Vicarious Fame

          Yesterday, I spoke to a voice recognition system so useless that it couldn’t even recognise the word “yes”. I was indignant. I don’t have a regional accent or any peculiarities of speech that I’m aware of. In fact, in my prime, several people told me that I spoke like James Mason, the actor. Some even said that I looked like him as well, to which I was never quite sure how to react. I mean, it felt like they might be saying, “Hard luck, you’re almost someone famous…”

          Occasionally, I have met people whose features remind me of well-known characters and, when I’ve said so, their reactions have been mixed: they might have been disturbed because they didn’t want to identify themselves with that particular celebrity; chuffed because it was someone they admired; or blank because the similarity had never occurred to them. On the other hand, occasionally, I fail to recognise the face of someone that I have interacted with several times before – as happened at a social event this week. As we sat down to a vegan meal in the company of mutual friends and acquaintances, I offered my apologies and excuses (different contexts etc.) and she accepted them graciously, but my fingers are still crossed for the budding relationship.

          The following morning, my Other Half and I had planned to go to the cinema for an early showing of a recently released blockbuster with a long title that I couldn’t remember and starring a famous actor, you know, the one who was in that film we saw – when was it? – about that bloke who thought he was…And so it went on. In the end, it didn’t matter because we didn’t go. The weather was so fine that we decided instead to put on our boots and go for a country walk. To further incentivise ourselves, we devised a mission – to locate the legendary but elusive Canteen at Maker Heights, a casual-dining establishment revered by local foodies. We’d walked past it several times on a low section of the coastal path, but it’s only visible if you climb up the hill. The Canteen is so named because it occupies a Nissen hut, one of many left-over military buildings sprawled around fortifications at the top of the hill. The complex was initially built in anticipation of an invasion by French and Spanish forces, with whom we had disputes at the time. They saw an opportunity to attack while most of the Royal Navy’s ships were stationed off North America, where they were engaged in the ill-fated attempt to suppress the colonial independence movement. However, the pesky foreigners never really got their act together and the fortifications were never tested. Today, they serve as leisure facilities based around camping and outdoor pursuits, the Canteen having upgraded from basic caff to trendy venue by appointing a creative chef who has introduced high-quality catering backed up by properly trained staff. They did not disappoint, serving up an epic bacon sandwich on home-made focaccia, the crucially different ingredient.

          Bread used to be the staff of life, but most of it now is far from wholesome, which is why I make a point of stocking up at one or other of the two authentic bakeries near home. I was at one of them the following morning and, while waiting my turn to be served, noticed a fellow customer, someone whom I’d seen a few times and remembered because of his distinctively bohemian appearance – though I’d like to think his talents are for more than dressing up. He was waiting for a coffee and, when it came my turn to speak up he said, “What a smooth voice you have.” We joked about my applying for a job as a radio presenter (“send them a voice-message”) before I left with my loaves, buoyed up on a tide of recognition as someone who might have been famous...

 

Fantasies of Stardom

          At this week’s University of the Third Age discussion group, we chewed over the topic of mortality, a wide-ranging subject that, at times, drifted into the realm of immortality, when some expressed their hope for a life hereafter. At risk of being labelled a cynic, I call this ‘wishful thinking’, even though it would suit me to believe otherwise. I mean, who wouldn’t want a second chance to get it right? One of the cruelties of life is that by the time you’re old enough to have learned some of its lessons, your time is up, you’re facing check-out and it’s too late to fulfil those youthful ambitions.

           This was just a few days after our return from Santander to Plymouth, when the Bay of Biscay had been as calm as a millpond (a simile that persists long after the demise of its namesake) which meant that I was able to enjoy the journey, stride the deck, eat, drink and take in some live entertainment, all without a scintilla of sickness. Allowing for the fact that live acts on board have the tricky remit of pleasing a disparate audience, I was keen to hear how the advertised musical duo would tackle the gig, so I filled my glass and took a front seat. Sure enough, their repertoire comprised a predictable playlist of familiar popular songs, but the skill with which the singer dispatched them was marvellous. To my (admittedly slightly sozzled) ear, her timing, timbre and calibration hit the mark in every number, whatever the genre – and there were several. Such skill comes not only from talent but also experience. Practice makes perfect, which is just one of the reasons I never made it as a musician.

