Llanito: en mi language

 

I have taken a hiatus from this blog for nigh on three years, maybe slightly longer. Life sometimes gets in the way - work, the dullness of routine that serves to numb creativity, the grind of getting each day done that stifles so many of those who might want, wish, would and should write their stories and tell their tales. Myself included, clearly.

But I've not been away entirely.

Since my last blog post, I have published a non-fiction book, co-written with my eldest daughter, Ciara Wild. Myth Monster Murder explored the story of Jack the Ripper, how the gruesome Whitechapel murders were, and are, mythologised by the media, how at least five women became the victims of his blood-happy knife, and of the gore-addicted press, victims themselves, perhaps, of rampant commercialism. Why did the murders take place and could they happen again, we ask ourselves in the book. I won't tell you the answer. The book is readily available on Kindle or on paperback through Amazon, Blackwells, Waterstones, Foyles....so treat yourselves!

Myth Monster Murderer by Jackie Anderson and Ciara Wild

That feat wore me out a little, so my writing became more of a dabbling, an early morning pre-breakfast gathering of thoughts and toying with the keys of my laptop, or the occasional scribbling in a notebook of disparate ideas, sentences and phrases that appear irrationally and unannounced into my mind and that occasionally drift together into a coherent whole.

But during that rather barren period, something has emerged in Gibraltar that is worthy of dusting down this blog and reawakening it. And that thing - or phenomenon is more approrpriate a word - is Patuka Press and its literary journal, the third issue being entitled: Llanito.

My copy of Llanito from Patuka Press

Here's where you can get your copy of LLanito

I spoke on GBC Breakfast about this back in July. It was a brief interview too early in the morning for me to be fully coherent so apologies to listeners, but in it I spoke not just about my writing and my book and the story I wrote that was published in 'Llanito', but also about the journal. 

I remember having conversations with fellow Gibraltarian Writers some years ago, shortly after a group of us worked on publishing an Anthology of Gibraltarian Poets (the first anthology of its kind), that centred around the vital importance of having a local outlet that would publish local writing - that is, writing that is not just produced locally, but by writers that have a strong connection with Gibraltar, who may be Gibraltarians living abroad, or people who had spent time in Gibraltar and had stories to tell. 

Writers might well love their craft, they might well be brilliantly skilled storytellers, wordsmiths, playwrights, poets, but if they cannot reach out to readers through some form of publishing, then their words are lost to the rest of us. And that is a literary tragedy, especially in Gibraltar, where there are so many tales to be told and its writers are bursting to tell them.

More than that; we want to tell them in our language, in Llanito, in the words that shape who and what we are as a people, and as an individual person.

In the past few years, there have been an increasing number of initiatives that have started to provide recognition for Gibraltar's writers, and outlets for their work. Among many other features, Gibraltar now has a Literature Week which this year is going to form part of the Gibraltar Literary Festival; there is a local book shop at last, which stocks works by local writers and about Gibraltar; there is increasing recognition, academically and among Gibraltarians, that our language is a clear and valid language that is part of our cultural identity. Social media and interest from GBC through various programmes such as Between the Lines, has helped tremendously. Young writers are daring to write and publish and not worry about whether what they have written is 'literature' or not; they do not care about meeting some vague and undefined standard of what is literature and don't question whether they can stand up to comparison with Dickens, Byron, Orwell or Rowling. Who wants to be like all the others anyway? We are who we are and say what we say and from what I'm reading of Gibraltarian writers, some can proudly stand shoulder to shoulder with other writers from other countries, or spine to spine on the shelves of any bookshop or library anywhere.

The joy of seeing this growth in local writing is immeasurable, more so when seeing that so much is now written in Llanito. Despite the decriers and nay-sayers, and I am not going to waste any energy wading into that argument, we are finally openly exploring what it means to be 'us', to speak in our own language, to write our own stories. What Patuka Press has achieved with Llanito is to put a stamp of approval, a public accreditation if you like, on writing in llanito. And that goes a long way to saving our dwindling language. As Charles Durante put it in his essay 'Llanito: Grammar, Etymology and Identity' in LLanito:

    "It would be a very sad day if Llanito were to disappear, as some have gleefully            predicted. It would be like losing a limb, a form of spiritual emasculation."

I can't help but agree. It would be a tragedy with far-reaching effects; the loss would be far more visceral than the loss of a gathering of words.

