ON A LIGHTER NOTE

I'm still reeling from the riots I witnessed on my recent trip to the motherland but what has really fascinated me is the Yin and Yang of everything that is wrong with Britain today. I refer of course to the EDL and the Muslims Against the Crusaders. What they have against a soul group is anybody's guess. I suppose I should have started this blog with the line 'are there any Muslims against the Crusaders or anti-Muslims against the Crusaders in tonight?' and add 'you might like to leave now the pair of you'. There's something very disturbing about the image of men with beards and bald men acting like it was the Battle of Lepanto or something. The bit I'm getting at is the inability to shut up for just one minute during the minute's silence on September 11th. God they're trying. I'm beginning to wonder if the two groups are working together, agents provocateurs with a double bluff. Both looks or styles are a bit too contrived for me, like when the police dress up and pretend they want to buy drugs from you. Or Lady Gaga or the Archbishop of Canterbury. No one who puts that much effort into how they look should be taken seriously.

Reeling is one thing but recoil is what I do every time that man Ed Balls appears, looming into my living room. He has a similar sweaty composure as a bloke called Tony McNulty who may or may not have been the Minsiter ( Minister even..)of Employment. I've yet to suss out where our mayoress is coming from. Her name is Ana Alos but H calls her Ana a Los Cojones for reasons only known to himself. Give it time and we will see if she can drag the town somewhere near the 21st century. She may even live up to her name one day.

YOURS, ANGRY OF MAYFAIR

Folk are up in arms about some crap T-shirts Top Shop had on and have since taken off the shelves. Said T-shirts had the sort of crass remarks I see on  T-shirts here the difference being no one realises what they are wearing like the boy walking towards me yesterday with 'I Still Live With My Mum' and underneath 'Go To Your Apartment' minus the 'Let's'. Not as bad as the mannequin minus the legs and knickers wearing a top that says 'Girls Do It Better' that I saw in a shop window the other day. Of course they do.

A couple of days ago H and I were wondering where we could go and what we could do that was cheap or free and decided to drive up to a lovely river called the Alcanadre which is deep in the Sierra Guara about an hour from here. We like to go every summer and it's lovely this time of year now the kids are back at school and the tourists have gone.There is a waterfall and H said it reminded him of Australia, a bit like a billabong.  It will be the last time we go as there seemed to be a lot of flies about for an area that looks clean and tranquil. Before we left I wandered further upstream and discovered why. The lovely people who have been before us have had a communal shit by the looks of it with toilet roll, wet wipes and excrement and of course flies all along the otherwise pristine river. When we got back to the car there was a parking ticket underneath the windscreen, 200 Euros if you please. Slap bang in the quinto infierno or el conYo de Bernada as my friend Jon likes to say. I shall be notifying the proper autoridades soon to let them know that their nationwide promotion 'La Magia de Huesca' is working. H blames the French.

Back in town the pedestrianisation of the Plaza Lopez Allue has left the shopkeepers there a bit peeved with them saying said pedestrianisation is having a negative affect on their trade. I don't get this about the whole affair. Without the car this town is going to crumble. They are presently building a car park in the centre of town, are using a space that was once occupied by houses as a makeshift car park which needs constant policing, have pedestrianised part of our barrio and yet it is all too sudden or too much for people to cope with. I would like someone to explain how trade is being killed up in the square when I have never needed to go by car. This is a town where everything and everyone can be found within a twenty minute walk. I say everything, I am still waiting for the sherry I have asked for or attempted to order ten times now. I have found a distributor on the internet, the one that probably supplies the shop I am trying to buy it from and I look forward to paying said shop a visit to say ' Y tu Donde compras?' the other promo that attempts to save the town from going under.

