Adios Market Harborough, Hola Seville

There are some mornings you wake up and you know that today is going to be a perfect day.  A beautiful sense of peace and tranquillity pervades as you stretch your lithe and rested body out across the crisp white Egyptian cotton bed sheets and trail your fingers lightly across the handmade velvet bedspread.  You swing your legs lightly to the ground and feel your toes disappear into the plushness of the Iranian silk rug picked up for a snip at some Arabian souk  and …… no, I don’t have mornings like this either.  At 01:00 Friday, with less than 12 hours before my ride pitched up to take me to Stansted Airport and my flight out to the European Masters Swimming Championships I was still staring vacantly at my computer screen knowing that the words and colours somehow ought to mean something, but my brain had stopped translating them into anything resembling English some time before.  The luxury of hitting the ‘off’ button and ignoring the consequences until I came back though immensely appealing just wasn’t an option because I had the second of two reports to get finished for the European Commission in Brussels.  With the titles ‘Non-legislative Initiatives on Gender Equality within the UK Workplace I  & II’ you may well have some sympathy with my plight. Four hours into the write-up and frankly I’d stopped caring about equal pay and crèche facilities and any desire to burn my bra was long since past. What I wanted was bed. And to pack.  Ideally in reverse order. But both these things were fast receding as possibilities.  You don’t need to know anymore dear reader other than it was a very late night and an early morning and when I did pack it was with rather more speed than planning and I didn’t remember the stringent Ryanair weight restriction until it was all too late. But,  here we are in Seville (or Sevilla – pronounced Serveeya – we’re going to be educated together over the next few days) fresh from a Ryanair flight which left ten minutes late and arrived twenty minutes early.  The early arrival balanced out the rather low opinion I had of Ryanair brought on by my experience of their on-line booking system.  Now call me shirty, but when you say on the booking form you don’t want travel insurance, doesn’t that mean you DON’T want travel insurance?  And having stated this preference more than once during the booking process wouldn’t you then expect NOT to be charged for it on the final payment screen?  Enough to say that Ryanair drove me to the edge of customer sanity and nearly into the arms of EasyJet which is saying something.  But anyway, here we were in Sevilla, on a balmy evening with the real world behind us and just ready for dumping our bags and heading out for some Iberian adventure.  For the two nights we had in Seville we’d chosen a hotel in the heart of the old quarter, close to the Cathedral which turned out to play a rather larger part in our short stay than we might have expected but more of that later.  We took a taxi from the airport (Spanish for taxi = …. Taxi.  That’s my kind of translation) with no idea of how long the journey to our hotel would take or how much it would cost because that is what happens when you visit a country whose language you speak only in the most rudimentary fashion.  But luckily the journey proved to be uneventful and acceptably priced (Eur 31 for a twenty minute or so taxi ride).  Hotel El Rey Moro was about a five or six minute stroll from our drop-off point at La Plaza Alfaro - a small local square paved with cobbles and flanked by three or four storey townhouses with ornate wrought-iron balconies and trailing geraniums. It all felt very Spanish.   We had a quick look at our rooms (small and orange), signed ourselves into the police register (apparently this is normal, we’re not wanted by Interpol or anything) and headed out on the town.

Comments

[Nicola James]

Ahh the joys of Ryan Air, the seats look so comfy until you have the unfortunate pleasure (did I say pleasure!) of sitting in them.

[Pete Cox]

Hi Lorraine, just to let you know (and this probably isn't the place to do it, but what do I know) I just won the John Clare Trust Poetry Prize. Presentation was at Westminster Hall. See you at next year's Beer Festival.