Mainly about Benidorm

Maggie thinks otherwise but I quite like walking. The difference is that I think of walking as a means of transport or a way to see things while Maggie thinks of it more as pleasant exercise. If I need to get from Atocha to Gran Via or from the Tate on Millbank to the Tate on Bankside then walking would be my first choice. On the other hand suggest to me that I might like to go for a walk on the tracks, amongst the trees, up the hill from our house and I'd prefer to do a bit of reading. I might do it for the company, I might do it if I'd been locked in for days or so as not to be churlish, but walking in the countryside is something I don't generally care for. As Ivor Cutler said about his dad taking him on country walks  ""There is a thistle", he would say. There were many thistles in Scotland. We were soon well acquainted with them". Here it's pines.

Now we have a couple of friends who have a holiday home on the coast near Altea which is about 15 km. to the North (and a tad East) of Benidorm. They share Maggie's view of walking. Our friends know that I'm a bit offish about just walking so, to stop me mumbling and groaning too much, they try to find a walk with a focus. One weekend they took us on a walk near Calpe to see La Manzanera Resort. This is a group of buildings designed by the Catalan architect Ricardo Bofill and built between 1964 and 1982. There are three apartment buildings in the complex - Xanadu, La Muralla Roja and El Anfiteatro - with things like sports facilities, a bar and a restaurant also in the complex. It was September 2016 when we saw these buildings. I read up about the architect at the time so that I could write the captions on my photos and that's probably the last time that Ricardo Bofill entered my thoughts.

Last night we went to see a film Nieva en Benidorm by the Spanish film director Isabel Coixet. I was looking forward to it. Benidorm is an interesting place, it's full of Spaniards but also very British. It's as Spanish as you can get and yet it's completely out of character. Personally I like it but I wouldn't want to stay too long! I'd heard a couple of interviews with the director on the radio and it sounded as though she had made a quirky film and that she too had developed a real soft spot for Beni and for the Britishness that abounds there. The film had the added advantage that it had been shot in English as the two principal actors are Timothy Spall and Sarita Choudhury and that always makes watching easier. At one point Spall wakes up after a night on the tiles in a very pink building - La Muralla Roja. "We've been there!" I whispered to Maggie as I nudged her. Mind you, as the majority of the picture had been filmed in Benidorm we could have been nudging each other all the while.