Dan & More

Barcelona, in Stunning Colour

Regular readers will have already digested Barcelona in Black and White and that gives most of the story. I’ve been so lazy with this that Barcelona in Black and White, Again, is already out. I did take colour photos, with my phone, and I present them here for your education and amusement.

Yep, we must be in Barcelona as there’s cured pig’s-legs everywhere. Our Spanish friend calls this Catalan comfort-food.

Dig in, I say. Local beer, three types of cheese, fresh bread and charcuterie up the wazoo. But there’s more to Spain’s second city than food and booze. No, really.

That’s the view from the hotel room window and that’s the Sagrada Familiar. The foundations were laid in 1882 and the final stone is yet to be placed. There are a ton of jokes to be made about the lazy Spaniards taking a 100 year siesta and such but that’s just how long it takes to make a cathedral. It’s the big tourist draw in this town and we were lucky enough to watch it taking shape from our bedroom window.

On our stroll to the pig-leg café, above, we happened to pass by this world’s most famous building-site and it really is impressive. Especially if you like cranes, which I do.

Here’s another look on our first evening in town, from battery hill. It’s a nice day and the view is good at sunset.

It’s the early the next day and we found this around the corner from our hotel. It’s a Gaudi-designed place and a pretty famous one.

We are off to the park. This involves navigating the unfamiliar public transport network. Nice marble on the walls.

The train system is pretty easy. Before you could say “knife” we were waiting for our local friends at the park gate.

If you’ve read Barcelona in Black and White you’ll know all about this park. If you haven’t, get cracking.

Enough park, it’s a nice day so let’s go for lunch.

We’ll take a spin through town first.

Even the light poles are fancy.

There’s that place again.

Tapas

This sign says don’t feed the wild pigs. But we’re in the city, right? What pigs? Oh no! Here they come!

After lunch, Ruben said he had something special planned. One can book a place at a hotel’s rooftop bar with a special view.

Yep, even better than the view from our room. They’ll let you stay up there for an hour or two, it’s not free, but if you keep ordering drinks then you’re welcome to stay.

The view really is a million bucks. Pity I can’t get the lighting right. Need a fill-flash.

It was a beautiful day and after about thirty minutes of going “Wow. That’s amazing!” one starts to notice some of the finer detail.

The cathedral is an expression of weightless mass, soaring towers and hyper-decoration, but if one gets a an idea of the scale…

These decorations a truly massive. Still hyper-detailed, almost fractal, but the delicate peak of this tower is the size of a lorry and much heavier.

The day remained sunny so it only made sense to sit back and soak it all up.

And by soak it all up, I mean soaking up a good weight of Estrella.

That’s the local Barcelona-beer and it does well in its natural habitat.

That truck in the background contains the bar. How they drive it up here each day is a mystery to me.

By now sun was getting low in the sky and the cathedral was changing colours.

It’s a spectacular sight, I wanted to stay up there until sundown to see the whole show.

Bloody hell Dan, haven’t you seen enough?

He’s right. Go home, you have a big day tomorrow.

So retire we did and glad we were too. Sachie had earlier laid hints that platinum-people receive gifts on checking into a room and we hadn’t. Hats off to the Renaissance Hotel team though.

And now it’s time for bed. It’s taken me, oh, a year and a half to get this post written so I’m going to cut it here and pick up the next day in a new one.

To be continued…

Yet Another Very Funny Joke

When I was young, about your age I guess, I apprenticed in a print shop. That would have been around 1952. Back then we didn’t have no Xerox or Linotype and we printed books on contract with movable-type. Type was old even then, as ancient and blessed as Gutenberg hisself.

You see, back in those days you’d set type, letters and punctuation that was made out of itty-bitty lead blocks. You’d set ‘em in a grid and space ‘em with shivs. You’d buy that type from a foundry in Europe, shipped over the Atlantic until you had a fine collection of Garamond Light, Garamond Bold, Garamond Light Italic or whatever the customer liked. Mostly Garamond for the fliers and books we used to do.

As I’ve said, my daddy died when I was young, so I was apprenticed out to Henry the first day I got into long pants. He was a stern man at times and it was the apprentices’ duty to get boxed around the ears on the regular. But overall, he was a kind man and took care to instruct me in a craft that was sure to shortly become obsolete. He taught me to read the type upside down and in reverse, I can do it to this day. My spelling wasn’t much but he helped me with that too.

