Ahora Caigo

HOLIDAY! CELEBRATE! And other words that end in an A sound...

We recently returned from a week in a teeny, weeny, holiday bungalini. It's been the making of this month. I calculated before we went that we hadn't been away on a holiday, just the two of us, without any computers, wifi coverage, nor much in the way of mobile phone reception, for the best part of 16 months. We didn't even....shhh... take any conditioner. (Straggly, unruly hair is a small price to pay for inner peace.)

The truth is we've not had much time, or many euros to spare. Oh, eff off, you live in a sunny place, I hear you protest. You can walk to a beach, you lucky biscuit. ¡Callate, puedes caminar a la playa, eres afortunada! OK, I admit, we can see palm trees from the living room, but we have chirruping emails to answer, rooms to clean, laundry to dry, ironing to do and several weekly food shops just like everyone else. Add some recent life/family/health/job insecurities to the mix and well, Little House on the Prairie it ain't.

So that's why ditching the city for this place for a bit was much needed. See how it makes the Mister look positively catalogue-model winsome?

The best bit was that there were two best bits: we could walk to a choice of two unspolit beaches along a rocky coastal path pretending to be mountain goats, and also - we had a barbacoa to put chicken on, something that took us right back to gnawing on jerk chicken with blackened fingers in our beloved Brixton. 
Oh, and a bonus thing. We learned loads more colloquial Spanish from the truly alien pleasure of watching telly in our little bungalow. We haven't owned a telly in more than a year. Ahora Caigo (quite literally, Now I Fall, or Now I Get It! - a game show where competitors fall through a hole in the floor at breakneck speed if they answer incorrectly - and  Millonario Anónimo (you know the format, but did you know it would be even more tear-jerking in Spanish? It's la crisis, you see) - were our favourites. 


I tell you what, we needed that holiday. Because the real work starts here. You remember that New York job I went for two posts ago?

They only went and gave it to me.

That's right, we're moving to NEW YORK FFS OMG ETC ETC.

I'll go first in August, and the Mister will follow in a few months, so now we are on EMOTIONAL HIGH ALERT and are bobbing wildly up and down like crazed trampolinists, veering between elation and woe at the thought of separating our lives - the ones we've just spent 11 months soldering together in this live/work space that has been our business and our home and our adventure and our comfort blanket all in one.

This is pretty big, yo.

January, Day 8

Feliz Año Nuevo! 

One of my new years' resolutions for 2014 has been to write at least a post a month on here, something I didn't manage last year with the upheaval of moving country. So I'm going to try to get January's post in nice and early. 

So far, 2014, you're all right, you are. It's day 8 and it has only rained once so far here (on the 4th). January days in Barcelona are bright, light until half 5 or so, and the evenings are clear and chilly. We still need duvets and slippers; our tiled floors are unforgiving. We still need a cosy blanket on the sofa. But the temperatures encourage action, so a walk is a good excuse to warm up and see the ocean. The beaches are deserted, except for weekend afternoons when they are teeming with families taking their abuelas out for a stroll, usually accompanied by little white dogs being promenaded in their jumpers or hats (I'm not kidding). It's wonderful to see the sun as high as it is, and skies are generally blue. Having said that, I'm ferreting away with organising visits to schools around the country for work, and so by day 8 I'm already suffering screen burn. The difference here is that when I go out for a walk at lunchtime, I get to go with E, and the sun just happens to be shining. This feels very different to any other January I've known in the UK.

Another new thing has been the feeling that the season of Christmas lasts longer here, largely due to the fact that the 6th January is a national holiday as well (El Día de los Reyes), with a whole set of traditions formerly unknown to me. It has been a beautiful festival to witness, with a fabulous parade around the city on the night of the 5th, incorporating live music, bright costumes and uniquely decorated floats. They transport each of the three Kings (Gaspar, Balthasar & Melchior) and their helpers who throw huge quantities of sweets (12 tons, apparently!) to the crowds as they pass by. The parade offers the opportunity for children to give their wish lists to the Kings, in the hopes that they will receive the gifts they have asked for. If they’ve been good, they might, but if not, they end up with a lump of coal. 

Here are some of the floats, including these mesmerising horse dancers - which were my favourite illumination of the night. They floated gracefully past our window and I felt myself watching openmouthed, so beautiful and ethereal were they. It's a pure kind of magic, that feeling of seeing something new and unexpectedly wonderful for the first time.

Here's wishing you a very happy, healthy, prosperous new year full of childlike wonderment and new things to make you go all slackjawed. Here's to 2014.

The Other End of the Northern Line

What a spectacular autumn this is turning out to be. On Monday I had a bonus day, a special, gold starred kind of day when the rest of the world was at work, and I was off and the Mister was off, and it was 27 degrees. In October. We woke up and blinked our way outside into the sunshine, scarcely believing our luck.

All summer long the Mister had wanted to get up to his old stomping grounds in the frozen north (a.k.a Finchley). Hampstead Heath was also high on the list, but the weather hadn't played ball at all and we had been enjoying the new neighbourhood too much. Finally on Monday, we took the plunge - and the tube ride didn't seem so far as it had seemed in high summer (hah!) when the Northern Line was a seething, sweaty mass of tourists and commuters jostling for elbow space. We called my mum and she came up all the way from Orpo to meet us, and glad for the escape she was too.

It was so worth it. Yummy mummies, pedigree dogs, Japanese tourists, perroflautas*, the elderly, the young, partially clothed lovers, swimmers, the very wealthy and the unwaged alike had all descended on the Heath's verdant curves and sparkling (ok, some were a bit scuzzy) ponds. Empty cava bottles strewn along Spaniards Road signalled the excesses of the previous balmy weekend. Clearly a higher class of drunkard frequents leafy NW3 than in SW8.

