September 11th

Next morning we said goodbye to Madrid and headed off to the train station with our heavy gear.

As we entered one particular Metro station, two cops stopped me and gesticulated wildly at my backpack. Not comprehending, I thought they wanted to search the bag as an anti-terrorism measure, but apparently they were warning against wearing rucksacks as intended due to a spate of highly skilled tea leaves who could razor such bags and remove the contents without the wearer realising it. Thanks, transport police!

The two and a half hour journey was spectacular and extremely comfortable in our brand new high-tech carriage, and this just a humble local train. Are you taking note, Japan, with your crusty ancient austere rolling stock?

Not only did we get a grand view of the arid but compelling landscapes of Castille, but we were also provided with glimpses of the things we had been forced to omit from our itinerary, namely the enormous royal palace at El Escorial and the medieval turreted walls of Avila. Further on, as we ascended into a region which actually had a few trees, we noticed long lines of modern windmills lining distant ridges.

At Salamanca station I opted for a taxi rather than trust my dodgy sense of direction, and soon we were gliding into the heart of this most Spanish of Spanish towns, its fine sandstone architecture glowing in the late afternoon sun.

The hotel proved to be superb – luxuriously appointed bedroom with separate marble-encrusted bathroom that was in itself was bigger than many Japanese business hotel rooms. In fact, so splendid was our habitation that I began to doubt the veracity of the ludicrously cheap price I had got the room for.

In the mean time, the safe didn’t seem to work, which necessitated some fine Spanish ‘mañana‘ attitude from the reception, who eventually sent someone up to check. It was then decided that a technician needed to be called, who was, of course, much later in arriving than had been promised, meaning that I had to hold off  on the big poo that I so desperately needed. When the diminutive fellow finally appeared, the problem was merely a dead battery. I don’t know if Pedro the Engineer Most Tiny was expecting a tip for his troubles, but he didn’t get one.

Late evening, and we headed out to  Salamanca’s Plaza Mayor, the most beautiful main square in all Spain, and pretty nice it was too, all golden sandstone backed by deep blue sky, and with an enormous stage in the centre since it was festival time in Salamanca and the streets were awash with young revellers and all manner of free entertainment.

Getting the zoom lens out again as a figure appeared in one of the balcony windows on one side of the square, I was hoping for some opulent lingerie-clad bit of crumpet, but it turned out to be just a bloke in a string vest. Nice!

At this juncture the roadies began to soundcheck for the night’s gig, and like an old man I had to beat a hasty retreat as my damaged eardrums couldn’t take the volume of the constant stream of amplified ‘uno, dos, tres.’

Next stop, a well-stocked supermarket, there to purchase all manner of fine produce for that finest of holiday meals, te hotel room picnic. Plums, cheese, smoked salmon, fresh bread, olives and a bottle or two of beer – marvellous, the food of kings!

September 12th

All day to explore Salamanca’s delights, a town encrusted with architectural gems from a rich past, but at the same time alive with the vibrancy of thirty thousand students attending the Castillian equivalent of Cambridge. Noisy sponging bastards!

First stop, the San Esteban monastery, an oasis of tranquility with only a handful of tourists. No rules and prohibitions here, just a beautiful church with a famously intricate plateresque facade a contemplative cloister, and an exhibition highlighting the iniquities of the Conquistadors in South America – enlightened indeed!

Following this, we crossed the river, gaped at at a road sign which clearly indicated just how near we were to Portugal, then recrossed into town by way of an original Roman bridge, the huge cathedral majestically forming a backdrop.

This gargantuan structure proved to be another great attraction, allowing us as it did to climb up onto the roof for panoramic views of the town and a chance to startle huge flocks of pigeons and perve down upon unsuspecting denizens with the zoom lens.

Equally unusual about the cathedral was the access to the upper galleries inside, from where we were able to gaze down upon a wedding in progress. Outside, the groom’s mates were engaged in coating the bridal car in all manner of objects, not to mention stuffing the interior with balloons. What japes!

Next, the vexing question of where to eat lunch once more. Here we dither spectacularly between street restaurants both devoid of custom, and witness a strange kind of critical mass phenomena.

See, nobody wants to eat in an empty restaurant, since this unpopularity might indicate the quality of the food, but then again, if nobody takes a chance all establishments will remain empty and they’ll be a lot of starving tourists wandering around.

