Looking over at Puig Major, the highest peak in the Tramuntana mountains of Mallorca, this month. I recorded this time lapse video on 16 January after hiking up to the ruined Castle of Alaró.
Alaró occupies a very special place in the history of the island as the one of the last holdouts of, successively, the Byzantines before they were conquered by the Saracens in the tenth century, and the Saracens before they were conquered by the Catalans in the 13th. You really feel the fear of invaders when you climb up to the fort, isolated on top of a steep hill from which you can watch the plains. It clearly existed for no purpose but to shelter people.
Ireland will be reunified – by the Post Office. They have yet again told me here in England that a parcel to Belfast is going to the “Republic of Ireland”.
You work 4 night shifts editing the UK news, manage finally to get to a post office just before closing, and they departitioned Ireland while you were sleeping. The scoop you missed.
You are asked why you did not give your full name on the parcel as the sender and you try to explain it’s because it’s going to Belfast and names can still cause trouble over there because of sectarianism. You realise this person does not know what “the Troubles” were, so you say it’s “kinda like Kashmir” and they look at you like you’re a fool, bless you, though you are pretty sure they know what Kashmir means.
At least the Post Office have now heard of Belfast.
I write this a couple of weeks after a holiday in Spain where I sent a parcel to people in Germany in order to finally get around UK-EU customs tariffs.
It was sent from a rundown part of Palma de Mallorca which had wow, an actual, fully staffed, beautifully branded and maintained post office, not a hybrid corner shop like back in England. Okay the parcel took 9 days to cross the Pyrenees but the mule reached Berlin in the end, contents fully intact, pack of fragile M&S apple pies included.
I live in hope my Belfast parcel doesn’t end up on a sorting slab in Cork.
On holiday in Mallorca and reflecting on a strange few days. Not that there’s anything strange about me being here – I am British (and Irish) after all, though most normal tourists arrive in summer while I only visit in winter. Probably my fifth visit now, for a week or so each time, and always in orange season. Do they grow peaches here too? I will probably never know. Maybe I’ll write a page in this blog about why I like the place at exactly this time of the year? Seven things to do in Mallorca in winter, something like that.
I’ll come to the strange part.
There is a very good (imho) Canadian TV serial called Mégantic about how the small, idyllic Quebec town of Lac-Mégantic coped after a huge fire killed 47 people there in 2013. It was caused by the derailment of a runaway freight train carrying crude oil. Watching on TV5 Monde, I had meant to finish the series on holiday and was still doing so when I read about the Almuda rail disaster in southern Spain on Sunday, which claimed at least 43 lives.
Plaça Major
Mourning was declared across Spain for three days. Official celebrations for Palma’s great annual holiday, the Feast of St Sebastian, were cancelled, though Tuesday remained a day off for understandable reasons. Walking around the city centre’s main squares on Monday, in the pouring rain, I saw a JCB removing the unused logs set up for the festive bonfire on Plaça Major as braziers stood filled but never to be lit. On Plaza de España, black drapes flapped in the wind at the back of the empty stage.
Plaça d’España
Some unofficial celebrations of St Sebastian’s did go ahead but with a minute’s silence in respect of the rail crash victims. One charanga street musician told me the holiday had originally been a celebration of the end of a plague in the city and an affirmation of life in the midst of death, so it did not feel inappropriate.
In the Canadian TV series, released a decade after the disaster, each episode focuses on one individual or family, sensitively conveying how they live – or, in some cases, do not – with bereavement and trauma months after the event. I can imagine some of those affected by the disaster in Spain might find consolation watching this some day, but just not now, when the grief is so keen. At several points in the TV drama characters use, with some bitterness, the French saying “il faut donner du temps au temps”, which may roughly translate as “time takes time”. In the immediate aftermath, the survivors and the bereaved are surely living out of time.
Ironically, a new Spanish film with a similar theme but a very different treatment is playing in cinemas this week. In Rondallas (English title: Band Together), a community is still in mourning two years on for seven fishermen lost with their boat. They finally decide to honour their memory by reconstituting the pipe band they had played in. It’s a feel-good film, even a comedy, with a strong theme of friendship.
On Tuesday night I went to see it in the Augusta Cinema, and found myself in a packed theatre. Whether it was because of the holiday or the rain or the subject matter and the timing, I do not know, but when the credits rolled, some in the audience clapped respectfully.
