Time to think

Happiness is being asked for something in the kitchen and not only knowing where it is, but also being able to find it without moving boxes.

This means of course that we are getting there. Wherever there is: some fabled country where people live in their homes without having to construct something at every moment; where they can move from room to room without having to thread their way through a potentially lethal box walled pathway; without fearing that every foot tread is going to destroy something which cost a substantial sum of money to place in your way. At the moment it is still a dream – but it is a dream which is partially fulfilled on the first floor of the house.

The living room and the kitchen are now reasonably presentable. They lack finishing touches and the chaos carefully hidden behind doors is work for the future – but here and now they are places which will excite interest rather than repulsion.

The same cannot be said for the rest of the house with the third floor being a place of horror – but with a view of the sea!

Toni is now a great deal more tranquil as (unfortunately from my point of view) he has managed to make the bloody television work. This also means that his mother will now contemplate being our first guest. She departed with the rest of the family earlier in the week vowing she would stay nowhere where she was unable to watch her favourite programme, which is about Barça and consists of people shouting at each other. You can see why these last days have been such bliss for me. Hard work indeed, but at least without the soul destroying awfulness which is Spanish television at its best. At its worst there is no simile of sufficient strength to give an accurate flavour of its deep worthlessness.

On the decorative side it has been an interesting experience to regress to one’s student days with the purchase of the expanding paper IKEA light shades to cover the bare bulbs. Some things, I tell myself, are design classics and never go out of fashion. And they are cheap, easy to construct and simplicity to fit. How many people have put them up as a stop-gap measure and then watched them (if they noticed them at all) become that fetching shade of cream which is a sign of maturity and a measure of how far they have become a part of the house and it would be a pointless extravagance to change them.

We are beginning to think of what paintings to put up and my idea of using the stairs as a sort of gallery is one way in which we can show rather more of our collection than we were able to do in the flat.

I love the use of the word ‘collection’ it gives gravitas to the unplanned accretion of art that I have accumulated over the years. I am proud to announce to the world that I have the largest collection of paintings, charcoals and drawings by Ceri Auckland Davies on the European mainland, and being a person cognizant of his responsibilities I am prepared to consider requests for loans to exhibitions so that I can read, “Private collection, Barcelona” in the catalogue!

I have been buying art works for over thirty years: from a wonderful ink drawing while in University through pottery ‘landscape pots’ while I was in Kettering to Ceri’s tempera paintings. I wish I had bought more. There are exhibitions that I have been to where for example the delicate painting of a bird’s wing; the portrait of a little girl: the original of a national newspaper cartoon serial; an eerie representation of a crowd; a delicate geometrical abstract and a large ‘metallic’ pottery plate – all tempted me and I didn’t have the cash or I hesitated too long. Those few missed opportunities came to mind very easily and if I gave it a little more though I am sure that others would rise up in my visual memory to taunt me with making the wrong choice in allowing them to go to different homes!

I always have before me the Missed Hockney. I saw a reproduction of A Bigger Splash in a newspaper and liked it immediately. It cost a lot, but I could have got the money together somehow if I had been really serious about the piece. But I wasn’t and I didn’t. The amount that the picture would be worth today keeps me awake nights! The further realization that I am missing equal ‘bargains’ (just as my grandparents didn’t buy Van Goghs) also causes me some unease!

The crisis in world banking (I blame BBVA) has shown just how fatuous the concept of saving is when almost half of what you have ‘put away’ is wiped out by the criminal ineptitude of avaricious, callous bastards. No, the ‘eat, drink and be merry’ (we will leave out the ‘et in Arcadia ego’ sentiment in the concluding phrase of the aphorism) is the only way to live.

So buy more art and be happy.

Sounds good to me!

White and gleaming!

I have cleaned and mopped the floor of the kitchen.

That statement in itself would be notable, but the fact that there is visible floor to be cleaned is even more remarkable.

The days have begun to merge one into another and yet the perspicacious might discern a barely perceptible format. The normal day starts with one or other of us (i.e. me) going to a bank or estate agent to demand the return of money. Money being refused the acceptable form of tension release is to go to IKEA. Something will then be constructed with consequent nervous tension and subsequent complete prostration.

