HOT IN THE CITY TONIGHT

So the sum­mer is draw­ing to a close, which means that all my neigh­bours’ an­tics of baby tor­tur­ing, dog abus­ing, reg­gae­ton and trap blar­ing, scream­ing blue mur­der, ham­mer­ing and drilling, pi­geon-feed­ing racist rant­ing and vi­o­lin prac­tis­ing will no longer be on pub­lic dis­play as the heat once again be­comes bear­able and peo­ple start clos­ing their win­dows.

It’s the same every sum­mer: once the real heat ar­rives, and tem­per­a­tures hit the 30s and be­yond, the mad­ness in my neigh­bour­hood be­gins. But it is a very pub­lic mad­ness, be­cause in the nar­row Sant Ger­vasi street where I live, when peo­ple open their win­dows wide, every­one else be­comes privy to every small de­tail of their lives. From ba­bies and pets strug­gling to cope with the heat (for the love of God, some­one do some­thing to stop all the dogs from bark­ing!), to the ten­sions of fraught re­la­tion­ships suf­fer­ing in the heat, my neigh­bours’ de­ci­sion to start doing all that in­dus­trial re­fur­bish­ing work on their flat, the el­derly Basque woman who lives across the street from me feed­ing the mul­ti­tude of coo­ing (and crap­ping) pi­geons on and above her win­dowsill while is­su­ing racist curses in Span­ish to any­one who will lis­ten – some of us have no choice, to the would-be Sher­lock Holmes screech­ing away on the vi­o­lin at all hours, there is no short­age of can­di­dates to dis­turb my peace dur­ing the sum­mer months.

In an ideal world, I would pack up and leave like many of my fel­low local res­i­dents, head­ing for my beach­side/lake­side/moun­tain coun­try house, cabin, car­a­van… but as a guiri who ar­rived here with few re­sources some 30 years ago, I have never been able to af­ford a sec­ond res­i­dence in the sum­mer, and even less so now with the way prices have rock­eted in re­cent years.

In a bid to change my sum­mer for­tunes, I have re­cently de­ter­mined to move out of the city in the near fu­ture and look for a quiet place to live nearer na­ture, so I will no longer have to tol­er­ate the guy who uses my street as a work­shop to cut ce­ram­ics with a power saw, un­ruly and thor­oughly dis­re­spect­ful French Airbnb tourist neigh­bours, TV ad­dicts who blare their mind­less pro­grammes out at all times of the night and day… you didn’t think that ini­tial list I made at the be­gin­ning of this col­umn was ex­haus­tive did you? Oh no, there are plenty more where that came from. And I al­ways find it hard to be­lieve that in a city so clearly civic-minded as Barcelona so many peo­ple have lit­tle com­punc­tion at shar­ing their dread­ful noises with those un­lucky enough to live within earshot.

All that being said, there is one ex­cep­tion to this dread­ful state of af­fairs. When I do even­tu­ally up sticks and leave the neigh­bour­hood, I will miss my local opera singer and blues pi­anist neigh­bours, who make my sum­mer more bear­able with their beau­ti­ful music. I have a “one in ten” the­ory that fits pretty much every­thing – an ex­am­ple would be that one in ten taxi dri­vers can ac­tu­ally drive safely, or one in ten peo­ple will show some cour­tesy and let you pass when you come face to face in a door­way. And my pro­fes­sional mu­si­cian neigh­bours are the one in ten who don’t make my life a mis­ery when the sum­mer comes round, so let this be my ex­pres­sion of thanks to them, rather than a moan about city sum­mer life.

Opin­ion