Sitting and walking

I half remember an early city walk that I did. It was around Oxford and the chap introduced himself as the obsequious Turnbull. He was about twelve years old, or so it seemed to me at the time, and he wore a threadbare suit complete with bow tie. He did a good tour though. I like walking tours around towns and cities. Trees and geology in Leeds, Jack the Ripper in Whitechapel, writers in Dublin or 1726 in Petrer - they're all worth a go. I don't even mind those leaflet based walks that do the drainage system in the Fens, Bomber Command in 1942 or Carmen Conde in Cartagena.

We've always tried to throw a few cultural things in amongst the alcohol and wild excesses of our lives (well that and the nightly cocoa) and even having to do it it in Spanish hasn't quite vanquished us. I've taken, purportedly, willing house guests to the theatre or to a film. We've done lots of music - festivals, flamenco, ballet, zaerzuela, contemporary, jazz, latin and opera. Folky and amateur stuff comes out of our ears and even word based activities, like poetry and comedy, haven't been out of bounds.

We've been a bit culturally bereft for the past few months though. Mediaeval and craft fairs, drinking and eating too much with pals and blessing donkeys, for all their fine attributes, don't really count as culture. So I was interested to see a bit of theatre advertised in nearby Novelda. The venue was the Casa Modernista, the Modernist House - a house we think of as being Art Nouveau - all intricate woodwork and stained glass. A theatre company is doing some sort of historical recreation there.

Almost at the same time Yecla advertised guided walks based on the books and life of the writer Azorín. They are commemorating the fifty years since his death. Azorín is getting a fair bit of attention locally because he was born in Monóvar and went to school in Yecla. Both places get mention in his books and so both have organised events. I didn't really see the Azorín link but we got to see a Billy Wilder film a little while ago as a result.

So I set about booking the Azorín tour around Yecla and the theatre in Novelda. A splendidly simple process for both. Google forms from Facebook in Novelda and a simple, reassuringly old fashioned email to Yecla.

Yecla came back quickly with an amusingly intricate form, so precise that it accepted my reservation at 8.03 Central European Time. The Google form didn't work so well. It took a couple of old technology emails to sort it out. The venue people emailed me in Spanish and later, for good measure, in perfectly acceptable English to say that there had been a bit of a blip but they had it in hand.

I was looking for a quote about Spring and the changes it rings to round off this post. Tolstoy's "Spring is a time of plans and projects" would have done nicely but Margaret Atwood made me laugh more "In the Spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt."

On being privileged

Sometimes it's surprising the things you don't know even close to home. A while ago we were watching the telly and there was a featurette about Murcia. The cameras visited the Ricote Valley which is some 65kms from Culebrón. One of the villages in the valley is Blanca. It's a small place of around 6,500 inhabitants. We didn't know, but we learned then, that it had an art gallery, the Pedro Cano Foundation. "We must go and have a look one day," I said to Maggie. Today was the day.

As we walked through the door the woman on the desk greeted us in English "We must look very English," I said, in Spanish. "No, but you're the person who phoned yesterday, aren't you?" Now that was true but my instant reaction was then that either they get so few visitors that they remember every phone call or we must look very, very English just like I'd said.

The gallery was really good. A nice light airy building. Interesting and well executed paintings with different themes well explained on each of three floors. On the third floor, the fourth exhibition space, there was a temporary exhibition of some perfectly nice water colours. Not as good, in my opinion, as the permanent stuff but interesting.

Somewhere as we went around I asked Maggie if she knew whether Pedro Cano were still alive. She said she hoped so as the woman on the desk had said he was coming to do a guided tour at midday. My Spanish is so good that I'd heard the bit about the guided tour but not understood who was doing it. To be honest I was for running away before he showed up. He might say something in Spanish, I would splutter and the whole of our Island race would be found wanting and stupid again.

Too late though. As we got to the front desk that guards the door he was there. We recognised him from a video. He held out a hand. He asked us simple things. He asked us if we painted. Other people arrived to divert the conversation. He turned out to be a lovely, lovely man. He radiated pleasantness. He was passionate about his work and about the foundation. He gave us a completely different perspective on the paintings. I often enjoy exhibitions but I haven't had as much fun in an art gallery since the late 70s when I was a member of Leeds City Art Gallery and bumped into Richard Long and Joseph Beuys under similar circumstances.