Today the attempt was made to get back the deposits, which amount to two months’ rent. The estate agent, as I fully expected did not furnish me with crisp Euro notes of pleasingly high denominations but instead informed me that the issuing of money was dependent on the finalization of a bill for the ironic tap. You may remember said sardonic piece of plumbing decided to malfunction within minutes of the arrival of the Owner for the final visit of inspection before we left the flat. At most this is going to amount to €100 (though with our ex-Owner and the bunch of thieves with an estate agents sign over their door who knows what they might be able to fabricate) so they are withholding €2,600 for some paltry sum of money!

I have studied the headed notepaper of the ‘estate agents’ with some attention as I would like to write a revealing letter to their professional body; astonishingly they do not seem to belong to one! Who would have imagined!

The pitiful state of the kitchen, which has necessitated our eating out most nights as it is impossible to prepare food in the three-dimensional jig-saw of a food preparation area that is masquerading as a junk room.

Because of the lack of shelves in the kitchen units (!) {About which I have been told by Toni not to make a fuss} our storage capacity is severely limited and there is also a woeful lack of drawer space. These two negative aspects precipitated our decision to get another unit for the kitchen.

My first choice of what looked like fairly basic but elegant metal shelving turned out to be horrifically expensive so I plumped for a cabinet sized version of the system which includes our wine rack augmented by a variety of handy IKEA plastic storage solutions. I also bought a selection of the wire accessories which ‘go with’ the shelving. I am not sure that I actually need them but they are fun and they were easy to install. After what seems like eons of screwdriving and painstaking interpretation of minute details in broadly drawn diagrams ease of construction is something to value!

And things are put away. Or, to put it more truthfully, are not on view. There are clear surfaces. Behind the doors of cupboards there are Heath-Robinson constructions of tins and packets and gadgets and cartons; but unless you look you wouldn’t know that there were there. All you see is a clean and featureless white door.

Toni is taking a siesta and, when the snoring subsides and he descends to see my hard work he will, with logic and innate efficiency explain to me why the places in which I have put things are the wrong places in which things have been put.

But at least there will be an initial gasp at the glory of white tiles revealed in all their bleached glory.

One lives for such moments!

Endings?

The Aval is mine!

Not without a fight. After assurances that the money would be paid into my account on Tuesday I was a little surprised to find that it had not been placed there. The woman who I have dealt with before whose banking statements are either fatuous or deliberately misleading or both was waiting to listen to my catalogue of complaints and plaintive (yet searching) questions.

Eventually after I had railed at her in an unusually fluent adrenalin fuelled tirade of Spanish I stormed out of the bank leaving her with a parting sally telling her that the services BBVA offered its customers were a joke.

Unfortunately because of my idiosyncratic Spanish it may have been understood as a complaint about the toilets! Gives them something to think about and there was no way that they could have misinterpreted my mood!

By way of calming myself down I went to IKEA. Again. IKEA stores are constructed on the Roman military principle that wherever you are in the world they are all the same so you know exactly where to go in the serpentine labyrinth that they construct to force you to look at everything they sell before you can get out. Our ‘local’ store is being refitted and, rather than close they are doing the store bit by bit. This means that if you go to the store on a daily basis (as I assure you I have) there are subtle differences as one section closes another opens. It is rather like being in the furnishing equivalent of the film ‘The Cube’ as interconnected elements in the installation constantly change and move.

At least in IKEA you are not squirted with acid or cut with fine wires or incinerated as in the film though I would maintain that there are certainly lethal elements lurking among the more metallic and disconcerting constructions on sale!

Calmed by the spending of money I returned to Castelldefels, deposited my purchased with Toni and, armed with my photocopied aval I returned to the bank.

My money was still not in my account and I asked The Woman to do something about it. She did, in whispered conversations in rapid Spanish which she hoped I would not understand. Some of it was technical, but I did understand that she was urging the people to whom she was speaking not to try and get me to return to Terrassa to get my money. This was a wise move on her part, because any suggestion that I would have had to do anything more than sit in front of her to get my money would have been met with a physically demonstrative expression of my disinclination to do anything more.

