If you go walking in the Yorkshire Dales, you won’t avoid a few ups and downs. And not just the hills either. There’s a small matter of stiles to be climbed to get over all those drystone walls.
This post is in response to this weeks WordPress Photo Challenge: Ascend
I’ve never told you about my Tuesday mornings, have I? Every other Tuesday, I’m in Ripon with Sheila and her Creative Writing Group. We have such fun. Today, for instance, having looked at how many genres of writing there are (dystopian novels, anybody? Memoirs? Epic verse?) we each wrote three sentences – just three – introducing the story of Cinderella. And then we did it again. And again.
I can’t take you to the panto (I wouldn’t anyway. Not a fan). But I can offer you my three versions of Cinderella, which neither Perrault nor the Brothers Grimm would recognise. Take your pick.
If you visit the town of Fantasienburg, be sure to visit the new museum dedicated to Cinderella’s Ugly Sisters. These two widely misunderstood figures from German mediaeval history have recently been reappraised. Evidence uncovered in previously unpublished documents found at the University of Würzfurt reveals a surprising story……..
or……
The court of the House of Grimm announced yesterday the death of King Charming at the age of 96. He died peacefully in his sleep. His reign was characterised by a rejection of the flamboyance shown by his father, in favour of the simple values espoused by his consort, Queen Cinderella……
or ….
She seemed a slatternly young woman. Her hair was greasy, her clothes stained and worn, and her hands, with chipped dirty nails, were covered in calluses. The equerry regarded her with disdain and disapproval …..
I might take one of these stories forward over Christmas. Which one?
This day three weeks ago, I was in Sagunt, near Valencia. When I wrote about it, I posted not a single photo, but promised you a few later. You’ll have to wait for the ones celebrating this fine city’s Roman, Moorish, Jewish and Civil War past. Today, you can see the cheeky dragon who’s roaring from the top of a perfectly ordinary drainpipe fixed to a perfectly ordinary house.
I’ll show you the cheeky cactus growing in the gutter of another perfectly well-appointed house nearby.
And you can see the cheeky red squirrel – so exciting to an English person used only to his pushy grey cousins – who declined to sit still and pose nicely while I fussed around turning on my camera.
This week’s WordPress photo challenge invites us to find cheeky photos.
Once upon a time – 1989 actually – two babies were born: a girl in England, a boy in Spain. They each had siblings more than ten years older than they were. They each went to school and did well, and in due course they went to University.
When they graduated, they wanted to train or work as teachers. The reality was that one of them could only find a job in a call centre, the other by working in a bar or restaurant It wasn’t what they wanted.
By chance, opportunity knocked. The English girl got the chance to work as a teaching assistant in Spain. The Spanish boy became an au pair in England. They worked and learnt hard, and within a year, both had found regular teaching posts.
Since then, five or six years have passed. The English girl speaks Spanish with ease. The Spanish boy is very comfortable speaking English. Their careers have developed nicely. Each considers the country that they ended up in, almost by chance, as home.
Have you guessed yet that the English child is my daughter Emily? The Spanish child is my new Spanish teacher Javi. If they wanted, it’s not impossible that they could swap the lives they’ve chosen by exchanging their jobs, their homes and their social lives with each other, and go back to their countries of birth. But they don’t want to. They’re settled, and feel enriched by the choices they’ve made. It’s called ‘Freedom of Movement’.
Oh, I say, WordPress Photo Challenge. That’s a bit much. ‘Serene’? I did that last week, under the heading of ‘Transformation’.
Still, you can’t keep a serene place down. And if l’Albufera as the sun was was setting good enough for last week’s post, it’s good enough this week too. Especially as I’ve exchanged enjoying the warmth in balmy Spain for shivering in temperature of 1 degree in gusty, snowy North Yorkshire.
This was a weekend of travel. Of packing up and leaving my temporary home in Valencia and catching a coach to Barcelona (there was some kind of disruption on the rail network which I was keen to avoid).
I was a little anxious about Barcelona. Every day for a fortnight, I’d watched the evening news on TV with my hostess. Every day for a fortnight the situation in Catalonia had been top of the agenda, for a good twenty minutes or so. There were pictures of massed placards, of disaffected locals chuntering volubly into microphones, of city fountains running in Catalonia’s colour of yellow.
I arrived in a city where everyone was enjoying a normal sunny Saturday, Spanish style. There were flags and posters certainly, but mainly concentrated in various hotspots. Catalonia’s been keen on nationalist flags for years in any case. What was (not) going on? ‘You’ve been watching Telecinco?’ howled Emily and Miquel, leaving me in little doubt that this less-than-even-handed commercial channel is the Daily Mail of the Spanish airwaves.
I don’t feel qualified to comment on what’s going on in Catalonia. But it does seem an awful lot like Brexit. Nobody is going to be happy whatever happens. Families and friends are divided. Hatred is legitimised. It’s a mess.
Still, I was there just to catch up with Emily and Miquel before flying home. To join the crowds of locals enjoying the warm autumn weather, calling in for a drink at a bar every now and then, before later, much later, having a convivial meal in a thoroughly convivial restaurant.
