A Rainha do Fado

Fadista (fado singer)

If it wasn't for the fact I've now given up playing, I think I'd be craving one of the Portuguese guitars used to accompany fado singing.  If you watched the Ana Moura video linked in the previous post, you'll have seen one in action.

It's a lovely instrument, a sort of cross between a mandolin and a guitar, with six pairs of strings, with the bottom three in octave-separated pairs like a twelve-string guitar.  Its most distinctive feature is the use of a splayed fan of so-called "Preston tuners", rather than the geared machine-heads normally seen on modern guitars and mandolins.

Queen of Fado

A few people have asked about the "how" of these composite pictures (I'm ignoring the "why" constituency).  In principle, nothing could be simpler.  Good taste, skill, imagination and judgement aside, it's just a big stack of "layers" in Photoshop (in my case, Photoshop Elements 10, because I'm a cheapskate).  Figure out how to use layers, and Bob's your uncle.

The "Fadista" image above contains 16 layers, comprising 10 images plus 6 layers which are "shapes", duplicate layers, or adjustments.  I particularly like the bottom right corner:

The guy stepping through a portal into another dimension (or possibly a fado club) was snapped exiting from the dark interior of a Lisbon cathedral through a "wicket" into the overpowering sunlight outside.  I have a personal aversion to featureless white "blown" highlights, so to me the shot is unusable as a straight photograph.  Regrettable, as the way his lanky body fills the narrow opening is great.  However, by contriving a mousehole archway in the stone blocks of the tiled wall image I thought I'd found a suitable use for the picture.  I still hated the blown-out highlights, though, so I selected the area inside the wicket opening and converted it into negative values.  Yes!  I could probably refine this a bit (the bottom of his leg is still "normal", for example) but I quite like the roughness of the effect.

Hmm, I'm now also noticing the sharpness of the division between the "tiled wall" layer and the "decoratively-shadowed steps" layer...  More work needed there.  As they say: ars longa, vita brevis...

Saudade

Portugal's main contribution to "world music" is the mournful, black-clad genre known as fado.  At its best, fado is one of those profound musical expressions that seem to plumb the depths of human emotion; at its worst, it is like being force-fed a diet of Mariah Carey.  You really have to be in the right mood.

The appropriate mood is saudade, one of those defiantly untranslatable words that define a culture, but loosely defined as

A deep emotional state of nostalgic or profound melancholic longing for an absent something or someone that one loves. Moreover, it often carries a repressed knowledge that the object of longing might never return.  A stronger form of saudade might be felt towards people and things whose whereabouts are unknown, such as a lost lover, or a family member who has gone missing, moved away, separated, or died. (Wikipedia)

The definitive possessor of saudade and singer of fado is generally said to be the wife of a Portuguese sailor, long absent at sea, and possibly sleeping with the fishes (the husband, that is, not the wife).

One of our hosts' friends in Lisbon was a photographer and academic, who was a fado aficionado.  He recommended to us a late-night joint where the Real Thing would be performed, as opposed to the touristic simulacrum.  But, after a few days of incessant and inescapable fado muzak wherever we went, the profound melancholic longing I was feeling was, simply, not to have to hear any more soulful wailing, however authentic, and we didn't go; something I now regret.  Maybe next time.

Crows, obviously, love fado.

As it happens, I did have a moment of saudade myself in Lisbon.  We were walking through the steep, cobbled streets of the Alfama district, when I heard a familiar tune drifting from a doorway.  I stopped to listen, and let the others wander on; they're very used to my stop-start progress.  It was a fado-ized version of "Case of You" by Joni Mitchell.*  Now, that song will floor me at the best of times, but leaning there in the deep shadow of a doorway on a street of a foreign capital, watching the world drift by in the sunshine, it transfixed me.  As I listened, I became acutely aware of the forty-plus years that had passed since I first ventured into Europe and since I first heard the album Blue (the two are closely linked in my mind) and recalled all the sadnesses and losses along the way; I also thought of Joni Mitchell's recent brush with death, and the Ten Thousand Things you think of in such wistful moments. Above all, I longed to be twenty again.

