After the Carabiniere’s tip-off about the limited options in San Juan de Ortega, we made the collective decision to strike out early for Agés, the next town along. So, after a day’s hiatus, I had my sunrise again – at the cost of my fingers, which were numb with cold for the first half hour at least. Mikel the Dane caught up to my ferocious pace to lend me his fleece-lined gloves. The way everyone looks out for each other on the Camino… there’s really nothing quite like it.
Shortly before reaching Tosantos I picked up the trail of Enrique the Arriero and his mule, Jena, and as soon as he came into sight I picked up the pace to catch up to him. It was a merciless effort on my already beleaguered heels but worth it – with so few in his trade left in the world, you don’t pass up a chance to learn something of that vanishing world. One of our number had lost his card to a hungry ATM so I couldn’t stop to chat long, but I told myself I’d try to catch him further down the road if I could. I had already penned “Entrevista con un arriero” in my journal and that would just be a waste of paper if I couldn’t fill it in.
After grabbing an early lunch/late breakfast at Villafranca Montes de Oca (20€ fed all seven of us with a sizeable tortilla & jamón bocata and drinks) the Camino wound steeply uphill into the Sierra de La Demanda. I won’t be the first pilgrim to say it was demanding and I won’t be the last, but it was a welcome change to be under the shade of the trees after the roadside meandering of the last few days.
There’s a monument about halfway through the Sierra to the fallen of the Civil War – that is, the opponents of the Nationlists in Burgos who were dragged out of their beds and summarily executed up here in the woods in the early days of the war. Most Spanish families can relate to this grisly tale: most of the circle of friends of my great-grandfather Mateo similarly disappeared, being known for harbouring or having harboured socialist sympathies even after the war was over. I said a prayer and moved on.
After another steep climb we finally made it to an open stretch of the Camino where the Carabiniere led us to a shaded spot where a food van had been parked on his last run of the Camino a year prior. The proprietor was still here, and while the ‘stamp girl’ was on her way (she’d gone to get fresh ink) he was happy to provide us with fresh strawberries free of charge while we waited.
Here, at last, I caught up again with Enrique, and was able to ask him all the questions I’d had on my mind about being an arriero.
Enrique – or Kike, as written across his hat – has been a muleteer ever since he was a child. He picked up the trade back home in Argentina, where the vast distances and tricky terrain have allowed the profession to long outlive its run in Europe. He likened the trade to studying to become a surgeon: long, hard work and dependant on the collected wisdom of many teachers and masters of the art. Experience, said he, was the best teacher of all, and – now in his sixties – he has had almost six decades worth of it. He grew up a poor man, living on the streets and carving a life for himself in the countryside, not that you’d know now from his noble bearing, bright white smile and polished riding boots (an bold choice of footwear for the Camino). Since his move to Spain twenty-five years ago, he’s got by working with horses and mules wherever and however he can, teaching, buying and selling, running activities for children… whatever he can turn his hands to. I remember as a child seeing the odd arriero in the country around Olvera, so it was more than just an honour to meet a man whose profession is that of the title character in my books. It was a warm dash of nostalgia.
The dark pine forests of the Sierra de La Demanda soon gave way to a skylit swathe of leafless oaks, covered so thickly in lichen that they looked half-dead, like greying, flayed cadavers beneath the sun. However, the forest could not have been more alive. A cuckoo called in the trees and followed us like a shadow along the Camino for some time, while chaffinches, blue tits and the piping song of a wryneck played a merry tune to carry us along. It helped to take my mind off the blisters forming on my beleaguered feet and then some.
Then, before we knew it, the trees were at an end and there, stretching out before us, was the meseta. The prehistoric treasure trove of Atapuerca lay between us and Burgos, but far away in the blue beyond rose the mighty snow-capped peaks of the Cordillera Cantábrica, as impressive now as they ever have been. We came down into Agés shortly after half past two – well into the afternoon – and within another half hour we had all decided to take a siesta.
The other pilgrims have gone out for a beer. I needed a little longer to recover this time, and besides, I wanted to strike while the iron is hot with the blog rather than wait until later. With the last twenty-three kilometres of this stage of the Camino still to go tomorrow ending in Burgos, I don’t think I’ll see Enrique again. So I wanted to record my interview here before I forget.
You never know who you’ll meet on the Camino. Teachers, scholars and sailors, bereaved parents and happy families, policemen and anarchists, priests and atheists. Now, finally, I can addan arriero to that number. BB x
After three to four days on the Camino de Santiago, you really do start to become well-acquainted with the faces of your particular clan – that is, those who are walking the same stages as you and, by extension, staying in most of the same albergues, too.
I’ve fallen in with a group of younger pilgrims ranging from eighteen to thirty-four, and rather than being an unsociable bastard and cannonballing my way toward my next stop, I decided to hang back and take the road with them today. The result? A more leisurely, more talkative Camino – and ultimately, more fulfilling. In some senses, quite literally!
While I didn’t manage to track down Enrique the muleteer today (though there were clear signs on the road that his horse and mule had gone on ahead but recently), I did track down the Professor (the Californian I met on day one), the Sailor (a Spanish/Australian globetrotter and his wife) and the Carabiniere, an outrageous but loveable Italian former policeman for whom the saying “the man, the myth, the legend” might well have been coined. And because I had company on the road, I was much more inclined to stop for food, which made today’s long, sun-scorched hike across the plains of Castile a lot more enjoyable.
Top tip for pilgrims on this stage: just as you reach the village of Viloria de Rioja, the Parada de Viloria on your right as you hit the town is one of the friendliest places on the whole journey. They don’t have a menu peregrino, but rather the husband and wife who run the albergue cook up a simple lunch with a donations box on the side – you give what you can. The eggs, the bread and the tomatoes are all fresh and presumably their own produce, if not sourced from the farmers a few houses down the road. I had what was probably the best tortilla sandwich I’ve ever eaten in my life today. Hell, I’d do that stretch again for another bite.
