When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere.
The opening of ‘The Day of the Triffids’ always comes to mind when the days do not appear to be following their true diurnal characters and your sense of time is being taken down a different part.
If asked I would have sworn that today was Sunday. The less than encouraging weather meant that the tourists were not out in force so all the restaurants and cafes had a forlorn, abandoned look and
The opening of ‘The Day of the Triffids’ always comes to mind when the days do not appear to be following their true diurnal characters and your sense of time is being taken down a different part.
If asked I would have sworn that today was Sunday. The less than encouraging weather meant that the tourists were not out in force so all the restaurants and cafes had a forlorn, abandoned look and
the traffic was sparse.
What is even more surprising is that we can now get a menu del dia at the weekends as well as during the week. Although this is normal elsewhere, it doesn’t usually obtain in Castelldefels. It is another sure sign that the season is truly at an end.
More intriguing is the attitude of one of the larger restaurants near us. Last year this restaurant was barely open and when it was it had few customers. Its erratic opening hours and poor quality of food ensured that it never had many customers.
This year the place has undergone a transformation. It has been renamed and a stylist restaurant part established. The site of the restaurant occupies a busy corner and can accommodate more than 100 covers as well as people at the bar. They must have lost money every week they have been open. The food is expensive and they refused to countenance a menu del dia – in spite of the fact that every restaurant around them did and they might have drawn one or two lessons form the fact that the restaurants had customers and they didn’t. Throughout the summer and the high season they continued with their financially disastrous programme of giving customers what they obviously didn’t want.
What is even more surprising is that we can now get a menu del dia at the weekends as well as during the week. Although this is normal elsewhere, it doesn’t usually obtain in Castelldefels. It is another sure sign that the season is truly at an end.
More intriguing is the attitude of one of the larger restaurants near us. Last year this restaurant was barely open and when it was it had few customers. Its erratic opening hours and poor quality of food ensured that it never had many customers.
This year the place has undergone a transformation. It has been renamed and a stylist restaurant part established. The site of the restaurant occupies a busy corner and can accommodate more than 100 covers as well as people at the bar. They must have lost money every week they have been open. The food is expensive and they refused to countenance a menu del dia – in spite of the fact that every restaurant around them did and they might have drawn one or two lessons form the fact that the restaurants had customers and they didn’t. Throughout the summer and the high season they continued with their financially disastrous programme of giving customers what they obviously didn’t want.
Now that autumn is well and truly here, today, they have decided to start a menu del dia. With their usual disregard of reality, they have pitched the price 5€ higher then the very successful restaurant next door!
The recent ‘unpleasantness’ in the financial markets shows that powerful, experienced, well respected and obscenely well paid bankers, the demi-gods of capitalism, have absolutely no idea at all about what they are doing; why then should we expect a mere restaurateur know any better?
Where finance is concerned the counter intuitive seems to be the best bet. The simple Puritan ethics which also seemed to be part and parcel of a basically Protestant ideology (is that the right word?) no longer work in the mad world we now inhabit. Who was it said that taxes were only for poor people to pay? They obviously lived in the real world: the world in which only the stupid live within their means and save!
The poor weather has abated somewhat and we were able to go out to lunch and to sit outside to eat it which says something for this climate on the first of November!
Following advice I have ventured out onto the beach to walk about to ease my hip and loosen my knees. The effects of the stormy weather of the past few days has altered the profile of the beach and deposited a certain amount of vegetation on the sand. My slow progress down the beach was punctuated by desultory photographing of waves.
This is an on-going project to produce one (just one) good picture off the coast of Castelldefels.
I have been prompted to new efforts by the sight of one of my neighbour’s efforts. He did point out that his image was actually a composite of five separate photographs magicked together with the power of Photoshop – a program costing only six or seven hundred pounds! I have to achieve the same results by catching exactly the right moment. Thank god for digital cameras and the costless ability to make mistakes!
I go on trying.
I go on trying.
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