Dad

Dad had a fall three weeks ago and couldn’t get back up again. He was on the floor for several hours before Sue his cleaner found him, shocked and hypothermic. It was lucky it was her day to come. Dad went to hospital where he has been ever since, recovering and struggling to regain the use of the hand on which he lay. When you reach a certain age and level of frailty it is often a fall which engenders a crisis and another step into the valley from which none of us return.

It’s been a blow to his confidence, but this time it looks like he will be able to return home and stay out of long term care, at least for the time being.

I’m going to the UK for a few days to help him settle back into his bungalow. With any luck I will be able to summon up enough love and compassion to stop myself from trying to throttle him after the first half hour.

Bye, bye Cordoba

I got up yesterday morning for my constitutional run and decided to make it a “farewell to Cordoba” tour. The sky was grey and bloated with water and as I crossed a bridge over the Guadalquivir the rain began to pour, making my running shirt stick to my chest. The rain stopped as I ran around the cloisters of the cathedral/mosque, watched by a couple of bored security guards. Later I puffed and sweated through the narrow cobbled streets of the old city and up to the running track in the orange grove, before doubling back to Sue’s apartment via Cordoba’s social housing estate. Like everything else about the City the estate has a “toy” quality, social deprivation on a contained and picturesque scale. The balconies are full of washing, old bicycles and caged songbirds, while amongst the oldish cars a dilapidated horse drawn carriage is parked. Outside the “Hunters Bar” there is a knot of not too threatening drunks in stained open-necked shirts and trainers.

Now I am back in Italy and it makes me sad to leave Sue in Spain. She will be home soon and so probably I will never see Cordoba again. This thought also leaves me with a pang.

The picture opposite I took in Malaga on a day so damp that this building began to dissolve, like our memories I suppose.

There is no conqueror but God

Sue and I went to Madinat al-Zahra today. It's the site of a great palace complex from where the muslem rulers of Al Andalus governed the south of Spain. As we wandered the terraces and looked out over the valley of the Guadalquivir I tried to put myself in the shoes of someone seeing the same view more than one thousand years ago. I got no further than feeling the brush of white cotton robes against my skin and half hearing an intoned phrase "there is no conqueror but God ... there is no conqueror but God ..." Something I first heard in my head in 1996 walking around the Alhambra, where my memory tells me it is inscribed over and over again in the decoration, "there is no Conqueror but God." In Arabic I'm sure it has a much more poetic lilt. "Allah" is such a soft and seductive sound by contrast to the gutteral and stoccato "God".

Now I am fifty five and I know what half a century feels like, one thousand years does not seem so far away. Scarily close in fact when I consider the ruins around me where once the centre of a great civilisation. Perhaps the builders of the Alhambra were right to remind the rulers of Al Andalus that however mighty their achievements they would still only be transient in the face of the one great truth that "there is no conqueror but God".


Or is it time that is the real conqueror?

Round and round the orange grove

I'm back in Cordoba visiting Sue. Among the delights of Sim City is a jogging track which snakes for two kilometres around a small orange grove not far from Sue's school. I visited it almost every day when I was here last and now it's like coming back to an old friend. It' s reminiscent of a snakes and ladders board and at almost any time of the day or night it is dotted with a variety of people, including runners, dog walkers and older folks taking a constitutional stroll.

Because the grove is actually quite small the track is packed into it in a series of tight curves and sqwiggles which makes it a peculiarly sociable place. Another runner could be a kilometre ahead of you but still only be fifty metres away as the crow flies. I try not to be too competitive but I still get a sense of triumph as I slowly reel in a fellow runner then overtake them. Similarly I do my best not to feel a sense of defeat as a young or not so young athlete lopes past me as I lumber along.

But overall the place is full of a sense of community as we all stroll, trot, hobble or bound round and round the orange grove towards our individual goals.