PRIDE AND FREEDOM IN LONDON

I recently attended a performance of Titus Andronicus at the Globe Theatre in London as part of the social programme we had organized for the European partners of the Remembering Yesterday Caring Today Training project who attended the symposium. 

This is one of Shakespeare’s bloodiest productions. It narrates a series of barbaric events that culminate in a banquet where a woman is tricked into eating a pie made with her own sons’ flesh. Rape, mutilation, physical and psychological torture and murder are offered to the spectators in such a stark way that it makes some people feel physically sick. 

I had been warned about the negative reviews this production had received because of its sensationalistic use of violence, an attempt to make a Tarantino-like version of Shakespeare. Actually, there wasn’t so much blood – it was theatre after all. What really shocked me was a scene when a girl is found in the woods by her uncle after having been savagely raped, tortured and maimed. It wasn’t what you could actually see, but the look of madness in the young woman’s face. This reminded me of a performance of the ‘Vagina Monologues’ I saw a few years ago in which one of the actresses reflects on the fate of the thousands of women who were systematically raped during the Bosnian-Serbian war of the 1990s.

Later on in the play, the girl’s father asks the emperor if a parent should kill a daughter that has been raped. The emperor answers that he should, so he murders her in order to save his honour. It’s chilling to think about how often I have heard the same story in the news in the last few years. 

Has humanity changed so little? Yesterday I was in the underground station and I read an announcement of Amnesty International asking people to sign a petition to save a teenage boy from being hanged. His crime? Being gay. 

Fortunately, there are moments when you can see a silver lining in such a bleak panorama. On the same day I attended the performance of Titus Andronicus, I was walking up Whitehall with a group of people who had come to London from all over Europe. When we reached the monument that commemorates the fallen in the wars, we came across a parade of members of the three services of the armed forces. 

As soon as this celebration finished, members of the police moved some fences and the floats of the Pride in London parade took over. In seconds, the sound of the army boots were substituted by the songs of Gloria Gaynor and other divas and the choreographies of topless muscular men and drag queens followed the same route that had been covered by the army march a few minutes before. 

This is one of the things I love about this city, the rich mixture of ways of living and the opportunity to express yourself and live the life of your choice. 

I leave you with the photos Lorenzo took during in Pride in London celebration in Trafalgar Square, one of my favourite places in London.

Lorenzo takes a break from photography in Trafalgar Square

I just caught the London eye celebrating Gay Pride with my mobile

Photography: Lorenzo Hernandez                                                                                      www.photolorenzohernandez.com

BACK IN LONDON

Drama workshop at the RYCT Reminiscence in Dementia Care Symposium

After spending a month in Malaga working at the Official School of Languages in Fuengirola, I am back in London. Going back to my old life in Spain wasn’t as hard as I expected. It was weird to meet my students on the last week of classes, but the teacher who had been standing in for me, Tamara, was such an amazing professional that she made the transition really smooth. After a couple of days I felt as if I had never left my post. It was also really nice to discover that many of my old students had been following this blog and had been connected to me somehow throughout the year.

Living at my mum’s was great: she and her partner, Julian, spoilt me rotten and I must say that I have never eaten so much “jamón serrano” in my life. They live far from my school and I have spent a long time commuting to work, but I also had a delicious sandwich in my bag. Travelling by train wasn’t that bad after all, I spent the time doing useful things such as reading Anita Berlin’s wonderful account of how her grandfather arrived in Spain or writing my contribution for the forthcoming symposium Remembering Yesterday Caring Today. Reminiscence in Dementia Care”.

However, life has been far from relaxing. I left in the morning and came back almost at midnight. To make matters worse, my permission to come back to London to help at the symposium wasn’t properly applied for and it wasn’t clear whether I would get it until the very last minute. Finally, I was given the green light to come to London less than 24 hours before my flight was supposed to take off. I was sighing with relief when I was told that my flight had been cancelled due to the French air controllers’ strike. It was 19:00 and I had to be in London the next day. The airline I was booked in could not offer me a place in the next 48 hours and I would miss the symposium. My colleague Paul helped me find another flight with another company. Fortunately, this one wasn’t cancelled. I travelled all night and I arrived just in time for the conference.