Eventually the money was in my account and I then asked for a full listed statement of the account. I lost my temper with the woman as she tried to convince me that the massive bank charges that had been ripped from my current account to finance the ‘risk’ element in my aval were reasonable. Reasonable! I give MY money to the bank who charge me 300€ to set up an account of MY money and then charge be a quarterly charge of 117€ for doing nothing with MY money and pay me a miserly 1.5% which they find other ways not to pay me.

It really does seem to me that the aval is a form of legalized theft and is nothing more than a cynical money making scheme in which is there is absolutely not risk whatsoever for the bank who, if the worst came to the worst, would only have to pay someone else’s money out of the gaping maw of their evilly amassed riches. God rot them.

I have opened a file and intend to ask my union for advice on how I can get my money back from the grasping fingers of the avaricious incompetents who have brought western society to its knees by their intemperate and self aggrandizingly selfish approach to their so-called profession.

But enough of the forays to come in the world of Spanish banking. What of today?

Today has seen the arrival of fridge, washing machine and dishwasher. At last we have re-entered the realm of what I regard as something approaching civilization.

The fridge is enormous and has an internal light whose power drove me backwards when I first opened the machine with the power on! It is also the right way round; so no more stooping for the milk in the vulgar little fridge that The Owner provided.

The washing machine, disconcertingly, plays little tunes at various stages in its washing sequence which at the moment charm with their novelty but I am sure will infuriate in the near future.

The dishwasher is stolid and Germanic and is gradually filling up.

The Family also arrived to celebrate Carme’s birthday. I realize with some trepidation that of all the members of The Family we now are the ones with the most available space for events! I foresee that our popularity is set to rise at the same rate as a seat for the next Real Madrid v. Barcelona match!

We also had the workers of our estate agent arrive. They came to repair the shower, toilet and gate. So, while The Family were eating the delicious cream birthday cake we were treated to an impromptu fireworks display as men ground the metal gate in showers of sparks and then added to the pyrotechnical display with a touch of spot welding. The youngest member of The Family stood wobbilly transfixed by the unaccustomed display.

No sooner had the workmen left than a colleague arrived and in the cool breeze underneath the house we sat and chatted about the evils of Mankind as they are evinced in the educational life of Catalonia. Most enjoyable.

Tomorrow another battle royal.

We have been told by our worthless previous estate agents that we should have our substantial deposits returned this week. As tomorrow will be Thursday and as the week is running out we are visiting our debtors and demanding the cash. Toni is working himself up into frenzy where only the full amount proffered on a cushion of crushed velvet is going to satisfy him.

I look forward to verbal fireworks. Especially if they try and retain any part of the two months’ deposit by trying to argue the toss about the condition of the flat.

Watch this space!

It does strike twice

There is a play by Gogol called ‘The Lower Depths’ which I know I have read some time back in my even more pretentious youth, probably set in a Silesian Salt Mine – the play I mean, not my youth. The title somehow dredged itself out of my memory (or should that be evaporated from the saline of my recollection) when I was confronted with something today.

Moving, as I am sure my more experienced reader will know, haemorrhages money at a degree which makes a slashed aorta look like a minor scratched knee. It was while I was paying by card for another tranche of money in excess of a thousand Euros payable to IKEA that I was informed that the amount had been refused by my bank.

As you know my bank is BBVA – the worst bank in the world – and I have taken every opportunity to rail against its stupidity, cupidity, mendacity, rapacity and other adjectives too vitriolic to commit to type. I has sent me, like some latter day dweller in biblical times to return to the place of the issuing of the aval to get my money back; it has charged me hugely for services which defy ironic condemnation; it has changed opening hours to ensure that I can never get to it; it has security doors which limit egress to one person at a time through a secure corridor – in short it is the sort of financial institution which was dreamed up by one of the ice locked traitors in the frozen lake in the lower circles of hell as envisaged by Dante.

Today was The Buying of the Electrical Domestics. These three essentials come to what my parents would have described as ‘a tidy sum’ and so; being prudent I decided to confirm that my use of my bank card would ensure a worry free purchase.

After the usual inordinate wait while the single cashier (do you know the profits that BBVA made last year!) slowly made her way through the increasingly frustrated line of BBVA clients (or ‘worthless scum’ as they are know my customer services in that worthy bank) until it came to my turn.

Of course, I was in the ‘wrong’ queue and had another hatred inducing wait for the single customer representative to be free.