Suddenly a group of locals chose one of the restaurants, which gave us the confidence to try it too, and shortly afterwards, as we sat so close to the passing tourists you could smell ‘em, faces full of gazpacho, the clientele swelled to saturation point while the other restaurant remained relatively empty. I suppose on other days it was the reverse. Now why don’t these places employ folk as fake dinners to ensure that the process kicks off?

After taking a siesta back at our hotel we headed out once more for the sights of Salamanca, but unfortunately the university and its ornately carved cloisters were already shut and we had to make do with the House of Shells and the House of Death.

Later in the evening, after the customary hotel room picnic, I came back into town for a last peek at the city, this time its splendours outlined against the night sky by floodlights, the streets full with drunken festival goers.

Next morning we trained it back to Madrid and thence to the airport for our flight back to the ugly sterile straight-jacket of Japan, a milieu so unpalatable after a superb week of Castillian splendour.

September 10th

Time for another day trip, so we jumped on the AVE high-speed train for a thirty-minute trip up to Segovia.

Now I’d heard that the AVE station was some way out of town and that most people took the connecting bus. Me, however, being stubborn and and an idiot, wondered if walking might not be an option, seeing as how buses in foreign parts are so difficult to use: how do you pay? Do you get in at the front and exit at the back? How will you know when you’ve got to a place you’ve never seen before?

The moment we exited the train station it became immediately obvious that the walking strategy was a non-starter : outside there lay absolutely nothing except scorched pale golden treeless ground for as far as they eye could see. No houses, no paths, nowt, and no indication of the direction in which the town lay.

After a brief vision of some vultures pecking at a small pile of bones in the middle of a desert, we got on the bus with all the other tourists and alighted half an hour later at the edge of Segovia, in front of the amazing sight of the enormous aquaduct that dominates the landscape.

This thing is really jaw-dropping in scale, antiquity and magnificence, even for a seasoned world adventurer like myself. I mean, this giant structure is two thousand years old and was constructed by the Romans without cement or clamps, and was still bringing water into the town a hundred years ago. Amazing to think of the skills that those Romans possessed while the rest of us Europeans were up to our knees in shit in our mud huts. These guys clearly understood mathematics, geometry, gravity and the curvature of the Earth. They had nice uniforms, too.

After viewing this epic structure from every possible angle and taking way too many pictures, we ascend into the city proper and make our way to the main square, passing numerous gorgeous architectural gems making the town a living museum.

Suddenly, however, I notice a strange gentleman following us. See, sometimes being a paranoid jittery bag of nerves has its advantages.

All visitors to the great sights of Europa should be aware of the existence of smelly people intent on relieving them of their valuables, which reminds me of a recent post on Tripadvisor.com where some cretin gave a Madrid hotel a terrible rating simply because outside he’d had his bulging wallet removed from his back pocket by a thief. Doh!

Here’s what you do to prevent yourself falling victim to the pickpockets (and yes, fat middle-aged Americans, I’m talking to you!). Put your passport, tickets, cash and credit cards in your hotel safe. If your room doesn’t have one, either lock these items in your suitcase or put them in a money belt to be worn under your shirt, tucked into your trousers.

Then each day, work out how much cash you’re likely to need and put that in a loose roll in your front pocket. Dress down (easy for me!), don’t flaunt your Rolex, stuff your flashy camera in a bag which doesn’t look like a camera bag, and without being paranoid, be aware of people around you.

The thieves work in teams. A spotter selects a good target, then the gang moves in and one member will attempt to distract you while the others remove your gear without you realising. I know this because I’ve seen it in action several times.

Anyway, there we were on the narrow streets of Segovia and my weirdo/criminal radar is telling me of an approaching nutter. This guy is smiling strangely and seems to be tailing us. We speed up, do a bit of weaving, but he’s still there. Luckilly the main square hoves into view, and there stands a very cool-looking Spanish policeman. Baseball cap, shades, goatee, and a uniform that looks like sportswear – oh, and a fucking great automatic pistol, too.

So we stop and have a casual chat near this suave upholder of the law, and turn to face our stalker, whose strange smile momentarily leaves his countenance upon spotting the cop, and he slinks off to the nearby tourist information office, lurking behind other less-wary visitors, no doubt.

I contemplate informing the officer of this weirdo, but decide that it is not the thing for an anarchist like me to do. Besides, our friend in blue is busy chatting up some strumpet.

Segovia cathedral, enormous edifice of sandy-coloured stone looms in front of us, and wonderful though it is, we decide that after our experiences in Toledo, it is perhaps better to enjoy it from the outside rather than enter and be fleeced by the Papists and suppressed by pedantic and constricting regulations.

