Terrible transport

Cars are hateful bloody things.  They are a thorough nuisance when you are without one, especially if you are used to one and therefore have conditioned yourself to be particularly helpless when motorised transport is denied you.  They are also vile when they are working as they constantly ask to be fed with increasingly expensive liquid and finding somewhere suitable to leave them is becoming virtually impossible.

It was therefore with ill concealed fury that, having woken up at an ungodly hour to get my car to the garage for 8.30 am I had to wait while people arrived at the garage before I could walk home.

That anger was as nothing when I heard that the trouble was the clutch which had to be replaced at a vast and fabulous cost!  So much for the season of goodwill.  The clutch costs as much as a mobile phone that one would not be ashamed to use in technologically literate company!  What a waste of money, when it could be spent too much more advantage on flashily showy gadgets.

There is something depressingly quotidian about mere transport which, in spite of its necessity, leaves me quite cold.

So the so-called “extra” pay (which because of the crisis I have not actually been paid, and even when it is it is no all of it) will be lavished on a bloody clutch!

The long walk back from the garage was cold and depressing and convinced me that, however much the clutch cost, it was worth it!

Car-less, we ate locally and tried out a new locale by walking over the blue pedestrian bridge to a motorway café which I have long longed to try.

The menu came in three sorts and we chose the cheapest of the menus at some off price of just under €7·50 which, with tax and coffee came to just under €9. 

For this princely sum I had a starter of spaghetti “mar y montaña” (the Catalan version of “surf and turf” which they claim to have originated) which comprised spaghetti, small bivalve shells, salty mushrooms and some unidentified bits of meat-like substances, all in a vaguely tomatoesque sauce.  It could have done with some grated cheese which I was too shocked to ask for, but it was reasonably good.

The second course was fatty meat (delicious, a guilty pleasure, but delicious) with woodchip like chips.  The sweet was Crema Catalana which was the best of the three courses and home made.  The wine was a very, very young and untamed Rioja made palatable by Casera.  I am sure that this was the sort of meal that, when I first came to this country I would have been bowled over by.

Although relatively cheap and relatively tasty, I am no longer so easily impressed and I think that I would have preferred to have paid a few euros more and had a much better meal.  It was just as well that I heard about the cost of repairing the car after lunch because my jaundiced mood would have made my reception of the meal even less positive!

I have just read one of Rider Haggard’s books after a very long period since I read the last one.  “King Solomon’s Mines” was something of a favourite with me when I was younger and the character of Gagool has remained with me.  I also seem to recall some expressive line drawings in the Puffin edition.

I loved “King Solomon’s Mines” but my reading of the most recent book makes me think that Haggard is something of a pernicious writer.

I know it is very easy from this historically distant standpoint to read someone writing about Africa in 1908 and take a snooty attitude towards the condescension and racism that, even if it is not plainly evident, must be there. 

Haggard goes out of his way to show the nobility of the natives and makes a number of snide remarks about the morality of the colonial whites.  The main character’s father is depicted as a bigoted and dangerously selfish clergyman devoted to the idea of martyrdom at the expense of his family.  The villain of the piece (one of many) is a renegade white “gentleman” who is demonstrated to be a coward who also hits women and has native “wives”.  Need more be said!

The plot is one of the sort which uses elements common to many of the novels of his I have read.  There is a more than generous ladling of magic and fantasy; there is a noble and self-sacrificing native; the main character is a fey, yet goddess-like white woman who rules over the imagination of the natives; there is war and struggle; death and redemption all leading to the affirmation of the power of love.

I read it compulsively as I am sure his readers did in the first decade of the twentieth century!

Now to bed to try and gain the right frame of mind to pay out the vast sums of money this are necessary to get my car back into service tomorrow.

It’s only money.