Stone paths in the garden

In August 1989 I was in Padova where I was impressed by a Renaissance herb garden which, if I remember rightly, also attracted the attention of the wandering Goethe. As an arty-farty individual I was taken with the idea of the garden with its regular beds laid out in a circular patterns of paths and walls and spent a couple of hours there enjoying the scents and the patterns of shadow from the surrounding trees.

Now I am in a small village in the mountains of Asturias laying stone paths in a garden that will become something like the herb garden that still casts its aromas over the years from the corners of my memory. Carmen has a more practical view of the venture and wants to see things getting done, although her practicality is thwarted by a level of perfectionism that capsizes progress: finding the right stone for the right spot is essential and I feel we are going to plant little before the long labour of stone-laying is done.

The village water supply

The village is in a state of turmopil over the water supply. Last year the town hall put in a new water supply causing havoc as they dug up the roads and laid the pipes. The new did not replace the old, which comes from a small reservoir on the hill: some people plugged themselves into it and maintained a tap with the old, some changed over completely, others stuck with the old and a few, especially those with cows, started using the new without fitting the compulsory meter.

Since the workmen made a mess of the roads in their efforst to lay the pipes, the town hall now wants to asphalt over the evidence of their sloppy workmanship. This will tidy things up but it will also mean that the old pipes will be impossible tog et to when they need repairing- a frequent occurrence since they are not buried deep enough to avoid frequent breakages when a heavy tractors pass over. This coinicides with the realisation that the water company is not so obtuse that it hasn't noticed the a disproportional use of water compared to the amount metered: the water thieves are going to have to pay for the new or sort out the old.

The issue divides the village. Those who use their houses at weekends and for holidays are content to pay for the new and forget the old because they are unlikely to reach the minimum metered anount and the charge is reasonable. Those with cows of course want to sort out the old supply but they want it to be a communal effort to defray some of the expense.

No one can agree on anything excapt perhaps that the best method of going about things is to have endless meetings where no one says what they mean until afterwards, when they huddle off into groups and make bitter imprecations against those who are slowing things down. You can't use the water for watering your garden or filling your swimming pool, they say. Well, go to hell then and don't count on my money. Ahh, so you won't help that means I won't help with the village fiesta. You wait and see, I'll be the first to say no to someone else's plans.

Will the old supply be saved? The clock is against it. When the council finally comes with the asphalt wagon, which is already parked at the junction like an unwieldy club of Damocles, the pipes have to have been moved. This makes it a race against time.

Culture Shock- Being Back in Britain

I'm getting culture shock from being back in Britain for a visit. The supermarkets are full of a miscellany of body types and shapes decked out in clothes that range from the vulgar to the extravagant, the streets are deserted after six in the evening and the bars are filled with young women with fat legs in short skirts that cover too little. Their boyfriends stand in mannish groups swearing unimaginatively about the football.

England smells damp. You notice it as soon as you get off the aeroplane. And Somerset has a rich, damp cow manure odour that drifts into Taunton town centre, where it competes with diesel fumes, fried food and cheap deodorant.

As a naive young man in New York in the eighties I scoffed at my American friends' notion that the English were still getting over the loss of Empire only to be struck by the layers of division and snobbery when I returned after a year. Now, coming back from Spain, I am struck again by how stratified society is here. There is a much greater diversity of dress and manners, and young people have a litany of terms that pigeon-hole the different groups: Yah, Toff, Hooray Henry at the upper end and the abusive chav and yob at the lower end, with a whole range of types the anonymous middle classes adopt to attempt to differentiate themselves.

In England people wear clothes as a badge of their difference. 'You're not going to wear those chavvy trainers?' I am asked. They are far too white and new.

Money can't get you up a social notch. I catch myself scoffing at a young man bragging about his 'brand new lotis (Lotus)'. Posh car; common accent.

The plebs shop at Asda's or Tesco's (always adding the vulgar possessive) filling their enormous trolleys with ready meals and cheap alcohol. The upper crust go to Sainsbury's for the variety or County Stores, which is the one remaining grocery store in the centre of town. There I see well-scrubbed senior in blazers and cravats looking out a crappy wine they will pass off as quality whilst their powdered spouses peruse the preserves and pickles.

A brief drive in the country shows that the villages have been taken over by professionals who maintain houses that would have been knocked down in Spain. There are trees that have been planted because they look good and everyone has a flower garden. This is almost the reverse of Spain: the hoi polloi in the villages the shabbily dressed proles in the towns, whereas in Spain the village is full of culture-less country types and the educated aspire to live in modernity in cities.

John Major's desire for a classless society is seen most clearly where the town joins the country, in the garden centres, DIY superstores and trading estates which are the common ground of the Englishman. If you were to put all the social classes into a pot and boil them down for a couple of decades you would come up with some sludge resembling this: Classic FM on the tannoy and pseudo-classical garden statuary cast in cement; a shopping trolley culture masquerading as self-improvement.

Oh to be in England again!

Maturity

What is maturity? I know a mature cheese because it is smelly and matured wine has a thicker flavour, but maturity in people is different altogether. It´s not just a question of ageing: there almost seems to be a moral dimension to the question fo growing up. Experience does not necessarily make you wise.

I wanted to write about maturity because I had come across the extraordinary phenomenon of children being more mature than adults. This led me to think that perhaps there is a developmental process that gives maturity. Maybe some people miss out on a couple of steps.

I like the idea of develpomental phases. It seems a useful way of describing the world of behaviour, particularly in children where it is very clear when a stage has not been reached. The child who does not get recognition for reaching a developmental milestone continues to exhibit fears, anxiety, attention-seeking behaviour, dependence and the unfortunate tendency to revert to infantile states, which then leads on to failure to integrate socially. People, including other kids, don´t recognise babies in older bodies, they just see irritating behaviour.

There are also developmental phases in learning: if you come across a child with a learning difficulty but no cognitive problem it seems likely that there is a psychological dependence on an infantile state.

I think parents have quite a lot to do with this and I have written elsewhere about the facility they have for making the child powerless by taking away her free decisions or negating her ability to choose by imposing ´improving´ adult tastes. This is the tyranny of the ´stupid´adult (who might, incidentally, be very clever, but who has this blindness to the person in front of him).

Summerhill helps children to achieve maturity by giving them the opportunity to reach their developmental milestones freely without waiting for that approval that ´stupid´ parents are so slow in giving. It also reflects back the infantile behaviour and says, "This is infantile", which is a desireable message, is not complicated and, importantly, does not mush together sentimental ideas of loving and nurturing with the simple celebration of acting appropriately.

Coming back to adults who are more immature than children, it is clearly the case that a 50 year old may continue to act like an adolescent and transform relationships into unresolved authority battles with an ageing or dead parent. A 30 year old can suckle, a 40 year old can have 2 year old tantrums, a 60 year old can be seeking approval eternally for her decisions.

Perhaps, in therapy, these developmental missteps could be resolved and useful change come about, but since these´problems´are so universal the mass diagnosis of therapy seems excessive. In practice we tend to accept that there are people we work with, socialise with and live with who are mature and others who are not. Just recognising this immaturity is valuable.

I don´t want to change the world, but I think it is a valuable service to the world to work with children and help them to reach their developmental milestones so that they do not continue into adulthood as the kind of irritating and self-indulgent adults that we all try to avoid!

Oviedo Shopping Centre

We are surrounded by stuff. It grows into heaps and piles that is stored and used, wears out and is thrown away or moulders in corners. Most of it is rubbish but the traditional bourgeois conception of life is to distinguish between the good and the bad by acquiring quality stuff: high value is put on the craftsmanship and materials that go to make quality stuff.