When she was free she was all smiles and reassurance. This was partly because she vividly remembered by response when she told me that I would have to return to Terrassa to get my aval sorted out – even though it was in a branch of BBVA and the money was to be paid to me, a customer of BBVA etc etc. There was, I was told, no limit to the amount which I could use on my card as long as there were funds to cover the amount I wanted to spend.

I think that there more intelligent of you will have worked out where this little tale is heading.

It didn’t bloody work.

After waiting (again) for the insane amount of paperwork to be completed in the shop for the purchase of the three kitchen machines and after having shown an amount of paperwork which would have got Hitler into Heaven my card was refused as the bank (BBVA in case the name of the evil bastards’ organization had slipped from your memory) denied my request.

It just so happened that I had withdrawn 600€ in hard cash for little things like curtain rods when I left the bank so I was able to put in cash and then pay the rest by card. As ‘the rest’ was just under a thousand Euros it didn’t take a mathematic genius to work out that my limit (which doesn’t exist) was 1000€.

I have to return to that institution (which is to banking what David Beckam is to particle physics) to get the full account of my aval and to ask, ever so gently, why I was lied to today.

I relish the future conflict.

I am going to write to whatever consumer organizations exist in Spain to denounce this travesty of financial rectitude and have already ‘opened a file’ so that the list of misdemeanours can be correctly itemized and flung in their corporate face.

During a day in which, in spite of everything, we have done quite a lot there has been little time for contemplation. Dinner this evening was, however one of those times.

We went back to our favourite restaurant and had a meal of sea-food tapas and for the first time in the day we were able to relax a little. The television was building up to event of the week: The Presentation to the People. This is a time honoured subject in biblical painting which involves Jesus and usually has the Latin title of ‘Ecce Homo’ – Behold the Man! The gory representations of Jesus were given a more modern and positive turn in the television presentation as this was the occasion when Cristiano Ronaldo was paraded before the baying hordes of Real Madrid fans.

Amid the suited dignitaries and disinterred past players the slim figure of Ronaldo dressed in the white strip of Madrid looked strangely incongruous and somewhat vulnerable. There was no visible panty line, but was rather homely to see the end of the shirt showing through the sheer white of his shorts, I was reminded of the Roman custom of having someone behind a successful general as the Great Man acknowledged the plaudits of the crowd on his Victory Parade repeating in the general’s ear, ‘Remember man that thou art mortal!’ I hope that there is someone for Cristiano because the idolization he is currently being given would turn the head of most people let alone an arrogant show off like him!

But such things did not concern me. Let it pass! What did occupy my thoughts was an observation that I realize that I have been making unconsciously for a long time.

People rarely look happy as they come from the beach.

It’s true. They trudge away looking as though they have completed an onerous task, as though some duty has been ticked off.

It is not hard to see why. The beach is an almost absurdly inconvenient place. The one that I am talking about is full of people who have shrieking children and/or noisy dogs. If they have neither of these requisites then they can compensate by playing radios tuned to hideous ‘music’ stations at levels which separate sand grains and see their music systems turned into a sort of sonic drill.

Drink rapidly becomes luke-warm and food attracts sand so that eating becomes a grinding experience. The sea, needless to say is too cold, too full of jelly fish, too crossed by currents, too dirty to be enjoyed. The wind picks up and sandpapers those tender areas when hands have failed to put lotion.

Waves of beach vendors sweep across the sands like the barbaric hordes from history and quiet is constantly shattered by announcements in Spanish, Catalan, execrable English and funny French.

The shrine of Saint James in Compostella is notable for the number of pilgrims who deliberately take the most arduous way to the Cathedral. Some complete the last stages of the Camino on their knees leaving a trail of blood behind them. Perhaps the Spanish share with the British the quiet satisfaction of turning pleasure into hard work when it comes to the enjoyment of the coastline!

We have been working so hard that we have forgotten what the beach looks like.

Just as a spur to our efforts, Toni’s sister and all members of the family have decided to hold said sister’s birthday in our extensive demesne.

So two days to get it all together.

God help!

The sun will shine tomorrow!

I have experienced many lifetimes since I last took finger print to key. I feel like some Buddhist illuminates who knows that he has died and been reborn in ever lower guises in the course of history.

