Two Ducks

2007-09-15T19:39:00.000-07:00

Just been playing around with embedding Google spreadsheets. Here's the result of doing a Google blogsearch on "NZETC" via the importFeed function in Google spreadsheets, presented as an embedded spreadsheet:

Note that this spreadsheet is "live" and will update over time.

Whakapapa: fine above the clouds

2007-08-28T18:51:00.001-07:00

How to spend a Wednesday. Weather looked pretty ratty until we reached the ski-field but great after that.

2007-08-14T18:42:00.001-07:00

2007-08-09T19:20:00.000-07:00

A squid (the Hawaiian bobtail squid, in this case).
One of my favourite creatures — very beautiful to watch with subtly changing colours. With their large eyes looking at you, they appear to be very intelligent / conscious.

Turakina river

2007-08-06T04:23:00.001-07:00

The Turakina river close to breaking into the lagoon

2003-12-27T15:06:00.000-08:00

There's many aspects of life in New Zealand that have been hitting the back of my retinas in the three or so weeks that I've been back, but one that sits quite strongly with me has been the white crosses seen planted on the roadside verges.

I remember this started happening about six or seven years ago, a white cross being planted by the family of a road accident victim to mark the site of the accident, and to act as a warning to other road users. However, inevitably, since this started happening, the number of white crosses has grown with the occurence of accidents over the years, and it is sometimes startling to see so many over the course of a short journey, and not always in places which you could appreciate as dangerous spots on the road.

As well as being struck by the number of crosses that have appeared, it is also startling and saddening to see the number that are regularly maintained, with a bunch of flowers left at the base or a wreath placed over the cross. One on the main road not far from where I'm staying is a simple white cross, but having the name of the unfortunate victim ("Fiona") painted across it means that it catches my attention each time I pass it, and makes me feel a little sad.

Talking about it with my mother, she told me about passing one on her drive into town where there is often a young boy seated next to the cross playing a guitar, and it left me to speculate whether it was a mother, sister, girlfriend or other that the boy was playing to.

These white crosses do remind me that death is not so far away, and make me think how little we sometimes appreciate our lives and those around us until they are taken from us, while of course serving in other ways to allow the families affected to grieve and act as reminders to other road users.

The road safety message is spread in other ways too; although much on New Zealand television is unmitigated crap, each christmas period there are usually one or two ads that feature on the box concerned with reminding the public about the dangers of the roads, and these ads are almost without exception chillingly effective.

The current ad features sequences of domestic and holiday interiors, such baches and caravans, with a camera panning across holiday snaps of people together, families in couples, and others, say pinned up on walls and fridges. As we are presented with each photograph of people enjoying themselves, one or more people fade away from the photograph, denoting deaths on the roads. All this to a soundtrack of a cover of Tears for Fears "Mad World".

A few years ago, while hitching up through the country at the start of the university holidays, I remember ending up one evening standing in a small pool of light underneath the solitary streetlight in a small place called Himitangi, trying desperately to cadge a lift from one of the few passing motorists. Eventually a car pulled over, and after a couple of questions from the driver, who had just finished a shift at a local processing plant, I was kindly offered a bed for the night at the house he shared with his wife, as it was pretty obvious I was going to have little chance of finding a lift. They were both lovely people, but both were almost unbearably sad, as their young son had died in a road accident about a year back, the son having been in the back of their car when they were hit by another vehicle pulling out in front of them. Although it's a number of years since that night, I'll always remember the mixture of generous hospitality and sadness that I experienced, and in spite of what I've been experiencing in the last little while, I know that it just can't compare to the loss of a child.

2003-12-18T12:30:00.000-08:00

A New Zealand road trip demands the consumption of New Zealand road trip junk food.

I've just been down to Wellington for a few days, and on the six hour trip on the way down I kept myself going with a meat pie (steak and oyster), a twin-scoop icecream (fig and honey, and boysenberry), and a Cookie Time cookie (apricot and chocolate).

Arriving in Wellington with my hunger sated, I found a beautiful city basking in the sunshine, wooden villas straggling across the step hillsides. It seems that almost everyone lives in houses with fantastic views across the harbour, or out into the Cook Strait with the Kaikoura mountains rising up from the South Island in the distance.

There are some things that appealed to me immediately, such as the geography of the city; there's something about living in a flat city that is a bit soul-deadening, and the abundance of hills fringing Wellington's harbour defines the routes one takes and provides many spots to get viewpoints over the city. The presence of hills changes the accessibility of certain parts of a city, with some parts becoming more remote and intriguing, and they become hard-won destinations if reached on foot or by bicycle. As a result of being sited on a hillside, sections of the city develop more of an identity, being distinguished from their surroundings and becoming more visual because of the elevations.
One evening I sat with friends on the grassy slopes of Mt Victoria and watched the sun disappear over the far hills, picking out landmarks in the city below while eating kumera chips.

Another feature of Wellington that I can't help relating to is the closeness to the sea; though truely sandy beaches are few, it feels so good to walk around the rocks and through the coarse sand while watching breakers crash a few feet out from shore, and there's something that's cleansing and good for the soul about surf beaches.
The friends I stayed with had a dog that was born to swim in the sea, and indeed he'd be in the water and a good part of the way to the South Island before you'd even found a stick to throw for him to retrieve.

Walking along the beaches, there's something about the flax bushes, the paua shells in the sand, and the scrub-covered cliffs looming overhead that ties into so many childhood memories, and so quickly makes me feel at home again. With the hills and the harbour hemming Wellington in, it is easy to get away from the city and to find oneself in more natural surroundings, and there's many places to go walking or mountain biking.

As for the social side, there seems to be more culture available than the city deserves (more than you can shake a stick at, as the kiwi expression goes), and there's no shortage of music, theatre and the arts. On the night I arrived I was taken to check out some local bands, while the next night saw us at a Calexico concert, who seemed genuinely surprised at the appreciative reception they received.

While I was in Wellington I managed to significantly increase my knowledge of the layout of the city, check out some of the culture, catch up with good friends, and get a flat organised for when I move down permanently after christmas.
Although it was a busy few days, everything seemed to dovetail together quite nicely, helped by the fact that no place in the central Wellington area is more than a few minutes away from another place, at least by car. Indeed, after being used to planning hour-long journeys across London, it's almost too easy to find yourself on the other side of town within ten minutes.

For the time that I was there the city seemed to be showing me her best profile, and my curiosity about the darker side of Wellington showed when my friend told me I was asking too many questions about the bad weather (Wellington has a reputation for foul weather and high winds, being as it is on the Cook Strait).

One of the first purchases I'll be making when I arrive is a mountain bike, which seems essential given the accesibility of the city and the temptations of the hills fringing Wellington.
All told, it seems to be the right place in New Zealand for me to be living in, and luckily I'll have the advantage of getting to know the city during the summer months.

2003-12-08T17:55:00.000-08:00

One thing that I've yet to get my head around since arriving back in New Zealand is how to deal with pronounciation, specifically Maori placename pronounciation.

Over the last twenty years or so, there's been quite an emphasis on pronouncing Maori placenames correctly, so the "wangeray" that you used to hear on the TV news when I was a kid has become "fangharay" (the actual spelling of the placename is Whangarei).

This was all well underway before I left the country, and now that I'm back, thinking that the correct pronounciation is the one to use, this is what I've been trying to employ in conversation.
However, it seems there are still plenty of people who are very happy using the old-style pronounciations, but not in all cases, and it's really hard to know which is more acceptable or comprehensible.

For example, my mother lives at a place called Apata, which correctly pronounced should be something like "Ah PAH ta", but the typically Kiwi squashed vowel pronounciation that seems to put the flicker of recognition on people's faces is "A pi tuh".

So, it's a bit of a cultural minefield to have to negotiate. Yesterday's interview went well, and it all sounds very promising regarding my chances of getting onto the publishing course. During the interview the big "M" question appeared, as I knew it would, which goes something like are you familiar and comfortable with Maori culture and Treaty of Waitangi issues?.

I guess eight years out of the country means that they'll cut you some slack, but happily I was also able to relate to the interviewer my time at university studying the Treaty of Waitangi and New Zealand history, and I think this qualified as a good enough answer. The Maori culture question is one that pops up again and again - there's no particular problem I have with that, but it is a question that you do have to have an answer to - "I don't know" just doesn't cut it.

2003-12-07T14:22:00.000-08:00

The great thing about running is that you can do it almost anywhere.

I've been conscious over the last little while that I've not been doing too much exercise. The swimming that I took up earlier in the year has petered out, though I'm keen to continue once I find myself settled near a pool. In the meantime, the one form of exercise I have occasionally been doing is putting on my trainers and going for a run around the neighbourhood every now and then.

Although a long time ago I remember thinking that it was a boring form of exercise (i.e. before I really attempted it), the thing about running is that it provides much more than just the physical exercise. It gives me a chance to get my body into a rhythm and let me mind work on some of the things I've been experiencing recently. It also provides a good way of checking out the surrounding neighbourhood; it's amazing the sorts of things I've discovered about the areas in which I've lived by running down some of the paths and streets I'd otherwise never have a reason to explore. It also lets me take a bit of time to enjoy the day, as I typically go running in the morning or the late evening, and on a fine day it's a great experience to be soaking up some sunshine while noticing the workings of the community around me.

This morning was quite nicely typical. Currently staying between Tauranga and Kati Kati, I took the car down to Omokoroa, a small beach suburb separated by about 15 kilometers from the urban sprawl of Tauranga, and ran through the roads leading around the harbour and along the foreshore. Being a fine day, the air was clogged with pollen, sitting like a transparent blanket over the landscape, and everyone I passed wished me a good morning (I'm still getting used to how spontaneously polite and good mannered people in NZ can be).

So, after an hour or so running around Omokoroa, I feel quite nicely chilled out and relaxed, which is going to be important as I've got a phone interview this afternoon for a year long publishing course that I'm keen to get into in Wellington. I'm pretty confident and relaxed about the interview, but at the same time it's been quite a while since I've had to go through any sort of interview process, and I really want to find myself in this publishing course come next February.

2003-12-06T14:42:00.000-08:00

Ever wondered about some of the big questions?

Over the last couple of days I've found myself reading a book called "What Should I Do With My Life" by Po Bronson. It didn't so much leap off the bookshelf at me as sidle up and give me a nudge in the ribs. The question the title of the book asks is at least partway valid for me at the moment as I'm in transition between lifestyles and careers, but it's not occupying all of my waking time as I think I've got a good idea of what I want to do with myself, at least over the next little while.

Still, flicking through the pages I realised the author had done some good work, getting many people to relate to him their experiences in the process of looking for what they felt they should be doing with their lives, and for some what it means and feels like once they know what they should be doing with their lives.
And the thing is, he's interested in these people and not just using them as an excuse to pop out a book.

I think I've learned more than ever over the last few month's how illuminating other people's experiences can often be, and this book is crammed full of just that, filtered beneath the author's very sharp gaze. In fact, in asking his question to the people that he encountered, Bronson ends up becoming involved in their process of discovery and exploration - his subjects let him know that his involvement in their lives is not a one way street, and they make him think deeply about what he is contributing and reflecting back to them.

Regardless of whether the title of the book is a question that you're asking yourself or not, it makes incredibly fascinating reading, partly because of the perceptive style of writing, but also because there is much in these people's experiences and philosophies that sings out about the human condition, and what it is to be human.

2003-12-01T12:35:00.000-08:00

Well, I've made it to the other side of the world, and emerged blinking from the aircraft into the strong sunlight.

Twenty six hours in transit was enough time to read two novels (As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning by Laurie Lee, and Youth by J M Coetzee), read two magazines (The Economist and Forbes,), watch five movies (The Incredible Hulk, Spellbound, T3, Notting Hill, American Wedding), eat two breakfasts and two dinners (Red Thai Chicken and Beef Casserole), and have two showers in the hospitality longues between flights.

With so much to pack in you'd think there'd be no time to sleep. Well, actually, there was plenty of time to sleep and this would have been my number one preferred activity, but the experience of flying seems to prevent my body from doing much dozing, and I think I managed four hours in total.
The combination of the fetid atmosphere, upright seating position, and constant engine hum is more than enough to prevent me from falling into a comfortable sleep, so bleary eyed I find myself squinting at the movie playing on the seatback video screen while miles high above Indonesia and between time zones.

Now that I'm back on firm ground, I've been doing lots of sleeping, and after two days, almost feel human again. Next time I do this trip a stop-over is definately on the cards.

2003-11-24T15:28:00.000-08:00

Anytime anyone asks you to explain why rugby is a better game than football (i.e. "soccer" for those of us who live in countries where there is more than one game that obviously qualifies as a type of football), just mention this bit from the Guardian newspaper's sports section, referring to the return of the World Cup-winning English rubgy side:

"The last time hundreds of English fans turned up at an airport to greet a returning England team was after the 1990 football World Cup when they lost the semi-final on penalties. Then the popular hero was Paul Gascoigne, and he greeted his public wearing a pair of false breasts."

Enough said, I think.

2003-11-24T15:05:00.000-08:00

My stumbling around Europe continues.

At the moment I'm in Munich, visting friends and my god-daughter who has recently become a one-year old.
It's funny what being around young children does to you. I've only had limited experience of young children in my life, and it's quite amusing to find yourself making disjointed sounds that have no resemblance to normal conversation. Not only that, but you find yourself chasing said god-daughter around the room, between and underneath the furniture on all fours.
She's really lovely, and thankfully appreciates my presence (something to do with my expressive eyebrows, I think).

Thankfully at the end of the evening I get to retire to a far corner of the house, so I don't get to hear her when she starts to grizzle at 2:30am, unlike her parents who get to hear this only too well.

Much of today was spent at the Deutsches Museum, sort of like the Science Museum in London, expect with a very German slant. They had a very good section on printing and print technologies, partly because many of the inventors in the field were German (Gutenberg included).

Also, there was an excellent section on Astro-nautics (I think that's what it was called). partly because again they were making a point that all modern space rocket technology derived from the WWII V2 rocket and Werner Von Braun, its architect and subsequent head of the Nasa programme to send a mand to the moon.
I'm not one to quibble though about the national slant, and it was all very interesting stuff, if a bit boyish.

2003-11-22T05:21:00.000-08:00

Something that's kept me busy for the last six weeks or so while I've been back in London are two printing courses that I've been doing at Kensington and Chelsea college, each a day a week.

It's been great to get back to doing printmaking, as it's something that I've really enjoyed in the past, and I've been learning quite a bit about some of the techniques I was unfamiliar about, helped by some very good tutors.

One thing that I've learnt during this time doesn't necessarily concern the printing process itself; I spent a fair bit of time doing drawings and hand-cutting plates, and these tasks can take a long time to complete depending on the difficulty and complexity of the image. What I've learnt in the process of doing these tasks, I think, is the reason why many people think that they are unable to draw or be an artist. Also, looking at some of the fantastically detailed works I've seen in some of the exhibitions around town in recent weeks (particularly the exhibition of contemporary Chinese printmakers at the British Library) has led me to the same idea.

