Do I smell autumn!

Cumulus!  The curse of the sunbathing classes!

Clouds do look pretty set against a bright blue sky – but when they get in the way of the sun they are vile.  No matter how often one tells oneself that even with cloud cover it is quite possible to get brown under a hazy sky, it simply does not feel the same.  And it adds an unwelcome air of desperation to the whole sunbathing business.

I remember on my expensive sojourns in Gran Canaria during the Christmas period that I would lie on my sunbed on the beach sometimes with gritted teeth trying to ignore the cutting winds or even rain and willing the sun (for which I had paid lots) to reappear and tint my skin to the exact colour of brown guaranteed to make my colleagues in Cardiff look at me with envious hatred when I turned up in early January for the start of term!

Today I could say that my dissatisfaction with the fluffy whites is not personal but a disinterested response because I am thinking of the limited number of days that Emma has to boost her Vitamin D levels!

We do have a Plan B – and that is to go into Barcelona and have a wander in the Gothic Quarter and perhaps take in an exhibition.  But I for one prefer the beach, swimming and lazing to a late attempt to find culture in my holiday!

The one thing about living where I do is that clouds are not usually the end of good weather.  They appear, fluffy and extensive and then disappear to allow sunshine to flow around and make the folk glad.  I have every faith that the present indicators of flying moisture will dissipate and allow normal service to resume.

Which they did to a certain extent, but not before the skies darkened to that threatening shade of blue which portends precipitation.  The rain has lasted at least five seconds leaving things glistening though hardly damp.  It is supposed to rain on Monday and not today!  I trust that this little spat of rain was only a teasing foretaste and not a harbinger!

We have been promised sun for today and tomorrow.  I have faith!

This evening Emma and I completed another few venues on the Ruta de Tapas which included snails (which Emma ate for the first time) and mussels.  Sadly, we finished the evening by going back to the place which, up till now has been holding on to first place in my opinion, but this time it was not as good as on the previous occasions.

The snails were presented in an inverted pyramid-like plastic container and had a surprisingly spicy sauce for this area.  That particular tapa has come up on the rails as it were and is now a contender!

With typical dedication and single-mindedness I am now more than half-way through the 30 featured tapas – but the time to complete the full range is fast running out: I have until the 15^th of September to eat my way through the rest of the tapas and submit my form for entry into the prize draw to join the restaurateurs for their gastronomic feast.

Toni has pointed out that the number of people actually finishing the whole 30 has got to be severely limited so the odds on winning have to be a damn sight higher than for the lottery!  But I thought the same about the absurd competition run by the Russian radio, television and camera makers. 

It was only when I returned to the shop where I had bought a Russian radio and considered it such good value that I had decided to buy another one for my father for Christmas that the shopkeeper fixed me with a steely gaze and accused me of buying a radio previously.  I stuttered out my guilt and then the man said, “As you have bought two, you are entitled to enter a competition!”

It turned out that entry for the competition was only open to those purchasers who bought two radios or two televisions or two movie cameras etc.  “This,” I thought to myself, “is a competition where the odds have to be stacked in my favour!”

The competition itself was not one which demanded a great deal of intellectual prowess: it asked you to list a number of attributes of your product in order of importance and then think of a slogan to go with it.  Before you even think about asking, I have had a long series of psychiatric sessions to bury my contribution deep in my subconscious and therefore I cannot repeat my contribution to advertising history.

I had moved from Kettering to Cardiff after waiting in vain for the letter of congratulation to drop through my letterbox in Barton Seagrave and had already started my new job in Llanedeyrn High School when I received a telegram (ah, time for a moment of historic wistfulness) informing me of my success.

My prize was a trip to Russia (all expenses paid) but it had to be taken at a time when part of the trip would have been in school time.

The head teacher at the time, a man of discernment (he did after all appoint me) and liberal sensitivity (he did after all support my application for leave of absence) said that even without pay it was too good an opportunity to miss. 

So, with the totally false justification that I was not merely going on an all-expenses jaunt, but was rather going on a scouting trip to suss out whether or not it would be possible to take a school party to the Moscow Olympics, my local authority not only gave me leave of absence to go on the trip but also gave me PAID leave of absence!

You can tell by the reference to the Moscow Olympics just how long ago all this was, but there are colleagues in Llanedeyrn High School (now retired) who still throw back the “paid leave” part of the story in my face as one of the great crimes in educational history.