So the impact of Patuka Press and its collections of stories, poems and essays should not be understated. To local readers it provides an affirmation of who and what we are culturally; we laugh and nod our heads in recognition of ourselves and our community, we marvel at the novel and the new that is being created day to day by talented Gibraltarians, we gasp at the variety of imaginative skill on show between the pages. That this third issue explores and celebrates Llanito, hablando de mi people en mi language, is testament to the surfacing of our love for Gibraltarian culture, our willingness to explore talk about what makes us us, the sunshine and the rain, the beautiful and the ugly, the whole gamut of Gibraltarianness, warts and all. The journal is both an achievement in itself, and I hope, it is also the soil in which our literary growth as a people will take root and find succour.

The next steps for Gibraltarian literature? It is, despite the decriers and nay-sayers among us, a growing, living thing but it is still young, it still needs a helping hand from those that can and from the whole community. Here are some ideas:

• Another publishing house. Patuka Press and Calpe Press and self-publishing may be wonderful things but we need the competitiveness of alteranative publishers to hone our skills and thrust our writing output into the realms of quality and not just quantity.
• Setting a high bar. Again, quality. It isn't just about work being published because it's been written or even because it's good. It's got to be good enough.
• A writing residency, where the writer in residence (perhaps selected from numerous applications to the National Book Council) works for 1 - 2 years as a writer, running workshops, producing work, organising readings, running writing groups, attending seminars, book and literary events in other countries, mentoring writers and so on.

Our literature is being read and analysed across the world. It's got to reach globally high standards and all those editors and publishers working with Gibraltarian writing, whether a news channel or a freebie magazine, a publisher of books or a literary journal, or a competition judge have to start to apply a bar. It is not enough for a writer to submit work and be published, it has to be quality work.

And while all that is going on, get yourself a copy of Llanito. I picked one up from Amazon because I happened to be in UK when it came out, but Bookgem sells it. And then get the other two issues: Shit Jobs and Borders and Boundaries. You'll find one of my stories published in each of the three editions, and I'm not just proud that my submissions were selected for publication; I am privileged.

Shit Jobs by Patuka Press

Borders and Boundaries by Patuka Press

Writers in the community or a writers' community?

Gibraltar is a close knit community. Whether we like it or not, our compact geography means we cannot escape the fact that we live closely together, work closely together and enjoy leisure time when we are barely able to avoid bumping into each other. This has huge benefits and some important drawbacks. 

For writers, the benefits should be the ability to reach out and work with other writers in an open, easy manner. The drawbacks are that we often need to be alone to concentrate and write and that we need to stand back from the world a little, observe it at a distance and then disappear into worlds that we create. Another disadvantage is that if we happen to write non-fiction, it is incredibly difficult to make any objective commentary without offending someone. And in a place that is so small with an element of crowd mentality that is sometimes disappointingly small alongside it, that can be disastrous for anyone trying to publish work.

So we seem to have an impasse - a community inhabited by numerous writers and yet no real writers' community to speak of. We have many writers in our community. Some are published locally and well-known: Hernandez, Durante, Caruana, Chiappe and Benady to name a few. Others are published abroad and known to some extent here: Sanchez, Cruz, Green (I think of her as Gibraltarian since she grew up here), Dignam, Moreno, to name a few of those. Sadly, Gibraltar has so much writing talent but such limited outlets and barely any support systems in place that while there are many writers in our community, we cannot lay claim to having a writers' community. I find that a sad reflection of how reading and writing - despite literary festival and a handful of book-related events such as World Book Day - are pushed into the margins of our cultural life.

The Writer Apart..............Image by Grae Dickason from Pixabay 

So what is it that I mean by a writers' community? I had to give that some thought - when I set out writing this post, I was not entirely clear what I meant. I had set out to vent some frustrations that there seems to be no proper platform for writers in Gibraltar. Not really. We have a couple of competitions which serve to put off more writers than these attract, a couple of attempts at writing groups which have never really built up to fruition, occasional poetry readings and workshops, but nothing concrete that an aspiring writer, of whatever age, can reach out to for support and encouragement and guidance. There is only one publisher, generally quite caught up with work, a government loan system to help to self-publish work and no form of filtering or editing. Worse than all that put together - no book shops to sell work in a focused way. There's a bit of this and a bit of that, but something essential is missing.

Writers, by nature of their calling, tend to be pretty solitary folk. And because we have to spend rather a lot of time in our own worlds, we can become introspective and full of self-doubt. Just as dangerous, we can also develop over-inflated ideas of how good our writing is only to have our egos smashed to smithereens when we don't win a competition or have our work rejected and described as mediocre. I expect most writers fall somewhere on a spectrum of mediocre that stretches from 'not too bad' along 'reasonable' to 'quite good, an enjoyable read'. There are very few in the world who are outstanding as writers. When writers are isolated from each other, they find it hard to develop their skills, or their confidence, or curb their over-confidence. Publication is a goal that can barely be aspired to in Gibraltar except through Amazon or if you have a good deal of cash available, and we are so out of touch with the international world of publication that the goal appears completely unrealistic.

