UK – Page 100 – don't confuse the narrator

home thoughts

I’ve been in the south of Spain for a couple of days, and have been talking to other writers down here.

It’s natural to want to put other people into some kind of context, so I wasn’t surprised when, shortly after I met her, one woman asked me “Where is home?”

Without much thought, I answered, “Spain.”

Then that began to rankle. It simply didn’t feel like the right answer.

Home. It’s not simply where you live, is it? It has to do with family and friends and a sense of belonging.
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from this week’s news

A couple of things that have caught my eye on the BBC website this week.

First, from the ‘most popular’ links, comes this:

Sadly, it doesn’t mean that having children can drive you to drink, which is what I imagined. It actually linked through to a story with the headline “Parenting style strongly affects drinking, Demos says”.

The second is from a story about UK social surveys and comes under the headline Why state surveys asked about bras and haddock.
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positivity check

When I first moved to Spain, the country was suffering a drought.

shoe boxes left behind after a street market

I think that lasted for the first eight years that I lived in Madrid, and, understandably, I didn’t really appreciate how bad it was, as I had nothing to compare the weather to. Yes, it was sunny; yes it was hot; but wasn’t that what Spanish weather was meant to be like?

(We all have a tendency to fall back on stereotypes. When I tell people I live in Spain they assume I must live on one of those fictional costas where no one ever does any work but spends all day and all the long, hot night sitting at a terraza on the beach drinking iced beer or cheap vino tinto.)
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scheduled water fights

Guardian headline:man charged over water fight

The Guardian have published a story about a guy being charged for arranging a ‘water fight’ using BlackBerry Messenger.

The chaps in in the picture illustrating the article are shown wielding what look like fairly hi-tech water pistols.

Certainly the ‘weapons’ look more efficient than those that I own, which, although pleasingly cheap and cheerful, are unfortunately made up of far too many sections and so tend to leak rather badly.
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more perseids

One of the poems I submitted to the South Bank Poetry Magazine competition earlier this year was Getting Around on the Underground, a sort of reminiscence of romantic and risqué encounters around London by a female narrator.

Somewhere amid the rambling it contains the following:

[…]the time we sneaked into St James’s Park
and lay at 2 a.m. in August dark, spaced out on meteor scatter,
cool grass at our backs, the universe heavy above us.[…]

Of course that scene was inspired by the memory I mentioned yesterday of watching the Perseids in Battersea Park back in the early Eighties.
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