On the first night of the holiday we were in a nightclub on board a boat anchored in Leningrad harbour admid oceans of Russian Champagne and piles of black and orange caviar – both of which I tasted for the first time on that trip.  Emboldened by drink and the general air of louche debauchery I engaged the competition organizer in conversation about the extraordinary set up of the thing.

He told me that, far from receiving merely a trickle of entries as sense might suggest, there were masses of them.  I took it that it was the genius of my carefully crafted (but totally forgotten) slogan that made me a worthy winner.  Not so, I was told.  I hadn’t in fact won – a woman had beaten me, but as all the rest of the members of the trip were blokes she had been given a camera and was more than please with her success and I, because of my sex, was boosted to the premiere position!  Happy, unenlightened days!

So, even if I complete the complete Ruta I will probably find out that thousands of people did the same.  And I fear that I can expect no advantages from my sex this time!

Nothing is easy

Cars get small stones in the same way that adolescents get spots; it’s one of the forces of nature. 

The stones that cars accumulate are of the small variety and usually of an indeterminate grey colour.  They are small enough to fit neatly into crevices and can travel easily underneath car mats.  It is only when they are raised that, rather like a neglected stone in the forest when turned over, a whole world is revealed.  In the forest it might be organic; in a car it is geologic.  And therein lies the real problem for their being cleaned away.

There is no such thing as an effective car vacuum cleaner.  I know.

I have now wasted two individual sums of money on machines which have promised suction and not delivered. 

The latest one, which I am ashamed to admit was a Hoover gave a new meaning to the word pathetic.  It did indeed suck up dust which it immediately expelled through the air outlet!  The little stones stayed stubbornly on the carpet.  When I finally deployed the “crevice tool” (I have no intention of explaining) it did less!

When a machine made by a firm whose name has become a generic name for the device it makes one expects more.  Luckily the box, although thrown into the bin, had not been taken out to the skip and so the hapless machine has been repackaged and will be taken back to the store as something not fit for purpose!

Emma arrived on time and, as is now traditional, was taken to the Maratime for a meal and a chat.  A bottle of wine and a considerable amount of gossip later we fell into our respective beds – but not before the Magic of the Coin was explained.

Emma is prone to mosquito attack and therefore our newfound knowledge about the amazing characteristics of coin-on-sting amelioration was a necessary part of the useful knowledge that any sleeper in these parts needs to know!

The morning was spent at the beach where the number of people enjoying the end of their holidays does not seem to have lessened.

What might have been a jellyfish brushed by right knee and I spent the next few hours having hysterical phantom sting pains.  After the kiss of the medusa last year where I ended up with an almost perfect circle of sting points which took a hell of a long time to diminish, I was more than eager not to suffer the same fate again. 

I may have faith in the power of The Coin but I would not like to put it to the test with the assertive pain of a jellyfish.  As the web page which talks about remedies for stings says, the best remedy is not to have the sting in the first place.

Our leisurely evening of sitting outside a café and having just a few tapas was stymied by the limitations of my two companions: the bad tummy of one and the wheat intolerance of the other, meant that I had to eat an entire plate of chocos myself because of the composition of the batter.  This meant that the plate of pimentos del padron was sent back to the kitchen with some left on it – a high crime and misdemeanour!

Tomorrow more beach time.

tonuight

Other people give in and buy a dish, but we spurn such easy solutions and instead watch British television via a single set in Rumney in Cardiff.

This morning we bought a lead which has now linked one of my portables computers to the television and through the magic of “Slingbox” we are allowed to see the programmes which the Pauls can watch on their television at home.

That is we could see a picture but sound was denied us.  So, to compensate for the lack of sound we have added one of the micro-speaker sets that I bought to listen to my I-pods which boost the sound from the portable so that we can hear as well as see.

Or at least we could when I went up stairs; now that I have come back nothing seems to be working – in the best traditions of computers.  And of course for no reason whatsoever.  Each of the components is working (allegedly) but not when linked together!  I suppose that we shouldn’t be surprised, because what technological innovation actually happens without some heartache?

I can cite (as who cannot if you are of a certain age) video recorder after video recorder that quite simply did not do what it said on the box.  Even the machines that were supposed to set themselves up (including setting the time) when you plugged them in did nothing of the sort.

So, as the television in working and the computer is working, it is, I suppose logical to surmise that the lead connecting both these working machines is the thing at fault.  But it does relay the “desktop” picture from my machine – but nothing else.

