Snookering you

A few months ago a charity-shop for a rescue animal charity opened up in the town.

It's run mostly by expat Britons as far as I can tell. Unusually though they do have Spanish names on their campaign leaflets and a badly timed endorsement by the recently ousted mayor.

Then there are also the posters with puppies and cats with names like 'Fetch', 'Lucky', and 'Wills and Kate'. Darkly photocopied images of the animals that they're trying to find homes for are described, or perhaps eulogised in perfect Spanish and English.

It is not the 'Brit-only' kind of place I avoid or seldom feel a need to encounter, So I've popped in a few times

I didn't need to go in and talk to anyone to find that out that the very concept of a charity-shop, the kind that spreads like a fungus on dying British high-streets, fighting turf-wars with fast-food restaurants, is alien to people in Spain.

It would be unfair to say that it is a concept alien to just the Spanish as all the customers I've ever seen coming and going have been Moroccan and South American Immigrants.

Mothers in bright clothes pulling their children close to them, folding them into their long hooded dresses and pulling on their grasping, curious hands in ways Spanish parents aren't inclined to do to their single, precious child.

There are notices carefully placed inside and out the shop, written in Spanish explaining that they don't buy things from people to then sell on. The concept of people giving things away to the charity shop for them to then sell and raise money for charity is new.

It's just as new and foreign as the concepts of animal shelters themselves, giving vaccinations to cats and neutering your pet.

It's quite unlike the quiet places that charity-shops seem to be in the UK, as people respectfully acknowledge the palliative atmosphere as volunteers and Ken Follet books slowly succumb to entropy.

I can only imagine the scenes that there must have been as people came in, trying to sell them things.

The gaggle of retired British women with at most, only the most basic of Spanish phrases learned and spread thinly in strong accents, trying to explain what a charity-shop is, all the while someone's trying to explain to them, why it is that whatever they have for sale is worth what they claim it to be worth.

I wonder if anyone ever tries to haggle?

As we're moving in a few weeks, just how much stuff we own is measured in metres squared, not shelves and piles, full drawers and wardrobes. Volume is a very real concept to us as we try to guess as to just how much of that is 'a van's worth'.

So off things go to the charity shop, a much more comforting sense of throwing away, discarding, than the normal trying to file things into recycling bins.

Every time I go in I have to translate something for them. May be for the customers looking for items they'd seen the day before, but had not bought, or the Spanish word for some of the items on sale.

I recently read that in Andalusia, on the thin shelf of the lintels above the doors used by matadors to enter the bull ring they rest images of as many catholic virgins as can they can so that they look kindly upon on the matador protecting him, or so that he can ask look up and make the sign of the cross to ask for their help just before he enters the ring.

As you leave the charity shop there are shelves of board games looking down with the faces of British television presenters and snooker players I vaguely recognise from the early nineties, but cannot name.

Once we're gone from this town, I doubt I'll ever see the shop again, so say a little prayer to the gods of snooker and light entertainment for me will you? It saves puppies and kittens.

Full stop

There was a pebble in my shoe, but it wasn’t the pebble that was the irritant, that was the shoe that surrounded my flesh, rubbed and blistered me, rigidly pushing against the ways I liked to move. Meanwhile, the soul/sole clung to the hard metamorphic rock because it was as old as time, or at least as old me, which might as well be the same thing.

Once the strange is familiar and what was foreign seeps from, not into your pores you are not a Guiri. In that sense he is dead.

Well, at least very ill and in convalescence as if all goes to plan, I’ll be moving again within a few years so he’ll be a Guiri once more.

Ginger

I’d like an affectionate cat” she said, her mind casting back rather than dealing in hypotheticals.

I knew what she was thinking about, that puppy she’d briefly owned, but had to be given away when her sister’s allergies had quickly flared up. For nearly 30 years her affection for animals had been held back behind scabs of practicality and tenant agreements

“I’d like a vocal cat, one which tells you when they’re hungry, happy to see you or just angry.” I’d said, also thinking more of things loved and lost rather than what could be potentially had.

One thing was for sure, we weren’t going to take home those three kittens I’d found and been feeding. Those poor bundles of fur covered in burs and summer earth would have to make do with the milk and food I’d been taking to the copse where they’d been hiding.

Hopefully the tri-coloured blind one would get better with some food and drink inside of her and if her brother and sister would carried on looking after her.

“It’d be nice to have a cat”, we’d agreed, before co-signing a verbal agreement with “We’re definitely aren’t not going to adopt them.”

Below the barrel I found a timecapsule

I’ve been going through the entries of a blog I used to write a few years ago. I stopped maintaining it and withdrew it from public view once this blog came into being. I never deleted it, and had long forgotten about it. I can barely remember writing more than two entries from that time period, so reading them is a genuine surprise. Not a wonderful one, but still a surprise. I’m not sure I like the younger me I’m discovering. He’s a bit of a downer and he writes  with a tone of grandeur that doesn’t fit his weak and unused writing muscles.
He might be embarrassed if he knew that the 30 year old me published him, but I know he wouldn’t mind me picking and rehashing his best bits for inspiration

A close friend once said to me:
“No-one moves to another country because they want to.”

