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.