Barcelona Diary
Michael Heath Have you ever had steak tartare with ice cream on it? Well, I have! I had it in Barcelona just a few weeks ago, and very nice it was too, so eat your heart out, AA. Gill.
I flew to Barcelona racked with guilt about the flight, knowing that I was bringing the world to a slow, overheated end but also knowing that I had to get away from Christmas, or the Festival of St Harvey of Nicks as it's become; a celebration of credit cards with all the charm of a department-store changingroom. Every year you shove half of Oxford Street on to your loved ones and receive half of Bond Street shoved back, and as I am phobic about receiving gifts, I tend to sweat a lot and panic — and want out.
So, Barcelona is the answer, said my wife, and as the children don't care where they are in the world as long as they are gummed to their Gameboys (isn't that sexist?), that's where we go.
The newspapers had been running reports of cannibalism at Heathrow owing to delays caused by fog, so it was with some amazement that we waltzed through without fuss or body-search. I suppose that it being Boxing Day everybody was off watching a pantomime Then, of course, it turned out that the fog was more hype than horror — three feet off the tarmac and we were in blazing sunshine, soaring away, leaving you all behind in shopping Hell.
La Boqueria just off Las Ramblas is the most amazing food market, full of tapas bars, nougat, and cheery old coves downing large whiskies and espressos at 7.30 a.m. (It's OK — I've got their names and have reported them to our health police.) If you wish your children to become vegetarians, show them the flayed lambs hanging in the butchers or, if you want a chance of educating them halfway decently in England, you might like to buy into the biggest lottery in the world and have a crack at the £2 billion prize.
Barcelona is the greatest town in the world and it also has the most aweinspiring park, the Parc de la Ciutadella, with a fountain that must have been designed by Cecil. B. DeMille with suggestions by Firbank. See it and jump about with glee! And then there's the architecture of Antoni Gaudi: his wonderful buildings and decorations are a suitable antidote to the thought of dour old Gordon Brown and his incipient regime. You must see Casa Ballo, a block of flats he designed in 1906 and, of course, Sagrada Familia, which is still being built and is also his gravestone (some architect! some gravestone!). Spanish architects must put anti-depressant on their tapas, as their new constructions all seem to have been designed from extraordinary, bizarre doodles done on the back of a bullfighting programme. I guess they don't have to submit their drawings to Ken Livingstone for approval. And only two small bombs went off while we were in Spain, so it was almost home from home.
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