The ´traditional´ avant garde artist cocked a snook at this bourgeois conception of taste, laughed at its frequent gaucherie and made pleas for a different aesthetic. This was based on the on the ´seeing eye´so that art could become more than just a collection of crafted objects and the artist´s vision became as important as the objects he left behind.

This tradition is evident in every gallery of Modern Art and, even though the story is old and the fable a little worn, I continue to enjoy it. There is something exciting about the Modern Art story. I want to look at an example of a building that expresses the conflict of the modern beautifully.

On a visit to a shopping centre in Oviedo I was struck by the extraordinary beauty of what, on the face of it, is an extremely ugly building. There is a large central space, a stairwell for the five or more floors. This stairwell is occupied by escalators, stairs and ramps so that, looking down into the pit, you are confronted by a mesh of bars painted in a nasty yellow that floats over the gray of the floors and the acid blue of the supports.

Behind this visually powerful structure is a delicate play of lights and gray tones surrounding them: the emphemerality of the twinkling seems to be saying something about the hidden spaces as well. There is constant movement. People are walking and standing on escalators, wholly dominated by this powerful structure, the minor tints of colour in their clothing swamped by the blue and yellow grid. As they disappear to the bottom layer they become less distinct and clear and then they disappear into the hidden spaces- the shops.

The experience of this shopping centre is more arresting than any work of art I have seen in a museum or gallery recently. It is visually enchanting. It entirely repudiates bourgeios notions of taste with is blue and yellow colour combination. It ought to be ´tacky´and ´nasty´ but with the effect of the hole, softening the colours, and the twinkling lights and grays, which give them an almost magical context, the experience of looking becomes delightful.

At the same time there are levels of meaning in this work- not meanings that I have put there, but meanings that arise naturally from the meditation on this extraordinary experience. The people are oblivious to the beauty of the structure and instead are attracted to the twinkling lights. Even the visual power of the yellows and blues cannot distract them from the enchantment of the ephemeral and they, therefore, become willing participants in the dance, the visual spectacle seen from above looking down or below looking up.

Not only this, but you can engage directly with the work by riding the escalators, walking the ramps or climbing the stairs. Then you can watch as the bars of yellow change in configuration around you and meditate on personal and cultural meanings. Bars mean cages; ascent and descent recall heaven and hell; the pit itself with its levels and layers recalls the vision of Dante. One is tempted to look for a guide to help question the people in various degrees of stupour or trance.

Then there is the final irony- appropriate since, in this age, irony is the defining tone of aesthetic experience- that the work refers to its own place in the history of Modernity. Within it the new bourgois searhc for objects of quality on the shelves of the stores. The commercial centre, which I have looked at as the work of art, is ignored in the quest to acquire more stuff.

Some voices may even decry the ugliness of the monstrosity that has been erected to service our appetites. However, like the best of Modren Art, this work interacts with, expresses, comments upon and at the same time remains elusive to, the world in which it exists. It is a masterpiece.

Summerhill Takeaway

I was a teacher at Summerhill School for six years and now I am not. I want to reflect on a question that many visitors to the school posed. ´Freedom is all very well here,´they would say, ´but this is a privileged setting. What can we take away from Summerhill?
What can you take away? And how can you avoid confusing or perverting the message when you attempt to transplant it into another situation? I have seen enough of ´family meetings´that try to ape something Summerhillian in the home to know that this is a perversion. I´ve seen parents being bullied by their children under the name of liberty so it seems that freedom itself can be perverted. And I´ve seen school councils with a democratic appearance that merely reinforce the heirarchical and authoritarian structures of the schools in which they have been ´gifted´by improving adults. No, if you want to take something away it must be something more honest and less obvious.
Children tend to say they like being at Summerhill because they can ´do what they like´. This simple idea is difficult to grasp and even when you have grasped it intellectually it takes a long time to enact. Do you do what you like? Think back over the past week and consider well whether you were doing what you liked, what you chose to do. Think also whether you liked waht you were doing.
Typically adults say things like: ´That´s all very well, but you can´t just do what you like. If everyone did what they liked the world would come to a standstill.´ Or they might say, ´You can´t just do what you like all the time. If you did the world would come to a standstill. Sometimes you have to face up to the real world. There are unpleasant things that you have to do. You may not like them, but they have to be done.´ Or they might say, ´I´ve had to give up a damn lot in my life to get where I am. You can´t tell me I would have done all that if I´d done just what I liked all the time.´
Well, Summerhill doesn´t come to a standstill. It seems to carry itself forward reasonably well without insisting that people do things that they don´t want to. And I suppose for those children, their world is just as real as the real worlds of those who fill their experience with things they don´t like doing. Besides, there are some areas in which the absolute ´do as you will´idea is moderated by the requirements of living in a community. This is the famous Summerhillian distinction between freedom and licence: you can do what you like so long as it doesn´t interfere with someone else´s freedom to do what they like.
This famoous dictum fits just about anywhere. You don´t have to be in a school or institution of any kind. In this world of more-or-less fucked up relationships a bit of ´do as you like´would really untie some knots. For example, next time someone says to you, ´I´ve got to go and see my gran´ you might say, ´Do what you like.´ Not only say it, mind, but truly mean it. Have the deep belief and awareness that what you choose to do is in your own power to alter. This is the case even if you have very limited options to choose from due to circumstances (lack of money, lack of time, pressures of work, family, social and political environments). It is always possible to take back the responsibility for your own decision-making, to turn away the ´helpful´interference of those who want to take away your freedom, and to insist that those around you make their own decisions without making you the butt and scapegoat. Let´s look at each of these dimensions in turn.
Taking responsibility for your own decisions means not existing in servile dependence on what those around you want. That´s not good for you and it´s not good for them either. The dependence can be justified along the lines of ´No-one will love me if I say what I really want, so I´d better find out what everyone else wants first before I reveal anything.´ I think it´s pretty easy to see that unfair this is on everyone around you. Everyone does it a bit, but if you find yourself in a chronic pattern of not doing as you like because you are waiting to find out what others like first, then you need to get a grip and take back the responsibility for your own decisions.
´Helpful´interference can be so subtly disguised that you don´t recognise it. It may be wrapped in emotional or intellectual paper, but the essential import will be the same: what you want to do is less important and vital than what you should do. An example of emotional wrapping would be: ´Mum will be expecting us.´ Do you see how cleverly that takes away all the power and responsibility from you to make the decision about what you are going to do? I bet mum wouldn´t want that either. An example of intellectual wrapping would be, ´There is a requirement to fulfil the conditions of the third clause.´ You can see, I imagine, that by intellectual I do not mean reflective or thinking. These kinds of conditions are frequently imposed by bureaucratic minds- not the triumph of humanity. They like to make you feel powerless but it is easy to reframe the situation by taking control of your ability to do what you like.
If you do this yourself you are doing a lot, but once you have really digested the message you will find that insist others around you do it too: don´t take responsibility for other people´s decision-making because you cannot decide for them what they want. You can tell when you are in one of these situations because you will feel the hackles rising on your neck and start to get the sensation that the person in front of you is not talking to you but to some superimposed image of a parent, teacher or friend from the past. ´I can´t decide what I want until you tell me...´ This is the basic message you want to fend off. And if you do not fend it off there will be consequences: ´It´s your fault that I´m not happy/entertained/successful etc.´ So when someone asks, ´Shall I have an ice-cream?´the only correct answer is, ´Do what you like.´ It may sound rude but it is a hell of a lot better than living in psychological dependence.
So, in a nutshell, I think the best thing you can take away from Summerhill is to do as you like. Pass the thought through your head many times a day and in conversations and social situations always recur to it. If you find yourself saying, ´I don´t really want to be here, but...´just cut yourself short, say what you do want and get on with it. No-one will miss your prevarications if you become more decisive in this way. There will also be a general increase in the levels of maturity around you. I´ll talk about maturity next because the funny thing about Summerhill is that a lot of the kids are more ´mature´than the adults: now why would that be?

