Category Archives: Reviews

Book review – Clearly Defined Clouds by Jude Higgins

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Clearly Defined Clouds book cover_Jude Higgins

In this collection overflowing with awarding-winning and highly commended flash fictions and micro tales, author Jude Higgins creates a world where goddesses stroll through the eons to discover Zoom while humans lament decreasing biodiversity and discover the simplicity of love beyond semaphore. Even at its most playful, this is a collection with big messages at its heart.

As I read, my mind filled with images – colour is a vital ingredient of Jude’s fiction. not least in ‘Pink’, where it paints a beautiful scene against a story of loss again “the blush of that single rose growing by the door, you said was a winter miracle, still alive, trembling in the frost.”

Overall, the colour-saturation of the writing is an impression enhanced by Jeanette Sheppard’s wonderfully evocative cover image.

Love stories are unconventional in Jude’s hands, even when they draw on familiar sources. In ‘Jack and Jill’ we discover how Jack really came to fall down the hill, and all that was lost because of it.

Familiar nursery rhyme and characters crop up throughout, from an ageing Gretel rewriting the past to a sparky, empowered Rapunzel.

Other tales experiment with form to devastating effect. ‘Dark Horses’ is particularly deft, telling Alf’s story by listing the horses he has known and loved. This is also one of the flashes accompanied by an image – adding another layer of storytelling I appreciated.

Family relationships are examined with a gentle, dreamlike magic realism in ‘Manna’ and ‘Wash it All Away.’ In each of these, and so many of her other stories, Jude shares her understanding of and empathy for human nature.

In the title story, ‘Clearly Defined Cloud’, an ending offers the promise of quiet contentment you’ll want to savour by reading more than once, while ‘The Icing’ clings to hope as precarious as petals and button eyes. Jude’s skilful touch and painterly imagery allows hefty topics to land lightly, sneaking in emotions below scenes of nostalgia and deceptive calm.

One of my favourite’s in the collection is ‘How to Collect Water From a Well When There is Only an Office Chair to Hand.’ In this dystopian tale, three thirsty women who’ve lost everything to men team up to solve the title’s puzzle and see off a growing number of salacious frogs. Some lines hint at a darkness that draw to mind Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale with the women taking turns to have spins on the chair “to remind me when I could go out and work in an office.”

This is a collection of sweeping variety, with each flash offering fresh viewpoints on the people we are, the hopes we hold close and the experiences that impact us along the way.

This book was given to me in exchange for a fair review.

Clearly Defined Clouds by Jude Higgins is published by AdHoc Books. Buy your copy.

The Great Festival Flash Off, online, hosted by Jude Higgins, is on Saturday 26th October 2024

At this online session, I’ll be teaching a one-hour version of my ‘Writing on Water’ workshop, inviting flash writers to explore different ways of using water to dive deeper into themes in their writing, with generative exercises, examples from a variety of writers, and time to write.

The full day (11am to 6.30pm) only costs £30, with two hour-long workshops and one 90min workshop, plus readings, breakout rooms for chats, yoga for writers and a competition each time.

In addition to ‘Writing on Water’, the 26th October edition of the Great Festival Flash Off includes workshops with Ingrid Jendzrejewski and a discussion/reading/Q&A with Karen Jones and Diane Simmons.

Book for The Great Festival Flash Off here.

Book review – Hereafter by Sarah Freligh

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Hereafter coverWhen our world has been shattered by loss, how do we carry on? Author Sarah Freligh asks this question, and countless others, in the stormy pages of her novella-in-flash.

Protagonist Pattylee is so real that her revelations read like memoir, with a searing honesty that captures not only her devastation at losing her son Petey, but the complex, wonderful minutiae that made him the imperfect, glorious human she raised as far as she could before brain cancer claimed him.

Some passages are delicious steams of consciousness, as in the opening flash: “What She Remembers: His First Year”, a beautifully smeared blur in which she tells her son “I found you at the end of the rainbow after it stopped raining.”

Petey’s own imagination paints scenery around them, as he tells his mother he was hatched from an egg and had fought at Normandy.

From the explosive narrative of ‘Metaphors for a Tumor’ to the hush of ‘Hospice: Quiet’ where a nurse comments “We die between breaths”, the contrasts in this collection only make the words shine brighter.

