Jane Thomson's Blog: But I'm Beootiful!, page 6

Manchester in a g-string?

Old bodies.

Naxos has got me thinking about them because, well, they’re all over the place. Back in Oz, older women wear one-piece swimsuits with frilly bits around the tummy and little skirts over the thighs because, you know. Older men wear whatever, because men will, whatever (fancy a shirtless hunk on a scooter with his beer belly hanging over the handlebars? Greece is your ticket). On the islands, people don’t seem self-conscious about imperfect bodies. Possibly they are at home, but here just about every woman wears a bikini, irrespective of fat rolls, droopy bits, acres of burned skin, etc. It reminds me of something I read in a book, My Brother Jack (which I didn’t like, btw), where the hero has to draw naked older women in Life Drawing Class. He’s thoroughly disgusted, naturally. So should we be?

Well on the one hand beauty is a fact and old age (however full of inner wisdom we might be) is not beautiful. On the other hand perhaps we should look more kindly on the faltering of the flesh … changing the subject I accidentally went to the nudist beach one day. I could’ve stripped right off amongst the stringy and bloated and burnt, but I kept my weird Aussie sun-smart gear on – shorts and a sleeved top – because… Because I’m sun smart? Ok, let’s be honest. Because the days when me taking my kit off on the beach was the signal for collective sighs of envy and lust are long gone, and I don’t want to be reminded of that. Keep the kit on, and I can still pretend that underneath is the perfect body that used to be.

I didn’t take any photos of the subjects of this essay, for obvious reasons. I’m sure you can imagine what I mean. So here instead is the beach. Which would make anyone want to tear off their clothes and prance around with their willies and boobs flopping out, to be fair…

And so on to Thera (which name I prefer to Santorini, because it reminds me of Greek history textbooks).

I read on the interwebs that this place is going to blow. Again.

When it does, it’ll take a couple of hundred thousand people (most of them tourists), a lot of infinity pools and hot spas, thousands of white-washed holiday units, over-priced mini marts and a whole bunch of deck chairs.

The Greek Government has a Plan for this, apparently. However, if they organise their volcanic eruption emergency response the same way they organise their buses, nobody will survive.

Never mind (I’m in Crete now, so no skin off my nose). I wanted to see Thera because of its famed loveliness, and because the last big eruption, roughly in 1600 BC, blew half the island off and destroyed Minoan civilisation. Which was pretty civilised, at least for the upper classes; plumbed toilets, multi-storey mansions with airy windows and charming wall paintings, piped water. Now I have seen it and it is stunning (at least, the views of the caldera, with its sweeping cliffs and sapphire bay, are). But the purpose of Thera nowadays is unquestionably to host holiday-makers. (In fact some would say that’s the purpose of Greece.) There’s something weird and unsettling about a place that has no reason to exist other than so people can get brown, have Sex on the Beach, and waft around in Greek goddess outfits. Speaking of which, it feels to me like a place that the gods have marked for imminent destruction (being gods, this might mean anywhere from tomorrow to next century).

Random things noticed/overheard; a pile of rubbish, mostly empty plastic water bottles, at the foot of a monastery on the spectacular path between Fira and Oia. The sewerage whiff off the view end of the upscale villas lining the bay (where does that shit go?). An argument between a young couple at a cafe; (he) ‘I just don’t see why we have to be out doing things all the time, it’s so expensive!’ (she) ‘Well you can stay in the room all day if you want to!’. A fat old lady to nobody in particular at a bar (…and I said, she’ll be here later, she said she was coming, like I told you before, and I don’t know why she innt here yet but…and…). She was still muttering away to the distracted nods of the waiter when I left half an hour later. A girl posing for photos on the porch of her luxury caldera-view apartment, her long red satin dress blowing out in a gale behind her. Obese stray pooches sunning themselves outside an abandoned church. An old couple standing in the surf on black-sanded Perissa Beach, kissing.

Circling back

Two stories.

