lifestyle – Page 21 – don't confuse the narrator

attached to the past

While looking for a picture of a quill pen the other day, I came across several pictures I took to accompany an article on stationery written many years ago.This one particularly appealed, and though I’m not sure I’ve got anything very witty or insightful to write on the subject, I thought I’d include it here.

I suppose I could mention the confusion between the words ‘stationery’ and ‘stationary’.
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kings, sages and magicians

Today is January 6th: el día de Reyes, the day when Spanish children finally get their Christmas presents. (Although we were told that Santa took gifts to children all round the world, he doesn’t visit many houses in Spain as he leaves it to the Magi to deliver the parcels – or coal for those who’ve been naughty – on Twelfth Night.)

It would make more sense to me if the kids got their toys at the start of the school holidays so they had something to keep them occupied, but I guess los niños españoles spend their time watching TV and adding more and more items to their wish lists as they see the different juguetes advertised during the half-hour commercial breaks.
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that time of year

The fact that it’s almost Christmas doesn’t mean I am any less busy, so, having no time to write, here’s a festive photo:

And an old, but seasonal, poem, slightly tinkered with. Well, it was a poem with line breaks, but the page format splits the long lines so awkardly I’ve given up and pretended it’s just prose:
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reunited!

A full two weeks after it went missing, my suitcase has been returned to me and I have been reunited with my dirty washing.

I have no idea where the case went in the meantime, although at one point I was told that they were looking for it “in eight different airports”. I think it must have gone a long way away, though, as the baggage tag labelled “RUSH” is dated the 7th of December and today is the 15th.

When it first went missing, I started to compile a list of the contents in a spreadsheet in case I needed to claim for them. When I’d reached some hundred items, I began to wonder whether it was all so densely packed that it had caused a singularity in the space time continuum and the case had imploded under its own gravitational pull like a black hole. It was, after all, only a small case.
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