As I write this on Wednesday, I am seated on a bench in Stations Park, above Palma’s underground rail and bus hub, enjoying the return of the sunshine. Small children play in the climbing-frame train across the path from me. I love this giant toy train. I have done from the first day that I saw it, years ago. Some days the innocent play of children feels like the most precious thing in the world.
“Shipshape and Bristol fashion” are the words that come to mind on a visit to Spain’s replica galleon the Andalucía, moored in Bristol last week on a visit timed for the English city’s Harbour Festival.
Your eyes feast on beautifully coiled ropes and lovingly caulked timbers, sails folded with studied rakishness, immaculately ordered officers’ tables and spotless cannon, as you pass around the decks with the other visitors. There is a whiff of Treasure Island in the air animating the kids (of all ages, as they say) along with the pleasure of learning some new history (I had no idea that bodega is also the Spanish word for a ship’s hold but it all makes sense now).
Wandering off along the waterside after my visit, past the other eye-catching ships moored in the city permanently, I ended up in a cafe on Spike Island called the Emmeline where, over a bowl of good salad and decent coffee, I leafed through the generous pages of the free local events guide, B24/7.
This was more out of idle curiosity – I went to university in Bristol and am always drawn back sooner or later to the old haunts – than with any hope of finding something for the early evening of my single day in the city, which would end with a train ride back home. So imagine the pleasant surprise of finding a play being staged just a few streets from the railway station in perfect time to let me catch my train. Not just any play either but Henry V (until 2 August), performed in the open air by an all-women company called Insane Root Theatre.
I had never seen Henry V but there were enough familiar lines – the “band of brothers” speech particularly – to intrigue me, as was the idea of a war play being staged by actresses.
In fact I enjoyed it so much that I wrote, privately, a short review. There was something quite shipshape and Bristol fashion about this production with its tiny cast of seven and minimal props – not counting the spectacular backdrop of one of Bristol’s bomb-damaged churches.
Last week I scribbled down my thoughts about Gladiator II in this blog because I was a bit annoyed by some of the snark around it but also out of loyalty to the brand because I had liked the original and other Ridley Scott films, especially The Duellists. The truth is the sequel has its flaws but it’s a film bound to lose a certain kind of critic in the trees, when the (holly)wood is staring out at them with a cheeky Irish smile.
This week I reviewed a quite different new release, The Last Dance, a human drama from Hong Kong about how we cope with change and death that moved me to tears while delighting me with its quality as a piece of film – the acting, script, cinematography, even the English subtitles.
I was the only one in the auditorium at the cinema in a town near London (which has a large community of Hong Kong emigres). Ironically given that this is a film haunted by the recent pandemic, it felt a bit like lockdown – maybe the approach of Storm Bert had kept people away? – but still, I do hope more people go and watch this film. I would happily go back.
Oh, it does also feature a sword – but fewer sandals.
No man, woman or fanged baboon steps in the same river twice. Why? Because the water’s not the same – as Seneca might have written had he too watched Sir Ridley Scott’s Gladiator, then Gladiator II nearly a quarter of a century later, instead of living out his days in actual Ancient Rome 2,000 years before.
The water’s different. Don’t go catching the late show in your nearest cinema like I did if you expect to re-experience the winter-soldier thrill of army-on-tribe at the Battle of Vindobona. But do settle down with a bucket of popcorn if a summertime amphibious assault mounted by Roman galleys, worthy of Peter Jackson’s Lord Of The Rings trilogy, lights your arrows.
A Gladiator sequel cannot cut it without memorable fights and the baboon encounter is as startling as anything in the original but a simple duel fought waist-high in an actual river may stay with you even longer after the credits have rolled, not least because of its cathartic symbolism compared with a very different scene on the River Styx.
Russell Crowe’s sword is in safe hands with Paul Mescal who only bows here to Denzel Washington as the gladiators’ master with his speech on the death of an emperor which is, well, positively head-turning. When Washington goes in one ear, he does not go out the other.
If there are flaws in the sequel, they may lie in a script unlikely to rest in the mind like Crowe’s great line, “Are you not entertained?” Anything else is probably covered by cinematic licence. The large audience watching with me in the cinema into the early hours of Sunday, most of them young and as diverse a crowd as you’d find, seemed happy to the end.
It’s good to know that in his eighties, Sir Ridley can still exhilarate and transport film-goers with a new film as he did, you imagine, back in the 1970s when he first put “strength and honour” on the screen with The Duellists.
