The Road from Santiago

  I have, sometime in the previous 1000 posts, mused on the nature of preconceptions being the spam of the mind. Thing is the universe is large and the brain capacity is small and while one is wondering if Sarah Biddulph did kidnap a mad woman in 1776 you don’t have space to know about every city in the world - and Cadiz, pronounced Cardiff - is one of them. My knowledge of Cadiz is that Elizabethans got tetchy with the place and that it held out against Napoleon and his ilk. In a wonderfully constructed board game called War & Peace the French tended to sweep all before them, leaving Cadiz and the like holding out. The French slowly have to strip garrisons to defend supply lines until it gets critical and they have to abandon land to make field armies. What I didn’t realise was that Cadiz really is stuck out on a limb and that it has a bit of reputation for being relaxed and liberal. I have included a satellite picture today so you get the idea that we are walking alongside a ...

  We are heading towards Chiclana de la Frontera, which appears to be one of those places which you live if you can’t be squeezed in to Cadiz.  They aren’t the only ones.  The Phoenicians and their descendants seem to have moved in.   Being on the river and within reach of the sea it seemed to be an ideal place for buildings, cisterns, silos and ovens and all the other things discovered by archaeologists in 2006. Fast forward to 1303. When the  Crown of Castille gave the place to Alonso Perez de Guzman  Guzman was Moroccan born and may have been a Muslim.  It is suggested his origins were smudged to fit in with the religious intolerance of the 16th century. The place boomed, along with Cadiz, during the Early Modern - interrupted by the tsunami caused by the Lisbon earthquake which killed dozens of people. In 1811 the French turned up to siege Cadiz. An Anglo-Spanish army turned up, under Sir Thomas Graham. They did for the French but did not manage to...

  It is another day of the straight road. I have been monitoring the Mabella Rugby Club. They are jolly active and been away for weekends for tournaments and good luck to them. So what about cricket? Spain became an Affiliated member of the International Cricket Council, and became Associate Members in 2017.  This may be a slow burn as the first recorded match was in 1809 - between two British teams - part of the Duke of Wellington’s tour of that year. Various expat groups played each other until 1975.  Did the founding of the Madrid Cricket Club’s founding pave the way for the return to democracy? History will have to be the judge of that and  while it is mulling on, we will move on. Spain went off to Austria to play in its first ECC Trophy, where they played Portugal - and lost by 63 runs. In 2019 Spain took place in their first T20 match and beat Malta by 7 wickets at the La Manga Club, Murcia. So far they have played 49 T-20 matches won 40 of them.  The high...

  Once I presented a thing on our village’s History. It was notable that, being a distance from where the local paper was printed and, what with one thing and another, the only time the working classes arrived in the headlines was when they were committing, usually petty, crimes. History is full of unrecorded people because History is what we record. The past is lousy with them. All of this is by way of an introduction to the fact we are leaving Medina Sidonia. We have an empty road ahead. True Born English peoples of all persuasions will have heard of the Duke, if they know anything of the Great Armada. He really just gets a cameo - on in the 2nd Act of ‘Elizabeth: Why I’m Fab’ and then forgotten.  Let us not forget him. Alonso Pérez de Guzmán el Bueno, 7th Duke of Medina Sidonia, was born 10th September 1550. He got the gig as Duke in 1558, when his grandfather died.  The family are a bit interesting.  His paternal grandmother was the illegitimate daughter of the B...