mikeytravels

Laurie Lee blurred the division between memoir and travel literature.

A Rose for Winter is the poorest of the Spain books. The naivety and wonder has gone and the writing feels syrupy, the descriptions rose tinted. The gypsies of Andalusia are romanticised almost to cartoon level. My own encounter with gypsies in southern Spain may have coloured this; sprinting after a bag thief in the streets of Cordoba who pulled a knife when confronted. The sort of experience that can only lead to prejudice and a million miles from Lee’s depiction of camp fires and guitars and the loveable vagabond.

Laurie Lee was rescued by the British Navy as the civil war gathered momentum and a memorial graces the main street in Almunecar. The town is close enough to Malaga to have a tourist overlay and pizzerias line the promenade, British and Germans in the bars. He came back and fought and the book of his civil war experiences is a strange one. The war is almost peripheral to the text and the danger inadvertently brought on by his own naivety and ill-health. Lee was too much in love with Spain to be a spy, but I can understand why the Republicans had suspicions.

Laurie Lee died in 1997 and lies buried at Slad in the Cotswold foothills; his gravestone hasn’t had time and weather enough to blend into the churchyard and looks stark on the steep hill. Opposite is the schoolhouse and the landscape of Cider with Rosie, the home he walked away from, to discover the beauty of other lands and to fight and romanticise them so many years later.

In a region better known for its grapes, the owners of the wineries (or bodegas) of northern Spain have turned their attention to front-of-house impressions.

The Marquis de Riscal’s new bodega and hotel at Elciego in Rioja is perhaps the most daring. Designed by Frank Gehry, it resembles a gayer Guggenheim with pinkish fins and sparkling curves. It’s not finished yet and all the more interesting for it, allowing an eye into its construction.

In the Simpsons, Springfield erects a Gehry building; a conventional structure attacked by wrecking balls to knock out the angles. Not too far from the truth! Underneath the skirts lies the geometry; all girders and supports, a corset to hold it together.

On the road past the bodega, a car lay bashed in a ditch. The consequence of building an incongruous building by a busy bypass? After the Guggenheim in Bilbao and the Los Angeles Concert Hall, Gehry is becoming a one-trick pony, but it’s still a decent trick.

Down the road in Laguardia lies Santiago Calatrava’s sparkling Ysios bodega. The building is glass-fronted with a choppy-waved roof and sits atop a bump in the landscape. Spring-blue skies bounced zig-zag shadows over the vines. A wedding erupted from inside. The entrance hall gave a more critical assessment, a reality of drips and buckets.

Architecture attracts architects. In Bilbao, Gehry built the museum, Norman Foster the metro (a first draft of Canary Wharf) and Calatrava added a bridge and an airport. Now everyone wants a go at bodegas. Richard Rogers is next and, hot on his tail, Norman Foster has one too, both in Ribero del Duero.

Rowland Rivron walks past in an Ealingly clean white suit. I point at him, “you’re going down Rivron.” “Not me” he pleads, “get Clarkson instead.”

But Jeremy is in a bad mood. He’s munching away on a piece of chicken (”donkey food”) and isn’t keen on the Spaniards (”lazy twats who sleep in the afternoon”). We make mental notes to hurt them.

La Tomatina is a tomato riot in a small Spanish town near the city of Valencia. It lasts for one hour for one day, every year in August. Its origins are blurry and its clean-up operation an endeavour of Forth Bridge proportions.

The day starts as all good days do, with a giant ham stuck atop a greasy pole. Local lads shin up, arse-over-tit down and eventually reach the ham. “Jamon Jamon” shouts the crowd, unwittingly marketing a tapas bar in Camden. This is the signal for part one of the pain to begin. Water hoses roar into the streets and drench everyone with powerful spray. T-shirts are removed, bunched up and thrown into a neighbour’s face. At noon, a klaxon sounds and a temporary truce is called. The lull before the storm.