Moving, as is well known, is one of the top five Most Stressful Experiences. Our move has been well within the tightest parameter of the top of the top five.

It is difficult to know where to start to illustrate the sheer horror of the whole catastrophic sequence of events, so I won’t bother. I will merely take you back to the day of the inspection by the owner.

Toni and I had sweated blood to get the flat looking as fine as it possibly could so that there could be no reason for The Owner (this time with a capital O for Ogre) denying us our full deposits back and, much more importantly, returning me my aval which amounts to six months’ rent.

We had cleaned in a way which would have delighted my mother’s father who was painstaking in the extreme in these matters (probably something to do with his having been an accountant and town treasurer) and even he would have found it difficult to have discovered any slight faults in our cleaning. We had plied bleach as if it was free, we had used every other cleaning agent on woods, glass, plastic, laminate, veneer, tile, fabric, steel, and several other more difficult to spell surfaces. We had painted ceilings to mask the growth of mould and Toni had siliconned every joint in the bathroom with specially bought, extremely cheap white stuff – and we were winning.

Every time we cleared away, something else would appear to take its place. Car load after car load of bits and pieces gradually revealed the full majesty of the tile floors which were sparkling with sweat!

We worked right up to the deadline which was the appearance of the Owner and the representative from our awful estate agents. Toni went out to take a last load of rubbish to the skip and I did yet another inspection of the property to ensure that we were leaving nothing.

Fifteen minutes to go and the inspections were, by now, mere confirmation that we had done our stuff.

My cursory glance into the utility area was satisfying: everything as it should be. Next door, or upstairs was taking a shower, but what cared I for neighbours who were soon to be ex-neighbours! The sound of the shower sounded oddly close. Too close.

With the sort of sick apprehension that is usually described in the more obvious detective stories, I opened the door of the utility cupboard and saw that the noise of the shower was actually that of a water pipe that had sprung a leak!

I heard Toni coming back up the steps to the door and, in the immortal words of Tom Hanks (the well-known non-actor) “Toni, we have a problem!”

It was the sort of ironic timing that only happens in books and not in real life, but however hard I tried to write the problem off to literary ineptitude, the hissing of the water kept reminding me that there was indeed something wetly wrong.

We had to turn the water off and, as we did so, the Owner turned up.

He was accompanied by a serious, officious looking young man who immediately read the utilities and started taking an inordinate number of photographs of all aspects of the flat. Walls, windows, lights, fittings, anything that looked significant and lots of things which looked amazingly insignificant were focused on and shot. I became increasingly suspicious and annoyed, as it looked like a clear prelude to a whole series of reasons for keeping the deposit.

The Owner however was supremely indifferent to everything going on and engaged in an animated conversation with Toni on the evil of our Argentinean neighbours in the flat below. Their crimes against humanity are too numerous to explain here, but their having seven dogs in a flat did not endear them to me. Toni actually used the conversation to say that their general attitude was the major reason for our leaving. This is nowhere near the truth but it did help our campaign for the return of the aval.

Formalities concluded we left for the house.

Our arrival was the point at which our lives, as we had known them, came to an abrupt end.

I have worked harder than I want to remember of any time in the past. I have gone through mere tiredness into the realm of hyper-fatigue where the world gradually appears to be more akin to the conception of Dalí than, say, Constable.

Gradually the house is beginning to have the appearance of a home. No room is without that transitory appearance which is the hallmark of the recently occupied house. There are boxes in every room and chaos peers round every corner, but there is an outline of what might be to come.

Everyone has his own story to chill the heart of the most optimistic mover and I have to say that I can top most of them with the experiences that we have had over the last six days!

Tiredness has become a way of life for us and we now accept it as a normal part of life, so I should concentrate on the house itself.

No one is interested in mundane facts about bedrooms, though I could tell you stories about the b ringing up of the new mattress that would make your toes curl.

We at last have an en suite bathroom which has been designated mine by Toni who has commandeered the guest bathroom as his.

My bathroom suffers from the taste of past times. The bath, sink and bidet are coloured in a tint which may be best described as ‘excreta light’ which is offset by a glaze of green tiles with tasteful stylized flower as a design motif! The light is a bulb hanging by a single wire on the glass. The mixer tap doesn’t really work and the toilet leaks.

