Posted 6:16 PM by Paul
Pamplona Again

The dreams acquire a greater intensity at this time of year with the light flooding in through the bedroom curtains at 5.30 a.m. I am dreaming about Pamplona. Fiesta of San Fermin. Running of the bulls and all that. Last night in dreamland I checked into the pension only to find out it was 1,000 Euros for 4 days in a shared room and Gordon Brown and his entourage had checked in down the corridor. Clearly my mind had worked out that it is not a Tony Blair kind of event - too noisy - too dirty - too working class. A little bit of guilt crept into my dream when I realised that I hadn't thought about ringing Heather until I got back to Heathrow airport. Years ago, I dreamt that the running of the bulls had been transferred to Sheffield. Old ladies were reduced to dodging into the back alleys between the terraced houses to avoid being gored.

The dreams are in colour. Red and white to match the white shirts and red neckerchiefs worn by tens of thousands of revelers. In the dreams I can hear the pounding drums and feel the frenetic dancing. I eat well during these nocturnal travels. I can taste the ham and fried eggs. The smell of roasting meat is mixed with sweating humanity in bars so packed you can hardly move. The delicious exuberance of the crowds dressed in white during seven days of non-stop Apollonian joy dissipating into total exhaustion when you find yourself still awake at 7.30 a.m. jigging behind the town hall band. Is it really tomorrow already? Long dead friends are resurrected and once more dance and sing. Matt is back amongst us where he belongs.

I have been going to the Sanfermines in Pamplona continuously for the last 27 years. If anything the anticipation and excitement grows with the time. It’s not a normal thing for a man of 48 to be doing every 6th of July.

I met many Americans as a result of Pamplona – as a working class Northerner where else would I meet them? For us America was a fantasy land only accessible via Saturday matinees or Marvel Comics. My first American friends were Peripherals who had decided to stay a while in Europe. Some had come in the late 40s on the GI Bill, others after a tour of duty in Vietnam. Others had dropped out of college and decided to live in a place where they could drink legally and cheaply aged 18. But my induction into the Sanfermines had nothing to do with Ernest Hemmingway or America.

It all started in 1975. I had just left Bretton Hall teacher training college after a disastrous two terms studying Drama. After a short trip to Paris where I thought I might get a job washing dishes – shades of George Orwell - I took a job at a large gentleman's outfitters in the centre of Sheffield called Jackson's the Tailors. The assistant manager was a small immaculately dressed man in his late 20s called Dave Cook. He was known to everybody as Cooky. He was fanatical about all things Spanish and in particular the Bullfight. A decade years earlier he had left his job and gone to Spain in the hopes of becoming England's next big name matador. He fought a couple of fights in small villages and even got gored. Then he limped back home to the North of England and a more secure life.

Cooky was a character. He was also a Mormon. He had converted to the Church of the Latter Day Saints when he met his wife, a life-long follower, who already had children by a previous husband. So, he converted to the faith, got married and gave up drinking - but did not give up on Spain. He had a huge bullfight poster pinned up in the tea room and berated his colleagues on the greatness of all things Spanish.

"If it's so good why don't you go and live there?" was a common sneering response.

" I fully intend too. " Dave would reply.

Most people thought Cooky was a pain in the arse. I thought he was amazing. He was so energetic in comparison with the rest of the staff who seemed to be sleep walking to retirement.

One Saturday we had opened up the shop and were stood in the early summer sunshine by the doors overlooking the pedestrian precinct. Cooky was wistful

" Beautiful day like this, they'll be hanging out the flags and bunting in villages across Spain ready for fiesta. Now I have got responsibilities but you haven't . That's where you should be. Not stuck in a shop on a sunny Saturday morning."

I loved the way that he encouraged me to just take off and leave. Normally bosses would drone on at you for hours about how 'if you played your cards right' you might have their job in 20 years. Cooky didn’t even bother to teach me how to measure up old men for their wool worsted suits. He knew that I would be on my way in a few weeks and actively helped me escape.

"So Paul. Where are you going on holiday this year?"

" Well I'm skint at the moment. Me and a mate are thinking of hitching down to Cornwall, but next year I am going to save some money and spend the whole summer in Greece."

Cooky exploded.

" Greece! Are there bullfiights in Greece? Are there fiestas in Greece? What are you going to do? Smoke dope and strum your guitar on the beach all summer! " I hadn't told him that that was exactly my idea.

“ Paul you should go to Pamplona for thje running of the bulls. Never been myself but a friend told me it was amazing. Go there with some mates and tell me what it was like."

Cooky was insistent. He picked up the theme at tea break and lunch time and I gave in. Pamplona it would be for the next summer holidays. I left the job at the tailors for a string of better paid temp jobs in factories, building sites, an iron foundry . I then moved on to a permanent job as a nursing orderly in a psychiatric hospital . Think One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest with Yorkshire accents. The experience cheered me up immensely. Hitherto I had been self-obsessed and had a bit of a victim complex. Born into a poor family. Dad died when I was 12. I saw myself as a bit of a working class hero who had had it tough. The hospital made me realize I had had it very easy. No mental illness. No family violence. No alcoholism. Loving mum, bothers and sisters. Food in the fridge. Good friends.

The hospital was populated by a cast of characters straight out of fiction.

The 1960s acid casualty staff nurse who admitted to having LSD flashbacks on the wards whilst he was handing out drugs to patients. The nursing sister who had known many of her charges since it was a locked mental asylum before World War II. Their medical notes revealed that they had been committed by 2 doctors back in the 1930s as teenagers for something they called Precox Dementia – a depressive paranoid condition we might now call teenage depression.

