Transcription

In fits and starts I have been transcribing my 1999 diary this year. Reading and typing more or less simultaneously, this has made for a thoroughly engrossing interplay of memories in the mind and on the page with the limited bandwidth searchlight of the conscious now.

Before I went 'e' in 2003, my journals were occasionally patchy and certainly less verbose. Yet it isn't the density of observation that makes this such a jarring assemblage of both high and low-res memories. Re-treading this daily path now can sometimes feel like hovering above a recollection. There's a new dimension to the remembered experience: a fluffed-up context, now enhanced by an appreciation of the sequence of events which were to follow.

On other occasions contrastingly, it is like being plonked right back in the tunnel, with all the implications for vision that implies. Instead of reliving the moment 'in the round', I am suddenly right back on the spot, and all the stresses and anxieties, the guilt, the uncertainty, and of course, more occasionally, the surreptitious sniggers, are back in the emotional foreground. And then there are those truly disturbing passages of text which result in no flashbacks whatsoever.

I picked this year ahead of alternatives, because superficially at least, I recall it as a twelve month period packed with big ticket moments, including a trip to Cornwall with John to witness a somewhat overcast yet utterly mesmerising total eclipse and an incident-packed business trip to Barcelona in the late summer, where I was put up by the client in a 3 1/2--star beach hotel in Calella, surrounded by inflatable dolphins and people with beer guts and tattoos. And that was just the children. (Apparently the bigger, better-prepared Pharmas and the world's extended community of opportunistic cardiologists had bagged all the rooms at the Hotel Arts etc. in Barcelona proper.)

And of course for the portentously-minded, the whole year was one breath-bated lead up to the big party of December 31 — which we experienced memorably here in Antigua — and the package of uncertainties heralded by the new millennium. (No doubt many of the same fretters will have been counting down frantically to December 2012 of late.)

Yet as I proceed sequentially, the wood of the larger meanings has tended to fall from view behind the trees of, well, tedium. How many exhausted early nights I had, how many silent wallowings in the hot tub, weekends lost to VHS sessions taking in all the regular shows we'd missed Monday to Friday.

'99 was also the year after the twelve months before in one important respect: it represented a new dawn for us after selling our baby to a NASDAQ-listed company and, as we returned from our post-millennial excesses, we were keenly aware that we were going to have to be accountable in ways that had not seemed all that important before...and that there were going to be factions forming around the office where none had existed before.

We now had a CFO for the first time, and the weekly Monday meetings she insisted on were where these new realities would play out most most uncomfortably. Former shareholders, recent option holders, and the newbie salaried employees would all have significantly different interests when it came to the now heavily-overseen financials and other matters relating to domestic governance.

Even our foreign masters would be torn: for on the one hand our numbers fed into their quarterly reports and they had their own issues with holders of different kinds of paper (not to mention the Russian default and a very volatile tech market), but on the other hand, the better we did, the more they would have to fork out in the medium term as part of the earn-out agreement.

They were also still snarling from the realisation that our pesky Norwegian managing director had got the better of their array of expensive lawyers who'd missed the clause which permitted a significant portion of our eventual windfall to be based simply on the passage of time and not on performance over that same period.

My former partner, the aforementioned wily CEO, took me for one of those serious strolls amongst the religious martyrs buried in the St George's Gardens boneyard in Bloomsbury. These were exciting times, he enthused, but some of the old guard, the dilettante amateurs such as myself and a few other notable members of the founding few who had managed to get such an implausibly elevated seat at so many corporate tables, might experience the coming year like suitcases which, not especially well tied down, tend to fall off the rickety bus as it picks up speed.

He was of course delivering a message, one that would allow him to step back behind the Doric columns as the knife thrusts were delivered into my back and belly. But this ominous chat morphed into a discussion about what I could do to become more obviously central to the new order; nothing less than a suit of armour forged from rejigged responsibilities — I was to become kind of knowledge gatekeeper and librarian on the side, with a visible role in keeping all my colleagues up to speed.

This was perhaps my first full exposure to the phenomenon I would later be able to recognise almost instantly as 'an initiative'. These are internal company activities, often quite rational and laudable in themselves, which are doomed to at best partial completion/success, because the main reason for undertaking them is to be seen to be doing something. After a further decade in the communications industry I would be under no illusions as to how endemic they tend to be therein.

