Let's Pretend it's Freezing

The guy at the end of the bar dunks a tea bag into a glass of hot water. Paco has his arms folded behind the bar, his girlfriend stands on the street beside a motorbike asking about tomorrow, a day off for all the saints.

Mendizábal is on the street. There is no inside, just the bit behind the bar. They serve you right there on the stainless steel counter or across the road on the terrace. Paco’s girlfriend, Claudia, doesn’t serve the tables too fast. She is looking forward to a day off tomorrow too. Cars take the corner off C/Hospital into C/Arc de Sant Agustí, cutting across Claudia as she balances six drinks on a tray; coffees in glasses, bottles of beer and a bag of crisps.

Night has fallen though it is barely evening on the street. The tobacconist shops are open after their midday break and the policeman have just finished ticketing cars that were double parked over lunch. Claudia remarks that the new black aprons are nicer than the green ones they used to wear. “Especially that dirty green one in the corner” she says pointing at the rag lying on a keg under the shelf under the colourfully tiled back wall.

I used to sit here with Keith with his crutches. He lived down the road in a first floor flat above C/Carme. When the balcony door was open and you could see the miscellany of passers-by ceaselessly ploughing the street day and night. You could hear the motorbikes beeping shrilly and friends calling friends and family members treating each other worse that anyone else would allow.

This evening I have come down from the Boqueria where it’s mushroom season. A stall holder was stacking specimens of varying shapes against an inclined board that barricaded off his counter and made the few mushrooms he had look like a veritable mountain. For the fishmongers it’s a good day, tomorrow is All Saints when families will eat together at tables for twelve with first courses, seconds and desserts. Marzipan-based balls of pine nuts and chocolate will be washed down with cava and chestnuts will be roasted in the oven in lieu of an open fire.

It’s still warm on this the last day of October. T-shirts are still the chosen attire of the young whereas the more mature wear short sleeved shirts. Tomorrow heavy marzipan concoctions and heat radiating chestnuts will be eaten out of respect for tradition if not out of desire. Sweet potatoes are roasted on street-side mobile roasting devices by roasters who are quick with a greeting and quicker still in wrapping their sales in steaming paper parcels.

In a cool autumn we can pretend it is cold and wrap scarves around our necks when colder climes would wear a jumper. In a cool year we can eat sweet potatoes and wish it was cold enough to drink hot mulled wine. This year the charade is evident and gives rise to jolly stories at the end of the evening news.

Soon it will get colder though and we will wear heavy clothes and furry boots and hats and scarves. We will take our winter clothes out of the wardrobe and shiver when it is fifteen degrees. Manel laughed the other day that he had taken his winter clothes out of storage already. There he sat sweating in a pull over.

Be it fitting or not we will dine autumn fare tomorrow. Paco will have a day off, he may even go to the beach for a paella, if the price is right and all the saints look favourably upon him.

What the World will be Like in 2010

“In four or five years it'll be open”, the lady in the information booth answered.

"The building work on the metro station across the road should have started by now but the mayor stalled it until after the municipal elections". He’ll have his reasons.

I don’t mind waiting. Until then I’ll sweep about on the motorbike. What got me was the day they started revving chainsaws outside my window. Just like the lady going down in the lift, I wondered why they were cutting down the trees in the park outside my house.

Little men walked, almost choreographed, between dumpers and diggers on the canvass that was my fifth floor view of the park below. They logged the trunks into manageable chunks which metal arms loaded onto waiting lorries.

All we have now are the memory of tree trunks in the shape of mammoth foot prints that punched clay holes into the tarmac. Here and there a trunk survives, shorn level with the ground. The rings can not be much more than thirty. “They’re cutting them down to work on the metro station” an old man who leaned on a cane told me.

Old people know. They do not know because they have grown intelligent. They know because the have spent time finding out. They have lived. For better or for worse, it’s the living that colours their view, or simply blurs it.

An old man in the park the other day told me that infants are more advanced than they were when he was at that age. “In the forties”, he said “children weren’t allowed out of the house”. I cannot contradict him for I am not yet forty.

“Four or five years” she said. When Line Nine will loop the city from the Baix Llobregat and the airport right round through the highlands of Sarrià and on through Gràcia and Horta along to Sagrera where the yet-to-arrive high speed train will have its home. The great loop like the circle line in London will avoid the centre and bring together the rich and poor the high and the low. It is easy to look towards Plaça Catalunya and forget who’s standing beside you.

In the time it takes to ready the ribbon for cutting on so many new stations the baby boom generation of the late seventies will have left home and set up their own homes. They may well be on to child number two or three. Sarrià, the centre of the city’s fee-paying schooling, will be more connected than ever. House prices may have levelled off. The trees outside my window may be nothing more than saplings and tractor tyre tracks may have given way to a lawn that’s automatically watered at eight o’clock each morning.