There's no getting around the fact that much great and interesting artwork takes a significant investment of time. Doing my own work, I've been reminded of the patience that's needed to complete work, and I think a lot of people (myself included, all too often) get impatient to produce results quickly.
I'm sure that many people can produce great artwork if they put in the time, but too many of us expect to shoehorn results into a too small space of time, and maybe suffer from a lack of concentration.

The funny thing is, that when you get immersed in the work, you don't seem to be concious of how much time is passing, and are not bothered by the length of effort required.
I think this is something to do with the left brain / right brain thing; to simplify, the left side of the brain is quick and impatient, whereas the right side of the brain is more interested in the work itself. I do notice myself feeling quite relaxed and satisfied while doing some of these long tasks, once I get beyond any sense of impatience I may have about getting the job finished.

I'm sure if we all allowed ourselves more time, many of us would find that we could surprise ourselves with our abilities to draw and paint - I know I have.

I think there are also plenty of artists out there who expect quick results, and may not be so interested in investing the time required.
To paraphrase Banksy, "Why is it that many artists are prepared to suffer for their art, but not many artists are prepared to learn to draw?"

2003-11-17T15:23:00.000-08:00

For some reason someone's erected a wind turbine on the southbank, just next to the Royal Festival Hall. I'm sure that this is not in order to pump an incremental bit of extra power into the grid supplying London, so maybe it's intended to get the general public to appreciate wind turbines as emblematic symbols of the modern age in order to soften us all up for future wind farms that will be springing up on skylines across the country.

Ah, here we go - turns out that this is basically what it is all about. From the 18th of November it will be generating something called the Shell Electric Storm, which will be a display of coloured lights and mist surrounding said wind turbine in order to "capture the imagination of Londoners and visitors to the capital and help build their awareness of renewable sources such as wind."

On another matter, why do I seem to have the knack of sustaining an average two day cold for more than a week?
My body seems only too efficient at producing large quantities of mucus (bet you wanted to know that), but the good thing is that it's got me off smoking for the last week.

At the moment I feel like my ears are stuffed with cotten wool, and I'm doing involuntary impersonations of Marlene Dietrich, albeit without the accent and one or two octaves lower.

2003-11-17T15:10:00.000-08:00

I've been doing a lot of finding out about various aspects of relationships over the past few months, both from first-hand experience and from hearing about the experiences of friends.

As a result I've been doing a fair bit of learning and thinking about it all, and have been surprised at some of the things I've discovered. For instance, in an age such as we are living in now, we all have much more choice about how we will live our personal and public lives, but the flipside of this seems to be that we get to experience much more uncertainty.
I think I've always been a person who expects the world to deliver substantial amounts of black and white, but too often things are couched in various shades of grey. And the more that I think I know myself and what I want, perversely the more room there seems to be for these shades of grey to flourish.

Maybe this has got something to do with knowing enough to know what it is that we don't know (if you can follow that).

At university one of the subjects I majored in was economics, which I always found fascinating from the social side. However, the fatal flaw in the science of economics is that by and large it assumes that people make rational choices.
Fine for some of the time, but all too often we all make choices that don't have too much to do with rational thought at all, but are guided by a gut instinct or emotion. Sometimes our guts seem to have a better handle on the truth than our brains, but not all the time, and it's a wonder of the human condition that we've evolved into something that can be both supremely rational and irrational.

I guess life would be a bit boring otherwise.

2003-11-12T06:02:00.000-08:00

I've been bothered a bit over the last week or two about this blog.

Although I've been putting up ocassional entries, I'm finding fewer things to write about, and haven't been feeling overly motivated about keeping it up to date.
After having a trawl through a number of other blogs the other day, I realised what the problem was. Much of my recent writings have not been too personal, more observational regarding little things in everyday life that I notice. Reading through some of the other blogs I've found, I realised that although the content and style differs incredibly, most of the best say something about the author and are often quite personal. In fact, a few go way beyond this and report stuff that the author would probably not be telling their collegues, or even partner ocassionally; it's funny how intimate people end up getting with the faceless masses on the Internet.

So, it's important I think to find the right balance between public and private when writing up a blog entry, and this is why I've been having a few problems with finding what to say.
There's been a lot going on in my life in recent times, and this weblog has only been reflecting a part of that. I think I need to change the balance of what I'm putting up, and stray a bit more into the personal.

Some of the other weblogs that I follow can be totally candid about everything in the author's life, largely I'd guess because the author is sure that noone they know is reading there work. As I know that a number of friends and family follow this, I'll not be putting every thought and reaction up here, but I will try to start writing a bit more honestly about my internal life, as well as what I'm finding going on around me.

Don't worry about the new approach though, I think I've got a reasonable nose for detecting and avoiding melodrama!

2003-11-10T08:55:00.000-08:00

The area around Upper Street and Essex Road in Islington is full of plenty of restaurants, cafes, gift shops and the like, all quite happy to relieve you of your money, but there are a handful of shops that really stand out for me.

Starting down Essex Road from Angel, there's a shop on the right hand side called Past Caring, which has got to be one of the best junk shops in London.
The window is always full of fantastically shaped glass ashtrays and vases (there was a time in the 1970s when the ashtray was almost a form of high art), and there's usually plenty of interesting crockery, clothes and fabrics from the fities, sixties and seventies.

If you're lucky you'll ocassionally find an old dansette record player or funky radio lurking in a corner, and there are always a few weird and wonderful things that have spent much of their life hanging on the walls in someone's bachelor pad.

I am physically unable to walk past this shop without poking my head in for five or ten minutes to see what's new, and given that everything is priced at junk shop prices rather than antique shop prices there's always a healthy turnover of stuff.

Across the road is a shop that I've never bought anything from, but one which is certainly much weirder than Past Caring. Called Get Stuffed, it's a taxidermists, and the window is always full of animals with suitably startled expressions.

There's the odd dog or two, lease in mouth waiting eternally for its owner to reappear, but there are also much weirder creatures.
Walking past the other night, I remember seeing the following animals: an ostrich, a bat, a leeming looking like he'd just encountered the cliff he was going to jump over (and yes, I know it's a myth), a bat, a brace of hare hanging from the roof, owls, weasels, jays, moles blinking in the light, and weirdest of all, a London pigeon (for what reason would someone decide that it was worth stuffing the all too common street pigeon?).

I don't know who buys these animals, but I do notice that the turnover in Get Stuffed is a lot slower than that in Past Caring. I do also remember the owner getting into trouble a while back for having certain animals in the shop that are considered rare and endangered, though I can't remember which.

2003-11-02T06:40:00.000-08:00

I'm not been much of a dance-orientated person for most of my life, but I've found myself introduced to the world of dance over this weekend in the form of a dance-orientated small film festival, and have been very pleased by what I've seen.

The most impressive film was about Carmen Amaya, the famous flamenco dancer, who captured the world's attention during the middle of the 20th century with her wild and furious innovations of the gypsy dance.
There was plenty of archival footage, including scenes from the movies that she appeared in, and her dancing was electric and very emotional.

Up to her time the traditional flamenco dancer either danced more expressively with the feet, or otherwise with the upper body, but for Carmen her whole body was used in the dance. The footwork was incredible, with very distinct and sharp stacatto threatening to drill holes in the floor, while her upper body would twirl and engage in all manner of improvised and set pieces.

She was a strong innovator, changing the nature of flamenco dance by using many of the male dance conventions in her dance, dancing in trousers at times rather than a dress, and using castanets and clicked fingers where they traditionally didn't appear, and changing the content and form of the traditionallt set styles of flamenco dance.

And not only was the dancing incredible, but the level of muscianship accompanying her was fantastic, with some of the best flamenco guitaring I've ever heard, particularly from Sabicas Castellon.

2003-11-02T06:21:00.000-08:00

One thing common to most people organising a party is the dreaded fear that starts developing around 7pm on the eveniing of the party that noone will turn up.

I know I, like everyone else, have experienced this at least a couple of times in my life, and this Friday just gone it was my flatmate who was going through the same experience.
She'd decided to organise a Halloween party and had gone to some lengths with the decorations and her makeup (dressed up in a definately scary witch costume, she is also possessed with a very wicked natural cackle). Being a large flat (around 20 flatmates), some were going to be at the party but a number of others already had other plans, including a dinner party going on elsewhere in the flat.

C was starting to get quite anxious around about 8pm that there was nobody downstairs in the large basement area dedicated to the party, and we did our best to assure her that it'd be OK and that everyone would turn up when they'd been thrown out of the pubs, it being a Friday night.

And sure enough, people starting drifting in about 10-10:30pm, and things were very lively for the rest of the night, and much fun was had.
It's not necessarily a London thing, as other places where I've lived parties don't often get going properly until later in the evening, but the extreme example I encountered this summer as in Madrid where people don't even consider going out to a party until it's somewhere near midnight.

In the end C was very happy with the success of her party, but I did sympathise with the way she was feeling earlier in the evening.
There's plenty of fears that are irrational to have, but that doesn't stop us human beings having them anyway.

2003-10-29T09:49:00.000-08:00

I've found myself back in London in time to check out some of the films in the annual London Film Festival.

Always a cornucopia of cinema, the trick is to read between the lines of the film reviews in the programme, which are always unstintingly favourable, and work out those films that really do deserve your attention. Once you've done that, you then have to work out whether the films that you want to see are going to reappear again in future on wide release, or whether the film festival is going to possibly be the only occasion to see them, and therefore you are totally justified in paying the slight premium that the film festival tickets go for.

Notable films that I've seen in the last week include:

The Station Agent
Lost in Translation (Bill Murray at his wistful best)
Wilbur (Wants to Kill Himself)
The Mother

2003-10-26T07:00:00.000-08:00

I found history in the making passing me overhead on Friday.

Coming out of my printing course, I heard the familiar concorde roar that many Londoners know, especially those that live underneath the flight path and have to pause all verbal communication while it passes by.
No sooner than the first concorde had passed directly overhead, landing gear dangling ready for the descent into Heathrow than the roar of the second concorde started.

In fact the last three BA scheduled concorde services were flying in to Heathrow in procession, each separated by about two minutes. In spite of the fuel-guzzling, loud and envornmentally unfriendly aircraft that it is, many people who have never been able to afford a flight (such as myself) still have a special affection for it. It's a symbol of an acheivement that may not be repeated, something that belongs more to fantasy than reality in many ways, and something that makes you think of things less ordinary.

So, it was wonderful and yet sad to see these three concordes descending together to Heathrow for the final time, and many people were rushing out of pubs and stopping their cars on the side of the road in order to get a final glimpse of the great aircraft.

2003-10-18T11:52:00.000-07:00

I've been wandering around the Southbank with a friend for most of the afternoon today, and it really is one of London's under-used asset. I can't count the number of times I've mentioned some of the places on the Southbank to people and just received a blank stare in return, and it's a bit depressing that more people don't realise how cool the place is.

At the moment there's a lot more people than usual making a visit, and this is because of David Blaine's attempt to spend 44 days in a glass box (which he has practically completed, today being the last day). I'm amazed at the attention that this has attracted, and it really does make me wonder why people find it so fascinating.

Would the same people consider lining up outside the visitors entrance of the prison when an inmate goes on a hunger strike? Is this not effectively the same thing? Although I'd personally not like to try to stave myself while sitting in a glass box for 44 days (particularly not while suspended over the heads of a less-than-adoring public), there are many examples where people have been through a similar ordeal in the past, and it is of course a test of endurance, not an illusion.

It could be that this is a public relations exercise by the GLA to get more people to make use of the Southbank, and if so, it has worked stunningly well. And if this is the cause I applaud the end, if not the means.

Reasons to visit the Southbank, in my humble opinion, include the following. You'll notice that the chance to see an American illusionist go without a few hot meals while being gawped at by those with nothing better to do does not feature on this list.

The Royal Festival Hall, my favourite London landmark
The National Film Theatre
The outdoor book sellers, underneath Waterloo bridge
The bars and ambience of Gabrial's Wharf
The opportunities to cut a few ollies with your skateboard
The London Eye
The Design Museum
The pubs that offer good beer and food, with a view across the Thames
The Tate Modern
The new GLA headquarters
The chance to walk across the new Hungerford bridges, not to mention the Millenium Bridge
The chance to look back across the river and thumb your nose at the West End, while admiring the lights strung through the trees on the far bank.
The opportunity to stroll along the riverside, somehow feeling that you are in Europe and not just the UK.

2003-10-16T04:12:00.000-07:00

When I was in Barcelona I was surprised to find some "banksys" stencilled onto some of the walls in the Barrio Gotico.

Banksy is the nom-de-plume of a London graffiti art terrorist (terrorist in the good sense), whose stencilled are provocative and humorous, and typically very nicely subversive. He's certainly been getting a lot of attention, and as well as being very creative, seems to be pretty busy given the number of images appearing around London (and, as I found, Barcelona - I wonder which other parts of Europe sport his spray-painted works?).

The Guardian has some background and images, while elsewhere there is a series of more extensive Banksy images.

There's a lot of anti-establishment humour in the images, and the style tends to be distinctive and recognisable. Given the level of recognition that he's acheived, I think it's impossible for him to remain uncoopted - the image on the new Blur album is his, and although publicly anonymous up to now, I'd guess this won't continue forever.

2003-10-13T13:36:00.000-07:00

You know those flyers that get thrust at you as you walk down the street?
Chances are that they are for an indie-goth-trance-ibiza club night, or a new branch of a trendy new coffee chain, but not always.

I was wandering past the National Gallery this afternoon, and an old white-haired guy waved a flyer my way. Given that he didn't look the right age to be promoting either an indie-goth-trance-ibiza club night or a new branch of a trendy new coffee chain, I took it and read it as I walked on. Rather than describe it's contents, it's easier if I reproduce them below, and let you see why it made me quite happily bemused:

"The painting you may have seen, Madonna and Child, reputedly by Raphael and owned by the Duke of Northumberland who wants to sell it for a large sum to the Getty Trust, banker and money launderer to the Anglo-American establishment, is acutally painted by me. The Duke is my brother and has effectively stolen the painting from me, and in passing it off as by Raphael he is also passing himself off as an impoversihed aristocrat, when in fact he is one of the richest people in the country and he and his cronies want to rule the world. As to how he thinks selling the Madonna will help him is another matter, but why else should he be selling this painting if it is not for some political purpose?
Whether or not you contribute my borther gets the money, but if you do contribute the painting is more likely to stay in the country and I am more likely to recover either my intellectual property or the money."

I'm still not sure what to make of this, but it's truely multi-faceted in it's weirdness, don't you think?
There seems to be one of two dubious points in there (I mean, everyone knows that it is Tony Blair and George Bush who are really running the world), and maybe a smidgeon of paranoia, but whatever it's certain that this guy must have a great and entertaining story to tell. Or, given that he was standing outside the National Gallery, maybe it's an example of performance art?

2003-10-11T10:23:00.000-07:00

Today has been an absolute pearler weatherwise, that combination of a brazen blue sky and settled weather with the chestnut and plane trees dressed in their amber coloured cloaks.

