The Journey To The Source

There were three children, and they usually played together, taking turns to bully, tease, and perform practical jokes on one another, of invariable crudity and variable inventiveness.
They built numerous "dens" in field and hedgerow, of which the overall standard of construction ranged from very-nearly creative, to execrably desultory. Sometimes these makeshift homes would be colonised by other little gangs, and ferocious battles would take place, from which many a deflated bike tyre, dead arm, and torn jacket sleeve ensued. They broke into derelict cottages, all of them Haunted, and carried away many treasures snatched from between rotting floorboards and falling ceiling plaster - abandoned fossil collections, centenarian pickles, and trunks filled with mildewed books - Anatole France, Mark Twain (illustrated), religious almanacs in Welsh (some Methodist schism, belonging to the same era as the preserves).
And they loved to make maps, sometimes elaborate and detailed surveys of imaginary lands, highly influenced by Tolkein and Co., sometimes carefully labelled charts of their real, immediate environment, all landmarks of juvenile importance being scrupulously inked in under real or - more often - assumed names, fanciful, onomatopoeic, or simply descriptive.
On these more prosaic plans appeared in addition, indicated only by complex codes, the locations of certain caves and crevices in the surrounding foothills, considered safer havens than the temporary encampments of the "dens", where could be stored all durable, damp-proof, and illicit prizes, without much fear of discovery -  unless of course an older sibling, or other Enemy Child, should come across, and decipher, the map.
In the cave stores were also kept emergency packages, tucked into tins or plastic boxes and buried in floor or wall, as convenient, containing all manner of things of which one might have need when far from home, for all three prided themselves on their knowledge of Woodcraft and Survival Skills, garnered from such disparate sources as Baden-Powell's "Scouting For Boys" (1938 edition) and a much-thumbed paperback copy of "Papillon", daringly liberated from the Mobile Library. The factual contents usually comprised half a dozen Swan Vestas, dipped in candle-wax to keep dry, an assortment of unhygienic plasters and gauze bandage, and a lump of Kendall Mint Cake. None of them liked Kendall Mint Cake, but a Guide for Hill-Walkers that they had once read had recommended it, so in it went.
One of them was afraid of spiders, but more afraid of the others knowing it. One was openly afraid of Ghosts, whereas two claimed not to be, at least when there were three of them, and it wasn't too dark. All three were afraid of farm dogs, which was a reasonable fear, as these were the usual, bite-happy welcome laid on for persistent and habitual trespassers.
They spent much time by The River, splashing and ducking each other in the shallow pool where you could swim a few strokes if you weren't too tall, hunting for the bigger boys' nightlines and stealing their hooks -  their catch, too, if there was any - tickling tiny, illegal trout, and making dams that were meant to keep the trout from escaping, but which always ended up with colossal, savage eels as sole occupiers, having eaten such fish as might not yet have slipped out between the carefully placed stones and away downstream.
So here it was, one day, that the three hit upon the idea for their most ambitious Adventure yet. They would follow the River back to its Source, making, on the way, a new map, so accurate and detailed that even the Ordnance Survey might be happy to get their hands on it. (A previous idea, to follow the River down-stream to its mouth in Cardigan bay, had been discounted; not only was it too far, but the route would take them through Tregaron, where lived several schoolfellows they were currently anxious to avoid). So the source was fixed on as a goal. They called it "The" Source, just as in their local egotism they called their little tributary stream "The" River, because it was the only one they knew.
The following morning, they set off so early that even the most vicious of dogs still lay safely sleeping. Trying to move stealthily in dawn light, army-surplus khakis and outsize rubber boots, they scaled the churchyard wall, picking out a shortcut between graves and garden spiders (on overtime repairing dew-damage), hardly pausing even to peer into cracks in the slate tombs, to see if the Bones had Moved in the night. Down the steep earth bank that separated church from stream they slid, the last tossing down to the first their once-green kit-bag, tastefully vandalised with Punkish biro hieroglyphs, and containing the usual supplies, supplemented by paper, pencils, and a makeshift measure - a school ruler and a ball of string.