Workshop on the use of visual arts-based activities

Again, going back to my life in London was really easy (I must have become a very flexible person). After a few hours, I felt I had never left. Fortunately, Sue Heiser and a group of wonderful people (I can’t mention all of them now, but I am extremely thankful to them) had helped Pam in the last legs of the conference preparations.

Most of the members of the European Reminiscence Network have worked together in the framework of a Grundtvig Learning Partnership (Remembering Yesterday, Caring Today) during the last two years. This symposium was the culmination of this project. Delegates from all over Europe (The Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Northern Ireland Poland, Slovakia, Spain) joined specialists from all over the UK to share experiences and ideas.

Josep Vilar and Duna Ulsamer give their presentation on the impact of RYCT on staffs and residents in the care home context

What was the symposium about? Well, Sally Knocker, summarised it very well in her introductory talk. First, she asked the audience to choose three pieces of information they would use to define themselves. Some people chose things related to their work, hobbies, family, personality... Then, Sally explained that when you are diagnosed with dementia, this is the only thing people see in you; all of a sudden, the rest of your defining features disappear.

The Slovak team led a series of activities on the use of visual arts

The day was packed with workshops focused on the experience and needs of participants with dementia, the impact of “Remembering Yesterday Caring Today” in the care home context, the needs of family carers, the use of drama, music and the visual arts in the RYCT sessions, and how to work towards an artistic product, training and evaluation. All these workshops had a common goal: to focus on the person, not the patient. Artists met social workers, care home managers, specialists in dementia, writers, family carers and persons with dementia who have made different contributions to the RYCT project according to their own skills.

Drama activity led by Pam Schweitzer

The day went by like a dream and I would like to share with you a few moments, illustrated by Lorenzo’s wonderful photos: the participants of the drama workshop lying on the floor reproducing the frozen image of a holiday, the people who joined the visual arts workshop writing and drawing on the paper-covered walls, Anita Berlin looking at the series of portraits that her son Alex had made of her father Ludwig, Josep and Duna talking about the impact of the project in the care home context... Of course I missed a lot. I wish I could have been everywhere, but you can get a taste of the exciting atmosphere of the day.

Anita Berlin looking at her father's portrait

We had lunch in the beautiful hall of the town hall in Woolwich (Pam managed to convince them not to move us to the basement, even if we were almost 100 people), and we had the “official” group photo on the impressive staircase, one of the landmarks of the building.

Dinner at the Town Hall in Woolwich

One of the pluses of this symposium was the outstanding theatre performances we enjoyed during the day. The first one was “Going Back”, the new reminiscence show by Eastern Angles, which tells the life story of Sid, a 94-year-old veteran and his wife Hettie throughout the 20^th century. This was a brilliantly performed show in which I would highlight the amazing choreography and use of sound effects.

Pam Schweitzer and Jon Tavener (director)  converse before the Eastern Angles show 

"Going Back" by Eastern Angles

The second performance was Wioleta Pietrasik’s homage to her grandma, who lived with Alzheimer’s during the last years of her life. This intimate piece was developed by the actress herself with the help of Pam Schweitzer. I loved the mixture of Polish and English and the humorous use of body language.

Wioleta Pietrasik shows how her mother used to stir the mashed potatoes

There was also an exclusive one-to-one performance by Clare McManus, “Tread Softly”, which took place in the kitchen, but only ten people could attend it and I wasn’t one of the lucky ones.

I had to speak at the end of the day, during the launching of the Reminiscence Theatre Archive, so I expected that by the time my turn arrived, everybody would have fled or would be half asleep out of exhaustion. To make matters worse, there was a break for “wine” right before my speech. Amazingly, everybody enjoyed my presentation (maybe it was the wine). I guess my life had been such a rollercoaster for the last seven days that I was too tired to get nervous. Actually, I really enjoyed sharing my enthusiasm about the hidden treasures of the archive.

To finish this entry, I would like to thank all the European members of the network for their support and appreciation. I met most of them in Poznan in October, when I had just arrived here, and now it’s great to see them at the end of this project. They are great professionals and wonderful persons as well. This is the end of one of their learning partnerships and the beginning of a new one, this time led by the very capable Catalan team. Pam knows that the future of the network is in good hands.

