BARCELONA MONDAY

This week has been one of rich experiences. For as part of my voluntary UNESCO work I had the opportunity the visit Barcelona to talk to colleagues there and as part of that visit I also had the opportunity of a private tour of Gaudi's Sagrada Familia Cathedral.



Gaudi’s great Catalan edifice, excites strong emotions. Like the translucent Barcelona light it cannot be ignored: can never become merely another townscape. It demands urgent attention, regardless whether you prefer your Cathedrals much as the medieval builders of the high perpendicular left them: light transfixed in an echoing perfection, with spires that claw at the sky.



Not for nothing, then, that Gaudi’s defining creation, still unfinished after one hundred and twenty seven years, should have been created a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Our busy and ephemeral age will leave few monuments behind when finally it crumbles into dust. Apart from massive concrete accretions there will be little enough to remind future generations that our epoch can boast those who have striven to weave beauty and complexity from stone and light and who, too, have reached toward the heavens.



The Sagrada Familia - the name means Holy Family in Catalan - has already survived great turbulence. War, fire, political apathy, poverty are only some of the ills which its creators have fought since work on the cathedral commenced in 1882. Now at last, with its World Heritage status and annual visits surpassing the 3 million mark, the great work is finally in sight of completion.



Gaudi himself died in 1926 with little more than the great carved facade with its four iconic bell towers completed. That was a shock to a project struggling for funds, though not as great as the disaster of July 1936. Two days after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War almost every church in Barcelona fell victim to anti-clerical rioters. The Sagrada Familia did not escape. The works were burned. Gaudi’s studio with all his drawings and the complex geometrical models from which his works took shape went up in flames. Building work halted for a generation.



We ascended nearly seventy metres above the Barcelona streets and moved like so many Quasimodos among the skeletons of the high Cathedral architecture where the immense sculptured finials of fruit and flowers are reminiscent of some far off Aztec vision. Still far above us the mighty decorated bell towers soared against the blue Mediterranean sky. It as a long way up and a long way down.



The work proceeds from models recreated from pieces of the originals, burnt and smashed by fire. Gaudi’s obsession with geometry makes it possible to recreate a whole section from the smallest part. The new models, still on Gaudi’s one to ten scale are fitted around the fragments of the original and so manage to look like plants regenerated from from a small piece of rhizome. The work has been a triumph of detection, a fitting tribute to the conquering nature of faith and human dedication.



Yet the Cathedral faces one last challenge. What has survived war and destruction to become a World Heritage site risks now being, quite literally, undermined. For a long time there have been plans to build a transportation tunnel underneath Barcelona that will pass within two metres of the Cathedral’s Foundations.



The ground on which the Cathedral stands is not good. It is feared that if the tunnel excavations do not give rise to subsidence, then years of vibration will one day cause the great bell towers of Sagrada Famila to collapse.



Many species of engineer have looked at the threat and have given their opinion. Some are re-assuring. Others take a more sombre view. But to re-route the tunnel would be costly for work has already started. The tunnel is at the outskirts of Barcelona itself. Only high politics can now halt or deflect its relentless advance.

FLOURS AND FLOWERS

I am pushing Aged Mother around Waitrose again. She, in her wheelchair, attentively scans the aisles as we go up and down looking at the whiskies and the toilet rolls, the yoghurts and the shampoos.

I have written about Aged Mother before. She is 87 and is sadly now feeling the effects of age in her knee and memory departments. “I know I have seen something that I want,” she says, as we go patiently back and forth, her eyes alighting eagerly on some scrap of coloured packaging only to dismiss it with a “No, it wasn’t that! What was it?”

Being an even-tempered and long-suffering sort of person I resist the urge to mutter, “I don’t know you haven’t told me,” but can’t help thinking it all the same. I mean it is not even as if this was my mother, though everyone of course thinks she is. She is actually Helen’s mother, but I have been brought along as, so often on these shopping expeditions that J and Helen organise, I am thought ‘good’ with Aged Mothers. (I use the plural because Helen has two: her own and her husband’s with a combined age of 185) Helen and J each have each a trolley. I am the safe pair of hands on the wheel chair.