It was common knowledge that some of the older women had been put away when they were teenagers to keep them quiet about the sexual relations they had enjoyed with local dignitaries – vicars. masons, politicians and psychiatrists. One of the long stay schizophrenic used to obsessionally scribble the names of his favourite food on the wall next to the bed. He was a big man and tried to strangle me when I asked him to come away from the dormitory and have a cup of tea. I was very calm and told him not be silly and put me down. I only started to shake with fear a couple of minutes later when the danger had passed.

But it was a happy time. Discos and proper girlfriends as well as night’s out with my mate Mark Oldfield who was now fully back in circulation after splitting up with his girlfriend. We had played in a school rock band called Bruin and although we were dreadful, Mark was a good guitarist. He was alos a great cartoonist, had a sharp wit and a wicked sense of satire. He had published a scandalous alternative school magazine just before we both left ( OK I was kicked out) called Eric. The highlight of which was a short story “Billy Bunter of Greyfriars” in which he mixed the writing style of 1930s English Public Schoolboy novels with the explosive violence of a Sam Peckinpah movie. The sado-masochistic section is still shocking 30 years later. He was talented and just a bit dangerous but like me he lived at home. What was the point in getting a flat? Less money for beer and guitar strings, Mark came round to my house or should I say my mum’s house quite a lot and we often sat in my attic bedroom listening to Marc Bolan records and drinking whatever they had on special offer at the local shop. Ususally cider. I told him about the plan to go to Pamplona and he agreed immediately. It sounded like a good plan. 2 weeks away getting drunk in Spain with a short stopover in Paris. This would stock us up with stories for the coming year and we could brag to our friends about our adventures. We just had to find out when this amazing fiesta actually took place. The Spanish Tourist Board were not much help when we rang them. All they could say was that it was some time in the first two weeks of July.

Even though I had left the Jackson the Tailors I kept in touch with Cooky. He invited Mark and I up to his neat semi-detached in a new development on the outskirts of town to watch Super 8 films of bullfights. That was our preparation for the wild bacchanalia of Fiesta. Sitting with a Mormon drinking de-caffinated coffee and talking about the different passes the matador made with his cape. We also listened to stories about his bullfighting exploits which we started to suspect were a little over embellished even though we were sure that he had faced horned animals in a spangly suit at some point. The strange atmosphere was added to when two Mormon elders – earnest 19 year olds from Utah dressed in identical black suits came to his house whilst we were watching bullfights. They drank squash and talked to Cooky about the church and showed him a film. I got the impression that his faith in the tale of the engraved tablets and magic spectacles was starting to wane. Mark and I made it back to town just before the pubs shut and downed a couple of pints by way of De-Mormonisation .


The Summer of 1976 approached and we booked our train tickets from the North of England down to the Spanish border. On the basis of a best guess we went for July 1st – 12th, figuring that we would at least get to see one bull run and do some drinking, We had about 10 words of Spanish between us. As the train slipped out of Sheffield Midland station I remember slipping back into my seat and imagining the holiday was already over and Mark and I had returned home bursting with stories to tell the lads in the pub. Then Mark came back from the buffet car with some beers and we started to plan ahead. We had a tent. There was forced to be a campsite near Pamplona, wasn’t there? Spain was cheap so we should have enough cash if we stuck to bread and wine, but we had to be careful during the 5 hour stopover in Paris. A strategically misplaced round of coffees and croissants could blow a hole in our budget. By the second can of McEwans Export it was all looking good.

We stayed the night in London in a converted coal cellar under a junk shop run by two friends from Sheffield who had decided to try their luck in the big city. It wasn’t going well and Howard had decided to spend a week at his mum’s to recuperate leaving Nick to look after us. Four months later I would be running the same shop. Nick cooked us a full English breakfast and saw us off from Victoria Station on our way south to adventure. In Paris we had a few drinks in a sunny terrace bar opposite Austerlitz station. The drinking left us dehydrated and with only a few minutes to spare before the train left. But that was OK we decided because we could always sit in the buffet car and drink lemondade. Except there was no buffet car and no seats. The entire train was full and we spend the first 5 hours of the journey standing or laying in the corridor. This was harder for Mark as he is 6’ 3 “ to my 5’5”. I managed to cadge a few gulps of water from another young backpacker just north of Bordeaux. Dawn broke over the Atlantic near Biarritz and we were both mesmerized by the sunlight on the water and brightly painted Basque chalets. It would have been a great moment but it was spoilt by my incessant moaning about how I was dying of thirst.

I was thrilled to see the kepis of the French gendarmes give way to the patent leather tri-corns of the Spanish Civil Guards at the Hendaye/Irun international bridge. As someone who had read stories of the International Brigades as a teenager I was ready to re-start the Civil War right away. Except the fighting bit that is. I fancied the speechifying more that the blood letting.

Pamplona lay before us and my absolute best hope was that we would have a good two weeks, not get the shits and come back with some great stories. I never suspected that we would both be coming back with our beards turning grey as we approached 50. I have just got an e-mail from Mark. Like me he is starting to feel the pulse race as he plays his CDs of fiesta music and hear the crowds chanting rhythmically SAN FERMIN – SAN FERMIN…SAN FERMIN in his head.

And Cooky? I am sure he is fine. I rang him in the early 80s and a voice I did not recognize answered the phone.

“Dave Cook? Sorry love they have just moved out. Emigrated. I believe they are living in Salt Lake City now.”