Postscript

Smile-wreathed faces must surely abound in Vitoria this Monday but here in Donostia, after the football match referred to in the previous posting, it is a question of "..woe, woe and thrice woe!" Sunday 8^th June was an ignominious day for La Real. With just a few minutes of extra time to go, a seemingly assured victory was unbelievably turned to defeat as first one goal, and then another, gave the day to Alavés. The life of a Real Sociedad supporter is filled with suffering these days…

Football is not really my 'thing' but if you want to be better informed about Spanish football in general I would recommend this book: Morbo: The Story of Spanish Football, by Phil Ball. Phil is also a Donostiarra and teacher too when he's not busy writing about football.

They say 'hope springs eternal' and that is all that's left for Real Sociedad supporters now - just one last chance. Will Fortune smile on Donostia and its beleaguered football team?

"By your team(s) shall ye be judged"

In case it had escaped your attention, the European Cup football competition has just commenced. Love it or loathe it, football plays a significant role in contemporary social life and it could be argued that one of the ways in which the stature of a city can be measured is by how many top-ranking football teams it can boast of. Take London for example. Donostia has one major football team, La Real Sociedad, which is currently fighting to regain premier league status. Why is this important? Because in many ways the psychological well-being of a city is integrally bound up with the fortunes of its football team. When the team loses and its followers suffer, so does the city, to a greater or lesser extent.

La Real have seen days of glory in the past but the last few years have been characterized mostly by disappointing results and a downward spiral towards relegation. The situation now is that the team is teetering on the edge of a joyous return to the Premier League or seeing themselves obliged to spend another year of uncertainty in the Second Division. Such situations provoke anxiety. To complicate matters further, this weekend La Real are playing Alavés, a team from another regional Basque capital, Vitoria/Gasteiz, and which has suffered even greater sporting indignity in the last year. If Alavés lose tomorrow, they run the risk of being demoted to the Third Division… Football is not my passion but I can't help but feel nervous about tomorrow's result.

The sharp-eyed reader will have noticed that the title for this posting refers to 'team(s)' - the fact is that the psychological well-being of sports fans from Donostia and Vitoria/Gasteiz has not only been conditioned by their respective football teams in the last week. Both cities have had cause for celebration too, this time in the context of basketball, which must be Spain's second favourite sport after football. Tau Cerámica-Baskonia from Vitoria/Gasteiz won the ACB (Premier) League title for the second time and Bruesa GBC from Donostia won promotion to the same premier league. TV news pictures showed team members attending public celebrations and 'thanksgiving' ceremonies in their respective home cities… Clearly, sport is a topic to be taken seriously in that it lies close to the hearts of many people. I only fear that some of those hearts are all too likely to be broken by this time next week. Let's hope I'm wrong!

Cooking up a storm..

One of the reasons why many people visit San Sebastian/Donostia is that it is famous for its innumerable restaurants, many of which enjoy very high international prestige. For years, Basque chefs have been in the vanguard of the world of nouvelle cuisine: Juan Mari Arzak, Andoni Luis Aduriz, Martin Berasategui are just three from a list of internationally respected chefs. Recently though there has been uncustomary turmoil in the world of Spanish haute cuisine. The source of this little culinary storm is Santi Santamaría, a leading Catalan chef himself, who provoked a public controversy with the publication of his book, La cocina al desnudo, in which he accuses many of his fellow chefs in Spain of taking things to unnatural extremes as regards the new ways they have developed for creating specialist dishes. For Santamaría, Ferrán Adrià, top Catalan chef, must be the arch culprit in this respect. Adrià's restaurant, El Bulli, regularly leads the list of 'World's Best Restaurants' but to hear Santamaría talk you might think that Adrià was the veritable Doctor Frankenstein of international cuisine. Some commentators have wryly commented on the fact that a bit of spicy controversy has been very helpful in promoting Santamaría's new book and that personal rivalry is as much a part of the clash of philosophies as anything else.

Whether you subscribe to the traditionalist approach of Santamaría or the more avant-garde style of Adrià and many of the top Basque chefs, you are guaranteed to eat well in Donostia and the neighbouring areas. Very well indeed. What's more, although it might seem expensive, eating in the top restaurants of Donostia/San Sebastian is notably cheaper than in other culinary centres of similar prestige around the world. So, the culinary storm that figured prominently in the media during the month of May is already disappearing over the horizon. As for the underlying debate as to whether haute cuisine is just for food snobs, rest assured that in the Basque Country what has never changed in popular cooking is the insistence on using only ingredients of the highest quality, cooked with the utmost care and attention. Bon appétit!