You hear them first, heavy wheels trundling through the medieval streets. A cheer goes up and the tomato trucks roll into the central plazas to dump their loads. A free for all begins as the streets run with red juice and nowhere is a hiding place. It’s a fight for survival. Darwin with weapons of fruit. A mobile phone floats past in a knee-high stream of red floaty-bits. An Australian girl cries and a drunken couple snog and form a popular target.

A horn sounds after an hour. Hands are shaken, bruises compared and the town heads downhill to a row of communal showers. Clarkson walks past, still not reconciled to the Spanish way of life. “Fuckers” he mutters. The smell of tomatoes stains our nostrils forever more.

I sat on a bench opposite the pub. An elderly lady was sunning herself. “Are you here because of Nick Drake?” she asked. I said I was, um, how did she know? “We can usually spot them,” she said as if there was a collective noun for pilgrims traipsing around Warwickshire looking for dead singers. She pointed out the church and Drake family home and told me about her new hip.

Tanworth was a one-bus-a-day kind of place. Pub, church, village hall. The pace of life was unhurried and the shops shut on Sunday. Sturdy Georgian cottages surrounded a tidy green, a war memorial sat in the centre, winter roses curled around its base. The village was almost the definition of slightly posh, Mail-on-Sunday England; the flesh of Nick Drake’s songs.

Drake lies buried beneath a beech tree in the churchyard of St Mary Magdalene. The gravestone was weather-battered and decked with dying flowers. The epitaph is simple, Nick Drake, remembered with love and the years of his life. The names of his mother and father are chiselled below, recent additions. Etched on the back are the words, ‘now we rise and we are everywhere’ two lines from the closing song on Pink Moon. I startled a cat, asleep against the gravestone and it followed me into the church. A brass plaque above the organ commemorates Nick’s life and music. The church was beautifully silent. The cat curled up on a pew, yawned and returned to sleep.

From the church, I walked to Far Leys, Nick’s boyhood home and the house where he died. Behind lie the Warwickshire hills, rolling middle England. The building is huge, austere; red bricked with thick square chimneys. It seemed too large and a little impersonal. Nick’s sister, Gabrielle always insisted their childhood was idyllic. I wondered how close a family could be in a house with so many rooms.

REM of course. And the B52’s. And Pylon I suppose, but REM mostly. I’ve wanted to visit for years. I remember old interviews with the band where they raved about the city. I grew up on REM and I stick by them even now, in their run-out-of-tunes twilight.

Athens is technically a city, but with the feel of a town. The vast campus of the University of Georgia sits downtown and the place fans out around it. I could tell it was a university town because I was the only one about at eleven in the morning and, sadly, the only one getting ready for bed come eleven at night.

In Starbucks the barista asked my name. I was caught off-guard and (in typical English reserved formality), I said, ‘Mr Gregory’. This produced behind the counter mirth, “Can I get, ahem, Mr Gregory a tall latte to go, please?” He bowed stiffly as he handed over my coffee and I left in red-faced embarrassment.

Athens has attractive suburbs. Away from the buzz of the university, hilly residential districts hide wonderful homes. I discovered pristine antebellum houses framed by manicured lawns and arcaded porches. There was a tree that owned itself and a great vegetarian grocery, and behind the cash register, the prettiest girl.

I did the REM sites. Weaver D’s Cafe with its Automatic for the People sign (now placed well out of nicking it reach), Peter Buck’s old house, the 40 Watt club. Outside the club a guy stopped me and introduced himself, “I’m DJ Zee” He was handing out flyers for the weekend with his buddy. He asked if I had heard of him and I said I hadn’t. He looked upset, so I told him I was from England. He relayed this data to his mate who looked thoughtful for a moment, then asked me if I knew someone in Swindon called Kenny.

The man on reception seemed a bit put out, but reluctantly conceded we did indeed have a booking. “How did you hear about the hotel?” he asked. I said something that I don’t normally say to hotel receptionists, “From the Leonard Cohen song.” He nodded and brightened up, “We were trying to get Len (Len!) back for his 70th birthday. Not sure he can make it what with the Buddhism.”