Toni is, at present, attempting to make some sense of what is going on.  I am restricted to making vague sounds of encouragement in the hope that when everything has been worked out I will be treated to some sort of condescending explanation about how simple the basic problem actually was if you knew anything about computers.  Sometime ignorance (pretended or real) is a very useful protection against IT angst!

Even as I type the problem is being dealt with as the screen on the television alternately goes black and then lights up while I am asked technically rhetorical (or possibly the other way round) questions.

As it is now after 5 pm we note with dread the arrival of a French family to take their places around the pool.  I am not going to use their arrival to indulge in a typically British condemnation of the whole race, but I would surely like to condemn this particular fragment of France.  More specifically a small sliver of the family: to wit, a small girl child.

The idea that children “should be seen and not heard” is a sound one (apart, of course from the “seen” part of the saying) and this is particularly so in the case of the small French girl child.

She does not communicate via the language of our enemies for the last millennium but rather though the language of a acoustically stunted bat – in other words her screams are just this side of human hearing, and shockingly painful withal!

And in a relationship that I understand well from the little darlings that I teach, the parent does nothing to soften the sheer cutting quality of the piping voice; no word of discouragement to the hysterical screams that seem completely disproportionate to the little body that produces them.  It is a relief to us when she merely shouts: it is far less painful!

I thought that I was impervious to the criminal stupidity of some sections of this country when it comes to the treatment of bulls. 

Living in Catalonia one does not often have to put up with ones fellow citizens being beastly to bulls.  After all, in Barcelona in the Plaza de España (!) the bullring there has been converted into a shopping centre!  I don’t think that the attitude of the Catalans can be more clear.

Further down the coast however in the troubled province of Valencia, which has only recently been released from the leadership of a very questionable gentleman, showed that there were lower regions of animal cruelty that I had not previously seen.

I have become hardened to other parts of Spain finding pleasure in taunting bulls to run around the streets, sometimes with burning torches attached to their horns! 

We have had the usual number of deaths from some of the taunters not being quite as quick on their feet as the bulls – and Spanish television takes great delight in showing the maulings they happen with bulls’ horns embedded deeply into the hapless failed bull runner.

On television this afternoon there was yet another variation. 

In some towns barricades are put up; shops are boarded up and metal cages constructed along the streets with bars far enough apart to allow humans through but not bulls.  For those not brave or stupid enough to run with the bulls there is tiered seating at strategic positions to allow spectators to “enjoy” the event.

All of the preparations were in place for the televised event but with the added element that this took place near the sea. 

The bulls were tempted towards idiots who were provoking them with the expectation that the bulls would charge and the impetus of their charge would take them over the high quayside and into the sea!  The young men (it’s always young men) were so near the edge of the quay that they too had to jump, dive or fall into the sea themselves to escape the mass of meat hurtling towards them.

The bull was “rescued” by men in a motorboat who grabbed the bull’s horns and pulled it alongside the moving boat and thus dragged the poor beast to shore.

It was a repulsive sight – and some parts of society here are trying to get bull fighting classed as a cultural even so that it can be “protected” from perfectly justified accusations of the ugliest form of animal cruelty.  Ah well.

The six-day weather forecast is for sun.  You have to take the smooth with the rough!

We woke this morning to the short, inane “tune” of a mobile phone playing distantly but audibly and incessantly.  Its short repeated music phrase was not aggressive but it was insistent and it was amazing how awake one was after ten minutes of that mindless sound.

As no earplugs were to hand the only reasonable response was to get up.  Which we have now done.

Early rising today is no bad thing as a degree of washing and cleaning is necessary as preparation for our next guest.  The washing machine is churning away and the tumble dryer is adding an extra few degrees to an already warm morning.

It is truly amazing how virtuous one feels after emptying the dishwasher; emptying the washing machine; transferring the load to the dryer and then reloading the washing machine.  My cup of tea seems well deserved after so much effort!

It is worth considering how much extra effort would have been needed to achieve what I have completed in a few minutes were I to be magically transported back to Cathays in Cardiff where I remember my earliest days.

The twin-tub and Flatley dryer were later innovations in my house, but I do have early hazy memories of a barrel like washing machine where the swirling mass was periodically poked with a wooden stick almost as if the clothing was part of a giant stew. 