Then the song finished and faded out, the street noise faded back up, and I felt somehow renewed, and -- to my surprise -- intensely happy.  Mainly, I realised, I was very happy not to be twenty again.  Very happy indeed.  Much as I'd enjoyed a brief excursion into a deep blue "emotional state of nostalgic or profound melancholic longing for an absent something or someone", it was good to be back.  Now, where'd everybody go?

* Almost certainly this version by Ana Moura.

Lisbon Crows

Sitting here indoors, avoiding torrential rain in Southampton, what better way to recall our recent ten days avoiding the blazing Portuguese sun than a bit of cut and paste?

Lundy

When I wrote the previous post, I was in a particularly hard-nosed, rationalist mood.  Ghosts?  Hah!  Who ya gonna call?  Nobody!  Have these people never watched Scooby-Doo, surely the most demystifyingly freethinking children's programme ever?  Lesson: it's always just some scam-artist in a rubber mask and a sheet.  On reflection, if you are being troubled by ghosts -- particularly if you are the owner of an allegedly worked-out old mine -- you should probably call the police.

This mood may have been in reaction to a strangely synchronistic thing that had happened a few days before.  What follows is true; what conclusions you draw from it are entirely up to you.

Having recently established a pied-à-terre in Bristol, I've been casting around for possible excursions, particularly into parts of the West Country we didn't visit back in the late 1970s, when we previously lived in Bristol, but were too cash, time, and car-poor to get out and about much.  Google Maps is indispensible in this regard.  I love just floating around over the landscape, like a glider pilot equipped with a pair of ridiculously powerful zoom binoculars.  While I was checking out the coast, for some reason Lundy Island caught my eye, sitting there at the mouth of the Bristol Channel so incongruously that, at first, I thought it was something stuck on my screen.

Naturally, having failed to scratch it off, I zoomed in for a closer look.  It looked so invitingly like a child's fantasy of a Treasure Island that I had to check it out further.  It does sound wonderfully romantic, if a bit bleak as a place to live.  It actually does have a history of pirates and buried treasure, not to mention dingbat aristocrats, deranged criminal dynasties, a castle, sandy coves, cliffs, and all those little Famous Five touches that make a wind-blasted rock into a proper island.  The place even has a connection with the Knights Templar, for Dan Brown fans.

Then, in Wikipedia, I read:

In 1957 a message in a bottle from one of the seamen of the HMS Caledonia was washed ashore between Babbacombe and Peppercombe in Devon. The letter, dated 15 August 1843 read: "Dear Brother, Please e God i be with y against Michaelmas. Prepare y search Lundy for y Jenny ivories. Adiue William, Odessa". The bottle and letter are on display at the Portledge Hotel at Fairy Cross, in Devon, England. The Jenny was a three-masted schooner reputed to be carrying ivory and gold dust that was wrecked on Lundy (at a place thereafter called Jenny's Cove) on 20 February 1797. The ivory was apparently recovered some years later but the leather bags supposed to contain gold dust were never found.

I started checking out the ferry times.

But my curiosity was mainly piqued by messages in bottles.  Some re-ocurring ideas in popular culture -- so-called tropes -- are so well-established that one is automatically skeptical of their veracity, or at least their alleged frequency. Pirates with one leg, one eye, and a parrot must surely have been thin on the ground, even in Bristol, the initial setting of Treasure Island *.  So how many actual messages washing up in bottles would it take to establish the idea in the popular imagination?  Perhaps just one or two?  Or maybe they were always turning up on the beach, like junk mail?  Was any castaway or shipwrecked sailor ever saved, in the days before GPS, by a note entrusted to the circulation of the world's ocean currents?  It seemed unlikely.

As ever, Wikipedia was a good place to start.  Who knew that the 16th century English navy used this ultra-unreliable medium to communicate enemy positions?  Or that Elizabeth I established the official position of "Uncorker of Ocean Bottles"?  Apparently, anyone else opening the bottles faced the death penalty [get this nonsense properly fact-checked ASAP.  Ed.].  I wondered what the oldest genuine message found might be, and whether it might be on display somewhere (ideally on the Web).  I was initially puzzled by what the Guinness Book of Records claimed as the "oldest" ocean-going message, given the alleged antiquity of the practice, but it seems what they mean by "oldest" is "longest time between despatch and discovery".  Disappointingly, the current record holder was a mere 98 years, one of many bottles dropped into the sea near Scotland in 1914 by a researcher from Glasgow tracking ocean currents, and recovered by the fishing-boat Copious (no, really) in 2012.

