Back in the Jug Agane

Saturday mid-February; oops, two months since the last post.

It is cold today and the wind is howling about the building like Wuthering Heights, whistling in all the windows. Today is the second day of rain in a row, bizarre! I woke early on Friday morning to one of Buenos Aires’s amazing electrical storms. Luckily, I awoke before the rain got going and was able to shut the shutters and windows to keep my lovely wooden floors safe and dry. It was a while before I could get back to sleep, so I lay in bed watching the room light up with every flash and listening to the rain getting heavier and heavier outside. My bedroom windows stayed open - there is a covered balcony outside them so the rain never gets in and the heat of Thursday was still quite something.

The rain continued until late yesterday afternoon, when I threw on some clothes and ran out to the local shops to get a few things. Most desperate was white spirit because I am painting again and I knew the *fork handles* hardware stores would be closed on a Saturday.

This morning it was raining again and (relatively) cold at 20 degrees. I almost need to put socks on and as it is am wearing a three-quarter sleeved t-shirt. Brrrrr! So what better than to sit at the computer and try to blog a little?

As you may know, I have been to Blighty for Christmas and January - which was an interesting and rather mixed experience. I have been wondering what to say about it, it was so odd. Now I have been back a couple of weeks, the trip has passed into that dreamlike thing that always happens to holidays.

It is a very strange thing to go back for a holiday to a life you are leaving behind, where some things are exactly the same, some have moved on a bit and others are irrevocably changed. It was harder to leave it this time; it felt more permanent and it was clearer to me what I will miss and not miss. I will miss the friendships that stand on foundations decades thick, as well as those that spring up easily in a common culture and language. I won’t miss the weather and I won’t miss the whingeing!

As any fule kno, the English weather is a chiz. I landed a couple of days before Xmas in fog at minus 2 degrees. Here’s a picture from the plane.

We were held on the apron while the ground crew defrosted one of the planes that had been sitting at a gate overnight and whose flight had been cancelled before they could get it out of our parking space. Actually it was lucky I was flying with BA as short haul flights were all cancelled so if I had come in on one of the European airlines, I’d have been stuck in Milan or Frankfurt or some such airport for Christmas. What horror - no sprouts!

The sun did not show for a week. Then it came out for a couple of hours. Then it rained thin, icy rain. Then it was another week before the sun came out. And the cloud was so LOW! Actually physically oppressively low. I woke up on New Year’s day, despite having had a lovely evening with my sister and her friends, feeling pinned to the bed by deep, deep woe. I just wanted to bury my head under the covers until it was time to come home. How bizarre. Probably a good thing in a way to remember how ghastly it can be to be alive. Well, I say that as if I needed or wanted reminding!

Anyway, I saw a lot of people but in many cases it all felt a bit inadequate. Some people spent the time just ranting or moaning on about some bloody topic, whether or not it was of any interest to me, which was a bit of a shock. Are my conversational skills so poor that I can’t change the subject? Must do something about that! Not that my having moved to South America is intrinsically more interesting than their day to day worries! Overall, there was the dawning realisation that that isn’t my life any more and all of those relationships must change.

Avid readers will know that the highlights of my visit were going to be meeting my new niece Marnie and attending Michael & Oswaldo’s wedding. Hurrah for both of those things!

Meeting Marnie:

Marnie came to my Dad’s house on Christmas day and was a real peach. We had a lovely day in fact. Apart from Marnie and her parents, one of my sisters came with her family and we got my Mum out of the nursing home for the afternoon. So that was ten people to cook lunch for and a baby to cuddle. The nephews on the whole were very well behaved and generally delightful - one small strop which isn’t bad for such a big day. The food was excellent (of course, I cooked it mostly!) and the cuddles plentiful.

I saw Marnie a few times after that and she is adorable. It is odd to think that I will never know her as well as I have known my other nieces and nephews, simply because I will rarely be there. The others are all up and running now and know who I am when I talk to them on the phone but it will be hard to get any sort of rapport going with her.

The wedding was just fabulous. The ceremony was in a lovely room in Marylebone town hall. It started with the strains of Ethel Merman while we waited for the boys, then they came in and made their vows - which seemed mainly to do with sharing a life of eating and drinking - and there was the rather dry civil partnership bit - and a swapping of rings and signing of the register. Then lots of hugging & kisses and photographs and meeting of old friends and new faces and a smattering of tears & showtunes throughout.

After the ceremony, we went off to a private room at Rules in Covent Garden for lunch. It was excellent. We ate and drank well, Oswaldo made a toast and yes, there was some singing. It was so nice to meet their friends and I think we all would agree what a lovely bunch of people we are! The room was just bursting with goodwill. I love weddings. It happened to be Michael’s birthday too so a cake appeared at some point but by that stage everyone was too stuffed to eat any more, so it was taken away and boxed up.

