Thursday 9th August One Sketch #137) Atocha Station, Madrid

From one chair to another
Speeding towards family
across a brown, parched land.

Yes, the end of my time in Madrid, although not the end of my time in Spain. On Thursday I took the train across country from Madrid to stay with my in-laws in Alicante. With a long time to kill I went for a walk along the Paseo del Prado and then came back to the station. I know that this sounds silly, but my train was at 12:15, and I didn’t want to go back into the station until the previous Alicante train – the 10:45 – had gone. To be honest, the Atocha station in Madrid seems to be going through a bit of an identity crisis, as I’m sure it thinks that it’s an airport. Before you could go into the Departure (Lounge) Area, you had to go through an airport style luggage check. Then when you got into the Departure area you couldn’t go onto the platform until your train was called, in the same way that you get called to the Departure gate in an airport. For all of that, though, the system seemed to work. I sat in one of the more comfy chairs which faced the glass doors onto the platforms and sketched one of the choo-choos which was waiting there.
When they allowed us onto the platform at about 5 to 12 I had time to quickly sketch the outlines of some of the people waiting, and when we got on the train – 5 minutes late so no bonus points to Renfe there – I completed the shading. The blokey sitting next to me seemed very interested in what I was doing. Finally he started talking to me, and even after my standard apologetic – ‘soy Ingles, no hablo Espanol mucho’ he kept talking. I kept picking up the odd word here and there, and after he pointed to my sketch, then the colourful logo on his T shirt I gathered that he was saying that my sketch would be a lot better with colour. Everyone’s a critic. I tried to show him the watercolour sketches in the book, but he wasn’t interested in a retrospective of my Madrid period, and said nothing. So, in an act of revenge, I noisily ate my crisps and drank my drink at him. That’ll teach him. I’d like to think that when he got off at Cuenca he had seen the error of his ways.
Fair play to the driver of the train. We left Madrid late, but we arrived at Alicante early.