Anyway, I am now up to March in the diary and many of my potential assassins are themselves little more than a folorn collection of open suitcases littering the highway behind. It had come as a relief to me that the first generation of potential usurpers had discovered that it was they who were not especially well strapped down on the roof. (I have a lifelong knack for simply outlasting my enemies.)

But the very nature of the new media industry meant that the flow of Johnny-come-latelies would continue to surge until the crash came three years later. If the first lot were creative professionals and experts who resented our rather non-specific abilities, the second wave was a collection of pathologically networking, palm-greasing and bean-counting suits, and once they had established their quorum within the firm — and we had thus returned to the pre-buy-out economics where overheads did not appear to have to be matched by revenues — the night of the long knives did finally come for the founders.

We had equity, they had options and no remorse. The CEO went several months before I did. Those who remained had perhaps 18 months left before the bubble burst and the new American holding company shut the whole thing down.

Snowmageddon

This is what it looked like a couple of days ago outside the home of our friends Betty and Scott, not far from Washington DC. Until today they hadn't managed to get out at all. Supplies of food were holding up, but the Zacapa Centenario was reportedly running low.*

In comparison my recent dip into the northern winter seems comparatively un-testing.

I'm certainly glad to be home now. Back in the UK I had been starting to feel a bit like a fish out of water — or perhaps like one of those parrots in Greenwich Park.

And on the several trips I made up to London I'd been beset by a sudden panic as I recognised the sense of heaviness brought on by the gravitational pull of the metropolis. For two years now I've wallowed in the very bearable lightness of being that comes with having escaped it, but I now realise that it only takes a ride or two on the tube before one's features start assuming the careworn grimace worn by the majority of one's fellow passengers down there.

Narrowly escaping 'snowmageddon' in New York, I flew down into the Yucatán and then bused myself into Chiapas. By this time the combined weight of my two cases (let alone the mochila with the tequila reposado and laptop in it and the plastic bag bearing the catalogue from the Van Gogh exhibition) was close to 65kg.

The big case had to be hoisted onto the roof of the shuttle in San Cristóbal using a heavy strap with a hook on the end of it. When the driver pulled up some 150m short of the Immigration building at the border I felt like a mula in all senses of the term.

Still, V was very pleased with most of the little luxuries I'd lugged from Heathrow to Huehuetenango, especially the edible ones. To celebrate we cooked ourselves something of a fusion dish last night: genuine Italian farfalle with tuna and peas, in a Indonesian shrimpy sambal sauce.

The Cuchumatanes are impressive and the road through them is much improved. Note to self: must return here with car, wife and dogs and explore a bit during the Guatemalan verano.

I'm beginning to think that as with the Cylons, there are only eight different types of traveller one is likely to meet on the shuttle between Antigua and San C de las C. How many times will I have to do this trip before I am confronted with my own facsimile?

A quick glance around the minibus revealed the middle-aged Mexican couple visiting Guatemala for the first time, the know-it-all European girl with blonde dreads and tats who's practically a resident now and would rather not mix with her fellow foreigners etc.** Different DNA for sure, but typologically almost identical.

One last observation about the state of the British economy as it pops a periscope up out of recession. No matter what it is you want to buy over there, they're determined to sell you something else with it.

A new pair of iPhone earbuds? Want insurance for them? A birthday card. How about some half price Cadbury's chocolate? A ticket to see Avatar? Have you tried the VIP seats?

Everyone's into upselling. There's hardly a product that doesn't come with a side-order of figurative fries. And it's not hard to see why, because it's a tried and tested way of spotting the people who think the bad times are over and don't mind being a bit discretionary with their income again.

* Their Chapin neighbours have been shoveling the white stuff out of their drive and into the main road in a manner not dissimilar to our own, whose technique for ridding themselves of piles of dust in front of their portones usually involves relocating said polvío to an area in front of someone else's house.

** In fact the unsmiling European blonde (they travel alone or in pairs) who acts as if Mexico is presenting itself to her as one big inconvenience, is also a rather common sight on the first class buses of OCC and ADO.

New Year's Day

LF still had his derrota face on this morning.