A writer's community is a place, metaphorically speaking at least, where writers meet other writers and realise that there are other people out there that actually get it. Other writers get the sense of frustration, isolation, doubt, disconnection from the world of reality, the difficulties of research and the grappling day to day with the English language, or Spanish or Arabic or whatever language we are writing in (Llanito included - we really ought to write in our own language as much as we can). Some writers can successfully be part of an online writing community. Others prefer the face to face link. Either way, coming together physically or virtually can help a writer thrive and the creation of a literary environment can help a community's literature thrive. That is what I feel is missing in Gibraltar.

Image by StartupStockPhotos from Pixabay 

I am not going to lay down blame or recriminations. I, alongside some other writers,  have tried to set up groups and workshops. And I have found it hard to sustain momentum or gain support. If writers in the community feel the need to be part of a writers' community in order to thrive and develop their writing, then they also need to put some time and effort into helping to create that community, that literary environment. There are writers' groups all over the world, and it is rare that any two groups are the same. Not everyone enjoys the experience, but where there are a number of different groups that help different groups of writers in different ways (a bit like there are so many different dance groups in Gib and every dancer will gravitate towards the one that they feel most comfortable with and benefit the most from) then literature of different types and styles will really begin to thrive.

A writers' community is a sounding board, it provides mutual support and encouragement,  it shares learning and helps develop skills, it can create collaborations and projects, it can help overcome fear and doubt, provide constructive criticism, prompt ideas, motivate and help each other through inevitable moments of doubt. They can embolden creativity, challenge the status quo and encourage subversive commentary on our society - what is creativity if not a subversion of what already exists? 

Writers' communities or groups don't have to be formal. They don't have to be formal associations with elected officers, or 'cultural entities' (a horrible expression that associates to paranormal activities in cheap blood and gore movies and is probably largely to blame - purely by its unpleasant aesthetic because writers are so sensitive to words and their connotations - for the lack of organised writers' groups in Gibraltar). Communities can be organic, amorphous, informal but with sufficient regularity of structure and shared values and goals so as to function well. They can be large or small, they can be temporary subsets of larger groupings working on a specific project. They can meet in a house, a bar, a park, in the middle of a street or under a bus shelter. At its most basic, writing only needs ideas, paper and pencil. And shelter - no-one enjoys writing anything in the rain!

Image by StockSnap from Pixabay 

I'm not sure why this doesn't happen in Gibraltar. There seems to be a degree of willingness to meet up until you organise a meet up and then no-one turns up. The Independent Writers' and Artists' Project may well blossom into something positive for writers and other artists and there are other groupings that seem to be emerging. It would, of course, help if our culture support systems took literature seriously. We have a new Minister now and a cultural services agency that has recently announced - finally - that culture is more than events. Perhaps an overdue change will happen. Sometimes writers, as part of the artistic community, just need the right foundation, the right support from government to develop.

Of all the artistic disciplines, it is in writing that the memories of our community are held. The stories of our diverse community are gathered through writing. Our common memories are turned into personal observations, into stories and tales that resound with local colour and characters that should always be preserved. It is through the writing of stories that films are made, that blogs are produced, that social media posts are created, all of which also hold our community's stories. Gibraltar, as I have said over and over, needs to tell its stories in the voices of its writers - even (and cultural services agencies please note) where those voices are not coming from the throat of 'born' llanitos, even if those voices have only 'just got off the plane'. Observations and stories told through the voices of those outside are just as valid as those from the inside. I think we need a writers' community. Do you?

Image by phillipbanks from Pixabay 

Writing and literature - is there a class issue? Discuss

Is there? Here are my thoughts.

There was a time when only the rich or people wealthy enough could read. They would receive education and only a very small number of the poor might be fortunate enough to be taught to read, through charities or religious groups. And, of course, the working classes would often be far too busy earning a living to have time to read, and they would not be able to afford books.

The nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw the start of the education of the masses, and suddenly books became readily available, lending libraries proliferated and most importantly, working people were able to access schools, and eventually universities. Literature for the many blossomed. The joy of reading became a part of everyday life for all people. The learning that literature brings, the opening of minds became an unstoppable force.

