Premiá de Mar, like most towns round here, has its share of Modernist architecture. Today I’m showing you a splendid door from 1918. Originally a cinema, this building known as El Patronat became a parish hall, before returning to its roots and becoming a local arts centre for performances and film screenings. I always enjoy its exuberant doorways when I pass by.
Here in Catalonia, the thing to do before a Sunday meal or when out meeting friends, is to visit a vermuteria, and sit down for a chat and a vermouth, negro o blanco. And if you’re on this part of the Maresme coast, you may very well choose to go to Espinaler in our next door town, Vilassar de Mar. It’s been part of the local scenery since 1896.
While it started as a simple bar, it’s gone on to bigger and better things: producing its own vermut; developing a piquant sauce, also called Espinaler that brings a little spice and je ne sais quoi to whatever you’re eating; preserving seafoods; and finally developing, in 2012, a gourmet store-tavern-warehouse in Vilassar. That’s where Malcolm and I went today – to window-shop ahead of buying a few treats to take home with us. Here are a few of the things we spotted. Before of course sitting down for a vermut and a tapa or two.
You might notice they even have the odd item from England. I haven’t any photos from the appetising cheese and charcuterie counters, because – well – they weren’t very geometrically-packed products.
I thought it was about time I showed some geometry from the natural world. This fellow is from Premià de Mar, but from last summer, when he was taking a rest in Emily’s front garden. He’s beautifully symetrical, and his limbs show off angles to great advantage. Google Lens says he’s an Egyptian Grasshopper. Does anybody either agree or disagree?
Today, Malcolm and I took ourselves off to Premià’s Museu Romà. It’s a museum brought into being because of a discovery during the development of new buildings in the 1990s of an important Roman site. It proved to have been what we might consider a conference and exhibition centre, built in the 5th century CE and an important place to promote the greatly appreciated wine grown on the estate. As the Roman Empire fell, so did the building’s fortunes. But after a few years, it re-invented itself, finding a new use as a home and wine-producing business. And later still, as a graveyard.
Star of the show is a wonderful floor mosaic, incredibly detailed and beautiful by any standards, and employing a full range of geometric idioms. It was hard to photograph satisfactorily, but here are a few shots – square of course.
We thought that the children here in Catalonia went back to school today. But no, as I discovered when I tried to take Anaïs along this morning. So instead, we went to the gym. A trampolining sort of a place, and full of geometric shapes. The kids bouncing around are blurred, because they were bounding at speed. Anaïs is in pink, towards the back.
Did you know that the Three Kings who brought gifts to the baby Jesus arrived in a ship? No, neither did I till this evening. Look.
They’ve already done what they had to do by visiting the Christ child. Now here they are approaching Premià de Mar, preparing to bring gifts tonight to all the good children in town. The ship flies the (geometric) flag of Saint George, patron saint of Catalonia. And the port itself is geometric enough, with the masts of so many sailing ships as a foil to the choir singing to welcome the three monarchs.
Later, they put in an appearance at the town square, then processed round the town. I have better (I hope) photos of the event on my camera, but for now, let’s make do with a few mobile phone snapshots – and not very geometric at that. Not so much of the kings, but of their elephants; drummers; coal wagons (naughty children get coal, not presents); post-people receiving letters written by hopeful children. Pictures of the kings, of the distributors of sweets, and other assorted bits of fun will have to wait for another day.
Where words fail, music speaks: so said Hans Christian Anderson. And when Leanne invited me to host Monochrome Madness for One Week Only, I thought Music might be a good theme. We bloggers come from all over the world. Though many of us, in many nations, have English as our first language, there are dozens of different ones in the WordPress melting pot. But we can all enjoy music together, whether singing, playing instruments, or dancing, Or all of the above at once. Let’s do it.
My header image was taken at the neighbourhood Festa Major in Gràcia, Barcelona. It’s out of focus, and I don’t care. It captures I think the verve and enjoyment of those performing drummers.
