

Read what others are saying about IN EXTREMADURA:

"My book of the year. Equal parts travelogue, history of Spain, love letter to cinema & literature, and comic treatise on the nature of truth, memory and mortality. A rib-tickling genre-buster..." - Nick Gilbert

"Undoubtedly one of the books about Spain I have read" – Orson Welles

"Smells like Andalusian dog" – The Salvador Daily News

"Anyone expecting a book about Spain will be disappointed. In Extremadura is largely concerned with torture, terrorism, funeral playlists, Welsh holidays and other morbid subjects... "– Toby Schneebaum

IN EXTREMADURA

Copyright 2017 Nick Gilbert

Published by Plankton Produktions

ISBN 978-1-910216-27-9

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Smashwords Edition, License Notes

Thank you for downloading this ebook. This book remains the copyrighted property of the author, and may not be redistributed to others for any commercial purposes. If you enjoyed this book, please encourage your friends to download their own copy from their favorite authorized retailer. Thank you for your support.

About the author

Nick Gilbert studied Film at the Polytechnic of Central London, Bristol University and the National Film School. After failing to make any mark whatsoever on the British film industry, he became a teacher of English for Speakers of Other Languages and a lecturer in Communication at Westminster University. He is the author of one other book (68½ - Movies, Manson & Me) and writes a blog under the catchy name of Plankton Produktions: Cult Films & Sounds, Spain & South America.

For some of us there has been Spain. First the Spain we imagined – a place we cannot remember now – and afterwards the Spain we found.

Rebecca O'Brien

HERE UNDER PROTEST

Late in his career, Orson Welles turned to commercials. Not that anyone would let him direct a commercial at that point. No-one would let him direct a film of any kind at that point, so Welles did straight-to-camera pieces for drinks companies and voice-over work for frozen foods as a way of funding his own unrealised projects and lavish lifestyle. Welles could make upwards of $15,000 a day from such work, or $75,000 in 21st century money. One contract could be worth half a million a year. His corpulent frame was deemed perfect for Paul Masson wine and Domecq sherry adverts, and his voice, a mellifluous balance of honied tones and huskier, cigar-ruffled notes, was deemed, somewhat bizarrely, perfect for Findus Peas. Thus was a legendary advert created:

We know a remote farm in Lincolnshire where Mrs Buckley lives. Every July peas grow there....

The pleasure, the infamy, of this advert – which you can readily access online (for example, on Paul Read's fascinating blog Speaking of Spain) - derives not from its quality, or lack of quality, but from the many asides recorded in the sound booth, the one-sided clash between Welles' monumental ego and the various determined if deferential ad men who, in Orson's opinion, aren't worthy of licking his boots. You don't know what I'm up against, he whines to no-one in particular, claiming that the copy he has to read may be grammatically correct but "it's tough on the ear... unpleasant to read. Unrewarding."

Is the boy genius right, or is he just over the hill, out of his depth, even in a recording studio with a piddling little pea advert for company? He can't read crumb-crisp coating because it trips on his tongue. But why should it? You only need to separate the words to make it sound effective. Crumb. Crisp. Coating. There's alliteration. He's an actor. Why can't he make it work? Because, I hazard to suggest, not so deep down he resents having to do this sort of thing at all, and because, in the depths of his arrogance, he presumes that he knows more about writing copy than the people who work for Findus.

Here under protest is Beefburgers. We know a little place in the American Far West, where Charlie Briggs chops up the finest prairie-fed beef and tastes... This is a lot of shit, you know that?

Finally, he appears to storm out with the immortal words "no money is worth this..." But did Welles really walk? According to Gary Graver, he didn't need the money, but he liked having it. As well as enabling him to realise his projects – or at least make a start on them – it enabled him to maintain two houses and "he was proud that for the first time in his life he had Visa and MasterCards." Nonetheless, it suited Welles to play the downtrodden artist, forced to prostitute himself.

When poor old Dietlief Sierck – better known to film buffs as Douglas Sirk – turned up for work on the studio lot, he'd frequently bump into Bud Boetticher and they'd joke about the films they were making. Hi there, Bud, Sirk would say. What are you doing? Oh, just some lousy old Western, Boettticher would reply. How about you? Oh, just some lousy old melodrama, Sirk would say. Their remarks were self-deprecating, yet they took pride in what they were doing, and they turned out masterpiece after masterpiece - in Sirk's case, All That Heaven Allows, Magnificent Obsession, Written on the Wind, Imitation of Life. That's four masterpieces right there. Welles was more self-pitying. Gore Vidal would invite him to dinner, and Welles would accept, but invariably cancel, saying he had an early call. "For a commercial. Dog food, I think it is this time. No, I do not eat from the can on camera, but I celebrate the contents. Yes, I have fallen so low."

Towards the end of his life, Welles was interviewed by Peter Bogdanovich, the director of Targets and The Last Picture Show, two of my favourite films. The larger-than-life legend came face to face with the young pretender, although, in truth, Bogdanovich was as burned out as Welles by this point. Bogdanovich brought a pile of papers to the interview, and Welles demanded to know what they were. Research, came the answer. Throw it all away, Welles told his interviewer. It can only cripple the fine spirit of invention.

It's worth bearing Welles' advice in mind as you read this book about Extremadura. Any research I conducted was largely lived research, and whatever I've read, or discovered through passing reference to the Internet, is only a starting point for a flight of fancy. I will digress, as I see fit, and charge off into the undergrowth, for there lie interesting things: not only the history of this little corner of western Spain, its dam construction workers, cooks and conquistadores, but also the twilight years of once-great film-makers and unsung actors, very few of them Spanish; discursions on peregrination and faith; terrorism and South American torture chambers; amphetamines and astronauts. This conscious meandering mirrors the river which gives the village in which I lived for ten months its name, Mesas de Ibor.

The Ibor springs in the Sierra de Guadalupe and flows – or sometimes trickles – north, close to but never quite through five villages collectively known as Los Ibores. These villages - Bohonal de Ibor, Castanar de Ibor, Fresnedoso de Ibor, Navalvillar de Ibor and Mesas de Ibor - lie just inside or on the fringes of the newly-created Geoparque Villuercas, in the north-east of Extremadura. To the rest of Spain, they mean only one thing: goats cheese. As the publicity produced by the regional government has it,

"El Queso Ibores es uno de los productos mas emblematicos de Extremadura. Su aroma y sabor evocan bellos paisajes, sierras y monte bajo, jaras, brezo, tomillo y matorral..."

("The cheese of the Ibores is one of the most emblematic products of Extremadura. Its smell and flavour evoke beautiful landscape, mountain ranges and rolling hills, cistus, heather, wild thyme and scrub..." )

To which could be added cork and oak, the defining trees of Extremadura. We knew of a village in Caceres province, where my partner Beni's father lived, alone. Cork and oak trees grew there. In early 2015, we decided to join him. It had been on the cards for a long time. The desire for a quieter, less complicated life, the chance to do some writing, to gain a better knowledge of Spain, a better grasp of the language. Beni wasn't so sure at first. For her it would mean moving back to the village where she had spent every summer since she was born; a village full, in her mind, of narrow-minded, backward-thinking peasants, rather like the malnourished idiots Luis Bunuel portrayed in his legendary "documentary" Tierra Sin Pan (Land Without Bread). The Bunuel film was made a long time ago, of course, in the 1930s, in the remote north-western corner of Extremadura known as Las Hurdes, a hundred and fifty kilometres from Beni's village. Nonetheless, some of that apparent idiocy and limited world vision lingered. Beni had escaped, by going to university in Madrid, and then moving to London. She loved her family, just as she loved the countryside around the village, and the climate. But the villagers themselves... well, they were such PESTS, as Orson Welles says of the Findus Pea people.

Our daughter Alma clinched the deal. She said she wanted to be with her grand-father, who was ninety. Beni agreed. She could see the benefits, for Alma and for her dad. It would also be a chance to re-connect with her cousin, who ran one of the three bars in the village; the best bar, by some distance, the bar that never closed. Siso was like a brother to Beni, the more so because his own father had died when he was a young boy, so Beni's dad had stepped into the void, and treated Siso like his own son.

In recent years the relationship between Siso and Beni had become strained. Beni never stopped loving Siso, but she argued with him, and his bar became, by dint of choice, more or less off limits to us. In truth, it had always been difficult for me to communicate with Siso, so this situation was reasonably satisfactory. Of all the villagers, all the members of Beni's family, Siso was the one most difficult for me to understand, the one with the strongest accent, who made no effort whatsoever to moderate or grade it for non-Spanish speakers. So I had avoided the bar, and avoided Siso. This year in Spain, in the village, would enable both Beni and I to rebuild a relationship with Siso which had once been close.

The move didn't happen straight away, but the decision was made, and we began planning. I asked for a year off work. A "sabbatical" sounds too grand, but I suppose it was a sabbatical. Beni's dad, unable or unwilling to wait any longer, moved into the newly built residencia on the outskirts of the village, leaving the family home empty for us to occupy. We found a school for Alma in the nearest town, Navalmoral de la Mata.

Then, in July 2015, Siso died. Everything changed. It was like The Last Picture Show. In the film, which is set in small-town Texas, the two young protagonists Duane and Sonny (Jeff Bridges and Timothy Bottoms) take off for a weekend of drinking and whoring across the border, in Mexico. On their return, they discover that Sam the Lion, who owns and presides over the diner, the pool hall and the cinema – the three social hubs of the town - has died. Sam the Lion, as played with grizzled dignity by veteran actor Ben Johnson, was their rock, the one constant in their life, the adult who welcomed them, however begrudgingly, who indulged them, guided them, shared his roll-ups with them. He was, in sum, the only decent man in a small town full of idiots, although there are a number of decent, long-suffering women. Duane and Sonny took Sam for granted, assuming he would always be there - as we do with people we love. From a relatively minor role in the film, Sam becomes, in death, the moral heart of the film, the true star.

Likewise, the black housemaid Annie (Juanita Moore) is the real star of Douglas Sirk's Imitation of Life. The Sirk film begins with the focus apparently on the aspiring actress (played by a plainly ageing Lana Turner) and, to a lesser extent, on her irksome daughter (Sandra Dee) but shifts, imperceptibly, to become a film about the relationship between Annie and her own daughter, who seeks to deny her blackness and "pass" as white. The superficiality of the white characters' lives is inexorably stripped away, and the sacrifice, strength and determination of Annie take centre stage, building to the film's devastating and unashamedly melodramatic climax - Annie's funeral - at which everyone in the film, even the milkman from an early and incidental scene, is present.

Siso was Annie. Siso was Sam the Lion. It felt like the heart had been ripped out of Mesas. I would never re-build my friendship with Siso, and Beni would never recapture the brother/sister-type relationship she had had with him. We moved anyway.

SEPTEMBER

Alma and Beni had been in Mesas since early August. The village fiesta fell in mid-August, and Beni had spent every summer of her life in the village, surrounded by her family and friends, while I had spent the last few years, since the London Olympics of 2012, avoiding the heat by staying at home and teaching pre-sessional English courses to Chinese students at Westminster University. I arrived on September 11th. The significance of the date only occured to me later. It was the date of the coup in Chile in 1973.

It had been a long, hard, working summer and I was determined to treat my first few weeks in the village as a holiday, before knuckling down to the task of finding a part-time job, although, quite honestly, I wasn't that bothered about finding work. I had a week's well-paid exam marking in London every two months, and there was the additional income from our flat, which we had rented out to a colleague.

Thumbing through the updated Rough Guide to Spain I saw that our local town and transport hub, Navalmoral de la Mata, still got a (forgive the pun) rough ride, still had "nothing to offer other than its road, rail and bus connections to more engrossing places..." It was true that even the people who lived in Navalmoral disdained it. But if you gave the place a chance, it revealed its charms: the walks on the hills above the town, with their views of the snow-capped Sierra de los Gredos; a phenomenal number of supermarkets (Mercadona, Supersol, Lidl, Aldi and Dia, to name but five) a pleasant little gypsy quarter, with a peculiar, possibly gay hole-in-the-wall bar called El Abuelo ('the Grandfather') and Toni's Churreria, for churros. It was also good as a base to explore the area, with Trujillo only forty-five minutes away by car, the Sierra de Guadalupe and Mesas to the south, the nature reserve of Monfrague to the west, and the aforementioned Gredos rising to the north: a solid wall of rock that separated Extremadura from Castile-Leon. As one looked at this wall, one could see, slightly to the east, the highest peak in Central Spain, Almanzor. At 2600 metres, it was chicken feed really. I'd climbed to twice that height in the Andes AND slept by a glacier - but I was much younger and fitter then. I'd never climbed Almanzor. It might have been half the height of an Ande, but it was twice the height of Ben Nevis, Snowdon and Scafell, the only three peaks I'd conquered in the previous twenty years. I made it the defining objective of my year in Extremadura to climb Almanzor.

There were reasons why I hadn't climbed it before. It wasn't recommended to do so for most of the year, not without crampons and an ice pick. It was covered in snow and sheet ice, not to mention thick cloud. The weather could change in an instant. And, while it looked enticingly close, sitting there just across the valley floor, the only realistic way to approach Almanzor was from the far side, the North. This entailed driving round the mountain range, via Arenas de San Pedro, and taking the Avila road, a journey of several hours just to get to the starting point. Moreover, in passing Arenas de San Pedro, it would be incumbent on us to stop and pay our respects to Beni's cousin Chusa, which would, in turn, involve a night's stay and a trawl of the local bars, or at the very least the local supermarket, to stock up on beer for Chusa's husband Victor. Which is ironic, as Almanzor (Al Mansoor) means the victor, or victorious, in Arabic.

Muhammad  Ibn Abi Amir was given the honorific "Al-Mansur" for his victories over the Christians, and was, it is said, captivated by the beauty of the mountain. But nobody climbed mountains for the sake of it in those days. As Robert McFarlane makes plain in his Mountains of the Mind, one of the dozens of books whose towering, Everest-like presence in the corner of my bedroom provided succour in the darkest moments of a Mesas winter, the obsession with Alpinism only really began in the 19th century - although as far back as 1492, the year of the Reconquista, Antoine de Ville ascended Mont Aiguille with a team, ladders and ropes, in what is the first recorded climb of any technical difficulty. The Enlightenment ushered in a new age of nature worship, and with it the desire to conquer mountains like citadels. Almanzor was only officially "conquered" in 1899 by M. González de Amezúa and José Ibrián, while the first winter ascent was made by Espada, Ontañon and Abricarro in 1903. You could tell from the names that the Arabs had been here. Almanzor, alcornoque (cork tree) algodon (cotton) algarroba (carob), alcaparra (caper). Driven out in the reconquista, or reconquest, a concept which still seems to carry great force in Spain, they were taking the land back by stealth, it seemed, much as the Mexicans were reclaiming Texas and California, at least until Trump came along. Navalmoral was full of Moroccans. Alma's school, also called Almanzor, was full of Moroccans. The market was full of Moroccans, together with a smattering of black Africans, mainly stallholders and traders. Superficially, they were tolerated, but prejudice against Moroccans reared its head all too easily, as we were to discover.

Driving south from Navalmoral, on the main road to Guadalupe, the first village you pass is Peraleda de la Mata. A few kilometres further on, you cross the Tajo, beneath whose dammed waters lies the village of Talavera la Vieja. Its only visible remains, for most of the year, are the pillars of the Roman temple known as Los Marmoles, and deemed to be of such historical importance that they were moved, block by block, and reconstructed on higher ground, next to the new road bridge. Then you reach the village of Bohonal, where the Ibor drains into the river Tajo, or Tagus, and joins the latter on its journey to Lisbon. Bohonal is where we would turn off the road every time we came back from a shopping trip to Navalmoral. Alma found Bohonal "pretentious" because, unlike Mesas, they had a hotel, or 'arador' as they called it. It used to be a parador, until the government, which has a monopoly on the use of the name, instructed them to change it, so they removed the P, and instantly created a new – and unique - category of hotel. We would skirt round Bohonal until the road straightened up for a kilometre or so, then descend to the valley of the Ibor, with its three bridges, one on top of the other (the modern bridge, from the 90s; the 'old' bridge built in the early twentieth century; the so-called 'Roman' bridge). Then began the short, circuitous climb to Mesas.

Mesas sits on a plateau of sorts (a mesa, or table) above the Ibor, below the higher peaks of the surrounding sierra, outside the geo-parque, outside everything, forgotten, abandoned. My father-in-law's generation was obliged – if not actively encouraged - to seek work in France during the 1950s. Beni and her sister Anna were born and grew up in Paris, in Saint-Denis, when Saint-Denis was full of Spanish and Portuguese, and the back to back houses – slums, effectively – would share outside bathrooms.

Most of those who now lived in Mesas were retired, Mesenos born and bred, who had returned from France to live out their retirement years in the village. Their children and grandchildren would visit during the holidays. Their grandchildren, on the whole, could only speak French, so French is the language one hears most in summer.

The villagers left me alone, for the most part, as they tended to leave most people alone. They only required a passing Hola or Adios. That went for the only gay in the village, Samuel, who divided his time between working in the town hall, working in the residencia, or old people's home, and looking after his own grandmother. It went for the only lesbian in the village, Quinti, who would occasionally get drunk and pick fights with any man in the bar, but not, I'm glad to say, with me, perhaps because I never went to the bar. It went for our immediate neighbour, Mercedes, who had returned from France to live in the village because, she said, there were no blacks or Arabs in the village (although this was, not, strictly speaking, true: there were at least two Moroccan women married to local men, and many door-to-door vendors and olive pickers passing through.)

A hermit-like existence suited me fine. All I wanted was to read, write & watch films, perhaps sallying forth once a day to practise my Spanish in the village shop. There were actually two shops, but since one of them was on the other side of the village, a good three hundred metres away, we only ever went to the one by the town hall. Phillip Connors' Fire Season provided me with the design for life I required: "The less normal I can make myself appear, the less likely I am to be drafted into any task involving contact with the general public... I must act the part – a goofy hermit with a weird beard and a faraway look in his eyes..." Or just be English, in my case. Yet try as I might, there were people who did not get the message, who attempted, in the face of all the sullen expressions, eyeball rolling and teeth gnashing an Englishman could muster (which is to say silently, inwardly, and metaphorically) to engage in human contact. Under normal circumstances, one might have called these people Spanish, but in Mesas, people's Spanishness counted for less than being Extremenan, and the friendliest people – those who most craved conversation, at least with me - were other outsiders of one kind or another.

First, there was Fabio, whom Siso had picked up many years before, hitch-hiking with his girlfriend Pili, and given a job to. Fabio and Pili, who was from the nearby Valle del Jerte, loved Mesas and never left. Fabio was bearable, even delightful, when sober, and we shared a fondness – in my case, more a form of nostalgia - for reggae and marijuana, but when he had been drinking, he became a raging bore and a pain in the ass, who pounded at the door until you let him in and then wouldn't leave. He was also Italian, so even more culturally predisposed to garrulousness than his Spanish neighbours. Then there was Enrique, the mentally ill half-Brazilian boy, whose brother had died, whose mother had fled back to Brazil, leaving him to be looked after by his father. Enrique was one of the few villagers who could speak any English (Samuel was another) and the two of them had acted as interpreters for my aunt and uncle when they visited Beni's father, Pedro, on a tour of Extremadura some years before. Enrique would have flashes of brilliance, and stop to speak to me when he passed the house, but his thought processes were so unpredictable that what began as a normal, intelligible conversation about the weather or whichever book I happened to be reading would swerve into parallel universes where the wind was trying to tell him things that no-one else could understand, about torture chambers, amphetamines and astronauts. Conversations with Mirella, a simple-minded Basque girl who lived with her boyfriend Santi, were scarcely any easier. Mirella also spoke English. She'd lived in the UK, working in some godforsaken hotel/restaurant for cacahuetes, and, as with so many young Spanish, had now returned to her village – in this case, her boyfriend's village – because there was no work in the city, and country life was cheaper, since you could live more or less for free in the family home, grow vegetables and (in their case) marijuana. But she talked like a little girl and punctuated each sentence with a quiet, disconcerting laugh. I found it difficult to know what to talk about, and her mental health gradually deteriorated over the short time she was there. Later, I discovered that she and Santi were going through a hard time, and she returned to the Basque Country. I don't know what happened exactly, but they abandoned their vegetable patch, and one day Fabio and I explored it and discovered their cannabis plants. Fabio cackled and said he'd make good use of them. Santi had also been the local expert on mushrooms, and knew where the best ones grew, and would go on solo mushroom picking missions. I secretly hoped he would ask me along, but he never did.

With El Mudo, or "the Mute", whose real name was Reyes, although nobody called him that, I never had a conversation as such, but he was desperate to communicate. Beni told me that he had been one of five children, three of them deaf, and he had gone to a deaf school. Being an intelligent child, he had done well, but at some point he'd been taken out of school and used as cheap labour by his family and all he did now was drown his frustrations in beer. I would often see him lurching around the streets, a beer can in his hand, but he was always friendly, always playing practical jokes on me and the children, or bringing us asparagus that he'd picked in the outlying lanes and fields of the village. Beni told me that there had been another hearing-impaired villager, years ago, whom everyone called Pedro the Deaf. Stop calling him Pedro the Deaf, his mother would say. He's not deaf. Until the day he got his call-up for the army, and she expressed her shock and horror as a mother. How can they call him up, she demanded to know. He's as deaf as a post.

The villager we had most to do with was our second nearest neighbour, Luciano. Luciano was, like Beni, a Manglano, related to her in some mysterious way that required algorithms to explain. Nothing was ever too much trouble for Luciano. He would gladly give us a ride if we needed one (which we often did, because our car kept breaking down), would gladly collect friends or family from the train station, look after our chickens and our dog, Pepe, when we went away on trips to the mountains, or Madrid, or Valencia. Luciano was adamant that he didn't drink, but his trembling suggested otherwise. He was an indispensable source of gossip which was, like all gossip, not to be trusted, and he would repeat himself as many as twenty times in a conversation. It would sometimes be as difficult to get rid of him as it was to get rid of Fabio, and he had very gnarly palms with which he used to shake my hand, frequently.

The absence of Siso gnawed at us all. It was Siso who had driven us to Caceres, where I was waylaid in the Medieval quarter by a journalist interviewing tourists, and had duly appeared in the local paper, mysteriously speaking perfect Spanish. It was also Siso who had "helped" me learn to drive by giving me the wheel on a night-time drive to a local hotel bar, a drive round the numerous hair pin bends that follow the dammed-up stretch of the Tajo/Tagus known as the embalse (reservoir) de Valdecanas, into which we nearly plummeted and drowned.

The embalse was built on General Franco's orders in the early sixties, and according to my father-in-law, it was one of the few good things the caudillo ever did. As in everything, though, there are winners and losers. Franco brought hydroelectric power to Spain, although not dams – Merida, to the south of Mesas, has some of the oldest working dams in the world, dating back to Roman times. With the building of modern dams came work, and water. But every dam meant the flooding of valleys, the evacuation of villages, the erasing of lives, communities, memories. Not all the villagers affected took it lying down. Those in the village of Janovas, in the Pyrenees, resisted for decades, in the face of constant harassment from the putative dam builders Iberduero, which involved the dynamiting and demolition of houses, the destruction of their fruit and olive trees, the cutting of power and water supplies, the loss of their schoolteacher, and the desertion of their own mayor, who jumped ship to a job in Barcelona. One couple, Emilio and Francisca Garces, continued resisting long after Franco had died and, it must be said, in the face of growing exasperation from their neighbouring villages, who lived in hope of work from the project. But Iberduero still held the concession, still planned (in theory) to build a dam, despite the growing environmental protests, and only lost their claim on the land in 2008. Visit Janovas now and you can still see the village, abandoned, its houses derelict and overgrown.

If you want to see, or visit, Talavera la Vieja, on the other hand (on the other side of Spain, for that matter) you have to wait until summer, when the water level in the embalse drops, and the church tower and rooftops become visible. Otherwise, for most of the year, the only remains you can see are Los Marmoles. Every time I passed them, which was often, I thought of another village, the one in Elem Klimov's elegiac film Farewell, which is also about the construction of a dam, albeit a dam in Siberia, and the subsequent death of a village. Farewell was started by Klimov's wife, the equally celebrated film-maker Larissa Shepitko. It was her attempt to film the Valentin Rasputin novel Farewell to Matyora, but she died in a car crash, scouting locations. Klimov finished it for her. It is thus a farewell to Larissa, as much as a farewell to Matyora.

The ultimate "dam" movie is, of course, Deliverance. I'm not counting The Dam Busters here, because it is more of an "anti-dam" movie, as is the Jesse Eisenberg eco-thriller Night Moves. If you're one of the few people who hasn't seen Deliverance, and to whom the phrase "squeal like a pig!" means nothing, I can't say you're in for a treat, unless your idea of a treat is a four-man canoe trip down a soon-to-be-flooded river, with a side order of sodomy and murder, but I can say this is one of the most exciting and disturbing mainstream movies of the 1970s. BBC Bristol's John Boorman directed, from James Dickey's novel, and he rightly regards it as his finest hour. When I first saw it, on TV, I had the misfortune (some would say the luck) to see a heavily edited version, in which a couple of toothless hillbillies appear to do nothing worse than pull down Ned Beatty's pants, but should you choose to see the full, uncut cinema version, you are left in absolutely no doubt what they do to Ned. This seems to have tapped a nerve among that section of the male heterosexual populace who live in mortal fear of being sodomised, just as it exerts a powerful fascination over heterosexual men who secretly quite like the idea. Deliverance was the first mainstream film to depict – graphically - a male-on-male rape and, while some men may express a certain disquiet at scenes of men raping women, the discomfort – and possibly the excitement - they experience in Deliverance is, I suggest, of another order. It certainly tapped a nerve with the inhabitants of Rabun County and the other parts of Georgia and South Carolina where the film was shot. John Lane recounts, in Chattooga: Descending into the Myth of Deliverance River of the tension in the cinema when locals saw the final film "especially in the part where they have sex and squeal like a pig". Billy Redden, who played the squint-eyed banjo boy in the film, told Lane that he liked it, "though I don't think they should have put that rough stuff in there." Locals were much happier with other productions shot in the area, films like Grizzly and The Great Locomotive Chase, with Slim Pickens.

The cast are perfect. Rarely, outside of a Tarkovsky movie, has a face conveyed such existential torment as Jon Voight, while Burt Reynolds is superficially typecast as outdoors man Lewis, who saves Voight and Beatty from further harm, but then, in a stroke of narrative genius, breaks his leg in the rapids and becomes utterly dependent on the resourcefulness of his less macho buddies to get him out alive. **Voight and Reynolds weren't first choices for the leads. Dickey, who had wanted Sam Peckinpah to direct, suggested Gene Hackman** for the part of Ed. Boorman wanted **Lee Marvin** and **Marlon Brando**. **Jack Nicholson** was then given the part of Ed but wanted too much money, while **Charlton Heston** and **Donald Sutherland** both turned down Lewis because they felt, in their diametrically opposed political opinions, that the film was "too violent". Nobody, presumably, was ahead of Ned Beatty in the queue to be sodomised. This is, incredibly, his first film (after some 15 years on the stage) but he went on to star in Nashville, Wise Blood, Mikey & Nicky AND The Big Easy, so he definitely meets the stringent requirements to join the Righteous and pass into Cult Movie Heaven.

Despite the visceral river sequences (no stunt men for Boorman and his actors, what you see is real) and that ground-breaking rape, Deliverance is, like Farewell, an elegiac movie, one which shows real feeling for the doomed culture of the Appalachians, soon to be destroyed by a hydro-electric dam, even if they do have strange ways of welcoming strangers.

Boorman returned to the theme of dams in The Emerald Forest, by which time his talents, like those of Peter Bogdanovich after The Last Picture Show, had waned considerably, and he had taken to casting his own son Charley in the main part of the white boy Tommy Markham, who is abducted by Amazon natives. Tommy grows up as one of the tribe and fights on their side against the dam builders, although most of the fighting they do is actually with another tribe, the Fierce People, so-called because they are cannibals. It's all a bit like Tobias Schneebaum's Keep The River on the Right, minus the homosexuality, and largely more convincing, despite the fact that The Emerald Forest is fiction and Schneebaum is ostensibly an anthropologist, writing from experience, albeit an anthropologist who, if half of what he says is true, took the concept of participant observation slightly too far, especially where it came to eating human flesh.

You wonder what it is like to be forcibly removed from the place you were born and grew up in, the place you love, even if – as in Talavera la Vieja - those places carry the scar of war, the bridges people had been thrown from. To be driven out of your home by dam builders, be they Soviet or Falangist, New Deal-type democrats or multinationals chopping down the Amazon, must be devastating. Sometimes true disaster strikes, as it did in Ribadelago in 1959, when a one-hundred-and fifty-metre-long section of the Vega de Tera dam wall gave way and eight million cubic metres of water poured down on the village, killing 144 people. Help arrived the following day, and 28 bodies were recovered. There was an inquiry, of course – there is always an inquiry - and the engineer tasked with establishing the cause of the disaster described in detail the flaws in the structure, the vulnerable pressure points, the inadequacy of the concrete. The survivors, meanwhile, were moved to a new village, dubbed Ribadelago de Franco, and grieving relatives were indemnified at the rate of 90,000 pesetas per adult man, 60,000 pesetas per woman and 25,000 pesetas per child. The Ribadelago project was then abandoned, the buck left firmly and squarely in the hands of the site manager, while the directors of the company, Hidroelectrica Moncalbril, got off with pardons from the government. Today you can visit the much-depleted lake, with its remaining half a dam, jutting across the narrow valley, to suddenly give way to a gaping hole, a jumble of concrete and boulders through which the water poured. But Ribadelago was nothing more than a minor setback, and the regime pressed ahead with its schemes, albeit sometimes – as in Janovas – meeting inconvenient resistance.

Is it worse to be drowned, or suffocated by a slag heap, as the children of Aberfan, South Wales were? That's the sort of question Alma would ask me. Would you rather be deaf or blind, she would ask. Blind, I would answer, because I couldn't imagine a life without the Beatles, Stevie Wonder or Frank Zappa. So, she would ask, after some thought, would you rather be wrapped in bacon and dropped in a pit of wolves, or covered in rotten fish and thrown into a lake full of crocodiles?

The avalanche of industrial slurry that covered Aberfan killed 116 children and 28 adults. The deputy head, David Beynon, was found with his arms around five of his charges, trying to shield them between the blackboard and the avalanche. His own son, Philip Beynon, now 63, spoke for the first time of his father's heroism on the fiftieth anniversary of the disaster, in 2016:

"My father must have heard the sound of the landslide coming towards the school. The children would have been frightened and perhaps ran towards him. Automatically he would have put his arms around them, but they were all buried under the force of that thing. All the kids in that class were killed, every single one of them, along with my dad."

Water had built up in the coal tip above the village. When it broke and slid downhill, the village was inundated. A few minutes earlier, and the school would have still been empty. A few hours later, and the children would have been on half-term holiday. The inquiry found the National Coal Board negligent, its chairman guilty of lying (or making "misleading statements"). The Coal Board and the then Labour Government resisted all attempts to make the other tips safe. Clearing them was only made possible when the villagers themselves chipped in with a contribution of £150,000 from their charity fund, money which was finally repaid by the government of Tony Blair, while a decade later the newly-created Welsh Assembly awarded the village a further £1.5 million in compensation, or approximately £10,000 per victim.

Another landslide, this time in the Aobamba Valley, near Machu Picchu, Peru, in 1998. Tragedy is averted by the quick-thinking of a train driver. Noticing that the Vilcanota river has dried up, in spite of the heavy rain, he fears the worst. A mudslide has dammed the river upstream. He stops the train and persuades his reluctant passengers to clamber up the valley sides to the safety of higher ground, just as the river breaches the dam and deluges the valley, carrying the train and everything else away with it.

Wales, Spain, Peru, Argentina... these are places I love. To me, Wales and Spain are linked, not only by real reservoirs, but reservoirs of memory as well. Two hundred Welsh men joined the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War, and thirty-three of them died in Spain. They came from the Rhondda, Cynon and Taff valleys to the south of the Brecons, from the coastal towns of the south, the rural areas of mid-Wales and the North Wales coalfields. They were for the most part miners and communists, radicalised by the General Strike and its aftermath.

My maternal grandfather John (Bertie) "nearly went" to Spain, according to my aunt. "Did you know," she emailed me one day, "that Daddy and his older brother Ron went to fight for the International Brigade, but Minnie Alice (their mother, your great grandmother) followed them down to Temple Meads and begged them not to go? Uncle Ron said they were going to fight for freedom. Minnie burst into tears. Bertie's only 18, she said. Please don't go, you're my only sons. So they all trooped back to Repton Road. Uncle Ron never forgave her, but I think my father was secretly rather relieved."

My cousin Marc, with whom I grew up, loved dams as a boy. Whenever an opportunity presented itself – usually on weekends in Wales, in the Brecon Beacons/Black Mountains - he would build a dam, and I would help him, or more often than not just stand by and watch as he worked. The British army had long used the Brecon Beacons as a training ground. Camped in our van, we would see soldiers marching through the rain, forced to bivouac overnight with nothing but their raincoats for protection. One time we saw a young soldier spending the night alone, a little upstream from where we were parked. He had been watching us – or rather, he'd been watching Marc – working on the dam, yet he'd said nothing, done nothing, behaved in fact like a semi-wild animal, wary of us. My uncle Dave wandered over and struck up a conversation before inviting the squaddie into the van for a cup of tea. He was – as we always said, and continue to say, sarcastically, when people jump at an offer – "a little reluctant".

Year round, the conditions are harsh. The Beacons are the first land mass the jet stream hits as it rolls off the Irish Sea. On hitting the mountains, the cloud can drop, causing a sudden fall in temperature and loss of visibility, as shocking and unexpected as the right-turns in Enrique's conversation. Within the space of 15 minutes visible distance can go from what is humanly possible for the eye to see, to a mere five metres. 2013 claimed the lives of four soldiers: Captain Rob Carnegie, who died in January in freezing conditions, and three reservists - James Dunsby, Craig Roberts and Edward Maher – who died from heat exhaustion in the summer of that year. Corporal Dunsby and Lance Corporals Roberts and Maher were, according to reports, "supremely fit", "intelligent" and "determined". All three were trying out for the SAS, and had seemed on course to complete their march. So why did they die? Was it lack of water (the inquiry into their deaths was told by walkers that other solders had begged them for drinks that day) or lack of foresight on a day of "freaky" weather? A delay in getting medical help, or disorientation in the unpredictable conditions for which the Army prizes the Brecon Beacons so highly?

I think of the Welsh/Argentinian co-production Patagonia, which ends with the elderly Cerys returning from Argentina to see her childhood home in North Wales, only to find it lost beneath a reservoir. In 1910 my father-in-law's uncle moved to Argentina. He came home one evening and told his wife they were leaving next day. What she hadn't packed by then would have to stay. Two cousins, their wives and children upped sticks and moved to the other side of the world. One half of the family would settle in Salta, in the Andean north of the country, the other in Cordoba, nine hundred kilometres south, having tried Brazil first.

In 1995 one of the children – Angela – returned with her own elderly son Marcelo to see the village her parents had left, and to meet, for the first time, her distant cousin, my father-in-law Pedro, who had begun corresponding with the Argentinian branch of the family late in life. At the same time I was flying from Australia to Buenos Aires, and from Buenos Aires by bus (a journey of 24 hours) to Angela and Marcelo's hometown, Salta. Of course, I didn't know them then. It would be another three years before I met Beni, four before I met Pedro, seven before I would meet Angela and Marcelo, in the spring – the Argentine Autumn – of 2002, on what was thus my second trip to Argentina. Beni and I were escorting Pedro, following in the footsteps of Angela's parents almost a century earlier. The other branch of the family, the Cordoba branch, took us to a reservoir in which, they said, the victims of the junta – the radical teachers, social workers, and trade unionists - had been cast alive into the giant overflow funnel known as a bell-mouth spillway, and came out the other end drowned and in pieces.

