They really were spoiling my view. There, jutting out into the Barcelona skyline, plump and firm as a darts player’s belly, as old and loved as a childhood sporting trophy, stood the weirdest pair of breasts you’d ever see this side of a drunk Google trip. Standing far too close together, they peered straight out – laughing in the face of nature or aesthetics – like the goggle-eyed appendages of some deep-sea creature.
The mammary equivalent of a startled cartoon character’s eyes made frequent struts round the crowded pool area, brandished by a brick-coloured woman that resembled a cross between Mariah Carey and a guy at work we call Gollum. And by Mariah Carey I mean the real, sexless, try-hard bundle of vanity, not the version this hideous woman would see.
Anyway, the view from Grand Hotel Central’s rooftop pool was almost as unnerving as the sight of her Morph’s-head boobs that obscured it. Forget vertigo: there was an unease in the fact that, as we sat slurping cava and toasting the fact we could afford this place (for one night only), the backdrop we’d paid for was one of unmitigated shanty town. New Cross in the sun.
This schoolboy dichotomy represents much of Barcelona. A historic ‘old town’ left for dead and picked apart by vultures brandishing guidebooks and bum bags. The dilapidated Barrio district becoming ‘chic’. Except on our late-night visit, when the vintage clothes shops were shut, the kebab shops open and it was about as chic as Bristol city centre. The age-old routine of displacing real residents to make way for huge developments that weren’t asked for, as with the Forum district.
It seemed – on my Ryanair carbon killer 48-hour trip at least – to be a city worshipping artifice like nowhere else. And nowhere else represents artifice quite like Barceloneta, which is artificial in only the way a beach built fifteen years ago can be. It was on this stretch of manufactured idyll that we found, by way of hotel reception, Shoko.
For a birthday meal by the setting sun of the Mediterranean, and at a hefty premium, I was hoping for something more glamorous than the overcooked stringfellows and tinned spaghetti sauce of my early self-cooking days. But that’s what ‘Cod fish with tomato confit and crunchy potatoes’ was. At least with the time saved not bothering to look up ‘confit’ they managed to insert a few more bones into the fish; it had more skeleton than the London Dungeon. Luckily the starter, foie terrine with fig marmalade and toasts’ did itself an injustice in translation. The terrine was as seductively soft as I’ve ever had and the plate came painted with a variety of drizzles and rocket that clearly hadn’t picked up as many airmiles as me. The place had eastern pretensions so the birthday girl had a wokful of king prawns – nicely displayed and as good as any high street takeaway apparently. Now I don’t know if and how and when God sends us signs in life, but as I just typed ‘seductively soft’ sitting outside Monmouth Coffee Company, a pigeon shat on my laptop.
