Fiesta?

 

 

Today is a National Holiday in Spain (including Catalonia) to celebrate ‘Spanishness’.  As you can easily imagine, this goes down like a cup of cold sick in Catalonia where any celebrations are, to put it mildly, muted.  We do, however, accept the holiday.

I thought that I was being on the ball by assuming early this morning that my swim would be delayed by an hour as, during fiestas the opening time of the centre is delayed.  I checked my ‘reservations’ on the app (all swims now have to be booked in advance thanks to the virus) and saw that the normal opening times were operational.

Not.

I arrived on my bike to a closed centre and a marked lack of eager car driver gym users queueing for the barrier to be raised.  I returned home and set about making use of the ‘gained’ time by settling down with a good cup of tea and completing the Guardian Quick Crossword.  First things first!  I did also unload the washing machine and sort the clothes; set Moppy off to do the mopping as she had virtually completed the hoovering by the time I returned from my abortive swim.  I’ve also unloaded the dishwasher and consequently feel smug that I have been a dutiful householder and done more than the majority of my sleeping fellow citizens around me.  I have also set my ‘morose’ setting to ‘full’ as I have read the headlines and leading articles in The Guardian and feel the full weight of 2020’s depression that has been the default state of the year!

If this year had been ‘normal’ by this stage I would now have been looking forward to the celebrations for United Nations Day on the 24^th of October when, coincidentally, I have a ‘significant’ birthday.  My grandiose plans for the day have all been scuttled of course, and the gathering of friends and relatives has now been consigned to the ‘completion’ of my significant year on United Nations Day 2021.  I can wait.

 

My menial task list now includes light hoovering on the third floor with the newly repaired and ‘relegated to the upper regions’ actual battery-operated Hoover (capital aitch) which should give some sense of cleanly order to the cluttered squalor in which I ‘work’. 

The Third Floor is really the equivalent of an attic and so it has a fair number of pieces of furniture and other impedimenta that simply don’t fit anywhere else and the jumble looks somewhat incongruous and hinders my access to the inevitable bookshelves with which I surround myself!

The saving grace of the third floor (apart from its existence) is the terrace which is spacious and south facing.  Toni’s ruthless cleaning of the kitchen has allowed a rather neat Perspex tray to resurface and I used that to make a pot of tea and take it upstairs for refreshment and to accompany tentative sunbathing.  The sun is out and, as long as there is no breeze at all, it is perfectly possible to ignore the month in the calendar and luxuriate in warm beams.

This is fine and dandy as far as it goes, but I have set myself a few more culturally improving tasks to complete today which require a little more than the ability to fill and empty a machine or push another one around a bit!

And lunch.  Lunch is going to be a culinary creation using whatever looks interesting in the freezer.  Some sort of fish casserole looks a possibility, so I’m off to create.