Sarah is unflinching as she invites us into scenes where the bereaved Pattylee drinks to dull the pain so she can “stumble on through the night, skid into a new morning.”

The challenges of single parenthood also stand out on the page, especially in ‘Two Days Arter Your Kid Dies, You Go To Work’, garnishing sentences with “a twist of lemon”, “a ghost of vermouth”, and “plastic swords of oranges and cherries the color of fresh blood red”, providing the impression of stinging sharpness as Pattylee soldiers on (to borrow one of the book’s other recurrent metaphors)  “Because you need money to buy the casket you’re paying for in instalments.”

You can taste each devastating page at the back of your throat, while shimmering colours Sarah evokes suggest the rush of life even as it drains away.

The shortness of each flash (some only a paragraph long), heightens the sense of time dashing by through Petey’s brief, vivid life and the ‘Hereafter’ of the book’s title. Throughout, with spaceships, meteor showers and Petey described as mist and glitter, there’s a sense of Petey taking flight.

Gradually, there comes a hint of healing as Pattylee finds her new version of hereafter beyond “the days and days of gray.” There’s something achingly rational about the birthday cake she bakes on what would have been Petey’s sixteenth birthday: “chocolate because she likes it, though Petey never did.”

As a portrait of parenthood, grief and humanity, this book sings, slaps and comforts by turns. The writing is clear, unfussy and distinctly unsentimental, making Pattylee’s emotional voyage utterly believable. From beginning to end, Hereafter is a story that feels necessary, relatable and real.

Hereafter by Sarah Freligh is published by Ad Hoc Fiction. Buy your copy.

This book was given to me in exchange for a fair review.

Poetry review – Battery Rocks by Katrina Naomi

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Battery-Rocks-book coverIn this impressively immersive collection, the sea is a force to be reckoned with like a tempestuous lover who will as soon cradle you in her arms as dash you against the closest rocks. Poet Katrina Naomi sets this theme from the first line of Fickle Lover: “Ours is not a relationship of equals.” and later: “You are always on display.” Not only a lover, then, but an unpredictable, narcissistic lover who will always, always put their own needs before yours, because yours barely surface in their awareness, if at all.

And yet, in Naomi’s language, this is not only acceptable, but alluring.

Plaiting in Cornish terms such as ‘An mor’ – the sea – and ‘byrla’ – embrace – Naomi Makes us revel in the otherworldliness of this element that brings us deadly hydrozans as gifts and washes us in “her shouty body.”

In I know you as, she asks the sea “Tell me/ what is your safe word?/ You never listen to mine.”

The beauty of feeling at home in the water, even as it threatens our steadiness, is palpable, not least in Thoughts Over Hot Chocolate: “some say we were once all fish/ beyond the land a sense of belonging”.

Throughout the visceral poems, the sea has personality and moods that pay into her unpredictability, with the poet alternatively being caressed by calm silky water and battling with waves. Human variance that shows up on the lines is far darker, however, in the poems i.m. of Sarah Everard (“With each stroke I strike the water / thankful for my strength that night”) and Tattoo: for Kim Moore.

Several of the poems play with form, jostling in landscape rather than portrait format to take up the length of the page and cajoling you to turn the book on its side. It’s a practical move that jolts you out of passive reading and requires you to act, while bringing to mind tipping and spilling.

The poem The Sea Speaks, written from the viewpoint of the sea, is utterly entrancing. This is the ocean as colluder, but only in the sense a cat welcomes belly rubs, until the moment it bores of attention and bites.

But the true threats, Katrina suggests, are those on land where we feel safe and therefore less guarded. In Cormorant, the poet mentions risks taken and luck that prevailed – a train crossing where “I moseyed across/ the metal lines” and narrowly missed becoming mincemeat, “the drink I left on the bar, (…) the knife my attacker forgot to carry.”

The whole world, she warns, is full of danger – at least the sea is honest.

Even in these dire musings, Katrina reminds us of beauty, telling us of the cormorant’s “dark whoosh of feathers” and how “The fleet of its wings has me shiver”.

