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Saturday, January 09, 2010

A little bit of Britain?




Although damp and miserable, the weather was not of major importance. Unless you were inland and up a bit.

Yesterday I sheltered a waif from the storm; or rather the steep, slippery, snow covered slopes which a friend would have to negotiate if she was to get home to her house in the mountains. Catalonia is a hilly area and the coastal plain only really exists if you are within spitting distance of the sea. As soon as you have completed a short walk inwards you will find yourself going inexorably upwards.

So, no going home for my friend and a rapid checking that the bed in the spare bedroom was constructed and had clean linen on it.

When she arrived we settled down to the civilized thing of life: conversation, red wine and a selection of cheeses. Civilization did not extend as far as providing a warm environment. Personally I trust that my welcome was as warm as would be expected, but the temperature was certainly a little on the low side.

Our house does have central heating powered by a gas boiler that is, shall we say, idiosyncratic.

It does heat the hopelessly inadequate radiators, or at least most of them and it provides the impetus to a fascinating sound track for the heating process as the radiators emit dripping, gurgling and churning noises. The boiler is a ‘combi’ and therefore provides us with hot water: but not upstairs in the bathroom when the central heating is on. If you persist in expecting warm water to come out of a tap then the whole system shuts itself down in disgust. This, surely, is not right.

In the kitchen sink, next to the boiler as it happens, you sometimes get hot water when the central heating system is operational but not on any reliable basis. Obviously a call to the agency is in order and I think Toni can do that as my Castilliano will glide gently into the panic zone when I think of the vocabulary that I will need to explain things.

This brings me to one of my forbidden purchases: a Spanish dictionary. Now I buy Spanish dictionaries in much the same way that so-called uncivilized tribes use sympathetic magic. My reasoning is that the more dictionaries I buy the more likely I am to gain a knowledge of the language. To many that will not seem like sympathetic magic but more like pure logic. But you see, I buy the books but rarely open them. For me the mere buying of the dictionary is the learning act. So far this has not worked. I do not however blame myself for this lack of progress; I blame the books. The dictionaries that I have previously bought (and I have bought many) are obviously not the ‘right’ dictionaries for me.

My latest purchase (from W H Smith’s in Bristol Airport) is a fairly small paperback Spanish/English Visual Dictionary. The key element in the purchase is the publisher: Dorling Kindersley. Any bibliophile will tell you that DK as a publisher guarantees top quality illustration – and this book is no exception. Each page has a selection of well chosen illustrations linked together by theme or place or situation. And I have learned new things, for example I now know that ‘el retrato robot’ is the Spanish for photofit. And were that not enough, on the same page I now know that ‘criminal record’ is translated by the wonderfully vowel heavy ‘los antecedentes.’ It is a truly beautiful book (ISBN 978-1-4053-1106-9) with some pages having an understated elegance which is breathtaking. Or perhaps it’s just me!

I have just looked up central heating (not there) and boiler (there, page 61) and discovered an elegant cut-away drawing of a boiler comprehensively labelled, but it is not enough to encourage me to phone and explain!

The new school term is looming and I fear that the welcome blanket of snow which has closed schools up and down the United Kingdom is unlikely to extend my holiday in Barcelona.

Justice! Justice and my bond!

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