Sabino the Cow Man

Sabino was standing at the bottom of the ladder in his madreñas or clogs that add another couple of inches to his already large stature. He was leaning on his stick watching me struggle with the foam gun I was using to replace tiles that had been lifted in the gale. My hands were covered in a sticky paste that was gluing my fingers together.

Sabino speaks Asturianu or Bablé, the local language, and although he speaks in Castellano to me I find it difficult to follow sometimes because of the accent. Vacas (cows) become bAH-kes and words that end in 'o' in Spanish end in 'u' (oo). All those oos make the cooing language sympathetic with the sound of surprise in every sentence.

A village stalwart, Sabino doesn't drive and rarely leaves the mountain valleys. The first time I met him he asked where I was from. 'Ah, las Inglaterras,' he said and paused. 'They don't have cows there, do they?' He paused again. 'At least not like the cows here.'

Asturian cows are big, beautiful jersey-type cows with wide noses that snort a stream of hot air on your outstretched hand and look at you with seductive brown eyes rimmed with black and cream. When they get frisky they jump over the fences and dry stone walls and mill around on the roadside until Conchi or Sabino comes along to round them up with a few touches of the switch and some shouting.

He complains that people don't want to work with cows any more. The village is suffering a decline in population that leaves me puzzled when I stop to think about it. The village houses with their well-worked stone doorways and their solid walls of mampostería or unworked stone, tell you that once this land supported many families not just at the subsistence level of a small-holding, or minifundio, but with a surplus that allowed decorative extras. Now it seems the same land does not give enough even to live poorly.

Tino, who was a lorry driver but now owns a furniture shop near Cornellana and dedicates his spare time to small-scale market gardening, knows the reason. 'La gente es zoqueta,' he says. 'People are stupid. They don't want to work and when they work they want it all to be easy. They think they can just make a living with cows, but it never used to be like that. You need to diversify. The land is good. You can grow anything here and all they want is a cash crop and go live in the city.'

Sabino has other ideas. I'm up the ladder and my hands are turning into paddles with this sticky foam so I have to come down and give him my full attention. The real problem these days, he tells me, is that all these city types are a bunch of maricones who don't know the front of a cow from its rear end.

Bride of Smelly- for My Mum

Smelly is Carmen's cat. His real name is Tin but I've been calling him Smelly since he came to the flat in Avilés and left us a gift right in the middle of the bed. And Carmen's cat is smelly. After a week in the flat there was a catty odour that pervaded everything.

He comes to visit from the village periodically because he is not neutered and goes out at night to fight with the other toms. Since he is not a good fighter he comes back with scratches all over his head and ears, miaows pathetically and requires medical attention. Being a patient animal, he allows us to wipe him down with betadine and wash the seeds and cowshit out of his fur in the shower without complaining.

I've grown quite fond of Smelly. This is a big surprise to me because I have never wanted pets and was initially a little dismayed by Carmen's evident desire to mount a small menagerie with Nicolás.

The latest addition is the rabbit whose name is Nube or Cloud. He is white with black rims around his eyes and is completely devoted to Carmen whom he follows around the patio, tripping her up as he runs in front of her feet. Carmen calls him Nubecita, which is a very girly name for a rabbit with eyes that look like they have been painted with mascara. I prefer his other name- El Bandido or The Bandit- which gives his eye patches another connotation. As he watches me with his nose bobbing up and down I get the feeling he is planning something evil.

The affection that Carmen has for the animals and the affection and devotion they return to her is charming. Even when she is pushing El Bandido out of the flowerpots with a broom she shows nothing more than a slight passing irritation and within a few moments will be crouched down caressing his ears. Initially nervous, he has learnt to be more trusting and affectionate from her.

I suppose that goes for me as well. When I was a student I ribbed my mum that she wrote a letter to me all about the cat and, being young and cynical, couldn't imagine being a pet-lover. Being cynical can seem smart but it is rarely wise: my mum stopped writing about the cat and, to be honest, I missed it. When I told Carmen about the cat letter, she said, 'Claro. ¿Y qué imaginabas? Of course, and what did you think would happen?'

The other day another cat appeared on the terrace. It was Smelly's girlfriend. I had seen her before. She came down over the roof and miaowed at Smelly then he got up from his bed and followed her off over the houses. That makes it sound as if he is a romantic but, when I gave her milk and some food this time, he showed every sign of being annoyed at me.

'That's my bowl,' he seemed to be thinking. 'And what's more, you don't give me milk in it.'

I don't give Smelly milk because Carmen insists that I have to warm the milk in a saucepan first. 'You can't just give him milk straight out of the fridge,' she says. 'He won't drink it. We've always warmed his milk.' This seems to be carrying devotion to your animals too far but, as I find Carmen's attention to these little things so enchanting, I don't discount the possibility that I might find myself warming the little prince's milk one of these days.

As you have probably noticed, finding the right name for an animal is important to me. Bride of Smelly tickles me because it sounds like the title of a horror film and the cat is hardly cute. She has a weak eye so she looks as though she is about to wink at you. Winky and Squint don't quite do it for me so I am still looking for the right name.

Of course Carmen finds it highly amusing that I am putting out milk for Bride of Smelly. 'I bet you never imagined you would be digging a vegetable garden and caring for cats,' she laughs. It's true. If I could be a little less smart and a lot more gentle I think I would enjoy life a lot more. It's a piece of good luck to have found someone I admire so much to learn these things from.

Driving in Spain- or the Koala in the Monkey Cage part II

It's a little too much to say that the Spanish are bad drivers, because they spend their driving lives performing dangerous operations that require considerable skill and coordination. Hurtling along the road too fast and too close, they like to move without indicating and overtake with warning on tight bends.

There is a surprising level of tolerance generally for this egotistical behaviour. Carmen even referred to it as 'good driving' once which was so counter-intuitive that I had no reply. If you have never driven in Spain you might find these pointers useful.

First, the speed limit is a suggestion unless there is a camera about and, since these are almost exclusively on motorways, you can drive as fast as you like through mountain villages. The normal speed for built-up areas is 50km per hour, but if you are on the main road passing through a village you can add another twenty to this.

You may feel a little nervous at roaring past the front doors of houses. They almost invariably give directly onto the road, because pavements are rare in the country and front gardens rarer. You can be confident that the residents are aware of the dangers, however, and will take precautions against getting squashed.

It can be more dangerous if, in English fashion, you stick religiously to the speed limit. Any drivers behind you will start to do dangerous things out of impatience at this unexpected behaviour: driving too close in an attempt to push you to go faster, for example, or overtaking in the middle of the village.

Considering the dangers of country roads people are remarkably blasé about going for a walk along the highway. As I said, there are few pavements in villages and the corollary of this is an almost total lack of footpaths for walking in the country. It is not at all unusual to come around a tight bend and see some old fellow taking his wheelbarrow for a walk or a couple of old ladies in wellies and aprons chatting as they stroll along. The normal response is to veer into the other lane without touching the brakes: you wouldn't want the car on your bumper to crash into you.

As you approach a town there are a couple of things that are immediately apparent. First, there is no culture of 'letting someone out'. If you are half out of a parking space you can expect the traffic to swerve around you rather than wait for you to finish the manoeuvre. Likewise, if you think you are being polite by letting someone out, think again. The cars behind will think you are waiting for the space and will swerve around you as well.

You are probably getting the picture that what you consider to be polite and 'good' driving is actually unexpected and dangerous in Spain. No example of the difference in culture is clearer than the use of roundabouts. On a roundabout it is perfectly acceptable for someone to roar around on the outide lane and beat you to the exit. In the UK this would be called 'cutting up' and would be a justifiable cause for road rage.

