Where have I been? Just a little technical difficulty. Known in the trade as stupidity - mine. I've kept my notes going as I watched the England splutter then stutter from , you've guessed it- the gutter. I was intrigued to hear that Darryl Harper was not having the best of days. Nasser seemed quite critical. The boy said that a radio commentator had sat next to the said umpire on one of the many criss cross Aussie flights, and had found him to be arrogant. Now where have I heard the term 'arrogance' and the umpiring name of 'Darryl' being linked in the cricketing past? I must look up the name 'Darryl' with one of those baby name books. There's bound to be one around here somewhere. I wonder what it means? Perhaps it is time to turn to technology to help the umpires. After all if they can manage a stump camera and microphone, they must be able to arrange for an electrode to be inserted up the umpire's ass. You know - one twinge for 'yes', two twinges for 'no'. I accept that with this system certain umpires might tend towards the negative for purely personal reasons, but this would be in order as it continues with the very laudable theory of giving the batsman the benefit of any doubt. And I am saying this as a bowler! I do see that the system would not suit the Darryls of this world as they appear to be so far up their own asses there would be no room for the wiring. Like all good micophonic set-ups the system will be reversible to serve as a speaker so that International Cricket Coaches may continue to talk through their asses rather than through their captains.
Now that the blog is up and running, i would like your opinions as to whether you'd like to hear more. I'll get my notes in order and although it's all over now, it may help your wounds heal as I tell a few tales of Down Under. If you are not sure of what you are getting I'll include a few ramblings about another tour. This of Portlligat, Dali's country, in Spain when England were taking on the South Africans in 2003. I'd just been reading an article about one in ten couples not enjoying their holidays because of the nature of the partner they were on holiday with! We were told 'to get on our bikes' when we tried to view his house without pre-booking. I was about to have a go at the missus when I decided to change my nature as I might have been that present article in the recent past. Tell us what you think. Would you like to hear more? Tough you are going to anyway.
At Portlligat Dali would have preferred to have got on his boat than on his bike. With the house closed to casual users we strode along the fishermen’s quay to see if we could book a trip around the Cap de Creus in the very same boat that Dali and Gala used. The bloke in charge sold us a couple of tickets. The missus had told me to check my change properly as it was probably a con. He pointed to a cardboard clock, like the sort you used to see up on the walls of reception classes in schools, before the Foundation Stage Curriculum innovation replaced them with digital ones so the teachers could fill in their tick sheets every fifteen minutes. The big hand was pointing to the 12 and the little hand was pointing to the 6. As both the hands of my watch were pointing to the 4, I worked out that we should come back in an hour and a half and then we would only have 10 minutes to wait in the boat before we were underway. The missus said ‘We Will Arrive Later Around Five.’ I didn’t argue. Being a key stage 2 teacher Time is not such an issue as Money and Change. Meanwhile we could sit and think about the Thermos full of Dutch coffee and holiday home made sandwiches that we left in the car back in Cadaques.
We found a sunny spot in the shade amongst the lobster pots and fell asleep. I awoke with a homard thinking I was still a gonner to see a thirty something classy lady stripping down to a black one piece swimming costume. She stepped from her clothes in classical style, and surrounded herself in a silky sarong. I assumed the missus was still snoozing, as I hadn’t been elbowed as a part of her look now pay later policy. Her slumber was not the reason for her inactivity. She had been quietly eyeing up the lady’s partner who was posing on the other side of the shrimpers’ nets like our first team used to do on Sunday mornings. He was a Luis Figo look-alike thereby explaining where the silky sarong had come from, as David Beckham had just moved to Real Madrid according to the football shirt that we had read that morning. He had a Gerard Depardieu nose to add to his apparent attraction. Unfortunately for him he had a fierce cold to match. He held a large white silk handkerchief to his striking appendage for much of the time. He must have been a committed professional. Most of the good teachers at our school only go down with coughs and colds during the holidays. Despite the sneezes spraying germs faster than the pace of a typical plenary session during the literacy hour, most of the battle hardened teachers use their deflecting strategies to remain healthy. This being the time after the end of the season and before the beginning of the pre-season, it is obviously a cross profession phenomena. Not being much in the way of football players the missus and I should have a resistance to the bug he’s got in the event of him sneezing in our direction and peppering us with spray. We are in trouble though if Beckham’s already taught him how to beat a defensive wall from just outside the area.