"Ay Dios tia, nadie me gana a mi" he'd informed V before their chess rematch yesterday. Perhaps he'd have contained his bravado had he known how long she had been preparing her cold dish of revenge.

In fact ever since he'd won their first contest back in June she has been frequenting numerous online chess arenas in order to develop a more advanced grasp of the game. On December 30 after wearing down what I had considered to be a most promising attack, she declared herself ready.

LF made the mistake of thinking the endgame would be a formaility once he'd captured her queen. Instead several of his most valuable pieces got themselves snarled behind a column of his own peones while one of V's broke through to earn her a replacement.

Her sobrinos are used to her quick mastery of almost any game, and are thus unsurprised when she 'makes them torta' in almost all video-juegos (except first person shooters, which she's never really taken to.) But LF felt safe in the sacred grotto of his chess accomplishments.

At midday today, there was the culminating peal of explosive claps, this one distinguished by the commingling of the acrid odour of faja quemada with the more pleasing aromas of incense. Soon afterwards toc toc toc tottoc was heard for the last time this festive season, as a small procession of children collected change on behalf of 'el Niño Dios'.

This is the only time of year that we tend to buy stuff in the market without really knowing what we're going to do with it. Which is probably why our kitchen is full of green habas right now. At V's request I went online earlier to seek out some recipes.

Prices have tumbled since festivities started a week ago. A mano of mandarins cost just Q1.50 yesterday: a 50% markdown from la noche buena.

We'd gone into town on New Year's Eve to collect the pollos rellenos we'd reserved at Epicure, and then unsure exactly what we'd intended to do with them, treated ourselves to an impromptu picnic in the Plazuela, making good use of the supersized pirujos that are traditionally sold here on the eve of public holidays.

J showed up unexpectedly after dusk with the exciting news that next year she was going to have to get used to flying around in a helicopter A LOT — her way of informing us that her new bloke is more pistudo than our wildest imaginings. She suggested that we meet up later on in the Parque, an arrangment which resulted in the usual frustrations.

Last night's big draw in town was the tenth annual Festival of the Calle del Arco, which began back in 1999 with the Millennium bash of fond memory. The numbers of out-of-towners this attracts has grown each year, such that these days the celebration has in effect bifurcated into two events topped off by separate firework extravaganzas — one funded by the Alcalde and the other by the shops and residents of la quinta.

Fluid movement up and down this latter artery is no longer possible any time after around 7:30pm, so the traditional toritos no longer fire rockets sideways into the throng...presumably because running away isn't an option any more.

In spite of the crush and our delayed arrival, we manged to meet up with my friends S and B a little before 11 and shortly after the familiar uncoordinated sequence of unilateral midnights, Chiqui and 'la beba' appeared beside us — just in time to get drenched in evil-smelling cidra by a coldhearted tourist who had shaken the bottle enthusiastically with just this kind of collateral damage in mind. I took a direct hit in the back, but had luckily just put my waterproof jacket back on. Chiqui was estrendando an expensive and modish new coat and didn't stop giving the culprit dagger looks for some time.

It had taken us a while to pick a parking spot earlier in the evening. It was far from central, but V was pleased that there seemed to be no evidence of little strips of tattered red tissue paper around the tyres when we eventually got back to the car.

Having reached home and said our final feliz años around the block, we had a stroll with the dogs at 3am. Judging from the number of burned out cohetes inside our patio and on the steps up to the studio, they'd had a torrid time of it. Jin barked at a tiresome local hoody who picked up some stones and waved his arms around threateningly, but, decided to hold onto them so that he could punish us for Jin's behaviour by chucking them at our front gate instead. Moron.

Today I went out with the kids to buy some more bombas and cohetes. We passed an American man and his two boys and he smiled in greeting. As soon as he had disappeared into his house on Comendador, LF whsispered to me that he'd noticed that this man had been carrying a small can of MACE in his right hand. The neighbourly smile is clearly a decoy. He's really just another paranoid nut from central casting.

Posadas and mordidas are go...

Driving back very late last night from the capital I spotted a festive warning flashing electronically above the Calzada Roosevelt: Cero tolerancia, 0% alcohol, 0% drogas. Shortly after passing the Mixco turn off, we were duly waved over by two agents of the PNC.

