I would like to say that my enthusiasm for the United Nations Organization is born of a burning desire to see nation speak peace unto nation and for all the peoples of the world to live in amity.
Those statements, positive in themselves and pious enough to be uttered through the gleaming lips of any vacuous beauty queen simpering up to a microphone, would be a credit to my social conscience.
Alas! My fellow feeling is explained by the mere coincidence of the day on which the United Nations celebrates its continued existence and the date which marks my entrance into this world.
UNO is older than I am (if you count the League of Nations, very much older) and . . . I was going to continue the comparison in a playfully metaphorical sort of way but, as soon as you start looking of the history of the United Nations and the skittish behaviour of countries, it gets a little depressing when you start to compare it with your life!
So I will draw on what optimism I possess and affirm my continuing belief in the essential worth of UNO (as long as they continue to celebrate on my birthday) and restrain my logical dismissal of an organization which can put the Saudi representative as the head of a committee on human rights! It is easy to see UNO as an expensive joke and it is as easy to list its failures. As with my union so with UNO: only as good as the members!
The day has been commemorated in a number of ways: telephone calls; e-mails; electronic e-mail cards; ordinary cards; spoken greetings and even via surface mail!
I have gained an excellent book, ‘Retrats de Ramon Casas’
which is exactly what I wanted – charcoal sketches by one of the finest Catalan artists of the last century.
So it goes!
A godly haul for United Nations Day with (astonishingly) three books bought by those presumptuous enough to assume they knew my tastes! By great good luck they were, as it happens, well within the target of the acceptable with the aforementioned book on Cassas, another on Klimt and a third on the Welsh contribution to the Spanish Civil War. Chocolate, a calendar, various teas, Clinique after shave and booze completed a heterogeneous collection of the usable! Thanks to all!
The latish arrival of the Pauls meant an even laterish meal in Tallerinas, a small restaurant at the end of our street.
The meal we had was, in its own refined way, more like something out of the Satyricon than something akin to your basic fish and chip shop.
The starters were large and various ranging from grilled prawns and the eponymous tallerinas
(small bivalve delicious shell fish) though squid and Catalan bread to whitebait – all washed down with white wine, red wine and gassy water.
My main course was lubina (a white fish) cooked in salt. This was shown to use in all its saline glory before being taken away and thoroughly filleted and presented as luscious meaty fish with accompanying vegetables.
The sweet course was well in accord with the idea of a Roman feast. The owner of the restaurant having suggested that a ‘surtido’ of cake would be acceptable returned with a stepped volcano-like construction with a frothy lava of whipped cream burgeoning up from the middle of the plate. Gasps of mixed admiration and horror greeted this appalling example of indulgence as eyes identified chocolate, lemon, almond, caramel, nut and various other types of pastry. A few of the fainter hearted (and, as it turned out, hugely hypocritical) diners gasped that they could not under any circumstances make any reasonable impression on the mountain of beckoning calories and it was, basically, all too much.
The end result you can guess and we left the restaurant bow legged with satiety.
Conversation bounced from topic to topic while we were in the restaurant but the focus of our attention was directed by the voluble high speed Spanish of the owner who in child-like enthusiasm gushed that sitting in that very restaurant was a Famous Person.
You have to understand that the ‘restaurant’ comprises a perfectly ordinary bar with stools for the drinkers with half of the remaining space taken up with bare wooden tables for basic eating and the other half the space filled with table cloth covered settings for those wishing to have the expansiveness of the extensive menu. The hierarchy of eating was levened by the omnipresent televisions blaring out over all.
I understood nothing of the torrent of language the owner used to convey his excitement about the honour he felt at the Famous Person’s presence.
My brushes with the famous have been almost entirely linked to one glorious evening in the Drury Lane Theatre in London when Clarrie organized a Stephen Sondheim AIDS Benefit Concert. This gave me the never to be forgotten opportunity to giggle over a drink with Dirk Bogade and deliver a message to the Queen of Slink - Eartha Kitt. The latter I found knitting in her dressing room wearing an old cardigan and large owl glasses! By the evening performance however, she had transformed into a glittering vision in lame and sequins!
That was in London: this was Catalonia. No singers here but a character who, even though he was out of my normal metier I should have been able to recognize.
We were told that we were dining in the presence of a legend of the football field.
My memory of this legend was not of a particular moment of sporting excellence but rather its antithesis. The moment when, watched by a world audience of umpteen million he head butted an opposition player.
God knows football players in the higher echelons of the sport are not noted for their restraint, taste or decorum but you might have thought that when your actions are being watched by witnesses whose numbers add up to the inhabitants of a major country their observation might have tempered your temper.
Not so, of course, with Zinédine Yazid Zidane.
This player whose part performances have gained him accolade after accolade and convincingly placed him in the pantheon of the greatest players of the game will be remembered by shallow followers of the Noble Sport like me as the idiot who nutted Marco Materazzi in the World Cup tie of France against Italy. In his very last professional game Zidane was given a red card and sent off.
The man sitting a few tables away from us looked nothing like the man that I had seen play for Real Madrid and his country. Nothing at all. We all agreed that he looked nothing like the player. Nothing like. But during the evening he was constantly pestered by diffident grown men who asked for his autograph and had mobile phone photos taken with him. He had, apparently, produced his identity card to prove his credentials to the restaurant owner.
If you looked closely you could see the ghost of the previous player, but his face was thinner and there was none of that intensity that he showed on the field.
To be truthful the most noticeable thing about him was not his relaxed courtesy (so different from his tough hard faced approach to the game) but his accoutrements.
Football players are the best exemplars of the ‘if you’ve got it flaunt it’ philosophy. They are not generally noted for their restraint and take every opportunity to disfigure their bodies by poking jewel topped things though various parts; exhibiting epicene growths of facial hair; restraining flowing locks with inappropriate head bands and writing inane drilled messages on their skin.
Were this not enough, when dressed in civilian clothing they accessorize with a vengeance.
Zidane (if it were he) was wearing a ring that the combined exuberance of Zandra Rhodes, Barbara Cartland and Joan Collins might have baulked at. A massive central stone bordered by a square of large diamonds created the sort of costume jewellery that could only be worn as a joke – but with his money, who knows?
I’m sure that there is moral lesson to be drawn from all this, but the sun is shining, so who cares?
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