A Lot Of Wind...

Writing is a question of motive, reading the same. It’s important to know why you’re doing it.

I can tell you why I write: it’s because I love the world as much as I hate it. Because I know it’s all I’ve got. Because a place can fill me up till I can’t breathe any more, pouring its stories into me like intoxicants. I can feel them in me, making me woozy even if I can’t always make them out, even when I can’t tell insight from pure imagination, or if those two things can be told apart.

I write because every time I so much as go for a walk the universe bowls me over. The daily litany of wonders: the sun, the wild Atlantic, murky Africa, the long coastal grasses and the man who won’t say hello to me even though we’ve passed each other by down at the water a thousand times. The litany of wonders and how it grinds. How it rubs raw.

I write because I won’t live for long. Because I’m a fucking mayfly and it makes me angry. It makes me grateful too. I write from the gratitude and I write from the anger. I write because I want to give you something and I write because I want something from you. I want your touch, like a cheap song; I want your breath on my neck. I write to make music of the noise, to make a noise in the dreadful silence, to find a silence in the roar. That is why I write.

Why do I read? See above.

The truth is it isn’t easy to tell reading and writing apart. Not when they’re done well, when each participant is pulling their weight, reaching out for the other through the unifying space of a story. If you are scanning this text with your cursor hovering over a share button, you are not reading. If I wasn’t bursting with anger and gratitude right now, I wouldn’t be writing. They are among the noblest things an ape can do, but they don’t come easy. Both elude, like all good things. Like wisdom. Like love.

Sometimes, I write for money. It has been an aspiration of mine to do more of that. To be called a writer by the world and not merely by myself. Since I write about places so much, the travel writing industry has beckoned. By now it’s an online industry of course, and that has meant a new set of rules for the writer.

Not that they call it writing anymore; it’s called ‘content’ now; writers are ‘content providers’ and there have been other changes. Consumerism – that great ratcheting vice we call the ‘free’ market – has made its mark here as much as anywhere else. If a publisher still uses words like ‘quality’ or ‘unique’ – and they do – they don’t mean the same thing they used to. Some writers may still be unaware that they merely refer to Google criteria. The business of writing is more automated than it has ever been, more a question of inexorable process.

What we might mean by ‘quality’ doesn’t get a look in. Writing is dealt with in the language of management jargon and what pass for editors these days are often more likeKey Performance Indicator managers. If your objective in driving traffic is to sell something at the end of it all – houses, cars, holidays – then this is all very well but make no mistake: if you’re a writer, you are behind enemy lines.

The IT-driven transformation in publishing filters down finally to the sentence itself. A writer’s job now is essentially to push buttons the reader can’t see – SEO, or whatever replaces SEO as the new orthodoxy. Never mind narrative – we line up the wonder of the world in numerical order: Hawaii’s number two beach, Spain’s number seven. The third best gallery in Paris. The eighth best masterpiece in that gallery. The eleven bagel stands you really shouldn’t miss when in New York (it’s alright to miss the others, but it would be foolish to miss these eleven). The four different types of traveller. The five different types of mother. The six different types of category.

Let me tell you what content is: straw – something dead and hollow to fill an empty box. What is ‘quality’ content? Fresh straw. Same box.

If you believe it’s a coincidence that writers are expected to behave more and more like software -  keywords, tags, metadata, lists -  then you probably still believe that we won’t be replaced by it. You probably don’t think that someone is working on that right now, or that they’re close.

Anybody who runs a blog will be familiar with the comical bot comments their spam filter catches.

“removal fee will be the most cost-effective the a will methods burnt even under-arm, well, it energy process. genitals. Pulling the hair out by the root is one of the your the seems hair regrowth your eliminate all hair growth. Spreading ho”

“SEO is is missing a few factors, for one you do not use all three H tags in your post, also I notice that you are not using bold or italics properly in your SEO optimization. On-Page SEO means more now than ever since the new Google update: Panda. No longer are backlinks”

Well, they’re going to get better at that. Machines will generate convincing language. At least, it will be convincing if you don’t listen, or read, too hard. And when it happens it won’t be their fault, these so-called publishers who dance the Google dance. They’re just playing the only game in town. The monkey/organ grinder analogy comes to mind and we aren’t talking about the organ grinder here; it isn’t as if they’re much further up the food chain than I am. They’ll be replaced by software too.

It probably isn’t even Google’s fault; I strongly suspect that the logarithms are less to blame than their quotidian deployment by the unimaginative.

