I’m not best suited for travel. There are too many things that can go wrong: breakdowns, postponements, missed connections, deportations, personal injuries, thefts… Strangely enough, I don’t worry about plane crashes, only the potential damage to my ears: a hangover from my last trans-Atlantic trip to New York, which could have been the source of the tinnitus in my left ear. It’s good to experience new places and see new things, but my natural nesting self prefers the comfort and security of its own home.
All of which makes April a remarkable month for your foreign correspondent, since it involved not one but two trips away – both involving hated airports and airplanes. The first one, early in the month, saw me winging my way to Belfast in a plane full of Norn Irish families fresh from evidently exhilarating trips to EuroDisney. It spoke volumes about the tenor of modern life that it tended to be the adults who wore the Mickey Mouse ears (for souvenirs). One such modern mum asked her wee child, ‘Would you like to play on your wee phone?’ I was transfixed by another specimen across the aisle with the blondest hair, the blackest eyes, the longest fingernails and the fattest lips I ever did see. Lord forgive them, I told myself, for they know not what they do.
We landed at Belfast International airport, 25 miles or so north of Belfast and built right beside Lough Neagh, now Europe’s most polluted lake thanks primarily to agricultural run-off. Yer man at the passports desk immediately made me feel at home. No worries about being barred from entry and incarcerated in an airless room for questioning. ‘How’re you doing today; you all right?’ he asked me with the cheer that’s entirely lacking when re-entering France. I told him I was here for a wee holiday. ‘Uch that’s great; have a lovely time now,’ he wished me, handing back my passport. (I always bring my French and British passports, just in case one gets lost or stolen and I find myself stranded and walled up in some alien hotel room. I keep them in separate pockets to defy thieves.) His welcome reminded me that for all the fat lips and pre-pubescent phones and sectarian violence, the Norn Irish people are some of the warmest and friendliest on earth.
I was there to meet my best-est friend from school, who
flew in to Belfast City airport near Rory McIlroy’s Holywood birthplace after
celebrating his 70th birthday on the Queen Mary from New York to
Southampton. My mission, which I chose to accept, was to hire a car from Mr.
Herz (he dead), meet my main man at
his cousin’s in suburban Finaghy, take a guided tour around our old school,
check out the record shops in the city centre, then take off on a wee trip to
County Tyrone and to Portstewart to see his childhood haunts and more long-lost
cousins, before returning to Belfast for one last evening prior to wending our
separate ways back home.
It all went miraculously to plan and I didn’t need that extra insurance that Mr. Herz (he dead) talked me into to protect me from damage and theft. Rory even finally won his elusive Masters on the Sunday. We were treated like visiting royals by the vice-principal of our old school, who proudly showed off the gob-smacking new facilities and presented us with a goody-bag at our conclusion. I now drink my morning lukewarm lemon in my MCB mug. We found one splendid record shop whose proprietor made me a present of the CD I took to the counter. Cousin Anna in Finaghy and Cousin Heather in Tyrone adopted me as an honorary member of the family. The latter couldn’t believe that we weren’t brothers. ‘You even write the same!’ (Mind you, she also thought that I was the calmest, most relaxed person she’d ever met.) I delivered the wee hired Toyota without a scratch, and the plane got me back to Paris Charles de Gaulle without incident. It was full of young families flying there to visit EuroDisney. Touch wood, my right ear seems to be fine.
Later that same month… after leaving Daphne with her
godparents and the cats with our house-sitter, the Good Wife and I got up at
the unspeakable hour of 3.30 to drive to Toulouse and catch a plane to Seville,
there to meet up with The Daughter, who had a friend’s wedding to attend on the
Saturday. Seville, I discovered, is the fourth largest city in Spain, full of
narrow passageways, fin de siècle metalwork balconies, gaudy churches, tapas
bars and populous plazas. The public buildings are among the most impressive I’ve
ever seen: the church of San Salvador, a temple of religious kitsch that puts
the Ro- in Rococo and the gold in bullion (no doubt plundered from the New
World in the name of God, Spain and the Catholic church); the ‘ossum’ cathedral,
the biggest Gothic cathedral in the world, from whose original Moorish tower we
looked down upon a maelstrom of football fans in the squares below, drinking,
chanting and setting off fireworks prior to the Copa del Rey between Real
Madrid and Barcelona that evening in the local stadium (and never, ever have I
seen so many replica football shirts); and finally the truly glorious Real Alcázar
palace with its formal gardens alive with the cries of peacocks, a dazzling
marriage of Moorish and classical architectural that maybe even tops the
Alhambra of Granada. I must point out, too, that – according to the official translation
– ‘the ablution court [of the cathedral] is dedicated to being a cemetery.’
