpose in its gait. Even its footprints tell you you’re in the presence of something magnificent: there’s no graceless wrinkles or adapted opposable thumbs in its pug, just a perfect symmetry of power.

We never did see the other nine members of the pack. It’s possible they made a kill during the night and decided to remain close to their prey, sending the two we saw ahead as scouts. Who knows? Eventually, we elected to abandon the vigil and leave them be, since by now the pack must have worked out where we were and how to avoid us. We left the forest by the same road we came, but not before a lone bull bison emerged from the trees just a hundred metres or so down the road. Poland, you sure know how to pull out all the stops!

We ventured into the strictly protected area of Białowieża Forest after breakfast, hoping to try our luck with some of the park’s rare bird species, but a combination of high wind and sleet cast a spell on the woods. A single mistle thrush cackling at the gates was the only sound we ever heard: neither the croak of a raven, the wittering tattoo of a nuthatch, nor the hoot of an owl, the mew of a buzzard or the drumbeat of one of the nine species of woodpecker that call the forest home. Nothing. Even the wind died away as we wandered deeper into the woods, where some of the trees are hundreds of years old, and others older still.

Białowieża Forest is famous for being one of Europe’s last remaining primeval forests, but what is even more fascinating – if a little disturbing – is that an astonishing 30% of its trees are dead (some figures indicate it may even be nearly 50%). It is, in a way, a forest of the dead, albeit one so full of life in the spring and summer that you could be forgiven for missing that small detail.

Not so in the bleak midwinter, however. The towering spruce trees look more like the charred pillars of a gutted cathedral, while those that have crashed to the ground seem like the carcasses of enormous serpents, their curving branches like shattered ribs on the forest floor. Everywhere is the sweet smell of decay and black fungus grows on the stumps of the fallen giants. The presence of several stones and crosses marking the mass execution site of hundreds of Polish Jews by the Nazis only adds to the creeping dread.

We spent around three hours in the woods, learning about the ancient trees and the various species of fungi that call the forest home, but the eerie silence of the birds was sorely noted.

We did not leave disappointed, however. Something far more beautiful and far more chilling took its place.

Just a hundred metres or so from the main gate, an unmistakeable howl broke the silence, echoed a few seconds later by another. It’s amazing how a sound that you must have imagined and read about in books for years can still make the blood run cold on instinct.

I would have settled for hearing a wolf over seeing one on this trip, and I got both. I may not have been the luckiest in love this year, but I’ve taken all the chips home with the wolves on this trip. Maybe it’s a sign that I’m doing something right at last – reconnecting with the younger version of me who was far more interested in the natural world than anything else.

If I have any budding resolutions for the New Year, it’s to do something like this again. I am, and always will be, a naturalist first and foremost, and everything else I claim to be second. I should reclaim that part of me. It is, it must be said, a genuinely happy and fulfilled part of me, and the greatest gift I could give to any children I should be lucky enough to have someday. BB x

Fall

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

There’s a small oak tree that grows beside the boarding house. It shed its leaves a couple of weeks ago, briefly covering the tarmac in a golden-brown carpet, before the groundskeepers swept them all up into the back of a truck and took them away to the tip. A beautiful gift of death tossed into the trash. Word must have got around, in that silent way that trees have, as so many of the trees around the school have since held jealously onto their leaves well into the usual falling season. My oak, stripped to the skin, looks cold. Winter will soon be here and it has lost its coat.

The world seems a little darker right now. It’s not just the longer nights. The news is full of it. Abuse in the Church of England. Treachery and death in the Middle East. A self-confessed day-one-dictator returning to the White House. Politicians who once laughed at the Man spinelessly throwing in their lot behind the future power base. Shadows creeping over Ukraine. I expected to see more of it on my social media feed, but there’s been surprisingly little said about the US elections. Perhaps the folks I know have listened to the voices in the wind and decided that now is not the time to voice their concerns online. Perhaps they vented their frustration elsewhere. Or perhaps – and I suspect this to be the grim truth – most of them just didn’t care overmuch.

There’s a quote often attributed to the Anglo-Irish philosopher Edmund Burke that runs along the lines of ‘evil triumphs when good men do nothing’. As is the way with so much these days, there’s almost no evidence that he actually said such a thing. We have learned to doubt everything. In that light, how can you blame a nation for putting their confidence in a self-confessed liar?

Burke did, however, say something similar, albeit a lot more profound:

When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.
Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770)

He might have been writing a little over two hundred and fifty years ago, but he might just as well have been describing the world as it is today. It is always rather chilling when the voices of history stretch their pale and clammy hands into the present.

Until we learn to put our differences aside and work together – even with those with whom we do not, cannot or simply will not see eye to eye – our future will be in somebody else’s hands. Until the educated West accepts this reality, there will be no end to the head-scratching and the bewilderment. I have beat upon this drum since my schooldays, where it was doubtless drummed into me by my teachers, but I still believe this to be true: that you should always be prepared to listen and engage in conversation, no matter what you believe. Cancel culture does not work. It just fans the flames of those who feel their needs are being ignored and their voices silenced. We are marching into an increasingly intolerant age, and it worries me that those who fight for tolerance’s sake are among the vanguard, whether they know it or not. Men like Trump ride into power on the backs of such virtue-signallers.

I’m reading my way through a number of books to try to see the world through somebody else’s eyes. It’s my way of dealing with the situation – particularly when my profession is to help children to make their way in the world. I’ve started with Douglas Murray’s The Strange Death of Europe in an attempt to understand the growing immigration frustration in my country (having been an immigrant myself, however briefly). Ilan Pappé is in the wings. I can’t say I agree with everything I read, but it’s broadening my perspective a little more, and that’s no bad thing.

In the spirit of remembrance, they read the list of names of former students of the school who lost their lives in the two world wars in front of the war memorial yesterday. All of the numbered fallen had one thing in common: not a single one had died on the field of battle. Died in a collision during training. Run over by a lorry near base camp. Killed by an explosive during a training exercise. Shot down by friendly anti-aircraft fire after returning from a successful mission. The senseless waste of war was never more plain. When I was younger I had the morbid suspicion I would see another such great war in my lifetime. It was only ever a whimsy, but these days I am not so sure.

Some of the students were dressed in their military uniform. I had a grim vision of a towering cenotaph. Etched into the cold marble slab were names from every corner of the globe. I hope it does not come to that.

On closer inspection, my little oak has not lost everything. Not yet. A few golden leaves have held onto life, a full fortnight after the rest bowed to the inevitable. It just so happens that they are growing on the branch that reaches closest to the light. I wonder if that is what is keeping them alive.

We can’t give up hope. Hope is one of the things that makes us human. As winter draws near and the world darkens a little more every day, remember to hold on to the light in whatever form that takes for you. It is a warm and precious thing. BB x