Then, the very next morning, the BBC news ran the story of the discovery of a similar bottle, one of many cast adrift in the North Sea by another ocean-currents researcher, this time from Plymouth, between 1904 and 1906, which had turned up on an island in the north of Germany.  At around 109+ years, it was quite likely the "oldest" message-in-bottle to turn up yet.  I was suitably spooked.  As coincidences go, it's not exactly spine-chilling, but it certainly woke me up when I heard it on the Today programme; I thought I was probably still dreaming.  It wouldn't be the first time I had drifted off again in the middle of one of Jim Naughtie's interminable questions.

I suppose the thing about such coincidences is that, like dreams, they feel incredibly significant to the "recipient", and are utterly meaningless to everyone else.  Presumably, the world being richly textured with events and massively populated by people, some such synchronistic, subjective spookiness is happening to someone, somewhere, all the time.  It must be a variant of good old pareidolia, that human ability to spot patterns that has saved us enough times from being eaten by leopards to have become hard-wired into our brains.  Though in some of us, clearly, more so than in others.

* Q:  Why are pirates called pirates?
   A:  Because they arrhhh...

The Headless Man

I laughed out loud this morning when I read this in a book review in this weekend's Guardian:

At times, Jacobs’s speculations owe less to Professor Blunt than to Professor Robert Langdon: “Simultaneously I scribbled down random observations of possible bearing on the case: my sharing of a birthday with Foucault, Foucault’s death at the same age that Velázquez had begun the painting, the realisation that the word ‘meaning’ was nearly an anagram of Meninas.” Another near anagram is “insane”.

The book, Everything is Happening, by Michael Jacobs, is a highly personal investigation into that much-investigated painting, "Las Meninas", by Velázquez.  "Professor Blunt" is Anthony Blunt, art historian, Soviet spy, and the author's mentor; "Professor Robert Langdon" is, of course, the protagonist of Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code.

As well as being amused, however, I was also intrigued to read that the book had been completed after the author's death by journalist Ed Vulliamy.  I happen to know Ed, in the sense that one "knows" someone briefly encountered at university forty years ago, in the heat of radical student politics.  I don't suppose he'd remember me, now, any more than I'd recognise him in the street, looking at his byline photograph.  How the years do change us.  I wonder if he still wears a QPR scarf?

But then I found that Ed himself had written in July in the Observer about his friendship with Michael Jacobs, so I read what he had written there.  It was both moving, and faintly annoying.  Moving, because of the tragic, painful circumstances of the book's genesis, and the doomed flourishing of a late friendship.  Annoying, because Ed is one of those well-connected, ambitious, and successful types you encounter at university, who seem destined to lead a life painted in more intense and vivid colours.  It is always annoying to be reminded of the comparatively dull grisaille and uneventful introversion of one's own life.  "There is a tide in the affairs of men", and all that.  In compensation, it seems his mother is Shirley Hughes, which is highly amusing, if you've ever had to endure her "Alfie" books with your kids at bedtime.  That "Ed is Alfie" gave me an even bigger laugh.

Vulliamy's article in turn linked to a further piece in the Observer by Jacobs himself describing his project, and its origin in a teasing communication from an old school friend, written on the back of a jigsaw puzzle of "Las Meninas".  What he describes is fascinating, and "Las Meninas" is a compellingly strange painting to be sure, but I have become resistant, practically immune, to suggestions of hidden meanings in works of art.  Sure, writers and artists may have embedded cryptograms and clues and meta-gestures ("art about art") in the works they create.  But they may equally well have not.  Even when they appear to be there.

For example, one of the best demonstrations of the futility of searching for cryptic messages in Shakepeare's plays is the astonishing fact that those famous words, "To be or not to be: that is the question, whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" are -- allegedly, I haven't actually checked -- an anagram of "in one of the Bard's best-thought-of tragedies, our insistent hero Hamlet queries on two fronts about how life turns rotten ..."  Cripes, how did Shakespeare do that?  Well, the fact is that he didn't, did he?