We left La Rioja behind today and started out upon what will become the Meseta Central. In a very real sense it already felt like we’d reached the middle stretch between Burgos and León – sun high overhead, the Camino cleaving close to the road, dust clouds and rolling wheat fields replacing former river valleys and distant mountain ranges. It’s stunning, but in a different way – a very Castilian kind of beautiful, austere and proud in its starkness.
Fortunately I had company to chew the fat with rather than lapse into the same clichés that other (and considerably better-versed) British travellers have used before me.
We arrived in Belorado shortly after two o’clock to find the town heaving with both pilgrims and locals – the festivities for Jueves Santo had just begun, and between that and the concentration of pilgrims in this small town, the albergue municipal was already fully booked. Luckily there were other options, and the place I ended up – Cuatro Cantones – could hardly have been a friendlier establishment. It even had a covered pool, which was a godsend after a twenty-three kilometre hike across the dusty plains.
Sopa de Ajo – a personal favorite!
I’m now over halfway through the walking stage of this attempt at the Camino. In two nights it will be over: I will have reached Burgos, at which point I will take my leave of my companions as some move on and others return home while I stay and rest in the city of the Cid. I will be immensely appreciative of the break, but no more so than my feet, which are not used to this much walking – even from somebody who doesn’t drive!
Tomorrow, we either roll the dice on San Juan’s one pilgrim hostel or push on in search of pastures new. Luck be an albergue tonight, I guess. BB x
If this is a later blog post than usual, it’s because I’ve bought into the spirit of the Camino a bit more today and allowed myself to socialise with some of the other pilgrims – which often takes some doing for an introvert like me. Tonight’s digs are fantastic, though, and I’m writing from the genuine comfort of my dorm bed in Santo Domingo de La Calzada’s cofradía, one of the longest-serving albergues on the whole Camino.
So first, a confession. After arriving in Nájera yesterday, I got itchy feet. The cliffs above the town were calling to me, and the voice telling me I’d already walked 30km that morning was drowned out by the other saying go on, do it, you’ll regret it if you don’t. The summit – a lonely bluff called Malpica – even had a cross at the top, which is essentially putting a hat on a hat. I had to climb it.
Oddly enough, nobody else was up there at half past four in the afternoon with temperatures pushing into the twenties. Which is just as well, because it turned out to be a hands-and-feet climb to the summit. Fortunately I’ve been doing that kind of thing since I was a kid, so I’m pretty handy with my feet. The view from the top of Malpica was breathtaking – moreso because I didn’t have an awful lot of breath left to take – but the real reward was the butterfly show. For whatever reason, a swarm had descended upon the clifftop, among them some of the most beautiful butterflies you can find in Europe: swallowtails. One or two of them – zebra swallowtails – were so large you could hear their wingbeats. The ‘blood dripping from their fangs’ kind, as my mother would put it. I was just happy to sit up at the top and watch them frolic for a while. It delayed the inevitable descent – again on hands and feet – for at least a short while.
I fully intended to wait for some of the other peregrinos this morning, but when 7 o’clock had come and gone, I came and went with it. I’m rather fussy about catching the sunrise on the Camino, and will happily sacrifice a sit-down breakfast for it. This morning, I’ll admit, I really should have dawdled, as it was biting cold out. It had been well below zero during the night and, with the sun still below the horizon, it was still -1°C when I set out. You notice these things quickly when you’ve only packed with heat in mind.
That being said, the Camino was busy. The Koreans had all set out well before sunrise. They’re turning out to be most of if not the only real pilgrims (in the religious sense) on the Camino, with the possible exception of the odd Brazilian. I’d hoped to explore some of the churches along the way, but they were all closed – a possible drawback to setting out so early – so I powered through the first fifteen kilometres alone, soaking up the silence of the green fields of La Rioja.
And what a silence! At the start of the day the birdsong was explosive, and I got quite used to listening out for certain motifs in certain places: the rasping call of a black redstart on tiled roofs, the drawn out wheeze of corn buntings on fence posts and the singsong warble of woodlarks in the vineyards. But at one point it suddenly all went quiet. No birdsong, no cars, not even the sound of distant chatter from other pilgrims on the road. I had to stop walking to listen, taking out the monotonous beat of my own two feet that’d I’d long since tuned out. It wasn’t eternal, but it was powerful while it lasted. I’d even say it will be a treasured Camino memory.
Just before Cirueña I fell into step alongside the only other English peregrino I’ve met thus far. It was good to share the road at last, and we swapped stories to the backdrop of the patchwork fields of La Rioja passing by.
Just shy of Santo Domingo itself, we caught up with a genuine arriero, making the Camino in riding boots and a high vis jacket, taking his mule Jena and a Connemara horse along with him. It was a fleeting encounter, cut off all too soon by our imminent arrival in Santa Domingo, and I hope I can catch up to him again – I must have a hundred questions or more from years of research on arrieros that only a real muleteer could answer. Wait for me, Enrique! BB x
Holy Week got off to a flying start last night outside Logroño’s cathedral, Santa María de La Redonda. It isn’t always easy to tell which towns will have a serious procesión, but for the record, Logroño goes the distance. It looked as though all the brotherhoods were out in force last night, garbed in white, red, green, black and blue. Crucially for me, they also beat out the same halting drumbeat from my memories of Holy Week in the south. Not every town does it, but you’ll notice if they do: it’s the ever so slightly delayed drum roll during the march that, once you hear it, you can’t unhear. It’s the suspense of the last days of Jesus’ life, as his followers waited to see if he would save himself. At least, that’s one way of reading into it.
I had supper with a rather awkward American, the only other guest for dinner at the albergue. He wasn’t even staying there, but appeared to have wandered in looking for a menu peregrino (the cheap three-course fare offered to pilgrims on the Camino). He had his reservations about how sociable people are on the Camino and pined for the quieter stretches, and from his less than satisfied reaction to the ‘vegetarian option’ he’d asked for, I couldn’t help wondering what he was doing out here. He was quick to want to fact check my anecdote about his home state of California being one of the only places in the world named for a fictional location (it takes its name from the mythical island in Montalvo’s 16th-century chivalric novel, Las sergas de Esplandián) but I won’t begrudge him for it. After Trump and the fake news boom, who’d trust anyone?
