Picos Folgate

Driving up from the main Potes road to the village of Bes, from which the rest of the family have launched themselves on a guided walk. (‘It says it’s easy – or does that word just mean ‘lower’, as in, the walk is in the foothills?’). The temperature has climbed into the nineties in old-fashioned money; there are stunted trees I don’t recognise with succulent-looking leaves and more butterflies than I have ever seen, in a huge variety of colours and sizes. A lot higher than we are, the Picos de Europa show touches of snow just below their summits.

I switch on the CD player and the latest Madness fills the silence. They are a London band and The Liberty of Norton Folgate is a love letter to London. Possibly their best ever record – certainly for some time. At home, this album sounds richly allusive, yes - full of dark rainwashed streets and London characters in all their complicated lives and sinfulness - but also an affirmation. It reinforces a sense of the place where you are. However strange, it is about home. Here in the Picos however, it seems wildly exotic. NW5, Holloway and Chinatown seem fictional places; unlikely inventions in this bright, green and mountainous landscape. London in some way becomes like all of its fictional manifestations – an outlandish, rare place that teeters on the edge of impossibility.