The local piscina natural is now active for the summer and new signs have been painted and displayed. This is one that has escaped the graffiti artists so far:
Some of my pedantic readers will realise quickly enough why I am not impressed.
Continue reading “the leisure business”
I dreamed of you last night and woke
to moonlight, sheet-tangled feet
cat-twisted and cold.I drowsed again, through decades, slipped
between cities and crossed continents,
embracing and embraced,
now chasing and now chased,
no pause between the kisses passed
from partner on to partner
down through the yearning years.I dreamed of you last night
and woke to moonlight.
(St John’s Eve – Midsummer Night – is celebrated across Spain with fire jumping in the street and general festivities. It’s supposed to be a time of powerful magic, and seemed a suitable title for this slightly chaotic dream poem.)
Ragged leaf veils
geometrical precision:
butterfly eggs.
In case anyone cares what sort of leaf it is, it’s a kiwi leaf, and the ones above are grape vines. And there is, indeed, something odd about the chaotic tumble of vines juxtaposed with the tiny perfect arrangement of insect eggs.
As I’ve said before, not only do Google adapt their logo according to the date, but they do so according to location, too. I find it strange, though, that June 21st should warrant a special logo only on the google.es page – celebrating el inicio del verano – and not on the .com or .co.uk versions. After all, surely summer starts on the same day?
Continue reading “summery”
Stevie Wonder may have been wrong when he sang “When you believe in things that you don’t understand, then you suffer.” According to an article on PhysOrg.com, German researchers have demonstrated that being superstitious can actually improve performance: if you have your lucky charm with you, you feel more confident and perform better. There again, it probably works the other way, too, and losing your amulet will make you perform worse.
Of course superstitions vary between cultures. I imagine that an English speaker who takes a test on Friday 13th will underperform, whereas a Spaniard would do worse if it was martes 13.
Which gives me an excuse for posting this photo.
Where English readers will see it as a good omen, Spaniards will think it augurs ill.
Either way, it seems a big responsibility for such a small cat.
don't confuse the narrator 