In Search of the Spanish Bullfight
13/04/2013
Máxima expectación y rostros conocidos en el encierro en solitario de José Maria Manzanares
[High expectations and familiar faces at the bullfight of José Maria Manzanares as sole matador]
El torero y escritor inglés Alexander Fiske-Harrison con su novia La. Hon. Antalya Nall-Cain
(Photo: Mario Niebla del Toro / ABC de Sevilla)
(Versión original en español aquí.)
A couple of weeks ago the eleven newspapers of the Vocento Group in Spain – El Correo, El Diario Vasco, El Diario Montañés, La Verdad, Ideal, Hoy, Sur, La Rioja, El Norte de Castilla, El Comercio, La Voz de Cádiz, Las Provincias - ran the following interview with me. The only exception was ABC which ran this one a few weeks before.
Alexander Fiske-Harrison
Having crossed through a dimensional portal, suddenly he appears in the bull-run of Cuéllar (Segovia), in an out-and-out race with Spanish fighting bulls, a copy of the Financial Times rolled up in his hand. With each stride, Alexander Fiske-Harrison, English gentleman, writer, actor and reporter for the British press spans the huge distance between his world of the cultural and economic elite of London and the bull-run of Cuéllar with its dust, hooves, horns and shoe leather. This is the story of how one man crossed through the door of these parallel universes and then relayed it in the first person to the most anciest newspaper in the City.
Now, perhaps, the Financial Times will give a respite to the workhorse of Spanish debt and point instead to Spain’s oldest bull-run. Perhaps the best part of the story is the signature on the article. Fiske-Harrison is not the type of tourist who cannot distinguish a cart-ox from a fighting bull, but is an amateur bullfighter whose curious journey began many years ago while search of new cultures and strong sensations. What he found was very far from his life in a grand English family – a line of bankers – with its studies at Oxford, its games of rugby, horses, shooting and the exclusive red and white athletics blazer of Eton College, where Prince William and David Cameron also studied. [Read more...]
The Spanish national newspaper ABC ran the following interview with me last week (with photos by Nicolás Haro).
The online version is available here. The beginning translates in a way you would only find in Spain:
Alexander Fiske-Harrison at his book launch in Seville (ABC)
Interview by Anna Grau
To Alexander Fiske-Harrison in his own country, which is the UK, some call him the “bullfighter-philosopher.” While others send him death threats, since he has gone from being active supporter of animal rights and a student of philosophy and piology in London and Oxford to being a matador in Spain. He is the author of Into the Arena (Profile Books), treatise on Spanish bullfighting for non-believers and foreigners. Many of which, he notes, come to our country intensely attracted to the fiesta nacional… and would swiftly back from where they came if this disappeared.
How to ask this man what he thinks of bullfighting ban in Barcelona? “Since then, the only money I’ve spent there has been to take a taxi from the airport to the train station to go to run with the bulls in Pamplona, a city that invests 4 million Euros each year in the Feria de San Fermín, and gets in return 60 million Euros from tourism.” Clear cut. [Read more...]
Spanish bullfighter José Tomás performing a pass on a bull at the Plaza Monumental bull ring in Barcelona. (Lluis Gene: AFP)
This interview with ABC National Radio was done sometime during the madness and thunder of Pamplona’s Feria de San Fermín – contrary to what is said, I had run the bulls exactly an hour before the interview and, consequently, sunk two large brandies mixed with vanilla milk to take the edge off the adrenaline (a concoction invented in Navarre for exactly that purpose) – hence the ramble. I then borrowed the landline of Graeme Galloway’s Pamplona Posse and stood in the stairwell – hence the echo (why the sound engineer who tested the line didn’t comment and ask me to move, I don’t know.)
Listeners might like to know that not only am I an Australian citizen (I hold joint citizenship with the United Kingdom), but as my mother, who was born and raised in Sydney likes to point out, her uncle was a cattle drover who worked the great overlanders including the Canning Stock Route.
You can listen to it here. It was broadcast this morning, Australian time.
My book, Into The Arena: The World Of The Spanish Bullfight was also reviewed in The Australian by Matthew Clayfied here
It is available for purchase online in Australia here and is published there by Allen & Unwin.
All in all, though, I felt Geraldine Doogue did a fair and good job on the interview (and with thanks to Nick Ridout on the research).
Alexander Fiske-Harrison
