topical – Page 40 – don't confuse the narrator

of bats, bees and bras

All this fuss in the UK free press about a the girl who found a baby bat asleep in the padding of her bra and didn’t immediately realise it. She has my sympathy.

Earlier in the year, I’d washed some jeans and hug them outside to dry. I didn’t notice anything odd when I got them in that night, nor when I gathered them up un-ironed the next morning and pulled them on after my shower. But when I’d got them on, I realised I must have left a hanky in the pocket, so put my hand in to get it out.

How quickly does the mind react?
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adopt-a-gay

Well, no, that probably isn’t what the newspaper is saying, but it’s the way I read it. From today’s Público online:

Cambio de sexo gratuito en la Sanidad pública

Catalunya en 2005 ya había aprobado una ley que favorecía la adopción de parejas del mismo sexo. […].

And the phrase which has caught my attention is la adopción de parejas del mismo sexo, which appears to me to be talking about adopting same-sex couples.
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political poets

The Spanish press has been full of politicians making comments about poetry recently.

Or perhaps not. More exactly, Esperanza Aguirre (Partido Popular, presidenta de la Comunidad de Madrid) picked up on something I think Gallardón (her closest rival, also from the PP) said a while back, and referred to herself as el verso suelto dentro del poema.

“The unconnected line in the poem.”

What exactly does that mean?
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time to start the year

Well, it’s January 7th and Christmas will soon be over. And about time, too.

Here in Spain the festivities begin back in early December: the Inmaculada is the 8th, but it tends to link up with the national Día de la Constitución on the 6th and there begins to be a general feeling that everyone’s getting psyched up for the holidays.

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oh little town of Bethlehem

It’s nearly Christmas, so it must be time to dust off the decorations. Not for me the tree and the tinsel, the baubles and ornaments that figured so importantly in my childhood.

No, since living in Spain I have discovered the art of the Nativity Scene and each year I set out my own small belén at home.

As most people do, I started off with the central stable scene – referred to here as the pesebre (manger), nacimiento (birth) or Misterio (mystery) – but as the years go by I’ve added figures and scenes and now I feel the display really does warrant the term “belén” which is the Spanish name for Bethlehem.
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