We stopped and had a drink and a fish finger sandwich at The Spaniards Inn, one of London's oldest pubs and apparently the birthplace of Dick Turpin. John Keats is said to have penned 'Ode to a Nightingale' in the beer garden. We just had a Pimm's.

The leaves were just beginning to turn and the colour of the sky made me stop and promise to myself that I would go outside more. I was reminded of reading Thoreau's Walden, which made me acutely aware of the power of nature over us poor pallid city-folk.


"Let us first be as simple and well as Nature ourselves, dispel the clouds which hang over our brows, and take up a little life into our pores." - Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854)

And as much as I am in favour of more recognition for South London's charms (perhaps not full-on transpontine independence, but a hat tip to the lofty ideals that Free South London's supporters champion), North London's not so bad, is it really.

(Now can someone who lives in NW3 please write an equally nice post about South London?)

*NB Thanks to Lo-Sal for the amazing word perroflauta, which roughly translates as 'Spanish crusty with a dog on a string and an undercut and/or dreads.'

Escape

This time two weeks ago, I was waking up on a sunny morning in Bordeaux, looking for the first café au lait of the day. The Mister was across the road, buying pains au chocolat, and we were looking at one another sadly, for it was the day we were due to fly back to London.

We had three hours to kill before it was time to get on the airport bus; that most depressing of transport types. We had already walked most of the length and breadth of the city but we knew it was important to keep moving and not think too much about the holiday taking its last gasps of air, and light, before being consigned to a dusty suitcase of memories.

We walked around until lunchtime, as the students at the University streamed out of classrooms and onto sunny squares, as office workers took cigarette breaks and murmured covertly over cups of coffee, and as more new tourists streamed into the city, gaping up at the magnificent sea-horses at Girondins, and snapping the circus big top pitched at the Esplanade des Quinconces. We met a sweet German couple in their seventies who asked us to take their photo with their old 35mm camera. They beamed for the picture like two lovesick schoolchildren. The Garonne glistened and beckoned as children played in the fountains at the Miroir d'eau.  I took a breath, on the tram back to the Gare St Jean, and held it, sitting very still, while I listened to that little voice inside, which said, why not stay?

Collecting our bags from the hotel, we had a minor argument, about something trivial, like luggage tags, or whose bag held the dirty laundry. It was only because we were both sad, and we had nothing to be angry with Bordeaux about. It was like it was something to do whilst waiting for the airport bus, because it was better than thinking about what we were doing; leaving this beautiful place which had enchanted us and made us want to stay and do anything just to have a little dog and live in an apartment with a balcony and raise French-speaking children.

We put our things underneath the bus and they got pushed to the back, as they always do. A family of South Africans sat near to us and talked very loudly about their cars and houses, their tannned blondeness and plentiful gold watchery seeming out of place on an airport bus. As we passed the Grand Theatre, and then the Piscine Judaïque, and finally the international school,  I cried a little. I turned my head away to the window, so no-one would see, and I made a promise to myself.

One day, little voice. One day soon, I will.

Octobre/Ottobre

What a bleeding crazy month. I'm so behind, at everything. I'm behind on this blog, on my StreathamPulse reviews, on my life's general meaning.

What the heck have I been doing? Well, here's how the beginning /middle of October went.

It seems like a long time ago, but it was wonderful to be back in Paris. It was for work, but I took a weekend there and enjoyed the sunshine. It was unseasonably warm and sunny for October.

Did I mention I'd quite like to live in France?

At the end of the month I went to Milan, also for work, and took a weekend off to stay with my friend Thea. Instead of staying in Milan all weekend, I asked her if she would come with me to Lugano (where I had a school visit) and then on to Lake Como. We stayed in a lovely little hotel up on the hillside, 1000m above sea-level, in a hilltop town called Brunate overlooking the lake.

Here was how we got there:

Here was what it looked like from the top of the hill.

Just incredible. The air was clean and fresh, my lungs were stronger and my mind was less full. It felt nice to shake off the city for a while. A year ago, I would *never* have said that.

This is a simple post to just look back at these photos, really. Just writing this has calmed my city-frazzled nerves and slowed my heart rate.

And to say that a lot of the time these days, I wish I was somewhere else.

I am really going to have to fix that.

The Bank Holiday Weekend

May 22-25, 2009

The Sweet:

waking up rock-star late, meeting an old flatmate who is Spanish and says my name like theeeeeees, taking a bus to East Dulwich, going to a hand-knitted organic muesli kind of café for lunch, picking out vintage clothes and spending way too much on a spotty dress, running back to change into said spotty dress, going to an 80s prom and dancing all night to really bad-good songs, drinking prom punch, then waking up and making a picnic and going to the common, meeting a random half-Maltese Canadian who was in London for 24 hrs, sunning myself and making hamburgers for everyone back at mine whilst watching Pretty in Pink, then going back to the common the next day and randomly bumping into a colleague who left me with his mates to watch cricket, drinking lots and lots of Coronas (with limes when I had some). Brill.

The Bitter: 

damaging my feet with supposedly ergonomic birkenstocks, being faux-bullied by a coworker who reminds me of Beaker, getting the night bus to my friend's house which decided to stop halfway and turn off its lights because some chavvy litle snarkers decided it would be a good idea to push the stopping button continuously for about half a mile around Elephant & Castle, accidentally defrosting the freezer (oops) before being woken up at 2.30am by the house party of complete misfits next door and making a 3am vow to relieve them all of their voiceboxes if they didn't shut up, eating a disappointingly squidgy ice cream from the bottom of the Sainsbury's freezer section (what? I was desperate), running out of limes halfway through an evening of Coronas, but still...utterly lovely.