El País (29th April) reports: "El escritor Michael Jacobs condimentó con una pantagruélica jornada gastronómica la presentación en Londres de su último libro, La fabrica de la luz: la vida en un pueblo andaluz. Enamorado de España, a la que ha dedicado más de media docena de títulos de su extensa obra de viajes, el autor británico aprovechó la velada para introducir en su país los hábitos culinarios de Frailes, el pueblo jienense donde sitúa la acción del libro. Juan Marías, del restaurante Rey de Copas, hizo los honores invadiendo con productos de tierras andaluzas la cocina de Moro, el local andalusí con más prestigio y demanda de Londres. No hubo economías en el menú, de nueve platos sin contar las entradas y postres. Desde pastela de pichón a ensalada de naranjas y pan de higo con bacalao, perdiz con miel y canela, lomo de liebre con gurullos y otros manjares que Marías rara vez puede preparar para la clientela local del Rey de Copas." It sounds mouth-watering. The book, entitled The Factory of Light: Life in an Andalucian Village in English, is published in the UK by John Murray in June, and will probably, given Jacobs’ lofty reputation as an expert in matters Spanish, be a more than worthy addition to the increasingly popular foreigner-in-Andalucia genre – he is, after all, no recent arrival. The village in question is Frailes, in the province of Jaén.

Comment by a colleague on Spanish students’ penchant for copying in exams: “They don’t see it as wrong. They see it as a virtue. They’re sharing”.

Puerta del Sol’s host Iñaki Gabilondo is by far the most listened-to radio journalist in Spain, El País recently reported. "Por programas, a la cabeza se mantiene el magazine matinal de la SER Hoy por hoy. Con 2.685.000 oyentes, el espacio dirigido y presentado por Iñaki Gabilondo obtiene una marca histórica y gana 362.000 seguidores respecto a la oleada anterior." Iñaki is PdS’s trumpet, and here I am, blowing him. If you’ll pardon the expression.

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Yesterday was the Madrid marathon, 2003. I struggled out of bed and crawled up the hill to Atocha in time to see the leaders whiz past. They’d already run 40km by that time. I reflected that someone running can be a beautiful and inspiring thing to watch. Then I crawled back down the hill again.

The message comes from Eva Sklar at Lolafilms that David Trueba’s Soldados de Salamina has been selected for the “Un Certain Regard” section at this years Cannes Film Festival. I’m pleased – Cannes has a reputation for not being particularly welcoming to Spanish films. A poetic, thought-provoking and thoroughly accomplished Civil War film starring Ariadna Gil as a writer investigating the escape of a falangista from the firing squad, Soldados deftly avoids the usual clichés of the genre and it deserves a British/US distributor for the way it fuses past and present into an enthralling narrative. The next issue of PdS will deal with la recuperación de la memoria in Spain, and will devote some space to it. The English translation of the fine eponymous novel it’s based on, by Javier Cercas, is due to be published in the UK in May by Bloomsbury.

In my beginner’s class the other day, in which they are learning the past tense, I asked my student José Luis what his friend Antonio did last night. “Antonio,” José Luis replied, “went to a restaurant with your wife.” Sometimes they have problems distinguishing between “your” and “his” - both can be translated as “su”.

Apropos of Nothing Section: In a recent debate in the Guardian between Charles Moore (editor, Daily Telegraph) and Piers Morgan (editor, Daily Mirror) over their papers’ differing attitudes to the war, Morgan writes:
"Judging by today's Media Guardian's ICM poll on newspaper readers and their views on the war I fear we may both be suffering from what I call the "Bob Cunis" problem - with roughly the same number of readers of both papers seemingly pro and anti the war. Cunis was the New Zealand fast bowler whose performance one day at Lord's was so mediocre that it prompted commentator John Arlott to observe: "Cunis's bowling this morning has been rather like his surname… neither one thing nor the other"."
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For boffins and browsers: The Library of Iberian Resources Online has about fifty full online texts, in English, mostly relating to Spanish medieval matters and mostly recent, but out-of-print university press monographs. Stanley G Payne’s standard introductory text, History of Spain and Portugal, is one of them.