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. A rest stop for rare individuals says the website which doesn’t explain much. It was the only place I wanted to stay in New York, but the online reviews didn’t exactly sell it. “I was scared to walk the corridors in case I got mugged” said one, “I got electrocuted by the shower” said another. I netted these minuses against a whole load of plusses from pop history. Dylans Bob and Thomas both had rooms here, Sid killed Nancy in another and Janis Joplin gave Len (as I now always call him) head on the unmade bed.

The whole place is stacked with art, it hangs on every landing and in many of the rooms. Some of it is great, but much of it is not great at all. Guests are encouraged to hang their own creations and the quality threshold leaps and dives on an ongoing basis. It is certainly unique and I spent one elevator ride trying to work out if the person squashed against me was male or female. There was barely enough room for two people, let alone his/her four yapping dogs.

We were up high on the sixth floor and the windows opened behind the neon sign, level with the ‘O’ in Hotel. I asked if anyone famous had lived in our room, “a writer” the receptionist said, but he couldn’t remember the name. The room was lined with empty bookshelves and decorated in faded everything. I asked a maid if she knew who the writer was. She thought he wrote science fiction and I was a little disappointed.

At George Best airport in Belfast, I cleverly bypassed the bag-in-the-hold queues by forgoing toiletries. A sprint around the chemist replenished my needs. In retrospect, I should have paid greater concentration in the dental section. What appeared to be some kind of Irish branded toothpaste turned out to be denture cream. I found out the hard way, scraping the gluey gunk from the roof of my mouth. The memory still makes me gag.

Architecturally, Belfast is defensive looking. Even the new boutique shops and ‘cathedral quarter’ redesignation can’t hide the recent history and where other cities would have smothered facades with glass, Belfast is more hesitant. Whether this is the subconscious working, I don’t know. The black taxi tour of ‘The Troubles’ was grimly fascinating. On the Protestant Shankill Road, blue skies shone on the Red Hand of Ulster mural and a powerful painted image of a lone UFF soldier trained his rifle as I crept past.

On the other side of the dividing line, the rain came down on Bobby Sands and the wall of empathising murals ranging from Palestine to the Basque Country. Even the weather seemed split by the sectarian divide.

Samuel Johnson once said the Giant’s Causeway was “worth seeing, yes, but not worth going to see.” This was a time before the Antrim Coast Road had been blasted through the rock. The modern route from Belfast is dramatic, the sea spraying the road, and Scotland visible on the horizon. The modern pleasure lies in the journey too.

At the Causeway, unexpected November sunshine played across the stone polygons and, squinting, I thought of a tumbled Inca wall. I preferred the myth to the science, the clever giant over the cooling lava.

I went to Derry because that’s where the Undertones were from and therefore it couldn’t be bad. I was surprised at the clarity of the murals in Catholic Bogside. No ambiguity here. Multi-coloured provocation, pushed right against the city walls, “You are now entering Free Derry” says one, another depicts a jailcell and all the people represented, were dead.

I knew things would be a little difficult in Kyiv when I spotted Air Force One on the tarmac as I landed. Major roads in the city were blocked off and the police were at every junction. In Independence Square, scene of the Orange Revolution in 2004, an anti-NATO rally was in full swing. Hammer & sickle flags flew over a makeshift stage and martial music blasted into my hotel room at the other end of the square.

I felt as if I was an extra in a cold-war drama & began to double back on myself to shake off potential spies. I kept getting lost, frantically turning corners like a headless chicken. Kyiv was difficult to map mentally and I pitied those on my tail, real or imaginary. The hotel was owned by the Ministry of Defence and my room felt as if Stalin had broken in and stolen everything that wasn’t brown. Twice the phone rang and yet each time I answered, there was silence.

In a way George Bush helped me out. I had to find a way around the blockages and followed the locals scaling walls and sliding down grassy banks. I saw a side of the city that was off the map and a little muddy.