The painting of the house is in poor order; there are no shelves in the kitchen cabinets; the glass is falling out of the studio glass door; the front gate is on its last legs; wood is rotting and so on and so forth – and we love it.

There is no comparison between the flat and the house. I don’t miss the beach view and rejoice in the space and the different levels.

I am typing this on the third floor balcony while Toni is looking through the telescope I bought him for his birthday a couple of years ago and cooing with delight as he inspects the craters on the moon.

It will take time for the idiosyncrasies of the place to become clear but we already realize that we have catapulted ourselves into a voyeuristic contemplation of a frenzied domestic situation which is being played out next door.

The family seems to live its life outdoors sitting round a table placed in the space under the house, shouting at each other while the television blares unnoticed – except of course by us! It appears that the adolescent girl of the household had made friends with various undesirable kids whom the mother denounced as ‘drug addicts’ and you can guess the rest of that scenario. I am sure that this particular soap opera will play itself out over the next couple of months.

As the kitchen has been a truly depressing space with few actual spaces between the boxes we have been eating out. Our most local restaurant is in the Maritime Club of Castelldefels and I have been impressed with the quality of food there. I have had the best pizza in my life there, though god knows the last time that I actually ate one!

We are yet to get a fridge, washing machine and dishwasher, but at least I have a little more cash now as my school has Done the Right Thing and paid me a double pay for June as would be traditional for all full time teachers and, much more importantly, I have had my aval back.

This means that I now possess the sacred bit of paper that is worth six months’ rent. As soon as I had it I went to The Most Hated Bank in the World (BBVA) and demanded the money be paid into my current account.

The woman in my bank in Castelldefels took one look at the form and said, “You have to go to Terrassa because that is where the aval was issued.” At the time that the aval was taken out I did indeed have my account in Terrassa but it was moved to Castelldefels. The aval is from BBVA paid for with money from my account. The money is to be paid into a BBVA account from BBVA. But I had to go to Terrassa!
When I got there they took the aval, photocopied it (of course) and handed me back a stamped photocopy and told me that the money would be paid to me on Monday, oh no, not Monday because it is a Bank Holiday in Terrassa, Tuesday then.

Just to remind you: the money in BBVA is to be paid to an account in BBVA, but it would take four days to complete. A few key strokes on a computer are far too technical a concept for that bunch of incompetent thieves to contemplate.

I intend to make a formal complaint about the breathtakingly appalling service (I’m not even going to put that word in inverted commas as their laughable approach to customers is beyond irony) and I am waiting for a full itemized list of the charges that those comedians have extorted from me for keeping my money for their use before I change my bank.

Tomorrow more work and a possible deadline for finishing the kitchen. The studio is almost complete and at least there is a comfortable bed in the bedroom. By the time Gwen and Dianne arrive there might even be reasonably comfortable beds in the guest room.

But that is too far into the future to be taken seriously, especially as there are boxes to be opened and essential items for the house to be found.

Bed seems both inviting and terminal.

And I don’t think that I can face another IKEA screw.

Until tomorrow! Until tomorrow!

As if to drive in the knife of viciousness a little deeper into the depths of my unreal tiredness the road to work today was one continuous traffic jam enlivened only by the death defying (unfortunately) antics of supercilious motorcycle drivers.

I had intended to get my ‘job’ for the morning out of the way before anyone arrived, but the traffic ensured that my arrival was only just inside the normal starting time.

The ‘job’ was photocopying ‘Holiday Homework’ for those miscreants who had failed their examinations. The work had already been decided and all I had to do was re-type the front page and use the originals to produce X numbers of copies.

I have always been amazed at the sheer ineptitude of people using the photocopier. The basic principles of use involved are surely easy to grasp, but it is a never failing source of self satisfied gloating to observe the antics of colleagues as they try and obtain the elusive copy that they want. Notice I said the ‘copy that they want’ which is very often not the copy that they get. They look askance at the results of their attempts and sometimes even shake the paper a little as if their failure were a mere wrinkle in the system that, with a little flick they can sort out.

Some people find the mere process of obtaining a single copy challenging but when you get to horizontal format double sided copying then whole forests are sacrificed in futile attempts to get a reasonable outcome.

