purplecthulhu

I spent most of this week in Santander in Spain, at a consortium meeting for one of the satellites I'm working on.

To get there, I had to get up at 4am and make my way to Liverpool Street Station and thence to Stanstead airport for a flight at 7:15am. Seeing London at this early hour is odd, but becoming somewhat familiar. Things were definitely busier on a Monday morning at 4:30 than during my previous foray on a Sunday, and I was able to catch a night bus. This was quite fortunate since the train to Stanstead was leaving a bit earlier than I was expecting, possibly a result of work on the lines over the weekend.

The train was surprisingly packed, as was the airport. The mix of passengers was ecclectic, with business people, young people, the retired, and whole families. Why the children from these families weren't in school, I don't know - its not half term time yet. This crowding shows the draw of the cheap airlines, which are using up the spare capacity at airports like Stanstead. This allowed substantial growth in this sector, but now is distorting plans for the future of the business, with the recent spurt in growth being unreasonably extrapolated 30 years into the future. We might end up with a ridiculous amount of spare capacity as a result, and a lot of wasted money and countryside.

Feeling somewhat guilty for benefiting from this arrangement, I got on the plane and headed to Spain, sleeping, or at least dozing, much of the way.

Bilbao airport, for that is where I flew, is a typical modern architectural object, with clean white concrete beams swooping from high ceilings to sturdy foundations. It was all curves and ramps, and hid the embarrassing and ugly necessities of carparks and access roads behind decorative grills and in sunken cuttings. My boss had hired a car for the drive to Santander, and I was nominated navigator, so after a few delays, we were on our way.

Northern Spain was quite a revelation. My previous experiences of Spain have been in Madrid and in the south of the country. These are all pretty dry and arid, and while there were mountains, they were on a large scale, and did not seem particularly well disposed to people. The countryside between Bilbao and Santander was green and very different. Much more like Wales or Cornwall.

The two cities are on the north west coast of the country, and are in the lumpy remnants of the Pyranees. The hills are bluff and proud, with steep sides and rocky tops, puffing out their crags to show that they're real mountains like their brethren to the north. They reach right down to the sea, making for lots of inlets and small bays. The road has to swoop around these and leap over new bridges to make its way to the south. There's not a lot of space along the coast, but some rough compromise seems to have been achieved with the mountains, so that they stand a little further apart and allow people to live in the valley gaps. Most of the towns we past were quite modern, with a lot of new building in some places, but there were clearly some older and more dilapidated properties on the hills between the towns. There were also some very ugly pieces of industrialization, with smoke stacks and tank farms providing an unwanted backdrop to otherwise attractive beeches. In one place there seems to have been a disagreement with the mountains since one of their member is being gradually dispatched by a massive quarry, stretching up to the top of what must have once been an impressive peak.

After about an hour and a half, we got to Santander, a coastal resort with a university attached. It had that same well healed gentility that Bournmouth has, but with the added royal attachments of Brighton. Not that those would've done it much good under Franco. Its other main claim to fame is that Seve Ballasteros was born across the bay, so the curse of golf courses is now eating up the public park land close to the town.

Our meeting place was on the Isla di Magdalena in an old aristocratic house converted to a conference centre. It was actually rather nice and the conversion was very well done.

We got through an awful lot of work at the meeting, and I was thoroughly tired when I got back to the UK on Thursday. I also felt the let down you get when you're taken away from the complexities of everyday life and allowed to properly focus on one thing, and one thing only, for a few days, and then return to find that nothing has solved itself while you've been gone, but has probably got worse.

Life would be so much simpler without complexities, but then it would probably complicate itself again if you got rid of them, or just become boring. At least that's what I tell myself.

I spent most of this week in Santander in Spain, at a consortium meeting for one of the satellites I'm working on.

To get there, I had to get up at 4am and make my way to Liverpool Street Station and thence to Stanstead airport for a flight at 7:15am. Seeing London at this early hour is odd, but becoming somewhat familiar. Things were definitely busier on a Monday morning at 4:30 than during my previous foray on a Sunday, and I was able to catch a night bus. This was quite fortunate since the train to Stanstead was leaving a bit earlier than I was expecting, possibly a result of work on the lines over the weekend.

The train was surprisingly packed, as was the airport. The mix of passengers was ecclectic, with business people, young people, the retired, and whole families. Why the children from these families weren't in school, I don't know - its not half term time yet. This crowding shows the draw of the cheap airlines, which are using up the spare capacity at airports like Stanstead. This allowed substantial growth in this sector, but now is distorting plans for the future of the business, with the recent spurt in growth being unreasonably extrapolated 30 years into the future. We might end up with a ridiculous amount of spare capacity as a result, and a lot of wasted money and countryside.

Feeling somewhat guilty for benefiting from this arrangement, I got on the plane and headed to Spain, sleeping, or at least dozing, much of the way.

Bilbao airport, for that is where I flew, is a typical modern architectural object, with clean white concrete beams swooping from high ceilings to sturdy foundations. It was all curves and ramps, and hid the embarrassing and ugly necessities of carparks and access roads behind decorative grills and in sunken cuttings. My boss had hired a car for the drive to Santander, and I was nominated navigator, so after a few delays, we were on our way.

Northern Spain was quite a revelation. My previous experiences of Spain have been in Madrid and in the south of the country. These are all pretty dry and arid, and while there were mountains, they were on a large scale, and did not seem particularly well disposed to people. The countryside between Bilbao and Santander was green and very different. Much more like Wales or Cornwall.

The two cities are on the north west coast of the country, and are in the lumpy remnants of the Pyranees. The hills are bluff and proud, with steep sides and rocky tops, puffing out their crags to show that they're real mountains like their brethren to the north. They reach right down to the sea, making for lots of inlets and small bays. The road has to swoop around these and leap over new bridges to make its way to the south. There's not a lot of space along the coast, but some rough compromise seems to have been achieved with the mountains, so that they stand a little further apart and allow people to live in the valley gaps. Most of the towns we past were quite modern, with a lot of new building in some places, but there were clearly some older and more dilapidated properties on the hills between the towns. There were also some very ugly pieces of industrialization, with smoke stacks and tank farms providing an unwanted backdrop to otherwise attractive beeches. In one place there seems to have been a disagreement with the mountains since one of their member is being gradually dispatched by a massive quarry, stretching up to the top of what must have once been an impressive peak.

After about an hour and a half, we got to Santander, a coastal resort with a university attached. It had that same well healed gentility that Bournmouth has, but with the added royal attachments of Brighton. Not that those would've done it much good under Franco. Its other main claim to fame is that Seve Ballasteros was born across the bay, so the curse of golf courses is now eating up the public park land close to the town.

Our meeting place was on the Isla di Magdalena in an old aristocratic house converted to a conference centre. It was actually rather nice and the conversion was very well done.

We got through an awful lot of work at the meeting, and I was thoroughly tired when I got back to the UK on Thursday. I also felt the let down you get when you're taken away from the complexities of everyday life and allowed to properly focus on one thing, and one thing only, for a few days, and then return to find that nothing has solved itself while you've been gone, but has probably got worse.

Life would be so much simpler without complexities, but then it would probably complicate itself again if you got rid of them, or just become boring. At least that's what I tell myself.