I was definitely one of the first out of town this morning. Though I passed some pilgrims on the road a few hours in, from the speed at which they were walking I suspect they’d been lodging one or two towns ahead. As a result, I had pretty much the whole 30km hike to Nájera to myself – including the first hour and a half before sunrise, which is always one of the most magical times to walk the Camino.
Approaching the Laguna de Grajera from the east, I counted about six or seven night herons flying in from their roost somewhere beyond Logroño. You can just about make out the silhouette of one of them in the photo above, as dawn was starting to break. There were rabbits everywhere – more than I’ve ever seen in this country – and the morning sky was alive with the songs of blackbirds and larks. I could have waited for company at any point, but I do love to have that part of the day to myself. Self indulgent, perhaps, but worth indulging all the same.
There was even an icon of Nuestra Señora del Rocío on the lakeside. Whether or not I sang her into existence through various repetitions of Las llanuras ardientes and El Rocío es un milagro as I was walking is conjecture. It felt special to find her here, so far from her usual haunt in the marismas down south.
Now, while I needn’t have set off quite so early (the 8 hours in the guidebook is a joke, the trek is at the very most 6h30 with a stop for lunch) I did have my reasons, and one was to catch a very specific angle of the sunrise at just the right moment.
At the brow of a hill to the west of the laguna stands one of the famous Osborne bulls for which Spain is so famous. By the time I got clear of it – at around 8.20am – the sun was almost exactly behind it. I could not have timed it better. Point and shoot!
The rest of the walk was pretty straightforward. The ruins of the old pilgrims’ hospice at San Juan de Acre were picturesque and the Camino itself, though it cleaved close to the road on occasion, was quiet and easy underfoot. I let a couple of Dutch pilgrims overtake and continued to have the road to myself. The Sierra de Cebollera remained cloudbound for most of the walk, and I kept my hoodie on until I reached Nájera – it simply wasn’t hot enough to justify fewer layers, and that’s not bad thing!
Navarrete was stunning – easily one of my favourite stations on the Camino so far. The church is a classic Spanish affair: pokey and generic on the outside, and an immense explosion of heavenly gold within. I lit a candle for abuelo, left a story in the visitor’s book, sang through Thomas Morley’s Nolo mortem peccatoris (since there was nobody there) and moved on.
From Navarrete, the final stretch rolled across the hills before sloping down toward the cliff face of Nájera. Legend has it the French hero Roland fought a Syrian giant on one of these hills in a single combat that went on for days, but I was happy enough to see the familiar silhouette of the giants of my childhood: griffon vultures, circling high above the meseta in the distance. I didn’t keep a tally, but there were raptors everywhere today. Kestrels and kites – both black and red – and buzzards and booted eagles, these last in both white and brown. Since it’s still early enough in the season, some of them were displaying still, climbing high and then plummeting down in a sharp V with wings tucked in. Between that and the flute-song of woodlarks that followed me for the last hour before Nájera, I have been in seventh heaven all morning. Oh Camino, I have missed you!
The Albergue Municipal is filling up. Maybe I’ll meet some of these people later. But for now, I’ve done my write-up for the day and I could use a little shut-eye before I seek further adventures in Nájera this evening. Until the next time, folks. BB x
I left over an hour and a half to make my flight this morning, but I could easily have done it in less. Even with the extras (a few more items of clothing than originally planned in case of inclement weather), I’m traveling lighter than ever. Who’d have the fuss of a suitcase when the open road is so inviting?
I think I must have raced to the gate in my eagerness. It was almost deserted for some time when I got here. Only two or three others joined me in my vigil: a Spanish girl chaperoned by her mother, a Greek/English couple (yes, I googled the man’s passport symbol – call me a nosy Parker but the square cross had me stumped) and a woman who from her accent could only be Basque: one side of her head shaved, brow furrowed, a black hoodie emblazoned with the slogan ‘DESIGNED BY AN IMMIGRANT’ in block white capitals.
No tannoy for this flight – the attendant called out Bilbao almost as quietly as I did trying to call a student over in the canteen last week for his poor choice of language. She only changed her tune to ‘Speedy Boarding Only’ when the first six or seven of us were clear. Sometimes, just occasionally, it pays to arrive ahead of schedule.
10.18am, Bilbao Intermodal Bus Station
I’ll say this much for Bilbao Airport: it’s a lot less hassle than Gatwick. All in all I don’t think it took much more than fifteen minutes between touchdown and the shuttle bus.
As I thought, the skies over Bilbao when we landed were clouded, grey and low. They always have been on my visits to this corner of Spain, to the extent that clouds and the Basque Country are virtually inseparable in my mind. The Spanish author Miguel Delibes once said that the sky over Castile is so high because the castellanos themselves put it there from staring at it so much. While my kith and kin chase the coy heavens plus ultra, always in search of the new, the ever practical Basques bring the skies down to their level, coveting the Viscayan rain and wrapping their dark forests in mist and cloud. I don’t expect to be free of that shroud until we reach the frontier.
11.56am, near Pobes
I’m now racing south on the Bilbao-Logroño bus, basking in the intermittent glow of the Spanish sun. Craters of blue have started to appear in the sky as though punched through by some celestial artillery, and still the Basque line of defence holds.
Here below, the landscape is changing. The military ranks of pines encamped around Bilbao suddenly give way to a gentle blanket of beech trees. Patches of brilliant green herald the coming of spring to these hills, and limestone crags scar the mountains like bones – first in uniform grey, then bleached with that warm golden stain that is so evocative of Spain’s highlands.
And then, suddenly, the dark hills of the Basque Country fall away and the plains of Castile are all around me: a forgivingly flat golden country, nestled between the high crags north of Haro and the snowbound peaks of the Sierra de Cebollera to the south. Castles and monasteries dating back to the time of a real frontier sit atop the hills and knolls like childish imitations of the limestone cliffs behind, the handiwork of the greatest craftsman of all.
And there, racing over the fields near an Alcampo petrol station, is my first swallow of the year. It’s only a fleeting glimpse as the bus races on past a bodega and a Lidl in quick succession, but it’s enough to make my heart soar – higher still than those Castilian skies.
