Weekend diary

Saturday, 24 November
I would say the alarm woke us at 4am, but in truth neither the wife nor I had had much sleep. This all goes back to the problem we are having with Cat as a result of a problem with the neighbours' cat. Say no more. By the time we have risen, showered, dressed, breakfasted etc, it is 5am and we are officially running late. We get in the car and drive to the airport. Fuck, it's cold! I mean, really cold. Even after driving for 40 minutes, more than halfway to the airport, with the heating running, we are still both freezing. Brrrrrrrr. Of course, we get to the airport in time, not great time, but in time. Blah blah blah plane, blah blah take off, blah blah land.

After a two-and-a-half-hour flight, we land at Valencia airport at 11am local time, give or take a few minutes and take a cab from the airport to our hotel, the fairly recently opened Vincci Hotel on Calle de la Paz. En route, the very chatty and friendly cabbie explained how the local Valencian language, in many ways, is rather more similar to Italian than it is to Spanish. Cool. On arrival at the hotel, at about 11:45, we discover (as suspected) that we cannot check in until after 2pm. We leave most of our bags and stuff and set off for a bite to eat.

We are ravenous, but we know from our Seville experience in January that Spaniards keep crazy time as regards eating. We eventually find a little tapas bar on, Plaza del Ayuntamiento, one of the main squares. The guy there tells us that they only serve seafood tapas. Although that's fine for us, I can't help suspecting, by the way he seems to say it, that many tourists don't like seafood. But then this is a port town, so seafood ought to be expected, no? We ordered a half-portion each of prawns and squid rings, with a pair of beers to wash it all down. The first few mouthfuls were great, but after a while it became a bit much. Deep-fried fish and beer on empty stomachs = not ideal. Oh well. We ate what we could and moved on.

We decided to head towards the park area via some other bits of the city, such as the Estació del Nord and some other stuff. Here's some video of the estació, which is Spanish for "station".



The park is so cool. Right through the entire length of the city, where once there was a river, there is now parkland. Some city planners thought it was a good idea back in the day, and so they diverted the flow of the river and created a wonderful public space. And all the bridges that spanned the waterway now span the park. It's so cool! Kids and dogs and buskers and tourists all just hanging out, cycling, walking, roller-blading, whatever, enjoying what was a glorious late-November afternoon.

We walked and walked and walked. And we got hot. The sun was beating down, and although we had lightened our load on arrival, my leather jacket was soon too much. At one point both the missus and I had stripped down to T-shirts, along with many others out and about. The 24th of November, and I'm in a T-shirt. Now that's what I call a rockin' good time!

More stuff later.

In my own peculiar way I feel mercurial

Today's the first of July. It's been a funny old week... We in the UK have got a new prime minister in the guise of Gordon Brown, and what a wet old fart he is going to be. First order of business seems to have been to get a new hairstyle -- one that makes him look about ten years older already.

Also, finally we have a smoking ban in public places. Finally. It's been a long time coming, and I, for one, embrace it. As a man who does a little bit of travelling, I've seen how clean the air in restaurants and bars is on some foreign soils, and I like it. When some of our Italian friends visited late last summer, they were open-mouthed at the fact people were smoking in eateries. And they come from Italy, a country where smoking has long been normal among da kidz. But they embraced the ban over there with more relish than I might have imagined.

It's been a funny old week, yes. We've also had three supposed attempted car bombings in Britain: two in London; one in Glasgow. I wonder, though, if car bombings are going to be a tool in the terrorists' arsenal over here whether they might need to import willing perpetrators from the Middle East. We in the UK, I think, love being alive a bit too much. We have good lives in the West, you see. Even the Muslim extremists among us must wonder, What point is there in killing myself? I can do so much more damage by staying alive, by living to fight another day, as they say.

I had an exhausting, physically tiring, emotionally draining weekend with my family last weekend, and on my return there was stuff that needed doing. I spent a total of eight or nine hours, over the course of Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, removing horrible old plasticky tiling from our kitchen floor prior to our new floor covering being fitted. Those hours were physically demanding. Most of the time I was stood up and bent right over, using a mini-sledgehammer and chisel to remove the tiles. The hammer was heavy; the tiles, stuck fast. I was removing around five or six per hour. My thighs still ache to bend over or sit on the loo or climb the stairs.

Funny old week? Yes. On Friday night, Red and I were awoken by our neighbours' alarm clock at about 4 in the morning. It kept on going: beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep. Ten minutes. Fifteen minutes. Twenty minutes. Clearly no one was going to turn it off. At 4:30am, I decided I had no choice but to knock on their door. The husband answered, apologized, and switched it off. Later in the day, the wife caught us and also apologized profusely before mentioning that they would be having a party tonight, so sorry in advance for the noise.

As it happens, the noise wasn't too bad. Most of it was in the backyard, drunken 30- and 40-somethings karaoke'ing to their hearts' content. But at about 2:45am we were awoken again -- this time to the sound of the neighbours moving their bedroom furniture around. Voices started to get raised, and then the wife shouted something about "don't just dump my clothes in the corner" and stormed out. Finally, we could get our heads down. For about ten minutes, until the alarm went off again, at about 3am. Fuck's sake! It rang for about four minutes, I guess, before someone ran back up from downstairs to turn it off. I feel sleep-deprived today. I feel a little "wrong".

Funny old week? Yeah, and it turns out that -- ALERT: DOCTOR WHO SPOILER -- Captain Jack is the Face of Boe (above). Fucking hell, who saw that coming?! Fantastic! Captain Jack is kind of immortal, y'see. "Will I never die?" he asked the Doctor (I'm paraphrasing). "If not, what will I look like when I get to a million years old?" Then the reveal, and we already know what he will look like at five billion years old. We've seen him die in the future, y'see. And the Doctor was there with him.

Yeah, it's been a funny old week here in the United Kingdom. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Ha! "United". Ha! "Great". I'm hoping I can at least book a table for Sunday lunch and experience a smoke-free dining experience on Day One of the ban.

And -- unusualness of all unusualnesses -- our pet cat Cat has finally done a new post: you can read his "five things" tag over here. He promises to write more often, too, but I'll believe it when I see it.