So off we head to the opposite side of the citadel, heading for the splendid Alcazar, a fairytale castle built like the prow of a ship jutting out into space.

The Moors first built fortifications here in the twelfth century, but many of the fancy turrets were added considerably later. It pains me to say it, but word is that Walt Disney used it as a template, but don’t let that put you off, for it is an amazing place.

Inside, as well as a comprehensive collection of medieval armour and weapons, there is a museum of artillery and another concerning early astronomy. The castle itself still has strong ties with the military, as evidenced by the large group of uniformed cadets gathered outside who contained among their number a number of young ladies. I was unable to restrain myself from bursting into a mantra-like chant of “girls with guns, girls with guns” before being forced to desist by my embarrassed companion.

The upper levels of the Alcazar are full of chapels, royal apartments and lofty battlements, but the piece de resistance ( or it’s Spanish equivalent) is the central tower. After ascending a knackering and frankly dangerous stone staircase to the top, the views were stunning indeed, and a fine chance to get both the polarisation filter an the zoom lens working.

While all this camera nerding was taking place upstairs, my companion, who eschews all forms of physical exercise, inexplicably chose to hide at the bottom under the stairwell, where I later found her curled up asleep on the cold floor like a cat.

Choosing a restaurant was again a difficult and trying experience. Guide books are no use, since they tend to concentrate on the renowned and hence the expensive. It remains then to spot somewhere that has enough clients that you know it serves half decent grub, but in Spain it was inordinately problematic to do this since we could not figure out the correct time to eat. Rumour has it that the locals eat a late lunch, say between 2pm and 4pm, but in Segovia everywhere looked deserted.

In the end the place we chose, while reasonable, was too full of underemployed flunkies to be comfortable, and the palpable difference in service between us, the set menu cheapskates, and the Spanish family nearby gorging themselves like Kings, made the whole experience somewhat less than satisfactory. The food was shite, ‘n’ all!

However, this in no way dampened our spirits on what was a superb day out to a truley remarkable location, and once again, as we hurtled back to Madrid on the AVE, we could not but rue the shortness of the visit and the vast number of splendours left unseen…

September 9th

Another day set aside for art in Madrid, and this time it was the big one – the world-class Museo del Prado.

Now you might think that the sensible place to have a ticket counter would be at the main entrance, right? Not so at the Prado. After queueing for a while, and with no informative signposting anywhere, we were asked for our tickets. Er, well, we’d like to buy some, please. No, no, you have to do that at the other end of the building! So off we go, down to the other end, where there are two entirely different queues and again no helpful signs whatsoever, with bewildered folk milling around everywhere around randomly placed disinterested cops. Jesus!

Museo del Prado

Eventually we gain egress, and immediately forgive the Prado for its arcane and East German-like means of obtaining tickets, since the contents are overwhelming and will occupy us until the late evening.

The highlights for me were seeing my favourite painting of all time – yes, get ready to cringe in horror at my 18 year-old student bedsit tastes – Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights.”

Now, most folk like to concentrate on the right panel of this venerable triptych from 1500, you know, the bit where bird-headed demons are devouring men with crows flying out of their arses, people are shitting gold coins and oddly futuresque spacemen are groping young damsels.

I like this part too, but I as I approached the painting I sneaked in behind a guided tour and was amazed and enlightened by the exposition of the English-speaking leader.

See, the middle panel, the biggest part, represents the overindulgence of man after Eden, and as such is little more than a thinly-veiled orgy. There are threesomes, interracial couplings, people touching their private areas from which are bursting forth bunches of flowers or birds, and all manner of weird interaction with fantastical animals.

You are left wondering whether Bosch was really just seeking to warn people of the dangers of indulgence, or whether he just got his kicks from his own perverted inventions, a pornographer if you will.

Aside from a few other Bosches, the same room also held Brueghel’s “The Triumph of Death,” obviously greatly influenced by the former, and likewise revelling in the nastiness of the fantastical scenes it portrays, and a great and powerful work because of it.

Elsewhere I reacquainted myself with Goya, not only the dark images from the horrors of the Napoleonic Wars, but also his celebratedly frank, nay disrespectful portrait of the Spanish royal family, his employers.

In this masterpiece the King looks like a fat pin-headed freak with a big nose, while his wife resembles an ugly barmaid rather than a queen.

Elsewhere, one young lady is portrayed with her face turned completely away, and the royal Granny peers out from the back rows with a gigantic black excrescence on the side of her face, looking like a hideous witch.

