The Ham Museum is a shrine
to swine: crimson haunches hang
in the swelter of strip lights; fat leaks
dripping into plastic cones while
an unobtrusive bustle of barstaff
serve the gathered worshippers.
With ritual gesturing, slim-bladed
knives skim iridescent curves.
Glasses are raised in veneration
of marbled flesh, and wafers
of translucent succulence dissolve
as devotees discuss the mysteries
of the world.
The (draft) poem is loosely based on a chain of bars in Spain, while the pig in the picture was photographed some time last year sitting on a table outside an English restaurant/wine bar/pub… Actually, I’m not sure what the Almanack should be classed as, but it’s worth a visit if you are in the area. It caters for a rather wider range of tastes than does the Museo del Jamón.
When I was a teenager we had fairly regular bomb scares at school. I was too politically naïve to know if it was the IRA or the PLO who were intent on disrupting my education, but I do remember that we spent many happy hours out on the playing fields waiting while sniffer dogs and their handlers searched the building. We were always told to take our bags with us when we evacuated the building as it left fewer things to be searched. And I learned to be wary of bags and packages left unattended at airports, railway stations and shopping centres. Continue reading “travelling”
I still haven’t explored all the functions of my new digital camera, which means that I occasionally press the wrong button and change the settings by mistake. Suddenly, for example, I find I’ve taken a whole series of pictures of a stationary subject, like this set of the Houses of Parliament.
Frustrating as this is, it has made me start thinking again about the different versions of a poem that arise from the translation process. Continue reading “towers & translations”
I knew that la crisis had forced lifestyle changes on everyone in Spain, but I’m shocked to find it has apparently made inroads into a tradition that lies at the very heart of the Spanish psyche: el puente.No, not that kind of puente. I’m talking about the puente that connects a public holiday to the weekend with an additional – official or unofficial – day off.
Tomorrow is San José, which is a fiesta for some comunidades. Usually, such holidays are celebrated on the actual day on which they fall, which means that when there’s a Tuesday or a Thursday fiesta lots of workers take the intervening day and make a four-day weekend of it. Continue reading “abridged”
As Valentine’s day approaches, the conversation turns to love poetry; revisiting an old poem, I found this fragment:
So many kisses left
on the station steps: kisses
scattered en la boca
del metro.
If the metro station in question were the one in the photo, I can only assume there was a tango playing in the background.
On a lingustic tangent, I really wish bus stops were underground so they also had a “boca”: then I could have called the post “besos & buses” and pondered the association between the Spanish besar and the English “buss”.
don't confuse the narrator 