Mark, Duna and Josep enjoy their meal at Pam's

Petr Veleta shows his dancing skills to the group

P.S. The next day Pam invited all the European partners to have dinner at her house and relax after two days of hard work. The food was delicious and the atmosphere was lively and warm. Each country was invited to sing a song and the Spanish team chose “Eva Mª se fue buscando el sol en la playa”. 

Probably not the best song of the night, but we enjoyed it

 Photos: Lorenzo Hernandez                                           www.photolorenzohernandez.com

REFLECTIONS ON WRITING

On my last night in London a friend from California, the writer Julia Halprin Jackson, urges me to face the ultimate challenge: to participate in a blog-hop in which a series writers give away the little secrets of their trade by answering a few questions. Being a rookie in the writing world, I feel really honoured to have been selected to join this project. I met Julia in 2006, when she was working as a language assistant in a primary school near Fuengirola. At the time I was leading a bilingual drama workshop with a wonderful Spanish teacher, Pilar Andújar, and soon Julia became one of our main assets. I will always remember her with her little notebook, writing down all the words and expressions that came up in our conversations. We have been in touch since then and she has been a constant collaborator of COLLAGEmagazine (watch out for our next memory issue, she has contributed with a most amazing story in which she pays homage to her grandmother, Amah).

Julia is an accomplished writer: her work has appeared in West Branch Wired, California Northern, Fourteen Hills, Flatmancrooked, Sacramento News & Review, Fictionade, Fiction365, Catalyst and Spectrum, as well as selected anthologies. Julia has been awarded scholarships from the Tomales Bay Writer’s Workshops and the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, and earned an M.A. in Creative Writing (fiction) from UC Davis. She lives in Northern California with Ryan, her fiance, where she co-founded and co-curates Play On Words, a collaborative literary performance series. And on top of all this, she’s working on her first novel, which is set in Southern Spain. You can learn more about julia at  http://juliahalprinjackson.com

So here’s my little contribution to this blog-hop:

What am I working on?

This year in London has been a source of inspiration. I began this blog as part of my project for the European Commission and what started like a sort of “obligation” has become a real pleasure. Thus, even if my Grundtvig assistantship expires today, my intention is to carry on adding entries to this blog. Apart from this, I have been in charge of editing and coordinating the next issue of COLLAGE magazine, which is devoted to the topic of memory and will come out at the end of this month.

Also, I have several projects in mind. One of them is to write the texts that will accompany a book containing the amazing photographs that my partner, Lorenzo Hernández, has taken all throughout this year.

Lorenzo has always encouraged me to write, but I never knew what to write about. Now, all of a sudden, my head is full of stories and characters that are waiting to be put into paper. I don’t really know where this will lead to, but I am really looking forward to embark myself into this adventure.

How is my work different than others in its genre?

I’d say that it’s probably the fact that all what I write is intimately connected to Lorenzo’s photography. His images are always my source of inspiration, although I wouldn’t say that they rule absolutely what I write. I start with the photos and then my imagination runs free.

Having said this, I must admit that Lorenzo’s way of looking at the world through his camera, his personal view, the way he makes the most mundane things beautiful and poetic, rubs off on me a little bit. We spend most of our time talking, we started a conversation almost twenty years ago and we haven’t run out of topics yet, and I think all this food for though must show up in what I write.

How does my writing process work? 

This is a question that has always fascinated me. Do writers know how their stories finish before they start writing or do they find out as they go? Years ago I asked this question to a very dear friend, the Irish writer Siobhan Galvin. She had written two one-thousand-page novels while raising three children and she told me that she used to write every day from 12pm to 13.30, once she had finished tidying up her house and before picking up the kids from school. She never new what she was going to write, it was as if the different characters told her what was going to happen next.

My case is the opposite. I need to have a structure in my head, a scaffolding that I flesh out in several drafts. Like Julia, I like leaving the text to rest and go back to it a few days later. Sometimes I erase everything and start all over again because when I wake up in the morning I suddenly have a much better structure in my head. With the blog I know the topic I am going to write about, I have the images, but I can’t start working until I have this structure.

Why do I write what I do?

Because once I have managed to finish a piece of writing, the pleasure is immense. I have always loved the ends that promise a new beginning, like the new friendship in Casablanca. For me writing is this new beginning.