A remarkable discovery at They Still Draw Pictures, an online version of a 1938 book which gathered together drawings done by Spanish children during the Civil War. The introduction is by Aldous Huxley: “If we look at them with the eyes of historians and sociologists, we shall be struck at once by a horribly significant fact: the greater number of these drawings contain representations of aeroplanes. To the little boys and girls of Spain, the symbol of contemporary civilization, the one overwhelmingly significant fact in the world of today is the military plane - the plane that, when cities have anti-aircraft defenses, flies high and drops its load of fire and high explosives indiscriminately from the clouds; the plane that, when there is no defense, swoops low and turns its machine-guns on the panic-stricken men, women and children in the streets.”

So far, this has been Real Madrid’s year (again): top of the league, the only Spanish team left in the European Cup, and 50% of the season’s most exciting game, their 4-3 defeat to Manchester United last week. But today belongs to their rivals, Atlético (where I’m a season ticket holder.) It’s their centenary, and celebrations included a giant paella in the Pradera de San Isidro, a veterans game carrying an Atleti scarf, and fans carry a 1.5km (nearly a mile) scarf long through the streets (they hope to get into the Guinness Book of Records with it.) An incredible sight. Crossing underneath the Scarf to get to the other side of the road felt like sacrilege. At one point, an ambulance came blazing up a side street, was unable to enter Paseo de las Acacias because of the Scarf, and had to turn round. The sick person would be thrilled to bits at that. One of the fans carrying the scarf chuckled “It’s OK as long as he’s a Real supporter”. Which is the downside of football: the upside today was the sheer exuberant fun the fans were having on this, the first day for a long time that the club has had anything real to celebrate about.

Elderly Neighbor entering house through newly-painted front door: Look at that. Somebody’s already kicked the paint off the bottom of the door. There are some real filthy swine (cochinos) around.
Me: There are a few bad people around, yes.
E.N. (after a pause): Fifty percent of Spaniards are filthy swine.
And away he shuffled. I enjoyed his mathematical precision.

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Some thought-provoking words from 72 year-old Cervantes Prize winner José Jiménez Lozano during his acceptance speech on Wednesday:

"Miguel de Cervantes se alimenta de la memoria y de la escucha, que son la material de contra; personas y lugares que han herido su alma, para que la de quienes le lean también quede lacerada por las palabras, y dé un vuelco..."

"... el oficio de novelista es una tarea profundamente misteriosa que molesta al mundo moderno..."

In his tribute, King Juan Carlos said: "Lucid reason, profound beauty, meticulous attention to detail are all there in the writing of Jiménez Lozano, who like Cervantes, starts from the small and fragile aspects of daily life, finding in them the thousand faces of the human condition." The King may or may not be familiar with the novels, but his presence at the ceremony indicates an institutional respect for culture which would nowadays be unthinkable in some of the other countries which have helped shaped it.

Literature celebrates freedom of expression: but security measures at the award ceremony, given current events, were notably tight.

The website of the Real Academia Española has a valuable new (meaning that I’ve only recently discovered it) feature – a link to a free online 2001 edition of its dictionary. From there you can drag the “Diccionario” link onto your toolbar.

Regarding Buddhists and tourism, David Ralston e-mails me to recommend Mick Brown's The Spiritual Tourist, which apparently has a chapter on Lama Osel.

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The Day of the Book in Spain is celebrated as always with a marathon reading of Don Quixote, kicked off this year by 2003 Cervantes Prize winner José Jiménez Lozano and followed, strangely, by four politicians: Deputy Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, Culture Minister Pilar del Castillo, Environment Minister Elvira Rodríguez and Culture Secretary Luis Alberto de Cuenca. (Incidentally, philosopher Gustavo Bueno, in a recent El País interview, claims that he once saw Prime Minister José María Aznar reading Cicero.) Even more strangely, one of the “readers” in the marathon was a voice synthesizer, developed by the Cervantes Institute and Telefoníca: it can be heard reading a part of Chapter 7 of Don Quixote here. An interesting report in El Cultural, “Los números de las letras”, reveals, among plenty of other statistics, that in 2002, 17,130 books were translated into Spanish from other languages, of which 8,902 were from English and 61 from Basque (as far as I can gather, there are sadly no English translations of any of José Jiménez Lozano’s work); that Harry Potter y la piedra filosofal was the best-selling translation; that Arturo Pérez-Reverte is the most-translated living author; that the average Spanish household contains 197 books; and that 47% of the Spanish population never or hardly ever reads. The report, perhaps aiming at statistical thoroughness, also lets us in on the secret that most books (54%) are bought in bookshops.

