El Rio Manzanares: flowing misery

This Saturday, at about 17.30, I decided to go for a stroll. Strolls are good as they make your mind take one too. I headed south towards El Puente (bridge) de Toledo which crosses the river Manzanares.

When I first heard that Carmen found a house in Madrid I immediately went on Google Maps and looked it up. I found that the flat was close to a river which looked of a quite respectable size – albeit seen from space. “Nice,” I commented to Eduardo, who also lives close to the river, “we can go fishing in the river on hot summer nights.” Edu considered this for a while before giving his well thought-of answer. “Thomas,” he said, “there are no fish in the river, actually – come to think of it – there is no water in the river.” And he was right. The river is ridiculous, a joke. My toilet has more water than this stream. It challenges the mighty river Chelmer – infamous in Essex for its width as it takes more than two people to look across it – for the worst river in the world.

Things only deteriorated for poor Eduardo when I later asked why an Indian was the mascot of our beloved Atletíco Football Team. “Well,” he explained with a voice of a child who is having difficulty in convincing his dad that Farther Christmas exists, “it is supposed that the Indian came sailing down the river and settled in the stadium to fight against our rivals.” One shameful look at the river and it is obvious why Atletí has not played a decent game at home for over two years.

My stroll took me over this flowing piece of misery. Turning right at the Glorieta de Marques de Vadillo, I headed ‘upstream’ (not that there is a current in any form or shape) towards the Atletí stadium Vicente Calderon. I passed a group of boys playing the drums although I didn’t take any notice, subconsciously I was still angry with the Manzanares. As I climbed some steps to get a better view of the stadium my feet trod on an ADN newspaper – one of these free newspapers you receive every morning. This would have been a somewhat minor event had my eye not spotted a picture on the second page. It depicted a pair of hands trying to catch a white ball. The title was: Recta Final Mundial de Cricquet en Granada.

This summed-up my Cricket World Cup ’07 experience. Deprived of Internet or any other source of information (Luwe in a valiant effort to keep me updated sent me two messages with scores but soon gave up as I failed to reply to any of them. I will let it be known that I enjoyed receiving these messages, slackness however took over) this was the first news I had of the World Cup since the murder of the Pakistani coach Bob Woolmer three weeks ago. And it was lying – torn up – on a Madrid pavement, neglected by everyone.


I soon found out that there was no point continuing my walk ‘upstream’ as there was no bridge in sight (although I could have easily jumped over the Manzanares…backwards and blindfolded). Therefore I turned back and again crossed the rather extravagant Puente de Toledo and found my self once more north of the river which marks the beginning of Madrid’s old town.

At this moment Tyler, my mate from Okalahoma City, phoned. “What’s up,” he greeted. I never know how to answer this question with any degree of honesty. “Clouds? The Sky?.” Luckily Tyler had already provided me with the only two reasonable answers some weeks earlier, so I could not be fooled this time. I answered: “What’s up yourself?” (“Not much”, is the other plausible reply and this coincidently was Tyler’s answer to my rebound). He wanted to know if we had any Spanish books lying around he could borrow. “Something nice and easy..you know, to practice some Spanish.”

When I returned home after my nice stroll I had a look for him and I could only find one book: Oscar Wilde’s El Retrato de Dorian Gray. “Perfect, that’ll do just fine,” I thought.