Returned yesterday from a couple of days in the UK to hand over to relatives and friends signed copies of my first novel, The De Clerambault Code, a psychological suspense thriller. Notwithstanding it is currently in the top 2% of Amazon UK book sales, I don't believe I need concern myself that those signed copies will go straight on eBay or be put up for immediate auction as if they were the latest JK Rowling...
Flying back over sodden, wind-swept, rain-lashed parts of the UK didn't present quite the same biblical images as last year's flooding but they came close. Interestingly, heavy rainfall in summer is a fact taken almost for granted now in the UK as are news items in both print and broadcast journalism about its effect on retail sales in terms of company losses on summer clothing, certain foods, garden furniture and so on. We read, for instance,that during cool weather the public eat more comfort food like chocolate - hence those sales are up - but fewer icecreams - so those sales are down. And all this bad news - poor sales and poor weather - hugely magnified during the current credit crunch.
And yet, poor summer weather isn't unknown in Spain. Yesterday, the leading item featured on Telemadrid - the only Spanish TV station we can access - was the previous evening's gigantic maelstrom of... hail! Madrid's municipal workers could be seen scooping up golf ball size hail stones from storm drains whilst rescue services were busy winching out stranded passengers from cars abandoned in flooded streets that were beginning to resemble small rivers. And some of Madrid's motorways, roads and tunnels were so flooded that numbers of commuters were unable to get to work by car and had to cram themselves into already crowded buses...
That same evening, too, we had a storm in Andalucia, though with nothing like the severity and ferocity of Madrid's. Everyone in the block was woken up late in the night by a huge, deafening crash and, even before the son et lumière thunder and lightening show took centre stage, I'm sure I wasn't the only one whose immediate, semi-comatose thought was whether the Large Hadron Collider had been activated a few hours early and a rogue proton taken a wrong turn down one of the 27 km long underground tunnels circling Geneva. And the end really was nigh...
But the end certainly isn't nigh - yet - for Señora Noriega, one of my apartment block's few permanent residents who lives on the ground floor and whom I bumped into on my return. I know she originated from Panama but my Spanish is as weak as her health so it's been impossible so far to establish if she is a relative, maybe even the wife, of former General Noriega of President Reagan/Contras fame. The surname is, after all, extremely rare. Only one is listed in the whole of the local telephone directory and that's hers...
Señora Noriega is a nice, elderly lady but she does possess one big drawback. And that is her dog. A yappy, blond bichon frise that she dotes on - as do so many elderly ladies here as in France and Italy. Maybe it's a southern Mediterranean thing. Whilst in the UK women take up golf or good causes when children fly the nest, here it's a dog!
In fact, you see as many canine peluquerias (grooming spas) around town as you do women's hairdressing salons. And since Señora Noriega can't get out much, she has the mobile peluqueria visit a couple of times a week. Just for a wash, blowdry and pedicure. For Lola, that is. Well, at least there's one gorgeous-looking female on the block...
Flying back over sodden, wind-swept, rain-lashed parts of the UK didn't present quite the same biblical images as last year's flooding but they came close. Interestingly, heavy rainfall in summer is a fact taken almost for granted now in the UK as are news items in both print and broadcast journalism about its effect on retail sales in terms of company losses on summer clothing, certain foods, garden furniture and so on. We read, for instance,that during cool weather the public eat more comfort food like chocolate - hence those sales are up - but fewer icecreams - so those sales are down. And all this bad news - poor sales and poor weather - hugely magnified during the current credit crunch.
And yet, poor summer weather isn't unknown in Spain. Yesterday, the leading item featured on Telemadrid - the only Spanish TV station we can access - was the previous evening's gigantic maelstrom of... hail! Madrid's municipal workers could be seen scooping up golf ball size hail stones from storm drains whilst rescue services were busy winching out stranded passengers from cars abandoned in flooded streets that were beginning to resemble small rivers. And some of Madrid's motorways, roads and tunnels were so flooded that numbers of commuters were unable to get to work by car and had to cram themselves into already crowded buses...
That same evening, too, we had a storm in Andalucia, though with nothing like the severity and ferocity of Madrid's. Everyone in the block was woken up late in the night by a huge, deafening crash and, even before the son et lumière thunder and lightening show took centre stage, I'm sure I wasn't the only one whose immediate, semi-comatose thought was whether the Large Hadron Collider had been activated a few hours early and a rogue proton taken a wrong turn down one of the 27 km long underground tunnels circling Geneva. And the end really was nigh...
But the end certainly isn't nigh - yet - for Señora Noriega, one of my apartment block's few permanent residents who lives on the ground floor and whom I bumped into on my return. I know she originated from Panama but my Spanish is as weak as her health so it's been impossible so far to establish if she is a relative, maybe even the wife, of former General Noriega of President Reagan/Contras fame. The surname is, after all, extremely rare. Only one is listed in the whole of the local telephone directory and that's hers...
Señora Noriega is a nice, elderly lady but she does possess one big drawback. And that is her dog. A yappy, blond bichon frise that she dotes on - as do so many elderly ladies here as in France and Italy. Maybe it's a southern Mediterranean thing. Whilst in the UK women take up golf or good causes when children fly the nest, here it's a dog!
In fact, you see as many canine peluquerias (grooming spas) around town as you do women's hairdressing salons. And since Señora Noriega can't get out much, she has the mobile peluqueria visit a couple of times a week. Just for a wash, blowdry and pedicure. For Lola, that is. Well, at least there's one gorgeous-looking female on the block...
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