Meanwhile, Goya lurks at the back. How on earth did he get away with such a monumental piss-take?

Velazquez outside the Prado

Velazquez – a nightmare to pronounce in lisping Castillian, and largely unknown to me until this trip. A master of capturing accurate facial expressions, his most famous work, prefiguring Goya’s liberties, chooses to reverse the normal perspective of a portrait, leaving us with Phillip II’s view of his daughters and court jesters messing around in the artist’s studio, with Velazquez himself in mid flow with the brush.

The King and Queen are reduced to a blurry image in a dirty mirror on the back wall. Revolutionary indeed.

Lunch was again in the gallery restaurant, where a fine tuna pie and rice salad were consumed with gallons of gazpacho and a beer.

Elsewhere in the restaurant we spotted an archetypal Japanese weirdo – a middle-aged man in unfashionable clothes, sitting bolt upright and muttering to himself.

In a satisfying reversal of what goes on in Japan, there was a wide circle of empty seats around him, despite the place being nearly full.

After leaving the Prado we proceeded to join the locals in the relaxing Retiro park, an enormous expanse of green in the city centre, featuring a boating lake in front of an imposing monument to some monarch or other.

I couldn’t resist making use of my zoom lens to capturing the expressions of the folk out in the little boats, but feeling somewhat uneasy at invading their privacy.

So if you notice your silly mug in the any of the shots displayed here, see you in court, baby!

(More images from this trip can be found here)

September 8th

An AVE train at Toledo Station

Up at the ungodly hour of 7am in order to get on the swish AVE high-speed train for the brief thirty-minute ride out to tourist trap and World Heritage Site Toledo.

As I marvelled at the splendour of the train and observed the scorched and arid countryside surrounding Madrid (where the hell do they get their water from?), I couldn’t help noticing the group of three fellow Brits seated nearby.

Well, the southern coast of Spain may well be a magnet for the lager louts and Sharons of the British Isles, but it is an entirely different type of Briton who goes to Toledo.

Brits in Spain

Let me introduce you to Piers. I know his name was Piers, because that’s what his two female companions called him. Late thirties, portly, wearing non-jeans and a red shirt shirt, notepad and pen tucked into the pocket, ruddy-cheeked countenance topped by an untidy mop of sandy hair and adorned with an unfashionable pair of spectacles whose lenses were caked with grime.

In his Oxfordian tones he boomed out obscure ecclesiastical facts while his cohorts nodded sagely, sometimes one or all of them noting things down in books with stubby pencils.

Now Piers may have had all the hallmarks of a nerd, but I have to say I rather admired him. Like so many of his background he was possessed of the kind of unshakeable self-confidence that I could only dream of.

No, Piers did not care a whit if others could hear his arcane expositions concerning the finer details of the Duke of Mantua’s heraldic crest (two crossed halibuts and a dentist’s drill), nor was he bothered about what others thought of his less-than fashionable attire.

A halibut

Piers – I salute you, man of conviction and steadfast purpose in the face of the fickle fashions of modernity!

Toledo’s setting is dramatic indeed – a medieval citadel perched atop a craggy outcrop, defended by steep ravines on all sides, and dominated by the imposing box-like Alcazar or castle and the giant cathedral.

We made straight for the latter after discovering that unfortunately the former was closed for renovation. Bloody typical.

Toledo's Alcazar

Now you might think that finding an enormous church visible from miles outside of the town would be easy, but Toledo’s streets are extremely narrow and winding, blocking practically any kind of visual clues from afar, but eventually we made it, sweating profusely in the 36C heat, and proceeded inside.

Toledo cathedral was not a pleasant experience for me. Normally I love wandering in a contemplative mood under the towering arches hoping for a glimpse of a large organ or two. However, this place is run by Nazis, it seems.

First up, there is an entrance fee. An entrance fee for a church? Outrageous! Then the draconian rules. Can I take photos? No. But I don’t use flash, I’m a ‘real‘ photgrapher. No. and take your hat off as well.

Unfortunately this just served to bring out the Anarchist in me, and my head was filled with violent anti-Catholic sentiment and images of certain acts from the Spanish Civil War as I loped awkwardly through the interior, which in all honesty, was far more interesting from the outside than within.

Pin 'n' Paella

For lunch we chose a popular sparrow-infested spot in the main square. Pin ordered the obligatory paella, while I thought I’d be adventurous and randomly picked three items from the menu. Well, the egg was well and truly on my face when they all turned out to be variations on the humble potato.

