Two Middle-Aged Ladies in Andalusia

"This is a longstanding personal favourite. It’s very simple, very candid, very humble. It’s a 51-year-old woman who, in 1961, sets out through rural Andalusia. Like Laurie Lee’s Gloucestershire, this is an Andalusia that doesn’t really exist any more in the same way. It’s very community-based, and all the villages are linked only by mule tracks. Yet everyone speaks the same language, in a broader social sense. She’s a teacher, she knows what she wants, she’s very religious. She goes to church almost every single day, and she’s shocked by bad behaviour. It’s just so lovely. It’s so innocent, so fantastic. Compare it to all those epics, macho men going all over the place. Here, suddenly, you have this wonderful woman who finds a horse who also happens to be middle-aged, called La Marquesa—who she has happened to borrow from the Duke of Wellington, as you do—going all over this Don Quixote-like landscape. What she wants is to write a story of her own, I think. Probably without realising it. It’s interesting how she decided to do it in solitude. And it’s her affinity with horses, and with God and Catholicism, that brought her to Spain. Not long after this journey, her marriage broke down, and I wonder if there was some kind of inner discovery, some new independence, because she proves to herself that she is extremely capable and an extraordinary horsewoman. But it’s her humility that is so addictive to read. There’s no arrogance there at all. That can be quite rare in travel writing, especially at that time. The ego has a big role to play. But she’s so shy, which makes it accessible, but at the same time you know she knows what she’s doing and what she wants. I think so. Also, it’s ridiculous to talk about one man’s journey, or even one woman’s journey, because you certainly rely on all the people who support you, whether that’s at home or whom you meet on the way, who grant you the ability to make it to the end. Without them you are nothing. In the past, it was the style to make it appear as one man’s victorious mission. But that’s a fallacy. And I find that, if you include all the other aspects of what makes up a person’s journey, it enriches the account. Because you realise these people are not semi-divine."