In 1982 a thin, brown, scantily dressed Australian girl stands by the roadside in Delphi, her thumb out for a ride. A van pulls over, and she gets in. She notices almost immediately that the driver is the spitting image of an ancient Hellenic statue; tight blonde curls on a large and noble head, straight, straight, high-bridged nose, full and faintly smiing lips, a rounded chin and muscular neck. It’s not a type you see often in modern Greece. He speaks little English and she little Greek, but on the way down the mountain they exchange a few words, and after a while he asks her if she would like to come and meet his mother. Touched but suspicious, she refuses politely. When they reach the bottom of the mountain, he tells her to wait a moment; he goes to the back of the van, fetches out a new-baked bread roll – it’s a bakery van, evidently – and hands it to her gravely. Then he drives away.

In the same year, the girl finds herself in Athens. For a few dollars she buys a bed in a hostel; the owner has them sleeping on mattresses in an enclosed concrete space on the roof. When it rains during the night, everyone drags their mattresses to the landings for shelter. There’s a boy she’s been talking to; he huddles under her sleeping bag (the owner’s hospitality doesn’t extend to blankets), his hands wander. Mortified, she’s conscious that the entire bedraggled community of backpackers can hear his wheedlings and her whispered refusals. Nevertheless, the next night the boy pays for a hotel room and she sleeps with him. It’s her first time. The experience is puzzling, embarrassing, emotionally and sexually confusing. For a long time afterwards, she remembers Athens as a place of deprivation, unhappiness and to some extent shame.

Forty years later I’ve returned to Athens and – though it’s a loud, cheerful, sunny and brazen city – some of the same feelings return. Staying at a hostel reminds me that I’m not – have never been – part of the scene. The beat, literally, goes on till 4am: I can’t sleep. The Acropolis more than makes up for it, and I wouldn’t say I dislike Athens, but…

Where antiquity meets public transport Athenians go all out decorating their cafes The Parthenon, minus bits some idiot Venetian blew up

Honestly, it’s a relief to leave. A few days later I’m in Delphi. With the mountains arrives happiness. The owner of my hotel has a smile of great sweetness, my room (mine alone!) looks out onto the mountains and the gulf of Corinth. The streets are steep and quiet. Up high, there’s always a silence in the air. Big heavily fleeced dogs lie in the sun; it’s clear nobody washes them, ever, but for a dog’s that’s a good thing, and the town feeds and medicates them. There are bowls out for the cats, too.

Temple of Apollo Delphi, minus some French I threw off the cliff for doing stupid poses Theatre of Dionysus Phaedriades, off which criminals (& French people) used to get chucked for sacrilege.

I wonder what happened to that Hellene in the bread truck? Something lovely, I hope. I think about my kind, erudite ancient history professor at uni, Doug Kelly, now dead, and salute him. I get briefly angry about the damage inflicted (by warlords and zealots) on the Parthenon and of course Apollo’s precinct at Delphi – but then I remember my crackpot comfort-theory, which goes something like this; all that ever was, is and will be, and in the complex illusion that is time and space, on one of life’s trillion-squared pathways, Socrates still walks the agora, discussing the Good (ο αγαθός).

So then I don’t mind so much.

Forget charming and exotic…who’s winning?

Why is it always sunny in travel photos? Why – I call this the Instagram Effect – is it necessary to constantly record yourself having a good time on holidays? Is it to convince your (Facebook) friends? Or yourself? And, are you allowed to stay in bed all day when you’re abroad (the answer to that one is, yes, unless I’m paying for you)?

These are important questions, obviously, but not as important as who heads the league table of Countries Who Could Show Us a Thing or Two About…

Food, for instance. Mediterranean countries are supposed to be much better at it than the McDonalds’ swilling, fried chicken and chips obsessed English-speaking bloc (by which I mean, places that speak English proper, and also the USA). I dispute that. Our supermarkets in Australia have all their stuff, plus party pies. Passion. Who wouldn’t rather have a dark-eyed Latin lover than some porky British stud from Manchester? Ah, but in middle age, wouldn’t you rather hear the dulcet tones of, say, Hugh Grant, ‘Would you like another cup of tea, dear?’ than the decibel-defying husky roar of a Sicilian spouse tossing your stuff from a fourth floor window? And they always say the British failure to emote has provided Cote d’Azur conference material for generations of psychologists, but why do we never get kudos for our natural ability to chill. Don’t get me started on the East, locus of all wisdom. Fair enough, when that’s all you’ve got, lean into it. I say.