"Art about art" aside -- artists are permitted a certain reflexive fascination with their own mystery -- in the end I think we have to conclude that the Great Secret is, simply, that there is no great secret.  Behind all the coded ciphers, mathematical puzzles, trails of clues, smoke and mirrors and distracting, abracadabratizing razzamatazz laid down before our very eyes by magicians of every kind, from high priests to David Blaine, there is ... nothing -- nothing beyond their manipulative desire to mystify or merely entertain, in response to our linked propensities for mystification and entertainment.  Jacobs seems to divine his own imminent mortality in "Las Meninas" and, by god, he was right.  Well, your turn to look in the mirror:  what do you see in there?

By way of an oblique illustration:  Recently, we were down by the Itchen Navigation, where a weirpool at an old lock forms a popular (if slightly risky) bathing pool.  I took this shot quite casually as we passed by.  People splashing about in the water on a hot August day.  Something about the scene tweaked my attention.  Click.  Not really my thing, but why not?

Only later did I come to notice how everything in the bathers' body-language is pointing to some kind of disturbance.  It's really quite theatrical.  And only then did I notice ... whoah ... the apparently headless man wading purposefully towards some mysterious portal.

I don't think a Jeff Wall or a Gregory Crewdson could have arranged things better.  I suppose, if it were a setup, I might have moved the foreground couple a bit nearer the camera?  "Just two paces, darlings...  Same positions... Hold it!"   And I suppose I could actually remove the guy's head, too.  But in the end it's just one of those uncanny games played by pure chance.  I make no claims other than that I happened to be there to take the picture.  It signifies much, and means nothing; but it certainly does gratify that desire to be mystified and entertained.  I thank you; please put some money in my hat.

But, wait ...  Never mind the headless man.  What's that in the sky?

Access Denied

One of the Ultimate Things happened to me this last week.  An external backup drive failed.  I'm still assessing the damage, but I think it's edging towards "inconvenient" rather than "disastrous".

It was my own silly, complacent fault.  In recent years I have tried to run a quadruple backup routine: internal hard drive, two external drives, plus intermittent DVD copies.  This broke down somewhat when (a) one of the two external drives became full (those 16 megapixel files fill up a drive quicker than you think), and (b) I needed urgently to replace my PC.  Somehow, somewhere in the confusion of retirement, some hospital treatment stretched intermittently over a couple of months, and swapping system components around, I failed to ensure that all files were being properly copied between the old PC, the new PC, the remaining active external drive, and onto DVDs, and had got into the very bad habit of using the single external drive as the main active drive for converting raw files and working them up in Photoshop during the period when the old internal hard drive was too full for comfort.

Inevitably, I suppose, it was that external drive that failed.  A local data recovery firm has managed to retrieve a mere 30% of its contents (one terabyte in all).  I had probably made things worse by running the "chkdsk" utility on it.  So it goes.  Luckily, many if not most of the raw files are backed up elsewhere, so it's just the final versions of work done in the last year and before the new PC came into operation that have vanished.  "Just"...

My biggest stroke of counter-balancing luck was finding an almost complete set of the photographs made during my Innsbruck residency last summer still residing on the laptop I had taken with me.  Phew.  Inexplicably, I seemed to have no other backup copy of those files.  I cannot understand how I seem to have failed to make any other copies of that work; it's a mystery.  Without that bit of luck, the entire lot would have been lost, a sobering thought.  As it is, to reprint or revisit any older work (for example, I had been toying with the idea of re-designing the Pentagonal Pool book) I will have to identify and find each individual original file in the set and reconvert it, a very tedious task indeed.

So, be warned.  In the wisest words concerning the failure of hard drives: it's not a question of "if", but "when"...  And make sure everything valuable is in at least two places.

Or not.  The whole thing gave me pause for thought.  Here am I, sitting like a dragon on my precious image-hoard, about which no-one else really cares very much.  Sure, from time to time I get asked to show some work, and occasionally sell the odd book or print, but I don't think I'm on course for a late-life burst of global celebrity.*  What's more, thinking ahead, I'd hate for my kids to inherit the task of deciding what to do with several terabytes of undifferentiated image files...  Are they e-junk or might they yet become a gold mine?  It's the curse of Vivian Maier!