And I don’t suppose we can lay all the blame at the feet of the writers who play along for a few crumbs. Writers need crumbs; they always have and they’ve always been prepared to churn out some shit so they can get a sandwich (or a drink) and get on with the real thing. No, the culprit here is the only one in the equation that we never seem to mention. The only one we let off the hook every time.  The only one to whom we allocate zero responsibility.

You.

Because by the time (and it won’t be long now) you find yourself reading an article about the six quietest parks in Connecticut, replete with map coordinates and a decibel graph and compiled entirely by a bot, that is what you will have come to accept. That is what you will call reading – your own compulsive, consumptive hopping from one distraction to another. ‘Reading’ will be the diseased behaviour you present with whenever you’re not doing what you’re supposed to be doing. Writing won’t be anything human at all.

And it will be your fault.

You’re probably not expecting me to say at this point that I’m feeling rather hopeful about the whole sorry business, today, but I am, even if only because, having been a willing participant, I don’t really care about it anymore. The marketplace is leaving meaning behind and therein lies the death of the marketplace. Like all consumers it will eventually devour itself.

So writers are to be squeezed out of the business of writing. So what? We’ll still be there afterwards. People will still need stories. We will always need stories.  Writers and readers will find a way to each other and to new spaces to share. Maybe make a few quid while we’re at it, maybe not.

It might be because the hostile man down by the water broke his silence today, after all these years. I almost didn’t notice him with my head down and my eyes partly shielded by my winter hat, but when I glanced up he was passing me by and he greeted me. Hegreeted me. Not the minimal nod that I might have expected, or a raised eyebrow, but an honest-to-god thumbs up, as if he’d been pushing against the barrier between us and his hand had suddenly burst through.

We’ll be straight back to the awkwardness tomorrow, I suspect, because I didn’t have time to respond, but it gave me quite a lift. It meant something, that humble little bit of human contact. It means something. I made my way back to the house with a spring in my step, to get down to some work. There’s no way I can promise myself, even having written this, that I’ll never write another list. I need my crumbs. But it won’t be today.

Today I’ll write something good.

Up in the scrub of the bird sanctuary, the little wooden bridge has been listing for a couple of years and now wobbles, worryingly, over a whorl of fish in the river below it – a great tumult of watery life, the odd flash of silver belly glints in the writhing green murk.

Out over the Atlantic it’s getting brighter and the clouds have dipped beneath the full moon, cupping it as they fan outwards and upwards in either direction like a jewelled insignia. On the opposite horizon the sun hangs low like a hunter, its light predatory on the long, back lit grass as night flees.

Straight down the slatted walkway, its tip not quite clear of the black Rif mountains, the lighthouse on the island blinks. I’m sweating under my hat and warm jacket and I pick up the pace, on my way back to the first coffee of the day.

Later, up where the bus pulls out of town, opposite Lidl and arranged around the roundabout, a clutter of tattered hoardings hawk property for sale or rent. One of them has been there since I arrived three years ago and features an artist’s impression of a development that has never been built. The ground around them is strewn with rubble and litter and behind them the concrete training tower for the fire service seems to list a little itself. All in all it’s the ugliest little corner of town but you can still see the Strait and Morocco from here and a young man in a baseball cap and a leather jacket has chosen this spot to find Mecca; he’s up on the verge, prostrate in prayer.

I’m not in my usual seat because it’s taken. A Scandinavian language emanates from it and although I don’t want to turn and look, others do. We could all tell they were trouble as soon as we saw them at the station: one of them lurching about clumsily and the other dressed in surfer gear and a multi-coloured cardigan, the requisite tussled blond hair, but framing an ancient leathery face. Whether it’s Norwegian we’re all listening to or Swedish, it’s slurred, and there’s a smell coming from the bottle they’re sharing that seems like turpentine to me.

It’s a relief to reach my stop because they seem so unpredictable – constantly changing seats and roaring incoherently – and as I pass by the younger one at the back door I’m struck by the lighter in his hand and how he clings to it as if it’s both an essential tool and a security item. I wonder how much more, if anything, there is to his life than a bottle of something to drink and a way to light a cigarette, and whether he’ll live much longer and what, if anything, he’ll leave behind him.

I’m walking more. K comes with me sometimes, at the weekends. We’ve just been up toCastillo de Castellar, an old fortified town that overlooks a glimmering reservoir and a swathe of forested wilderness about fifty minutes from here. It’s a castle but also a pueblo blanco – a little “boutiquey” these days perhaps, with its cutesy galleries and craft shops, but undeniably beautiful, and we walked away from it a little, downhill and into the forest where one of our little parque natural maps indicated the presence of some pre-Roman tombs I wanted to have a look at.