(Above: Taormina and roundabouts, Sicily)

Africa I haven’t been to, but I believe they’re cheerful there. You’d want to be. What is it with this deification of ‘the other’? Either we’re calling them beknighted savages and greasy rascals (who just happen to be sitting on a bunch of Roman ruins/scenic castles/exotic beachfront) or the answer to everything that’s wrong with ‘the West’. Why can’t we just like ourselves, for what we’ve got and are relatively good at (science, government, being comfy, conquering places that haven’t invented guns yet) and also like foreign places for what they’ve got and are good at (ruins, scenic castles, exotic beachfront, winning Gross National Happiness surveys). While, of course, working on national self-improvement (for us, getting drunk less. For them, not turning the beach into a giant ashtray). Just kidding – didn’t someone once say make jokes not war?

Salerno, where I’m at right now (see above), doesn’t have much of a reputation – everyone wants to go to the Amalfi Coast or Pompeii or whatever. But I’ve taken a shine to it. The streets are full of little tunnels and rat mazes, but you don’t really get lost because there’s only up (to the rather spectacular hills) and down (to the harbour which is, unexpectedly, teeming with fish). People live in palaces, literally (well, they do in the old town – amazing what you can do with a five hundred year old ducal mansion when you parcel it up into two room apartments and turn the courtyard into a parking lot). There are little places selling delicious – and more to the point – cheap – food, everywhere. Shopkeepers are only mildly rapacious. I would gladly spend a week here growing fat in the sunny piazzas watching old men gather gravely on benches (unlike in the book, this IS a country for old men).

Of course, I’m not speaking of the REAL Salerno. The real Salerno is just like the real anywhere else, full of ugly apartment blocks and petrol stations. Don’t you hate it when people say ‘ah but you need to go to the real blah blah…’ by which they mean the shitty boring one where nobody speaks your language except when they’re mugging you. Almost as bad as those people who say ‘Oh that band was great in their early years but then they sold out…’ meaning ‘I’m too cool to like anything that lots of other people like!’.

Tomorrow I head to Athens, a place I haven’t been since I was nineteen, about ten centuries ago. In fact, I lost my virginity there (maybe it’ll turn up, you never know). Anyway, extreme nostalgia awaits.

Main pic is the temple of Poseidon at Paestum, half an hour’s train ride away.

Ancient ghosts, irksome kids and changing (no) religion

Suppose you went to Belsun, two thousand five hundred years after World War 2. What would you expect? Would the echoes of all that suffering and misery have vanished into the commonplace? Or does suffering leave no traces?

I went to the stone quarries of Siracusa, Sicily, last week. Around the 5th century BC, thousands died there of starvation and hard, pointless labour. The quarries were stocked not only with slaves and the Tyrant’s (dictator’s) political prisoners but also with the survivors of the famous Athenian defeat in Sicily. I can’t remember how many men set out on the great expedition from Athens to Syracuse in 413 BC, but I’ve read that at least 40,000 died there, either in battle or in the quarries. One man managed to find his way home, broken and starving; he was almost killed by the mob (so Thucydides says) before the news came in to corroborate his story; the entire Athenian army had been destroyed.

Well, the quarries don’t have what you’d call a cheerful air. The Ear of Dionysios (a fissure in the cliffs which allowed the Tyrant to listen in on the whispered conversations of his imprisoned enemies, so the legend goes but I think it’s unlikely) is a nasty, dank and creepy location. And yet I guess Athens was the aggressor, as Russia is now.