For some reason, although it's not true, autumn days like today seem to be the longest in the entire calendar. Maybe it's something to do with an unexpected blessing of such gorgeous weather after a few days of warning of winter's onset, or maybe it's just the realisation that a day like today will be one of the last for a number of months to come and should therefore be savoured appropriately.

Even Finsbury Park manages to look stunning today, something that I'd not thought possible previously during my eight years in London.
The squirrels are plump and demanding to be fed, and have less fear than at other times of the year. Watching them bury nuts, they really seem to be gardeners in minuture, springing around the lawn to carefully select the best plot, scooping out the earth, and then gently tamping down the soil afterwards with their hind feet.

It can be a great time of year, and I think I'd gladly swap a fair share of summer for a similar number of autumnal days such as today.

2003-10-10T10:05:00.000-07:00

One of the joys of wandering around London is keeping your eyes peeled for some of the historical detail tucked away in various parts of the city.

Over the years that I've lived in London I've noticed quite a number of horse drinking troughs, provided through the munificence of the Metropolitan Drinking Fountain and Cattle Trough Association. These days of course they are redundant, but they typically have preservation orders and are now retained as historic momuments.

Some I've noticed are filled with flowers, but more often they are simply filled with the litter of passersby. Each time I notice one I think about what sort of city London must have been when the roads were given over to horses and carts, and I wonder how the problems of horse-drawn traffic would have stacked up against the car congestion that we have these days.

I do remember reading a while back that many Londoners welcomed the appearance of automobiles, as it meant the streets would be free of horse dung. Little did they realise that they'd be swapping one form of pollution for another.

2003-09-30T07:35:00.000-07:00

Sick of doodling the same old doodles on the postit pad while bored / on the phone / changing mental gears? Then you might be interested in the Big Draw, a week of nationally organised activites to get people scribbling with their chewed pencils in a more creative fashion.

There are a number of notable figures from the illustration arts popping up, including Quentin Blake, David Hockney, Gerald Scarfe and Posy Simmonds, and too many events to shake a stick at.

Partly for my own benefit, here's a list of the events taking place in London during the week.

So, time to sharpen up those HBs and flex the fingers.

2003-09-29T05:27:00.000-07:00

One thing I'll miss about the UK will be the beer. For some reason that no-one's fully explained to me, the UK, alone in all of Europe and the wider world, persists in its tradition of creating bitters and ales rather than pilsener-style lagers (for a primer on the differences in beer types, check out this page).

There's absolutely nothing wrong with this in my view, and there's a wonderfully wide range of different bitters and ales available throughout the UK. Indeed, part of the fun of exploring a new part of the country is to find oneself in a pub getting through a pint or two of the local tipple.

Perhaps it's something to do with the climate - with the UK not generally noted for searingly hot summers (although this one just been is a notable brain-frying exception) drinking heavier style cellar-temperature beers in a cool climate seems to make sense.

And about the temperature of beer in this country - it's often referred to as being flat and warm in comparison to pilsener-style lagers. Well, it may not be super-cooled like many of your lagers, but when the weather on a good day often necessitates the use of a warm cardy or somesuch then cellar-temperature is just about right.

Also, the choice of beers in the average UK pub (6.5 draught beers, 8.9 bottled beers) is typically better than elsewhere in Europe. Noone else in Europe matches the variety of draught beers, although the Belgiums do manage to have an average of 17 bottled beers available in a typical pub (and there's nothing wrong with Belgium beers, either).

There's plenty more that could be written about UK beers, and the often superb pubs in which they are often served, but I think I'll save that to bore the next person I end up sitting next to in a pub.

2003-09-28T08:42:00.000-07:00

Well, my life has taken a sharp right turn in the last little while (anyone whom I haven't filled in and is interested can email me for details).

As I result I'm currently back in London watching the Autumn creep in and catching up with friends. It's giving me time to properly say goodbye to London, and to the people I know here which is very nice.

It's been interesting seeing those I know reaching certain points in the cycle of life that are quite a way from when I first met them, and also good to have my experiences relativised when they talk about their past experiences.

I won't rabbit on with the philosophy, but there's been much to think about in recent times and it's interesting how a challenge gives one a different perspective on many things.

2003-09-16T12:09:00.000-07:00

For those who haven´t been watching closely, the space race has taken a few new twists recently. Since the recent shuttle disaster effectively shutdown the US space programme, the Brazilians are keen to get a rocket into space despite a recent launchpad disaster, and the Chinese are gagging to get a man into orbit.
Even the Europeans are looking skyward, with the launch of their first (unmanned) mission to the moon.
If this is not enough, there are plenty of private individuals lining up to conquor space because of initiatives such as the X-Prize.

So, it looks like it won´t be too long before the heavens are as busy as the M25 at rush hour. I wonder if anyone´s had any thoughts about the need for the orbital equivalent of a few sets of traffic lights and round-abouts?

However, it may be that conventional spacecraft are obsolete if those experimenting with lifter technology manage to come up with anything.

Basically, a lifter is a type of levitating craft which some people are claiming is based on the technology behind flying saucers (yes, it does get a little weird). Although the principles involved are not fully understood, it does sound interesting. At the moment experiments have been limited to a number of leviatations of very light craft, but a recent success involves Orville, the world´s first ever mouse "Electronaut".

All bizarre in its own way, but fascinating nonetheless.

2003-09-15T12:23:00.000-07:00

Looks like Wellington is coming up in the world, according to a recent article in the Guardian (link courtesy of brainsluice).

Good thing then that it´s where I´ll be ending up in a few months´ time, although maybe the hobbits will have gone home by then.

2003-09-15T12:16:00.000-07:00

Has anyone noticed that novelty ringtones seem to be disappearing, or is it just me? These days I hear more conventional ringtones when peoples mobile phones go off, which tends to get me reaching confusedly for my mobile at the same time as I´ve always used a conventional ringtone.

Perhaps people have finally got tired of hearing the Mexican hat dance / Mission Impossible / the Simpson´s theme tune twenty times a day - I know I have.

I´ve just spent an hour or two watching the waves roll in on the beach at the bottom of Barcelona, with a crowd of eager surfers pouncing on each suitable wave.
There´s a strong on-shore breeze today, so the normally flat sea has been producing decent breakers, with the waves cascading over the breakwaters.

It´s one of the assets of Barcelona, and was given a makeover as part of the preparations for the ´92 Expo meaning that there are good facilities, although the sand can sometimes be more dirt/dust than true sand. Then again, I´ve been spoiled in the last few weeks with the fantastic beaches along the Cantabrian coast.

2003-09-06T15:37:00.000-07:00

Madrid has been fantastic over the last couple of days, and any hesitation I had about visiting this city has been totally dispelled.

It is a total contrast to Barcelona, the other big city in Spain, and is very beautiful and sophisticated. I´m lucky enough to be staying at a friend´s apartment very close to the centre, so everything´s on the doorstep, and tomorrow morning this will be so literally when the Rastro starts up.

I´ve been introduced to the Madrid nightlife, where people only start seriously thinking about going out for the evening after midnight - the concept of time here is so distorted that the Spanish even use another word to distinguish the socially important part of the night - the madrugada, which generally refers to anytime after midnight but before about 6am. Even entertainment listings will refer to events happening at, say, "Sabado 1 mad." which means 1am.

This is a bit confusing initially, as it begs the question whether it refers to 1am on Saturday ("Sabado") morning or 1am on Sunday morning; turns out that the correct answer is that it is 1am on Sunday morning.

The galleries here are stuffed full of fantastic art, including much of non-Spanish origin such as Hieronymous Bosch ("el Bosco" in Spanish). The Prado is the queen of all, with fantastic collections of works by Goya and Velazquez, but the Reina Sofia has the Picassos, including the monumental "Guernica" and it´s attendant studies. Interestingly, Picasso executed a number of studies after the completion of the painting, almost as if her was thinking of having another go at it.

However, the most stunning sight of all to date, at least for the initial thrill, is a train station, the Atocha Estacion, where someone has had the incredible vision to make a public place such as this into a stunning garden.
More specifically, the high-ceilinged concourse doubles as a palm house, with gigantic fronds towering over one´s head. High jets spray a fine mist to keep the humidity constant, and there is a feeling on wonderful relaxation - a great place to have to while away the time if your train is delayed. In fact, I suspect that a number of people there on the day I visited had no intention of travelling, but were simply there to enjoy the ambience.

As I say, simply inspired.

2003-09-04T04:32:00.000-07:00

I´m leaving sunny Santander (well, not particularly sunny over the last week) to travel to Madrid this afternoon for a few days, before heading off to France.

As far as the five weeks of language courses go (two in Santiago, and three here in Santander), I´ve learnt most of what can be learned easily and quickly and anything I learn from now on is going to be more difficult and probably going to take a lot longer to assimilate.

So, I think it´s a very good time to start putting the Spanish that I´ve learnt to good use. After the next week in France, I´ll be starting the Camino de Santiago, and I´m sure I´ll be meeting a lot of Spanish speaking people along the way. It´d be ideal to run across a Spanish peregrino (pilgrim) or two with a bit of English and do some sort of language exhange thing while walking the Camino, but this may be wishful thinking.

Yesterday afternoon was spent visiting some of the pretty towns along the Cantabrian coast in the company of Olga, the woman that I´ve been staying with for the last three weeks. All very pretty, especially Santillana del mar (although a total tourist trap at the same time), and it was interesting to find Gaudi´s El Capricho, an interesting holiday house that he built in Comillas.

That man must have been such a workaholic - even while on holiday he was putting his predigious talents to work.

2003-09-02T08:32:00.000-07:00

Almost every day since I´ve been in Santander I´ve passed by a shop in the main street which specialises in school uniforms. This would be nothing worth noting usually, except for the fact that the manequins in the window are the most miserable that I´ve ever seen.

By this, I don´t mean the condition of the manequins, but instead the expressions that they have on their faces. Each one of them, dressed in a sample school uniform, wears what can only be called an expression of resigned disgust. Maybe this is some sort of psychological slight of hand intended to reassure the kids that get dragged into this store that it is perfectly acceptable and natural to hate wearing uniforms.

I remember from when I was at school that the only pleasure to be got from wearing the school uniform was working out some means of sabotaging the dress code, whether this involved non-regulation accessories, or altering the clothes so that they looked suitably scruffy or outlandish. This could include ultra-baggy shorts, ripped shirt sleeves, or in the case of the girls the cat and mouse game of shortening skirts so that they revealed as much as possible while eliciting no more than a low grumble from the teachers and staff.

2003-09-01T05:22:00.000-07:00

Well, another weekend´s walking in the Picos de Europas saw me getting all the training I was after, and more.

With another classmate from the language school, I walked the Cares gorge, which follows a track hewn from the cliff-face of a narrow gorge, and it was particularly stunning. We trekked up a narrow gorge to Bulnes (pop. 23), a beautiful pueblo tucked away in the folds of the mountains, and found a high rock from which we could survey the view down the valley while eating lunch.

However, one of the local goats had eyes for our lunch, and it was hilarious trying to hold onto my lunch and my perch on the rock with one hand while trying to fight the goat off with the other - we both managed to get quite a few pictures of the goat hassling each of us, and it was ridicuously funny.

The route down the Cares gorge exists purely because of the hydro scheme, but it is a wonderful accident that it traverses such magestic countryside.
We stopped in Cain for the evening, another small village where the local men were playing a stange game, looking to be a combination of petanque and skittles. They would throw a wooden ball from a distance of fifteen feet into a square marked in the dust, and try in the process to knock down as many skittles in the square as possible. It was great to watch, but after half an hour I still had absolutely no idea as to the system of scoring.

Sunday saw us continue down the end of the Cares gorge, and eventually we had to tackle the hardest bit of the journey, which was trying to find our way across a mountain range back over from the province of Leon to Cantabria, to where we could catch a bus back to Santander.

It turned out to be an epic walk, and with a combination of low cloud and a lack of marked trails we found ourselves climbing a few more mountains than we expected, scaring a troupe of wild deer in the process.
Eventually we found our way down, but not to where we were supposed to be, but luckily the guidebook´s advice about the ease of hitching proved to be true, and although we missed the bus, we made it back to Potes for the night.

I think, all up, we walked a total of about 55km over the weekend, with about 30 of this on Sunday over terrain that was often rough and steep.
So, given that all the gear (boots, wet weather gear etc) functioned OK, and that I was carrying a full pack for the entire weekend, I feel happy now at attempting the Camino.

Bring it on.

2003-08-29T08:38:00.000-07:00

One thing about studying Spanish in a typical language school here in Spain is the rapid turnover of students. Although most people sign up for more than one week at a time, at the end of each week there are a fair few that have finished their studies, and are off maybe to return home, travel, or study further elsewhere.

So, there´s a continual turnover of fresh faces, but at the same time it´s easy to meet these people, as everyone is typically interested and keen to get to know the others in the school.
Both in the language school in Santiago, and now here in Santander I´ve met a number of very nice people, maybe only for a few days at a time, but it´s always been worthwhile meeting and talking to these people, and finding the occasion to go out for a drink or a meal somewhere. Most people have a story or two to tell, and it can be very interesting if you keep your eyes and ears open. I feel that I´ve been enlightened a number of times talking to some of my fellow students.

Next week will be my last here at Santander, after which I´m off for a week to catch up with friends in France and do some hiking in the mountains before beginning the Camino.

2003-08-28T05:10:00.000-07:00

When I was in Galicia, in the far north west of Spain, a few weeks ago, the issue of the sinking of the Prestige oil tanker and the subsequent oil spill was such a big issue. As I´ve mentioned previously, there were still slogans, posters, demonstrations etc demanding that this sort of thing never be allowed to happen again ("Nunca Mais" is the popular slogan - "Never Again").

Well, last week I went to one of the beaches near Santander with the family that I´m currently staying with, and we took a walk along the rocky coastline.
At one point I found myself scrabbling along some rocks, and getting black tar on my hands. Talking to Olga, it turns out that this is the remnants of the Prestiage oil spill. It is amazing that it managed to reach so far along the northern Spanish coast, as it is quite a long way from the Galicia (probably more than 500 kilometers), and it gives one an idea of the magnitude of the disaster.

When I was in Santiago I bought a book of photographs of the clean-up operation, with hundreds of volunteers sifting the sand and scrubbing down the rocks on the beaches. It all looked like such amazingly back-breaking and tedious work, and the sad thing is that there is still much oil contained inside the wreck of the Prestige which is slowly leaching out into the sea, and will possibly find its way onto these Spanish beaches for a long time to come.

2003-08-27T04:55:00.000-07:00

Some funny little things concerning the Spanish language:

1. The way people say "adios" (goodbye) instead of "hola" (hello) when they pass in the street.

2. The fact that the word for "to hope" and "to wait" is the same (esperar).

3. The fact that the word for lunch is simply "food" (comida).

4. I think I´ve mentioned this before, but it´s the small words that you have to watch out for; the big words are often very similar to their English counterparts, although the endings differ depending on the context (e.g. probalamente = probably).

