Translate

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

A world too small for comfort


I had my hair cut today.

I left a pause there for the chortles of disbelief that might meet such a bald statement – pun intended!

I rejected one establishment with plant sin the window and a row of hairdryers as being far too opulent for the fairly basic job that was needed on my scant locks and settled for a rather grimy little corner shop that I had noticed on one of my peregrinations around the more obscure parts of central Castelldefels looking for book shops.

This, when I eventually found it looked much more reasonable. It had an old fashioned chair with real tip up metal footrests; a small plaster image of an old fashioned barber in the window; tufts of un-swept up hair lying around the chair and an awkwardly placed series of very hard chairs stuck in a poorly lit corner.

I had to wait while what I thought was an inordinately long period of time was given over to the hairy heads of two tiny children and then it was my turn.

With a fluent lack of Spanish I gave what I fervently hoped were sufficiently panicky instructions to the barber which would encourage him to trim rather than eliminate what hair I had left.

My mumbled Spanish encouraged him to guess my nationality. He was, of course wrong, but I have learned to accept that I have looked, look and will continue to look German to all Catalans I meet. On being told I was British he enthusiastically changed his mind and pinned my nationality down to English. My rapid correction of this misattribution was about to be accompanied by an explanation of where Wales was when, to my astonishment he smiled and asked me if I was from Newport, Cardiff or Swansea!

In the small world that we inhabit it turned out that his wife was from Newport! There followed a conversation in which he was encouraged enough to lurch in what I am sure he thought was some form of English.

He started talking about his ‘political’ family in Wales which sounded interesting enough until I realised that he did not mean that at all and was instead referring to some form of a branch of his wife’s family – so I smiled and said, ‘Si.’ Don’t knock it, that approach has got me out of more tight linguistic corners than I care to remember. I sometimes wonder what a list of all the things that I have said ‘Si!’ to would read like. I think that I might be very surprised!

When he had taken the shockingly large amount of money for the small quantity of hair that he had actually cut, he handed me his card while bemoaning the fact that his wife was not there to delight in the fact that he had coiffured the head of someone originally from only nine miles away from her ancestral home! To make the sort of coincidence even more surprising it turned out that his name was Stephen (but in Spanish of course) as well! There followed a further fractured conversation about the popularity of the name in our respective countries, and his bemoaning the fact that in Spain it was relatively rare.

As if that was not excitement enough, I have spent the evening printing out some of my more vitriolic letters and emails to The Owner for use in the forthcoming meeting.

I take a great deal of encouragement from the fact that we are going to have a fair representation of the injured parties from The School That Sacked Me and the discussion that will be generated from a selection of the suffers should be a good basis for an action plan for the future.

I have invested a lot of hope in this meeting and will be bitterly disappointed if it fizzles out into the usual inactivity which has allowed The Owner to continue her unprofessional, autocratic rule for too long.

Hope springs eternal!

No comments: