Our evening meal was taken outside
a bar in the centre of town just by the railway station. Considering its central position, as Laura
noted, it was airy and tranquil, with the pots of sturdy greenery giving an
illusion of a stunted dell. Perhaps
Laura’s comment was a hostage to fortune as almost immediately a deranged
looking man staggering along the street with a plastic beaker full of what
looked like liquid mud, lurched up to the entrance of the bar and asked the
Chinese waiter if he could have a fill up of water.
The good-natured waiter complied
with the request and the man went on his way muttering to himself and spilling
quantities of his evil looking concoction and lurched his way into the open square
space in front of the station.
Then the dogs started
barking. And went on barking. And then there were sounds of an altercation
with raised voices above the threnody of yelps.
Like the aristos in ‘Dr Zhivago’
looking out at the protesters in the snow from their warm and secure privileged
position behind falsely secure windows, we, in our leafy bower watched
developments, while I sipped my end of meal cup of tea.
Sirens heralded the arrival of
the first police car and as the ‘trouble’ veered towards the pedestrian
underpass through to the station car
More police cars arrived, their
flashing lights giving not only a suitably lurid setting for the excitement,
but also marking a similarity to the ‘festa major’ fair that had been
established at the far end of the car park - I do like an element of the
serendipitous in my evenings out!
An ambulance then arrived,
shortly followed by a second. And we
settled in for a suitably gory finale to the evening’s entertainment.
As we were finishing our meal it
had the temerity to start raining, not convincingly admittedly, but still water
falling from on high in August!
This soon stopped, as indeed did
the drama as, one by one the police cars and ambulances drove off with nary a corpse
or villain in sight.
The rest of the family were
frankly sceptical about my explanation of the whole event being part of a
street happening as part of the ‘festa major’ of our town – though Toni’s
sister did applaud me politely at the end of the little drama and congratulate
me (because surely I had something to do with it?) for finding a way to pass
the time to the next event on the horizon.
This was a free concert.
Now I have been to a totally memorable free concert
next to the beach here in Castelldefels that featured the student orchestra of the University of
Southampton playing a spirited performance of Sibelius’s second symphony, this
concert, however, was not like that.
The entertainment, that had started
by the time we got there, was of a Catalan group who sang, very loudly, in
Catalan. There were no seats. But I soon discovered a fringe group of the
elderly and infirm and the opportunistic who had found a limited number of
metal chairs from somewhere. I soon
found the somewhere and Carmen and I were soon part of the group.
The disadvantage of our position
(seated, with the rest of the audience standing) did mean that our view was, to
put it mildly, limited. But the very
professional light show that accompanied the singing, together with a liberal
amount of stage smoke, did ensure that the lighting effects were clearly
visible ell beyond the confines of the stage.
I did attempt to take some
photographs, where my mobile phone (disconcertingly) recognized that I was taking
pictures of a ‘musical event’! How did
it know? [I really wanted to use an
interrobang at the end of the last sentence, but I don’t know how to print one.] The end results were patchy, but taking
pictures at night at x5 zoom on a handheld phone, I am not sure what I expected
to get!
A long (for me) walk back to the
car, bidding ‘bye’ to our second set of visitors and bed. I slept as though drugged and snoozed more on
the beach this morning!
It’s a hard old life, but someone
has to live it!
Tomorrow Barcelona, and the start
of my serious research in the library of MNAC to find out more, much more about
the life and times of Adam Elsheimer.
Questing continues!
