It’s not the best photo ever, but I love it. Evening. A busy street in Thessaloniki. A woman enjoys some time out by dragging a chair out – not onto the pavement, but into the road itself. Well, why not? Streets were for people long before they were used by cars.
For Debbie’s One Word Sunday: Seating (well, 44 words in my case)
On the first Saturday of every month, a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six other books to form a chain. Readers and bloggers are invited to join in by creating their own ‘chain’ leading from the selected book.
Kate’s: Books are my Favourite and Best
I haven’t read the starter book, Tom Lake by Ann Patchett, which is set in small-town Michigan. Here’s how Book Browse summarises it: ‘Tom Lake is a meditation on youthful love, married love, and the lives parents have led before their children were born. Both hopeful and elegiac, it explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart’. It sounds to me as though it also reflects upon how in the end we are alone, even if living in an established family or community.
Kent Haruf’s Plainsong is set in small town Colorado. This beautifully written, spare, stark book takes as its theme the loosely intermingled lives of various abandoned souls who live in the imagined town of Holt, Colorado. There’s teenage Victoria, pregnant and abandoned by her boyfriend; Tom Guthrie, whose wife has retreated into deep depression, leaving him with the care of his young boys, Ike and Bobby; the elderly McPheron brothers; infirm Iva Stearn. These isolated people display dignity and stoicism in their difficulties, and struggle towards some sense of connection and community. Holt seems a pretty bleak town, and the landscape that surrounds it too. Haruf’s descriptions are always understated, always telling. His characters maintain their privacy, whilst allowing us to care about the ultimately optimistic conclusion of the book.
From a bleak town to a bleak continent: let’s go to the Arctic with Christiane Ritter: A Woman in the Polar Night. In 1934, Ritter, a painter, left her ordinary life with a teenage daughter to join her husband in his life as trapper in Arctic Spitsbergen. It turns out to be as cold and inhospitable as we all imagine, and twice as primitive. Home is little better than a shack, the stove is primitive and unreliable, and all fuel needs to be found and collected by them, The same applies on the whole to food. They have only a few basic supplies. Animals and birds have to be caught and processed, and these fatty unfamiliar meats form much of their diet. Husband and Norwegian friend and housemate are often out trapping, looking for animals whose fur they will sell. That’s enough to tell you what much of this book is about. It’s twice as tough as it sounds in this unforgiving climate. But it’s beautiful too, and Ritter dwells on this. Straightforwardly yet engagingly written, this book offers an insight into the strange world which she chooses for a year to inhabit, and leaves reluctantly.
Here’s another book about a woman alone: The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty, by Vendela Vida. This book is written in the second person, and it distances us from a protagonist who wants to stay distant. She’s a young unnamed woman who’s come – fled perhaps – from Florida to Casablanca. Checking into her hotel, her backpack with all her important documents is stolen. The police ‘find’ it, but it’s not hers, the woman whose documents it contains is not her. But she accepts it. In many ways, losing her given identity suits her. She soon changes her identity again… and again. Her need for anonymity runs deep, perhaps partly from her wish to escape her own face, disfigured by teenage acne. Perhaps because of what we come to know of her story – no spoiler alerts here though. Through what little agency she has, she time and again shifts the ground beneath her feet. This is a novel of profound unease and bewilderment, and distancing our heroine from us by simply calling her ‘you’ is a part of that bewilderment. An unsettling reading experience – recommended.
Nahr is another isolated woman, who tells her (fictional) story in Susan Abulhawa’s Against the Loveless World. A powerful story, told by Nahr, a Palestinian woman in solitary confinement for an unnamed act of terrorism. Her time in the Cube, as she calls her cell is recounted in short chapters interleaved with longer accounts of her life thus far. Much of her early life was spent in a Kuwait ghetto where many Palestinian refugees, dispossessed by the Gulf War fetched up. After an unsuccessful school career, Nahr works hard at menial jobs to save up so that her brother can avoid her fate by going to medical school. She meets an older Kuwaiti woman who blackmails, prostitutes but also loves her, propels her into high-end prostitution. Marriage to a freedom fighter saves her reputation – and his – but he’s a closet homosexual who soon deserts her for his lover. I don’t want to reveal more of the story, but eventually she returns to Palestine and finds close relationships and a political awakening that changes her life forever. This timely read, detailing the brutal legacy of Israel’s ongoing occupation of Palestine is both powerful and thought-provoking. Though it is of necessity one-sided, it should be required reading for anyone wishing to understand recent Palestinian history. The shock waves of recent events continue and escalate.
