Good Meal, Good Conversation, Good Night

It certainly did rain the other night. That heavy merciless rain that leaves not a thread dry.

I thought I could get as far as Can Estevet having drowned only one layer of clothing. I deceived myself, alas. When I arrived Roger suggested I dry myself off with the hand drier in the toilets. To get myself anywhere near dry would have taken at least twenty minutes of crouching under a hand drier that periodically clicked on and off. The convex (and ridiculous) reflection of my wetness on the finger-printed and water-spattered nozzle convinced me of the futility of my efforts.

Back to the table I went, only to see Roger greeting half a dozen young men at the other table. They all wore jeans and t-shirts or un-tucked shirts. They were uniformly shod with those fashionable pseudo-trainers that have little more than plimsoll soles.

The tables were pushed tightly together which meant I had to slide in between the table and the chair in a moving seated position. The back of my chair touched against that of Roger’s friend now and again, even though we were well out of earshot, in a restaurant where conversation is as highly valued as traditional Catalan cuisine.

The walls, ornately tiled to just above the diner's head height, are generously covered in photographs of the great and the good of contemporary Spanish culture. From flamboyant singers to reserved actors, from musicians to dancers, they are all there, photographed and autographed, more often than not shoulder to shoulder with the aging owner-cum-head waiter.

On a previous visit to Can Estevet I tugged on my friends sleeve to draw attention to the middle aged lady dressed in cowboy garb with her back to us. A little later she brought us our second course and it became apparent that she was the revered co-owner of this historic eateria where only those who come on recommendation would care to enter.

The table cloths are all of gingham, some carry wounds inflicted by careless smokers, others betray the rough justice of a ruthless washing machine. In all we ate well, sea food and steak in Rocafort sauce, all of which was served at lightening speed, as if the waiter was convinced we were double parked on the narrow street outside.

Far from it indeed, the scooter sat on Ronda Sant Antoni bathed in the easing rainfall just beside a blind-lottery-ticket-seller’s booth. Then out we came into the moist night, well fed and desirous of further conversation on similar subjects.

The hubbub of the streets Valdonzella with Joaquin Costa invigorated us as we strolled further down into the Raval. Just as far though, as the Granja where writer Terenci Moix lived out his early years and nowadays young dishevelled types pore over beers while others stand at the bar waiting for someone to vacate a table.

And then the conversation ended just before we had nothing left to say. It was the right time to hit home. Home on the scooter, damp and shivering but thankfully none the worse for wear.

3 Little Lives Enter Stage Left

Two text messages arrived in today. Each beep was the birth of a new life.

First there was Marcel then later when I was mixed up in mixing plaster to finish off a never ending job, Milos came along. Marcel hadn't cried yet so his father loved him all the more. The voice of baby Milos was not heard over that of his father who chanted triumphantly like a conquistador who'd found a new coast.

A new generation is permeating our lives. It's peeping out through the clothes of newborns and from the padded security of expensive pushchairs.

Pablo chipped a tooth today as he was about to leave the crèche bound for the park to play on the swings and slides. It's chipped good and proper. A chip like the triangular chunk that breaks off a bar of chocolate. A piece that will, they tell us , manifest its absence by darkening the colour of the trunk it left in situ. The enamel triangle chipped off Pablo and was swept away at clean-up time or disappeared into the dust of the day.

Night has fallen and Pablo is asleep on his side, one arm tucked back under him, the hand appearing behind him. The other arm lies before him, the palm facing upwards like there's nothing to hide.

Marcel and Milos are, I am sure, crying now, for they are hungry or they are lonely or they are uncomfortable or simply because they are alive.

And there goes life. Ay and it's a good day to be alive.

Welcome to life chaps, welcome on stage.

How Benevolent White Elephants Nightly Take Barcelona

My next door neighbour stormed Barcelona last night.

His wife was with him in the cab, in the spacious white cab, the armoured rubbish-crusher mounted behind them. They were flanked on either side by speeding white elephants on their way into the city to disappear what we threw away today, what we didn’t eat yesterday, last night’s leftovers that we scraped off the plate into the bin under the sink.

At 10pm every night the onslaught rages. The white elephants race into town with empty bellies, with high hopes at the start of a new night, a new negotiation of tight corners and narrow streets where restaurateurs curse them and little old ladies and children turn over in their beds for the beeping and scratching outside their bedroom windows.

Other vehicles arrived from other places, along the Gran Vía under Plaça Espanya and into the heart of it all. Buses arrived from the airport with newcomers who looked right at Montjuic and the fountains, left at a bull ring on stilts. A coach marked “Zaragoza-Barcelona” zoomed by on the home straight to the Estació del Nord.

Cyclists pressured past on creaking pedals and a lady waited to cross the road on her way home, or to some place that endowed her with a relaxed, and easy gait. She paused at the roadside as taxis crawled by, their drivers distractedly twiddling at GPS navigators dangling from windscreen-mounted arms on suckers.

The nights are not yet cool but the oppressive heat has gradually receded like a tide that snuck away and left us more room on the beach. It is the eve of the Mercé, Barcelona’s grandest festival, where the streets come alive with heavy-headed medieval dancers and dragons bathed in sparks.