I have very clear memories of the mangle which I sometimes helped to turn.  I particularly remember towels which used to emerge from the rollers like stiff pieces of coloured cardboard – a process which never failed to delight me.  The washing line was stretched across our back yard and I remember that as something which meant that my play was severely restricted.  I did not help with the pegging out of the clothes, as I was too small (!) to reach the line – but I do remember pegging the pegs onto the end bits of each other and attempting to see how many pegs I could keep pegged in a line before they all snapped off into their individual entities.  Now that’s entertainment!

There are many who would say that using an expensive electrical drying machine in a country where strong sunshine is plentiful is a grotesque waste of money and that naturally dried clothes are so much better somehow than those forced into an artificially tumbling drum.  To those I say, so sue me!  I am sure that Our Oscar had something glitteringly witty and interestingly perverse to say about “natural” which I can’t at the moment bring to mind, but I am sure that I agree with whatever it was.

There are ten short days left to this year’s summer holiday.

That sentence in its stark awfulness makes chilling reading – and given the beggared holidays that we have during the rest of the academic year is about as long as the time that we have for the Easter and Christmas holidays respectively.  And we don’t have half terms!

I noticed in one of the parks in the centre of the town that the trees which shaded it had dropped many of their leaves which were sere and brittle underfoot: a harbinger of autumn!  Sigh!

 

Meanwhile the washing and the drying churn on with each machine having new loads to cope with.  And there is still more to go.  There is something very domestic and traditional about doing the washing on a Monday; and later there will be the cleaning. 

I hate it!

It has been a muggy day today and Toni has spent some it reclining trying to get rid of a suspect tummy. 

I sincerely hope that he is fighting fit by the time Emma arrives tomorrow evening!

The Sun Shines!

The Pauls have been fortunate in that every day that they have been here has been fine.  Which is more than I can say for my sojourn in the UK earlier in the holiday!

Their growing desperation to change colour puts me vividly in mind of my own frantic behaviour towards the end of a 14 day stay in sunny climes when the growing realization that tanning opportunities are decreasing by the second.

As last night’s festivities included celebrating in a flowingly liquid way overcoming the grasping evil of the Stunted Dwarf thieving manager of the restaurant we went to, there seems to be a disinclination on the part of our guests to spring from their beds and soak up the rays.

Going to a major supermarket on a Sunday morning reminds me of the worst excesses of M&S on the lead-up to Christmas, where hordes of women-type people of both sexes sweep through the store in a ruthless fashion that makes Genghis Khan look like a member of the St John’s Ambulance Service – and that is a very carefully chosen simile.

 

Suffice to say that the experience is something on a par with what experimental mice undergo in the most severe laboratory conditions so there is an incentive to drag oneself out of bed at an unearthly hour to get any goods that you need before the masses surge into the buying area.

Driving to our local small supermarket in Gava was akin to a general inspecting his troops nodding with approval their preparations for the battle as the visiting family platoons of holiday-makers begin their preparations taking various pieces of important equipment out of their cars and amassing the vast quantities of food in plastic containers that is an essential element in the Spanish Family on the Beach.  Laden with parasols, chairs, beds, balls, hats and enough food to feed a normal division they make their sullen way to the beach resenting every footstep because they have not been able to park within millimetres of the sand and sea.

By the time I returned all parking spaces within easy reach of the house had been taken and the more outré parking spaces (zebra crossings and tangentially to rounded corners) had begun to be taken up as well.  I therefore had to use the parking of last resource: the driveway.

It’s hot.  Very hot.  And the Third Floor is like a “microwave oven” according to the Pauls, though Paul Squared has been tempted to lie out there as a sort of “last chance” quick-tan expedient!  A dangerous choice, but one I took myself on every occasion on the last day of a holiday when I was living in Britain!

The day will not end with the taking of the Pauls to the airport; we then have to go to Terrassa to collect the various goodies that Toni’s mum has brought back from her holiday on the island of Majorca.  I am hoping that she has brought back some of the excellent spicy cheese wrapped in vine leaves that we tried the last time someone came back from a visit to the island bearing gifts!

Alas!  Toni has been stricken with some sort of tummy bug (possibly aggravated by his unaccustomed second glass of wine last night!) and we did not go up to Terrassa.

The Pauls have been taken to the airport and we had our evening meal accompanied by that wistful sadness that comes when friends have gone home.

Still, we are looking forward to our next guest due next Tuesday.  Time marches on!