I have asked three blogger friends to carry the torch: Gloria García Ordóñez, who works as a coach, reflects about life and the human nature in her blog;  José Manuel Cruz Barragán leads a “double life” as an economist and film critic; and Joaquín García Weil is a philosopher and yoga teacher. I admire the three of them and I would like to thank them for joining me in this adventure. Their blogs are in Spanish, so I’ll leave their biographies in this language.

JOSÉ MANUEL CRUZ BARRAGÁN

Sevillano de nacimiento y malagueño de adopción. Aunque mi titulación dice que soy Licenciado en Económicas y Master en Administración de Empresas, al mismo tiempo también me apasionan el cine y la literatura. De acuerdo con ello, llevo una "doble" vida en que, por un lado, soy consultor empresarial y asesor financiero independiente y, por otro, soy escritor. En 2013, publiqué mi primera novela, Sin tregua se consumían nuestros ojos, que, espero, tenga continuación en breve. Actualmente, soy el autor de dos blogs: uno de economía, EL DEDO EN EL DATO (http://eldedoeneldato.blogspot.com.es) y otro de cine, EL ESPECTADOR IMPERTINENTE (http://elespectadorimpertinente.blogspot.com.es).

GLORIA GARCÍA ORDÓÑEZ

Cordo-malagueña, filóloga, formadora y coach. Anglófila, bebedora de té, practicante de yoga y entusiasta del vino tinto. Me encanta leer al sol, ver películas, reunirme con mi familia y quedar con mis amigos. Si es alrededor de una cerveza bien fría y de un plato enorme de buen jamón ibérico, mejor que mejor. Disfruto de mis momentos de llanto y aún más de los de risas. Creo que la Vida es increíblemente hermosa y que el dolor es sólo un amigo que trae un mensaje en la mochila. Tengo a la Muerte presente cada día y lo que me mueve es seguir camino mirando hacia adentro, conectando con el otro, aprendiendo y creciendo. Escribir es para mí una auto-terapia primero, y a través de mis reflexiones, nacidas de mi aprendizaje, quiero pensar que puedo aportar algo para que otras personas también avancen en su proceso de auto-descubrimiento. Escribo sobre la vida y sobre el ser humano, desde una perspectiva integradora y sistémica y dentro del marco respetuoso y ecológico que me aporta el coaching

http://www.esplingo.com/blog

JOAQUÍN GARCÍA WEIL

Joaquín García Weil, Licenciado en Filosofía, practica Yoga desde hace veinte años y lo enseña desde hace once. Es alumno del Swami Rudradev (discípulo destacado de Iyengar), con quien ha aprendido en el Yoga Study Center, Rishikesh, India. También ha estudiado con el Dr. Vagish Sastri de Benarés, entre otros maestros. Ha colaborado en Psicología Práctica, Yoga Journal (versión española) y la Revista Dharma. Ha fundado y dirige YogaSala Málaga, centro de yoga y meditación, donde enseña estas disciplinas.

http://yogasala.blogspot.com.es

AN UNCONFORTABLE TRUTH

Mati and daughters

A few years ago Lorenzo photographed a mother and two daughters for his “generations” series. Even if the daughters were in the summit of their beauty, it was the mother, who was in her mid seventies, who stood out. She had this star quality that reminded everyone of the actress Geraldine Chaplin. However, when she saw herself in the portrait, she hated it and she said she didn’t know she looked so old. His daughter, who had commissioned the portrait, displayed it in her apartment, nonetheless. It was not until dozens of people had praised the photo that she started to appreciate it.

This is not news for Lorenzo; we have learned to accept that people feel uncomfortable when seeing their portraits for the first time. We also know that they will eventually grow to love them.

Mati modelling for Lorenzo in Dior

I recently listened to a radio interview with the legendary photographer David Bailey, who is currently showing a retrospective of his work at the National Portrait Gallery, and it gave me food for thought. It did not surprise me to learn that the same happens to him. He said that he loves it when someone who poses for him hates the portrait and then, twenty years later, his wife phones saying: “Do you remember that photo you took of my husband? It’s the best portrait he’s ever had. Could we have a copy now?”

Michael Caine's famous portrait opens David Bailey's Exhibition in London

Bailey tells us an anecdote about Picasso and Gertrude Stein. When she saw her portrait, she said: “ I don’t look like that!” and Picasso retorted: “You will”. A good portrait shows your real self, the one that naturally emerges throughout the years.

