Barcelona While I Was Alive

This Blog Is Dead - Weep Ye Not

2007-03-22T00:04:00.000+01:00

The writer of this blog is happily passed away at the age of 33 years and some very few days.

The imperative is to outlive him.

Where Cats are King & Memory is Life in Death

2007-03-21T23:42:00.000+01:00

I raced here on a motorbike, the palms worn thin on my gloves. From riding about this city.

I find the gates locked, it’s half past six and the souls sleep at six – or wake up – or maybe there aren’t even any there – maybe it’s just that the gatekeeper clocks off at six to get home and live life, meet friends, or family – or nobody – maybe just to watch TV and eat something simple – cold meats and a round of bread with sharp edged wine that doesn’t make him wince because he’s used to it.

And so the gates are closed. There are three of them. The central and largest one, flanked on either side by two equally imposing, slightly less large, subordinate gates.

None is open. All three are chained and padlocked – the chain languishing loosely about the uprights – no one will force it – no one will question its authority.

For who wants to enter a cemetery before time? Who wants to be among the dead while the living are warm about us?

Not I it is true – for I am not finished living in this city of Barcelona, or any other for that matter – but I have been imperceptibly drawn here to squeeze between the chinks in the gate, to seep in like smoke or morning mist, or a wish – a desire to get through, get on.

The locks and chains restrain the physical life in us. They cannot restrain the other.

I am through now and up the hill past the monumental tombs that house the remains of the great and good and the great and bad, indiscriminately. We cannot tell them apart from this distance, for the engravings fade beautifully into stones that embrace their bevelled lettering like so much wording in sand. Some are renewed, embellished and give life to death, for a few more years until someone forgets, or remembers.

On up the hill through the streets of the dead who once occupied our city called Barcelona – so many bars, cafes, churches, squares, shops and so many lives. They lie on dead streets now, streets strewn with leaves when the sun punishes the trees rooted in the dry earth.

Cats lope here, hold the fort and look out across the port where cruise liners jostle with cargo ships all giving forth cargos that will spend money, cost money or make money. Money that will dictate the size of the tombs that will encase us when we die. The rich remain rich in death, in Barcelona.

Architects design palatial tombs for rich families just as they design palaces that decorate the city and catch our eye or block out the sun for us.

And here I find myself among the dead but I am as if alive. My memories are of the most irrelevant kind. The trivial, throw away moments that life is full of. The details overlooked by so much awareness of tomorrow and getting on and plans for this and plans for that.

My memories hang in time like balloons that the wind could easily swish away – but there is no wind here among the dead. And no tomorrow to build on today – to fill up my mind with new irrelevancies, new joys and simplicities which come to mind now that I have left them behind; the way the door jammed sometimes in the winter when the air was humid. The way the bus held us captive as if on a wave that was due to break, when it breaked.

Goodbye Barcelona that is alive – goodbye to beauty and to ugliness. Here I will stay squeezed in a niche on this hill above you. Where I can look down like the cats upon the living – and I wish that I were there with a pen, in a bar, with a glass of wine and a sensation of warmth and it being time to go home – or time for dinner, or time to live – or time to live.

Queue the Abstract

2006-12-18T22:50:00.000+01:00

Reach

Defend

Act

Breath
Leave Space

What You Can See with a Pen

2006-12-12T21:10:00.000+01:00

I had to buy a pen to make this worth while.

There’s nothing happening and there’s nobody around, except tourists and die-hards.

No fish – that’s the killer. No fishmongers, no crowd. No life, no smells, no locals. Why open if there’s nobody here. No fish on Monday.

The sound of an electric plane paring down wood is about all I can hear over the voice of the delivery man sitting next to me. He’ll never forget, he says. Something bad has happened. He’s taken a seat for a smoke and to talk of how Mondays are slow, how Mondays are always slow. Now he smokes and speaks of Christmas. His companion talks of family for Christmas – how to get paid double for working on feast days. That way he can make a little more, cash in hand, and juggle his days to see a little more family for Christmas.

The Boqueria without the hustle and bustle is like a film set before the stars arrive. All vans and hard work; preparation.

The barman has a lumpy scar on his face that runs from his right sideburn to his chin. It must have been quite an opening – perhaps someone with a knife wanted to see in – or wanted him to see in. He seems to have forgotten about it. It doesn’t tilt his face or make him twitch. He doesn’t raise a hand to touch it. It has become part of what he is – a turn he took that left a brand.

Miles of aisles run away from me in a grid that becomes a radial convergence of bare stainless steel benches at its heart. On any day but today fresh fish lie gaping, some slithering slightly, piles of crabs crack their exoskeletons at us as parents point them out to children.

The ladies call us guapo and reel us in with special offers and recommendations. They tell us how fresh it all is and turn a specimen over on the bench or laugh and joke while skinning a sole.

They are visited at election times and photographed when the man-on-the-street needs to be seen. Like a wet finger in the air, the good folk of the Boqueria are turned to for direction. The opinion of the masses distilled through the heat of conversation, so many mouths all achatter – ceaselessly selling and buying.

You can eat fresh fish at the bar. They carry it ten paces across the aisle from a stall and place it on the pan for one’s good self. Today the fish that lie exposed under angular glass bar-top vitrines are of dubious origin. The chicken, yellowing and pasty now, is not to be recommended. Perhaps an open minded foreigner might order it in an effort to get closer to the local customs.

But then the locals cannot always be relied on for their discerning taste. They may well be immune to death by poisoning or a dodgy stomach. Beware gullible traveller, while tonight you are big, tomorrow you may awake as if bound to the bed by a myriad of tiny cords.

The floor is strewn with cigarette butts and empty sachets that held single helpings of sugar. The clock is ticking and the bar staff are not inclined to sweep up what rubbish lies in the aisle – the public highway.

In the corner of my eye a gentleman with a blue sleeveless anorak orders a coke and ice in a long thin glass. He pours the coke slowly and watches the bubbles rise. He stops three quarter way and taps the base of the bottle against the glass – to make it fizz more, it seems. He pauses then, then waits a little more, then drinks.

The quirky ceremony of the individual. Signs of life indeed. What greater ceremony can there be?

Playing at Bridges

2006-12-12T21:09:00.000+01:00

We’re standing on a bridge – six million car journeys of us are standing on the bridge between the Día de la Constitución and the Feast of the Purísima.

Some of us are lunching in restaurants. Yet more of us are eating fast food, sandwiches or hamburgers, while we trudge through the crowds of Christmas shoppers. They’re in from the provinces and the prices are twice what they’ll be in three weeks time. But hey we don’t mind, it’s Christmas – let’s not get rational about it.

