Loving summer in London!

I have been a bad blogger of late.  My excuse?  It's summer in London.  A real, proper summer in London.  Not like the lousy summers we've had for the preceding three years that I've been here.  

The first summer I ever spent in London I found myself trapped in Oxford because of the floods.  That's right - the middle of summer and there were floods trapping us in the town and closing off all roads to London.  The second summer I waited patiently for the sun and the heat to arrive and it never did.  Last summer the papers promised us a "barbecue summer" but, while there were one or two splendid days,  that was it.  So you can imagine my delight at having a proper summer for once.  I'm determined to make the most of each and every sunny day in case summer stops tomorrow.  For that reason, I haven't been writing much.

One of the best things about summer in England is the long days.  The sun only seems to finally disappear at around 10 pm, meaning that the afternoons stretch into evenings and picnics can safely run until 9 pm.  So we have been having quite a few picnics. 

There has also been an endless supply of excellent bands stopping in London as they make their way through Europe on the festival circuit.  Last week we saw the Avett Brothers (who were incredible) and a couple of weeks before that we saw Local Natives (also excellent).  Tomorrow night we are off to see Grizzly Bear in Hyde Park.

It is also World Cup fever over here, which means lots of pub lunches followed by game watching.  I confess I don't know anything about the soccer (or "football", as I'm told I must call it).  In fact, the very first World Cup game I watched I had to ask some friends why one player was wearing a different colour to all the other players.  They told me it was because he wasn't one of the players - he was the umpire.  Not that this lack of knowledge has stopped me from watching the games.  In fact, so far as my work colleagues are concerned, I'm a mad keen football fan.  That is because all such fans have been allowed to knock off work early to watch the England matches.  Last Wednesday afternoon all the mad keen football fans were allowed to leave work at 2 pm to catch the afternoon's match.   I insisted I was such a fan even though, in fact, it took me the better part of the game to work out which team was which.  Pretending to be a mad keen fan when I'm not was not easy.  I had to quickly excuse myself from the conversation when it has turned to matters (things like the team line up or best players) where I thought my ignorance would be uncovered.   When questions on those topics were fired at me, I made the excuse I was dying to go to the toilet and bolted out of the room, returning only when it was safe.  That avoided my ignorance being uncovered, but I suspect my colleagues now think I have either a very weak bladder or chronic diarrhea. 

Today is a blisteringly hot 31 degrees.  As I'm typing this I'm looking out the window and thinking that there are better places to be than behind a computer screen. I'm going to try and convince G to come swimming with me in the ponds in Hampstead Heath or to go for a jog.  And then it's off to the pub to watch the (likely last) England game of the world cup.  I am genuinely barracking for them this time.  If they get through, I'm anticipating that us mad keen fans will have a good excuse to take a few more afternoons off work.

I love London in summer!

nudity in Barcelona

Every time we have been to Barcelona (three and still counting), we encounter a nudist.  This trip was no exception, as we saw a young man confidently walking the streets wearing only shoes and a satchel. What made this trip different from most was that this time around I found myself an unwilling nudist (or almost nudist).

The first occasion of my near nudity arose due to the ill-thought out lifts in our hotel.  Our hotel had a roof-top pool (or it was advertised as such; really, it was no bigger than a large bath).  One afternoon, before heading out to Primavera, I decided to take a quick dip.  As we were on the 5th floor and the pool was on the 9th, I thought it would be safe simply to catch the lift from our floor to the pool wearing my bikini and nothing else.  Given that towels were provided on the 9th floor, I didn't even bother to wrap a towel around my waist. 

There were three lifts and their design favoured style over functionality.  The way that the lifts worked was that you would select which floor you wanted to go to before entering the lift, using a numbered keypad on the wall. Once you pressed the number of the floor you wanted to go to, the keypad would then flash a letter "A", "B" or "C".  Then, when one of the three lifts arrived, the idea was you checked to make sure it was the lift designated with the letter that had been flashed on the  keypad before stepping into it and waiting for it to deposit you on the correct floor.  The inside of the lift had no buttons, so you could not change the lift's destination once inside it.

