It's not the arriving it's the journey!

Chaos is not the same in all countries.

In Britain, the fatalistic acceptance of failure and even the grudging admiration for systems operating properly (i.e. not working) allows the Brits to indulge in their well honed repertoire of moans, groans and sighs. I speak not as an outsider; I too have come to accept the relentless dissatisfaction which is the lot of any Briton trying to Get Things Done. “We will be there before 11 am” and casually arriving in the evening; “We will call you back within the hour,” and surely any comment here would be superfluous; “The cheque is in the post!” all the great lies that we have to live by and, as the papers constantly remind a generation that doesn’t know what the hell they are talking about, it brings out the ‘spirit of the blitz.’

I was supposed to go to Castelldefels today to sign papers and hand over vast sums of money to ensure the apartment is ours for a year or so. The trip to Barcelona was uneventful; it was only when I went to the station in Barcelona from which I was supposed to catch the train to Castelldefels that the unusual discommoded me. The station announcer seemed to be encouraging people to go to Sants in Barcelona to catch trains to destinations like Castelldefels. What was not explained, or was said too quickly for my Spanish, was that there had been a derailment and there were no trains to Castelldefels at all. This I eventually gleaned by fairly desperate questioning of a uniformed man wearing a badge with a big i on it.

A trip by bus from Sants to Gava and then a train to Castelldefels did nothing to lessen the tension of the day. In spite of everything I was on time for my meeting with the Estate Agent, he of course was late. The convoluted negotiations could not disguise the fact that he and his firm would be getting over a thousands pounds for doing virtually nothing, and not even doing that nothing well.

To call estate agents blood sucking vampires is to dignify a semi evolved life form with an insult steeped in literary history and made famous by Hammer Horror films. I would rather compare them with nematode worms, but nemotode worms, at least have a useful function in breaking down human ordure in sewerages whereas estate agents etc etc.

It was considerable disgust that I left the den of thieves and returned to the town for lunch.

I think the restaurant was called Club Lancaster and was poncy enough for Toni to prefer virtually any other restaurant in town but, as Toni was languishing at home with sickness, I felt free to indulge myself.

God, I love this country! What can you say when a waiter having inexpertly dropped red wine on table, knife and serviette leaves the rest of the bottle as a sort of apology. And, later, when the same waiter failed to respond to the request for another glass of wine opens a new bottle, plonks it on the table and doesn’t charge for it on the bill.

And the food was good too. The restaurants here are as good value for money as the estate agents are, well, not!

And I’ve bought a car too. I think. The conversation with the car salesman (which went on for two hours) was a sobering taste of what is to come if I try and survive in a country that doesn’t speak English as their first or even second language. The use of a computer to translate Spanish into English produced a sort of gobbledegook which, given the absurd flexibility of English, resulted in a laughably ungrammatical sentence which still made sense to an English speaker!

I wonder what I’ve actually put a deposit down on. I hope it isn’t pink or red. I’m almost sure that it is blue – but more than that I would not like to volunteer.

The journey back to Terrassa was, quite frankly, a nightmare. The eventual train from Castelldefels to Gava disgorged what seemed like half the population of Barcelona into a series of buses. And, if you’re still with me about the idea of national chaos being different depending in which country you are in then the behaviour of the Spanish and Catalans showed how unlike their British counterparts they were. There was very little grumbling and the arrangements of the buses were workman like and efficient.

Yes we did (even I did) cross the tracks to get to the exit to get to the buses, but the queues were relatively orderly with only the usual scumbags shamelessly pushing in. As with traffic, pushing in is a way of life in Spain so it is not marked with violent horn blowing or vociferous muttering. The queues were quickly directed into buses and we were soon on our way; and I managed to keep the seat next to me free by judicious placing of various bags. Result!

Sants in Barcelona was a nightmare; not because of heaving masses of humanity pushing, shoving and generally behaving badly, but rather because my single question to an information guide of “Terrassa?” with a stylish upward inflexion produced an immediate series of instruction on how to get to my train in faultless English! To my crestfallen question, “Do I really look so English!” he replied, “Sorry!” I’m not sure what to make of that exchange.

The train journey to the wrong Terrassa station (miles away from Toni’s home) seemed to last for eons and I was only mollified by the fact that my return was greeted with applause and a bowl of substantial chicken soup with Toni saying that he had seen me on TV as part of the downtrodden masses attempting to get home in spite of the traffic chaos. The last bit about being on TV was not strictly true, but I had been filmed in Gava as our tortuous procession of the dispossessed waiting for a purposeful train wended its weary way towards a bus.

Tomorrow has to be less stressful and much more peaceful.

Doesn’t it?