I waited until she removed her strapless high heels, before I elbowed the missus gently to return her to reality. ‘Why have you got both hands over your dick?’ she asked.’ If the football shirt has got it wrong’ I replied, ‘Old Gerard-Figo over there who you’ve been marking for the last ten minutes is likely to slam a germ or two straight at us, and by the look of him some of his bugs may be more interested in attaching themselves to pubic hairs rather than nasal ones.’ She refused my invitation to lend a hand with the defensive wall. I made a mental note to begin the disciplinary procedures when we got back to the apartment in L’Escala.
The cardboard clock must have been quite an advanced one as a bell began to ring at ten to six to assemble Dali followers to the Gala which was the name of the boat. It would tell others that there were only ten minutes to go before the Angelus, which wasn’t a name of a boat, peeled out to any remaining villagers in case they were doing anything untoward in the middle of the field, so they could face the church with a clear conscience and cross themselves rather than the Spanish Inquisition who I’ve heard have taken over from the Swiss Guard at the Pearly Gates. The man who sold us the tickets turned out to be the alarm bell, and encouraged us on board no doubt to attract other customers in accordance with the safety in numbers theory. I don’t mind stepping onto boats from a quay. It is the stepping off that can be noisily disquieting. Those same physics text books I spoke about earlier always had a cartoon picture to illustrate reaction and action being equal and opposite, showing some poor matchstick man stepping off the boat with an increasing length of stride pushing back the boat as he attempted to step forward on to the quay, until he did the splits and dipped his balls German officer style into the Turpentine or Serpentine or whichever river it was.
I liked those attempts at humour in the textbooks of the day. They were rarer than finding a neutrino particle together with a quark in a matchbox, but they were enough to make you smile before it was back to the grimace while you carried on with your revision. Some of the recent revision books I’ve seen make you laugh your cap off, while you are supposed to be studying. Learning is deemed to be fun these days, but such hilarity not being the mother in law of invention might have played a contributory part in making some of our latest engineering feats the laughing stock of the world. I reckoned that the average contents of the boat would be about a dozen, but only Gerard-Figo and his lady together with their little girl joined us. The boat wobbled slightly as the saronged senora stepped forward to negotiate her way aft. Diplomatically I held out my hand. She took it, steadied herself, said ‘Gratias Senor’ and sat opposite the missus. She swept her head back and slotted her sunglasses into her hair. The little girl perched herself precariously at the front of the boat, and senor Figo sulkily stretched his tall frame across the rest of the seats, with his head against a seat cover rather than the lap that had been tentatively offered him. He held his white silk handkerchief ready to signal to the coastguard to bring him some Lemsip in case he became more under the weather. The water boatman waited a while longer, but no-one else joined us although there were nine other couples strolling up and down the quayside. Most probably they didn’t want to catch whatever he had. What a shame couple number ten didn’t turn up, unless they were already in the boat of course.
The boatman shrugged his shoulders, untied a rope and pushed against the quay with a long pole. He turned the rudder and the boat about faced. He delved down into an oily hole turned a key and the engine spluttered into life, belching a thick black cloud of smoke that covered Gerard’s head. When it had cleared, his face like the boat had reversed. Instead of black wrap around sunglasses dividing his face into a third and two thirds, he now had a black face with an identical pair of sunglasses to the ones which were now on the top of his jet black hair, except they were white. I didn’t have the will or the vocabulary to tell him. His daughter came to his rescue by pointing at him and saying ‘Papa’ loads of times. He wiped away the soot as he had been wiping away the fluids that had been emerging from his nose into his sodden grey silk handkerchief. No need for the Spanish RNLI as the symptoms seemed to disappear in a time that the manufacturers of Lemsip would die for.