Isolation seems to be developing as a bit of a theme here. Here’s isolation of a completely different kind. Orbital, by Samantha Harvey. Six astronauts (two of them are cosmonauts), all from different countries, some male, some female, orbit the earth in their International Space Station. We visit them for one day only, as they travel 16 times round the globe. We experience with them the wonder of this journey: the brush-stroke beauty of the landscapes they view from afar, as well as tiny detail – headlights, fishing boats. We accompany them as they go about their often mundane daily experimental tasks. Or using the treadmills that are part of their daily routine. Or we see their sleeping bags, billowing in weightlessness: the spoons they eat with, attached by velcro to the cabin wall. We perceive aspects of their life back on earth – children, a loveless marriage, a trusting partnership. The book moves through the spectacular and the ordinary, distance and intimacy and invites us, the readers, to wonder too.
Wonder at the earth? Let’s look at Meadowland: The Private Life of an English Field, by John Lewis-Stempel. An utterly absorbing account of a year in the life of an English meadow. From harsh January, through the months in which warmth and life returns, to busy summer and autumn and back to chilly dormancy again, John Lewis-Stempel notices and absorbs everything. He sees birds, insects, animals and plants in microscopic detail. He relishes smells, tastes and sights. He enters fully into the life of his traditional meadow, one that may have existed for many hundred years. A celebration of traditional country scenes, leaving the reader with a campaigning zeal to preserve the rich variety of life it contains if sympathetically managed and left to itself. As he himself says: ‘To stand alone in a field in England and listen to the morning chorus of the birds is to remember why life is precious.’
Isolation seems to be a theme here. Will that continue next month, when we’re invited to start our chain with a favourite travel guide?
My first five photos come courtesy of Unsplash: Alexander Andrews; Levartravel; Vince gx; Annie Spratt; Gallindo Bailey. The final shot is my own.
Leaving a coffee shop in town the other day, I spotted this tea set in the window, confected entirely from remnants of cotton, and oddments of wool.
Cheery, isn’t it?
For Bushboy Brian’s Last on the Card.
There are dozens of quotations about shopping, and most of them don’t fit me. I can’t agree with Marilyn Monroe – ‘Happiness is not in money, but in shopping.’ nor with the words from a film I haven’t seen, Confessions of a Shopaholic: ‘When I shop, the world gets better.’ I’m more with Franklin Jones: ‘A bargain is something you can’t use at a price you can’t resist.’ My title quotation is by AJ Lee.
I make an exception though with food shopping- especially abroad, and especially in markets. And even more especially in fish markets. In this country, we seem hardly to extend our reach beyond cod, plaice and haddock, with tuna and salmon as well these days – and even those may be tinned . So a visit to a fish market in Europe or Asia is a revelation. Here are some shots taken in Spain and South Korea, where they seem to catch enough daily to empty the oceans.
Fruit and veg and groceries seem more interesting in a sunny spot: especially if a fellow customer in Thessaloniki is a Greek Orthodox priest busy on his mobile phone.
Or if the shopkeeper has made a point of announcing his wares in a very original way, as here in Cádiz.
Some shops are so handsome they simply invite browsing. This shop in Barcelona, Queviures, is thinking of charging an entrance fee to those who mumble ‘just looking‘. And look – you get a view of the street behind in the window reflections – for free.
Here’s another – in Newcastle this time – also providing a view of the street it was in.
It’s no longer a camera shop. But that day, it wasn’t selling fine food and coffee either. But we had fun photographing it for free.
No clothes shops here. I’ve shopped for clothing exclusively in charity shops for five or six years now – yes, even for my outfit as mother-of-the-bride. And I didn’t look like a bag lady. So I’ve been told. I therefore have no shots of elegant and fashionable clothes emporia. Just this. Once upon a time, this mannequin was the clothes horse for many a stylish window display in Málaga. Her glory days are over.
Despite my lack of enthusiasm for retail therapy, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed strolling round markets and shops at home and abroad for Ritva’s Lens-Artist Challenge #288. I’ll never be keen to shop-till-I-drop, but ‘you can always find something you want‘ (Sophie Amurosa). Especially if it’s edible.