On Sunday, a bit more of the same, with Miquel’s family this time, before flying back to a windy Leeds, where the temperature was a mere 23 degrees colder than it had been in Valencia in the middle of the week.
And this week? I’m doing as little as possible. Exhaustion has set in.
My fortnight in Valencia is at an end. I’ve got the certificate to prove it, from my school of Spanish. And before you send me virtual pats on the back, it’s a certificate of attendance, not of achievement.
But goodness, I needed a break yesterday afternoon. This fortnight’s been full on. If I haven’t been doing Spanish, or watching Spanish TV with my hostess (not recommended), I’ve been getting a severe case of Museum Foot.
An afternoon at the sea? In the country? Why not both? L’Albufera is Valencia’s Natural Park. It’s a large fresh-and-seawater lake, a rice-growing marsh, and a sandbar. It’s beautiful, and only an eight kilometre bus ride from town. I spent the afternoon exploring the unexpectedly characterful Mediterranean maquis scrubland and a deserted beach.
But it was the last hour of all that was transformative, washing away a fortnight’s stress. Good stress, but still….
I got a trip on a boat which puttered slowly and quietly across the lake and through the reed beds as the sun set, herons and cormorants fished, and ducks patrolled the waters. It was perfect, quite perfect.
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Manises seems down on its luck. This town, eight kilometres from Valencia, was once a centre of gravity in Spain’s ceramics manufacture.
The old station at Manises, decorated with tiles.
I went there today, and found a town proud to celebrate its history, with a super-helpful Tourist Office. I found a town which like our former home of Laroque, has lost its reason for being. Textiles in Laroque, ceramics in Manises are almost all gone, victims of changing fashions and cheap imports from Asia.
Manises has over seven hundred years of pottery production to boast about. It was an early adopter of an Arabic technique, lustreware, and the wealth of the nearby port city of Valencia ensured a ready stream of buyers. They perfected cobalt blue pottery too, and cornered the market in supplying floor tiles to the elite.
pottery from the 15th century, in the Ceramics Museum.
They made functional everyday ware too, so weathered all kinds of economic and political ups and downs through the centuries.
By 1932, there were 112 factories in town. Now, no mass production any longer exists. There are small specialist producers. And that’s it.
A plaque illustrating the town in the early 20th century.
But it’s fun to walk round town, or visit the park. Ceramic plaques tell the town’s story in various ways. There are some great buildings – this is the above-mentioned Tourist Office.
Better than this though is poking round the back streets and seeing the variety of ornamentation on totally ordinary workaday houses.
And just as good, going to a rather good restaurant housed in a former ceramics factory.
Not much seemed to be going on now. I expect everyone is at work at the airport up the road.
PS. Here is a great blog post describing Manises so very well
Once upon a time, perhaps every fifty years, Valencia used to be engulfed by floods. The River Túria, which largely encircled the old city centre, regularly burst its banks and devastated the town. 1957 was particularly bad. The streets became canals, houses were ruined, and more than eighty people died. Something had to be done.
The solution was radical. They moved the river. The Túria now flows well south of the city and those floods are all in the past.
But what to do with the old river bed? Well, what about a multi-lane superhighway charging through the city, linking Madrid with the port of Valencia? It jolly nearly happened.
But the citizens, horrified, had a better idea than the planners. What about a park? The plan took many years to realise – there’s little commercial advantage in green space. But eventually work began on preparing the site, and later on planning and planting. Now the Túria Gardens are much loved, much used. If you want to go jogging, ride your bike, walk the dog, play sport, bring the children to let off steam or have a picnic, you have a nine kilometre (soon to be eleven) circuit to play with. It’s an idyllic, peaceful place at any time of day.
How do I know all this? Because I went on a Free Tour Valencia yesterday. For ‘free’, read ‘pay as you like’. This company has good, informative and interesting guides. They have to be good, or they wouldn’t earn anything. If you go to Valencia, be sure to seek them out. Thanks, Carlos. I hope I’ve got my facts right.
The gardens seen through an arch of the 17th century bridge of Sant Josep.
I never thought to ask. I wish I had.
I never thought to ask if it was the Valencia Marathon on Sunday. I never thought to ask if the Marathon would begin and end at the City of Arts and Sciences, where I’d planned to spend the whole day.
It was all quite fun at first. I was walking through the wonderful Turia Gardens, the dried up river bed that is now a park encircling the city centre, when I heard music and announcements in the street above.
This is what I found when I went to look.
And that was fine. But as I neared the City, the crowds grew. Paths were closed. The crowds, the noise, the music became ever more invasive.
I took a few photos, and decided that this noise, these crowds, this carnival wasn’t for me. All the paths I thought I needed were closed, though, or jammed with people, and getting away turned out to be very tricky. This was not the low-key day I’d planned.
It was ok in the end. I found a park at the other side of the city, and did a whole lot of nothing. It was just what I needed.
PS. On the metro today, a Spaniard asked me the way. I told her……
From Pyrenees to Pennines 
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