Next, a quest for an El Greco masterpiece hidden away in a little church called San Tome. Confidently taking the map, I managed to guide us to precisely the opposite end of the town, and we were only saved from eternal confustication by the kindly intervention of an elderly inhabitant who set us right.

El Greco - The Burial of Count Orgaz

By the time we’d located and viewed The Greek’s composition, it was getting late and so we had to forgo entrance to the two intriguing synagogues in the nearby Jewish quarter, and instead finish our visit to Toledo with a long walking tour around the town and then back to the station.

Hmm...which way?

It was during this pleasant peregrination around the city walls that I spied in the distance a strange line of shuffling beings clad in floppy hats, some holding aloft small parasols, some wielding large cameras, and all wearing spectacles. Out in front was a flag-bearing leader, ushering along her flock. Who were they? An obscure sect of mendicants on a pilgrimage? Closer inspection revealed the shocking truth – a Japanese tour group!!

Now to be honest, we were at this juncture lost again, and the time of our train was drawing near, so on a sudden inspiration I decided to tag along at the end of the tour group, sure in the knowledge that the guide would bring us back to civilisation. We moved through a tunnel under the town walls, and there, before us in gleaming steel and aluminium, was a set of outdoor escalators ascending up to the citadel. Yes, trust those lazy Japanese to home in on possibly the only such contrivance in the whole of Toledo! Anything but actually use your own feet to propel you forward!

Well, it got us back on track and we made it just in time for our train back to Madrid, so God bless them idle sons and daughters of Nippon.

(More photos of this trip can be found here).

September 7th

Up bright and early at 8am – which may not seem early to many, but trust me, when your holiday regimen consists of staying up composing techno music until 4:30am, it’s early.

I’m immediately greeted by a dose of Montezuma’s Revenge, but downing a couple of industrial strength Japanese creosote pills takes care of that.

Today has been earmarked for Madrid’s modern art gallery, the Reina Sofia. We find it easily enough near the wonderful Atocha rail station, housed in a grand nineteenth century building containing a stand of palm trees actually inside it.

Madrid's elegant Atocha train station

Near the museum we fortify ourselves with caffeine in Starbucks, which will be our only visit to that particular raper of third world nations during the whole trip. Much grubbier than its pristine Nippon-based counterparts, too, and we are disrupted by a young Spanish geek who is frantically searching the café for an electricity outlet so that he can charge his laptop. He even pulls out the sofa my Mrs is seated on in the hope of uncovering a socket, so to speak.

It is at this juncture that I begin to notice the prevalence of tattooing among the local populace. When I left Europe for Asia in the early 1990’s, tattooing was reserved for those with hard occupations or who were just hard: sailors, soldiers, bikers and criminals. It was a self-inflicted mark of Cain intended to demonstrate both membership of outsider groups and to prove one’s mettle by undergoing an irreversible process visible to all.

Is this sculpture from the Reina Sofia gallery is mocking your crap tattoos?

Nowadays, when I’m back in Europe, it is clearly the preserve of the mindless herd-following idiots, such is the currency of this ugly self-maiming. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that it is actually more of an act of rebellion now to not have a tattoo. Funniest of all are the middle-aged who try to get in on the act: chubby 40-something housewives with those stupid little things on their shoulders, or the balding old git in the art gallery who’d had done a huge swirly thing all over one arm. Ridiculous!

Love the weird perspective on this painting in the Reina Sofia gallery

So if tattooing is now the norm, how do the sailors and criminals of today show their outsider status? Answers on a postcard to…

The Reina Sofia art gallery was as good as we had imagined, and we ended up spending all day there, including taking lunch in the rather posh gallery restaurant.

Indeed, a tip for those visiting Spain would be to likewise make use of the cheap set menus available at lunchtime, which even include dessert and drinks. Lunch is apparently the biggest meal of the day, and ordering from the menu in the evening will set you back a small fortune, so best to fill your gut at midday, then indulge in the splendid holiday pastime of hotel room evening picnics, whereby one feasts on a variety of goodies from the local supermarket smuggled past the reception desk and consumed on the bed in front of the telly – paradise!

Pin, the consummate art critic, is not easily impressed...

The gallery restaurant was actually so posh they were doing a photo shoot with some famous bods at one end of it, while I, dishevelled and freshly bearded, shoved gentrified chicken and chips into my cakehole.

A nice touch in the gallery was that the taking of photos without flash was allowed, although there was an unpleasant incident at one point when some old American twat told an official that I had been using flash: obviously if some idiots cannot tell the difference between an AF auto-assist light and a flash, then we might as well all pack up and go home!

