Lake Types (Laguneros)

The lakes, because of their beauty, their extent, and the fact that they are a hundred and fifty miles from the sea, attract a lot of people who don’t have the time or the money to go to the beach. Most of them are there for a swim and a rest, and why not. They mostly use the campsites, or the cheap hostels created for the purpose.

The water is much better for looking at than for swimming in. The good swimming areas are few and small. At busy times, summer weekends, and most of August, they are horribly, insufferably full. Since I don’t usually go to swim, except in September when it’s all much quieter, it doesn’t bother me, and on the other hand it gives me the chance to study types, which is always interesting.

There are the young. Some are couples, vaguely hippy/Bohemian types, who don’t have any money because hippy types don’t, for some reason. They have knotted hair and tattoos, are always painfully thin, and usually have a dog that eats better than they do. Such couples are usually pleasant, open and interested in everything they see. They are the ones who look for Don Quijote’s cave, and find hidden places among the reeds on the lesser-known lakes where they can put a towel down and enter the water easily. They are to be found at the campsites, along with the Northern European families who’ve crossed France with a little camper van and whose children are determined to look as though they enjoy this sort of thing. They are also cheerful and lively, and don’t have an ounce of spare fat either, but what is good to see in 20-year-olds looks a bit creepy in middle-aged Danes.

The other type of young people are groups of students, usually mixed, with a bit of everything, friends who are doing what they can on their budget. There is often a fat girl who is delighted to be there, and a thin girl who isn’t happy and is going to make sure her boyfriend knows it. But people come here to have fun, and the groups like that are especially good at finding places away from the crowds. They tend to have a car so they drive around until they find somewhere they can jump in the water, spread out a bit, pretend to fish, and encourage each other to hire a piece of plastic in the shape of a racing car or a giant swan with which to pedal around the lake and generally have a good time. They don’t have children to think about, are tireless and find everything a big laugh. Ahh, youth. I used to have one.

There are gypsies, too. You don’t think of gypsies as going on holiday, and it’s true they don’t seem to go far, but those that live near the coast, or in this case the lakes, sometimes take the children there. Gypsies eat very badly. You can see it in their skin and their eyes, and they are always fat and flabby. When they swim the women sometimes take the opportunity to wash the clothes. I’ve seen it at the beach, too. Otherwise they’re just more people relaxing.

There are older families who are there for the same reason- they have no money- but they are used to having no money and to making do with a cheap hostel at the lakes, and to having to explain to their children yet again why they aren’t going to Estepona like their friends. It is a subgroup of these who eke out their holiday money by poaching and stealing from the surrounding land, or by selling drugs to the others. You can usually tell this type easily, because they don’t look as though they’re having fun.

You have the ones who park their car near the water and turn the radio up full blast, providing entertainment to all those around them whether they want it or not. There are those who set up a table and a sunshade anywhere they can and spend the day sitting under it, come what may. Nearly everyone brings their own sandwiches, so the bars only sell a few cokes. These are bad times for dealing in luxuries, and anything extra is a luxury to many people now.

Then there are the Rumanians. I’ve written about them before. They love water, and they especially love fishing. The quieter parts of the lakes are full of groups of Rumanians, fishing and picnicking.

Lost Dreams

There is, atop a hill overlooking the largest of all the lakes, the unfinished shell of a building that has spent decades falling apart, since the owners’ dream of having the best hotel on the lakes ran into reality some time in the 60’s. You can see it from miles around- the spot is very well chosen- but I had never been up to see it. This morning I decided to find a path, there had to be one, and if it was overgrown it would be easy to hack through, as the undergrowth is fairly sparse there.

It took a few miles, a very interesting and rather steep few miles, of wandering over the hills behind the village before I found a way to get to it, but I got there in the end. It is well-designed, all the rooms have balconies that look out over the water into the distant hills, and there is a large terrace and walked on which it was doubtless imagined that guests would sit in the evening to eat and drink late into the night, in the open air and with the beauty of the landscape below them.

Well-conceived, but it never opened. In fact it is no more than a shell, and now that there are many cheap hotels nearby and building in the park area- it falls within it- has long been forbidden, it will probably stand in proud and ever greater ruin until it’s declared unsafe and destroyed.

The original owners are probably dead. They moved on to other dreams, some of which worked out, I believe, and left us a monument to the best-laid plans.

We are Extraordinary

We are extraordinary creatures. Formed from chemicals that can only be created by the unimaginable pressures and temperatures at the heart of dying stars, endowed with the power to detect our world in various ways that have been developing for hundreds of millions of years. The perceptive powers of our senses are limited compared with large numbers of animals, and we do not have at all some senses that other animals have, and yet these powers, though not the greatest among life forms, are extraordinary enough. That a bunch of chemicals can combine, reproduce, be aware of themselves and process information about the world around them is in fact so remarkable that we cannot even begin to understand it. Science accepts that some things just are.

Yet we can describe how the world works from what we can perceive. We can conceive means to make things easier to understand, we can imagine models that allows us to perceive things with the mind that are beyond the perception of our bodily senses, we can probe the invisibly small and interpret the unimaginably distant, and we can grasp how this affects us, and our place within it.

When I say we, I mean a small number in the most extreme cases, and a larger number who have a more general understanding. I once clung by my fingertips to the coattails of this last group, but it doesn't matter one way or the other. The fact that I share a species with such people is quite something.

We are extraordinary. Why do so many of us choose to be not even ordinary?

To Whom does the World Belong...

