The Here and Now

Even though I trained as a historian, I'm not comfortable dwelling too much on what's been and gone, so no more about my past for a while. And if you're wondering why I studied history in the first place, I've come to the conclusion thirty years on that the choice of subject was driven by a need to understand the present.

It didn't work, I'm still as baffled by the present as always. So to keep things simple, here's the here and now:

Well, the sun's shining today (ok, it is Spain but it rains here more than you'd think and then some). If I say it rained a couple of days ago that doesn't quite catch the intensity of Spanish rain. To try and illustrate what I mean, not too far from here there are the ruins of a large church complex; it was destroyed in the eighteenth century by rain. I'm not kidding, rain here can be like the wrath of God when it tries hard enough.

So, the sun's shining, and there's a stiffish breeze blowing the trees in the park opposite. When it's quiet round here - and believe me the Spanish are rarely quiet - you can usually hear the waves on the sea-shore 350 metres away. However the current soundscape contains dogs barking, kids running around the play area in the park, and a bunch of guys from the ayuntamiento revving up their weed-whackers.

... and suddenly, silence. It's often like that; there's an unspoken collective agreement to take a break mid-afternoon: parents drift off with their kids, cats bed down in sunny spots, dogs stop barking. If Wifie wasn't playing Okami on her Wii, and yelling in frustration when things go wrong I could probably hear the sea.

As for smells, courtesy of a fellow traveller's sneeze returning from Sardinia three days ago, I can't smell a damn thing. Tomorrow I want to talk about history.