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Amor de Barcelona: some images of passing adequacy & a relation from a board by night of regret & an ache at imminent departure

With vodka in mug, down Baluard, past the washing strung along the footpath, which I never snapped, to the almost hundred metre strip of sand beach, where I’m writing this, on the edge of a boardwalk. To my right, the D of the W building, the smaller sister of

Camp Nou, Castell de Montjuic, Fundació de Joan Miró

We went seeking the Camp Nou Experience. Plus. First we had to get to Camp Nou, by way of Collblanc, Metro L5. Tourists flocking through streets where there were a conspicuous number of old people, to the stadium Barca’s home. Which, as it happens, is right next door to

the decorative rules by which ornament proliferates on the surface that grasped like ideas by the generative depths become those structures on which whole works are made

We hired bikes and ventured once more into the arena of Gaudi commercialism. Although it took a long time to get to Park Guell. We went via the Grand Gherkin, where we stopped, hoping to be able to get to the top. Entering through a full security check, we got

La Sagrada Familia, greater than the cult of Antoni Gaudí, Vinçon, Desigual, Entrevidas by Anna Maria Maiolino at The Fundació Antoni Tàpies, La manzana de la discordia

Out into sun, we followed the edge of the marina around to Port Vell, cutting in to catch the Metro at Drassanes, connecting, and popping up at Sagrada Familia. It had crept up behind us, the massive biomorphic slip-cast of Gaudi’s still unfinished Last Citadel of Christendom. It

the temptations of football, arms, in the cloisters of water-closets and geese

Sinking in: slowly. Which is how the decision whether to attend tomorrow night’s game between Barcelona and Sevilla had to be approached. Ten at night. Seats started at 74, for top and back of the stand; went from there to 86 euros, for goal ends; and thence to 106,

unstuck: Figueres & finally BCN

Thank God and all his merry men, We have escaped! You would not believe it. But I’ll say it anyway. We caught a taxi to Spain today. Today we went to the station, railway, having been told the one train that would not be cancelled was the 12:30

on heeding H. & the laughing patroness we hie to the life-size talking crucifix of the bus-stop: Collioure to Perpignan & back, just

It would have been a pretty tale of Collioure and the Spanish Gothic, its lightness as opposed to its oppressive heaviness in the North, a relief, presaged by reliefs yesterday, undone, done up. Hard to say. Instead it was more bureaucratically sanctioned bad service, sanctioned, because, it seems that anybody