In the centre of Cordoba there was an exhibition in the former detention centre and torture chamber of the junta, honouring the dead and disappeared. I was warned not to go downtown because they were also commemorating the war in the Malvinas and as a gringo, I wouldn't be safe. But how would they know I was English, and not French, or American? One of Beni's cousins, Daniel, refused to shake hands with me at first because a friend of his had died in the war. We soon became firm friends through a mutual hatred of "La Thatcher". Daniel lived at home with his parents, although he was forty or more, and chain-smoked. He'd lost his best friend in las Malvinas, and a girlfriend had also died. He lived his life in mourning, it seemed to me, in a tiny, monastic room above the family car repair shop, with a single bed and a photo of his dead girlfriend, listening to Queen, who he adored. We watched the attempted coup in Venezuela together, on TV, which was confusing, to say the least, not only because it was in Spanish, but because the coup was launched – and lost – through television, the TV companies conspiring to bring down the elected president Hugo Chavez, and the charismatic Chavez brazening it out, speaking to people in their living rooms. Afterwards, when the dust settled, those stations that had supported the coup lost their licences, and liberals the world over bemoaned the lack of media freedom. But, someone asked, if a commercial channel in Britain had supported an attempt to overthrow the democratically elected government, you'd expect them to lose their licence, wouldn't you? When the time came for us to return to Spain, Daniel hid in his room, and wouldn't come out. It was too painful for him to say goodbye.

In 1983 I went to Spain for the first time, part of a three man "Inter-Railing" brigade. We were armed only with a copy of The Hitch-hiker's Guide to Europe, which came complete with readers' contributions. The top tip for visitors to Spain, from J.D. Boyle, of Kansas, USA: "Paper napkin dispensers in just about all Spanish bars supply unlimited quantities of (thin) toilet paper..." Our Grand Tour took in Belgium, Germany, Italy, France, Spain and Morocco. I recorded our antics, and my impressions, in a diary and, subsequently, in Kerouac-style unpunctuated prose: "I was by now very stoned it had gotten beyond the stage of being nicely stoned things were out of control and I was drunk as well; I remember lying on a wall by the sea walking to a piece of waste ground with rubble and palm trees while Olly wandered among the debris taking photographs and somehow we rolled one final killer spliff..." (note the inspired use of a semi-colon mid-sentence - so not entirely unpunctuated!)

At this point Spain held no particular appeal; it was just another country on the Inter-Rail itinerary. I felt much more excited going through Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin; seeing Venice, the location and in many ways the main character of Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now; experiencing Tangier, the erstwhile home of William Burroughs and Bryon Gysin; and finally visiting Paris, a focus for all kinds of naive/romantic notions. If I had any concept of Spain, it was the Scylla & Charybdis of Franco and mass tourism, and I was equally snobbish about both. Yet something lay there, dormant: a barely conscious awareness of deeper possibilities, a sense – even before I'd read Jan Morris – that this was indeed the most exotic, the most African of European countries.

But where did that "barely conscious awareness" come from? Was it Orson Welles and his tacky adverts for Domecq Sherry? Or Don Quixote? Readers of 68½: Movies, Manson & Me will know that I saw the film of the musical Man of La Mancha (which is based on the life of Cervantes) at the Dominion Theatre in 1972, aged eight, on the same day my mother took me to a sex shop on Tottenham Court Road. Even now, the mention of Don Quixote or Peter O'Toole, even a few bars of The Impossible Dream, brings forth a veritable Aberfan of visual memories, in which the whirling Dervish windmills of the Quixote mingle with outsize dildos and tubes of brightly coloured lubricant. Don Quixote then crops up in my first (five year!) diary, a small blue lockable affair, around 1977, spelled as "Donkey Hoti", which makes him sounds like a Native American mule, and given that Sancho Panza rode a donkey, this makes some kind of sense. Around the same time, my aunt and uncle introduced me to Luis Bunuel, whose final film That Obscure Object of Desire I saw at the Bristol Arts Centre. It took me a couple of viewings – and the prompting of my uncle Dave – to realise that two different actresses (Angela Molina and Carole Bouquet) play the part of Conchita, the flamenco dancer, but I derive some satisfaction from the knowledge that very few people notice the device, just as very few notice the symbolic erection at the end of Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows unless it is pointed out to them. In his autobiography My Last Breath, Buñuel explains that the decision to use two actresses came about when the original actress, Maria Schneider, was sacked and the producer, Serge Silberman, was on the point of abandoning the shoot. I suddenly had the idea, says Bunuel, of using two actresses in the same role, a tactic that had never been tried before. Although I made the suggestion as a joke, Silberman loved it, and the film was saved.

That Obscure Object of Desire takes place against a backdrop of terrorism, perpetrated by the very Bunuelesque "Revolutionary Army of the Infant Jesus", and barely acknowledged by the protagonists, until the final shot, when an explosion appears to kill both Mathieu (Fernando Rey) and the object of his desire, Conchita.

There's something of Oshima's Ai No Corrida in the Bunuel movie, and why shouldn't there be? Both films were shot in France, Ai No Corrida in 1976, and That Obscure Object of Desire a year later. In Ai No Corrida (also known as In The Realm of The Senses, or in France, in a nod to Roland Barthes, Empire of the Senses) the lovers fuck, and suck, and egg each other on (sometimes literally, with actual eggs) while outside, the Japanese army marches off to war in China, where it will commit its own acts of state-sponsored terror. In both films, the lovers (or would-be lovers) are only interested in the objects of their desire, and with varying degrees of success they try to shut out the wider world. But reality intrudes, over and over again, whether it's the flag-waving Japanese cheering their men off to battle, or the fly that crashes into Mathieu's martini; the elderly maid who pulls back the partition door to bring the frantically fucking lovers their breakfast in Oshima, or the enervating snap of a mousetrap in Bunuel.

But That Obscure Object of Desire did not - does not – speak of Spain to me. Was it, then, the painting of Guernica by Picasso that first drew me south? A four-by-two-foot reproduction hung on our living room wall and my uncle Dave would brief us on the historical background, in the broadest brushstrokes: the Civil War, Franco, the Basque Country, the first aerial bombing of civilians (although surely that was the British in Iraq?). I was drawn like a moth to the single electric bulb which hangs in the middle of the picture. Or is it a bomb crashing through the roof?

Perhaps the annual holiday of my childhood friends Rod and Phil on the Costa del Sol sowed the seeds of a later obsession with Spain. Actually going there ourselves would have been unthinkable for a Left-leaning middle-class family like ours. We tended to look down our noses at any kind of "package holiday", especially one taken in a right-wing dictatorship. British anarchists and Spanish exiles had done their utmost to highlight the atrocities of the Franco regime, the torture and execution of the veteran communist Julian Grimau, for example, even though Grimau's party had done more than their own fair share of torturing and executing during the Civil War. Yet in spite of the protests, the pleas for clemency, Franco went on merrily torturing and garrotting political prisoners through the 1960s and 70s. The incongruity of the death penalty in a modern, or at least developing, European country is brilliantly satirised in Juan Berlanga's black comedy El Verdugo (The Executioner), although, as Jeremy Treglown has pointed out, the film is not only about the death penalty – which still existed in the UK at the time, lest we forget – but also "a critique of other aspects of the Franco regime, among them nepotism and bureaucratic and ecclesiasticial corruption, and the ways ordinary people were persuaded to connive in these practices, through traditionalism, through passivity, perhaps above all through the modest aspirations of family life, that keystone of conservative Catholicism."

El Verdugo concerns a young undertaker, José Luís, who begins dating (and, shockingly for early sixties Spain, sleeping with) Carmen, the daughter of an aging executioner, Amadeo. When Carmen gets pregnant, she and Jose Luis are forced to marry. Amadeo then learns that the apartment he has been promised on retirement will only be given to him if his new son-in-law takes over as executioner. Amadeo convinces Jose Luis to accept, promising the young man that he'll never have to execute anyone, as a pardon is almost always granted. José Luís nonetheless worries that a killer will be caught and sentenced to death. When the inevitable summons comes, he is on the island of Majorca and takes refuge in the famous caves of Drach, which contain one of the world's largest underground lakes. But his employers track him down, calling out his name from their rowing boat through a megaphone. For the executioner, as for his victims, there is no escape, and the unforgettable final scene has Jose Luis being manhandled towards the garrotting chair to perform his duties.

All the same, by 1977 Franco had been dead two years. The country was going through a cautious transition that would culminate in the attempted coup of February 1981, the failure of which ended all hopes for the rump of Spanish fascists (at least until the new millennium) and signalled the beginning of the Movida, a decade-long party that combined 70s punk attitude with the worst of 80s fashion.

The year before my Inter-Railing trip, I had travelled up to London to see Hawkwind at the Hammersmith Odeon. The support act was Spanish heavy metal band Baron Rojo (Red Baron). The group had, apparently, moved to London to record their second album, Volumen Brutal (1982) which was released in both English and Spanish versions (Bruce Dickinson of Iron Maiden is said to have helped translate the lyrics). And yet, despite my love of metal – which has lasted, more or less, into my sixth decade – I spent the entire performance in the bar. That's what you did during the support act in those days. It made no difference to me, nor did it mean much, that Baron Rojo (Baron Row-Joe, as we called them, in our ignorance) were Spanish. However, it may be some small comfort that Rolling Stone ranks Baron Rojo 18th in their list of The Fifty Greatest Spanish Rock Bands Ever, a mere twelve places behind Extremadura's own hard rock greats, Extremaduro (Extremely Hard).

Whatever it was that had brought me to Spain – the Quixote, the Picasso, the Bunuel, Baron Rojo, my grandfather's abortive mission to save the Republic, the convenient presence of a family friend in Valencia - here I was, at last, and my first sensations were the tastes: a boccadillo con calamares (squid roll) for breakfast; a boccadillo con chorizo (with thinly sliced chorizo); tortilla de patatas; above all, the coffee.

It took me years to realise the secret of Spanish coffee, or café con leche to be precise. What made it more delicious than even the best Italian cappuccino? The answer is sterilised milk. Under no other circumstances would I normally choose sterilised milk over fresh milk, but now that fresh milk is finally available in Spain, I keep a carton of full-fat UHT in the fridge for my morning café con leche (although I don't know why I say 'morning café con leche' since I drink coffee the way Frank Zappa drank coffee i.e. morning, noon and night).

After the tastes came the smells, foremost among them the smell of cigarette smoke. I smoked Ducados because I thought it was 'romantic', because that's what the Spanish smoked. Then I discovered Fortuna, and switched to those, because they were made from blond tobacco, and gentler on my throat, but still authentically Spanish.

Colours, on the other hand, never left much of an impression. Yet now I love Extremadura because it is, for the most part, a luxuriantly green place, like Britain, and not at all what you expect to find in Spain. Having said that, the sky is blue nearly all the time. It is a perfect combination.

OCTOBER

One day, seized by the momentary delusion that we could actually build a life in Extremadura, we looked at a couple of flats in Navalmoral. I'd seen an advert in an estate agent's window, for a two-bedroom flat, clearly in need of some attention, but on the market for only 20,000 Euros. We asked to see it. On the way to the viewing, the estate agent confirmed that it wasn't in the best of shape, that it could do with some TLC, or whatever the equivalent is in Spanish. And it's not in the best of areas, he added. It's debatable whether you can really divide a town the size of Navalmoral into areas, apart from its distinct gypsy quarter, but the estate agent's meaning was clear. Moroccans. Go south of the main drag in Navalmoral and you apparently enter the twilight zone of drugs and crime and (worst of all) Mohammedans. As if to confirm this, we were greeted by the smell of lamb and spices, and, on the stairs, a passing Moroccan – a potential neighbour.

In truth, the flat was too small for us. It might have been somewhere to park our modest savings in an age of low interest rates, but really we were just kidding ourselves, playing around in a fantasy world of cheap property. And the ceiling in the stairwell was very low, even by Spanish standards. The estate agent offered to show us another flat, on the other side of the main thoroughfare, the "nice" part of town, near the theatre, and the market, and the white people. We were tempted, but we needed time to think. By the time we had returned to Mesas, we had abandoned the idea, although doubts lingered for some days afterwards.

Meanwhile, I started teaching at the Academia Liverpool, in Navalmoral. The school was run by Adrian, from Mexico, and his wife Christina, who hailed from Caceres. They had met while working in Liverpool (strictly speaking, the Wirral) - hence the name of the school. The students were mainly from the nuclear power station in Almaraz and divided into two groups, intermediate and upper-intermediate, although they kept chopping and changing between the two levels, depending on their work schedule. And, it turned out, not all of them worked at the nuclear. There was a journalist from Radio Navalmoral, called Marisa, and a mysterious Frenchman, who rode a low-slung motorbike straight out of Easy Rider, and wouldn't tell anyone what he did for a living. He was keen on gardening, and soul music. There was also Javier, who worked at the nuclear, and was slightly simian in appearance, shy and nervous, but also a quick learner. He liked outdoor activities, and agreed, in principle, to climb Almanzor in the spring or early summer. As a reward, I promoted him to the higher level class.

When Siso was alive, he too worked on and off at Almaraz, in the busy periods when they were "cleaning" and took on extra, casual workers. He always scorned our opposition to nuclear power. He even scorned the opposition to a nuclear "cementerro" (i.e. dump) in the village, saying it would bring much needed "investment" (or compensation). The opponents of the plan won out in the end, and the "cementerro" went to another village, along with the money. However, it turned out that Jose Maria, who lived in Mesas and played cards with my father-in-law, had a vegetable garden (a huerto) on the outskirts of the village, and received a small stipend from the nuclear for the right to test the radioactivity in his veg. So the village was receiving something from Almaraz, apart from almost undetectable levels of radiation.

My mother Jackie came to visit. We drove across the valley floor to the Sierra de Gredos, but encountered a solid wall of black cloud marginally less ominous than the trailer to the movie Twister and were forced to turned around. Navalmoral was still basking in sunshine, and it was a short drive to the fourteenth century castle at Belvis de Monroy, my favourite castle in the whole world, built on land given to Hernán Pérez del Bote by King Sancho IV to encourage the repopulation of Extremadura after the Reconquista. I've lost count of the times I've visited Belvis. I've taken every single visitor there, and it has never failed to impress and amaze. It's also something I can unreservedly recommend to any would-be visitor to Extremadura without worrying that I'm giving away a secret. In my view, the more visitors the better, although with increasing numbers of visitors the chance of a serious accident increases as well. This is the castle Health & Safety forgot. You can clamber freely on the walls, run up steps, along walkways, across rooves, none of which have any safety rails. The star attraction is the keep, the one part of the castle which has been restored, in the sense that a stairway of sorts exists to the top, from where the views south to the embalse, and north towards the Sierra de Gredos, are amazing. All of this may change. The castle is protected under the generic Declaration of the Decree of April 1949 and Law 16/1985 on Spanish Historical Heritage. Since 2016, following serious subsidence, it has been owned by the Society of Friends of Castles of Spain. There was some grumbling from locals that the castle hadn't been kept within local, public ownership but my own purely selfish fears were more that with the anticipated attention to the upkeep of the walls and the preservation of the castle, I wouldn't be allowed to run around at will any longer, flirting with death, standing as close to the edge of the flat tiled roof of the great hall as I dared, gazing down on the village below like the lord of everything. My fear, in other words, that Health, Safety and the preservation of heritage would take precedence over the freedom to endanger myself, my daughter, my friends and their children.

Jackie wanted to see Caceres, capital city of the province which bears its name, which used to get overlooked in tourist guides, or at least in The Rough Guide to Spain, which is the only guide book on Spain I've ever consulted. Things are slowly "improving", if attracting tourists is a mark of improvement (which it undoubtedly is for the local economy). Caceres, which is about an hour and a half's drive from Mesas, now gets many more visitors than when I first went there, fifteen or so years ago, and was heralded in the local newspaper as that rare beast, un turista ingles. It now boasts – in addition to the annual WOMAD festival, which started in 1992 - a raft of outstanding restaurants, including the two-Michelin-star Atrio and El Figon de Esutaquio, the former haunt of the writer Javier Cercas, where the migas – fried breadcrumbs – come highly recommended by the Extremenan chef Jose Pizarro.

Pizarro began his career in the Fonda de San Juan restaurant in Cáceres before moving to the _Hotel Cañada Real_ in Plasencia, then to Madrid, and finally, to London. He opened his own restaurant in 2011, in then newly-fashionable Bermondsey. I have actually met Jose Pizarro. I can say that - in my limited experience of high end restaurants and fine dining establishments – he is only one of two chefs, the other being Michel Roux, who has actually come to our table and enquired after our meal. With Roux, whose stock has rather fallen following the news that he paid his staff less than minimum wage and kept the tips, it was charming and exciting, but you knew it was part of a ritual that he performed every single day he was in the restaurant, and he visited every table. With Jose Pizarro, it was more like the dirty fork sketch in Monty Python's Flying Circus. The waitress had innocently asked us if everything was okay and my friends and I had said that we loved the food but found the portions mean. Before we had asked for the bill, Pizarro appeared in a state of anxious genuflection and launched into an intense and reflective conversation-come-explanation of the pressures a chef/patron operated under, and the quality of the produce he was using. He then "decided" – seemingly there and then, although I suspect he had already been thinking about it – that he was going to use cheaper cuts of meat in order to provide bigger portions. Would that satisfy us? Given the quality of the cooking, we said that it probably would, and he offered us a dessert on the house, which we gratefully accepted. But we've never been back.

Cooking in Mesas, I sometimes consulted Rick Stein's Spain, the book which the Lord of Padstow wrote to accompany his TV series. He describes filming with Jose Pizarro in Extremadura. The Spaniard was making an escabeche – a sweet and sour marinade - of tench, a fish which is plentiful in the lakes around Caceres. While they were filming Pizarro, a local TV crew asked if they could film the British crew at work. Soon after, another local TV crew came along and asked if THEY could film. A TV crew filming a TV crew filming a TV crew: it's like the Russian doll structure of The Saragossa Manuscript, in which layer after layer is stripped away to reveal a new mystery, like a literary version of Pass the Parcel.

Pedro Almodóvar was sent to Caceres, at the age of eight, to study for the priesthood. His family followed, his father opening a gas station, while his mother sold wine in a bodega. Almodovar later said that his real education came from the cinema in Caceres (American screwball comedies, French New Wave, Italian neo-realism) and that foremost amongst his influences was Bunuel.

So here I was again, in the same information centre where I had been interviewed by the local paper fifteen years earlier, only this time with my mother, who was transfixed by a video of the Jarramplas festival in Piornal. This, we learned, was the highest village in the Sierra de Tormantos, above the Valle del Jerte, and every January, on Saint Sebastian's Day, it plays host to the Jarramplas festival, in which hundreds of young men pelt a be-costumed volunteer with turnips.

Who, you may ask, is the Jarramplas? He (always a he) is a young villager selected at random to be the scapegoat, dressed in colourful fabric and a strange, somewhat African horned mask. He walks the streets, banging his drum to summon the attackers, who then chase him round the village, bombarding him with turnips and competing to see who can throw the most the hardest. Why do they do this (apart from the thrill of it and the machismo)? One theory has it that pelting the Jarramplas symbolises the punishment and expulsion of a cattle thief by Native Americans, as witnessed by the first conquistadors. Another says it mirrors the punishment of the giant Cacus by Hercules in Greek mythology. Whatever its origins, it has become both a part of the fabric of Extremenan life, and an annual exorcism of all evil. In that respect, it resembles the Stoning of the Devil or ramī al-jamarāt (literally, "the stoning of the place of pebbles") which takes place in Mecca, or rather in Mina, a few miles to the east, during the Hajj. Here pilgrims ritually cast pebbles at three walls in a symbolic re-enactment of Abraham's rejection of the Devil, which simultaneously represents the repudiation of the self, the pushing aside of one's basest desires and wishes, and submission to the will of Allah. The Stoning is considered the most dangerous part of the pilgrimage, as sudden crowd movements on or near the Jamarat Bridge can cause stampedes and on more than one occasion, thousands have suffocated or been trampled to death. Crowd conditions are especially difficult during the final day of Hajj, the day pilgrims leave Mina and return to Mecca for the final circumambulation of the Kaaba. Some scholars feel that the ritual can be done at any time between noon and sunset but many Muslims are taught that it should be done immediately after the noon prayers. This leads to people camping out till mid-day, then rushing out to do the stoning.

In 2004 the Saudi authorities replaced the pillars with 26-metre-long walls, as many people had been accidentally throwing pebbles at people on the other side. To ease access to the jamarāt, a pedestrian bridge was built, allowing pilgrims to throw stones from either ground level or from the bridge. Despite these precautions, a stampede during the Hajj of 2006 killed some 350 pilgrims. Another crush occurred on September 24, 2015 when at least 2,411 pilgrims were killed, according to the Associated Press, although Saudi reports reduced the number by two-thirds. If the AP figures are correct, the 2015 crush would be the deadliest in the history of the annual pilgrimage. The Egyptian writer Nawal El Saadawi questions whether there is a need to stone the devil at all. But surely, if the Devil exists, he should be stoned. Everybody must get stoned.

Unbelievers and infidels are afforded a rare insight into the ramī al-jamarāt in the extraordinary French-Moroccan film Le Grand Voyage, made in 2004 by Ismael Farroukhi. This is a film which deserves to be better known and more widely seen. It starts intriguingly enough, with the more or less fully "Westernized" Réda roped into driving his devout Arabic-speaking father to Mecca, a journey which takes them through Italy, the Balkans, Turkey, Syria, and Jordan. As they travel ever closer to Mecca, their relationship grows closer in the face of the difficulties – practical and emotional - they encounter. But the film really comes into its own when they get to Mecca, and the boundary between fiction and reality blurs, revealing to the uninitiated the spiritual depth of faith and the communal power of pilgrimage, before the father dies, happy.

I had thought that perhaps there could be a Spanish Grand Voyage, a sort of symbolic, cinematic re-re-conquering of the Islamic treasures of Granada, Sevilla, Cordoba etc. Perhaps that film will get made. But a Christian version of the same tale already exists, in the form of the Emilio Estevez film The Way. In a reverse of the earlier film, it is the son, played by Estevez, who dies at the very outset, and the father (Martin Sheen, also the real life father of Estevez) who undertakes the pilgrimage as a homage/tribute to his son, carrying his ashes. I'd always assumed that Emilio Estevez had chosen to take his mother's name, but it turns out Martin Sheen's real name is Ramón Antonio Gerardo Estévez. Sheen's own father, Francisco Estévez Martínez, was born in Galicia, hence the affection for Santiago and the Camino, I suppose, since the idea for the film was Sheen's. It is a film of quiet, and thus huge, emotional power, though rather more self-conscious in its string-pulling than Le Grand Voyage. Perhaps this is because the loss takes place at the start of the film, and hangs over the entire journey, rather than coming as a satisfying but devastating twist at the end.

Though not a believer, I like to think that I felt something of the power imparted to the pilgrim when I undertook a section of the Camino with my father and brother ten years ago, especially at the starting point of our pilgrimage, in Leon, when my father and I attended a mass for pilgrims in the church attached to the Convento Santa Maria de las Carbajalas, a surprisingly inclusive mass which reached out to all beliefs, all motives for walking the Camino (mostly, these days, curious or touristic) and made us feel part of the same unstoppable force, reaching back through time to the first pilgrims - a feeling which sustained itself for the first few days, through the pounding sun and uphill battles against gravity, age, the weather; through the first two or three nights of sleeping in the shared dorms of the nominally free refugios, the nightly symphony of coughs, farts and snores from middle-aged Germans, before we decided to cut our losses and sleep in hotels along the way. We had, in fact, been paying so much in voluntary contributions to the refugios that our own hotel room, our own en-suite bathroom, worked out no more expensive. And perhaps, in so doing, we were slightly safer. In 2011 police in Navarre arrested two men who were stealing from hostels along the route. Three years later, a man from León was arrested in Boadilla del Camino, where he had carried out at least 20 robberies. The same month, thieves made off with several thousand Euros from a dormitory in a hostel in Lugo. This phenomenon is illustrated in The Way by the episode where a gypsy boy steals Martin Sheen's backpack (containing the ashes of his dead son). In itself, this is not an improbable occurrence but it swiftly degenerates into melodrama when the proud, English-speaking father of the boy returns the backpack and ashes to their owner, saying how ashamed he is of his son, how gypsies have an unfair reputation, and then invites Sheen and his fellow travellers to an "intimate gathering" with food, drink, music and dancing around a fire, which provides plenty of colour to the film but detracts from the otherwise plausible storyline. Take it from me, there are very few Spanish gypsies who speak fluent English.

Robbery isn't the only risk, of course. Between 2010 and 2014, there were at least seven rapes on the Camino. Then, in 2015, a 41-year-old American pilgrim, Denise Thiem, went missing. Her body was found buried near the village of Castillo de los Polvazares, and a local man confessed to the killing. The president of the Korean Association of Friends of the Camino (yes, there's a KOREAN Association of Friends of the Camino) said that many women were afraid to travel the route alone. Spanish authorities retorted that more than 200,000 people travel the various stages of the Way each year, and that crime levels are well below the national average. Very few of the people who die on the Camino are murdered. The majority die, like Emilio Estevez, in road accidents, or of natural causes - heart attacks mainly. One or two have drowned at Finisterre, but my favourite Camino death, if I may put it that way, is the 65 year-old Irish pilgrim who died in 2014 when he "fell off his bicycle."

There's another reason to watch The Way and that is for the tiny part the veteran actor Matt Clark plays in it, effortlessly "being" rather than acting. He is never a leading man, nor even a supporting actor in the sense that we usually understand the term, of playing second or even third fiddle to the leads. No, Matt is always lurking somewhere between tenth and twentieth in the cast, more often than not a slightly put-upon or hard-done-by sidekick and, for much of the 1970s (his heyday) a dispensable cowhand who would invariably meet a bloody end. He has to make the most of his small parts, knowing that his time on screen – his time in this world – is limited.

In the Heat of the Night was his first part of note and sees him get a creditable twelfth billing, behind Sidney Poitier, Rod Steiger and Warren Oates, but also behind the likes of Peter Whitney, Kermit Murdock and Larry D. Mann (and where are THEY now?). It's currently fashionable, as it was fashionable in the sixties, to belittle the film's liberal credentials, its anti-racist intentions, its journeyman director Norman Jewison, but it is easy to forget the impact this film made, not least for the moment when Sidney Poitier, slapped in the face by the plantation owner Endicott, slaps him back.

Will Penny marks the beginning of Matt's golden period, when he found himself cast almost exclusively in so-called "revisionist" Westerns. Bridge at Remagen (15th billing) Macho Callahan (11th billing) and Monte Walsh (16th billing) were followed by his first masterpiece, Don Siegel's The Beguiled, in which he makes only a fleeting appearance (14th billing) as Scroggins. He's up against John Wayne and a bunch of kids in the distasteful rites of passage movie The Cowboys and STILL only gets 22nd billing! Then come the glory days of the early and mid '70s: The Culpepper Cattle Company (8th billing) and The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid (8th again!) mark Matt's cinematic zenith, and the emergence of Phil Kaufman as a writer/director to be reckoned with. Did Matt dare to think his star was in the ascendant? After Jeremiah Johnson (10th billing) and The Life & Times of Judge Roy Bean (17th billing) he makes what is his one and only appearance in a Sam Peckinpah movie, shot by Kris Kristofferson in Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid. He gets to fall down the stairs in slow motion, blood spurting out of his back, the Peckinpah equivalent of winning an Oscar, in spite of the lowly 13th billing. He's back, in 14th place, in The Outlaw Josey Wales, written by Kaufman and directed (as if I needed to tell you) by Clint Eastwood.

Then came the eighties, the most horrible decade of the Common Era, worse even than the 1930s or the Black Death, when there were no more Westerns and Matt made an unwise twenty-year detour into comedy. Come the new millennium, he bounced back with South of Heaven, West of Hell, which is quite one of the weirdest westerns ever made. Directed by and starring Dwight Yoakam, with a cast that includes Pee-Wee Herman, Luke Askew, Vince Vaughan and the Fondas Bridget and Peter, Matt gets a lowly 12th billing, behind Luke Askew again, and is peripheral to the story. I guess that's why I like him so much. I can identify with him. For much of my life, I've been a bystander, peripheral to the action. Some might say my being peripheral is a good thing, especially in this book. George Orwell, for example, who asserted that "one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane." But frankly, this approach smacks of a voluntary airbrushing out of oneself, a kind of literary Stalinism, or Buddhism, or Islam; at any rate, the subjugation of the individual to the people, the state, God, the cosmos. If I want to do that, I'll take some acid. Or as Henry David Thoreau states, boldly, in Walden: "In most books the I, or first person, is omitted; in this it will be retained... we commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking..."

South of Heaven was self-financed by Yoakam, when backing was withdrawn at the last moment, and it has been dismissed as a vanity project. As if any film, or book, or record, or painting, or poem, could be other than a vanity project, with films the guiltiest of all. Isn't every Jennifer Aniston or Tom Cruise movie a gigantic, misconceived vanity project, when all is said and done? If only those critics had the courage to sell their Malibu homes, as Yoakam did, and sink 4 million bucks into making a film. Or perhaps it's just as well they don't. South of Heaven Etc grossed $28,140 and Yoakam's production company filed for bankruptcy, with crew members taking him to court to get paid. For Yoakam it was "the hardest experience I've ever gone through in my professional life" (so something worse happened in his personal life!) and he toured with a stripped-down pick-up band to pay off his debts.

What does any of this have to do with Spain? Spaghetti Westerns, for a start, many of which were filmed in Almeria, in south-east Spain. My father-in-law loved Westerns, especially For A Few Dollars More, or La Muerte Tenia Un Precio, as it's known in Spain. He loved the little paperback cowboy novels you can buy in Spain as well, printed on cheap paper. But more to the point, Matt Clark was a pilgrim in The Way. So, he's been to Spain, walked The Way, and I have followed in his footsteps. Or he has followed in mine – I was first, I think.

October 21st marked the 49th anniversary of the Aberfan disaster. Then came news of a friend's near fatal accident in London. Julie, the midwife who delivered Alma, had been run over on her bike by a Tesco delivery lorry, and lost a leg. This happened on October 4th. The accident, she said, "was a classic lorry-turning-left scenario. It was a lovely, sunny, Sunday afternoon. Keith and I were cycling along Old Street. We stopped at a traffic light. I turned and told Keith we were going straight ahead and when the light changed we set off and the lorry came from behind and I got caught in the front wheel arch as he made the left turn..." According to Keith, "there was a guy walking along on the sidewalk when she went under the truck wheel. He saved her life. He was a Royal Marine. He was calm and methodical – he used my belt to apply a tourniquet to her leg, which kept her going until the paramedic arrived. He stabilized her and kept her alive until the ambulance crew arrived.

When the Marine called in for an ambulance Julie heard him say it was an amputation, "but I think I already knew (...) I am so impressed with the treatment I got. The NHS is phenomenal. The surgeons are mainly military, rotating in war zones so their knowledge of traumatic amputation is vast. I was in intensive care for a couple of days but then recovered in my own room, then a ward with a wonderful view of London from the 16th floor. I'm in a rehab unit now and have a leg already which I'm learning to walk on. We get physio 2 hours a day and the rest of the time is spent on the ward, boring but I can go home at weekends and out at night until 9.30 so I know a lot of pubs around Kennington now...."

October 24th was the day that Spain filmed itself for Spain in a Day, a documentary "inspired by" – i.e. copying - the Oscar-winning Life in a Day. Beni and I drove her dad to the huerto, for which there is no adequate translation, although I said earlier, a propos Jose-Maria's huerto, that it was a vegetable garden. Sometimes it gets translated as allotment, but that implies something rented from the council, and feels very English to me. A huerto is a piece of land you own, a smallholding, in which you grow things to eat, although even that description barely does justice to the extent of Pedro's huerto, the hours of labour, the love and care that Pedro has poured into his land, his vegetables and olive trees and fig trees, the sheep he once again took to keeping late in his seventies/eighties. There, under an olive tree, we filmed him reciting a poem he had composed, and which he had memorised through countless renditions. Beni submitted the poem to the website and we waited to see if it would be accepted, a wait of six months or more as it turned out.

Eight months after my inter-rail adventure, I undertook a second trip to Spain. I had finally caught the Iberian bug, a bug that had lain dormant for years (so I guess I caught it a long time before, I just didn't know it). My fleeting encounter with the country the previous summer had failed to satisfy my curiosity. How could it? How could a lifetime do justice to Spain? I was studying film in London by now. During the Easter break I caught a coach to Paris, and from there I hitch-hiked south through France, into Catalonia:

"At 8 o'clock in the evening I was walking along a minor road about to give up for the night when a car stopped, a Czech man and his Spanish girlfriend going to Almeria. They were two of the nicest people I've ever met. We slept near Tarragona, south of Barcelona, they in the car, me under an olive tree in the rain. It was beautiful..."

The following day we arrived in Valencia, and I found my way to the house of my mother's friend Sally, who my friends and I had descended on the previous year, unannounced, turning up at her beach house in the pouring rain, as nineteen-year-olds do. She had lived for some years in Spain, but visited Bristol every summer throughout the seventies with her Spanish partner Paco, and subsequently with their daughter Nela. Sally and Paco later split up, and Paco died in a car crash, while Sally found love again with Eduardo. When I first met him, the previous summer, Eduardo was working as a waiter in a nearby bar, and he hadn't taken too kindly to the unexpected arrival of three young men who couldn't speak Spanish. This time, at least, I had given warning, and I was alone.

I found Valencia boring at first. I wandered around the markets and museums, even the zoo, at a loss what to do. So I did what I knew best. I went to the cinema and watched films: an of-its-time indie sci-fi/sex comedy called Liquid Sky ("a disappointment" according to my diary, although "it raised some important issues") and a Spanish film called The Long Night of the White Walking Sticks. I can find no evidence whatsoever of the existence of this film in either English or Spanish, nor can I remember anything about it, but it's there in my diary, and I love the title.

After three days I hitched back to London, and film school, spending a night in Barcelona, which "looks like a place where there's actually a lot to do... I will come back", and getting a lift from Montpellier to Nimes with an old man who was going out dancing and denounced Montpellier as une ville bourgeoise. I slept under a tree that night, and next day got a lift from a couple of Christians, who invited me home for lunch in their parents' country house, where the entire family attempted to convert me, and begged me to stay for Easter. I made my excuses and left. It took me another twenty-four hours of non-stop hitching/waiting to get to Paris, and the coach. I had a day to kill in Paris (Easter Sunday, to be precise) but unusually for me, didn't go to the cinema (I went to the Pompidou Centre instead).

Later that year, I made my third trip to Spain, this time with my girlfriend, Annette. By now, I was well and truly hooked, although I'm still not sure what I was hooked on, exactly. The cheapness of it, perhaps. The food, the drink, the cigarettes. I had read Orwell's Homage To Catalonia, although not, ironically, 1984, the year this all took place in. I fondly imagined Barcelona to be a hotbed of anarchist fraternalism. We were promptly mugged on our first night, which set off a recurring pattern of robberies, rip-offs and close shaves in the Catalan capital. Of course, the anarchists hero-worshipped criminals. It's also the case, as we now know, that not all residents of Barcelona were anarchists. The Stalinists and Trotskyists, for example. Although, in a rare show of begrudging solidarity with the anarchists, the Trotskyists found themselves ranged against the Stalinists in the tragic May Days of 1937, while the Catalan bourgeoisie took their hats off and kept their heads down, until Franco had won the war.

