La Torre de
Dalt is a large 'Mas' (a Catalan traditional farmhouse) in the hills
above Girona. It's the place where, for the last five years, Anne has
run her annual writing retreats. When her course ended this June, I
hired it for a second week and invited friends and relatives to join
me. I told them this was a celebration for my 70th year, but it also
marked the completion of Left Field - bringing
together some of those who have played their part in my life and
without whom I would have had no memoir. I had worried how these
people from my past and present would mix: a political banner maker,
a businessman, a bereavement counsellor, musicians, writers and
journalists. I need not have. Widely and in some cases, wildly,
disparate people spent the week talking, eating, drinking, walking
and partying together. No one there will forget how we all fell in
love with Alice Kilroy as she encouraged us all, willingly or not,
towards the Revolution. The writers soon became known as the
'murmuration of writers' as they met in corners of the building to
create new work or read excerpts from their novels and poems. They
seemed to flock and flow through the building like birds. In the
evenings, during their 'open mic' nights, they read their work and
invited the rest of us to join them. Oha Maslo, who had driven from
Bosnia to Spain with Teo Krilic and his family, apologised for
turning down their invitation to hear them: “As soon a I see the
first comma,” he told me, “I go into a coma.” If I'd told him
that one person was writing a novel about setting up a whorehouse in
Australia, he might have forgotten his problems with punctuation
marks. In any case his apology was adopted by Julian Herbert, one of
the poets there, as the opening phrase for his paean to the week: Comma coma? Trace back
through castles, Until, until
they're in the sky, And we hold
hands together, While we
fly. Teo played
guitar while Oha joined him on the cajon drum. They sang Na Klepeci Nanulama – about a woman
hearing the clogs of her dead mother on the stairs. La Torre looks
across at the Cap de Creus above Cadaqués where Dali had his summer
home. Some guests visited his museum in Figueres, but they didn't
need to go there to experience the surreal. The week took
on a weirdly wonderful quality when the Balkan rock group, Dubioza
Kolektiv, dropped by. They were en
route from Barcelona to France, a tour which was to end at the
Glastonbury Festival. When someone asked them where they were from,
they answered from practically every country of ex-Yugoslavia. “What
was that war all about?” said Mario, “Here we are all together
again.” With funky haircuts and dressed in black they didn't touch
the bottle of whisky they had brought for me, but drank tea and
coffee and ate dainty biscuits. The whisky was emptied that evening,
but with no help from me. I am no longer allowed to drink much
alcohol. Oha and Teo shook their heads in bafflement each time I
turned down an offer of another beer or glass of wine. The only
advantage of not joining in, apart from staying alive, was that I was
able to talk a bit more sense. On the last day, Maureen Larkin read a 'haiku' for me, which pretty well sums up my life in 18
syllables: '70 miles
speeding, The cops
have not caught me
yet, No point
braking now'. Check out La Torre: The Film!
(Left Field has reached its target of 100% . If you
haven't bought your copy yet it's now 100% certain to be published)
Order here
PIC: Alice Kilroy' 'banner inspired by the haiku
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