In theory (i.e. according to the latest wild promise to emerge from the mouth of Boris) all Brits of my age-group will have had the chance to be jabbed by May.
In my case however, this 'chance' is starting to look like a classic Catch-22. The longer I leave it the more likely I will need to be vaccinated just in order to go and get vaccinated.
And right now a visit to the UK would commence with an extended stay at a so-called quarantine hotel (where I'd be responsible for making up my own room) for the tidy price of 1750 quid.
I'd then have to wait up to three months for the second shot and, based on current regulations, would neither be permitted to leave the UK nor, should I somehow get around that one, be allowed to re-enter Guatemala, at least without spending a few days somewhere else first.
Briefly during the decade before last, V was asked by the late, great Bruce of Panzón Verde fame to act (occasionally) as his official taster.
It wasn't that he was afraid of poisoners, he had just detected that she possibly possessed the kind of sophisticated tastes that are perhaps a bit more rare over here and wanted to tap into her opinions on the dishes he was offering at his inn.
This put her fairly immediately in an awkward situation one night in his restaurant. Bruce had ordered chicken in a green curry sauce and when it was placed in front of him by the chef (also an acquaintance of hers) he asked for an off-the-cuff opinion.
The curry was delicious. Yet she felt she had to observe that the rice should not have been made to go for a swim in the sauce before it left the kitchen.
Here's another example I captured on my last trip out of Guatemala in 2020, to Huatulco, Oaxaca. The rice is, in terms of quantity, a borderline case, and yet is just about holding its own against the flood tide of the sauce.
There's almost nothing I could say about this world that I couldn't find a way to intelligently contradict in a matter of minutes. Yet when it comes to food, I do tend to become a bit more dogmatic.
That said, I will never give a restaurant a bad review simply because I was served up a plate that I didn't enjoy. There is always going to be something subjective about the experience of noshing.
There are people — like my father — who will go to pretty much any restaurant and order pretty much the same thing every time (like a steak) and then there are people like me who will usually tend to be a bit more adventurous and experimental. This will, statistically, lead to a greater incidence of disappointment.
I fondly remember having lunch with my father in a small restaurant in Lambs Conduit Street in London which did not offer the steak option, at least not of the mooing variety. In fact the menu consisted almost entirely of tidbits most of us have never tried, like crocodile and scorpion. The look on his face as he studied the menu will stay with me forever.
A dinner FAIL that V constantly reminds me of occurred back in the early noughties in San Sebastián. Basque cuisine is considered by many aficionados to be quite possibly the very best in the world and the finest restaurants in this city take the form of 'closed door' sanctoria, far more akin to private dining clubs than the sort of joints one might typically encounter in a Spanish town with attached beach.
She ordered a rice dish in squid ink and received what looked like a viscous blue-black soup with a few grains of rice floating like miniscule carcasses on the surface.
It looked yummy enough to me, I have to admit. I've ordered something similar more recently at my favourite seafood restaurant in San Salvador — La Ola – but their version is definitely more rice in squid ink than squid ink with floundering grains.
Where I do get annoyed by meals consumed outside the home is when they fail what I regard as the basic rules of hospitality. If the plate that emerges is something I would be embarrassed to put in front of a guest in my own home, then I deem that the kitchen should be thoroughly ashamed of itself.
The quantity of rice served as a side is often a handy metric. Here in Antigua Guatemala I've seen arroz served in volumes indicative of a long siege by an encircling army outside the city limits.
I have never quite understood why chapines skimp on the carbs and veggies. It surely has to be cost effective to provide the customer with a sense of plenty rather than famine.
I have probably mentioned before another handy rule of thumb. Never accept less than an entire single piece of fruit on one's plate. This applies to plantains, avocados, tomatoes and so on. (With papayas one may have to settle for half as the bare minimum.)
One possibly doesn't have to be British to appreciate the irony of naming a funeral parlour after the patron saint of lost causes and dead ends.
San Juditas, known to us as Saint Jude Thaddeus, is the second most popular saint in Mexico after you know who. Though there's one that looks a bit like Skeletor in a bathrobe who may not show up so much in the Catholic church's official statistics.