Actually I don’t mind at all. Aged Mother, in her own way, is quite fun, and the whole quasi-Buddhist exercise of subjugating the self leaves one quite serene. I may very well be in the same helpless state myself in only a handful of years. If so I want to know I have credits in the Karma bank.

In small doses the very old and the very young are no different. All that is required is the ability to remain unembarrassed and an aptitude for one-sided conversations on Joyce Grenfell lines for which shopping provides splendid opportunities.

“Let’s look at the orange juice, shall we? Mmm, what sort shall we buy? Do you like orange juice? It can be rather acid, don’t you think, though mixed with olive oil it is supposed to be good for the bones, or rather the joints. Does that make a difference? I mean if it were good for the bones could one expect that it would be good for the joints as well?”

I pause for the response: “I don’t really know, dear - but orange juice, yes! Did I ever tell you my grandfather was the Mayor of Harrogate......” This is the signal for rapid intervention. The Harrogate story lasts ten minutes and is recited faithfully on each and every occasion we meet and sometimes more than once). I plunge in heavily to effect a diversion.

“Ah yes, Harrogate,” I say. “Beautiful town. But I wonder whether they drank orange juice there. At the mayoral meetings, I mean. You know, to wash down the toffee? Did your grandfather eat toffee, and if so how were his teeth?....” and so we go on.

If all else fails I recite Shakespeare to her: though to mutter ‘For God’s sake let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of king’s........,’ can serve to raise the eyebrows amongst the unwary.

Written down like this it all sounds horribly patronising, but it does work. She doesn’t know what we are talking about, but then neither do I really. But we both are, on the face of it, having an intelligent afternoon’s conversation. I ask her to hold a random carton of orange juice while we beetle off in search of J’s or Helen’s trolley to put it in.

We are having a similar conversation about bread flour which I tell her I need. “There’s flour here,” she says observantly from her position two feet away from where I park the wheelchair to browse. Indeed, she is right! Bags and bags of it. What a surprise! But this is Waitrose after all. I am looking for a special flour, I tell her confidentially, one that has grains in it. I ask her opinion of granary flours. She considers the matter gravely and confesses she can’t tell, or doesn’t know, or has forgotten. But she says this most positively and we are both satisfied that this is a valid exchange.

We are joined at this point by a young woman holding a bunch of flowers in search of some Canadian extra strong, reinforced gluten, flour in a black bag with a red maple leaf, which happens at that point to be directly behind Aged Mother’s wheelchair.

“Look at these lovely flowers,” she says to Aged Mother, her attention temporarily diverted from flours to flowers. She thrusts them under Aged Mother’s nose. “I couldn’t resist them.”

“Oh those are nice!” says Aged Mother beaming. I move the wheelchair to one side and tell her we are looking for a flour with grains in. She replies not to me but to Aged Mother (which makes me want to complain that it’s the people in wheelchairs that are supposed to be invisible not their hardworking pushers) telling her that the aforementioned Canadian flour is excellent because the strong gluten prevents pumpkin seeds with their sharp edges from cutting through the dough and ending up at the bottom of the loaf.

We are rapidly bordering surrealist territory. Aged Mother enters the spirit of things by nodding sagely and opining helpfully, “Of course it does.”

“I suppose you’ve done a lot of cooking?” ventures the young woman wistfully, on the basis of those four words which have now elevated Aged Mother to the status of a sage to be deferred to on all matters of baking.

I will say this for Aged Mother, she knows how to milk a situation. She stretches out an arm and says in a stage whisper. “I used to bake for Lord and Lady Fermoy, you know, Princess Diana’s grandparents.” And indeed she did when she was a girl in her teens and before she ran away at the outbreak of war to become an aircraft fitter, leaving the Fermoy kitchens bereft of her culinary talents.

But the Fermoy story and how she first introduced the name of Diana to the household is another well-scratched record. Luckily, at this point, fate intervened in the shape of the young woman’s husband. Grabbing a bag of flour, we executed a hand-brake turn and sped off to the safer pastures of jellies and jams.

THE CHAIN SAW IS REAL

The car I picked up at Edinburgh Airport was a hideous shade of slime green. Why anyone would want to drive a car that colour, I don’t know. Still, it was a sporty little number - two doors and a petrol engine. Touch the accelerator and the car shot forward. And it was as nimble as a go-cart. The Europcar people said it was a SEAT Ibiza - so there!