It’s half past two and families are pouring in here for lunch. This place pays homage to the sea, to sailing and its literature. I see Moby Dick squeezed up beside a book about knots. The tables are small and round and covered in white table clothes that hang half way down to the ground.

The waiter is past middle age and wears a fleece jacket, a closely shaved grey hairstyle and glasses with very little frame – just bridge and arms.

It’s a motley crew, we’ve got; a Peruvian with a hat, some Germans with children and an old couple who only really came in because they wanted to use the toilet. That they have done and now they are sittings at a tiny table glancing at the menu.

There’s an elevator in the kitchen that takes the plates up and down, delivering and receiving. Right now it’s not in use; our fleeced waiter seems capable of working without it.

A bar runs above my head like a curtain rail in a shower. It originates in the wall on my right and carries many tiny light bulbs along its length till it runs to ground at the same height in the wall on my left. This is the sky, I believe.

You can believe your fancies.

We are on the bridge.

Letters for You, Letters for Me

2006-12-12T21:06:00.000+01:00

Valle said it was for Valle. Nixon said it was for Victory. I said it was a line that reached a point of inflection and turned back almost upon itself.

Last night it was a strip of light that ran down a ceiling in a passage under a building beside a gig house where five bands played.

Inside there was a lot of smoke, smoking, cigarettes. Cigarettes that were loaned and borrowed. Cigarettes filled the air with a presence that only becomes evident this morning on the clothing sitting in a ball in the corner.

Young people, mostly men, bearded, crowded the floor, greeting each other and catching up.

The music obliged everyone to lean forward and shout into the listener’s ear while looking downward. This brought to the floor more attention than it merited. It was covered with large sheets of some rigid material, could have been plastic, could have been wood, or maybe metal. It was riveted to the floor rather like the stretched material that covers a sofa.

Amsterdam – Light in Early Winter

2006-12-01T22:31:00.001+01:00

The lady sitting opposite Marta wore a black ensemble. A Dutch lady who entered and sat beside the low table that ran along the back wall and under the window. She leafed through a magazine, she focused on nothing, she was waiting.

The husband arrived, clad in a similarly black rig-out of equally understated elegance. She greeted him with a kiss. He leaned down to her as she sat on a velour cube-for-a-seat coloured green. She ordered his coffee and his apple tart with whipped cream. He perused the Sunday papers. He stood up now and then to search out a different paper at the other end of the long narrow along-the-wall table.

I moved to seat near theirs. A low cube, this one red, under the window where I could lean my elbows and cup my camera at the right height to photograph the bikes coming over the bridge before me.

The sun was golden, low and soft like a gift of dissolved summer in winter. It shone over there while over here we were in shade – what we gained was the picture of beauty on the other side.

I noticed how the cyclists were sun-lit before they reached the half way point on the bridge, then they fell into a lesser light that my camera called shadow. Bicycles swooped around to the right mostly, that was the way to the centre. Some were going back to where they had come from. Some ladies rode side-saddle on big old black bikes pedalled by fit young men in gabardines whose corners waved back at me. Some ladies rode bikes with boxes over the front wheel. The box was big enough and deep enough to carry a young child and some bags or two young children or many bags. Some cycled alone – all cycled slowly, leisurely. Nobody was in a rush, it was Sunday around noon.

A young lady walked out of the light and across the bridge. She wore a black coat over a floral winter dress. She wore boots with buckles on the heels to tighten the leather around the ankle – she didn’t use this feature – it was an aesthetic plus to break the monotony of the sheer vertical.

She moved in the viewfinder of my camera, appearing on the left in the light at the other side of the bridge. She moved, only the upper half of her, visible behind the bridge’s hump. Then she rose and moved to the centre, still illuminated, glowing at the edges. Behind her a street with greenery blotched. Rising above her left shoulder the golden window panes of narrow four-storeyed houses with decorative bottle-neck parapets and gables. The facades leaned out over the street like contained bulges.

Into the shade she moved towards me. I did not look at her, nor did I notice her looking at me. She moved further right and out of sight. The café door opened and in she walked. As if I had photographed enough I turned off my camera and sat back beside Marta.

Undoing her coat she greeted the couple, well-dressed in black. The door opened again and what must have been the son, came in, he too was in black, as sharp and presentable as his parents. He kissed his father and his mother and sat with his girlfriend. She kissed him full on the lips and smiled – they seemed new, to the parents in law at least.

All four talked politely. The father ate his apple tart which tasted of cinnamon. He cut it with the edge of a spoon and scooped cream onto it as he slid the slice off the plate and into his mouth. The mother sat, cross-legged towards the young couple. Her hand lay at ease on her right thigh. Her finger wore an engagement ring – one central diamond with two smaller ones on either side supporting it.

The cuff of her well-tailored jacket came down as far as her wrist. A few centimetres from the cuff an X was sewn in two long light blue stitches, each about a centimetre across. Above the first X was another, and a third completed the triad - the three Xs of Amsterdam. A declaration of identity, like wearing a heart on a sleeve.

It was time for us to go. We put our jackets on for it was chilly. The light still beamed on the other side of the road. And we walked towards it.

The Mystery Around Loving a Place

2006-11-30T21:00:00.000+01:00

Nobody is alone in here.

Conversation is banging up against the walls like it’s trying to get out. The floor has scattered islands of saw dust to soak up the beer that’s splashed off the trays or the bar. It is, in fact, a practice that promotes sloth above cleanliness. And we buy it under the banner of tradition.

Bar Tomàs is an institution in Sarrià. The average person here is beautiful; even the ugly ones have dickied themselves up with flash clothes or the right creams.

Scarves are good if you’re a girl. If you’re a guy try a pair of black plastic-rimmed glasses and something with a collar. It doesn’t matter if it’s worn out as long as it cost a pretty penny when you bought it.

Enter young man who hasn’t shaved today, (or yesterday) but he looks good for it. He pulls his orange jumper down to meet his trousers just enough for us to notice his desirable black underwear with a thick branded elastic waistband. He doesn’t care for his appearance, he seems to be saying. Let’s not split hairs.

The toilet has double doors like a saloon. You can bash in and out of them and we can notice how you effortlessly hip you look in your studied easy gait. You can carry yourself back to your chair like you are walking across the living room floor. Make yourself at home, we’re at ease with the world.

None of the girls has messed around with their hair. No dies or bleaches or yelling reds. Quality cuts and more-than-daily grooming serves us up a sight to behold; a vision of healthy youthfulness, healthy roots and not a split end on a shapely head.