5. The fact that the word for body is a little macabre ("cuerpo", similar to "corpse" in English).

6. The fact that the words for "weather" and "time" are exactly the same (tiempo).

2003-08-26T05:36:00.000-07:00

One very pleasant surprise with Santander is the Cantabrian coastline. It turns out that the beaches around here are pretty much everything you´d want and, along with parts of the Portuguese coastline, the Cantabrian coast is the only part of Europe that I´ve seen that makes me think of New Zealand.

A great beach should have the following: plenty of good, clean sand; nice rolling dunes in the background, with clumps of toitoi growing amongst them; wide expanses populated with not too many people; a fair bit of surf, with the water clean and temperate; and plenty of sunshine (goes without saying).

Well, the beaches around Santander, particularly on the other side of the harbour have all this. I took a walk along the clifftops last week, and had some great views down the coastline and out to sea.

Sometimes homesickness can be such a nice feeling.

P.S. You may have to refresh the page if you visit the link above for the picture of toitoi (hit the "F5" key on a PC) in order to see the picture.

2003-08-25T05:25:00.000-07:00

I´ve just spent the weekend walking in the Picos de Europa, a national park in northern Spain which, although not huge (maybe 40 kilometers square), contains a very impressive amount of alpine scenery.

Although it´s Spain, it could be Heidi country, as the valleys are green and lush, rising up into high vertical peaks, and the hillsides resonate with the sound of the bells tinkling around the necks of the livestock.
Indeed, walking back from Sotres on Sunday along the road following the valley floor, I thought I heard church bells, only to turn a corner and find a herd of cows making music as they chomped away.

Walking into the valley on Saturday, I found myself being followed by a tormenta (the Spanish word for "storm", or, as one of the teachers here at the language school says, "thunder-lights"). It was a little scary, as the approaching weather was obviously very foul, with huge peels of thunder echoing across the valley and bright shafts of bolt lightening every few seconds. However, my wet weather gear managed to hold up, and I think I missed the worst of the storm.

I´d brought a tent along, but because of the rain was quite happy to stay at the albergue (hostal with dormitary accomodation) in Sotres, which was more modern and well run than you can normally expect.

In contrast to Saturday, Sunday was a fantastic blue-sky day, and the views of the mountains and pastures were almost surreal. In contrast to the pastureland that I know from England and New Zealand, it´s amazing that people can eke out an existence with livestock on what is often very limited patches of green grass; in the afternoon I took a route which led along a hillside, with occasional bedroom-sized meadows branching off the path.

At one point I looked up and noticed some cows and two human figures very high up on a scree slope on the opposite side of the valley. I could have been mistaken, but it seems that they were milking the herd, and it looked like a lot of hard work to chase the cows around the slopes.
The area is known for its cheeses, including a type of blue cheese, although unfortunately I didn´t get the chance to try it (possibly next weekend though).

Sunday afternoon ended with a trip down the Fuente De teleferico, a cable car connecting 900 meters of vertical drop down a mountain face.

2003-08-20T05:20:00.000-07:00

Today´s post is the conversation between the Cheshire Cat and Alice (in Wonderland), which is featured on a poster above where I´m sitting, and seems curiously apt at the moment.

"Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"

"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.

"I don´t much care where -" said Alice.

"Then it doesn´t matter which way you go," said the Cat.

"- so long as I get somewhere," Alice added as an explanation.

"Oh, you´re sure to do that," said the Cat, "if only you walk long enough."

2003-08-18T08:24:00.000-07:00

Something I didn´t expect to find in sunny Spain is the presence of a number of solariums, or tanning centres. Why, given the abundance of sunshine hours in this country, would there be a demand for these? You´d think that possibly they´d be justified in the winter months, but the ones that I´ve noticed in Santander are open at the moment, and seem to be doing a busy trade, even though Santander is home to some fantastic beaches with great sand and sea.

Speaking of the beaches, one of the local playas is called "Bikini Beach", and the locals claim that it is where a certain foreign female student first introduced the Bikini, and that the swimsuit was named after the beach itself. This all seems pretty improbable, and it´s more likely that the beach was named after the swimsuit, given that the history of the Bikini points to a French automotive engineer developing a radical new swimsuit for his mother´s lingerie business, and this swimsuit was named after the US atom bomb explosion at Bikini atoll four days prior to its introduction.

Interestingly, the Bikini has actually been with us for at least 1800 years, as there are mosaics in Italy dating back to 200 A.D. showing women clad in fur Bikinis!

Another point about the Spanish language that I noticed, which is that often the translation of certain words and phrases into English can end up sounding very funny. For example, if you want to order fish, and you prefer it grilled, the word is "plancha". However this word is also the same for the iron used to remove wrinkles from clothes. So a literal conversation could go something like:

"How would sir like the fish?"

"I´d prefer it ironed, thank you".

2003-08-16T01:50:00.000-07:00

I´ve been reading a very interesting book over the last couple of weeks, called "Guns, Germs, and Steel", which purports to be the "history of everybody for the last 13,000 years".

It tries to explain how certain civilisations got to be the ones that did the conquoring, while others became the conquored, and it arrives at some pretty surprising conclusions. In the largest part, the factors that made the difference are the ability to produce food surpluses through agriculture, often because of the luck of certain societies having domesticable crops, animals, and a good climate. I.E. Not much credit can be given for differences between races or cultures.

However, this book also carries out some of its investigation by looking at the similarities between langauges, and for me it´s been fascinating to find how history can be traced by the development of langauge.
For example, many languages in the world belong to certain groups and can be traced back to certain root languages. In the case of English, this language belongs to the Indo-European group and includes many similarities with other languages in the group, including Latin, Spanish, Russian and Sanskrit.

One way to date historical developments is to look at the languages in a particular group, and to see whether they share similar words for certain objects/concepts, or whether they each have unique words for these objects and concepts.
If the languages in the group share similar words, then it is highly likely that they already had these particular words before they branched from the root language.

For instance, the word for "sheep" in the languages of the Indo-European family are quite similar: "avis", "avis", "ovis", "oveja", "ovtsa", "owis" and "oi" in Lithuanian, Sanskrit, Latin, Spanish, Russian, Greek and Irish respectively, which strongly suggests that sheep had been domesticated by the people using the original root language of the Indo-European family before the other languages branched off.

You might think that the above list doesn´t include English "sheep", which is very different, but the interesting thing is that English has the word "ewe", which is related to the above list.

Apparently, by looking at the sound shifts of the Indo-European languages over time, it looks like the original word for "sheep" was "owis" in the root form of the language that was spoken 6000 years ago.

One European language that shares very few similar words with other languages is the Basque language, which somehow has managed to survive as an island of uniqueness in the sea of European languages which share much of their vocabulary. There´s a lot of speculation about the origin and history of the Basques and their language, and they certainly have a strong local identity here in the north of Spain.

2003-08-14T11:17:00.000-07:00

Well, my whistle-stop tour of the north of Spain continues.
Tomorrow I´m off to Santander on the north coast, as the language school here in Vitoria can´t offer any classes next week, whereas the one in Santander can.

Santander is given a bit of a rough time by the guide book (uh, the Rough Guide), but according to the locals here in Vitoria it´s quite a nice spot with some good beaches. Tomorrow I´ll be able to judge for myself. Whatever, it´ll be a good base for doing some training in the Picos de Europas for the Camino de Santiago, which I´ll be aiming to start in a month´s time.

Spent today completing a 20km walk through the beech forests near Vitoria, and it was so quiet. Very beautiful territory to walk through, and after leaving the information centre I didn´t see another person along the entire walk (and, thinking of yesterday, no snakes either, although plenty of small scurrying lizards).

2003-08-13T12:40:00.000-07:00

It´s funny the unexpected things that I´ve been discovering since I´ve been in Spain.

When I was young, maybe up to the age of 9 or 10, I used to be a natural in the water. I remember a swimathon at my primary school where, dressed in pyjamas (I´ve no idea why), we swam as many lengths of the school pool as we could to raise money for the school. I was the last one remaining in the pool and had passed 100 lengths when the teacher got tired of waiting and ordered me out. I remember feeling as if I could have swam up and down that pool all day.

Since then though, my swimming experiences have been all too infrequent, and I´ve found myself in a swimming pool less than once a year for the last so many years.
However, over the last few days I´ve been rediscovering the joy of swimming. I spent an afternoon at the pool in Barcelona with Kate last week, and did a few tentative lengths, and yesterday I discovered the fantastic olympic-sized public pool here at Vitoria. I found myself getting more comfortable and relaxed in the water the more I swam. By the end of the afternoon I was swimming continuous lengths easily, and feeling that I could go on without stopping.

I think it´s something to do with feeling comfortable in the water, and finding the right pace at which to swim (it also helps that the swimming pools here in Spain have beautiful water, and are not hyper-clorinated like those in the UK). The pool here at Vitoria is very large, and well populated with sun loungers and the local populace, but it´s been a weird summer in Spain so far, and in the water I found myself feeling like Dustin Hoffman in the pool scenes from The Graduate, removed from the rest of the world around me.

Today however, the activity has all been land-based (apart from a short dip in the lake at the end of the afternoon). I´ve been breaking in my new trekking boots, and completed a 12 kilometer walk around a local lake. As well as being the inaugural journey in my new boots (which carried me around the lake perfectly), I also saw my first snake since I´ve been in Spain.
I stopped while crossing a bridge and looked down to watch the schools of small fish swimming in the water, and the dozens of blue-bodied dragonflies skimming across the water´s surface. Then I noticed something weaving it´s way sideways through the water, and sure enough it was a snake, lazily swimming in the warm water.

This memory of this scene came to me again 3 hours later when, upon completing my walk round the lake, I took a dip to cool off. However, I figured it was a big lake and a little snake, so I felt happy that the law of probability was on my side (although I didn´t give any thoughts to the snake´s possible extended family until later).

2003-08-12T03:42:00.000-07:00

I´ve enjoyed much of Barcelona over the last week, and have been reaquainted with some of the sights I saw on a previous visit as well as making new discoveries.
However, I´m happy to have left Barcelona for the mid-northern town of Vitoria, which I´ll be using over the next few days as a base from which to do some walking/trekking.

Some of the sights in Barcelona that were quite amazing include the Font Magica de Montjuic, a large fountain which provides amazingly colourful chorographed displays on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturday evenings. It´s comparable to a display of fireworks, except that it is all acheived by a mixture of many different jets of water and sequences of coloured lights. A very wonderful experience, especially as viewed from above on the steps leading up to Montjuic, with the Barcelona skyline acting as a backdrop.

Also, Barcelona is the place to see Antoni Gaudi´s constructions, and although they are all amazing in their own way, one of the loveliest to visit on a warm summer evening is the rooftop of Casa Mila ("La Pedrera"), a plaza on top of the building crowned with bizzare representations in the forms of the chimnies and air ducts.

Other Barcelona landmarks, not found on the tourist map, are the Horchaterias. They exist mainly to serve the delicious horchata ("orxata" in Catalan), a drink made from tiger nuts (which, confusingly, have nothing to do with nuts, but are instead nodules from the root of the chufa plant). Horchata is only slightly sweet (in comparision with your average softdrink), and incredibly refreshing after a hot day wandering around the Barcelona streets. Although available in supermercados and occasional bars, the best stuff by far is that that one finds at the Horchaterias.
Another beverage served at the horchaterias, almost as good as horchata itself, is granizado, a slushy drink made from ground ice with coffee or lemon (or, if you get really confused when ordering it as I did, both).

Another note on the Spanish language: because the Spanish pronounce "ll" as "lye", this can lead to complications when the Spanish co-opt words featuring "ll" from other languages, such as "parallel". The solution, as seen in various street signs around Barcelona, is to use a hyphen to break up the "ll". For example, one of the main avenues in Barcelona is called "Paral-lel" which means it will be pronounced as "Para-lel" rather than "Para-lye".

2003-08-08T07:57:00.000-07:00

Just spent much of the day shopping for a pair of trekking boots, and visiting MACBA, the Barcelona museum of contemporary art.

There´s only three halfway suitable shops in town in which to buy boots, so you think it´d be a relatively simple process; in fact I´ve been into each of these three shops probably 4 times, and am still trying to work out what sort of boots I need.

I did find a suitable pair yesterday, but I listened to the little voice of moderation, and put them back on the shelf thinking that I´d return today and make certain they were what I wanted. Well, I returned, but the boots had been snaffled by some other happy shopper, and they were the last in that size.

Why is it, with what I consider average-size feet - UK 9, Europe 44 - that there never seems to be much in this size in the shops? Probably because there are many other people with similar sized feet, but you´d think those in charge would account for this and get a few more pairs of this size into the shops (to be even more difficult, I´m actually a half size - UK 9.5 - but I´ve only ever found one pair of shoes in this size that suited me, so have given up looking).

As for MACBA, I wasn´t realy in the mood to concentrate and study the works properly, but I did notice the thing that caught my attention the one other time I´ve visited the museum two years ago.

Just as you enter, having bought your ticket, there is a hall with three tables, each with three or four boxed jigsaw puzzles, the photograph of the completed jigsaw on the top.
The scenes are quite ordinary, such as a view of a living room, a person working at a desk, but the photos are well-lit, and they catch everyone´s attention.
Both times I´ve visited, the tables have had a number of people gathered round, putting different puzzles together. It´s a simple thing, but it really seems to catch people´s attention.

Following the first visit to MACBA, I took a photo of my sister-in-law´s apartment living room in the Bario Gotico, and got it produced by a lab as a jigsaw in imitation of what I´d seen at the museum. Made quite a nice christmas gift.

2003-08-06T03:08:00.000-07:00

The pensions and hostals in the Barrio Gotico (the old town) in Barcelona have been designed to ensure that the inhabitants get the least sleep possible per night.

They are typically located on top of or across from noisy bars, and all the street noise seems to drift directly into the windows. Because of the heat the floors are typically lined with marble or somesuch instead of stone, ideal for creating the maximum amount of noise as someone in flip-flops visits the toilet in the middle of the night.

Also, if the window in a room doesn´t look out onto the noisy street, it will instead face inwards into a well in the middle of the building, which is ideal for hearing all the strange human (and non-human) noises emanating from the other rooms also facing into the well.

The plumbing systems are suitably ancient that any activity in the bathroom will result in the pipes groaning for the next quarter of an hour, and all doors have been designed to create the maximum noise when they slam shut (as they must do in order to close properly).

On top of this, just when one starts getting to sleep around 5am, the delivery vans and mechanical street sweepers arrive in the streets below, invariably parking beneath your window for minutes at a time so that you get to hear the ruminations of a diesel engine in close detail.

2003-08-03T02:36:00.000-07:00

It´s now come time for me to leave Santiago De Compostela, and I´m sad to go in a way.

I was thinking about the cathedral this morning, and the funny thing is that in the time that I´ve been here I´ve had almost no interest at all in the inside of the building, and I´ve not felt any desire to see the botafumiero in action (a gigantic censor that is suspended from ropes and swung the length of the church by seven men, releasing clouds of incense - there´s a story that the ropes broke when Catherine of Aragon was attending mass here, and the botafumiero flew out a window).