It has more than once occurred to me that an unconventional way to rescue endangered mammals might be to send them on a bit of a one way trip. Black Rhino? Off to Patagonia. It's worked for other invasive species like the Welsh.
Our own kind has a marked tendency to divide itself up into natives and migrants, which spills over unhelpfully into the way we tend to see nature.
Yet people, animals, land masses, are all constantly on the move.
This piece of land called Guatemala where we now find ourselves began life as an island in the Pacific.
Along with all the other islands we now refer to as 'Caribbean' it commenced an eastward migration, hoping to pass between the two continents of North and South America...and failed.
In the 90s we visited one of the land masses that made the passage successfully: Saint Lucia. On that island lizards and frogs are beyond abundant. We had to constantly check our shoes, our bed...
When the island had slowly slipped between the western hemisphere's giants, many animals from both hopped on for the ride. But not large predators, like felines.
Any reptiles that washed ashore found themselves in a paradise where they weren't selected quite so naturally for the menu and duly went forth and multiplied.
It's a shame that Pablo's hippos look set to be denied the same opportunity. They have become iconic figures in recent South American folklore.
The first Central American movie to receive a Golden Globe nomination, and near enough to being a bona fidechapin masterpiece.
I had some issues with local auteur Jayro Bustamante's earlier work, Ixcanul, but not with this.
We watched it last year and I am not sure why I didn't get around to reviewing it at the time. It takes two rather crucial pieces of Guatemalan mythology, one very old, the other very contemporary, and moulds them pretty successfully.
The way the wife’s character is handled is superb and some of the tomas are superlative, especially the courtroom scene.
It does however require some prior knowledge of the underlying material.
My very first evening here in La Antigua, long ago, involved an all night drinking session with Rodrigo, nephew of Efraín Ríos Montt, at the home of a very congenial retired engineer from Dundee called James Stewart.
It was the latter who first introduced me to the gathering lore surrounding the general, and perhaps as a consequence I have ended up with a more nuanced view on this than most.
I tend to believe that Ríos Montt became the totemic figure of Guatemalan civil war demonology, singled out for particular blame because, over time, the issues had apparently become simpler and he was pretty much the only significant participant left to collar.
My views on these matters were strongly influenced in the 90s by Masacres en la Selva, Ixcán 1975-82, an extraordinary book authored by Ricardo Falla, a Jesuit priest with a sideline in almost disturbingly dispassionate anthropological observations of mass murder.
There is a crucial 'scene' that I tend to recall, in which an army patrol has entered a village with the express intention of slaying all of its inhabitants.
Then, word reaches them of the coup that raised Ríos Montt and his two less memorable muckers to the presidency. The bloodshed is put on hold and the soldiers begin to mill around socialising with the very villagers they had only recently proposed to slaughter.
The new government will bring an end to the genocidal policy, they apparently surmised. But then another order comes through. Go ahead. And they do.
A delightful gem of a Netflix movie about two kindred spirits, an eccentric and doomed lady of the manor and an auto-didact with a passion for excavation, who combine to encounter the greatest treasure ever found beneath English soil on the eve of WWII.
This would be a war that would shake up the individualist philosophies that had taken hold before it. In his 1945 essay The War Has Taken Place Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote "We are in the world, mingled with it, compromised with it." Dirty hands became the new post-war buzzword of the existentialist movement, which pointed to a notion of freedom tempered by the demands of the moment which, after all, we are not supposed to rise above.
The Dig is a gently profound tale of how we are compromised by history, how it dirties our hands, yet in a potentially positive fashion.
As such it is not really about the Sutton Hoo finds at all, but how the people who made them came to appreciate how each of us mingles with the history around us, forming part of a human chain, linking the deep, mythical past to the imagined futures of the likes of Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon.
Non Brits probably need to bring to this a basic knowledge of our history and national mythology, not so much our dark ages as our 'darkest hour'.
At the heart of the story, and yet strangely absent, is the man who had himself buried in a ship in Suffolk surrounded by royal regalia and a richness of other extraordinary personal items, Christian and pre-Christian. He is commonly identified as Rædwald of the East Anglians, a powerful early seventh century king mentioned by Bede, said to maintain altars to both Christ and Woden in apartments adjoining his hall.