I could easily reduce that hoard to the selected and sequenced images in my various books and shown in various exhibitions, together with a generous "family album" plus a hundred or more uncollected favourites for luck, and still have room on a 32 gigabyte USB stick.  That would certainly be a whole lot easier to back up.  The books exist in multiple hard copies, and will outlive both me and Blurb; I also have decent exhibition prints of most of the good stuff.  If I did lose all the other electronic files, it could be a blessing in disguise.

I should remind myself of my own words, read out (in a German rendering) at my Innsbruck opening last year:

It is important to emphasise that I regard photography primarily as a process, not as an outcome.  I photograph every day – in my lunch-hour, on the way from the car-park to my office – in the same way that a musician practices scales.  I recommend this: try to find photographs where you are, and never wait to be where you wish you were.  As they say, "Wherever you go, there you are".

The 80 or so images you see on the walls here are a by-product of this primary activity of creative seeing, not its purpose.  A relatively small by-product, too.  I show photographs constantly as a "work in progress" on the Web via my blog.  There have been over 2000 images posted there since 2008.  Two thousand: that's an average of five a week.  Again, I recommend this sustained level of productivity: I believe firmly in Malcolm Gladwell's "10,000 hours".  Or, as Henri Cartier-Bresson put it long before Gladwell, "your first 10,000 photographs are your worst"...

Ten thousand photographs?  That's about 250 gigabytes...

* Do feel free to correct me, if you have good reason to believe I'm wrong...

Glorious Mud

Beneath the Portway at Sea Mills

Our new Idiotic Towers regional office, based in Bristol, is perched on a cliff above the Avon Gorge, affording magnificent views (as the estate agents say) of the woodland on the opposite side of the Gorge and, depending on the time of day, either a glittering expanse of navigable water or an equally glittering expanse of reddish mud.  This is because the lower reaches of the Avon are subject to the push and pull of the tides in the Bristol Channel, which have a huge range, apparently second only to the Bay of Fundy in Canada.

You can get right down next to the river from our windy heights by clambering down through a wooded nature reserve, running across the busy Portway trunk road, negotiating some overgrown and crumbling steps, and then walking along a riverside towpath to Sea Mills and beyond, presumably all the way to Avonmouth Docks.  On Sunday, we went as far as Sea Mills.  The tide, needless to say, was out.

Looking towards Avonmouth from Sea Mills

Cyclists

Clever Crow

Here's a treat for fellow crow enthusiasts:

Incredible, no?  The presenter, by the way, is Chris Packham, who seems to be pulling into lead position as heir apparent to Attenborough.  Chris -- a local lad, and a graduate of Southampton University -- is a genuine and well-informed wildlife enthusiast, who first made his name as the punk-haired presenter of The Really Wild Show.

He is also a keen photographer, and...  But now I realise I'm repeating myself -- I've already written this post, two years ago!

[UPDATE: Ah...  Actually, it seems in this version Packham is not the presenter!   Never mind, it's the crow we care about!]

Postcard from Lisbon 5

One final scuffed, bent and well-travelled postcard comes through your letterbox, long after I've returned home.  Perhaps you're away on vacation yourself, and it falls into a pile of bills and junk mail.  Perhaps this reminds you of the opening sequence of Wim Wenders' film Lisbon Story.

So, no trip abroad would be complete without some shots of mysterious wall markings.  There are few things I like better than walking along a cobbled backstreet in a foreign city, waiting to be stopped in my tracks by some cosmic message concealed in plain sight.

My holiday companions enjoy this stop-start style of progress rather less, especially when the cosmos is being particularly chatty...  Which, in Lisbon, it was (I mean, that last one...  It is a clumsy guitar, isn't it?). But I do appreciate that waiting around for the family fool to finish admiring yet another set of random splats, scratches, and splashes of light is tedious, not to say intensely aggravating, so I try to restrain myself.  But, hold that thought, cosmos-in-Lisbon, I'll be back...

Ever since -- quite fairly -- being tagged as one who habitually makes "horizonless" pictures, I've consciously been looking up more.  Like any good shape-shifting contrarian, I don't like to be known quite so well as that.  It's especially rewarding to look up in places where everyone else is looking straight ahead or down.  In this case, a roofline in Lisbon's picturesque Alfama district (where I suspect the Tourist Office is responsible for maintaining the photogenic quantities of colourful washing hanging out on lines), and a view of the "25th April" suspension bridge passing some 200 feet above an outdoor restaurant table in the LX Factory compound.