There’s humour in the collection too, as in Mordrik (a gorgeous Cornish word meaning low tide), where “Starfish strand/ before/ dangling/ from a gull’s beak/ a late breakfast/ of legs.”

This poem’s stanzas are scattered across the page in a visual representation of a sea-shorn shore.

Morning, Far West is a prose poem worth murmuring aloud to yourself to bolster yourself full of promise and hope.

Naomi chooses not to use full stops in her more traditional poems, as though reminding us no thought can ever be complete, while we breathe.

In all, this collection is a marvel and a solace, bearing memories of sea and evocations of the sense of peace that comes with embracing the wild. It’s a wonder to dip into daily and savour before setting aside, still licking the salt from your lips.

This book was given to me in exchange for a fair review.

Battery Rocks by Katrina Naomi is published by Seren Books and available to buy here.

Poetry review – Grief’s Alphabet by Carrie Etter

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Griefs-Alphabet-72dpi-rgbPinning the memories of several lifetimes to the page and shining up the gut-punch moments that really sum up key relationships is no mean feat, but poet Carrie Etter achieves it with apparent ease. From Birthday as Adoption Day to the soaring hopefulness of Reincarnation as Seed, the poems tug and pull at you like rough weather or the tumble of a hectic family. It makes the passages of stillness even more powerful, as Etter pulls back her arrow and lets it fly to strike with exquisite accuracy into your heart.

In part I. Origin Story, and especially in The Lauras, we taste the hope of belonging with the pleasure of being mis-called her sister Laura’s name (“Which did I covet more, the lyrical Laura/ or her blood and with it/ the unspoken moniker real daughter?”), while in American Dream, the panic of redundancy is played out on the precarious stage of a staircase: “She stares at him, grimaces, does not yet know./ He holds his head in his hands. He counts up his dependents.”

The duality of this time is caught in The House of Two Weathers or the Years after the Layoff, where couplets showcase doubled up possibilities suggesting the variable weight of moods on the family home: “The potted African violet on the kitchen windowsill/raised its richest purple or drooped/ The mother bustled over the stove/ or at the sink stood, staring out.”

The thin line walked throughout childhood and beyond shimmers like a fairytale where things breathe in shadows, an image given solidity in Graduation: “I put my neck in the bear’s jaws / to make a true picture / of how I / how we got here.”

This poem, like several others, sits in a dense paragraph on the page, so that reading it is a headlong rush that makes you want to go back and read once more, slowly, so you don’t risk missing a word.

In part II. The Brink, we face the worst, with a loss so great this entire collection is dedicated to it. Scenes unfold over a borrowed coffin, in a church where “hazel-haired Laura sways as she weeps’, and in the dispersal of a household and lifetime’s possessions, with laments and wonder echoing through titles such as Why didn’t I Save One of “Her Lighthouses for Myself.

In part III: Orphan Age, healing begins through an act of remembering, and noticing, from lists like the gorgeous The Modie Box, to the sudden delight of Wintering, where the poet watches a flock of small birds in a maple tree. “The day would be short, and they would have all of it.”

That line to me shouts out the emotion at the heart of Grief’s Alphabet. Life is short, and like small birds on a winter’s day, we should demand every scrap of it.

This is a collection of love stories to families and our younger selves, of forgiveness, acceptance and an appetite always for more. As personal as these slices of ordinary lives are, in each I suspect you’ll find something recognisable, moving and remarkable.

Grief’s Alphabet by Carrie Etter is published by Seren Books. Buy your copy here.

This book was given to me in exchange for a fair review.

What are you reading? I’d love to know. I’m always happy to receive reviews of books, art, theatre and film. To submit or suggest a review, please send an email to judydarley (at) iCloud.com.

Novella review – Burn It All Down by Karen Jones

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Burn It All Down by Karen Jones_front_coverImagine a farm on a seashore where two sisters celebrate the possible death of their brother-in-law, and the third, his wife, isn’t sure whether to mourn or join in with her sisters’ revelries.

Imagine a home where chickens, guinea pigs and hedgehogs roam free with the memory of a pheasant on a leash.

Imagine if you couldn’t be sure what was real.