The exterior of the cathedral has been much more interesting and important, and I´ve spent quite a bit of time sitting under its gaze, drinking, talking or writing in cafes, and just sitting in the sunshine watching people living their lives in public.
The cathedral is surrounded on different sides by three separate large plazas where people meet, stroll, sit in the sun, and watch the performance artists and musicians play, and somehow the exterior of the cathedral seems to offer back a reflection of all the life that is going on around it, and because of this it seems like a living being.

Santiago has been a city which has shown me things when I´ve needed to see them, and which has introduced me to people when I needed to meet them.

And all this against a backdrop of some of the most beautiful medieval architecture I´ve ever seen, experienced during wonderful long hot summer days.
The old town is such a charming and beautiful place, with many narrow twisting streets and with the cathedral rising up to dominate the north of town.
It´s a town that´s big enough to be a place for people to live, not just a place to entertain the endless tourists.

So, with all this, what more could you ask for from a place?

2003-08-02T15:19:00.000-07:00

One little trap in the Spanish language, which so far I´ve thankfully managed to avoid, involves two essential words which anyone learning Spanish in Spain comes across in their first few days.

The word for beers is cervezas (pronounced "thervethas"), while the gentile word for the toilets is servicios (pronounced "servithios").
Mix these two up, and you´ll either find yourself presented with a cold beer when in desparate need of a leak, or being directed to the back of the restaurant after asking for a drink.

2003-08-01T14:58:00.000-07:00

There´s many similarities between English and Spanish, but there´s also a number of weird differences.

One of many that I´ve picked up on recently is that there are no words in Spanish that begin with "sh", and that´s because it´s not possible in Spanish to make the "sh" sound, as the "h" is pronounced silently.

If this was also true in English, you wouldn´t be able to shop, sail a ship to the shore, shiver, shout, and many other things.

The funny thing is, here is Spain, Spanish is not the only language, and other languages that one finds in Spain do have a way around this.

Both the Basque language and Gallego make use of the "x" to stand in for the missing "sh", and indeed the Basques have given the English language the word "caix" (or "cash" in English).

Weird, huh?

2003-07-30T13:52:00.000-07:00

I spent part of today having a look through the Convento de Santo Domingo de Bonaval, and the adjoining Museo do Pobo Galego (museum of the people).

The museum covered a lot of the traditional culture of the people of Galicia, and there were at least a couple of notable things in there, including an overcoat made completely out of bunches of straw (i.e. not woven - there´s a picture here, but you´ll have to scroll down to find it).
Covering the entire body (including the head), it makes the wearer look like a scarecrow without any clothes (as the persons clothes are not visible beneath the overcoat).

I can understand that if you´re poor, and without the ability to nip down to the nearest woolworths or second hand clothes shop, then making do with whatever you can find in nature is only sensible, and for reasons like this I usually allow the more bizarre aspects of traditional culture a bit of leeway.

However, the second thing that caught my eye just had to make me laugh because of the absurdity. It was a photograph taken maybe 80 years ago, and showed a folk dance in the countryside, four men facing four women, all surrounded by a group of local onlookers.
The men all looked typically dour as they do in these sorts of photos and so did the women, but each of the women had a reason to look stoney-faced as they each had a rock balanced on her head, keeping it there without the use of their hands while dancing (sorry about the pun).

That´s right, a rock, not a stone. They were roughly hewn, and about half the size of a person´s head. You see something like this and just have to wonder who would think of coming up with such a dance/tradition.

But certainly the most incredible thing in the museum wasn´t an exhibit at all. It was a staircase, or rather three staircases. I´ve seen postcards over the last couple of weeks showing a wonderful spiral staircase, and in one corner of the cloisters I found it, except that whereas I thought it was a single staircase it was actually three separate staircases, each starting from a different point in the round stairwell.

Magic! I looked up and it was impossible to tell where each would take you to, and indeed it was like the ever-moving staircases at Hogworts (Harry Potter), taking you to a different destination each time you used them.
As soon as I had descended from one, I looked around and immediately couldn´t tell which one it was that I´d used. I had to try them all, and the most special thing was that one of them lead right to the top of the building and out onto the best view over the rooftops of the old town, shimmering in the sun, that I´ve seen.

The museum was in the cloisters of the Church, which I entered afterwards. I´ve seen plenty of churches, but it was incredible walking into this one, as the silence was absolute, and there was an incredible and overpowering smell of flowers, the strongest I think I´ve experienced.
The reason for this, I found, were the numerous large wreaths laid in a chapel commemorating local heroes. Because of the recent fiesta there had been a commemoration of local identity in the church, and the wreaths had now had a few days to start to decay in the warm Santiago climate, and the church was swimming in the aroma.

Speaking of local identity, there´s a lot of sentiment in Galicia for independence, and strong political activity in general, and the morning after the fiesta many of the banks in the new town had graffitied slogans across their windows.
The funny thing is that, given that there are strong campaigns for independence or at least autonomy in many parts of Spain, including Galicia, the Basque country, Catalonia, Asturias etc, I wonder exactly how much would be left of Spain if everyone was to get their way.

By the way, you might notice that I´ve added links to the right to a handful of other blogs. Each of them is well worth checking out (in my humble opinion). For various reasons I´m not reading too many other blogs at the moment, but will add to this list in time.

2003-07-29T12:51:00.000-07:00

Given that Santiago De Compostela is the end of the line for the pelegrinos (pilgrims) walking the camino de Santiago, it´s impossible to miss the new groups streaming into town each day.

Each afternoon when I pass through the main square in front of the cathedral, there´s always a group or two sitting in the sun on the stones in the square, talking animatedly in Spanish. These pelegrinos are typically young, and are almost certainly those Spainards that have done the last 100km or so of the camino in order to qualify as an "official" pilgrim.

It is easy to distinguish them from those pilgrims who have walked the entire camino (i.e. typically starting in Roncevalles, something like 800km to the east), as the young Spaniards are jubillent, and their clothes and features don´t have the dusty appearance and meditative expression of the true pilgrims.

My spoken Spanish is coming along quite nicely at the moment, and I think I´ve learned a few things that have enabled me to jump ahead a bit.

One of the most important is the observation that there are so many of the more specific words which are essentially common to both English and Spanish.
This means that, in the middle of a conversation, you can make a guess at a word, and as long as you twist the pronounciation and get the ending right, you´ve got a fair chance of being understood.

Not only are many words (but not the verbs, unfortunately) similar between the language, but there are many phrases that translate exactly - one that caught my attention yesterday was "crocodile tears", which has exactly the same translation/meaning in Spanish.

I guess this has something to do with a shared romanic influence and christian culture (i.e. the bible).

2003-07-27T11:34:00.000-07:00

Want to see something funny? Check out this over at Radmilla´s "My Two Second Shelf Life" blog.

2003-07-27T11:23:00.000-07:00

Two important discoveries today; a fantastic park, and a museum of comtemporary art bigger than a town such as Santiago has a right to.

The park is large and arranged over a series of levels, and has plenty of spaces to make one´s own, with plenty of the type of well-nourished green grass that demands to be sprawled upon. I spent a good part of the afternoon lying in under the shady fringes of a well placed tree, following the shadow round the tree as the sun crossed the sky. For much of the time I was practising my Spanish, and have found an excellent tool to help me do so. I´ve bought a graphic novel in which the dialogue is completely in Spanish, and it is complicated enough to help me to improve my vocabulary (I reach for the dictionary each minute or so), but I am still able to understand most of it as I read it. I´m pleased with how I´m doing regarding some of the nuances of the language, such as tenses, imperatives, and accented verbs (there are different meanings for a verb, depending on whether it is accented or not).

The contemporary art museum was also a real find, and is very impressive, having had recent exhibitions by good artists, including English artists such as Antony Gormley and Gillian Wearing.
There were a number of artists being exhibited, but one that really got my attention was David Claerbout.
His work is in the form of video projections covering large surfaces, and although I liked all I saw, one in particular was fantastic.

It was a projection of a still shot showing a plane falling out of the sky, a split second away from crashing into a lush landscape. Overlaying this still was a projection of the same landscape, a long loop of the colours and the patterns in the landscape changing as the sun and clouds changed overhead.

In spite of the imminent tragedy of the aircraft, it was such a beautiful and restive scene, and I stayed there watching it a long time. You can see a shot of the scene here, but be warned that this is absolutely nothing like seeing the work itself.

2003-07-26T04:56:00.000-07:00

Learning another language (i.e. Spanish) makes you realise more about your own language (English, in this case).

In Spanish there are two verbs for "to have". The first, "haber", is similar to "have" in English, however there is a second, "tener".

In English we have derivations of this second verb, such as obtain (to get to have), detain (to keep having) and sustain (to continue having), and the Spanish equivalents are similar (obtener, detener, and sustener).

However, at some point English seems to have lost the root form of this verb, which I guess would be the word "tain". I´ll have to look this up in a big fat old English dictionary to work out if it ever was used in the English language.

On another note, across the street from the flat is a shop called "De Noche" ("Of the night") and it is open 24 hours, which is quite handy when everything shuts down around here during seista and on Sundays.

I was picking up a few things there for dinner last night, and was about to buy a tin of sardines, when I looked a bit closer at the label. It was called "Miau", which is the noise that cats make in Spanish (like miaow in English, however Spanish dogs go "Gau" which is a bit weird).
Although it turned out that it wasn´t a can of pet-food, it made me more aware of the perils of buying food in a country where you don´t always know exactly what you´re buying.

In the same shop, I saw something which only proved that we are living in the age of the Internet; sitting on the shelf behind the counter was a box of chocolate bars called "online".

2003-07-25T08:48:00.000-07:00

I keep coming across some lovely Spanish phrases to represent similar ideas that we have in English.

A couple that I learn the other day are:

To give birth = "Dar a luz" ("Give to the light")

Honeymoon = "El viaje de leche Y miel" ("The journey of milk and honey").

2003-07-25T08:41:00.000-07:00

Hands up who can play a tambourine.

Now, hands up who can play a tambourine well.

I was walking through the town this afternoon, when I came across a group of young Gallegos, maybe 18 or 19 years old, playing an impromptu session of celtic folk jigs in the middle of the street leading down from the front of the cathedral.

There´d been a march and demonstration in the main square to do with "Nunca Mais" (more about that below), and people were dispersing in all directions.

I´ve never thought much about the saying "the piper calls the tune", but it was true in this case, as the only melody instrument was a set of Galician bagpipes being swapped between two guys who could play them, and they started the songs, with a young girl and guy playing marching drums around their waists, plus a couple of others with tambourines.

There was nothing professional or rehearsed about it, and they were making such a great sound, really vital and alive. The songs they were playing were folk jigs, and it seems that many people in the crowd knew them as people would come from the crowd to dance for a number or two, or in a couple of cases whip out a tambourine from their bags.

These two tambourinists who joined in from the crowd were probably the best tambourinists I´ve ever seen; people think of it as a simple instrument, but to play it well and make it come alive is a special skill. They were playing fast stacatto with their fingertips, and the same time catching the main rhythm with the heel of their hands, and were incredible to watch.
A couple of young girls, dressed similarly to boy scouts, joined in from the crowd and danced some wonderfully complicated jigs with each other, turning each other round and round against the music.

It was a fantastic experience, the musicians enjoying themselves just as much as the crowd, and we all spent more than an hour swaying with the music while the Galician drizzle got worse and worse.

I mentioned "Nunca Mais" above, and it there are many posters, T-shirts etc here in Santiago that bear that legend. It took me a few days to work out what it is about as I couldn´t find "Mais" in my dictionary; it turns out it´s Gallegan, but not too removed from Spanish, and simply translates as "Never Again".
It refers to the sinking of the oil tanker Prestige off the Galician coast last November, and with the tanker still leeching oil the coastal wildlife and fisheries have been devastated. There´s a strong local feeling about the disaster, and blame against the Government for not doing enough to prevent it, or cope with the aftermath.

2003-07-24T12:23:00.000-07:00

It´s the night of the start of the fiesta, and Santiago De Compostela is all dressed up in her finest clothes.
The streets and windows of the buildings have been cleaned, the lights are up, music fills the streets, and the fireworks are all ready to go; it should be a great sight.

Things kick off formally at 11:30pm tonight, when the fireworks in front of the cathedral are lit. I´m not quite how long the party is supposed to go, but asking around I´m told not to expect any sleep for the next day or so. Suits me fine, as my next Spanish class is not until Monday, so there´ll be plenty of time for sleep in between.

Today´s activity with the language school was a trip to the cinema, where we saw a French film, dubbed into Spanish, based on an English story. Mas Confusado!, and it was one of those French films where everyone is jumping into bed with each other. I managed to pick up a few complete phrases, but much of the time I was only getting isolated words, although it was possible to work out what was going on.
The problem with seeing a movie in Spanish, unlike buying something from a Spanish shop, is that you can´t say "Puede repitir?" ("Can you repeat?").

Many words in Spanish are remarkably similar to English, and it´s often easy to guess at the meaning of a word, but the thing that really stumps an English speaker is the incredible number of variations of a single verb.

For example, in English there is the vowel "live", which I think only has four forms (i.e. "I live", "You lived", "We are living"). There may be other words used with this verb, depending on the usage (e.g. "I could live", "They went to live"), but it´s essentially pretty simply.

Not in Spanish.

The infinitive is "vive" ("to live"), but there is a different form of the verb for each person, including the formal (e.g. vivo = "I live", vive = "formal you singular/he/she lives", vives = "informal you singular live", viveis = "informal you plural live", vivamos = "we live", vivan = "they live").

Ok, so that´s six forms of the verb in the present tense.
Then we have the future tense (another six forms), the conditional (six more), the simple past tense (yet six more), the present subjunctive (yep, six more), the past participle (one more), and possibly an imperative (another one).

So, given the above, it´s quite typical that a Spanish verb wll have around 32 variations.

Phew! There are rules for the formation of these verb forms so it is possible to guess verb forms for an unkown verb, but the real killer is the irregular verbs (in English, a verb like "go" is irregular, as it can be "go", "went", "gone").

So, to be able to fully work with the Spanish language, the big challenge is to conquor verbs, including the irregular verbs (I forgot to mention that, unlike the English language, Spanish also has features such as gender, where a particular none is treated as either female or male - for this there are rules too, but also many exceptions).

2003-07-23T11:55:00.000-07:00

I´ve been wondering what the point of all the ugly scaffolding that they´ve been putting up in front of the cathedral in recent days is, and this afternoon I found the answer.

Come the day of the festival (St James day, Friday 25th), the entire facade of the cathedral will have been recreated in paper and cardboard, and come the appointed hour it will be set light to and will disappear in a blaze of fireworks (fuegos artificiales).
Why they want to pretend to burn down the church that they are obviously so proud of is a bit beyond me.

