Two Autumn birthdays
My birthday is in the middle of October, a time thought of as Autumn in the Northern hemisphere. There are pictures of me as a little girl in London’s Kew Gardens, dressed in red, knee deep in orange leaves. But over the years, the seasons have changed, and more green leaves cling to the trees as this day comes around. The air is tepid rather than sharp and the vibe is more late summer. I’ve enhanced the seasonal shift by moving to San Sebastián, where the moist maritime climate keeps everything green for longer, only allowing a muted Autumn to sneak through at the end of November. Most of the time, I love the sea, how it wraps itself around everything and prevents the worst of the cold from snapping in. But for my birthday, which happens to be before a national holiday, I crave the feeling of a first frost, the colours I grew up with. For the past two years, my boyfriend has picked up the hint, and planned a quest towards Autumn, within the pandemic restrictions. On neither occasion did we need to leave Spain. While Spain is known to Northern Europeans for its sun, every region has its own microclimate and you’re often just hours away from the season you’re seeking.
Autumn I : October 2020
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Destination: Logroño and Haro in La Rioja, Spain
Overnight stays: 2 in a Haro Bed and Breakfast
Transport: two buses there and two back
Covid protection: a full range of facemasks indoors and out
Eating: mushrooms in olive oil and garlic
Listening: the Blindboy podcast
Wearing: all my clothes at once, because the weatherman lied about how cold it would be
Cast: me, my boyfriend
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I mostly remember the blue bus to Logroño, which made it feel like a school trip. All of us are in masks, because it’s 2020 and there are still no vaccines. It must have been a point when contagion was relatively low, because we were careless enough to wear cloth masks – mine, Breton stripes, his, the bright green of his local football team. Holding hands, one ear of a headphone each as we listen to the Blindboy podcast. There’s a poem read by Juliette Binoche and an interview with Graham Norton. As we drive out of the Basque Country and into La Rioja, autumnal attractions appear: breath-drawing colours, pumpkin patches, and slope-roofed cottages that resemble carved pumpkins themselves for the prosopic arrangement of windows and doors. There are mountains of grazing flock, dense clusters of forest and even a snow warning.
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When we arrive in Haro, there are wines in bars, shops and even in a barn attached to a vineyard. As I’m a follower rather than a leader when it comes to alcohol, the liquids become a claret muddle. I think they taste better for being closer to the source; I just wish that my first sip of crianza three years ago hadn’t been so vivid. The memory of being able to drink good, young wine for just two euros moved me so much, that even the abundance of La Rioja comes second. Still, I like to look at all the bottles and see how some years’ cosechas (harvests) are more valuable than others - to think how fleeting events like storms could make a difference.
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We take a freezing, rain-soaked walk through a vineyard. Though we are completely alone, we keep our face masks on for a different sort of protection. I’ve not been this cold on my birthday since I was a student in Edinburgh, a place I was in a one-sided relationship with. It repaid my love of its Gothic beauty with blistering cold and winds that took the skin off me. Being reminded of those cold birthdays makes me feel young and resilient. There are rainbows suspended between mountain peaks for whole minutes, and at the end of them, a silverish creek and a family restaurant that has the comfort of a roof and proper seating. Proper seats are rarer in Spain than they are in ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears.’ It’s more of a perching culture.
Autumn II: October 2021
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Destination: Jaca, Canfranc, Zaragoza in Spain. Pau in France
Overnight stays: 1 night in a horse ranch near Jaca; 2 nights in a Zaragoza B and B.
Transport: a rented white Fiat Scorpion
Covid protection: 2 vaccines, indoor masks
Listening: the Blindboy podcast, Nova and Nostalgie radio stations
Eating: pink tomatoes and fat tortilla
Drinking: doce lunas wine and apricot juice
Wearing: reversible white sweater
Symbols: the moon, isosceles triangles
Cast: me, my boyfriend
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On the road
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This isn’t a surprise, so much as the delayed fulfillment of a wish. From the time of my boyfriend’s off-hand mention of a 1930s train station in the Pyrenees between France and Spain, I became fixated on going there. I’ve had a thing for train stations ever since my friend Jo took me to see Brief Encounter, a 1940s love story that takes place in one. I’ve been dropping hints since June that I want to go to the Canfranc for my birthday. We’ll combine it with my boyfriend’s obsession – Zaragoza – the Northernmost city conquered by the Moors in 714. According to legend, this lesser-known town has been thought of as the threshold between Northern and Southern Spain.
