Free-D

This week I’m far from Salamanca, 900 kilometres in Fact. It’s a funny life drifting between two worlds; you end up being a stranger everywhere. There’s also a sense of relief on arriving at either destination which isn’t simply due to the escape from the impersonal ordeal that is modern travel; there are always the things you’ve missed whichever country you’re returning to.

Maybe that’s just a “glass half empty” philosophy – but a sense of loss isn’t purely negative; going, as it does, hand in hand with a sense of value. The things which strike you first on returning to England are the old familiar greyness, the smaller scale of everything and most of all the flattened modulations of the English voice. It often feels as if there’s a sense of disappointment in the air, which might be due to the fact that we can never live up to the greatness we achieved during the war (a wild supposition I know).

For some, England will always be the land of air raid sirens and “make do and mend”. I suspect that I share this dubious anachronistic image with many Englishmen my age. Which is odd considering we were born long after the event. Perhaps it’s not so strange though; “hard times” after all aren’t necessarily “bad times”.

In fact the English have no greater sense of nostalgia than for such days: you’ll never hear a Brit say something like “Do you remember that wonderful month in Monaco we broke the bank and milked Champagne from the Baroness di Tutti Frutti”; they’re far more likely to say something along the lines of “Do you remember when we had to live in your uncle’s chimney and eat Bovril on Hornby rail tracks for a year? How I miss those days.” All of which I can perfectly understand. What I’ll never “get”, however, is the Spanish “straightness”, their startling and often charming way of “telling it like it is”. Strangely, this doesn’t appear to make them any the less complex. Indeed to my English perception the Spanish seem quite unpredictable, at least in terms of their beliefs.

I met a barman once who told me that he was an atheist and “didn’t believe any of that nonsense”. However, he informed me just a few days later that he prayed every morning on his way to work that his boss would “peg it” before the day was out. It’s meeting people like that who really make travelling worth while, not the ham or the history or any of the rest of it. It’s always the people and friends from either world you miss – when it comes to them, the glass is always half empty.