Inspired by the artwork of Andrea Kowch, Karen Jones paints a world where loneliness etches figures against the dusk. Beth has been married off to a man she doesn’t love, which means that the farm where she grew up now belongs to strangers. When her husband fails to return from a sea voyage, the mood grows unstable and Beth’s main concern is whether she will ever be touched again.

Her sisters Olivia and Esther are wild, riddled with spite and mockery, yet seem to want more than anything to lift Beth from her melancholy and infuse her with their unbridled joy. They are also uncanny creatures, who, Beth notes, “know my thoughts and dreams, even though I have never told them of these fancies. They knew my mind as if it were theirs.”

The stories turn you like waves with dreamlike passages soaked through with stark realism as the sisters claim they need no man, and pragmatic Beth disagrees, stating in ‘There Goes The Bride’: “They are naïve. No one would trade with us. No one trades with women, except to take advantage.”

The last line in the same brief tale offers an excellent example of the author’s capacity for wielding wit to devastate unwary readers: “Alone in my marital bed, I counted my blessings; it did not take long.”

The ekphrastic writing is so vivid, it’s easy to envision the paintings they sprang from, but it’s well worth a quick Google – like having a rumour satisfyingly confirmed.

The penultimate story is also the title tale and contains the full novella pinned to just enough words to fill a page. It’s a gorgeously compact work of prose poetry. The rhythm offers echoing refrains and vivid scenes to revel in, from “an ungrateful cat” who spits out milk to the desire to “knead your skin and bruise it like the berries for tomorrow’s pie, because there must always be pie.” These are sentences so artfully crafted they engage all the senses and seem richly scented and as seething with heat as a crowded kitchen.

The entire novella is a feast of impressions, where grief tangles in the wind with delusions and uncertain wishes. By the end of the book however, the yearnings have settled into something satisfyingly sure and possible. An enrapturing read full of heady passages that weave together to draw you inescapably in.

Burn It All Down by Karen Jones is published by Arroyo Seco Press and available to buy here.

This book was given to me in exchange for a fair review.

What are you reading? I’d love to know. I’m always happy to receive reviews of books, art, theatre and film. To submit or suggest a review, please send an email to judydarley (at) iCloud.com.

Novella review – A Tricky Dance by Diane Simmons

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A Tricky Dance Cover. Shows figures dancing in a swirl of red and blueContained within just forty pages, Diane Simmons’ novella-in-flash portrays a 1970s childhood and adolescence that shines with possibilities. Exploring the ways we discover, confound or eschew our assumed paths through life, Diane introduces us to Elspeth, not the richest and maybe not the smartest, the most popular or the prettiest, but very much the star of her own story.

Diane seeds in the important details with a deft hand. In the second story, ‘Things in Common’, we learn that new girl Lorna “doesn’t mention her dad. Maybe she’s not got one. It’d be great not to be the only one in our class without a dad.”

The slim volume shimmies with what isn’t, who hasn’t and what can’t possibly be, with dreams held close to protect them from being quashed with mockery. This is a community where it doesn’t do to let others know you’re bolshy enough to crave the stars, as Rory, the one person who truly seems to see Elspeth for all wonder she contains, discovers when he’s reckless enough to admit to wanting to be an astronaut. “‘We don’t have rockets in Scotland, stupit!’ Jennifer sneered at him when he gave his answer. ‘We’re no America!’”

Elspeth wisely keeps her dreams to herself, for now.

This is a place and time where liking (or pretending to like) the right Bay City Roller sits alongside the practice of “guising” – going from house to house to earn some pennies with a dance or a song.

For Elspeth, ballet lessons seem as far out of reach as the moon, as she counts the coins in her piggy bank, “calculate what I’ll need for Guides, for the school trip to Edinburgh Castle, for my mum’s birthday next week. Maybe if I stopped Guides, sold my uniform, scrounged a few quid off Mum… And then I remember the hole in my school shoes, remember Mum’s face when I told her.”

There’s a huge amount of power in this matter-of-fact, uncomplaining tone. Elspeth is determined to find a way to dance, to get on and fit in, despite the challenges she faces, and that makes her hugely appealing as a protagonist.

In the early stories, the loneliness and treachery of playground rivalries and betrayals take centre stage, but before long Elspeth’s spirit and determination grow unmistakable.