He was the leader of a group of fairly recent migrants who would give the English their name, their language and perhaps some of their lasting cultural preconceptions, yet formed perhaps just 5-10% of the overall population at the time.
The movie is necessarily shy about the most emblematic of the Sutton Hoo treasures, the king's helmet. When first excavated it was in something like 600 pieces, which is probably why we are denied any artificial big discovery moment.
Shortly afterwards it was re-shattered and then put back together bit by bit, over quite a extended period. The chance discovery of a dragon's head piece in a separate cardboard box turned out to be the solution to the problem posed by the crest. Slotted in between the eyebrows it became clear how both these and the moustache formed part of a winged dragon overpassing the warrior's face. (Seen clearly here in the British Museum's later reconstruction, along with the pagan iconography of its panels.)
The original was adorned with gemstones that almost certainly came from the Indian subcontinent. It was around a hundred years old already at the time of burial. This would date it to the period just after the end of direct Roman rule and in basic shape it does follow the template of the imperial parade helmet. There were two holes in the base of the nose to assist with breathing and the face plate was designed to enhance and deepen the voice of the bearer in a somewhat Vadery fashion.
One of the loveliest pieces found alongside the helmet was this belt buckle, said to be worth by weight in gold precisely the weregeld for a slain thegn or Anglo-Saxon nobleman. So maybe Raedwald liked to loosen his breaches after a big blow out meal at his long table, and thereby show off just how affordable the lives of others there present would be to him.
The real Edith Pretty was said, like many of her class and generation, to be obsessed with spiritualism. A vision of spear-carrying warriors atop the strange mounds has been noted as the inspiration for borrowing excavator Basil Brown from the Ipswich Museum and setting him upon her barrow.
As Pretty, Carey Mulligan is again wistful and wonderful, yet she is outshone in the production by Ralph Fiennes, whose portrayal of Brown is pleasing in the extreme.
Some considerable effort seems to have gone into making Lily James appear less incandescently sexy than she usually does as the slightly frumpy amateur archaeologist Peggy Piggott, and yet the end result is perhaps one of her sexiest roles to date. The trouble here is not so much her fictionalised fling with cousin Rory (Johnny Flynn), but how she ever got married to the closeted Stuart in the first place.
Until Lever's wife Carmen went to the police on February 18, 2018 and accused me of having attacked her when I was not in fact even in Guatemala, I could be said to have been guilty of overlooking the threat that she posed. (Perhaps a classic case of mosquita muerta.)
First impressions should count, and the first time I came across her roughly four years earlier (the time that Lever was trying to apologise to me for repeatedly kicking his dog), I detected an uncanny emotional vacancy emanating from her.
Nevertheless, my wife and I soon both had reason enough to be sympathetic, having concluded that, as the little dog appeared to have vanished, she was perhaps likely to become a victim herself.
We were indeed soon witnessing some unchivalrous behaviour, most memorably when she was heavily pregnant in 2015. I'd been chatting to Lever in front of his main entrance and she pulled up in her car. He continued to converse with me, ignoring the fact that directly behind him she was obviously struggling to open the heavy iron gate.
During the course of my wife's own first lengthy dialogue with her early in 2015, right outside our gate, a bubbly Carmen Solares had announced her engagement, described her wedding dress and then, rather bizarrely invited V to the event itself in May.
V politely refused of course, and found herself gently lecturing the younger woman on how she should only ask along people she knows rather more deeply and would thus have a vested interest in her wellbeing.
Around the same time (February 25, 2015) the mother of our two grey tabbies strayed over the wall and into Lever's garden and I had a perfectly civil exchange with his fiancée during which she permitted me to go inside and collect our errant kitty.
So we both concluded that she was young and possibly a little naïve and given what we had already seen of Lever's behaviour when she was not present, we were inclined towards a compassionate approach. Indeed, once Lever's apparently deliberate encroachments on our territorybecame undeniable, my wife advised me to go easy on the pair of them as they were newlyweds, his wife is pregnant etc.
