The Magpie is back.

I can’t believe it has been so long since I wrote on the Magpie Press but I have just returned home after a month on the move – first of all, in Ireland, doing Children’s Book Festival visits, and finishing up in Madrid with a fun visit to the British Council school in Pozuelo where I met about 120 bilingual seven and eight year olds and their enthusiastic teachers – thank you to the school director Gillian Flaxman and all her staff who made my visit such a pleasant one.

Then it was off to COBIS, the conference of the Council of British International Schools, which was being hosted at King’s College, in Soto, on the outskirts of Madrid. I was leading seminars for KS1 and KS2 teachers but also had the opportunity to meet many of the delegates. I was delighted to hear the opening address by Matthew Syed, the inspirational journalist and author of “Bounce – The Myth of Talent and the Power of Practice” and can’t wait to read his book.

I also had the greatest fun I’ve ever had at a conference, sitting in a baby chair in the hall in King’s College in Chamartin with thirty or forty Early Years teachers, listening to Alistair Bryce, a former headmaster and now author and educational consultant, talking about the impact on their attainment of getting children outdoors.

It was inspirational – I wasn’t sure if I wanted to go straight back into teaching or if I wanted to be a six-year-old again. He described how he got them building “small worlds”, like the project where the children first built a pretend toll bridge with construction blocks. Then they had to take to their bikes and pass through the bridge, select the REAL money from a bucket to pay their toll while the toll bridge keepers had to give out the right change. Everyone had a go as a toll keeper and as motorist and had a great day, learning about money and change and mental arithmetic on the sly, while they planned and cooperated on building their bridge. Alistair was brimming with ideas and had us all laughing like hyenas with his accents and affectionate imitations of the children he meets. Could he be Peter Kay’s handsome little brother?

On our shared taxi ride back to the hotel, Alistair told me that he has been commissioned to write a series of non-fiction titles for Bloomsbury over the next three years.

Look no further if you need an inspirational teacher/writer to come to your school or speak at your conference.
There was a nice surprise this morning when the postwoman arrived with copies of the second Witch-in-Training books, Spelling Trouble, which has just been published in Russian in a lovely little pocket edition.

And now it’s time to get back to my abandoned book about the Wrens, the twins who were not at all like one another.

I’ll be back soon.

A Writer’s home in Madrid – casa-museo Lope de Vega

Why are we attracted to the homes of dead writers? Or, for that matter, to newspaper features  about the rooms where living writers work such as those in El País and The Guardian? Do we think, as readers or writers, that seeing where a writer lived and worked will make us understand him or her the better? Is  it a kind of fetish, a sort of nosey-parkerism, or simply a harmless form of literary tourism?

Certainly a multi-million pound industry has been created in the last twenty-five years or so, establishing literary trails and tours around the Brontë family home in Haworth, Shakespeare’s birthplace in Stratford-upon-Avon or Jane Austen’s house  in Chawton, Hampshire. You can visit Victor Hugo’s house/museum  in Paris, or the tower in Sandymount where James Joyce lived briefly and in which he set the opening chapter of Ulysses. You can even rent a room and have B&B in Stevenson House, Robert Louis Stevenson’s childhood home in Edinburgh.

And, in all probability, before you leave,  as well as the writer’s books, you can pick up a souvenir tea towel,  a poster, a plaster bust of the writer, a packet of Christmas cards, a pot of jam or a book of local recipes.

Or perhaps, you do need to look at Dublin bay from the top of Joyce’s tower on a chilly morning to understand what he meant when he wrote about “the snot green sea. The scrotum-tightening sea.”

Anyway, since I had come across by chance the casa-museo where the playwright Lope de Vega lived from 1610 until his death in 1635, I ventured in to get a glimpse of domestic life in Spain’s  theatrical Golden Age. It is a handsome three-storey house with a pretty walled garden which Lope described as his “guertecillo”, his little kitchen garden. It still has an orange, a fig and a pomegranate tree, a covered well, box hedges and a small potager with tomato, pepper and chilli plants.  Upstairs there is a chapel where the playwright celebrated Mass every day after his ordination – he had become a priest after his second wife died although that did not stop him taking a mistress and having another child. (He had a very colourful personal life and fathered at least eleven children.)

The main library/study on the first floor is a large elegant room, with a sturdy desk and wooden bookshelves containing about fifteen hundred giant books of the period, on loan from the National Library, where I longed to be left alone and browse. (In Lope’s last testament, he had left an extensive inventory of all his belongings so the house has been restored with the typical furniture and effects he described.) Off the study is the anteroom or drawing-room where the women of the household congregated – it is furnished, not with chairs but with a low platform covered in cushions, mirrors and a brass brazier, a reminder of the lasting influence of Moorish Spain even into the seventeenth century.

The attic floor was a later addition to the house when Philip III moved his court from Toledo to an overcrowded Madrid and householders, including even Lope de Vega, were impelled to offer accommodation to members of the King’s entourage. One of the rooms was the bedchamber of the swash-buckling Captain Contreras. According to our guide, Contreras was the inspiration for Capitan Alatriste, the hero of the contemporary Spanish novelist Arturo Perez Reverte.