But there are barriers. Books cost money, even online versions - as do the devices needed for reading these. With most countries experiencing an increasing divide between rich and poor, affecting access to education as much as anything else, the love and development of literature may be wavering for the poorer in our society. And writing, as with many other artistic disciplines suffers when fewer people have the time and space to be creative.

If you have to work to live, then the time you have available to write is so limited. There are of course, many stories of successful authors overcoming difficult circumstances and publishing great works. But they are few and far between. To write successfully, some basic ingredients are physical space, mental space and time. For many, especially working parents - or working single parents in particular - finding the time to write when you are not so tired that you can't think, is a luxury that many of us simply cannot afford. There must be many wonderful works of literature that we are missing out on for the sake of so many writers not having enough money to live on to write.

Of course, it's not just about the sitting down and writing part of it. There's the isolation unless you happen to be in some kind of support group. There's learning the skills - we never imagine that an artist will simply start to plop paint on canvas without first learning some basic techniques, nor do we expect the pianist to start playing a concerto without first having a few lessons and learning the scales. But lessons for writers - at least in Gibraltar - are non-existent. Students - young people who go away to university - can take creative writing degrees. There are some who don't go away to study because while they might be great writers, they might not be equipped with three A levels. Nor might their families be able to supplement the maintenance grant to help them live abroad while they study.

This means, then, that writing and literature continues to some extent to hold a place of greater value in households of more affluent economic means. There's a whole raft of social and economic theories about this including nurture, habit, role modelling and so on. But essentially, there are more barriers to entering the literary world if you are working class or poor than if you are middle class or rich. That's not to say that working class people can't overcome these, but barriers that limit entry to one of our essential arts empoverish our culture.

Take our celebrated annual literary festival. A littering of Gibraltarian writers - thank goodness, positive role modelling for youngsters (if they can take time off school or work to attend the talks) if they can afford the ticket prices. I've totted up that if I, as an adult, want to see all of the  Gibraltarian writers, it will cost me around £84 if I include those talking about Gibraltar or other Gibraltarian writers. I'd like to see more well-known writers too so if I attended several more, then I would need to fork out over £100. Ouch. No can do.

So as a Gibraltarian who loves literature, I already feel a bit excluded from this event. Attending it in previous years, with great circumspection and counting of coins, I have been astounded at the plummy English accents, the twinsets and pearls, the way that the scruffier classes shuffle about uncomfortably in venues that perhaps give off a false grandeur - the University, the Garrison Library, the Convent - and the chatter on having lunch in Soto the next day. Well removed from the rookeries of our Upper Town where wildly intelligent and creative writers may well be lurking but with a sense of exclusion from the upper crust ambience of the Gib Lit Fest. 

There are some good things in our literary festival if you can access it and feel at ease. But it is growing increasingly exclusive, an occasion for all the wealthy ex pats from the Costa trying to keep a finger in the English (it's largely about the English) intellectual frame, or their families, a chance to 'do' the former colony and still circulate among their own. And while in reality it may not be quite as extreme a picture as I'm painting, if you attend this year, please take note. I know I'm not the only one who has observed this because of the many conversations I have had with others attending. Even the Brits notice. This year, there's a couple of Lords (both Tories) - figures of politics if not of literature at its most sublime - appearing, along with a chef, the Green Goddess (a true icon of get your butt moving literature) a couple of professors, historians, journalists, a poet or two and some novelists. 

Gibunco Gibraltar International Literary Festival 2019

The benefits of the festival being several, including filling some hotel rooms and restaurant tables, I would not dream of it not taking place. But it looks to me like Gibraltar is just another venue in a circuit of similar events. I really am not sure what value it has culturally at all, what it does to develop our own literary talent. Do our books sell to the visitors that attend? The festival bookshop, after all, is the only physical book shop stocking new titles in Gibraltar.

In Gibraltar, we cannot expect to generate a body of our own literature - and I'm just talking about written works worth reading, let alone great or superior works which last well beyond a single generation - if we do not ensure that writing and reading is accessible to everyone in our society, that being an author is something realistic that anyone can aspire to become. We are a nation of story tellers - that much is clear if you happen to wander to Casemates for a late breakfast and tune in to the many conversations held over coffee and churros. So where are the stories? And the poems? There are some authors: Mary Chiappe and Sam Benady, Mark Sanchez, Humbert Hernandez, Giordano Durante, Rebecca Faller, Gabriel Moreno among a few others. But are these household names? And are they recognisable outside of Gibraltar? I know Mark Sanchez is making inroads in the world of academia outside of Gibraltar, and Gabriel Moreno and Jonathan Teuma are known in at least UK and Spain, but unless Gibraltar really fosters literary talent at home - and that means opening up writing as an art form and nurturing it far more than we do, then we will always lie in the shadows of our former colonial masters, masters of a class system devised to keep the natives in their place and away from those of 'better breeding': the class system at its worst.