Then on Saturday August 8, 2015 there was a major rumpus next door. The noise of (a lot of) breakables breaking followed shortly by the bizarre sight and sound of the now Mrs Lever running around starkers in the street outside screeching like a banshee. Her husband, himself only semi-attired, was soon out and began to make use if the sort of deplorable misogynistic language towards her that we'd become all too familiar with later on.
We didn't see what happened next, but can surmise that he somehow man-handled her indoors and then into what has to have been either a cupboard or a very small room, securing the door. From that point onwards, and throughout the night until almost dawn, she could be heard banging and screaming loudly, pleading to be released.
This was a fairly traumatic experience as we had no sense of what we ought to do and in the end did nothing. (There's video of this incident, which is not for sharing in public.)
So on top of our initial inclination towards sympathy we additionally ended up with what one might describe as a legacy of guilt.
Had this been London we'd have instinctively dialled 999 for sure. But here in Guatemala any involvement with local law enforcement tends to come with blowback so, in a sense, we pulled the pillows over our heads.
The first clear sign that Carmen Solares de Lever intended to be our antagonist was when I had a meeting with the engineer in charge of the water department at Cesar Brañas on February 6, 2018.
For a week he had been conducting an investigation we had requested into the excesses that had arisen on our bill since Lever fashioned a sort of swimming pool in his garden.
Not only were we worried about the unusual extra charges which had cropped up, but we had been alerted by the alcalde auxiliar that we could be liable for any issues that might occur should Lever attempt to empty his pool through our drains and out on the western flank of our property. It was also unclear to us that our plumbing system could cope with such a sudden deluge.
Up until this stage this official had been helpful, promising me an expediente on the matter, but the moment I joined him at his desk it was clear that something had changed. 'La Canchita' had been in to see him, he confided.
At this stage all I had asked for was an explanation in writing of the fines and for why the neighbouring property did not feature on their system.I had not made any attempt to report Lever personally for hurto de fluidos to the MP and had no intention of doing so.
Yet somehow, as the official reported it, his wife had discovered that we had asked for an investigation into what were essentially our own private affairs and was apparently determined to actively interfere with it, even though this could only lead to a multilateral dispute that was completely avoidable.
My meeting with the engineer then took a bizarre turn. He asked me if, by any chance, I happened to possess any photos of 'La Canchita' in a bikini.
A clumsy attempt at entrapment I surmised, largely because of what was to follow. If I had said yes, I imagine that he'd have pursued another tack, but since I admonished him for his tasteless and unprofessional inquiry, he said he could perhaps find a way to reimburse me for the excess charges we had been asked to pay.
We'd still have to cough up downstairs first, he added, because this compensation would not be coming from the Municipality itself. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink, say no more squire.
I refused. The investigation was never about the money and anyway, accepting a pay-off in this way in front of a witness (he'd made sure that another, mute Muni employee pulled a chair up to the desk during this exchange) could undoubtedly be just another form of entrapment.
In receiving water and not paying for it, Lever always knew he could be committing a fairly serious delito, and when he admitted the circumstances to me I provided a warning which at the time I thought friendly.
On the 23rd of September 2016 we bumped into each other outside and he asked me out of the blue if we pay for our water. I told him that of course we did.
He looked a bit flummoxed and prattled on how he had inherited a 'special deal' from the previous owner whereby the water supply came free of charge. I made my best sceptical face and served up my friendly warning, adding that freeloading would be frowned upon even more so in this village where the often feeble daytime flow of water has been the number one gripe for at least four decades.
No Meter Lever
Anyway, I had long known about this anomaly.
My refusal of the apparent bribe was arguably the impetus for the false denuncia almost immediately afterwards on February 18 not, as was later suggested, our taste in music (see below).
We have concluded that the Levers will use slurs and sham legal counter-attacks against us as a way of throwing up difficult obstacles to any criminal investigation into his own behaviour.
At a meeting within the Ministerio Público on October 22 last year, their lawyer Claudia Paniagua made a wayward claim that had me looking for my jaw on the shiny terracotta tiles below.
If your jaw is not on the floor now, it should be. An accredited lawyer in this country, with designs on the highest office, suggested in front of a public official in the justice system that being miffed in the manner of a petulant adolescent would be just cause for breaking the law by lying to the police.
And she stated this as if the she were a first hand witness to this dreamt up event.