My featured photo is from the indoor market in Seville.
The featured photo shows the Vikings as we always seem to think of them: a bellicose lot of marauders and fighters. In fact they were much like the rest of us – seeking a simple life of home, work and family. A trip to York, the Jorvik Viking Centre and the Viking Festival showed us an everyday story of country folk.
They must have been doing something right. They even had a willing slave in the form of my eight year old grandson cheerfully wielding his broom for his temporary Viking master.
A few shots from our recent stay: only one is from Barcelona. It’s not hard to tell which one.
For Debbie’s One Word Sunday.
In this week’s Lens Artists Challenge, Donna of Wind Kisses fame urges us to show images that make us hear the sounds issuing from them.
I immediately thought of the fields round here, when during the spring and summer, the backdrop to a walk is often the quiet susurration of crops swaying in the breeze. Or maybe this image here shows a brisker noise as the breeze becomes instead a hearty wind.
Birdsong is the backdrop to any country walk. But instead of images of birds trilling their hearts out, I’m showing you two shots from times when I was a major source of irritation. ‘Don’t you even THINK of harming my babies’, hissed the graylag goose.
‘Don’t you even THINK of harming my babies’ screamed the Arctic Tern. What do you mean, I haven’t got the wings entirely in shot? I was in fear of my life here.
Ours is a riverside landscape here, and especially now in winter, the waters chatter rhythmically over rocks and gravel.
Let’s go into town. Any town. There’s bound to be something going on. Maybe someone has dragged a piano out into the street.
Maybe there are Morris dancers out and about. And Morris dancers don’t have to be men these days …
There might be dancing in the street in Catalonia …
…. or celebrations of Chuseok in South Korea, with insistent drum beating .
But bah gum, I’m a Yorkshire lass, and I can’t close without a rousing melody from a fine brass band. You’ll find another image in the featured photo.
This is a window designed in honour of a vet – James Herriott. He (under his real name of James Alfred Wight) made his name by writing a whole series of books about being a young vet in Darrowby (actually Thirsk) visiting farms and their animals hither and yon in the Yorkshire Dales from the 1930s onwards. If you don’t know his books, you may know one of the TV series going out under the name of All Creatures Great and Small: 1978 & 2020, as apparently they’re doing the rounds the world over.
Well, there’s a museum in Thirsk as well – World of James Herriott – occupying the house he and his family lived and worked in all those years ago. And it has a window celebrating the landscape that formed the backdrop to his work. Here it is as the featured photo. And here is a bit of a collage of the backdrop to the working week of any Yorkshire vet, then and now. Except I haven’t got a picture of the White Horse at Kilburn featured in the window. About 170 years ago, it was cut into the landscape to emulate the chalk hill figures of southern England, and Herriott, like all the rest of us, would see it often as he drove round and about the area.
If you’re in the area and want a good family-friendly destination, the museum is highly recommended. You’ll come away with all the older family members saying ‘I remember those’, as they peer at tea-cosies, mangles and a thoroughly ancient car (Gumdrop, anyone?), bemused by the vetinary equipment, and entertained by the quizzes and activities in the children’s gallery. You too can insert your arm into a cow’s rear end to deliver a reluctant calf.
And for a bit of context, here’s a view from a window in the museum.
Whether the weather be cold,
Or whether the weather be hot,
We'll weather the weather
Whatever the weather,
Whether we like it or not!
Traditional
I thought I’d put together Anne’s Lens-Artist Challenge #286 – Weather – with the aid of children’s rhymes.
Rain, rain, go away,
Come again another day.
Rain, rain, go to Spain,
Never show your face again!
Traditional
It’s not just children who’d willingly sing this these days. In the UK it’s rained pretty much constantly all this year. But in Spain, they’d cheerfully take some of our surplus. In Catalonia, in mid-winter, the reservoirs are a mere 16% full, and water-use restrictions are in place.
When the wind is in the east
'tis neither good for man nor beast.
When the wind is in the north,
the skilful fisher goes not forth.
When the wind is in the south,
it blows the bait in the fishes' mouth.
When the wind is in the west,
then 'tis at the very best.
Traditional
The fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking
over harbour and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.