So is writing and literature a class issue? This is by no means a top-grade essay; I would need to try much harder to achieve that. But I have made my point: yes it is, and in Gibraltar with the way we continue to lap at overseas talent and avoid growing our own, literature is as much a class issue as anywhere else.

Sing your own song

"Everyone is looking out of the world through their emotion and history."

So said Ben Okri, an award-winning writer of intensely beautiful and spiritual prose and poetry.  Okri's work is steeped in the myths and fables, and in the history of the Nigeria of his birth and formative years.  His voice, unique though it is to him and to his creative talent is also, in part at least, the voice, or one of the many voices, that make up the song that is Nigeria.

It is probably far too simplistic to say that the place where you live is the major influence on your writing - the landscape and the culture that surround you when you are young, growing up, or where you spend such a long time that it gets right into you.  There are all sorts of factors that give you the voice that is uniquely yours and these would include your education, your family make-up perhaps, your experiences at different points in your life, your health, your relationships with others.  

I'm particularly fascinated by how where you are - your location, the place that you physically inhabit in the world - influences your writing.  After my post last week about what being a local writer in Gibraltar might mean, this week I have been mulling over how being Gibraltarian or being in Gibraltar might affect a writer.

There has to be something, I pondered, in the fact that we are so many people crammed together in such a small space.  The noise of everyday, which rises quite a way up into the Upper Rock even when you try to escape it, carried on the breeze that whips up dull sounds of traffic or the sharper roar of an aeroplane taking off, or the boom of pile drivers cutting through the sizzling of the cicadas in the trees on a summer afternoon, must surely permeate all our thoughts.  The intensity of the blue of a winter's sunny morning out at Europa, one of the few spaces in Gibraltar where you can feel surrounded by light and open space is at once refreshing and soothing, inspirational perhaps.

I guess we find stories in our history, that mixed bag of events where cultures met and mixed and clashed and from which we are emerging, slowly, perhaps painfully, as our own nation with roots that are embedded in traditions from all over the world.  This means that our language is mixed - English and Spanish are entwined somehow.  Some of us prefer one language to the other, some of us write in one language for some purposes and in the other for different types of expression.  It is a reflection of how we use those languages day to day.  Still others of us speak in other languages: Moroccan, perhaps, Urdu, or Hindi and a host of others.

Some writers will be of one nation or other and have visited, lived in or near Gibraltar, and have found their inspiration here for a piece of work.  I think of Thomas Mogford's detective novels, for example.  Gibraltar's own contribution to world literature is still small, still very much developing, but even what there is has a fascinating story to tell of how place influences voice.  

Take Humbert Hernandez's short stories "El Accordeonista y otras historias". These are stories based on his young days in post-war Gibraltar and reflect a lost period which just about remains in our collective memory.  They are stories of his childhood, and fittingly, he writes them in the language of his childhood: Spanish.  

Gabriel Moreno writes in both languages, and uses language to explore that duality of identity that many Gibraltarians experience - a classical post-colonnial English education focusing largely on English rather than Gibraltarian history and literature - yet a day to day cultural existence that is predominantly Spanish - villancicos and polvorones at Christmas and torta de patata on the beach in the summer.  Speaking at the Gibraltar International Literary Festival last month, he fascinated me with his view on English and Spanish in writing; the former being presented as a precise language which cuts through emotion and positions meaning almost as if writing is a form of engineering, whereas Spanish flows in a wave of passion and emotion, carrying meaning like waves to the shore.    (Those are my words not his - he described what I am trying to convey much more succinctly and in a more learned fashion, but this is what I "heard".)

Sam Benady and Mary Chiappe, an older generation than Moreno's, use classical English language and writing techniques to create their historical whodunnits, and yet in so doing, they express a uniquely Gibraltarian world-view of a particular point in time and place.  Mark Sanchez' novels come from a Gibraltarian experience, not just in setting, but in "The Escape Artist" from the perspective of a Gibraltarian student in an English university. (Click the link below).  