WALK ON BY

In George Mikes' How To Be An Alien he talks about people on the continent wearing their best on Sunday and folk in England wearing their worst. I must admit that this is still true at least in my parents' house as I witnessed my father, who is the owner of many jumpers, wearing his 'favourite' with the elbow missing. I thought it might be just attention seeking but judging from the state of his Barbour jacket, the opposite of the ones I see here in Spain, I think it is just the norm with him. British people have a strange dress sense. In big cities people look quite slim and sophisticated but miserable and self obsessed. Go further afield and look around you in the post office queue and everyone looks like they are wearing their pyjamas with a dash of autism. However, I did my own study last night, inspired by my aunt who I mentioned before with her own 'survey' and had a butcher's at the crowds milling around outside the Cafe Centrale here in the centre of town. Admittedly it was two o'clock in the morning and in the rough end of 'El Tubo' and my investigation led me to believe that most people here have no idea how to dress either but in a different way to the English or the Brits. It's still 'Cardiff with a suntan' or maybe Merthyr Tydfil, with the shortest of skirts with high heels for women and the men wear their trousers on the hip with very few adopting the trousers round their arse look which is slowly creeping in. I'm trying to remember my most ridiculous outfit or look from my salad days and I guess it would have to be the amount of make-up I once wore which had some small children telling me I looked like a clown. There is also a fading memory of some Dr Marten shoes that I thought looked lovely with my dress. 

There are a couple of condemned houses on our street and they have been for some time. This didn't stop a family moving in and living there for a couple of years. From time to time as I walked past these houses I would remember that they were about to collapse but when in Rome do as the Romans do, which here means nothing. On Saturday nobody was allowed to walk up our road as one of the buildings had given up and partially collapsed. Nobody was killed for a change, and the latest is that well yes, they will have to be pulled down. I presume they got the family out and the caged birds they had pinned to the side of the walls. It will be interesting to see how many police and fire folk will be needed for the espectaculo. The other day I counted about twenty milling around. I am sure there will be lots of men congregating with their hands behind their backs, the same ones who appear whenever there is a big hole in the road.

MY RIGHT FOOT

While we were in England I made my mum watch a programme called My Hoarder Mum and Me which took a TV presenter, Jasmin Harman and her mum on a journey or an attempt to get rid of the stuff that clutters up her home, the mother that is. Her mother was quite extreme and had to sometimes sleep on whatever space she could find on the floor. I wonder how many people suffer from what can appear to be a  mental disease and seems to affect loads of people in Britain including my mum and is something I have to seriously keep an eye on. I have always felt it was a fear of letting go, of leaving the past behind where it often, if not always, belongs. My problem is with bits if paper and not writing stuff down in notebooks enough. Henderson calls my mum's house 'the house with the stuff around the edges' and everywhere you look there is stuff from the past she can not or won't throw away. Jasmin Harman's mother couldn't bear to throw away a load of Sindy and Action Man dolls away. Her son threw them on the table and said of their intertwined bodies, ' they look like an orgy!'. With my mum it is our old school books, Christmas cards, stuff that may come in handy one day but generally over forty year's of 'stuff' accumulated and an unbearable feeling of loss if anyone tries to interfere and throw 'her stuff' away.  Hoarding, especially the extreme kind, is not recognised as a mental illness but I think in extreme cases it is. I can never remember a time having a cup of tea with my mum and not having to share the sofa with hundreds of books, magazines, unopened mail and beside me anything from a plastic vegetable rack full of scourers, brushes, bits of twine and other things that won't be thrown away because they are bound to be needed a few days later. It is a trait I have inherited and have battled with and I am sure it has also got to do with a range of things including the Second World War and all its impact on people when they had nothing and had to salvage and make do with what they could find, and maybe superstition, the idea that if you throw away something useless or broken but sentimental, then something awful might happen or you might need it at a later date and the idea of not having it around is too much for some people including Harman's mum and mine. Harman's mother got too distressed if asked why she would need bits of cable she found in the street. I suppose a certain amount of control is involved. When people are asked what they need with the rubbish that surrounds them get annoyed and upset that you are asking and it gets worse if you suggest they get rid of it.