Lane discipline does not exist: a car in the right hand lane could be taking the first, second, or third exit. This means that if you are in the left hand lane you will probably have to cut across the traffic. For this reason, Carmen always sits in the right hand lane no matter where she is going, even if there is a huge queue of traffic- most people agree with her.

On the open road you need to get used to people driving close to your bumper. No one is aware of the three second rule here. Ricardo, who learnt to drive in Finland, asked a friend of his why he was driving so close. What would happen if the car in front suddenly braked? 'But he would have to be crazy to do that!' was the incredulous reply.

People are working on the assumption that you can drive fast and close if everyone shares the same expectations. Don't get all nervous and English: it makes it dangerous. You can have a car on your bumper for many miles on a road that is deserted and far too windy to overtake. There is no benefit in driving so close, people just like it that way.

Conversely, if you leave a space between you and the car ahead of you, you can expect a succession of cars behind you to see that as an open invitation to overtake. There may be little to gain in a queue of traffic miles long but there is a general rule of the road that if you see an opportunity you should take it, even if it makes no sense and is dangerous.

Modern technology has made a great impact on the fatality rates in Spain: new brakes are better than the old ones and the steering in a new car is much more responsive. There has also been a concerted campaign to reduce drink driving, although it continues to be surprising that there are bars in service stations. You can expect to have a number of shocks and surprises driving here, but you should return in one piece. Just don't be too English about it and you will be just fine.

Monte do Gozo- or Shouting in Public

Monte do Gozo is the last stopping point on the Camino before you head into Santiago da Compostela and it is the first place you get to see the spires of the Cathedral. There is a chapel dedicated to St Mark and a hideous concrete, glass, steel and bronze monument that commemorates the symbolic pilgrimage of Pope John Paul II.

I always feel excited and happy at Monte do Gozo. We have successfully brought a group of pilgrims 160 km across rural Galicia to this point. The pilgrimage is nearly over and the sooner we get into the city the more time I will have to explore a city whose granite heart hides an endless variety of charms and hidden corners. It bubbles with life and happiness, particularly of the pilgrims for whom this part of their camino is over.

This time I found myself in a grumpy mood as I shepherded the group down the last stretch on account of a group of cyclists who had camped themselves on the path between the monumnent and the chapel. They had pulled out a leg of Spanish ham and were busy shouting at one another over the loud American music that was pumping out of their support van. There is a Spanish word for this- jaleo- and like many words it is hard to translate because armando jaleo or making an offensive racket is not offensive here.

People frequently shout at each other in the street, for example, not in anger or aggression but simply because it seems better to call out, 'Hombre!' at the top of your voice than to walk a couple of metres further and talk. No one minds this, just as no one minds children running riot in restaurants, or the ever present television that fills a bar with noise even when there are no shouting locals to do it.

'Somos así,' said Ria my fellow guide. 'That's the way we are. You don't know what it's like to complete a pilgrimage like they have. They are just excited and happy. That's all.'

When I mentioned it on the phone to Carmen, she said something similar: 'Es nuestra naturaleza. Somos más expresivos que vosotros. It's in our nature. We're more expressive than you are. Here if you feel angry you give three shouts and get it out. Not like you. You walk around with a black face and don't say anything. You English are far too polite. You just hold it all in.'

Carmen has a way of turning things around so that I feel wrong-footed and defensive.

'So, I should have gone over and shouted at them?' I asked ironically, but really I knew she was right. In England I also object to people who shout at each other in the street when they could easily be understood talking and groups of young men and women making an offensive racket in public always make my hackles rise. The difference is that here no one agrees with me.

It seems so obviously a bad thing to be loud-mouthed and coarse that it makes me feel even more grumpy when I notice that no one else cares about it. Then I start to feel like the koala in the monkey cage. I get a similar feeling driving in Spain, but that will be another blog.

The herb garden

Valentín has a dry sense of humour. And like many of the villagers he looks at me struggling in the garden with Carmen with a mixture of puzzlement and condescension.

'There's hardly enough work here for two people,' he says laconically, leaning out of his car and watching us fighting with the raspberries that have run wild in the vegetable patch. This is country machismo. For him a spade is just a toy shovel: the Spanish male likes to heft a weighty tool and the pica they use is an impracticably heavy chunk of metal on a crude post. It is curved and pointed: great for digging holes; lousy for anything delicate.

Gracina is out in her vegetable patch as well and Severo, walking by to tend his horses, looks at me then across at her. 'I've always looked after the animals,' he says. This is the village wisdom. The huerto is the kitchen garden and, as an extension of the house, it is female territory. The men look after the big animals like horses and cows. The women deal with the lambs and the chickens.

Everyone knows that if you want to find out when to plant or pick you should go look at what the older women are doing, because they are the guardians of all the traditional knowledge.

Valentín is a burly man with sandy hair and a blue eyes. His face turns pink in the sun. He could be English. 'What's that?' he asks Carmen.
'It's supposed to be a laurel,' she replies, 'but Severo keeps cutting it back with the scythe. It's never going to grow.'
'What do you want that for?'
'Well, you can use the leaves for cooking...'
'It's a weed. Anyway, there's loads of it up the mountain.'

The very idea of ornamental gardening confuses the villagers, so when we dug over part of the field to start a flower garden it fell well outside of the expectations of our neighbours. Flower gardening is limited to the omnipresent hydrangeas, the occasional rosebush and a few potted geraniums.

We could justify nasturtiums or capuchinas because you can eat both leaves and flowers. Even so Severo's face was a picture of bewilderment when he saw me put one in my mouth. It is eccentric to plant things just because they look good. God knows what people will think of the flower garden if it starts to come together. And if I work in the flower garden I will be some kind of pansy.

Pepe,or the busdriver's philosophy

When we are on tour we use a bus company based in Melide called Gomserbus. I think the busdrivers add something special to the tours because they are local people with a distinctly local perspective: they open a door to the culture of everyday Galicia.

Pepe is the Spanish abbreviation of José. Pepe the busdriver is a short, round man with twinkly eyes and a Super Mario moustache. He stretches out his hand and says 'Hombre!' when we meet at the Posada Regia in Leon to start the tour. 'Me alegro de verte- pleased to see you.'

Pepe's alegria is not at all forced: it bubbles out of him irresistibly, a child-like enjoyment of food, wine, family and friends. When we stop at a bar or restaurant he will say, 'Ya me conocen aquí- they already know me here.' It doesn't take much to know Pepe and I like to think that his philosophy of life, if it were ever to be written down, could be encapsulated in three words: Y ya está which could be roughly translated as 'And that's all there is to it.' It sounds better in Spanish.

'Pepe,' I asked, 'how can you know everyone? They can't all be your friends.'
'Well,' he replied, 'maybe they don't actually know me, but I just have to go in and say hello and...pues...y ya está.'

He's right. There's something about that cheeky smile that makes you feel you know him even after a few words. I suppose the same is true of grumpy people as well: you only need a few minutes to realise you don't want to talk to a curmudgeon.

Last year we were eating at a parrillada or grillhouse near Palas de Rei. Everyone was sitting at the table waiting for the food and Alex asked, 'Where's Pepe?' Twenty minutes later he came in and sat down.
'Where've you been, Pepe?'
'Oh, well...'
'No, come on. Where've you been?'

As soon as he'd dropped us off at the resaurant he'd got back in the bus and driven back along the Camino. We'd all commented on a woman with her five young children walking the trail. We'd seen them all trudging along in the declining light. 'That's so irresponsible,' one of the ladies said. 'What are they going to do if they get to Palas and there is no room at the albergue?' There had been much tutting and comment, but Pepe,probably thinking much the same, had just turned the bus around, picked up the whole family and taken them to the hostel, making sure they were settled and comfortable before coming on to dinner. We jokingly dubbed him San José.

