Roll away the stones

DRIFTING along the ridge of a hill I come across a heap of stones. And then another heap of stones. And then another. Back in my native England I might have glanced at these heaps and deduced – with the air of a man who might be an expert but isn’t – they were the work of an ancient people, probably late Neolithic or early Bronze Age to middle Iron Age. But this is Spain, not the heathery moorlands of Cumbria or the northern Pennines, and different rules apply . . .

They have a curious effect on me, these heaps of stones. Suddenly I feel an urgency to charge through heather and bracken and feel the mud of an upland bog beneath my feet – not this baked ground and Andalucian dust. Strange, the things you assume you will never miss when you move to another country. I return to the house peculiarly unsettled but with lots of pictures of stones.

Still peculiarly unsettled an hour or two later, I check my emails and click on a message from the social media site Linked-In, notifying me of a job for a native English copywriter with a travel and tourism company in Barcelona. I read through the job description – but it’s burdened with stuff like this:

Analyze content architecture for all brands and provide a vision, strategy and directions to help decision making.

This cures my malady immediately. I am no longer unsettled or feel a yearning to return to a land that bludgeons its own language into nonsense. I spend a happy evening exploring Spanish pre-history and archaeology websites while using Google Translate to analyse their content architecture.