Some old biddies gawp at Picasso's 'Guernica'

The gallery, minimally represented by Spain’s modernist greats, Miro, Dali and Picasso, contained a wealth of pleasing work by artists I was hitherto unaware of. The centre piece, and indeed, the main attraction in Madrid period, is the aforementioned Pablo P’s Guernica, which is indeed stunning in the flesh. Hard to believe that this work was painted over seventy years ago, giving me the feeling that the term ‘modern‘ is somehow in need of an update.

By the time we left the gallery it was already evening, but still fiercely hot, so we retreated to the shade of the Botanical Gardens where we did revel in arboreal splendour and spot one mangy red squirrel.

An old friend spotted in Madrid's botanical gardens

Finally a walk up to the Plaza de Cybeles, a kind of huge roundabout circled by large ornate buildings in the heart of Madrid’s most affluent area.

Plaza de Cybeles

Preamble:

Spain at one time did not even register in my mind as a travel destination due to a long-held prejudice in which I believed it to be nothing but a haven for the lager louts of Europe on their beach package holidays (see Eric Idle’s superb monologue on this subject from nearly forty years ago in a Monty Python travel agent sketch,  or watch the current British comedy ‘Benidorm‘ which, perversely, I love).

For many people, this is Spain...

Anyway, by accident I found myself stranded on the Iberian peninsular one day in October 1989 with a fistful of dollars and unlimited time, due to circumstances too complicated to recount here. I ended up discovering that Spain’s interior was in fact replete with treasures on a par with any other European nation, even surpassing most, visiting Madrid, Seville and Granada.

Fast forward to 1997 and I returned, this time for a week-long stay in Barcelona as part of my honeymoon, no less, and once again I loved the place, made all the better by having a bird on me arm, a Cuban cigar in me gob, and finally enough dosh to stay in a plush pad and be able to afford to eat in restaurants.

Your humble author drops in on Salvador Dali, Figueres, Spain, 1997

I’d always wanted to return, knowing that there were plenty more delights to behold, and so it was that I returned this month to the Castillian heartlands for an all too brief jaunt , revisiting Madrid and acquainting myself for the first time with a trio of World Heritage listed towns in the shape of Toledo, Segovia and Salamanca.

September 5th – 6th

Friday night, in a psychosomatic high fever with snot flying out of my snout in buckets, I hastily book rail tickets on the web, negotiating labyrinthine Spanish sites and nearly coming to grief due to a crashing Firefox (thanks, Mr.Snow Leopard!).

Late Saturday, bullet train to Osaka, and overnight it on Turkish Airlines to Istanbul. Questions: how can a two-engined Airbus possibly carry enough fuel for the fourteen-hour flight? Why are the Turkish stewardesses so unfriendly?

Clandestine iPhone snap of approaching grumpy stewardess on Turkish Airlines

My strategy of showing up early at check-in pays off, and I am able to avoid deep vein thrombosis in the emergency exit seats. I contemplate donning a mask, either to stop me spreading my lurgee (kept in check my massive doses of Contac 500 which makes me feel like I’m floating two feet above the ground) or to prevent the egress of the lumps of H1N1 which must surely be floating around the cabin. However, I soon dispense with the idea and indeed the further from Japan we travel the fewer masks are in evidence, until in Europe they are nowhere to be seen. They may be effective in preventing sickos from flecking their sputum around, but apparently they don’t do jack to stop the incoming viruses who can just as easily crawl up your hand or form a chain and bungee jump down your earhole.

Istanbul airport – sadly no views of Hagia Sofia on the way in, we kill time buying huge boxes of Turkish Delight whilst observing the numerous pale Russian young men who are everywhere, interspersed among the throngs of Arabs. Honestly, dropping all notions of PC, is there an uglier language than Arabic anywhere on this planet? I doubt it. Those harsh gutterals make it hard to determine if they are trying to communicate or just coughing up phlegm.

Next flight to Madrid, and I try to watch a Turkish documentary about Gallipoli. It is atrociously subtitled, and soon debilitates into an exercise in nationalism and militaristic propaganda, not to mention a deification of Attaturk. And that’s why they can’t join the EU, along with a little matter of 1.5 million dead Armenian civilians.

At last, Madrid! Stinking, red-eyed and blotchy-skinned, my first sight of Spain is not auspicious: a shitty looking half-built airport terminal. While waiting at the baggage claim a drunken Russian does a projectile vomit all over his fellow travellers while a man with either burnt hands or leprosy asks my companion to light his cigarette in the smoking area.

