Author: Ivor Starkey

If the cook knows her job properly, she will see that the meat is boiled till it has no taste left and that the fat…is rancid. A Spaniard feels when he eats this dish that he has vindicated his toughness of fibre. He has not degenerated from the breed of men who conquered a continent with a handful of adventurers, wore hair shirts day and night until they stuck to their flesh, and braved the mosquitos of the Pilcomayo and the Amazon

— Gerald Brenan, South from Granada

August Sun beats down over Spain, the only true melting pot of Europe. The names of its conquerors shimmer in its heat and roll across the Meseta towards the Cantabrian mountains. Phoenician. Roman. Goth. Moor. The peninsula lies, tanned and beautiful, waiting.  

Walking alongside ruined castles, stone walls, and quiet churches comes a new invader. Two gangly Anglo-Saxon bodies, one male, one female, struggled beneath two brightly coloured backpacks. They cooked pink under the Sun, and they cooked inside their boots. These descendants of Drake, Raleigh, and Hawkins struggle up the lane, wiping sweat out their eyes. 

These blonde beasts are in the flower of their lives, at that heightened point when we are most vigorous, most insufferable. The female – Honey – was tall, freckled, and beautiful, somehow managing to maintain her sexual spell even whilst sweaty, sunburnt, and tired. Her male companion, James, held masculine pretensions. He grew out a moustache and mullet, went to the gym regularly, and made fun of his professors in the pub with his friends — although he never voiced these uncomfortable opinions in his gynocratic seminars. 

They had met in their first year of university, when he’d gone to her flat for a party. And after years of the most impassioned waiting imaginable, Honey had eventually been broken down, finally agreeing to go out with him. They got on well enough, though she disapproved of his friends and their little public house samizdat. 

That spring they’d both graduated and had decided to take their hallowed qualifications and inflict them on the rest of the continent. A 21^st century Grand Tour, they hoped to expand their horizons, cast off the shackles of the anachronistic England and become citoyens du monde. 

 As soon as the graduation gowns had been taken off they had set off for Europe with the self-righteousness and intellectual frigidity of Mormon missionaries. Sun, spice, and the Mediterranean had called to them across the Channel, those lost lands of the EU, the Union reaching to its long-gone Lloegyr. 

Honey and James had gone to Germany first. Germany, the heart of the guilty continent, the Kaiser’s dignified but decrepit widow. Our young Brits had loved it, especially the capital. Berlin had felt safe and hedonistic, a little Epicurean Garden to themselves, fenced off from the dark puritans to the East. And yet despite their nose clutching, no matter how much they distracted themselves, they couldn’t quite get rid of that waft of beer-hall populism floating on the winds. But no matter. 

Next on their youthful odyssey, France. Paris hadn’t quite been what they’d expected – there was little of the golden cosmopolitanism that had been so hoped for. The sacred sites of modern democracy had felt worn and desacralized, revolutionary vigour replaced with a tired and robotic Republicanism past its prime. 

Spain was the last country on their voyage. They had seen it in their fever dreams, the Peninsula laid out before them like the battered Shield of Achilles, brown Meseta and bronze mountains. Visions of warrior bulls and blazing wine had plagued their nights. These images of the land where even atheists believe in the True God had nearly put off the pair from travelling southwards. But after some self-reflection, they diagnosed these nights terrors as mere manifestations of their own prejudices. After all, were they not global citizens, belonging to all lands and none?

After arriving in Madrid, the couple had shaken off their dreams by taking advantage of the new Spain. Gone were the days of Franco and Sunday mass, and in were mass population exchange, reggaeton, Almodóvar. The young couple spent the long summer days smoking in cafés and visiting the Prado and Retiro. To find some vestiges of La Movida Madrileña, the nights were — true to form — passed fighting off uncles and tall genderqueer hookers in second-rate clubs. James had nearly thrown up in front of Velazquez’s Las Meninas, his stomach churning to and fro, turning on its bilious waves the countless vodka limóns he had consumed that morning.

It was in this tired and bruised Bacchic state that an idea had come to him, carefully placed into his soul by the perennial gods of Europe. It was something different, new, radical. Such an idea seemed to hover in front of his vision, shimmering as if his eyes were filled with sweat, heat, and sunscreen.  

Why don’t they leave Madrid, head out into the sticks, see that real Spain that appealed to men of great calibre? A walking trip was what he needed. Taking out a map of Spain — virtual, of course— he scrolled and saw on the blue screen the mountains to the North, the Picos, the heights of Europe. 

Taking his findings to Honey, James told of her of the land he had seen and the desire, the simple but overpowering urge to be there. 

 Honey, her blood running thin with weeks of copious drinking, numbly agreed.  