(Perhaps more significantly, Mrs Lever has now given two completely different sworn testimonies about the events of February 18, 2018 to two different judges at the Juzgado de Paz. By a simple process of elimination, one of these has to be false and thus potentially criminal.)
In my own country you can be jailed for simply ringing the emergency services without a proper pretext.
Having been subjected, during the autumn of 2019, to an intense and really quite loathsome stream of personal abuse via Carmen Solares de Lever's named personal Instagram account, I can honestly say that at no stage during that six week period did it ever occur to me that this alone provoked me into leaving a malicious and bogus statement against her at the local police station. (She dictated that I verbally and even physically abused her that day, "and not for the first time", an account at variance with later assertions that nobody opened the door.)
On the 18th of February 2018 I was up in Campeche Mexico, — and have the passport stamps to show for it — and so could neither have attacked her nor indeed repeatedly played a regeeton track that causes her distress, unless her hearing is astonishingly acute.
Tellingly, she never mentioned this subjectively-traumatic tidbit of Latin pop at the time of her denuncia, nor indeed in front of the judge. This was a detail added two and a half years later by her new lawyer.
And I checked and found that the track was only added to our iTunes Library a few months after the incident, by which time Lever had been long using music with conscripted lyrics supposedly in order to hurt and intimidate us.
If we really had been blasting out this track non-stop for twenty hours I do think that every human and animal on either side of the wall would have been rendered permanently senseless.
Yet in a way Claudia Paniagua was of course correct to suggest that Mrs Lever's denuncia originated as an ill-conceived act of petty vengeance — just not for the reason she was suggesting.
We faced up to our accuser on March 12, 2018 at the Juzgado de Paz.
By this time Lever had already commenced his campaign of misogynistic abuse against V. It was shortly after those initial infractions, that I wrote about the former here in my blog, in a rather fresh state of rage.
Yet the exposure that proved perhaps most stressful to me was having to deal with defending myself against cooked up charges in a foreign court, and when my lawyer advised us to seek reconciliation at the conclusion of the audiencia (suggesting that this was the done thing and would probably put an end to the Levers' hostility), I agreed and I believed him — and this has turned out to be one of the bigger mistakes I have made in my life.
For it's clear to me now that I should have made Mrs Lever face the consequences then and there for her lies, not least because he has made two subsequent false denuncias against me, both now desestimadas.
Indeed, the reconciliation on March 12, 2018 was forged on condition that the Levers build their own wall and the judge duly gave them six months to do so. In order to secure that 'treaty', Mrs Lever must have perjured herself by claiming in the courtroom under oath that she already had a signed-off architectural plan for said wall, and that the application had been duly filed.
Her lawyer Rebeca Barrios then raised her hand and'gave faith as a lawyer' that this paperwork, including the plan, was sitting somewhere in the Muni. It was not. (This is something that could get you disbarred in the UK.) They had, in effect, misdirected the judge to their application to build a bodega.
Outside in the courtyard I shook hands with Mrs Lever and really did hope for the best. She had committed to keeping the peace and furthermore to making sure that everyone else in her household knew that she had, and would thus be bound to collaborate.
Yet within a matter of weeks she was seemingly on the warpath again.
The next move was to go to the Muni and report us for painting our front gate and the edges of the pavement either side. Seriously. You couldn't charaterise this even fancifully as a lio de vecinos, because the matter had nothing to do with the Levers at all.
We had been collaborating with the local COCOPRE with a security matter regarding a mysterious vehicle that tended to park alongside our banqueta every day which somewhat ironically turned out to belong to a fiscal auxiliar at the MP involved in some dangerous liaisons. It was the neighbourhood watch group and the alcalde auxiliar that suggested we paint the pavement edges.
Here she is again in late 2018, apparently dead set on dobbing us in once more, this time for the apparently heinous offence of repairing the cobbled road in front of our house. (It may be worth mentioning here that this empedradowas originally funded and laid down privately by the previous owner of our home, not by the Muni.)
It's that little nod of triumph that makes this clip so delightful.
Around the same time she was also joining in the childish fun of giving the finger whenever possible to our security cameras,more than occasionally whilst accompanied by a toddler.