Here are some dancers in neighbourhood festivals: in Catalonia; and in England – Morris Men.
Instrument players now. The drummer accompanying the Morris dancers; drummers celebrating Chusak in South Korea, and brass players marching in London in those heady optimistic days when some of us still thought Brexit might not happen.
Of course some instrumentalists out in the street are trying to earn a living. Here are buskers in Ripon and Bath.
And a harpist playing at a friend’s wedding in the grounds of the ruined Abbey at Jervaulx ….
Here are singers in Seville, relying simply on the beauty of their voices; and a singer-instrumentalist, heavily dependent on a supply of electricity to produce a sound.
Of course, first you have to have your instrument. Here’s a music shop in Málaga.
This thrush is a musician from the natural world. He commandeers a high branch here, spring after spring, and simply sings his heart out from early morning to early evening, almost without stopping. I wish you could hear him.
And while we’re in the Great Outdoors, is there anything more musical than a tinkling and plashing stream, tumbling tunefully over rocks?
Please do join in with your own musical offerings. And link back both to this post, and to Leanne’s site too, here.
So said Mick Maslen, Yorkshire artist and teacher. And perhaps none is more energetic than the Leading Line: the one that draws you insistently into an image to discover what lies at the other end. And which may leave you wondering, because you often never reach it.
My header image is from Cádiz, and is a bit of a text book classic. Pavement, road, seawall, cars, kerb-side buildings – even to a lesser extent the wispy clouds- all lead you on and drop you outside the city’s cathedral.
In other examples, it’s the journey along the lines, rather than the destination that commands our notice. Here’s one from Chalons-en-Champagne: the wall paintings rather than the chap at the end, are the story. Just as the couple in the underpass in Premià de Mar attract less attention than the graffiti they’ve just walked past.
Other leading lines have no destination that we can see. The Chirk Aqueduct, with viaduct behind is going somewhere. We just don’t know where. The same with the Rolling English Road in the Yorkshire Dales, and the track in another part of the Dales whose path has been enveloped by fog.
Just one more image today. The astonishing Millau Viaduct in France, some two and a half km. long, sweeps majestically about 35 metres above the River Tarn and the landscape and communities beneath- sometimes (and oh how I’d love to see it then!) even above the clouds.
For Leanne’s Monochrome Madness and her guest host this week Sarah, who writes Travel with Me.
This week’s Monochrome Madness theme is proposed by Aletta of nowathome: and she’s chosen Steps or Stairs. It’s an interesting idea, and one where I could have chosen the grand and elegant staircases gracing the finest palaces and country houses of the rich, titled or famous.
Instead I’ve chosen the steps trodden by ordinary folk on their daily round in Barcelona (featured photo), Newcastle and Sitges; or by monks engaged in their spiritual duties at Fountains Abbey; or by a hiker, needing to nip over a few drystone walls on her several mile journey from A to B.
Or there’s the worker helping construct la Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. It might be one of the most famous buildings in Europe, but shinning about its heights looking for footholds is just part of his 9 – 5, every working day.
And I’ll leave you with one little treat. A harpist at Jervaulx Abbey this summer, playing at the wedding of some good friends of ours. She was working, even if the rest of us weren’t.
This week, Leanne’s Monochrome Madness has no theme. She has chosen to showcase lighthouses. We’re rather thin on lighthouses round here, so I won’t join her. Instead, I’ll show just a few towers I’ve seen this year.
My first tower of the year was a human one, seen in York.
Then we went to Spain to meet our new granddaughter. And do a spot of discovering too.
And later, I went back to Spain again, to lend a hand as my daughter’s maternity leave ran out. I still had moments of sightseeing.
And most recently, it was off to Holgate Mill, a fully functioning windmill slap in the middle of a housing estate in York. I must introduce it properly soon.
My featured photo is of Christ Church Hartlepool, now an Arts Centre. I was going to add in an AI generated photo too. Just for fun. But they were no fun, so I abandoned the idea.
From Pyrenees to Pennines 
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