Al Norte

At some point this adventure has to end up back in Brexitland. Today was turn-north day so I went to the station and printed out the ticket I bought online a few days ago to Cáceres, about 260km from Seville. There's only one train a day, leaving just after 5 in the evening and arriving just after 10. 

Moving on this late in the day allowed me a very languid last few hours in Seville, which felt appropriate for a Sunday. The cafe terraces were full of locals and I joined them for coffee and my best tostada con tomate yet (there is competition). Then another coffee. When the €3.40 bill arrived I told them they'd forgotten to include my second coffee. No, they said, the first coffee was free with the the tostada. Excellent value, and I'd sat there from desayuno until the locals started turning up for Sunday lunch. For the next time you or I are in Seville: Il Solito Posto, in Alameda Hercules. Their tostada are excellent, their olive oil is delicious and they are nice to old women on their own.

To keep to an average of 52 kph (30mph!) this sweet little ambler is, as I write, going not much faster than running pace through rolling hills. It's much more like a bus. At Almendraleo I watched a passenger step off the train onto the platform, step off the other side of the platform, then wheel his red case across a field.

There are feathery trees I can't identify and hexagons of olives that I can, growing in the rusty soil or, more efficiently, in vast hedgeless fields of golden stubble, all glowing in the evening sun. The combine-harvested hay-bales remind me of the groups of women in the fields, dressed head to ankle in black, winnowing grain by hand, who I saw on my first trip to Spain. That was in 1976 and I'd driven from London, to celebrate Franco's death 7 months earlier, with a forthright British communist who had previously been in Spain in 1937 to support her republican comrades in the civil war. It's odd to realise that more time has passed since that trip than what then seemed the eternity since the civil war.

As we approach Cáceres the sun is setting. Against the orange sky I watch telephone pole after telephone pole, maybe 30 of them, each with a ragged stork's nest on top, each containing adult and young storks. Suddenly they are no more. I look at my phone map. It's Aljucen and the railway line has just parted company with the river.

As we arrive at Cáceres it's dusk and the day-after-full moon is very bright. I dump my bags and go out for a late evening explore. I've arrived in the middle of the theatre festival, with different plays being performed free in the squares on different evenings. I hear drama and laughter but at 11.30 pm I am an hour too late to be allowed in.