This is a place to meet after school on weekdays, after lunch on weekends and after work on days when you should have gone home earlier. Waxed jackets, Shoei helmets, slacks and loafers are post-work wear. If you’ve got a tie you can loosen it and unbutton the neck of your shirt. You can speak of deals or sport, last weekend in the Pyrenees or next week’s skiing if this damn warm spell would break and we’d get a decent snowfall. It’s nearly December for pity’s sake!

How can all this go on amidst such shabby surroundings? Here again Formica is king, a paint job from way back when the Olympics buoyed rejuvenation and above the bar a collection of clay wine dispensers that could do with a dusting. How can it be?

Perhaps it’s the bar staff aplenty. Their pseudo-uniform of black trousers, white shirt and navy tank top might be the draw. It might be how they participate in your evening, how they comment on any hint of personality you let slip as you sat down. They’ll remark on your clothing, your attitude, your order or your lack thereof. To be a waiter here you have to be happy, it seems. Or very sad. You have to be a character or we don’t want you. It may be that the place has made them what they are. They started average now they excel themselves in oddness, affability and the ability to slip into the slightest crack that appears in your conversation.

It’s bravas and beers I’m afraid. Don’t come the sophisticated here. You can have anchovies in brine or meatballs if you’re lucky. They could root out some cheese if you push for it or bread in a basket lined with a napkin. You’ll get a toothpick to lift what you bought from the plate to your mouth. No cutlery needed among friends. You can raise your hand and we’ll bring you more. You can step out of the way too, when we have to pass by from the back store to the kitchen with a plastic bin-full of potatoes hand cut into chip shapes. We are all friends here for there is no need to struggle or be aggressive. A joke can overcome a misunderstanding and a bill can be slashed if we like you.

The suits are arriving as the evening pushes on. The school girls with the scarves wrapped tight indoors are checking mobile phones and leaving. Till receipts are appearing on tables as those standing bear down on the seated.

A typical bar is Bar Tomàs. A mystery to a newcomer. The very salt of life to a regular.

Dirt, Death and a Bonny Baby

2006-11-28T22:57:00.000+01:00

This evening on the Plaça de la Catedral I saw a man moving large green boxes around on a pallet truck.

Before I saw him behind it, I saw the green mass move, as if floating, between other boxes. It found a resting place in a line straight enough to delineate a passage.

In a few days these wooden boxes will open their upper halves on hinges and present themselves to the world as the Mercat de Santa Llúcia.

With Christmas in mind we’ll stock up on handcrafted earrings and necklaces. We’ll buy all the necessary accoutrements to build a crib even if we don’t believe. There’ll be running water and plenty of moss; great blankets of moss that we’ll clip with scissors or rip with our hands. A full complement of angels and animals will feature, huddled around a swaddled child that will not attract the attention of anyone but the faithful.

The others will muse at the caganet figure with his trousers about his ankles, his rear end cocked, depositing its refuse in the presence of the son of God.

The first moments of the physical intersection between God and our world are blessed with the defecating man whose form changes every year. Will he be a footballer or a politician? An actor or the Pope? Who knows but the factory that is currently busy pouring plastic into new moulds? When the market opens we’ll see who has won the honour and we’ll laugh like we did last year and the ones before that.

Tiós, logs with faces and forelegs will be bought in all sizes from miniature to mini-tree. The small ones grow, of course, into the big ones when you feed them. If you care for them during the weeks before Christmas they will swell with goodness which they’ll pour forth as presents on the night of the twenty fourth.

When the Tió is big and fat we’ll cover him in a blanket to keep him warm. We’ll sing songs to him to convince him that our love is not based wholly on want. Then we’ll beat him with sticks and order him to defecate, nay, shit, yes to shit, to shit presents!

Pregnant with goodness the Tió will offer up presents which parents will pull from under the rug. The children will be rewarded for their care of the Tió over so many weeks and the night will be a frenzy of playing, laughing and being together.

Of old the Tió was found in the forest where the family sought him out. He was then only a log but the children dressed him up and cared for him. After he had thanked his carers with presents he would be placed on the open fire where he would make the ultimate sacrifice; he would give his life to heat his friends.

In accordance with the inexorable cycle of life, the Tió’s ashes would be taken next day to the forest from whence he came. There they would be sprinkled on the ground, fertilising it, infusing it with life in the springtime when a new Tió would slowly rise from the ashes of his predecessor.

And in all of this Jesus is absent. He is in a manger on the shelf where the lights flash on and off and the recycled water runs ceaselessly in tiny mountain springs. Beside him the caganet we chose as our favourite, the figure that represents our year, fertilises the winter earth, helping to bring new life.

This tale is a beautiful yarn spun from the threads of nature and goodwill. This tale seeps into the fabric of life. In this tale light and running water nurture and bring joy to life.

Ah, but without dirt and death there would be no life at all.

Ah, but what of the bonny baby?

How Gardeners Get Their Kicks

2006-11-27T23:04:00.000+01:00

Baldo had his hat on. He came through the door his head bowed slightly like he had to avoid the lintel.

Ricky was there in black. Mole too. Steve had left an hour earlier. We all waited for Xavi.

I greeted a table heavy with drinks. Along the back row Ferran looked comfortable in his role as anchorman. He had the rope tied around his waist, ready to lean backwards when the shout rang out to take the strain. Rai nodded a hello, thrusting a hand forward like somebody reaching into your soul. Bonhomie washed over the group, a non-verbal celebration of being there on an important birthday.

Xavi had just stepped out to for tobacco or something. He’d left his jacket but he’d taken his girlfriend. That meant he’d be back. Or that’s what they said.

Gonçal was present in mind, body and spirit. Spirit is perhaps what we will remember Gonçal for. He’d just finished recording the new album and it was going to be a goodie. Pablo played me the first one some years ago. One track he introduced as being “one for the girls”. The new album had lots of that, Gonçal maintained. He was animated about it. He was looking forward to the mixing, the mastering and the getting it out there. He’d listened to the raw cuts on the way home in the car and they were good enough to make him smile contentedly and nod his head. Infected by Gonçal’s positivity I turned to Mole for conversation.

He was understated as usual. He’d played his piece in a day, could have done it in half a day, he said, without exaggerating or selling it as a strength. The drum tracks underpinned it all. They were the place where everybody else would hang their coats.

I was sold on the new album and called for a beer. Xavi was on his way we supposed. No new information, it was past one a.m.

Baldo is sitting down now. His hat nestling on top of a pile of jackets like a mother hen sitting on eggs. I took some time out beside the hat which came up to my shoulder on the next seat. Baldo’d picked it up in London. He’d shopped around for it. Not sure what he was looking for but London had it all. He finally found his head gear in a fashionable store for young types who don’t normally play accordion as well as this man.

