Living in Dalston, in north-east London, means you end up a long way from a lot of things. Above all, from north-west London.
In Dalston, gravestone-white is the predominant colour. Day or night, you walk around in a living cemetery. At 9am, the streets are populated by a bustling crowd, many taking the bus or heading for the overground station, café latte in hand. Others wander around the market or take out cash from an ATM. Few people stay at home at 9am on a Tuesday. But my friend does.
Tapping through my Spanish language app, I think how different it was for you, all those Christmases ago in the early sixties. We talked about it once in your first-floor kitchen as the steam condensed on the window in nonsense patterns I couldn’t read, mottling and screening the garden outside.
How do you feel about sharing your home with a stranger? To some people this is an odd, if not downright scary, idea. How can you know they are not an axe-wielding murderer? Of course you can never be one hundred percent sure, but I think it is fairly unlikely; when I was growing up, we always had lodgers from abroad in our house, and so far I have lived to tell the tale.
The party started out as a session of good, and somewhat gay, Spanish music for a small audience made up mostly of Spanish gay men and lesbians living in the capital. But the music started attracting more and more people, mostly Spaniards, who then brought their British friends with them and others from all over the world.
There is no poet, outside his poetry. Never. Other voices, other incarnations may exist alongside the poet, in conflict with him, but the poet without his flesh, the flesh of his poetry, does not exist. And so his existence is not real; not composed of biographical facts. Facts are alien to poetry. And what transcends a poem is its own life, one that is new and different and almost without certainty. It is a sign. No biographical information alone can explain the poem’s existence, unless it too is of poetic fact.
I tend to think stupid things at night. Sometimes they’re so ridiculous that I can’t stop myself laughing out loud. It’s serious, I’m a head case. I live in London, and so it’s in this city that I sleep. In a double bed, too much of a double, so much so that it causes confusion. Especially for me. Take last night, when I greeted the person that wasn’t there, and yet who could have been. “Hello, my love,” I said.
So, what is Christmas like in England? Is it similar to how we do it in Spain? And how do the Spanish festivities match up to those of our European neighbours?
It is no coincidence that London’s Somerset House should have chosen the figure of Ferran Adrià to define “The Art of Food”. But we do have to ask ourselves who really chose whom. Two years after closing elBulli, Adrià – our world famous icon of gastronomy – is still an international benchmark of culinary creativity and research, whilst Somerset house, with its spectacular neo-classical building in the heart of London has attracted over 2.5 million visitors every year since its opening in 2000. It’s a perfect partnership which is joined by Estrella Damm and the Instituto Ramón Llull, an organisation internationally recognised for promoting Catalan language and culture.
Luis Cernuda runs away from Spain during the war and arrives in England from France. It will be a stay of nine years in the country (1938-1947). Time during which Cernuda reach his final adult voice. Physical space (we could differentiate between the geographical and mythical) and the feeling of a loss bound will be consolidated in his poetry.
Hello, everybody, and welcome to Brit-es.com. The relationship between Spain and Great Britain is as remote as the most ancient nation-states in Europe. We should really talk about Portugal, Castile and England (and let us not forget Galicia, the great loser in Iberian-British History). I would recommend reading Atkinson’s classic, A History of Spain and Portugal, where it was all clearly explained sixty years ago.