Now the trouble is that this zero tolerance policy segues nicely with the unofficial Christmas bonus drive operated by certain rogue elements within the force. Indeed, you might say that the two weeks or so before both Christmas and Easter are the key fundraising fortnights in their calendar...so we should have been ready for a bit of aggro when we planned to break out of our Panchoy comfort zone for seasonal shopping purposes.

We had both our licenses, the vehicle's SAT papers (in my name) and V — at the wheel — had both her cédula and her passport on her...but unfortunately I'd neglected to take my own passport into Guate with me. And so it was that I learned that not carrying my actual passport around (photocopies simply won't do) is an offence punishable by immediate deportation.

Of course the agente at V's window had something even more on-the-spot in mind, but part of this game is that the man in uniform can't actually bring himself to say it; he just assumes that the individuals that he is inconveniencing will understand the etiquette. "You haven't been stopped before have you?" he observed with a note of chagrin as we met his sharp statements with some of our own. (We are of course veterans of such stand-offs, but can hide it well enough.)

He eventually noted that he would let us off this time "porque usted es Guatemalteca", but I had the sense that V had worn him down a bit with her mindgames, and as if to confirm this, his well-wishes for the journey ahead sounded a bit like a veiled threat, much like a Mississippi sheriff might sneer "you folks have a nice day now."

Her best ploy was mentioning that his colleagues in Panorama were our friends and neighbours and making to ring up one senior named officer at the station there. She's carefully cultivated said law-enforcer; this is the kind of country where it's always handy to have a range of people you can call up in different situations.

Meanwhile the copper on scene had given it his best go too, insisting that she recite her cédula number from memory ( B2...is the peculiar marker of the true panze verde) and listing the various delinquents, including narcos and kiddyfiddlers, who'd been no match for his police-work over the years.

I must get into the habit of taking my passport out with me at all times, the policeman added...even when I nip across to the tienda.

The trouble is that I lose stuff. Last time I mislaid my passport (Phoenix, 2007) the British Consulate wasn't answering its phones and I had to trek across the Sonoran desert to LA in order to get their attention.

UPDATE

— 'Zero tolerance' is generally a seasonal rather than an everyday problem in Guatemala.

— The car in front stopped and its driver passed his papers to the police with a ten or twenty Quetzal bill inside. This is how the locals do it; they don't even have to apply the handbrake.

— If we'd been in the right-hand lane we could have driven on without stopping, but in this instance it would have been impossible to do so without llevandole al policia como corbata...given that he was standing right in front of us.

— Of course you don't need to carry your passport with you at all times, and I don't intend to start doing so from now on; though I might consider it when travelling outside my local jurisdiction, especially after 10pm.

— If it hadn't been my passport, it would have been something else, like the steering wheel on the right. They simply wanted their Christmas money.

— It is rare that the police in Antigua play the checkpoint fundraiser game or hassle tourists. Indeed Antigua has its own special force dedicated to helping and protecting visitors.

— I have never paid a bribe to the Guatemalan police.

Another slow start to the week

A recent view of Agua from our studio terrace. (You can tell that it's recent because of the little gold flores de muerto poking up if front of the nazarenos.)

My typing today is being hampered by the sprained fingers on my left hand which I picked up kicking a ball around yesterday with (and against) a mixed-generational selection of V's family. I've also got bruises on my right thumb and knee and assorted cuts scratches received when I went headlong into a bourgainvillea.

And that's just the surface damage. For the match was followed by fried fish (pargo), ceviche, sopa de camerón, revolcado and cake, all washed down with rum...and we were soon sacando al diablo from the bottle.

Syntax Era

I took this pic at the Science Museum in London back in 2002.

Many (...many) years before I had had my first encounter with a computer in there. I typed in my name at the prompt and the black & white screen then diplayed "Hello Guy!". I was totally thrilled; as far as I was concerned it might just as well have been Hal 9000.

The BBC's one-off TV drama Micro Men (working title 'Syntax Era') tracks the rivalry from 1978-1985 between (Sir) Clive Sinclair and his former employee Chris Curry who went on to form Acorn Computers.

