Category: spanish

excuses

It’s been longer than usual since the last blog update and I was wondering what excuse to make. I wasn’t sure whether to say I’d been too busy or just not had any ideas. Then I remembered the notes I made the other morning while I stopped off for breakfast in the hotel bar in the village.

The TV was on – is there a bar in the whole of Spain that doesn’t have a television on all the hours the place is open? – showing some kind of morning magazine programme. Although the sound was on, there were three other people in the place (that includes the barman) and the conversation – jumping back and forth between the farthest corners and behind the bar – was sufficiently loud to drown out most of what was going on, but I managed to gather some of it.
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millions and billions

Rabbit reading by Lance Tooks
drawing courtesy Lance Tooks

I was intrigued by the BBC website Magazine story entitled Do the dead outnumber the living?

My attention was caught in particular by the table at the end showing a total for the number of people who have ever lived as 107,602,707,791.
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(not) a batting title

blue sky with faint clouds and oak tree buds

Against a spring-blue sky
the twitch and loop of flickering wings
says: pipistrelle!

 

Of course it’s saying it in Spanish, and I see from the IberiaNature glossary that there are some two dozen species of murciélago in Spain, so I may be mis-hearing what’s being said.
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of love poetry and distractions

pine cone fragment
I complained, or at least commented, recently, about the temptations and distractions involved in dusting bookshelves. At the moment a similar temptation confronts me every time I clean the log stove and re-lay the fire.

No, I’m not using books for fuel, but I do tend to start each fire off with a fir cone or two and a few sheets of paper; I’ve tried using some of my old drafts of poetry, but I fear my writing will never set the world alight and newspaper is definitely better.
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of pigs and poetry

I took a new poem-in-progress into the writers’ group on Tuesday. Its title is La Matanza – the Spanish word for slaughter or massacre.

It’s a piece that I’ve been intending to write ever since we bought the house in the village and were told the guy couldn’t come to prune the trees on the long December puente as he’d be busy with la matanza.

In most parts of Spain, a cada cerdo le llega su San Martín – pigs get what’s coming to them on November 11th – but it seems that in our village it’s more traditional for the pig slaughter to take place on the feast of la Inmaculada.

That juxtaposition of the innocence and virginal white of the immaculate conception with the sheer red-blooded traditional country ritual of pig slaughter seems to be crying out for a poem to be written.
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