It's been a while.
Well I've been on holiday so shut up your face holes.
I could dribble out a long essay on what I did over the holidays in England, buuuut that would be pointless.
1. Some of the (few) people who read this are also those that I met during my holidays.
2. It's probably not that interesting. Why would you want to hear me, or read me, saying
how perfect my week was in England.
It was perfect.
Days with friends and days with family and days with the tele and no time to stop no don't stop don't stop the fun don't make me think about going back to work keep giving me mince pies and fat juicy turkey let me continue to wallow under my parents auspices. And snow.
There.
Oh you greedy buggers, fine here's some snow.
What do you mean what did I do for New Years?
I went to Puerta del Sol to watch the archetypal firework ceremony and do the Spanish tradition of eating 12 grapes during a 25-30 second countdown. The idea is to eat them all before the bells chime out the fact that Spain has just blundered into another year. Gypsies, Chinese shops and supermarkets sell little occasion cans filled with 12 seedless, chemically skinned dwarf grapes for easy, and more importantly, rapid consumption. Gay little tins? NAY! We thought. We're better than that. We bought a big bag of red, seeded, slightly grubby fresh grapes. By grapes 7, 8 and 9 - that seemed to be fighting it out to be the first grape to heroically clog my throat - I thought to myself 'yeah, should have bought a gay little tin'. Having let the flakes of fruity flesh settle at the base of my lungs I swallowed the rest of my beer and spluttered 'happy new year! back to the flat?'. We then had a quaint little house party and watched the superior London fireworks on youtube.
Oh and Three Kings Day?
Roscon, tea, my mate Euan and Top Gear in the morning.
Lunch and Goldeneye in Plaza de Castilla with Esther and Fran in the afternoon.
Self-cooked dinner, Trivial Pursuit and Guess Who game with Euan, his girlfriend Mahal and her friend Marta in the evening.
The Spanish hate colour. I think that's a fact. Maybe not hate. No, not hate. They don't 'get' colour. I mean, if they did they would function better.
I have a Maintenance student (the highest level in the school, only three students, basically fluent) called Henrik Claus Brandt. He's German, yes. He said in a moment of brilliantly enunciated remembrance: 'my father once said that you can judge the progression of a civilisation by the way the people drive'.
True.
Germany, England, Scandinavia. Good drivers.
I'm not going to say that the Spanish are less of a civilisation, but they really fail spectacularly when you put them behind a wheel.
Green = Go
Amber (if present - on some Spanish roads it's just Red/Green) = slow/get ready to stop
Red = Stop
Not in Spain. If they abided by these rules cars/taxis/buses wouldn't flash straight through red lights, people wouldn't become red stripes on the road, there wouldn't be massive traffic jams, people wouldn't be leaning on their horns for hours on end and everything would be less stressed. Also, a criss-cross no stopping marking here and there wouldn't go amiss. It's not just the cars. The pedestrians, and you know my thoughts about them, also have some form of psychological and physiological block when it comes to colours.
When there's a red man people start to cross as long as that immediate strip of road, in the straight line of sight, is clear. Then they kick up a fuss when they are nearly turned into dust by a vehicle. Similarly when you're waiting to cross, you often find yourself marooned behind a crowd of eejits who are primitively deciding, each in their individual minds, if this green man means 'cross' or, more simply 'look at me I'm green'.
Idiots aside, it's good to be back. I love this country. Though I shan't lie, I have heard faint and distant whispers calling me back to the Motherland...
I do like snow.