Our block of flats is now a living hell!
August = Holiday = Family = Togetherness.
As the smallest of these flats (i.e. ours) is three bedrooms you can imagine that three or four generations of noisy, baby producing, dog owning, smoking and pool using people are now comfortably infesting our previously sedate immediate neighbourhood.
The only way to counter this influx of foreign (in all senses of the word) bodies is to attack. I now officially consider virtually everyone I know as family and cordially invite them to stay with us in the flat and to speak loudly on the balcony in the King of Tongues so that the parvenu usurpers to proprietorship can be put in their place.
When the best that Spanish Literature can do to boost the status of their language to counter the massive kudos of Shakespeare is to roll out Lope de Vega as Big Bill’s opponent then you know that you are onto a winner. Take it from one who has read Lope de Vega that he is a playwright you only read if you have to. Various modern productions have tried to make his plays relevant and trendy, but they are giving better directorial ideas than he deserves!
I am typing this on the balcony crouching in a sliver of shadow from the fierce heat of the sun. The beach is as packed as a very long beach (which could probably take the entire population of Catalonia if it had to) can be. Professional beach goers have virtually created small towns out of connected beach umbrellas, tables, loungers and collapsible chairs and tables. They have boats and floats and god knows what else and you half expect them to start building palisades and mount forays against near beach denizens to take over their space!
Talking of space have you noticed (if you do not have a baby) just how much the ‘essential’ impedimenta space for an inchoate, incontinent and incoherent human being actually takes up?
At lunch yesterday there was a family party of mother, father, doting aunt and grandmother centred on a nappy wearing child whose greatest achievement (met of course with whoops of delight) was thrusting a bread crust in the general direction of the mouth of her father. This was accompanied, of course, by disgusting gurgles and shrieks which would have had anyone else shown the door immediately. When they finally did leave, each one of the adults was burdened with an enormous bag which contained ‘things for the baby.’ And they had a pram packed above and below with yet more ‘stuff’!
It used to be that going to the sea side was in itself an adventure and something which of itself was exciting enough to keep any life form interested for the visit. Now unless the hapless family travels with the equivalent of a cinema, restaurant and clothes factory as well as a small construction company to allow the child to ‘build’ a sandcastle there will be tantrums and guaranteed misery for all.
In a revealing piece in The Week (which I recommend unreservedly etc etc) extracted from The Weekly Standard, Joseph Epstein writes that “America has become a ‘kindergarchy,’ children have moved, “from background to foreground figures in domestic life, with more and more attention centred on them, their upbringing, their small accomplishments.” He continues that he once told his mother that he was bored, she suggested that he bang his head against a wall to take his mind off it. “I never mentioned boredom again. My generation was just left to get on with. Visit friends today, however, and you find children’s toys strew everywhere, their drawings on the fridge, TV sets tuned to their shows. Parents seem little more than indentured servants.”
I wonder if that strikes a chord with anyone!
Of course this could just be the resentment of an only child thinking back and working out just how much he didn’t have when the opportunity was there. Where was my towel with ‘Muffin the Mule’
on it? Where was my mini backpack with ‘Captain Pugwash’ emblazoned on the back? 
When didn’t my parents allow me to watch DVDs in the car on my personal player?
The answer to the last one was that they weren’t invented for another swathe of years that, in the interests of delicacy I will not enumerate!
Time for tea! Well, dinner.
August = Holiday = Family = Togetherness.
As the smallest of these flats (i.e. ours) is three bedrooms you can imagine that three or four generations of noisy, baby producing, dog owning, smoking and pool using people are now comfortably infesting our previously sedate immediate neighbourhood.
The only way to counter this influx of foreign (in all senses of the word) bodies is to attack. I now officially consider virtually everyone I know as family and cordially invite them to stay with us in the flat and to speak loudly on the balcony in the King of Tongues so that the parvenu usurpers to proprietorship can be put in their place.
When the best that Spanish Literature can do to boost the status of their language to counter the massive kudos of Shakespeare is to roll out Lope de Vega as Big Bill’s opponent then you know that you are onto a winner. Take it from one who has read Lope de Vega that he is a playwright you only read if you have to. Various modern productions have tried to make his plays relevant and trendy, but they are giving better directorial ideas than he deserves!
I am typing this on the balcony crouching in a sliver of shadow from the fierce heat of the sun. The beach is as packed as a very long beach (which could probably take the entire population of Catalonia if it had to) can be. Professional beach goers have virtually created small towns out of connected beach umbrellas, tables, loungers and collapsible chairs and tables. They have boats and floats and god knows what else and you half expect them to start building palisades and mount forays against near beach denizens to take over their space!
Talking of space have you noticed (if you do not have a baby) just how much the ‘essential’ impedimenta space for an inchoate, incontinent and incoherent human being actually takes up?
At lunch yesterday there was a family party of mother, father, doting aunt and grandmother centred on a nappy wearing child whose greatest achievement (met of course with whoops of delight) was thrusting a bread crust in the general direction of the mouth of her father. This was accompanied, of course, by disgusting gurgles and shrieks which would have had anyone else shown the door immediately. When they finally did leave, each one of the adults was burdened with an enormous bag which contained ‘things for the baby.’ And they had a pram packed above and below with yet more ‘stuff’!
It used to be that going to the sea side was in itself an adventure and something which of itself was exciting enough to keep any life form interested for the visit. Now unless the hapless family travels with the equivalent of a cinema, restaurant and clothes factory as well as a small construction company to allow the child to ‘build’ a sandcastle there will be tantrums and guaranteed misery for all.
In a revealing piece in The Week (which I recommend unreservedly etc etc) extracted from The Weekly Standard, Joseph Epstein writes that “America has become a ‘kindergarchy,’ children have moved, “from background to foreground figures in domestic life, with more and more attention centred on them, their upbringing, their small accomplishments.” He continues that he once told his mother that he was bored, she suggested that he bang his head against a wall to take his mind off it. “I never mentioned boredom again. My generation was just left to get on with. Visit friends today, however, and you find children’s toys strew everywhere, their drawings on the fridge, TV sets tuned to their shows. Parents seem little more than indentured servants.”
I wonder if that strikes a chord with anyone!
Of course this could just be the resentment of an only child thinking back and working out just how much he didn’t have when the opportunity was there. Where was my towel with ‘Muffin the Mule’
on it? Where was my mini backpack with ‘Captain Pugwash’ emblazoned on the back? When didn’t my parents allow me to watch DVDs in the car on my personal player?The answer to the last one was that they weren’t invented for another swathe of years that, in the interests of delicacy I will not enumerate!
Time for tea! Well, dinner.
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