The man who sets his fold-up wooden chair facing the steps where he unzips the covers on a long row of budgie cages may well have new birds. Or a new chair, or perhaps a new hobby. Some of the elderly folk who play bowls on the sandy surface in the afternoons may be using magnets on strings to pick up the metal balls they can’t reach down to.

And the metro in itself will not change the way we live, it will open up possibilities that we can opt for or not.

“Four or five years” she said. In the meantime; let’s live. As with money, time now is worth more than time in the future.

Three Things to Forget about - or Never to Remember

Two people I didn't notice

A place to pause

What other peoples' lives look like from the outside.

Take the Wheels Off and You can Jump It

The evening can take you home.

The evening can take you on a stroll about the city.

The evening tastes of patatas bravas and bottles of beer.

The evening folds down parasols on terraces and lays tables for dinner.

This evening I see skateboarders on the Plaça dels Angels outside the MACBA. This land is their land, as is the cold urban grey of the esplanade outside Sants Station. Tonight they’re jumping over a skateboard stuck in the cracks between the granite slabs that cover the plaza.

Fold-up bicycles and old racers with straight handlebars are chained about the place. Young people with no homes to go to chat on telephones and tourists and art-lovers trickle in and out of the museum.

A Moroccan couple push a pushchair diagonally from C/Ferlandina over to C/Bonsuccés. They seem less frivolous than the skateboarders who are chewing the cud in loose fitting denims. Art galleries and cafes fill in the gaps between hardware stores and pokey shops chock-a-block with saris and tea sets.

A convenience store, where the assistant bags your purchase on the unmoving conveyor at the till, stays open till the small hours. Its functionality contrasts with the throwaway design studios and bars whose windows are smoked and red-lettered to justify the increased price of consumption.

Anything that crosses the square in front of the museum can be photographed. A person moving, a person standing, a white van carrying tablecloths.

At exhibition openings the flashes turn this place whiter. From Barceló to the king himself pass through here. They take side doors where the cars can park out of frame. They glance out across all of this. Across the disappearance of streets that housed the lowly.

The churches were not demolished, they were only desecrated with the arrival of Sonar in the summer. This disembowelled neighbourhood has healed and is no longer licking its wounds. Polyglot young people can mill about here now practicing jumps which they won’t perfect till the give it up. Young families on the way to someplace can get a foothold and wide-eyed travellers can avoid putting down roots here till their roots beckon.

Yes the evening can make you ramble.

Yes the evening can lead you astray.

Perhaps the evening should drag me home.

The Importance of Nothing Early in the Morning

It’s dark when I wake up. The light emerges from behind the buildings as I leave home and take the scooter. I asked Pepa one day what it is she likes about Barcelona. She said it was the golden light in the afternoon. I saw that light this morning before the sun shrugged sleep off.

The roads were clear but a wave of traffic crept inwards towards the centre.

I stopped unconsciously at the white line, waiting for the lights on the other side of the road to turn red before giving it everything my 50cc’s got. A horn sounding in the placid tranquillity of early morning is an offence to the ear. I looked left and saw a fellow motorcyclist in silver plastic sunglasses signalling to me. “You’d better put air in those tyres mate”. I turned to look down at the back wheel. “You won’t see it that way” he said. The lights changed and the moment evaporated into a roar of motors competing for pole.

Yellow men-at-work road markings channel us into chicanes and make us brake where before it was throttle that was called for. Trucks and buses sit across junctions on hatched boxes. Motorbikes edge forward tilting this way and that under wing mirrors at the traffic lights. To move on a scooter is to live. To stop and wait is to die. That much they share with sharks. Poetic justice perhaps; it is often constant restlessness that gets the motorcyclist in the end.

Red cats’ eyes embedded in the roadway delineate the outside lanes, flashing bright but dimming in the dawn light. Delivery trucks and cars parked with hazard lights bristling get little understanding from policemen with pens and notepads in hand. Bus lane infringers get photographed by miniature-Mercedes mounted with cameras and spotlights. Their drivers do not resemble the more prim folk who drive similar little-run-arounds later in the day.

Buses pass by with passengers dreamily holding on to bars and poles and rubber straps hanging from the ceiling. They are mostly women and immigrants. They catch your eye for a moment and stare at the street-surfers who ferociously zip by their window so early on this fine morning. Surrendering control to the bus driver can be a blessing or a curse. The motorcyclist surrenders nothing as he throws down his bottom dollar at ever lane change.

Nothing happens on the way in when your face is held in stasis inside a helmet with the visor down. Nothing happens inside a bus looking out at the golden light turn ever more silver. Nothing happens on the pavement waiting for the green man to beckon you across. Nothing happens at that time of the morning. We all just silently change places. We mull things over, we make plans, we yearn for sleep while, frustratingly, we lose the ability to find it.

Morning starts dark and brightens to gold here in late October. When the face awakens we forget that. We forget about nothing.

The Well-Heeled Queue for Dessert