Nostalgia

Reading Proust, as I suppose you have to do eventually, a number of things struck me. First of all, old Marcel is even better than the Spanish at creating sentences full of minor clauses, parentheses, semi-colons and so on which go on for well over a page. Then there’s the nostalgia thing. I was listening to Bizet at the same time as reading and it got to that bit of Carmen that Esso once used for an advert (anyone who was a child in the 50s and 60s will know what I mean – “The E-e-sso sign means happy motoring....”). And suddenly there I was, thirteen years old and marching out of assembly with other green clad girls at my school while the orchestra played Carmen ... badly, it has to be said! So that was my “madeleine” moment! And then this morning, progressing into “Un Amour de Swann”, I came across the character Odette saying, “Je ne suis pas ‘fishing for compliments’”. So even Monsieur Proust was in the habit of sprinkling his French with bits of idiomatic English!

Phil and I have been indulging in our own nostalgia trip since we arrived here last week, visiting some of our favourite places in snatched moments when the rain let up. On Saturday we walked up to A Guía, the promontory at our end of Vigo with a chapel-cum-lighthouse on top. 

It’s a lovely walk and it didn’t feel too cold (we even took our jackets off at one point) but the photos came out looking very wintry

Yesterday we walked up to the other high point at the other end of town, the Castro with its fortifications. It was very pleasant in the sunshine. We particularly wanted to look at the point where there used to be an abandoned hotel/restaurant. You used to look down onto the very fragile-looking roof where some foolhardy person had painted TE QUIERO in big red letters.

Now there is just a sort of stain on the ground where the hotel was dismantled and moved to somewhere in England to be rebuilt.

We found we couldn’t leave the fortifications by what I always think of as the back door, past was probably the stables back when the place really was a fortress. The door was padlocked. A local told us it’s been locked for weeks for no reason that she has heard of. So we had to go the long way round. And even so the old pathways and steps that formerly went past the hotel were all blocked off. Signs told us that they are doing some kind of archaeological work on the site.

The Castro looks much more like a fortification from that end now that the hotel has gone.

I hope the rich man who took it away to re-open it as a restaurant in England is enjoying his bit of Galicia.

The building was not especially beautiful, in my humble opinion, but there’s no accounting for nostalgia.