That first night in Barcelona, we'd had a cheap and enjoyable meal in the Barrio Chino and were sitting in the Placa Reial in the dark. I was smoking a cigarette. Two men – thin, junkies – approached and offered us hashish. I said no, and they asked me why. Because I don't have much money, I said. HOW much, they asked me. Evidently they were masters of the Socratic argument. I should have got up and walked off then and there, as the more streetwise Annette attempted to do, but I was happy and relaxed. I didn't perceive the threat. Cuanto dinero tienes? How much money do you have? A knife was (or appeared to be) sticking in my side by now, and I saw the sense in giving them what I had in my pockets. Slowly, reluctantly, yet with no apparent alternative, I reached inside my jacket, produced a clutch of notes and handed them over. Not content, they began patting me down. A sudden panic seized me. All our holiday money was in a money belt around my waist. Having given them a large slice of it already, I came to my senses and did what Annette had tried to do a minute earlier. I walked away, and they let me go. They'd already made more than they ever imagined they would. In the years to come, there would be many more such indignities, and they were always my fault.

NOVEMBER

It was still hot. The long days were marked by comforting if sometimes restricting rituals-come-obligations: letting the chickens out in the morning; escorting Alma to and from the bus stop where the school bus would collect or deposit her; taking my father-in-law to and from his evening card game; locking the chickens up at night; remarking on the warmth, and the blue sky, and how far it felt from London weather. In Spanish Journeys, Adam Hopkins writes that "Spaniards wage a systematic war against the daylight, pulling down vast, clanking roller blinds called persianas and pursuing their domestic lives in deep obscurity". But it's an obsessively clean obscurity. I believe the Spanish buy more bleach than any other nation: they bulk-buy it, the way they bulk-buy olive oil, and they use it compulsively. The Spanish are not house-proud so much as house-ashamed. You will rarely be invited into a Spanish home, but just in case you are, or you drop in unexpectedly, and force yourself over the threshold, everything is kept spotless. A friend of mine has a theory that this manic cleaning is rooted in the Church, in the re-conquest of Spain from the Moors and, latterly, in the language of Franco and the Nationalists. All these institutions – the Church, the Reconquista, Spanish Nationalism – share a language of scourging, of purification and eradication, ridding the world of vermin, be they Protestants, Moors or Communists. The Spanish have, according to such a theory, domesticated this concept. Under Franco, the Spanish woman had nothing to do but clean, and clean she did. But not Beni. She and I shared a dislike of housework, and only did it, reluctantly, when people were coming to visit. I would get the top of the stove to clean, and Beni would go down on all fours and start scrubbing like Lady Macbeth, until her hands were raw and red. Did other Spanish women do this on a daily basis? I vowed to start checking their hands.

To supplement our income, I started teaching English to the only teenager in the village. Elsa was, I think, in the second year of her bachillerato, or A-levels. At any rate, she was seventeen, and she took the bus to school every day with Jesus, who was twelve. This wasn't the same bus which Alma took. That was the 8.30 bus. Elsa and Jesus took the 8.00 bus, while everyone else took the 7.30 bus. Three buses in an hour and a half: one for the adults (who paid, but were subsidised) one for the two secondary school children, and one for the primary school child. Having grown up in Thatcher's Britain, my instinct was to rail against the wastage and inefficiency. But then I thought of the jobs being created, the extra hours which the driver and – in Alma's case – the chaperone were paid for, and it made sense.

Elsa was strange. Was it teenagers, or twenty-first century teenagers, or Spanish teenagers? I wasn't like that at seventeen, was I? I'm pretty sure I was comfortable around adults and reasonably sociable. We used to sit around my aunt and uncle's kitchen and get stoned together. Jazz musicians would visit and get stoned with us. I probably didn't say much, certainly nothing of any value, but at least I spoke when I was spoken to. No money was worth it to sit in Elsa's living room, not being offered a cup of coffee, let alone a joint, only getting monosyllabic answers to my questions. It was like having teeth pulled. Then, suddenly, it ended. She said she wanted to stop for Christmas, and that she'd let me know when she wanted to start again in the New Year, but she never did get back to me. She didn't even acknowledge my existence when I walked into the bar and saw her there with her friends, or passed her in the street. Was I even more boring than her?

One night Elsa's rugged, one-eyed father Mario had a fight with Fabio, the Italian, who worked under him at the town hall. Fabio was drunk, which is a bit like saying that the sky is often blue in Mesas or they speak Spanish in Spain. Suffice to say, there was an altercation. Fabio landed a punch, the two of them were dragged apart by their respective wives, and by next day it was all forgotten, at least by Fabio, who turned up for work as normal, as if nothing had happened. He was sporting a black eye, so at some point Mario, who wasn't Italian, in spite of his name, must have got a punch in somewhere.

Friday 13th October. I don't recall how we learned the news of the Paris attacks, of the eighty-nine dead in the Bataclan theatre, the dozens more killed in cafes and bars. Because of Beni's connection to Paris, it touched her in myriad ways: a relative watching the football in the Stade de France, where three bombs went off; her journalist cousin Luca, who would, of an evening, visit one of the cafés raked by machine gun fire, but who had decided to stay at home that night and watch opera on telly; her nephew Rafael, who was stranded in central Paris, unable to get home, forced to spend the night in a hotel, alone terrified; his mother – Beni's sister – two of whose students were at the Bataclan that night, lying on the floor in an inch of blood, playing dead.

It was the same at the Atocha station, in Madrid, during the attacks which are known in Spain as 11-M, for the 11th of March 2004. On that occasion, a cousin lost a leg. Is it worse to lose a leg in a bike accident, dragged into the wheel arch of a Tesco lorry, or in a bomb attack on a train? When the 7/7 attacks took place in London, a year after Madrid, we were in Cornwall. Friends had rented a cottage in Lamorna Cove. Beni was pregnant, and we had her nephews staying with us. Rafa, who found himself alone in Paris that night in 2015, was ten years old. On the morning of July the seventh we walked down the stream from the cottage, through the woods, onto a hill overlooking the little harbour. Beni's mobile rang. The caller – a concerned relative, perhaps a friend – wanted to know if we were okay. Of course we are, replied Beni. We're having a lovely time here.

Years passed. Camping in Wales, at Llanthony Priory, in the Vale of Ewyas, with Marc. That night, in the small, crowded, underground bar of the priory hotel, we met a couple from Newport. For some reason, forced to share a table, we hit it off. At a certain point in the evening, after numerous drinks, they confessed that they weren't from Newport, they were actually from London. They'd been on the Underground during 7/7, or at least the woman had. She'd emerged physically unscathed, but she'd never got over it. They couldn't live in London anymore, so they'd moved to Wales. They couldn't hold their drink though. We staggered back to their tent, whisky bottle in hand, but the woman passed out, her boyfriend apologised, and Marc and I rather awkwardly took our leave and returned to our own tent. When they left, in the morning, they passed without a flicker of recognition. Sober and hung-over, they must have felt embarrassed, or ashamed.

In the aftermath of the coup in Chile, many Chileans fled to Europe. Since Franco was still alive, just, they couldn't go to Spain, so they sought refuge in France, the Netherlands, the UK. Following the attack on the Twin Towers, a group of international film-makers, among them household names Alejandro Inarritu, Mira Nair, Samira Makhmalbaf and Shohei Imamura, got together and made a portmanteau movie, called, with striking originality, 11'09"01 September 11 because each section is 11 minutes, 9 seconds, and one frame long. Ken Loach's contribution is about a Chilean exile writing to the American people about their shared fate, and figures amongst his very best work. Ken is always better doing documentary than drama, I think, although this is a bit of a halfway house. The protagonist is playing himself, and the scenes in which he writes his letter are very obviously staged.

There's also the Cuban documentarist Santiago Alvarez's found footage homage to the singer Victor Jara, who was brutally murdered in the Santiago National Stadium by the Chilean army. The Alvarez film bears the catchy title of El Tigre Salto y Mato... Pero Morira... Morira (The Tiger Pounced and Killed... But He Will Die... He Will Die). When I was still writing book reviews for The Good Book Guide, they sent me a book by Victor Jara's widow Joan to review. This is what I said about it:

"The late sixties/early seventies were heady years in Chile. As leading light of the New Chilean Song Movement and champion of Salvador Allende's Popular Unity government, Victor Jara bridged the gap between politics and culture. He sang not only about but for the poor and oppressed – the peasant stock from which he hailed – and as such, was a hero to them. For a while he was able to bask with his English wife Joan in their hard won if fragile victory. But all the time the military, aided by the CIA and multinational companies, were plotting their revenge. When, finally, the coup came, with unimaginable ferocity, Victor was singled out for special treatment. His hands smashed, his tongue cut out, he met his maker along with thousands of others in Santiago's National Stadium. It's a testament to the courage of Joan Jara that she has been able to write of their life together, their hopes and dreams, the beauty of Victor's music and the power of love, even in the midst of terror. A truly heart-rending memoir."

My favourite Jara song is probably El Derecho de Vivir en Paz (The Right to Live in Peace) which can be found on the 1971 album of the same name, which also features the songs El Alma Llena de Banderas (Alma's Up To Here With Antonio Banderas) and Ya Parte El Galgo Terrible (I Went to a Terrible Party in Wales). Those are the translations Google comes up with, anyway. El Derecho de Vivir en Paz was Jara's expression of solidarity with the people of Vietnam, who in their desire to "live in peace" had defeated the French at the battle of Dien Bien Phu and were, when he wrote the song, giving the Americans a comprehensive lesson in peace studies as well. El Derecho de Vivir en Paz is, I think, atypical of Victor Jara's work, in the sense that it's quite good. It has a rockier, more psychedelic vibe to it than most of his songs, which are generally a bit dreary and earnest. It is, in other words, both "a good place" to start listening to Victor Jara and emphatically not "a good place", because it will mislead you into thinking that you want to hear the Antonio Banderas song, or the one about the party in Wales, and take it from me, you don't want to.

Ah, the lure of Wales and the Black Mountains. Another book I was reading in Mesas, Albion Dreaming: a popular history of LSD in Britain by Andy Roberts, mentions a journey Allen Ginsberg made in the summer of 1967 to visit his English publisher Tom Maschler in Capel-y-Ffin. The two men dropped acid and cavorted in the hills around Llanthony. Out of Ginsberg's experience grew the long poem Wales: A Visitation ("a solid mass of Heaven, mist-infused, ebbs thru the vale, a wavelet of Immensity, lapping gigantic through Llanthony Valley...")

Then there is The Weathermonger, one of the books I was reading to Alma at night, having recovered my own childhood memories of a strange tale set in Weymouth, involving a Rolls Royce Silver Ghost and certain magical powers over the weather. It was Peter Dickinson's first book for children and it shows. Herge couldn't have come up with a more far-fetched, demented plot, or one less suitable for children.

It starts innocently enough. Britain is in the grip of a time known as The Changes. The people view machines as instruments of witchcraft and live in a quasi-medieval state, working the land in the manner of 1970s back-to-nature anarchists, the sort of acid enthusiasts who litter Albion Dreaming and who comment, approvingly, that the Stonehenge Festival "had the feel of a medieval encampment" – i.e. no toilets, limited medical knowledge, a complete absence of anyone to protect you from Hells Angels, etc. In Weymouth, Geoffrey (the town's "weathermonger") and his sister Sally are about to be drowned for the crime of using a motorboat. They manage to escape across the Channel to France, where modern life goes on as usual, and a British version of De Gaulle's Free French pertains. The authorities persuade Geoffrey and Sally to return to Britain and find the cause of the "Changes". Geoffrey and Sally duly return and steal the aforementioned Silver Ghost from the Beaulieu Motor Museum. It's these little touches of verite, as well as the use of locations closely linked to my own childhood, such as Weymouth and the Black Mountains, which in large part explain the appeal of the book to me, then and now. Needless to say, the Silver Ghost attracts the attention of the superstitious locals and the two are quite literally hounded across the West Country to Wales, where they discover an enormous medieval tower besieged by wolves.

The tower is in the care of the timid Mr Furbelow, who, in the book's greatest, most un-child-friendly twist, turns out to be keeping Merlin (yes, that Merlin!) hooked on morphine in an underground chamber. The intricacies of preparing a fix are described in minute detail, and I had a lot of explaining to do, I can tell you. The two siblings manage to wean Merlin off the junk, and the Changes – which are a manifestation of his addiction/suffering, or something like that – go away, if changes can be said to go away and that isn't an oxymoron. Funny how I didn't remember any of this from my childhood, only the Silver Ghost and the bit in Weymouth, but there you are. Perhaps it isn't such a traumatic book for kids after all. I mean, if they can survive Dora The Explorer's Egg Hunt, they can probably survive anything.

Merlin's withdrawal – in a chapter entitled Withdrawal, in a book for children, remember – reminded me of Popeye Doyle's going cold turkey in The French Connection II. I duly tracked the movie down on a free streaming site. Merlin isn't nearly as foul-mouthed as Popeye. In fact, I'm not sure Merlin says anything during his withdrawal: it's all expressed through the literally earth-shattering upheavals he causes. When John Frankenheimer, the director of French Connection II, took on the job, he was determined not to simply replicate William Friedkin's French Connection, a film he admired greatly. French Connection II is a very different beast, at the heart of which is the extended "decompression" sequence in which Gene Hackman, playing Popeye, gets to employ every Method tool at his disposal.

And how, you may ask, does Popeye, an upstanding detective, whose only vice is alcohol, come to be a junkie? Why, he is abducted on the streets of Marseille by his arch enemy Charnier and, for reasons best known to Charnier, forcibly hooked on heroin, rather than simply killed. The villains then dump him outside the police station in Marseille and it is left to his French counterpart Inspector Barthélémy to oversee Popeye's recovery, which he does with a mixture of carrot and stick (or Hershey bars and sick) in the grottiest police cell this side of Midnight Express.

And then there's the ending. The first French Connection had the mid-movie car chase to end all car chases, a race between Popeye, in a commandeered car, and the overhead train in which his quarry, a member of the heroin gang, is trying to escape. French Connection II reinvents the chase as a race through Marseille harbour between Popeye, this time on foot, and "Frog One" (i.e. Charnier) in a boat. At the very end of the harbour, as Charnier emerges from inside his boat, sure that he is safe, Popeye manages to pull a gun from a holster on his calf and shoot Charnier dead. End.

During the summer of '85, I travelled by ferry with two friends, Andy & Mike, from Plymouth to Santander. We continued our journey by bus, train and thumb, via Bilbao, San Sebastian and Pamplona, to Barcelona, the scene of my humiliation at the hands of the junkies the previous year. My memories of San Sebastian are fond, and yet in my diary I dismiss it. It's true I haven't been back since, or felt the need to, so it can't have been all that. "Boring, boring, boring and boring," I wrote in my diary. "San Sebastian may be a lovely place at night, but it's as dead as fuck during the day. The only interesting thing that's happened this morning is a boy banging the ground with his squeaky hammer..."

Some years later, I read and reviewed a book by Mark Kurlansky about the Basques (The Basque History of the World). This is my review:

"Kurlansky, award-winning author of Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed The World, takes an equally unconventional and engaging approach to those curmudgeonly nationalists, the Basques. True, this history ploughs a more or less linear furrow, from the uncertain origins of its subject – whom many consider the first inhabitants of Europe – through fluctuating fortunes with the Moors, the French and los Reyes Catolicos to the horrors of civil war and the rise of ETA. But each chapter also addresses a particular facet of Basque culture – whether it be their passion for salt cod, whale meat and baby eels, the origins of their distinctive beret, or the evolution of their unique and impenetrable language, while the whole is punctuated with mouth-watering recipes reflecting the glorious tradition of Basque cuisine..."

There are only so many three-star Michelin restaurants you can take, though. It doesn't make me want to go back to San Sebastian, or Bilbao. Barcelona, on the other hand, exerted a strange pull, in spite of my bad experiences. This time round there was no mugging, nor other humiliation, unless you count being kicked out of a bar humiliating, and we rather wore it as a badge of pride. We wreaked our revenge on the city by getting drunk and generally behaving like young Englishmen abroad, being kicked out of our pension as well, after we brought the population of the Placa Reial back to our room for a late-night game of poker. The narrow, car-free streets of the Barrio Gotico were an exciting maze in which we never quite got lost, unlike the anti-hero of Ben Lerner's Leaving The Atocha Station, who leaves his hotel one morning in search of coffee and spends the rest of the day trying to retrace his steps. We would invariably and, it seemed, quite naturally stumble across people we knew, not only the dregs of the Placa Reial, sleeping off their hangovers or looking to score more drugs, but people we knew from London, including a short, ugly sound recordist who had come to the film school the year before to give a workshop, and who was, it appeared (quite naturally) making a film about the Barrio Gotico. We left Barcelona triumphant, and continued the debauchery further up the coast, in a holiday flat which Andy's parents owned in L'Escala, on the Costa Brava.

Many years later, I received a letter from Mike. "It still amazes me," he said, "that we woke up one morning and realised we didn't have any money left – not a single peseta – and no ticket home." We hitched to the nearest RENFE station and got on a train. This was in the days before ticket barriers. Mike reminded me in the same letter of a conversation I had struck up on the train with a young French man, who had innocently asked me if I liked Phil Collins. "Je deteste Phil Collins," I replied, according to Mike. Plus ca change...

DECEMBER

Each day in the village was punctuated by public announcements made by Mario through a loudspeaker fixed to the roof of the town hall. They reminded me of the similar announcements in Robert Altman's film of the Richard Hooker novel MASH. Though nominally set in a field hospital during the Korean War, MASH was an obvious surrogate for the Vietnam War, or "conflict" as so many euphemistically refer to it. That war still raged as I was feeling my way towards an awareness of "serious" cinema in the mid-1970s. MASH's endless parade of helicopters shuttling back and forth with frontline casualties spoke to me both artistically and ideologically. It may fail to shock now - the slapstick, the sexism and the pseudo-anarchist contempt for authority may grate - but there is a genuine edginess about MASH the movie, not least in the bloody operation theatre scenes. Elliot Gould and Donald Sutherland, playing Trapper John and Hawkeye, are a bit like Captain America and the Kid in Easy Rider, and just like the characters in Easy Rider, they become tiresome and boring after a couple of hours in the cinema with them. Most people came to MASH via the TV series, which anaesthetized the little bit of anarchy and anti-establishmentarianism there was in the film and replaced it with something anodyne and cosy. Week after week of Alan Alda – stepping into the Hawkeye role and making it his own with his shrill, whiny voice - nullifies and sanitises any political satire there might be in the situation, which is entirely the point of a TV series, I suppose.

I felt the same about the bars in Mesas when they filled up on a weekend, or on a puente – the "bridge" between the weekend and the regular bank holidays which the Spanish enjoy. The official holiday (or holy day) seemed to fall on a different day of the week every time, and rarely on a Monday, as it would have done in the UK or USA. This allows the Spanish worker to extend the weekend into the middle of the week, and sometimes even the whole week. On such occasions, the sound of two dozen Alan Aldas would emanate like a mosquito buzz from each and every bar in the village. Because they were speaking Spanish, and because the voices blurred into a sea of conversation, they sounded like waves breaking on rocks, the voices rising and falling and rising and falling. I remember someone once said that he didn't like operas because it was all vowels, and that's what the Mesas bars sounded like at night, all vowels, all crashing on the rocks.

The social life that formed around the bars – the noise, the chatter, the merriment, even the drunkenness – was becoming less and less bearable. I craved the quiet life, the country life. That's why I was there, and yet I was only IN the village, not OF it. I didn't participate in village life. I communicated less – far less – with other people than El Mudo did. Only with nature did I commune. This wasn't a good thing. I wasn't proud of my self-imposed internal exile, nor am I knocking the villagers for doing what is only human i.e. talking. Maybe they didn't talk about much, but they were still living out the stuff of opera – jealousy, gossip, anger, love, rivalry – while I had retreated into a rarefied world of history and music and films. And old films, at that, like MASH.

The announcements marked the passing of the hours, the days, the weeks, the months. They marked the arrival of winter, and the hunting season: "Attention, attention, tomorrow is a hunt. All villagers with animals on land to the east of the village, between the village and the river, should move their animals indoors. Pili, lease keep Fabio locked up until the hunt is over, or I'll punch his lights out..."

Coming back from a walk in the countryside, keeping well away from the hunt, we found the street that led to our corral awash with blood; a garage floor covered in the bodies of deer and boar waiting to be butchered; a vet in attendance to check for trichinella. I flashed back to a scene in Tobias Schneebaum's Keep The River On the Right when the author first goes hunting with the man-eating Akarama tribe: "One body from each hut was brought out and dismembered. The heads were cut off... all viscera was removed, cleaned and wrapped in leaves..." At least the people of Mesas weren't cannibals, I wasn't being invited to consume human flesh, or to participate in any men-only circle jerks with these hunters, as Schneebaum had been. Which was just as well - I couldn't imagine wanking in the round with Fabio and Jose Maria. I thought also of Apocalypto, almost the only good thing you can attribute to Mel Gibson. I was thinking in particular of the human sacrifice scenes early on in the film, which caused so much consternation among the anthropological community. Scholars such as Traci Ardren and Lisa Lucero argued that Gibson had confused Mayan with Aztec culture, that Mayans didn't go in for that level of bloodshed (they only sacrificed children) that the actors "didn't look or sound Maya at all... their Yucatec diction was terrible and lacked the real lyric cadence of Maya languages" etc. Frankly, who cares? I hate Mel Gibson as much as the next man, stupid, drunken, right-wing, anti-Semitic, English-bashing, wife-battering Sedevacantist that he is, but for once he made a half-way decent film and he didn't have to read Breaking The Maya Code to do it. I doubt if there will ever be a more intense, nightmarish, documentary-like depiction of human sacrifice in pre-Colombian Central America, whether it's authentically Mayan or not. Sadly, no-one is making films about the Aztecs so we have to make do with Aztec sacrifice transposed to the Yucatan, Mel Gibson-style. What's so great about authenticity anyway? Some of my favourite "historical" films play fast and loose with the truth. Do you think all those Roman slaves really stood up and shouted "I'm Spartacus!" in solidarity with Kirk Douglas? Or that the so-called "Battle" of Algiers was actually a battle? This bothers some people: on the Open Democracy website Martin Evans takes issue with Gillo Pontecorvo over his choice of title, and berates him for ignoring the divisions within the Algerian Front de Liberation Nationale. Presumably Mr Evans would have preferred a film called The Low-Level Urban Debate Between Competing Factions of the FLN During The Struggle For Independence in Algeria.

The first time I saw Apocalypto, I approached it, on the back of What Women Want, with trepidation, and I was pleasantly surprised. Sure, there's a bit too much joking around at the start with tapir testicles, and Jaguar Paw's pregnant wife and young son trapped at the bottom of a well is a touch too Hollywood for my tastes, but the decision to use an indigenous language (however poor the diction) is a stroke of genius. The pursuit of Jaguar Paw by the Bad Mayans cleverly combines elements of Deliverance with Cornel Wilde's The Naked Prey, in which the Bad Mayans are Black Africans who roast a white explorer on a spit, then chase Cornel Wilde through the bush with spears, a bit like they do in Apocalypto, except that the Africans recognise the innate superiority of the White Man in the end and even wave to him in magnanimous defeat, whereas the Bad Mayans all die, horribly. There's also an obvious – if unintentional – link to Boorman's Emerald Forest, with its Fierce People and its white hero-figure (something Apocalypto, to its credit, eschews).

As well as Schneebaum, and Gibson, I thought of Elem Klimov's Come And See, and the film's single most shocking moment, when the young boy Flyora and the older girl Glasha return to their village, which has been attacked by the Germans. The village is deserted, and Flyora believes that his family has gone into hiding on a nearby island. As they flee the village, Glasha looks round and sees the bodies of all the villagers piled up behind a farmhouse. Fabio, Luciano, Mirella, Marta, Mario, Jose Maria, El Mudo... imagine if they were all slaughtered and piled up behind the town hall or church, like the wild boar and deer I saw in the garage near our corral. Fortunately, no such thing occurred in Mesas during the Civil War. The villagers, from what Pedro told me, perfected the art of appeasement and emerged to greet each successive wave of "liberators" with the appropriate flag, Nationalist or Republican. True, the village priest was forced to go into hiding at one point, when the Republicans were in the ascendant, and lived in a cave by the river, but the more devout women of the village took him food and when the Nationalists won, he emerged, a little dirtier but otherwise unscathed. A Republican rump then joined the maquis (the Spanish use the same word as the French for the resistance) and carried on the war for years afterwards, hunted by the Civil Guard. In April 1945 they launched "la incursion mas espectacular de maquis en una poblacion cacerena" ("the most spectacular incursion of the maquis in a population centre of Caceres") according to Julian Chaves Palacios. The so-called "French" division, led by a Meseno, Jeronimo Curiel Gomez, aka El Gacho, entered Mesas and captured the guardhouse, which was occupied by two of the four Civil Guards in the village. They at least resisted: one of them, Juan Martin Gonzalez, was badly injured, and died afterwards in hospital. Meanwhile, the other two guards were apprehended in the taberna and marched around triumphantly. When he received the news, Lt Colonel Gomez Cantos, in charge of counter-insurgency operations for the province, hurried to the village. The guerrillas had, of course, already left – they had no chance of holding Mesas against a full complement of soldiers. Gomez Cantos, incandescent with rage, held the three surviving guards responsible for the embarrassment. Their lives had been spared by the maquis, but they were shot by firing squad on the orders of Gomez Cantos.

That this skirmish, this military storm in a teacup, qualifies as the most spectacular incursion of the maquis in Caceres tells us much about the level of post-war resistance to Franco in Extremadura, and across the peninsula. More to the point, it demonstrates the brutality and callousness of the Nationalist mindset. If they were willing to shoot their own men for incompetence, it is small wonder they could, without mercy, execute thousands of Republican prisoners.

Pedro used to say that the Civil War wasn't as bad as the years that followed, the anos de hambre, or years of hunger, which lasted well into the forties, when Pedro and his siblings supplemented their meagre diet with weeds and acorns, as the Catalan writer Juan Goytisolo's family had been forced to subsist on chestnuts and wild pumpkins (it could have been worse). Pedro's older brother, Narciso, had a rare form of bone disease, and he spent much of his life in extreme pain, but he probably would have done anyway, regardless of his diet. It didn't stop him courting a local girl, Benigna. Nor did the disapproval of her parents. When Benigna decided she wanted to marry Narciso, the family locked her away and forbade Narciso from seeing her. One can understand their fears. Narciso was going to die. They married anyway, and had two children, Viviana and Narciso Junior (i.e. Siso). Siso's father died when he was two, and his mother never remarried.

Pedro did his national service in Barcelona. Then he started courting Benigna's sister Orosia. His pursuit was obsessive. Like many Mesenos, like many in the Ibores and across whole swathes of Caceres, Pedro went to France to find work. For two years he lived in Paris, working in a foundry, then as a roofer. But all the time he wrote to Orosia, until he was ready to come back and marry her. They had two children as well. They named the first one Beni, in honour of Orosia's widowed sister. In 1963, she was joined by Anna.

I haven't seen La Caza (The Hunt) which Carlos Saura made in the mid-1960s, before he turned to films about dancing. But I thought of Saura when I saw the street running with blood, and the garage full of dead deer and boar. I thought of the similar scenes of animal carnage in Renoir's Regle du Jeu, which I had seen, many years before, at the Everyman in Hampstead. In those days I thought nothing of taking in three films at the Scala in King's Cross of an afternoon, then cycling furiously up to the Everyman in Hampstead for a double bill in the evening. I saw Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout, in which David Gulpilil slaughters a number of kangaroos and wallabies, not to mention an iguana, and Ted Kotcheff's Wake in Fright, in which the industrial-scale massacre of marsupials puts Walkabout to shame. There is a website which names and shames these films, along with Bunuel's Tierra Sin Pan (for cruelty to donkeys and goats) The Wild Bunch (cruelty to scorpions and ants) The Ebola Syndrome ("scenes of frog killing") A Sixth of the World ("an elk is killed in a sacrifice") Chocolat ("features a monkey being kicked") and The Seventh Continent ("a fish tank is smashed, fish are scattered on the floor and die...") to name but six of the hundreds of films on the list. Of course, there is cruelty to humans too, in almost every film starring Jennifer Aniston, but no mention is made of that. And no mention of The Deer Hunter, in which, of course, no deer are killed, although Apocalypse Now, a film I admire but dislike, is taken to task for its on-camera slaughter of a water buffalo, possibly a symbol of the "horror" Coppola is at pains to say very little about.

I saw the poster for The Deer Hunter on a London Underground platform, around 1978 or '79. I must have been in London for the day, up from Bristol for a concert (Jethro Tull, Frank Zappa, Hawkwind – it was one of the three). What was it about, I wondered, this X-certificate film with Robert De Niro in beard and hunting jacket? I asked my aunt and uncle if they knew. They in turn asked their friend and film buff "Big" Dave, so-called to distinguish him from my uncle, "Little" Dave. Big Dave made a few enquiries (to whom, or how, I have no idea – this was long before the Internet) and got back to me with all the information I needed: The Deer Hunter was a "Vietnam movie". That was good enough – it was immediately on my "Must See" list.

Big Dave had a ground-floor room in his house which was full, from floor to ceiling, of pulp paperbacks: the entire series of MASH books by Richard Hooker, with their enticing covers, half peace sign, half naked woman's bum; James Dickey's novel of Deliverance (even leaner and tighter than the film); Theodore Olsen's Arrow in the Sun (better known as Soldier Blue); Fielding's Tom Jones; De Sade's Justine. I was friends with Dave's stepson Joe and I relished the chance to rifle the bookshelves during sleepovers, dipping into these semi-pornographic paperbacks. Gradually, the lure of Dave's record collection took over, and we would play our way through Deep Purple In Rock, Judas Priest's Killing Machine, AC/DC's If You Want Blood You've Got It, A Farewell To Kings by Rush, and albums by Bachman Turner Overdrive and Mahogany Rush.

Dave didn't get on with Joe, but at least he tried. One Christmas, perhaps the Christmas of '79, Joe got a real Vietnam War US Army ration pack, which came in a large cardboard box, and included numerous sachets of dried food, green cans of beef casserole, creamed soup and blancmange-type desserts, a carton of Kool menthol cigarettes. My cousin and I were jealous as hell. The war had only ended four years earlier but this package seemed like a time capsule, a relic of another age (the sixties!) The three of us smoked a couple of Kools each before deciding that menthol cigarettes weren't for us and that in future we'd stick to marijuana.

Joe left school at sixteen, maybe younger. He'd only been going to school in the loosest sense of the phrase anyway, as his mum and stepfather Dave sent him to a "free" school in Durdham Park, where the children were free to do and study pretty much what they liked (unlike the so-called "free" schools of today). Dave gave him work but Joe didn't seem to like working any more than he liked studying. He left home to live in a bedsit, on the edge of Clifton, behind the University Student Union building. Within a couple of years, he'd met a girl called Alison, and they had two kids in quick succession. When they broke up, Alison began "seeing" (i.e. fucking) Big Dave, who had broken up with Joe's mother and weighed 30 stone (he wasn't called Big Dave for nothing). At least that's what I heard. It's hard to believe that any young woman would have wanted to clamber on top of Dave's walrus-like body except for money, and it was certainly hard for Joe to believe. Having always been a bit "different" (possibly due to Asperger's) he went properly mad, if I can put it that way, began running around naked and was committed to hospital in the now-derelict Barrow Gurney, where my childless Great Aunt Sybil also wound up.

The last time I saw Joe, he was drinking in the Cadbury pub, in Montpelier, Bristol. He was suspiciously happy, beatific even, and I assumed he was on Prozac, or something stronger. He swore he was okay, that everything in his life was fine, but I felt he did protest too much. Big Dave had proved to be the bastard Joe always said he was, although perhaps there was more than met the eye there. We can't ask Dave - he's dead now. Regardless of his undoubted faults, I'm grateful to him for putting me right about The Deer Hunter, and for the education I derived from his books and records.

John Cazale was dying when he appeared in The Deer Hunter. Meryl Streep, his real life partner, nurtured him through the shoot. She didn't really want to do the film, because she felt her character was nothing more than a "vague, stock girlfriend", but she wanted to be close to Cazale in his final months (he'd been diagnosed with lung cancer) All the scenes with Cazale were shot first. The studio considered him a liability and wanted him taken off the picture, but Streep and Michael Cimino, the writer/director, stood by him. No Cazale, no movie, they said.

Cazale excels in at least three films of the 1970s – The Godfather (Parts I and II, which are really just one long film, and best seen that way) Dog Day Afternoon and The Deer Hunter. In fact, these films – together with The Conversation and a posthumous appearance in The Godfather Part III – mark the sum total of Cazale's film work. How much of what he brings to these parts is his cancer, his impending mortality? As what point did he know he was dying? His performance in The Deer Hunter is no better than his performance in Dog Day Afternoon or The Godfathers – all are superlative. He is never likeable. You don't feel sorry for him, even when Al Pacino gives the order to have him shot in The Godfather Part II. You feel sorry for Al Pacino, that things have come to this, that you would even consider having your own brother killed. Would I have my own brother killed? I don't think so. Not even if I ran a vast crime syndicate. There must be some reason, you think to yourself. I mean, Freddy (the Cazale character in The Godfather, the feeble middle brother, who lacks the sex appeal of the dead Sonny or the brains of his younger brother Michael) has betrayed the family. Then, in Dog Day Afternoon, which is based on a true story, Al Pacino holds up a bank to get the money for his boyfriend's sex change operation, and Cazale (Pacino's real-life friend) plays the hapless sidekick, whom the FBI kill at the end. He is always getting killed. Except in The Deer Hunter, where it is Christopher Walken who dies, by his own hand, in a tragic game of Russian roulette. His body is brought home from 'Nam by De Niro, and his friends and family bury him in the grim Pennsylvanian steel town he comes from. It's cold and grey and industrial. Cazale lingers by the grave. He is the last to walk away, in a poignant scene which was, of course, shot before the Vietnam sequences, before Cazale himself died, never to see the completed film.

I first ate deer (or venison, as the Normans insisted on calling it) in Scotland. A friend of mine had a boyfriend called G - short for Gerard - whose family owned a castle near Inverness. It wasn't really a castle, more like a large crenellated house, but it was still impressive. A housekeeper lived nearby and she would turn the heating on a few days before any visitors arrived. Nonetheless, on both my trips there – one at Easter, and one at New Year - it was snowing and freezing cold. The only room in the house that gave any warmth was the drawing room, which we could at least light a fire in. The hallways were lined with stags' heads and paintings with eyes that followed you, and the master bedroom, in which I slept the first time, had a four-poster bed and its own, spiral staircase down to the dining room. There were shotguns in the gun cupboard, and the estate generated income from wealthy Japanese who paid handsomely to hunt deer.

G was embarrassed about his family's wealth. It took me a long time to learn his full name, and longer to discover he had been to Eton. His brothers were in the army. G was the black sheep in a sense, the sensitive artist, although also a flyweight boxer, short and skinny and strong. My abiding memory of G is seeing him perform somersaults on the Tube, using the old-fashioned hand supports that hung on reinforced metal and rubber coils from the ceiling of the Tube carriage, with hard plastic bobbles at the end. He used them to spin 360 degrees, head over heels, for the fun of it. G never seemed to drink, but was always happy. Perhaps because he didn't really drink.

On our initial visit to the "castle" in Cluny, we went for a "walk" that became a wade through waist-deep snow, onto the hills above the house, and we saw deer. The second time I went, we were nearly killed on the way to the house when my brother Tamlin swerved to avoid an oncoming car and lost control. We slalomed in and out of another half dozen cars or so for a couple of hundred yards before coming to a halt, and the five of us emerged dazed from the car and crouched, or knelt, in different points on the road and recovered our composure, the air from our breath condensing in the cold, dark night. On New Year's Eve we went to a ceilidh, where we felt like – and were – outsiders, gate crashers on a small community event, as if we'd walked into The Wicker Man or its more nuanced, updated younger brother, The Last Great Wilderness. G's brothers dressed in kilts like the lairds of the manor they were. Tamlin and Julie, my girlfriend, danced jigs and whirls with all and sundry, both of them carefree and carpe diem. Tamlin could throw himself wholeheartedly into any dance – I'd seen him do the same in a salsa club at the Edinburgh Festival years before. In Cluny, as in Edinburgh, I watched from the sidelines, too aloof, too passive to participate.