We spoke about my motorbike and how it carried me round door to door. We discussed my accident and he asked me what bike I had. “A Scoopy fifty” I said. “Good bike” he said, he’d been looking for a bike to get about town. The car, he’d driven down from Lleida when he moved to Barcelona to live in a flat with others capable of wearing provocative head gear, was parked up in Montjuïc while he wasn’t using it. The windows got broken or it got a dent now and again. He’d take it back to Lleida and leave it there next time he had to pay to get it fixed, he said.

His buy-a-new-motorbike budget was six hundred euros. He’d looked about but stubbed his toe on an advert for a seventies original Hammond organ. Six hundred made it his and stalled the motorbike dream while the organ pumps and hums under Baldo’s fingers and toes. It fits in his bedroom with a lot of other instruments with keys.

Xavi hadn’t arrived. He was capable of drawing a crowd, not appearing and not loosing face. That is an achievement. Such a friendship may only be cultivated over many years of attentive gardening. Perhaps he was watching us from across the road, enjoying what he’d given us on his birthday. He gave us the pretext to meet and catch up, to share dreams, news of our projects and recent purchases.

There will be more birthdays and more nights around heavy tables under hand-made smoke clouds. I look forward to them.

Happy birthday young man, I raise a glass to your green fingers.

No Comment Necessary

2006-11-21T21:51:00.000+01:00

I have to wait here till 7. That’s nearly forty ~~years~~ minutes.

The glass on the picture I had framed was scratched and they’re replacing it. And so I find myself in a bar called Mauri. It’s an old style place with old style bar staff that prepare old style tapas. They speak in Catalan and fuster around incessantly behind the wooden bar.

There are three windows in this room, each with its net curtain, reminiscent of those used to keep the neighbours from looking in. The largest window had the curtain pulled back when I sat down. The elderly barman shuffled about half clearing up glasses and paper off the tables, drawing the curtain as he went. It must be that time of evening. When the street should not see what goes in a haunt such as this.

We are ringed in by shoulder-high wooden wall panelling painted brown. At chair height it’s scratched to the grain by arriving then adjusting then leaving.

Two young men come in and take a table. They reach across to an adjacent table and claim the ashtray thereon. One wears a black-and-white-knit Union Jack jumper while the other smokes like a lady. They call for carbonated water and iced coke. Small bottles so as not to over do it.

Serviettes sit on each table in flat metal containers with legs. A staple feature of any bar. Their contents have spent the day migrating to the floor where they have not yet been swept up into the dustpan with the wooden handle that sits over there in the corner.

Punters enter in dribs and drabs, bums on red leatherette covered seats with straight backs and no mercy. They are a place to deposit one’s weight while the tubular bars make their mark on the back of the thigh. The ashtrays too have their way of being. They are round and glass with straight sides with cigarette-supporting chunks cut out of them while they were hot. They are made to be broken, to go unnoticed, to serve.

Formica table tops on exactly square four legged frames have chips off the sides, a sign of age and experience. Of having spent much time being about while life went on. None are lop sided, a testament to simplicity and durability. None are attractive or desirable, the kind of table that you could sit a printer on or throw out on a Thursday when the used-furniture collectors call around.

The young man sitting opposite me is wearing a t-shirt advertising anti-virus software. Fashion is what you make it.

These crisps are potato flavoured. Just plain potato. They are served in a bag on a plate, elevating their lowly status onto a par with a potato tortilla or chicken croquettes. This particular strain is hand made in Premià de Dalt since 1975, the year the Caudillo passed away yesterday.

So much life came from so little death.
And so much death from a life.

Evening in a bar when nothing happened while they were replacing the glass on the picture I had framed. Another day that doesn’t merit comment. Perhaps I should stop here.

Life on a Platform

2006-11-14T21:54:00.000+01:00

It's that time of the evening when most people finish work and head home.

I hope it’s not rush hour here because there’s only a smattering of people in the enormous train station ticket hall. The Estació de França is an anomaly in this city. It only enters conversation when a rock concert crowds the platform or someone talks about turning it into a library.

Not many trains pull in here. Only the ones that nobody I know has ever taken.

Three policemen arrive on the scene; hat’s are removed with right hands and placed delicately under left arms. They lean on the railway bar and call for late afternoon sustenance. The echo of voices is hollow and empty, church-like, goodbye-like, kiss-until-later-like. A young couple sits on the ground reading books. They make up one tenth of the crowd. A tall man with a bag is restless and paces about, back and forth, back and forth.

There’s a bag scan on the way to the train. The security guard is sorry for the trouble caused and feels like he could be convinced to give it a miss just this once.

Before he punched my order into the till, the gentlemanly waiter asked me if I was rail staff. “No”, I replied, knowing instantly that I had given the wrong answer. “That’ll be 3.50”, the till advised him, 1.60 for the coffee, 1.90 for the croissant. “I hope they pay well here”, I said, remarking on the exorbitant prices. “That’s the price around here young man” he replied, neither defending nor criticising company policy. A model employee to be sure.

The prices have had their affect in this café fitted out for a thousand. No more than fifty people sit here and wait. Over there they smoke, while over here it’s prohibited. Nothing more than a sticker on the table informs us of this ruling.

The building is all arches and marble floors, the new annex that houses the offices is minimalist and clad in that fibrous stone that Mies Van der Rohe chose for his pavilion on Montjuïc.

Descend to the toilets and such select interior design gives way to functional white glaring light. There is paper in the cubicles, but there are no seats on the pots. A group of four young men enter behind me and I hastily finish up my business. In surroundings as hard and uncompromising as these it is not wise to find oneself outnumbered.

Back upstairs at the ticket office the constant queue of five people is maintained as only one window attends customers while the other has a closed sign hung between the queue and a second ticket seller who does not deign to sell tickets. More than ten other windows lie idle, curtains pulled down and lonesome looking.

One row in front of me on my left sits a grey-haired man with glasses, cupping his chin in his hand. At the same angle to my right sits perhaps the same man in a younger guise, a dark suit and black hair. I know he’s the same man because he cups his chin in the same way, he leans back on the chair and crosses his legs, left over right down at shoe level. They are both staring out across the smoking area and on to the horizon that is the great lobby and shining marble waiting area. They will stand up in time and catch trains. They will not realise that they are living the same life, just that one is ten paces ahead of the other.

It is only in a place as empty as this that we can see ourselves. When the commotion disappears we are easier to identify.

Near-death Experience Number X

2006-11-12T23:04:00.000+01:00

I almost died the other day. Again.

It was morning and I on my way to work. I noticed the building on the corner was coming along. They’re up to the first floor now, taking the casing off to reveal the skeleton of what will be home for some of us.

At the lights I pulled up on the left of an ambulance. I knew it would go straight on as the depot was a left turn. The morning shift would be beginning for the crew too. They wouldn’t be turning back home this early on a sunny morning when there was so much to be done.