A Catalan tradition on St. George’s day has women giving their loved ones a book, while the man returns a rose. No gender stereotyping there, then.

Apropos of Nothing Section: Quoted by French beauty Liane de Pougy in the wonderful diary anthology The Assassin’s Cloak (ed. Irene and Alan Taylor, Canongate Books): “One of Cocteau’s jokes. Talking of a chameleon, he said: ‘Its master put it down on a tartan rug and it died of over-exertion’.”

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Semana Santa is over. The first three days in Seville were rained off, and for the first time in more than fifty years not a single procession was able to complete its route. The front pages of the local press showed people weeping at this: a lot of time and emotion is invested in Easter in Andalucia. (And one thing that makes Semana Santa special is that, unusually in today’s world, it has no truck with the world of marketing – a huge popular event which the corporations can’t take advantage of.) When the rain let up on the Wednesday and Holy Week tardily began, the whole city was out on the streets. I finally got the chance to see Bowling for Columbine and when I came out, the lack of available taxis meant a forty-minute walk home through streets which were either impassible, thick with people watching the nazarenos and their Virgin pass by, or else totally deserted. It’s unusual to be able to walk up the middle of a wide Seville street pretty much in isolation.

Then it was on for three nights to the Alpujarra, the mountain region in the south of the Sierra Nevada which Gerald Brenan made famous. Brenan must be one of the least famous people ever to spawn a tourist industry, but he has, of course, recently been helped by Chris Stewart’s bestselling Driving Over Lemons. We stayed at the Alcazaba de Busquistar, an impressive, isolated complex of hotel rooms and apartments about seven miles from the nearest village of Trevélez (where, when I asked for the newspaper kiosk, I was told by an old man that “aquí no hay nada de eso”.) The rooms are done out in alpujarra style – whitewash, stone floors, timber beams, and the smell of wood smoke is ever-present. There is also a TV, set permanently to Disney Channel.

Sunday was a wonderful four hour walk. It starts in Mecina and goes down into Fondales where, typically of the region, there is a fountain with nine tiles arranged in a square, in which the poet beautifully laments the loss of his lover:
To the little Isabel,
She had dirt on her face,
And hair like dead grass,
Beautiful eyes
With the shine of spring.
The walk then goes across the river and up the slope to look back at the villages of the central Alpujarra scattered across the opposite hillside. I crossed paths with about 20 people during the walk, only two of whom were Spanish; one was a German woman who had apparently lost her tall boyfriend during the walk. I’d met him 20 minutes before: if he’d only thought to stand on tiptoe, she could have seen him from a mile off. Near a rocky promontory, there was a seemingly-abandoned scooter and, lying on the ground, a helmet – my imagination suddenly turned this beautiful spot into a beautiful place for a suicide. On the way back into Ferreirola, a woman praying on a stone platform (actually an old era, or threshing floor) looking down the valley, who I accidentally disturbed; by the posture of her prayer, she was a Buddhist (there are many in the area, and at least one incredible story.) I recommend Jeremy Rabjohns’ chatty, responsibly detailed walking guide to the region, Holiday Walks in the Alpujarra.

The Monday journey home took 10 hours for a five hour journey, a crawl from Despeñaperros all the way to Madrid through a generally featureless landscape. Highlights: pulling up on a grim industrial estate near Aranjuez, part of a useless detour, to feed our three month-old son; the service station which chose what must be one of the busiest days of the year to close its restaurant; almost driving into a guardia civil car and getting booked for crossing a stop sign. Meanwhile, people were overtaking on the inside at 180 km per hour (and not being booked for it.) By eight o’clock on Monday night, the radio told me, traffic accidents had claimed 122 lives over the Easter period.

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Reading the powerful Las fosas de Franco by Emilio Silva and Santiago Macías. Silva’s grandfather was executed in 1936, and a few years ago Silva went in search of his bones, an act which symbolizes Spain’s recuperación de la historia. He tells how, at a notorious detention center during the Civil War, the double-barrelled Spanish surname was put to sadistic use. There are many people called García something. When calling prisoners out to be executed, guards would call out, for example, “García…” and then leave a pause while all the many Garcías trembled for their lives. Only after a few seconds would the guards call out the prisoners’ segundo apellido.
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