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.