I scratched up against her underbelly, the lowest painted bit down the side of the ambulance. Just in front of the double rear wheels. My bike slid, and was crushed a little. I slid beneath her and felt nothing. I didn’t hear anything either. It was a moment of freedom from thought, control, and decision making.

They saw me in the left wing mirror as they sat facing out with their orange sweaters and blue trousers with reflective stripes behind the knee. The driver rolled down the window and looked out at me. Was I alright? I didn’t know the answer either. There’s a thirty second gap after an accident when you are incapable of answering that question. Lie still or sit still and let the question answer itself.

I lifted the scooter off and felt my legs, arms, my elbow was aware of itself. My left hip called out for notice as did the thigh on the same leg. I stood up slowly as passers-by gathered, caught between caring and wanting to get off to work on time. I was in fine enough fettle considering. The ambulance had moved a little further off the road to the left.

The scooter had taken a bashing, loosing her back light and an indicator, the plastic panel on the left where my leg was, had come away from its anchor and jutted out just enough to need replacing.

I dwelled on the irrelevance of these details as it was clear I had been pardoned. I had been given a slap on the wrist and shown how easy it is to do away with me.

We searched for insurance forms and laughed about the incident. Together we pieced together the details for the insurance companies. They called me John and I called them by their names. The morning sun warmed our conversation and I unzipped my jacket as we settled into our roles.

The side sliding door of the ambulance stood open. Pumps and chairs, a stretcher with wheels, small drawers containing everything needed to keep you alive on a short trip.

“Could you take a look at my hip” I enquired. “I might as well, as you’re all set up and that”. I sat into the ambulance and lowered my trousers. The ambulance man applied antiseptic to the two superficial grazes on my leg. He cleaned them off nicely “So as not to dirty your trousers” he said. A nice chap indeed.

We shook hands and wished each other well as I set off for work, they set off home, they had seen much suffering. It was time for bed.

It was nine o’clock, I noticed. I started the bike, which still worked in spite of her appearance. A block from home, I decided to ride around to the crèche where I was just in time to meet my wife dropping my eighteen month old son off for another day of life. That I nearly missed.

How the Eve would Taste if you could Eat it

2006-11-09T22:19:00.000+01:00

The dew was down at eight o’clock this evening. I went back to get my bike on the Plaça Catalunya and it was covered in a mat film of water. The cooling air had squeezed out the surplus moisture, cleaning up of an evening like someone shaking a table cloth out a window.

It’s not yet Christmas. The lights hang colourless and lifeless above the street. Men with ladders are putting them up day by day around the city. Santa hasn’t appeared yet nor have the sounds of Christmas begun to chime in our ears. I heard John Lennon’s “And so this is Christmas” the other day on the car radio. It sounded empty, and unrelated to life on the street in Barcelona today.

There was lots of room in the shops where buyers haven’t yet decided to buy. Browsing was the order of the day. Let’s leave it ‘till it's too late like we usually do, so we can push through streets filled with masses of scarves and bulky clothing grappling with shopping bags. Today Christmas shopping feels like planning a little too far ahead.

The Rambla has a new tarmacked road surface after lying scratched to the grey bone for days. The white lines are painted sharp on black, the dots that marked out the middle are still visible between the dashes. Casually oblivious that it is their fate to dissolve away in the next rain or passing bus tyre. Tourists are easy going too. They stand about taking photos at Canaletas as if the streets were empty. The shoe shine man smokes as he waits for custom.

Down at Boadas the cocktails come easy, and even in La Oveja Negra, den of beer swilling, the pace is reserved at this early hour, on a day when nothing much is planned. The terraces out beside the Triangle are full of sippers who don’t need to shiver, unless they choose to.

It is a good time to be in the city. It’s the eve of something. It’s the time before all that commotion is visited upon us. Now is the time we’ll forget about because our calendars remain empty of great occurrences. The coming weeks will bring a desire for the near future. A focus that will get things done before we all sit down for a while and chew the fat.

This is the eve, a time to enjoy, a time of low expectations, making happiness all the easier to obtain.

The shoe shine man is finishing his cigarette and tidying his tools on the mat he has set before him, an arsenal ready to be called into action at the drop of a coin. There is no need to rush today. While other cities are afire with light and bustle, here in Barcelona we have been afforded time.

Just like the hours in the evening before dinner at ten, hours which don’t exist elsewhere. This is a chunk of life we slyed away from whoever doles it out.

Savour it. What we do not spend now we will spend later.

Two Evils Meet at Midnight

2006-11-07T00:45:00.000+01:00

I raced out without my wallet. Downstairs in the lift that visits the even numbers, the odd numbers were broken. I had to come back.

It was ten to twelve and the filling station attendants strike was starting at midnight. The needle on my scooter was about to flash red for empty so it was essential I got to the station before the strike kicked in.

I pulled onto the forecourt, alone, not a one about. The attendant was still at the night hatch. I pre-paid six euro to fill up the tank. In the end I was hard pressed to squeeze five sixty six into her. “What’s the strike about?” I asked him while paying. “Same old gripe” he answered, “Money, we’re looking for a raise”. “Fair enough” I said safe in the knowledge that my tank was full.

I waited across the road to observe what a strike looks like. At twelve on the dot the attendant left the hatch and withdrew to the backroom. I can’t imagine the staff quarters are very big, at least not big enough to remain comfortable for the two full days the strike is set to run.

A Vespa pulled in carrying a man whose helmet was designed for a smaller head. He parked in what I am sure is his habitual fashion and walked over to the hatch. He waited patiently, no shouting, calling or knocking on the window. He was seemingly unaware that his wait would surpass his expectations.

Then a Seat Leon arrived, red and rearing. Its driver was well groomed in the gelled short-haired style. He carried his keys in his hand as he made his way across the forecourt to obediently stand beside the Vespa rider.

They both stood glancing through the shop windows to see whether the attendant was perhaps finishing off his sandwich or retuning from the bathroom. Alas no, he did not appear. Following Union orders you see.

Having seen my fill I mounted my bike and drove across the road to inform them of their fate. “What time is it now?” the large-headed small-helmet wearer enquired. “Eight minutes past twelve replied Mr Leon”. I explained the strike had begun at twelve. “I’ve been here for a long time”, the helmet pleaded.

A two day wait is a long time when you’re cold and it’s midnight on a back road. A low salary is perhaps a curse that’s worse.

Starting Low but Looking Up

2006-11-05T12:59:00.000+01:00

There’s a helmet on a stool beside a red tiled bar with a stainless steel top. There’s a teenage girl waiting beside a coffee for someone to finish playing water polo in a very hot swimming pool.