On the basis of more optimistic advice from the same lawyer, that had defended us against her false denuncia in March 2018, we had installed these cameras in April 2018 precisely to head off the threat of any future legal harassment and, more generally, to tempt the señora to behave herself.
Ambidextrous?
And yet it is surely she not her pareja who must be held responsible for encouraging their cleaner to get in on the act, recorded here on November 7, 2018 making an entirely uncalled-for obscene gesture at my wife.
In a way we are glad that we went on record ages ago with INACIF about our growing concern was that Carmen Solares de Lever would in due course start to weaponise her children against us, because that duly happened right on schedule.
I suppose the most recent development is that late last year on October 29, Mrs Lever took her husband and Lic. Claudia Paniagua to the Ministerio Público in order to make another denuncia against us both, this time making use of a more prejudicial statute: pertubacion de la possesion.
On this occasion the attempted stitch-up was even more blatant. Mrs Lever changed the date of the alleged events, picking a subsequent afternoon which allowed her own gardener to contribute to the evidence (something he was filmed doing)
And to cap it all, took along a picture of our young nephew Alex taken the previous day in an attempt to falsify his identity. We suspect the change of day was planned to allow them to say that the image was of our occasional garden helper who only attended on Saturdays.
If her first pack of porkies was something of a knee-jerk reaction, this one was in a sense much more morally repugnant, because it was clearly premeditated and came packaged with grubby inuendo.
The latter included insinuations about the position of our security cameras, which had been installed by pros and were part of a system documented in detail by the fiscales from the MP the previous February in relation to the aggressive intimidation we'd long been subjected to by her husband.
These possess low-res, wide angle, analogue lenses not telephotos, and the nearest internal camera at the time of the denuncia was situated at least 25m from the property line.
At the time of installation the Levers were in effect benefiting from the privacy afforded by our wall and the plants and trees that we were growing alongside it.
Anyway, article 279 of the local code specifies that wild and damaging allegations of this nature need, at the very least, to be supported by a third-party dictamen and the Levers presented nothing of the sort. Only insinuations.
Incidentally, I won't be making any statements in any of these posts that I would not be prepared to repeat — under oath — at the juzgado. These are all descriptions of concrete events or dialogue.
I do have scruples about perjuring myself. And I am being very careful to properly distinguish between events I suppose to have happened and those I know to have happened, and can prove it.
Whilst Lever himself is WYSIWYG. his wife on the other hand could be characterised as nearly all artifice. And far more ruthless.
The lesson here is that one should take care not to acquire as an embittered foe someone who hasn't really worked hard to get where they are, for individuals with acquired status can act on a sense of inherent vulnerability.
Anyway, the question that any good historian would now be asking is this: is this all just a case of a man who acted as a presumptuous and mildly anti-social next-door neighbour — hell-bent on getting away with whatever he could whenever he could — ultimately led astray by a spiteful spouse, whose ill counsel would ultimately escalate what had begun as a minor border controversy — easily resolvable with a dollop of good manners — into a ruinous and potentially deadly conflict?
Or put it another way: a bloke who was so pig obstinate about not building his own wall or discharging his other obligations as a property owner in Guatemala, that he allowed a containable situation to crumble alarmingly.
Well, Lever left all common decency behind remarkably quickly.
And once that happens, the perpetrator can either come clean and take the punishment or he can try to duck and dive like a shirker, whilst in the meantime doing everything in his power to demean his victim.
Once toxic people lose the ability to control you, they soon resort to an attempt to control how others perceive you.
The incident below was a kind of drive-by derogation. In the evening of the 8th of November, 2018 Lever found us clustered in a small family group, children included, outside our home as he whizzed past on his Douchati shouting "Ahhh, it's the cunt and the ugly bitch", yobbishly.
We ignored him and continued to do so as he settled in his own entrance and began lecturing several generations of my wife's family from a distance about how she had married me for my money.
The two of us met in La Antigua 32 years ago. I had just graduated and my future wife was working here in IT.
We were introduced by her family. During the time we later lived in London she was taken on by two of the biggest investment banks in the City, Bankers Trust and Merril Lynch and was for a long time the higher earner. When I co-founded an ultimately successful digital media company, we had been together for years and in that particular story I owe her so much.
