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.
“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.
patrickgjackson 