                                                     END OF PART ONE.
                                                 PART TWO TO FOLLOW

Tauromachia

    The earth is baked as hard as Neolithic pottery now, curling up at the edges, golden and done. The mountainous bones of the land stick out in the terrible, sleepless light like the ribs of a starving pariah dog. Even the olive trees, which seem not to need water, maintaining their uniform silver-green year round, are muffled for the moment in a gritty layer of fine yellow dust. The soft green pelmets of wild fennel began to show short weeks ago; already the Levante wind hisses through their hollow, desiccated stalks, ghostly liquorice pan-pipes.
    How our ancestors must have feared the sun. It starts life; warms and coaxes crops from the inert, chill soil; and yet at the last, kills it. How short the cycle must have seemed to them, that takes living things from seed, sapling, and fledgling, to hay, chaff, and ant-cleaned bones. Imagine how, long, long ago, before writing or memory, maybe even before we had speech or names for each other, a group of terrified creatures made their first, clumsy attempt to slake the vengeful drought, pouring a libation onto the dead ground for the pitiless, insatiable Thing in the sky to gobble up.
    Fast-forward to today. For today, in more than a hundred miniature Coliseii across Spain - at this very instant, perhaps - a man decked in a suit as fey and fantastical as any of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes costumes will step out into the ruthless sun and the still-clean sand, to challenge a monster from a primal nightmare, with a scrap of pink cloth and a skewer.
    High summer is the season for Bullfighting. In Malaga in August, every day a death, till the season ends in Ronda in September with the authentic, splendid barbarism of the Corridas Goyescas. The ceremony opens with the procession of the Damas, rolling up in a cavalcade of picturesque, picaresque "carrozas" and meticulous, flounced and fearsomely corseted eighteenth century finery, to occupy the most expensive seats in the country. And the killing begins - and ends, for another year.
    Goya, he for whom the "Goyescas" are named, loved to draw the Toros, his cruel pen quite at home in the Plaza. Picasso, too, though as a lifelong, elective exile from the Land of Bulls, he can't actually have seen a proper "Corrida" after the age of twenty-five. It might be on its way out now; Barcelona has banned it; but the images created by Miquel Barcelo to commemorate his city's last ever five o'clock massacre have been amongst the most stolen event posters in history. It takes longer than that to convert the collective soul of a people.
    I've never been to the "Toros" en vivo. Paying a month's salary to sit in the cheap seats at a culturally sanctioned crime-scene doesn't hold much appeal. But it's hard to spend a summer here and avoid the images of carnage coming live from the ring on the tv screens of every little bar and "venta" in the Andaluz community. So I've seen hundreds of helpless, predictable brutes topple silently into the dust, following a play - which the innocent victim doesn't know is only a play - of life, death and sacrifice on the little stage that, for two or three bloody hours, stands for a world.
    I saw, once, a bull refuse to fight. It does happen. Not a Little White Bull was he, though, but a huge black beast with grey splotches, straight from a Cretan fresco.For ten minutes he stood, motionless and emotionless, a monument of Assyrian stone, immune to taunts, goads, the spirited capering of the Toreadors or the murderous looking Banderillas embedded under his hard leather, letting blood like springs on the hillside. At last, the gates to the bull-pens opened, and in came the half-dozen cows, to lead him, victoriously garlanded in his revolt, to a better life, one hopes.
    And I have seen a terrible thing.A young matador, hardly more than a Novillero, hacking away at a poor creature for some fifteen minutes without being able to finish it off. The crowd roared in disgust, they booed, they threw things. Just as it seemed the stalls were about to explode - the young man desperately attempting to maintain the correct expression of noble unconcern as he lunged for the animal's heart with the wicked curved sword, again and again failing to strike true - an old bullfighter ran into the ring.
    He wasn't an impressive figure. He strained at the seams of his Traje de Luces; his short jacket barely covered his respectable paunch. His friendly, unheroic face would have looked more at home dealing out Pints than Death.
    With an imperious gesture, that would have seemed comical from such a prosaic form as his in any other circumstances, he ordered the younger man away. He walked straight up to the exhausted bull, now standing with blue tongue protruding, panting great, heaving breaths, unwilling to fight on, unable to die, and took its colossal head between his hands. Staring back into his eyes, the animal sank slowly to its knees, and he lowered himself to the ground with it as it fell. It lay, finally, with its head in his lap, and he stroked it and spoke soft, quiet words to it. I do not know what the old matador said to the dying bull. But three hundred sangria-fuelled, riotous fans of blood and adrenalin fell silent around them, Sol y Sombra alike.
    At last, he quietly brought out a small knife with his free hand, the one that wasn't cradling the great primeval skull, and with one slight, firm movement, severed the spinal cord. The short-sighted, uncomprehending eyes went dark. The bellows movement of the vast, straining lungs gently subsided.
    When the Matador finally stood up again, the crowd also stood. They clapped, slowly and sonorously, heads bowed in respect, as he left the ring.
    Death in the afternoon.

