Beside the Seaside

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In Which I Ride the Perfect Road

September 10, 2007 by Mike

Attention bikers. Give up yr job. Leave yr family. Sell yr house. Get here as soon as you can:

Click this link!

Ride this road every day, back and forth, up and down, round and round, every last, luvverly curve of smooth tarmac unsullied by lorry, truck or car. It was just me and the road today. I have lots of coast to ride, so offer this to you instead. Enjoy:

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Gernika

Route: Donostia - Gernika

Happy birthday, Catherine. And to think I'm on the Camino today.. yr Camino.. on my two wheels.

I waved goodbye to the Lindsay-Balls.. with more than a hint of With thrown in -- Rupert has my Pa's eyes. Harry and Lily have skool today, Di is off to Bilbao for a meeting this morning. (I expect to take two days to get there myself.. but then Rupe would take a couple of weeks), so Phil, Rupe and I go for a Man's Breakfast. (Low fat croissant and coffee.) And then.. I'm off again.

Heard the one about the Frenchman, the German and the half-Norwegian/ half-Englishman...?

I swing out of Donostia on the motorway, accelerating up from the slip-road to join a French biker on a BMW and a German biker on a Honda (in itself, newsworthy). So there we are, a Frenchman, a German and an Englishman.. three jokers in search of a punchline.. I'm suddenly loving the sensation of riding shotgun to a faceless compadre or two.. but no sooner have my fellows realised I am there than I am peeling off onto a sideroad to head down to the coast.

They should be jealous of me. While they plough on down the motorway, I'm suddenly, blissfully, twisting through a verdant valley, small villages and smaller farms, no sign for now of the sea on the other side of the first rank of hills that line the coast. It's beautiful, I've been told, but I'm not seeing it. No matter, this is the coast road, and I'm cherishing every degree of contour. It's good riding.

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I stop in Gernika. You may know it better as Guernica, because that's how Picasso spelled the name of his greatest painting -- in Spanish rather than Basque. And you may have seen Guernica -- but, like me, you'd have had to travel to Madrid, the capital of *Spain*, in order to do so. It's ironic that a painting that has come to represent the purest form of 'Basqueness' has such Spanish credentials. But then Picasso himself was Spanish, born near Malaga.

There's a line of thought that Basqueness, as a nationalist sentiment, is just a 19th century construct anyway, a jumbled hybrid of conservative, anti-centralist Carlist malcontents and radical leftist activists -- a hybrid as hard to understand as the language. But this isn't the place.. and I'm not the person.. oh where oh where is Basque scholar Andy Hooper when you need him? (Answer: watching the rugby.)

Where was I? Oh yes. Gernika puts a good face on the absence of Guernica. Indeed, there's an exhibition to mark the 70th anniversary of the painting that includes several preliminary sketches, on loan from Madrid. But as for the real thing, it's still in another country. (The exhibition is closed today, so I'm stopping the night to see it in the morning.) (Which means an afternoon and evening in Gernika -- which I have been told many times is a boring, poky little place with nothing going for it except its terrible history; a town whose centre was bombed to destruction by the Nazis, and then rebuilt by Mr Ugly. It's true, I'm afraid. No doubt a little joke by Franco, who hated the Basques almost as much as they despised him. But the setting, in the lush, green hills, is gorgeous: he couldn't take that away.)

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