Speaking of fireworks, a few days ago I was walking down the street I lept out of shoes when an almighty explosion, like a cannon-shot, went off overhead. Turns out that it was a "chupito" (literally, a "shot") which is a very loud sky-rocket, used for it´s noise rather than it´s display.
There was a religious procession wending its way along the street, with four men carrying an effigy of the virgin Mary, and the closer they came to the church, the more excited became the old man letting off the chupitos, until they were going off at 5 second intervals.
The Spanish really like making noise and are very talented at it, in all forms.

Something else I saw today which was very poignant: we had a tour of an exhibition of works by a well-known local artist, Jose Angel Valente, who was principally a poet, though he had many other talents.
It took me some time to decipher some of the inscriptions, but one of easiest was:

"La palabra poetica empieza justo donde el decir es imposible"

which translates beautifully as "the poetic word begins exactly where speach is impossible".

2003-07-22T14:32:00.000-07:00

Day two of my Spanish language course, and I find myself picking up a bit of confidence. The other students are all quite lovely, and although my class is just myself and an Italian girl, we have a combined break in the morning and in evening everyone that´s currently studying in the school gets together and we go and check out something around Santiago De Compostela (note: after a week here, I think I´ve finally worked out how to spell the name of this place correctly).

This evening it was a house in the old town, that was "muy tradicional" and was used, amongst other purposes, for teaching the young men in the Tunas. Four quite tiny floors, with the basement being used for the horses (who had to enter through the front door, and then walk down a flight of stairs), and the top floor being used for the kitchen, because of the good availability of light at the top of the house (the tiny and cramped streets tend to reduce the natural light in the lower floors).

It´s at times like this that I realise how hard some expressions are to translate from English; I was going to say something in Spanish about how it´s a bit weird having the kitchen on the top of the house, and I realised that there was no way I´ve come across yet to say "upside-down" in Spanish. It´s funny how simple things/phrases like this can really stump you.

Something else interesting I saw today: when we first arrived in Santiago, we saw a statue of two old women in a park, brightly painted and planted in the middle of the footpath, making it easy to mistake it at first glance for the real thing.
Taking a coffee this morning in the cafe across from the languge school, I noticed a large photograph on one of the walls of the same two old women, except in the photograph they were real people.

I asked, and given that my Spanish is still far from perfect the story goes something like this. They were know as "las dos Marias" (the two Marias), and were always friends, being involved in some way in the Spanish Civil War on the republican side. I´m not sure whether it was because of the war, or because of something else, but both of these women somehow became convinced that they were forever living in a certain year, and related to everyone for decades after until their death as if time had stood still.

Every day for many years they would walk round the town for much of the evening arm in arm on their paseo (as is typical of most Spanish couples, families and friends), and they became such a fixture because of their presence and their gentle madness.

They both died in 1976, but they were such a part of town life that they are still remembered, and have been immortalised in the statue in the park, and in other places around the town.

I mentioned the paseo above, and the act of spending much of the evening simply strolling through town and sitting with one´s family and friends is something that is so wonderful about Spanish public life. It´s a bit hard to describe, but it makes Spain such a relaxed place to be, with people simply happy to be social with the rest of the community on a daily basis. There is no fear or problems in walking the streets in the evening as there are so many people around, and somehow the act of living one´s life in public like this has such a salutory effect on the children. The Spanish children (and the adults they grow up to be) are all so wonderfully open and well-mannered, and it seems funny how such a simple daily act can have such a wonderful effect on a society.

Sure beats sitting at home watching TV all eveninig (the Spanish tend to do much of their TV watching in the middle of the afternoon, during the siesta period).

2003-07-20T11:58:00.000-07:00

There´s something on this blog that I included when I first started it. I´ve never explained how to use it and I´ve since largely forgotten all about it, which is a bit dumb of me. It´s a means communicating when someone reading this blog has seen something that they want to reply to, or who just want´s to drop something into the conversation.

If you look at the bottom of each of these posts, you´ll find a little link titled "Comments". If you click on this link a new window will pop up, which will show any comments that other people have left about a certain post, and will let you add your own comments.

It´s easy and safe to do at home, and any comment you leave will be there for me (or any other person visiting this blog) to see. The counter next to the "Comments" link indicates how many comments have been left, so it´s easy to tell if anyone´s left a message.

The reason my mind´s been jogged about this is because I´ve just had a look back through some of the recent posts and have noticed comments (which I should have seen earlier) from friends, and other people, including a nice one from a Serbian woman who noticed a post I put up about a poll of peoples attitudes to money, body image, and fame.

It´s funny to think who ends up reading these musings.

2003-07-20T10:39:00.000-07:00

While in Salamanca I had the chance to check out the local art galley, which was showing an exhibition of rather loosely related works portraying children, called "Niño".
Although the standard of work varied a bit, there was one artist, a photographer called Loretta Lux, who really got my attention. It´s great when you see someone doing something truely original and innovative, especially with portaiture.

Back in Santiago, the town´s busying itself for the festival, this coming week. The big day is July 25, St James´ day, and here in Santiago the celebrations run for a week. Already the lights are on around town, and there are performances in the streets by musicians, dancers and performers.
I spent part of last night watching Galician folk dancing in the square next to the cathedral, and it made me realise how closely related the people in this part of Spain are with the celtic culture that you find in places such as Ireland and Scotland.
The Galician bagpipe features large in the music, looking like a cut-down version of its Scottish cousin, but makes just as much noise, while the dancing is not so dis-similar to some of the folk dances that I´ve seen in the UK.

2003-07-20T10:24:00.000-07:00

Alcochofa.

Now there´s a wonderful word. It means "artichoke" in Spanish, and I ordered a plate of these the other day, not being exactly sure what I´d end up with (in the past I´ve managed to order head of lamb due to similar menu infamiliarity).
The alcochofas turned up, doused in olive oil and served with bacon, and were delicious. It also helped that I´d had the luck to chance upon a good cafe in Salamanca with a hidden garden terrace where I could watch the sun going down while enjoying them.
There´s plenty of other intriguing Spanish words, but most of them I have yet to learn their meaning. On Monday I´ll be starting a Spanish language course back in Santiago de Compestella, largely conversation based, so hopefully the vocabulary will come along leaps and bounds.

Neo-conservative.

Now there´s a word I hate. Bush and his cronies are out to create bitterness and division in this world, largely in the interests of corporate greed and nepotisim, and there currently doesn´t seem to be anybody willing to stand up to them.
There´s a lot more that I could write about Neo-conservatists, but it´d just put me in a bad mood.

2003-07-18T07:39:00.000-07:00

Oops!
I´ve just realised that the email address link on this blog has been wrong for the last few months. It´s now been sorted out, and should anyone who doesn´t already have the correct address want to email me (maybe to find out how wonderful the weather is in Spain, or how cheap the beer is), I can be reached on jason.darwin@twoducks.net.

Kate and I meet up in Santiago de Compestella (the end of the pilgrim trail that Kate´s been walking for the last month, which translates beautifully as "St James of the field of stars"), and completed the three days walk from Santiago to Fin Isterre ("the end of the world").
The Galician countryside is very beautiful, and also very verdant and lush because of the high rainfall, having a climate similar to Ireland, but warmer (we actually got caught in torrential rain on the last day to Fin Isterre, so cheated by getting a taking for the last 25 kilometres).
The walking is excellent, and as long as you follow the yellow arrows scribbled on the ground and on the backs of signs and telephone poles, you travel along infrequently used country lanes and along walking tracks.

There are horreos everywhere, which are grainhouses made from stone and on stilts, used to store the corn harvest. We had some beautiful views of morning mist covering the fields with the newly risen sun showering everything with a golden light, truely sublime.

According to Kate the refugeos/albergues on this last stretch of the pilgrims´ walk are of a much better standard than she typically found along the rest of the route, and come complete with good beds, decent showers and kitchens, all for whatever donation you see fit to give. One small thing that got me into a bit of trouble is that you are supposed to have a compestella (the document proving that you have walked a significant part of the camino prior to Santiago) in order to stay in these places, however we managed to persuade the people at the refugeos/albergues to let me stay.

Fin Isterre itself has a beautiful and simple romanesque church, built on a slant, and then about twenty minutes walk out to the cape is the light house and the cliffs and beaches where pilgrims celebrate the end of the walk. It´s customary to burn your (presumably ragged by now) clothing having been walking for many weeks, and there was plenty of evidence of ashes around. However, it was a bit of a wet day, and Kate didn´t have any clothing that she particularly wanted to part with, so that was one custom we didn´t observe.

Arriving back in Santiago we had a wonderful night wandering around the town, finding a great place to eat and to celebrate the end of Kate´s camino (although the saying is that the walk has finished, but the camino has just begun) with an excellent menu del dia (I think about 6 euros each for two main courses of good food, bread, a bottle of very acceptable red and a dessert).
We visited the Parador bar (the ritiziest hotel in town), but the atmosphere didn´t feel quite right for a drink, and outside at the other side of the square we found a Tuna in full swing. A Tuna is a band of young Gallician men dressed up in medieval costume, playing traditional instruments (lots of mandelins and tambourines, although I noticed a duble bass in there too) and singing Gallician folk songs (from the celtic tradition) with good strong voices.
The music´s upbeat, and a senora/senorita is selected from the crowd to be bashfully serenaded by the Tuna, while members of the crowd dance to the music.

I´ve really enjoyed Santiago, and it has a very special charm and character, although I think it means different things to both Kate and myself, as for Kate it represents the end of her camino.

2003-07-11T10:50:00.000-07:00

Fifth day in Spain, and I´ve negotiated the north of the country from Bilbao, where I arrived, to Santiago where I meet up with Kate this morning (in, of all places, an Internet cafe).

Bilbao made a great first impression, and I enjoyed wandering round "las seite calles", the seven streets (well, there´s a few more than seven) of the old town, which are pedestrianised and full of humanity of all ages gracefully gliding through.
One of my first impressions was of how well mannered people seem to be, all very polite, even the ocassional beggars.
The Guggenhiem was fantastic, but almost too much to take in as far as the building goes. The art inside was just as impressive, as they are currently staging a retrospective of the mid-late twentieth century, and it was full of works (well, plenty of work, but well spaced out over the massive interior) by artists such as Jasper Johns, Jeff Koons, Alexander Calder, Andreas Gursky and others.
Interesting how particular artists (such as Jasper Johns) seem to have dated, while others which you think would date (Jeff Koons) still seem fresh.

After Bilbao, Burgos, which was a sweet interior town, with a nice river flowing past the old city and an impressive Catherdral (being catholic, Spain is quite awash with grand ecclesiastic buildings).
Burgos is also on the pilgrim route, and it gave me my first chance to watch dusty pilgrims stumbling into town, some stopping to pose by the statue of the pilgrim resting on the park bench.

Leon was next, and once again a cathedral, albeit the most impressive yet, dominating the middle of the old town, and the stonework sparkling clean (the workmen had retreated to the cathedral´s interior where the noise of their tools reverberated round the inside of the building.)

I´ve developed a means of learning the Spanish language which, while maybe not novel, is certainly quite enjoyable; it involves sitting at a table outside a cafe, scanning a chapter of my grammar or phrase book over a beer, before moving on for a walk round part of the town and then stopping at another cafe to repeat the experience.
So far it seems to be working, and I have been getting to some grips with the construction and grammar of the language. I can understand much of what I read, but am not yet up to more than a very basic conversation - the problem is trying to keep up with what people are saying, and swapping the verbs and pronouns round to match what I understand from English sentance construction.
For example, the sentance "I have it for you" translates into Spanish as "Tengo te lo", where "Tengo" = "I have", "te" = "you" and "lo" = "it".
There´s a certain logic to it, but it seems back to front coming from an English-speaking culture (of course, the Spanish would claim the same about English).

Overall, the initial impressions of Spain and the Spanish are great, and the climate and people are both very friendly. It´s staggering how many cafes and bars there are - some streets seem to feature no other type of shop, but try and find a supermercado (supermarket or grocers), and you´ll spend an entire day walking round town.

2003-07-03T12:46:00.000-07:00

My northern adventures have now come to an end, and I'm back in London for a few days to have a wisdom tooth removed, before heading off to Bilbao, then Santiago to catch up with Kate at the end of her trek.

Hadrian's wall was singularly cool - pretty impressive remains of the wall itself, bridges, forts, milcastles and watchtowers, plus great views of rolling Northumberland countryside (some pictures of the territory here).
I spent two days walking the central section, from Birdoswald in the west to Chesters in the east, about 25 miles. For much of this distance the wall follows a great natural stone ridge rising out of the landscape, called the whin sill, and it gives you the chance to enjoy great views in all directions.
You've got to be impressed with the Romans - they managed to build a wall 4 metres high, 2-3 meters across, plus a milecastle and two watch towers every mile, for a length of 80 miles, with only manpower and horsepower.
Add to this the central heating, glazed windows, and concepts such as coinage that they introduced, and you have to admit they had it pretty sussed given the resources of the day.

I also enjoyed checking out Newcastle, a city I'd not been to previously. The waterside, with the "blinking" millenium bridge and the Baltic building is cool, and the Antony Gormley exhibitions were great, especially Domain Field - he must be contemporary artist number one with the british public these days.

I didn't detect too many signs of the hard northern drinking culture, although it was obvious that Saturday night starts about 2.30pm in the afternoon (about the time of day that I saw a hen-party making their way derminedly towards a bar).
There definately seems to be a high-level of what I guess I'd call body-conciousness - almost everyone, irrespective of age, seems to be dressed in tight fitting t-shirts, with liberal helpings of fake tan, sharp-haircuts, and splashes of jwellery and cologne in equal amounts.

2003-06-27T13:48:00.000-07:00

I think I need to amplify something I alluded to earlier, which is the motivational effect of a good tail wind on a cyclist.
Many people think that a cyclist's wost enemy is heavy rain and large trucks thundering past. Although these definately feature high on the scale, public enemy number one for a cyclist is a constant head-wind.

I've been lucky enough to only have encountered a head-wind on a couple of days and that was only for part of the day, but I did meet one cyclist who'd faced a head-wind for three days in a row, and was seriously thinking of giving up his trip.

It doesn't sound like it's such a bad thing, but I reckon I can do about 15 - 18 mph on the flat with no wind. Give me a reasonable tail-wind and this ramps up to something like 25 - 28 mph (you can actually feel yourself getting pushed up the hills - a very nice feeling). However, with a reasonable head-wind (i.e. nothing like hurricane strength), and I'm down to about 8 mph on the flat, and considerably lower going up any hill.

It's amazing just how much wind resistance one scrawny body and a bicycle represent, and very dispiriting when the whole day is spent cycling against such a wind, which is often gusting unpredictably.

So, maybe you can understand that the joy I experienced yesterday cycling through the Orkneys was somewhat aided by having the best tail-wind of the trip, helping my along all day (even letting me accomplish a few hills in top gear or near top gear).

2003-06-27T09:56:00.000-07:00

Something I learnt yesterday: a person from the Orkney Islands is called an Orcadian, which somehow seems a grander title than you'd think they merited (no offence to the Oracadians out there).