Post Haste

Well, then. Ahem. Ahem. I've just been looking over that excerpt in my last post, and thinking it over (with a little sage advice from some trusted friends. You know, the sort of friends who aren't afraid to take the car keys from you when you've just downed six bottles of Beaujolais and are about to show everyone how you can drive like the Stig off "Top Gear".)
Basically, my heroine is starting to annoy me. Well, she is meant to be a bit of an annoying character. But rather like the great Edward Gorey's "Mr Earbrass", I find it disconcerting when a character starts to assume a fitful reality on their own account. She may not have peculiarly unpleasant nubs on her greatcoat, but she is insisting rather a lot on telling the story in her own way. And if there's one thing I haven't got the patience for, it's a fictional back-seat driver.
So what to do? I could, of course, abandon her. I could erase her files, delete the post, put my pencilled notes on the fire. I have the power! Take that, mere paper person! I don't care what it says in "The Matrix", I made you, and I can snuff you out any time I choose!
But I still have some faith in the idea behind "Writer 51". After all, they got themselves born all on their own, without the say-so of any one creator. And that's such an impressive achievement in itself for someone who isn't actually real, that I feel they should be given a fighting chance.
So, back to the drawing board. Even as I write here, I feel an Idea coming on, haha... No, not that Idea, Lobachevsky. Athough... wait a minute... do I still have those inedited sheaves filched from Italo Calvino's wastepaper basket? I do? It might just be worth a shot! (Faint cries of "It'll never work, Carruthers!", "Don't do it, you mad fool!", "You'll never get away with this!", in the background. Fades to black, dot. Dot. Dot...)

Unforthcoming Titles

Oh, all right. Go on, then.
In response to massive public demand (well, a couple of people have shown a polite interest), I have decided to go ahead and give you all a real treat. I'm going to preview the entire first chapter of my upcoming masterpiece on this blog (first draft, anyway). Now, be warned. It's heavy stuff, is this. Hermann Hesse, hold on to your hat...
Here you go.



WRITER 51

 The Prologue.

Someone once told me that publishing is like a lifeboat. I can’t remember who.

I can’t remember where or why, either.

Be that as it may, the crux of the simile, (to the best of my recollection), was that you can’t risk a lifeboat carrying, say, fifty writers, for the sake of throwing a line to a fifty-first. Writer fifty-one might well be as good as the ones in the boat; it doesn’t matter. Better that fifty make it than fifty-one don’t.

I’m Writer 51.

This is my story.

I always knew I was meant to be a writer. Even as a tiny child, I sat on my bedroom floor weaving my dolls and stuffed toys into an endless series of terrifyingly trite tales, graduating, with my first crayoned letters, to little books, lovingly and carefully stitched together out of scrap paper, (first by my mother and later by myself). These I filled with the somewhat morbid soap-style antics of woodland creatures, progressing as I grew older to even more saccharine epics concerning Elves, Goblins, and cloyingly romantic Countesses in sub-Bavarian castles. My parents praised me, preserved my efforts in their own special drawer, and told their friends that I was “So Gifted”, and would certainly, in the fullness of time, prove to be the next Iris Murdoch, or at any rate Margaret Drabble. By the time I started secondary school, and won the Junior Writing Prize – thus stimulating, perhaps a more important landmark in my early development, the first of a long, long series of Booker Prize Acceptance Speeches – I was already verging on the insufferable.

It was also the year I first met Mabel.