Still on this subject, a friend on Facebook mentioned the most useless thing they owned was an antique monocle which set people off, writing in their useless 'stuff' they can't or won't throw away. Mine included a beautiful pair of Charles Jourdan high heels that I can get my left foot in but not my right. I added that I might just wear the left shoe and don a  slipper on the right. Other useless things include a Biba coat that makes me look like Fagin and a set of forks from the one euro shop which bend when I eat mashed potato. I think I may have thrown the forks away but not after keeping them for a while just to demonstrate to friends the uselessness these shops. I am also haunted by another pair of shoes that have a snow globe of the Eiffel Tower in the heel. This is the sort of madness I left behind in England but for some reason have kept the evidence under my bed just to remind me of where I came from. Nowadays I buy shoes that I wear till they fall apart. women are often obsessed with shoes and there is no denying a beautiful shoe but perhaps that is what they should remain, a beautiful thing to be looked at, not worn. The heel height of women's shoes in Britain is ridiculous and vary rarely seen here. I am talking the type of bondage shoe favoured by Mrs Beckham who will probably be a cripple by the time she is forty.

STILL ONE IMMENSE LUNATIC ASYLUM

It's hard to fathom that this time last Saturday we were sitting peacefully in a garden on the edge of the New Forest and now I am off to see the latest Almodovar film, The Skin I Live In. Quite a lot has happened in the last month or so. One minute we are whizzing round the mountains and canyons of the Pyrenees, the next we are flying over the charred remains of the Sony factory in Enfield. The next few weeks I guess we will be asked by our Spanish pals as we ease ourselves back into the life here, 'what the hell happened man?' to which I will reply that when the Brits or in this case, the English do something, they like to do it well. Whether it's Royal weddings or producing the best comedy or teenage pregnancies and thieving, we leave no stone unturned in the pursuit for perfection. The first week in England seems like a bit of a bad dream, like it never happened as we watched agog at our fellow countrymen and women charging through the streets, bored out of their brains waiting for something to happen. 

Other things that I remember from our airing in the motherland are the propensity for religious or God fearing moments especially in the way some folk speak. You only need a storm on the horizon and people start to think it's Armageddon or that if it does rain heavily it will wash away all the obvious sins, or worse, that 'the Gods are angry'. I picked all this up as I went along, listening in on other people's conversations or gleaning info from my aunt, the one who says she likes to do 'her own survey' on the madness of the masses. There does seem to be a constant obsession with money, buying stuff to add to all the stuff you already have and the end of the world. For a nation that on the whole doesn't believe in much they do go on about what's right and wrong and when will there be a decent trial on all of this. Then there's the idea that the sort of everyday horrors that occur in Britain don't happen anywhere else, that the rest of the world or at least the countries people think about emigrating to are free and dancing around enjoying themselves with no crime rate and cheap booze. I was shocked at how cheap the drink is in England and amazed at the news that Torquay is the spiritual home of many a Scots man who gravitate there and nourish themselves on something called Buckfast fortified wine. It's also known as 'wreck the hoose juice' and is said to contain as much caffeine as ten cans of coca-cola. Sounds like the 'Calimocho' the youngsters like to drink here.

Other wonderful things spotted include the still growing amount of people in mobilty scooters puffing away on fags which you don't see here in Spain. Instead you just see dozens of folk in neck braces. People are still growing in the UK and I am as fascinated as the last time I saw them but trying not to stare at the souls stuck in obese bodies, struggling as they stuff their faces with pasties. I'm not surprised there are so many as I meandered through the queue at Marks and Spencer, passing sweets and chocolates of a variety I had never seen before but couldn't wait to get my chops round. Give me a month and I would be catching up with the rest of the nation. The trips to the supermarket lasted hours as I savoured all the wonderful things on offer, half of which didn't get eaten and are now rotting away in my elderly parents' fridge. Here's to the next trip to the 'immense lunatic asylum' that is my native sod.