I’m now in Palermo – a rubbish-strewn Paradise of sorts. It’s as if a colony of rats nested in one of the more scenic areas of the Garden of Eden…not that I’m likening Sicilians to rats. More, humans in general. The setting is worthy of the gods; the city is a wreck. But, you know, full of life and liveliness (by which I mean, people communicating at the top of their voices, the 6pm ‘look I have a scooter I can do wheelies’ hour, and women in jeans so tight you’d have to get a labiaplasty to wear them). I saw an African woman zooming down my street on a scooter; she was talking full throttle on her mobile at the same time. That’s Palermo (mum used to say, shut your mouth or a fly’ll get in. Their mums must say something like, keep your mouth open or your jaw’ll seize up!)

On the second day my prepaid Spanish SIM ran out. Without mobile data) I’m like, how the fuck did we ever do this back in the 80s? Speaking of which…

The usual jumble of rocks, used to belong to Heracles or possibly Zeus. Ate lunch on it. Temple of Concordia, Valley of the Temples, Agrigento Sicily A nearly extinct species of Sicilian goat (eats only temple-grown olives)

Here is an honest-to-God fifth century BC Greek Temple (so intact I thought at first it must be a fake). Valley of the Temples, Agrigento. I’m completely bowled over, paganised (I’ve converted to Athena) and convinced that someone should build a similar monument to Google Maps, which enables the traveller to arrive at the train station of a strange city, turn on the Divine Light, and find her way to safe lodgings with barely a mis-step. Without You, oh Lord, I am lost. Literally.

And finally, a brief story about a child. Eating my sandwich in the park with a bottle of water sitting beside me, this frilled and be-plaited brat sidled up with a flower she had just picked from a nearby garden bed. No thanks, I said (somewhat wise to the ways of gypsies, by now). So the evil kid gives me a coy look, stoops down to pick up my water bottle, and prances off with it. At this point I assume I’m supposed to leap up with a cry of rage and try to get my bottle back, but since it’s just tap water in cheap plastic I just look at her. Eyeing me, she chucks it into the garden. I shrug. Back she prances, picks up the bottle, takes off the lid (very deliberately) and pours the water out. Job done. She makes a that’s what you get then face at me. I make an I don’t give a fuck face at her. Later I pick up my plastic bottle and stroll off. There had to be a point to all that but damned if I can see what it was. The girl (about six, I’m guessing) will no doubt grow up to become a menace to society.

The secret to happy travelling is…

Go south. Clearly the Brits have long recognised this, despite their traditional cries of ‘But yer get betta fish n chips at home, innit!’ and ‘Wot – three euros for a fookin bi’ of toast n jam!’

I thought I would like Spain, where people are passionate, warm-hearted and tend to cluster in large groups laughing and drinking red wine, but…I admit to feeling happier in Portugal. And happier still in Italy, where hardly anyone (so far, mind you I’m in Sicily, the toe end) seems to use hair straightener and the women don’t all look like social media influencers. In Rome no doubt it’s different – but there you are, that proves my point. Happiness? Go SOUTH.

View from my balcony in the village

I’m staying with a family in a village just outside Catania. The house smells of cat pee (there are kittens!) and the kids are hyperactive and the beach is at the end of the street so – Paradise. I must be about the last person to discover Airbnb (just like I was the last person to get a mobile phone, and just in time for Airbnb to have become about as popular as Putin) – but hey, being thrust into the midst of ordinary (although evidently hard-up) Sicilian life beats sitting in a beige hotel room. And to be fair, I’m only taking up the attic, so not rendering any locals homeless. The day for these guys begins about ten and I don’t think anyone shuts up till midnight, a liveliness that I find appealing rather than irritating. I haven’t spotted any Mafiosi yet; probably hiding in plain sight. The cars are all dusty – I’m guessing either pollution or detritus from the volcano. I clutch my purse, out of caution, but there seems no particular need (mind you, last time I was in Italy in the 90s someone nicked my wallet).

Roman baths of Achilles under Catania’s Cathedral The old Roman theatre Lunch. Followed by diarrhoea Street view of cathedral Mt Doom. I mean Etna.