Palas de Rei is Pepe's local town although he lives in Pambre, a tiny village with a big medieval castle a few miles up the road. Like many Gallegos, Pepe feels that when you are in his territory he has an obligation to look after you. He invited Alex and me to dinner with his family swelling with a pride that went both ways: here is my family; here are my friends.

He goes through a typical ritual with Alex when we stop for coffee.
'Ya está!' he declares brandishing a five euro note.
'Put it away,' protests Alex and turns to the barmaid. 'Here. How much do I owe?'
'Don't take his money,' orders Pepe and snatches Alex's money out of the barmaid's hand to slide it back along the counter.
'I'll get angry,' Alex says with a frown.
'No, I'm paying y ya está!' responds Pepe. If I want to pay I've found the best way is to do it secretly while no one is looking. That doesn't avoid the pantomime of taking offence, but it cuts it shorter.

Pepe also helps me to understand married life in Spain. He says when your wife is complaining about where you have left your shoes or the work is getting her down your should give her a hug and caress her ears. He gives me a grin. 'Tell her you love her y ya está. No hay más- there's nothing else.' So I, with my English tendency to take things too seriously and to be irritated by what I see as criticisms, am learning to take things with a busdriver's philosophy: te quiero, y ya está.

The Grass

The first thing I noticed, even before we had unloaded the car, was that the grass was knee-high. It was raining a light drizzle, known in these parts as orbayu, that is responsible for the disheartening fecundity of the grass, the nettles, the dandelions and the plantains.

I left Carmen in bed in the morning and took my painting things out for a walk thinking that I might sit down on the hillside and do a drawing, but it was sunny and warm. A haze was rising off the meadows and I knew there was an opportunity to get the strimmer out and the field a trim before I left for the Camino.

It is not an pleasant task. Aside from the noise and the vibration that makes the shoulder muscles ache, the strimmer turns everything to tiny flecks covering your legs and arms with a greenish paste knitted together with slug goo.

Carmen came down and and started plucking out the weeds in the flowerbeds. 'That's the last time I have mercy on the daisies,' she complained. 'I thought they looked pretty but they end up everywhere.'

I looked at the thick wadges of cut grass that littered the field and covered the gladioli in the small bed between the apple trees we planted last year. Carmen will nag me for leaving it later, but Severo says you should leve cut grass for a couple of days because it is ten times easier to rake dry. Anyway I was feeling tired and wanted to go in and start making lunch, knowing that she would be busy in the garden until the last moment oblivious to the passing time.

Severo, our neighbour, makes me think of Andrew Marvell as he strides up the hill with his scythe over his shoulder. I've watched him at work and it seems he can mow a field with the blade in half the time it takes me to with the strimmer and come up clean. He is of the type Perez Galdós calls 'our country athletes' in El Caballero Encantado. He's sixty but thinks nothing of jumping over a wall or running along the path in his wellies just for the fun of it.

Since Carmen had people in the rental house who were sunbathing in the patio and enjoying a weekend of rustic peace and quiet, I was more than usually sensitive to the fact that I was ruining all that with the infernal machine. After we had eaten I said to Carmen that I was thinking of asking Severo to show me how to use the scythe instead.

'Claro,' she said. 'Fijate the size of the blade. Thiss, thass. You can cut a lot more with one swipe.'

Carmen loves all the country traditions like planting things according to the phases of the moon, wall-building and spreading manure that has to be just the right consistency. But she also has a typical Spanish woman's way of telling me that I am probably not up to it.

'The guadaña is dangerous,' she says, with a look that implies I will almost certainly end up cutting off my foot. 'It's not as easy as all that, so you'll have to take classes. You'd better give it several goes with Severo before you go and get yourself a scythe.'

I'd like to say I've learnt not to take this personally but I feel myself turning prickly, just as I do when she comes into the kitchen, adjusts the gas on the cooker while I'm cooking, tuts at the way I'm peeling the potatoes and tells me I haven't got things in the right order. I can only explain this as a cultural difference: men here are supposed to be a bit useless; women are supposed to boss them around so they don't go off the rails. Pepe says the right way to deal with this is to give them a kiss and tell them you love them: I have a lot to learn.

If I learn how to use the scythe, which in my non-Spanish way of thinking cannot be overly complicated, I will have something meditative and calm to do in the garden. Unlike the strimmer that rattles its way into your bones, the scythe will give me a sense of connection with the task. I'll also be able to her Carmen as she tells me what to cut and how. And it wil be easier to stop and give her a kiss and tell her I love her!

Abandoned houses- Portugal

I'm one of a long list of Englishmen who has been to the coast of Portugal around Lisbon. When William Beckford, the eccentric and extremely wealthy hedonist, discovered Sintra in the late eighteenth-century he went about designing follies, those strange semi-architectural vestiges you can still find in the parks and gardens setting a touch of romantic decay amongst the exotic plantings of trees and ferns. There is no need to build follies these days, however: there is plenty of romantic decay in the existing buildings.
Who owns the shuttered houses? It seems that the modern Portuguese do not want to live in these elegant mansions with their ironwork grilles and high ceilings, preferring the new developments of apartment blocks and chalets. Easy to build, easy to maintain they spread out in ugly estates around the villages that are not protected, with little room for the pedestrian but ample parking space for the car; not much garden to care for, few trees and easy access to the shops.
Beckford was queer in all senses of the word. He wrote a strange novella called Vathek and hobnobbed with arty types. These arty types still exist. I was invited to a life-drawing class by a woman I met in the street and thought that the place was ideal for a community of artists. If only someone would surrender the keys to that beautiful house on the edge of the Parque da Liberdade to make an art school!
Setúbal, Lisboa, Sesimbra and Azeitao all had their share of follies. These abandoned houses are not necessarily so big that they could not be inhabited. Indeed in Sesimbra, a vibrant fishing village, the houses are famously small showing the preference of the fishermen for accommodations that resembled the cabins they were used to at sea. Now a walk through the old quarter is saddening as the tiles are falling off the facades and the whitewash is peeling. Along the seafront enormous five star hotels offer air-conditioned modernity to the tourist who wants sand and sea without roughing it.
This makes me reflect on whether my attachment to these vestiges of the past is just a Romantic dream. If you can't get digital TV and the kitchen isn't big enough for a washing machine and a dishwasher then who is going to want to do up one of these old ruins. On top of that they have those old wooden shutters that probably do nothing to keep the heat or the cold out in comparison to the omnipresent rollerblinds that make modern flats in Portugal look like closed banks at midday.
We went to the Manueline church of Bom Jesus in Setúbal. There was a whiskered chap at a desk listening to samba on his transistor radio and looking out across the concreted-over park in front, where youths sporting backward caps and blazoned T-shirts skateboarded badly on the slopes and high fived in the midday sun. The combination of samba and late gothic architecture was appealing and I stayed there whilst Carmen went off to the park with the kids. I was the only one in the building besides the bored warder and I thought of Pillip Larkin- 'randy for antique'- and his predictions about the future fate of churches in High Windows. Then I went to the museum, paid my euro to the surprised ticket man and spent fifteen minutes with the Portuguese primitives before the overwhelming urge for the bathroom made me rush out in search of a bar.
I kept thinking, 'This is important stuff. Don't people value it?' And I suppose some people do. The Museu de Arte Antica in Lisboa is a wonderful cool building, which alleviates the runny nose and itching eyes of an allergic reaction to the city in the space of ten minutes. I wandered around the deserted halls winking and smiling at the bored guards as I sought out Nuno Gonçalves' altarpiece with its dozens of potrait heads. Someone is prepared to pay a lot of money to maintain this- not many people are interested in looking at it.
It's a bit like the houses. Everyone thinks that Sintra is wonderful. They even talk about it as though they shared in it in some way: the micro-climate, the trees, the wonderful old buildings. But I enjoy the fact that it is all slowly crumbling away in neglect- leaving us with truly modern follies.