I walked to Dynamo Kyiv’s stadium, sunk into a bowl and surrounded by chestnut trees. A statue to legendary coach Valery Lobanovsky sat outside, perched on the bench in an era before chalked technical areas. He looked trim in bronze but an adjacent billboard showed him in later years, bloated and blotchy. A bridge spanned the ring-road below and connected the parks on either side. Clamped to the bridge, amid the football graffiti, were thousands of padlocks; lovers initials etched or inked into the metal.

In two days, I covered a lot of ground, visiting the monastery of Pecherska Lavra, discovering a glimpse of the intensity of Eastern Orthodox religion in the caves that ran underneath. I ate at a restaurant with an 18th century rustic theme and watched football in a modern Irish pub. On the Andriyivskyi Descent I was confused by Bulgakov’s birthplace and sobered by the Chernobyl museum in Podil with its mutated river creatures and ghost town signs. And all the time behind and in front of me, the golden domes of Kyiv’s churches.

I left Kyiv, walking up to the metro station under a night sky just beginning to blue. Aside from streetsweepers and dog walkers, I was on my own and the city looked peaceful; no barricades or police or Death to the Imperial West banners. I dived into the metro, down into the depths of the earth, through beautiful brick arches and clean-tiled caverns and followed the President of the USA back to the west.

Patience, I was told. You need patience to travel in Ukraine. This isn’t a cheapjet central European destination and there are no stag parties or direct flights to Stansted. English isn’t a natural second language and the alphabet is cloaked in Cyrillic. These are the things that attracted me to Ukraine.

I flew into Kyiv and then directly up to Lviv or Lvov or Lwow or even Lemberg. This is a city with plenty of names and many previous owners. It sits in the far west and once formed part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, before rapidly changing hands between Poland, Nazi Germany, USSR and presently Ukraine. The word Ukraine, means Borderland and Lviv was its literal definition.

It’s a pretty city with a beautiful main square and hundreds of churches. I rented an apartment above the Drama Theatre in the old quarter. Squeaky parquet flooring alerted my neighbours to my precise location at any time. A market filled the outside square selling wooden tankards and Soviet medals and in the evening drunks sang below my window.

Next to the Drama Theatre stood the Opera House, built during the Hapsburg years and gloriously ornate. Then, in front of the opera house; a pig! Its snout rooting in the grass as a crowd gathered. I bought a ticket to the ballet and sat dead-centre in the upper balcony, £5 well spent. The building gleamed inside and Swan Lake floated across the stage. This was my very first ballet and I was entranced.

This constant changing of hands has benefited Lviv’s café culture. Viennese espressos competed with thicker, sludgy coffees and Lipton’s tea, drunk black, was an everpresent. In the evenings I moved on to local lager or sweet sparkling wine from Odessa.

Under the watchful eye of Ivan Fedorov, Russia’s first publisher, and backing against the Church of the Assumption was a book market. Tolstoy sat next to Thomas the Tank Engine alongside Reggie Kray’s memoirs. I found two 1970s Soviet guidebooks, one with faded photographs of Lviv, the other with paintings of Minsk showing strolling couples in picturesque parks. In the latter, Lenin statues kept an eye on things and if you wanted culture where better than the Museum of Atheism, housed in a baroque church?

I stood for ages in the rain waiting for a marshrutka to the airport for the red-eye to Kyiv. These minivans hurtle around town following complicated routes. I deciphered the Cyrillic in the windscreen and flagged one down. Fifteen minutes later and we were still in the city. I double-checked with the other passengers, “Aeroport?” “Nyet!” came the chorused reply followed by furious pointing in the opposite direction. I jumped out in a dreary suburb, crossed the road and the rain fell harder. Eventually another marshrutka came along and this time my “Aeroport?” query was answered with nodding heads. I folded myself against the back windshield and passed my fare over many heads to the driver. My glasses steamed up. Finally, through a smeary window I saw a plane landing and squeezed out. Patience was the best thing I packed.