I’m drunk on all this scenery, in case that wasn’t obvious (the overblown choice of a frontier semantic field was probably a dead giveaway). Rehab is the usual cure. However – to keep in line with this post’s choice of imagery – sod that for a game of soldiers. I have a week and more to wander around my grandfather’s country once again. I can’t think of a better rehab than this.
5.27pm, Albergue Santiago Apostol, Logroño
Logroño is climbing back out of its siesta. I’ve spent the afternoon here and there, though perhaps more here than there. Here being the Albergue Santiago Apostol, the same place I stayed when I last did the Camino four years ago. The only thing that seems to have changed is the stamp for my pilgrim’s passport. That, and I’ve come alone this time.
The albergue is quiet. I’ve only crossed paths with a handful of other pilgrims: Joan i Laura, a couple of peregrinos from Girona, a French family of three and a German family of four. I expected the Camino to be busier during Semana Santa, but I guess if you have a week’s holiday you’d do the stretch that can be done in a week or less – that is, the last 100km from Sarria. Out here in La Rioja, it’s likely to be rather quiet.
That will make for a rather soul-searching experience, which is no bad thing!
I’ve gone for dinner and breakfast at the albergue, 1) to make sure I actually eat and eat well and 2) to meet some of the other pilgrims ahead of the 31km stretch tomorrow. And also 3) because, at 16€ for dinner and breakfast, it’s a steal. I hadn’t forgotten how affordable the Camino is, but it is nice to rediscover, as it were.
I ate my lunch (chorizo and queso curado in a fresh barra de pan) under a beech tree on the bank of the Ebro river. Spring may be slow in coming to England but she’s been here a while already. The beak-clicking display of the local storks can be heard every so often, even from the albergue, though a drumming woodpecker in the park was giving them a run for their money.
English and Spanish birdsong combined on the riverbank. Blackcaps, wrens and blackbirds supported a local chorus of serins, short-toed treecreepers and wrynecks. I don’t think I’ve seen (or heard) a wryneck since my first stint in Villafranca back in 2015, but I hadn’t forgotten its call. After scanning the branches for a minute or so I tracked it down to a lightning tree just a few metres from where I was sitting. They really do look bizarre, the way they move about mechanically, looking for all the world like the clockwork nightingale from Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale. The wryneck kept me company for most of my lunch and only took off when a dog walker came by, carrying an African grey parrot on his arm.
I’ll try to catch the first of the procesiones tonight. ‘It’s only Monday,’ said the hostalero at the desk, alluding to the fact that the pinnacle of Semana Santa is toward the end of the week. Even so, my pride as a Spanish teacher is at stake (I have just been teaching the topic to my Year 10s) and besides, I’m a fanatic for the pasos. You can blame my year in Andalucía for that. I’ll also see if I can’t locate the local legend of the Bookseller of Logroño that fellow English traveler George Borrow recounted in his book on the Gypsies of Spain, published a little under two hundred years ago – because what’s an adventure without a quest of some description? BB x
Last night, according to the Beeb, there was a planetary parade. After yesterday’s exceptional conditions – the first day of spring in every sense – it would have been easy to spot from home. That the news decided to report the phenomenon exclusively in the past tense was a kick in the teeth. At the very least it would have been something to write about before the holidays. A warm-up exercise, so to speak, since that’s usually when I have the time to write. I bent the usual dry spell of the summer holidays to my will last year, but this year’s summer break is looking to be all about wheels with little to no time for anything else. Knowing I have to spend a great deal of the summer learning to drive is a pain in the neck, albeit a necessary one, and it’s naturally got me thinking about all the things I’d rather be doing. Fortunately, at this point in my life I can limit all those things to one thing and one thing only, and that’s the job I didn’t finish two years ago: the Camino de Santiago.
So, in my typical stubborn fashion, I’ve thrown caution to the wind and booked a return flight to Bilbao to pick up where I left off over the Easter break. Peregrino soy, volando voy.
Last time I made the trek I got as far as Logroño before having to fly home for both a house move and my pre-PGCE literacy and numeracy test. That’s somewhere between a quarter and a fifth of the total distance (780km). And though I’m not a fan of re-starting things if I can help it, it does feel like one of those treks that ought to be made in one, if you can.
Realistically, it takes about a month to walk the whole Camino, from Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port to Santiago de Compostela. A month of 5am starts and 12pm finishes, racking up around 20km a day before noon with afternoons spent resting, exploring and talking to fellow pilgrims. It’s an experience like none other. Everyone is on the same road, but no two people started in the same spot or with the same motivations. You fall into a healthy routine after a couple of days, and yet every day is different.
People come from all over the world to walk the Camino. For the first couple of days, I tagged along with three Italians and an Argentinian. We parted ways at Estella when I stayed behind, enchanted by the Basque town. You could easily walk the Camino in a month, but there’s so much to see and do that it’s worth stopping every so often to see all the towns along the pilgrim route have to offer – and your feet will appreciate a day off after five or six days’ walking. Since I’m traveling within the parameters of a two-week holiday I don’t have all the time in the world, so I’ll try to follow the same pattern this time around: five or six days of solid walking, broken up by a decent night’s sleep in somewhere that isn’t an albergue at either end. That tends to be a good idea.
My credencial, or pilgrim’s passport, is already sitting on the coffee table, open at the last stamp. My sleeping bag is rolled up and ready to go and I’ve ordered a good quality rucksack as the one I used last time is at my parents’ place – and it was falling apart after more than a decade of use. For a sense of continuity, I’ll aim to stay at the same place where I came to a stop last time. My Spanish colleagues at work expressed some dismay at the idea of doing the Camino at this time of year – “pero oye, esto se hace en verano” – but I’m going to trust my instinct on this one.
I’m well aware that I’m heading out in none other than Semana Santa, the holiest week in the Spanish calendar. As well as adding to the colour of the Camino nights, with all the reckless passion of the pasos, it may well make for a busier (and more Spanish) Camino than usual. But after a couple of safe and highly-organised school trips, I’m more than game for a proper adventure. And few things provide quite like the Camino.
