Reading E F Benson’s preciously oblique prose in the plane prepares one for what is for me (for everyone?) a life involved in irony.
I leave sunny Bristol and emerge from Barcelona airport to lashing rain; my first meal in Castelldefels is, of course, Japanese; magpies seem drawn to the house; this Friday is obviously a Sunday; there are more green plastic bits from the artificial Christmas tree lying on the floor than when I cleaned and hovered thoroughly after putting the damn thing away before I went to Britain. And so on.
I thoroughly enjoyed my return to Britain: friends, family, shops, drink, Television, Radio 4 (at the right time!), snow, driving on the proper side of the road, Tesco’s, Indian food, English spoken everywhere, newspapers, friends again, soft water you can drink from the tap and real money.
Although I don’t actually wear them myself, I can appreciate the apposite nature of the image of a glove to express familiarity. There are some situations and places where they are simply right and accustomed. For the first time it made Catalonia seem almost ‘foreign’ and distant. My old life wrapped around me and obstructed my view! The very weather seemed to be conspiring to keep me in Wales as the snow fell and the life of the country ground to the usual halt in the typical way that we respond to weather conditions which are described in the never-to-be-forgotten and constantly used phrase of British Rail: “wrong sort”. It was first used (notoriously) to explain the failure of the rail system to cope when the “wrong sort of leaves” fell on the line. The adjectival phrase has now been used to describe virtually every type of natural form of material caught in the forces of gravity and which has descended on road, rail, sea and air routes.
Everything coalesced to distort my sense of where, what and who I was. It was as if I had stepped out of normality into reality and that a return to Spain would be truly odd. Which is where I suppose the irony comes in? No sooner had I had a conversation with the taxi driver taking me back to Castelldefels about the unseasonal ‘British’ rain than I felt that what I had just left in Wales was “another country” where they “do things differently”.
Which is another way of saying that I am glad to be back?
But that I recognize that there is a certain something which is only available when I am there in Wales – just as my life here in Catalonia is also distinct. I may be the common factor, but the experience of living my life is certainly not the same in both countries.
Of course they are different countries, Catalonia and Wales – but my responses are both more obvious and more subtle than can be explained by the glaringly geographically different. Perhaps I should, as if often do, go to the words of Milton and (taken out of context as they often are) say to myself, “Not equal they, as they not equal seemed” and enjoy the difference.
School on Monday.
Sigh!
I leave sunny Bristol and emerge from Barcelona airport to lashing rain; my first meal in Castelldefels is, of course, Japanese; magpies seem drawn to the house; this Friday is obviously a Sunday; there are more green plastic bits from the artificial Christmas tree lying on the floor than when I cleaned and hovered thoroughly after putting the damn thing away before I went to Britain. And so on.
I thoroughly enjoyed my return to Britain: friends, family, shops, drink, Television, Radio 4 (at the right time!), snow, driving on the proper side of the road, Tesco’s, Indian food, English spoken everywhere, newspapers, friends again, soft water you can drink from the tap and real money.
Although I don’t actually wear them myself, I can appreciate the apposite nature of the image of a glove to express familiarity. There are some situations and places where they are simply right and accustomed. For the first time it made Catalonia seem almost ‘foreign’ and distant. My old life wrapped around me and obstructed my view! The very weather seemed to be conspiring to keep me in Wales as the snow fell and the life of the country ground to the usual halt in the typical way that we respond to weather conditions which are described in the never-to-be-forgotten and constantly used phrase of British Rail: “wrong sort”. It was first used (notoriously) to explain the failure of the rail system to cope when the “wrong sort of leaves” fell on the line. The adjectival phrase has now been used to describe virtually every type of natural form of material caught in the forces of gravity and which has descended on road, rail, sea and air routes.
Everything coalesced to distort my sense of where, what and who I was. It was as if I had stepped out of normality into reality and that a return to Spain would be truly odd. Which is where I suppose the irony comes in? No sooner had I had a conversation with the taxi driver taking me back to Castelldefels about the unseasonal ‘British’ rain than I felt that what I had just left in Wales was “another country” where they “do things differently”.
Which is another way of saying that I am glad to be back?
But that I recognize that there is a certain something which is only available when I am there in Wales – just as my life here in Catalonia is also distinct. I may be the common factor, but the experience of living my life is certainly not the same in both countries.
Of course they are different countries, Catalonia and Wales – but my responses are both more obvious and more subtle than can be explained by the glaringly geographically different. Perhaps I should, as if often do, go to the words of Milton and (taken out of context as they often are) say to myself, “Not equal they, as they not equal seemed” and enjoy the difference.
School on Monday.
Sigh!
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