Soon we are on the metro, tired and bewildered, expecting to be assaulted by gangs of Roma children at any minute (more non-PC – chill, it’s humour), but instead get treated to the sight of a sexy young South American lady pull out her large tit in full view of everyone and proffer it to her progeny. Japan this is not, and it takes some adjusting to get into the European way of things.

The Suites Viena Hotel near the Plaza de España is wonderful. Warm friendly receptionists give us an enormous modern room complete with its own kitchen and microwave oven. This is quite possibly the largest hotel room I’ve ever stayed in, and the price is good too.

Hotel Suites Viena, Madrid

By now it is late afternoon, and though tired, we feel duty-bound to go out for an exploratory stroll. We head down to the nearby Palacio Real and its attendant Sabatini gardens, all bobbly trees, hedges and fountains, very nice indeed. However, the heat is astonishing in its ferocity – at 6pm it is still scorching hot, in the upper 30’s C, and we are shamefacedly forced to seek out giant buckets of liquid refreshment in that traditionally Spanish hostelry known as Burger King.

Next we climp up to Plaza del Sol, a transport hub and centre of old Bourbon Madrid, which leads us to the Plaza Mayor, an ornate square formerly the site of bullfights, executions and the odd bit of inquisition torture.

Madrid's Plaza Mayor

None of these sights are overwhelming in their beauty, and I reassure my companion that while Madrid is no Paris, the surrounding towns of old Castille and the city’s art treasures will more than make up for the Spanish capital’s slightly worn appearance.

(The full set of photos from this trip can be found here).

OK, that was some crappy jazz album by Miles Davis, but now that I have your attention, I’ve just posted an amazing 143 quality pictures of my recent trip to the Iberian peninsular on my website. We ain’t talking shots of lager louts throwing up in Benidorm, no, we’re taling about artistic images of old Castille: Madrid, Toledo, Segovia and Salamanca.

Click here to get the goods.

Has there ever been a computer operating system upgrade that did not in some way monkey with your settings and generally screw things up?

Apple launched the 10.6 version of its operating system three days ago, and like a true geek I immediately went out and bought it.

"I've come to monkey with your system..."

Now here’s the good news – it only cost about $30, the disc is multilingual and also contains a full version of the operating system, not just the new bits, and the installation was painless, requiring neither product key nor authentication.

Compared with the crap you have to put up with when dealing with Microsoft this is all very refreshing. You are trusted and not automatically assumed to be a criminal.

Now the bad: well, nothing on the scale of past Windows disasters and nightmares, but why can they not produce an upgrade which leaves your settings alone?

Most people like to personalise their machines and have them set up in ways which suit their usage, and after a couple of years that’s a pretty intricate network of customisations, the upsetting of which can be very vexing indeed.

So, Snow Leopard. What has this beast done to offend me? Two small but annoying things, and one big pain in the arse.

This cat has had its paws in the display settings. Starting up Firefox, the letters have all gone tiny, a serious problem if your eyesight is as bad as mine. Sounds like a snap to remedy, huh? No! I go into the preferences and simply increase the size of the fonts, but this just causes a weird pattern of behaviour in which the pages start out with tiny letters, then suddenly shift to the bigger ones and vice versa, for no apparent reason. Annoying as hell!

Next up, upon booting up the big cat for the first time I notice that the screen looks incredibly dull and dark. Finding the brightness control, I see that it’s reset itself to the minimum. Fine, I can just bring up the brightness level, but no setting looks right, and I can’t remember where I had it previously. Why did they have to monkey with it?

"I've come to Snow Leopard with your system..."

Even worse, but probably something I can get used to, is the fact that the colours look all wrong. Everything is darker. Somewhere deep down in the list of changes on the Apple website they mumble something about changing the gamma settings for the displays. Well, thanks a bundle, it was fine as it was!

Now the big weakness of the Mac, for me at least, is that it has been so stable and hassle-free over the last couple of years that I’ve never had to learn how to go into the guts of the beast to tweak things. Windows was so totally crap that you had to do this all the time so that it became second nature, but now I’m at a loss in this respect.

Europa Universalis III

The big annoyance is a very Microsoft-ish one: my favourite game, Europa Universalis 3, no longer works!!! This game has been my salvation over the last few months, and is vital to my existence. OK, this might not seem like such a big deal, but see, most niche games don’t get the luxury of a Mac version, so this is a rarity indeed. Doubtless the company behind the port will eventually put out a patch, but still, a junkie needs his fix, right?

