Carlos and Liliana come for a short visit

How much can one pack into a single day?
Apparently a lot if you are Carlos and Liliana, who came for a whirlwind visit. They were with us for less than two days, but a catalog of what they managed to squeeze into this time is phenomenal.
They started in Guildford in Surrey, England. They whirled around to Stansted Airport and checked in for a Ryanair flight to Santander. The usual preocupations on a Ryanair flight, overweight, reorganisation of contents of bags to avoid having to fork out exhorbitant amounts of money, rushed to grab a seat and finally arrived in Santander.
We picked them up and we rushed straight to Kiko's birthday bash. Friends, food, wine, dancing and around midnight we headed home and rest. Next morning assembled artworks for the exhibition to be inaugurated later in the evening at the Ruas gallery. Two phone interviews with local radio stations, lunch at the Marine company restaurant, a little rest, then off to start the exhibition. Speeches by politicos, Marisol and the visitors, lots of people on a freezing night, lots of networking and art talk, wine and food, followed by a large group moving to a bar for more wine and tapas. Again arrived home after another late night.
Next morning after breakfast, drove off to Bilbao to take in the Guggenheim museum, a coffee and we said goodbye.
Phew now we can relax for a few hours!

Dreaded sales in the cold climate

There is something quite deceiving about January sales. For one thing its frighteningly cold outside (In Europe at least) and people are looking for any excuse to go into a shop, which may have heating. Secondly there is an animal instinct, probably not fully documented but more pronounced in females of our species, which homes in on any shop whose windows exclaim '50% OFF'  with the words 'upto' and/or 'On selected items' in very small script.
In my case I have the additional problem in the form of my skepticism that famous brands tend to put out 'sale' merchandise which they might not sell normally and hence give their 'sale' prices a look and feel of a bargain. This (skepticism) has grown ever since a Macy's salesman told me that I should not be fooled by the difference between the original and the sale price. I had dared to tell the man that the sale price had seemed comparable to the normal price of the particular product I was interested in. He further confided that in the US no one buys anything unless it was on sale, so Macy's seemed to have sales all year long, with the sale price being what one would find normal.
There are exceptions. Here where we live the small shops that sell clothes and shoes etc have good sales and you can see that the same items which were available before, have now lower prices as part of the sale. Perhaps the sales are more genuine the smaller the outlet. The other day we went into a small Habitat outlet in Bilbao, and sure enough they had some items on sale..but mostly these were out of season items like Xmas cards and small gifts which after the Christmas rush are now going to be not in demand. Fair enough I say, however we now have enough cards for the next two Xmas and New Year cycles and a quantity of small frames to line all the walls of the apartment with photos. Its a bit like having people over for lunch and making so much food that the hosts keep eating for weeks afterwards.
I exaggerate, and recently our lunch guests have absolutely devoured every last bit of the Indian food that Marisol dished up for them. The Indian lunches are becoming a bit of a reputation and all our friends are perhaps waiting for their invitation. The dining room being small this can only happen for a few friends at a time. The ingredients may soon run out and we may have to make a trip to London to stock up again. Perhaps we have to learn a few recipes which only require local ingredients so that we can sleep easy that the Tandoori Chicken Massala is not about to run out!!
Local ingredients are in plentiful supply, since the economic crises has singled out the groceries supermarkets as the one business that is booming. Every conceivable chain of supermarkets now has a big store within a few hundred meters of our home. Some whose owners are freezing up north in Germany and France. How can a population of perhaps ten thousand have so many supermarkets, I ask myself. How much turnover a large buisness needs to have to make it viable?
Lets say that Telco (perhaps a subsidiary of Tesco?) employs twenty people..I would guess that the employee costs are perhaps as much as half a million Euros a year.What would be an employee to turnover ratio? perhaps 10 or 20 or more? A guesstimate would be 5 to 10 million turnover and there are ten of them.
So a total of an average - 75 Millions which means we are spending 7500 per person? An average family is spending 15000 Euros per year on groceries? NO WAY. Even if I got the figures wrong by a factor of 2.
Anyway these are times of crisis, perhaps when the economy improves, these stores will be in a good position to cash in. I doubt that this can be their buisness model.. And we did not count all the small shops like fishmongers, butchers, fruits etc etc.
I am glad I dont have to compete in this sale business, could be depressing to run a business.

New Year - Recover health, Diet, Save and make a resolution.

