The delight which met the final disappearance of the Neighbours from Hell at the end of last weekend after their Cava soaked departure – cava soaked that is from our point of view as we opened a prime bottle to celebrate their apparent dismissal from Castelldefels – was only matched by the augmented disgust we experienced when they reappeared this Friday evening!
The sense of betrayal we felt when the
whole tribe of them produced the usual sound landscape which indicates their
possession of their property was bitter indeed.
Throughout the week I have been taking a
swim in the communal pool surrounded by delightful silence as the manic chorus
of discordant voices led by the vile ogre from next door has been absent and he
has not been surrounded by his raucous “court”.
The water was undeniably cool, but it was worth suffering a little
discomfort to wallow in the freedom of a shouted talk and smoke-free
atmosphere.
Then they return!
Toni, however, takes a morbid interest in
the vagaries of our temporary neighbours and has developed a George Smiley-like
observational analysis of their behaviour.
He assured me that they would leave by 7.00 pm on Sunday and we had to
look to the “placing of the car” to determine if we were truly rid of them.
The car is in the drive!
Just as they use the house for only the
summer months, they also squander a car purely to rest in the drive to give the
impression that they are in residence.
They are (Hallelujah!) truly gone and, in
spite of the impassioned pleas of a sad neighbour urging them to return next
weekend we can be fairly sure that their sojourn here is over for the year.
The second bottle of Cava is cooling, but
was not deemed cold enough to match the required level of the necessary
celebrations after the departure and so we went into town and had a caña y tapa
as an accompaniment to our delight.
The cooling pool is still acceptable as an
environment in which to swim vigorously, but is certainly not conducive to
wallowing in a casual manner. As time
goes on it will be become more and more of a pain rather than a pleasure to
immerse oneself in the chilly waters.
This will have the advantage of driving away the noisy users but the
clear disadvantage of being too painful to use.
Silence and tranquillity comes with a price attached!
Yesterday, in order to escape the booming
bass bombast of our noisy neighbours we fled to Sitges for lunch in the
restaurant that we always go to. A three
course meal with wine is still available for €10 in a place which is within two
minutes walk of the beach.
The weather has been glorious and, out of
the shadow of school, I have been beautifully positioned to make the most of
it.
However, summer is clearly waning and I
must give thought to those tasks which have remained undone for years. And years.
Next week I intend to phone the Open
University and find out if there are any suitable art history courses that I
could take. In theory, I think that I am
still registered with the OU as I still have some way to go before I can claim
a degree.
The nuts and bolts of resurrecting my OU
career will be much more significant now as I understand that the cost of
courses is dramatically more expensive for those wishing to study
overseas. We will see.
I have already checked up on my Opera
tickets and the first of the series is on the 8th of October. This will be a perfect opportunity to find
out exactly how much it would cost to put my opera and hotel plan into
operation.
I have discovered a reasonably priced hotel
near the opera house and staying in the city rather than paying for the car in
one of the central car parks is financially almost equal! Leaving the car in the station car park in
Castelldefels, using the cheap ticket on the train, staying in a hotel and
returning the next morning seems like a good and relatively stress-free
package.
Roll on culture!
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