Speaking of which, Mount Etna looms snow-capped in the distance while Catanians go about their cheerful business. Must have been a lot like that in Pompeii. I feel potentially doomed – but happy!

Oh, and it’s your last chance to pick up a sexy bloodsucker (what IS it about vampires?) at the prom (o). Although Lady Charlotte isn’t sexy. Just sensible. Like me.

Other people have terrible taste…

And more judgemental ignorant statements that no decent open-minded person should tolerate!

So Seville. Gorgeous place. Orange blossom all over the place (makes my eyes itch!), early Islamic elegance, charming cobbled streets every which way (in the guide books they say ‘get lost in the charming mazelike streets of…’ so that’s just what I did. Get lost. For frigging hours!). Don’t get me started on Easter processions. When you’re supposed to be somewhere, now, and you’re lost, and google says ‘now turn left’ – but you can’t, because there’s a bloody great troop of pointy-hatted weirdos in the way moving with all the focused speed of a crippled slug. And then, when you do finally turn in to get some kip at the end of your sightseeing day, that awful music keeps going…and going…and going. I am NOT going to buy the CD of ‘Holy Week in Spain’ (except, possibly, for my enemies). Seville, I’m just kidding, you were great. Women in black lace mantillas – I want one. And here is a video of a lady doing flamenco in the park – I was enthralled!

Anyway I’ve now crossed the border to Portugal (what border? A twenty minute ferry ride across the river at Ayamonte, no questions asked AT ALL) and am currently in that Paradise of the British chav, Albufeira.

Everything that should be blue is blue (sky, sea) and everything else is white with terracotta tiles on top – perfect. It’s actually a very pretty place on the Algarve, except when you descend to the neon thumping hell that is the lower Old Town. The seventh circle – I’m sure Dante mentioned it somewhere – contains entertainers providing the worst possible versions of James Blunt, Britishers in various stages of drunkenness dancing in the street, and a selection of tourist gaudiness that would make a parrot goggle. What, I asked my friend, leads a respectable middle-aged lady to tan herself silly, dye her hair emergency red, buy a strappy dress in blue, orange and yellow, wrap her arms around a bunch of shaven lads from Birmingham, and do the macarena (or whatever it was) in the public square of a foreign seaside town? But what’s so bad about red hair, said my friend? I don’t know, it’s…it’s…

Personally, I think frizz, no makeup and moth-holed leggings are in much better taste.

I also offended my friend by saying I like Portuguese people loads more than I like Spanish. Spanish people scare me a bit. Inside, they are of course warm, friendly and lovable. Outside, they’re slightly grim. Portuguese people, on the other hand, seem pleased to help (and that’s not just Albufeira – the lady at the railway station at Vila Real de Sant Antonio, at the border, was really sweet – they nearly all are). AND they all seem to speak about nine languages, including, to my relief, English. My friend said, well, Spanish people are friendly to me (she speaks fluent Spanish) – so I have to conclude that it’s a language thing (or it’s me).

So now, everyone duly offended, I can relax for the day!

Speaking with the dead

So here’s a coincidence…

I’ve been writing a book about a woman who decides to pursue her dead husband into the underworld. As a prelude to doing this, naturally she tries to contact him via medium. Since I have no idea what it’s like to consult a medium, I had been thinking that I should find out…and, arriving in my airbnb in Seville, what should I find on the bedside table but an ad for the host’s occult services! Spooky!

As this is something of a ‘yes’ trip, I decided to go for it. Kind of a mistake, kind of not.

The mistake was thinking I could do this without becoming emotionally involved. It still only takes a thought or mention of my son to bring tears to my eyes, so of course when the (very pleasant) husband said he was feeling an angry, blaming presence, immediately my guilt over Felix’s death rose to the surface. So that was the end of calm, sceptical Rose.

First there was much bandying about of questions and counter-questions…

‘I’m feeling a strong feminine presence…very strong, aggressive’

‘I don’t know any strong aggressive angry women…’

‘Well, it could be a man hiding behind a woman…’

‘Ok…so what is…this person…angry about?’

