Life in Culebrón

I can’t remember when I went to Avebury. It was a long time ago – before my bones started aching all the time and even before my hair turned white. I went to Castlerigg, near Keswick, around the same time. Both are oneiric memories – fleeting and half-forgotten, yet leaving a lasting impression. In both places I felt a link with the past – nothing academic, nothing to do with dates or history. It was a sense of continuity, not of dogma or rhetoric, but of something that was ours – a shared patrimony. I can hardly claim any shared past with Spain. My dad used to say that he’d sailed with Drake aboard the Pelican when it set off around the world. His proof was the name John Thompson on the muster roll. Obviously he hadn’t, but the idea that one of his forebears – one of mine – might have done so would be easy enough to check. I never have, though. Better a good tale than a refuted fact. Either way, my upbringing and lineage place me firmly on the side of the raiding, piratical English ra...

There's a certain tendency to euphoria sometimes. It would happen from time to time driving across the fens or maybe with the MGB in the Cotswolds. Just feeling glad to be there, to be passing through. It happens a lot here. As I drive across some Spanish landscape with, maybe, high hills, or never ending plains or, perhaps, just watching that ochre yellow dust trail as a car or van drives along some dirt track I start grinning for no particular reason. Maybe it's my age but nowadays I've got to the point where small pleasures cheer me up quite as easily as things on a grander scale. Maybe it's always been like that. Lots of the films that I've liked most across my lifetime of cinema going have been the ones that are classed as independent film. There are lots and lots of celebrations in Spain. They are everywhere if you look. I wonder if they have a more obvious impact in small towns and villages. The centre of Pinoso is more or less closed off for the eight ...