OK, so apart from these issues everything else is working fine, but the question I find myself asking is what was the point of this upgrade? The hype has it that it is more of an underlying code rewrite aimed at speed and efficiency than a feature-packed bonanza. Well, in all honesty I haven’t noticed any differences in speed at all, and the only new features in evidence are a slight change to some minor aspects of the interface and an updated version of the video player Quicktime, which appears to be just as useless as its predecessor (get the infinitely better freeware VLC player for all your video needs, folks).

So there we have it – an utterly pointless upgrade from my point of view, and one with annoying issues which make me wish I’d never installed it.

And guess what – you can’t uninstall it, once it’s on (not without freshly installing the previous OS, anyway).

So, if you’re thinking of upgrading, first check the lists of incompatible software that are around, and perhaps hold off until the problems have been ironed out, since it looks as if us early adoptors are going to be doing the beta testing for Apple.

H.P.LOVECRAFT – ‘THE CALL OF CTHULHU AND OTHER WEIRD STORIES’ (1999)

This, the third volume of Lovecraft’s horror stories in Penguin Classics I have read, continues in much the same vein as the previous two.

This selection, ranging from short pieces barely ten pages long to works which might be classified as novellas, exemplifies the Lovecraftian world in which Earth is the sole outpost of sanity in a chaotic universe which constantly threatens to break in and wreak havoc.

Lovecraft, active in the early twentieth century, can be said to have transformed the writing of horror, replacing the ghosts of Poe with a more cosmic terror in the form of mysterious ‘elders‘ who lurk in the background of our normal world.

Most stories are set in his native New England, focussing on decayed and crumbling rural communities hiding vile secrets, and as in all of the best exponents of the horror genre, it is not upfront gore and violence which serve to instill fear in the reader, but the slow build ups, often conveying a sense of dread and menace which always seems to be just out of sight.

By far the most successful in this respect are the two longer pieces ‘The Whisperer in the Dark‘ and ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth.’

The latter concerns an ill-advised trip to a secretive town shunned by the outside world, a decaying stinking place where the sparse and sullen inhabitants all have an oddly disquieting cast and where the local churches seem to have forsaken Christianity for something older and altogether more vile.

The 'Innsmouth Look' - reminds me of a few people I know...

Lovecraft’s skill in racking up the tension before the cataclysmic denouement is masterful, and reading this tale alone late at night is as inadvisable as a visit to Innsmouth itself.

Highly recommended for those who like something a little more cerebral than the usual stock horror fare.

JEAN-DOMINIQUE BAUBY – “THE BUTTERFLY AND THE DIVING BELL” (1996)

This slim volume was initially chosen by someone other than myself as material for an ill-fated book club. Since the acrimonious demise of that enterprise, the book has lain unregarded on my shelf, unfairly dismissed as being a representative of all that is wrong with book clubs (being forced to read books you wouldn’t have otherwise chosen).

A few days ago I decided to give it a go, partly since it was such a short work, and partly just to be shot of it.

I’m glad I did, although it is far from light reading.

The author, Jean-Dominique Bauby, was an editor for ‘Elle‘ magazine before being suddenly struck down in 1995 by a massive stroke which left him ‘locked in’, a rare condition in which the brain is trapped in a virtually inert body, the diving bell of the title.

Mr.Bauby in his prime

Trying to comprehend how it must feel to be in such a state is something most of us would rather avoid, and yet Bauby took it upon himself to tell us his awful reality.

Amazingly, he composed an edited the book in his head, dictating it to a scribe by the only means of movement available to him – blinking one eye.

Imagine the painstaking task of having your scribe run through the letters of the alphabet in order of frequency of usage, then blinking at the one you require, building up words and sentences letter by laborious letter.

The remarkable result is not a maudlin tale of woe and self-pity, though it is painfully sad, particularly as the author died of pneumonia a few days after publication, but rather is a testament to the human spirit and a valuable reminder that those who are robbed of their communicative faculties are not simpletons to be patted on the head and patronised, or avoided as subhumans.

Bauby’s clear and necessarily concise writing details his day to day existence in the hospital, the interactions (or lack thereof) with friends, family and staff, interwoven with memories from his earlier life.

I’ll not deny that I would never have chosen this book myself, but I am glad to have read it, distressing and painful though it is (I do not find much uplifting in it as other critics seem to), as it is a most moving and insightful work that rightfully derserves its acclaim.