Carl Sandburg
I can’t claim that Carl Sandburg’s is a children’s rhyme. I couldn’t think of one. Can you?
The north wind doth blow,
and we shall have snow,
and what will the robin do then, poor thing?
He'll sit in a barn,
and keep himself warm,
and hide his head under his wing, poor thing!
Traditional.
This hardly-there snow is pretty typical of wintry conditions in England. And I know that a robin lives pretty close by: this field almost qualifies as my back yard.
Red and yellow and pink and green,
purple and orange and blue:
I can sing a rainbow,
sing a rainbow,
sing a rainbow too.
Arthur Hamilton
All three of my children used to sing this one – often – at assembly in primary school. I wonder if it’s still going strong?
So that’s it. Oh, hang on, I’ve forgotten something. Sunshine. Well, I would, wouldn’t I? It’s February in England, and famously sunless. Let’s show British sunlight, rather than the full-on sun of the holiday of our dreams.
And most children can sing the less-than-traditional The Sun Has Got His Hat On by Noel Gay. So let’s leave you with this cheery version.
Most of us living in Britain know something about the model villages built by philanthropic industrialists in the 19th century. With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, workers poured in from the countryside to a filthy urban environment. They found, alongside work for long hours in the newly-established factories, hastily built, crowded, poor quality housing with no facilities.
Some philanthropic factory owners decided to do things differently. Robert Owen built New Lanark for his miners. Titus Salt built Saltaire near Bradford for his textile workers. William Lever, 1st Viscount Leverhulme built Port Sunlight for his soap workers. And so on. All these communities offered decent, usually terraced housing with a small amount of outside space. There was a shop, a school, an institute for adult learners, a health-care facility of some kind, certainly a church. There was not however, a pub, or anywhere where alcohol was sold. Workers at the time often drowned out the reality of their miserable lives by drinking, and those philanthropists wanted a different life for their workers, whether they liked it or not.
So we were interested to visit Colonia Güell when we found out about it. It’s a similar set up in a manufacturing area, Santa Coloma de Cervelló, just outside Barcelona. Spain’s industrial revolution came later than ours: but in 1890, industrialist Eusebio Güell realised that if he wanted to attract workers from Barcelona to the factory he was building on his country estate – an essentially rural area – he would have to provide housing. And like his British counterparts, he wanted to do The Right Thing.
Eusebio Güell didn’t just want to have any old housing. He sought out the best architects of the day, disciples of the Modernista movement: the ideas behind Art Nouveau found particularly vibrant expression in Catalonia. More details here.
He provided decent housing for both workers and professionals in spacious streets, the factory itself of course, a theatre, a doctor’s surgery, a school. The school however was for boys only. In many ways it was progressive, teaching foreign languages as well as the three Rs. But girls had to make do with being taught embroidery and other manual skills that would make them dextrous with machinery when they went to work later on. Nuns at the convent taught them, and also provided a nursery so that mothers could return to work soon after they had given birth.
Of course there was a church. And in 1898 Eusebio Güell commissioned the young Antonio Gaudí to design and build it. Had it been finished, this church would have been as ambitious a project as Gaudí ‘s still not quite finished Sagrada Familia. Two naves, lower and upper! Towers! A central 40 foot dome!
The building was begun, but in 1914 the Güell family decided to stop funding the project and Gaudí turned his back on it with only the lower nave completed, now known as the crypt. It was consecrated in 1915. I found it difficult to photograph, but here is a miscellany of shots from the inside and outside of an astonishing building.
During the Spanish Civil War, the mill was collectivised and run by its workers. After the war it was sold back to the Güell family, who sold it on again. Its days were numbered. The textile industry in Europe was collapsing and the factory ceased production in 1973. The factory itself was sold off piecemeal, and the houses to their residents. The settlement was in danger of losing its identity. But in 1990 the Colonia Güell was declared a ‘Heritage of Cultural Interest’ by the Spanish government and the protection of some of its most relevant buildings was established. Nowadays it’s an ordinary working community with an extraordinary history.
We enjoyed walking round and exploring. Sadly, we couldn’t see the factory. On Sunday its current many and various component businesses are shut, the gate to the site barred.
It’s not the easiest place to reach from Barcelona without a car, and as these things are apt to change, I won’t include public transport options. But we’re so glad to have visited, and will go again.
From Pyrenees to Pennines 
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