under cover of fog and forget

[More old...]

A man and dog hug the shade by a whitewashed wall. The dog, a little unsteady in the heat, moves slowly through the weeds and parched wildflowers of the gravely field edge. When the bus from the city announces its arrival with swirling dust devils and a squash of tyres on tarmac, the man whistles, and walks forward with hands in pockets.
In the late May sun, Chipiona bus station bakes on one of those expanses of scrub dotted between unlovely half-built developments that are modern Andalusia’s response to the tumbledown Roman aqueduct, the stork-topped mudejar tower and the whitewashed brick wreckage of a thousand years’ weathered housing stock. Under the concrete canopy, teenagers thump down fold-out stairs first, eyeing each other in white denim, strappy tops, baggy shorts and baseball caps. As the last pensioner stiffly descends, man and dog look on, before he turns away, shaking his head, still whistling. The dog follows, pattering always in whatever shade can be found, headed somewhere lazier.

We walk past a T-junction, where local scooter girls wait, glancing at the incoming city talent before puttering towards the sea, ask directions to the beach, and are pointed to a bleached unfinished road between low-rise buildings. It’s not so easy. Three beaches fold around this town – the squint against the wind and you’d miss it Las Canteras, the short, scruffy-dog-loveable Cruz del Mar, mostly shored up behind ancient and murky fish pens, and the longer La Regla, backed with cheap hotels painted brightly, optimistically, against the Atlantic wind. The lighthouse, Spain’s tallest, gives a sense of the dangers of this coast of waves, wind and currents, though today the ocean seems too sunbeaten to work at the rocks. Down where the tired rollers trundle to a halt, a boy, no more than ten, tanned and sure-footed, with curling toes gripping the slimy surface, is fishing from the breakwater. He stares at the sea, accusingly, as if his were the only baited hook on the whole Atlantic coast. He’s caught nothing all day. Turn the corner, beyond the lighthouse, and the beach curves away, at the point where the town loses conviction, to the church of Nuestra Senora de la Regla. There, a black madonna statue blesses those who wrestle trawlers and lilos alike. More of the latter, these days.

Along the seafront, in front of the overspill of the cafes and bars, a girl in a communion dress walks on the very edge of the pavement, itching to get on the sand; others are plain itching, as the coarse sand peppers oiled skin in the gusty wind. Over the low seawall, a grandad in a sailor hat fusses round children who work diligently on sandcastle extensions, and a brother-on-brother penalty shootout goes into sudden death. Urgency has put its feet up and is sipping a spritzer in the shade.

It’s an easy kind of pleasure to sit, feet in sand, outside a bar seemingly airfixed together from plastic weatherboarding, watching the comings and goings, and listening to weekending Sevillanos dispute the merits of the city’s two football clubs in characteristically belligerent tones. This corner of Cádiz province lies at the end of a blessedly air-conditioned bus route from the swelter of summer in the Andaluz capital, and a jostle of down-for-the-day teenagers, squabbling families and shuffling retirees bears out the attraction of this ventilated coast for those in the airless interior. They come to stretch out, to sprawl on the beach in bikinis and heels, or muffintopped swimshorts, and to eat and drink. Whilst the former tuna-fishing villages skewered on the silver coastline to Tarifa have a surfy, international flavour, this end of the Costa de la Luz remains marinated in sherry. Sanlucar, just ten kilometres away, is the home of manzanilla, the lightest grade of the sherry bodegas’ product, with a salty tang and a fresh, slightly oily taste well suited to the spit-and-seaweed ambience. Chalked up on a hundred blackboards, food is simple, and tailored to the local obsession with the brisk transfer of catch to bubbling oil – fried anchovies, hake and cuttlefish, shrimp fritters, battered cod, battered prawns, battered batter.

IIn the backstreets of the old town, the church square hides a Cruz de Mayo, one of the lower-key Andalusian mergings of God and the bottle. The cross itself is elegantly dressed with vines, and flowers, in a dinghy washed up on a beach of petals. The action is at the temporary bar, where a flamenco-dressed matron spins with enthusiasm to piped sevillanas, her heavy steps watched by a small crowd, syncopated clapping echoing around the plaza. Nearby, lovers recline under the shade of a palm, in front of the wedding cake church, decked with bougainvillaea. It’s a moment of distilled Andalusia, a drop or two of oily beauty. But even this seems too earnest for Chipiona. It’s a bucket and spade kind of place, unfussy, unstuffy and, with only a narrowing of eyes, a babelfish in the ear, and a broken thermometer, it could be anywhere on the more windswept coasts of England, complete with the steamy tang of fried fish, the rattle of one-armed bandits and the spillage of plastic cup punters onto promenades.

growls at strangers

The Sevilla Foto festival is all over most of the Alameda and a good bite of the rest of the city. I’m particularly enjoying the Foto Rutas collective exhibition. There’s something oddly pleasing in seeing familiar shop windows embellished with some excellent photos.

six kinds of thankless

[more prefabbed travel guff no one wants. See how I can write in a style I really don't like]

Pick an Andalusian town, any Andalusian town. Given luck, you’ll find a crumbling Moorish castle, a crop of wonderful churches, some palaces, patios, the last trappings of mediaeval Christianity and more bars than can possibly be sustained by anything other than the inhabitants’ impressive commitment to the good things in life.

