Meanwhile in Valencia

Nothing much to report. For the first time in a long time, I haven't gone out for an afternoon walk, and won't. It's cloudy and blustery, with rain threatened, and I've got a bit of a migraine. That's my excuse.

I did go out this morning, for exercise, with my long-time companion Fred Douglass. It's 1838 now, he's met and married his first wife, at 20, and has made his daring escape to the free north. 

He's taken a new surname, the one we know him by - his birth name was Bailey. One of his underground railroad conductors selected the name, at Douglass's request. The man was inspired by a popular poem of the day by Sir Walter Scott featuring a hero of that name. Douglass added the second 's' at the end to make it more distinctive.

He and his wife Anna have settled in New Bedford, Massachusetts, centre of the booming American whaling industry. Fred is doing wage work in the shipyards. He has already fallen in with abolitionists. I'll let you know what happens next. Within a few years, though, he'll be writing his first autobiography. (He wrote three; he was not a modest fellow.)

*

This afternoon, I returned to Valencia, Spain, 2016. As anyone who has been there in the first half of March knows, Valencianos are mostly crazy as a bag of cats. This is when they celebrate Fallas, an end-of-winter festival with some very strange traditions. 

Neighbourhood groups around the city build storeys-high sculptures from wood, Styrofoam and bright acrylic paint. (Originally they were papier mache.) They're erected in the neighbourhood, usually at a street corner. Many of the streets are blocked off and pedestrian-only at Fallas time. 

The sculptures depict all manner of subjects, almost always satirical and/or fantastical. The modeling is like three-dimensional caricature or illustration. Valencia - Spain in general - has a strong tradition of respect for the illustrator's craft. Valencia has a museum partly devoted to it.

What makes the whole thing crazy is that at the end of the two-week festival, they burn the sculptures down in the crema (same root as crematorium but pronounced kraymuh). That happens on 19 March, the official last day of the festival. 

In light of Covid, the city agreed to postpone Fallas 2021 until some time in the second half of this year. Last year - when we were there - preparations were well underway, with many Fallas sculptures partly or completely erected, when the government abruptly locked the country down.

As well as the huge outdoor sculptures, the city's many Fallas art studios also produce smaller ninots - the name for the figures in the big tableaus. They're usually finer than the big ones, often with themes to appeal to children. The ninots are displayed together, and judged, at an indoor venue. For the first time in 2016, it was at the Science Museum in the City of Arts and Sciences.

Karen and I went to see them in mid-February, and of course I took photos. What strikes me in looking at and working on these pictures five years later is that I hadn't really appreciated the astonishing level of craft and artistry poured into these things. And for what? To be displayed briefly in the spring and then mostly forgotten. (The little ones aren't burned.)

As I say, bag of cats.