No matter how much I think about that statement I can’t fault it.
In Khaled Hosseini’s “The Kite Runner” Amir’s father describes sin with a similar profundity:


“There is only one sin, only one. And that is theft..”


“...Every other sin is a variation of theft; When you kill a man, you steal a life. You steal his wife's right to a husband, rob his children of a father. When you tell a lie, you steal someone's right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness...”
Neither of us then knew that within twelve months that I’d become an immigrant myself. I doubt she even remembers saying it, she might even read this and never know I'm talking about her.

In that way that boys and girls often do, that friend and I have drifted apart. Our wings began to unfurl and mature and with a wobble and a push from our legs we flew, picking up a breeze each and gliding slowly apart. Actually it wasn't as beautiful a separation as that, in fact it was as ugly as they come, but that's for another day far in the future when that wound is numb scar tissue.

The original blog entry from 2005 that inspired this entry can be viewed by Selecting the white text below the fold:

catching my breath

I don't think I'm alone in being so quiet on my blog since the summer. Most of the bloggers I follow seem to have gone through the same. It was the car crash and the following wait to see any sort of physiotherapy that knocked me for six. It changed a relatively active exercise regime into a sitting and watching TV all day routine. The threat of legal action by one of the parties in the crash has meant that I've never been able to write about the one thing that was happening to me. Even if I hadn't been in too much pain to write anyway. That threat is still real so I still have to be quiet.

The physiotherapy has finished, but I had committed myself before the crash, to learning German and doing a creative writing course. Two severe pressures on my energy. Energy that wasn't renewing itself because of one of those flaws in the human body:

The less you do, the less energy you have. The other one that pisses me off is its ability to store fat, but not vitamins, but that's another moan to be rolled out flat in a future online moan.

You don't pay for my words and I make no money from them so the words I put here have been a low, low priority and I'm not going to promise you that that will change anytime soon, but I'm just suggesting that it might.

Taid

I own one item of jewellery, a plain gold ring. A 21st birthday gift to the young man that would later become my Taid. I was given his ring after he died. I don’t remember if he wore it when he was alive, but it is time-worn, its engravings smoothed through age.

A floral pattern reaches out, embracing its flat top where you can just see the intertwined initials of his name ‘Gordon Griffiths’. When I wear it I think of parts of his hands I do remember:

His thinned index finger stripped of flesh in an accident down the pits and the green scars too, tattooed with cloying coal dust, hiding in plain sight, in the nooks of scars.

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Taid, Grandfather

Favourite books

Because my life isn't a complicated enough I'm studying German classes at evening classes and doing a distance learning course on 'Creative Writing'. I had to submit a list of my favourite books as an ice-breaker. I thought I'd share it with you all. What are your favourites?

Although I've heard of or read a few of the authors and books in other people's favourite books list, 90% of them are new to me. not I'm not sure whether I should be embarrassed at my ignorance or pleased at the exposure to the new. I've spent a few days running my eyes and fingers along bookshelves in the house and in my head, trying to think of a list.

Trying to choose favourite books is like trying to choose favourite bus timetables; more dependent on the world around you than the paper and ink themselves and just as liable to change.

Even so I think I've managed to find a recipe to help me choose. A little bit of the number of times I've read a book, a dash of the vividness of the imagery recalled and two parts the number of pages I've folded down so I can return to find passages once again.

So, in no particular order:

Jasper Fforde, The Eyre affair: There's absolutely nothing else like this, to describe it would make it sound ridiculous, look it up for yourself and see all the positive reviews. I've read this book 5 times. Suspend your disbelief and breath and dive into the book.

Birds without wings, Louis de Bernières: You can feel the pressure building as you watch the storm clouds of nationalism come rolling in from across the Mediterranean to drench everything in the Levant until the streets run crimson with the soil of olive groves.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe, Douglas Adams: Read and reread at an impressionable ages, my 'voice' as I write is just a poor impression of his.

Iain Banks for example; 'The Business' or 'Use of Weapons': When I want to escape the world I wrap myself up the in his Space Operas which he writes under the only slightly different pen name 'Iain M. Banks'. His socialist perspective is a comforting, but demanding towline in the cold of space, but a rallying call when he writes his disturbing Fiction as 'Iain Banks'.

Laurie Lee, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning: I love the entire trilogy of his autobiographical works('Cider with Rosie', 'A Moment of War') and without them, the filling couldn't be a sandwich, but the second speaks to me like no other part. Although now thickly coated with a skin made of of blood, concrete and the rust of time the strong Iberian sun sometimes pierces it to show the silhouette of the already violated and gored Spain he glimpsed before its Civil war.

David Crystal, The Fight for English: I hope you don't mind the inclusion of a factual book, but it's a well researched and intellectually sound antidote to the returning tides of intellectuals who try to clean the murky and fast flowing waters of the English language.