G's brothers invited us to dinner at the family's "other" house – the smaller, uncrenellated, warmer house where the family stayed. Dinner was venison. It was too strong for me, which is to say it tasted of something, but I ate it out of politeness. At the time I preferred food which tasted of nothing: tasteless, factory-farmed meat; tasteless, bland cheese. Six months later, Julie dumped me. It was hardly a surprise. That New Year in Scotland, she'd wanted to dance on a mountain top in the snow, and I had stayed in bed, reading (Captain Corelli's Mandolin – not even a good read).

Nearly Christmas, and it was still hot in the village. One day, early in the month, the tables around the bar in the plaza – the bar which Siso ran when he was alive, but now run, mournfully, by his grief-stricken girlfriend, as a kind of public service – filled with villagers, some of them only down for the weekend from Madrid, or Malaga, or even further afield, all of them known to Beni, men and women of her generation, fuller of face and wider of girth now, but the friendships of old returned, eased by the succession of beers, and accompanying tapas. After a plate of simple but delicious canapes came a plate of migas, topped by a fried egg. Extremenans are weirdly proud of migas. They're only breadcrumbs, for God's sake, fried with chorizo and tocino (fatty bacon). And they're soft! I mean, they're meant to be soft, but all the same.... The first time I had them they were crispy, and all the better for it, delicious in fact, and I thought they would always be like that, but everyone who's made them since goes easy on the oil, and even adds water. When I make migas, I make them crispy, with lots of olive oil in place of the bacon fat. I think migas might be better as a garnish than the main event.

I still fantasise about running a bed & breakfast, something we nearly did when Siso was alive, when he and Maribel were still married, and property in Spain was cheap. We had the whole package in the palm of our hands – the house, the builder (Siso) the paperwork (Maribel) - but we decided against it. Even now, fifteen years later, I imagine the simple but delicious no-choice food I would serve up for dinner in our B&B (or casa rural, as they call them here): home-made goat's cheese and jamon tortellini served in a pool of intense cherry gazpacho (the cherries from El Valle del Jerte, the ham from the plains around Trujillo, the cheese from Los Ibores) sprinkled with crisp migas, smoky with paprika, and a fried egg on top from our hens.

I prefer a restaurant with no choice. It's like eating in someone's home. One of the best meals I've had was in – or just outside - Canamero, an hour's drive south of Mesas, past Guadalupe, in a restaurant called Algo Asi (or something like that) run by a Swede and his Spanish wife. The restaurant was recommended by Maribel – or rather, it had been recommended TO Maribel, when she was still with Siso - and the four of us went, in the days when we did things like that, as a foursome, and because I didn't drive at the time, I could drink to my heart's content, which always makes a meal seem better. There was, as I said, no choice, and we ate outside, in the restaurant's courtyard, on a warm summer evening. There were all manner of Middle-Eastern styled starters to begin with, mezze I suppose you'd say, some of them picante, the owner explained, all too aware of the Spanish palatte and its aversion to the strange and spicy, but rather under-spiced to my tastes, and grilled meats to follow, and a bottle of local wine. But the meal really came into its own with the cheese, several large slabs of which – one of them a gigantic Manchego – were slammed down on our table for us to help ourselves, and a delectable assortment of chocolate desserts to finish, with half a dozen bottles of home-made liquer to pour ourselves (I sampled all of them). Simple food to be sure, but so good, and cheap, and the company so congenial. I've dreamt of going back, but I know I can never recapture that moment or reconstruct the experience. Siso is dead, for one thing. We no longer socialise with Maribel, and no-one is offering to drive me there.

One of the presents "Santa" brought Alma was a board game based on the Spanish version of Junior Masterchef (actually, there is no Junior Masterchef in the UK, so maybe it's a Spanish idea, like pan con tomate) There are two ways you can use the picture cards, which show typically Spanish ingredients such as ham (jamon) garlic (ajo) and rosemary (romero). You can either play a simple memory game, remembering where the matching cards are (and, in my case, practising my culinary Spanish at the same time) or, in a more demanding and inspiring task, you can use the cards you are dealt to devise ideas for meals. Alma loved the second task, despite her almost total ignorance of even the most rudimentary cooking techniques. I invented complicated, sub-Michelin star dishes which no-one wanted to eat, while Beni's ideas were simpler, homelier, and delicious.

Either side of Xmas, the olives were being picked. I've long been a fan of Extremenan olive oil, which in effect means my father-in-law's oil, although it isn't strictly speaking, his oil – the small quantity of olives from his groves go to the communal vat at the local co-operative along with everybody else's, and you get the oil back in 5 litre flagons, and the best you can say is that it comes from the Sierra, from Los Ibores, and while it can be harsh on the throat, it's fresh and thick and green.

In Olives: The Life & Lore of a Noble Fruit a Californian olive grower tells Mort Rosenblum that the Spanish picual olive has the "aroma of cat's piss" and I know what he means, but it's what you're used to, right? To me, it's good oil, even if, like so much in Extremadura, it is barely appreciated in Spain, let alone outside it. Rosenblum focuses, understandably enough, on the endless olive plantations of Jaen, in Andalusia, where so much of Spain's olive oil is produced, but still finds time to sing the praises of Catalunya, Aragon, Toledo... pretty much everywhere but Extremadura. And that's how we like it.

The first time I picked olives was at the turn of the millennium, my first New Year in Mesas. I was press-ganged into helping Beni's brother-in-law Jean Claude and his brothers Michel and Santi pick their father's olives. Moises oversaw the work but didn't do much himself, due to his poor eyesight sustained in a roofing accident – he trampled on Pedro's crops as well. We drove out through Fresnedoso, where Moises had grown up, and from there - via a series of ever-worsening, ever-narrowing tracks of red earth - to the steep olive groves he owned. We knocked the olive out of the trees with long sticks (which, according to Rosenblum, damages them) and I kept myself going, whack after whack, thinking of Russell, the skeleton-faced Leyton Orient fan who had stolen my girlfriend Julie, and inadvertently done me a favour, for here I was at the dawn of the new millennium, in the January sunshine of Extremadura, knocking olives out of a tree, rather than stuck in London in a relationship which was doomed to failure.

For Hispanophiles of a certain age, the reputation of Spanish olive oil is forever tainted by the 1981 outbreak of "toxic oil syndrome" which claimed as many as a thousand lives and left 25,000 seriously injured or disabled. It was, quite simply, the most devastating case of food poisoning in modern European history. The first victim was an eight-year-old boy, Jaime Vaquero Garcia, who fell ill and died in his mother's arms in Madrid. Learning that his five brothers and sisters were also ill, doctors at the La Paz Children's Hospital began treating them for "atypical pneumonia" until the hospital director, Dr Antonio Muro, told them it was out of the question medically for six members of a family to be suffering the same symptoms of pneumonia at the same time. As the number of cases mounted, it was established that the common denominator – the thing which all those suffering had eaten while their unaffected relatives had not - was a salad ingredient. Muro believed that the contaminated foodstuff was being sold at the local street markets. He patrolled the mercados and noticed the large, unlabelled containers of cheap cooking oil. He went to the houses of affected families and removed the containers of oil for analysis. Tests showed that almost all the oils had different constituents. Such a variety of oils could not account for one specific illness. Muro was sacked. His superiors stuck to the oil theory, according to which contaminated colza, or rapeseed oil, intended for industrial use only was being sold for consumption. This theory had the attraction of being persuasive. To protect its olive oil industry, the Spanish government had banned imports of the cheaper colza, then widely available throughout the European Community (which Spain had not yet joined). Imports of rapeseed oil had to be made inedible through the addition of aniline, but unscrupulous businessmen were removing the aniline, leaving – or possibly producing - toxic compounds in the "refinement" process. However, this theory failed to explain why different oils with different chemical constituents were producing the same effects, or why several of those affected by Toxic Oil Syndrome – such as the young Madrid lawyer Maria Concepcion Navarro, who fell ill and died in August of '82 – did not shop in the working-class markets, and had only used the more reputable cooking oils. Moreover, she had been hospitalised in November 1979, 18 months before the start of La Colza, as they called the tragedy. A commission was appointed to deal with these questions, looked at the distribution patterns of the oil, and noted that large quantities of colza were sold in regions (notably Catalonia) where there had been no cases of TOS. Could the cause be something other than oil?

Though now jobless, Muro also continued his investigations. Speaking to stallholders and lorry drivers, he concluded that the culprit was a pesticide sprayed on tomatoes from Almeria. An agricultural boom was taking place there, made possible through the use of such pesticides. Some farmers, Muro reasoned, may have used the chemicals a little too liberally, or perhaps harvested the crop too quickly after applying them. Knowledge of such a mass poisoning would have had disastrous consequences for the chemical industry, and for Spain. Almeria represented an economic miracle. The news that its produce could be poisonous would impact not only on the export trade but on Spain's other source of foreign income, the tourist trade. It is a classic conspiracy theory, supported by sections of the media and given a further twist, as Muro died suddenly of a mystery illness in 1985. It is tempting to shrug and dismiss his claims - support for which had in any case gradually ebbed away - but we should always remember that our paranoia may reflect a legitimate concern: that they are, in fact, out to get us.

As the New Year dawned, the weather changed. My aunt Pat wrote from Cornwall that Jackie had given her Winter in Madrid by C.J. Sansom for Christmas. "It's not particularly well written," she said, "but he knows how to spin a yarn and his research on the aftermath of Franco's victory is impressive - Madrid in ruins, packs of voracious dogs roaming the poorer quarters, the way in which the legacy of the civil war left people starving. He also evokes the attitudes of the different factions - the republicans, anarchists, communists – it's quite well-handled. But his narrative leans towards the popular thriller and, although there's nothing wrong with that, I was disappointed with the ending. However, reading the book did nudge my memories of Homage to Catalonia and helped me revisit again that old, sad, nostalgic commitment to Republican Spain."

In 68½ - Movies, Manson & Me I asked, rhetorically, where I had been happiest. Always on islands, I said. On Fraser Island, Australia; on Omotepe, Nicaragua, where I celebrated my 36th birthday by having my ear syringed, for free, in a crowded clinic; on Isla de las Mujeres, Mexico; on the Isles of Scilly, the most south-westerly part of the British Isles, and in Spain. Yes, Spain is technically the larger part of a peninsula, but as Jan Morris says in Spain, "whichever way you enter her, you feel a sense of separateness..." We were living on a kind of island in Mesas. An island within an island, not really inter-acting with the locals: Beni, because she thought the rest of the villagers narrow-minded and backward, and me, because I was absorbed in my writing, and reading, and thinking, surrounded by English – English books, English music, Facebook in English - nodding a greeting to everyone, holding a hand up to acknowledge a neighbour's passing existence while non-verbally killing the prospect of any conversation they intended to make. Then, on New Year's Eve, Alma went into meltdown. She said she missed her friends, her school, her bedroom, her books and toys, the trips to Wong-Kei in Chinatown. Evidently, it was Alma who was "here under protest". We'll go back to London, we promised. Only another six months till the end of the school year. All I wanted to do in that time – my New Year's Resolutions – was to visit Las Hurdes, and to climb Almanzor.

In the summer of '86 I finished film school, dumped Annette and returned to Barcelona, alone, in search of work as an English teacher. I was going to start a new life in Spain, or rather Barcelona, which is not the same thing, as we now know. I bid my London squat-mates a theatrical farewell, informing them that I wasn't sure when or if I'd see them again, and took the coach to Paris. From there I tried to hitch, but the pickings were meagre. In service station after service station, I was forced to beg for lifts, ignored, denied, and sometimes reluctantly taken in. I accepted one lift, according to the journal I kept, from a young man "who sold fire extinguishers and couldn't speak a word of English just gabbled away in French making no attempt to slow down and fiddled constantly with the radio which was on my lap we drove through fog and my tiredness made it seem very strange with the lights in the dark and snatches of fog coming at us out of the darkness and brief periods of sleep then being awoken at the turn-off for Valence, the driver said I could get out because he wanted to get home and sleep as well so I stumbled into the cold night with thick fog all around looking for somewhere to sleep and found some woods near the motorway and crawled into my sleeping bag when I woke it was 9 o'clock and the sun was up and two wood-cutters were sawing trees nearby..." (I hadn't yet outgrown my Kerouac phase).

Then, finally, Barcelona. Still hopelessly romanticising the decreptitude of the Barrio Gotico and Barrio Chino, I rhapsodised in my journal about "the sounds of the city, the Inca pipe music from the shop below my pension, the man juggling metal balls outside the cinema, making a steady chink-chink noise, the buskers and drills and cars and everything..." But I couldn't find any work. I had no experience of anything, apart from working in my aunt's health food shop and doing a three-year film course, and I was unable to lie. On November 5th I conceded defeat and went to International House, willing to pay the last pesetas I had to actually TRAIN as a teacher. After I had undergone a short grammar test they rejected me, saying that I should go back to London and do a foundation course first, that the course in Barcelona was for experienced teachers, and not Kerouac buffs. Disconsolate, I walked the streets and in the course of my walking I had an epiphany: I should return to London to fulfil my destiny as a film-maker. Having made that decision, I decided to celebrate at my favourite restaurant, Casa Jose (which is, since the pre-Olympic clean-up of the early nineties, no longer there). I got a bit drunk, and wandered around the Placa Reial, nostalgic for the camaraderie of the previous year, when Andy and Mike and I had made friends with the human flotsam and jetsam of the Barrio Gotico, rather than nostalgic in any way for being mugged at knife point with Annette. I found myself down on Escudellers, or Rotating Chicken Street, as we had dubbed it, on account of the chickens rotating on spits outside the legendary tourist trap Los Caracoles. Be careful, a voice in my head was saying, too quietly for me to hear. You'll get into trouble. I walked round the block and back again to Escudellers, drawn to the side streets, the sleaze. Be careful. I was LOOKING for trouble now, and I found it, in a clip joint. My loneliness made me vulnerable to the advances of an impossibly attractive female barfly, who fondled my thigh and convinced me to buy her a drink. When the bill came, I didn't have anywhere near enough to pay, and a large, ugly bouncer had appeared from nowhere and was blocking the door. I was forced to leave the watch that Annette had given me as collateral. I could have just left it behind but the watch had some vestige of sentimental value, compounded by the guilt I felt for the way I had treated Annette, so I went back the following day, paid the extortionate bill, and retrieved the watch (which stopped working soon afterwards). My love affair with Barcelona is over, I solemnly wrote in my diary on the bus back to London. Twenty-four hours later, I was knocking on the door of my erstwhile squat, tail between my legs, cap in hand, begging my flatmates to take me back.

JANUARY

Sometime between New Year's Eve and January 6th, we drove to Arenas de San Pedro to see Beni's cousin Chusa. Arenas is in the Sierra de Gredos, and sits in the shadow of Almanzor. It is mercifully cool in summer, and mercilessly cold in winter, the snow-capped mountains close enough to touch, if your arms are a couple of kilometres long. But the main attraction, in winter, is the amazing display of nativity scenes, or Belenes, which can be viewed at the Franciscan Santuario San Pedro de Alcántara. Each year the exhibition reflects the nativity scenes of a particular part of the world, 2015/16 being the turn of South America, but many of the scenes feature every year, and pander more to the Spanish penchant for wildly over-the-top and extensive nativities, covering entire tables and sometimes rooms (Siso's girlfriend Trini has one such nativity in her shop in the village). There were nativities made from bottle tops, life-size nativity scenes made almost entirely from plastic cups, nativity scenes made from dried pasta, Hansel & Gretel type nativities made from sweets, as well as more conventional scenes with hundreds of miniature figures, not always matching in scale, and historical anomalies like the Holy Land butcher slaughtering a pig to make chorizo.

Not far from Arenas is Ramacastañas, and near Ramacastañas is a cave, las Grutas del Águila, or the Grotttos (Caves) of the Eagle. We didn't visit on this occasion – we'd already been on a number of occasions before – but if you find yourself in that neck of the woods, they are well worth going to see. There is, strictly speaking, only one chamber but you walk for a kilometre or so, up and down and around the cave, following a concrete path, with slippery, concrete steps, watched closely, almost suspiciously, by the guide, whose standard spiel adds nothing to the experience, but in his defence there's no hurry either, and you can pause and drink in the astonishing array of stalactites and stalagmites. The caves are privately run, but inexpensive. Last time I was there, it cost around six or eight euros to enter, stark contrast to the municipally-run caves in Castanar de Ibor, which cost twenty Euros per person, putting them on a par with Cheddar or Wookey Hole.

Las Grutas del Águila were only discovered by accident on Christmas Eve 1963. A group of local children were playing on the Cerro de Romperropas (the hill in which the caves are found) when they saw what they thought was smoke or mist escaping from a hole. In fact, the warm air escaping from the cave, which has a constant temperature of 20° centigrade, was vapourising as it escaped. Arming themselves with ropes and a flashlight, the children crawled into the 60cm wide hole, and, after crawling for some fifty or sixty metres, found themselves in the main chamber. However, they were unable to find their way back at first and spent five hours searching for the exit. After several months of hard conditioning work, the caves were opened to the public on July 18, 1964.

We drove back to Mesas on the twisting, forested road that clings to the base of the Gredos, crossing garganta after garganta, and passing from the faintly right-wing Castile y Leon to the more socialist Extremadura. One of the last villages in Castile y Leon is Poyales del Hoyo, scene of the exhumation, in 2003, of three Republican women shot during the Civil War. The village is still sharply divided in its politics and its attitude to the "recovery of historical memory", as Giles Tremlett makes clear in the opening chapter of his book Ghosts of Spain. Rather like the former Fascists and newly-minted devotees of rightwing democracy that vote in their millions for the Partido Popular ("Popular Party") I've largely avoided mentioning the war up till now. I can justify this by arguing that others – Hugh Thomas, Paul Preston, Giles Tremlett – do it much better. I've even had a T-shirt printed that says "Historians do it better" but it's also because in a way I subscribe to the same theory, that it's best left alone, enough is enough etc. But my friends in Madrid would never forgive me if I wrote about Extremadura and didn't "mention the war". So this chapter is about – among other things - the Civil War. It's also about La Vera, which is really the loveliest part of Caceres, but so far from where we were living – which is to say, a whole hour's drive away across the valley - that we barely visited it in the ten months we lived in Mesas. Just as one may say Los Ibores to a Spaniard and he or she will immediately mention the goats cheese, so La Vera is synonymous with pimenton, or paprika.

The conquistadores – many of whom, lest we forget, came from Extremadura – brought peppers back from the Americas and presented them as a gift to the king and queen, who passed these unfamiliar vegetables on to the monasteries to cultivate. They are now grown, smoked and dried over oak and ground into fine powder in La Vera. The pimenton de la Vera is, even before garlic, the first thing I reach for in the Spanish cupboard.

Most of La Vera lies in Caceres, which begins, if you're heading west, around Madrigal de la Vera. The road then passes through Villanueva de la Vera before you arrive in Valverde de la Vera, where we once visited a funny little museum of local history, run by a funny little man who it took us no small effort to find so he could open the museum up for us and show us around. Inside a typical if now unoccupied and musty house, built for people no taller than my shoulder, was a treasure trove of ancient agricultural tools. folk craft and, on one wall, a framed portrait of Franco which the old man, with a shrug, said merely represented the reality of the region's history but seemed to me further confirmation, if confirmation were needed, of the divide that runs down the middle of these villages, as surely as the water gutters do. Such a divide was no less evident in Mesas, where, you could argue, the present day alcaldesa (mayoress) had been elected, on a PP ticket, to protect the interests of the landowners, the horse-riders and hunters, over the smallholders, peasants and pensioners.

On the sixth of January we drove into Navalmoral for Reyes, or Kings' Day, the day when children all over Spain get a second lot of presents. They used to only get presents on January the Sixth, but Christmas Day is king now, so they get two lots of presents. We watched the cabalgata, the cavalcade in which a series of floats drive through the centre of town, with three locals dressed as the Three Kings, or Wise Men, one of them inevitably blacked up as Balthazar.

The most spectacular cabalgata is the one in Madrid, which is shown on television. The current, left-of-centre mayor of Madrid, Manuela Carmena, had yielded to pressure from anti-racism campaigners and found a real black person to play Balthazar, something her right-wing predecessor had always refused to do, on the grounds that the Kings were chosen from city councillors and there were – surprise, surprise - no black councillors.

The cabalgata in Navalmoral was a far more modest affair, and more traditional, in that a white man still blacked up as Balthazar, but there was something touching about it nonetheless (although perhaps not for the town's North African and sub-Saharan community). The white Christian majority squeezed down the sides of the narrow, normally pedestrianised main street, and watched as the floats passed in a flurry of fake snow. The Kings used to throw sweets to the children, who would scrabble between the floats for a few caramelos, but that had stopped since a tragedy in Malaga a couple of years back, when a boy was crushed to death under a float.

Paul Kennedy, hard core Chelsea fan and part-time Hispanophile, arrived the day after Reyes. On the 10th, David Bowie died. I came downstairs to find Beni crying. What's wrong, I asked her. David Bowie's dead, she replied. Oh, I exclaimed, I thought something terrible had happened.

I can't say I ever really loved Bowie. Certain songs, mainly from his so-called "Plastic Soul" period (Young Americans/Station To Station) do bring me out in goose bumps, but the outpouring of grief, on a level unseen since the death of Princess Diana, was something difficult to comprehend. Everyone rushed to compare notes on that fateful night in 1972, when Bowie sang Starman on Top of the Pops, his arm slung around Mick Ronson, and people's lives apparently changed forever, as if no man had placed his hand on another man's shoulder in public before. It's hard not to see this as a collective delusion, or at best collective suggestion, influenced by the 2012 Dylan Jones book  When Ziggy Played Guitar, which expends 200 pages (200 pages!) analysing those three-and-a-half minutes of telly. "It was thrilling, dangerous, transformative," says Jones. "It felt that the future had finally arrived."

But did this watershed moment really "create havoc in millions of sitting rooms all over Britain", as Jones argues? Not according to Joe Moran. He says "no fossil record of its contemporary effect on viewers remains... Bowie's performance inspired no press coverage or public reaction at the time, simply vanishing into the ether to make way for The Goodies..." yet "one of the traits of popular collective memory is that it likes to fasten on landmark moments when everything was transformed and after which nothing was ever the same. The truth is always subtler and historical change always more of a continuum..."

Still, Bowie was effective enough in The Man Who Fell To Earth, the film which Nicolas Roeg directed in 1976, when both men were at the peak of their powers, Roeg coming off the back of a glorious triptych – Performance, Walkabout and Don't Look Now – and Bowie about to embark on his (Low, Heroes, Lodger). Of course, Bowie isn't really "acting" in the Roeg film, and that's when actors are at their best, just "being", like Lee Strasberg in The Godfather Part II, or John Cazale, dying in The Deer Hunter. Bowie simply IS Thomas Newton, and Newton IS Bowie, alien/pop star/other.

Bowie gave one other half-way decent performance on camera, in Nagisa Oshima's neglected film of Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence. Again he does very little, while the other actors – Ryuichi Sakomoto (Japan's very own Bowie) "Beat" Takeshi Kitano and (God help us) Tom Conti - orbit around him like lesser planets. Everything in Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence is understated, controlled, repressed, and really rather good, although spoiled by some ill-fitting flashbacks, and Tom Conti.

Twenty-two minutes into  The Man Who Fell to Earth, randy college professor Rip Torn receives a mysterious gift by post. It's a book, Masterpieces in Paint And Poetry. He flicks through it, and his eyes alight on a reproduction of the painting by Breughel, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. On the facing page, we see the words to the W.H. Auden poem, Musee des Beaux Arts ("The ploughman may have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, but for him it was not an important failure.... the expensive delicate ship had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on").

There is a glorious silence as, for fifteen seconds or more, the college professor reads the entire poem, the camera lingering on the page, so that we, the viewers, share in the moment. Nowadays, these post-Star Wars days, we would hear him reading aloud, in voice-over, and we would cut back and forth, between the page and the lips of the actor moving slowly and deliberately, and God knows what else.

It is one of a number of extraordinary moments in a less than perfect film; a film which shows its age in both good and bad ways. For it must be said that some of the acting is clunky, and not only Bowie, although Bowie gets away with it because he's an alien wrestling with human language and behaviour.

In the end, The Man Who Fell to Earth is simply a 1970s film, made at a time when audiences were treated as intelligent beings, almost Thomas Newton-like in their ability to fill the gaps in the narrative, to "read" a film, to be patient and thoughtful, to understand the place a poem could have in a film, to understand that a film could BE a poem or a painting in time.

"The ploughman may have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, but for him it was not an important failure.... the expensive delicate ship had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on...." Who cares about the things we post on Facebook, the books we write, our thoughts and feelings, our daily lives? Icarus plummets to earth (or rather, he plummets into the sea) and the ploughmen go about their business, blissfully unaware. It is a scene which could resemble Mesas at almost any time in the last thousand years, its inhabitants oblivious or indifferent to the world at large, to the goings on in the next village, even to the goings on in their own village. Breughel's painting has inspired other poets too: Charles Madden, William Carlos Williams, Brian Aldiss, Christine Hemp, Aaron Pastula, Anne Sexton, Stephen Spender, Muriel Rukeseyer.... but they are all concerned with the myth itself, rather than the painting. My favourite of these poems is by Edward Field, who imagines Icarus surviving the Fall, to lead a life of quiet, suffocating normality, perhaps proving, after all, that he who loved and lost is no better off than he who never loved at all, for "he had thought himself a hero (...) but now rides commuter trains, serves on various committees, and wishes he had drowned."

We drove to Cabanas del Castillo, a lonely village on the fringes of the Sierra de Guadalupe. Cabanas del Castillo has a permanent population of fifteen, who live in the cabanas, and a ruined castle (el castillo) perched high on a jagged ridge. It would be a good place to hide out, I thought to myself, as we climbed the steep path through a deep fissure of rock, and I imagined the climax to a film in which someone who is on the run "goes to earth" in this place, but is finally tracked down by their pursuers. This imaginary film would echo Geoffrey Household's weird novel Rogue Male, in which the hero, having tried and failed to assassinate Hitler, flees to a farm in Dorset, where he is found, hiding in the bank of a hollow way, by his Nazi nemesis. It's an utterly preposterous and compelling tale, and the film version, with Peter O'Toole, has stayed with me since childhood, although I had forgotten the title \- indeed, the very existence of the film - until I read Robert McFarlane's Wild Places a few years back.

In 2005,  Macfarlane and his friend Roger Deakin set out to find the real-life hollow way which inspired Household. Deakin writes of it in his diaries, Notes from Walnut Farm, while Macfarlane gives his version of events in both the introduction to the republished Rogue Male and the imaginatively titled Holloway. We are, it seems, currently obsessed with returning to nature, with "rewilding" our lives (as the journalist George Monbiot puts it) if not actually, then virtually. We greedily devour the adventures of others as they frantically pursue the last vestiges of wilderness, rambling, foraging, wild-swimming. And yet, while arguing for the managed return of wild horses, lynx, wolves and even (possibly) bears, Monbiot concedes that "the clamour for the lion's reintroduction to Britain has, so far, been muted." Indeed, not all of us hanker after the wild with quite such enthusiasm as Monbiot. I, for example, am one of the people he gently derides as "content with the scope of your life... feeding the ducks is as close as you ever want to come to nature" in which case "this book is probably not for you." According to Monbiot, we find the notion of the fugitive going to earth, animal-like, a compelling one, even if the fugitive is a cold-blooded murderer like Raoul Moat or Harry Roberts. Charles Foster takes this idea of hiding a step further in his wonderfully deranged Being a Beast, wherein he describes living like a badger in a man-made set, with his severely dyslexic son for company.

My film would reference the oft-ignored Powell/Pressburger movie Gone To Earth, which, while set in the England/Wales borderlands around the Long Mynd, is, in its passion, its fatalism and death fixation, as "Spanish" as Jamon Jamon or Matador. This is in large part due to the character of Hazel Woodus, played by Jennifer Jones, here doing a bizarre version of a rural Shropshire accent. She is half-gypsy, half-Carmen, a wild child with "animal in her eyes", as Richard Thompson would have it, whose best friend, her only friend, is the orphaned fox cub she has raised. In an echo of Tess of the d'Urbervilles (a book that Mary Webb, the author of Gone to Earth, must have read) Hazel is not quite seduced by the caddish squire (David Farrar). Then, on a whim, she marries the effete but dutiful parson (Cyril Cusack). When the parson fails to consummate the marriage, Hazel runs back to the squire and this time they do the dirty deed (more than once, it appears, since she sets up home with him). It can only end tragically, and it does, with Hazel and her volpine friend plunging to their doom in a disused mineshaft. There's no messing around either, with anti-climactic funerals or nonsense like that – the credits roll over the blackness of the shaft, as sudden as the ending to French Connection II.

Gone To Earth was a co-production between Powell/Pressburger and the American producer David O. Selznick, who was "dating" Jones, the star of Duel in the Sun, which crops up in Matador. Selznick had a serious Benzedrine habit, and would write long, rambling, amphetamine-crazed memos to Powell, which the director would throw away, unread, but always reply with the same words: "Thank you for your useful comments. We shall take the utmost account of them."

Speaking of going – or falling - to earth, and amphetamines, the appositely-nicknamed "Buzz" Aldrin was prescribed the stimulant Ritalin for depression, according to a website on Art & Amphetamines. He thus joins an illustrious group of celebrity "speed freaks" which includes Judy Garland, Omar Sharif, Adolf Hitler, Anthony Eden, Johnny Cash, John Lydon and Lemmy of Hawkwind. Co-incidentally (or not) Hawkwind asked Buzz Aldrin to perform with them at the Glastonbury Festival, according to their leader, Dave Brock, and Buzz was happy to do so, if his fee was paid to charity, but the plan – such as it was - fell to earth.

Perhaps my real passion for Spain also lies in speed. My first tangible connection to Spain (and "connection" is the right word here) were the diet pills my grandmother brought back from a holiday there. They made her feel "strange", she said, and she passed them on to my mother, thinking she might want to lose some weight, and my mother passed them onto me, knowing that I would make good use of them. Those pills saw me through many a Saturday night, as well as my first night at Glastonbury, in 1981, the night before Hawkwind played (sans Buzz Aldrin). I owe a lot to Spanish diet pills.

From Cabanas we continued to Canamero. This is wine country, not all of it good - I've had some ropey pitarra from these parts - but there is some very drinkable plonk too. We stumbled across a fetching little restaurant, Restuarante Ximenez, the kind of place you dream of finding by accident, with a comedor at the back of the bar, its frosted-glass screen adorned with football scarves; a ten euro menu del dia including wine ad lib; a friendly, efficient but thankfully unobsequious waiter, and a reproduction of Picasso's Guernica on the wall.

Everyone knows about Guernica now, I guess. As a boy I admired my aunt and uncle's scaled-down reproduction of the painting, which hung on the living room wall, until my cousin and I "liberated" it and hung it in our recreation room (yes, we had a recreation room). Consequently, I knew from an early age the bare bones of the events which the painting depicts, namely the first aerial bombing of citizens in Europe (by German planes, fighting for Franco). It may even have been the first step on my road to Hispanophilia, pre-diet pills. But I didn't know about George Steer, whose life is celebrated in Nicholas Rankin's Telegram From Guernica, untll I was asked to review the book for The Good Book Guide sometime in the early noughties. This is what I wrote:

"On the 26th of April 1937, at the height of the Spanish Civil War, the civilian population of Guernica (or Gernika, as it is known in Basque) was bombed by Franco's nationalist forces. It wasn't the first time civilians had been attacked from the air - that dubious honour belongs to the Italians in Libya - but the sheer carnage of Guernica shocked the world. The man who did most to bring this atrocity to light, and who galvanised the expatriate Picasso into painting his greatest work, was George Steer. Almost alone among the press corps in Spain, Steer bothered to dig beneath the rubble of Guernica, and his investigation pointed the finger of suspicion at the Nazis, whose infamous Condor Legion were secretly assisting Franco. Steer's subsequent despatch was one of the most controversial of the war, and earned him a place on the Gestapo's Special Wanted List. But his career as a war correspondent didn't begin or end in Spain. A diminutive South African educated at Winchester and Oxford, he narrowly beat Evelyn Waugh to the post of Ethiopian correspondent for The Times (a humiliation which Waugh never forgave). He befriended Haile Selassie, and became a fervent supporter of the Ethiopian's struggle against the invading Italians (unlike the condescending, conservative Waugh, who saw in the Italians the light of civilisation illuminating the darkness). To the right of Orwell, but well to the left of Waugh, Steer alerted the world to the Fascist game plan, while the world stood by and watched. When the conflict turned global, Steer enlisted (as Orwell had done in Spain). He fought not only in Ethiopia, which he helped liberate, but in Libya, Egypt, Finland and the Far East, where he pioneered field propaganda techniques to disaffect the Japanese army. Ironically, for one who saw so much action, he was to die, in 1944, like T.E. Lawrence (with whom he was often compared) in a senseless motorcar accident in India. But by then his work was done, and the Fascism he abhorred was all but defeated. Nicholas Rankin tells Steer's story simply and succinctly, with little need for embellishment. The drama is already there, in the life, which was truly extraordinary."

For some reason I was reminded of Steer in Guadalupe, where we visited the famous monastery, with its Black Virgin and historical connections to the "discovery" of the Americas, Guadalupe being the first pilgrimage Columbus made on his return to Spain. Columbus is said to have presented Ferdinand and Isabella with the peppers that would later become synonymous with Extremadura. Wandering around the gloomy interior of the church, we came across a life-size figure of Jesus on the cross, his modesty protected by a skimpy loincloth that was held in place by the unnaturally prominent pelvic bones. He was so emaciated that he resembled a prisoner in a Francoist work camp, like the unfortunates who helped erect The Valley of the Fallen, outside Madrid.

Beni was reading El Impostor, by the Extremenan novelist Javier Cercas, which the writer himself calls a "novel without fiction" i.e. a novel based on a "real" person, although whether the life described is "real" is a moot point, and forms the crux of the novel. Enric Marco, the protagonist, was in the anarchist trade union the CNT (Confederacion Nacional de Trabajadores, or National Confederation of Workers). He was also the head of Amical de Matthausen, the organisation which represents the 9000 Spaniards interred in German concentration camps during World War II.

The Madrid-based historian Benito Bermejo met Marco at a conference in 2002. Bermejo found Marco's story intriguing, not to say suspicious, as Marco had been in the Bavarian camp of Flossenbuerg, rather than in Mauthausen, which is in Austria and is where the majority of the Spanish prisoners – 7,500 of them - wound up. Only 2,335 would survive.

Marco claimed to have fled to France at the end of the Spanish Civil War, and to have been arrested by the Gestapo, who sent him to Germany. In fact, he had gone voluntarily, as a worker, direct from Spain, under a 1941 agreement between Franco and Hitler, and was employed by the Deutsche Werke naval shipyard in Kiel. He had, in other words, not been fighting Fascism, as he claimed, but helping the cause, one of 20,000 Spaniards to do so, and while he did end up in a German prison, it was for an unspecified misdemeanour which he was never convicted of, and he was not sent to a camp. In 1978 he became secretary general of the CNT, which had been relegalised following Franco's death. Two years later he was expelled. Now in his mid-nineties, he is unrepentant, arguing that through his lies he kept the memory of Hitler's Spanish victims alive. "Our Icaruses are old and increasingly feeble," he told Bermejo, "but they are still here, still fighting."

Cercas has his own inner demons to deal with. He wonders how much of his "novel" is about Marco and how much it is, in fact, about its author, Cercas. Where are the boundaries between truth and lies, he asks, in the "novel without fiction"?