The steadiness to the prose keeps you rooted in Elspeth’s world, where extra paper rounds and hand-me-down dancing shoes provide opportunities. Small triumphs come in the form of mastering Pythagoras, while letters written to the Jackie Magazine advice page manifest gifts as crucial and magical as any glass slippers.

Elspeth’s quiet confidence elevates these interlinked tales. As she heads to the football field and notice that one of the lads, Ewan, has the ball, she notes: “He always has the ball. And he’s always Jennifer’s dancing partner. But me and Ewan hang out some nights and play football – I bet he’d rather dance with me.”

The language pops throughout, painting Elspeth and her classmates in your mind’s eye as vividly as any description could. Filmic and absorbing, I felt I’d streamed a mini-series and binged it in one sitting, and was now desperate for Season 2 to drop.

A Tricky Dance by Diane Simmons is available to purchase here.

This book was given to me in exchange for a fair review.

What are you reading? I’d love to know. I’m always happy to receive reviews of books, art, theatre and film. To submit or suggest a review, please send an email to judydarley (at) iCloud.com.

Book review – The Naming of Moths by Tracy Fells

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The Naming of Moths book coverWith such an evocative title and cover, you know you’re in for a world of wonder with this collection of short fiction. The tagline ‘Short stories of myths, monsters and mothers’ adds a flicker of curiosity before you enter the pages’ worlds.

The gorgeous title story won author Tracy Fells the Canada and Europe regional award for the 2017 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. This tender tale of loss and solace weaves in the displacement of war with ancient mythologies about the longing for a child. In it, we’re invited to consider ideas of responsibility and ritual, in which the naming of moths has both an emotional and empowering purpose.

Fells has the skill to pepper potentially sad scenes with quirky, images that make you smile: “The woman with the moustache is refreshing her lipstick in the only mirror left uncovered.” In other tales, “computers squatted like fat hens” while in another a cake falls “in jammy clumps” onto a pair of “ballet pumps.”

‘Twisted’ is an exquisitely told, achingly dark tale of birthdays and family, balanced by luscious lines like the ones above.

Fells’ lyrical mastery over word choices gives every passage a special sort of glow, illuminated. A theme of metamorphosis runs throughout, as characters take back some element of control, changing lives for the better or simply shaking off the past in favour of a hopeful future. Vulnerable characters find their strength, often aided by more bolshy, beloved allies, such as Auntie Ruth in ‘Twisted’, who “said exactly what she was thinking, even if it was a bit rude.”

Other stories run along more overtly surreal tracks. ‘The Weight They Left Behind’ is a haunting piece full of colour with a hint of Black Mirror satire.

In ‘Household Gods’, Fells reminds us how little we know of other peoples’ struggles, and of the wells of compassion that run deep. Drawn into a hospital’s Special Care Unit for premature babies, we meet a couple who barely know each other, and are challenged to judge or withhold judgement from Mo, the protagonist, and his fumbling attempts to look after his ageing mother, his new wife and baby Nadira. Even here, the possibilities include the uncanny.

Fly on the Wall Press is a publishing house with a passion for great storytelling that does far more than entertain. The four-times British Book Awards’ Small Press of the Year finalists describe themselves as publishing “unparalleled political fiction, evocative poetry, and genre-defying anthologies addressing urgent global concerns.” These preoccupations are seeded subtly through their carefully selected and beautifully produced books, lodging in your consciousness and prompting you to re-examine a world where nothing should be taken for granted.

The realism in Fells’ collection forms firm foundations elevated by imaginative flights that serve to highlight aspects of human nature. These stories made me marvel at our capacity for love in all its forms, and to forge our own paths despite obstacles. Each story nudges you to remember how much happens unseen in the lives of every stranger we encounter. Sometimes it takes the surreal to help us truly glimpse the realities we live among.

The Naming of Moths by Tracy Fells is published by Fly on the Wall Press and available to buy here.

This book was given to me in exchange for a fair review.

What are you reading? I’d love to know. I’m always happy to receive reviews of books, art, theatre and film. To submit or suggest a review, please send an email to judydarley (at) iCloud.com.

