GRASSY ARSE

I need to lighten up. My ar­ti­cles of late have been pretty grim. Apolo­gies.

First of all, though, we need to ho­n­our a crown­ing mo­ment.... In case you missed it.... Eu­rope Day, May 9th. The con­ti­nent’s eco­nomic and so­cial col­lab­o­ra­tion in an un­sta­ble world and, fun­da­men­tally, the en­dur­ing peace among mem­bers, are worth com­mem­o­rat­ing. The union is far from flaw­less but every­one is at the table. Talk­ing never works, until it does. Diplo­macy is to never stop try­ing. It is bonkers to get up, throw a wob­bly and storm out.

As for the new king of Britons, with his de­flat­ing com­mon­wealth, frac­tious realm and crit­i­cal mass of am­biva­lent is­landers, I will leave you to de­cide whether his coro­na­tion was glo­ri­ous pageantry and a timely flag-wav­ing boost for a flag­ging na­tion, or gross and fur­ther ev­i­dence that the coun­try of my birth is so ob­sessed with the past to be in­creas­ingly di­vorced from re­al­ity (to the lam­en­ta­ble detri­ment of all, es­pe­cially the poor­est and the younger gen­er­a­tion). John of Gaunt’s dying speech in Shake­speare’s Richard III springs to mind.

Any­way, I want to talk about my Mum. She loved Cat­alo­nia. With an Iber­ian an­ces­tor’s genes promi­nent in her com­plex­ion, she felt at home. She was no lin­guist, but at least she tried. “Grassy arse” summed up her grat­i­tude as well as blud­geon­ing of the lan­guage, but on she went and the ef­fort was al­ways ap­pre­ci­ated.

I much pre­fer hear­ing some­one have a stab at the lingo in­stead of plough­ing on with Eng­lish as if it is uni­ver­sal, while ap­ply­ing the tried, tested and ut­terly use­less tac­tic of shout­ing.

Lluís the car­pen­ter had an ex­pres­sion of con­sti­pa­tion. He was des­per­ately try­ing to fathom what the loud and in­cred­u­lous Eng­lish­man wanted. “I WANT A DOOR! A DOOR!”. At this point he opened an imag­i­nary door, stepped through and closed it be­hind him. Lluís was by this point strain­ing so hard to grasp what was going on he was turn­ing pur­ple.

The Eng­lish­man turned and looked at me with an ex­pres­sion that said this bloke is a berk. I en­joyed ad­vis­ing him he had got the wrong man. There was a berk in the work­shop, but it wasn’t Lluís.

In April Mag­gie and I cel­e­brated 30 years to­gether. We took the high speed train to Madrid and Mag­gie and I rooted our­selves in the Lavapiés dis­trict, where we met gor­geous peo­ple from the city and Cen­tral and South Amer­ica and, yes, we sought to freshen up our Span­ish.

Tapas bars fea­tured, nat­u­rally, and in one we were pay­ing when an Eng­lish cou­ple set­tled by the win­dow.

The waiter, who we had fath­omed was Car­los, was whizzing in all di­rec­tions. The cou­ple sum­moned him.

“We want a beer and -”

“Beer? Many?”

At which point the woman made an ef­fort. She spoke Eng­lish, but in a Span­ish ac­cent.

“Juan.”

“I am Car­los.”

“JUAN” She held up one fin­ger em­phat­i­cally. “JUAN!”

Car­los re­treated. As did we.

Grassy arse.