These were the bubble years of the micro-computer. It seems that Curry had the idea first but couldn't distract Sinclair from his fantasies about personal transportation. Sinclair was still, as was his wont, first to market with the ZX80 (see above, the little white door wedge beside the Apple II), but then Curry and his colleagues won the contract to make the BBC Micro under license.

Sinclair responded by trying to outflank Acorn with a move upmarket (The hideous QL or Quantum Leap) while Curry did the opposite, trying to steal some of the ZX Spectrum's gaming thunder with his Electron. Neither machine sold well and the champagne days came to an end.

For years Britain (and Cambridge geeks in particular) had led the way with 'personal' computing but surrendered the advantage to large-scale American and Asian enterprises. "We could have been the British IBM!" Curry snarls at Sinclair at one point, and the narrative here does suggest strongly that both men became distracted by their feud and might have done better to collaborate from the start.

One of the great Cambridge pubs, the Baron of Beef on Bridge Street, is the scene for some of the central encounters between the warring entrepreneurs. The last time I was in there it was just after collecting my 'free upgrade' MA in 1993, so I wasn't entirely sure if they'd shot in the real interior. In my day the floor was still covered in sawdust.

Sinclair had made the first slimline calculator and the first digital watch, but it seems he never really believed in the tranformational powers of computing and even today recoils from the Internet. He appears to have simply spotted an opportunity to significantly undercut the Apple II (the largest machine above) and the Commodore Pet on price, calculating that he could make hundreds of thousands of people desire a home computer even if they had no idea what they were going to do with it.

The drama concludes with bittersweet footage of Sir Clive (whose company Sinclair Research recently comprised himself and er...nobody else) in his C5 being passed by big lorries emblazoned with the logos of Microsoft and Compaq. Anyone for an A-Bike?

Tony Saint's script is gently funny and full of nostalgic touches, playing with the counterintuitive notion of Sir Clive's sexual magnetism. The Office's Martin Freeman is an always likeable presence and comedian Alexander Armstrong has a good turn as the irascible inventor. (Though his slaphead/ginger scalp prosthetic looks like it could be more firmly attached with Blu Tack like the RAM unit on the ZX80.)

{Full disclosure: I have a ZX81 and a BBC 'B' in a box in my storeroom here in Guatemala!}

Birthday Boy

Today Bali celebrates making it through his first twelve months. Here's a collection of his best pics across this debut year.

Guatemalan homes tend to have roughly equal quantities of indoors and outdoors, and Bali is our most indoor cat, and also the most polite and gentle. Feeding him a piece of ham is like putting your credit card into an ATM.

He'll wait for as long as necessary outside any door he knows we're behind, but once inside will jealously maintain his personal space. His response to over-petting has earned him the apodo 'The Ginger Whinger'.

— Favourite toys: Straws, dental floss, TV remotes, iPod cables and headphones, brooms in motion.

— Favourite TV: David Attenborough, Disney-Pixar animations...basically anything where some of the participants have tails.

— Favourite foods: Papaya, tomato, mandarins, grapes, frijoles and the usual meats and treats. (Doesn't like tortilla, pasta, rice, bananas or fried plantains.)

— Favourite sleeping places: My foot and the doghouse.

Apagón

A lightning strike in Escuintla took out the power in a large part of Guatemala for well over an hour yesterday evening. We have candles in strategic locations around the house, but some of our neighbours seemed to have little alternative but to pour out onto the street. The valley all around filled with dense pools of gloom. Only the Sindal kept chugging away.

Earlier we'd downed a few cocktails to celebrate our anniversary. V's recipe for the 'Dos Décadas' contains fresh lime and cucumber juice (and a few drops of tomato juice) plus a couple of measures of Don Ramón tequila. We watched a programme last week which listed the number of different local products seemingly named after that much loved character from El Chavo del Ocho.

A musical interlude for our 'anniversary'

It's twenty years today since V and I first met, so here's one of 'our songs' as a bit of a musical interlude.

I'm going on my holidays...

And the blog is coming with me. Aside from the pre-processed updates the posts may be a bit thinner on the ground for the next couple of weeks...

Almuerzo interrupted

V just screeched "like Monica Seles...being stabbed in the back" when she realised that her bowl of rice had toppled onto the floor. Not since that wrathful ghost had its mits around her neck in Scotland back in '92 has she emitted such a heartrending shriek.