But, in the interests of memory and conviviality, I have also been making a conscious effort, these days, actually to record the places we've been, seen, and stayed, something I have conspicuously failed to do in the past.  In the end, that's what holidays snaps are for, after all.  Although I doubt I will ever succumb to the modern vice of photographing my food on a restaurant table and sharing it on Facebook before tucking in.

Bridge?  Oh, that bridge...

Postcard from Lisbon 4

There was a bit of a to-do when we tried to pass through the check-in desk at Bristol Airport. We generally try to fly with hand-luggage only, and in the past have understood this to mean "one cabin-sized bag or trundler*, plus one moderately-sized handbag or shoulder-bag".  Not on EasyJet, however, it seems.

To be fair, the EasyJet luggage restrictions do say "one piece of hand-luggage only", and I did point this out to my partner and daughter when I read it.  Nah, they scoffed, that means "one piece of hand-luggage AND a handbag" -- it always does!  Nevertheless, I obediently packed one trundler, and they packed a trundler and a bag each.

Our flight was called, and we joined the boarding queue at the gate.  When our turn came, the EasyJet person said, "One bag only!  All things must go in one bag!  One bag!"  There was no arguing the case -- the person was impervious to my partner's industrial-grade sarcasm and scorn -- and there was a frantic five minutes scrunching, bending and stuffing things into the trundlers, including the other two bags.

Later in the week, chatting with my daughter about the way travel regulations have changed over the years -- remember currency restrictions? -- I recounted the Futon Incident of 1980.

We had flown to the West Coast of the USA, to stay for a few weeks with a friend and her American husband in Oakland, California.  Neither of us had been to the States before, and it was quite an adventure, not least because of the perpetual feeling of déjà vu derived from having watched countless American TV shows and movies, and the tricky differences in vocabulary (try asking for "twenty Marlboro" in an American store and see what you get).  Not to mention the sound of gunfire at night as locals shot out the streetlights, or the occasional low-grade earth-tremor.

Shopping in Berkeley, we spotted a shop selling hand-made Japanese roll-up mattresses, otherwise known as a futon.  We had to have one: no-one in England could yet buy such a thing, and their comfort, convenience and health-giving properties were legendary.  So we ordered a lovely deep-blue cotton-filled futon, in ordinary double-bed size.

Shortly before flying home, we collected our futon.  After we had checked it over, the thing was rolled up tightly for us, tied, wrapped in black plastic and securely taped up.  We left the shop carrying it between us, one at each end of a sagging, six-foot black sausage.  We must have made a curious sight, walking into the customs and passport check area of the San Francisco international terminal, carrying what to any objective observer would appear to be a human body wrapped for disposal.

We were approached by a customs official.  Could he see our passports, please?  And might he ask what was in the package?  Oh what, this package?  Yes, that package.  We gave him the story about the futon.  He was unconvinced, and uttered the immortal, but ominous words, "I see.  Do you smoke marijuana, Mr. Chisholm?"

Now, I suffer from Smart Mouth Syndrome.  It has landed me in trouble many times, but like any sufferer of a troublesome syndrome, I have acquired strategies over the years to help me out.  I needed help, because the following responses were already queuing up in my brain like aircraft awaiting permission to land:

A. "Of course I smoke marijuana, you dolt, but do you honestly think I'd walk into San Francisco airport lugging 30 pounds of the stuff barely concealed inside a mattress?  Do I look like an idiot?"

B. "Narcotics??  I am amazed and insulted that you would even suggest such a thing! Do I look like a dope-fiend?  I demand an apology!"

C. "Is that some fancy Mexican brand of cigarette?  I'm a Golden Virginia man, myself!  Though I've been enjoying your Marlboro brand during my stay here.  Hey, listen, have you ever asked for twenty Marlboro?  No?  No, I don't suppose you would have -- no-one seems to sell cigarettes in packs of 10 over here, so why would you even think of doing that?  Well, we do, and I did, and I got given two cartons of ten packs!  Heh!  How about that?  Two nations divided by a common language, or what? Whoa, is that gun real?"