K had a bottle of water and a bag of sandwiches with her and when we found the tombs, after an hour or so of tramping over dry leaves in the still summery wood, we sat down to eat. They are body-sized grooves carved into the solid rock and there are three of them: two of them aligned head-to-toe and full-sized and a smaller one between them and perpendicular: the makings of a sad story if ever I saw one. It was noon; when I stood my shadow followed the line of the adult graves exactly and I felt sure that they’d been carved out there to face the sun.

And there they remain. They face the castle too, though that didn’t exist – and nor did theArab culture that built it – when the tombs had occupants. They are shallow and I speculated that the bodies had been put there and left exposed, for raptors and wildlife to take care of the flesh. All long gone now, but not those three hollow imprints.

The following morning I get out of the house a little later, so it’s daylight and although I’m supposed to be on a fitness kick I swap my power walk in the sanctuary for a stroll through the old town and out to the island. I see a bit less of the waterside and the port nowadays and there have been changes; as I pass Santa Catalina – they call it a castle but it’s just some rich guy’s house, built in the early 20th century and now abandoned – I hear building work going on inside. The place has been derelict for years; it sits on a height and can be seen from afar, and despite its overblown and somewhat silly “moorish” style, has become an emblem of Tarifa.

I wonder what they can be doing, and also what the steel structure they’ve erected at the edge of the sand is going to be. They’re beginning to clad it and I suppose it might be a chiringuito. I’m not sure if I approve of its two storey height, down here where it interrupts the view of the sea and the Tangier coastline.

The causeway out to the island has been lined with minimalist, concrete benches and a catamaran bobs on the quiet water of the bay. Fishing trawlers leave and return to the pier. Dogs clamber happily over the rocks, down at the water’s edge.

When I get back to the mainland I ask an old guy if he knows what the noise is that’s coming from Santa Catalina. He doesn’t, but it doesn’t stop him speculating or dragging a passerby into the conversation. Neither of them knows, is the upshot, but it takes them an awfully long time to admit it.

They’ll both have seen more changes around here than I have – the evolving footprint of the town: a building pulled down here, a new one there, a road, a roundabout, each new generation – and these two will have seen a few – leaving its own mark.

On the way down here I passed by a traditional old house and the front door was open. In the little passageway that led to the inner patio there were some old photos of the town as it had been fifty years ago, and eighty, and a hundred. It had been much smaller of course, and having stepped in to look at the pictures for a moment, I now know that where I stop and talk to the two old men was nothing but sand – no whale-watching visitor centre, no unemployment office, no fish restaurants.

Some of the structures in the photos are still here and some aren’t. Plenty of new ones have sprung up to take their turn in the lottery; that two of the survivors are the robust 10thcentury castle and the silly house on the hill undermines any sense of predictability we might have about a thing’s longevity. Still, I’m drawn to the idea of having a shot myself, of leaving something behind, and head home to the first coffee of the day, and to work.

Cádiz at night is the 18th century through a film noir looking glass. At every intersection in the old town the antique street lamps line up in all four directions, their light rising to illuminate the upper floors of the terraced town houses. Oddly uniform facades of cluttered little ornamental balconies – most glassed in to form protruding, paned windows – recede symmetrically into the distance on all sides. It’s a vertical world – the tall houses, the litter-strewn triangle of the retreating street, the mirror image funnel of sky revealed at roof level – in the form of a slender ‘x’. You might reasonably expect Mozart to walk around the next corner. In a trilby. Hands deep in the pockets of his overcoat, a gitanes dangling from his lips.

At street level the light of the lamps falls on cobbles, on ground floor walls whose colours daylight will reveal: the characteristic shades of the city – wine, champagne and salmon pink, pale blues and the ubiquitous brown of wet sand. All of them a little washed-out, as if the residents of this sea-locked city have grown so used to seeing their handiwork bleached by the sun and salt that they now paint it that way to begin with.

Some of the street level facades are left unpainted, exposing the mottled grey and sandy colours of the stonework and giving rise to the impression that this whole city grew organically from the waters that surround it; a close look at the big blocks reveals a surprising texture – they are comprised of shells and must be made of material gleaned from the sea bed. Neptune’s own bricks – a spellbinding detail.

