YOU WANT SOME?

After so much time with­out being able to visit due to travel re­stric­tions and health con­cerns, I have ac­tu­ally vis­ited my home­land three times in the last two months. I never in­tended to, but my mother’s age and an op­por­tu­nity to visit an old friend in Lon­don to see a par­tic­u­lar show I wanted my son to see meant the three trips were all squeezed in at the end of the year.

Now, when­ever I visit my home­land I am al­ways on the look­out for con­tent for this col­umn, be­cause that’s why I started writ­ing it in the first place, to make cul­tural com­par­isons with my adopted home­land after mak­ing Cat­alo­nia my home so many years ago. The thing is, I started writ­ing it be­cause cul­tural phe­nom­ena about Cat­alo­nia used to seem strange to me, but now it is the other way around. Now it al­most feels like I am a for­eigner in my own coun­try when I re­turn there, which, al­though some­what dis­turb­ing on a psy­cho­log­i­cal level, still serves the pur­poses of this col­umn nicely. And even more so when my Barcelona-born adult son joins me on my trav­els, since he is keen to learn more about the ways of his fa­ther’s peo­ple – to put it in more po­etic terms – hav­ing spent his early child­hood in Girona and the rest in Barcelona.

And I do have plenty to re­port from the land of Brexit. But with­out going into pol­i­tics and what seems to me to have been the ut­terly ru­inous de­ci­sion of break­ing away from the EU – wit­ness the dis­as­trous eco­nomic and so­cial state of af­fairs cur­rently grip­ping the UK, with no fore­see­able light at the end of the tun­nel – I’ll refer to an anec­dote from our trip to Lon­don in early De­cem­ber, where my son got to wit­ness first-hand a rather shock­ing side of my coun­try’s char­ac­ter.

There we were, walk­ing down the street in the di­rec­tion of my friend’s house in North Lon­don, when the three of us – my friend, my son and my­self – in­ad­ver­tently caused a bot­tle­neck on the pave­ment be­tween the ter­raced houses and parked cars, some 50 yards from a bus stop. At that mo­ment, a bus passed us and I heard an ad­mit­tedly slightly im­pa­tient voice from be­hind say “Can I get through please?” I made way for the man, who was clearly try­ing to catch the afore­men­tioned bus, and he hur­ried past us. So far, noth­ing un­usual. But then, quite out of char­ac­ter for some­one I’ve known for around 35 years, my friend said “Al­right grandad!” I hadn’t yet seen the ap­pear­ance of the man in ques­tion, and when he turned to con­front us with that very typ­i­cal British arms-out pose that sig­ni­fies “Come on then, you want some?” I was fairly as­tounded to see that he was roughly the same age as my friend and I – that is, mid-50s – and re­sem­bled a uni­ver­sity pro­fes­sor in his tweed leather-elbow patched jacket, rather than a mem­ber of some fear­some Lon­don gang. I al­most laughed at the rather pre­pos­ter­ous sight of this be­spec­ta­cled man ap­proach­ing pen­sion­able age chal­leng­ing the three of us to a fight, but, re­al­is­ing that would only in­flame the sit­u­a­tion, I man­aged to con­tain my mirth and calmed him down with a sooth­ing ges­ture re­lay­ing the well-known British mes­sage of “It’s not worth it mate”.

The up­shot of this en­counter was three­fold: a) the man missed his bus, b) we had some­thing to talk and in­deed laugh about on the rest of our walk home, and c) my son got to ex­press his in­credulity that a man of ad­vanc­ing years would be will­ing to get into a street fight with three strangers over a dis­parag­ing re­mark. But that is sim­ply part of his on­go­ing ed­u­ca­tion over his fa­ther’s cul­ture. Look­ing at some­one the wrong way can get you into trou­ble, let alone shout­ing ironic re­marks at them in the street.

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