‘He won’t say, he thinks you should know’

‘Well then…what does he want me to do about it?’ (I’m thinking, at this point, well he is dead, so..)

‘He needs you to communicate with someone…to get in touch with someone you maybe don’t speak to?’

‘But there isn’t anyone I should speak to that I don’t speak to…could this person identify themselves, at all?’

Apparently that was a hard ask. The medium went off and had a smoke to calm his anxiety. On his return we established that the otherworldy contact was probably a black boyfriend I had once who I’ve long ceased to give a fuck about and, I would think, vice versa. We picked him because he’s the only one of my exes that I’m pretty sure is actually beyond the veil, so to speak.

Realising that this wasn’t much of a revelation, the medium said he could sense another presence who was feeling much more comfy and peaceful, and at that point I made grateful noises and rushed away.

While the husband was having his smoko, I chatted to the wife, who taught him the mediumnic art. She explained that spirits exist in another dimension in which feelings, rather than words, are the preferred method of communication. They apparently can’t tell us what it’s like in this dimension, for the same reason that nuclear physicists can’t explain quarks to ants. Well, I could buy that, I guess…

But I can’t say I was convinced. The mediums (media?) were lovely, and did seem to genuinely believe in their art. The experience was fascinating, if extremely upsetting (for a while the idea of an unforgiving and furious Felix took hold of me in a particularly horrible way, and I was extremely relieved to find that it was only an unregretted and apparently pissed-off ex).

Never again.

Here are some cheerful pictures of Seville’s Royal Palace!

…but you’ve still got a pussy!

Would you ask your grandmother if she’d like a sex toy?

Me neither (but then, both of mine were dead by the time I was five). I’ve been staying with a lovely woman who sells lingerie online in Cadiz. Sometimes, people nervously ask her if she also sells toys. She does. So she asked her grandma if she’d like one. “No!” came the flushed reply. “My husband died ten years ago, I’m done with all that!” “Well grandma, but you’ve still got a pussy.”

I can’t imagine a conversation like this taking place in any Anglo-Saxon nation, but I could be wrong. Anyway, I’m in Cadiz, which is refreshingly warm and sunny and happens to be the oldest inhabited city in Europe (possibly because it’s so near Africa…?). It’s also where Columbus started off from (some of us wish he never had. Then again, Spain loves Burger King).

Semana Santa (Easter week) has started here in Spain and so I took myself to see an Easter procession. The first thing you notice is all these people (some of them kids) in KKK hats, blue, black and white, complete with long belted gown. These are the penitentes (and I hope they’re truly sorry!). The view out the eyeholes must be distinctly curtailed; it’s bad enough seeing over my COVID mask. Still, you don’t see them tripping over. The most spectacular, and to my Australian atheist eyes, odd part of the whole thing is this gigantic carved float with the Holy Family sitting up on it. It sort of sways past, borne coffin-like by a bunch of guys walking, and everybody stretches their necks and the kids climb up the railings and the brass band plays and the carriers of shiny things (crosses, mitres, whatever) shake them in the air and everybody wears their best boots and pantihose (which are still ‘in’ here) and their slinkiest outfit…

The hardest part of being in Spain so far is getting a meal. One day I accidentally ordered a tuna salad (atun). I hate tuna! I could have cancelled the order when I realised but I didn’t have the Spanish. I’m frankly scared of Spanish waiters. If you can point, it’s alright, but then they unleash a storm of Spanish on you (‘would you like fries with that?’) and you’re fucked. This must be how aliens feel, on landing in Texas. ‘Can you tell me the way to the White House?’…..’No, no…wait, hang on, why is he pulling his pants down?’

One of the nicer things about Spain is how you see people out walking their elderly relatives. There’ll be a middle-aged person or a youngster arm in arm with their aged aunt or grandparent or whatever, carefully modulating their steps to the ancient’s leisurely shuffle. That’s something you don’t see often in Australia, where grandmas belong in nursing homes, not on the street.

