All the Single Ladies in Peterborough

The paddleboat swans are forming up for attack. I am in Peterborough, a normally intriguing city beset, like the rest of the country, with a thick, bleak, expressionless gray cloud like a bad children's diorama. The young artist has fashioned a crafty brown cobblestone quarter, full of shops and garden-walls, churches, and a cathedral, but he has underscored his whole effort by the backdrop made of too few thinly-stretched cotton balls fastened to the shoebox with bottles and bottles of rubber cement. I think we'd all rather a few clouds fall out of the sky than have a frownyface sky like we've had, with the thick snow and ice it has brought that is finally melting away.

However, none of this changes the large "V" of white-feathered fowl advancing resolutely across the glassy water as if I were a piece of helpless and cornered waterborne plantlife. The few colorful and brown mallards are looking around as the armada passes them going, "Huh? Huh?"

They gather their bulk formation at the foot of the cycling path, their not-runners'-feet churning humorously beneath the surface. They are looking at me and saying, in their own way, "Sir, won't you give us some vittles?" Yes, swans speak a little like the guy at the beginning of "David Copperfield" (this is England, after all). They stare at me for minutes, then they realize I have no bread, and they are disheartened. I am amused.

Eventually, one of them rolls its swan eyes at me and says, "Lame!" It rolls its neck and head to the side like a troubled teenager and begins to move through the group while they are still trasnfixed on me, the cruel American who dared come to the shore without vittles. Eventually, one by one, they file after the leader, going away from me, hoping the woman pushing the stroller across the way has brought appropriate vittles to the river's edge.

I'm not sure whether to call this leader-swan Magellan, for its decisive leadership and in honor of the book I'm reading (Over the Edge of the World: Magellan's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe [!]) or Beyonce, for its limber, defiant neck and trend-setting characteristics. Its gender a mystery to me, I think--since it is pretty and did not first befriend me, then try to convert me, and finally and rashly burn my village--that said swan is more likely "bootylicious" than the commander of the biggest maritime voyage of its time, and with a funny beard. This is my logic, but it is not law; oh, and Katherine of Aragon is buried in Peterborough, and the city is close to our circuit, both are why I came in the first place, and, having eaten lunch in Thirlby, why I brought no vittles. The swans were a bonus.

Sevilla

In Magellan's day––by the way, I'm reading a book on Magellan––Sevilla had twice the population of London, and it appears the city has lost none of its vibrancy. As the families flood the main street, along with Punk-influenced teenagers with creative facial piercings and the innumerable and pram-contained babies, I can imagine the flood of traders that led the world to assume that absolutely anything could and was bought and sold in Sevilla.

I am trying to find a place to write, but while there are some open chairs, it is a Sunday afternoon and every table is filled up with families, food, and babies, babies, and the strollers which carry babies. So I am on a bench outside of a Starbucks, waiting for the line to die down so I can purchase americano-warmth, and I am opposite what at Magellan's time was the third largest cathedral in Europe, after St. Peter's in Rome and St. Paul's in London.

There's not much time for reading, though, what with essays and all. Now is the daunting essay about my body of creative work––the numerous poems in the rough, the plays, the screenplays in process, my journalism and scholarly work, this blog––and I'm hard pressed to articulate it all.

It is probably good that we are in Sevilla. We have a great hostel and wonderful travelers. Our Canadian friends Neal and Bria just left so loved, and I regularly discuss Brazilian and Italian history with Alex & Anna, Mateo & Betty; we love the hostel staff, and Nate gives me the last of his churros. This is a city filled with families, babies, street performers, and babies, all things that fill me with joy. So what if in our times before and after the Camino we have seen all of Sevilla? There is still excitement over seeing the rowers on the river and the unkempt '92 World Expo site, overgrown and cordoned off as if it could house zombies or velociraptors (Neil and Bria suggest I make a zombie/dinosaur film there, and Neil has offered to don a velociraptor costume... I think he'll be in the scene where Merav gets eaten... or where she and the velociraptor meet, become friends, pick olives on a hillside, and eventually travel together).

It is a good spot for me to pour over these applications too, and Ryan and Merav seem to remember, in spite of the regularity, that they are more than sufficiently awesome, greeting these days with excited, new eyes.

Jolted out of my iPod-influenced writing trance, two Moroccan girls greet me in Arabic. They are looking for jobs, see me with my green blog notebook in front of the cathedral, and think that not only do I look like someone on-the-job, I also look like I speak Arabic. I did not know that I looked this way. Nonetheless, I tell them the truth (that I'm an American guy with no job writing to you, dear readers), wish them luck and they fade into the families stepping into the expanse of families and the slow, open tracks of the Sevilla tram that bisects them. I love this culture: how, because of Franco's repression they smoke in front of No Smoking signs; how kids being with their parents is as much a necessity as grease on a car mechanic; how we can drink beer with our lunch and everyone is going to do it respectfully; how they are so friendly that, if an Ice Age suddenly descended, they would pull me in like male penguins and keep me warm, not caring if I stutter through their language. There is some terrible history, like many countries, but it is a marvelous present.