Alhambra to America...

Dear Juliet

I like America and its princess (that's you), I liked it from the first moment I came through customs in Hawaii in 1989. I was coming back from the working holiday to Australia and successfully made that early crossing of the Pacific. I was on United flight 812 Sydney to L.A. that August and I'm afraid to say flight 811 (going the other way) had lost a door west of Honolulu earlier that year.

They'd checked flight 812. It's door hinges were weakening too, but I was reasonably sure they'd fix them pretty soon. I'd stayed briefly in a backpacker hostel in Sydney's Kings Cross (er, it burnt down six weeks later, arson...) and after arriving in L.A., I'd gone up to San Francisco and missed the 1989 earthquake by a few weeks. I remember heading east over the Oakland Bay Bridge and, well, a piece of it fell off during the quake...

It's always been like this: I go somewhere, something really interesting happens to me, I leave without a scratch and then the whole place blows up behind me.

I hope you're not having a conniption reading all this, but the Christie family was always like this. My grandfather John Lawson Christie (Jock) got through three years on the Western Front during the Great War with only one scratch. He was then dragged back for World War Two, was rescued at Dunkirk, trained commandos and actually volunteered for D-Day (long story). According to oral history, when Jock toiled up the beach at the age of fifty-six, the Germans just put their hands up. They'd probably taken one good luck at the greatest invasion force in the history of the world ever, knew they wouldn't have a chance in hell so decided it might be a better idea just to offer their guests some German sausage and schnapps.

And, indeed, on every other beach it was Saving Private Ryan and worse...

Dad fought in Burma and survived World War Two, and I seem to have inherited their incredible luck. I might tell you the story about Brexit and the Soho bomb sometime, or maybe not...

Anyway, Mum noticed this about Dad in post-war civilian life and, although very mild-mannered, looked him hard in the eye one time and said:

"You've got the luck of the devil."

So I was lucky and I liked America. I'd studied Creative Writing and American Studies at college and it's amazing how perfectly that defined my future escapades.

One of Dear Miss Landau's more subtle themes also covered the fact that, in 2010, I subconsciously reverted to the ways of my fathers and started acting like a soldier in the field. I even adopted my father's old call sign and there is a brief mention of Dog Easy Fox in the book...

Dog Easy Fox, inbound...

That always brings a tear to my eye.

But where did America begin? I hadn't paid that much attention to my American Studies back in the day, but ever since I'd found out about "bibliophiles bartering for Christian gospel manuscripts illuminated by illustrators from the East at the great book markets of Toledo and Cordoba" while researching Macnab, I'd wanted to see some of Spain's Islamic architecture.

I finally managed it in 2023, deciding to go see the Alhambra in Granada.

Please do not worry. No bits fell off the plane and the hotel didn't burn down. I achieved another life's ambition, and while I was there did a bit of casual research into local history.

And I got a little surprise.

As you know, Ferdinand and Isabella endorsed Christopher Columbus's expedition to seek passage to the East Indies and, well, you know where that ended up!

What I did not know was where that endorsement took place.

Well, I found out. After finally kicking the Moors out by 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella took possession of the Alhambra and got back to business.

Essentially, they backed Columbus to go find America at the Alhambra.

Allah the Merciful the Compassionate does indeed weave the threads of men's destinies into many strange tapestries...

I toiled up the mountain path, found out this truth and looked westward to the Americas for a long time, thinking of its princess.

Love,

James