All this talk of impostors might lead the reader to wonder if there are not also impostors of a kind in this book. Elem Klimov, Larissa Shepitko, Matt Clark, George Orwell, George Steer... they're not Spanish. Didn't Spanish Fascism's more outré adherents – the likes of Quiepo de Llano, Valleno Nagera and Ramiro de Maetzu - rail against foreign influence, against the International Brigades and Communism, just as they railed against Masons, Jews and Arabs, all of them alien bodies sickening the soul of Spain? Nagera conducted a fruitless, Quixotic search for the "red gene", while Franco, ever the pragmatic, used the North African army to re-conquer Spain (to re-re-conquer it) reasoning that the Moroccans under his command would find it less stomach-turning to murder men, women and children than the average "Spanish" conscript would.

What, then, of Washington Irving and Richard Ford? George Borrow and Gerald Brenan? W.H. Auden and Orson Welles? Impostors, fakes, all of them! Doesn't Welles admit as much in his pseudo-documentary F for Fake? It is all about forgeries and fraud, in the art world and in the cinema. It's also a ground-breaking film, a precursor of the mock documentary or "mockumentary" with which we are now so familiar. Like Javier Cercas, or, for that matter, Bunuel in Land Without Bread, Welles play fast and loose with the "truth" in F For Fake, operating in the no-man's-land between fact and fiction. However, as with so much Welles, the effect is frustrating and half-baked, a surfeit of ideas tossed off at breakneck speed, the former child genius too impatient to develop any one theme beyond the flimsiest substance. As Simon Callow puts it in The Road to Xanadu: "the remaining years of his life are a sort of sustained falling apart in which, Lear-like, as his world crumbled further and further around him, he was vouchsafed extraordinary insights (...) his engagement with his own personality led to the complete abolition of the dividing wall between himself and his creations..."

One thing Welles and I do have in common: we both love Spain. Welles first travelled there when he was seventeen, and later, in 1937, he lent his voice to the commentary of The Spanish Earth and his support to the Republicans. Six of his films were shot, or part shot, in Spain: Mr. Arkadin, Chimes at Midnight (with Falstaff's extended paean to "sherrie sack" foreshadowing the Domecq Sherry ads he would later make) The Immortal Story, Don Quixote, F for Fake and The Other Side of the Wind, although two of those (Don Quixote and The Other Side of the Wind) were unfinished. Moreover, three of the six episodes of his documentary series Around the World were devoted to Spain. Clearly, he liked filming – and being - in Spain. His wish was to be buried there, and his remains - together with those of his wife - lie at the bottom of a well on the property of the bullfighter Antonio Ordóñez (if there was one thing Welles liked more than eating, it was bullfighting).

In 68½ - Movies, Manson & Me, I explained how I once had an argument with my uncle Dave about Welles. I had claimed there were at least a hundred film-makers better than Welles. You can't even NAME a hundred film-makers, my uncle guffawed contemptuously. Glove duly flung down, I went away and drew up a list. I managed a mere ninety-two directors as it happens, but that was only the men.  There was not a single woman to be seen. When my mother read the book, she accused me – not unreasonably - of sexism, although I think she was more concerned about the manner in which I described my ex-girlfriends than the lack of women directors, of whom she probably couldn't name one. I'd certainly add Larissa Shepitko and Daniele Huillet to the list, so that's 94 directors, all of whom I preferred to Welles and thought to be his equal in ability.

When, rebuffing the advances of several well-known and reputable publishers, I chose to privately publish 68½, and duly had one hundred copies printed, for friends and family, Alma sneered, as only Alma can sneer: "You don't HAVE a hundred friends, dad!" Well, fuck you, I thought. What do YOU know? You're just my daughter. True, many of the one hundred copies – let's say, around twenty-five per cent of them - were going to go to relatives, who could – in theory – be relied on to read my work, if only because they would scour the text for references to themselves (fruitlessly, I should add). This might imply that perhaps I didn't, after all, have a hundred friends worthy of the name. Gauntlet duly flung down once more, I sat down and made another list, just to be sure I wasn't a complete social outcast.

What makes a friend, I asked myself, in an unnerving Sex & The City-type moment, as opposed to a colleague or mere acquaintance? I had to be in touch with them, however infrequently, I decided. I could include partners of friends, but only if I were able to hold a brief conversation with them AND if I were reasonably confident that we would stay in touch in the event of a break-up or fatal accident involving their partner. Alma said that a friend was someone you'd trust with your life, which I thought was asking a lot of my friends. But someone you trusted, yes. With your keys or even your daughter, for a few hours. Someone with whom you could talk honestly, have a laugh, but might not agree with about everything. Some of my workmates were also friends, even some of my students (not counting current ones) but did I have one hundred friends? I didn't even have one hundred Facebook friends. Then again, not all my friends were on Facebook, and I'd been careful to ensure that the only people I "friended" were people I actually knew and liked. Should I even have a hundred friends? Was it possible? Wouldn't that be valuing quantity over quality? Perhaps, but Alma had challenged me to a friend-off. I was merely doing a head count for her benefit. The pruning could start later. Although, with age, the pruning seemed to be taking care of itself.

Let this list, then, serve as a form of acknowledgement to all the people who have helped me in life, and therefore in the writing of this book, not counting my family. I know acknowledgements are supposed to come at the start, or sometimes at the end, of a book, but books about regions of Spain are supposed to include a modicum of research as well.

I begin with my childhood friends Rod and Phil, who are brothers, and their parents Di and Gordon, who now live near Alicante; our family friend Sue Brooks and her older son Miles; family friend Sally Johnson, who lives in Valencia, and her daughter Nela; my school friends Oliver Curtis, "Batman" (real name Richard Pattman, but even his wife calls him Batman) Mike Steer, Alison Cox, Richard Roome, his mother Janet, Dorian Williams, Mike Houghton, his brother Jim, Tim Eagle, the Johns Lough and Pett, Malcom Lewis (formerly Pugh) Ade Seel, Adrian Lovell (ne Anderson) Maxine Williams, and Joanna Roberts.

From film school and life in London, I still see Andy Lambert and Karen Martinez, Zadoc Nava and Mitra Tabrizian, Kamina Walton and Paul Gilbert (no relation!) Michaela McRae Simpson, Tim Marsden and Barry Cannon; Barry Sullivan, who wrote a book about Stockhausen and now calls himself Finbar O'Suillebhain for some reason; Mike Hoyle, Julie Dinsdale, Marcus Harvey, Neil Thompson, Michael Sefton. There are a handful of people I still know from the TV industry: Tracey Ann Ross, Martyn Hone and his wife Silole, the journalist and writer Neil McKenna, erstwhile screenwriter Michael Ennis. Teaching has given me more friends: Pamela Southall, her daughter Jamie, Chelsea fan Paul Kennedy, Simon Phillips, Siobhan Maxwell, Steve Jackson, Michela Ravano, Kris Knauer, Katie Kennedy, Judy Cransberg, Fiona Daniels and Chris Hayes, Constantine Buhayer, plus my union buddies John Atteridge, Jean Mumford and Laurence Elliot.

There are ex-students I now count as friends: the Mexican Silvia Hernandez, the Italians Andrea Agostaro and Oreste Palamara, Japanese architect/boxer/DJ Tomi Haruhito, Andalusian Miguel Charte and his ex, Enka Guijarra, and the Atletico Madrid fans Amador Sanchez Bea and Javier Del Nogal. There are our Mexican friends Armando & Machi, and my boss in Navalmoral, Adrian Gonzalez, together with his wife Christina, as well as our French friends Sandrine and Olivier, who we met while travelling in Mexico the second time, in 2004.

Alma's school in London, and the surrounding community, has provided some of our newer friends: Theresa Thomas, Nick Birch & Isabelle Caillol, Rosie & Andrew, Kate Duchene & Robert Hickson, and Rachel Williams, our immediate neighbour. Then there is my taxi driver friend Andrew Wallace; Tom Boll (whose best man I was) and Jane Watt; Brian "Tom" Thompson, who now resides in Rome; Lily Lagarde, from Switzerland; Maani Petgar, from Iran by way of Sydney; Huw from my Welsh class; my dad's friends Martin Hauser (a Lutheran pastor) and Alan Armstrong (a Brexit supporter). There is Hong Wei, otherwise known as William Chen, who I met one night in the nightclub Heaven, and there is, at a push, Fabio from Mesas, who certainly considers ME a friend.

So, I told Alma I had done the math and I had 90 friends. I guess I was as determined to 'beat' my daughter as I was to 'beat' my uncle Dave. Alma just laughed and said I obviously knew more film-makers than I had friends, and in neither case could I name a hundred people, which just goes to show you can't outwit an eleven year old. By the time we'd finished arguing about it, I had to cross a few more people off the list anyway, and move them to the "former friend, no longer in contact" list.

There in the chapel in Guadalupe, in a moment of casual racism which I masked, rather badly, in joke form, I remarked to Paul Kennedy that it wasn't every day you saw a Black Virgin, but in fact they're all over the place – all over Spain, which has fifteen at least, all over France (around forty) Germany (eighteen) Italy, Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia, even Willesden, in north-west London.

When Cortes conquered Mexico, the natives embraced the Black Virgin as one of their own, incorporating her into their Aztec paganism with gusto. She has become "their" property, their patron saint. The link to the original Madonna in Guadalupe, to Extremadura and Spain, has been irrevocably severed. As Adam Hopkins says, in Spanish Journeys, Spaniards can believe in Hispanidad – the notion of an overarching, monolithic "Spanishness" with all the cultural superiority complex that implies - as much as they like. Latin Americans "no matter how Catholic, would rather eat a dish of worms than enter the monastery tied so deeply into this colonialist concept..." Perhaps they've been reading Charles Foster, and prefer to live as badgers?

Henry Kamen takes this point further. The point about Hispanidad, that is, not my point about badgers. He describes the rejection of Spanish culture by the newly independent South American countries, how they contrasted North American society favourably with the rapacious "mother country", although the pendulum did swing back in favour of Spain after 1898, when Spain "lost" Cuba to the US in a spectacular military collapse. Hispanidad, or hispanismo, thus accompanied a surge in anti-American (i.e. anti-Yankee) sentiments, a process that continued between the World Wars, thanks in large part to the efforts of right-wing cheerleaders like Ramiro de Maetzu, who saw Spain as the great civilizing influence in the world, and certainly in the Americas. where a loose affiliation of Spanish-speaking cultures, each with their own particular history and identity, was taking shape. "The nations of Spanish America have to be true to themselves," wrote Maetzu, "and they will not achieve it if they are not at the same time more Hispanic." Yet, despite his efforts, despite the ongoing efforts of the Spanish state, the Spanish elite, the Spanish intelligentsia, the deeply held beliefs of many Spanish, left and right, the pendulum would seem to have swung away from Spain again. You see this in the angry exchange between Hugo Chavez, left-wing firebrand president of Venezuela, & then king Juan Carlos at the Ibero-American summit, Santiago de Chile, in 2007. Chavez keeps interrupting Spanish Prime Minister Jose Zapatero with criticisms of Zapatero's predecessor, Jose Maria Aznar. Finally, exasperated, Juan Carlos tells Chavez to shut up ("porque no te callas?").

Zapatero seems like an eminently reasonable and dignified man, and it's true that Chavez could be a bit boorish, even overbearing, at times, but the king's intervention smacks of colonialism, down to the over-familiar use of tu, rather than usted. Where one stands on this depends on whether, like many Spanish, you buy into the idea of Hispanidad, or you believe, like Chavez, Daniel Ortega et al, that it's about time Spain stopped patronising its ex-colonies and treated them as equals, rather than children (hence tu). It's also true that the translation is misleading, and that "porque no te calles?" could be translated as "why can't you be quiet?" which is at least less insulting. The danger with this attitude, and with Hispanismo in general, however well-intentioned, is that it not only perpetuates an unequal relationship between Spain and its former colonies, but maintains a hierarchy of linguistic groups and cultures within Spain as well. In his capacity as rector of Salamanca University, Miguel Unamuno famously and bravely stood up to the Falangist general Millan Astray, but he still shared the Francoist desire to eliminate Catalan and Basque as languages, even though he himself was Basque.

Adam Hopkins may mock the notion of Hispanidad, but he is quite taken by Extremadura, "the part of Spain where I should like to lay my bones", just as he is taken by the Conquistadores, those "men of astonishing hardihood and bravery", men like Cortes, Pizarro and the "gentler" Vasco Nunez de Balboa.

Cortes and Pizarro we know were monsters, although lately there's been some revisionism: see, for example, Hugh Thomson's Mexican memoir Tequila Oil for a half-hearted defence of the Spanish. They were, it seems, merely bringing their civilising influence and restraint to bear on the bloodthirsty Aztecs (and the bloodthirsty Maya, if you believe Mel Gibson).

Yes, the Aztecs were crazed with war and sacrifice (the sacrifice of their prisoners) but Cortes barely paused for thought before massacring them. I think of the moment William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Warren Oates and Ben Johnson also pause, at the end of The Wild Bunch, right after they've shot the Mexican warlord Mapache dead. They drink in the hesitancy and confusion of Mapache's men, as the conquistadors must have done, then let out a triumphant laugh and embark on their suicidal killing spree, all guns blazing, until no-one is left alive, not even them. Unlike the Wild Bunch, Cortes and Pizarro survived, for a while at least, long enough to enjoy the fruits of their stolen riches, topless Mexican wenches and all in the case of Cortes (Sam Peckinpah would surely have approved). But Cortes was obsessed with finding the non-existent El Dorado, and he died of dysentery, a wealthy but bitter man.

Pizarro imitated Cortes in life, conquering a country by taking its leader hostage and having him murdered, with no shred of honour, only remorse, which is always the saving grace of the Catholic. His death, however, was violent. He was murdered by supporters of his rival, Diego de Almagro. A large bronze equestrian statue of Pizarro, designed by the American sculptor Charles Rumsey, dominates the Plaza Mayor in Trujillo, which was only an hour's drive from Mesas, and our second-favourite place to take visitors, Cabanas del Castillo being the first. Is it Pizarro though? The Lonely Planet Guide to Spain says "all is not as it seems" and that Rumsey "sculpted it as a statue of Hernán Cortés to present to Mexico, but Mexico, which takes a dim view of Cortés, declined it, so it was given to Trujillo as Pizarro instead." Pizarro imitating Cortes again, or Cortes imitating Pizarro? The Guide offers no evidence to support the theory, and I wouldn't trust Lonely Planet to guide me towards a decent restaurant, let alone get its facts right, so this may just be a myth (a myth which doesn't crop up in any other guide books either).

So what, then, of Balboa, "discoverer" of the Pacific, whose "gentle" pursuit of wealth and power led to his own death by beheading?  Peter Martyr d'Anghiera writes, in De Orbe Novo, of Balboa feeding forty homosexual natives to his dogs because they "dressed effeminately with women's clothing" and "went too far with unnatural temerity." Apparently, "only the nobles and the gentlemen practiced that kind of desire", which was a convenient excuse for Balboa to get rid of them and appoint himself the sole authority, since the "people knew that sodomy gravely offended God."

I had to go to London for work. Another week marking exams for the Ministry of Defence, which meant I wouldn't be able to go to Piornal; wouldn't, in other words, see the Jarramplas. I was relieved in a way. It was enough to know the Jarramplas was there, that it would always be there, that the possibility of going one day existed, and that tradition persisted in Spain. Some things - the scapegoating and pelting with turnips of random villagers, white men blacking up for King's Day, the patronising of former colonies - never changed.

Spring was taking its time to arrive. Spring was the season I had always visited Spain in the past. The pattern was established during my relationship with Claire, in the years between 1988 and 1991, when we visited three times. The first time was to Barcelona in 1988, the year of Acid House and tapas. It is fashionable to reflect approvingly on the cultural impact of house music and ecstasy, but I believe that history will consign them to the dustbin, while assigning Britons' discovery of tapas, and the consequent elevation of the tapas bar to a quasi-religious sphere of activity, its rightful place in the text books. For a long while tapas bars were all the rage in the UK, even if they now appear rather sad places, and the people who frequent them seem like lost souls cursed with the nervous, ruminant expressions of deer grazing on the grasslands of Extremadura. Either that, or they are Spanish who have fetched up in London, whose nostalgia – in the strictest, Tarkovskyian sense of the word – is more powerful than the repellent effect of the prices and portion sizes, not to mention the very IDEA of paying for tapas! The tapas bar redefined our relationship with food, and has led directly to the current craze for so-called "sharing plates" (although you could only really share them with a person who has an aversion to eating, such as a supermodel).

Back in those giddy days of pumping beats and patatas bravas, self-appointed scenesters like Robert Elms were springing up from nowhere, raving about Barcelona nightlife, specifically the nightclub Otto Zutz. Being fashion victims who read The Face (in my case, the boyfriend of a fashion victim who read The Face) we had to see for ourselves. It was, I hardly need tell you, utter crap. But we did discover a vegetarian tapas bar called Mas I Mas (More and More) which, while not on a par with Algo Asi in Canamero, was nonetheless a very acceptable bar/restaurant. We ordered a Spanish take on tempura, and the staff were warm and friendly, which is more than you can say for the welcome we received at Otto Zutz.

We went to Barcelona with Julie, who as a midwife would later deliver Alma, and her boyfriend Marcus. The best thing that happened all week, the thing that got me most excited, happened in the airport on the way back, when I saw David Byrne of Talking Heads. Not THE Talking Heads, as I misguidedly called them, until a film editor friend, Stuart de Jong, put me right, shortly before he emigrated to Canada. Something's been bothering me, he said. It's the way you insist on referring to THE Talking Heads, when it's just Talking Heads. Which was ironic, since we had spent months and months editing a TV series full of nothing BUT talking heads. Anyway, I just wanted to get that off my chest, he said, so that I can die happy, or at least a bit less miserable than I am, since I am Dutch.

Stuart's misery was alleviated somewhat by a happy twist in a lifelong saga of unspoken love for his cousin, Sharon. Sharon had married and moved to Canada, while Stuart had moved to London (where he also got married) Neither of them was happy in their marriage, and both of them eventually divorced. Sharon had a daughter, who grew up. One day, around the time we were cutting the documentary, Stuart went to Canada to visit his relatives. Knowing that she was now single, he told Sharon how he felt, and she said she had always loved him too. Stuart told me he was moving to Canada to live with Sharon just as soon as we finished the film. He showed me a photo of him and Sharon as teenagers, standing together on the top platform of the Eiffel Tower. It had only taken him thirty years to summon the courage.

FEBRUARY

To Alcala de Henares, on the far side of Madrid, to see Beni's university chum Ana. For years I thought her first name was Ana-Labra, double-barrelled like Maria-Rosa, or Marie-Carmen, but it turned out it was just Ana, and that Beni referred to her as Ana Labra to distinguish her from her sister Anna. Ana Labra had married an Armenian called Karen, who ran the kebab shop in her local shopping centre. In spite of his name, Karen was a man, short and swarthy, with short arms, like a Caucasian (truly Caucasian) Cee-Lo Green. Ana taught French at the University of Alcala de Henares. She had been recovering from an emotionally and verbally abusive relationship with a fellow "academic" when she met Karen. He paid her compliments (piropos, the South Americans would say) and made her feel good. When they married, Ana's father told Karen he'd won the lottery. He was speaking metaphorically, of course, like any proud father. It took Ana and Karen years – and thousands of Euros in IVF fees – to conceive. Now they had a beautiful daughter, Gabriela. Yet Ana's father still slunk around, sulking, like the grumpy cynic who refused to buy a lottery ticket from the workplace syndicate, and now had to watch them breaking open the champagne.

Next day, we moved on to Chinchon, south of Madrid, to see Beni's "niece" (actually, her cousin's daughter, but this is Spain) who had bought a house in the countryside for cacahuetes, and looked after a growing number of stray and injured dogs. Her only neighbour was a crazy man who lived in a cave (possibly Ana's father). The garden would look amazing in the summer, when all the vegetables appeared, and the fruit trees – cherry, fig, olive, orange – bloomed, but in February, it was cold and bare, and the house was freezing. We huddled round the fire in the living room and played board games, while stray and injured dogs pottered around us. One of them had no hind legs, and had been fitted with wheels, which squeaked as they scraped on the stone floor.

On the way back to Mesas, we got lost in Aranjuez, and shouted at each other. Finally, after driving round and round in circles for half an hour, we found the "right" road, which is to say the road to the Montes de Toledo. This bypassed Toledo itself (which would have been far too pleasant and relaxing) and took us through a series of small towns and villages of ever-diminishing prospects, in one of which we stopped to find a restaurant, but nowhere was open. I was desperate for a pee, but there wasn't even a bush to piss behind – just wide, windswept streets and a group of elderly vigilantes tasked with keeping the streets free of human urine. We jumped back in the car and sped off, the road deteriorating into kilometre upon kilometre of single-lane, potholed tarmac. The car shuddered onwards, and I abandoned my dream of looping south, through the Parque Nacional de Cabaneros, and then north again, through the wildest part of the mountains. We cut our losses and took the most direct route, passing Espinoso del Rey, stopping only to pee and collect pine cones for the fire, although Beni later complained that they made too much smoke.

Holidays over, Alma went back to school. Almanzor was participating in the regional radio station Radio Edu's story-writing competition. There would be four rounds in total, and the winner of each round would go through to the final in June, when the overall winner would be chosen. This is the story Alma wrote:

La curiosidad mató al gato

Lo había intentado en más de una ocasión, pero era superior a mis fuerzas. Mi abuela me había advertido que no me acercara a aquel sitio maldito pero una fría noche en que el viento aullaba me dirigí a la misteriosa mansión de los Sangrador.

El cielo nublado bloqueaba la luz de la luna y mi linterna apenas alumbraba. Las sombras en los rincones me espantaban y cuando por fin llegué a mi horroroso destino estaba pálida y algo arrepentida.

Empujé la puerta de la casa y un chirrido resonó por toda la calle. Parecía hacer más frío dentro que fuera. Las baldosas estaban sucias y rotas, las paredes mohosas, infestadas de cucarachas y la mesa polvorienta, cubierta de fiolas humeantes con líquidos de colores extraños.

Un escalofrío recorrió mi espalda. ¡Me has desobedecido! - grajeó una voz. Una sombra se adelantó, ¡era mi abuela! "¡Ahora permanecerás aquí para siempre!" Murmuró unas palabras incomprensibles mientras sacudía los dedos. Quise huir, pero había quedado petrificada.

Curiosity Killed the Cat

I had tried not to, but I couldn't resist. My grandma had warned me not to get close to that evil place but on a cold night when the wind howled I turned in the direction of the Bloody Mansion.

The sky was cloudy and my torch hardly shone. The shadows in the corners scared me and when I finally arrived at my horrid destination I was pale and rather regretted ever going.

I pushed the door and an ear-piercing screech echoed about the street. It felt colder inside than out. The floor tiles were filthy and shattered, the walls were mouldy, infested with cockroaches and the table was dusty, covered in smoking flasks full of liquids of strange colours.

A shiver ran down my back. "You disobeyed me" croaked a voice. A shadow stepped forward, it was my grandma! "Now you shall remain here forever" She murmured a few incomprehensible words whilst shaking her fingers around. I tried to escape but I had turned to stone.

My sister came to visit, with her partner Sarah and Sarah's son Riley. They picked up a hire car in Madrid and rang us to say they were on the way, but the GPS sent them to the wrong Navalmoral, one in the mountains of Avila. They drove through a snowstorm to get there, remarking on what a remote place we lived in (which we did – just not THAT remote). I was waiting by the furniture store on the outskirts of Navalmoral, as arranged, when I got a call from Mel. She said they were in Navalmoral. I asked if she could see any obvious landmarks. There was a bank, she said. Okay, I said, starting to feel slightly worried. There were actually quite a few banks. Which one were they near? Oh no, there was only one, she said, sounding less worried than me, but a little uncertain now. And a bar. I took a deep breath, and told her she might be in the wrong Navalmoral. Was it Navalmoral de la Mata? Mel checked on the GPS. No, it was Navalmoral de la Sierra, two hours away. She started to cry. We're very tired, she said. We're going to work out what to do and we'll call you back.

It was okay in the end. They arrived three hours late, but they'd seen a good part of Avila, certainly much more than I had ever seen. And in the snow. We took them to Navalmoral the next day, to try the famous churros. Then to Cabanas del Castillo, Canamero and Guadalupe, the same round trip we'd done the month before with Paul Kennedy.

When we got back to Mesas, there was a call from a woman, Alejandra. My boss Adrian had given her my number because she was looking for private English lessons. With Alma and Riley sniggering in the background, I arranged to meet Alejandra in town, and from then on I was subjected to constant taunting by the children, which is perfectly encapsulated in these pictures which they drew:

No sooner had Mel, Sarah and Riley left than it was off to Las Hurdes for my birthday weekend. I'd always wanted to go to Las Hurdes, mainly for its associations with the legendary Bunuel documentary Tierra Sin Pan, which I had finally seen shortly before the trip. Now, after 17 years, I was going to the legendary "Land Without Bread". It wasn't even that far from Mesas – a couple of hours by car, or less, depending how far into Las Hurdes you wanted to venture, how native you wanted to go. Extending the comparison which I always made in my mind between the UK and Spain, if Madrid to Navalmoral was like travelling from London to Bristol (on a similar stretch of motorway, albeit with mountains) then going to Las Hurdes was like continuing over the Severn Bridge, into mid-Wales, although there was no bridge to cross between Navalmoral and Las Hurdes, only more motorway, then a series of ever-deteriorating roads which made the road through the Montes de Toledo seem positively state-of-the-art. Not once, but twice, climbing a series of hairpin bends, our path was blocked by a herd of goats, and there was nothing to do but park on the verge and wait. It became apparent that we had chosen the most direct but certainly not the fastest route into Las Hurdes, and I was thankful that we didn't meet a single oncoming car in the two hours we spent between leaving the motorway and rejoining civilisation of sorts, not far from Las Mestas, where we were staying.

Land Without Bread was made in 1932, during the Second Republic, after King Alfonso XIII had abdicated and a progressive coalition of Republicans and Socialists had come to power. This was a time of huge social progress and equally violent unrest. The government attempted, amongst other things, to introduce an eight-hour working day and solve the land problem by giving proper tenure to agricultural workers. But the forces of reaction were gathering. Bunuel, keen to do his bit for the cause, but equally motivated by anarchist mishievousness, had read a book about Las Hurdes, and decided that this poverty- and disease-ridden backwater of a poverty- and disease-ridden country met his requirements perfectly. The film was financed with money by Bunuel's friend, the anarchist Ramon Acin who, like Karen, had won the lottery, although in Acin's case, he had actually won the lottery. Chronologically, it completes a trilogy of surrealist films, which began with Un Chien Andalou (1928) and L'Age d'Or (1930). But Land Without Bread is less overtly "surrealist". It presents itself, not as a film dream, but a documentary, complete with voice-over, and the extravagant hand of Salvador Dali, with whom Bunuel collaborated on the earlier films, is nowhere to be seen. Instead, in his first "solo" film, Bunuel gives us half an hour of malnourished children and infant mortality; village idiots grinning miserably through missing teeth; bandy-legged dwarves; a donkey stung to death by bees, and a goat which plummets to its death from a treacherous path. Bunuel juxtaposes these grim images with dramatic, of its time music and a monotone voice-over that, apart from sounding (in the English language version) like Orson Welles advertising Findus peas, heaps disdain upon condescension, yet is so preposterous, so cruel, that you find yourself questioning its veracity. All it needs to be as melodramatic as Gone To Earth is Jennifer Jones playing a haggard old crone.

Its critical reception, by Left and Right, reflects the timeless debate about portrayal of suffering (viz Band Aid etc) - to what extent do such images spur the audience to action, or merely reinforce and perpetuate stereotypes, and with them, a sense of helplessness and defeatism (or indifference)? Many on the Left felt that there was more of the latter than the former, and were infuriated because they were already acting to bring basic sanitation to the area. When he came to power, Franco banned the film for his own reasons – obviously, such images were incompatible with his vision of Spain - but, like the Republicans, he invested in the area, building roads and dams, simultaneously raising the living standards of Hurdanos while changing the lives of some forever. As in Talavera la Vieja, the area around Granadilla (not properly Hurdano, but that neck of the woods) was flooded by Franco's dam-builders in the nineteen fifties. Granadilla, though above the water level, was expropriated by the state, and those villagers who stubbornly refused to leave became squatters in their own homes. There was no land left to work, and access was reduced to one road. By 1964, there was no-one left, and the village was left to the looters. After Franco's death, Granadilla became a Historical-Artistic Ensemble and volunteers (mainly students and young people) began coming to restore the ghost town. Some fifteen to twenty houses around the main square have now been restored. Getting there is as difficult as it was fifty years ago, via a pot-holed dirt road from Hervas, but it's well worth the effort.

Then, in 1999, another film-maker, Ramon Gieling, retraced Bunuel's footsteps. He wanted to show Land Without Bread in one of the Hurdano villages and see what the locals thought about the movie that had become synonymous with the area. Their feelings are made plain in the film – and the very title - Prisoners of Bunuel. They were still angry, and with reason. Bunuel had faked almost everything. The donkey who is stung to death was slathered with honey and placed next to a couple of hives. The goat who "fell" from a craggy path was in fact shot, and you can see the puff of smoke on the right of the frame. The dead child was merely asleep. The idiots and morons were local politicians.

Beni agreed with the Hurdanos (the ones who were angry at Bunuel – there is, as with all matters Spanish, some divergence of opinion). It was, she said, as if one were to make a documentary about Mesas and only show El Mudo staggering drunkenly through the village, clutching his asparagus, or Fabio landing a punch on his boss Mario. Which is exactly the sort of documentary I would make, given a chance. Like Bunuel, I'd set up scenes. I'd get Mario to issue rabid proclamations from the town hall public address system: "Attention! I know a place in Mesas where dwarfs and morons are very common. The town hall employs them as street cleaners and labourers, as long as they stay sober. The terrible impoverishment of this race is due to the lack of hygiene, under-nourishment and constant intermarriage with Italians. The smallest of these creatures is 48 years old. Words cannot express the horror of his mirthless grin as he trudges to and from the bar. Here is another idiot..."

I may not be making a film, but I AM writing a book, and the inhabitants of Mesas – or Navalmoral, or Extremadura, for that matter – might take exception to my descriptions, as the inhabitants of Campos de Nijar, in Almeria, took exception to the book that Juan Goytisolo wrote about them. The mayor was so angry that he reportedly threatened to string Goytisolo up by his bollocks from one of the town lamp posts if he should ever came back ("si Goytisolo se atrevia de nuevo a volver a localidad le colgaria por los huevos de los faroles del paseo...")

But surely the critics of Land Without Bread are missing the point. This was a satire, a parody of the ethnographic travelogues of the time in which the authority of the narrator, his observations on life in the exotic corners of the world, was accepted without question. As the local priest says, in Prisoners of Bunuel, "to make his report more convincing and compelling (Bunuel) enlarged reality a little.... sometimes you have to help the truth." It's a sentiment Javier Cercas and his subject Enric Marco would concur with. It doesn't matter that it's Las Hurdes. It could be anywhere. It just had to feel remote and other. It couldn't have been Madrid, or La Mancha. Chance determined that it was Las Hurdes, and if the Hurdanos still feel incensed by a documentary that was made 80 years ago, still fail to get the joke, and the serious point Bunuel is making through humour, that surely confirms their backwardness.

Here is another idiot: a young man, scarcely a teenager, in Prisoners of Bunuel who complains that tourists and outsiders comes to Las Hurdes looking for poverty and deprivation. "They think we live like Indians," he grumbles, echoing the ethnocentrism Bunuel was mocking.

Las Hurdes is indeed a very different place now, a top tourist destination with four-star hotels and, I might add, excellent honey, the production of which, so far as I'm aware, causes no donkeys to be harmed. In Las Mestas we found kilogram jars of Tio Picho, the dominant local brand ("from the beehive to your table") for eight Euros. I celebrated my birthday at the Hospederia Real Las Hurdes with a dinner of home-made boletus croquettes; an aubergine and goats' cheese stack; morcilla in filo parcels with a kiwi coulis (weird but nice); solomillo of pork with potato mille fieulle and cheesecake with honey. All the same, I couldn't help noticing the absence of bread. And the roads are as bad as they were in 1973, when, according to the projectionist in the Gieling documentary, a journey of 30 km also took two hours by car. Gieling was shocked by the way modern Hurdanos live. "I had the idea that I had gone 50 years back in time," he said in an interview with The Guardian. "People still live in a very humble way." But that is precisely the attraction, and the way the tourist board markets the region. "Time has not quite stood still," says the tourist guide, "but it has certainly slowed right down." The Hurdanos are apparently still "the Prisoners of Bunuel".

Meanwhile, the population of Rabun County, Georgia, remain "the Prisoners of Boorman". Forty-five years after Deliverance was shot, the locals are still smarting, as film-makers Cory Welles and Kevin Walker discovered when they went to make a Gieling-type documentary, which they called The Deliverance of Rabun County. Welles and Walker met people who had been passed up for jobs because the film had reinforced stereotypes of Rabun County, "presenting it as all hookworm and incest, buckteeth and bluegrass."

In John Lane's Chattooga: Descending Into the Myth of Deliverance River, a local challenges the author's suggestion that James Dickey and John Boorman created the stereotypes which now seem to define the area. "Those people are out there," the local admits, "they're just not the only people out there." It's a point borne out by Dickey's friend Al Braselton, with whom he canoed the rivers in and around Rabun County: "We never ran into any sadistic mountaineers. They were always friendly to us... one time a man and his son gave us a helping hand when we really needed it. I had hurt my ankle and was having a tough time walking and these people had taken us back to our car in a jeep."

Billy Redden, who played the retarded boy banjo-player in the film's second-most famous scene, had no apparent hard feelings when he told Welles and Walker that Deliverance was the single greatest experience of his life, although this doesn't say much for the rest of his existence. Incidentally, only one of the hands he plays the banjo with in the film is his. The other – the picking hand – belonged to a real banjo player. They cast Redden for his looks, not his banjo-playing skills.

Forty years separate Tierra Sin Pan and Deliverance. Another forty-five years have passed since Deliverance, and television documentaries haven't moved on much in that time. They may even have gone backwards, after a golden age lasting up to the early 1980s. Now programme makers treat us all as morons and idiots, recapping every five seconds on what we've seen, as if we were goldfish that can't think back beyond the last scene.

In 1989 Claire, Julie, Marcus and I went to Madrid. While the others charged around the city in search of vegetarian restaurants, taking in the key tourist destinations (the Rastro, Retiro, Prado etc.) I designed my own, bespoke itinerary, which involved a Cassavetes movie (Husbands) at the Filmoteca, and the consumption of Russian salad in the functional bar in the Filmoteca's lobby. I did consent to visit a sherry bar or two around the Plaza Santa Ana, and finish the night with churros, as the Madrilenos do, although I don't think we stayed up as late. Rather like Japanese tourists, Marcus and Julie always seemed to have the names of all the hip bars (hip by tourist standards) which they'd culled from the Rough Guide and Face, but I didn't have the stamina to match. One day Claire and I went to Aranjuez on our own, and walked in the gardens. It seemed a lovely, verdant relief after the barren, arid streets of Madrid, and nothing – no visit since, in eighteen years of visiting the city with Beni en route to Mesas – has changed my feelings about Madrid.

Claire and I travelled on from Madrid to Seville. Or we may have flown direct to Malaga. I don't recall much about Seville, apart from the obvious tourist attractions: the Cathedral, the Giralda, the Alacazar; the prettied-up gypsy quarter; a slightly nervous and fruitless trip to Triana, in search of an authentic flamenco bar; some good tapas. And of course the oranges. Roger Lewis, writing in What Am I Still Doing Here, says that "Seville is an orange city. The streets are lined with orange trees, heavy with fruit. The sand in the bullring is yellow with an orange tinge. The food is orange and blood-red – peppers, pimento, paprika. I can't shake the colour off..."

