Buildings take time

 

 

 

Another tortuous milestone in the construction of the Sagrada Família has been reached with the placing of the star light on the top of the Virgin Mary Tower and, this evening, blessing and lighting it.  This is the first of the two filial lights to be achieved, the second will top the central and largest tower in the basilica – the one which will mark the completion of the project and the one on which building has been delayed because of Covid.

     There was an ambitious plan to have the building complete for the centenary of Gaudí’s death in 2026, but this is looking more and more unlikely.

     In spite of living in Barcelona (the province and metropolitan district) I have visited the Basilica only once, in the summer of 1958 when my father dragged me off the bus tour of the city that we were on and took me to what I understood to be a series of ruins but was informed that I was standing in the unfinished part of an on-going masterpiece by the Catalan architect Gaudi.  I was, generally, unimpressed – though that attitude changed as I found out more about the architect and his buildings.

     Why, you might ask, have I not visited the building again, especially as it now has a roof, and the interior is complete?

     Gaudi is constantly associated with natural forms and the Basilica looks like a growing thing, something more vegetable than stone. 

     Gaudi ‘lived’ his buildings, he was intimately involved in their evolution from design to structure and he was capable of making on-site adjustments to his plans, so that the word ‘evolution’ associated with his buildings is something which is real – that is what happened.  The plans were a starting point and Gaudi was the guide to their development.

     The great cathedrals of the past were always works in progress, and sometimes that progress was glacially slow, as buildings emerged over decades and sometimes centuries.  Gaudi lived on site towards the end of his life, and he was dedicated to seeing his concept of the building rise.  And that’s the point: a Gaudi building needs Gaudi to see it through to completion.  Without Gaudi, the building is something else.  Not worthless and not necessarily inferior, but definitely something else.

     Gaudi was killed in a traffic accident, but his plans survived.  Well, they survived until the Spanish Civil War when they were burnt, but enough survived for projections to be made about what the final form of the building should take.

     Every great building is, of necessity, a collaboration – it is how far that the collaboration should ‘develop’ from the original idea that is in question about the ‘finishing’ of Gaudi’s masterpiece.

     I used to say that I would have preferred to have had some sort of encompassing structure placed around the parts of the Basilica that Gaudi had completed and say, this is what we have, we can imagine the rest.  A building without Gaudi throughout is not a Gaudi building.

     Perhaps that is a little too purist and I have vowed that if and when the building is finished (in my lifetime) I will visit.

     Those visitors from the UK who have visited the Basilica have come away singing its praises.  I have been content to view it from a distance and enjoy the silhouette rather than look too closely at the detail!

     The quick-sketch outline drawing of the Sagrada Família shares a place with similar sketches of the Eiffel Tower, Big Ben and The Sydney Opera House as being something that is instantly recognized from a few quick lines.

     As I visit Barcelona on a fairly regular basis, I have of course, seen the Sagrada Família close-up from the car and I have to admit that it is an imposing pile, I hope that things come together, and I will be able to visit!

Johnson is a liar.  He is liar who is found out in his lies on a regular basis.  He treats the truth with the same contempt that he reserves for his past wives.  And yet, he preserves his popularity with the voting public.

     Perhaps, the Christmas Party of Christmas Past will be the ghost that drags him down.  With scandal piling onto scandal in the traditional way of Conservative rule over any period of time, it seemed as if each new disgrace was something that could be wafted away with an airy phrase or some cod Latin.

     The joking contempt that his personal spokesperson displayed in laughing about how to deflect difficult questions about a Christmas party held during the height of Covid restrictions might be the thing that finally (finally!) cuts through to the general population and brings about, if not his downfall, then at least some sort of change in the way that we are governed.

     Johnson has tired his usual tactic of smooth sincerity and the sacrifice of an underling to turn away the rightful wrath that should be meted out on his head.  His lies have finally caught up with him and there is a growing groundswell of opinion that he should resign.

     Although I personally think that he should have been sacked rather than given the chance to resign a long time ago, I am still not convinced that the Tory Faithful will give up what they see as an electoral advantage (i.e., Johnson’s skills (!) in campaigning) for any airy concept of honesty or probity.

     This evening, Covid Plan B has been announced by Johnson (in a press conference NOT in The House of Commons) as a necessary part of the regulations to try and keep the Omicron variant in check – but also, and far more importantly from Johnson’s point of view as a “dead cat on the table” distraction to keep prying noses out of the detail of exactly what when on in the Christmas Party Fiasco of last year.

     Why should anyone do anything Johnson says, when he so signally doesn’t feel himself to be bound by the rules that he stipulates for others?

     It will be interesting to see what the media say about all of this, especially as there were pointed questions about the hypocrisy of Johnson and his misfits in the press conference announcing the measures.

     The best Christmas present that we could all have, is that Johnson resigns instantly.  God knows I loathe the deadbeat candidates that are likely to take over, but they (with the possible exception of Goblin Gove) are almost bound to be better and to have at least a shred of something approaching an ethic.   

Please!

 

Page turning pleasure

 

Would I recommend it?  That is the question that I am asking myself after finishing the last page and plonking the weighty tome on the coffee table.  Origin is the fourth (I think) novel by Dan Browne that I have read – though, now I come to think of it, I haven’t actually bought one of them.  All loaned.  And gratefully received.

     Origin is one of those books which you can read as if it’s a screenplay, so many of the set piece descriptions seem purpose written for the cinema.  It makes much of its setting in Spain and Barcelona and, as someone living in Catalonia within easy distance of Barcelona, I cannot deny the little frissons of delighted recognition as major architectural landmarks like the Casa Milà (La Pedrera), La Sagrada Familia, and even a mention of the small airport in Sabadell that we sometimes pass when going to Terrassa are described.