Now here they were, far from Madrid and out in the sierra, surrounded by the true, stark, harsh Spain he’d hoped for.  All around them is Spain laid out in its bronze-skinned glory, mountains and deep valleys, the aftermath of some frenzied brawl amongst the gods. The path is of small stones and baked mud that breaks underfoot. It winds its way along the valley, rising and falling like a glider in hot wind. 

“How much further?” Honey asks. 

“Not much more. The pueblo is just over this rise.” 

Our couple begin their sweat soaked ascent, their packs weighing down on their shoulders. 

“What we going to do when we get there?” Honey somehow still manages to look gorgeous even whilst slithering under a rucksack twice her size. Her red cheeks make pretty her freckles.  

 “Find a nice bar. Have a drink. Enjoy the view.” James was starting to feel a little flush of annoyance each time she spoke. They walked uphill in silence for a few minutes. Despite the fact it was just the two of them she seemed to dragging behind her the weight of opinion, of people, of nauseating society. 

“I’m loving these mountains” she said, and they both stopped as she removed her phone from her pocket and took several photos of the valley. She passed the phone to him, seeking his approval. The mountains looked much less impressive, he thought, and you couldn’t quite make out the deep dips and ridges that appeared to have been made by divine hands. The whole effect was somewhat cartoonish, slightly nauseating. 

“Lovely stuff. Definitely post that on your story.” And inside his tall and fragile English frame, the freedom loving, anti-modern part of him writhed and squirmed. 

After she had posted the photos and sent them off into the ether, they continued their walking. Honey kept checking her phone as she went, remarking on who had liked her story. All platitudes. 

Finally at the top of the rise, they looked down at the town below, all yellow stone walls and orange tiled roofs. The lane wound downhill before flowing into an empty, stone plaza in the centre of the hamlet. Without saying a word, only taking a few moments to salivate over the drink to come, they set off.  The only people on the streets were a few blue-overalled farmers, laughing and smoking in a huddle by the water fuente. An electronic sign told them the temperature — over forty degrees. 

There was a bar in the plaza with a green and white awning. A shadowy group of patrons sat underneath. Honey and James went inside, then outside, then inside again, arguing all the time whether to sit indoors or outdoors. No one paid them the slightest bit of attention. James went to find them a seat outside. She went to find them a drink. 

The bartender, whose bread-and-wine belly hung far over his tricolour belt, hadn’t taken kindly to Honey’s gender-neutral Spanish: despite the gnashing of a few academics in the Anglo-Saxon world, his language was at home in these mountains, dwelling still in its original valleys. In fact, he’d made quite a point of it. Who were these sunburnt foreigners, and what had they done with his language?  James had been sat outside, watching the stones of the plaza cook in the Sun, and had missed the confrontation. The first he knew, Honey came storming outside, redder in the face than ever before, freckles angrily gleaming. A trail of beer followed behind her. As she placed the glasses on the table she launched into a tirade of insults, bringing all the anger of the frustrated moralist to bear.  

“What’s happened? Did somebody say something?” 

She closed her eyes and pursed her lips. 

“Nothing. It’s just men.” James looked at her, started to form a retort, and then fell back into silence. They sat, surrounded in this quiet for five minutes, then ten, looking at the plaza and sipping their drinks. After about twenty minutes, Honey turned her shimmering eyes to him. 

“I want to go back to Madrid.” 

James curled his lip at her. 

“I want to go back to Madrid and then I want to go home.” 

James was so close to arguing, so close to saying that they should stay, so close to pouring his beer over her blonde head and walking away on his own. But the heat had made him tired, and for once he began to long for the cool winds and blue hills of his homeland far away. They’d catch the train that evening, he agreed. After finishing their drinks, and a few terse words with the bartender, James and Honey shouldered their packs and began making the journey back to the train station. The Sun also was homeward bound, and the valley began to darken. 

Something appeared on the horizon. It began as an eggshell-coloured form, a little bug in the distance. Emerging from the shimmering heat, they could make out that it was a little white van, which rocked slowly as it navigated the ancient pathway.  As it grew closer, they could just make out a man behind the wheel. He slowed down to let the couple pass. 

“Hola, Buenas,” James greeted him, and complimented him on the pretty black dog that lay in the passenger seat. 

The farmer in his blue overalls beamed at our sunburnt guiris and trundled away, his van swaying gently as it went along the lane. 

And as the cicadas hissed and the Sun warmed the stones of the path, our young couple walked on. They walked in the direction they had come, unknowingly in the presence of all those virile kings and their peoples, who had conquered this land, dwelt in it, and made it their own.  

 Ivor Starkey. Ivor is an undergraduate studying Modern Languages at the University of Bristol. Last year, he came first place in the Roger Scruton Legacy Foundation’s Essay Contest in the 6th form category.