We spent a few days in Aracena, because I'd read a description in the Rough Guide of walking in countryside full of chestnut trees, which I liked the sound of, but without a map or a guide or even enough Spanish to seek local advice, we found ourselves sticking to the metalled road, which we followed downhill for a few kilometres in the late morning sun, until we decided that one tarmac road was pretty much the same as another, however many chestnut trees there were on either side, and turned around and went back to Aracena, to see La Gruta de las Maravillas. This was impressive enough, especially the so-called Cave of Bums, but really no more impressive than La Gruta del Aguila in Arenas de San Pedro, or the cave on Tresco in the Isles of Scilly, which readers of my earlier 68½: Movies, Manson & Me may recall features heavily in my unproduced screenplay Hell Bent For Leather, or even the railway tunnel which features heavily in my early Super-8 film Heart of Darkness. What is it about caves, I wonder? I thought I was happiest on islands, but perhaps I am, like Gollum, happiest in caves.

We moved on to Granada, which also has caves, but we were too afraid to enter the Gypsy Quarter, and contented ourselves with the Alhambra, where we could inhale the air of Lorca without the risk of being mugged. Anyone with a passing interest in Spanish culture knows that Lorca was "Spain's greatest 20th century poet" (copyright, every single guidebook ever written about Spain) and that he was murdered by the Fascists at the start of the Spanish Civil War, either for being a Leftie (which he wasn't) or a homosexual (which he was) or both. Still, the details of Lorca's death remain somewhat murky, in spite of Ian Gibson's groundbreaking and methodical Assassination of Federico Garcia Lorca, and his remains have never been found. A 2016 article in The Daily Telegraph reported that archaeologists had located Lorca's "grave" at the bottom of a long-disused and buried well, but access would prove difficult. Lorca's descendants continue to oppose exhumation, while Fascists, of whom there are still a number in Spain, generally behave like naughty children when asked about the several hundred thousand murders their fathers and/or grand-fathers committed, looking at the ground and shrugging petulantly while denying any knowledge of – let alone contrition for – the massacres. So much for good old Christian values of honour and decency. Yes, there were atrocities by the Left as well, but as Paul Preston demonstrates fairly convincingly in The Spanish Holocaust, they were far fewer, and that counts for something in the numbers game. Plus, the Left usually confess with a certain pride and say that he (or she) had it coming, because he/she was a brutal, exploitative landowner, or a priest (almost as bad in pre-Civil War Spain) or at very least a member of the International Brigade who stupidly joined the wrong party (step forward, George Orwell) and, well, you know, you have to break a few eggs if you want to make a tortilla.

Personally, I'm no fan of Lorca the poet or playwright. Luis Bunuel found the plays "ornate and bombastic", and he was Lorca's friend! He also described Lorca's first play, The Love of Don Perlimplin, as "a piece of shit". I saw once Yerma (or The House of Bernarda Alba – I forget which) at the Theatre Royal in Stratford East. It was an imaginative, energetic production, and we (Claire, Julie, Marcus and I) had a box close to the stage with a great view, but I didn't have the foggiest idea what the play was about, even though it had been translated into English. Perhaps BECAUSE it had been translated into English. No, give me Lorca, the album by Tim Buckley, the man with "more octaves in his range than you have brain cells" as one wag on rateyourmusic puts it, any day.

Tim Buckley had the voice of an angel, and recorded a handful of astonishing LPs in the late 60s and early 70s, starting with the relatively conventional but lushly orchestrated Goodbye and Hello and ending with the "sex-funk" albums, Greetings From LA and Look At The Fool. In the midst of this fertile period he released his masterpiece, Lorca, the title track as perfect a musical expression of Lorca's death as you could hope to hear, regardless of what the lyrics actually say. "Written in 5/4 time," writes Julian Cope, "with an ominous marching bass toward uncertainty, it sounds otherworldly organic (...) and at times, because of the abstractness and dissonance, is hard to listen to." That's an understatement. Buckley has, intentionally or not, channelled the imminent arrival of death, the fear, the horror, the shit and piss of every firing squad victim.

Buckley himself died of a heroin overdose, aged 28. Apparently he wasn't an addict, it was his first time. Believe that if you want. He also fathered a son, Jeff, at 19. The two of them only met once, because Buckley senior couldn't handle marriage or fatherhood, and he moved out before Jeff was born. Buckley junior grew up with his mother, but went on, nonetheless, to record one great album, Grace, which showed how much of his father's vocal talent he had inherited. He also staked his place in rock history by popularising Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah with what will always be the definitive version of that now-cliched X-Factor standard. On the evening of May 29th, 1997, he went for a swim in the Mississippi, fully-clothed and wearing his boots. A week later, his body was discovered. The autopsy showed no signs of drugs or alcohol, and suicide was ruled out, but, you have to ask yourself, what kind of person goes swimming in his boots?

Three deaths, all of them shrouded – to varying degrees - in mystery. What does it all mean? What is the connection? The explorer Apsley Cherry-Garrard describes, in The Worst Journey in the World, how, as part of the fateful Scott Expedition to the South Pole, he made a journey across the ice to collect penguin eggs, how the killer whales would swim up below and smash the ice to get at the ponies. Clever bastards, those orcas. Tim Buckley has the same quality, his voice slithering along, going nowhere, it seems, then suddenly erupting, breaking the ice and hitting the high notes mere mortals cannot reach. He was a clever bastard too, and he had a killer wail, as did his son.

Of that trip to Granada with Claire, I can't remember a thing, apart from the long and boring bus journey from Seville. It's like it never happened, like I've wilfully erased this part of my life from my memory. In 68½: Movies, Manson & Me I not only used the Cherry-Garrard story to illustrate how other writers were ripping me off, the way killer whales do, but also likened my time with Claire to being in the Unification Church, or Moonies, as they are better known. I'd like to take this opportunity to apologise, and to make clear that in no way do I hold Claire responsible for anything, whatever I may have said in the earlier book. It was I who voluntarily surrendered myself to half a decade of late-80s bleeding heart liberalism, with all the attendant feelings of guilt for being a man, a strange indifference to drug abuse or food that tasted of anything except vegetables, and a level of tolerance to fashion magazines and fashions in general (house music, tapas etc) that I now find alarming. I can only explain it as a form of self-hypnosis or self-brainwashing, and I absolve everybody, including Claire, of responsibility. It was me who chose to waste my twenties on that life, if life it was. It simply means that I don't remember – can't picture – where we stayed, or where we ate, or what we did, or what I thought of the Alhambra, so I'll have to flesh out this part of the narrative with my favourite part from Gerald Brenan's South from Granada, the part where he's young and horny and embarks on a romance with a beautiful girl, whom he only ever sees sitting in the window of a Granada house, and whom he makes love to (in the old sense of the term) by wooing her through the bars of the window. Suitably flattered, the girl finally agrees to meet him in the square one night. Brenan turns up early and waits, nervously, for the girl's arrival. Eventually, he spies her from afar, approaching with her chaperone, and realises she is a dwarf.

A similar thing happened to me once, in the Bristol and West Building Society office on Trafalgar Square. I had not long severed connections with the Moonies and was enjoying my new-found freedom, but missed the good stuff, like sex. I had, on a number of occasions, made deposits in this branch of Bristol & West (I'm talking literally now, not figuratively, not about sex, of which there was almost none those nine months) and I had noticed a sweet, rather timid cashier with pointed ears and a short, boyish haircut to whom – in my sexually frustrated state – I decided to pass a note. I find you incredibly attractive, I wrote on a piece of paper. This is my number. Call me if you want.

Fortunately, my better judgement clambered up into the belfry of my head, and rang a desperate peal of caution. I resisted the temptation, and the crumpled note remained in my pocket. The next time I went in to the office, she was there again, only this time she was standing up and I can only say that the lower half of her body was as elephantine as the upper half was elfin, and that when both parts of her body were put together they made her look like a gigantic wasp. A big-bummed wasp at that. So I embarked on a relationship with a friend of my mother instead. Tina was at least ten years older than me, and had three almost-teenage children. She also had a friend, called Lizzie, who was likeably scatty and the grand-daughter of the poet Robert Graves to boot. We were going to go to Deia, where Graves had lived, along with the musician Kevin Ayers, although they hadn't lived together (not biblically, anyway.)

It used to strike me as odd that so many famous people could live in Franco's Spain and not feel any apparent guilt about it. Dali, of course, but he was Spanish, and a Fascist. But what of Graves and Ayers? Did they not count Majorca as Spain? What of Welles, or that other skilful fraudster, Roman Gary? What of Johan Cruyff? On the other hand, as hard-core Chelsea fan and part-time Hispanophile Paul Kennedy is keen to remind me, Spain never really embraced Fascism in the way Germany and even Italy did. They fought a civil war, and half the population lived in sullen defeat, biding their time, never accepting Franco (though Cercas describes the bulk of them as understandably "apathetic, cowards or collaborators.") Perhaps the same was true of Hitler and Mussolini as well. Didn't we also live in sullen acceptance of the Thatcher regime for over a decade? Wasn't I one of those people who kept saying, after every election defeat, that's it, I'm leaving, but somehow never did, until that radiant dawn in 1997? Is there a single country one can live in without compromising one's ideals? Was the France of the 1950s and 60s any better, considering the things they did to the Vietnamese and Algerians (the latter on their own soil, on October 7th 1961)? Is Australia any better, given the treatment of their own indigenous people and, lately, refugee seekers? Is Mexico, or India? All of the so-called democracies have their secrets, every bit as dark as Tiananmen Square.

Through the break-up with Claire, I had remained on good terms with her flatmate, Julie. One day Julie told me, with touching concern, that she didn't think the relationship with Tina was really "me". I panicked, aborted the trip to Deia, and dumped Tina. So I never did go to Majorca. Then again, perhaps Graves and Ayers were right. Perhaps Majorca isn't really Spain, any more than the Canaries are.

MARCH

On the 2nd March 2016 the Peruvian striker Claudio Pizarro became, at 37, the oldest player in the Bundesliga to score a hat-trick. I remembered seeing him play in the Copa America, which I was watching in a bar in Potosi, Bolivia, in 1995. But that would have made him sixteen at the time. A quick check online revealed that Pizarro actually started his career in 1509, sailing to the New World with... sorry, wrong Pizarro. CLAUDIO Pizarro began playing football for Deportivo Pesquero in 1996. Time and altitude must have played tricks on my memory. I was very ill in Potosi, suffering the effects of soroche, or altitude sickness, and the large lunch and alcohol I drank in the bar afterwards didn't help. I went back to my pension and threw up, then spent a restless night in the no man's land between consciousness and strange, discombobulating dreams. Pizarro went on to play for Werder Bremen, Bayern Munich and Chelsea, before he moved back to Bremen and scored that hat trick. Chelsea fans never saw the best of him, but I remember a game – the game I thought I had seen in Potosi – where Pizarro didn't so much fire in a cross as caress it, and the ball described an arc from his foot to the head of his fellow striker and pinged off the target man's forehead into the goal. But it may have been one of my dreams.

The broad beans were ready to eat, but there was plenty more planting to do. Then came news from Argentina. Daniel had died, on the 5th of March. His death affected me more than the death of Siso. Siso had that diffident, shrug-of the shoulder quality one finds in the stereotypical Spaniard. He was generous, but I found it hard to connect with him. Daniel was my kind of guy. Once we'd got over the initial problem of me being English, and him being Argentinian, and hating the English, once we'd got over that problem, he was like a puppy, eager to please, delighted to see me, always laughing at my jokes, hacking with a chain smoker's laugh (he had that in common with Siso) denigrating himself as the "black" of the family. He was mildly racist, mildly macho, and frequently anti-social. He'd refuse even to attend family gatherings, hiding himself away in his tiny cell of a bedroom, above the car workshop which served as the family business, with his Queen records and his photo of his dead girlfriend, only to emerge the next day with a big grin beneath his Freddy Mercury moustache, and even though I understood the words he used as little as I understood the words Siso used, I thought that I understood his actions.

This is the letter I wrote, in June 2015, when we first learned that Daniel had a brain tumour and was going to die:

"Querido Daniel, estoy haciendo algo que no he hecho desde hace mucho tiempo, es decir que estoy escribiéndote. No sé porqué ha pasado tanto tiempo sin escribir. Muchas veces he pensado en ti, y he querido escribir, pero siempre ha habido algo "más importante" o más urgente. Ahora me dice Graciela que estás enfermo, que tienes cáncer, y no hay nada más importante que escribirte.

Qué puedo decir, Daniel, para aliviar tu sufrimiento, tu dolor, el dolor de los que te quieren? No quiero "ser inglés" y evitar el tema ni quiero ser insensible o demasiado directo. Sé que ya has sufrido mucho en tu vida, que has perdido seres queridos. No puedo decir que comparto tu sufrimiento, pero por lo menos puedo decir que yo también he perdido seres queridos, y que voy a perder uno más – vos.

Cuando nos conocimos, fue un momento de "dificultad" que nunca tomé en serio, porque tú no lo tomaste en serio tampoco, y pasó muy rápido. Luego, a pesar de los motivos muy justificados que tienes para odiar los Británicos (es decir, el gobierno de la Thatcher, y la gente que lo apoyaba) vos me aceptaste en tu casa, en tu familia, como si yo fuera un pariente de sangre. Me trataste tan bien como a Beni y a Pedro. Nos reimos, y compartimos momentos que, para mi, fueron, y son, muy importantes, muy preciosos. Tu cariño me afectó mucho, sobre todo porque podía ver la combinación de cariño y dolor que llevabas.

Hay gente que te quiere, allí y aquí. Estoy seguro de que uno de ellos es Pedro. Sabes que vamos a pasar un año en España, en el pueblo, con él ? Que Alma quiere estar con su "lalo"?

No puedo decir más sin repetirme. Espero que sepas, que puedas reconocer, que tu vida ha tenido valor, que has afectado las vidas de personas distintas, en maneras distintas, y que me has tocado con tu generosidad, tu amor, tu humor.

No puedo escribir sin llorar. Te dejo, Daniel, con un abrazo fuerte. Espero con todo mi corazón que no sufras y que nos encontremos otra vez, en nuestros sueños, o en un lugar mejor..."

(Dear Daniel, I'm doing something which I haven't done in a long time, which is write to you. I don't know why so much time has passed since I last wrote. Many times I've thought of you, and wanted to write, but there has always been something "more important" or more urgent to do. Now Graciela tells me you are ill, that you have cáncer, and there is nothing more important than writing to you.

What can I say, Daniel, to relieve your suffering, your pain, the pain of those who love you? I don't want to "be English" and avoid the subject, but nor do I want to be insensitive or too direct. I know you have suffered a lot in your life, that you have lost loved ones. I can't say that I share your suffering, but I can say that I too have lost loved ones, and that I am going to lose one more – you.

When we first met, there was a moment of "difficulty" that I never took that seriously, because you didn't take it seriously either, and it passed very quickly. Then, in spite of the entirely justifiable reasons you have for hating the British (which is to say, the Thatcher government and the people who supported them) you welcomed me into your home, into your family, as if I were your own flesh and blood. You treated me as well as you treated Beni and Pedro. We laughed, and shared moments that for me were, and are, very important, very precious moments. Your kindness touched me greatly, above all because I could see plainly the combination of love and pain which you carried around with you.

There are people who love you, there and here. I am sure that one of those is Pedro. You know that we are going to spend a year in Spain, in the village, with him? That Alma wants to be with her grandpa?

I can't say any more without repeating myself. I hope you know, that you can recognise, your life has had value, you have affected the lives of different people, in different ways, and that you have touched me with your generosity, your love, your humour.

I can't write without crying. I'll leave you now, Daniel, with a hug. I hope with all my heart that you don't suffer, and that we meet again, in our dreams, or in a better place...")

The touch made him smile again. The sea tickling his feet and the soft sand caressing his hair brought him memories from long ago. It had been so long since he had heard the song of the waves and tasted the salty sea air! The colourful little houses looked like toys and the seagulls that bobbed in the wind seemed far away stars, their trails twinkling like glitter stuck to the clouds. The moonlight reflected on the sea as if it was the heart of the earth; a colossal pearl shining with all its might.

The boy didn't lose sight of the fishes dancing in-between the waves, the jellyfish jumping through the water and the winkles throwing themselves at the sea from the rocks. He managed to forget the endless days of walking, the exhaustion and the fear of not finding refuge in any country. For a moment the sea had made him smile again.

That was Alma's entry for the second phase of the short story competition, which she also won. This is the Spanish version:

El roce le hizo sonreír de nuevo. Sentir el mar cosquillearle los pies y la suave arena acariciarle el pelo le trajo a la mente memorias lejanas. ¡Hacía tanto tiempo que no había oído el canto de las olas ni saboreado el salado aire del mar! Las casitas de colores parecían juguetes y las gaviotas que flotaban en el aire aparentaban estrellitas lejanas con sus estelas brillando como purpurina pegada a las nubes. La luz de la luna se reflejaba sobre el mar como si fuera el corazón del mundo; una perla colosal brillando con todas sus fuerzas.

El niño no perdía de vista a los peces bailando entre las olas, las medusas saltando por el agua y las caracolas tirándose al mar desde las rocas. Consiguió olvidarse de los interminables días de marcha, el cansancio y el miedo a no encontrar refugio en ningún país. Por un momento el mar le había devuelto la sonrisa.

All this talk of dying. When my friend Ezra committed suicide, only one song, Stairway to Heaven, was played at his funeral. It struck me, listening to it that day, in a crematorium in north-east London, that I'd never really heard the song properly. How many times had it been on in the background, how many times had I sung along to the meaningless, (or, if you prefer, "hermetic") lyrics, without understanding them? What is there to "understand", after all? Other than to impose your own interpretation on them, which is fine. I interpret them as being "pretentious" in the true sense of the word, pretending to a deeper meaning than they actually have, suggesting a depth of insight that they withhold from the listener. For the first time, at Ezra's funeral, I had nothing else to do, my mind was clear, except for the thoughts and memories of Ezra whirling around inside my head: could I have saved him, if I'd only tried a bit harder... could ANYBODY have saved him?

I kept meaning to set down on paper clear instructions for my own funeral, and the music I wanted played. The list kept changing, and I kept forgetting what it should include, vascillating between one, all-encapsulating song and a non-stop continuous mix that would hold the mourners for an hour and a half. As a compromise, I decided on the following records, to be played in the order I have chosen here:

I'm On Sick Leave, Randy Brown

Randy Brown belongs to a select band of 70s soul singers – DJ Rogers is another - who although relatively successful at the time have slipped into obscurity. Randy produced three or four fine albums, of which the finest is generally reckoned to be Welcome To My Room, but all of which are highly libidinous. The Midnight Desire LP has a cover which reminded my Brazilian friend Luiz of a German porn movie. Why German, I wondered, and then I remembered that I once came across a cache of German porn in my mum's old house in Bristol and Luiz's remark suddenly made sense. On Sick Leave comes from the early, pre-German porn phase of Randy's career, and it's the way I'd like to begin my funeral, as if to say, "Yes, I'm sick - very sick in fact - but I might be back, in some form."

Into The Mystic, Van Morrison

I never know what to say about Van Morrison that will add one scintilla of insight to the vast and largely pointless reservoir of commentary that already exists. He's Irish, he was in the Irish R&B group Them, he's a grumpy old so-so and he's still pumping out Celtic soul of an order that Kevin Rowlands can only dream about in his silly, drug-free, zoot-suited dreams. Most importantly, Van Morrison recorded Into the Mystic, which first appears on Moondance, although the live version from the live album It's Too Late To Stop Now is even better than the studio version. Of course, people often say that about live versions and I think they're generally wrong, for all kinds of (mostly technical) reasons, but if you CAN bottle atmosphere, and then un-bottle it on the record and let it pour out of the speakers like Robin Williams in Disney's Aladdin, then Van did it with Into The Mystic.

See You When I Get There by Lou Rawls

Lou has his supper club side, of course. Maybe that's his only side. But it's supper club in the way Tony Bennett is supper club i.e. in a good way. Philadelphia Soul only really has two gears – silky smooth mid-tempo and silky smooth up-tempo. Every Philadelphia artist (Billy Paul, the O'Jays, Teddy Pendergrass, Jean Carn) seems to do both equally well, and apart from being male or female they all sound the same to me, which is to say they all sound brilliant. I put it down to Earl Young's drumming, mainly. That's because I'm an ex-drummer and I'll always give the drummer some. Who else is going to? This track has a special place in my heart because Beni likes it, and because the lyrics make sense in the context: I'm off into the mystic now. I'll see you when I get there, okay?

One by Johnny Cash

Apart from a brief phase when I listened to New Year's Day (on New Year's Day 1986) I've always hated U2. The old joke about Bono comes to mind, the one where he's on stage, and he starts clapping slowly, and tells the audience that every time he claps, a child dies in Africa, to which a wag in the audience replies, "Well, stop clapping then!" If I was at a U2 concert, I'd tell the whole audience to stop clapping. But I have to admit that One is a good tune, and when Johnny Cash covered it at Rick Rubin's instigation, on the American Recordings series, they took it to a higher level altogether. Truth be told, there are half a dozen Johnny Cash songs which I'd be happy to have played at my funeral (I Walk The Line, Long Black Veil, Wanted Man, Fulsome Prison Blues, San Quentin and Hurt, in addition to his version of One) but there's something so comforting about Johnny's voice that even cack like Boy Named Sue brings me out in goose bumps.

Two Little Boys by Rolf Harris

I've always thought Two Little Boys was a song about my cousin Marc and I, and working on the assumption that I will die before him (probably a misplaced assumption) I have always felt that it would be a sonic tip of the hat to the most important male man in my life, just edging my dad, uncle and three brothers out at the finishing line. "Okay," I'd be saying (from beyond the grave) "we never did get to join the army, never did fight in some quasi-Napoleonic, Saragossa Manuscript-type battle where I could save your life by offering you a ride on my horse, but hey, this one's for you." Except that on revisiting it recently, I discover that the boy who gets rescued is called Joe, just like my childhood friend Joe, who I conspicuously did not rescue from his battle with insanity. I may even have contributed to his madness, as we all did in small ways: not answering the door when he called round, even though he could see the lights were on, could hear the music we were listening to (more likely Hawkwind than Rolf Harris). Nowadays, with Rolf's reputation around children somewhat tarnished, the song has taken on a whole new dimension, and might well be seen as in questionable taste at a funeral, or anywhere else. You can't even post comments about it on YouTube.

Summer by Millie Jackson

Back before she became famous for her lewd lyrics, Millie Jackson was just another awesome female soul singer in the long line of awesome female soul singers, though tending more to the deep, Southern side of soul (Doris Duke, Sandra Phillips, Sandra Wright) than the uptown diva style I usually plump for (Patti Labelle, Chaka Khan, Loleatta Holloway). Summer comes from Caught Up, which is a concept album of sorts about a love triangle, a timeless theme that Millie explored further in the equally magnificent Still Caught Up. It's a cover of an old Bobby Goldsboro track that, in Millie's hands (and lungs) captures the heat of the Deep South and burgeoning teenage sexuality as well as any song about burgeoning teenage sexuality in the Deep South ever did.

Keep The Fire Burning by Lou Johnson

It has to be the full, eleven-minute disco version, mind. That will give people a chance to go to the toilet if they need to, before the climax of the ceremony. Be warned, though – this is SUCH a deep, soulful groover that you may feel the urge to rush down the front and bang your bongos along, as my brother Tamlin did when Abba came on at our grandmother Joyce's funeral. Afterwards, I encountered an elderly lady leaving the hall, shaking her head disapprovingly and saying to anyone who would listen that it wasn't her idea of a funeral. "Never mind," I said, "you'll get your chance soon enough." Obviously this song works better if I am cremated, but I'd prefer to be buried, so Cover Me by Bettye Swann might have to serve as a (bongo-less) graveside back-up.

Psychedelic Warlords (Disappear In Smoke) by Hawkwind

Another song which works better at a cremation, but I don't care, as I love Hawkwind and I would happily be buried to this. Disappearing in smoke could be taken metaphorically anyway, in much the way that the French treat les cendres de Napoleon metaphorically i.e. there are no ashes, he was buried as well, and just putrefied like we mere mortals, but the French are really talking about what remains i.e. the afterglow, the legacy, the memory, and that will do just fine for me. Mind you, I'm basing this on a single, rather dubious source – Stephen Clarke's How The French Won Waterloo (or Think They Did) - so you should take my remarks with a large pinch of salt. Not that the French are particularly rigorous when it comes to research. They prize a well-crafted opinion over the facts every time, and I'm down with that. Vive la France! Vive Hawkwind!

The 11th of March, or 11-M, came and went and we didn't even notice. Perhaps we were too absorbed in the arrival of spring, after an incredibly mild winter. We drove across Spain to Valencia for las Fallas, the week-long orgy of fireworks that ends in the ritual burning of the eponymous effigies. Each neighbourhood builds a large falla (some as big as small buildings) and a small one, called a ninot. March 19th is the Night of the Torch, or Nit de Foc (you've got to love Catalan, or Valenciano as they call it round these parts). Each day, in the early afternoon, there's a firecracker display, or mascaleta, as well. The Spanish are, arguably, the noisiest people in the world, and the Valencians are, arguably, the noisiest of the Spanish regions. Alma's description, in her holiday diary read as follows: "It only happens in Valencia and it's when people build massive burnable statues of genies, animals and people. There's Spain's president (sic) Rajoy, and weird creatures. Then, at a certain hour, they all get burnt...." As ever in Spain, the apparent indifference with which multiple generations of families – from children to grandparents - greeted the most explicit sexual imagery was unnerving. The Spanish Prime Minister, Mariano Rajoy, could be butt-fucked by a strap-on-sporting Angela Merkel and they would smile and nudge their children and point. And they did. We stayed with an old friend of Beni, a Polish English teacher called Andy, and watched the fireworks each night from the safety of his balcony on the outskirts of the city. It was far too crowded in the centre for me. The Nit de Foc fireworks were erupting all over the city, and it reminded me of the bombing of Baghdad, Operation Shock and Awe. I used to think I knew Valencia well – based on that one brief visit in 1984 - but now I wandered around in a state of disorientation.

In the early 1990s my friend Tim, whom I had met in London some ten years before, had (unlike me) fled the Thatcher dictatorship and was teaching English in Barcelona. Actually, he was teaching English in Manresa, which is a small Catalan town an hour's train ride from Barcelona, with all the caveats that implies. I think Tim summed it up in two anecdotes, one of which concerned the much-vaunted pan amb tomat, or, as Tim called it, bread and tomato. It's not like they invented the fucking wheel, he would say. It's just bread and tomato.

The other story concerned the 1994 European Cup Final between Barcelona and Milan. Early on the day of the final, according to Tim, the town had started setting up a giant screen in the main plaza, putting out chairs – hundreds and hundreds of chairs – in neat rows. By early evening the plaza had filled up and the game duly began. Barcelona were firm favourites to lift the trophy. This was the "dream team" managed by Johan Cruyff and spearheaded by the Bulgarian Hristo Stoichkov and the Brazilian Romario. They had just won La Liga for the fourth year in a row and, two years earlier, had finally got their hands on the European Cup, thanks to a free kick from Cruyff's compatriot Ronald Koeman. Milan, by contrast, were in disarray: Marco Van Basten was injured and their totem, Franco Baresi, was suspended, along with his fellow defender Alessandro Costacurta. UEFA regulations limited both teams to a maximum of three non-nationals. Milan coach Fabio Capello left out Jean-Pierre Papin and Brian Laudrup, preferring the in-form Dejan Savicevic, Zvonimir Boban and Marcel Desailly. Barcelona's team virtually picked itself, which meant no room for Laudrup's brother Michael, because Stoichkov and Romario had an almost telepathic understanding and Ronald Koeman was the linchpin of the defence. As a Milan (or, rather, a Savicevic) fan I was expecting the worst. Milan scored first, Savićević breaking down the right and passing to Massaro, who tapped the ball into the net. Massaro then doubled the advantage before the break. People started to leave the square. In the 47th minute, Savićević, having the game of his life, capitalised on a defensive error by Nadal and lobbed the Barca goalie Zubizarreta for the third goal. The chairs in the plaza were now emptying and by the time Desailly made it 4-0 to Milan, the plaza in Manresa was empty.

I thought of these stories a lot, as I watched the campaign for Catalan independence gather momentum on television, never quite sure which nationalist politician was which, what party they belonged to, whether or not I should like them. The state-run, pro-government RTVE channel certainly wasn't going to encourage any sympathy for them, so I had to trust my bad Spanish and my instincts. I felt that Artur Mas wasn't to be trusted, but Oriol Junqueras seemed alright. At any rate, he clearly liked his pan amb tomat.

Tim was living on the top floor of a building on the outskirts of town, although where the centre ended and the outskirts began was difficult to judge. His flatmate, Felix, who was American, and gay, was allegedly giving private lessons in the flat to a young boy but the lessons, so far as we could tell, from our vantage point in the living room, seemed to consist of a lot of thudding and banging. Felix was later arrested for stealing valuable books from a Spanish library, but that was long after the Manresa days.

There was only so much to do in Manresa. We went into Barcelona and I looked up old friends. Barry from Donegal. Jonno, a friend of the Cambridge crowd I was hanging out with in London. Jonno drove me round the streets at night on his motorbike and we tried to get into Otto Zutz, because we were drunk, Jonno far more than I. My lasting image of that night is of Jonno held aloft by two bouncers, one holding his arms, the other his legs, like Donald Sutherland in The Day of the Locust, as they ejected him from the club. But perhaps this happened the next time I visited Barcelona, arriving by bicycle in the spring of 1996. It's hard to tell: the visits blur into one, like the nights of debauchery.

APRIL

I felt bad that I'd not even noticed 11-M, so as penance I made myself re-read Ben Lerner's Leaving The Atocha Station, which I hadn't liked much the first time round. The novel is narrated by a young American poet, Adam Gordon, who is living in Madrid on a poetry scholarship in 2004, the year of the Atocha station bombings to which 11-M refers. It's a very funny and knowing book, which mercilessly ridicules the pretensions of its protagonist. Adam runs away to Europe and sneers at his countrymen - not so much the tourists, who are forgiven their ignorance and insensitivity, as his fellow expats, the pretentious, wannabe intellectuals, working on their pretentious, self-absorbed books while making ends meet teaching English. Lerner/Adam at least recognises the irony of such a position, and hates himself most of all ("I imagined breaking the bottle over her head...then raking my throat with the jagged glass").

Leaving The Atocha Station touches only tangentially on the 11-M bombings. "History was being made and I needed to be with Spaniards to experience it", says Adam. But he is too detached and self-pitying to engage with history, or Spain, even though he's supposed to be writing a "research-based" poem about the Civil War. Anyway, he's a foreigner, a poet and a bi-polar dopehead who somehow manages to attract beautiful, protective Spanish girls, for whom he invents tall stories (that his mother is dead, his father a monster). It's sometimes difficult to tell the girlfriends apart, and that, presumably, is intentional, as it echoes the device Bunuel uses in That Obscure Object of Desire. When Leaving The Atocha Station came out, critics appeared not to notice the allusion to Bunuel, and I was congratulating myself on my singular brilliance in getting the reference when I came across a website with an article entitled  "Writing Poetically about Spain and Desire" by Yelena Akhtiorskaya in which she makes the following observation:

"a movie that flits amid its pages is Luis Buñuel's That Obscure Object of Desire (in which) two very different actresses play the same character (...) within the logic of the film, they're not just interchangeable — they're the same woman, and at no point is this absurdity acknowledged..."

Should I rejoice that someone else was (finally) on my wavelength, or retreat once more into my shell, smarting from the knowledge that I was no different to the thousands of other men who had moved to Spain to write books, or presented mix tapes to their girlfriends as if this were a radical new form of showing love? Re-reading Lerner, I wasn't so sure of the Bunuel link. Yelena Akhtiorskaya and I may have read too much into it, or just read too much.

Alma didn't want to enter the third phase of Radio Edu's Story Competition. She had already qualified for the final, twice, and would merely be competing against herself, again. Besides, the opening line of the third story ("Late in his career, Orson Welles turned to commercials") didn't inspire her as much as it inspired me. On top of that, her friend Kate had come from London, with her parents Nick and Isabelle and her sisters Lucy and Julia in tow. They rented a house (a casa rural) in the plaza and we drove into the mountains, the Sierra de los Gredos, where we swam in a freezing mountain stream just outside Garganta La Olla. Afterwards, we found an old man selling local honey for seven Euros a kilo, one Euro less than Tio Picho. The shop from which he peddled his produce contained nothing but an empty cold counter and a couple of anachronistic kitchen appliances – a rotund 1960s fridge and an unused meat slicer. These, and the green and white colour scheme, reminded me of Argentina, where everything seems to come from the 1960s. The old man went out back to get the honey. It came in tall, thin, unmarked jars, and was darker and runnier than Tio Picho. It tasted less floral, more intense, more waxy, like the honey I used to hate, but now loved.

One day it rained, and our visitors went to Trujillo on their own. Another day we took them to Cabanas del Castillo, and picnicked on the ridge, next to the castle, as eagles wheeled around us on the air currents. The bar down by the river had also opened for the season. I realise I haven't said much yet about the river, even though it's played such a large part in my relationship with Mesas over the years. In the early days, around the turn of the millennium, we'd walk the several kilometres down to the river in the baking sun, and meet old friends sunbathing on the roof of a disused hut, next to the small dam where everybody swam. Then the mayor had the bright idea of bulldozing a road across private land to the swimming spot, and cars started driving down to the river, and the magic faded. The landowners went to court and managed to get the road closed, and now you have to ask their permission to cross their land on foot, and no-one wants to ask them, because, as Beni says, they've been going to the river all their lives, there's a de facto right of way, albeit not one recognised by the court, so why should they ask permission?

At this point, people started going more to another swimming spot, down by the bridge over the river, which had the advantage of a bar, and free parking. But for some years I continued to go to the old place on my own, less to swim than to explore the river canyons, imagining myself in Deliverance, climbing the almost sheer rock walls, losing my shoes in the fast-flowing water, throwing myself in fully-clothed to retrieve them, revisiting the same spots again and again, and each time I did so, I got to know the river a little better, felt it a little more familiar.

In the same way I have, over the course of nine months, revisited this book countless times, going over and over the same ground, each time taking a step further, mapping out the ground, discovering new ideas, rediscovering memories. This book is, as I've already said, a little like the Ibor, long and winding, fed by a finite number of small tributaries, memories of Mesas mingling with other adventures in Spain and South America, half-remembered books, obscure films, Welsh holidays, all of them merging into one. That is the intention anyway.

I knew my father-in-law had feelings for the river too, although he didn't romanticise or rhapsodise it the way I did. He had once chastised me for going alone on a particularly dangerous section, where the footpath narrows to nothing and the only way is up and over the cliffs, creeping along narrow precipices fit only for deer and wild boar. For him, the river represented memories of childhood, of growing and drying tobacco in the old tobacco-drying house, which was still there, still had a few dessicated tobacco leaves, the size of palm fronds, hanging inside its ground floor. My father-in-law was like the farmers, loggers and merchants who lived in the counties of the three states bordering the Chattooga River, whose love for the river was "primal, a part of them. Something you see every day, you take for granted.. but you sure as hell would miss it if it were gone..."

Just as my father-in-law loved the river, he never tired of Mesas itself. He would sit on the bench outside the residencia and gaze with love and wonder on his village, his fields and trees, his rocks and clouds, the sky and the distant mountains, the way he gazed with love and wonder on his grand-daughter. The Beat poet Gary Snyder once said "the most radical thing you can do is stay home". In that respect Pedro was more radical than me. I had once been a pacifist, and yet here I was working, indirectly, for the Ministry of Defence, marking language exams. I had marched against the Iraq War, and now I was passing or failing military candidates in Arabic, Pashtu, Farsi, helping them to better communicate with – better eavesdrop on, better interogate - their enemies, the people whose lands they had occupied. On one occasion, to celebrate the successful completion of his MA in International Liaison & Communication, an ex-marine, who I'll call Tim, invited me out for a drink. We wound up in a cocktail bar around the corner from Foyles bookshop. As he downed one mojito after another, Tim moved from concern about his aged father, who was going to be evicted from his flat above Foyles, to full-blooded confession of his own crimes in Iraq. He had spent a tour of several months going out every morning to a different address, with orders to kill everyone, men, women and children. We'd come back at lunch, he said, clean ourselves up and do the same thing again in the afternoon. I finished my mojito. I have to get home, Tim, I said. My daughter will want to see me before she goes to bed.

