I am now getting thoroughly paranoid about
the weather. Today is more cloudy than
sunny and I feel the usual resentment that is the natural concomitant for me
for anything less than flawless blue skies with an unrelenting sun shining
forth in refulgent splendour. Still,
after the excesses of yesterday my reddened skin needs some time to readjust!
Today is a Bank Holiday and a day on which
Castelldefels can expect to do good trade with a full beach and people from
Barcelona spending money as if it had gone out of fashion, but such a brightly
dull day is not going to get people out of their flats and into the traffic
jams just to sit huddled together on the beach pretending they are having a
good time in the blustery wind which is still with us. You have to be British to bring that sort of
thing off successfully – after a lifetime of unsatisfactory Bank Holidays.
In Britain of course there is the
alternative to the beach – the DIY shops.
Rumney Common (if you looked very, very hard it was possible to see a
few wisps of grass pushing up through the paving stones as a reminder of what
the area used to look like) was full of stationary traffic as the lemming-like
instinct of the British for self-improvement shopping during a Bank Holiday
took hold!
In Catalonia, however, the enthusiasm for
24-hour shopping has not yet reached British proportions and Bank Holidays are
more like what they used to be in Britain rather than the free-for-alls that
they have become.
Shop opening hours do take some getting
used to here. They usually open at about
10 am but then they shut at 1 pm and do not open again until 5 pm when they
finally close for the day at about 8 pm.
It is always strange for someone from Britain to go into the centre
during the afternoon and find a ghost town.
Saturday afternoons are as dead as any other time of the week. Odd.
Some restaurants in Castelldefels seem to
have opening hours that only the most learned clerks in the Middle Ages who
spent their time calculating the date of Easter (and burning those who
disagreed) could possibly understand.
There seems to be no positively agreed half-day closing in this place
and some defy all logical understanding in the ways in which they run their
businesses. They are also capable of
taking holidays in the actual holiday time which, in a summer seaside town
would appear to me to be commercial nonsense – but it is part of the rich
cultural experience that comes with changing countries!
Our swimming pool remains stubbornly empty
– apart from the rather unsavoury looking pool of brownish water which does not
seem to have drained away. The pool’s
emptiness is a monument to the god-given fact that nothing, absolutely nothing
can be done during Semana Santa or Easter Week.
The world, apart from seaside restaurants which have not decided to be
closed because of an indisputable right to whimsicality, does nothing.
Government and its associated bureaucracy do
nothing – but can find time to emerge from holiday to make announcements about
the most swingeing financial retrenchment in Spanish democratic history in the
hope that during a holiday we will not take it so seriously as if it were to be
made during work time.
This is a serious
wake up call to the Spanish people, but I fear they are all too fatalistic to take
is seriously and will bumble on denying the evidence of collapse all around
them. I say them because here in our
little bubble of Castelldefels there is very little evidence of the so-called
crisis to be seen. Prices keep going up
and people keep looking affluent. I am
obviously well out of my league living here!
The Easter
lunch in Terrassa was excellent
with a truly startling Esqueixada (salt cod with chopped peppers, onion, tomato, garlic, olives, etc –
all raw in a marinade) which tasted different, in spite of Toni’s mum saying that she had
done nothing special in its preparation.
We then had “blind man’s” fideua which means that all the shellfish had
been taken out of their shells so, consequently, a blind man could eat it without
difficulty. Most civilized, even though
there were no blind people at the table.
It is traditional at this time in Catalonia to have a Mona de Pascua
which is a special Easter cake which comes in a bewilderingly various range of
shapes and sizes. The kids had one each
baked by their ever-resourceful aunt; but other relatives had done their bit
too. We had one Bob the Sponge cake with
chocolate house and figure; two Barça players on a chocolate pitch; a cake with
a chocolate fish from Finding Nemo; a butter chocolate cake made by the grandmother
and the great-aunts; a third chocolate cream cake made by the aunt and another
cake that we didn’t actually get to see!
I tried as many as were offered and they were all delicious.
The highlight of visiting Terrassa however was not the food but the
people. The two teachers, Toni’s
sisters. They start school
tomorrow. And I don’t. An extra day!
They looked at me with outright hostility when I told them. And with increasing hostility as I reminded
them at every opportunity that presented itself!
Tomorrow the last day of the holidays and time to do some tasks that a
gained day when everyone is back at work!
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