I say we met; in reality, Bridgington being what it was (twin town of Parochial, Alabama, and winner of Most Heterogenous Village In The South-West every year since 1868), I had worshipped her at a mute, whimpering distance since pre-school, gawping, longingly. As a fat kid on a diet mentally stalks the plastic Sundaes in the ice-cream parlour window. As a lazy-eyed cat-lover in peri-middle age presses up sweatily against the jeweller’s Spring Weddings display, drooling hopelessly at fantastical, unpossessable goods. But never, even in the most highly-dramatised flights of my fancy, dreaming that she could possibly one day be mine.

Mabel was, ( I beg your indulgence for the cliché), everything I was not. We were the same height, yet she always seemed taller, except on those occasions when she wanted to make herself cute, protectable and petite. She had dark, curling hair that was allowed to grow long; mine was limp and fine, and always cut off before it could do itself any damage. Her eyes were large, brown, and expressive. Or vacuous, depending on her mood and your perspective. Her nose was small and stereotypically dainty, whereas mine had just started with that dirty adolescent trick that makes it grow faster than any other part of your body, excluding puppy fat and feet. She looked pretty in things like ra-ra skirts and pedal pushers; I looked like I’d eaten the previous occupant. Puberty changed nothing. Mabel remained the golden-limbed beloved; I was Job in the pit, scratching at my acne with a pot-sherd.

In short, I adored Mabel with blasphemous intensity, and she in her turn repaid my love by using me, mercilessly and comprehensively, throughout our entire relationship.

I don’t know what impulse first moved Mabel to sit down next to me on the bench in the school playground. It might have been some uncharacteristic surge of kindness, friendliness even – we were all starting to experience the strange and sudden hormonal urges of a looming adolescence, after all. It might equally have been the stirrings of the killer instinct for a willing victim already awakening in her prepubescent soul. In the light of later experience, I rather suspect the latter, though somehow – God knows how – I find myself still wanting to excuse her, to find some scrap of genuine affection to fawn over with my untrainable cur’s mind.

I got up straight away, thinking automatically that she wanted the bench to herself. She pulled me back down, smiling. I sat, obediently, immobilised by her regal generosity and her beneficent beam like the proverbial bunny in the headlights.

“What’s your name?”

“I’m Gloria.”

“I’m Mabel. With an E.”

I didn’t know how else you could spell it, but I didn’t say so.

“I like Duran Duran. Who do you like?”

I didn’t like Duran Duran. I said,

“I like the blond one. He’s lush.”

I didn’t even know if there was a blond one. I presumed there was. There usually was.

“Do you want to be friends?”

Did I want to be friends! Did I want to be friends with Mabel Godalming!

It wasn’t even a question.

I must have sat staring for longer than I thought. “We could sit together at lunch,” she added, maybe thinking (Impossible!) that I was going to reject her magnanimous offer.

“Yeah, that’d be nice,” I said, not wanting to seem over eager, and possibly scare her away. “I mean, I mean, that’d be Lush. Cool.”

The bell rang just as my brain fainted, saving me from the mute confession that must surely have come, that I had no more words to say.

We were an item.

Every day we sat together on the bench at playtime, writing alternately Hilarious and Deeply Tragic pieces for inclusion in the school magazine, of which I was also the new, uncontested Editor. At any rate, I wrote; Mabel just had to Be. Occasionally, I included an article under her name; as my Muse and constant companion, I felt it was only fair that she should receive some credit for her input, even if only I, she, and our English teacher, would ever see it. (Of course I also believed, semi-secretly, that back issues of the “Bridgington Comprehensive Times” from our era would, some day, fetch record-breaking prices on the collector’s market).

I was on a roll. Drawing on a spectacular overflow of confidence and creative juice, I now completed, and submitted, my very first novel. Naturally, I had written “novels” before, but they had been just stories that rambled more than usual, in bigger writing. This was the real thing; a monster with more than fifty chapters and five hundred pages, covering the whole range of teenaged emotion from grovelling self-pity to screaming hysteria, and all dressed in a plot you could have invaded Poland with. I think it was about a kind of sad Vampire girl who is thwarted in her love for a rather effeminate Knight Templar, his appearance clearly based heavily on Mabel’s performance in the school production of “Ivanhoe”.