Musicians will play for us and we’ll watch human castles erect themselves only to be successfully dismantled, floor by floor. We’ll think they won’t make it so high as they rock and tremble. We’ll pretend we’re not excited by it and we’ll sigh silently in relief as the tower melds with the crowd squeezed into the Plaça Sant Jaume to see what they’ve seen every year, thrilled by the dissimilar repetition like a daily-football-highlights addict.

We’ll leave the squares strewn with plastic glasses, redolent with beer and sticky coca cola. We’ll kick papers from our feet as we pace home or seek yet more emotion in smokey bars.

And my next door neighbour will nudge the white beast’s withers, inclining her left, right, then canter, then gallop. And the streets will be clean when we awake from it all, ready for more of it.

And at 4am, the small hours of the morning, a keen ear will hear the turn of a key in next door’s door and they will both, husband and wife, push in home, to sleep till the sun is shining up the Ramblas from the port.

Roadworks, Shiny Floors and Blue Turning White

A Sunday morning stroll took me down the back streets of a neighbourhood on the outskirts of Barcelona. The greasy shutters are down and at this hour the sun shines straight down the street through the trees. The leaves illuminated look quite pleasant.

The pavement is slanted downwards and away from the buildings to the road. He who has one leg shorter than the other might be pleased to walk on such an incline, the rest of us find it uncomfortable. We are urged constantly onto the roadway.

The roadway has been a feature of life around here for almost two years. The roadworks channel our journeys down diverted paths every two or three weeks. The neighbours on one street petitioned the council to clean the street each morning to keep the dust down and allow them to get on with their lives.

Today I crossed the Gran Vía between makeshift barriers and fences. Right from Plaça Cerdà to the new five star Hesperia hotel the cranes and bulldozers lay quietly snoozing on a well deserved day off. The sun beat down with such vigour that only fools and raindogs challenged its reign.

I found the shopping centre open, eerily beckoning passers-by into its empty cavernous belly. The musak played on but the shops were closed. The sun shone in here too, illuminating the walkways and shop windows, the escalators and the flashing tiled floors. The Moscow metro station on which this monstrosity was based has never seen such light and vacant ghostly activity.

I ventured on to where the early-morning seemingly-soulless coffee drinkers nestled around stainless steel tables penned in to outdoor tarpaulin-covered terraces. The attraction cannot have been the food or the drink. It cannot have been the vacuous disgruntled waiters who’d drawn the short straw to work today. It may have been the respite that this shady spot afforded the street walker on an early, blazing Sunday morning.

And away toward home I turned. On a heel on a squeaky floor, in an airconditioned whale's belly, with the sun shining in through its blow-hole windows.

Back across the Gran Vía past the half built future that will change everything. Past the nascent streets that are nothing but dusty channels between recently laid kerb stones. Past bars where, on weekdays, men in blue workingmens' suits lean on stainless steel counters with a wooden toothpick protruding from between their lips.

The blue collars and scuffed boots predominate here now. The day they curse the makeover, the rehabilitation and the modernisation might yet come. When the dust rests and the trees arrive. When the roadworks give way to different coloured collars things may change. For the better? Who can tell?

The lives built here on the outskirts of Barcelona are being built upon by others.

And so the tale begins.

Hipping it up in Sidecar

Sidecar (see-day-car) is a low down place low down in the bowels of a building on the Plaça Reial.

Folk with odd hairstyles or no hairstyle hang about there in the hope of hearing music that no one else has heard. Something that might become something or was something or is something somewhere else. Just not here, on the place Reial where everybody else is on holiday sipping down beers in large quantities from bulbous glasses that could hold fruit enough to feed a family.

Nobody in Sidecar cares about the man in the yellow waistcoat hosing down the square outside, nobody passes a remark on the homeless fauna wining dining and at times courting al fresco, for life. For this is Sidecar the temple of nonchalance, where it is essential not to care about anything or anyone, except music that is.

I caught a gig there last night by a band called Scarlet's Well. It was unexpected but enjoyable. The place was not packed, but then it never is. The “in crowd” is a small population.

On the less than generous stage a rag bag of eight musicians belted it out in the most inimitable fashion. The bowler-hatted lead singer looked down into a lectern while the female lead jigged on high heels to his right. Her gladiator metal-clad mini dress reflected light enough to excuse one for staring a little too long in her direction.

From the suited accordion player to the cowboy-shirted Canadian Mountie guitar player the band members proved at least as eclectic as their set.

The flyer described the band as “Pop-Cabaret”, a description which prior to the gig meant nothing to me. As the night drew to a close I understood that booking this band for a wedding set would thrill the waltzers, the moshers and the eastern-European-gypsy-music fans alike.

The audience swayed to the slow ones and threatened a mosh on the fast ones. Alas the lack of numbers meant that the safety necessary to make a fool of oneself was not at hand.

I stood back, mid-crowd and tried my best to block out the futile genre-auto-categorisation that was grinding gears inside my head. This band seemed to go with whatever their song writing jams threw up. Most bands kill the stuff that’s not "their sound". These guys bravely wrestle with it, incorporating it untamed into a musical adventure that doesn’t stop until suddenly there’s no sound left.