All went well until the Monday morning. It could have been worse; we could have been in a lift. We arrived at the Flamenco Museum to find it shrouded in darkness. The woman at the desk explained that the lights had gone out suddenly and we should come back a little later. While wandering around the old labyrinthine Jewish quarters, Debs picked up a snippet of conversation to suggest that the lights had also gone out in Barcelona. In trying to cross main roads rendered anarchic by the immobilisation of traffic lights in order to reach the shade and safety of the beautiful public parks, high anxiety set in. We had little cash, so how could we pay to eat out or even buy salad foods to eat in? How could water be pumped to the taps? How could planes fly without air traffic control to guide them? How, why, what, where, when…?
And when the power came back suddenly early evening, I worried that the rush everywhere to phones and TV sets to find out what had happened would plunge us back into darkness. For me, the most likely explanation seemed to be a cyber attack, no doubt courtesy of those fiendish Russkies checking to find how easy it would be to bring a nation to a standstill prior to invasion. My wife, my dear modern-day Mrs. Malaprop, with whom I have just celebrated 35 years of near-constant marital harmony, suggested it was a Khyber attack, but I felt a raid on central electricity generating boards by rabid hoards of spear-wielding Afghani tribesmen rather unlikely.
It was well that we left early for the station the next morning to catch our train to Cordoba. There was aggravated pandemonium in a forecourt that thronged with queues and crowds shuffling and jostling aimlessly to a soundtrack of incomprehensible announcements and instructions shouted through a megaphone, all witnessed by a camera crew perhaps from Seville Today. Having just about given up on the idea of travelling by train and discussing instead a drastic last-ditch flight by Über, suddenly we caught the word ‘Cordoba’ on the public address system. ‘T’was a miracle! Our church visits must have prompted some benevolent deity to give us a break. Mirabile dictu, we arrived in our destination only 15 minutes later than originally scheduled.
Significantly smaller than Seville, Cordoba is another gem – even though the proprietor of our apartment, almost certainly a man, neglected to provide a bread knife and instructions for one of the most incomprehensible induction hubs ever built to defy a Khyber attack. And yet… reader, I cracked it (quite by chance). Serendipitously, on our first afternoon there, we found the modest, unassuming Flamenco Museum, which charged the Missus and me a princely euro and Tilley the Kid twice that for admission to one of the most enjoyable and charming museums ever perused. The Good Wife likened it to another unexpected delight, Cumbria’s very own Pencil Museum. The history of the genre was stored in a succession of white drawers that opened to reveal information, videos, sound recordings, portraits and memorabilia.
Architecturally, though, the high spot of the trip was our
visit the next morning to the Mezquita-Catedral de Córdoba: one-part mosque, one-part
cathedral and several parts optical illusion. Like some fantastical M.C. Escher
drawing, the columns and two-tier arches appear to recede into the distance in
a perfectly straight line on latitudinal, longitudinal and diagonal planes. And
plonked right in the middle of it all is a 16th century Renaissance
cathedral that glitters with gold and general decorative vulgarity. By contrast,
the mosaics and extraordinarily intricate stone carvings of the Islamic remains
are truly spellbinding.
Thus ended our trip to Andalucia – without catastrophe, despite the best efforts of Afghani tribesmen or Russian deviants. Who knows what long-term damage might have been perpetrated? But perhaps it will amount to less than the damage inflicted on the English language by incompetent translators (or more likely Artificial Intelligence). This splendid example comes from Cordoba’s church of San Francisco. Writing as if Saint Francis of Assisi, our guide states, ‘My fully evangelical, austere and simple religious life made me nt [sic] of brothers soon. And, although I do not like anything I admit, I am the first known case in the history of visible and external stigmatization.’
Well, it’s almost as impenetrable as that induction hob. As the first known case of serene anxiety and catastrophic calmness decidedly not dedicated to being a cemetery, may I suggest that these people pay a proper translator?