But instead I used Oblique Strategy No. 1:  play dumb.  I can do dumb very well, and it generally works for me.  Luckily it worked for him, too, but I could see he was sorely tempted to slash open the contents of our "package" just to be sure.  No-one wants to be the guy who let a six-foot long black-plastic wrap containing 30 pounds of prime weed walk onto a plane to London.  Hey, they said it was a Japanese roll-up mattress!

Oh, and then we got into how much we'd paid for the thing, and very nearly landed in some really hot water.  As I said, remember currency restrictions?

And that, child, is why your mother and I always travel with hand-luggage only.  Makes for a faster get-away.

* I'm never sure whether "trundler" is our family coinage, or a generally-understood term for a rigid, wheeled suitcase with a collapsible handle.  I'm afraid that, like most parents, we have inadvertently saddled our kids with some non-standard, private vocabulary that can, from time to time, cause them acute embarrassment.  Sorry!

Postcard from Lisbon 3

Did I mention that Portugal is all about tiles?  In the older streets of Lisbon the exterior of pretty much every building -- including six story tenements -- is covered from pavement to roof with glazed tiles.  Thousands and thousands of hand-painted tiles.  Each building will have a different repeated motif, with a different border design, and the decorative effect is stunning.  It is also slightly disorientating, as to a Brit tiles are very much an interior feature, associated with kitchens and bathrooms.  I'm sure there's a reason for all this external ceramic cladding, but it won't be to facilitate wiping down surfaces after a fry-up.

However, there is also a high degree of dilapidation.  Some older buildings are crumbling and barely upright (even though these almost all postdate the famous earthquake of 1755, which destroyed the city, plus the remnant of Voltaire's faith in a benificent deity); others have either been bricked up or have been completely gutted internally, leaving only their fancy facades standing, as if the tilework has turned out to be stronger than the internal stonework.  However, I assume these are the equivalent of British "listed" buildings, and are awaiting infill with modern apartments.  The Portuguese economy being what it is, there may be a long wait.

Like any European capital, Lisbon shows several very different faces, depending on which streets you walk down, but in general, and despite the economic plight of the southern EU countries, it's a clean*, safe, modern, and welcoming city.  It has benefitted from several waves of development, successfully transforming itself from a post-industrial backwater into a thriving commercial centre and tourist destination.  In that it is reminiscent of Bilbao, that other Iberian Atlantic-facing port city.  I really liked the place, and intend to return.

Typically, as our host was keen to point out -- he has experienced the anarchy of modern London -- lisboetas still take queueing for buses very seriously.  By such signifiers the Portuguese, like their language, show that they are determinedly not Spanish.

Lisbon at night from our apartment

*  In Lisbon, the domestic rubbish is collected every night.  EVERY NIGHT.  Though, admittedly, in the early hours, and Portuguese bin-lorries are no quieter than British ones...

Postcard from Lisbon 2

Everyone -- and I mean everyone -- says the one excursion you must make when in Lisbon is to visit Sintra.  The guidebooks are quite insistent about it.  So we did.  And so, it seemed, did everyone else; it was very crowded.

Now, I don't mean to be a terrible inverted snob, but the doings of royalty and aristocrats both bore and mystify me.  These, after all, are the people that gave us gilt-with-everything decorative styles like rococo, not to mention any number of dynastic wars.  Confronted with a concentrated efflorescence of aristocratic folly like Sintra, with its compacted layers of fantasy castle building and queasily intertwined family trees, you can only stretch your eyes and wonder.  This is not "taste" or high culture; this is freakin' Disneyland, right there in real life, perched on a rock.

Portugal is all about tiles, tiles, tiles

As we had limited time, we only managed to visit the Folly of Follies, the Palácio Nacional da Pena.  A bus from Sintra town takes you up an awe-inspiring series of hairpin bends, and deposits you at the entrance, some 400 metres higher up the hill.  It's hard to convey the sheer artificiality of the place.  Everything looks like a stage set, and you wouldn't be surprised to see a couple of stagehands effortlessly pick up some mighty boulder (of which there are many artfully left lying around) and reposition it somewhere more eye-catching.  Outside, it's quite enjoyable to gawp at Pena's tacky towers and decorative tilework, and walk around the windy, fun-sized battlements, declaiming Hamlet ("Look where it comes again!").  But inside it is pretty dull, made even more tedious by having to shuffle along a prescribed route through an endless succession of rooms containing four-poster beds and bad portraits, coralled into a slow, one-way queue of fellow tourists.

