Beach life in all its variety!

The sea is a slate grey today as lots of interesting shaped sun denying clouds fill the sky. The morning flights into Barcelona airport are winging their way over the flat and I’ve moved some of the furniture around as a way of proving that the flat is ours and not the landlord’s.

My much prized and greenly vaunted piece of equipment that, using solar power (sic) should charge up all my various gadgets, is not working. As I have, as it were, put all my electrical leads into one power source, I am now finding that everything I possess is slowly running down.

Camera, hand held, phone, everything that makes modern life acceptable is fading away before my very eyes. It is like a science fiction story in which you wake up and find that modern civilization has ceased and the survivors have to eke out an existence using the dregs of power left in batteries before the darkness sets in! I’m sure that such pessimism is merely a reflection of the sombre look of the day. A day without sun is like Fideuá without pasta. So there!

But of course, this is Spain and not Britain, so in spite of clouds, when I got back from buying a carbon squandering power pack to get my gadgets back on line, the beach was bathed in sunshine!

My painstaking research into food continues with a visit to Cel Bleu near the beach at the end of our road. The menu: gaspacho andaluz; Fideuá mariscos; salmon a la plancha; helado; vino tinto; cortado – 10.50€ I’m not even going to translate that into pounds sterling – it’s too shaming!

A little foray onto the beach with desultory paddling and then a plonking of myself down on a deserted stretch of beach to watch the succession of planes swoop into the airport.

When I sat up again a couple (not young) had established themselves on my right, with the man in a state of considerable undress! They then proceeded to disport themselves in a manner more befitting the matrimonial bed than the pubic (sic!) beach. As there was no one within the vicinity I hoped that the performance was not for my benefit. I returned (defiantly) to my observations of aeronautical preparations for landing.

When I next resumed the vertical position my unclothed companions wandered significantly, and threateningly, to my left – and much, much nearer.

At this point, as it used to be written in the more scurrilous Sunday newspapers, your correspondent made his excuses (to the waves) and left; deciding that a swim in our sequestered pool was an altogether more salubrious alternative to encroaching sexual abandon of ageing nudists who really should have known better!

Domesticity has taken a further step forward with the first use of the washing machine – I mean in this flat! It is making all the right noises so I assume that everything is normal. There is no tumble dryer (!) so I will have to utilize the wire contraption which I think is used in such circumstances. This object looks like a mixture of a surrealist take on an ironing board and an early Barbara Hepworth, but I am sure that utility will become apparent when necessity demands a dry towel!

Wish me luck.