The surprise on October 9th is not the destination, but the journey, which will take place in a rented Fiat Scorpion. It looks and smells so new and I’m grateful because I’m still weak from this Autumn’s super-cold. I thank my boyfriend profusely, promising him impossible things; that we won’t have an accident or get scratches, that he won’t lose his deposit. Being in the car is a novelty for me, and I lose the first hour fiddling with the radio dial and checking out the roadie types at the petrol station, who are beringed up to their eyebrows, with leather jackets and a sleeve of tattoos. You don't see people like this in preppy San Sebastián. One of the great things about moving from England to Spain has been the permission to uncensor my curiosity. Whereas in Britain, casting more than a roving glance is considered rude, in Spain it’s almost expected that you’ll look again and long enough to take in the details of something that caught your eye the first time.
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I’m ecstatic, high on endorphins and flu medicine as we drive eastwards through Navarra to the not yet seen Aragón. Blue wildflowers lead the way like roadside stars and the fast-approaching Pyrenees make me think of toblerones. I’ve never seen anything so triangular in nature. The sky is a mirror, without a speck of cloud or dust. It makes me think that even on the clearest days, we’ve been labouring under humidity in San Sebastián.
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We stay in a B and B called Charlé that adjoins a riding school. It is near a town called Jaca on the brown, Southern side of the Pyrenees. In the evening, after washing in a mint green bathroom that reminds me of my grandmother’s, we decide we will walk to Jaca via a strip of the Camino de Santiago. The camino has paths all over Northern Spain. Our own city is on the Camino del Norte, but it’s a different route that has caught up with us here. We set out in a lush, lavender twilight, but darkness closes in suddenly, a skinny new moon and phone torch our only light. The camino is meant to be closed at night, but it’s not clear how anyone would bar access. Wet cold rises up through the ground and I will it to not make mine worse as I detour over a bridge so steep it resembles an upside-down U. When we finally reach Jaca, we drink a wine that I actually remember – it’s called Doce Lunas (twelve moons) - a rare red that I hope to re-encounter.
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We’re on the road again, the next day. It turns out that our Mecca, Canfranc is two towns. My boyfriend nicknames the first of the two Catfranc, for its vast feline colony. There are rows and rows of sweet, pleading eyes, hungry triangular mouths; no bit of bread will splinter into enough crumbs to feed them. Canfranc II, closer to the French border is like a ski town, with so much wood and everyone sitting in rows, watching mountains which have not yet produced snow. It’s a bit of a misadventure, as the train station is under repair and you can only see a bit of the ceiling through a hole in the building works. It is a wooden ceiling like my other grandmother’s. I wonder, is the world a giant grandmother’s cottage? Am I destined to glimpse rooms in all my late relatives’ homes on this trip? I surrender, join the roadside mountain-watchers for a breakfast of tomato toast.
To Pau and back
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My boyfriend suggests a detour, towards the French town of Pau which is across the border. On the French side, the trees resemble my favourite summer lolly, a Twister, for their interspersions of green and red leaves. Here, on the green North side of the Pyrenees, the clouds re-find us, they whisper in French. Susurrer, it’s a word we hear on either the Nova or Nostalgie radio stations, because the trip is long, and we finished listening to Blindboy an hour ago. Fittingly, Nova has new music, some of it from French-speaking parts of Africa, while Nostalgie plays old songs and makes me nostalgic for childhood holidays in France. Pau, when we approach it, is a white and green spa town and looks like it has entered its ninety-ninth year of sleep, the clouds falling so low that they cover the roofs. But beyond its endless carpark, the town has a smattering of life. There is a castle, fountains, the chatter of tourists. My boyfriend remarks that though he’d barely heard of Pau (it’s one of the lesser-known French cities) it’s styled up to be unforgettable. In the centre at least, there’s pride in every paving stone. We do the cliché thing of Spanish tourists and go to a creperie. In my notebook, I write about the window frames above us as though I want to remember them forever. They have a white scalloped edge, but the scalloping is sloppy and reminds me more of a cartoon ghost's outline. I order, for the first time in ages, an apricot juice. It comes in a bottle, but it’s like a sip of velvet. It might be the nicest thing I’ve tasted all year.
