Wandering around in Barcelona (2008)

 I do like finding old HDDs - they're little time capsules of nonsense. Here's a blog that I thought was forever lost forever like forever. It was on The Fly's website, which is lost forever. I used to get paid to do this kinda shit. What I didn't say here was that someone nameless took the opportunity to sign their name inside a nearby hollow concrete piece that was about to be added to the Cathedral. Someone is stupidly proud of that pencil mark in history.

I was walking round Gaudi’s barmy genius half-finished masterpiece, La Templa de Sagrada Familia, staring at the magnificence of the confluence of geometric exuberance and natural symmetry of its art nouveau construction. Every year this insanely wonderful cathedral grows a little from the Barcelona topsoil; inside it’s a glorious confusion of concrete dust, moulded tree-like towers and visionary litheness. 

Even the stones yet to rise to the nowhere-near-finished interior have a playful, familiar, psychedelic gravitas, reaching toward the heavens, tendrils seeming to waft in the breeze. It’s a wonderful place, not even halfway to half finished and it seemed to speak strongly about human endeavour, mortality and – more importantly, maybe – that vision and madness are matters of perspective, and that time is itself malleable. One day this will all be finished, maybe, but it will continue to speak to people through its nodules and its sculptures, the knaves and the naves; the angles and the angels and god is in the details.

Inside, too, there’s a hubbub of humanity: queues snaking to snag a two-minute ride in the lift up to the topward balconies from which it’s possible to look out over Barcelona, over the crowds and the creatures and the kissers and the crimes. To be world-famous attracts that sort of thing, and Barca certainly fits that bill. And inside, there are accents and languages and dialects and footfalls of all the multitudinous hues of life, too; a chorus of conversations, all individual but all part of a more musical whole – a life orchestra. And as I walked through Gaudi’s dream one of the orchestra seemed to step up behind me and begin to perform a solo for us. Shivering, I stilled, and I listened.

-This is gorgeous.

-It’s so big

-I went to a church in the Vatican and that was best in the world but this is nearly best

-I walked into that church and I cried

-I think there’s another one somewhere in Rome or something that wins that one though I don’t think I could take it I would just look at the door or something and probably wee myself

There wasn’t any more. I was left standing, paralysed, as the solo moved off to the museum underneath the edifice.
 
(If I was Michael Holden I think that might have been a bit better but I’m not so what can you do?)
 
Later that night I found myself amidst a massive crowd near the old Estrella Damm brewery, necking that excellent Catalan brew and straining to watch a load of bands  headlined by Primal Scream. The BAM festival is a massive part of the annual celebration of the city/summer end/who needs a reason called Fiesta de la Merce, which goes on for a week or so every September. It’s still warm enough for shirt sleeves here and despite the spots of rain here and there it’s ace – stages everywhere you look, street entertainers, people building human castles 40 foot high and all manner of stalls, traders, colour and exuberance. 

It’s alive with possibilities and the main problem is tearing yourself away from it to get some much-needed sleep. The Scream were great and the thousands wouldn’t let them offstage: they’d probably still be there if the audience had their way. The crowds dispersed from the plaza at around midnight or thereabouts, and the cleaning crews came out to sweep away the gristle and the plastic. Tomorrow, there’d be new crowds here; there always are.