That wind, though...  The whole point of Sintra is that its elevation and westerly aspect gave Portugal's rulers some cool, moist relief from the blazing summer heat of Lisbon down at sea-level.  Unexpectedly, we got a first-hand demonstration.  From the battlements we watched a bank of cloud approaching, which gradually enveloped us in a damp and cold embrace that was distinctly Welsh in its chilliness.  The magnificent views disappeared behind dense white fog.  The wind gathered strength.  Being dressed for heat, the chill factor of the constant buffeting became truly unpleasant, and we quickly abandoned the place, catching the next bus back down the long and winding road to the baking plain.

Up here we freeze, down there they bake...

Postcard from Lisbon

I've just returned from 10 days in Lisbon, staying in an apartment* with my partner and daughter, who -- to our surprise and pleasure -- had asked to go on holiday with us as a 21st birthday present, and chose this remarkable city as our destination.  Myself, I'm afraid I can think of few things I would have been less likely to have asked for when I turned 21.  In fact, by mutual agreement, I stopped going on holiday with my own parents after 1970, when I was 16.  But the "generation gap" was much wider back then, I suppose.

I'd not visited Portugal before.  So, as I can hack a fair bit of tourist Spanish, I thought I might as well quickly pick up some Portuguese in the preceding weeks.  How hard could it be?  I hadn't reckoned with the pronunciation, however.  In summary, written Portuguese looks pretty similar to Spanish, but spoken Portuguese sounds like a sibilant carcrash of Russian and Spanish.  Don't believe me?  Try playing the sample text at this website (weirdly, Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights).  I loved Lisbon so much, though, that I have resolved to put some effort into this intriguing language, and revisit at a cooler time of year.

With a "proper" camera, too.  As I have explained before, I never have any great ambitions for my holiday snaps; even the best of them exist in a contextless limbo which cannot be incorporated into any existing "serious" sequence (although something could be made, I'm sure, out of "daughters successfully evading the camera, again").  As a consequence (and in order to carry hand luggage only onto the flights) I chose to take just a Fuji X20 compact that I bought second-hand a couple of months ago.  It's a solid little camera with a built-in zoom that folds away very neatly and yet offers a reasonable range of focal length and aperture.  The image quality is what you would expect from Fuji, but it only has a 2/3 inch sensor that gets noisy above 400 ISO and I'd hate to try and get a gallery-sized print out of most of its indoor files.

Calouste Gulbenkian Centre for Modern Art

Like any sensible person on holiday in a hot country, in the heat of the afternoon I head for museums and galleries rather than the beach or the shopping streets, and Lisbon has some world-class examples.  I particularly enjoyed the Museu Colecção Berardo, a sensational collection of modern art from the early twentieth century to the present day and -- most importantly -- air-conditioned to perfection.  The so-called LX Factory was also worth a visit, a set of old industrial buildings beneath the gigantic "25th April" suspension bridge that have been turned into a creative hub, offering workshops and gallery space, as well as retail and refreshment outlets (including Landeau, selling allegedly the best chocolate cake in Lisbon).  Although I have to say there seemed to be little that was characteristically Portuguese going on there:  there seems to be a universal Euro-Trustafarian style, which borrows elements from everywhere else -- grafitti from America, tattoos and hairstyles from Britain, interior decoration from Scandinavia, philosophy and graphic novels from France, attitude from Germany -- but studiously ignores most local styles and traditions.

A zen-lite worldview is still all-pervasive, too, among the "creative" young.  I may have more to say on this later, but at 61 I do find it amusing to be encouraged to consider the brevity of life and the necessity to live it to the max by young people still lazing their way through the long morning of their lives.  As if, when we were their age forty years ago, we weren't doing and thinking exactly the same things.  Come on, you kids, do make more of an effort to move it along a bit!

LX Factory window

* My first serious experience with airbnb, and I can recommend both it and this apartment.

Portal 5

Portal 4