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On the way back, we spot a row of factories. They are 1920s buildings, sleek and moon-coloured. A 1925 electric factory called Miegebat even has a crescent moon logo. This respect for aesthetics would make you hope that the workers were treated with dignity, like full human beings.
We’re back to the brown South-facing Pyrenees, to the idea of Spain. We make two stops, one to sprint off carsickness in a bowl-shaped green valley and the other to a fairground town where we order churros and have a video call with my boyfriend’s family. It’s already dark and cold when we get back on the road to Zaragoza. I look out for the moon – it has grown and keeps changing places. The journey is long, long enough to grow bored of all talk and music. But the approach to Zaragoza is worth it: a cathedral of mesmerising symmetry; its spires, almost too close to one another, appear in butterfly-wing tension.
Zaragoza: a geometry lesson
The B and B in Zaragoza has a chlorine smell and a colour like the bottom of a swimming pool. It makes me conscious that we’re in a pandemic and I spend a few sleepless hours monitoring our neighbour's cough. But the next day is my birthday and we have cake for breakfast in a café opposite the cathedral. Everywhere, there are the triangles of the Virgin of Pilar, the city’s patroness. This mother and child container is the same isosceles as the mountains. The festival on October 12th marks the occasion when the Virgin miraculously appeared in Spain, at the same time as she was living in Jerusalem. In order to celebrate this feat of bilocation, which happened centuries before Meta, girls become triangular, donning their frothiest petticoats, as do the cakes in bakery windows. We go to the only places open, bars called Damascus and Levant where it’s midnight inside and there’s a strong smell of tobacco and lemon disinfectant. Here, we’re served another type of triangle, a piece of tortilla de patata so dense you can balance a coffee cup on it. This is different from the North, where such girth and dryness would be a sin.
Picasso, perspective
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Before leaving, we sneak in an exhibition of Picasso drawings from the Vollard suite. His use of line is hairy; he’ll not make one mark if he can make seven. I’m reminded of my friend Juliette, who began each composition embellishing a twinish line, leaving us in suspense about the form her drawing would take. Picasso is like the moon, presenting multiple views of the same face and always managing to be surprising. He says, forget what you know; what you think you have seen. On the walls are descriptions of all the disgusting things he did with girls young enough to be his granddaughters. It makes me think of the warnings on cigarette packets.
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Picasso’s message of seeing with new eyes, seems appropriate for a birthday and it accompanies me on the final twist of the journey, one I would not have guessed in a thousand years. Sitting in the passenger seat, the roads spool out before me with all their possibilities and are eliminated one by one. We arrive without me having guessed our destination: Gorbeia Natural Park in the Basque Country's Álava province.
We tramp alongside a creek, and find a new amphibian creature in the water. My picture of it got lost and to this day, Google Images has not supplied its likeness. It is a threshold creature, because on the other side of the water I stumble on a cluster of trees that have obsessed me four Autumns at least. They are beeches with short trunks and long candelabra style branches - a genetic mutation that resulted from mining in the area. I saw these trees in a photograph and searched for them in other parts of the Basque Country, but to no avail. And now they're here - a whole plot. My boyfriend tries to take credit for this, but of course, he could have not known about this obscure patch of trees. He does, however, have a magnetic field of good luck and serendipity, one that touches me by proxy. All around us are purple crocuses and blue star flowers. It feels like spring; Autumn is my spring. By the end of our journey, the moon has ripened to half.
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