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Blogs by Steve Kerr
June in Halifax and Andalucia 6/17/2016 11:27:26 AM
The rain spitters down onto the gray stone slabs on the dark
streets.It has been an unusually dreary ,dull ,rainy week for
June .Today it seemed to be appropriate weather for the type
of week it had been .Orlando ,Florida then the assassination
of Jo Fox on a Yorkshire street .Events that have shaken the
country .It has also been a most trying and difficult week
at work .
The deep green shades of the countryside that just manages
to poke its head out of the dry stoned dykes that line the
roads from Halifax to Elland ,contrasted sharply with the
dark ,at times almost eventidal skies of this June .
When I was a very young man and spent much time in the
provence of Andalucia The Fiesta De San Juan celebrated
with much gusto in the small town of Zalamea in the
province of Huelva on June 24th ,Midsummers Eve.It was in
the latter half of the 1970s that I tasted my first glass
of Aquardiente ,a variation of ouzo ,which made me
extremely drunk.There was of course much flamenco and
sevillanas which I used to know how to dance very well.Time
alas has led to my inability to remember the steps .My
friends and I used to travel to the Flamenco disco at
Vallverde del Campo.
It was in a Spain of the transition :Franco had not been
dead long and his sceptre still haunted the new
"democracy".It was ill advised to criticize or malign
Franco in any way .There was still a lot of poverty to be
found in rural Spain and it was a far cry from the liberal
European Union Spain we know of today.
Zalamea had changed very little since the civil war which
still breathed a simmering resentment and its boiling
vengence bubbled angrily beneath the surface of transition
Spain.The towns narrow streets and whitewashed houses whose
balconies gave of a glow of reds and pinks from geraniums
and bourgainvilla a.The shops ,often indistinguishable from
houses, hid incognito behind shutters in their shy shade
as the bells of the parish church which,I had on occasion
rung and which had once been a mosque rang out every time
a death occurred in town .
That sleepy town where I used to eat tortilla and chips for
lunch with a glass of beer ,lurks still in my memories of
youth .I have not visited it since 1983 but it is still
there .Perhaps some things are best left in the past for it
is there that pleasant memories are kept intact.