Dave (otherwise Happy Snaper) had given me directions. But first I had to get out of the carpark, which wasn’t easy. True, there were no shortage of signs saying ‘exit,’ but these led into fences, or else nowhere. It was Kafkaesque. I was about to admit defeat when I spotted, under the red banners of the rival Avis concern, a tiny road to freedom. We were off, the car and I, to visit the Cowarts Academy far away among the snow covered hills.

First the M9 and then the A84: names, half-remembered from the mists of time came rolling back. Stirling, of course, and then Callander, Strathyre, Lochearnhead, all the while following the signs for Crianlarich - the Capel Curig of Scotland as I remember it - whose presence on the map is almost more important than its presence on the ground.

Half way up Glen Ogle, just as the evening darkness had closed in, the traffic came to a halt amidst a welter of flashing blue and amber lights. A car had gone over the parapet and plunged down into the valley below. A recovery operation was under way. Foot by foot the winches were dragging it up.

This did not relieve my state of apprehension as I approached Cowarts. One’s first day at school is always pretty nerve-wracking. And I am a lot older now, less malleable. What would I find over the brow of the hill and down the other side - look out for a wooden sign and a track, Dave had said.

Look out? It was dark and the sign was brown. I hurtled past and then, sensing something out of the corner of my eye, reversed and there it was ‘Wester Lix’ carved into a pine plank above a track that led into the black fastness.

Bump, bump, bump went car and I over the potholes. ‘Go as far as you can,’ Dave had said. ‘And then stop and toot.’ Bump, bump - a house here, a house there, all dark, a cluster of houses, a cluster of cars, no obvious end to the track - but no obvious continuation either. My heart raced as I tooted. Was all this wise?

Nothing. No lights - had I missed a turning? I got out of the car and approached the nearest house. There was a bell. A bell-type bell. Not something you pushed or pulled, but something into which you put your hand and waggled the toggle and out suddenly came a mighty and far too loud a clang and immediately there were lights and a pounding of feet, the door thrown open, and there was Headmistress herself, summoning her new pupil across the threshold.

Why had I been ridiculously apprehensive? The encounter with Gill and Dave was more like a home-coming. There are many houses into which I go where I say to myself ‘how odd’ and where you feel that you could never settle. But here was a house in which I felt instantly at home. A great whoosh of warmth and comfort, dogs demanding attention, a big glass of wine (ditto), a great bowl of nuts, laughter, charm and a conversation as almost if we had been cousins of many years standing. How do you classify a blend of intelligence and creativity, of caring and understanding, of laughter amidst sadness, of tidy and polished chaos and a welcome as big as the hills? I felt instantly at home.

A great meat stew bubbled on the hob and we ate and drank and swopped stories until it was time for bed. Sadly this was the most fleeting of visits as the next morning I had to return the slime green car to the airport and get myself into the centre of Edinburgh for a meeting with our Scottish UNESCO counterparts. But I got to stay in one of Westerwitch’s lovely cottages and in a bed big enough to sleep a whole family. And in the morning I snapped these pictures out of the window.





I wanted to take a picture of the red squirrels, but the Nutkin family were disobliging. Only one squirrel (was it Nutkin himself?) came racing across the lawn. I imagined I could hear him singing:

“The man in the wilderness said to me,
‘How many strawberries grow in the sea?’
I answered him as I thought good -
‘As many red herrings as grow in the wood.’”

Downstairs, Westwitch admits to having three studies. (I suppose it depends how bad you have been as to which one you are summoned). But in the one by the door lives Cyd Fishus, the shy, one-eyed Piranha with scales that glow orange and golden below his dark silver back. He is a most handsome fish, if a touch scary. Not something, however cuddly he might look, you would really want to put in your bath.

We were going to have walked out to see the sheep, Bam-Bam and Pebbles but the rain was falling by now and making their acquaintance had therefore to be foregone.

The dogs are wonderfully lovely. I especially liked Sassie, the Collie, so calm and patient, just enjoying having her ears fondled, chin tickled or head stroked. But then Arnie, the Jack Russell was lovely too.

But then it was time to go. Great purple hugs abounded, despite the fine rain, I turned to car around, waved out of the window and bounced away down the potholes and towards the road that would take me to the airport.