Using only one finger, and the English department typewriter, (to which my editorial status gave me, fortunately, unlimited access) I typed out every one of the five hundred leaden pages to the correct double-spaced, A4 format, and posted it – to Penguin, if memory serves.

Two weeks later, I also received my very first Rejection Letter. I kept it for years. It was kindly phrased, and hand-written (unlike so many to come), and I cried like a great, flouncing baby.

By the following day, I had decided that Penguin books had simply made a terrible, Philistine mistake. Future generations would shake their heads over this one, I thought, and in a gesture of great trust and generosity, I gave the manuscript (which had been considerately returned to me, even though, in my egotism, I had quite consciously omitted to include a stamped addressed envelope), to Mabel for safekeeping, until such time as Future Generations should have got their act together.

She said she didn’t want it.

“It’s Not Quite the Sort of Thing I’m Looking For Just Now”, she parroted happily.

I stuck the manuscript in the top of her school bag and ran off in a deflated little cloud of  doubly rejected misery.

I got over it. Soon the Team was back on the bench, Coleridge and Wordsworth, Riding and Graves, Ezra Pound and T S Eliot (even if Ezra seemed to spend a lot more time polishing her nails than her namesake would have.).

The future beckoned, wreathed in rosy-fingered, metaphorically confused glory.

                                                          *              *             *

We’ve both got the wrong names, Mabel said. You’re not a Gloria. I mean, “Gloria” is for actresses, and pop-stars. It isn’t you at all. And I’m not a Mabel. “Mabel”s an ugly name, it’s like fatties, and speckos. There aren’t any models called “Mabel”, are there? It’s just ugly, common and ugly.

I didn’t think “Mabel” was ugly. “Mabel” was a beautiful name. Of course it was, it was Mabel’s name. “Gloria” was ugly. How could she think “Gloria” was glamorous? “Gloria” was an old-lady name. If names had a scent, “Mabel” would smell like orchard apples, and minty gum breath, and romping in hay-lofts. “Gloria” would probably smell more like pink hair-curlers, old Lycra, and stress incontinence.

Still, I felt a little hurt that Mabel didn’t think I could have a glamorous name. But she didn’t mean it. And anyway, she was right – I wasn’t glamorous, not in that sort of way. But it didn’t matter, because I wasn’t going to be a pop-star, or a telly presenter, or a vacant, empty-headed actress. I didn’t need that. I was going to be a writer, wasn’t I? A famous, wealthy writer. Gloria Lambert, author. Novelist. Booker Prize Winning Novelist. Nobel Prize. Why not?

When you’re a really rich writer, of course, you can buy couture clothes, you can have designers design you things, you can be Sophisticated, which is actually much posher than Glamorous. And people still want to sleep with you. People wanted to sleep with George Sand, even, and she wasn’t Glamorous. She wasn’t even normal-looking, and she did all right.

I felt reassured. As long as I stuck to the plan, everything was going to be fine.

A Novel Experience

I've been a bit lazy about posts lately. Other matters taking precedence, that sort of thing. I have, however, aside from working towards my much-procrastinated exhibition (which is going to be soooo impressive when it finally happens, I swear!), been whiling away my endless leisure moments by writing a Novel, following a suggestion by someone else who was commenting on a particularly alarming - or alarmist - article about self-publishing in the Guardian, that I should write about a character who had emerged unbidden from the foam of the ensuing debate, called Writer 51. (Actually the Article wasn't bad reading, but the Fun was definitely in the Forum - Up Pompous, anybody?) And so "Writer 51" started to take shape in my mind, that unfortunate wannabe author who is never quite sure whether she really isn't good enough for an established publisher to take her on, or it's just that the quota in the lifeboat has already been filled... hence the numeration.
In the excerpt that follows, my heroine, who has just started secondary school, and won her very first writing prize (naturally convincing her that she is predestined for great things) is talking to her "best friend" (who is, equally naturally, going to turn out to be selfish, shallow and exploitative, and will inevitably go on to steal boyfriends,  bursaries, and eventually the heroine's precious work...) about names.

WRITER 51- Names.