The Escape Artist

Kailash Noguera writes from the depths of a hispanic passion that sometimes bursts full of light and sometimes broods darkly, harsh as the Rock that birthed it.  David Bentata and Levy Attias bring us works that are imbued with the spirituality that influences so many of the people that have their roots here. Sonia Golt displays the flamboyance that is the Mediterranean: sunshine and sea-spray and falling in love.  Rebecca Faller uses her native English in all its glorious, incisive fullness with the precision of a military operation to cut out a sharply-defined view of her adopted Gibraltar, warts and all and with a tinge of humour - because you cannot get away from laughter in this tiny city.

I could go on.  Gibraltar's writers and those writers in and around Gibraltar, are all writing  Gibraltar's song.  We are all writing our view from our place, our history and our emotions.

If it is true that there are only seven basic story plots, then there are as many ways of telling a story as there are people. Each of us has a unique view out of their own world, an individual experience which to a greater or lesser extent may be shared with some others, but the beauty of writing is that we each have our own very special voice, and each is as valid as the other.  

That last thought is rather comforting.  Rather than wondering if I ought to try to write like this or like that, I just have to write like...me.  I write my view of the world, for better or for worse, with my way of expressing things, with my experiences, influences, passions or my own brand of cold cynicism, shaping and colouring what and how I write.  So.....to sharpen yet another quill and write some more...I'll do it my way.

Photo courtesy of www.FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Mediterranean Blue

Surrounded by blue - the view across the Straights to North Africa

Blue.  Everywhere.  We are surrounded by this intense blue.  It's the first thing I notice on opening my eyes in the morning; a blueness that shimmers and tells me what the day is to be like.  At night, it is navy, punctured by the silver sliver of the moon and the pinpricks of a million stars.  On a winter's morning, it is a fresh, clean, sharpness of blue, and in summer it fades behind a white haze as the sun bleaches even the sky with its heat.

That's what living in Gibraltar is like.  I can pour forth voluminous paragraphs about culture and commerce, finance and shipping, borders and nasty neighbours and politics, apes and tourism, but actually, living here, growing up here, being part of here, is about that incessant, vibrant blue that surrounds us, day in, day out.  

The sky and sea are the dominant features of our lives.  We are perched on a jutting, upwards thrusting narrow rock with limited if lush vegetation and only small opportunities for independent survival. But so tenancious are the indigenous people, mixed over generations of trade and interaction with the rest of the world as we are, gripping onto our rock face with the agility of mountain goats, that we have managed to create an economic success of a pretty tricky situation.  

To the South of the Rock

Yet it is the sea and the sky that dominate our lives and our thinking.  The sea fed us, nurtured us, imprisoned us.  To live and to expand beyond the immediate, we had to sail, to use the sea, learn its ways, read its moods and movements so that we could survive its ferocity.  It was the sea that brought us trade and took us to the rest of the world.  It was the sea and how we could overlook the entry to an ocean, the passage in between two continents, that brought us riches.  

Cruise ship in harbour as the evening draws in

It is the sea that still dominates and shapes us however we try to tame its strength, and it lies there, allowing itself to be fished in and sailed upon, for filth to be poured into it and its resources to be threatened, and for its boundaries to be pushed back.  For now.  Standing at the edge of land - artificial land, created by dropping enormous rocks into the sea - I see a beast with emerald eyes lurking in its depths, waiting to reclaim its own.  What goes around comes around, and I hope not in my lifetime.

Moonrise over the Rock

In the meantime, it is the colour.  I am no psychologist, but that vibrant blue that surrounds us at every turn must surely have an effect on people.  Is that why Gibraltar more than bustles and buzzes, whether with the energy of commerce and enterprise during the working week, or with excitement and passion of sport, music, dance and leisure activities of the weekend?  Music festivals, May Day festivals, National Day festivals, International Song Festival, literary festival, arts festivals, drama festivals, all sorts of sporting tournaments - the variety is endless.  When, on the other hand, the sky turns out grey - and when that odd, easterly cloud, el Levante, sits perched on the Rock like an ill-fitting hat and muffler, the grey cloying and so deep it borders on purple - and the sea is like a layer of slate scales, the mood dulls and deadens and people frown and tell each other their very bones ache with the damp.  Gibraltar on a grey day is like looking at a work of art without the light on and blackout curtains blocking the gallery windows.

I have often wondered to how great an extent the landscape can shape the nature of the people that live in it.  Without a doubt, landscape has inspired much writing - consider the many poems inspired by the awesome beauty of the Lake District, for example.  I cannot avoid but being influenced by the openness of the sky and the intensity of the blue that lies at my feet wherever I stand on this Rock.  I think, unscientific though my observations are, that I can sample a little of that theory of landscape here.  Gibraltar is the gateway to Europe and the guardian of the Mediterranean, and its colour is Mediterranean Blue.

