October 29, 2009
Just before leaving for the airport in the morning I managed to finally reconcile hours of indecision
about how many clothes to stuff into my suitcase for a 7-day trip to what was forecast to be a warm Andalusia. And I did so by packing enough for 14 days in the Arctic. Whatever happened to those days past when I would set off south on a whim with a hickory stick over my shoulder and a polka-dot hankie wrapped around the end, a few necessities for the
care-free travelling man poked inside? Yet I have a photograph, and here it is on the left, of me packing just a small holdall for a trip to Lebanon in the 70s, no laptop, no Blackberry, no Zen video player, no camera, cards and battery packs, no mobile phone, no electric toothbrush, chargers, batteries, books, mags - I probably didn't even have a jacket to pack back then.Punishment came later that day in Spain, as we failed, again, to find the hotel in Jimena de la Frontera despite my confident assurances that I remembered every tight little turn, every impossibly narrow one-way street, and I ended up, again, having to drag an extremely fat and heavy suitcase across the village square and up and down through the back streets of the village. The suitcase clattered loudly and embarrassingly on the cobbled stones, echoing among the narrow corridor of whitewashed houses with their wrought iron balconies and bay window grills, causing a few bored locals to open the shutters on the upstairs windows and look down, shaking their heads and chuckling. This was the most fun they'd had since the corrida of 2007 and the inexplicably cruel, and I kid you not, "See whose donkey can carry the heaviest weight" contest that marred the opening of the festival for us.
Click here for my Flickr photos of Andalusia
The descriptive language that threatens to become onomatooeiac as it decends into a cascade, no crescendo, of alliteration, makes this little ditty well worth a read. This will be plagiarised by a new generation of budding writers and aspiring playrights. Well done and I look forward to your next post.
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