I’m on my way to extricate K from the shops. She’s in the changing rooms of Papaya or Tara or whatever it is and has a poor signal. We’ll go for tapas, but for now I have this precious time to wander alone and pretend I’m a tragic figure in a film by Orson Welles. I reach a corner that opens out onto a small, three-sided space from which springs an incongruously large and muscular building – a baroque oratory which turns out to be that of San Felipe, the place where in 1812 the Cortes of Cádiz declared the first Spanish constitution. I’m not alone; a huddle of Spanish visitors to the town look up at it with me and photograph each other below the carved scrolls that adorn its walls, representing the various deputations – Asturias, Barcelona and so on. This is how this city’s larger buildings present themselves: by surprise, around some unremarkable corner, and squeezed in improbably.

In the neighbourhood of El Mentidero even the ordinary little shops seem to partake of the general air of anachronism. Grocery stores and alimentaciones spill their light onto the street, shining on the advertising placards (fruit, bocadillos, household detergent) of the businesses opposite, bolted to the old walls between windows and doors. You couldn’t pedestrianise this place – people wouldn’t be able to live. Nevertheless, cars are few and far between; I imagine there is some limited permit arrangement for residents and besides, you’d need to be heavily incentivised to drive in here. I’ve seen even experienced taxi drivers need two or three attempts to get round some of the tighter corners.

We drop K’s shopping bag back at our hostal and head out. Even more than in Tarifa – a town known for registering a degree or two lower on the celsius scale – it’s fresh and breezy, almost cold. We pull our jackets tighter around us as we run out of street at the north western end of town and the lights of El Puerto de Santa Maria wink at us from across the black bay. I drive K to distraction by stopping at every new view and bidding her stand and look with me. Apart from Granada, there is no other city that has this effect on me. I get drunk on it.

And in it – it’s good to get out of the cold and into each bar. We come to Cádiz often but this is the first time we’ve stayed, not counting Carnaval,  and we have the chance to see the city through the lens of night. Beautiful plazas present themselves to us that we haven’t stumbled upon before, planted with species from the tropics and the Americas, the seeds brought back by ship no doubt when this was the gateway to the New World. Bright green birds flit between the palms and the pines. We tuck into a mousse of goat’s cheese and tomato marmalade in some slick place and I resist the temptation to steal the slate platter it comes on. Then a more down-to-earth place with tastier food and then a couple of bars in the El Populo neighborhood as our evening gradually loses focus.

We yawn over our drinks at times and it isn’t the disgraceful night we’d foreseen, but subdued as we are it’s good to get to know the city better. We finish up in some funky place with a couple of surprisingly cheap cognacs and walk back through the chilly streets to our bed, navigating our way past the adorable couple who run the place and want to talk to us all the time. At length.

In the morning we stroll and as midday approaches the place is busy with others on their Sunday paseo, particularly along the streets that surround the cathedral where young African men set up their portable kerbside emporiums – blankets laid out with fake designer handbags and underwear, drawstrings attached to the four corners for a quick getaway. I pay a euro for some camarones – miniscule shrimp eaten whole and unpeeled from a paper cone – and then, observing so many others at tables with coffees and beers, we go to the Café Royalty.

On a corner of the Plaza de Candelaria, the great, grand old café sits – all gilt-framed mirror and trompe l’oeil scenes on the ceilings. A fin de siècle feast for the eyes. Waiters in floor length aprons and fussily presented food, we stick to coffee and thoughts of the great and the good who would have patronised the place when it was new at the end of the 19th century– the usual motley crew of high society, intellectuals, writers and musicians.

It occurs to me that, as obnoxious as they may well have been, reflected in all this ostentatious harking back to an earlier age, they were still somehow attached to the rest of us. Still on the same side of the looking glass. You could find them in a café around the corner from your own. These days, that would be considered a security risk. Our rich have retreated behind high compound walls and out to private islands. They are rich and nothing else, no longer engaged with the world and its tribulations. Our tribulations. Tacky oligarchs who justify their 70k dresses with some tax deductible charity cheques.

Nice coffee though, and the gracefully curved wooden coat hooks above the marble-topped table in the corner, overlooked by an enormous mirror, it’s surface a little worn, would make a perfect place for Mozart – fresh from some sharp-tongued, criminal underworld intrigue – to hang his hat.

“No puedo vestirme bien,” I complain to L, who employs me.

She laughs.

In Tarifa the year has made its mind up: it’s autumn now, the mornings fresh and dim despite the clock change, the evenings dark and every few days or so what I now, after a few years of Andalusian acclimatising, call cold.