     Brown is a master at grafting further meaning onto the already significant, and he makes the most of the architectural backgrounds that he uses.

     To say that his novel’s narrative structure is contrived, says little – of course it is, that is part of the reason that his work sells so much and so widely.  We expect high tension action in his work, and part of the delight is seeing how he fabricates the excitement around settings and buildings that millions of people have visited.  He finds a way to make your memory of the guided tour just a little more high-octane by sprinkling his narrative magic of mysterious codes and signs to be deciphered to make the ordinary, deeply fascinating.

     Brown shares with Bryson the ability to make what appears to be complex understandable to the general reader.  He is careful to give information so that we are not left behind so, for example, philosophers or painters or mathematicians may be cited in the text, but there will always be a little extra information so that the reader can place them, almost as if they are wearing a descriptive name tab.  This is done unobtrusively, but constantly, so that you start noticing the ‘helping informative hand’ that you are given.

     Did I enjoy the book?  I have to say I did.  Will I ever read it again?  I have to say I won’t.  But Brown as a safe pair of story-telling hands producing a rollicking tale, Origin works.

 

 

Where are we going to eat for Christmas?

     In the UK, this time in November is too late to think about getting somewhere in a restaurant.  All the spaces will be gone.  And at a price that makes you wonder if it’s worth it just not to have to do the washing up!

     Here in Catalonia, you can consider going out to a restaurant on Christmas Day for a decent meal, without paying a fortune.  But even here, where you can leave booking fairly late, it is advisable to book early.

     Family discussions have at least started and tomorrow we are going to try out a restaurant that has been suggested to see what the food is like.  I have not seen the Christmas Menu but going out for Sunday Lunch seems like a good idea, and I am all for trying before eating – at least this lunch will not be as expensive as the Christmas meal.

     I suppose we expect to pay something like 45 to 50 euros for the Christmas lunch and that will probably include wine and Cava and coffee.  Not that the inclusion of alcohol means anything to me, as I am still true to my determination to drink nothing, if the only ‘something’ that my doctor allows me is “one small glass of red wine a day”.  I would like to see any self-respecting Welshman stick to that!

     And I am now, after a number of YEARS of alcohol denial, more and more convinced that cold, pure, water is unbeatable as an all-round drink.  Honestly!

 

 

What guilty pleasure?

 

There are some things that you do that you know are questionable, but you do them all the same.  Because sometimes you simply want to fall, or should that be Fall?  We are, after all, only human.

     Perhaps I am making too much of my current weakness, but I do feel that it is a guilty pleasure.

     The source of my self-indulgent unease is a book.  Not a book that I have bought (for once) but I book that I have been loaned.  It is a substantial book, with a rather fine cover featuring an overview of the city of Barcelona with the instantly recognizable structure of La Sagrada Familia taking centre stage. though in my reading so far, the action has taken place in the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.

 

 

 

The title of the book is Origin, and the author is Dan Brown, he of The Da Vinci Code, and it is Book 5 in the series featuring his academic enigma solving professor Robert Langdon.  And should I be reading it?

     The fact that I am even asking myself the question is significant.  Why shouldn’t I read something that has sold, with his other books, over 200 million copies?  Or is it because he has sold over 200 million copies that I should shun his work as being far too popular for my fastidious taste?

     There is a sort of snobbery over best-sellers that posits that if the appeal is so wide-ranging then it must perforce be somewhat infra dig to be seen paddling in such muddy overcrowded waters!

 

      

 

 

     One of my favourite quotations is taken from Len Deighton’s Billion Dollar Brain and concerns someone sneering at another character whom he accuses of talking in clichés, the response from the accused is, “I got nothing against clichés, son. It’s the quickest method of communication yet invented, but I get you.”  Which nicely puts the supposed superiority of the sneerer in place, and yet at the same time recognizes that while the efficiency of the communication via cliché might be unparalleled, there is an element of style that is lacking.

 

 

 

     I have only just started reading Origin and I am already hooked.  Yes, I can see that the structure of the novel is formulaic and yes Brown is serving up all the old tropes from religion, secrets, codes and mystery that has served him well, not well, most handsomely in his previous books, but if you are wheeling out Robert Langdon (again) then you just about know what to expect in terms of subject matter (just as you do with James Bond) but the delight is finding out how the old tune has been jazzed up to keep you reading.

     Brown is a safe pair of narrative hands, and the action fairly bounces along.  I am not expecting to find the equivalent of The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann in his pages, but I am expecting to be intrigued.  It also helps that the locations in Spain that he has chosen for the action so far are all ones that I have visited, and therefore feel a personal link with them.

     And, anyway, I should point out that I am a person who has read ALL the space adventure Lucky Starr novels written by Isaac Asimov under a different name (Paul French) purely for money.  They are awful, and I devoured them.  To be fair, these novels were written for a juvenile audience, and there was a hope that the series would be picked up by a television company and produced, but they never were.  To give a flavour of the book, I could cite just one of the snappy titles, Lucky Starr and the Pirates of the Asteroids, and the writing matches the banality of the title.  And remember, I’ve read it, and the rest of them.

     I justified to myself the reading of the Lucky Starr series because I was on a sort of project to read all the sci-fi stories and novels that Asimov had ever written, so I had to read the Lucky Starr novels to achieve completion.  Did they have the profundity of Nightfall or The Foundation Trilogy?  No, of course they didn’t, but they were not attempting to match those.  And I enjoyed them.  All of them.

     Brown was quoted as saying of The da Vinci Code that he hoped it would be “an entertaining story that promotes spiritual discussion and debate” and from what I have read in Origin so far, he could claim with some justification that same statement as a tag line for the novel.

     And what, after all, is wrong with “an entertaining story” at any time!