Out here in the bar the young people play with coffee spoons in empty coffee cups. They’ve eaten their croissants and drunk their coffees. Now it’s back to conversation. Helmets lie on the ground beside swimming bags stuffed with gear. Some helmets have fluorescent lightening strikes and fins out the back, others are sober, cheaper, whiter.

The girls on the left talk of study and sports clubs. The short haired young men at the next table cannot be overheard but stretch and sit sideways on their chairs. Some speak Catalan while others speak Spanish. Some switch constantly, borrowing words from both languages.

Last week’s elections have passed and the coalition government is showing signs of solidifying. Talks are underway and are reported everyday on the news. Here in this swimming pool café there is no talk of politics among the young. They have a vote but whether they voted or even thought of it is not clear on this Saturday morning at 10am.

The girl with the helmet at the bar is jigging her leg like she wishes something would end. She is more wrapped up in warm clothing than is necessary indoors. Not two days ago we entered that time of the year when motorcyclists dress out-of-synch with the rest of the population. The cold felt on a speeding bike is many degrees below that felt by a stroller with a shopping trolley.

The volume rises as parents come up from the pool where the water polo match has ended. Discussion of play and neighbourly conversation is in the air while the cook and the waiter emerge from the back room where they have been resting. Perhaps the rush hour upon us.

And just now all the young people who have been seated around me have stood up, taken helmets jackets bags and natter and left for the dressing rooms. I am alone with the parents who are ordering sandwiches, coffees and small glasses of beer. The coffee machine is grinding and squealing like a conscript forced into the fray.

A teenage boy and girl are standing together at the bar now. He has seated half of himself on a bar stool that tilts his body towards her. She adjusts her trousers and wiggles a little. It is an early start, indeed.

The weekend promises.

Let's Pretend it's Freezing

2006-10-31T20:59:00.000+01:00

The guy at the end of the bar dunks a tea bag into a glass of hot water. Paco has his arms folded behind the bar, his girlfriend stands on the street beside a motorbike asking about tomorrow, a day off for all the saints.

Mendizábal is on the street. There is no inside, just the bit behind the bar. They serve you right there on the stainless steel counter or across the road on the terrace. Paco’s girlfriend, Claudia, doesn’t serve the tables too fast. She is looking forward to a day off tomorrow too. Cars take the corner off C/Hospital into C/Arc de Sant Agustí, cutting across Claudia as she balances six drinks on a tray; coffees in glasses, bottles of beer and a bag of crisps.

Night has fallen though it is barely evening on the street. The tobacconist shops are open after their midday break and the policeman have just finished ticketing cars that were double parked over lunch. Claudia remarks that the new black aprons are nicer than the green ones they used to wear. “Especially that dirty green one in the corner” she says pointing at the rag lying on a keg under the shelf under the colourfully tiled back wall.

I used to sit here with Keith with his crutches. He lived down the road in a first floor flat above C/Carme. When the balcony door was open and you could see the miscellany of passers-by ceaselessly ploughing the street day and night. You could hear the motorbikes beeping shrilly and friends calling friends and family members treating each other worse that anyone else would allow.

This evening I have come down from the Boqueria where it’s mushroom season. A stall holder was stacking specimens of varying shapes against an inclined board that barricaded off his counter and made the few mushrooms he had look like a veritable mountain. For the fishmongers it’s a good day, tomorrow is All Saints when families will eat together at tables for twelve with first courses, seconds and desserts. Marzipan-based balls of pine nuts and chocolate will be washed down with cava and chestnuts will be roasted in the oven in lieu of an open fire.

It’s still warm on this the last day of October. T-shirts are still the chosen attire of the young whereas the more mature wear short sleeved shirts. Tomorrow heavy marzipan concoctions and heat radiating chestnuts will be eaten out of respect for tradition if not out of desire. Sweet potatoes are roasted on street-side mobile roasting devices by roasters who are quick with a greeting and quicker still in wrapping their sales in steaming paper parcels.

In a cool autumn we can pretend it is cold and wrap scarves around our necks when colder climes would wear a jumper. In a cool year we can eat sweet potatoes and wish it was cold enough to drink hot mulled wine. This year the charade is evident and gives rise to jolly stories at the end of the evening news.

Soon it will get colder though and we will wear heavy clothes and furry boots and hats and scarves. We will take our winter clothes out of the wardrobe and shiver when it is fifteen degrees. Manel laughed the other day that he had taken his winter clothes out of storage already. There he sat sweating in a pull over.

Be it fitting or not we will dine autumn fare tomorrow. Paco will have a day off, he may even go to the beach for a paella, if the price is right and all the saints look favourably upon him.

What the World will be Like in 2010

2006-10-30T22:15:00.000+01:00

“In four or five years it'll be open”, the lady in the information booth answered.

"The building work on the metro station across the road should have started by now but the mayor stalled it until after the municipal elections". He’ll have his reasons.

I don’t mind waiting. Until then I’ll sweep about on the motorbike. What got me was the day they started revving chainsaws outside my window. Just like the lady going down in the lift, I wondered why they were cutting down the trees in the park outside my house.

Little men walked, almost choreographed, between dumpers and diggers on the canvass that was my fifth floor view of the park below. They logged the trunks into manageable chunks which metal arms loaded onto waiting lorries.

All we have now are the memory of tree trunks in the shape of mammoth foot prints that punched clay holes into the tarmac. Here and there a trunk survives, shorn level with the ground. The rings can not be much more than thirty. “They’re cutting them down to work on the metro station” an old man who leaned on a cane told me.

Old people know. They do not know because they have grown intelligent. They know because the have spent time finding out. They have lived. For better or for worse, it’s the living that colours their view, or simply blurs it.

An old man in the park the other day told me that infants are more advanced than they were when he was at that age. “In the forties”, he said “children weren’t allowed out of the house”. I cannot contradict him for I am not yet forty.

“Four or five years” she said. When Line Nine will loop the city from the Baix Llobregat and the airport right round through the highlands of Sarrià and on through Gràcia and Horta along to Sagrera where the yet-to-arrive high speed train will have its home. The great loop like the circle line in London will avoid the centre and bring together the rich and poor the high and the low. It is easy to look towards Plaça Catalunya and forget who’s standing beside you.

In the time it takes to ready the ribbon for cutting on so many new stations the baby boom generation of the late seventies will have left home and set up their own homes. They may well be on to child number two or three. Sarrià, the centre of the city’s fee-paying schooling, will be more connected than ever. House prices may have levelled off. The trees outside my window may be nothing more than saplings and tractor tyre tracks may have given way to a lawn that’s automatically watered at eight o’clock each morning.