In 1999 Bailey was photographing the singer Marianne Faithful. She was in her underwear in the process of changing clothes when he said: “Don’t move. This is the picture.” She was 53 and she looked 53, which is one of the things I love about her. He told her that he wanted to show the world that she was “Marianne Faithful” and didn’t give a monkey’s about what people thought. He took two pictures. In one of them she was serious; in the other one she was laughing. She hated the second one. It was not the fact that the photo showed her mature body; in this sense both photos were identical. It was the grin, with a hint of madness, which upset her. The second photo somehow announced the decadence of the mind, something that terrifies all of us.

It’s easy to please a model: a little bit of photo editing and you are as good as new. It requires boldness to show the poser’s inner self. It also demands the gift to connect with the person that hides behind the mask. Bailey said that doing a portrait is a mode of communication. I cannot agree more. Lorenzo does exactly the same: he talks to the model and clicks, and that’s the picture. He doesn’t need to think about what he’s going to do, it just happens. He says it’s as if it was the unconscious that took the picture.

It’s funny to think that men normally accept this sort of exposure more than women. I wonder why. I am a bit like Marianne Faithful. I have no problems with him photographing my body, but it takes me a while to see my face as it is reflected by the camera. I always look too anxious. Again, this is a reflection of my character: I worry too much. On the other hand, when I look at the first portraits he took of me, I really like what I see, and I have come to accept that this is what will happen to the current ones, eventually.

In a world where digital cameras and photo editing software have made photography accessible to everybody, where it’s so easy to show who you would like to be, not who you are, we really need artists who have the bravery and the talent to reveal people’s inner selves.

You can visit David Bailey’s Stardust at the National Portrait Gallery until 1^st June 2014.

You can listen to Tim Marlow interviewing David Bailey for BBC radio at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b03phd4f/Getting_the_Picture_The_Camera_Has_Attitudes/

To see Picasso’s portrait of Gertrude Stein click here

To see David Bailey’s portrait of Marianne Faithful, click here 

Photography: Lorenzohernandez                                      www.photolorenzohernandez.com

A SONG LIKE A RIVER

A few days ago, Lorenzo found a small jewel in Televisión Española’s website, a programme devoted to a song I used to listen to when I was about twenty, Gabinete Caligari’s Camino Soria (The Way To Soria). In this programme the presenter, Juan Carlos Ortega, offers us a delightful twenty-minute piece of reminiscence. As he tracks the history of the song, he embarks on a personal journey: he recognizes places he used to visit, remembers a girl who rejected him, and he even meets one of my generation’s national heroes, the legendary National Radio DJ Jesús Ordovás.

Ordovás accurately defines Camino Soria as a song-river, because it’s like a flow that carries you downhill. It tells the story of a man who has been abandoned by the woman he loves and decides to embark on a journey to Soria, a small town on the banks of the River Duero in the cold lands of Castilla. Soria has strong links with the poets Machado and Becquer, but Gabinete’s lead singer, Jaime Urrutia, confesses that they chose the name because it rhymed with history (historia), glory (gloria) and memory (memoir).

The programme ends with Juan Carlos and Jaime sitting together on a wooden bench next to the river Duero. Jaime takes the guitar he has been carrying the entire journey out of its case and starts strumming the chords, singing the first lines of the song. Juan Carlos joins him. They sing slightly out of key and Jaime sometimes forgets the chords, but Juan Carlo’s face reflects the joy of reminiscence.

A few weeks ago I had a similar experience along Regent’s Canal. This is one of the most enjoyable walks in London. It was a day that announced spring, the sun was shining brightly for the first time in months and there was an atmosphere of anticipation. We started near King’s Cross, next to the site of Central Saint Martins, one of the best arts and design schools in the world. The building is located in a square covered with little fountains that throw jets of water into the air. There was a group of children in their swimsuits jumping about with contagious thrill. On the terraces that lead to the canal groups of young people were basking in the early spring sun.

Our walk along the Canal was like Camino Soria; we just went with the flow and observed what we found along the way: we came across a young man who had prepared a barbeque receiving his first guest, several couples holding hands, a group of boys having a row under one of the bridges... There were houses whose gardens led to the canal and barges where people lived. 

