Two doves, yeti and wisdom

 Two more collared doves or probably the same as I posted earlier on top of an ornate street lamp.

A thin middle aged man is showing off in the beach. He has minimal bathing attire, and very little hair on top of his head, but otherwise is hirsute from neck to the tips of his toes. He attracts the attention of the younger members of my family. Later I learn he is known as the Yeti of Garaffe, a small town down the coast. He arranges himself on the sand like a work of art, unfolding and spreading towels like carpets. He has a page on Facebook, but I recommend no one to look at it.

In the window of a shop in Sitges  specialising in tea is a packet in English with the words: Tea is liquid  wisdom. Just add hot water.

Perspectives, owl and sunsets

 

Perspectives. I took a similar photograph last year but luck and experience have improved this version.

An unexpected and  present from my friend Artur Duch. A small book called Los Más Bellos Cuentos Zen incorporating El Arte de Los Haikus. I have always loved the stories told by Japanese Zen masters and the 17 syllable poems known as haikus. To read them in Spanish instead of English probably throws extra light on material inevitably based on translation from the Japanese. But what I like most about the book is the library mark on the fly leaf, which shows a perch  constructed of the letters Duch between two lines. On the perch sits an owl. When I draw Artur's attention to this he says that his name Duch is the Catalan word for owl. I am deeply touched.

People looking out over the sea as the sun set hold telephones up to photograph the glow in the sky and the red  and gold tinted clouds. On the screens the sunset is repeated again and again and brighter and brighter as the light fades.

Agave, prawns and vibrations

 Evening in  Sitges with agave.

Among tapas on offer are fat, peeled prawns wrapped in thin strips of potato and deep fried.

The stainless steel railing, (as in the photo) which follows the edge of the  pavement along the entire length of the beach picks up up vibrations of waves and passing people so that if you hang on to it you  can "hear" the sea and the tramp of feet with your hands.

Perch, wisdom and feral cats

Handsome street lamps on the sea front make an ornate  perch for ringed doves.

Aged 80 you feel free to say want you want but what is there of value left to say?

Once again the pretty swimming pool in the hotel is ours undisturbed by other guests. Its surroundings are exotic, banana and date palms, bougainvillea, pomegranate trees and hibiscus,  and living among them three feral cats, the remains of a family of four or five kittens which were there last year. As soon as we arrive the cats look affronted at the intrusion and vanish into the undergrowth.

Composition, bocadillos and scene-setting

 Composition. Legs, feet and shadow on the sand.

Among my favourite Spanish words is bocadillo. It refers to a sandwich but one usually consisting of a generous filling inserted in a crisp bread roll.  My favourite bocadillo filling?   Lomo, a slice of  freshly carved pork loin.

Every morning they set out tables and chairs, hoist sun shades, brush the pavement, ready for the day's entertainment. A gentle routine like setting up the scenery and props for the performance of a play.
 

Surprise, unaccompanied and litter-free

Three days into our holiday comes my birthday. And with it a surprise. Over recent years it has been celebrated quietly by Heidi and me in Sitges far from the madding crowd. This year because of the number of birthdays counted by some since my arrival on earth, the crowd come to us. As far as I am concerned  it is out of the blue. We meet as it were by chance at the restaurant where Heidi and I usually have lunch.  My children,  Toby and Pippa, Heidi's children Jenny and Caroline, Toby's two children, Jacob and Jet, and Pippa's Josh and Rowan, Toby's partner Kim and Pippa's husband, Dom, Jacob's girlfriend, Lydia, Heidi and I all line up after lunch beside the sea where a passing stranger takes our cameras and captures the memory for several of us. Only Pippa's daughter, Giselle at present in Australia, can't make it.
 How do you thank members of your family for such a gesture? I rise to my feet and casting my eye round the lunch table provide a vignette memory of encounters with  each of those present. My notes are their faces which fortunately I can still identify. A speech, I think to myself, where  my notes are their faces.

Every year a busker performs in front of the restaurants opposite the sea. He is an Italian clarinetist (not a very good one, I think) who has hit on the idea of trundling around an amplifier on which he plays recorded versions of classical music, for example Mozart's clarinet concerto - and at moments which he considers appropriate, makes his own live contribution. This year for a couple of days the amplifier breaks down. What an improvement! The reedy voice of his instrument, unaccompanied, weaves in and out of the sound of the  sound of the breakers, bringing a sad, plaintive and above all genuine note to his performance. For once he has my enthusiastic support.