Pedro Menendez de Aviles

I came back from Santiago da Compostela yesterday. The roads were deserted because of the fiesta of Corpus Christi so it was an unusually pleasant drive on the winding roads that unite the two sections of motorway, dipping through foggy valleys between Galicia and Asturias. I went straight up to the village where Carmen was working on her rental house and spent a moist afternoon tugging at the nettles around the herb garden in the mist before descending to Aviles in the evening.
Aviles is a port with a steel factory and a historic centre that combines charm with bad taste in equal measures. I'm sitting in a cyber cafe here now having walked through the gardens of the Parque Ferrera that used to belong to a mansion- now a luxury hotel. There is still mist in the air and the declining light gave everything a melancholy tinge.
This morning, however, I went out onto the street in a buoyant mood with a list of things to do and a number of extra ideas of my own. My first stop was a small shop that sells plastic models and Warhammer miniatures. I was surprised to find it in Spain because it seems so English to me: the orcs and goblins, the ogres and knights come straight out of Tolkein and are used in a complex game with great tomes of rules you struggle to apply in a game that can last two hours.
José showed me around the shop. In the back he has three tables laid out with scenery so that people can come and play out their campaigns there and, in an adjoining room, there are benches with paints and materials for painting the figures.
"Look at this one," he said, showing me a model that looked like a cross between a skeleton and the monster from the Alien films. It was painted with great care.
"The difficult part is the back." His delicate white fingers pointed out the scales in graded colour descending the spine: it was a work of patience and care.
"We get girls as well," he added. "Sometimes they paint things in strange colours, but they have a lot of skill. And if the girls paint things pink, well the boys... One of them painted his Bretonians with the colours of all his favourite football teams. Not so you would notice, but when you know..."
José is a kind of lay teacher for the people that use the workshop: far too shy to function in the hurly burly of a school but with a lot of ability in helping people. He told me how kids come in expecting to be able to do everything all at once and he has to show them how to go about things more slowly, building up the colours carefully.
When I left the Warhammer shop I went around the corner to the secondhand bookshop to talk to Pedro Menendez de Aviles. He has the same name as the 'famous' navigator whose statue is in the park by the riverside and gives a wry grin in acknowledgement of this coincidence. Whereas the original was a buccaneering conquistador, Pedro is another gentle character like José in the Warhammer shop. His shop is a box with the typical dusty smell of secondhand books and he sits at a desk between piles of them waiting to be shelved.
Pedro is also a kind of teacher. He loves his books and can help people to find what they are looking for either in the shop or on the internet. He is a guide for the lost old things that some people no longer cherish.
"There are no bad books," he said. "They come here because someone wants to throw them out and I find new owners for them. There is something good in all books."
He told me to buy the newspaper and look for an article on some photographs that had been found in someone's attic in eastern Asturias. There were over 500 photographs taken during the brief period up to 1946 when Spain was an ally of Nazi Germany: pictures of the historic meeting of Hitler and Franco at Hendaye and of Himmler shaking hands with the monks at Montserrat.
This photo album had survived the time when it was imprudent to ally oneself with fascists by being stowed away and forgotten. And now with the passage of time had revealed itself to be a true treasure. Another book waiting for its reader.

San Nicolás, Portomarín

It's a church with battlements: a rectangular block of stone with the look of a fortress. San Nicolás de Portomarin belonged to military monks, the knights of the Order of St John, who guarded the bridge across the Rio Miño from which the town gets its name- pontus minei - Portomarin. When General Franco dammed the river to create the Belesar reservoir his engineers moved the church from its position in the valley to where it now stands on the hillside commanding the main square of the new town. You can still see the traces of the painted numbers they used to reassemble this giant 3-dimensional jigsaw puzzle alongside the masons' marks of the original builders.

The church's west front is dominated by a large rose window which gives the interior considerably more light than is typical. This later romanesque church shows a sophisticated but simple iconographical programme and some fine quality carving. The main doorway is a typical 'apocalyptic' portal. On the tympanum above the double doors Christ sits in majesty surrounded by a mandorla indicating his glory and holding the book of judgement in his left hand and blessing with his right hand. He is crowned. The flat spaces to left and right were probably painted with legends or the figures of the tetramorphs- we can't know for sure as any traces of paint that are currently visible would be of a later date.

Surrounding him in the archivolts are the twenty-four elders of the Apocalypse who lack the spontaneous naturalism that is the mark of Master Mateo's genius on the Portico de Gloria, which clearly inspired this work. However, the musical instruments are well descibed. Just as in Santiago they are mainly string instruments, following an ancient bias that gave a higher spiritual status to the heirs of the lyre (Apollo) than the heirs of the flute (Pan) or the drum (Tubal). Both wind and percussion are associated with dancing and debauchery with the sole exception of the organ, which is the ecclesiastical instrument par excellence and is represented by an elder with a portable version.

Below Christ on the door jambs there is a devil on the left, with two tuskers emerging from his mouth, and an angel on his right. Casting our eyes downwards from here to the step we can see the side that most people preferred to enter: the angel's side is worn away.

On the north side there is another door. The tympanum shows the archangel Gabriel raising his right hand in salutation as he approaches the Virgin Mary. She has a look of surprise on her face and is lifting both her hands with palms forward as if to fend him off. This is the moment from the gospel of Luke where the Virgin says, 'Behold the handmaiden of the Lord.' It is the moment of the incarnation of the word of God in her womb and the curioous plant that sprouts between the two figures is a combination of a stylised lily (purity) and pomegranate (fertility). Between the archangel Gabriel's hand and face is a censer. Incense shows that this is a holy moment and we shall see in Leboreiro that there are two censer bearing angels on that church flanking an enthroned Madonna. It may also make us think of the botafumerio, the enormous censer that swings on cords through the transept of the cathedral in Santiago da Compostela.

The south side door completes the iconographical programme. If up to now we have had the judgement and the incarnation, on this side we have the means by which the faithful can attain the salvation that the incarnation promises. In the centre is the titular saint with his bishop's mitre flanked by two deacons, one holding a missal, the other holding his crozier and a peculiarly shaped rod which may be intended to represent a harp (?). The jambs supporting this tympanum show devils' heads devouring people: from the mouth of one emerges a leg; the other has seized a man by the arm and foot, leaving his testicles clearly visible. The message is that the fleshly side of man leads to corruption and death, spiritual salvation is achieved through the mass and the church.

Look out on the north and south doorways for the capitals with good examples of intertwined serpents and fantastic birds with males and female heads and serpent tails. I am far too cautious to assign any meaning to this, but they are a good example of what St Bernard of Clairvaux called "beautiful deformity and deformed beauty".

The Church at Barbadelo

Barbadelo is on the edge of a hill with a panoramic view of the valley that leads down into Sarria. The church is off to the left of the Camino partially obscured by the graves that, in typical Spanish fashion, rise above ground in stacks. It is a curious romanesque church of the second half of the twelfth century which served a mixed sex abbey founded in the early 1000s as a subsidiary of the famous monastery of Samos on the other side of Sarria.

The church has an unusually broad single nave with light entering from two pairs of rectangular windows in the thick granite walls. Unlike so many romanesque churches on the Camino it has a square east end instead of the more normal semi-circular apse. This suggests that it must have had an impressive altarpiece which, in the course of time, was replaced bby the current one: a rather indifferent Baroque structure with later statuary.

The real interest of the church is in the portals and the exterior ornament. The west door has paired half columns with storiated capitals which, reading left to right, show fantastic birds, Daniel between two lions, paired lions or panthers and the three wise men before Herod. In Gitlitz I read that there was a flagellation but I think this is a mistake- I can't identify that. On the tympanum supports there are pomegranates and the tympanum itself shows Christ with his arms outstretched above a vinescroll pattern with a central bird mask.

