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Before going to Venice, at the beginning of October, I was invited to observe a group of women throwing 1,000 pullet eggs at a huge canvas, organised by Sarah Lucas at the T. J. Boulting Gallery to create Sarah’s piece ‘1000 Eggs: For Women’, the key work of a group show called Un Oeuf Is Un Oeuf, (I’m sure you get it). My friend Hannah, who owns the gallery, intimated that it would be okay for me to throw one as it was open to ‘women, those who identify as women, and men dressed as women,’ but as I didn’t fit any of those categories I felt it would be improper to take part.
However, my friend Marsha Rowe was staying overnight, and she was a perfect participant. I introduced her to Sarah and Hannah as the co-founder of Spare Rib, Europe’s first Feminist magazine, and the co-founder of Virago Press, which began life as Spare Rib Books. Her Feminist credentials were therefore impeccable. They were delighted to meet her, and she threw a few eggs. Here’s the action, the result, and Hannah keeping a careful record of the participants.
I had not seen my friend Maribel for six months, when she visited London, so I arranged to visit her at her new home in Andalucía. After a decade in London she finally realised that, much as she liked her friends in London, she missed the wonderful food of the South of Spain and the huge, wide beaches of Terifa too much and bought a house in Algeciras. I was naturally reminded of William Burroughs, who, on being asked by British Customs and Immigration the reason for his visit replied, deadpan, ‘I come to Britain for the climate and for the food.’
I first visited Maribel at her new house in November of last year [see my December 2023 Blog] and was interested to see how much work on it she had done. When I was there before there was no stove, no fridge, no electricity in most of the house, and so-on. Now she had painted the place and had a fully functioning kitchen, comfy living room, worktable and power. It had been transformed.
This time I flew into Gibraltar, which is just across the bay from Algeciras, and dominates the skyline whenever you look towards Africa. I had checked the Wunderground weather forecast and was only slightly dismayed to see that rain was predicted for all eight days of my visit. But the point was not to sight-see, I’d done that, but to catch up with Maribel.
Unless he’d been travelling, my old friend Hoppy would drive out to the North Downs about once a month to ‘stretch his eyes’. It seemed good advice to me, and though it was not long since I stared out across the Venetian Lagoon, it was not actually raining so we went down to the sea at Tarifa. To my mind, the Atlantic is always grey as opposed to the Med which is Le Grand Bleu, and today it lived up to expectations. But it is still magnificent, with dozens of container ships at anchor offshore, awaiting their berth at Algeciras’s huge container port. The beach, with low cloud, was even more impressive in the grey light, with no people, much as it has been since the Strait was opened millions of years ago. I love it.
In Venice, I had been in a hotel and so unable to cook, whereas now I had access to a kitchen. Not that I did much, but buying food is always a good way to get to know a place. The first thing, of course, was to buy a good selection of wine, mostly Rioja, some local. I couldn’t find any Bobal, which I’d hoped for as it’s hard to find in London. I made stuffed squid one night and duck breasts another, both bought from Hipercor, part of the huge El Corte Inglés supermarket chain rather than from an open air market because I didn’t want to carry shopping to the car in the rain. (If El Corte Inglés actually had branches in England I would shop there all the time; as usual in continental Europe, the food far surpasses anything I’ve ever seen in Britain, and that includes Fortnum’s, Harrods and Selfridges, but they, oddly, have very small food halls in comparison. Of course it is much cheaper than them, it’s the biggest chain store in Europe, third biggest in the world, though by Spanish standards Hipercor is upscale.)