Last night, in a return to pre-COVID tradition, we celebrated Tenebrae in the Abbey Church. With the latest wave of infections sweeping the staff and students, I’ll admit I had my doubts I’d be able to go up and sing as I used to with a house to run, but my housemaster very kindly stepped in, allowing me to bolster the tenor line. It’s hard to overstate the importance of making music in my faith: singing is an act of worship. Perhaps that’s why I didn’t go to Mass when the churches opened last year, while the ban on singing was still in place – how could I practice my faith without lips to speak? I remember saying as much to one of the school’s youth chaplains once, who remarked that I ought to rethink my approach to faith. Was he right? I don’t think so. I think everyone’s path to God is individual. Mine just happens to be through music, which, all things considered, is hardly surprising.
I spent a great deal of my childhood in and out of churches. My mother played the organ for the village church when I was very young, and I remember sitting (probably not so quietly) next to the pedals, listening to the growling hum of the organ long after the last notes faded into the stone walls. Later, during my short spell at a prep school, I spent two nights a week up in the organ loft of Canterbury Cathedral while my father sang for the cathedral choir. What was undoubtedly an incredible privilege became routine – that is, until a Victorian-minded parishioner who happened to look up one week decided that children were better “seen and not heard” and my brother and I were unceremoniously ousted, forced to sit in the quire thereafter.
Perhaps that was God’s will, because twenty years later, I still jump at the chance to stand in just such a stall and tangle with some sacred music. There’s really nothing quite like it.
I have a somewhat unorthodox relationship with God. If it were a Facebook status, I might just go for “It’s complicated”. Somewhere deep within, my spiritual compass spins toward Israel. Maybe it’s the stories my mother brought me up with or the belief we both share that our ancestors were among the many thousands of Spain’s Jews who converted to hide from the Inquisition, many hundreds of years ago. It would go some way towards explaining the ferocious proclivity for the arts borne across the generations by my ancestors, at a time when intellectualism was unwise and even dangerous. Millán-Astray’s battle cry of “muera la inteligencia” in 1936 – around about the time my grandfather was born – hardly seems out of place for a country where, for hundreds of years, it was better to hacer mala letra than open your mouth and betray your wits. Our own Michael Gove gave us an uncomfortable reminder of this dark past when he claimed the British had “had enough of experts” in the lead-up to Brexit.
I can hold my head up high every day as a teacher knowing that I am the next in a long line of teachers, all of whom dabbled in music and poetry and art. Were they really Jews, though? I’d like to think so – I really would – but I have no proof of that. I have barely enough solid proof of my connection to my grandfather, never mind a connection to a Hebrew ancestry that may or may not have ever existed. The silver Star of David I sometimes wear beneath my suit is no heirloom, but rather a keepsake from a Jewish silversmith in Cordoba; a reminder of the terrible fate suffered by the Chosen People in a land far from home that was once their paradise. Will I ever know for sure? I doubt it. But some things you see with your eyes, others with your heart. This is one of those things the heart sees. Something you have always known or believed with little to no provocation. I believe because I cannot be sure. It’s the weakest of arguments, the merest of threads. But about such threads, Faiths are often weaved into being.
So why am I a Catholic? With such silent conviction, how can I stand there in the darkness, singing Christian verses and watching the candles going out to mark the extinguishing of Jesus’ light and life from the world, a little under two thousand years ago?
I am a Catholic because I would make the same journey as my family. Whether or not my ancestors found their way to the Christian God through awe or terror, I would take that road that they took. And there is something fundamentally grounding about faith. Standing as one with my students and singing songs that have been sung for hundreds of years… you feel a power, there, echoing down the generations. It’s all the more powerful when you see the date at the top of the copy reaching back to the middle ages. One imagines one’s voice reaching up to the heavens and mingling with the voices of those who came before you on its journey across the stars. Perhaps that’s what the choir of Heaven is: the echo of thousands of years of collective prayer through song. I’d like that.
I might also point out that the Catholic church represents an important bastion against the foe, since modern Christian music is, to my ears, quite possibly the wettest, most uninspiring drivel ever produced. It clearly works wonders for some, but it does nothing for me. Give me plainchant any day. A colleague once joked that one of his greatest fears was that he should reach the pearly gates only to find that Mozart and his kin are nowhere to be found, and Hillsong reigns triumphant. It’s a joke (and a nightmare) I share. But that’s a story for another time.
I am also a Catholic because Faith is a journey of forgiveness. Noli mortem peccatoris. Those were the words of power that spoke to me last night, as the last of the candles were snuffed out. I do not want the death of the wicked. I bear no ill will against those shadows who persecuted my people, because there is too much hate in the world already. I wept on the shores of the Dead Sea years ago at the sight of the sun going down over the Holy Land, knowing I was not yet ready to see it with my own eyes. Jerusalem evades me still: the last time I tried to make that journey, a little hiccup called Covid-19 came thundering in.
Finally, I am a Catholic because of what it stands for. Katholikos. Universal. It chimes with me in much the same way that the Arabic expression ahl al-Kitaab – people of the book – called out to me in my Arabic studies, many years ago. The world is immense and no two people are the same, and I think it’s as foolish to expect everyone to share the same faith as it is to expect to find two identical grains of sand on a beach: the closer you look, the more you’ll find yourself doubting. But I have built my faith upon doubt rather than surety, because that, to me, is what faith is all about. Believing in the light when all the world is darkness because your heart tells you to do so. Fate may be the master builder of the temples of our lives, but hope is the cement that holds the stones together. I believe in that light and in that hope. And in my heart I know I would go on hoping, though every light in the world were extinguished as they were last night, one by one.
In three days’ time I set out for Italy on my first solo adventure in a long time. Venice will inspire, no doubt, but it’s Rome I’m especially excited to see. I hope I can catch some music there during my stay. I could use some of that ancient magic after what has been quite a long term. BB x
Women’s eyes are always bright, whatever the colour.