Granite does not give itself to fine detail in the carving and the charm of this sculpture is in its rustic stylisation. The Christ has exaggeratedly long arms and his eyes are mere bore holes.

In the north wall there is another doorway with conspicuous scallop shells in a frieze above the capitals of the supporting columns. The capitals show lions on the left and intertwined serpents supporting a chalice on the right.

If there is a theme here it is that of resurrection: the pomegranates, the vine, the story of Daniel and the vine scroll all suggest that the primary motive of devotion is the slavation afforded by the resurrected Christ. The pilgrimage story of the three wise men is, of course, appropriate to the Camino de Santiago since they followed a star and the Camino to Compostela (field of stars) is said to follow the via lactea, or Milky Way.

Above the doorways there is evidence that at one time there were wooden porches of considerable breadth extending into the precinct on both the north and west sides. This is worth further investigation. Were the porches designed to receive pilgrims? Was there a processional or liturgical use of the portico? We must imagine the church without its surrounding walls and tombs which are of a later date. Perhaps the two doors were used to keep the men separate from the women: I can't help thinking that a mixed community of male and female is a temptation to stray from the path!

Shopping with the Undead: the Corte Inglés

Yesterday we went to the Corte Inglés. This department store is in a huge building on the edge of town with a fabulous view of Avilés from the car park. The store has no windows. It is right next to the cemetery, and it makes me think of those zombie movies where the living dead take over shopping malls.

I went to the cemetery last year on the Día de los Difuntos to scrub down Carmen's mother's tombstone in the company of hundreds of Spanish matrons with their buckets, bleach and nailbrushes. It is a complete barrio for the dead with weeping angels and virgins for the richer, tackier graves and simple inscriptions on the poorer ones, stacked up like apartment buildings with a square facing stone.

The Corte Inglés is an enormous undivided aircraft hangar, which also has its richer and poorer sections. At the end closest to the cemetery is the supermarket- Hipercor, Hipermejor, as the endless tannoy announcements tell you- which is always chilly with the cold cabinets and freezers pumping out cool air. Nothing much would rot here but, in case the proximity of the dead should introduce decay into the air, everything comes double-wrapped in plastic, even the oranges and bananas.

From this end you can look down the aisles of twinkling lights and advertising banners to the far distance where the 'posh' people buy their clothes and accessories from franchised vendors. Shop assistants flit around, like strange priestesses, in their tight nylon trousers and green and white tops, their nails painted with shiny, translucent varnish and their eyes and lips glistening exotically.

"Ouch!" I grunt as Carmen prods me in the ribs.
"Stop staring," she demands.
"What?"
"But look... Ouch!"
"And it's rude to point."

I can't help it. As Carmen was talking to one of the assistants I saw grains of powder moving around on her face. Her eyelashes were stuck together with a glutinous wadges of mascara. It was as though one of those painted virgins had come to life. She had at least two colours of lipstick.

"Claro," says Carmen. "If you are going to work here, you have to put on the mask."

It's fantasmagoric and makes me think of zombies even more than the sleepwalking shoppers who bumble unnaturally slowly between the rows of electrodomésticos that must have been unloaded last week from a giant Chinese container ship: they all look as though they would fall apart if you sneezed on them.

Spain has signed up heartily to consumerism and the Corte Inglés is emblematic. I enthusiastically wait for their new advertising campaigns that fill the huge billboards around Avilés with giant women pouting in high heels or baring their ferocious teeth to the world. The sheer scale of these photographs makes them extraordinary and, since I have a geeky art hstorian's delight in relgious iconography, I like to see them as the expression of a peculiarly modern Spanish cult of the ephemeral and gaudy, a new twist on the Spanish Baroque, if you like.

Yesterday we were heading for the shoe section at the far end. Carmen had bought me a pair of shoes for my birthday and they had started to come apart on the second day. This was doubly laughable because they were advertised as 'machine-washable'.

"Vamos a ver," said the curate of this particular side chapel of the Cathedral of excess. "Let's see." He was a round-faced, tubby man with a Franco-era moustache and pudgy fingers who would not have looked out of place in a cassock but was wearing a double-breasted suit that just about accommodated his double girth.

He started pulling at the seams, opened the shoes further, then grabbed a new pair and pulled them open as well. I looked at his handiwork. "That's the way they are, you see," he concluded. I wasn't sure if he wanted me to apologise: to say, "Oh, of course, I should have realised that" and forget that the Corte Inglés has a no quibble refund policy.

Behind him I could see through the open door that led to a shabby store room with boxes and disorganised papers. Looking past the mirrors, lights and glitter of the sales façade and then down at those open shoes with their gaping seams gave me the same sense of sadness you might get on discovering that magic is all trickery. And I couldn't help noticing that the underling he delegated to give us the refund was wearing a peculiarly glittery lip paint: her mask, her painted face.

Pretty villages, pretty ugly towns

Villandás where we live is a pretty village. Its traditional stone-built houses with terracotta tile rooves sit in picturesque fields where the brown jersey-style cows with their soft eyes rimmed with eyeliner tinkle their cowbells. The traditional barns- or horreos- sit on their saddlestone supports like gypsy caravans come to rest on giant mushrooms. If you head for the local town, however, you are in for a shock. The first time I drove through Grado it was a rainy day and I thought, 'When did the Soviets make it to Asturias?'
Grado is a good argument against car tourism. You can see the town as you approach it in its magnificent location in a rich valley surrounded by hills. And it's ugly. The apartment blocks rise sheer out of the farmland with all the grace and charm of giant cardboard boxes. From one end of the town you enter along the straight approach road from the motorway from Oviedo lined with brand new hangars and warehouses interspersed with abandoned older buildings turning dirtier and dustier with each day. The road is littered along the borders with that omnipresent scrub and rubble the road-builders like to leave behind.
The main road that passes through the centre of Grado passes through a gully of ten storey apartment blocks that butt directly onto the road, with bars outside wafting their aroma of beer, cider and tobacco onto the street. All of the older buildings along this road are abandoned or in poor condition. Carmen said that the buildings are protected by a local ordinance so you can't knock them down like you used to be able to. This doesn't mean you have to do them up, however, so people just wait for them to fall down then ask for permission to build another apartment block.
The visible casas de indianos on the edge of the main road are surrounded by large ironwork fences that say 'No Entry'. These exagerrated and overblown mansions were built by people returning from Latin America with the fortunes they had made there and display an extravagant taste for ornament, but their very scale clearly makes it difficult for them to be maintained these days: they are neither residence nor museum. If you stopped the car to have a look you would not be able to get much closer and you might decide to just keep going until you reach the other end of town where things peter out along a winding road where local drivers push aggressively along at breakneck speeds.
In spite of its ugliness I find Grado charming. Between the main road and the river, where some enlightened planner installed a sweltering, shadeless walk from one end of the town to the other (with views of the cardboard boxes), lies the heart of the town. A mish-mash of one way streets between two-storey terraces in various states of decay brings you to a pedestrianised zone in the centre where there is a handful of buildings that are old enough and well-built enough that they can neither be torn down nor will fall down.
Tha administration has taken over one of these palaces for the Ayuntamiento and another houses the library or Casa de Cultura. But the real charm of Grado is not the architecture- it is the people. Burly men in check shirts with round bellies and dirty trousers walk smiling into the dozens of shops that sell spades, shovels, fertilizer and seeds. Women with frumpy clothes push prams with fat babies that look eager to get going with the rotovator whilst stern-faced grannies talk over each other on the corners of the streets. A blue-faced man walks by coughing and spluttering, then stops under the trees of the small park to light a cigarette and talk about the cost of cow feed with a buddy.
On the market days there is a bustle of activity at the trestle tables and there is a real sense of local pride in the bread, the vegetables and the fruit: it is not all cheap clothes from China like many markets in Britain. And on these days, when Grado is filled with people from the surrounding villages who descend to the plaza to sell their veggies, you have the sense that the town is really no more than the expression of the aspirations of all those village folk. If a group of villagers could get together to design a town they would probably come up with something a bit like Grado: ugly, friendly, functional and thrown-together.