Before spouting such disrespectful and libelous nonsense, Jason Wade Lever needs to take a long hard look in the mirror.
Overall then, I am inclined to see his reluctance to open a water account with the Muni and his use of his wife to hamper any investigation into this as a symptom of a more sinister phenomenon, into which Mrs Lever's persistent meddling with the authorities slots largely as a sub-plot.
By way of a cliffhanger though, I will report that long before we were brushed away by the Departamento de Agua in early 2018, on April 29, 2014 someone had burgled the water meter from right outside our main gate, resulting in a minor flood in the vicinity that lasted several days.
Fortunately, we were advised at the time by an old friend, then the alcalde auxiliar, to properly report this a crime to the PNC, along with the meter's numerical ID.
These devices have some minor intrinsic resale value. But we wondered at the time why of all the water meters in the village, the as yet unidentified thief chose ours.
It was some time before we apprehended the possible connection between this theft and the fact that the missing meter was registered to our address, which was suddenly being shared.
UPDATE
On
October 12, 2023, after a legal battle lasting over four years, Lever
was finally convicted - specifically for the misogynistic verbal assault
of Friday July 26, 2019 and its aftermath.
During
the course of last year Lever's attempts to avoid facing his victim
became ever more blatant and an arraigo was imposed. Faced by the
consequences of his continued attempts to enter and leave the country in disregard
of this judicial order, he finally presented himself at the Juzgado de
Paz.
He first tried to pay off his victim, then tried to turn his own
trial into a reverse-prosecution, whereby my reports of the Levers' bad
behaviour were presented as bad behaviour. Neither of these ruses
prevented the imposition of justice in the end.
A few minutes into this film we both became aware that we might have seen it before, though we weren't entirely sure. Never a good sign!
Teenagers with ouija boards is a very tired conceit, indeed one very likely to induce sleep.
Paco Plaza's take on this stands out quite strongly however, for he avoids the generic high-school character tropes of Hollywood, instead situating this visitation from beyond in an unusual domestic arrangement within a working class suburb of Madrid in 1991 (the no phone zone again), laying on the social realism just enough not to distract.
There's also a captivating, Goya-nominated performance from then newcomer Sandra Escacena, convincingly portraying a melancholic fifteen-year old, at once prematurely adult and trapped in pre-pubescence, forced to act as surrogate carer to three younger siblings, as her own widowed mother works long shifts in a local café-bar called La Cigala.
The latter played, by Ana Torrent, is something of a cult figure in Spanish horror, and we chose Verónica as a follow up to the wonderful Cría Cuervos (1976) on the basis of her appearance here alone.
Overall it is very nice to look at, but not especially scary. No matter how many times you show me a mochila falling on the floor, or indeed a filthy mattress, I am not going to be terrified. Blind nun? Meh.
And it makes no difference to me at all to me that this was supposedly the first time a Spanish police inspector included direct observations of 'inexplicable' phenomena in his report.
Not being a believer in the supernatural, I find that movies springing from this genre most appeal when they play intelligently with the form while still managing to poke around in the pile of seemingly less conscious existential anxieties.
My understanding of the ending differs slightly from the movie's Wikipedia entry. For me this is a metaphysical twist that could have been developed or even just flagged up better: a sort of prematurely-ejaculated ghost, if you would.
That's V outside the little thatched cottage that my parents acquired when I was a baby.
She has always been very emphatic (and in those days very analogue) about demonstrating her disapproval with any supposedly unflattering snaps I might have taken of her.
The village of Letcombe Bassett, 3km southwest of Wantage, remains a smallish cluster of such thatched buildings dating mainly to the seventeenth century.
My father always recounted rather proudly how his property appears in the Domesday Book and there have been significant archaeological finds around the village, including Roman and Iron Age grave sites.
After the second world war the long history of this settlement almost came to an abrupt end when the local council decided it would be too expensive to install mains drainage and planned to relocate the residents.
There's a fascinating British Pathé documentary from 1948 about the ensuing local resistance, which begins with a woman opening the gate of a small home identified as 'Arabella's Cottage', which bears a striking resemblance to ours, yet I believe is another, slightly larger structure very close by.