SOMETHING IN THE WOODSHED

There are lakes under the sea. There's a snail that's made of metal. There is a shark that eats its siblings while still in its mother's womb and then there are people who do things that you and I find unbelievable. So, my feet had hardly touched the motherland and the flames of discontent ignited to welcome me home. It was ten years ago that I upped tools and downed sticks or whatever it is you do when enough is enough. Enough being sick of having stuff, spanners, dog shit, you name it, thrown at me by kids who dared me to stare at them so they could threaten me with my life. Kids in the street accosting an old Jamaican man for cigarettes and when he told them to piss off they started on me. 'Why you lying?' they asked when I told them I had no money or fags. The list goes on. The stories my mum told me she had learnt from her neighbourhood. The bacon put on a dead Muslim woman's body while she lay in the hospital morgue. The couple over the road who disappeared suddenly because the wife was embezzling money, got caught and ended up in prison. The woodshed next to her house someone was using to make up their bags of heroin to sell on. The police running across my mum's garden in a no longer gentile London suburb as there was a crack den down at the back of someone else's garden. Crack den down, crack den down. Sounds like a bloody hoe down. Ho' down the crack den down the back of my garden. I love Britain. I love England. I love most of the people but whenever I come back I feel like I am in one giant lunatic asylum.

RAZONES TO BE CONTENTO

H's friend B came over from the Netherlands so I had two crazy Dutchmen to keep me entertained. With him and his lady friend we spent some hours tasting all the food Rick Stein missed, on account of him not knowing that 'Aragon Existe'. I guess the most memorable has to be Callizos in Ainsa which is highly recommended but our lunch will be forever embedded in our minds for various reasons. Firstly, the wonderful Red Kite that made a swoop for the raw red meat the restaurant staff had presumably left out on the wall under our table to keep the tourists amused. It was quite a sight as this amazing bird of prey made a grab for it. Moments earlier and it could have been a West Highland Terrier that had been sniffing around. Then the food. This restaurant is noted for its cuisine but also for the presentation and the way the food is announced and explained everytime it arrives which kept the French family on the next table amused as we, that's H and pal and me and K, grappled with the parmesan sticks wrapped in what looked like condoms. 'No, your supposed to eat them!' they roared as they looked upon as savages. That was the starter or one of them. The olives dangling from a Bonsai were lovely as were the unfertilised eggs of an angel. Then we tucked in to some bacalao tempura which unfortunately came in the exploding version for H's mate who didn't need this kind of trauma having spent time in Bosnia and other war torn places as a journo. Said contents went all over his camera just as the Red Kite made off with more scraps. After cleaning him up with all the serviettes ( no, not napkins, but the Spanish serviettes designed to be used in their hundreds) a restaurant can muster he nearly sat in what was left of the tempura which had managed to land on his chair. Shaken but scrubbed he settled down to the next course which translated rather ominously as 'Lamb caught in the cross-fire'. It was delicious but then we felt some drops of rain. Only slight drops, nothing fancy, the kind that can keep a conversation going about whether it will or not, you know, suddenly open up and wash us and everything in sight into the river below. I was in no doubt that it would but tried to keep everyone's spirits up by saying otherwise. The conversation continued with all of us saying that 'it was going to be one of those showers that lasts a few minutes and anyway, look, it's going that way, the sky is blue over there', when suddenly the heavens did what they are supposed to do and I found myself aiding and abetting the owner who was now clinging to an enormous parasol and various wine glasses. We must have looked like a bunch of drunks going down in a sinking ship. No one could stand or walk what with the force of the wind but miraculously we made it indoors clutching various bottles and glasses and spitting leaves and twigs. We left the food to its fate and as I looked back at the remains of the garden there was one bloke, probably Aragonese, determined to finish his lunch with that stubborness they are famous for. Thankfully the restaurant put us in the basement and brought us our puddings. H's mate was OK here while the storm raged above, but his PTSD was almost triggered off by the waitress announcing that what he had in front of him was a delightful mix of goats' yoghurt, candy floss and dulce de leche which sounded the perfect antidote until she then clanged a big metal spoon against the side of his dish to evoke the 'sounds' of the Pyrenees, presumably the bell around the goat's neck as it was thrown from a great height. I had visions of him, H's mate, not the goat, in a straight jacket by the end of the meal and being attended by a priest from the nearby Opus Dei monastery we passed earlier. On top of this we had a kid ( no, not the orphaned offspring of the above, just a typical Spanish child eager to please) bouncing up and down the stairs giving us all a running commentary of how the storm was getting on and my pud had space dust in it which was unexpected, pleasurable and thank God, not being eaten by B.