The Tepid Take

In the closing chapter of The Old Patagonian Express, the writer, Paul Theroux, faces a problem: he has spent the entire book outlining his journey across America by the trains he takes along the way, with names like the Balboa Bullet and El Jarocho. However, as Theroux reaches the final stretch, the last few miles to the Tierra del Fuego - a journey intended as the ultimate reflective denouement - he finds this route has no calling card, no title; the motif has been broken by reality itself. Theroux won’t let this stand, so he decides to baptise the train himself, with the help of a boy across the aisle; it gives its name to the book, a symbol of Theroux’s ability to imprint what he has learned over two continents onto the miniscule details of provincial life. The journey changed him.  There is a stereotype, one that carries more than a grain of truth, about gap year students and other sorts who go on follies to faraway lands, always in the pursuit of “finding yourself”. The...

Spain, 1929. In the shadow of an unfortunate war with America - so disastrous they called it “The Disaster” – the country entered the waning years of its second-to-last dictatorship. Facing a dwindling sense of international relevance and the opening scenes of the Great Depression, it was hardly the brightest time for an international expo. And yet, Spain’s hosting of the Ibero-American Exposition was the most successful the country had seen since Barcelona’s turn at the Universal in 1888.      The space built in Seville for the 1929 Ibero-American Exposition was designed as a synthesis of all things Spanish and the legacy of Spanish communities in the Americas; it was composed in no small part of two central spaces: the Plaza de España, a testament to the history of Spain, and the Parque Maria Luisa, a series of elaborate pergolas and fountains scattered among American flora. The building style of the Plaza de España – which you might recognise from its appearances in...

Every April, Seville plays host to Feria, an Andalusian tradition stretching back to 1846. In reality, ferias – a special kind of festival similar to a carnival or town fair – occur all across Spain; it just happens that the grandest belongs to Seville. In 2018, almost half a million people visited the Feria each day over the course of a week. The festival featured exactly 212,000 energy-saving light bulbs and over one thousand separate tents to visit. This goes without even mentioning the giant theme park operating next door. The Feria de Abril is vast, a feat of organisation, complete with a new, extravagant portico every year. It even has its own cocktail; but underneath the surface, all is not well at Feria. The cruel divides of Seville’s society disguise themselves behind tent flaps and guy ropes. A RECIPE FOR REBUJITO ( coctél de feria ) - 1 part manzanilla (local fortified wine) - 2 parts lemonade - Mint leaves to garnish The history ...

Seville has a reputation in Andalucía. Its citizens, marked out for being more “pijo” (a Spanish idiom denoting poshness or swank) than the rest of the region, are stereotypically depicted in various memes as the wearers of sports scarves, pastel polo shirts and carefully curated mullets. Equally, the city itself centre boasts a wide range of ‘bougey’ boutiques and luxurious restaurants. However, as is the case in many European cities, the suburbs of Seville are radically poorer than the town centre; in addition, they are marked by their racial diversity, while the high street is almost entirely white. In this context, there's one particular suburb of Seville that stands out, notorious today as much as it was upon its foundation in the 60s.      The suburb in question is a housing estate known as Las Tres Mil Viviendas - The Three Thousand Homes. I first encountered Las Tres Mil in a class I was taking at the university in medieval history. The professor was talk...

On the 29th of March, 1969, Madrid played host to the 14th annual Eurovision Song Contest. At the time, Spain was undergoing a regime crisis, as the future of Francoist dictatorship lay in doubt. While it would be another 17 years before Spain joined the European Economic Community, marking the tail end of the country’s democratisation, the economy was slowly internationalising. Culture quickly followed suit; Spain shared victory at Eurovision that year with, among others, the United Kingdom. Only a week earlier, however, a tiny shard on the edge of Iberia had played host to a completely different musical outfit: John Lennon and Yoko Ono, marrying on the Rock of Gibraltar.      They weren’t the first, and they certainly wouldn’t be the last: the spot now plays host to many a British couple looking to enter into the union of matrimony, while enjoying a average daily sunshine hours unseen anywhere else in the United Kingdom. As an Overseas Territory, a self-governing bu...