This was the name Thomas Hardy gave to a dwelling in his fictionalised version of Letcombe Bassett — Cresscombe — in Jude The Obscure. The 'cress' part suggested by the fact that the village was long famous for the cultivation of this fast-growing perennial, and the cry of 'Bassett Cress' was well known in the Covent Garden market of old.
There were other important literary inhabitants and visitors. Jonathan Swift lived at the rectory in 1714 as he finished off Free Thoughts On The Present State Of Affairs and at around the time Alexander Pope is said to have dropped in.
Our old weekend getaway sits within its own little valley through which passes the brook, feeding a pond that my father populated with trout. The A338, running along the one edge of this valley, was once a Roman road.
Letcombe, originally Ledecumbe, derives from lede in the combe or the brook in the valley. The Bassett part comes from a Richard Bassett, who held the manor in 1158.
Alfred the Great was born nearby in Wantage in 849.
A trio of Oscar winners headed up by Denzel, make this retro detective noir a must view surely? Kind of.
It begins with a girl driving down a lonely highway at night, followed by a caption: "October 1990".
Ah, we think, we're been plonked in that narrow temporal block where violent thrillers are starting to accumulate. The no phone zone. (Though there's a cameo from a beeper later on.)
Yet perhaps the very reason this movie feels a bit tired and derivative, or at least as if thirty years of serial killer screenplays had never been written, is that director John Lee Hancock has been trying to get his script taken up for just that long. Spielberg and Eastwood have shown interest along the way, then passed.
Washington starts off well enough, allowing one to think his performance alone will carry one through, but then turns torpid. Luckily at this stage creepy Jared Leto turns up properly. Malek does his thing with the eyes throughout. It's deliciously moody and nocturnal, to the extent that one might not notice that it is not really committing to what's at stake.
The ending is going to feel unsatisfactory to many. I suspect it would have worked better if the film had been released in the year it is set. This way it just adds to one's sense that the audience has been wantonly jerked around by withheld information.
It never ceases to amaze me how many of Antigua's hospitality businesses are owned and managed by rank amateurs.
The precise proportion is frankly anyone's guess, a pie chart that much harder to plot owing to the presence of businesses owned by people who are at least trying to offer a professional service, and yet are prone to the (more than) occasional mess up.
The other stay, staring kitchen ennui in the face, we decided to call up one of the newest entrants for a home-delivered antojo.
No names, as this experience could, unfortunately, be said to be all too exemplary.
The bloke that answered the phone sounded as if the call had woken him up. It was late lunchtime, a period that in Spain at least might qualify as siesta time.
The order was progressing just fine until after I had provided my address, at which point the man on the end of the line informed me that he'd need around thirty minutes to start cooking and then perhaps another twenty or so to deliver.
And then he murmured that there would be a Q20 delivery charge.
While I was mulling all this, he suddenly added 'Oh, I seem to have run out of chicken...'
By then I was close to suggesting that I could deliver some pollo for him to cook from my own freezer.
Here's the thing. This is a new business with the term 'Express' in its name. From the pictures on el feis, I can deduce that it is almost wholly geared up for home delivery. The Q20 surcharge is absurd as it would have cost me less to go and collect this meal in an Uber.
The chicken dish in question is something I have prepared myself and I am well aware that it is not something that can be knocked up from scratch in half an hour.
By far the best home delivery experiences we've during the pandemic have been from local operations that are not hiding behind a brand or a concept and are generally not trying to be something that they are not.
The good news seems to be that nobody that has had any of the leading vaccines against covid-19 has subsequently been hospitalised with a severe form of the disease.
The various jabs are however less than 100% effective in staving off all symptoms and, at least in the case of the Moderna vaccine, reduce transmission by up to 66%. (And it is currently assumed something similar occurs with its competitors.)
This suggests that vaccination passports alone would not be sufficient to give the necessary shot in the arm to international travel in 2021.
Matthew Lynn in the Spectator this week...
At the current rate of the rollout, it will be 2024 before most of Europe hits the 70 per cent inoculation level believed to be necessary to take a population to a critical level of immunity. Australia and Japan have not even started yet, while much of the developing world is being left to fend for itself.