In some ways I can't avoid being drawn to that colour, that light, to the open sky and the unending sea.  This is just one of the stories that shows that influence:

                                         Mediterranean Blue

     Blue is the sky on a fine May morning. It is the sea when the west wind blows across the Straits in June and when the sun sinks into its cool comfort after scorching the surrounding flats all day long. Blue is the intensity of a love given freely and cruelly returned. It is the colour of forget-me-nots nestling by a brook in the greenness of springtime Kent.

     Sara’s eyes were the azure that captures sailors like a whirlpool to drown them in their depths. Sara had seen men drown in shades of grey. That was the only colour her eyes could see:  the leaden shadows of the dank Levanter cloud that had settled on the backs of the buildings that creep up the Rock towards the Tower of Homage; the grey of the steel and glass box that was her office, a rambling, undefined space decorated with white paint, dove fabrics and black fittings; the various shades of the suits – fitted, pinstripe, Prince of Wales check, plain, flared, tailored, and all grey. The hands of disappointment that gripped the inside of her stomach and twisted it each time she thought of those forget-me-nots in Kent were today, as always, the colour of thunderclouds.

     “Enjoy your evening out on Saturday?  Where did you go, casino?”  Jennifer’s cheery Monday morning voice was too pink, her hair too blond, her lips startlingly glossy, her blouse a painful white.

      Sara gave her secretary a frost-bitten stare and the curt answers that best suited the dullness of the day.

      “Oh come on, you went out on the pull, you said,” Jennifer was still only twenty, single and fascinated with the older woman’s lack of lovers.

     “I was joking. A woman my age doesn’t need to go out on the pull. We have far more interesting things to do,” Sara admonished. It had been an eventful Saturday and she did not want to share the details of it with the young paper pusher.

     When Jennifer breezed into Sara’s office with her mid-morning black coffee, Sara had relented a little.

     “My friend Laura and I started at the Marina with a quick meal,” she told Jennifer, hoping to placate her curiosity. She gazed out of the window at the damp of the day trickling like a layer of sweat down the tiled facade of the building opposite. She felt unusually claustrophobic today, enclosed, the outdoors offering no respite from the infinite gloom. The heat of the day belied its dullness. At least in England you rarely suffered this wet heat, where you dripped out of your morning shower and could feel the sweat running down your back as you tried to dry yourself off.

     “Oh, it’s nice there. Then what?”

     “Can you get me copies of the Transport International accounts for last month please?  Oh, we wondered into Spain to meet up with Laura’s cousins and had a great evening dancing flamenco at a bar in Estepona. Very tame really, but fun, and good for the figure.”

     “You hardly need to worry about your figure. You always look great.”

     “Exercise, raw fruit and vegetables, my girl. It would do wonders for your skin too,” Sara turned to examine the accounts and ended the conversation. Jennifer had perfect peaches and cream skin, unusually fair for a local girl, but then her father was English. No, he was Welsh, Sara corrected herself, and might have been her lover all those years ago had she not been so besotted with Nigel.

     Nigel, the tall, fair, green-eyed, fresh-faced Englishman that had helped her with her cumbersome cases into the halls of residence at university all those years ago and who had stopped her heart with a flash of an emerald smile. Nigel was a second year student from Tenterden, a volunteer helping the freshers settle in. Sara had told her parents she intended to return as a teacher, but once she had spent two overawed days in Nigel’s easy company she knew she never wanted to return to a small town jutting out into a sapphire sea.

     In Richmond Park, Sara discovered the scent of grass that is trimmed for the last time before winter, the desolate darkness of the leaves on the oaks just before they crisped to brown and fell to the ground, the velvet of the cloaks of moss that lined the banks of the brooks where she sat with Nigel, both art students, both sketching, he engrossed in his work, she engrossed in him. They dated, they courted, Sara frequented the chapel on Sunday mornings while Nigel trained at the local pool. He had wanted to swim for the Olympic team and had only narrowly missed selecion. Then, for the rest of the week, she struggled with the red flames of desire that coursed through her young veins at his touch, and resisted him.

     “Sara, why don’t you come out with us on Friday this time?” Jennifer bubbled at her through her pastel makeup as they finished for the day and emerged to the pea-soup air that swirled in the street. The concrete beneath Sara’s feet was black and sticky. The evening stank of sewers that had festered in the heat and not been flushed through by rain for weeks.

     “Well, I’ve a lot of work on these days, especially with those gaming houses talking to the bank about finances. I’ll probably have to work through the weekend,” she hesitated, needing friends now more than ever,  “but if I manage to take some time off, I’ll call you.”