That’s when we cheer, and clap our hands and answer “Yes” to our mates, “Yes, I’ll have another one…if it is that you’re going to the bar”.

The Marvelous World of Jaume Balmes

Balmes is our street. My son was born on it. I work on it. I zoom down it and crawl up it.

I cross it everyday for a coffee at Paula’s. I cross it to go to the bank. Sometimes I meet friends on the way over.

There’s a Romanian-looking lady standing on the corner with Marià Cubí. She holds her child in her arms and her hand out for money. On the opposite corner there’s a news stand where they stack the papers in piles in the morning. Some stacks face the street and others, generally La Vanguardia, face into the shop. That way you have to turn your head sideways or all the way around to read the headlines. They stock international news papers too, and wrapping paper, best sellers and birthday cards.

We buy birthday cards for each other in there. They’re normally pretty bad, horses' heads or cats playing with balls of wool. Then we sign them with insults and kisses and hand them over two months late.

Down the way there’s the Metropolitan gym where the well-heeled and well-tanned go. Large motorbikes clutter the pavement outside as we pass down for lunch. The window beside the gym entrance is translucent from the shin up to just above the head. We cannot see in, much as we’d like to.

Down the way there’s the Japanese, pan-asian as Nicholas calls it. We know the menu off pat and the lady on the till always has to add everything up and ask us whether we want to pay separately or together. She messes up the change and smiles and wonders and starts again. Always the same. Same as the food.

Trabal has a catwalk sunken into the restaurant floor between the tables. The chief waiter/fashion icon floats about us, looking over our heads at his reflection in the olde-world-Barcelona-black-and-whites framed on the walls. The dishes are as descriptive as the song titles on a Sufjan Stevens album. Wordy, touchy and feely but short on information transfer.

On the way back and past our door you’ve got Paco Tabaco, frequented by a miscellany of smokers, drinkers and faux-artistes. A service beyond the call of duty is de rigueur. Service with a smile at least, an embrace at most. An advert stuck on the floor presents a cigarette packet as an obstacle. Reassurance from Paco diminishes this obstacle as it does others. The last bastion of vice on this block on Balmes.

Bar K’s literary references stop there. Just where the home grown and common or garden begins. Mari knows everyone’s name, but mine (I must introduce myself). The stainless steel counter and Formica table tops on metal tubing legs provide surfaces fit for food that can be ordered in one word per course; gazpacho, ternera, flan, cafe.

Then back full bellied and rearing to go. Till tomorrow, till at 12.59 it’s time to venture out again into the marvellous world of Balmes, ecclesiastic, writer and philosopher.

Ben's Place on a Summer Night

Ben’s place is in fact "Ben and Paula’s place". You can tell that by the walk-in wardrobe. The well folded trousers and shirts on hangers betray conjugal bliss on weekends.

On entering the apartment one must opt for a left or right turn. The permanent curry smell wafting from the kitchen attracts most visitors to the right. Possessors of a finer palate may swing left to a rather spacious bedroom with different areas; a sleeping area featuring a bed and a chill out area featuring a sofa.

Ben, I am sure, whiles away the summer evenings on the sofa with a paperback in hand and a handkerchief to mop his brow.

The main living area close to the curry-doused kitchen has a large couch with head rests that encourage one to sleep. A high-class bean bag is thrown in the corner, it sits there open-armed inviting passers-by to lie inside it.

Ode to the ice-crusher that seems to be crushing its way through the last of the large ice cubes that Ben feeds into it on the way to making mojitos. Lucky we have Andrea on hand to turn Ben’s crushed water into sippable cocktails.

Were it not for the new pseudo-air conditioning I may have lost some weight on my last visit. That said tartiflette washed down with French rosé kept the weight up, excellent conversation kept the spirits up.

A typically pleasant summer night in Gràcia, wouldn't you say?

Rain, Scooters and Bare Feet

It lashed rain again last night. So hard the furniture moved about on the balcony, I ventured out in the rain in my shorts and flip-flops to put everything to ground level so that nothing would fly before morning.

The garage was flooded when I took the bike out. Flooded might be a bit strong, perhaps puddled is a better description. The electricity was off so I had to work from memory to find the key hole in the chain-lock, free my helmet and spark the baby into motion. The garage was a bit spooky with the one headlight beaming out across cars and wall and the puddled grey floor.

On the street it smelled of rain, freshly fallen and sitting-on-the-pavement rain. Not yet oily and greasy rain. The kind you can drink if you're a child and nobody's looking. I had my sandals on as it's still warm in Barcelona. On the bike’s foot-platform they don't get wet but it's kind of rule-breaking to sit pretty above so much water in your bare feet. Like sitting with your legs dangling over a river.

The corners are dangerous in the rain. Don't break hard or you’re off. Watch the white lines or you’re off. Hitting the ground in the rain isn’t as bad as hitting the dry ground, scratching, grazing and rasping.

I park on the pavement outside work. There she sits in the rain awaiting my return in my sandals, to speed again in the rain, to take corners slowly again, in the rain.

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