Luckier still and it will be Carmona casually ticking off the checklist and asking if you’d like fries. A romantically derelict Alcazar, a flush of fine churches, a shady main square, bars, restaurants and a handful of hotels are all here, but what makes Carmona special is the box-set succession from Neolithic remains, through Carthaginian, Roman, Moorish, and Renaissance styles, right through to the mouldering art nouveau of the Cerezo Theatre.

Arriving at siesta time, there’s little to do but wander the streets and wait for the town to open like a jetlagged flower; it’s the kind of sleeping beauty Andalusia does so well, away from the crowded coasts and cities – a music box tinkle to Seville’s brassy blare. Even by local standards (nearby Écija is another outcrop of perfection on the dusty plain), this small town is crammed with unregarded masterpieces alongside the picturesque decay of a thousand years of housing stock. As everywhere in the province, ancient churches are scarred with the blocked doorways and windows of social and ecclesiastical change – patches on patches, mortar on rubble. There’s quiet splendour in the delicate plasterwork on the library, the palatial houses in the centre of town, the domes and courtyards, and the shapes and textures of innumerable balconies and doors.

A fair walk outside the town walls through the colossal Puerta de Sevilla is the Necropolis, where, in the late 19th century, hundreds of burials of the more well-to-do citizens of Roman Carmo were uncovered. It’s a little spooky descending into a mausoleum in the silence of off-season solitude, starting at the scuttle of a lizard and checking nervously over your shoulder. While none of the tombs offer any Tutankhamun moments, this is an atmospheric place, and a surprising glimpse of just what a substantial town this was in the days when Baetica was one of the richest provinces in the Empire. Further Roman survivals are the amphitheatre across the road and, in the old town, the restored Puerta de Cordoba where the city walls spill on to the broad plain, now, as when first built, awash with grain.

Skipping forward a few hundred years, the Alcazar is as uncompromising a pile as you’ll find, though part-transformed into an elegant parador (with prices to match), looking out across the plain with well-heeled grace. This kind of reinterpretation is nothing new, as the town’s Mudéjar belltowers show – here, as elsewhere, the Reconquest subsumed and transformed, working on anything but a blank slate. San Pedro’s Giralda-Lite form and the convents of Santa Maria de Gracia and the Convento de las Descalzas (a beauty and the beast pairing) are highlights, but there are too many churches in the town for anything other than bewilderment at past social priorities. Also worth looking out for is the Iglesia del Salvador, its tower seemingly snapped off like a cone under the weight of the ice cream dome. It was never finished.

On the secular side, the old town’s main plaza is surrounded by elegant buildings, with the disintegrating Moorish Revival façade of Bar Goya the standout – and the food’s not bad either. Most of the bars serve up a blackboard of Andaluz favourites; so far from the ports, land wins out over sea, and ham, grilled pork and pulses are to the fore. This time of day it’s strictly for tourists. The locals are elsewhere: perhaps in Bodega Jose Mari (opposite the market square) where fragments of Roman columns support the doorway and a rough chalk scrawl proudly proclaims the first of the year’s mosto. Sadly, before I have time to sample more than a glass or two of what’s on offer, it’s time for the bus back to the city. Though, Seville being Seville, that’s not such a hardship.

like link wray gone uke

“The wigs of lawyers could hardly acquire their modern significance until other people stopped wearing wigs”
Eric Hobsbawm. The Invention of Tradition.

I’m not sure what to make of the Rocio pilgrimage (link with a great old photo). It’s a revealingly Andaluz spectacle, with casual stapling of scraps of what people really want to do (travel and camp with friends, drink, get dressed up) to a religious manilla folder of devotion and faith-based healthcare.
More on this when I’m able, but for now it brings one of those clifftop gulps to think how we got to here, where an ox in the city streets is a miracle and a news helicopter is unregarded background.

and where would we all be then?

‘Crushed stone is one of the unappreciated marvels of modern industrial society.’
Brian Hayes- Infrastructure.