The Monastery of Poblet, nestled high in the hills of the province of Tarragona, Catalonia, has played a vital role in the history of the ancient Crown of Aragon. As the Crown’s pantheon, each king was buried high in those hills, ever since its foundation in the marriage of the County of Barcelona and Kingdom of Aragon. However, the long line of successive kings buried there was put to an end by Ferdinand II: He broke the oath promised centuries before to instead be buried with his queen, Isabella, La Católica, in Granada. Ferdinand was the first king of what Spaniards call the Monarquía Hispánica: a great pan-Atlantic empire and precursor to the modern Spanish state. However, Ferdinand was for the most part secondary to his wife, Isabel, given that she controlled the then far more powerful and populous Crown of Castile. The role of Ferdinand’s homeland, the Crown of Aragon, and its most powerful province, Catalonia, was from then on firmly tied to the whims of the Castilians, und...

One of my favourite phrases of all time – a phrase that constantly re-invites its own relevance - isn’t even a quote: it’s the name of a piece of art. El sueño de la razón produce monstruos , or, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, is the name of an etching by Spanish Enlightenment artist Francisco Goya (granted, most people have heard of this bloke). What I love about the name is that, while its intended interpretation is entirely valuable - that when we cease to keep a watchful eye on our society, citizens corrupt themselves and breed ignorance - translating sueño as ‘dream’ instead of ‘sleep’ can lend an entirely new interpretation. While the “dream of reason” was not the intentional concept Goya aimed to describe, it is an excellent metaphor to describe how the Enlightenment ideas espoused by Goya and his peers in Spain & across the world could eventually be used to derail human flourishing instead of working in its favour; that the glorification of reason would l...

This piece was also published in CityMetric in 2018. Perched on a mesa in the middle of a wide Andalusian plateau, Ronda is a sleepy Spanish town much like any other. Its inhabitants number a meagre 35,000. The nearest city, Malaga, is 100km to the south. The town is unassuming from a distance.  And yet, as a place, Ronda has been home to more than its fair share of famous figures; since the 19th century, an air of romanticism has led artists from Irving to Rilke to Welles to Hemingway to visit Ronda, and write no shortage of poems and prose dedicated to the city. This was no doubt a testament to the town’s stalwart atmosphere; it is cited as the first home of bullfighting and maintains an almost village-like contiguity even in spite of its size. But if any one monument defines Ronda’s ubiquity in the Romanticism of old, that monument would be the Puente Nuevo, the New Bridge, which spans the Guadalevín river cutting the town in two. The third of a series of increasingly ela...

Spain is a peculiar country for cyclists; a cruel divide between thankless highways with nary a cycle lane in sight and beautiful, delineated tree-lined cycle paths in the cities that could bring themselves to it. In this regard, it’s not a far cry from the state of the UK – except many a British town, most notably my hometown of Ipswich, made a questionable half-effort to make the town cycle friendly, with paths flanked by parking and irritatingly necessary “shared spaces”. In Spain, they either go the whole way or they don’t bother. Why might this be? How can my local bicycle repairman help us get to the bottom of things? And why did I spend almost a year swerving out of the way of pedestrians, goats and a lone chihuahua? Allow me to answer at least two of those questions, and maybe the third if you’re feeling lucky. A good place to start would be clearing up the nonsense title; as any budding geographer will tell you, Bournemouth is famously not located in Iberia. Rather, it wa...

This is the first in a series of ten Year Abroad posts I will be writing this summer. They will deal with a range of topics, from culture, to history, to the positively urbane. This first one is mostly about the nominal experience of the year abroad, and how technology has changed it. One of the things I lost on my year abroad – besides four folding bikes, two pairs of trousers, and, annoyingly, the ability to speak fluent English, was my old laptop: a beastly thing with almost 5 years of solid service. While I never made a habit of taking my laptop into university to study, preferring to stick to a paper and pen and the occasional library computer, I found the machine an essential component of my year away nonetheless; seeing as it enabled me to watch Peep Show at my leisure as long as I had it around. While most British television channels use region-locked online players, YouTube, Netflix and the like circumvent this. Yet this wonderful boon is in fact a double-edged sword,...