Cherry bolted for the door and Bali gave me that fight or flight? look if his. For a brief moment the notion that it might have been my fault was enough to make me howl like a banshee too.

Fortunately we'd already consumed roughly half of it. V had cooked it up with latino condiment Bijol — essentially a mix of annatto, corn and cumin — adding sweet basil and 'culantro' for flavour.

But the of acme of this meal had been the veggie dish that the ill-fated arroz accompanied. Broccoli and grated carrot were first fried in olive oil, before a quarter cup of milk, a bit of cream and the liquid from a jar of olives were added. Once this had reduced, a beaten egg was broken over the pan to bind the dish and a few capers tossed on top. The whole concoction was then covered and left to simmer. Yum...

Tramites

Last week I had cause to wonder whether Guatemala's tramitadores might have become as endangered as the axolotls.

For my induction into the process of dealing with the local bureaucracy at the Finanzas building in Guatemala City (pictured) turned out to be a whole lot less painful than I had anticipated.

In fact I was at first caught out by the speed of service: having been given a number and a form to fill out, I hadn't managed to complete said form before my number was called...and so was duly sent back to get another one!

I was soon back at window No23 and the expected barrage of trabas was immediately forthcoming. My assembled paperwork was sifted through dismissively and I was informed that I appeared to have turned up without the necessary documentation from the shipping company i.e. I was screwed.

But then, somehow, I managed to achieve an almost complete turnaround in the attitude of the bureaucrat allocated to my case. What followed was a veritable arrebato of calculated leniency, which included letting me off a missing photocopy. (OK, this was a page without any actual relevant information on it.)

Adopting a gentle manner akin to that of an indulgent parent, he painstakingly collated all the sheets of paper I had presented to him and at last informed me that there would be one final piece of sidetracking: a trip back down to the ground floor to pay Q50 to Banrural before returning for another numbered position in the line. But don't worry, he told me with a knowing smile, there's hardly a queue today. I'm sure he could spot the look of utter bewilderment on my face.

I was soon on my way out of the building, passing a few rather resigned looking tramitadores, surely destined to be victims of the Guatemalan state's leisurely modernisation. Nevertheless, the fact that this particular tramite still requires a visit in person to a government building in the capital regardless of where one actually resides in Guatemala, probably means that their final extinction will yet be posponed for a few more years.

Anyway, as part of this recent undertaking I've discovered an interesting little local tax called the Boleto de Ornato. Every January or February Guatemalan citizens (and, as it turns out non-citizens too if they want to get anything done) are obliged to pay a small sum for their boleto, which is supposed to cover any costs the local Muni incurs each year relating to the beautification or indeed just the tidying up of the local urban environment.

Here in Antigua the 'cheapest' one costs Q10, but if you decide to buy it any time other than the first two months of the year you pay a 100% fine: so in my case I paid Q20. It won't matter if you weren't in the country in January.

Now the intriguingly barmy thing about this tax is that it is in a sense voluntary: nobody will come knocking on your door if you don't pay it. Yet in spite of being a local tax tied to local services, the key incentive one has for paying it is not in fact a nicer set of lights in the parque at Christmas, it's the fact that one can't expedite any paperwork with the national government without presenting this year's Boleto de Ornato.

"Big Foot threw an ice-cream at Ronald Reagan"

Today marks the twentieth anniversary of my first visit to Antigua. I'd come to Guatemala the year before but hadn't made it down here.

But on August 25 1989 Surfer and I rolled into town, presented ourselves at the Mistral and were soon embroiled in a marathon drinking session with James Stewart — a retired engineer from Dundee and a true Scottish gent — and the nephew of Guatemala's most famous living ex-dictator. (One of Mr R's most memorably oblique contributions to the conversation that evening has now been immortalised as the title of this blog post. ) We then decamped to James's house near the Tanque de la Union, by which time only his parrot was talking any sense.

The next morning I woke up with a la gomota del infierno and the kooky premonition that this place was going to be very important in my life and that I had to return to spend more time here.

But first we had to be ejected from our hotel — ostensibly for all the laughing and babbling that had been going on into the small hours. The manager apologised profusely for our expulsion (she clearly had a soft spot for the pair of us) but there was no appeasing the trenchant American couple in the room next door. She introduced us to her delightful little niece Blanca, who escorted us to a replacement hospedaje around the corner.