I like innards. Not innards which come attached to lymph nodes, mucous membranes and other horrors, but systems innards, whether technological or organisational. For whatever reason of first or second nature, the noodle-unravelling of systems thinking comes pleasurably to me. I can accept, but can’t really understand how, there are people wandering the blacktopped streets of this or any city that have no interest in why crushed stone is one of the underappreciated marvels of modern industrial society, how it connects to things that aren’t crushed stone, and why it might matter to us, and our generous ecosystem.

mister fifty fifty

broken geometry so

we can maybe have tea sometime

This is an old one, which no one else likes. It´s from the Alcazar, a couple of years back – the first time I came to Seville.

just find the loneliest street in town

One of my favourite scientific writers for making myself feel simultaneously very clever and very dim is Douglas Hofstadter, and one of my very favourite bits of Douglas Hofstadter musing is on understanding analogies, from this geeky collection.

Formal analogies are a fundamental mode of thought, often useful, more often useless but entertaining. The basis of an analogy is the suggestion of a relationship which can be strongly mapped on to a new situation, so X is to Y as A is to B. Or is it? The act of forming an analogy relies on selecting which characteristics to compare. And difference being difference, mappings are always partial and imperfect.

Hofstadter devotes some time to how we choose, from among the infinite possible analogies in a [link]domain, something which seems to work. For example, to slightly twist the earlier example,
B is to C as Y is to?

The ‘correct’ answer here will depend on what, somewhat arbitrarily, we decide is the most important characteristic of the relation. The first two possibilities relate to position in the alphabet. The first (as Y is to Z) considers translation of relative position most important; the second (as Y is to X) considers reflection of relative position most important. Even ignoring outlandish analogies, and sticking to answers involving one letter, there are many other valid possibilities, for instance in the domains of sound, relative frequency (e.g. B is ranked eight positions below C in an English letter frequency chart, Y is ranked eight positions below D), letter forms (e.g. A and B have a central horizontal line. Y has a central vertical line, so perhaps T would be appropriate), and so forth. Some of these seem more valid than others, and that tells us something about the relative strength of characteristics and relationships, and what we consider intelligent in this area.

When we start to go beyond formal realms, into natural language applied to a world made of more than words, things get more complicated – for example, remember those dark times when Dennis Thatcher was the First Lady of Britain. The mapping is imperfect, though this is, of course, what gives the statement its kick. A perfect mapping is either not worthy of mention, or so drab as to lose any entertainment value. For something more stimulating, the best we can hope for is that something feels right somehow.

What does will depend on what those sharing the analogy consider essential in the domain selected, and how far we are prepared stretch the mapping. Analogies (and their kissing cousin, metaphors) start to deform destructively taken beyond their elastic limit.

This ungainly preamble is edging towards a rash statement, essayed in the park after a bottle and some of cheap rosado, whereby I claimed, as several times before, that, in some ways, Seville is the Glasgow of Spain. It’s not, but why might the analogy seem to work? What context would make it seem valid?

Here, the conversation was about food, and specifically fried food. As in the home of the Glasgow salad, fried potatoes (here what speakers of British English call crisps, and of North American English chips) often accompany something equally beneficial to cardiac function. Oh, and there’s also accent. The Seville accent is thick and earthy, and the language diced into short sentences often spiked with the Spanish equivalent of four-letter words.

On these terms, perhaps Cádiz of Andaluz cities maps better onto Glasgow, with an equal or greater commitment to batter and banter, and an even more impenetrable accent. Which might leave Liverpool, Newcastle or Bristol as a better mirror-image of Seville. Somehow it seemed important to pick a port (Seville was for a time the major port to the Americas and the second city of the Spanish empire), somewhere renowned as lively or spirited (in no way is Seville the Hull of Spain) and somewhere with a unique take on the language (though not a different language – Seville isn’t the Swansea of Spain; Bilbao or A Coruña might be, in this domain). Though, of course, it’s not important at all.

[And by way of relief after 700 words of that, here's a photo]

something tells me I’ve not been told

Summer seems to be here again. The jacarandas think so, anyway.

if I talked about the old times

[...and the last section. All this has reminded me that I really ought to join Liberty again]

“Lawrence Looi, 31, who has been a staff photographer with news agency News Team for the last three years, had been sent to cover a protest on public roads outside the International Conference Centre on Thursday morning when he was approached by a police constable who objected to having been photographed…Looi says he was then approached by a police sergeant who asked to view the photographs taken. Looi agreed to this, but refused a request from the sergeant for any photographs which showed identifiable police officers to be deleted…When Looi refused, the complaint says: “[the police sergeant] then threatened to take my camera from me to delete the photographs, to quote…‘Do it or I’ll do it myself’. He then grabbed hold of my camera with the intention of doing so”

