Meanwhile

While I’ve been waiting for the 'next great thing' to write about, a great deal of time has passed, but if your list of unread RSS items is as long as mine I expect you’re grateful. Sadly, no great bolt of lightning of inspiration has struck me in all this time though, nothing to send me into a flurry of activity. The ideas that slide across my brain as I lie awake in bed zigzag like a drip of condensation down a window pane. Only to always evaporate in the bright Spanish sun by the time consciousness finally dares to show its face.

In a more poetic world these lost ideas would reside somewhere, their potential expended in a short life amongst other lost ideas. I imagine my ideas would have to hide underneath branches and great leaves from the powerful and striding ideas of children and the lock-up-able as they stamp across the realm of ideas lost.

The calendar that sits inside my head is very subjective, it doesn’t show my full days of work, rest and play. Instead it shows the shrinking expanse of days until I fly back to the UK for Christmas in bright shades of red and blue.

It’s not that I’m desperate to escape, you understand, but I’m excited at the chance to see family and friends outside the stresses of weddings and funerals, to speak carefree and untethered to the ball and chain of translation.

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ElGuiri

How big is a whale?

Vía: Why that's delightful!.

For those that need cheering up

Death by pervert

"We are all made of stars"

Is one of those positive sayings you might be unfortunate enough to hear outside of a Moby song. However. for this blog entry I'm going to need another saying:

"Men are all bastards"

To be fair to both stardust and bastards everywhere I'd like to propose a qualifier to both sayings:

"..but some more than others."

I have seen some extraordinary examples of men ogling women in my time here in Spain: From the sneaky peering over newspapers and the use of reflections in shop windows to the blatant staring at a woman's body as she walks past you in the supermarket. There's also the unusual but not unknown, and terrifying for the victim, stopping of car to shout and honk horns (this may, or may not, be a double entendre).

However, one man's ogling nearly got me killed the other night.

As I walk to work every night I have to walk along a narrow path beside a busy crossroad bejewelled in traffic lights. As the lights do their thing the road changes from queues of cars lighting each other's exhaust fumes to fast cars controlled by drivers determined to make up the time the traffic lights cost them.

On Thursday night I got stuck behind a gaggle of adolescent girls. I couldn't walk past them without wandering into the busy road drenched in 8pm rush hour traffic. So, I was forced to wince silently as the laughter found my skull's resonance frequency. They passed a man in his late forties who leant up against the wall and let them past as Tom might let Jerry wander innocently into a trap. He stared at them as they walked past and continued to do so as they walked away and I walked closer to the bottleneck his gut was causing. He continued to stare as I swung sideways to squeeze past, tiptoeing on the kerb. As I was all but safely past I entered the field of vision of his beady eyes. Presumably this was narrower than average for a man of his age from years of self abuse. As he stirred from his trance let out a cry and his gut pushed into me like a fatty version of the boulder in'Temple of Doom' . If I hadn't grabbed his arm instinctively to keep me on the path I'd have been thrown into the path of an SUV. As I walked away from my near miss the fat bastard called something out to me that I didn't understand. I don't have the quickness of wit in Spanish to insult without thought and I muttered 'dirty pervert' under my breath. Perhaps someone reading this can take the time to think of a good enough translation for me. You never know when it might be useful

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ElGuiri, Spain, Ogling

On the dark side

It’s just me and the cat awake and no matter how much intelligence I sometimes imagine she’s endowed with I am the only one who’s kind of excited by an election far, far away with little direct effect on me. Just to see them vote him in, vote him in hard, to see approval for intellect and reason over bellicose ignorance would be a grand old thing

Thinking with your gut, isn’t just about food, it has increasingly been seen as a valid philosophy and is often what characterises the extremes of politics on the left and right and can only end in dangerous outpourings of nationalism, regionalism and other violent -isms.

I remember seeing the rightwing nutjobs and religious fundamentalists who’ve controlled the dialogue in the United States for over ten years on Michael Moore’s TV Nation fifteen years ago. They were funny, over there and little bit scary. Then, about a decade ago they started to control the hegemony of the United States. That was genuinely scary and seemed unreal. That has probably been dented by the Presidential election today(as of writing 03:50 GMT) and we’re seeing them return to the fringes where they belong, but as these things are cyclical I’m really not looking forward to my 38th year.