Sundays are not what they used to be. If we go back far enough then they consisted of family walks, in uncomfortable best clothes, in the quiet streets of post-Sunday lunch Cambridge. That was shortly after the Roman’s left Britannia, I believe. More recently they have been days when we might take a gentle walk around the city park in very comfortable and exceeding casual clothes before lunch. Not a huge change, you might think, but don’t underestimate the effect of uncomfortable clothes – having to wear a tie and tightly buttoned collar when you are 8 years old is not something to be lightly dismissed.
Even more recently they have taken a more sinister turn. A few weeks ago I found I was presenting some of my work to a group of people in Harrogate who clearly didn’t think that Sunday mornings were a time for dossing around. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t a bad thing to do, but as I worked my mind did slip back a couple of decades when I might have made the effort to pick up the papers on the way to the pub for a Sunday pint with some mates. The following week I was only saved from more Sunday work by the unusual event of the Icelandic volcano, which just shows how bad things have got when only an act of God can make your Sunday a day of rest, and the week following I found myself swiping the mozzies at the end of the conference in Namibia. Last Sunday had hardly got underway, though, when I was accosted by more-than-miffed colleagues who had been presented with hotel bills in Guimarães where the APPI Conference had been taking place. It isn’t that they were expecting free hotel rooms, just that they expected someone else to pick up the bill for them. Quite right too, but my worry – soon to be confirmed when I went to the hotel to sort out the mess – was to find that our VIP guests, the god-like figure David Crystal and the more ephemeral figure of the divine poet Moniza Alvi had also been asked to pick up their own tabs when checking out some two hours previously. Time for maximum possible red face on my part and rehearsal of the most abject apologies possible to esteemed guests when they finally climbed off their London bound plane.
Never mind, a chance to recoup Sunday when we drove Claudia and Juan up to Vigo (the only alternative to the 90 minute drive would have been a 5 hour train journey), stopping off for lunch in the attractive riverside town of Ponte de Lima, where we admired the Roman legionnaires still plucking up the courage to cross the river Lima, which they had mistaken for the memory sucking river Lethe. Crossing into Galicia we were reminded of the curious roads the Galicians seem to favour. Are the lanes really narrower than usual, or are the banks than seem to line the roads exceptionally high, or what? You definitely know you’re driving somewhere else quite unlike anywhere else in either Spain or Portugal. The airport was fun, if your idea of fun is rather a bent and twisted variety. Finding it was fun enough and the road works had Auntie Doris, the voice in our hard working GPS machine, getting quite excited – hysterical even. Even when we found the airport we weren’t too sure. I mean normally one recognises an airport. Planes are one normally reliable indicator. Terminal buildings are another. Signs saying ‘Welcome’ or ‘Bienvenido’ to XXX Airport/Aeropuerto are also a fairly decent clues. None of these, but gradually it became clear by the baggage that people were wheeling about the building site that we might be near. The multi-story car park was a typical Galician construction – with lanes constructed up a gradient of 45º and only 1 mm wider than the vehicles, with a tight 180º turn at the top of the ramp. Clever. Now we left Claudia and Juan in their hired car, by now expertly negotiated from the Europcar people, trying to find their way out of car park number two where their car was parked, a car park of such cunning design that it had an entrance but no obvious exit. Now it is quite possible that they are still trying to find their way out and that they never got to Baionna at all but we were still in full Sunday mood, skimming back down the road in the bright sunlight and planning where we’d eat that evening.
Which just goes to show that you have to get hold of Sundays and shake them a bit and they turn out all right. That, and make sure you don’t wear short trousers and ties to go walking the streets in.
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