Some areas were busy and noisy, like the stretch that crosses Camden Lock, and others were peaceful and silent. 

When we reached Regent’s Garden, we saw the back of the aviary from the zoo and when we finally reached little Venice, we found a harbour full of barges that looked like a little village. 

We were about to reach the end of our walk, which lasted for more than four hours, when we came across a huge blackboard with the words “BEFORE I DIE...” written a hundred times. There were pieces of chalk for those who wanted to write a message. In the spur of the moment, I scrawled the first thing that came to my mind: “I want to meet Paul Weller”.

For me Paul Weller was the beginning of all. I was an 11-year-old when I listened to “Going Underground” for the first time. This song was like an epiphany, a sudden realization that there was a world beyond my little life in a town in Southern Spain in 1980. Music has played a key role in my life since then.

When we left the Canal in Little Venice, we walked down the street, crossed it and... guess who was on the other side, holding the hand of a little boy? Paul Weller.

You can watch “La mitad invisible: Camino Soria” at http://www.rtve.es/alacarta/videos/la-mitad-invisible/mitad-invisible-camino-soria/1629082/

You can watch the video “Going Underground” at  http://youtu.be/AE1ct5yEuVY

By the way,  do you recognize the poster in the background?

Photos: Lorenzohernandez                                         www.photolorenzohernandez.com

THE RANK STENCH OF THOSE BODIES

Detail of Charles Sergeant Jagger's "No Man's Land"

At the beginning of November 2012 I had the opportunity to attend the celebration of Remembrance Day at the English Cemetery in Malaga, the oldest non-Roman Catholic Christian cemetery in mainland Spain, and I must say it was an impressive experience to stand in silence in the middle of the tombs covered with little white crosses and wreaths made with poppies. Not many Spanish people know about this tradition, which has its origin in the very end of World War I. The hostilities ended “at the 11^th hour of the 11^th day of the 11^th month” of 1918. Since 1919, a two-minute silence is held in Britain to pay homage to those who died in that war and in subsequent conflicts. People also wear poppies in their lapels, a tradition that has its origin in the poppies that bloomed in the battlefields and the poem that John McCrae dedicated to them, “In Flanders Fields”. 

This year commemorates the centenary of the outbreak of World War I, a tragedy that shaped the future of Modern Britain. Contrary to other historical events, the spirit of this war is still alive and tangible in this country, something that took me by surprise, as I hardly remembered the list of dates and battles I had been fed in high school: le Somme, Ypres, Gallipoli, Passchendaele…

World War I started to take shape in my conscience as something real, lived by real people, when I read this passage in Andrew Marr’s “The Making of Modern Britain”, a description of the salient of Ypres by a journalist, Philip Gibbs:

“a sea of red liquid mud composed of brick dust and bodies, bits of bodies, and clots of blood, and green metallic-looking slime, made by explosive gasses... Human flesh, rotting and stinking, mere pulp, was pasted into the mud-banks. If they dug to get deeper cover, their shovels went into the softness of dead bodies who had been their comrades. Scraps of flesh, booted legs, blackened hands, eyeless heads, came falling over them when the enemy trench-mortared their position.”

I would like to illustrate this passage with a work by Charles Sargeant Jagger,   a bronze frieze titled “No Man’s Land” which shows a man hiding among the corpses of his comrades. You can find it at the Tate Britain.

Then I watched the magnificent series of documentaries by Jeremy Paxman “Britain’s Great War”, which gave me a new and more human insight of this conflict: the memory of being shelled by German boats in the middle of the night shared by a one hundred and five year old lady who survived the Hartlepool raid at the age of seven; the posters of Kitcheners’ appeal for volunteers that managed to recruit two and a half million men for the British army; the doctor from New Zealand who restored the facial injuries of disfigured soldiers and created the basis for modern plastic surgery in a hospital in Sidcup, a short bus ride from where I live; how Britain managed to face the shortage of manpower by involving women into the war effort and how many of these women died of poisoning working in munitions; the first conscientious objectors and the increasing gap between those who fought the war and those who sent them to the trenches…

Let’s take a short walk around Central London and find the traces the first modern conflict has left in this city.