In many situation there is at least a theoretical risk of tripping over one of those shin-high laws against ungentlemanly conduct, the non-application of which relies on the courts throwing out the odd sniggerworthy case to encourage the inherent decency of those who enforce them. Photographers have reportedly been pulled for ‘causing an obstruction’, ‘behaviour likely to lead to a breach of the peace’ (a good nebulous one, this) or any of a number of the nasty restrictions on the right of assembly and movement dating from the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 and afterwards. It’s much harder to find convictions on these, but the threat of arrest (recorded, potentially recoverable from police records), a caution (ditto), or just a general belief that the police can do anything more than politely request that a photographer desist, may lead many natural cowards – step backward me – to put away the lens and politely thank the officer most kindly for his or her forbearance. Unfortunately, police (who are, let’s not forget, just as likely to be incompetent, potentially malicious, and out for an easy life as the rest of us), PCSOs and private security guards (who are, etc.) are not particularly likely to know the relevant laws, and may be willing to make claims unsupported by any likely court interpretation. Add in stop and search on suspicion of almost anything (including any number of offences under the Terrorism Act 2000), and the odd bit of alleged off-the-books manhandling, and it’s not entirely surprising that blower brushes are being squeezed nervously.

Besides the usual array of catch-alls for causing mild nuisance to a person in authority, photographers may also have to deal with specific claims based on two good things – privacy and child protection.

On privacy, this neat guide by Liberty has some interesting material. See particularly the discussion of media and privacy and the public interest.

On child protection – it’s neither illegal to photograph children without parental consent, nor to publish pictures of children without permission. Print and broadcast media in the Uk periodically swing towards compliance with codes of conduct (voluntary for press, potentially enforced by Ofcom/BBC governors for broadcast) that may stop them publishing some pictures some of the time without consent, until somebody else does. At the risk of being sucked into that cultural plughole where lurk the kind of horrors Phil Collins so kindly warned us about, I’ll at some point try to justify taking so many pictures of children. But more of that later. Legally there’s no reason not to, assuming it’s not pornographic or otherwise obscene(and I’m happy to leave that to the courts to interpret). Most of those ‘parents banned from taking pictures at watered-down nativity play – what is the world coming to?‘ stories will be down to jumpy schools interpreting their duty of care excessively. The same may go for private or voluntary organisations supervising children in a public place, and which may not take kindly to cameras mostly through fear of parental, rather than legal, censure. There are other situations where photography might be legal but potentially highly negligent e.g. identifiable child+name+separation+possessive dispossessed parent. Otherwise, while it’s clearly sometimes better not to, you can.

“There is no legal restriction on photography in public places and there is no presumption of privacy for individuals in a public place. It is for the Chief Constable to ensure that officers and PCSOs are acting appropriately with regards to photography in public places and any queries regarding this should be addressed to the Chief Constable. However decisions may be made locally to restrict photography, for example to protect children. Any questions on such local decisions should be addressed to the force concerned.”

Tony McNulty, Home Office Minister of State, in a (private) reply to an enquiry.

Which leaves me to ask why, with such a skimpy legal backing for photographer-bashing, street photography seems threatened, feels threatened. I’d like to rule out the possibility that the country is slipping into the kind of comfortably shabby nightmare depicted in this wonderfully British dystopia, where street photography would lead fairly rapidly to the Maidstone gulag. So, I fall back on social climate, a particular state of political slump in which much that’s good is under a dammit lazy hail of illiberal Molotov cocktails, fuelled by the usual high-octane guff and burning indignant rags. Reading the papers, it seems that, when given the space, polite opinion is, not unusually, willing to countenance anything deemed necessary to stamp out whatever moral failings, street crime, terrorism, immigrant and underclass misbehaviour, the old machine has on the go to distract from routine redistribution of all we thought we’d won back into the gated community of people who get to matter. I wouldn’t claim it’s necessarily examined and deliberate. Just that it suits, and that many of us are either overly willing to be persuaded, or lazy enough to go along with it.

“In May last year, Thames Valley Police rescinded a caution which was given to photographer Andy Handley, of the MK News in Milton Keynes, after he took pictures at a road accident scene”.

Grisly journalism, untidy, irritating, ugly, perhaps wrong, but, nevertheless, a minor victory.

I want to attribute this to someone clever, but can’t, because I made it up last night:

To defend what’s important, it’s not enough to defend what everyone agrees is important – it’s necessary to defend the unnecessary, the reprehensible, and the unpronounceable.

[For anyone in the US, this wonderful pdf guide, has some highly entertaining worked examples. I'm investigating the legal situation in Spain, and would be very interested in what's happening elsewhere.]