Back home!

Yesterday morning started in the way whose idea keeps me going throughout the school year: sitting in the sun on the Third Floor taking a leisurely breakfast where only the sound of passing 747s breaks the idyllic silence!

Pine trees may be evergreens but they drop needles in much the same way that Labradors moult.  When I returned from my foreign excursions our street looked like a film set with drifts of needles making the place look as though it had been deserted for years.

We have no pine trees in our front garden but the neighbours more than make up for that loss so that walking up the path is now a pleasantly crunchy experience.  We will have to have a barbecue so that the collected needles can flavour the food while at the same time being disposed of!

No professional gardeners in this area use a brush to clear up the detritus from the trees.  Instead they use petrol powered hand held blowers to gather the needles together.  These are efficient but the noise they make is capable of drowning out passing planes and they are always used first thing in the morning – presumably on the basis that if the sweepers are up so should we.  While I am all for solidarity with the working class I am sure that there are quieter ways of gaining my support.

Yesterday was a Terrassan birthday so the evening was spent there in a quality fast food restaurant with four generations of the birthday boy’s family.

To my totally unconcealed chagrin he was given a tablet computer by his wife and I thought that he paraded his ownership of the same in an undignified, vulgar and totally heartless way.  God knows I have tried to justify buying an i-Pad but with my current ownership of The Machine even I, the acknowledged Gadget King of Castelldefels find it difficult to justify the purchase.  Not, of course that such concerns have ever stopped me in the past.

This is particularly true in the watch department. 

As is my staunch tradition I marked the holiday by buying another timepiece. 

As is well known and universally acknowledged by aficionados of chronology any decent watch must have numbers not markers; day and date; sweep second hand; luminous hands and hour markers and must be waterproof enough to allow swimming.

The present watch is a Seiko and I have returned to a machine with a mechanism that powered a very expensive watch from years ago.  This is a “kinetic” model and its USP was that it was half price in a shop in St David’s Shopping Centre in Cardiff.  I am not one to ignore such a (still expensive) bargain – especially when the only feature that it was missing from the key list was numbered hours.

The model I now have is elegant and minimalistic and it is a bloody sight lighter than the one that I bought in Gran Canaria.  As I have no further holidays, trips or excursions planned this one might well see me into the new school year!

One interesting side purchase made while getting the historical novels for the birthday boy was that of a Terry Pratchett novel for the astonishingly low price of €1.95.  This was “El Color de la Magia” and, as I have already read it in English it might make it a little easier to read in Spanish.  I snatched it up because Stewart had left a copy of “Money” by the same author on the coffee table in the living room of the house and I am not one able to resist Mr Pratchett’s novels when I see them placed provocatively in front of me.

I find Pratchett’s style very congenial to my sense of humour and the blend of irony, fantasy and imagination is something that I find enticingly addictive. 

I have therefore adopted the protective technique which “saved” me from overdosing on science fiction books: only buy one author at a time, second-hand and under 50p.  I went through the entire oeuvres of Robert Heinlein and Asimov in this way.  And when I say the “entire” oeuvres I mean up to and including things like the “Lucky Starr” stories by Asimov written purely for money under a pseudonym for which a light lobotomy is necessary to enjoy their clichéd emptiness.

Were I to give in to my liking for Pratchett I would keep Amazon going for the next year or so purely by my purchasing efforts!

And I will probably be reading without my glasses and contact lenses.  At present I am less than impressed with my new prescription: distance is little problem but normal reading is blurred and my brain refuses to favour the eye with the lens for print.  I think that they might be OK for school with an effort, but I am not convinced.  I will soldier on, but the battle looks like matching the arid attrition of the trenches rather than the glorious successes of my longbow-wielding ancestors.

Lunch was in a restaurant on the Ramblas leading up to the church in Castelldefels and one could weep for what one is able to get for the €10.50 that I paid for a tasty, well-served meal sitting outside.  The weather just about justifies sitting outside, though the sun is noticeable for its absence except for spasmodic beams which let you know that it is still there.

Obviously I am in shirt and shorts because, though the weather is far from what one has a right to expect in July, it is far from cold.

This is the perfect weather to start looking at my books with a view to their complete re-organization.

Simply typing that sentence has reduced me to prostration and militant exhaustion.  I know that I am going to have to steel myself to throw books out and it is something which I find almost impossible to do.  Far better to prevaricate in print rather than take irrevocable Nazi-like actions and throw books into metaphorical flames!

We shall see if actions match intentions.