HENRY RIDER HAGGARD, KING SOLOMON’S MINES
Sunday 27th March. Eight days until Italy, my first solo adventure in a long time. My desk is a little cluttered: a Marco Polo guidebook to Rome, a spare exam paper for Year 7 French, the Greenwich Maritime Museum’s Pirates: Fact & Fiction and various other odds and sundries. The pile of books I dip in and out of continues to grow. Previous girlfriends would have kept that habit in check, but in this bachelor’s pad, the library creeps through the house like an advancing army, billeting its troops on every flat surface in sight.
I don’t know what to expect from Italy. The last time I set off with a city break in mind I came home early. Barcelona was all a bit much, and I didn’t have much of a plan beyond seeing the old city. After three months of windowless boarding school life, however, I’m just looking for a change of scenery, really. Something to make my journal hum with anticipation (since this one is currently the least-travelled of the five, despite having the longest shelf life – thanks a lot, COVID). I’m hoping I’ll meet some interesting people who’ll give me stories to tell, and with whom I can share stories of my own, but the most likely outcome is a solid twenty-odd pages of sketches. And that’s no bad thing.
My primary inspiration in this field is the French illustrator Gustave Doré. You may have seen his works before, even if you don’t know the name: his was the creative genius behind the dark engravings that told the stories of Paradise Lost, Dante’s Inferno and Don Quixote, as well as various illustrations of the Bible. Some divine brilliance guided that man’s hand throughout his life. Half the hangings in my flat are prints of his, and all of them pillaged from desecrated copies of the most precious book in my library: an illustrated account of the Spanish adventures of Jean Charles Davillier.
It took me over a year to track down a copy of said book for myself. I’m not a collector of rare books, but I do take a small amount of pride in having a well-stocked Spanish library, and when I learned of the existence of this masterpiece, I knew I had to get my hands on one somehow – before they were all chopped up for their precious prints. Its rarity is evident in the ludicrous priced charged by some vendors on the internet: I’ve seen well-kept copies of the book go for as much as £1,350, with the most reasonable offers starting at around the £350 mark. So I could hardly believe my luck when I found an eBay vendor trying to get rid of theirs for £50. Collection only – as if that would prove an obstacle for such a prize. I’ll never forget the sheepish look on the trader’s face as she handed it over.
“Are you a collector, then? It was in a box in my dad’s garage along with all this other junk. Feel free to have a look. We’re converting the place and need to get rid of a lot of his old things. It’s funny, the day after you paid for it, I saw another copy going for several hundred. I guess I undervalued it.”
She did. Considerably. But beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and to me, it’s more than just a rare book of Doré’s. It’s a window into another man’s head: another man who, like myself, came to Spain and was bewitched by its very own brand of black magic.
Of all Doré’s prints, I treasure his landscapes most of all, but it’s his portraits of the Spaniards themselves that I want to leave with you today – and particularly the fair Spanish ladies.
I’ll be honest with you, I’m as much a sucker for beauty as the next man, and when I’m sitting on the high street, or on the Tube, or scrolling through Pinterest, nine times out of ten it’s the girls who catch my eye and stir my pencil into action (Freud and a thousand schoolboys would have a field day with that sentence, I know). Double the prize if the sun is shining at the right angle, and Doré does this spectacularly – you can almost hear the midday heat in the image above with its shadows cast straight down by an unforgiving Castilian sun immediately overhead.
The grass is always greener on the other side, right? My grandfather found something that caught his eye in an English girl, a long time ago, but it’s his people who hold my eye. Not that I’ve ever held down a relationship with a Spaniard. It’s a hard thing to do when you live on this rainy rock, as Spaniards’ ties to their homeland are stronger than steel. I’ve met a few wanderers, but they are the exception to the rule. Cortes, the great conquistador of Cuba and Honduras and the Mexica Empire, came home to die. And when Spain is as beautiful a country as she is, who can blame them?
I’ll leave it to San Isidro of Sevilla to conclude with words more powerful than my own:
Of all the lands that extend from the west to India, thou are the fairest, o sacred Hispania, ever-fecund mother of princes and peoples, rightful queen of all the provinces, from whom west and east draw their light.
I hadn’t planned to write much this evening, what with reports to finish and the first round of the school debating competition to support, but as I let World Poetry Day pass me by without saying a word yesterday, I thought I might pay a short homage to some of my favourite poems and say why they’re so precious to me.
RITHA AL-ANDALUS
Ask Valencia what became of Murcia And where is Jativa, or where is Jaen? Where is Cordoba, the seat of great learning And how many scholars of high repute remain there? And where is Seville, the home of mirthful gatherings On its great river, cooling and brimful with water?
These centres were the pillars of the country: Can a building remain when the pillars are missing? The white walls of ablution are weeping with sorrow As a lover does when torn from his beloved; They weep over the remains of dwellings devoid of Muslims, Despoiled of Islam, now peopled by infidels! Those mosques have now been changed into churches, Where the bells are ringing and the crosses standing.
This misfortune has surpassed all that has preceded And as long as time lasts, it can never be forgotten!
Lament for the Fall of Seville, Abu al-Baqaa al-Rundi (1267)
Al-Rundi’s lament for the fall of al-Andalus is poetry in action. It’s a desperate plea for help from the Muslims of al-Andalus to their coreligionists across the sea in the language in which they excelled. Regardless of where you stand on the debate over whether Islamic Spain really was a haven of tolerance in a darkening world, it is hard not to be moved by the words of its poets as the westernmost star of the Islamic world was dragged below the horizon, never to rise again. Perhaps it was that sense of impending doom, with the Christian wolves howling mightily at the door, that infuses the words of al-Rundi and Ibn Zaydun and their kin with such mournful magic, conjuring up an image not of what was lost that had once been great, but of what could have been in such a land. I could have chosen any one of a number of beautiful Hebrew poems to chime in more closely with my family’s experience, but al-Rundi says it so masterfully.
As a child growing up in a former Moorish stronghold in Andalusia, I was completely bewitched by the lost paradise of the Moors. I am under that spell still.
Of course, it sounds a lot better in Arabic – especially since Arabic poetry of the highest calibre is song in its purest form. You can have a listen here.
