Blog 2

The pool opens off the dining area – this works well as cooked sausages and prawns float. Gazpacho and sangria pose a bit of a problem though.

Speaking of floating, in 1964 on my great OE I stayed with my sister and friends in a villa on the island of Ibiza off Barcelona for some weeks. We had a very deserted beach with a tiny island just off it to which we were able to swim pushing food and drinks on an inflated lilo in front of us. The little island was covered with lizards but also there were these curious kiwi-fruit looking and sized balls of roots that drifted onto the beach and dried in the sun. We found them good for fuelling the fires we lit to cook on. We affectionately called them furries as in we’ve got furries – no wurries! When one fell off the fire and lay smouldering it was a “furry with a singe on top” which we put to music and the tune is now quite famous! Well here’s a picture of those very same furries taken on the beach off Gandia 43 years later. Now how about that!

Language.

It has always been a puzzle to me as to why we go to so much trouble in particular in French but in English also to make a verb match the gender and plurality of the subject. If suis only comes after je and am only after I then why not drop the je and the I! In most cases the Spanish seem to have done just that. Fantastico.

The sea in Spanish is masculine; in French it is feminine. Where the two coastal zones collide there must be a gender blender of some sort. As we drive north into France later I’m considering swimming at that very spot to see what happens. After perhaps years of being in a single gender sea a molecule comes upon a place where frustrated male meets frustrated female by the billions! And if he or she “mingles” right on the boundary every wriggle could change the mingle from gay to straight to lesbian and back in the blink of an eye. I’ve heard the term “a confused sea” in nautical circles, perhaps this is its true origin.

And finally – I’ve always looked for a shortcut to surviving with a foreign language. I’ve found it, I learned to say sorry “lo siento”. I walked through Gandia saying ‘lo siento’ to everyone who came my way and some who didn’t. You get a lot of strange looks but nobody gets annoyed with you and every now and then it rescues you from an embarrassing moment.