          It's not widely known that I was in a folk-music group at the age of nineteen, singing and strumming a guitar, on stage, at our college folk club. (Photographic evidence exists.) But before long, my interest in traditional songs such as Whiskey in the Jar waned and was ousted by Bob Dylan’s repertoire. Then came the Beatles, the blues, psychedelia, rock and, eventually, jazz. My abilities as a performer did not keep up with this progression: lack of a driving ambition, along with a disinclination to practise and a tendency to be distracted by other interests, saw to it that the limits of my talent were never tested. Which brings me back to the wistful notion of reincarnation. Another chance to make it as a rock star would be nice.

          It's not going to happen but, this week, I did experience a return to those folk-singing days when a friend invited me to go along to a pub where she and a motley crew of amateur folk afficionados continue the tradition of making music, not on stage, but in situ around the tables. They were a dozen in number, taking turns to sing and play, sometimes harmonising ad-hoc, sometimes joining in choruses. I use the pronoun ‘they’ because I refrained from singing, partly due to a lack of familiarity with many of the songs, but mostly because of inhibition. The audience was a bit thin – just me and another bloke at the bar – but that may have had something to do with the England vs Italy football match running concurrently. In any case, they were not performing for an audience, they were playing for pleasure and to keep alive the tradition of live and sometimes spontaneous music as part of socialising with others.

          When I got home that evening, I felt inspired to pick up my guitar and try once more to get my stiff old fingers around a few chords, hoping to revive the remnants of my modest abilities. The result was not encouraging but it did get me thinking about something that has been on my mind for a while – joining a choir. It could be a second chance of sorts, though I suppose that would involve having to practise.

 

My Time as a Gas Fitter

          I suppose if you learn anything from foreign travel, it’s that knowing the language is beneficial. I don’t know Spanish, but I thought I could cope with ordering coffee and a croissant – variations of the word “coffee” are easy to mash up in continental Europe and croissant needs no translation – but this morning mine came sliced like a loaf of bread and served with butter and jam, which left me dumbfounded. I mean, how is it even possible to slice flaky pastry? And why would you do so? Actually, I haven’t really needed Spanish, on the whole, because most of our time here has been spent in the company of a community of finca owners hailing from anywhere but Spain. They all speak English when together.

          Still, despite ignorance of the language, there is much general knowledge you can pick up in the course of foreign travel. For example, in the town of Reus, there is a museum devoted to the work of its most famous son, Anton Gaudi, son of a boiler maker but better known as the architect of Barcelona’s La Sagrada Familia – (which was not, by the way, his only claim to fame). If you want to know more, you could try Google, but I would recommend visiting the museum, especially as it close by the museum of vermouth, the world-famous aperitif that was invented in no other place than Reus. And in the city of Tarragona, we took a guided tour by way of a talking app activated by GPS and narrated in English by an Australian who was big on the Roman history but made the fundamental error of describing the Mediterranean sea as an “ocean”. Still, I forgave him. Australia is surrounded by oceans and, besides, everyone loves the Aussies, right?

          Something that required no language at all was a piece of performance art we encountered at the Jaime Botín arts centre in Santander. In a vast gallery lit only at one end by a glass wall overlooking the sea, two young women lay as if asleep on the floor. They awoke slowly, moving like creatures weighted down by fathoms of water and began to emit whale-like musical tones, harmonising intermittently. When they were ‘awake’, they were joined by a mother carrying her baby, with whom all three interacted as it crawled about and attempted to walk. All the while, the performers ‘sang’ and made rhythmic clicking sounds – so unlike the usual high-pitched cooing that babies are usually subjected to – and the baby, who had no language, appeared to join in as if he had been selected by audition for the part. I thought they were exploring human development as a natural and universal process before language skills and cultural norms become part of our learning and serve to differentiate us from others.

