Resumed . . .

Alas!  What must my reader be thinking as day follows day and I write nothing.  It is not as if nothing has happened as our second British visitor of the summer arrived and left and we are preparing for the third.  But nothing.  Sad.

So – dinners and lunches; excursions and sunbathing; seaglass collecting and lamp building; TMA writing and grade getting; exhibition visiting and photograph taking; reading and studying; telephoning and talking; walking (!) and swimming; speculating and arguing; holidaying and working; laughing and cooking; spending and dissimulating . . . and I could go on, and usually would but there is the next part of a James Bond film to watch and, after all, I am only human!

Talking of frailty, I went to the Apple store.  I know that I was wrong, but I was with Suzanne and I begged her to watch over me and prevent me from signing over my life to that unfeeling money Hoovering organization.  To be fair I had a reason to be there.  A slight one, but a reason none the less.

From time to time I forget to plug my phone in and I find myself hoping that the sliver of power that is left is sufficient to work when I need it.  Obviously this was, and is, an unsatisfactory situation.  Never let it be said that I was not aware of the appropriate gadget to make life easier.  I knew that there was a device which would plug into an iPhone and give a power boost when you need it.  I also knew that with a touch of Protestant delayed gratification I could get such a device at a reasonable price from the Internet.

But I was in the Apple store in the centre of Barcelona and, rather than paying a reasonable price later I could pay an extortionate at once and not only get the device that I needed but also get a cord-pull closing, pseudo metallic plastic bag with an Apple symbol on it.  There was no real choice.

I now have an integrated case and battery booster and a woeful gap in my current account!

And another more shallow gap in my knee.  This is as a result of an attempt to get an ice cream at night and being thwarted by one of the depressions around the trees in our little Ramblas.  My fall was spectacular, but disappointingly unbloody.  I was resolutely macho about the whole thing and even managed to salvage my somewhat squashed ice cream and eat it with something approaching equanimity.

For the last week there has been an organically fascinating multi-coloured scabbing of the injury and now the consequent itching as the new skin forms.

And all the while thunder is growling and harrumphing in the background with an absurdly melodramatic light show of multiple lightning strikes and now, at last after an almost impossibly muggy day a welcome storm.  At least it will get some of the dust off the car!

And tomorrow, normal service in the writing area should be restored.