The man who sets his fold-up wooden chair facing the steps where he unzips the covers on a long row of budgie cages may well have new birds. Or a new chair, or perhaps a new hobby. Some of the elderly folk who play bowls on the sandy surface in the afternoons may be using magnets on strings to pick up the metal balls they can’t reach down to.

And the metro in itself will not change the way we live, it will open up possibilities that we can opt for or not.

“Four or five years” she said. In the meantime; let’s live. As with money, time now is worth more than time in the future.

Three Things to Forget about - or Never to Remember

2006-10-29T21:31:00.000+01:00

Two people I didn't notice

A place to pause

What other peoples' lives look like from the outside.

Take the Wheels Off and You can Jump It

2006-10-26T22:36:00.000+02:00

The evening can take you home.

The evening can take you on a stroll about the city.

The evening tastes of patatas bravas and bottles of beer.

The evening folds down parasols on terraces and lays tables for dinner.

This evening I see skateboarders on the Plaça dels Angels outside the MACBA. This land is their land, as is the cold urban grey of the esplanade outside Sants Station. Tonight they’re jumping over a skateboard stuck in the cracks between the granite slabs that cover the plaza.

Fold-up bicycles and old racers with straight handlebars are chained about the place. Young people with no homes to go to chat on telephones and tourists and art-lovers trickle in and out of the museum.

A Moroccan couple push a pushchair diagonally from C/Ferlandina over to C/Bonsuccés. They seem less frivolous than the skateboarders who are chewing the cud in loose fitting denims. Art galleries and cafes fill in the gaps between hardware stores and pokey shops chock-a-block with saris and tea sets.

A convenience store, where the assistant bags your purchase on the unmoving conveyor at the till, stays open till the small hours. Its functionality contrasts with the throwaway design studios and bars whose windows are smoked and red-lettered to justify the increased price of consumption.

Anything that crosses the square in front of the museum can be photographed. A person moving, a person standing, a white van carrying tablecloths.

At exhibition openings the flashes turn this place whiter. From Barceló to the king himself pass through here. They take side doors where the cars can park out of frame. They glance out across all of this. Across the disappearance of streets that housed the lowly.

The churches were not demolished, they were only desecrated with the arrival of Sonar in the summer. This disembowelled neighbourhood has healed and is no longer licking its wounds. Polyglot young people can mill about here now practicing jumps which they won’t perfect till the give it up. Young families on the way to someplace can get a foothold and wide-eyed travellers can avoid putting down roots here till their roots beckon.

Yes the evening can make you ramble.

Yes the evening can lead you astray.

Perhaps the evening should drag me home.

The Importance of Nothing Early in the Morning

2006-10-26T00:17:00.000+02:00

It’s dark when I wake up. The light emerges from behind the buildings as I leave home and take the scooter. I asked Pepa one day what it is she likes about Barcelona. She said it was the golden light in the afternoon. I saw that light this morning before the sun shrugged sleep off.

The roads were clear but a wave of traffic crept inwards towards the centre.

I stopped unconsciously at the white line, waiting for the lights on the other side of the road to turn red before giving it everything my 50cc’s got. A horn sounding in the placid tranquillity of early morning is an offence to the ear. I looked left and saw a fellow motorcyclist in silver plastic sunglasses signalling to me. “You’d better put air in those tyres mate”. I turned to look down at the back wheel. “You won’t see it that way” he said. The lights changed and the moment evaporated into a roar of motors competing for pole.

Yellow men-at-work road markings channel us into chicanes and make us brake where before it was throttle that was called for. Trucks and buses sit across junctions on hatched boxes. Motorbikes edge forward tilting this way and that under wing mirrors at the traffic lights. To move on a scooter is to live. To stop and wait is to die. That much they share with sharks. Poetic justice perhaps; it is often constant restlessness that gets the motorcyclist in the end.

Red cats’ eyes embedded in the roadway delineate the outside lanes, flashing bright but dimming in the dawn light. Delivery trucks and cars parked with hazard lights bristling get little understanding from policemen with pens and notepads in hand. Bus lane infringers get photographed by miniature-Mercedes mounted with cameras and spotlights. Their drivers do not resemble the more prim folk who drive similar little-run-arounds later in the day.

Buses pass by with passengers dreamily holding on to bars and poles and rubber straps hanging from the ceiling. They are mostly women and immigrants. They catch your eye for a moment and stare at the street-surfers who ferociously zip by their window so early on this fine morning. Surrendering control to the bus driver can be a blessing or a curse. The motorcyclist surrenders nothing as he throws down his bottom dollar at ever lane change.

Nothing happens on the way in when your face is held in stasis inside a helmet with the visor down. Nothing happens inside a bus looking out at the golden light turn ever more silver. Nothing happens on the pavement waiting for the green man to beckon you across. Nothing happens at that time of the morning. We all just silently change places. We mull things over, we make plans, we yearn for sleep while, frustratingly, we lose the ability to find it.

Morning starts dark and brightens to gold here in late October. When the face awakens we forget that. We forget about nothing.

The Well-Heeled Queue for Dessert

2006-10-22T21:37:00.000+02:00

Heaven at the Gates of Saint Peter

2006-10-11T21:53:00.000+02:00

There’s a café with carnations on the tables and floral designs on tablecloths pressed under glass table tops.

In Sant Pere there’s a square where tables seat chattering groups who drink slowly and talk quickly. They hang about till the time has passed for them to leave. They laugh and joke, they talk solemnly then smile again. Normal human beings whiling away an afternoon in the shade.

Around here the textile sellers and underwear vendors from years back are giving way to merchants from the East. Merchants from China whose shop signs are bilingual; Spanish and Chinese. Aesthetics are sacrificed to space utilization. Clothes hang on mannequins like they hang on hangers. Strip lighting banishes tones and textures. The charms of modern marketing have no place here. If you want it you buy it, price dictates.

A fair day on Sant Pere Més Alt brought the local commercial fauna onto the streets. The council had set up tables and stalls along the thoroughfare where the shopkeepers who sold and NGO volunteers who, sold too, shielded themselves from the sun that cut the street in two in mid-afternoon. The lower bank was glaring white, the upper cast in a somnolent shadow. Parasols and tarpaulins covered the conversation that emanated from many mouths sat on fold-up wooden chairs. The kind they pull off dancehalls when the politicians have gone.

Down by the Mercat de Santa Catalina the squares of earth where buildings were razed have been replanted with the life of new architecture. Improbable concrete outcrops hang above our heads as the workers clear away the pallets and place latticed steel sheets across holes in the ground. Turn a corner and the whole block is gone, cordoned off now with two-metre lengths of metal fencing anchored in long and narrow concrete shoes.

