I'm missing my home in Bristol

I miss hearing the school children crashing down the hill by our house and the ruckus as they muck around at the crossroads, climbing on a neighbouring wall and arguing under the wonky lamp post outside our front gate. Once 4 boys stood by the lamp post to properly practise a rap that I'd heard them working on since beyond the top of the hill.

They are also a bit naughty, they pinched figs off next-doors tree last year and I suspect it was they not the wind behind the incident reported yesterday in an email from the Chinese lady living there at the moment

One thing want want to let you know. One of the roof on rock pillar at front door* fell down yesterday, due to the strong wind maybe. I found it was moved into the yard this morning by someone, I must say thanks because it is too heavy to move for me. I don't know how to deal with it, just leave it in the yard.

*trans note: front door = gate post in this instance

the bus from Bristol to London

is a journey that takes one hour and a half, this is just to get to the beginning of London, if you want to get into the centre of town the bus takes at least another hour to get through the traffic.

Like most sensible passengers I get off the bus at the beginning of London and take the tube

I got on the bus at Bristol on Monday and the driver said You going to Victoria?

I said, Yes but I'll get off at Hammersmith (with all the other passengers)

You're supposed to get a ticket to Hammersmith and you're supposed to pay more to do that !!!!

The whole week went the way of Alice in Wonderland 

After Blind Ken started questioning me about my appearance I became aware that another person was in the house, Ken kept leaving the room to squabble with someone that might have been a housekeeper - should she use a supermarket voucher to buy milk or fish? He'd say what he wanted, come back to where I sat and bring our conversation back to my piratey teeth then he'd change his mind and leave the room again to tell her to buy fish ... or milk.

Clearly she could have been more use in the room to tell Blind Ken if I also had an eye patch and a parrot but I never got to meet her.

During a family gathering this week

my father and I took turns to relate the story about how he came to visit me in France in the early eighties: I was working as a goatherd in a remote woody-hilly place somewhere near the Pyrenees and had sent a letter home describing the route to get to my hut, it was illustrated with a map and my father used it to pay me a visit. *

it was a good story with lots of adventures  - there was one part that I had never heard before:

My father left me to get on with my goatherding and went off to do a few days walking in the area by himself. The first night he stayed in a B&B then continued on his way. A few hours into the day's walk he stopped by a hedge on a dirt track to scrump a few cherries when a van hove into sight and stopped next to him, there were two men inside - one from the previous night's boarding house, this man leaned out of his window and said   

Monsieur, you left this at our 'ouse

and handed over some greyish white fabric that my father recognised as his own, rather unfashionable, underpants

* the map and another version of this story is here

From Grumpiness...

My morning walks continue - I multi-task and look out for premises that could accommodate a small film company with a lot of kit, I take notes of the estate agents boards stuck on buildings and peep into abandoned warehouses and cathedrals.

The walk bit of my day is lovely - when I come home for breakfast I am in a very happy place, then after nine I get on the phone to witless estate agents, attempt to track down elusive surveyors and present my findings to The Director who tells me that what I have come up with is too big, too small, too high up, too far away, too nice, too grim or ‘just not what we’re after’.

Today's map - inspired by my friend Red-handed shows how we could find our way from grumpiness to a better place.

My Career As A Cartographer

Revisiting Cecil’s drawings and the prospect of the Epic Walk took me back about a hundred years to a time when I had a job looking after goats in a very very remote part of France.

I wrote home fairly often. One of my missives described a journey that I made to attend a party in the nearest town; it started with a walk through the mountains to meet some people with horses, then we galloped like Horsemen of the Apocalypse through a thunder-and-lightening storm to my nearest neighbour’s house where everyone except me changed into dry clothes. This is where the tarmac road started, the last section of the journey was the most dangerous and involved a sort of toy jeep. I arrived at the party squelchingly wet through and hallucinating.

My father, on seeing my letter which was illustrated with a map a bit like the one above but less precise*, thought it was about time he paid me a visit, he took the train as far as he could, then the next morning he started walking, first using a proper map, then the detail ran out and he used the map in my letter, it took him all day in very hot heat, when I came home in the evening I found him sitting on the log pile outside my cabin, looking as fresh as a daisy.

My own morning walks continue, my feet have settled in to the big boots but my hips have gone a bit achey, I am feeling dangerously old about half of the time. This is exacerbated by grumpiness brought on by my search for office premises.

* my dad is no sentimentalist, the original is long gone.

Snapshots From The Last 7 Days: Catalonia

Driving from Santander to Barcelona was easy enough, but once in Catalonia things got a bit confusing. The Catalan people have their own language and like to name/number their roads or not as they see fit, I spent 4 hours being lost in the spaghetti knots of roads around Barcelona trying to find my way to where the crew were working.

There are currently a series of unofficial referendums being held around the Catalonian towns and villages to try and get support for independence


In Barcelona I handed over the van to the cameramen so they could drive the kit home. The Director and I then took off for a few days on the rocky Catalonian peninsula of Cadaqués.


The centre of Cadaqués is maze of crazy-paved and cobbled streets which will become dead ends or steps or simply a rugged sort of rocky riverbed, quite a lot of streets are unnamed and most houses don’t have numbers

I had a go at making a map of Cadaqués


I had booked an apartment on Picasso Street, the landlady emailed me to say that there was no house number but I should call when we arrived and she would take us there. We wound our way down around the mountains and parked the car in what seemed to be roughly the right bit of town, suddenly before us we saw Picassso Street and felt triumphant, I called the landlady:

Me: Hola – Isabel, we’re here - at the end of Picasso Street
Isabel: Which Picasso Street?
Me: It has a furniture shop at the end where I am
Isabel: No you’re at the wrong Picasso Street, you need the short one.


Isabel came to our rescue riding this moped