For the third and last time that year, I was marking exam papers in London. It would be the last time I ever dirtied my hands for the MOD. The contract had gone to another provider. I would be out of work, but free of guilt. In Madrid's Chamartin station, en route to London, I ordered a boccadillo with calamares for the first time in years, perhaps the first time since my early, tentative forays to Valencia and Barcelona. It tasted as good – as soft, salty and comforting - as ever. This is the life, I said to myself, thinking of that line in the Frank Zappa song 200 Years Old. This was the life indeed, living in Spain for a year, for ever if I wanted, living on the rent from a London flat and occasional work teaching English, and I wanted no other. Returning to Mesas, ten days later, the train trundled along the valley floor from Talavera la Reina. The clouds were lying low and heavy and dark over the Sierra de Gredos, the mountains, two thousand metres high, pushing against the cloud. It was almost impossible to tell what was mountain and what was rain. The hills to the south, the Montes de Toledo and the Sierra de Guadalupe, lay lower, like piles of horse dung dropped from on high, a few desultory clouds gathered around them.

I arrived back in Mesas. It was Easter. Beni's sister Anna was visiting from Paris. So were the neighbours across the road, Susannah and Miguel, and their three children. One day Beni, Anna and I press-ganged Anna's youngest son Mati and his friend Dorian into coming with us to La Vera. We drove across the valley and up to Garganta La Olla. The boys were bored, Mati apologising to his friend for bringing him on this boring road trip. Nothing interested them, not even the famous Blue House in Garganta, which had once been a brothel, or my attempts to involve them in a game of hide and seek in the narrow alleys between the old timbered and balconied houses, alleys no wider than the girth of a man. The only game they were interested in was their DS game. Lunch was a grim affair in a touristy upstairs restaurant, served by a sullen waitress and cooked by someone with only a passing knowledge of cookery.

We decided to keep going up, to Piornal, the highest village in the mountains, where they hold the Jarramplas festival every January. The boys' faces dropped. We twisted and turned a hundred times during our ascent, passed herds of goats and the last remaining wisps of snow. I wondered where and when and how we might eventually find a village in this landscape of sparsely scattered trees, rocks and red earth. Then suddenly we were in it. The sun shone, but a cold wind blew and no-one was around. The Jarramplas museum was shut. We ordered drinks from the only bar, and sat outside in the sun, our collars pulled tight around our necks. The drinks never came. I went back inside and found them waiting on the bar. There are your drinks, said the barman. I'm not a waiter.

We drove down the far side of the mountain into the Valle del Jerte, famous for its cherry blossom, which attracts tourists from all over Spain and beyond, but seems rather underwhelming to my mind. I'd much rather eat the cherries, and this we would later do, in early June.

1997. Post-Olympics, I visited Tim, who had moved into Barcelona proper, for what was, according to my diary, "a week of not doing very much – getting up late, wandering into town, ogling the luscious meats and cheese that adorn the market stalls, drinking strong coffee and smoking Fortuna, eating out in cheap restaurants before staggering home to spend the rest of the night nattering and drinking."

We (my soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend Julie and I) did manage one or two day trips: to Montserrat, and Figueres, to see the Dali Museum, only to discover, after a three-hour journey by slow train along the coast, that it was closed, and one glorious day on the beach in Sitges, swimming and eating paella. It all sounds very pleasant, yet I know that a sense of ennui was setting in, both with Barcelona and with Julie, who would dump me the following year. Our last night in Barcelona, Tim invited Jonno over for dinner, and Jonno brought a young American hippy girl, for whose presence he felt the need to apologise. She had been a co-worker on a youth camp the previous summer and they were having a "thing", which to judge by his apology - and her conversation - was purely sexual. She bored us with the story of her friends, who had named their children Spring, Summer and Fall. We all fell about laughing and one of us said it was a pity they didn't have a fourth child. They could have called it Winter. It's not funny, she said. Winter died.

I've been back to Barcelona a couple of times since, with Beni. We stayed in a friend's flat near Montjuich one time and revisited old haunts. By the turn of the millennium the city had completed its transformation from seedy port to post-Olympic gastro capital. The old, cheap eateries had gone, replaced by El Bulli copyists. In truth I was bored, and the last time I passed through, hung-over after a friend's 50th birthday weekend in a small spa town north of Barcelona, you couldn't move for language students and tourists (of which we were ourselves two). Jonathan Meades told his fellow writer and curmudgeon Roger Lewis that by making Catalan the official and effectively only language of the Catalan state, the separatists had driven Spanish-speaking teachers, academics, lawyers and other administrators back to Madrid, and that "the effect on Barcelona has been to turn it into a glamorous hick town." That's how I feel when I go there now.

I know there is an argument in favour of gentrification, a refutation of the love affair with low-life. Adam Gopnik has something to say about it in his New York memoir Through the Children's Gate, which I was reading avidly in my bedroom in Mesas in order to avoid the growing heat of spring. Such love of decay and deprivation is, he says "standard-issue human perversity. After they gentrify hell the damned will complain that life was much more fun when everyone was running in circles. Say what you will about the devil, at least he wasn't anti-septic. We didn't come to hell for the croissants."

Gopnik is writing about New York, rather than Barcelona, and New York in the 1970s and 80s was arguably a whole lot scarier than Barcelona, but my experience of Times Square in 1980 had a lot in common with the Placa Reial of that time. There is an underlying whiteness to Gopnik anyway: the deep-rooted FEAR of Harlem, without mentioning its blackness, race being the great unmentionable in white American discourse, the "embarrassment about our own relief". You know a city (Barcelona, not New York) has had its day when Woody Allen discovers it. Vicky Cristina Barcelona has a lot to answer for: stereotypical picture postcard views of the city from Parque Guell; Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz prostituting themselves in a New Yorker's fantasy of what Barcelona life is like (basically, painting and threesomes). One of the most damning reviews of Vicky Cristina Barcelona appeared in China Daily:

"When the film isn't painting women as severely over- or under-sexed basket cases, it gets condescending with its travelogue vision of Barcelona. A great deal of the film takes place on, in, or near La Pedrera, and the rest in the city's most lovely spots. Like Allen's London, there is no room for slums, garbage, crime or any other social ill. In Allen's world, everyone is a miraculously independently wealthy artist, wine flows easier than water and the cruellest thing about the world at large is that there's just not enough affection."

Wag that he is, Woody once remarked that if he could do it all over again, he'd do everything the same "with the exception of watching The Magus." Mind you, Robert Irwin, who wrote the superb Satan Wants Me, one of the handful of novels I've read more than once, defends The Magus in his autobiography of the sixties, Memoir of a Dervish, and despite the presence of both Michael Caine AND Anthony Quinn in the cast – two bigger hams Extremadura couldn't produce – I'm incined to trust Irwin's opinion over Woody's.

Me, I'd do everything the same with the exception of watching Vicky Cristina Barcelona, or Match Point or Midnight in Paris or pretty much any of the forty (!) films Woody has made since he gave up making funny movies around the time of Stardust Memories, all the way back in the 1980s.

Two years passed. Julie and I broke up. I met Beni, on a teacher training course in Hammersmith, and in Easter of 1999 I made my first visit to Mesas. I was struck by how much the village resembled the Andean villages I had passed through. I knew South America better than Spain at this point, and Beni had to explain that it was, in fact, South America that resembled Spain, and above all Extremadura, since that was where the conquistadores had come from.

Beni's father, Pedro, was a retired shepherd, although his idea of retirement was to work all day in his huerto, growing onions, tomatoes, lettuce, peppers, chickpeas and melons, watering the fig and olive trees and, when that proved insufficiently demanding, buying a new flock of sheep and selling the lambs to Moroccans for Eid. He also kept chickens and, when I first met him, a pig, although pigs were fairly undemanding to look after, so far as I could tell.

Orosia's domain was the house which, under her watch, was spotlessly clean. She cooked twice a day, a gigantic lunch and a marginally smaller dinner. Through Orosia and her sister, Tia Beni, who lived next door, I was introduced not only to lentils with chorizo, potaje (chick peas, cod and spinach) and a seemingly infinite range of ways to turn stale bread, sugar and milk into dessert, but the legendary cocido, a stew of chick peas and different bits of meats which, on first encounter, seemed to include chicken's feet, although Beni says this is impossible and that my memory is playing tricks on me. Tia Beni's son Siso lived at the bottom of the street with his wife Maribel, son Noel and daughter Bianca; another aunt, Tia Concha, lived around the corner. The litany of names, kisses and meals, the incessant gabble of Spanish – more precisely, Extremenan - was overwhelming. I tried to copy the Extremenan accent, dropping the final consonant, indeed most consonants. Has cenado? ("Have you eaten?" - an incessant question) would emerge in my tentative Extremenan as athenao? Beni, who had escaped her peasant roots to study French philology at university, wasn't going to stand for that.

I fell in love with Extremadura because it wasn't like the other parts of Spain I already knew. It reminded me of the West Country in its greenery, its gorges and caves, the primitive but mystical rituals and traditions, the prominence of cheese, but most of all in the way it good-naturedly embraced yet still managed to overcome its reputation as the poor country cousin of Spain. Extremadura had a straw in its mouth, and a Westerly burr to its accent.

The iconic green, white and black flag only appeared in the mid-70s, after Franco had died, and despite its recent origins, the designer remains unknown, though it may be a lawyer from Oliva de la Frontera called Martín Rodríguez Contreras. There are various interpretations of the colour scheme. The regional government maintains that the green represents the military order founded in 1166 in Alcantara (Arabic for "the bridge" that crosses the Tagus) to capture and defend the town from Muslims; the white is the Kingdom of León, which repopulated the region during the Reconquista (by, for example, encouraging Alonso Fernández del Bote to build his castle at Belvis) and the black is the Moorish kingdom (taifa) of Badajoz.

In 2008, a local professor of history proposed an alternative theory, in which it is the green part of of the flag which symbolizes the Muslim era (incidentally, Extremadura's only period of complete independence, albeit as a Moorish taifa) white stands for León (as above) and black represents the color of the clothing worn by the Lusitanians, the Indo-European people who inhabited this part of Spain (and Portugal) before the arrival of the Romans. However, most Extremenans subscribe to a simpler interpretation of the colours: green and white for Cáceres, black and white for the southern province of Badajoz. In this case, green equals hope, white equals honor or purity, and black embodies the sadness of unemployment, marginalization and emigration. This seems to me as good an explanation as any, and one that speaks to the experience of Pedro and Orosia, and thousands like them.

So began the to-ing and fro-ing, the visits at Easter and summer and Christmas/New Year. I saw the new millennium dawn in Mesas and not, as I had once fantasised, at the pyramids in Giza. After Alma was born, the number of visits increased, especially when Beni's mother, Orosia, was diagnosed with Alzheimer's and after she died, Beni would take Alma every couple of months to see her beloved grandpa, her abuelo.

Each visit to Extremadura also meant that I got to know Madrid better, as Barajas is the nearest airport to the village. We would stop in Madrid, with Beni's cousin Bibi or with friends. I could still drink copious amounts of alcohol in those days without becoming immediately ill (not in the sense that I recognise illness, anyway), and one night, according to my diary, "we got very old-style pissed, crawling from bar to bar, drinking beer and cold dry sherry and cheap red wine, puffing away on Fortuna at 320 pesetas a pack... the last bar we found ourselves in was run by an ex-bull-fighter and was celebrating its fifth birthday so they were giving away free champagne which I drank on top of two very large gin and tonics. The next thing I remember is waking up on the floor of my friends' flat with their pet iguana crawling over me and a terrible headache. I took two Nurofen, but immediately puked them back up, plus the champagne and gin and tonic and sherry and beer and cheap wine. I picked the Nurofen out of the pool of vomit in the sink, washed them off and swallowed them again. I felt much better after that."

Then to the village for "two weeks of recuperation, no alcohol to speak of, no cigarettes, blue skies, sunshine, a light breeze, pigs in the street, long walks through mountainous greenery, olive trees and wild asparagus, herds of goats crossing our path, sunsets and deaf-mute idiots. But enough of Beni's family..."

One day at that time a circus came to the village. This is going to be crap, I thought, but it wasn't. It was conjurors and contortionists and trapeze artists, boa constrictors that made the children in the audience shriek with horror and clowns who stuffed live ducks down their trousers. Alejandro Jodorowsky would have approved. Another day it was Easter and the women of the village dressed in black and wandered from house to house in candlelit procession, singing religious songs. And the rest of the time I lay on our bed in our bedroom – which hasn't changed in eighteen years, still the same mattress on the floor, the same wardrobe and single poster of Robert Doisneau's The Kiss on the wall – and read: World of Wonders by Robertson Davies, and a book about Mexican circuses (co-incidentally) and a great Spanish novel called La Guerra de General Escobar by Jose Luiz Olaizola, which is based on the true story of a Civil Guard colonel who refused to rebel against the elected government, remaining loyal to the Republic despite his antipathy towards communists and who, after the war, was shot on Franco's orders. It's probably the last book I read in Spanish.

MAY

For Beni, the highlight of May was discovering a large quantity of fresh horse manure by the frog ponds known as Los Noques. She arrived back at the house, out of breath, and collected as many plastic bags as she could humanly carry. Curious, I followed her down to the ponds and together we spent a thrilling half hour or more filling the bags with horseshit to take to the huerto, and still we barely made a dent in the piles dotted around the ponds. Although undeniably romantic in its way, this wasn't for me the highlight of May. That was the Trujillo Cheese Feria, or Festival. We wouldn't have gone to or even known about this, had a friend from Zaragoza not rung to tell us that he was going, and that he wanted to pay us a visit at the same time.

Amador is the most knowledgeable person I know when it comes to cheese. He came to stay with us in London some years ago, as a paying guest and language student, and we became friends, despite Alma telling him that he looked like a murderer. Amador arrived in Mesas with two female friends, who appeared to be a lesbian couple, although it was hard to tell, as they made no physical contact whatsoever with each other, so maybe they weren't. They had booked the casa rural in the plaza, the one in which Kate and her parents stayed the month before. Beni introduced Amador and the "lesbians" to the last surviving cheese maker in the village, who proudly showed them her cheeses, which she made on a tiny scale, mostly for her own consumption. She let them take one, which Amador produced triumphantly at the early evening table, wrapped in a cloth, to be eaten as a tapa with our beer.

We drove to Trujillo, which normally boasts a "slightly under-cherished quality," in the words of Rick Stein, but on this day every parking space was taken, and the main square, already busy, was rapidly filling with people. There were 108 stands, gearing up for the arrival of 200,000 visitors over the course of three days. Amador loaded up with cheese and, after a leisurely lunch in the garden of a smart hotel (which was more leisurely than we intended, due to the leisurely approach of the waiters and the overwhelming number of diners) we headed back to Mesas. On the outskirts of Trujillo, Amador was pulled over by the Guardia Civil and breathalysed. They were doing it to every third car, it seemed – there were lots of easy pickings on a day like this – but they were mercifully patient with Amador, who was so nervous he couldn't manage to blow into the breathalyser. It reminded me of that scene in Annie Hall when Woody Allen is invited to try some cocaine, becomes uncontrollably nervous and sneezes it everywhere. Eventually Amador produced a satisfactory (negative) result and we were able to continue our journey. Back in Mesas we had a cheese orgy, with seven different kinds of cheese, mostly goat. I don't as a rule like goats cheese but around these parts you basically have to eat goats cheese or not eat cheese. I thought they were okay. Amador was disappointed. I suggested that perhaps he had overdone the whole cheese thing, what with eating almost nothing else, and posting nothing on Facebook but photos of cheese. He agreed that the attraction was waning. It had become something of a chore for him, a cross to bear. He wasn't sure that he wanted to go on living and breathing cheese. His Facebook activity went quiet for a while, but he's up to his usual tricks again, posting photos of cheese and nothing else.

Thanks to Amador and the "lesbians", we also discovered a producer of honey in our very own village. The honey from Mesas, we learned, was not only cheaper, at five Euros, than either Tio Picho or Garganta la Olla honey, but also better. Having schooled us in the way of cheese and honey procurement, Amador and his friends then returned to Zaragoza, or Saragossa as it is known in The Saragossa Manuscript (more exactly, The manuscript found in Saragossa, or Le manuscrit trouvé à Saragosse, since it was written in French, by a Pole.) The film version, Rękopis znaleziony w Saragossie, was held in high esteem by the likes of Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola and Luis Bunuel, as well as my Polish student Aleksandra, who presented me with the DVD, right after she alerted me to the existence of Ryszard Kapuscinski. I was very happy to receive a copy because it was an extremely elusive film, and one I had wanted to watch for some time, but in the event I found the intertwining stories and characters – gypsies, thieves, inquisitors, cabbalists, English teachers - confusing and fragmented.

Of course, they are meant to be confusing. They are narratives within narratives within narratives, the literary equivalent of Chinese boxes (although earlier I likened them to Russian dolls) in which, little by little, it becomes apparent that there is some kind of conspiracy going on, involving a secret Muslim society, and the connections between the hundred or so stories - gothic, picaresque, erotic, historical, moral and philosophical – begin to make some kind of sense.

In his magnificent biography of Franco, Paul Preston tells how, in 1930, "Franco returned hastily to Zaragoza where he had to receive the visit of a French delegation led by Andre Maginot. Maginot presented Franco with the Legion d'Honneur for his part in the Alhucemas landing. On his return to France he declared that the Zaragoza academy was the most modern of its kind in the world. Maginot's ideas of modernity had yet to be put to the test by the armies of the Third Reich..."

Ah, the Maginot Line. As a teenager I stumbled across National Lampoon magazine – which is much funnier than their films - and saw, in the back of one particular issue, an advertisement for National Lampoon's French Comics, a republication, in English, of selected French bandes dessines. "The French have given us much to laugh about," the Lampoon said, by way of enticement. "Rabelais, Moliere, the Maginot Line..."

And still the visitors kept coming. A former colleague, Pam, came from London with her daughter Jamie. They had lived in Peru for a year but Pam didn't seem to have learned much Spanish. Not that I was any better. We dutifully went to Cabanas del Castillo, to Trujillo, and to the river, where Pam became the first person to swim that year.

They never let me be. I still remember the icy glare of that creature and the strange language that it used. Also how he left my sister dying, without a care. The hard fingers digging into my neck and the kick that sent me flying to a cage. I lost all track of time, it was a long and painful trip, watching my land disappear behind me. How to describe the fear, and the cold?

Since then I have lived here, I have lost my dignity and liberty. I watch my unfortunate friends, pace around their cages, down headed. Every day, strangers come to look at us, to watch us eat, drink and sleep. They shout things at me, they laugh at me. I don't have the space, or reason, to run; the food they give me has already been hunted. I don't even feel like roaring any more. I hardly remember the savannah. I should have been a lion king. Instead, I'm just a clown.

That was Alma's third competition entry, in the fourth and final round of the Radio Edu story-writing competition. She called it Vida Robada (Stolen Life). This is the Spanish version:

Nunca me dejaron ser. Aún recuerdo la gélida mirada de aquella criatura y el lenguaje extraño que usaba. También cómo abandonó, indiferente, el cuerpo moribundo de mi hermana. Los dedos duros clavándoseme en el cuello y la patada que me llevó volando a una jaula. Perdí la noción del tiempo, fue un viaje doloroso e interminable, viendo como mi tierra desaparecía tras mí. ¿Cómo describir el miedo, y el frío?

Desde entonces vivo aquí, he perdido la dignidad y la libertad. Observo a mis compañeros de infortunio, que, cabizbajos, dan vueltas en su jaula. Cada día, gente extraña viene a mirarnos, a vernos comer, beber y dormir. Me gritan cosas, se ríen de mí. No tengo espacio, ni motivo, para correr; ya está cazada la comida que me dan. Ni ganas de rugir me quedan. Si apenas recuerdo la sabana. Yo debí ser un rey león, en cambio. No soy más que un payaso.

My childhood friend Phil Saunders travelled all the way from Denia with Roxana, Nicole and Carla. Being soft Southerners, from down near Alicante, the sort of people who kept a woodstove burning in March, they complained about the cold constantly, even though for us it was now uncomfortably hot in the village during the day, and no worse than balmy at night. We joked that Roxana should, as a Peruvian, visit Trujillo and pay obeisance at the birthplace of her country's founding father. Okay, she said. We piled into the cars and Roxana snapped photo after photo of Pizarro (or is it really Cortes?) on his horse. Or rather, she took photos from behind the statue, so they were mainly of the horse's ass. Some weird revenge thing, I suppose.

"Did a vehicle come from somewhere out there, just to land in the Andes?" sings George Duke on the Frank Zappa/Mothers of Invention album One Size Fits All, recorded in 1975. Well, in spite of Erich Von Daniken and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, we can be reasonably sure the answer is no, a vehicle did not come from out there just to land in the Andes, or anywhere else. There are plenty of perfectly rational explanations for Peru's Nazca lines, some of which acknowledge and incorporate a relationship with the Gods/cosmos, albeit one emanating from Earth, and focusing on the entirely understandable need to believe in other worlds/higher powers, rather than entertaining the actual existence of extra-terrestrial or supernatural intelligence. Personally I don't care if aliens visited the earth or not. My favourite take on the whole "do they come in peace?" argument can be found in one of those National Lampoon comic strips from around the time of Close Encounters. A suburban couple are pestered by a succession of door-to-door salesmen, and the husband becomes increasingly irate. Meanwhile a spaceship lands, and a group of crudely delineated biped aliens closely resembling Thomas Newton in The Man Who Fell To Earth, or perhaps Morph in Vision On, emerge with beaming smiles. Let's see if the people on this planet are friendly, they say. One of them knocks on the first door he sees. The husband, now seething with rage, yanks the door open and pounds the unsuspecting spaceman into burgermeat. Bruised and disillusioned, ET slinks back to his ship. How did it go, his shipmates ask, innocently. Level this planet, he replies with a dismissive wave of his arm.

Friendly or not, aliens would carry all kinds of diseases which would instantly wipe us out, or we'd wipe them out, and anyway we have enough problems (economic inequality, global warming, Coldplay) to worry about. Can you imagine Chris Martin writing a song like Inca Roads, a song that uses at least ten different time signatures in fewer minutes, and includes what is for many the finest of Zappa's guitar solos, recorded live in Helsinki.

I love that Von Daniken wrote his silly books and that lots of people read them and got interested in Peru. Certainly it was a mixture of Von Daniken, Frank Zappa, Tintin, and Werner Herzog that led me to Peru, and Macchu Picchu.

I've discussed Zappa. We can also dispense with Von Daniken, whose arguments don't stack up, so let's move on to Tintin. The Tintin storylines rarely stack up either, but they don't pretend to anything other than fiction. Flight 714 came late in the series, in 1968, my favourite year and the storyline is far-fetched, even by Herge's credibility-stretching standards. Changing planes en route to Sydney, Tintin, Captain Haddock and Professor Calculus bump into their old friend Skut, back from The Red Sea Sharks. Skut is now personal pilot for the millionaire Laszlo Carreidas, and Tintin and co are invited to join him on his private jet. This being a Tintin book, they soon find themselves on the wrong side of a plot to kidnap the grumpy tycoon. The plane is duly hijacked by the disloyal crew - the uber-cool, eye-patch sporting Skut excepted - and landed on a volcanic island, where the mastermind behind the plot is revealed as none other than Tintin's old foe (and sometimes friend – Herge never could make up his mind) Rastapopoulus. Captain Haddock's villainous old shipmate Allan, whom we first encounter in Cigars of the Pharoah, also pops up as the evil Greek's henchman, in charge of a motley crew of islanders. Tintin and his friends are bound and held in a World War II bunker, while Carreidas is injected with a truth serum which will compel him to reveal the number of his Swiss bank account. Luckily, the ever dependable deus ex machina Snowy helps Tintin and his friends to escape. Then, in a narrative left-swerve the likes of which you rarely find outside of Psycho, or perhaps From Dusk Till Dawn, Tintin is guided by telepathy to an underground temple inside the island's volcano (did I mention the volcano?) guarded by an astronaut-like statue (shades of Von Daniken). As they go further and further into the underground complex, the group come across a journalist, Mik Kanrokitoff, who works for the magazine Space Week. It is his voice they have been following, transmitted telepathically from a spaceship. Kanrokitiff explains that he is working with the extra-terrestrials, who were once worshipped as gods by the islanders, and that they wish to communicate with the Earth's scientists. At this point the volcano erupts, but Tintin and his party, despite being INSIDE the crater (!) are able to reach safety. Meanwhile Rastapopoulos and his cronies escape in a rubber dinghy. Kanrokitoff hypnotises Tintin et al and they all escape in a flying saucer. Tintin and his companions are then traded for Rastapopoulos, Allen and the treacherous plane crew, who are whisked away to an undisclosed fate in outer space. Tintin, Haddock, Calculus and Skut awaken but cannot remember anything. Only Snowy, who cannot speak, remembers the alien abduction.

Thematically, Flight 714 shares much with the earlier Prisoners of the Sun, in itself a continuation of The Seven Crystal Balls, the first Tintin book I read. In Prisoners of the Sun - apart from anything else, Herge always came up with great titles - Tintin, Snowy, and Haddock travel to Peru to rescue Professor Calculus, who at the end of Seven Crystal Balls has been kidnapped. In Peru they learn that Calculus is to be executed for wearing a bracelet belonging to the mummified Incan king Rascar Capac. After the usual adventures, they find themselves deep within the Andes at the Temple of the Sun, a last outpost of Inca civilisation, where they are brought before the Prince of the Sun and sentenced to death – along with Calculus \- for their sacrilegious intrusion. The prince allows them to choose the hour of their execution, so Tintin times it to coincide with a convenient solar eclipse and the terrified Incas think that Tintin can command the sun. Obviously they weren't familiar with eclipses, despite the whole sun worship thing they had going on. The three friends are duly set free and return home.

Influenced by the adventure stories of his own childhood (Dumas, Stevenson, Rider Haggard) Herge concocted storylines that were outlandish and implausible, but his picture research was impeccable, and the quality of art work unsurpassed to this day. My pre-pubescent brain teemed with images from Herge: evil-looking Inca mummies miraculously brought to life, temples of the sun, caves hidden behind waterfalls, spitting llamas, spaceships. I was nonetheless entirely unprepared for the hallucinatory experience of Herzog's Aguirre Wrath of God, the opening images of which, filmed at Machu Picchu, show a seemingly endless line of pike-bearing conquistadores, chained Inca porters, yet more llamas, pigs and monks snaking round and down the perilous mountain path, into the rainforest below. Among them one eventually notices Klaus Kinski, who looks as if he has been waiting all his life for a part like this, which indeed he had. Aguirre plots to depose Don Pedro de Ursua, who has been charged by Pizarro with finding El Dorado, and – in the most unforgettable line of an unforgettable script and film – aspires "to write history as others write plays."

Much of the credit for the striking effect of Aguirre, above all the opening sequence, must go to the music of Popol Vuh, the so-called Krautrock band, formed in 1970 by keyboardist Florian Fricke, which in the words of Wilson Neate, writing on the website AllMusic, "blends pulsing Moog and spectral voices to achieve something sublime... awe-inspiring, overwhelming (and) unsettling."

Sublime. Awe-inspiring. Overwhelming. Unsettling. That pretty much sums up the film, which prefigures Apocalypse Now in its hallucinatory journey upriver to the heart of madness. A life-size wooden ship appears, perched in the highest branches of a tall tree, one of those WTF moments that only Herzog seems able to conjure. As they drift, starving, on their raft, the last remaining survivors of the mission are picked off by arrows shot by unseen assailants. The raft is overrun by monkeys. Only Aguirre is left, ranting to the monkeys: "I will marry my own daughter, and found the purest dynasty the world has ever seen. Together, we shall rule this entire continent. I am the Wrath of God!"

The mistake Aguirre makes is to travel by water. If you follow the land-locked Inca Road, it will lead you wherever you want to go, whether it is to the secrets of Macchu Picchu and the Nazca Lines, or the hollow ways of Dorset where Geoffrey Household's rogue male hid, or the Canadas Reales along which Extremenan shepherds still drive their sheep in the great transhumancias, or migrations. These movements of the herd were originally a consequence of Spain's two distinct climatic regions, the dry south and centre and the rainy north. As the dry season began, in May, the shepherds would take their animals to summer in the mountains of the north, before returning south for the winter.

Ya se van los pastores

a la Extremadura

Ya se queda la sierra

triste y oscura

The shepherds are leaving

to Extremadura

The mountains are left

sad and sombre

The paths they used - 80,000 miles of them – criss-crossed the country, following the routes of migratory wild animals, and dating back to Neolithic times. Theoretically protected by Spanish law since the 13th century, they have been steadily eroded by the expansion of building projects, roads, and those accursed dams, all products of Spain's post-war socio-economic revolution. Today, the shepherds still march through the streets of Madrid. The traffic comes to a halt on Gran Via, Madrid's version of Oxford Street. A one-time "right of passage" became as well a protest at the incursions of modernity, and now as much a cultural celebration as anything, the Fiesta de la Trashumancia, where music acts as an accompaniment to the shepherds and their flocks.

The transhumancia. The very name made me think of human migration, the movement of Pedro and Orosia, Beni and Anna, and thousands like them, backwards and forwards, between Spain and France, Mesas and Paris. In their case they spent the school year, the winter, in the north, and the scorching summer in the village, fetching water from pumps, cooking on open fires, pissing in the street. Only later, when they had moved back to Spain permanently, in the years immediately before the death of Franco, did they get a bathroom and a gas cooker. Beni attended a boarding school at first, then two years catching the bus from the Mesas to Navalmoral, as Alma would do. Then Madrid, and university, while Anna went to study ceramics in Valencia, moved back to Paris and married her childhood admirer, Jean-Claude, whose parents also came from los Ibores.

Suddenly, in late May, there were no more visitors. Friends came from Madrid, but they didn't count, unlike the Incas, who did count, but had no system of writing. We were into the home strait. I wouldn't be sorry to leave and head back to the cool and damp of London. There was, still, a magical moment in the late evening, around 9pm, when the light was incredible and the heat more or less bearable. Otherwise it was down to the river for a swim, which we couldn't do because the car was playing up. It had developed a new noise which had to be fixed, if only for aesthetic reasons, This rather threw the Almanzor climb into doubt, as I wasn't at all sure the car would make it up to the plataforma on the far side of the Gredos, a three hour drive and steep ascent away. Could I persuade someone else to drive me? The obvious candidate, Oscar, had vanished without trace. Meanwhile, a paella with Fabio and Pil was looming. We kept putting it off until we could put it off no longer. It was the opposite of climbing Almanzor. Climbing Almanzor was something I yearned to do but was doomed not to. Dinner with Fabio was something we dreaded but couldn't avoid. We compromised, and arranged a trip to el Jerte, to pick cherries.

JUNE

I was the designated driver. I never asked, but I assumed that Fabio had lost his licence. Perhaps Pili had as well. The first part of the trip to el Jerte was uneventful enough, bordering on perfect. Fabio was sober, and we began the rounds of visiting each and every one of Pili's many siblings, all of whom were busy sorting and packing the freshly-picked cherries. At the first brother's house, perched a little way above the river which gives the valley its name, we followed a magnificent "snack" of ham, cheese and beer with an orgy of "rejected" cherries which we ate from the "reject" box. These were as good as anything I'd ever eaten in the UK, and led me to wonder what the cherries that actually made the grade could taste like. But it wasn't about the taste so much as the size and the lack of blemish. Pili's brother told us about grafting and cross-fertilising, and I realised that I was actually understanding about ninety per cent of what he was saying, even if I couldn't add much to the conversation.

We went to a riverside restaurant for lunch and things degenerated. The food was pretty bad – the green beans swimming in oil and garlic, the fried fish shrivelled and unappealing. Pili told us about the five-year-old nephew she lost in a landslide which covered his house and I thought of Aberfan, and the 50th anniversary coming up in October. Fabio was getting more and more drunk, and tapping everyone he met for a drink, which included a couple more of Pili's brothers – thin as junkies – who we found outside a bar on the narrow and pleasingly balconied main street. We wandered up through the village to the mum's house, which had half a dozen storeys, and as many more unemployed siblings lounging about, bored and looking like extras from Tierra Sin Pan. Bending ourselves double to fit the rickety wooden stairs, we were given a tour of the upstairs, unchanged in a couple of centuries or more – indeed, it felt as if we'd stepped back into a scene from Cervantes or Goya - then it was up the road (more climbing) to a sister's house on the outskirts of the village. Here we were made to feel less welcome, by the usually exceptional standards of the Spanish, but they had a lot of packing to do in fairness to them, so we stood around and watched cherries being sorted and packed. Fabio had, by this time, given us the slip, the nominal motive being to fetch a cheese he had left in the car which he intended to present to the sister, but it gave him the opportunity, we surmised, to return to the bar so that by the time we found him, several hours later (hours I had spent watching cherries being packed, hours I would never get back) he was roaring drunk and incapable of reason.

On the way back to Mesas Fabio wanted - demanded - to smoke. Beni said she would have to get out of the car in that case, and make her own way back to Mesas, which was a walk of a mere fifty kilometres. Fabio cursed and screamed that he should be able to smoke in his own car, so we struck a deal and said we'd stop for him to have a cigarette.

While Fabio smoked in the car park outside a roadside bar, Pili told us another of her morbid stories. This time it was about a little girl from her village who put her hand inside the mouth of the wooden rocking horse in the village park. The horse had serrated wooden teeth and it "bit" her, so she told her dad. Don't be so silly, he said, but she insisted. Come, she said. I'll show you. Go on, then, he said, laughing. Put your hand in the horse's mouth. And she did, and the horse bit her again, and only then did the father realise with horror that there was a snake hiding in the hollow of the horse's mouth and that his daughter had been bitten twice and it was too late to save her.

Fabio got back in the car. He didn't like my music, so he started looking for something else to put on, drunkenly fumbling in the well between his seat and mine. The cars in front of us kept slowing down and speeding up. At first I couldn't understand why. Then I realised that the lead car was being driven by an old person, very slowly. The other cars would slow down, allow some distance to build up, then accelerate and be forced to slow down again. This process was being repeated over and over again. It was difficult, and dangerous, to overtake on the constantly winding valley road. Meanwhile, Fabio was spilling CDs everywhere. He fumbled in my lap for one. The driver immediately in front of me eventually lost his patience and – sensing an opportunity - overtook the entire line of cars, then slowed to a halt in front of the lead car, as if to say, how do YOU like it? The entire cortege concertinaed to a halt. I slammed on my brakes, nearly running into the back of the car in front. For FUCK'S sake, I screamed at Fabio - or rather at Beni, in English - tell him to behave himself or I will stop the car now and you'll ALL be walking home!

We passed the entrance to Monfrague, one of the carefully managed natural jewels in the Extremenan crown. I realised we hadn't been to the wildlife reserve all year, although it was hardly surprising since I had only been there once in eighteen years, when my dad and step-mother came to visit. It wasn't that far, as the crow, or eagle, or vulture, flew but it was quite a convoluted drive, and I put bird-watching on a par with playing petanque or watching Spanish TV i.e. very low down on my list of priorities. That said, I recalled a very pleasant lunch on the edge of the reserve, and at least one viewing spot where there were probably more vultures than tourists, although at least some of the vultures were running drinks stands.