The boat weaved and three put put putted its way through the moored fishing rigs that were just about holding back the motor cruisers, speed boats and yachts that endlessly encroach cubic centimetre by cubic centimetre in their attempts to erode what was still a picturesque natural harbour into just another marina. As they bobbed so innocently up and down they were slowly erasing Dali’s signature on the documents he had signed to prevent the destruction of the natural heritage of Portlligat. We slipped out of the Puerto in our vintage boat and headed towards the Cap de Creus. It was as if we were taking part in an historical re-enactment that was being gawped upon by pay for view customers in more modern day vessels, loudly going where they thought no one had been before. Only two boats did not acknowledge us. The crew of the USS Enterprise did not wave in deference. In fact their bow wave gave us quite a shock. I expect they were on another mission. The loudest vessel of the lot was the Marie Celeste, but it just drifted lazily by as if it were empty.
We soaked it up. It was pleasurable to turn the tables on the cruising coast and space hoppers whose intention to land on those deserted sandy bays or planets where nobody had been before by land for a picnic, was hampered by dozens of others doing exactly the same thing, making them realise they were holiday makers or humanoids just like everybody else. ‘An abundance of shags’, said the missus pointing to the cormorants on the rocky outcrops. As it turned out she wasn’t far off the high water mark as we were to find out when we got the low-down on what actually happened amongst the rocks and coves when the tide was out, Gala was away and the only hoppers were of the sand variety. The water boatman turned out to be a greater rather than a lesser water boatman. When we reached the furthest point away from Portlligat and just before the meter ran out, he turned the boat around to head back. The coastline was now on my right and on the missus’ left. He took out a photograph album from below the seat. Up to that point he had been talking to the couple separately on and off in Catalan, and we had been pointing at the views saying little as if we were in a railway compartment on the Cornish Riviera Express pointing at the holiday makers on the beach at Dawlish Warren, on our way to Cornwall.
Now with the exception of the little nina who was still keeping her distance listening to a lesser Sony walkman, we were all in a space huddle. For the first time Luis showed some interest in his missus. He touched her silky sarong. Perhaps his cold was coming back. The boatman showed us a picture of Gala and Dali sitting in the boat. Our view matched the one in the photo. He pointed to himself, the boat and towards the steep rugged cliffs of the rocky shoreline. He spoke with a sense of pride to the Figo-Depardieus. He was the boatman in the picture. We were sitting in the same spot so to speak in the same company as D & G. I stole a glance at Luis-Gerard. Despite the miracle cure, he had continued to wipe his nose with the black silk handkerchief. In the time it had taken to get to the point of return he had charcoaled a mustachios that stretched out both sides from the middle of his top lip, then up and back, again both sides, towards the middle of his nose. I’m glad I could not so to speak the lingo as anything I uttered would be so patently inadequate. To prove the point I boldly shouted across to Scotty who was on ‘The poop of the vessel’ to ‘Beam me up’. The Enterprise shot off at Warp nine.
‘Would you like me to translate?’ said Gala. I mean Mrs Figo-Depardieu who turned out to be Madame Figo-Depardieu. I should have known. There had been clues. The touch of her hand, the fact that French and Catalan are so similar so to speak. Her English was pretty good, and there wasn’t any stage in the earlier undressing and dressing where she didn’t look sexy and at ease with herself, the world and the voyeurs. Compare this with the changing techniques of the grockle on Dawlish Warren, and you can understand why all the emmets on the train were pointing at them. She told us that he described Gala as being ‘How you say? Strong willed?’ According to the boatman, assuming nothing was lost at sea in translation, there were lots of stormy arguments between Dali and Gala that rocked their boat but not their relationship in their wake. Dali must have written an escape clause into his contract made with Gala. On calmer days Gala would not be there and the boatman became a ferryman for Dali’s friends who would party on the sandy beaches and skinny dip with some lowlife that Dali imported from Barcelona and put up in some of the properties more accessible by land, which are now left as landmarks in their own right along these shores. It leaves you thinking who was the King of the castle and who was the dirty rascal.