The difficulty with the hotel's lift system is that, when you are tired from getting home at 5 am the night before, it's hard to keep track of what letter flashes on the keypad and so which lift you are meant to get into.  As I discovered the hard way, if you don't pay attention to the letter flashed at you and simply hop in the first lift that arrives, you can find yourself deposited on a floor you never intended to visit.  In my case, when the lift stopped and its doors opened, I ambled out in my bikini, only to find myself standing in the foyer of the hotel rather than on its roof.  Worse still, there was a large group of businessmen standing by the information desk.  Initially none of them noticed me as I stood self-consciously in my bikini, frantically pressing "9" on the keypad and waiting for my designated lift to arrive.  It was at that point that one of the employees behind the information desk decided to be helpful, and shouted to me "madam, you must look at the letter that appears on the screen.  You must get in the lift that matches the letter if you want to go to the pool.  You must have gone into the wrong lift to be down here".  There was no avoiding the bemused stares of the businessmen in their suits after that.

That incident paled in comparison to the one that was to follow. 

The next day, I rolled out of bed, tired and bleary eyed and wandered into the bathroom.  I stripped off my pyjamas, turned the shower on and, while waiting for the water to warm up, went into the adjoining toilet.  These details of my ablutions are necessary, for reasons that will become apparent. The window in front of the toilet was a large panel of clear glass.  There were no curtains.  This did not bother me, as I thought at the time that the window did not need curtains given that it simply looked out to the roofs of nearby hotels. 

As I sat on the toilet, in all my naked glory, I suddenly found myself face to face with a man, who was pressed against the panel of glass like spiderman, peering in at me.  I sat for what seemed like an eternity, trying to work out if I was dreaming or hallucinating, before realising neither to be the case; instead, I was face-to-face with a window cleaner who seemingly had no intention of averting his eyes from my state of complete nudity.  The last time anyone had seen me in this state I was around 2 years old.  And even then, according to my mother, I usually at least wore some clothing by way of my underpants on my head. 

It is hard to muster much dignity when you have been seen, naked, on the loo but I did my best, covering what bits of me I could with my hands and running out of the toilet.  A quick exploration of the hotel afterwards meant I found the culprit - it seems the hotel has its own window cleaners who work off the roof of the hotel and clean the windows every morning.   

Perhaps the Spanish are so comfortable with nudity they do not see the need for curtains, blinds or even some warning about the window cleaners attending the building every morning.  I am not quite so easygoing. 

I confess that these incidents have not given me a taste for the life of a nudist and you are unlikely, at any point soon, to see me embracing the nudist lifestyle in Barcelona.

Primavera!

This week I have been recovering from an exotic Spanish cold.  It wasn't the sort of memento I was hoping to take back from my holiday in Barcelona, but my suffering was worth it for the fun we had over the previous week. 

G and I were in Barcelona for the Primavera music festival, a festival well worth the exclamation mark assigned to it in the title to this piece.  Primavera is a three day orgy of music and involved some old-time favourite bands such as Pavement and the Pixies, as well as some of our more recent favourites, such as Wild Beasts and Florence and the Machine.  I also discovered a new-found love for acts I had thought I despised, such as the Pet Shop Boys.  You can see the full line-up here.

The holiday had a rather inauspicious beginning.  G and I arrived at our hotel in Barcelona (the Silken on Avenue Diagonal) in the early hours of a Thursday only to be told that, notwithstanding the fact we had pre-paid for a week's stay in the hotel, the hotel was overbooked and they had no room to give us.  We were ferried to an associated hotel for the night.  We then returned to our booked hotel the next morning, grumpy and tired.  To compensate for their error (or perhaps simply to stop us complaining at the hotel's front desk) we were upgraded to a suite for the remainder of our stay and provided with a daily complementary breakfast.   

On the Thursday two friends, Ke and Ka, arrived.  The four of us then began the routine we would follow for the next three days. We spent an afternoon wandering around Barcelona, stopping for the odd tapas meal and drink.  Then we all met in our suite at around 5 pm for cava and nibbles before heading to Primavera.  There, we fueled up on beer, red bull, jaggermeister shots (what can I say - they were only 1 euro each) and food from the food court before dancing the night away until around 4 am.  We also met up with some more friends who were in Barcelona for the party and generally had a debauched and excellent time. 

After three excellent days of partying, G and I then finished the trip off with another three nights of r&r in Barcelona.

The only downside to the trip was the fact that most of the hotel saw me nude, or nearly nude.  But I'll save that for another blog post.