The village association

Rural depopulation is a continuing phenomenon in this area. We live in the south of the concejo of Grado in a small Asturian village called Villandás. Villandás has a couple of dozen houses and a couple of dozen residents at the weekend. During the week that number descends to scarcely ten- there are more cows than people.

Looking after cows is the major activity of the permanent residents in the village and they all agree that cows are a lot of work. You can't miss a day- they need to be taken out to pasture, given water to drink and milked at a regular hour. This affects the pattern of the day. You see people with their cows in the morning and the evening and if there is any social activity it will be set between different cowherding tasks.

It was appropriate, therefore, that the meeting of the village association should take place in front of a cowshed in the middle of the village. The men were gathered around the door of the cowshed murmuring quietly about the quality of milk and feed whilst the women, who this year have been nominated to all of the posts of responsibility, were chatting more loudly and volubly under the porch amongst the dogs who were busy sniffing each other's behinds.

Carmen was elected president of the village association this year and I had gone along to the meeting in her place as she was busy talking to the people in the house she rents (www.fade.es/pisondefondon). After a while I realised that everyone was waiting for the president.

'I wouldn't bother waiting for Carmen,' I said. 'She said she would be along in ten minutes but that could be an hour.'

'Claro. And I have to go look after the cows.' Nobody in Spain bothers much about lateness and claro is the all-purpose word that means 'fine, I see, no problem'.

'Well, why don't we look at the possibilities then.'

'There is the old chapel and there is a space up by the Campuso.' The Campuso is a large building at the top end of the village where the road turns to dirt, just where the illegal chickensheds are situated. The options floated back and forwards between the idea of using this bit of land where the road branches into path to build a new building, or making use of an abandoned building.

Abandoned buildings are a feature of this landscape. For an Englishman it is strange to see so many quality houses with no one living in them, their rooves going to pot and their outbuildings gradually falling into decay. Water is wreaking havoc with the stone walls of Blanca's second house opposite ours on the hill, for example: it seeps through the poorly maintained tiles and gets between the heavy stones opening up cracks.

'What about that triangle of land at the top of Carmen's field?' Marisol asked.

'Well, I can't talk for Carmen, but I think she might have some other ideas,' I replied.

'Claro.'

The conversation became animated as the women all threw in their ideas and their thoughts. The women have a peculiar way of talking that I have noticed when Carmen talks to Clara. They both talk at the same time, roughly about the same thing, without really listening to what the other person is saying. When you translate this to the village association meeting it is comic: four women all talking at the same time raising their voices to be heard but not stopping to listen. The dogs at their feet found this animation infectious and a ratty, aggressive terrier started running around attacking the alsatians' legs. These responded by baring their teeth and running around in a furry chaotic mob. It was rather fitting for this meeting.

There were no conclusions and a month later there were still no decisions. The Mayor of Grado came up to the village and looked at some entirely different options that no one had considered. Talking to Enrique I realised that there were some villagers who didn't even care for the idea of a social centre.

'What's it for?' he asked. 'We don't need a social centre here. Who is going to use it?'

'People can play cards there,' Carmen said, valiantly defending the notion that the village could have a social life.

'But who is going to play cards?' Enrique persisted. 'No one wants to play cards and, even if they did, why do they need a special building?' Enrique has a dry sense of humour and, even though he is from the city, has completely adopted that rural fatalism which likes nothing more than to pour cold water on a bright idea.

I thought of Enrique when Carmen returned from her most recent meeting with the women of the village association. They were all excited because they had received a letter from the Ayuntamiento saying that there was a grant for cultural activities from the Principality. Time was running out to make the application and they needed to come up with some ideas quick.

'Why don't we have a competition to make traditional desserts,' suggested Lily.

'Or we could get someone in to explain how to use your freezer better.'

'What about getting someone to do a course on keeping fit in your old age.'

What passes for culture in the village does not include literature, music or art. The main social event of the year, when the population of the village goes from thirty to three hundred, is the village fiesta. The 'cultural' component of this is the verbena, where a chap with a silky, wide lapelled shirt and a hammond organ plays cumbias and salsa and the women dance in pairs while the men prop up a bar in a tent getting drunk into the small hours and occasionally letting off fireworks.

Putting the village association in the hands of the women was a great idea. They get excited about the idea of fomenting life in the village and this is hugely entertaining. And, of course, if there is a grant going they will not miss the opportunity: wild dogs couldn-t stop them.
We were discussing the idea of the using this grant opportunity with Amand and Amalia, Carmens brother-in-law and sister. Amand is a theatre professional who mounts all kinds of shows for schools and colleges. They ran through a number of the ideas that they had used in other places, including poetry and paperfolding, painting workshops and puppet shows for children. Finally, they came up with the idea of Pinta la Vaca: Paint the Cow.
I can't wait to see it. A life-size fibreglass cow and calf for people to come and paint. It could only be better if it had cider running from its udders and a functioning moo activated by a well-positioned hand.

Eating Nettles

In these mountain valleys there are nettles everywhere. If I dig a little in the garden I find the web of roots that lies just below the surface. That will be exactly where last year I rooted out all I could find with backbreaking work. Some grow in low mats that rapidly cover large expanses of field. Others cheerfully pop their heads up above the tallest flowers in the garden, their hanging flowers waving cheekily in the breeze.



After the rain the nettles look fresh and vigorous. I should qualify that because the omnipresent stinger is always fresh, even when the other plants are yellowing with thirst. They look so fresh they are almost appetising...



Carmen's brother is an artist. He took us for a walk last winter with a fuggy head and streaming nose in search of bracket fungus to make an infusion he said was a sure-fire remedy for catarrh. Since he is also a devotee of other fungi of a more hallucinogenic nature I was a little sceptical and left the tea for the believers, but when Carmen called me on the Camino and said, "We're eating nettles!" I had no doubt Santiago was in town.



"You're eating nettles," I echoed. "That's great. Wait till I tell my walking group- they´ll love it!"

"Don't laugh," she replied, a little testily. "You're having some too, as soon as you get back."



Carmen's family- that is her sister, her brother and herself- are all what a Spaniard might call chiflado, which roughly translates a bonkers. They had a get-together with a friend of Santiago's who was busy prosletysing the health merits of the common stinging nettle. They all like to go out into the wild and dig their fingers about in the dirt getting authentic organic ingredients from the roadside. It's charming



We know a little about the merits of the stinging nettle for the garden because we make a purin from nettle leaves. We soak them in buckets of water until the fibre and stalks rise to the surface and the liquid forms a thick, foul-smelling soup. The theory is that anything as robust and pest-resistant as the nettle must make a healthy addition to the soil or the compost. The idea of eating purin was unappealing- but I can't say no to Carmen.



Like so many things you don't really like, I ended up saying it was 'not that bad really'. We threw some into a stir fry because I couldn't face the idea of blanching them and sticking them in a salad and nettle soup would have been much too much like purin. The taste is irony like spinach but the texture is unpleasant- the leaves have no substance and form little globs of dark green goo. If it isn't healthy at least it looks it.



Perhaps I should leave the nettles alone. At the moment I am trying to supplant them with false nettles which at least have pretty flowers and lemon mint that smells good when you touch it. But I am sure they will make a comeback on the dinner table when the nasturtiums we are currently eating are out of season!