IF
If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too; If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies, Or being hated, don’t give way to hating, And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, Or walk with Kings – nor lose the common touch, If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you, If all men count with you, but none too much, If you can fill the unforgiving minute With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run, Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it, And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!
Rudyard Kipling (1895)
I’ve always been a fan of Kipling. I guess you can chalk that up to a few years in a prep school when I was younger. Colonialism, privilege, blah blah blah. That doesn’t shake the fact he had a special gift for words. My relationship with this particular poem started on my first day as a deputy boarding master. My first housemaster kept a copy of this poem on his desk, propped up against the computer, and I made a point of reading it every time I should be in the office. It gave me strength in what was arguably a tough year – training as a teacher for the first time is tough enough without an earth-shattering global pandemic cutting right through the middle of it.
I really can’t think of a better poem for a housemaster. The virtues Kipling offers up (an edited selection above) are just as important today as they ever were, and if I should follow that path myself someday, I too will have a copy of this verse in my office. For myself, if not for my boys.
EL MOZO ARRIERO Y LOS SIETE BANDOLEROS
Camino de Naranjales caminaba un arriero: buen zapato, buena media, buena bolsa de dinero. Arreaba siete mulos, ocho con el delantero; nueve se podian contar, con el de la silla y freno. A la salida de un monte siete pillos le salieron: – Donde caminas, buen mozo, el buen mozo arriero? – Camino hacia la Mancha a un encarguito que llevo. – A la Mancha iremos todos como buenos companeros.
Al revolver de una esquina una taberna que vieron, – Echa vino, montanes, echa vino, tabernero, que lo pagara el buen mozo, el buen mozo arriero. – Yo si lo pagare, que tengo mucho dinero, que tengo mas de doblones que estrellitas tiene el cielo. El primer vaso que echo se le dieron al arriero. – Eso no lo quiero yo, que yo veneno no bebo. Que lo beba el rey de Espana que esta muy gordito y bueno.
Sacan los siete sus sables saca el suyo el arriero. De los siete mato a cinco y los otros dos huyeron. Viene la Guardia Civil y se llevan al arriero y el arriero tuvo tiempo y a la reina escribio un priego.
Y la reina se reia Cuando lo estaba leyendo – Si como ha matado a cinco hubiera matado ciento. Y cinco reales son diario mientras viva el arriero.
Camino a Naranjales, Spanish Folksong
Not all poems have to speak from the heart. I love a poem that tells a story. And I’ve loved this one since I first heard it years ago in the grating tenor voice of an extremeno shepherd, recorded for posterity in the archives of the town library. There’s a beguiling frivolity in a lot of Spanish verse that pairs jauntily with the mournful Andalusian elegies and love poems, but it’s the tales of the arrieros, the brave and hardy muleteers, that I’m especially drawn to. No art, no gravitas, just a wily muleteer who bests seven rogues and is rewarded for his courage by a queen, no less. Pure Spanish whimsy – and I adore it.
What are the poems that shaped your world? Do you have any favourite lines or stanzas? Do you sometimes try to weave them into your writing like I do? (You might have spotted a thinly-veiled reference to Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Two Scavengers in a Truck, Two Beautiful People in a Mercedes in Sunday’s post, which remains stamped across my heart – like most poems one studies for GCSE.)
I should read more poetry this year. I’ll start this weekend, while I’m on duty. It’s a lot easier to get through a poem a day than a chapter of a book, I find. Especially as a teacher. BB x
I have a confession to make. For a wannabe author, I’ve always been rather guarded about my stories. As a teacher I make no secret about the fact that of my various hobbies I love writing best of all, above drawing, above being out and about in nature – and, yes, even above music. Why? Because writing is one of the few things in the world that you can truly call your own. You can’t compare your voice to somebody else’s any more than you can compare your ability to think. But, for all the show of carrying a journal around and self-consciously dropping into conversation now and then that I write for pleasure, I don’t really talk overmuch about my books.
There’s a couple of reasons for that. The first one is simple self-defence, the fear that somebody could steal your ideas and tell your own stories as though they were their own. Laugh if you will at that idea – what story hasn’t been told and retold a thousand times over since the dawn of time? – but an incident involving my artwork, DeviantArt and an alarming case of identity theft back in my schooldays has left me cautious about putting my work out there. In that case, I was lucky that the thief had been indiscriminate in their robbery: though some of the drawings they claimed as their own were odds and sods from the novel, more than a few were portraits of friends from school, so it wasn’t just my intellectual property on the line. Together with some friends, we kicked up a fuss and had the thief’s account taken down. To their credit, DeviantArt were pretty quick. I don’t suppose I’ll ever know who the culprit was, though reason tells me it could only have been somebody I knew. I learned a valuable lesson, though: art is easy to steal.
The second reason is the simplest one: there’s just too much to say in one sitting. I can see that on those occasions when somebody leafs through one of my journals. There’s so much going on in there and none of it in any particular order, and without a map, you’d never know where to start. Entering into a writer’s world is probably a rather daunting experience, like arriving at a house party and finding you don’t know any of the guests. You could try. You could sum up the Lord of the Rings saga by saying it’s all about a quest to destroy a magical ring, but that leaves out the silent terror of the Mines of Moria, the treachery of Gollum and the mournful autumnal kingdom of the elves; the details that make the world come to life. Story-telling is a necessarily one-sided pastime, and since my day job places such an emphasis on listening, my favourite hobby is something I try to avoid at all costs, because it feels selfishly out of sync.
Today, I’m going to break a habit. I’m going to let you into my world.
We can start where it all began. Where it all began to take shape, I mean. According to my journal, that was at 15.30 on Friday 13th November, 2015, on a rocky outcrop beside the Santuario de Nuestra Señora de la Montaña just outside the city of Cáceres. I’d been writing “the book” for about twelve years by then – I can trace the first draft back to 2003 – but it was here in Extremadura that everything suddenly fell into place. As I looked out across the plains of Cáceres and upon the city thrown into shadow by the setting sun, something magical happened. It was as though I was staring at a giant jigsaw puzzle that was suddenly arranging itself into perfect order before my eyes. I wrote myself a note in my journal – “What might this place have looked like in the 1600s?”. Sometime later I pencilled in two words above that line: “it begins!”.