I've just arrived back in Edinburgh by train, after completing the cycling yesterday with a fantastic sunny day zooming through the Orkneys (had a magnificent tail wind), checking out the standing stones and other neolithic sites. I've had a better trip than I expected across the top of Scotland, both with the weather, but also with the scenery. It seems like a bit of a secret, but there's some fantastic golden sand beaches up there, surrounded by pretty cool countryside (I guess the unpredictability of weather is the thing that keeps more people from knowing about this).

John O' Groats (or Jan de Groot, to give him his proper name) was nothing special, a couple of tourist shops and a signpost, but I was expecting that. However, I wasn't sure what to expect when I caught the ferry across to Burwick at the bottom of the Orkneys, but I was pleasantly surprised. As well as having some very nice rolling countryside and reasonably quiet roads to cycle on (although there are more people living there than I realised), there's some fascinating history.

The islands are linked by a series of causeways, so you travel from one to another by road. I thought this was rather considerate of the Orkney authorities, but it turns out that the purpose of these causeways is to block off the eastern sea approaches. During the second World War a large chunk of the British fleet operated out of the Orkneys, and although they thought that the eastern approaches were unnavigable because of sunken ships, a U-boat manged to sneak through in October 1939 and sink the Royal Oak, with a loss of 800 lives.
As a result, the causeways were built, largely with the aid of Italian prisoners of war, who left behind the Italian chapel, an amazing piece of work created by the POWs using two Nissan huts.

As well as the war history (I think also that much of the German fleet from World War I was scuttled in the Orkney waters before the British could prevent it), there's an impressive amount of neolithic history, more than I've seen anywhere else in the UK. Within the space of a few miles there are at least two circles of standing stones, one "conventional" sized circle with huge stones (the Stones of Stenness), and one huge-sized circle with conventional sized stones (the Ring of Brogar), a neolithic mausoleum, and the fascinating Skara Brae.

Skara Brae is a village that was constructed just over 5000 years ago (it gives me a headache thinking how long ago that is - it's longer ago than the building of the pyramids, and is longer before the birth of christ than we've been around since, by oh, a thousand years). And, for 5000-year old architecture, there's some relatively modern innovations, albeit a few things we take for granted are missing (such as windows - therefore no fire = no light).
Each house has a large dresser at the head of the room, and for those of us who have grown weary of repeated trips to Ikea, there's plenty of inbuilt storage in the walls and behind the furniture. And, right up to date with current thinking, the dwellings are very thermally efficient, being sunk into the sand dunes with turf covering the stone walls.
All very fascinating, and well worth a look if you ever make it that far north.

Ok, so that's the cycling bit over - I've just traded my bike in for a backpack and will be heading south to Newcastle tomorrow for a bit of a look around and then to spend 2-3 days walking the central section of Hadrian's Wall.

2003-06-21T05:31:00.000-07:00

One of the themes that I've noticed arising during my cycle trip is the old and the new appearing in the landscape that I've been passing through.

On my first day, cycling from Penrith to Alston, I stopped off to look at the Long Meg stone circle, thousands of years old, and while I was there an RAF Tornado jet fighter zoomed overhead on low-level manoeuveres.
This wasn't the only time that I encountered the RAF jets - one day, cycling through the tops of the Penines I felt like I was being buzzed by two Tornados for much of the afternoon - they seemed to be following me for most of the afternoon, swooping overhead. They practice their low-level flying over the English-Scottish border, supposedly flying as low as 250 feet, but I'm sure they were lower than that, and it can be disconcerting to be wandering along a village high street or a country lane when one flies past - because of the speed that they travel at, there's often no audible warning until they are directly overhead.
I did even come across a memorial between Callendar and Killin to two RAF aircrew who'd died when their Tornado crashed into the hillside - suffice to say this makes me even a bit more worried when one passes low overhead.

On another note, I've been seeing plenty of house-martins and swifts, but only maybe one or two swallows.
According to the BBC, the swallows have been held up somewhere on their migration back from Africa to the UK, so have not yet turned up (and of course summer doesn't start until the swallows arrive en-masse, or so the saying goes).
I wasn't even sure until recently how to tell swifts, swallows and house-martins apart, but I've discovered that the swallow has the much longer tail feathers, whereas house-martins have a white-patch on their backs, and swifts are brownish and higher-flying.

I've spent a few evenings now during my cycle trip watching the house-martins and swifts circle round whichever village I've ended up in, swooping between the buildings and over the meadows chasing insects.
A very pleasant occupation indeed, after a good pub meal and a couple of beers, given that it's pretty much fully light until 10:30pm.

2003-06-19T09:17:00.000-07:00

I've arrived at Aviemore, the Scottish ski resort, and it's a bizarre town. Although I've seen ski resorts in a number of other countries, I never expected to find the equivalent in the UK, and it just seems so unnatural.

There's the large hotels, the faux pine-cladding on the shops, the general newness of everything, and true to form regarding ski-resorts, the lack of anything that could be called a halfway decent pub.
Apparently the facilities on the ski-field are actually not that bad, but the problem is the lack of good (i.e. clear) weather during the season.
The only concession that I could find to a typical UK high street was the Sue Ryder shop (a UK chain of charity shops).

Well, Inverness tomorrow, then off into the vast wilderness that is northern Scotland.

2003-06-17T09:16:00.000-07:00

Have just made it to Pitlochry, which is a buzzing little town in the Scottish Highlands. Quite a nice place, but everyone seems rather busy, and for some reason it gives me the impression of a TV/film-set town, where everybody's just been given the signal to perform while the camera pans through town (or maybe it's just me, not having seen too much in the way of population centres for the last three days).

Yesterday's cycling was fantastic, the best day's cycling yet, tracking an old railway from Callendar to Killin in glorious weather, passing alongside long lochs, underneath fantastic stone bridges and over long viaducts, while not really encountering anything capable of generating a sweat (even managed to spend half the morning, enjoying morning tea in the sunshine).
A good part of my cycle journey through the top of England, and Scotland has been along old railway lines, where the track and sleepers have been ripped up and the route turned into cycling and walking paths. These are absolutely great, as you get to see some amazing countryside along well-formed tracks while not having to navigate any significant gradients. Because trains can only handle very gentle slopes, the people that originally built these railway lines have had to be ingenious in their routing through the mountains of Scotland (the only part of the UK I've seen where I feel the word "mountain" is truely justified).
The bridges and viaducts that I've encountered on these railway routes often make me stop to appreciate the skill and effort that was spent on their construction - they were all fully manual creations, created by hand in the 18th and 19th centuries, and would have taken a great deal of manpower to put together. And although these railway lines are now redudant, they would have been in use for typically well over a hundred years, so I guess they would have got their money's worth out of them.

It's a pity that these routes don't carry trains any more - a number of them would be fantastic scenic journeys, and would surpass most journey's available these days on the British railway network.

2003-06-12T12:55:00.000-07:00

Edinburgh is such a cool city.

I've been roaming around today, just taking in the city and enjoying the good weather, and the whole place is just buzzing.
Had a wander round the castle, which I've not done on my previous two times here, and managed to sneak into a tour group and get a bit of the commentary. Saw the Scottish "Honours" (i.e. the crown jewels), which included the stone of scone, the lump of sandstone that's been used as a coronation seat for over 1000 years. Slightly ordinary in appearance, it's been graced by a large number of royal bums, including that of the current incumbent, QE II (I think in her case the stone was actually shoved underneath the coronation throne proper, rather than her sitting directly on it).
Such a more down-on-the-farm piece of furniture I couldn't imagine.

About six years ago Kate and I came reasonably close to moving to Edinburgh; while she was still at UCL, Kate was offered a research post here (with part of the same organisation that ended up producing Dolly the sheep, I think), but unfortunately the job didn't come with funding, and she couldn't arrange the requisite funding through the British Research Council.
Would have been very interesting living here, I'm sure - after spending 6 years or so at university in Dunedin, Edinburgh feels remarkably similar, with a culture that seems all out of proportion to the size of the place.

One thing I certainly didn't expect is walking into the the Elephant House (one of the best cafes in this town, discovered on a previous visit), and being confronted with "Tears" by the Crocodiles (great NZ band from the early 1980s) issuing from the sound system. Made my day, very nicely.
Along with Stockholm, I think it has to be one of the few places in Europe I'd consider living for an extended period of time.

Tomorrow it's back on the bike for the start of an eight-day stint that'll see me end up in Inverness, where I plan to take another rest day.

2003-06-12T04:42:00.000-07:00

In preparation for heading off to Spain next month, I've started reading a book about the Spanish civil war by Antony Beevor. I've known vague details about the conflict for years, particularly via the writings of authors such as Hemingway, but I never realised the true horror of the conflict.
It's no wonder the Spanish are still reluctant to talk about it, and don't seem to have fully owned up to their history - it was a time of brutal slaughter and repression (on both sides, but particularly the fascist Nationalists under Franco), and led to many deaths (there's a report of a mass grave discovered in recent years on the outskirts of Saragossa containing 7000 bodies, killed by the Nationalists) - grim stuff indeed. Franco stated that he was prepared to "shoot half of Spain", and managed to work some way towards this.

There were a number of causitive factors, but it seems that it was basically a fight against "old" Spain (i.e. the large landowners, the Catholic church, and the military) and "new Spain (the liberals and the workers, formed into a number of organisations based round the tenets of anarchism, socialism, libralism and communism).
I mentioned yesterday the expansion of the middle class being one of the great acheivements of the 20th century - the Spanish experience leading up to the civil war was of a society of a large (and often dispossessed) rural peasant class, and a large working class in the cities, presided over by a cabal of the aristocracy, the church and the large landowners; in many ways this was almost a feudal society, and it came smack up against the 20th century (the rise of Marxism, the organisation of labour via mass communication/dissemination of information), so it's not surprising then that something had to give.

Interestingly, one of the major movements on the Republican side was the anarchists, and I never really knew what they represented. Turns out that they were formed largely as a recation against the autocratic control of the state, and the anarchist ideal was not total disorder, but instead a system of locally organised co-operatives, making their own decisions and being mutually supportive of the rest of society. Where they tended to differ markedly from the socialists and the communists was that they had an abhorance of central government control, and didn't see the need for organisation at the level of the state. This gave them a bit of a problem when they had to form regional and central republican governments after the rise of the Nationalists, and many tended to abstain from taking part at all, which gave the small minority of communists their chance to seize power.

Given that the last attempt by nationalist factions to seize power was in 1981 (the parliament was held hostage under gun-point by the military, who tried to orchestrate a coup, and failed, largely due to King Juan Carlos' refusal to co-operate), it'll be interesting to see how far Spain has moved on from this situation. As they've been one of the fastest-growing economies in western Europe in the last twenty years or so, you'd hope that the chance of such divisions reappearing would be unlikely, if not impossible.

2003-06-11T11:10:00.000-07:00

Have just made it to Edinburgh, after my longest day of cycling yet (60 miles - not a patch on the guy I met yesterday who, in his late 60s, had just knocked up a distance of 80 miles). Having got to Edinburgh, I figure that I can award myself a rest day, and there's plenty of things to check out here that warrent a day out of the saddle.

Just to bore everyone with accounts of additional wildlife I've seen, the list now includes: seagulls, terns, deer, a red kite, crows. There's also been lots of non wildlife, including sheep - white sheep with black faces and horns, black sheep, white sheep - lot's of different varieties, but I wouldn't have a clue which (contrary to stereotype, us Kiwis can't always tell the breed of a sheep at 50 yards).

Just checked Kate's blog, and it sounds like she's doing well too, having clocked up her first 100 kilometres (so only about another 700 odd to go then).

And, on the subject of blogs, Liam has added his presence, commenting on what's it's like to be an Englishman in Aoteoroa.

I've also been thinking: what are the most important developments of the twentieth century?
After thinking a bit, I've decided that the answers are not always the obvious ones. My first suggestions for what should be included in such a list include:

the adoption of the automobile (technically developed in the 19th century, but it certainly hit critical mass in the 20th, and it's been interesting passing through older parts of the country, where the towns and villages were developed in the age of the horse - no such thing as ribbon development then, rather nicely clustered hamlets, at distances of maybe 3 to 5 miles).
the expansion of the middle class (there was a time when most of the population of most countries were working class, and this produced obvious frictions with the minority ruling class, vis-a-viz the Russian Revolution and the rise of Marxism. Thankfully, now that - at least in the western world - pretty much most of us can be considered middle-class, society is not as extremely polarised as it once was, although of course there are still plenty of problems to be solved. This enlarged middle-class is what makes that one-(wo)man-one-vote system work, and you can see why the ruling class in past centuries was terrified of the concept of universal sufferage).
Reinforced concrete (so much of today's architecture relies on this, and without it we wouldn't have buildings of the size and complexity, or bridges of the length that we now do. I'm not sure what the greatest single-span brick/stone bridge (i.e. not made with reinforced concrete) is, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was less than the width of a six lane motorway such as the M1)

2003-06-09T12:17:00.000-07:00

Well, it's taken me five days of hard cycling to find an internet cafe, but I finally found one here in Berwick-on-Tweed.
I've been lucky enough to have pretty good weather for most of the trip to date, and have seen some stunning scenary cycling thorugh the Penines. In spite of all the hill-fear I started the trip with, the geography's been pretty good so far, with the only huge hill being that leading from Penrith up onto the Penines proper, and that was made up for by the cafe at the top that served the best scones I've had for years (both sultana AND cheese - yum!)

I'm amazed by the variety of wildlife I've been startling as I zoom down the road - I've seen rabbits, hares, water voles, curlews, lapwings, plovers, chaffinches, goldfinches, billfinches, frogs, herons, a weasel/stoat thingy, and the list goes on.
As well as all the fauna, there's plnety of flora as well, with lots of meadows of wild-flowers, especially buttercups (I'm not so good on naming plants, so won't attempt to here). It seems that June is a very good month indeed to be cycling round the countryside.

The countryside that I've been passing through is largely Geordie territory, and I'm amazed how almost everyone sounds like Jimmy Nail (or that guy that played Neville alongside Jimmy Nail in Auf Wedisain Pet, and more recently was in Peak Practice).
Scarily, I've even found myself thinking in Geordie, so maybe it's a good thing that I'll be crossing into Scotland tomorrow.

One of the best things I've discovered about cycling so far this trip is that it gives you the perfect excuse to indulge in pub-lunches and dinners without guilt. Speaking of which I'm feeling peckish for a pint of bitter and a plate of cod and chips...

