I may have not openly declared myself as Simon the Writer until I was on the point of publishing my first three ebooks, but of course I had been writing since long before that. 

One place where I published my writings before that date was on my Granada la bellawebsite.  The name hints at the dual nature of the city where I live, its light and dark sides, la bella and la bestia sides. Because while the Beauty of Granada is undeniable, it can also reveal itself as the Beast.

An example of how Granada succumbs to the beast in its breast can be seen in the way its Gran Vía de Colónbulldozers its way through the heart of the old city with no regard for historical or aesthetic considerations.

 

There is also a portal into my Granada la bella blog which frequently deals with the issue. 

But perhaps the most impressive aspect of the website is the chronology of events: TheLife, Times,and Works of Federico García Lorca, starting with the arrival of Vicenta Lorca in the village of Fuente Vaqueros, a few kilometres out side Granada, in 1892. Six years later, she would give birth to the poet.

The chronology ends, for the time being, with an account of recent developments in the fruitlesssearch for the poet’s mortal remains 

This failure is one of the darkest aspects of the city’s dual nature as la bella and la bestia. The city that is today happy to cash in on the glory of Lorca’s achievement and name is the same place that allowed the poet to be murdered by right-wing thugs while proving incapable or insufficiently willing to locate his corpse. 

Labrad, amigos,
de piedra y sueño en el Alhambra,
un túmulo al poeta,
sobre una fuente donde llore el agua,
y eternamente diga:
el crimen fue en Granada, ¡en su Granada!

- Antonio Machado

Free translation:“Let us build in the Alhambra, friends, from stone and dreams a memorial to the poet above a spring where the water weeps and enternally complains that the crime happend in Granada, - in his Granada!” - Granada la bestia.

 La bella./ Beauty

La bestia / the Beast

This is an extract from my memoir-based novella 1969 A Year in a Life

And I also include a link to the song it is referring to 

Our predicament, the predicament of us footloose provincials from the humbler classes, was in some way encapsulated by a rather curious pop song called Where Do You Go To My Lovely which was at the top of the UK Hit parade throughout March (released January 1969). To a kind of frivolous flippant upbeat waltz rhythm and melody, the song tells the story of a lass by the name of Marie Claire who overcomes her innocuous and indeed lowly origins to rise from obscurity and become totally accepted for herself, or who she makes herself out as, in high celebrity society.
Now ours were not this Marie Claire’s aspirations, nor were our origins comparable to her back-street urchin childhood in Naples. But there was something in her burning ambition to escape her class destiny that we shared and which seemed reasonably feasible to achieve, even if we did not think of it in terms of class. It was our perceived provincialism that we resented and tried to escape from, or failing that, hide. I think a cosmopolitan orb like London was full of such people, who met on an equal footing by revealing little or nothing of their family ties and class background. Of course, you could give yourself away from time to time, committing an embarrassing faux pas or failing to carry off your assumed persona with the right degree of panache.
Maybe the coming together of John and Yoko epitomises this 60s social phenomenon. John became a working class hero, but what of Yoko? We knew nothing about her family or social or class background, and it never occurred to us to ask, such was its irrelevance in those days of rootless egalitarianism. I had zero or only the vaguest notion of the family background of my co-workers at the BOAC Air Terminal, although I think I would have been in many cases surprised to discover the reality. Indeed, when one colleague did take the step of inviting a number of us home for a birthday party, it was not what I expected. Maureen was my idea of a typical English grammar school girl, neither bright nor dim, neither rough nor smooth, and – I hesitate to add – neither attractive nor displeasing to behold. Her father turned out to be a BOAC airline pilot and the thing I remembered about their house was the bathtub filled with ice, to keep the champagne chilled and the passion fruit fresh. But this glimpse into the family life of a colleague was fortuitous to an extent, because Maureen, unlike so many of my BOAC colleugues, was a) a Londoner and b) did not feel ashamed of her class/family background.
A high proportion of my BOAC workmates, incidentally, were Australian homosexuals who had come to London to escape the asphyxiating social mores that predominated down under. Working for BOAC gave them the chance to live freely, yet hang on to a lifeline that allowed them to maintain contact with their families and loved ones back home.
Another thing about this class background anonymity was that as so many people were in the same situation as you, there was nobody trying to catch you out. It was not as if you were trying to break into an already existing higher class. The rules were being written as we played the game, so to speak. It was a time of social flux, and Marie Claire took full advantage of it. And so did we, in a more modest, less ambitious fashion.

Peter Sarsted’s ‘Marie Claire’ song won that year’s Ivor Novello Award, by the way, shared, just for the record, with David Bowie's 'Space Oddity’, which, oddly enough, made little impression on me at the time.