July 2012 – Leeds's Singing Organ-Grinder

In Babia

Off cycling, and stuff, Palencia, León, Babia, Entrego, Soplao, Bilbao, Burdeos, then north, should anyone fancy a beer or feel impelled to offer a bed! Since you wondered, the first case of “estar en Babia” in Corde is from an Englishman.

Spanish local politicians, actually quite reasonably priced?

Potential earnings of Spanish mayors and executive councillors were the Dutch system to be adopted.

Gibraltarización / gibraltarisation

Lovely word, but does it serve to express other entrenched Iberian hatreds?

Onion-Apollo and old chorizo moon fight it out in a stewpot-cosmos of bean-stars

I think it’s quite Turner, but the public says it’s underexposed and I should have cleaned the camera lens. Alubias pintas by.

Amusing neighbourhood battle for control of public resources

Old guard horticulturalist-hippies versus arriviste mums-with-babes-hanging-off-their-tits, at stake a substantial villa and gardens near Park Güell and corresponding state subsidies. Let the death threats commence! Younger and stony-broker, I briefly contemplated the cloister, sacred or secular (Dutch prisons were pretty good back then). With retreats genuinely isolated from public-spirited humans increasingly hard to find, I…

Unusual duelling weapons

Of sausages, sugarcandy, daggers on helmets, sharp-bladed collars, pills, and billiard balls, with a note on zombie destruction.

Bicing, Spain’s worst public bike scheme

Sez a German motoring organisation.

Juvenal: Will you please … learn the colour of your own bread

Class consciousness didn’t commence in the bakeries of the Industrial Revolution.

Otto van Veen, distribution of herring and white bread after the raising of the Spanish siege of Leiden by the Geuzen in 1574

Hammer horror!

Why the guillotine should not be Spain’s tumbril-filler in the coming revolution.

James Last, a bicycle trailer, and a pianola

From a tip by the Nun, the story that Hans’ dad, Louis, used to drive to gigs with a bicycle trailer containing bandoneon and drums, working entire evenings for four marks – this presumably before hyper-inflation. And at home there was an old (?!) electric piano with a remote music roll mechanism on which he…