Play review – Arabian Nights sets Bristol Old Vic aglow

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Arabian Nights production photos taken at Bristol Old Vic on 24th November 2023 in Bristol. Arabian Nights Company_Photo by Ellie Kurttz

Bristol Old Vic has a tradition of staging festive productions that transport us to other worlds, with colour-infused sets and costumes, modern twists on familiar tales and a dash of humour to keep the audience enthralled.

Writer Sonali Bhattacharyya and director Blanche McIntyre have delivered in full with Arabian Nights, treating audiences to an imaginative production packed with characters designed to win hearts and jolt emotions.

With contemporary references and ironies sprinkled in, including mention of TikTok and a mobile phone as a gift for a girl who would prefer a bag of lentils, the central messages are the power of stories and of working together.

When Schere heroically takes the place of a neighbour to become the King’s next wife, she breaks a pattern the peevish king has been wedded to since his wife left – marrying a woman and then casting her into the palace dungeon the very next morning. At this point, we are told, around 100 ex-wives languish in the dungeons. Schere is determined no more women will be sacrificed to the King’s broken heart, and intends to keep the King’s attention with stories, with each nightly tale ending on a cliff-hanger.

Yasemin Özdemir as Schere is a force to be reckoned with, fearless and determined to help the King learn to be a better person. Sara Diab as Dina portrays Schere’s younger sister, deftly demonstrating her blossoming from a person who’s always believed they’re less than their sibling, and discovering her own courage.

As the King, Nicholas Karimi brings to the stage a character who is both comical and terrifying – basically a toddler who might have you thrown in the dungeon if you fail to serve him the dinner he demands.

As the King’s whims empty the sea and rob his people of food, hope begins to flourish in the form of candles glowing in the windows of parents in gratitude for their daughters who have not been summoned to marry the King thanks to Schere.

Yet when Schere is asked to make one final sacrifice, it’s more than she can bear.

Arabian Nights production photos taken at Bristol Old Vic on 24th November 2023 in Bristol. Nicholas Karimi as the King and Yasemin Özdemir as Schere with Hannah Sibai’s palace windows lit by Nao Nagai. Photo by Ellie Kurttz

Nicholas Karimi as the King and Yasemin Özdemir as Schere with Hannah Sibai’s palace windows lit by Nao Nagai.

Hannah Sibai’s set is gloriously realised. Simple windows hanging in mid-air to represent the village, and an ornate trio of windows as the palace, with atmosphere painted with lighting from the talented Nao Nagai.

And, yes, Samuel Wilde’s puppets are magnificent – relying at times on the full eight-strong cast to work the horse in flight, an extraordinary serpent and the tentacles of a leviathan.

Arabian Nights production photos taken at Bristol Old Vic on 24th November 2023 in Bristol. Full company working the serpent.

Full company working Samuel Wilde’s serpent puppet.

Family sits at the heart of the tale, with Schere and Dina’s dad Maruf (Saikat Ahams) desperately trying to keep his daughters safe. We’re never told what happened to their mother, only that they miss her and set a place for her at meals. I thought she might appear in a moment of crisis, but in the end she is only a memory. The neighbours join in to help, however, and show that family can be more than biological.

One wonderful strand in the production is the discovery that the ex-wives are far from passively awaiting rescue, and are instead busily striving towards their own great escape.

It’s an apt reminder that while the stories we see ourselves represented in can empower us, we ultimately have the ability to write our own stories and be an active player in our own triumphant tales.

Arabian Nights is at Bristol Old Vic until 6th January 2024. Book ticket from £10 (plus concessions) here.

