It’s over a month since we went off to Spain in February, but my lack of a post about either Almeria or Malaga doesn’t mean it wasn’t great. It really was great, but other things such as FAWM (of which more later) kind of got in the way of reporting back.

Like most of our travels in Spain, this was an attempt to balance somewhere well-known (and therefore potentially touristy) with somewhere a bit less so. Almeria, in this case, was the ‘a bit less so’ bit. There are some buses direct there from Malaga airport (see the Alsa website) but, for the most part, you have to get the airport bus into the city centre bus station and then strap in for a three hour (at least) trip east to Almeria.

So what’s it like? It’s a small city, not really very touristy at all, but friendly, apart from the

taxi driver at the bus station on the first night who refused to take us, saying he didn’t know where our hotel was. We stayed at Aire Hotel and Ancient Baths, in Plaza de la Constitucion right dead centre of what action there was (so there was no way the taxi driver didn’t know where it was) and it turned out to be a real bargain, with very luxurious rooms, great service, and a spa in the basement which included, amongst the usual treatments and pool temperatures, a floatarium – a warm pool loaded with salt that allows you to float. If you haven’t tried it, don’t knock it till you have – it’s meant to be a stress buster, and to boost creativity, amongst other things.

Creativity was a topic on my mind during my time in Spain. Partly this was because I’m half way through a book I got for Christmas by Marcus du Sautoy, The Creativity Code: how AI is learning to write, paint and think. It’s interesting, although the author’s insistence that mathematicians can be creative, too, gets a bit tiresome after the third time. Yeah, I know, all right already. I’m only a third of the way through but, like all supposedly creative types (yes, yes, maths guys too) I’m a bit discombobulated by the thought that AI will soon be doing what we do creatively, only better.

The other reason I was thinking about creativity was because of February Album Writing Month, or FAWM, which I may have mentioned before. Like nanowrimo, where you’re supposed to write a novel in a month (I never even tried that one) FAWM is

an online event where you sign up (no fee, but a donation is kind of expected) and try to produce an album in a month, This was my third year, and like previous years I had little or no expectation of writing the 14 songs required to make the quota considered, FAWM-wise, as an album. A lot of people say I’m very prolific, but I reckoned if I got 4 or 5 done, even with the extra leap year day, I’d be doing well.

So no one was more surprised than me when I finished 14 songs in the month, with most of them being conceived in the 12 days we were in Spain! I had noticed before, in the days when I worked full time and wrote fiction and poetry, that a lot of scribbling happened on holiday, and I put that down to just having time and headspace to do it. However, I now think there’s something else at work.

One thing, I think, that boosts the language part of your brain is speaking another language. I’m not absolutely fanatical about this – if a waiter or whoever is determined to speak English I let them – but, in general, I spend most of the day thinking about how to say something in Spanish or actually speaking Spanish to the locals. Shuttling meanings and sentence forms about between two idioms does, I think, do something good to the old grey matter.

There’s also that float in salty water. It’s a bit hard to explain in lay terms, and I don’t know the science of it, but all I know is that you emerge refreshed, calm, and in that state where you practically only have to reach up and pluck the next idea down from the air above your head. In this country floatariums are often expensive and potentially claustrophobic, being housed in little pods, but if you get the chance to do it, I thoroughly recommend it.

However, that’s not the whole story, as I was producing material before, and long after, my salt immersion therapy. Maybe it is just being in a different place than where your head usually is. Now I’m working for myself part time, I find it much easier to switch off from the day to day concerns of every day life. Participating in FAWM itself is great too, as it kind of gives you licence to focus more time and energy than you might normally on the actual business of writing songs.

One last thing about Almeria. We were going to basically laze around the centre of town, drifting from cafe to tapas bar. If you go and want to be more active, there’s plenty of historic ruins to visit, plus, Cabo de Gata, a renowned nature reserve, as well as the place they used to make the spaghetti westerns in, called Mini Hollywood. Next time, maybe, we’ll stir our stumps and do these things too.

So finally, here’s a video my great friend Audrey Russell made of one of my recent songs. It’s the title track of an EP I’ve just released, along with two of the songs I wrote during FAWM this year:

You can go here for the Bandcamp site where you can preorder the EP. Incidentally, I’m donating the proceeds of this project towards helping one woman and her family in Gaza. This is on the initiative of my good friend Chris Mitchell, who emailed me recently about it; Chris writes:

‘Last week I launched an appeal to raise funds for a friend and her family, in Rafah, Gaza. I am now asking my email contacts if you would like to help. She understandably wants anonymity but I vouch this is genuine.

She reaches out for help saying:

“I was living in Gaza with my family and I was working as an English language teacher and translator. After one week of war, I was displaced to Rafah. I lost my home, my job, my dreams, and everything. I lost more than 15 family members and also friends. The prices here are very high, and my father can’t  provide for the needs of 9 people with 2 children.”

Her story is Gaza. But it is breathtakingly appalling by civilised standards. It just is how the war impacts all of the 2.5 million Gaza citizens, less the 33,000 killed to date. Apart from the scarcity of food, prices have doubled since October, one kilo of sugar is around $20,  a basic meal for a family would cost about $50. Man made famine is now a reality. It used to cost $2,000 dollars for those applying to exit Gaza through Egypt. Now it costs at least $6,000, just to leave what was described to me as hell by a young Gaza man six years ago. If it was hell then, the war has plumbed the deepest circles of the inferno now.

I know dozens of Israelis suffer in captivity in Gaza. I recognise the grief and loss of the families of those 1,139 killed on 7 October. But the response is no longer proportionate and the International Court of Justice has found there is a case to answer for murder and worse.

The war must cease, the relief aid flow, detainees be freed and a process of lasting peace begin, centred on the democratic and human rights of those who live in Palestine..

Yet until then, individuals like my friend and her family are living in horror and destitution. I can’t help 2.5 million people but I can respond to a cry for help from one woman and her family, and to ask others to do the same. We can make a small difference at the individual level in the name of humanity. We don’t have to feel helpless, it’s all too hard.

Thanks again for your kind generosity, and solidarity with people who are in desperate straits, mortal danger and with no prospects of a better future, simply because of where they live, a place that used to grow olive trees.’

If you don’t want to buy the EP but want to donate, I can arrange that too, of course!