We’ve both got the wrong names, Mabel said. You’re not a Gloria. I mean, “Gloria” is for actresses, and pop-stars. It isn’t you at all. And I’m not a Mabel. “Mabel”s an ugly name, it’s like fatties, and specs. There aren’t any models called “Mabel”, are there? ‘S just ugly, ugly and common.

I didn’t think “Mabel” was ugly. “Mabel” was a beautiful name. Of course it was, because it was Mabel’s name. “Gloria” was ugly. How could she think “Gloria” was glamorous? “Gloria” was an old-lady name. If names had a scent, “Mabel” would smell like orchard apples, and minty gum breath, and romping in hay-lofts. “Gloria” would probably smell more like pink hair-curlers, old Lycra, and stress incontinence.

Still, I felt a little hurt that Mabel didn’t think I could have a glamorous name. But she didn’t mean it. And anyway, she was right – I wasn’t glamorous, not in that sort of way. But it didn’t matter, ‘cause I wasn’t going to be a pop-star, or a film-star, a vacant, empty-headed actress. Who needs that? I was going to be a writer, wasn’t I? A famous, wealthy writer. Gloria Lambert, author. Novelist. Booker Prize Winning Novelist. Nobel Prize. Why not?

When you’re a really rich writer, of course, you can buy Couture clothes, you can have Designers Design you things, you can be Sophisticated, which is actually much posher than Glamorous. And people still want to sleep with you. People wanted to sleep with George Sand, even, and she wasn’t Glamorous. She wasn’t even normal-looking, and she did all right.

I felt reassured. As long as I stuck to the plan, it was all going to be fine.

More excerpts from the (unrevised) first draft soon - I can hardly wait! Or I might get round to that fascinating excursion into Romano-British Religion that I've been planning. It's going to be more exciting than it sounds, I promise you...

Twilight of the Daubs

Oh, how we love to trample on our Fallen Gods. Now that summer is upon us, one can scarcely open a quality broadsheet (as they once were) without reading some critic's belated and shocking discovery that Damien Hirst Can't Paint, or that Tracey Emin Can't Draw ( she never said she could, did she?). The truth of the matter is, as ever, much sadder, in its own way almost poignant, pathetic. An artistic movement that was essentially and irrevocably identified by its Youth, has had the tastelessness and temerity - to grow Old. Erstwhile Naked Emperor Damien now gazes out at us sad, grey and bemused from behind his thick glasses like a Poundland Hockney. Tracey Emin chatters interminably to anyone who will listen about the effects of premature menopause, so harsh, so bewildering to one who has never resolved adolescence. We hear little of the rest. Sarah Lucas went to Rehab (Yes to Life, No, No, No to Immortality). Billy Childish still grinds out stubborn landscapes in his Mum's spare bedroom, his hostile stance now as quaint, antique - and relevant -  as that of the Pre-Raphaelites may seem to a modern art history student. In Charles Saatchi's fridge, sacrificial blood drips silently onto Ms Lawson's Meringues, ephemeral as a Chocolate Jesus. The Tents of the Philistines burn unmourned without the city gates. (How ironic that we use the name of the cultured Philistines to denote Art-Haters, when it was the austere, image-phobic Hebrew nomads who were themselves the icon-smashing Islamist Fanatics of their day). Now we jeer and defile the carcase of the murdered Winter King, as we look for something New and Young to take his place. History is rewritten to fit the cycle. True Artists die young - Mozart, Vincent, Keats and Carravaggio. No matter that Picasso was poor into his fifties, or that Kandinsky was over forty when he first turned a painting on its side, lost figuration and founded abstraction. Helen Chadwick did it right - killed by the bacilli whose forms she was attempting to coax into her images, a living but deadly Magic Lantern Show. Yet I am sadder that I shall see no more of her work than satisfied to see the circle properly squared and the myth fulfilled. Once it was the case that the artist grew old and died, but his art lived on. That was true immortality. Over the last century (and a half, more or less), thanks to the Alchemists who gave us the cruel preserving juices of the silver nitrate, we see the artist forever young, frozen and trapped in time, while his work withers and fades in the unforgiving light of the natural calendar. Poor, poor Dorian Hirst with his Botoxed shark, as fresh and lifelike now as Mr Disney's head in its cryogenic vat, emptied of the ideas which gave it purpose, a macabre relic devoid of beauty, devoid of meaning, formaldehyde tears seeping from the seams of the glass coffin where Great Snow White awaits, not the life-giving kiss its puckered, decaying lips still gape open to receive, but the charity of decent burial. In the meantime, Mr Barnum steps up to the tank with a contract, and another pot of Rouge.