Cast

  • Saikat Ahams as Maruf
  • Ajjaz Awad as Gulab/Umm
  • Sara Diab as Dina
  • Roxy Faridany as Maryam
  • Nicholas Karimi as The King
  • Patrick Osborne as Jafar
  • Yasemin Özdemir as Schere
  • Arinder Sadhra as Rahiq/Zara

Everyone else

  • Writer Sonali Bhattacharyya
  • Director Blanche McIntyre
  • Designer Hannah Sibai
  • Lighting Designer Nao Nagai
  • Sound Designer & Composer Oğuz Kaplangı
  • Movement Director Aline David
  • Puppetry Designer and Consultant Samuel Wilde
  • Casting Director Christopher Worrall CDG
  • Associate Director Melina Namdar
  • Costume Supervisor Anna Dixon
  • Associate Puppetry Designer Hannah Southfield
  • Puppet Maker Izzy Bristow
  • Puppet Maker Bryony Harrison Pettit
  • Puppet Dresser Katy Hoste
  • Placement Maker Jessica Miller
  • Placement Maker Blue Harrison
  • Fight Director Annie Mackenzie

Have you watched, seen or read anything interesting? I’d love to know. I’m always happy to receive reviews of books, art, theatre and film. To submit or suggest a review, please send an email to judydarley (at) iCloud.com.

Porto in five senses – touch

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São Bento Railway Station by James Hainsworth

There’s more to see (and touch) at São Bento Railway Station than trains. By James Hainsworth

In February 2020, my hub and I spent a long weekend in Porto, little knowing that the coronavirus pandemic was about confine us for the most part to our own homes.

In this time, I believe it’s vital to recall the beautiful, wide and varied world that exists beyond our immediate locality, and with this in mind I’ve been sharing a five-part travel guide to Portugal’s second largest city.

Each Tuesday in lockdown I’ve posted a new travel guide to Porto focusing on a different sense, beginning with the most evocative – the sense of smell. Last week was all about the sounds that knit this city together.

Today I’ll guide you through this characterful town via the sense of touch.

Touch – the city walls

Porto is famed of its tiled edifices, one of the finest examples of which is the foyer of São Bento Railway Station (Praça de Almeida Garrett, 4000-069 Porto, Portugal).

Porto tiled boulder by Judy Darley

Even some of the boulders are tiled in Porto. By Judy Darley

I couldn’t help reaching out to run my fingers over the city’s ancient walls. This was before touching became a risk-seeker’s adrenalin sport, don’t forget. The moist atmosphere, which is part of the reason why so many buildings are tiled way and beyond our own bathroom tiling at home, ensures that any uncovered stones tend to sport lichen or lovely moss.

 

Stepping inside buildings such as Chocolateria Ecuador (Rua de Sá da Bandeira 637, 4000-437 Porto, Portugal) reveals the textural riches within, as well, in this case, the scent and flavour sensations.

Plus, quite a few shops we visited have their own shop cat mewing out for a consensual stroke.

Porto shop cat by Judy Darley

Come on in to meet today’s special purr-chase. By Judy Darley

Explore Porto’s other sensory offerings

Porto in five senses – smell
Porto in five senses – taste
Porto in five senses – sight
Porto in five senses – hearing

Porto in five senses – hearing

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Seagulls above Porto Cathedral1 by James Hainsworth

Seagulls above Porto Cathedral by James Hainsworth

This travel article was originally published in April 2020.

Late in February 2020, my hub and I flitted off for a long weekend in Porto. We had no way of guessing that within a couple of weeks we’d be in lockdown, confined to our homes.

Porto’s attractions may be closed for the foreseeable future, but I believe it’s more important now than ever to remember that a whole world exists beyond our immediate surroundings.

Each Tuesday in lockdown I’ve posted a new travel guide to Porto focusing on a different sense, beginning with the most evocative – the sense of smell. This week is all about the sounds that knit this city together.

Porto busker on Rua das Flores by Judy Darley

Busker on Rua das Flores, Porto, by Judy Darley

Hearing – Porto’s street musicians

While Fado, the Portuguese songs of lament, rolls out from a number of bars as well as part of a Cálem port tasting package, you can’t go wrong with a bit of busker-appreciation in Porto. The streets are peppered with musicians and singers; the more tourist-heavy the route, the more performers you’ll encounter. Even on a breezy day in very early March, people paused to listen to this musician on Rua das Flores.

Porto tram by Judy Darley

Porto tram by Judy Darley

There’s also plenty of ambient noise here – the whirr of approaching trams and the cry of seagulls choosing which monument to settle on are two that seem to sum up Porto’s romantic character.

Explore Porto’s other sensory offerings

Porto in five senses – smell
Porto in five senses – taste
Porto in five senses – sight
Porto in five senses – touch