Turning this joke on its head, Spanish newspaper Hoy noted – with reason – that Monfrague was full of foreigners, or guiris, and that most of them were birds. Black and tawny vultures, imperial eagles and Bonelli's eagles, black storks, hawks, blue elanios: the sheer diversity of species is what makes Monfragüe unique. My favourite spot in the park is the Fuente Frances, so called because a Frenchman, Alain Jonsson, drowned there trying to save an eagle in April 1979. It was siesta time and no-one was about. Jonsson was a freelance cameraman travelling with his colleague, Gérard Porcher Philippe. Walking from the so-called New Bridge to the Cardenal Bridge, the two men saw a bird, probably a kestrel or falcon, fall into the Tajo. Jonsson tied a length of rope around his waist and told Porcher Philippe to hold it from the shore while Jonsson made his way into the water and attempted to rescue the animal. When he realized that the rope wasn't long enough, he told Porcher Phillippe to let go, but he was swept away by the current. Porcher Phillippe rushed back to the car, returned with the spare tire and threw it into the river, but it was too late. Jonsson had gone.

The Civil Guard and locals searched, but to no avail. The search was abandoned. Two months later, with the arrival of summer, the water level fell. A young man, Gelasio González, was helping his father herd their goats on the mountain. He came across the body of Jonsson hooked around a tree, like Drew in Deliverance, the rope still tied around his waist. Today, in the place where the goatherd's son found him, there is a spring, the Fuente Frances, or French Spring.

There had been at least one more guiri death in Monfrague since then, not counting the birds who had died. In late 2011, a forty-something Finnish tourist, Passi Pulkkinen, rented a car in Villareal de San Carlos. When he failed to return, the rental company alerted the police, who subsequently located the car in a parking lot in Monfragüe. Inside, they found a personal computer, a camera, and a photocopy of Pulkkinen's passport. The subsequent search for Pulkkinen involved fifty people, helicopters, boats, dogs and – for all we know – birds. At the same time, enquiries at the Finnish Embassy in Madrid established that Pulkkinen had already "gone missing" in Finland and that the police of that country had searched for him in a forest a few months earlier, before giving up the chase. Pulkkinen's body was eventually discovered by mushroom hunters in a secluded depression among the pine forests of the Collado del Lobo. It was in "an advanced state of decomposition". A few metres away was his backpack and water bottle, and, according to Hoy, unspecified medicines and "diabetes" needles, but there were "no signs of external violence". The body lay on the ground on its back, legs bent. Pulkkinen was wearing blue jeans, sneakers, a hoodie and a raincoat.

According to the newspaper, it is possible that Pulkkinen became disorientated while walking in the national park. Yet, even discounting the presence of medicines and needles, this seems too convenient, too simple an explanation. Pulkkinen had gone missing in Finland. He had made his way to Spain, left what amounted to very heavy-handed clues to his identity in the car and managed to "get lost" in a nature reserve where it is hard even for school children to get lost.

The story of Passi Pulkkinen intrigues me. Perhaps one day, when I have run out of ideas for books, assuming that I still want to write, I will research the back story and hypotheses properly, instead of just on the Internet. I'll visit Monfrague again – for only the second time – and interview the car rental people, the mushroom hunters, the Civil Guard. The Spanish love to be interviewed, unless they are politicians or royalty and you wish to ask them about funds which have mysteriously disappeared, in which case they tend to clam up. I might even go to Finland, where they all speak English, and give the story ("The Man in Monfrague") some local colour with references to Tove Jansson and the Moomins; the guitar solo Frank Zappa recorded in 1974 for Inca Roads; the cinema of Aki Kaurismaki; the artistry of Jari Litmananen, "widely regarded as the greatest Finnish football player of all time" (in a crowded field) and the section in Cuzio Malaparte's Kaputt, where, in the depths of the Finnish wilderness, he finds a frozen lake dotted with the heads of drowned horses. Plus they have an annual air guitar competition in Finland. I feel that Passi Pulkkinen deserves to be remembered, or at least recorded, in a book few will read. Until then, the mystery of how and why he died in Monfrague must remain just that, a mystery.

We were nearing the end of our time in Spain. I was looking forward to feeling cool again, getting our flat back, even voting in the EU referendum and seeing an end to all the unpleasantness of the Brexit campaign. Matters had spiralled out of hand on social media. Normally calm and rational people – mostly Remainers, it seemed to me - were abusing strangers and calling them racists. On the other hand, the undercurrents of xenophobia, while hardly responsible for the murder of Labour MP Jo Cox, who was shot and stabbed by an embittered neo-Nazi, nonetheless provided a poignant and depressing context to her death. Support for the Leave campaign dropped off as a result, and I felt sure we'd all see sense on June 21st. Such apparent cause-and-effect phenomena are always misleading.

Meanwhile, my determination to climb Almanzor slowly dissipated. There was only a week left to go. I had no-one to attempt the climb with, the car was unreliable and the weather was against me. There was still snow on top, and even if it melted suddenly, there was more or less permanent cloud covering the peak. Visibility would be zero.

It is entirely inevitable, in the process of ageing, that we accept the simple fact we AREN'T going to do everything we thought we would do in our lives. Some of those things we no longer want to do. At twenty I was sure I was going to travel on the Trans-Siberian Express, to Beijing, or, more daringly, Vladivostock. Then I read, in The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to Europe or The Trans-Siberian Handbook, about the redoubtable tea ladies who ran the train like a concentration camp, and doubts began to enter my mind. I'm perfectly okay now with the idea of NOT going to Beijing, by train or any other means of conveyance. I'd just like to attempt a figure-of-eight circumnavigation of both the Black and Caspian Seas, taking in Istanbul, Odessa, Tehran and Baku. But I worry this will never happen either. I worry, in fact, that I will never do anything anymore, except read and write, listen to music, watch films and drink wine.

In Fitzcarraldo the eponymous hero, played by Klaus Kinski when Jason Robards fell ill, tries and fails to make his fortune by dragging a boat over a mountain to reach the rubber plants ordinary rubber barons cannot reach. He doesn't really want the money, except – as all maverick entrepreneurs from Branson to Anita Roddick to Bill Gates claim – to "do more things with". In Fitzcarraldo's case, this means building an opera house in Iquitos, the early 20th century Amazonian equivalent of flying a hot air balloon around the world, I suppose. Fitzcarraldo is inspired by the opera house which actually was built in Manaus at the height of the rubber boom. He successfully drags his boat over the mountain, with the help of some suspiciously co-operative Indians, but then they cut the boat loose, in order to fulfil a tribal prophecy, and it drifts downstream into the rapids, on which it is wrecked. So Fitzcarraldo shrugs and "makes do" by bringing an entire orchestra and attendant opera singers to Iquitos on another boat, from which they give an impromptu performance for the locals. Perhaps I could "make do" and walk the less demanding, lower altitude Circo de Gredos instead of climbing Almanzor.

The best thing about the final scene of Fitzcarraldo – the best thing about the entire film, among many good things – is the expression of pure pleasure on Claudia Cardinale's face. I used to think she was miscast, or at least that she seemed out of place, the obligatory Italian actress in a Euro-pudding of a movie, albeit a splendidly deranged, visionary Euro-pudding. I thought she was put there simply to squeeze some money out of Italian backers in an otherwise strictly Teutonic vision of Spanish colonial madness, but I'm glad she didn't go the way of Jason Robards and Mick Jagger, who, if the Devil had won the day, would have played Fitzcarraldo's sidekick. Kinski and Cardinale are great together, they are the film's heart. The tart with a heart – cliched, yes, but in this case also life-affirming and heart-warming.

Perhaps the fictional Fitzcarraldo could take some small comfort from the eventual decline of the South American rubber industry, which was precipitated by the British. They took the rubber tree to Asia and there planted vast and more easily managed rubber farms, while the Amazon swiftly reclaimed the opera house in Manaus. According to Robin Furneaux, "the electric lights went out, the opera house was silent, the jewels which had filled it were gone; vampire bats circled the chandeliers and spiders scurried across the floors."

Myself, I feel a little like the writer Roger Deakin, although not enough like him, because he was a man of action. In Waterland, he assumes the Burt Lancaster role in the film of John Cheever's The Swimmer, and swims his way round the UK. As part of this project, he plans to swim the Corryvreckan, the daunting two-mile strip of open water between the Scottish islands of Jura and Scarba. The Corryvreckan is the third-largest whirlpool in the world, or the sixth-largest, depending who you believe. A popular myth has it classified by the Royal Navy as "un-navigable" but this is not true. It is merely "very violent and dangerous", according to the Admiralty, and "no vessel should attempt this passage without local knowledge." At first Deakin, an accomplished and frequent swimmer, thinks he can make it across the seething channel. But standing on the shoreline, watching the tide batter against the submerged pyramid of basalt, and calculating the distance he'd need to swim, he dismisses the idea as suicidal folly. I'd spent ten months saying I was going to climb Almanzor, waiting for the spring to come, watching the snow stubbornly refuse to melt, hoping against hope that a clear, blue, snowless day would come around before I returned to London. My students had warned me it wouldn't, and you could only "climb" Almanzor – which is to say, walk up it, in trainers – in July and August, precisely the two months I did everything to avoid. Like Deakin, I abandoned my plans, recognising the madness therein.

Part of the 1946 Powell-Pressburger movie I Know Where I'm Going was filmed in Corryvreckan. Understandably, the footage was only a back projection – you wouldn't expect actors to risk their lives in a real-life whirlpool. Instead, they sat in a studio and had buckets of water thrown over them, which is bad enough. A model boat was then used for the wide shots. Powell & Pressburger were masters of foregrounding and exploiting artifice in their films, most spectacularly in A Matter of Life and Death, with its black and white Stairway to Heaven, and the studio-bound Himalayan picture Black Narcissus. And yet, the Archers' Manifesto, as set out by Pressburger in a letter to the actress Wendy Hiller in 1942, states that "no artist believes in escapism. And we secretly believe that no audience does. We have proved, at any rate, that they will pay to see the truth."

George Orwell lived on Jura while writing 1984. He was nearly drowned when a boat trip to Glengarrisdale went wrong, and the party - Orwell, his sister, niece, nephew and three-year-old son Richard - found themselves dragged into the maelstrom of the Corryvreckan. You could say that Orwell DIDN'T know where he was going, or at least didn't know what he was dealing with. The boat's engine was dragged into the depths and the adults had to row to a nearby island, where they awaited rescue. In some reports this is exaggerated to imply that their boat was capsized by the whirlpool, and that Orwell and his three-year-old son clung onto a rock until spotted by some lobstermen. In reality, the boat capsized as they were disembarking onto the island, already in relative safety (albeit without lifejackets) and they were able to light a fire to keep warm, which attracted the attention of the lobstermen.

I haven't read 1984. Like a lot of people, I've simply absorbed the ideas, the buzzwords, by osmosis: Big Brother, Room 101, Newspeak. Everything in 1984 means the opposite of what it appears to mean. The Ministry of Truth is, in reality, the Ministry of Propaganda, of Lies; the Ministry of Peace is a Ministry of War. Orwell's experiences in Spain, witnessing first-hand the instant re-writing of history by the Communists, informed his fiction, and his world view. The British Government took him at his word and renamed the War Office the Ministry of Defence, a process only completed in 1964.

In The Songlines, Bruce Chatwin describes a meeting with the cultural attaché of the British Embassy in Kabul, whose office is filled with copies of Animal Farm, which the British Council, or its forerunner, uses both to teach English and to instruct Afghans on the evils of Marxism. "But pigs?" Chatwin protests. "In an Islamic country?" The attaché shrugs. He says it was the ambassador's idea, not his.

I can say that my Spanish experiences have formed me as much as the Civil War formed Orwell, that they have formed this book, this memoir. You may recall Orwell writing that "one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality." Well, again I've failed. I can only offer my apologies to anyone expecting a self-effacing window on Extremadura.

Back in London, June 24th. Beni woke me with the news. The Leavers had won. We were out of Europe, or would be, one day. I was no longer in Extremadura, no longer in Spain. That part of my life was over, for now. Who knew if and when we would go back again, to live, or what would happen here, in Britain? What about Beni and Alma, neither of whom had British passports or nationality?

Those that voted for Brexit did so for a multitude of reasons. Not all of them were Little Englanders. I remember when we joined the Common Market in 1974 that many on the Left were against it. My family, for one. Now we face an uncertain future, but we have faced an uncertain future since Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979 and started dismantling the idea of fair wages and working conditions, affordable public housing, a healthcare system worthy of the name, a pension that would offer a modicum of dignity in old age. Meaningless metaphors came thick and fast. A landslide blocked the road between Bohonal and Mesas. Had my return already been cut off? Was I no longer welcome? There was another, slightly shorter, steeper track which they quickly converted into a serviceable road, and it's doing fine, a year later. Clearing giant boulders takes time in Spain.

Then the European Championship. England crashed out, to Iceland. I had never seen such a dismal performance by an England team. Wales, on the other hand, were a revelation. After beating Northern Ireland, they went on to play the game of their lives in the quarter-final, against Belgium, who were, improbably, ranked second in the world. The dream had to end some time, and it did, in the semis, against the eventual winners, Portugal. But it was good while it lasted. Like Extremadura.

News arrived from Spain. Alma had won the Radio Edu story-writing competition, beating herself into second and third place, or third and fourth, or second and fourth. We'll never know. The local paper duly ran a story:

Alma Gilbert, alumna del colegio Almanzor,

gana un certamen literario de ámbito regional

Alma Gilbert Manglano, alumna del colegio Almanzor, se ha proclamado ganadora del III Concurso de Relatos Encadenados de RadioEdu 2016, la Plataforma de Radios Escolares de Extremadura, en categoría de Primaria.

Alma ganó tres de las cuatro fases que componen el concurso, además de la fase final, según han informado desde el propio centro. El texto ganador, 'Por un momento', entusiasmó al jurado compuesto por profesorado del instituto Vía Dalmacia.

Alma Gilbert, student at Almanzor school,

wins a regional literary contest

Alma Gilbert Manglano, a student of Almanzor school, was proclaimed winner of the Third Chain Story Competition of Radio Edu (2016) the platform for school radio stations in Extremadura, in the Primary School category.

Alma won three of the four preliminary rounds that make up the competition, as well as the final, according to information provided by the centre itself. The winning text, 'For A Moment', was a hit with the panel, comprised of teachers from the institute Vía Dalmacia.

Hang on a minute, I thought to myself. My ten-year-old daughter is winning story-writing competitions for the radio and appearing in the local newspaper, and they don't even know I exist. I can write stories too, you know. I wrote a children's story (Dai the Llama) for Alma, even if she didn't like it, because it's really for adults.

On top of that, Pedro, my de facto father-in-law, had made the final cut of Spain in a Day. The entire country would see and hear him reciting his poem in his beloved huerto. Literary success had skipped a generation. We were out of Europe. How much worse could it get?

Never mind. We would still have Spain. The Spain we imagined and the Spain we found. Alma was here, Alma existed, evidence of a shared history that could not be easily undone, a history sealed in various royal unions, in La Espanola Inglesa by Cervantes, in the capture of Gibraltar, the Peninsular War, Gerald Brenan and Laurie Lee, Orwell and the Civil War, Costa del Sol package hols, tapas bars, Lineker, Hughes and Venables, Beckham and Bale. There were journeys backwards and forwards, a continuing tension between where we wanted to be, for Alma's sake, in the precarious comfort of post-Brexit London, and the responsibility we felt – the responsibility Beni, above all, felt – for her father. He was well cared for, in the residencia, but he missed his family, his daughter, his grand-daughter, even (I might hazard to say) his son-in-law. He missed stimulation, and intelligent conversation. In the residencia he was surrounded by people, all of them younger than him, in various degrees of vegetative states.

We visited, in February, and our visit lifted his spirits. Then things took a turn for the worse. There were a couple of months of suffering, pain and indignity. He hated it, as everybody does. Beni returned to spend another week with him, but no sooner had she returned to London than the phone call came. Pedro had died, in the early hours of Thursday the 30th of March, the day after Theresa May triggered Article 50, the two-year process by which the UK would leave the European Union.

In the tanatorio (from thanatos, the Greek for death) in Bohonal: people came to pay their respects and offer their condolences. It felt half like a mortuary, half like a goldfish bowl. Pedro was lying in state in a refrigerated, glass-walled ante-room, but many people didn't even go to see him. There was a bar. Some of the mourners found themselves in the wrong room, even though there were only two rooms, two groups of mourners. It didn't seem to matter: they offered their condolences regardless. Some people would come just to see who was dead, as they did every day. And why not? What else was there to do?

En el campo me crié, razón por la que lo quiero

cada árbol, cada cancho, cada cerro,

cada valle, cada objeto es un recuerdo.

Ahí pasé con mi familia años de dicha sin cuento

junto a mis padres y hermanos que ya todos están muertos

pues ya ves tú, campo hermoso, si en ti guardo yo recuerdos.

Cuando pienso en mi familia, y veo que no la tengo,

a veces río su gracia, otras lloro su recuerdo

pero sé que es ley de vida y me resigno por ello

I grew up in the countryside, which is why I love it so

Every tree, every stone, every hill,

Every valley, every object a memory

Here with my family, I spent countless years of happiness

Together with my parents, my brothers and sisters, now all gone

So you can see, beautiful land, how many memories you hold for me

If I think of my family and see that they're gone

At times I laugh at their jokes, at others I cry for their memory

But I know that's life, and I'm resigned to it

We slowly followed the hearse up the hill from Bohonal to Mesas in our beat-up old Renault. I thought again of the ending to Imitation of Life. True, there was no Mahalia Jackson singing in the church, only a fat Latino priest, who didn't know Pedro, and made no mention of him, bar the "insert name" part of the service. But everyone had come to the funeral.

Pedro was no Icarus. He knew his limits, his village, the trees and fields and boulders around it. But he had made a splash, and the other shepherds, goatherds, ploughmen, drunks and deaf mutes heard him, just as Annie's fellow churchgoers, former employers, even the milkman answer her call in Imitation of Life. There were the workers from the residencia; there were his card playing buddies Jose Maria, Lauriano, Eloy and Goyo; there was his eighty-year-old cousin Florián, with whom he shared a room, distraught; and El Mudo, who pounded his breast with his fist and hugged Beni, sobbing.

Campo hermoso, campo abierto

aunque soy un ignorante sé mucho de tus secretos

sé dónde anidan las águilas y los buitres carroñeros

cómo silva el aguilucho , cómo graznan los cuervos

dónde anidan las perdices, cómo crían los conejos

sé cómo arrulla la tortula y cómo cantan el ruiseñor y el jilguero

Beautiful countryside, open countryside

I may be ignorant , but I know something of your secrets

I know where the eagles and the vultures nest

how the eaglet cries and the crows crow

where the partridges nest and the rabbits burrow

I know how the turtledove coos, how the nightingale and goldfinch sing

We walked on foot behind the hearse to the cemetery, where Pedro was laid to rest in a tomb above his wife Orosia. The sun was shining, the wind blew through the single cypress tree. The last person I talked to was Enrique's dad, whose older son had died of cancer, whose wife had returned to Brazil, and whose younger son was mentally ill, possibly schizophrenic. He put an arm around me and told me he had loved Pedro. So let me take everything back that I said about Mesenos.

Conozco todas las fuentes esparcidas en tu suelo

sus manantiales alegres muchos de ellos están secos

porque por lo general llueve poco en los inviernos.

algo sé de agricultura y de ganado doméstico

yo sé cosechar el trigo que en pan convertimos luego

también sé criar la carne que abastece nuestros pueblos

sé cómo plantar un árbol y sé cultivar un huerto

ya ves que sobre tu suelo he hecho trabajos diversos

y todos los hice siempre con amor y con empeño.

I know all the springs scattered over your land

the once-happy waters dried to nothing because it rains so little in winter

I know something of agriculture and farming

How to harvest the wheat that we turned into bread

I know how to produce the meat that provides for our villages

How to plant a tree and cultivate a garden

So you see, I've done all kinds of work on your land

And I've done it with love and determination

In 68½ - Movies, Manson & Me I joked about the incessant search for a father, or father-figure, even though I had a perfectly good father and an uncle who was like a father to me. So I had two fathers already. But still I looked to older men as fathers of different kinds, or mentors. In Pedro I found a true father figure, one who called me hijo (son), and not in a threatening, Cockney gangster way as the aged Michael Caine might patronise a younger, pro-EU voter who dares to question his support for Brexit. Pedro called me hijo because he saw me as a son, and treated me accordingly. Sometimes, he would make the lightest of demands: to prune the olive trees, or pick up a sack of chicken feed from the farm suppliers. But mostly he just looked at me, spoke to me, with love.

Campo hermoso campo abierto

Si sé todas estas cosas evidente es que te quiero

y quiero seguir contigo mientras yo pueda hacerlo

porque te digo en verdad que yo me ahogo en el pueblo.

cuando me falten las fuerzas no haré ningún aspaviento

aceptaré resignado la invalidez de mi cuerpo

Beautiful countryside, open countryside

If I know all these things it's because I love you

And I want to carry on for as long as I can.

I tell you in all honesty I suffocate inside the village

But when I lose my strength I won't make a fuss

I'll accept the worthlessness of my body

As I reach the end of this book, I'm reminded of another closing scene, that of Robert Bresson's Pickpocket, which was such a huge influence on Peter Bogadnovich and The Last Picture Show. Early in the Bresson movie, the pickpocket Michel meets a young woman, Jeanne. But his friend Jacques starts going out with her. Michel doesn't seem that bothered (it must be a French thing). When his mother dies, he goes to the funeral with Jeanne, but a visit from a police inspector scares him into leaving the country. He travels to Rome and then to England, where he plies his trade, blowing his ill-gotten gains on women and drink. He eventually returns to France, to find that Jeanne has had a child by Jacques but is now alone. Michel begins to work (legally) but soon reverts to crime. He is caught at the race track by a plainclothes policeman and sent to prison, where Jeanne visits him and Michel tells her, "Oh, Jeanne, to reach you at last, what a path I had to take..."

Campo hermoso campo abierto

mucha lástima me da de verte como te veo

tus tierras que producían trigo, cebada y centeno

hoy solo encuentras en ellas jaras, tomillo y romero

no hay jóvenes que trabajen

y los viejos no podemos

Tu porvenir es oscuro tu mal no tiene remedio.

Beautiful countryside, open countryside

It saddens me to see you now

In the land that once produced wheat, barley and rye

Today you only find rockrose, thyme and rosemary

There are no young to work, and we oldies can't

Your future is bleak, there's no remedy.

To reach this point, what a path I had to take. I began by writing about Extremadura, and thus about Spain, but I found myself talking, as ever, about books, and films, and music, and me. Yet all along, I find, this book – the book that really wanted to be written – was about my father-in-law, Pedro. He is the great absence in these pages, and his life – though lived simply, and for the large part in a village of a few hundred people – could fill a thousand pages. This is the reason I came to Spain, or that Spain came to me. This is why I came to be in Extremadura. In the meantime, since I returned to London, I have been reading The Shepherd's Life by James Rebanks, a book which resonates deeply and moves me, for what are now, I hope, obvious reasons. It is a book I would have liked to show to Pedro. I could have described it to him, even attempted to translate passages for him. Surely, Pedro would have appreciated and agreed with the two simple sentences that finish the book: This is my life. I want no other.

NOTES:

Josh Karp, _Orson Welles's Last Movie: The Making of The Other Side of the Wind (St Martin's Griffin, 2016)_

 www.speakingofspain.com/speaking-of-spain-blog/orson-welles-and-his-affair-with-spain

 Gary Graver, _Making Movies With Orson Welles_ (Scarecrow, 2011)

 Jon Halliday (ed) Sirk on Sirk (Faber & Faber, 1997)

 Although this closed down in the summer of 2017.

 Phillip Connors, Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout (MacMillan, 2011) p25. Anyone thinking of reading The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac would do better to read this. Connors is, like, way better than Kerouac.

 Poor Luciano didn't have much luck after we left the village. First, he fell and broke his ankle. Then he fell foul of the village drug-dealer, Johnny, who beat him up so badly that Luciano was hospitalised. He might easily have died, since his spleen was ruptured and a broken rib punctured his lung. Johnny went on the run, unsurprisingly.

 Jeremy Treglown, Franco's Crypt: Spanish Culture and Memory since 1936 (Vintage, 2015) p36. See also www.water technology.net/ features/feature-the-worlds-oldest-dams-still-in-use/

 John Lane, Chattooga: Descending into the Myth of Deliverance (University of Georgia, 2005) p20. A poet, discussing a canoeing trip down a beautiful river on which one of my favourite films was made. It's as if I had dreamt this book into existence.

 ibid, p64

www.express.co.uk/life-style/life/718965/Aberfan-landslide-disaster-1966-50th-anniversary-book

 Hugh Thompson, The White Rock (Phoenix, 2002) p257-258. The White Rock is also the name of Thompson's website, which is very good indeed, and covers a lot more than just South America.

 Ken Welsh, Hitch-Hiker's Guide To Europe (Fontana, 1989) p247. The pre-Internet, pre-Rough Guide, 1970s travellers' Bible. Has aged badly.

 Nick Gilbert, 68½: Movies, Manson & Me (Plankton Produktions, 2016) p23. A Pultizer-Prize-winning genre-bender: part autobiography, part Manson biography, but mostly a rant against the film industry and the world in general.

 Luis Bunuel, My Last Breath (Fontana, 1987) p47

 Treglown, p209

 Las 50 mejores bandas de rock españolas, según 'Rolling Stone.

www.elperiodico.com/es/ocio-y-cultura/20121031/50-mejores-bandas-de-rock-espana-2239166

 See www.theguardian.com/money/2016/nov/17/tv-chef-michel-roux-jr-paid-kitchen-staff-below-minimum-wage

 If you are unfamiliar with this sketch, it can be seen on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9VLwV48OHs

 Frederic Strauss (ed) Almodovar on Almodovar (Faber & Faber, 2006)

 See  http://amawalker.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/memorials-pilgrims-who-died-on-camino.html

 Adam Hopkins, Spanish Journeys (Penguin, 1993)

 Evidently, given Johny's violent assault on Luciano in late 2017 (see note 7 above) this isn't such a rare occurrence in Mesas.

 https://vimeo.com/163950192

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCQrf0SHix8

 Andy Roberts, Albion Dreaming: a popular history of LSD in Britain (Marshall Cavendish, 2008)

 ibid

 www.food.gov.uk/business-industry/meat/trichinella-pigs

 Tobias Schneebaum, Keep The River On Your Right (GMP, 1988)

  http://archive.archaeology.org/online/reviews/apocalypto.html

 https://newscenter.nmsu.edu/articles/view/2862

 www.commondreams.org/views06/1217-24.htm

 An unnecessary and flamboyant reference to the Michael Coe book, Breaking The Maya Code, the title of which is self-explanatory, I think.

 www.opendemocracy.net/martin-evans/battle-of-algiers-historical-truth-and-filmic-representation

 Julian Chaves Palacios, Huidos y Maquis: La actividad Guerrillera en la Provnicia de Caceres 1936-1950 (Imprenta KADMOS, 1994) p107

 Juan Goytisolo, Cronologia in Disdencias (Barcelona, Seix Barral, 1977)

  http://rateyourmusic.com/list/titusfox/animal_cruelty_in_films/

 Karina Longworth, Meryl Streep: Anatomy of an Actor (Phaidon Press, 2014)

 Mort Rosenblum, Olives: The Life & Lore of a Noble Fruit (Absolute Press, 2004). There I was, lamenting the lack of books about olives, and along comes Mort Rosenblum to fill a yawning gap in the market.

www.theguardian.com/education/2001/aug/25/research.highereducation

 Download it for FREE from Smashwords, or for 99p from Amazon.

 Morris, Jan, Spain (Faber & Faber 2008) One of my favourite transsexuals discussing, with characteristic immodesty and grandeur, Spain, and by extension, islands.

 You get a pretty good idea if you watch the video, which is available to view at www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5Y4ZIXfu2Y

 www.grutasdelaguila.es/

 Giles Tremlett, Ghosts of Spain (Faber & Faber, 2012)

 I haven't really.

 http://platea.pntic.mec.es/~anilo/museo/museo.htm

 www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jul/06/david-bowie-ziggy-starman

 Imagine my horror when I discovered, moments after printing this book, that the writer Philip Hoare also features an extended discussion of The Man Who Fell To Earth, and this scene in particular, in his new (2017) book, RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR. Indeed, the entire book is one long discussion of "Icarus figures" as the review in the Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/aug/05/risingtidefallingstar-philip-hoare-revuew) makes plain. Still, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, so I won't be suing, Philip.

 George Monbiot, Feral (Penguin 2014)

 ibid p127

 ibid p11

 "Child-beater, murderer, mutilator of unarmed people" (and, most damningly, friend of Paul Gascoigne) Raoul Moat evaded capture for a week before police cornered him on the banks of a river in Northumbria and he shot himself (some think the police shot him: "We will fight to get justice for you," says one Facebook post.) Harry Roberts was an armed robber who famously gunned own three policemen in 1966 and became a sort of folk hero among anarchists, prompting the chant "Harry Roberts, he kills coppers!" (also the title of a novel by my erstwhile actor chum Jake Arnott).

 He has a website: www.charlesfoster.co.uk/

 www.youtube.com/watch?v=8H5Q6-OVRbA

 www.dr-bob.org/babble/20050428/msgs/491230.html

 Carol Clerk, The Saga of Hawkwind (Omnibus, 2006)

 Simon Callow, The Road to Xanadu (Vintage, 1996) p576

 Tomas Alea, Woody Allen, Pedro Almodóvar, Robert Aldrich, Robert Altman, Lindsay Anderson, Hal Ashby, Juan Antonio Bardem, Robert Benton, Ingmar Bergman, Luis Berlanga, Peter Bogdanovich, John Boorman, Robert Bresson, Luis Buñuel, John Cassavetes, Henri Clouzot, Francis Ford Coppola, Joel Coen, Roger Corman, David Cronenberg, Vittorio De Sica, Carl Dreyer, Clint Eastwood, Sergei Eisenstein, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Federico Fellini, John Ford, George Franju, Sam Fuller, Peter Greenaway, Yilmaz Güney, Michael Haneke, Monte Hellman, Werner Herzog, Alfred Hitchcock, Shohei Imamura, Derek Jarman, Neil Jordan, Aki Kaurismäki, Elem Klimov, Alexander Kluge, Stanley Kubrick, Akira Kurosawa, Fritz Lang, David Lean, Ang Lee, Spike Lee, Ken Loach, Joseph Losey, David Lynch, Guy Maddin, Dusan Makavejev, Chris Marker, Russ Meyer, Nagisa Oshima, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Sam Peckinpah, Arthur Penn, Roman Polanski, Gillo Pontecorvo, Michael Powell, Nick Ray, Karel Reisz, Jean Renoir, Glauber Rocha, Nic Roeg, George Romero, Roberto Rossellini, Ken Russell, John Sayles, Paul Schrader, Martin Scorsese, Ousmane Sembène, Don Siegel, Douglas Sirk, Vilgot Sjöman, Jean-Marie Straub, Andrei Tarkovsky, Paul Verhoeven, Dziga Vertov, Jean Vigo, Luchino Visconti, Andrej Wajda, John Waters, Peter Weir, Wim Wenders, Haskell Wexler and Zhang Yimou, if you want to know.

 Suitably repentant, I offer up a parallel list of women directors I admire, although saying that any of them are BETTER film-makers than Orson Welles may be going a tad too far: Alison Anders (Grace of My Heart) Andrea Arnold (Fish Tank, Wuthering Heights) Sofia Coppola (Lost in Translation) Claire Denis (Chocolat, 35 Shots of Rum) Sara Gomez (One Way Or Another) Joanna Hogg (Unrelated, Archipelago) Danille Huillet (co-director with Jean-Marie Straub of The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach, Unreconciled, Othon, Class Relations and From The Clouds to the Resistance, inter alia) Agnes Jaoui (The Taste of Others) Maiwenn (Polisse) Samira Makhmalbaf (The Apple) Haifaa al-Mansour (Wadjda) Elaine May (Mikey and Nicky) Jocelyn Moorhouse (Proof) Mira Nair (Salaam Bombay, Monsoon Wedding) Kelly Reichardt (Meek's Cutoff) Cynthia Scott (The Company of Strangers/Strangers in Good Company) Larissa Shepitko (Farewell) Joan Tewkesbury (Old Boyfriends) and Ann Turner (Celia). No doubt there are more.

I haven't actually SEEN the last four in years, but they pop up on Facebook, and I actually "talk" to Maxine and Adrian Lovell more often than I talk to most of my family.

 Although Rachel died, suddenly, in June 2017, so logically she shouldn't be in the list, unless I am going to include all my dead friends as well.

 For an exhaustive, though incomplete, list, see  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Madonna#List_of_Black_Madonnas

 www.shrineofmary.org/

Hopkins, Spanish Journeys, p151

 Quoted in Henry Kamen, The Disinherited: The Exiles Who Created Spanish Culture (Penguin, 2008) p330-331

 ibid, p341

 The exchange can be seen, with subtitles, on YouTube www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3Kzbo7tNLg

 Kamen p392-393

 www.lonelyplanet.com/spain/trujillo/attractions/pizarro-statue/a/poi-sig/1209168/360768

 Go to www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vx4RGuqoeyg if you want to see the documentary.

 Juan Goytisolo, Campos de Nijar (Grant & Cutler, 1993)

 https://elpais.com/diario/2010/10/30/babelia/1288397571_850215.html

 Check out their products at www.eltiopicho.com/index.php

 www.theguardian.com/film/2000/sep/09/books.guardianreview

www.marketplace.org/2012/08/22/life/40-years-later-deliverance-causes-mixed-feelings-georgia

 Quoted in Hart, Henry, James Dickey: The World as a Lie (Picador, 2000) p249-250

 www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/04/13/remains-of-federico-garca-lorca-hidden-at-the-bottom-of-a-well/

 http://rateyourmusic.com/review?id=24125510

 www.headheritage.co.uk/unsung/review/1230

 See http://fusion.net/story/233279/1961-paris-massacre for a context in which to place the Paris attacks of 2015.

 In the 1960s sense of R&B, which is, I suppose, a sort of white approximation/appropriation of 1950s Rhythm & Blues, with a dash of Soul, as opposed to the late twentieth/early twenty-first century sense of R&B, which is Rubbish and Bollocks, with a dash of Shit.

  http://forward.com/culture/143585/writing-poetically-about-spain-and-desire/

 John Lane, Chattooga: Descending into the Myth of Deliverance (University of Georgia, 2005)

 The track can be found on Zappa & Beefheart's Bongo Fury (Discreet, 1975).

 Quoted in Roger Lewis, What Am I Still Doing Here? (Coronet, 2012) p210

 Of course, I wrote all this before the "illegal" referendum of 2017 and the brutal actions of the Spanish police/state against those Catalans who were trying to vote for, or even against, independence. Give the glamorous hicks independence, I say.

 The famous Barcelona building designed by Antonio Gaudi, and otherwise known as Casa Mila

www.chinadaily.com.cn/hkedition/200810/09/content_7088819.htm

Rick Stein, Rick Stein's Spain: 140 New Recipes Inspired by My Journey Off the Beaten Track (BBC. 2011) p218. Forget George Orwell, Hugh Thomas and Paul Preston, Laurie Lee, Gerald Brenan and Ian Gibson. This is the only book about Spain you need. Oh alright, I'm joking. But it does have recipes, which the others don't.

 The Alhucemas landing (also known as Al Hoceima) took place on the 8th of September 1925 at Alhucemas. It involved both the Spanish Army and Navy, together with a smaller French contingent, and brought an end to the Rif War. It is considered the first aero-naval landing in history.

 Paul Preston, Franco (Fontana, 2011). Alas, I no longer have this book - I've lifted the quote from an old letter of mine, so I can't tell you which page it's on. I could go to the library, of course, or even search online for a pdf, but then again, so could you.

 Read my earlier book 68½: Movies, Manson & Me if you don't believe me.

http://www.allmusic.com/album/aguirre-the-wrath-of-god-mw0000454259

  http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/world_football/3747175.stm

 Curzio Malaparte, Kaputt (New York Review Books Classics, 2005) p55

 Robin Furneaux, The Amazon: The Story of a Great River (Hamish Hamilton, 1969)

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