more bats and bell towers

bell mechanism, Brecon cathedral

Yesterday I quoted Claude Debussy as having said:

The colour of my soul is iron-grey and sad bats wheel about the steeple of my dreams.

I’d found the quotation on the web, but, as with so much information out there today, there was no source cited and no original French.

So I went looking and found this in a footnote of Debussy: his life and mind, Volume 1 by Edward Lockspeiser:

J’ai en ce moment l’âme gris-fer et de tristes chauves-souris tournent au clocher de mes rêves!

Which makes it look as if the quotation is genuine.
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what’s for dinner?

As a vegetarian, I’m used to seeing things on Spanish menus that really don’t appeal to me. Yesterday, though, I was particularly taken – or not – by the top two items on the meat section:

Carnes: secreto, lagarto, chuletillas, cochifrito...

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sea sounds

Sea at Alicante

While I was in the south, I managed to get an hour or so to walk along the marine parade at Alicante, which is as good an excuse as any to post this old piece, written in response to a challenge to write a favourite joke as a poem:
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thank you for your feedback

Those who blog with WordPress will be used to the fact that each time you add a new post you get a post-published feedback page telling you how many posts you’ve made, how many words the latest one has, as well as suggesting tags, offering possible topics for the next post etc.

My previous post was greeted with this:

Wordpress post published feedback: "This is your 494th post. Bomb!"

I know it wasn’t the most inspired of the posts I’ve ever made, but I didn’t think it was so dreadful it deserved to be greeted with a bomb.
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dogs, whistles and the dark ages

medieval fair with castle backdrop

I think Ávila always have some kind of Medieval Fair at this time of year, but it’s the first time our village has decided to do the same. So, for a couple of days the castle courtyard and carpark have been given over to tents and stalls and general activity that has about as little to do with the Middle Ages as is possible.
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