     Sara thought of friendship and remembered Nigel. Nigel had been jade, the colour of jealousy and perfidy. She had brushed aside visions of him swathed in cloths of cinnamon spice and tangerine, limbs locked with some of the long-limbed blondes at whom he would glance when he thought she was not looking. A lifetime of gazing at nothing but the grey and white of the pillar of limestone on which she lived, an expanse of blue so bright it burnt the eyes and the sable and olive tones of the sierras across the bay had left Sara with a thirst for green, for the colour of spring, of newness and life.

     It was on a cushion of lush grass and a pillow of bluebells in the early weeks of summer that fateful year that she surrendered to her lust. Nigel had kissed her throat, and the wanting had poured from her in a torrent of crimson that overwhelmed them both. He had lain between her legs and whispered words of love to soothe her until she had sobbed with desire. Then they had sat against a tree and rested, and he had told Sara her eyes were the colour of the forget-me-nots that dotted the green lace that bordered the woods.

     Two weeks later he had told her he was engaged to Lucy; leggy, platinum, big-breasted and with skin creamy white like the top layer of milk in a bottle. Sara had plunged into the indigo depths of a despair so great she thought she would never emerge.

     A month after that, she discovered she was pregnant and she went on to fail all her exams. No boyfriend, no place at college and no hope, so Sara did the only thing Nigel suggested she should. He had even hinted he would leave Lucy if she did it. She did not sleep for a week, so that she saw everything under a haze of scarlet as the veins in her eyes swelled.

      She had not expected the abortion to be so quick. A few moments in surgery and the baby was torn away, a bundle of red and blue, the same red-streaked indigo as her crushed soul.

     Sara had returned to Gibraltar in the oppressive heat of a full Levanter in August. She had been ill for months, which had saved her explaining to her parents why she had had to give up her studies. Nigel had stayed with Lucy, Sara had flushed her soul down a hospital sluice, and her world had been shades of grey ever since.  A monotone existence, except for the times she was able to exact revenge, spill out her bitterness on other men.  At those times, for a few desperately short hours, she could see her world in exquisite colours again.  She thirsted more and more for those few hours.

     “Would you like a lift home?” Jennifer offered, “Mario is picking me up today on his way home from work. His brother will be with him. He’s not much younger than you and very tasty. You’ll like him.”

     “Stop trying to pair me up with anyone, I have no time for playing games with men, and thanks, but I think I’ll walk tonight,” Sara smiled at Jennifer, thinking she should be pleased the girl wanted to include her in her life. But, like Sara, Jennifer had an unerring ability to attract men and enjoyed the chase and conquer games they played occasionally at the local bars. Except all Jennifer did was sleep with her conquests. Sara’s game always ended shrouded in the midnight blue of the sea.

     Sara strolled up to Main Street. The crowds of the day were thinning and Sara paused to buy herself a bottle of rum and some cigarettes. She found it hard to face the infinite black of the night without some form of anaesthesia. She considered buying the day’s newspaper, but refrained, too scared at what might have been found by the Rock’s eager reporters, or by the coastguards. Instead she walked on, through Southport Gates, past Jumpers Bastion and onwards, her strides long and easy despite the thin heels. Now and again she looked to her right, to where the sun broke from the clouds and shot sparks of white light at her from the surface of the sea. That great, grey, groaning beast, where she had left her last lover just a few days earlier, surrounded her. It was everywhere she looked. Sara could not avoid that expanse of slate. She hated it, was terrified of it, yet it drew her, and now it held what was left of him in its cold, watery embrace.

     “I’m sorry, Madam, but you cannot walk through any further, we have closed the Rosia Bay area off to all the public,” the sergeant’s voice terrified her to attention.

     “Oh, I’m sorry officer, I was day dreaming. Do I really have to walk all the way back and then round Europa Road?”  Sara struggled to think.

     “I’m afraid so.”

     “Why is the Bay closed?”

     “We think there’s been an accident. We have divers out there.”

     “Oh dear, is anyone hurt?”

     “A body washed up on the shore. The fourth in the last year. Another suicide, it appears.”

     “My goodness. That’s terrible. Well, I’ll go back then.”

     The sergeant nodded his helmeted head in respect, navy against the backdrop of stone.

Sara managed a smile as she retraced her steps. The chicks return to roost, her grandmother tended to say. She shuddered with ice-blue rage. Another one gone and still no-one had found out. She had triumphed, and it was only in those moments of triumph that she could look out of her window at the Mediterranean and admire its unique blue.