PS, here is this month’s free books promo (my gothic regency novel Lady Charlotte’s Dilemma is in it). Vampires and all that…

The difference between appreciating things and…

actually enjoying them comes down, I’ve found, to weather.

This is amazing – I tell myself, gritting my teeth, as I wander through Granada’s famed Alhambra complex. I exaggerate – I did enjoy it, in a frozen sort of way. Granada’s Sierra Nevada range still has a thick layer of snow on the peaks, and the city is ‘enjoying’ some sorely needed rain – apparently it’s been in drought for two years. That said, there’s nothing like traipsing about among the monuments getting wet all day and then kicking back at a cheap hotel where the heating doesn’t work…whinge whinge here, anyway here is Granada, Spain.

Apparently a guy called Washington Irving only discovered the ruins of the Alhambra a couple of hundred years ago – until then this fabulous place sat mouldering like Anghkor Wat, forgotten by all but the squirrels. Interesting factoid; the Moors were very fond of ponds and fountains, and so the Nazaries Palaces are home to a large and contented frog population.

I had expected Granada to be much like Cordoba but hillier – in fact the stone in each Spanish city is different and this lends an entirely different character. In Cordoba it’s golden (a bit like Sydney sandstone) but in Granada it’s grey.

I left Granada in a blablacar (the long distance equivalent of Uber) with three young Spanish guys who for the first half an hour didn’t say a word. I realised after a while that one of them had a cockatiel in a carry case he was murmuring to, so we got talking about that, and the endearing habits of los gattos (cats) and Spain’s latest Eurovision hit (I let on that I thought Eurovision was shit, which was a mistake, as this was an LGBTI-friendly vehicle). Now in Cadiz, in the flat of a friendly artist who designs lingerie for a living (all mine went to the op shop long ago, sadly).

And finally, some remarks on Google. Which guides my every step, as in…’turn left at Calle de Catolica…3 minutes to your destination….turn right towards Ave de WherethefuckamI…five minutes to your destination….turn right again on Calle LookslikeIhavegonewrongsomewhere…ten minutes to your destination….right again on Ohshitnotthisagain…..and here we are back on Calle de Catolica!’

I’m gradually getting better at it.

Annoying things religions do…

And yet, without them…

I spent this morning in the Mesquite, the magnificent mosque built by Abdul ar Rahman 1 in Cordoba in 785AD and subsequently turned into a cathedral when the Christians won the War. The Moorish colonnades and arches are wonderful to behold, the glitzy Christian razamatazz and smirking saints not so much. King Carlos 1 cried, apparently, at the mess they’d made – he should have just said no. To be fair, Islamic clerics did the same to Istanbul’s Ayia Sofia, covering up the gorgeous Christian mosaics with Islamic curly stuff because, well, God doesn’t like pictures of things. Religions!

And yet, without them, there’d be no Mesquite or Ayia Sofia either, so…

I began this trip with the vague idea that I’d just decide where to go as I, um, went. This is alright so far but has its drawbacks, in that there are lots of places I want to see, in diverse directions, and one does not want to spend all day on the bus. Choices have to be made. Ultimate considerations (like wanting to end up, sometime or other, in Sicily) need to be factored in. I guess there are always planes…

One thing I do like about eating in Spain (apart from the snails, entrails and pig foetuses) is the tapas. For about three euros you can order a small plate of something you’ve never had before. If you don’t like it, order another one. If you do, there you go, that’s dinner. Yesterday it was tomato, garlic and breadcrumb soup! Also, the maitre’d sang.

Cordoba has you wandering around with your jaw dropped and your mobile phone camera permanently cocked – what, another bougainvillea-draped Romanesque balcony/cobblestoned piazza/Roman temple cum cafe/picturesque alleyway/girl with inadvisably tight vinyl shorts? The air is filled with the scent of (mock) orange blossom. Moorish courtyards full of espaliered oranges and assorted floristry.

On the other hand, somebody has been practising the recorder outside my hotel room window for about two days. Now that, at least, is as gruelling on the ear as it is at home in Oz.