          Preconceptions about the serving of croissants are not the only fixed ideas challenged in the course of this trip. Another is that Spain is one country, with one language and one cultural tradition. I now know better than to say as much in the hearing of a Basque or Catalan. But we’re heading back now to the Hermit Kingdom on a ferry with a fair quota of second-home-owning Brits bemoaning the fact that Brexit has meant their overseas sojourns are limited to ninety days per year. If there is a benefit to Brexit, the ferry operators are probably the ones counting it.

          As for the gas-fitting, one of the tasks requested of me by our host at the finca was to fix her gas hob, which had only two of its four burners working when we arrived. Fortunately, she has another hob in the guest quarters because, as of the day we left, the hob I attempted to fix lay partly re-assembled in the expectation of parts arriving. Mañana, as I believe they say in Spain.

 

Journey to a Different Life

          On September 24^th, we set off for Spain to spend some time with a friend who made a new life for herself some five years ago, when she moved to an off-grid finca near Tarragona where she now devotes herself to the organic welfare of her land and menagerie. When we were last there, we helped out with various things, including the building of a hut for the donkeys she was planning to acquire. It’s another world.

          So, selecting a suitable wardrobe for the trip was tricky, given that we’d be spending two nights on ferries, four in cities and ten on the farm – all during a changeable season which had seen the finca recently flooded by heavy rain soon after having been threatened by a forest fire that passed within a few hundred metres. You can overthink packing but, since we were not flying, we were able to stuff garments for every eventuality into a couple of capacious roller-cases that we could then drag along the few streets to the ferry terminal. The vessel itself is fitted out with all the amenities of a mini cruise-liner but if, like me, you’re prone to queasiness at sea, the pleasures of luxury travel are of no consequence. What matters is not throwing up one’s lunch. I fared better than expected but did have to retire to my bunk halfway through the televised Wales vs. Australia rugby world cup match.

          We berthed next day at Santander, caught a bus to Bilbao and bedded down for a couple of nights in the old town, where the transformation from inner-city working district to tourist attraction appears to have benefitted all concerned – the place hums with ‘local character’. Every second building is a bar serving wine and pintxos and there isn’t a McDonald’s to be seen. We had our fill before and after the obligatory pilgrimage to the Guggenheim and would have left town happy, even if the gallery had been closed that day. It wasn’t, of course. The Guggenheim, which has only a small permanent collection, was showing an extensive, crowd-pleasing array of Yayoi Kusama’s works. It was busy – too busy to accommodate the pair of fashionably attired Japanese girls who, wearing wide-brimmed hats, kept on posing for photographs in front of their favourite works. More than a few people walked deliberately in front of them to protest the inconvenience, but our fashionistas were immune to niceties of etiquette.

          People were thinner on the ground in the gallery that contained Richard Serra’s massive sculptural installation – a series of curved structures made of 50mm-thick steel slabs – the scale of which had me puzzling over how and where it had been manufactured. His five-metre-tall steel panels enclose a series of mazes, though which people are invited to wander. They are fascinating to behold but the moment I set foot inside one of them, I was overcome by claustrophobia and a feeling of panic. The effect lasted for as long as it took to find the nearest bar and settle down with plenty of Basque refreshments. There are other galleries and museums in Bilbao for which, despite my good intentions, I had by then lost enthusiasm. Next time, perhaps.

          We travelled by train to Tarragona and our friend met us at the station for the final drive to her finca. We sped along in her electric car, anticipating a glass or two before bedtime, until she introduced an unexpected note of anxiety. “Uh-oh, the donkeys have gone walkabout”. She was consulting a phone app that connects to tracking devices fitted to their halters.

          The rounding-up process was complicated, so it was around 01.30 by the time we got to bed. I slept well but my dreams were of reinforcing the compound fence. Welcome back to finca life, a world away from the simple convenience of a lock-up-and-go city apartment.