This year, it’s not too early to go to the fantastic street carnival, Las Fallas, which takes place in Valencia in February and March every year. You’ll find fanciful figures, fireworks and fun. But if travelling’s still tricky, we can join this pair of oddballs on their motorbike, whom I found a few years ago in the museum devoted to this special festival.
For Becky’s Square Odds
With thanks to Sue of Words Visual, for reminding me about this doughty pair of old crones,
Argentona’s parish church of Sant Julià dates from the 16th century. But every one of its ancient gargoyles has been recently replaced. Here’s an off-beat little bestiary:
I’d like to have offered part of an animal alphabet, but as you see, we’ve moved straight from Ass to Cockerel and Cricket without passing B. Far too odd.
For Becky’s Square Odds
Walking down a busy main street in Valencia a few years ago, my eye was caught by a welcoming shady square. Through the palm trees I could glimpse a few columns – maybe Roman remains? and a steady stream of people drifting in and out of a handsome building.
Curious, I investigated. It was a library. The Central Public Library of Valencia. I went in.
How spacious, airy, beautiful and welcoming it was! Later, I discovered that this building had once been the first psychiatric hospital in Europe, founded in 1409 as the initiative of one Friar Juan Gilabert Jofre, to care for the mentally ill. It was called Hospital de Folls de Santa María dels Pobres Innocents – the Hospital of the Poor Innocents. This actual building was begun in 1493, and was and is in the form of a Greek cross, which housed the different wings of the hospital. It added general hospital facilities in the 16th century and also suffered a destructive fire.
During the 1960s, hospital facilities were moved elsewhere in the city, and the authorities began the site’s demolition: the church, the pharmacy and old medical school are gone. There was an immense public outcry. What was left was saved, and the building retained and developed as a library and archive service. Those columns I saw outside are not Roman, but surplus to requirements when the building was redeveloped.
It’s a fabulous place. Not only is it a welcoming, light-filled and serene space, it’s a busy one. It’s right by two of the city’s universities, so study areas are busy with students as well as the general public. The collections seem vast: the English section, for both adults and children was well-stocked, At one point I sat down in the section devoted to newspapers and periodicals and browsed through recent copies of the Times and Sunday Times and some more academic publications in English. Of course other European nations were represented too. There were book groups advertised, including a monthly one for children in English (obviously aimed at Spanish children, rather than any resident English ones); an ‘introduction to philosophy’ group for children; reading groups for dissidents; for theatre-goers; for students of Valencia’s social history, as well as the usual more general ones; photography and cookery workshops; lectures (‘Football now and as it used to be’). I was beyond impressed. Here’s a gallery of this library community at work on one ordinary weekday afternoon – before the pandemic – I don’t know how it will have changed.
Meanwhile, what have I been reading this last month? Reviews for most of them will appear over the next few Six Degrees of Separation posts.
Fiction:
Gabriel Chevallier: Fear.⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Delphine de Vigan: Based on a True Story.⭐⭐⭐
Donna Leon: Beastly Things.⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Patricia Lockwood: No One is Talking About This.⭐⭐(abandoned)
Sakaya Murata: Convenience Store Woman.⭐⭐⭐⭐
Jane Smiley: The Strays of Paris.⭐⭐ (skim-read)
Sarah Winman: Still Life.⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Non Fiction
Allan Ahlberg: The Bucket⭐⭐⭐
Charlie Gilmour: Featherhood.⭐⭐⭐⭐
Ann Patty: Living with a Dead Language: My Romance with Latin.⭐⭐⭐
For Bookish Beck’s Love your Library.
Posted as part of One Word Sunday.
Here’s a blast from the past: from November 2012 in fact, when we were hunkering down for winter in France. It was round about now that The Orange Man arrived …
Winter has arrived. How do I know? Although the nights are cold, the afternoons are still for going walking or tidying up the garden wearing a tee-shirt, beneath a duck-egg blue sky. So until the other day, I thought we were clinging on to autumn.
But on Thursday, the Orange Man arrived. This is exciting enough news for it to be worth phoning a friend. Every year, once winter kicks in and the orange harvest is well under way in southern Spain, a huge container lorry arrives in Lavelanet. It parks up at a disused petrol station on the main road into town and becomes an impromptu shop.
The man with the lorry, the Orange Man, speaks only Spanish, and sells only oranges. Not singly or by the half-dozen, but in large 10 kilo boxes. 10 kilos, 10 euros. What a bargain. These oranges, though sometimes a little knobbly and in irregular sizes, are the juiciest and tastiest you’ll ever eat, and it’s no wonder that whenever you pass, you’ll see someone pulling up their car and opening the boot for a case or two. Our Spanish friend won’t have to stay long. In a few days the entire container-load will be sold, he’ll return to Spain …. only to return when he’s loaded up again.
