Free-D

It’s Christmas! Sorry, am I being a little “previous” in my joyous tidings? It’s so easy to be fooled by the yuletide “goodies” currently stacked up in every shop. Many of them look as if they’re anticipating some kind of festive disaster. Perish the thought of having to survive a nuclear winter on turrón alone. Anyway, there it is, we’re deep in seasonal trimmings; hanging heavily above the thoroughfares of the city are Christmas decorations and plush boughs of plastic evergreen. Read the rest of this entry »

We all love a noisy crowd. All the better if everyone’s drunk and it’s two in the morning. That is unless you happen to be over thirty with a job and possibly a baby or two into the bargain. There’s a time for everything. Even pan pipes. Well, not pan pipes. But you get the drift.

There’s nothing as selfi sh as youth, but we shouldn’t despise the young because of this: it’s natural. Just as it’s natural for the “adult” community to impose rules, such as, “no drinking in public in large numbers”. Fortunately the Salamancan botellon hasn’t sparked off a huge crime wave. Certainly nothing to compare to the scenes we see regularly on a Friday night in most large towns and cities in England. Contrary to received wisdom I think that for many their teenage years are the least enjoyable of their lives. It’s an age full of stress and self consciousness. I’m not going to talk about hair appearing in “strange places”: besides, the old have as many problems with this as the young. (at barely forty I’m already having to trim my ears).

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Salamanca is enjoying an insight into the Arabic world with the “Ciclo Nosotros (Árabes). It’s not the first such encounter the city has had. Between 712 and 1085AD Salamanca experienced eastern culture first hand. Like all invasions this had its positive as well as negative aspects. Life wasn’t exactly stable during those three hundred and seventy odd years: Salamanca was taken, lost and taken again. However, the Moorish presence was permanent enough to mean that a class of Spanish Christian came into existence that actually adopted the Arabic language and culture to a large extent. Although the “moors” were driven out permanently by Alfonso VI in 1085, much of Arabic culture remained. So much so that when Salamanca University was founded in 1218 by Alfonso the IX (not all Spanish kings are called Alfonso by the way.) it became one of the most important sources of Arabic learning available to the western medieval world. This flowing of knowledge from the east became an essential spur to philosophical enquiry in Europe. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s often at their  borders that things enjoy their most vital qualities. Think for a moment of the view of Salamanca from the far side of the Puente Romano. The Tormes has its source in the sierra de Gredos  and flows into the Douro, 247 kilometers away in Portugal. It lingers as it passes by here and defines the edge of the city, giving it one of its celebrated aspects– and certainly one of the most photographed. And Salamanca’s not the only place which becomes somehow more “itself” at its edges: for those of us who have experienced it, who could forget the British coast and those “bracing” summer holidays? What could be more English than spending a week at the grey borders of the country, teeth chattering, clad  in trunks and daring oneself to dip a shrinking toe into the brown waters of the channel? Read the rest of this entry »

You may have missed, as I did, news of the death of “Papa” Clemente, the false pope of El Palmar de Troya, Sevilla recently.

His rather tenuous link with this region was a visit to Alba de Tormes in May 1981. It was an unfortunate date for him. For some reason the nuns of Alba suspected that he and his followers were planning to steal the relics of Santa Teresa – (they raised the alarm by ringing the convent bell.) Read the rest of this entry »