The night draws on apace!

Sants railway station in the centre of Barcelona has been transformed into an eighteenth century vision of the grotesque and picturesque.

This underground cavern supported by vast concrete piles looking like sweptback slim-line funnels from some sleek yacht is undergoing what looks like a mixture of destruction and renovation. Solid shafts of sunlight penetrate the murky depths from jagged holes above illuminating well placed piles of rubble and discarded giant machines in such a dramatic way that one suspects that the whole thing has been set up for an artist like Piranesi to complete another set of etchings of the fantastic.

In every area in which I have been in Catalonia this week (God! Have I only been here a week? It’s certainly been an active one!) there seems to be a frenzy of building, rebuilding, restoration and casual destruction. Walk along virtually any street and you will suddenly encounter a gaping hole where an entire building has been ripped out leaving jagged masonry on either side to denote where the living inhabited limb used to be. In a rather touching act of architectural anthropomorphism Spaniards paint the newly exposed areas with an earthy ochre coloured paint almost as if they were applying a sort of iodine to the exposed flesh of the building!

Barcelona is a city of extraordinary casts.

I have never seen so many people proudly exhibiting such a bewilderingly large display of the doctor’s craft in swathing limbs and bits in plaster of Paris. I have seen so many people in neck braces that I was beginning to think that it must be a chic new fashion accessory. Legs, knees, arms all swaddled in medical white with sometimes a patch of material to give a collage like effect to the whole. One man had his hand swathed so completely that it became one white gigantic comma.

I think that there should be a new i-spy book of Plaster Casts because it would be a doddle to fill it in while walking around Barcelona and then I could claim my feather from Big Chief i-spy! For those of you who know what I’m talking about, did you ever meet anyone who actually got a feather from Big Chief i-spy? I tend to think that this was another of those comforting myths which kept me in place when I was young. Like milk tablets – that takes me back!

I have just been invited to join the family in their inexplicable activity of Scoobydo which appears to be a form of finger knitting which has struck this previously stable family unit like some sort of obsessive compulsive behaviour.

Toni has now given up after confirming his status as a non teacher by attempting to teach me how to do it. He is eating the strange mixture of nuts and seeds which keeps him noisly happy for hours. Carmen and Laura continue with their knotting like opressed labour in some Oriental sweat shop. Strange are the ways of the Catalans!

To day is St John’s Night Eve, the shortest night of the year when, as I recall from extensive listening to Mussorgsky’s “Night on a Bare (or Bald) Mountain” also known as St John’s Night (though I may have made that bit up) this is a time when witches are abroad and waiting to pounce on the unsuspecting.

I have been told that sleep tonight is bound to be interrupted with explosions and fire. The celebrations of the birth of St John are six months before the birth of Jesus, hence the 24th June. Festivities in Spain include the burning of bonfires over which people apparently jump to prove their courage and to rid themselves of sin and disease. I await with interest the revelations that will come when I go and see how Terrassa celebrates. As long as there are fireworks I will be satisfied.

The Spanish, or perhaps the Catalans, seem to have a predilection for fireworks in their most dangerous forms. There is a form of conjuring known as ‘street magic’ which is performed, as the name suggests, in the street and close to the punters. In Spain they have the same approach but with fireworks.

I have not yet recovered from my experiences in Sitges when a whole troupe of hessian coated, sinister hood wearing visions from a Bosch painting of Hell showered a screamingly delighted crowd with fountains of fire from dangerously hand held fireworks. What a fire officer in the UK would have made of it all beggars description; the courts would have been busy for months!

I have great hopes for this evening (already there are sporadic explosions although the sun is still shining) and I hope to have a thoroughly pyrotechnically intimidating night.

Witches beware!