Litter is seldom seen on the beach. Every morning council workers clean and rake the sand. But most important, beach users belong to a responsible and considerate culture. One man lying on the beach near the spot from which we swim has a cone-shaped ashtray with a lid. The sharp end of the device goes into the sand.  When he has finished a cigarette, he stubs it out in the sand and drops the end into the open end of the cone, covering it with the hinged lid.

From the balcony, beak and Babel

Edge of the sea.

With its small, sharp beak a collared dove under the breakfast table spots  with its quick black eye and pecks up crumbs invisible to me.

Menus and "to let" signs in the busy parts of the town are this year for the first time in Russian as well as French, English, German and Spanish.

In step, waiving and sounds and strange airs

It isn't long  after settling down before I begin to take photographs looking down from our balcony where the bright sunlight  casts clear shadows on the tiles of the promenade. The tiles our new replacing the narrow road that used in former years to intervene between our hotel  and the sea.

Among those who walk regularly by the sea from one end of the small beach to the other is a woman whose exercise involves raising her arm intermittently so that you don't know whether she is waiving or  just keeping fit. Not drowning but waiving.

Somewhere en route to the hotel I hear a repeated electronic sound. "Is it me?" Nowadays so many devices call us with information of one kind or another. "It's your phone".  "No it's not: my phone is switched off. At least I think it is." I pat my pockets. "But where is it? Have I lost it?"  More searching. Could I have swallowed it? But the noise stops. It couldn't have been me. Or perhaps it was and someone has given up trying to reach me.

Dove, blankets and sketchbook

A collared dove arrives on our balcony to greet us as we enter our room at the hotel. Last year such a visit was a rarity. Now as subsequent arrivals demonstrate the birds have multiplied. They are almost as common as the sparrows which used to pick crumbs from under restaurant tables, and which they have now to a large extent replaced. As this is the first holiday snap I take just over two weeks ago when we arrive in Sitges for our annual indulgence in luxurious living and what turns out to be a holiday of magnificent  surprises,  it will be the first in the series  of snaps which will follow in the next few days.

Our first evening meal outside Costa Dorada is  at the end of a cold spell  and what proves to be the onset of a heat wave. The proprietors provided us with blanket as the wind rises. What a pleasure to hear the waves breaking just a few feet away and yet to remain snug. Sitting in the open whenever possible is important to us. I recall the presence of blankets outside restaurants in Munich in the Spring. Nowhere else in my experience, but Heidi says that in Bavaria and Austria it is common practice.

Our friend Artur who is an artist holds up his Moleskin sketch book. "This is my camera," he says. We bring  him one as a present every year. He must now have at least 10.

High Flyer

Mary Lampeter, aged 28, with all the qualifications, confronts the financial director of  Universal Words, but does she want the top job on offer? See my new story on One Fine Day.

Dare

Today's very short story in One Fine Day ( see right hand column for,link)concerns the repetition of a single word. Go on I dare you. 

An iPad features in a new take on a Greek myth. See One Fine Day link right hand column.

Breather

As last year at this time this blog is taking a breather. To replace it for the next few days I shall be posting a series of stories on One Fine Day ( http//:www.hnjh.blogspot.com ) If you have visited Best of Now in the last few days and been disappointed it is down to a combination of birthday celebrations and an elusive wi fi now restored thanks possibly to the intercession of Santa Tecla.

 

Home made emoticon  = You have me there. I just don't know!

A photograph in the Independent shows a seemingly endless line of people winding up the track leading to the top of Snowdon in North Wales. It is the easy route I seem to remember but easy or hard it strikes me as  horribly overcrowded. When I last walked up that way there was no one in front and no one behind us, though we met  one or two coming down. People I believe now  queue to climb Mount Everest which less than 100 years  ago no one had reached the and survived. High time to explore space to escape our fellow humans.

As I draw to the end of L'Abesse de Castro,  a long short story by Stendhal,  feeling compelled to read more Stendhal, I reach for my copy of Le Rouge et Le Noir, but the prints is small and densely spread across the page. Can Amazon help me with a  Kindle French edition. For some reason you can't obtain Kindle editions from Amazon, France in the UK. And Yes. Within a couple of minutes it is installed. And at zero cost. Kindle has its drawbacks. But this is  reassuring. And with a French dictionary on board I feel wonderfully relaxed about the project.

Textures, sap, fruit and forecasts

Cloud and rooftop. A contrast in textures,

While sap still runs in the leaves,  fruit, nuts and conkers ripen and fall. Climbing beans hang ever more densely on the vines and butter nut squash ripen among their foliage. Autumn is upon us and Winter looms. Seed catalogues arrive through the post with promise of a new growing cycle. Paul the gardener opines with a capacity for stating the obvious rivalling even my own that one season follows another.