The press was a new model, if we was in 1920, and electric. We would set a page of type, set the auto-matic inking roller and stamp out pages. We’d set many pages at a time and cut them later; it was a hard but noble craft

The paper would be fed in by sheets and Stamp! Stamp! Stamp! Page 27 to 31 of whatever book or periodical would arrive in the receiving bin to be cut and eventually shipped to the bookbinder a few blocks away.

As you’d expect, by 1952, typesetting was giving way to the rotary print mill and other ‘innovations’ of the craft. Newspapers had moved to it a good 30-years before, but old Henry’s shop was kept alive by his decades-old contract with a publisher of textbooks. The old ways do die hard and there was a fine trade in hardcover textbooks for the university crowd. You see, we held engravings for the illustrations, so if they wanted a reissue or new edition, they’d be knocking on Henry’s door.

I didn’t know it was my last print run with Henry, when it happened. I only had a few months to go in my apprenticeship and could already see that there was no bright and prosperous career ahead. It’s about that time I decided to join the Navy, but that’s another story. Henry’s publisher-friend had landed a fine contract for a run of big posters from some fancy-pants doctor. Williams, I think. They needed another 900 large, colour posters for a new crop of anatomy students, so Henry dusted off the engravings from 30 years before and got ready for our biggest payday in, well, forever.

Trouble was, it was a rush-job that had Henry and me working days and night, Monday to Sunday. Each poster was four sets of coloured plates, assembled from sub-plates that had to be tuned to the finest register or the run would be for naught. It was punishing, thankless work and Henry was not a young man, even then.

It was a Friday night and I’m ashamed to say I let Henry down. You see, I was courting y’ grandmother at that time and was taking her off to the pictures. I begged off at six, scrubbed my inky fists and walked out with a grin on my face. Henry shouted “Get lucy kid!” as the door slammed on the print-shop and I drove off in the old Ford. Ask your father about that Ford, he’s the one who wrecked it.

Henry was found the next morning, dead as timber and flat as China, the press still feeding sheets over his crushed body. Stamp! Stamp! Stamp!

From what we could discover, old Henry must have fallen asleep, had a stroke or passed out from exhaustion before tipping onto the press and being instantly crushed. The first 100 sheets or so where a bloody mess, but the repeated motion of the ten-thousand weight press arranged his bones, veins and organs into the best damn anatomy poster that Dr Williams and his students ever seen.

Old Henry may have been captain of a sinking ship, of a shop that would surely be out of business in a few summers, but in the end, he proved himself to be a damn fine printmaker.

Another Funny Joke

After small-talk the conversation settled down for a time. The stranger gazed into the campfire and toyed with the tip of his moustache. I guess we were all hypnotized by the flames because when he spoke, it felt like I had been shocked awake.

“I was a child at the time, no more than eight years of age.” He fell to silence for a while and then, as if he just remembered he had an audience straightened up and looked at us. “That would have made it 1972, or so, and Uncle Dick was grey around the whiskers even then.” He paused while Gary and I exchanged a nervous giggle.

A Funny Joke

My great uncle used to work on the railroad. It was his job to prowl up and down the train calling “Tickets please!” in his blue uniform and little cap. He would announce the next stop or throw you out at said stop if you caused a ruckus in the club car.

He worked on the line every week for fifteen years, and he was a surly bastard. The “Tickets please!” might be “Tickets! Tickets now!” Questions would get a sarcastic answer half, well, most, of the time. He was lazy and God help you if you lost your ticket. He was once suspended for two weeks for assaulting a confused young man who had gotten on the wrong train.

As a kid I only ever saw him at the odd family gathering where he’d get drunk and complain about how the railroad was going all to shit, his supervisor was an idiot and passengers were a pack of imbeciles who no longer respected the uniform, God help them.

He was often drunk, even on the job. They say he was drunk on his last day on the line. The day when the electrics failed while the train was careening downhill and there was no compressed air for the brakes. Perhaps it’s because he was drunk that he scrambled out the window and up onto the roof of the carriage, then staggered along the tops of the cars to the engine.

He gripped the collapsed pantograph with both hands. Witnesses say he gave an almighty heave, although I don’t understand how anybody could see from inside the train, to push it back into contact with the overhead line, although such a thing would surely result in his own fatal electrocution. But that’s what he did and that’s the day he proved himself a very brave man and a fine conductor.