Algeciras is a small town – about 150k – but acts as the shopping centre for a large area including some very rich communities. I’m getting to know the old town centre which has some very good bars and restaurants. Maribel took me to the famous Bar Casa Pepe for tapas, which moved a few years ago to an unassuming new residential area so most of the thousand pictures on the net are out of date. The food is superb and very cheap with most items in the 2,00 to 2,80 euro range. I like the town, it is working-class, in no way touristy, but friendly and with a few nice features: the Plaza Alta, a pleasant town square with palm trees, where all the seats are made from elaborate tiles. It is surrounded by pedestrianised streets filled with outdoor restaurants and bars. A section of the old Marinid town walls, and pre-1342 Islamic constructions of an uncertain date have been excavated near the centre of town. Next to them is a delightful little park filled with gigantic trees. This was all in strong contrast to Venice, one of the most beautiful places on earth, a stage-set where every view is a picture postcard, where I had been only 10 days before, but there is a calm, Mediterranean quality about Algeciras that I find very pleasant and relaxing, and the complete lack of tourists helps. I, of course, am a visitor.
Algeciras is surrounded by a national park and it only takes a few minutes’ drive to find yourself in an area of incredible natural beauty. Bird watchers holiday here to observe the flight path of birds migrating to Africa, in some parts every electricity pole is topped by a huge spikey stork nest, usually with a stork in it standing guard, kestrels circle overhead, and then there is the beach: a huge wide stretch of sand reaching 20 k up the coast from Terifa, mostly completely wild but with windsurfers and kite flyers as well as beach bars and restaurants set among the pines. This was why Maribel returned here from London and I can see why as even in cloudy stormy conditions it is spectacular. I am not much of a countryside-lover but I do enjoy walking along a beach, and I love even more sitting at a beach bar, looking out to sea and people watching.
On November 4th I was the ‘keynote’ speaker for an online symposium from the Global Blake Network. The subject was ‘Musical Afterlives – exploring musical settings of Blake’s poetry and his inspiration & classical & popular artists.’ I was involved because back in 1969 I produced an album of Allen Ginsberg singing Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience that was released by MGM Records. My friend Camila Oliveira interviewed me via Zoom, she in Lisbon, me in Algeciras. In preparation, back in London, I had made rather a fuss about using Zoom, which I had never before seen or attempted to use as it turned out that my computer was too old to use it. My son fixed it so that I could use my phone, but on the day Maribel soon set me straight as she uses it all the time and connected me to the conference on her laptop in seconds.
Situated in the National Forest are occasional country houses, now used as hotel, owned by the government of Cadiz but leased out each year. In one we ate in a huge airy room looking out over the forest. We both had locally shot venison in a chocolate and chestnut sauce with a nice rioja. Extremely rich, extremely good, and extremely cheap. As you see, we each had a serious portion of meat.
On a nice day we took a walk in the Parque del Centenario, created to celebrate the millennium but neglected ever since. The headland looks straight across the bay to Gibraltar. There are the ruins of two forts there, built to guard against the British in Gibraltar, the Brits referred to as ‘the enemy’ in the information panels, but now little more than ruins.
As usual the bay was filled with container ships waiting to enter the port of Algeciras. About three million containers a year pass through the port, for transhipment, transfer to smaller ships, or for EU markets. Who knows what is in most of them? They cannot scan them all. The month I was there, October, 13 tons of cocaine arrived from Guayaquil in Ecuador hidden in crates of bananas, ‘one of the largest seizures in the world’. That’s a lot of Charlie. It led to the arrest of Oscar Sánchez Gil, head of the fraud and anti-money laundering division of Spain’s national police force in Madrid. When they raised his home they found twenty million euros in cash hidden in his walls.
I was encouraged to see a fair amount of pro-Palestine graffiti in Algeciras (as well as in Venice), showing that the people recognise Israeli genocide even if the politicians don’t. One good example showed the slice of watermelon, used when the Israeli government banned them from using their flag – the watermelon has the same colours. (Note the flag on the roof).
Then, sadly, it was time to go. But there was one last surprise. As soon as you cross over from Spain to Gibraltar, there is a huge branch of Waitrose. This was something I really didn’t expect. If only my local branch stocked what they have there. It would make life so much easier.
