Frohe Weinachten

Sue and I met in Cologne for Christmas to be with our friends Thomas and Nicole and their son (and my godson) Joshi. We have been spending Christmas with them on and off since we first met in 2002, when we were cruising through France having given up our jobs and sold our house in the UK. It was, as ever, a traditional German affair with goose and red cabbage and a tree with real candles. The Christmas atmosphere was accentuated by very cold weather and frozen snow carpeting the landscape.

Getting there was hard work, especially for Sue, who worked until the 22nd and then set off from Cordoba the next day, catching a train to Malaga and then a plane to Germany, arriving at 3.00am on the 24th after a gruelling bus ride from the airport. I had an easier time travelling from Italy, but still when I got to my first train station in Cologne I felt like an old and confused man as a ticket machine eat four precious euros in change which I had scraped together to get to the stop nearest to Thomas and Nicole’s house.

In the end I was glad to get back to Italy. My plane climbed through light fog out of Weeze airport to reveal a blue sunlit world, which I had not seen for nearly a week. From way up there the earth was covered in fluffy cloud through which poked strings of massive wind generators, rendered tiny by our height and slowly paddling the surrounding mist. An hour later we were flying over the Alps and I was willing the plane on to Bari.

Now I sit at my PC thinking of Sue back in Spain and preparing for the new school term. I wish I were celebrating the New Year with her tonight. But then in a way I guess I will.

A Perfect Day in Cadiz

It was one of those “perfect” days. The kind of day one starts in a good mood and during which good things happen. We drove to Cadiz down a long sandy spit with a big Atlantic sea pounding the beach. It was grey and misty, but the sunlight down here in Southern Spain is so strong that the clouds were still bright and luminous and every now and then a shaft of silver light would break through and flash off some distant windows.

Cadiz is almost an island and as it grew on the shipping trade from the Mediterranean and the Indies it had nowhere to go but up. A typical dwelling has a warehouse at the bottom, apartments on the middle floors and a tower above from which the ocean could be scanned for the returning fleets. Looking up at one of these towers I could imagine an anxious merchant willing a galleon to coalesce out of the haze.

Now although Cadiz is still a busy port with ferries coming and going to North Africa, it feels like a tourist city, with guided walks everywhere and labels on everything of “interest”. We visited on a public holiday and so the place was full of tourists and locals out for a stroll. Wandering around the grid of narrow streets Sue and I searched for comparisons and found many familiar things, here a bit of the Brighton Pavilion, there something of San Malo or Venice.

After four or five hours we drove back down the sandy spit and headed for our hotel further down the coast. Yes, it had been a good day we acknowledged. Though it’s strange how much more memorable bad days can be. Best write it down.