Vanessa Bell-Brighton, Madrid, Monday 16th March 2026
Bandoxa: A Celtic Journey by Martyn de Tours
In the misty interstices where memory meets myth, Martyn de Tours’s Bandoxa: A Celtic Journey emerges as a beguiling memoir, a tapestry woven from the threads of Welsh valleys, Spanish sierras, and the capricious whims of a life lived with irreverent gusto. Published in 2025, this self-designed volume, complete with a front cover image by the author himself, defies the staid conventions of autobiography, opting instead for a rollicking, shape-shifting narrative that flits between the personal and the poetic, the absurd and the profound. De Tours, a polymathic wanderer whose email address (martyn.de.tours@martyn.es) hints at a life straddling strategy consulting and soul-searching, invites us into his “cabin above the River Mendo” in Galicia’s Oza-Cesuras, where goats hold grudges and skies perform like temperamental bards. It is a book that, in its anarchic charm, recalls Virginia Woolf’s insistence in A Room of One’s Own that “fiction here is likely to contain more truth than fact”, though de Tours’s truths are marinated in humour, history, and a dash of hallucinatory flair.
From the outset, de Tours signals his intent to subvert expectations. The introduction, “Bandoxa: A Life Lived, Remembered, and Reimagined,” paints a “vibrant mosaic of reflections” that encompasses “revolutionary Welsh princes, poisoned oceans, a grifting cat, angry school projects, the ghost of Segovia, and a fair amount of very questionable weather.” This is no linear chronicle; rather, it is a “memory salad,” as one chapter title aptly puts it, tossed with vignettes that leap from childhood in Caerffili, where dragons “still wink at toddlers”, to sun-drenched escapades in Mallorca and Madrid. De Tours’s prose pirouettes through time, geography, and genre: one moment, we’re amid the surrealism of an “Imaginary Bandoxa Bar,” where patrons debate Yeats over pints; the next, we’re dissecting the cultural DNA of his grandfather, whom he dubs “Grampa Jorge,” insisting with mock-forensic zeal that the man’s love of sauce and crusty bread proves his Spanish origins. “He would wipe the pattern off the plate, given half a chance,” de Tours writes. “Just how Spanish is that?”
Such passages brim with the wit that Oscar Wilde might have admired, for as Wilde quipped in The Importance of Being Earnest, “I can resist everything except temptation”, and de Tours tempts us relentlessly with his digressions, turning memoir into a feast of intellectual mischief. His chapters on school projects, for instance, transform adolescent assignments into mini-epics: “Owain Glyndŵr – The Dreaming Prince of the Hills” becomes a meditation on Welsh rebellion, while “The Sea That Screamed: Minamata and the Poisoned World” channels ecological outrage with a fervor that echoes Somerset Maugham’s keen eye for human folly in Of Human Bondage, where he observed that “people ask you for criticism, but they only want praise.” De Tours, however, balances praise with self-deprecating barbs, admitting his youthful anger as a “fire that burned without direction,” teaching him that “projects weren’t just homework; they were portals.”
The book’s Celtic heart pulses most strongly in its fusion of Welsh and Galician identities, a theme that resonates with Antonia Fraser’s historical acuity in works like The Warrior Queens, where she explores the indomitable spirit of figures such as Boudica. De Tours mirrors this by invoking Noson Galan Gaeaf, Wales’s precursor to Halloween, with its bonfires and gender-swapping revelries, drawing parallels to Mexico’s Day of the Dead and lamenting the Church’s co-optation in 609 AD. “People believe that their departed loved ones return to spend time with the living,” he notes, infusing the ritual with a poignant longing that bridges cultures. This cross-pollination extends to his Spanish sojourns: from mastering flamenco under “Maestro Andrés Segovia” to navigating love in Majadahonda, where “the warmth of humanity” shines through even in “times of COVID-19.” De Tours’s Mallorca interludes, ten in total, each a jewel of sensory detail, evoke sunlit terraces and “terrible weather” alike, underscoring a migrant soul’s quest for belonging. As Woolf might say, in To the Lighthouse, “What is the meaning of life? … A simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.” De Tours strikes such matches repeatedly, illuminating the mundane with epiphanic glee.
Yet Bandoxa is no mere travelogue; it is a sly critique of modernity’s absurdities, laced with political asides that skewer “suckered by politicians” and anti-intellectualism in “Damn Intellectuals!” Here, de Tours channels Maugham’s sardonic gaze, quoting Twain’s quip that “the trouble ain’t that there are too many fools, but that the lightning ain’t distributed right,” while imagining a dialogue among “three of virtual realities’ most astute jesters” on ignorance as a “national sport.” His humour, often anarchic, think a “grifting cat” or “monkey business” in rural Galicia, serves as a bulwark against despair, much like Wilde’s epigrams that mask deeper truths. “Life has only two news bulletins before it all fades to adverts,” de Tours muses in his closing chapter, “Until Another Day,” a valediction that blends Dylan Thomas’s rage against the dying light with a cheeky punchline: “What is the meaning of life? 1956! Wicked.”
What elevates Bandoxa to brilliance is its stylistic audacity, a Woolfian stream of consciousness punctuated by lists, asides, and surreal flourishes that recall the New Yorker’s penchant for narrative depth amid whimsy. De Tours’s voice is confiding, conspiratorial, urging us not to be “disappointed” by the tale’s elusiveness: “There is too much to say and too little permitted to be said.” This restraint, paradoxically, amplifies the intimacy, making readers complicit in his “wandering into Bandoxa,” where fears dissipate like mist and joy kneels “beside you like a childhood friend.” Fraser’s biographical empathy finds echo in de Tours’s tender portraits of Grampa’s football boots, of lost loves, of a “love of my life” amid Edinburgh festivals, revealing a man who, like Maugham’s protagonists, grapples with identity’s fluidity.
In an era of polished, ghostwritten memoirs, Bandoxa stands as a refreshingly handmade artefact, its imperfections, occasional repetitions, and meandering pace endearing rather than detracting. It is a book for those who savour the FT Weekend’s cultural digressions, offering insights into Brexit-era migrations, the solace of food (“a spellbook”), and the redemptive power of music, from Genesis to flamenco. De Tours’s praise for “the ultimate sports drink” (horchata, presumably) and his railing against “damn intellectuals” who mock the clever form a multifaceted prism, refracting life’s chaos into something luminous.
Ultimately, Bandoxa is a triumph of the human spirit, a Celtic odyssey that, in Wilde’s words, reminds us that “to live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.” De Tours lives vividly, inviting us to join his parade of memories, myths, and mirth. Read it, then read it again, different every time, as promised. A gem of a memoir, brimming with insight and irreverence.
THE END