The world does not belong to the people who moan all the time, because it has no need of them. It doesn't belong to those who think they are important, because it doesn't share their opinion. It doesn't belong to the lazy and unwilling because they contribute nothing to it. It doesn't belong to the wilfully ignorant, because they will never understand is. It doesn't belong to the cowardly, because it will destroy them.

Does that mean the world belongs to me? I sometimes feel it does, or at least, that it could.

Notes from the Road- Santoña and the Marismas

Laredo is a seaside town that consists almost entirely of a spit extending almost all the way across the estuary to Santoña. On one side is a very serviceable beach, much of the rest is grass-covered sand, and wherever possible there are houses for tourists. It has, as far as I know, no history, and the population trebles in the summer. In the winter those that are left just mooch about waiting for the sun to come out. Not somewhere you’d want to live.

It is, on the other hand, a very good place to start walking from (to leave, if you like). As you walk west you come immediately to the marismas, the expanse of the estuary, with shallow water, and highly fertile mud just below or just above the surface. If that doesn’t sound especially inviting (and it does smell a bit) the reason I like it is that it attracts a lot of birds.

Most people associate the marisma with shellfish, and there are indeed some very good mussels and clams produced there, as well as sardines, for which the bay is famous, but for the eye and the spirit the interest is provided by the birds.

We walked along and beside the mudflats for several miles, through the port of Colindres* and then through a eucalyptus forest where we got caught in a rainstorm. The road is wet at times. It doesn’t matter; you cover yourself and the rucksack as best you can and later you dry out again.

Then you join the road and walk across a series of bridges that cross the flats. The road is mostly bridge from then on, and you have a clear view of the whole estuary and the sea beyond. The greens and blues and greys rise and fall across the water and the nearby hills and the birds swim and fly lazily across your path. The pictures don’t really do it justice and I think the words don’t either.

It's Just water

I am reminded once again that the latest object of the crazed, obsessive hatred of the ‘Person who knows that anyone who does anything he doesn’t enjoy or understand, however trivial, is evil and must be denounced with great frothing and drumbeats’ is a bottle of water.

I don’t know who Andrew Martin is, but apparently he has a book to sell, so we mustn’t expect too much. Even so, you would have thought that, having been offered a column in the Independent to attach to the advert for his novel, he would take the opportunity to find something intelligent or interesting to say. He sees things differently.

He starts by belittling someone who thoughtfully put a bottle of water beside his place when he was speaking at an event. Maybe he hasn't spoken in public much but there has always been water available to speakers, because they often like to moisten their mouths as they speak. (Personally I prefer whisky, but they you are.)

He goes on to insult entire classes of people who he has never met, whose motives he makes no attempt to understand, whose 'offence' should eb beneath the notice of any intelligent person, and whose behaviour he has, in any case, invented himself for the occasion.

Water is essential to the human body. How much is a matter probably left to the judgement of the individual body, which has ways of making it very clear when it needs more (or less). It is probably better to err on the side of overhydration than dehydration, since the body suffers far fewer ill effects that way. They aren’t so great anyway, the body is good at recovering from most imbalances.

Prolonged exertion in hot weather can cause considerable loss of fluid, which will need to be made up, at least in part. Dehydration can lead to headaches, nerve inflammation, muscle weakness and pain, aging of tissue and damage to organs. Of course, few people need to be told when they should drink water. If you don’t feel thirsty you probably aren’t.

On the other hand, a lot of people have acquired the habit of carrying a bottle of water around with them, and sipping regularly from it. In so doing they have gained the opprobrium of the sort of people who cannot allow anything, anything at all, to escape their criticism and sneering condescension.

Why these critics are prepared to show their pettiness and meanness of spirit in this way I couldn’t say, but they clearly are. And they can refine it further, too. They can criticise the use of bottled water as against tap water, ‘ethical’ versus ‘unethical’ brands, bottle size, mineralization levels, the apparent physical condition of the bottle carrier.

People drink water. They drink when they feel the need or the desire to drink. Sometimes they act for no particular reason. Sometimes they are influenced by the words or actions of others. It really isn’t a big deal. It’s just water.

hrrummph>

On the Bathing of Mules

There is a place on the lakes, at the end of the lake known as the Tomilla (because of the thyme that grows on the hills there, I imagine- I haven’t noticed more there than in other places but someone must have done), there is a sort of swimming pool known as the Baño de las Mulas (the bath of the mules). It’s about 30 feet on a side, though one side is just the rest of the lake. The others are a natural shallow bank, easy to get into the water from, a low concrete wall, and a dam. The dam was built to control the flow of water into a channel that once powered a small hydroelectric plant. There were once a number of them along the string of lakes, but they are all long abandoned, as the local demand for electricity became much too great for their capacity. They are interesting relics of an age that thought we had come as far as we could go.

This dam happens, then, to create a kind of pool, about three feet deep everywhere, which was presumably, at one time, used for washing mules made dirty by toiling on the dry earth in the hot sun. It’s a nostalgically bucolic image, though whether anyone actually took mules there to swim I couldn’t say.

Nowadays people swim there. There are a couple of good bars on the water’s edge, it’s almost impossible for children to drown, and there’s an area for parking your hippy van, setting up your picnic table and sunshade, turning the radio up loud, and trying to find a free spot of water to splash about in. On summer days, especially at weekends, you can’t move there. I go past it often on my wanderings, and contemplate, slightly bemused, the human ability to have fun because that’s we came for, whatever the circumstances.

Out of season, but when it’s still warm, it’s a good place to cool off and to watch the pike that swim lazily out of the rushes upstream to do a lap or two of the pool. For the moment, I shall only see it in passing.