lifestyle – Page 26 – don't confuse the narrator

not all’s fair in love and Warrington

I don’t think I’ve ever been to Warrington. And now I have less interest than ever in going there.

According to this story in the Telegraph, it appears that “No-kissing signs have appeared in the taxi rank at Warrington Bank Quay Station” and that lovers are being forced to use “designated areas only”.

It seems odd that a place in the UK should be adopting such measures when it’s only a couple of weeks since the BBC published a report beginning “A court in India has dismissed criminal proceedings against a married couple charged with obscenity for allegedly kissing in public in the capital.”
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the dirty bits

Firstly, an apology to those who’ve seen the title and arrived here looking for pr0n.

Secondly, an apology to those who’ve looked at the photo and are expecting foot-fetish stuff.

Even if I admit that there’s an ‘adult’ element to the upcoming musings, it’s actually all U-rated.

I may be ‘talking dirty’ here, but that’s ‘dirty’ as in ‘not clean’, not the more metaphorical dirt.

So, the question I wanted to ask, was: when was the last time you felt you needed to make an extra effort to wash behind your ears, or to scrub your knees?
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personal details to go

I’ve already had a moan about Starbucks and their grammatical inadequacies, but now I’ve found further reason to complain.

At the weekend, I had to meet a fellow writer who lives in the centre of Madrid; she suggested we meet in Starbucks. Not my first choice, perhaps, but no problem. When I got there, there were two customers at one of the tables, and no one else in the whole place. The camarero – I bet he’d have called himself a barista – took my order.

It annoys me that the smallest measure in Starbucks is “tall”. It annoyed me more that the waiter wanted to know my name.
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counting cars

In the previous post I said that back in 1964 there were a fraction of the number of cars in Spain that there are today. I’ve actually looked that up and figures cited this week in the newspapers claim that back then there were “dos millones de vehículos frente a los 30 millones de ahora y cuatro millones de conductores frente a los 25 millones que existen en la actualidad.”

Let’s look at that again, in English:
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coches de choque

After three weeks of the grey-green UK “summer”, I returned to the dusty yellows of Spain and found the village in the throes of fiestas.

Las fiestas del veraneante, to be precise – the annual celebration during the last week of August which is put on for the benefit of those who spend summer in the pueblo. Veranear – “to summer”. Not a verb that exists in English, though we do talk of birds wintering in warmer climes.

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