Summer Begins on May the Fortieth

The Municipal Swimming Pool is open for business in Algodonales, though school only broke up a few days ago. Lines have been strung up in the street outside, and rows of ancient bath-towels flap in the breeze like the flags of a particularly muddy crusade. Older children roam the street in small swarms like flip-flopped bees, to and from the miniscule pool in their bathing costumes and last year's swim-school t-shirts, their hair glittering and frizzy with the new chlorine. It's going to be the greatest summer ever (just like last year, and the year before, and the year before that...) There will be swimming, of course, and sitting in doorways at siesta time, gossiping in the shade (sleep is for Old People), cracking sackfuls of almonds with a rock on the marble step - an afternoon's work - staying up all night dancing and drinking "tinto verano", the wine punch that is nearly all lemonade anyway, and gabbing and flirting, and, for the very brave, still being the first to the pool or the river in the morning. Considered the most "Macho" are those lads who can claim that in summer time, they never go to bed at all. On midsummer's eve, in every pueblecito the fires of St John's Night burn away the Bad of the year now past (there's Mari with a hosepipe and a face of thunder, diligently watering the perimeter of the bonfire in a slow, dripping circle - a very necessary precaution in a land where a forest blaze can reduce hectares of imported Eucalyptus and native Pine to scented ashes in an hour). At the coast, at midnight, they wash their faces, hands, and feet in the sea, for luck. Once, two strangers, a mother and daughter from Granada, stranded like myself at the airport (the last buses inland leave before eight o'clock in the evening), offered to share their hotel room with me, for nobody should be alone on Noche San Juan. But before we slept, we had to file down to the shore in the still-warm dark, our way lit only by the glow off the horizon towards Morocco, and the embers from the remains of the last Sardine feasts, and solemnly wash away a year's sins and sadnesses with the cool salt water.
   And all summer long, there will be Feria - a thousand little Ferias in a thousand little villages, all different, uniquely the site of pilgrimage for the Pueblo's scattered sons, and all, inevitably, precisely, just the same. Each town hall will hire one of the same hard-working three- or four-man bands that, every summer, work their way tirelessly around the length and breadth of Andalucia, playing each night an identical repertoire with as much enthusiasm and verve as if they hadn't performed the self-same set already a hundred times this month. There will be old standards, pasadobles that everyone over thirty knows how to dance, and by the end of the evening, the Mayor's wife and the other Matrons will be tipsy enough to dance the Dance of the Little Frogs, as they do every year. There will be a new summer Pop Hit, complete with ridiculous movements, which every eight-year-old in town will know how to dance already, and they will be invited on stage with the band to perform it, one girl lugubriously incanting the words with Serious Eyebrows and a high, quavering flamenco soprano copied off the Saturday evening Talent Show on Canal Dos Andalucia. Everyone will drink "tinto" and horrible Cruzcampo beer in sticky plastic cups from a makeshift outdoor bar, and they will eat Pinchos and charred Chorizo, and quail's eggs cracked straight onto the Plancha, all served with small, hard chunks of stale, dry village bread, and pronounce it the best and finest food in the world ever, "sin duda alguna". The younger children will wander about interminably sucking the frostbite inducing tubes of "polofla" in all the colours of no earthly rainbow that ever was, consuming, it seems from the evidence of their livid green, blue, and orange cheeks and lips, very little else. Everything will be just as it always has been, just as it always will be - and just as it always should be.
    Little people of tomorrow, the summers that will come will never again be as long, as glorious as this one. The freedom you now enjoy will be a dimly remembered garden closed off behind a rusting, padlocked gate. Nevertheless, keep Summer in your hearts, that returns each year whether you want it, or need it, or notice it at all. Remember the world when it was flung wide open and full of light, and however dusty the road, it always lay ahead of you.