Spot the reeds

A day out with good friends in the Club du Troisieme Age to la Jonquera in Catalunya, to eat a good meal and do some festive shopping. It had seemed like a good idea, and it was, in so far as the friends and others were good fun, and I came back with a bit more than I could reasonably carry. But.

But - it was a day spent on motorways and shopping malls (see picture) which I normally avoid. Which I'm temperamentally against.
But - La Jonquera is a place I find deeply bizarre and discomfiting, most of it a desert of concrete and tarmac and cut-price outlets crossed by hundreds of coaches and long-distance lorries, haunted by very young-looking prostitutes on most roundabouts and lay-bys, a place where I would not dare go into a hotel for fear I would fall into a brothel, a place of desperate and discounted consumption. A place you go to for cheap fags and booze.

There is a real town somewhere - Teleri and I stopped there once, and found normal, quiet streets and shops, and a museum of the retirada - the retreat of refugees fleeing Franco - which is very moving.

In the shopping centre we were first herded into a cinema for a ten-minute film on the town. There were a lot of shots of rivers and reeds - the town's name comes from junco, Spanish for reed - which were notably absent from our experience, and that of most travellers passing through. The town's future and its ways of doing business were 'evolving' we were told.

I was OK on the way down. Maybe it was the La Jonquera experience sinking in, maybe the memories of driving that way (on minor roads!) with Teleri, but something put me in a real grief-stricken funk on the way back.

As for spotting the reed, here's Jimmy with 'Cold andLonesome'. At least I got someplace to go.