2003-06-01T02:03:00.000-07:00

Friday night's party was a great success - many thanks to all who attended, and especially to Gloria for a lovely (and totally unexpected) speech. We had some idea that many people would turn up for an hour or two and then drift off, but by the end of the night you would've found more room in a sardine can than on the Lock Tavern's roof terrace (we were blessed by the best weather of the year, making al-fresco drinking almost a necessity). I've yet to catch up on all the stories from the night (there was a posse heading off to the later-opening bars in Camden when we left), but I'm sure there was one or two suitably sore heads the next morning (Neeta? ;-)

Interesting poll in today's Guardian. Which would you choose from the following:

An Olympic gold medal
A knighthood
The Body of Nicole Kidman
The body of David Beckham
The Booker Prize
The Turner Prize
£50,000

Turns out that the dosh is the overwhelming favourite, with people voting as follows:

£50,000 (70%)
An Olympic gold medal (9%)
A knighthood (6%)
The Body of Nicole Kidman (5%)
The Booker prize (4%)
The Turner prize (2%)
The body of David Beckham (1%)

It says some interesting things about people's attitudes. Maybe we're not a nation of Philistines after all, with more people choosing the Turner prize over the body of David Beckham. Also, it looks like the body image thing is much more important for women (5% voting for Nicole Kidman's body) rather than men (only 1% for David Beckham's body).
As Kate pointed out, the lucrative choice on the list, for those of us that can string a few words together, would probably be the Booker prize, as any subsequent novel would be worth much more than £50,000. Also the Olympic medal would probably be worth much more in celebrity endorsement/after-dinner speaking fees.

2003-05-30T01:11:00.000-07:00

Do you think that this is just a little bit derivative, in name and format (requires flash)?

2003-05-27T09:38:00.000-07:00

I still get amazed by the ends that people put technology to. I just looked up the forum on UpMyStreet.com for my local area, and found that someone had started a fight (of the cyber variety, with plenty of humour).

Edited highlights:

"BIFF! Take that you bounder!"

"Fine words butter no parsnips, Sir!"

"*bitch slaps* All of you x"

Guess someone's (or a few someones) in my neighbourhood tend to get a bit bored at work then.

2003-05-27T07:18:00.000-07:00

The selling points noted on the back of a Spanish phrasebook that I bought earlier this afternoon make sly reference to the intended audience:

"This phrasebook makes a great sangria coaster and provides some protection while sunbathing. Opening it reveals a whole world of other possibilities"

On another note, it's been a lazy bank holiday weekend, the last that I'll be enjoying in the UK. The packers are coming next Monday, and we're at the stage of scratching our heads, wondering what obvious things that we've forgotten to organise before our departure.

2003-05-18T06:58:00.000-07:00

Now for the techy stuff...

Many of the currently available mobile phone handsets support WAP, that protocol which was supposed to revolutionise our lives by giving us access to the Internet wherever we happened to be.
After much dot.com era hype and pre-publicity, WAP turned out to be, in the most part, slow, unwieldy, tedious, and limited, in that much of the content of a web page could not be rendered on the small screen of the mobile phone.
What did appear on one's phone screen was often hard to read, if not often incomprehensible because the page information was presented out of context, due to missing attendant graphics and because the information was stripped out of the tables which gave it meaningful structure.
So, as a result many people have given up on WAP, and it's doubtful whether users of the newer mobile phones seldom if ever make us of it.

This is a shame, as there are some good uses that WAP can be put to. Because of the limitations mentioned above WAP is most suited to browsing web pages which have simple formatting with text-based content, and where any dynamic content is near the top of the page, allowing users to quickly view the modifications since the last time they visited the page, rather than having to scroll through a large number of screens (WAP browsers only return part of a web page at a time, resulting in the user having to view a series of WAP screens when viewing a single web page, typically waiting 5-10 seconds for each WAP screen to be displayed).

It turns out that there is a large community of people using the internet to create pages which have exactly this type of structure, as weblogs (of which this page is one example) are largely text-based (fast download), simply structured (no tables or graphics, the absence of which, when stripped out by WAP browsers, render the page content hard to decipher), and have recent content typically added to the top of the page.

Weblogs also often link to other weblogs, which means that the WAP user is able to browse related threads easily and quickly.
However, weblogs have not usually been setup in WAP-accessible format (a special type of markup language is employed, similar but different to HTML, which is used to encode standard web pages), therefore they cannot be directly browsed by standard WAP browsers.
This turns out to be not a problem when a WAP gateway is used. Simpler to use than it sounds when described, a WAP gateway intermediates, processing the request for the web page, and changing the HTML content to WAP content, and returning this to the user.
So, instead of directly trying to access the weblog website with your web browser, one visits WAP-enabled search engine, and enters the address of the web page if known, or searches for it if the address is unknown.

As it happens, Google is one search engine that supports WAP browsing. On my mobile phone Google was pre-entered as a WAP bookmark when I got the phone, but can be reached by inputting the address (www.google.com/wml).
From the Google search page I select "Search Options" and then "Go to URL" and enter the address of the blog web page that I want to visit (in the case of this page, it is twoducks.blogspot.com). Google returns the web page, converted into WAP format. I'm able to read the recent entries at the top of the page, and follow the links to other pages.
Also (which is very handy), I'm able to add this page to my bookmarks. In future, when I want to see the new entries on this weblog, I can choose this bookmark and be taken straight there, without even thinking about Google's involvement.

I've added the weblogs that I follow on a regular basis to my WAP bookmarks, and find it very handy when traveling to visit these pages via my mobile phone and find out what interesting events have been going on with the people who maintain these sites.

And it's not only weblogs that are suitable for WAP browsing - there's also a wealth of text-based websites out there that have been simply formatted for viewing on PDAs (i.e. Palms and Pocket PCs). In my case, I tend to catch up on the news stories on the excellent Guardian site (www.guardian.co.uk/avantgo).

2003-05-02T02:21:00.000-07:00

Unbelievable! I still feel close enough to my student years that I'm wary of knocking students without due cause, but in this case someone's having a laugh. Not only do these lucky suckers get iPods to "help with their coursework", it turns out that the course is "Gothic Imagination" - so what exactly is that when it's at home?

2003-04-30T15:52:00.000-07:00

Just spent a very nice couple of hours or so listening to Hem play at
the Borderline. A more melodic bunch of people you couldn't wish to
meet.

On another matter, why is it that there is a red sea, a white sea, and a
black sea, but there is no green sea or blue sea (which, you would think
would have been obvious choices when all this geographical
naming was going on)?

2003-04-27T09:25:00.000-07:00

Kate's Blog...

Kate has changed her blog - you can now tune in to her thoughts at Queen of The Slipstream

2003-04-16T05:48:00.000-07:00

I encountered one of those annoying little questions of trivia the other day that keep you (well, me anyway) awake at nights: what is the difference between degrees Celsius and degrees Centrigrade? It turns out that there is, in effect, no real difference (and therefore I could have saved myself about 10 mintues of sleeplessness).

2003-04-09T06:41:00.000-07:00

I managed to catch some of the Sky News footage of the current scenes in Baghdad before lunch, and among the carnage and cruelty of war there are some humorous images.

There was an image of a man beaming at the camera (and eveyone around him) while he held a poster of Saddam with one hand, and beat it with a slipper held in the other. Ocassionally some other passerby would stop to give the poster a kick or a whack which the the slipper holder was happy to accomodate, and then he would resume slippering Saddam's image in between yelling out (obviously anti-Saddam) epithets.

Looting amongst the general population seems to be the order of the day, and amongst the articles being joyously carried off by the Iraqi civilians from Saddam's palaces and the government buildings were:

a couple of office chairs
boxes of stationary
a pot containing a large bunch of colourful artificial flowers (the new owner seem particulary happy with his find)

Such are the spoils of war.

2003-04-09T06:25:00.000-07:00

Well, everybody's gotta grow up sometime.

Seems that Charlotte Church is in trouble with her mother for wearing a T-shirt with a dodgy slogan, in this case "My Baribie is a crack whore". While it's probably a commercially ill-advised choice of wardrobe as regards her career, it's the sign of someone getting old enough to be able to express their own opinions, and it's possible that she might even make some new young fans as a result.

I did catch her a few months ago when she was guesting on "Have I Got News For You", and she actually came across as being quite intelligent, but also sweetly self-deprecating at the same time (it's always nice to find a true sense of modesty in a celebrity).

All power to her I say.

2003-03-30T12:36:00.000-08:00

Sometimes the Internet can be a force for good in some quite neat ways.

For example, if you live in the United Kingdom, and are hacked off at the current government's policy re the war in Iraq (or any other matter of civic concern), you can fax your MP.

Just as a small note, one of the most amusing anagrams I've come across in quite a while is that of "Britney Spears" being derived in whole from the word "Presbyterians" - maybe she is a chaste woman after all.

2003-03-06T10:18:00.000-08:00

It's amazing what ages does to our bodies.

I never would have thought for a minute that the current UK Foreign Secretary could ever have born a likeness to Phil Spector, but there you go.

2003-02-24T14:45:00.000-08:00

After long deliberation on a suitable name, Kate's just put up her first blog entry as the milkywaykid. Check it out if you get a chance.

2003-02-17T15:43:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking as a result of this weekend's peace marches around
the world. The turnout was incredible, with more than a million people
turning out to protest together in each of London, Madrid, Barcelona and
Rome. It is certainly for a cause that people consider important, but
I've been wondering why this weekend's demonstrations were more well
attended than, say, those that were conducted during the height of the Vietnam
war; at the moment we are trying to stop a war, but one would think that
the imperative is surely even stronger when a war has begun.

Possibly part of the reason for the strong turnout this weekend not only
has to do with the cause, but also with the ability to promote
alternative viewpoints, organise support and spread information as we
are now able to do with the mass media and technologies such as the
internet and email.

Now that people can communicate instantaneously worldwide with others,
communicating their message to individuals or en masse to large groups,
maybe we are seeing a change in the operation of society.

This reminds me of an article I read recently, which was arguing that
the nation state as we have known it for the last few hundred years is a
dying institution; with mass communication, as well as mass travel,
people are able to form affiliations across geographical boundaries much
easier than would have been the case even ten years ago.
It could be that what we are witnessing is the emergence of a new form
of collective social consciousness, one that is not necessarily
represented by our elected officials at a national level.

If so, I guess we can expect more campaigns in future on a global scale
similar to that witnessed on Saturday. And it's going to be very
interesting indeed to see how the exsiting instituations rise to meet
such challenges.

2003-02-16T10:27:00.000-08:00

Yesterday's anti-war march was a huge success - around a million people flooding through central London to converge on Hyde Park. The crowd was very well behaved, made up of people from ever background imaginable, and included many people for whom this was the first protest march they'd ever been on.

As a result of this sucess, it leaves Tony Blair in a very awkward postion. Realising that a significant part of his population does not support the impending war, he is risking his future if Britain ends up involved without clearly justified reasons.

Some pictures from yesterday's march can be seen in the gallery.

2003-02-13T04:25:00.000-08:00

Just discovered, via a flyer that someone handed me on the street, that BBC have started up a new digital-only radio station, 6 Music. And it turns out that it's great - a radio station for the Mojo generation.

Once upon a time (i.e. about 3 or 4 years ago) the London BBC station was called GLR and had some great presenters, such as the likes of Phil Jupitus, Mark Larmaar, Peter Curran and Gideon Coe, all DJs who not only were much more intelligent and funnier than we're normally allowed to expect, but who also played great music, often from their own collections.
GLR was the best thing on the dial, especially given that London doesn't have anything along the lines of a student radio station, but unfortunately the bueracrats got in the way, and GLR became London Live, and most of the DJs defected (although I still catch Peter Curran and Sean Hughes ocassionally).

Although Xfm came along, it was not the champion of the diverse, eclectic and wonderful that eveyone was hoping it was going to be, instead it ended up playing music from too narrow a range, typically the louder indie guitar bands.

So, since the demise of GLR, there's been nothing much to get excited about on London's airwaves, however this new station, 6 Music, has some great presenters (Gideon Coe, Phil Jupitus) and plays some great music - in the space of the last twenty minutes I've just listened to Sonic Youth, Cocteau Twins, Goldfrapp, Blondie and Ron Sexsmith (the tail-end of Gideon Coe's show).

Fantastic! So our ears are saved at last!.
Well, there's one small problem, which is that 6 Music is entirely a digital station, meaning you can pick it up on digital TV, digital radio, and the web via real-audio (there's some great real-audio sessions from people like J Mascis and the Go Betweens on the web-site), but unfortunately it's not available via normal analogue radio.

I guess this is the way that all radio is going to go, as the powers that be would like to free up large parts of the radio spectrum currently used for analogue transmissions for other uses, so eventually we'll all have to invest in a digital radio if we want to listen to stations like this.

In the meantime, I can pop my headphones in an listen while I'm working at my laptop at work - that'll do nicely for now.

2003-02-12T08:08:00.000-08:00

What a great idea!
The Wikipedia is an example of a WikiWiki, which is sort of like a blog, except that it's updatable by all users.
This means that you can have huge collaborative projects, where any person visiting the site is able to change the content - in this case the Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia that has grown from the submissions and editing of those visiting the site.

If you (like me) think that blogs are what the web should be all about (i.e. the ability of anyone to easily publish their views/thoughts/opinions on the web, resulting in a conversation with the world at large), then WikiWikis take this one step further and turn the web into a place where freedom of expression meets collaboration.

By the way, WikiWiki comes from "quick" in the Hawaiian language, in case you were wondering.

Where is the puffer fish?

2003-02-11T05:28:00.000-08:00

I hope I'm mistaken, but it seems that the puffer fish in the tank in
the O2 centre has disappeared (it's possible that I'm wrong, as there is
a large rock in the tank that it could be hiding behind).

It's a great shame if it has gone, as it was the most interesting thing
in the O2 centre by far.

2003-02-07T04:46:00.000-08:00

We've been having horrendous problems recently with our gas suppliers, Atlantic. Seems they decided to bill us for a non-existant meter, and Kate's been bravely battling them to get things sorted out.

Altantic is a newish reseller, so I guess we should have expected problems like this, however, it looks like even the big boys are having trouble billing customers, and in some cases not billing customers for years!

2003-02-01T08:24:00.000-08:00

Just managed to update the website to the new domain (now uses www.twoducks.net, instead of www.twoducks.com, although the old location should function for a few months yet).

Put up some pictures from the day that we spent wandering around Brighton with Gloria and Richard. Tres cold!

Also, put up some pictures of my walk to work through the snow the other morning, taken on the camera that attaches to my Sony t68i phone.

2003-01-23T10:22:00.000-08:00

Went down to the Books Etc in the O2 centre at lunchtime to pick up a Spanish course (book & CDs) for Kate. There's quite a good range of titles in the shop about major languages such as French, German, Spanish etc, but also a few interesting ones. Swahili anyone?

The Spanish is coming along well, although I've been trying a few exercises away from the textbook that I'm using, such as writing a letter to a friend, which take ages to complete. Many of the rules in Spanish are quite sensible, though it does take a while to get familiar with the grammar.

An interesting feature is the way that subject pronouns (I, we, you, they, she, he, it) are quite often dropped from sentences, as the construction for the verb lets you know who you are talking about.
For example, to say "We are here" in Spanish, the translation would be "Nosotros estamos aqui", but you would typically only say "Estamos aqui" ("Are here"), as the end of the verb estamos lets you know that it you are talking about a number of people, including the speaker.
If you were to say "They are here", that would be "Estan aqui".

Well, enough for today's lesson.