The ‘originals’ that I was given were of the ‘forests wasted’ variety with pages printed upside down. In spite of my tiredness I made an executive decision to ‘make things good’. This was a mistake. The photocopier ran out of paper almost immediately and my re-arranging and re-photocopying of selected faulty pages soon developed into an epic race against time to get them done.

But done they eventually were, with the expenditure of reams of paper and all of my remaining nervous energy. I used to be able to tell how much I had drunk by the exact level of disintegration of my level of squash playing. Now that my knees seem to be packed with gravel I have another indicator: the number of typing errors that I make.

Even the untiring efforts of the irritating Microsoft typing corrector are insufficient to cope with the level of random letter insertion that my insensate fingers are producing.

I have asked if I can slope off early and help Toni in the final (please god!) efforts of the packing and the commencement (dear god!) of the Cleaning of the Flat in Preparation for the Arrival of the Owner and the Returning of the Money.

Toni and I are still talking. Just. There was a period during some late night (or perhaps it just seemed late) transferring of ‘stuff’ from flat to house when we went through a quietly spoken, extra polite phase which was mutually terrifying. One sense that, should the veneer of civilization peel away for a moment then it would be carving knives at dawn! But we survived. Just.

This afternoon has to see the final move completed and the Great Clean Up begin. House cleaning is not my forte. I would prefer to adopt the ‘leaving the money in the envelope for the cleaning lady’ approach, but I have not been allowed to pursue this course in Catalonia.

I am a little perturbed that we will be moving to a place with three (count them) flights of tile stairs and an extra room. I feel that something must be done.

But not by me.

I was allowed out early so was able to catch Toni cleaning my bathroom. Because mine does not have an outside window it is prone to damp and mould and we have taken extraordinary measures to ensure that the place looks even better than when it was given to us. We are trying to eliminate all the potential reasons for the Owner to quibble about how much of our money he pays us back. We are looking for 100% which, in Spain, is a truly ambitious expectation!

We have now made a further three visits to the house taking an inordinate amount of further ‘stuff’ which has apparently been breeding overnight!

We have still not moved everything, but, by later this evening we should have transported the overwhelming bulk of what we have to move.

Further cleaning today and tomorrow and then the fateful Visit of Inspection!

Tomorrow our phones and all other forms of communication will be cut, supposedly to be restored to our new accommodation in a couple of days time. I am not sanguine about the assertions of our internet provider and therfore this will probably be the last of my entries in the blog for some time!

Perhaps I am being unduly negative.

Or realistic.

Who knows!

Time has stopped

Two and a half days of moving and it is still not over. We haven’t even begun to clean the flat to ensure that the Owner has not justification for keeping the money that he controls as our evilly enormous deposit of many, many Euros.

So I am not really in the mood to reject as mere fairy story the latest conspiracy theory that I am developing. Toni’s fanaticism has meant that I have been a grudging spectator to the latest series of football matches devoted to some sort of cup.

This one is FIFA inspired and therefore tinged (to say the least) with the corruption which is the life blood of that thoroughly discredited institution. This one is allegedly inter-continental so we should be seeing the best national teams on the planet.

It is my lifelong belief that the whole purpose of FIFA has come down to trying to get The United States of America interested in real football and to that end they have worked assiduously to try and get the Americans a trophy of some sort. The final in this ludicrous competition is between the USA (shock, horror!) and Brazil. For three quarters of the game the USA has been in the lead but now Old Football has reasserted itself and Brazil have equalized. Quarter of an hour to go and I fancy the Brazilians to make it safe. But there again, what the hell do I know about football? Or indeed care!

But I still think that things are fixed.

We have discovered that there is much more to transport after our M&V move than we had ever feared in our worst nightmares. We have been back and fore for what seems like most of our lives and there is still a mass of ‘stuff’ which seems glued to the flat and, no matter how much we move, more ‘stuff’ appears asking politely for an IKEA cardboard box and smirking at our naïve belief that we are ‘making real progress.’

My tiredness has now reached epic proportions and I have no idea how I am going to readjust to ‘school mode’ tomorrow. At least we can go home after lunch so I can help Toni in the ‘Final Cleaning’ of our (hopefully) empty flat.

Such interesting days ahead!