Once Surfer had packed himself off back to St Andrew's, I made my way back down to Antigua from Placencia at the end of the following month. And the rest, as they say, is history!

Doggy style

Relations between felines and canines in our house occasionally come unglued, but between Osli and Cherry at least there has always been an unusually close bond.

Quincentenary

So this is what I missed on Saturday, having fled the scene before the orgy of light classical entertainment commenced. Baksheesh had backstabbed and I didn't fancy it on my own. (Note how Welsh mezzo-soprano Katherine Jenkins can't help but propose marriage to a Pauline...any Pauline!)

The occasion, dubbed the Q Festival (Q for Quincentenary) was a kind of premium open day event designed to mark the 500th anniversay of the founding of S.P.S. (Yes, the school is actually older than 'Antigua' Guatemala....)

Many of the buildings in which I myself toiled, constructed rather hastily in the late 60s when the school shifted itself across Hammersmith Bridge to Barnes, are now awaiting demolition. The maqueta for the planned new school was on display in the Montgommery Room...surrounded by flyers asking for donations. So maybe this would have been my last chance to take this little nostalgic trip back to my formative years. Frankly the place looks rather tired and tatty. Roll on the bulldozers.

Speaking of Montgommery, a brief perusal of the boards highlighting memoral old boys from each of the five centuries revealed to me that there were in fact two OPs at the heart of the glorious cock-up known as Operation Market Garden in 1944 - for Major General Roy Urquart (a part played by Sean Connery in A Bridge Too Far) had also attended the school. He was to spend most of the battle for Arnhem Bridge holed up in a Dutch town house as the 1st Airborne Division was wiped out around him.

Eisenhower apparently thought Monty's problem was that he was a bit chippy because he didn't go to either Eton or Harrow. The Yank-in-chief obviously hadn't met many Paulines before. The military tradition has been strong there over the centuries, with John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough and occupant of Blenheim Palace, being the stand-out example.

On Saturday I couldn't help chuckle when I spotted small hordes of men, not that much older than myself, dressed as if they had spent the middle part of the last century shooting down Messerschmitts, what.

My favourite OP will always be Samuel Pepys, with John Milton a close second. Surprisingly there was space on the twentieth century display for G.K. Chesterton (Catholic) but none for Sir Isaiah Berlin (not so Catholic). Rampant atheist Dr Jonathan Miller wasn't on there either, but they did name the theatre after him!

When I left I had to swim against the flow of boaters, panamas, picnic baskets and all kinds of perpetual public schoolboy totems, as the whole sub-Glyndbourne summer shindig got under way.

Pantalla Azul de la Muerte

My blogging activities have been seriously curtailed of late by a series of intermittent faults on my laptop. It does appear more or less stable now, but the sound card is still screwed so it will have to go back to the tecnico later this afternoon.

Workers' Holiday

The albañiles working on the road outside had their on Mayday celebration on Saturday 2nd. Building sites all around the neighbourhood were decorated with crosses, balloons and ribbons and their resident trabjadores gathered to have a little tipple and let off some fireworks.

There wasn't a May Bank Holiday in the UK until the early 70s as this date was up to then generally associated with revolting plebs and missile launchers trundling through Red Square.

For this very reason the High Master decided that his boys were too posh to partake in such proletarian merrymaking, and for the first few annual instances of the new holiday insisted that we all come into school as usual.

This didn't go down at all well with many of the parents who — employed in the main by less august and discriminating institutions — tended to resent having to spend a summer bank holiday without their children. For others of course, this must have been a bit of a godsend...

Enforced blogging hiatus

Due to PC meltdown. Back as soon as this can be resolved...

Níspero time

We've been gorging ourselves on nísperos this morning!

This little yellow fruit, also known as a loquat and as a Japanese medlar, is an extreme rarity back in London, though V and I have located a nisperal at the back of the Fellows' Garden at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich.

It was originally native to South-eastern China.

The pips look a bit like roasted coffee beans.

Here in La Antigua, the nisperales of San Juan de Obispo, up on the faldas of the volcano, are said to give the most succulent fruit. Their pears are great too.

Pillow biter