RE-IMAGINING the City Radio 4 Some travel programmes have a whiff of the freebie about them.
It’s all about somebody famous getting a buckshee holiday somewhere and you can taste that off the airwaves.
It is marshmallow radio – sweet and fluffy with little depth. But not this.
Re-imagining the City is a Falling Tree production and that, in itself, is a signal of quality.
Writer Colm Toibin takes us meandering down ancient alleyways with him to the Barcelona he fell in love with in the long ago.
He knows it deeply. It felt like an intimate conversation, it felt like we too were wandering the Gothic quarter, hearing the clang of cathedral bells.
When he lived and taught English in Barcelona, Toibin was in his 20s, he had nothing to lose. It was September 1975 and he came to Barcelona inspired by the writings of Orwell and Hemingway.
Spain was still under fascist rule back then – it was the unknown, it was ripe for exploration.
It was a city of sin and down at heel streets, it was run down and dangerous and bewitching.
In Barcelona, he said, you live by the church bells: “You wake to them and learn to sleep with them”.
He talked about the woman who lived in a neighbouring flat to him and who complained all day about her fate being stuck in that place – he had to listen – and he treated us to his version of her, rattling away... and what a way to learn the native tongue and a fine accent.
We went for a stroll down the street of melancholy.
“See those seats ... when you are down and forlorn and sick for home... someone will come and talk to you,” he said.
By the end of it, I was as much in love with Barcelona as he is.
The bangs and rattles of the gas tank man; neighbours poking their heads out of windows in upper floor flats; the hush of waiting for the opera to begin.
It was all magical.