In Algeciras it’s a different story – the unseasonably late summer lingers on without consistency; yesterday it was fresh enough but today it’s just plain hot. Because I live in Tarifa I’ve come to work in a warm top that I regret the minute I step off the bus. Nineteen kilometres separate the two towns but there’s the small matter of a mountain in between and the temperature differential ranges between noticeable and shocking. Catches me out every time.

It’s particularly maddening at this time of year. I know I will have issues in my little classroom today. Gender issues. I will flick on the aircon to get the room comfortable and when the kids arrive, the debate will begin. Girls vs boys and me.

“Que frio!” M will exclaim, crossing her hands to rub her upper arms theatrically.

“Maestro!” P will chime in, her face a picture of suffering.

Never mind that both of them are basically wearing beachwear to school. The boys and I will look at each other as we always do, like sulking puppies.

“What are they talking about?” our eyes will silently ask each other. “This is a small room with a closed window in the south of Spain on a sunny day. There are ten people in it. Ten human bodies. It is hot.”

“Why are they saying it’s cold, teacher?” the little boy eyes will plead with me. They don’t understand yet. Neither do I.

I have three just three words for you, M.

Car. Dig. An.

Of course my retort is imaginary. I can’t remember the Spanish for cardigan. The girls, who we outnumber eight-to-one, will win again and we will sit and sweat and suffer. Later, as I walk to the bus stop in the dark, damp from the experience, I will be cold. Jesus.

K will be waiting in Polly. I always glance back over my shoulder to the back seat when she picks me up to see what she’s got for dinner. Food is another measure of the changing seasons; for the last few months it’s been all about fish and dressed tomatoes but as I lift open the shopping back tonight a couple of gongylodes are revealed with a tub of crème fraiche and some dark brown bread.

The seasonality of food is partially a question of altitude: a bell-jar graph that peaks around February as we eat the oranges, apples and pears from the upper branches of a receding winter. Then it’s the gooseberries and apricots of spring as well as the sweet new leaves of the warming weather.

In summer we can stand in our garden and look our food right in the eye – climbing tomatoes and beans – but we’re looking and bending down by the time August and September arrive with their aubergines and marrows.

It’s when the temperature really drops that so do we, down to ground level, digging in the dirt itself for swedes, parsnips and celeriac. Hence the gongylodes on the back seat. When we get home we’ll peel and chop them, adding them to a pot with some onions, leek and celery and when they’ve fried for a few minutes, some swede and chopped carrot along with a fairly finely diced potato to thicken the soup.

We’ll eat it with beer, bread and butter and with the night time framed by the window there could be no better illustration of the sudden transition we’ve made between seasons. Just last week the children I teach were dressing up for the rather disneyfied version ofHallowe’en that seems to be everywhere nowadays.

It’s the dark time of year and as if to protest, the light has exploded in a myriad of shocking colours. At dawn the skies are purple and green, the gullies and ridges of the African coast across the water crystal clear and ghostly blue. The last brilliant performance before we hunker down for winter and our meagre daily ration of hard white sunshine. When the skies cloud over we’ll crave even that.

I commented to K the other evening (it may have been during an anti-capitalist rant, I don’t remember) that we’d probably all be a lot healthier, physically and mentally, if we did away with all of this clock changing nonsense and just obeyed the sun that gave rise to us all and its seasons. Winter would be the hibernating part of the year. We’d all get up a lot later and bed down a lot earlier. Not a lot would go on in between. It would probably involve a lot of cider.

But no, if anything it’s the opposite. With the pleasure of summer behind us it seems the whole northern hemisphere hunkers down, not to hibernate but shoulder to the wheel, embracing a joyless vista of work-related objectives and banal to-do lists. September marks the start of a new year for an English teacher and as a writer too, things are hotting up – more paid writing gigs and a book to plough ahead with. It doesn’t help that the unwritten part of it grows at an exponentially faster rate than the written part.

It feels like the pressure is piling on just when it should be alleviated. The harvests are in – surely we should all be winding down, the height of our exertions a quick roll in the warm hay with a rosy cheeked someone? But no…

I suppose we’ll have the heating on soon. In the average Tarifa house, heating means one of those portable radiators on wheels or, as in our case, a three bar electric fire that devours electricity (more pressure) and effectively  heats a semicircular area approximately half a metre deep directly in front of it. Of course, K will want it pointed at her. We will fight battles of will over who gets to sit closest to it and have it point at them. I will lose of course, never mind her vastly superior stash of woolly socks and fleeces.