The market has changed everything. Her years as a refugee on the Avinguda de Lluís Campanys near the Arc de Triomf have ended and she has gained an eternity of splendour under waves of colourful mosaic.

Frank Gehry and a reporter from the New York Times called on Lino’s door one day to see the undulating roof. From Lino’s front room the whole roofscape can been seen unobstructed. Gehry was impressed, with Lino’s apartment, I am sure.

The streets are being re-paved and bollards inhibit parking. Fashionable types stroll about and stop for coffee in a square like this. A square that was lost to a neighbourhood that seemed too far down the street past the Palau de la Música.

Sant Pere, a matrix on a map tucked invisibly between Laietana and the Arc, between the Ronda Sant Pere and Princesa. All of them, streets that took us somewhere that existed in a time when this place did not.

Lisbon, Farewell

2006-10-09T22:02:00.000+02:00

The morning of the night before we left Lisbon we agreed that we should make the effort to find some Fado.

We’d caught a glimpse of some through a window into a bar in the Barrio Alto one night. We didn’t go in because we were on the way to nowhere in particular and we thought we’d seen signposts just up ahead. We looked in a guide and came across a place where you can be sure the “stars of tomorrow” would be appearing. That sounded a little touristy but we were up against the wire.

We booked a table and caught a taxi. I had the address on a flyer I’d picked up someplace and I read it out as best I could to the taxi driver. He took his right hand off the gear stick and held it back to me asking to see the flyer. I surrendered it to him and he unfolded its many folds into a pleated triptych and said “Ok I know the place”. That seemed to mean he didn’t need the address, just the name.

The taxi took off in a direction we hadn’t ventured before. Down the back of the Alto into residential streets with cars parked too close together. The taxi skirted as if on tram rails between the parked cars on either side and we descended from high streets into lows.

On entering a short street with nothing to attract the traveller the taxi pulled up outside a restaurant whose walls to the street were illuminated by lights that were invisible to us. Or maybe we were distracted by the head waiter who greeted us by reservation name as we disembarked from the taxi. He ushered us into a porch and then on into the main dining room-cum-performance area. Some twenty or thirty diners were already there relaxedly witnessing sprucely dressed waiters cork bottles of expensive wine.

We had not enquired about the prices in this haunt but a cursory glance at the menu made it clear that the cash we carried would not get us out of there. Resigned to that fact, we ordered as if we were spending someone else’s money. A superb fish dish with fine Portuguese wine topped off with the house speciality dessert, coffee and liqueur.

At certain well orchestrated points in the meal the lights were dimmed and two musicians, one playing something akin to a bouzouki, the other a guitar, emerged from an alcove over there behind a column. Having struck up the first cords a singer followed cloaked in black and lost in the shadows. A voice full of the heartfelt love of place and the anguish of loss and distance spilled forth, increasing in intensity as the song built and grew to the closing crescendo of emotion and grave tones.

And after a triad of songs the lights went up and burned holes in the retina. And more feasting ensued. And more drinking led into the next of many dimmings of lights. And then a face we had seen all about Lisbon on posters advertising a two-night-only-not-to-be-missed concert entered over Glen’s left shoulder. Hands were clasped and two kisses endowed on head waiters as she moved towards the alcove and out of site.

Mariza, all in black, light textiles hanging about her in a fashion that memory cannot recall. Her fierce white-blonde short hair played counterpoint to the low-lit defused ambience of the place. Her elegant passing infused an eager excitement into those who knew, inquisitive wonder into those who didn’t.

The triads continued, intensified now by the presence of a force that seemed closer to the heart of it all. The lights were dimmed and raised again as the night grew old for those who consulted watches, young for those for whom tomorrow was negotiable.

The taxi was called and the bill was paid with a plastic card that misrepresented our poverty. The head waiter adjusted himself in his suit and opened the car door. I turned to look at this place that had charmed us and left us warm inside.

I cannot say my mind was clear and filtering focus from blur. You see, tomorrow was negotiable for us. The night was now perhaps younger than we were. We gave the driver vague directions towards the high ground where the bars and bistros blurred into one like lampposts on a fast moving street.

These are the last words from Lisbon. Fare thee well my dear and companion on this journey. I brought no books to distract me from you; you gave me reading aplenty.

Lisbon, Belém, Where Pastry is as Important as History

2006-10-08T00:28:00.000+02:00

We left the city centre to see what we could see in Belém (by the sea).

The hotel receptionist sorted us out with directions for getting there. “Get a day-ticket on the bus for three euros” she said. The bus driver gave us short shrift with an unambiguous “No” to that request. “Why not?” I asked, “Because I don’t sell them” he responded. I took a single for one twenty and walked, cowed, to the back of the bus.

I sat beside a guitar carrying musician who had the tiniest ponytail it’s possible to force into an elastic band. He was studying the sheet music to a song entitled “John Lennon”. Just then Glen pertinently enquired how we would know when we had arrived. Having already dashed any possibility of friendship with the driver I resigned to ask our musician co-traveller. “I am going there” he seemed to say, in fast Portuguese, which may have been something entirely different. I willed myself to believe that my understanding of his pronouncement was correct.

As we neared the town of Belém we became aware that the entire population of Lisbon had converged on the place on this, the day of the Implantation of the Republic. The President’s official residence is in Belém along with several World Heritage Sites.

The Jerónimos Monastery is the main tourist draw with its ornately sculpted cathedral and recently refurbished cloisters. The corpse of Vasco de Gama of discovery of the way to India fame lies there alongside that of poet, Luís de Camões.

We strolled in the direction of the tram tracks towards the sea to the enormous sculpture commemorating the “discoveries” of foreign lands and shipping routes. On the way we took the underground walkway under the track and there was our man the short-pony-tailed musician playing, perhaps, “John Lennon”.

The sun was not as high as it had been and the day trippers were beginning to retire to the bakeries and coffee shops along the main street. One of these coffee shops, Pastéis de Belém, was the largest labyrinthine coffee house I have ever seen. The queue was out the door and growing. The infinity of tables inside was jammed with families eating pastries and drinking coffee. The queue for the toilet, both mens’ and womens’, was cordoned off down one wall, and growing.

We did a lap of this micro cosmos and walked back towards the modern Centro Cultural de Belém where lavish and ornate sculpture has bowed out to straight lines, contrasting stones and glass. The only sane answer, I believe, to the challenge faced.

With the sun turning golden in the evening we headed back under the tracks for the bus. And still our guitarist played on.

He was alone in a stone tunnel where sound reverberated and lent gravitas to every note. The last vestige of public animation, he collected little for his efforts at this late hour. He was by this time, playing for himself. A noble act indeed.