When he departs for the last time at the end of the season, we’ll know for sure that spring has arrived.
For Fandango’s Flashback Friday: a chance to go down Memory Lane and give an older post an airing.
What a good idea Becky had when she began to start her blogging week with a favourite portrait! I’m going to follow suit, and choose to give fifteen seconds of fame to a special bird: a stork, nesting on a church in Tudela in Spain.
It is a grey Monday outside. And Jude has invited us to celebrate grey and black in this month’s Life in Colour challenge. Let’s go on one of our mini-breaks and see what we can find. We’ll start in London:
Oh, but maybe London’s too obvious as a starting place. Let’s start from Gateshead instead, and join a group gazing out of the window from the Baltic Centre.
We’re off to Spain now. We’ll stop off in Seville. You may need a comfort break by now, so we’ll stop off at the public toilets in Plaza de España, and enjoy the reflections we can see in its glass walls.
Shadows from street lights as evening falls, but we get away in time to see the Alhambra in Granada illuminated at night – it’s the featured photo.
We’ll pop across the next day to see my daughter in Premià de Mar. It’s silhouettes and sunny shadows there.
This is only a mini-break. We’ll go home via Whitby and just have a stroll to the end of the pier. There are always cormorants there. And seagulls on the rooftops.
Time for home now. Goodnight!
It was in Berlin that I first really discovered a love of Street Art. Maybe it’s because I got some background understanding by going out for the afternoon with Dave, of Alternative Berlin Tours. I learnt the difference between graffiti, street art, stickers and transfers, and something of the political anger and activism that can inform so much of it: particularly near the former Berlin Wall. This has now been re-invented as The East Side Gallery and I don’t show anything of that here because many of its images are so well known. Here are some examples we saw in Dave’s company, or exploring later on our own.
Having done Street Art Module One in Berlin, I was ready a year or so later to do Module Two in Valencia, It was here that I met an irrepressible type who peoples doorways and random bits of street furniture, painted by David de Limón.
And it was here too, as we once had in Seville, that we encountered street artists doing their day – or occasionally night – job.
Here are a few more:
And here’s one just for Past Squares …
And we’ll have a whistle-stop tour of Spain and view a few more:
Maybe this is my favourite image of all, a bit of fun created from damaged plasterwork in Seville:
Although – hang on – no. My real favourite has got to be in Manor House Gardens, Hither Green, because the artist appears to have designed this image with my granddaughter in mind.
With thanks to Patti for providing us with a chance to wander city streets this week in quest of images that amuse, provoke and stimulate us. It’s the perfect moment to join the Photographing Public Art Challenge too. As well as Monday Mural. All this and Past Squares and Monday Window too … This is taking multi-tasking to a new level.
The header image comes from the top floor of an apartment block in Málaga.
This month’s Life in Colour invites us to look at orange. Happy to help. I’ll grab your attention in the feature photo, with a rather orange sky.
When I got my new phone, my not-at-all top-of-the range, bargain-basement smartphone, I discovered that it had a feature called ‘spot colour’. I tried it out in the garden, and in the woods, making orange my spot colour of choice. Here are some results:
Now let’s abandon the gimmicks, and simply go for a walk along Ripon Canal on this early autumn day:
And let’s remember past moments in Valencia, and in Le Jardin Extraordinaire for Becky’s Past Squares:
Shall we end with a single perfect rose ….
… or with a bit of fun – the play food I made for William and Zoë’s kitchen?
Electric light outside – as streetlights, spotlights, making our streets and subways safer: an undeniable blessing. But spotlights, bright and colourful advertising? The featured photo is of a rainy night in Busan South Korea. Cheery colours certainly, but far more than we needed to find out way round. And look at this. These hotels are out in the country, in a small mountain resort, surrounded by forest. The lights went on as dusk fell, and remained on till morning …
All the same, it’s hard not to enjoy streetlights reflected in the water while mooching round a city. Here are a couple of shots near the river Guadalquivir in Seville.
It’s mood-enhancing to see the city become a playground at night. Here are the fountains of La Alameda, also in Seville. And the neighbourhood of la Viña in Cádiz, where post-Christmas groups relax over a meal or a few drinks in the still-decorated street.
But metro stations and subways need lighting too. Here’s Barcelona, and London.
But the other evening, taking a late walk round the village, best of all was the glow surrounding the houses as families wound down for the day. A cosy, comforting and gentle radiance.
From Pyrenees to Pennines 
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