Madrid, apparently

I have spent much of the week in Madrid. Apparently.

I say apparently because it was a work trip — tightly scheduled and allowing precisely zero downtime. I often hear the phrase, “Your job must be great, you get to travel,” but anyone who travels for work knows there is a marked difference between work travel and pleasure. This was very much the former.

I disembarked at the airport under cover of darkness, straight into a taxi and on to the hotel. After check-in, I immediately headed back out to a restaurant for a pre-arranged dinner. Due to the late arrival, this consisted of assorted small bites from the remnants of tapas service and a glass of wine, eaten while chatting. Then it was back to the hotel and straight to bed, ready for an early start.

The next day was an all-day conference, followed immediately by dinner, and then — you guessed it — bed. I did glimpse some beautiful snow-covered mountains in the distance from a conference room window, but that was the sum total of my view of Madrid that day.

Thursday was marginally better. I rose early and squeezed in a very short run, again in darkness, before returning to the conference. I left at lunchtime, back into a taxi, which offered another fleeting glimpse of the city before delivering me to the airport and homeward bound.

That was my Madrid experience.

I will, no doubt, be repeating a similar pattern next week, when the destination is Modena, Italy.

Back home for the weekend, it was a cold start. Pepper and I walked around Holden Reservoir in the morning, the air sharp and still.

I’ve been using the Merlin app more than usual lately, though I really need to set up the alerts on my watch. Leaving it running in my pocket for the duration means I now refer to it as the “Jim Bowen app” — it tells me what I could have won. (A very 1980s Bullseye reference there.)

True to form, it informed me that I could have won a long-eared owl. I comforted myself instead with goosanders, herons, and deer — not a bad consolation prize.

Merlin does occasionally get things wrong, but for the last couple of weeks it has been consistently claiming to hear an American robin. Ordinarily, I’d dismiss this, but it’s not just my app: a friend who walks in similar places has also had it flagged and is convinced she’s seen it. This comes hot on the heels of a news report that a European robin has been delighting people in Montreal, thought to have crossed the Atlantic by ship. Who knows — perhaps we’re in the midst of an unofficial robin exchange programme. I’ll keep watching; it could be an escapee that’s quietly settled in Helmshore.

It was also the weekend of the Great British Garden Birdwatch. Regular readers will know that my small garden is something of a feeding hub, and I watch — and photograph — its visitors daily from the window. On returning from our walk, I topped up the feeders, settled down with a warm mug and my notebook, and prepared to count.

It was… disappointing.

High winds and the frequent visits of my neighbour’s cat, Kevin, put paid to the wonderful numbers I’d been expecting. No bullfinches, goldfinches, nuthatches, chaffinches, long-tailed tits, or coal tits. Instead, I counted a couple of blue tits, a pair of great tits, two robins, and a lone sparrow. There was also a solitary reed bunting and a blackbird — but overall, numbers were well down on my usual tally.

Still, the count was done, and my results submitted.

And perhaps that’s the quiet lesson of the week: some places are passed through rather than truly seen, while others — home, the garden, the view from the window — reveal themselves slowly, even when they disappoint. After conference rooms and taxi windows, there is something deeply grounding about standing still with a mug in hand, watching whatever chooses to arrive, and being grateful simply to notice