And so it began. The cast of characters I had carried in my head and in my heart for over a decade moved to Spain, and the kingdom of Meridia was born.
Picture a corner of the world where the fields go on forever. A land of immense blue skies and sparsely-populated hill-towns, clustered like barnacles about the few slopes that rise out of the motionless sea of earth, where the merciless sun comes down with unfettered fury in summer, and in winter, chill winds howl unimpeded across the plains. A kingdom that has seen people come and go: Moorish forts atop the limestone crags that the vultures have not claimed for their own; Roman arches and theatres rising out of the earth like the bones of some long-dead giant; and, deep in the mountains that ring this hidden kingdom, the faded artwork of a people so ancient that they have long since faded into oblivion. And such mountains! Look to the north on a clear day and you can see them towering mightily over the fields, vast and blue like the sky above, their peaks scarred with snow well into the spring. That’s where the old forests cling on, fugitives from the axes that carved the Roman Empire from Spanish lumber many centuries ago. And where the forests give way to the water, powerful rivers bubble up from the deep, thundering through the hills and carving sheer ravines through the finger-like ridges that splay across the plains from the Sistema Central.
The best of it is that I don’t have to invent this world at all, because it actually exists, and her name is Extremadura. All I had to do was to imagine her in somebody else’s hands. My hands.
When I first set out to create Meridia – named, of course, for the city of Mérida – I initially wanted to keep the real-world location a secret, until the close of the story, at least. It didn’t take me long to realise just how impossible that was going to be from a worldbuilding perspective, particularly over a saga spanning seven books, but since “big reveals” are and always have been a majorly appealing part of story-telling, I played along for a time. I was also still reluctant to fully transition to the use of Spanish people and place names, so I had a go at creating names of my own.
Casiers. Barosse. Meroon. Looking back now, I’m cringing already at how disgustingly English they sound. But then, few tales come into being in a matter of moments. Worldbuilding takes a long time, longer by far than it takes to tell the story itself. I can only guess at how many hours Tolkien must have poured into the creation of Arda. It’s taken me all of twenty years.
Here’s the same map, drawn about a year later. It’s the eighth of a total of ten maps of the peninsula in the same journal (when students ask me how I can draw a map of Spain from memory… this. This is how). It’s probably the most accurate, and the one I still use today when mapping out the events of the saga, the exception being the retroactive introduction of the “corredor cordobés” that cuts a swathe from Córdoba to the city of Cádiz, separating Meridia from Granada and providing a political flashpoint for the plot. Ringing the map, you can see the history I’ve had to build up around it. I tell you, writing a historical novel is one thing, but writing allohistory – that is, an alternative timeline – is a messy, time-consuming business. If I didn’t keep a journal, I doubt I’d remember all the details. Nevertheless, they’re absolutely essential to giving your world an identity of its own, just as the “Greatest Generation” and the “fight them on the beaches” speech are integral parts of our collective memory.
Creating five hundred years of history for a kingdom which never existed is quite the task. Beginning it is easy, as is the wrapping it all up at the end. It’s what you do in between that’s the trouble. How do you explain away, for example, the men who changed the world who hailed from that corner of the real world? How do you rewrite an essentially Spanish history in a timeline where Granada did not fall until the middle of the seventeenth century, where Seville was in foreign hands for the greater part of the Age of Discoveries, and – perhaps most importantly of all – where almost all of Spain’s conquistadors from Cortés and Pizarro to Francisco de Orellana and Núñez de Balboa hailed from a land that did not carry the flag of Castile?
To be honest, that’s half of the fun, trying to find radically new ways of retelling history. It’s why I wrote my dissertation on the Cronica sarracina, arguably one of the greatest works of fiction ever sold as fact in Spain (or was it fact sold as fiction?). I’m doing the same thing with Meridia: I’m telling the story of Spain through a glass darkly, holding up a devil’s mirror to the country I know best.
And once the world has taken shape in your head, it’s time to set your characters running across its empty plains, so your voice can follow them, painting their footprints with words.
I take my inspiration from the world around me. From books, mostly, but also from photographs, legends, paintings and even conversations with strangers. More than one character has slipped between the pages of the book over the years after a brief encounter with one of those larger-than-life types. In essence, the saga is my paean to my grandfather’s country, so I try to weave as many details in as I can. The madmen of the Hurdes. The seven chairs of Mérida. Goya’s fight with cudgels. The mystery of who really got to the New World first and the Lisbon Earthquake. The odd real person makes a cameo appearance from time to time: Diego Velázquez, Michiel de Ruyter and the lost children of the sack of Baltimore. I get the same satisfaction threading their tales into the narrative as I did from peppering each and every essay I wrote at university with “ursulas” (unnecessarily farfetched sidetracks that somehow relate back to the essay question, named for the sea witch in The Little Mermaid). When you’ve been writing the same story for twenty years, you’ve got to find new ways to keep the game fresh.
And sometimes, it’s not a book or a person that finds its way into the worldbuilding effort, but the real world itself, in real time. Like this little snippet from the journal. I’ll leave you with the date (24/6/2016) and let you guess what it’s referring to.
Worldbuilding is laborious. It takes a bloody long time if you plan to do it right. It took me a matter of seconds to decide to move the fictional kingdom of my childhood into Extremadura, but it’s taken my characters all of five years to finish unpacking. The central characters of the story have only borne their new Spanish names for a little over a year. But it’s easily one of the most entertaining parts of the story-telling business, and it doesn’t half smooth out the writing process when you finally find the time to sit down at the computer and have a solid crack at the next chapter.
So… what would you like to know? Asking for somebody else’s thoughts on what is nothing more or less than the single most precious creation of one’s life is more than a little unnerving – I’m not afraid to admit I got the shivers writing that question – but the purpose of story-telling is to share, and I could do with airing the world inside my head for a change.
Alternatively, if you’re a writer too, does my experience with the worldbuilding process sound familiar? I’d love to hear your thoughts. BB x
The Book of Barnabas 