It’s cold and wet and blustery and dark. A thoroughly depressing day but, as I sulked my way upstairs, I looked through a window and noticed the two dogs who live in the flats opposite us, sitting together at the top of a flight of steps, just inside the overhang of the building watching the weather with patient indefatigability.
Dogs, especially large dogs seem to be good at patience. Rat dogs are of course more known for their insistent irritability and hyper-sensitivity, and one barely counts them (and that is my being kind) as dogs at all. No. But smaller dogs with a touch of Collie in them are more than acceptable and accepting.
Take, for example, the dog in the restaurant we went to on Sunday (isn’t it usually ONLY guide dogs that are allowed into restaurants? But let it pass, let it pass) where the dog (some sort of Collie cross) settled down almost immediately, finding himself a place between his owner’s foot and the window, and there he stayed for the course of the meal sustained only by a few pats and a scrap or two and a water bowl provided by the staff in the restaurant.
Far be it from me to draw a parallel between a young dog and a young human, but the difference in acceptable behaviour by the latter compared with the former when grown-ups are around in a social public situation is telling!
I should however take some guidance from the dogs opposite where their patience in this instance (usually they are yappy buggers) is to be commended, and indeed emulated.
I half-joke with my Catalan friends that my ‘contract’ with the Generalitat in Catalonia stipulates sun for 365 days a year, and that I have an undoubted right to a refund for every shitty day I have to experience here!
Although the weather can be bad here in Catalonia, indeed as I type the rain is lashing down outside and we have had overly dramatic thunder and lightning, usually every day will give you a moment of sunshine to see you through the bad weather interludes. Today for example, although the morning was cold and cloudy, there was also some hazy sunshine – not enough to tempt me to sit outside with the smokers to have my cup of tea after my early morning swim, but still, sunshine.
It didn’t last and after lunch the rain set in and hasn’t stopped. Yet. But I preserve my composure by putting total faith into the quick return of scraps of sunshine to keep me sane.
The saga of The Christmas Lunch has now developed a further chapter as another, and who knows even better, location has been found and we are going up to Terrassa tomorrow to give the menu del dia a try.
My most pressing concern is not the food, but the parking. With my knees in their present condition, each step is something to take into careful consideration. And there are lots of quite steep hills in Terrassa as well, and while going up slopes is bearable, the going down (even slight) slopes is not.
Whatever we think about the quality of the food tomorrow, a table for the Christmas Lunch has been booked at the restaurant and so we are hoping and praying for the best.
The Duolingo app continues to dominate our lives, and some of Toni’s hysteria (what else would you call the decision to take up Navajo in the expectation of earning simple points to add to his total) has rubbed off on me and forced me to make a doggedly determined assault on the points total of the people in front of me.
The end result of that is that my index finger of my right hand is rapidly growing a callous with the screen-jabbing finger writing I have had to do to amass the points to ensure my ‘safety’ in the top ten to guarantee my progress through to the Sapphire League!
My enthusiasm is bound to wane soon, but until it does, I am gaining by going over yet again those points in the acquisition of a language that I have already gone through many times before.
Some day they will stick. Please!