Yesterday's forecast promised gales and heavy rain for the country as a whole. Yet outside the window  this morning the leaves are  so still they might have been carved out of stone and the sun shines from a misty blue sky. By this afternoon the prophecy begins to be proved true. Rain drops speckle the window pane.


 

Ruby, flexible and blind driving

Leaf of ruby chard too beautiful to cook.

This morning in the window of an antique shop a notice catches my eye. It reads: "Baby Sitter Available and Flexible."

In an awkward corner of the  fitted kitchen is a deep  cupboard which  contains two circular rotating shelves, avoiding what would otherwise be wasted space. In the 25 years since its installation I have never been  sure how the spindle on which the shelves turn  is fixed. Until today that is when the plate to which it is attached looses a screw and the whole  shebang loaded with jugs and things slips sideways.
 DIY has diminishing attractions for me especially when it involves kneeling, half lying on the floor, feeling for the screw holes, inserting the screws and driving them home blind. Not only that, but the floor of the cupboard under the rotating shelves is covered with the sort of sticky dust you find only  in kitchens. Not only do I manage the screwing bit, but fixing a damp cloth to the end of a broom handle, I succeed with unaccustomed athleticism in reaching and removing the dirt of a quarter of a century. I don't enjoy it at the time, but having done it, I feel as though I have run in a race and won a prize. If I had any strength left I would reach behind me and pat myself on the back.

Trainers, woe and exercise

A pair of trainers discarded on the wooden slats of one of The Grove rubbish bins.

"Woe is wondrously clinging: the clouds ride by." I rather like this anonymous Anglo-Saxon observation quoted in the Faber Book of Aphorisms.

How absurd! I spend two days polishing and  seeking advice on a 150 word short story. It is an entry for the weekly competition in The Spectator magazine. Entries are supposed to have an "ingenious twist" at the end. My chief reason for taking the trouble is my professional interest in short stories demonstrated in my other blog, One Fine Day. So this is little more than an exercise, which I shall soon forget about. But I am half enjoying myself.

Glut, defence and peaceful sleep

Beans. They are now growing so densely that I have no time to take photographs. This was taken a few days ago.  It's pick, pick all  the time. Neighbours are suffering as much as ourselves from the glut which I channel in their direction. In a couple of weeks we'll have the white  beans from inside the pod to blanch and sauté  with a little garlic.

"Going anywhere interesting?" Another bit of automatic speak, this time from a man in a travel shop who assumes that I am going anywhere at all, which I may or may not be. "Usual," I say, a recent defence against this new kind of small talk. "Going on holiday?" another shop person says, "Sort of," I say.

 

"Oat straw flower, licorice root,  chamomile flower, lavender flower, lime flower, valerian root, tulsi leaf,"  so reads the list of ingredients on  the packet of  Pukka Night Time, a herbal tea promoting "peaceful sleep". I normally sleep peacefully but some who don't tell that they do after a cup of it in the evening. I try  some and find that when I wake I remember my dreams which is unusual for me.

Bliss, weeds and getting it wrong.

The young. The Forum  on the edge of The Common is a place to go for gigs in Tunbridge Wells.

Weeds by R Lloyd Praeger is one of the books which I refer to from time because it gives me a new perspective. Many wild flowers loved and fostered by naturalists and even gardeners qualify at some time or other to be listed as weeds. What is a weed then? Any plant growing where people don't want it to grow. I mentioned Persicaria (also known as knotweed)  the other day, because I keep seeing it in formal flower beds and on the market stalls of nurserymen. At first acquaintance I rather ignored it. Its closeness to dock and mountain sorrel,  plants of course appearance with unimpressive flowers, may be the explanation. But its flowers are altogether more striking and its leaves less intrusive. Praegar has little time for it."The main point," he writes, "as in the case of all annual plants, is to prevent seeding; this is accomplished by energy in hoeing and hand pulling."

Though looking back  I guess that I am or have been wrong in my views and judgements much of the time. Fifty per cent  right would be a good score. I wonder if others can claim to do much better.

Viola, scent of herbs and fatted cattle

 A solitary yellow viola self-seeded in the black painted wall of The Compasses. And the shadow of the photographer.

Cutting basil as the scent rises from the snipped stem is equalled only as a sensual experience by the fresh onion scent when cutting the grass-like leaves of chives.

"Why would anyone want to be a vegetarian?" asks a meaty young man to another as he steps out of The Compasses amid the odour of  the Sunday roast emerging from the kitchen like the smoke from fatted cattle burned in their honour  reaching the nostrils of the Greek gods on Mount Olympus.