A lot more was said than the missus and I were led to understand. Even if the conversation had been in English I got the feeling I would have missed out on the subtleties of it all. Whatever was said It must have hit a chord with the Figo-Depardieus as they became quite lovey dovey. I would have liked to have known whether the boatman had joined in the regatta, but I couldn’t bring myself to look her in the boat race to ask. She wouldn’t have heard me anyway. She only had eyes for Luis-Gerard. ‘Momie’ said the little girl.’Puis je assis avec toi et Papa? The missus and I budged up. We knew it to be a Brian Johnston champagne moment, and we knew also there was a time to take a back seat. Even the boatman seemed choked. Luis-Gerard had finally twigged. He must have seen the same image on the rock face that Dali had seen on the side of the cliff that he recreated into an Apparition of the face of Gala. Only Luis-Gerard would have seen his own image as Narcissus before the beautiful features of his wife’s face finally etched themselves onto the impenetrable rock strata that was his mind. It was not easy to distinguish between little loved and a little love amongst the rocky nooks, but he had at last managed it.
The rest of the trip back was noteworthy for the ‘joie de vie’ that bounced like tennis balls between the French family, the missus and the boatman. I wasn’t really part of it. Whatever I’d been served up in the little restaurant in Cadaques was still there or thereabouts. Despite the offshore breeze that would have blown the evidence away, I knew that this was not the moment to break wind or confidences. I’d wait until later when hopefully my conscience and my bowels would be clear. My worry was that if I lost concentration not only would I destroy the ambience, I would so affect the waters that were still running deep out here that the blue flag Dali and Gala awarded themselves for godliness like the whale of the same colour would be beached into blubber. The missus was almost blubbing herself as the romance of it all overcame her as we prepared to disembark. My reaction was to hold on to the tethering rope until all had stepped safely ashore. ‘Merci monsieur’ she said as one and all exchanged handshakes, but not addresses. The water boatman took a haddock and a San Miguel out of the icebox, flicked the little hand to the 8 and rejoined his fishermen friends, tossing the fish onto their barbeque. You didn’t need to be the pupil of the week to know that it meant 8 am not 8 pm Spanish time.
I don’t know what number Luis Figo plays for Real Madrid or for Portugal, but this bloke had a number ten on his back as he walked away arm in arm with madam with the jeune fille skipping happily on the pavement at their side, the walkman nowhere to be seen. I glanced back to the Gala. It was a seminal moment. Maybe I was expecting a wave to emerge from the Gala. All I saw was a gentle sway and a ‘trompe-l’oeil’ of Tom the cabin boy, and he was saying nothing. The missus and I scuttled down the quay, squeezing past a car that had parked near where the fishermen were cooking. It had a Barca FC sticker in the window. Three of the tartiest looking women I had seen since leaving England, got out and strutted across the quay in their stilettos and fishnet tights to join the party. ‘There’s the answer to your question Englishman!’ shouted the water boatman, from a clear throat as he held up his beer in salute. The missus didn’t need to pull me away. There was a hierarchy of high heels and I had the former pair already impressed upon my soul. Besides I needed to leave an impression somewhere else p d q. I chose the high ground overlooking the eggs on the roof of the Casa Dali, on the assumption that it was the omelette that did for me back in Cadaques. The missus asked me if I was OK. A little bit of loving goes a long way. We set off together. There was a long way to go. I was physically and mentally drained. It must have been a good hour since I saw the missus’ face on that rock.
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