Hello! This is a Small Talk newsletter. That means it’s mostly off-topic and has very little to do with writing tips or my Tales from the Triverse serial. Sometimes I just can’t resist writing about something that’s grabbed my attention. You can adjust your notification preferences if you’d rather stay on target.
The saying is that it’s about the journey, not the destination, but for me it’s the other way around. I’m not a great traveller. The actual journeying I find very stressful, especially flying, and tend to approach a looming holiday with a certain amount of dread.
Once I arrive, that anxiety vanishes and it’s all about the place. This month I was fortunate to visit Porto, in Portugal. As far as I can tell, Porto is called Porto because it’s a historic port. The drink port is called port because it’s from Porto. Portugal is called Portugal because it was named after Porto. It’s proved a versatile word.
Porto is a city on the river Douro, right on the Atlantic coast. It splays itself across the steep slopes of river valley, which is connected by a series of unnecessarily beautiful and fancy bridges. here’s the Pont Luis I, which has a train track along the top and a road bridge along the bottom:
Pedestrians can walk across the top and bottom, so it’s a good measure of the verticality of the city. Porto is built on top of itself, which required me to learn entire new map reading skills. Bear in mind I live in Norfolk, a county in England that is famously flat; I’m not used to locations being next to each other on a top-down map, yet separated by 30 metres of hill or steps.
That verticality is most obvious when climbing from the water to the top of the Clerigos tower, which makes itself known from almost any vantage point:
Where Porto does connect to my writing is that visiting it was a direct feed into my imagination. You can fully expect a Porto-adjacent city to show up in Triverse at some point, either transposed into the future or as a fantastical equivalent. Visiting other countries is so useful for encountering different architecture and cultural history.
Porto fully embraces street art and graffiti, for example. Norwich has a bit of this, but Porto’s tall scale is particularly well suited to it. check out this cat:
Most of you reading this newsletter probably like books, so there’s no avoiding Livraria Lello. While a total tourist trap, the bookshop is nevertheless a proper eye massage:
There’s a battle between old and new in Porto, which reminded me of southern Spain. Here in the UK, there’s very little ‘wasted’ space, due to it being a geographically small country, which means that you don’t see much in the way of derelict buildings — if a building is no longer needed, it will usually be cleared away to make room for something else.1 There’s a lot of very old stuff in the UK, and then a sort of generic ‘modern’ phase. It’s harder to see the progression of history. Porto is different in that it wears its architectural and cultural history on its sleeve, and you end up with views like this:
On top of the hill there’s a fancy, large, well-kept building. There’s new construction happening with the crane to the top-right. But halfway down the hill is a derelict three storey building, and hints of an older settlement. Here’s another example:
Note the church to the bottom-left, and then the ruined building to the bottom-right, now reclaimed by nature. There’s a sense of a constant cycle of the old and the new in Porto, which constantly had me asking what was this building? Who lived here? Why did they leave? Stories everywhere, in other words. These weren’t run-down areas of the city: abandoned buildings with collapsed roofs would be nestled right between gorgeous town houses with ornate tiled facades.
Meanwhile, here’s a woman encased in carbonite:
I write science fiction and fantasy, which is a lot easier to do when I’m encountering new things and experiences. New places in particular spark ideas and ways of living that I might not otherwise have considered, and which can then become the root of an extrapolated alternate reality. Nothing in Norfolk gives me this kind of scale:
Let’s not forget the moment I stumbled into an accidental Wes Anderson movie:
I have an urge now to incorporate a dense, extremely vertical, on-top-of-itself city full of visible history into Triverse. It’ll happen sooner or later.
There are exceptions, depending on where you are, of course.
Enjoyed reading. Not yet visited Porto but is, along with about only three or four cities, that I won't to visit. You write: "Here in the UK, there’s very little ‘wasted’ space, due to it being a geographically small country, which means that you don’t see much in the way of derelict buildings — if a building is no longer needed, it will usually be cleared away to make room for something else." Well, not people know this, but the BALTIC (the huge contemporary art space in Gateshead) – for many years a derelict flour mill — came about and into existence as a direct result of a trip to Porto (paid for by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation — Calouste Gulbenkian being a Portuguese and Anglophile philanthropist). The visitor, who I shall not name, then employed by Gateshead Council, was struck by how some of the old, and previously derelict, port warhouses had been converted for use as cultural and social spaces.
Looking forward to reading more Small Talk posts. All the best.
That is some bookshop. And here was me thinking Bradford Waterstones was as good as it gets (it’s in the old wool exchange, a cathedral to the city’s wool trade)