Walking into an exhibition of two paintings by a Renaissance master would be surprise enough but to find myself looking into the Garden of Gethsemane shook me about right.
The thing is, I hadn’t really meant to be at the Ulster Museum at all, only at the hot houses nearby in Belfast’s Botanic Gardens and that was because I had started missing Singapore. I just wanted to get in and feel heat and humidity again, look at big waxy flowers and giant leaves – all in a tightly controlled, cramped space of course, for the full Singapore vibe!
As I wandered the hot houses like a hungry ghost I thought back to the hot, scented darkness of evenings spent walking in Singapore’s Botanic Garden or in the roof garden below the tower block where I worked earlier this year. To be in a garden at night with the temperature still barely below 30C was such a novelty for me that I could think only of the Garden of Gethsemane, the place in Jerusalem where Jesus Christ was betrayed according to the Bible. I have no idea how hot it would have been on that actual night nearly 2,000 years ago, but that was the illusion I was quite happy to entertain. In the Palm House on Thursday, I felt such a pang of longing for South-East Asia that I nearly cried.
Coming out into the Botanic Gardens again, into the cool of an Irish summer afternoon, I was heading for the far exit on my way to Belfast city centre when I gave in to an impulse – I was on only the briefest of visits to Northern Ireland – to nip into the museum. It remains one of my favourite treasure-houses, if only for its Spanish Armada exhibit: the wreck of the Girona with its gold from the Americas and rubies from Burma. And what did I find inside but a rare reunion of two Caravaggio paintings which had adorned the same Roman palace four centuries ago: The Supper At Emmaus, on loan from the National Gallery in London, and The Taking Of Christ, on loan from the National Gallery Ireland in Dublin.
I couldn’t look at Emmaus without laughing, politely of course. The subject is two of Christ’s followers who have unwittingly been eating with him in an inn after his death and suddenly realise he is back from the dead and back with them. Presumably they failed to recognise him without his beard! One flings out his arms in amazement while the other clutches his chair. WTF At Emmaus might be a better title.
The Taking Of Christ, on the other hand, terrifies me. It shows the moment after Judas embraces Christ to identify him for the soldiers who will take him away for the ordeal that will end in his crucifixion. Judas greedily clutches Christ’s shoulder, his lips still pouting from the fatal kiss, glazed eyes staring out of flushed face. One soldier has placed a steel-gauntleted hand on the doomed man’s chest. Christ’s eyes are closed, his expression pained but resigned, his fingers locked in prayer, as someone behind him cries wildly for help. It is a devastating depiction of betrayal.
I came away thinking about many of the betrayals in my own life, great and small. Sometimes I’m afraid to shove my hand into my pocket in case I find 30 pieces of silver in there. I also thought of a few points where I had stayed loyal, to people or ideas. Such is the power of great art.
One of my favourite views: the steps to the rooftop gardens for my morning break walk
My work attachment in Singapore is nearly over and already I can see myself missing this place when I get back to England.
Will miss the frangipani flowers which are just about everywhere here
For nearly four months I have been working BBC digital news night editor shifts, mostly international but quite often domestic too, while keeping more or less normal office hours – Singapore is seven hours ahead of the UK. The wee small hours of the morning in London are bright daylight over here and it’s a smart move by our managers to have someone on who, theoretically, is rested and fresh in a different time zone. Colleagues in the New Broadcasting House newsroom were amused to see me on the screen during planning meetings in short-sleeved shirts with blue sky in the office window behind me while chilly drizzle presumably comes down on Portland Place in the dark.
Daybreak from the office window (time lapse)
Finally, too, I’ve been able to meet all my Singapore Bureau colleagues properly and get to understand the work they do on our Asian and Business coverage.
Singapore logos feel so good
I’ve spent my time off exploring the island, which could not be easier because of the public transport network.
Here, there and everywhere: Singapore’s MRT metro trains
While 04:00 starts don’t allow for much night life I’ve enjoyed the local culture and just being around such friendly people. You can read about my experiences here.
But I did do a lot of work including many days of overtime, which came up in a conversation with a local cabbie recently. “You’re working six days this week? So you’re half-Asian now.” We had a good laugh then.
Mini-dinosaurs and office blocks: just a normal work day in Singapore
Just back from an early walk out along the city’s Green Corridor, a former railway line. You can hear the birdsong on this time lapse I made just after dawn. The corridor passes several canals.
For railway buffs, some cute bridges have been preserved and also some stations like the one below.
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