Our journey begins at the Cenotaph in Whitehall. It’s a key landmark in the commemoration of the dead in the wars since 1919. On the Sunday nearest to the 11^th November a service is held, which is attended by the Queen, religious leaders, politicians, and representatives of the armed and auxiliary forces. The poppy wreaths that are deposited at the base of this monument can still be seen months afterwards. The BBC has a very interesting history section about World War I and there I learned that this monument, whose name means “empty tomb” in Greek, was originally built in wood and plaster, as it was intended to be used only at the 1919 Armistice Celebrations, but it became so popular that they had to build a permanent one in 1920.

Today is a lovely day that announces the end of winter and the street is full of colourful characters, like this group of men dressed like ludo counters. 

However, as we walk up towards Trafalgar Square, we are reminded of conflict once again. 

Not very far from the statue of Field Marshall Douglas Haig, whose strategy led to the death of so many in the Western Front, we can see a group of demonstrators trying to draw attention to the situation in Venezuela. 

Next to them there is another group of protestors against the invasion of Ucraine by Russian troops. Our walk cannot be more meaningful today.

Trafalgar square is the next point in our pilgrimage. If you had been here one hundred years ago, you would have seen placards encouraging people to buy war bonds. You would even have seen a tank, one of the main technological advances in British warfare, parked in the middle of the square. And if you had been here during the celebrations after the Armistice, you would have seen the Australian and Canadian troops making a bonfire with these placards. In the final documentary of his series, Jeremy Paxman shows a stone under Nelson’s column where you can still see the effects of this act of patriotic vandalism.

Our next stop is the National Portrait Gallery, where there is a very recommendable exhibition, “The Great War in Portraits”, which allows us to put faces to those who led and fought this war. What impressed me the most was the opening sculpture, Jacob Epstein’s “The Rock Drill”, and a wall covered with a collection of portraits of people involved in the war, famous and anonymous, allies and enemies, men and women. You can read the story behind these faces in a booklet that is provided in the gallery. 

This exhibition will be open to the public until 15^th June 2014. Whether you are planning to come to London soon or not, even if you have already been to this exhibition, it’s worth listening to the curator’s guided tour: http://www.npg.org.uk/whatson/firstworldwarcentenary/curator-tour.php

I have already mentioned Charles Sargeant Jagger. If we carry on walking towards Hyde Park Corner, we will find one of his most famous works: the “Royal Artillery Memorial”, which shows four figures: a driver, an artillery captain, a shell carrier and a dead soldier covered by his own coat. The driver is wearing a cape that is being blown by the wind and when I look at him I often have the feeling of looking at the figure of an angel with its wings extended.

The next stop leads us to the other side of the park, in Marble Arch, where you can visit a monument that pays homage to all the animals that lost their lives in wars. Their role was key in the trenches: pigeons that carried messages, mules used to transport armament and munitions, war horses... Again, I remember a passage from “The Making of Modern Britain” where Andrew Marr describes some of the terrible conditions these animals lived in: mules who had their vocal chords cut for fear that their braying gave away the soldiers’ position, horses who were painted in black for the same reason... On this monument you can read the inscription “They had no choice”.

Our walk ends at the Marquis of Granby, a pub you can find behind Millbank, next to the river Thames. Here there is a corner devoted to one of the most fascinating heroes of this war: the poet Siegfried Sassoon. He was sent to the front in France, was injured and won the Military Cross. However, he decided to throw it into the Mersey estuary and stand against a war he felt pointless. His poetry describes the horrors of this war and denounces the gap between those who fought it and the callous politicians who made the decisions at home. Eventually, Sassoon decided to go back to the front in order not to abandon his comrades and was wounded again. In this corner you can find some photos, together with some original copies of his work.

I would like to finish this entry with an extract of one of Sassoon’s poems, “The rank stench of those bodies haunts me still”:

“To-night I smell the battle; miles away


Gun-thunder leaps and thuds along the ridge;

The spouting shells dig pits in fields of death,


And wounded men, are moaning in the woods.”

APPENDIX

If you want to find out more about this engaging topic, visit the BBC history website: http://www.bbc.co.uk/ww1

And finally, if you want to check how much you know about this event, I invite you to do this quiz: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/quiz/2013/jun/11/quiz-first-world-war

I managed to score 7 points. What about you?

Photo: Lorenzo Hernandez                                            www.photolorenzohernandez.com