If you are in Madrid, go and have a look  – and, amazingly, there is no “Exit through the gift shop” – not even a postcard for sale!

Harvest time in Utiel Requena

The wine-growing area of Utiel-Requena (DO) was once dedicated to producing the sort of plonk that gave Spanish wine such a bad name but now a new generation of enologists are establishing new wineries or transforming old ones to produce some outstanding wines including cavas.  (Utiel Requena is the only wine region outside Catalunya that is entitled to a “cava” denomination.)  It’s just about an hour and a half from home (about 40 minutes north-west of Valencia city) so we set off recently on a wine tour. We visited two wineries, the Pago de Tharsys, a 200-year old estate now run by Vicente Garcia, a French-trained winemaker and his wife Ana Suria. They produce limited edition wines using only grapes grown inside their own vineyards, employing traditional methods and the most sophisticated technological installations. Interestingly, they harvest their grapes at night when temperatures are low. The climate here is extreme, scorching summers and severe winters. We hadn’t made a booking but were made very welcome, given a tour of the vineyards and the winery and ended up tasting and buying some great tinto and cava.

Our second visit was to the Torre Oria bodega – a lovely old modernista estate designed in 1897 by the Valencian architect Jose Donderis who also built the train station in Valencia , the Estacion del Norte, and the Mercado Central.  As well as tours of the estate, they also run one-day wine-tasting courses here so if you are on holiday in the Valencian area and want a change from the beach, the restaurants, the architecture, the art and the music of the city, you could spend a day or two in Utiel Requena. There are dozens of other bodegas on the “Ruta de Vino”. The town of Requena itself was a revelation.  Under the old city, within the walls of what was a Moorish town, there is a vast complex of tunnels and galleries. These date from the eighth century and were excavated by families in the old city to be used as warehouses. When the Moors, or more correctly moriscos, were finally driven out of Valencia in the expulsions of 1609, the city was abandoned. Later in the seventeenth century when it was repopulated, the underground tunnels were rediscovered and used for the storage of wine, the manufacture of the large ceramic storage vessels – “tinajas”, many of which are still there  – and even as an ossuary for bones when the crypts of the local churches were too full. Legend has it that the tunnels were also used as a refuge during the Civil War.  The visit takes about an hour and is well worth it. Book Recommendation:  For anyone interested in the history of Islamic Spain, I recommend two books by L.P. Harvey, published by the University of Chicago – Islamic Spain, 1250-1500 and Muslims in Spain 1500-1614

the pig in Spain

The Pig in Spain

 

What would you choose as a modern icon of  Spain– the Guggenheim in Bilbao? Las Meninas of Velazquez?  Maybe a flamenco dancer in polka-dotted flounces? Or the roadside black bulls of Osborne sherry?

Well, when Spaniards were asked the question recently, a huge percentage nominated as their national icon the jamón ibérico – the cured leg of the Iberian pig.

The devotion to the pig and all its many bits in Spain has been attributed to the aftermath of the persecution and expulsion of the Jews and Moors from Spain since both Jewish and Muslim faiths forbade its consumption. In the wake of forced baptisms and conversions, what were called “the new Christians” found it essential to demonstrate great enthusiasm for eating pig. Any distaste for pork could be taken as evidence of heresy. In Toledo, as late as 1568, Elvira del Campo, the wife of a scrivener, was tortured on the rack for days by the Inquisition, accused of being Jewish for her refusal to eat pork.

To avoid auto da fe, the rack or burning at the stake by the Grand Inquisitor, pig-eating became a symbol of a true Spanish Christian.

And, of course the “old” Christians had to equally profess their great love of the pig to show that they had “pure blood”. They still do.

On a recent windy Mid-February Sunday morning, I attended a “matança del porc” – the ritual slaughter of a pig. It took place in the garden of Casa Pepa, a local restaurant set amid ancient olive and orange trees with a fabulous backdrop of the mountains which were the last redoubt of the Valencian moriscos until their expulsion in 1609.

Fortunately, by the time I arrived, the squealing was over and Piggy was already dead. He was lying on a long trestle table, with his head hanging over one end, and was being hosed down before being efficiently butchered.

Three other mournful porcine heads, decorated with wreaths of bay leaves like Roman emperors, presided over the top table.

Long trestle tables were laid out with mounds of other piggy bits – chops, ribs, liver, kidneys, belly, loin, pasta de butifarra, little trotters – they say you can eat every part of the pig except its trot – next to a long line of barbecue grills.

People filed past the tables selecting what they fancied and cooking it themselves, before sitting at one of the tables set up among the olive trees.

There were home-made breads, carafes of rough home-made wine (lethal) and jugs of beer, and later on Pepa served her legendary rice dish, arroz con fesols i naps. After lunch, there was dancing and live music but the star of the day was the pig in all its glory.