The happy couple, over the threshhold and straight into a number:

In the evening, we went to their flat for more drinking, lots of cheese and some serious non-stop renditions of showtunes. It took weeks to get ‘No Business like Showbusiness’ out of my head and now I risk it all by typing that… I’ll be singing it again for days! Yes indeed, I have already started. It was joyful. Not always tuneful, but joyful certainly! The strongest picture in my mind is of the happy couple doing a rendition of some number from Wicked where the witch starts flying. Oswaldo, eyes wide with wonder, giving a commentary on the number and how it was staged, then catching up with Michael who has carried on with the song. I think I would hate to see the actual thing just in case it interferes with my memory of their rendition.

It really was a fabulous day.

There were other highlights, but it would be a mistake to list them all. Same goes for all the things I didn’t get round to. I'll stick to the two most howling omissions: I did not make it either up to the North or out to the West to see some of my favourite people. It was extra nice though when a couple of people made journeys to come to me. I think I need to plan better next time. Daddy has suggested I have a big party at his house and I think he is right.

I got shot of an amazing amount of stuff while I was there and Daddy can now see daylight from the window under the stairs. We took crates and crates of books to Oxfam, some of which I may regret but there is no point keeping them indefinitely and there was no question of shipping old paperbacks out here. Ditto the boxes and boxes and bags of clothes and trinkets that went to the hospice shop. It was quite a relief really to shed possessions. Amazingly, there is still quite a quantity of stuff I will have to deal with one way or another next time I go back but happily Daddy doesn’t seem all that fussed about giving it floor space.

I have not been dancing much since I got back for one reason and another. The first week I was a bit out of it with a cold and jetlag. Then this week I have been on a mission catching up with friends because I had let that slip so badly last year and I feel I need to make more of an effort with my social life. I went out for drinks or food on a couple of what would otherwise have been good dancing nights.

Needless to say, I have been to a couple of top evenings at Club Espanol, where I was welcomed back by many familiar faces and warm embraces. This week, I had an almost out-of-body experience dancing some walzty di Sarli milongas with one of my favourite milonga dancers. It was quite late, so there was a lot of room for manoevre on the floor and we just glided around. I had my eyes closed and just the biggest smile on my face. I told him it felt like flying and I think he was pretty chuffed. He tried to explain to me why - or rather how - I am a good dancer but I didn’t quite get it. It wasn’t the usual nonsense, he was actually trying to explain something. Damn my half-baked Spanish! Anyway, I left after that because I could not hope to have a better dance.

Last night, Kikki asked me to join her and some friends at a new milonga and I was all up for that. Something - white spirit maybe, I really should wear more when I’m painting! - had brought my legs up in an unsightly rash and it was way too hot for tights, so I went through all the wardrobe possibilities and ended up in a pair of unsuitable black trousers and a sparkly t-shirt - not very tango. By the time I was ready to go, it was already eleven (Kikki had said she’d be there around ten, it was an early milonga) so I went down and hopped in a cab. When I was almost there, I reached into my bag to change my shoes and found I had brought the wrong ones. It was the really high foxy red ones which would have looked and felt all wrong with an outfit that felt all wrong already. When we pulled up outside the place, I just sat there and didn’t like the look of it. The taxi driver made some joke about all the old folk sitting in the window of the lobby and I just thought ‘forget it!’. So without even getting out of the car, I asked him to take me back home, which he thought was hilarious. We had a nice old chat on the way and he asked me if I’d like to go out for a beer. I did actually consider it but ultimately am still too English for that! So, he just dropped me home and insisted on undercharging the fare.

It would have been too late to go back to that milonga with the right shoes so I thought of going to Gricel instead, which is a later finish and which I rather like but I could not get over the feeling that it was not meant to be, so I just watched a bit of tv and went to bed.

Tonight I am planning to go to El Beso, tomorrow to Porteno y Bailarin. What will stop me? Square eyes from all the typing maybe.

Oh, and of course you want to know about the flat. It was so nice to come home to. Cupola sitting cheekily on the terrace as ever. No disasters in my absence, though there was a substantial quote waiting for the electrical work that needs to be done. My nice neighbour is away so I will wait til she gets back to discuss it with her. Once the new supply is in to the building, I have to get a lot of rewiring inside the actual flat, so expensive times ahead. It will be lovely to have all the electrical sockets the same and hopefully more of them, we shall see. I’d like to get the lights onto a separate circuit from the power but that is apparently unheard of here and may require too much excavating of walls & ceilings.

I have made a big long list of things still to be done, top of which is finishing off the spare rooms ready for guests. So all those promises, people… !

Then there are many, many small details to be attended to, like door handles, catches & locks, before I have another big push and get started on the maid’s quarters upstairs. It will need gutting and some substantial work and I have not yet decided what it will become.

I also have some dreary bureaucratic things to attend to, which will no doubt take time and stretch my Spanish. I have a stronger more down-to-earth feeling coming back this time. It is my life and I have to make it work. It is still a big adventure but the quality of it has changed, so I have to make changes too.

So all in all, happy to be back, a bit wistful about the visit to London and a little daunted by what I have to do now, though the steak and the sunshine will see me through.

Oh good, the sun is coming out! Whizz, whizz!