There is a certain similarity of the experience of these post New Year times with previous years, because we tend to overdo things every year at this festive time. As I write this the best is over and we can safely go back to our normal lives, which if I think about it, is quite hectic at the best of times in my case.
The end of the year brought some good and bad news as one might expect..the good being that 'the boys' came to spend a week with us with their families and partners, while the bad was that we all fell victims to the dreaded virus with flu, cold and bronchitis.
On a more positive note the collective splurge on presents for xmas and Jito's birthday probably kept several countries' economies afloat and the prolonged period of eating out meant that we all carried excess weight around by the time we had wished 'Merry Xmas and a Happy New Year' to everyone and all dispersed again, hence the slant on the title of this post.
Large packages with many stimulating presents were assembled for Jito's first birthday and first taste of Christmas. We made a small party with one or two other small kids in the family and the traditional cake for Jito to blow out the candle with some help from the guests. As he tore open the presents one by one, he enjoyed the surprise and the novelty of each for a few moments, before moving on to the next. The very next day Manjeet, Almu and Jito were meant to be flying back to Madrid, and the restrictions on the luggage while flying meant that a few of these presents had to be left behind to be played with on future visits.
And of course the New Year Resolution.
Now resolutions are personal things, and one has the problem of setting an expectation and then not delivering. I could give up smoking, but I never smoked.  Chocolate? its not really a problem. Travel more? have done enough for now.. So what would be a good objective?
Write more
See more of the family
Manage my finances
Learn a new language
Prepare an exhibition of my photos
Do more exercise, play more golf and squash?
But somehow those do not appear to be proper resolutions, just things I would have tried to do anyway. One feels that a resolution has to be something big and daunting that is going to be difficult and require a big sacrifice.Sounds like I am growing too old to worry about resolutions?
That sounds bad and perhaps therein lies a credible resolution...
Maybe the resolution should be to think positive and not to slip into an old age slowdown.
Happy New Year y'all.

The history of where you live

Every place has a history, since time passes relentlessly and leaves in its wake an infinity of stories many of which are only known locally and do not bother the world at large. Naturally there are places where a lot happens, and they become part of the world historical heritage. Many history books catalogue these places and people everywhere study these and research events to remember for future generations. Big cities like London, Paris or Delhi have a lot of well document history and a lot of it makes fascinating reading. Other places even if they are smaller become famous through some event that thrusts their history to become of worldwide interest. Events such as a natural disaster, a president getting killed or a world war being sparked usually makes a place unforgettable.

I have lived and traveled through  many places whose history is generally considered interesting. Delhi, for example, where I grew up, has seen centuries of occupiers, invading armies and massacres on a regular basis. Another place I have known is London which also has had a long and colourful past which includes people like Jack the Ripper, Sherlock Holmes and all the Kings and Queens and miserable stories like the plague, the fire and all the killings in the Tower.

However there are an infinite number of places which remain out of the limelight but create a history, which often remains unwritten and this gets either forgotten or passed from generation to generation by word of mouth. How many among my friends would have known anything about Kumasi or Maracaibo, places where I lived for significant periods. I have not seen too many books about the history of these but they had their periods worth documenting. Kumasi was (and is) the capital of the Ashantis who were a force to be reckoned with and rich because of the gold that was to be found in the region. And Maracaibo, well maybe the less said about this one the better.A bit like the wild west which had little to be proud of until oil was discovered in the region.

The place where I have now come to live in Spain (Laredo) has a rich history since it was established by Romans when this part of the world was part of the Roman Empire. However few people outside of this region would have heard of any of it or much less bothered to read about it anywhere. I knew that some books had been written about it but had not yet fully familiarized myself with many periods of the story of this place.

So when an organisation which brings together the 'friends of the heritage' of the town invited me to attend a launch of a new book about an aspect of the history that I did not know about, I decided to accept, and it turned out to be fascinating and I was not disappointed.The book appeared to document the work and times of a series of 'governors' appointed by the King, who were known as 'corregidores' or correctors. They existed in pre-democracy times between the 16th and the early nineteenth century, and their function was to administer justice and represent the King in the region, often with a ceremonial 'baston' with which he was allowed to beat people who misbehaved.  I was pleasantly surprised to learn that this town of a small population was the capital of the region until it was considered more suitable to move the capital to Santander at the beginning of the Nineteenth century.

Now this book may seem to be not too exciting a project, but if we see it through the eyes of the local population, it could be very interesting. And here is the thing I wanted to get down to..that the history of a place is always interesting for the people of that place. Like people, every place has a story and we only need to be in that place to make it worth discovering that story.

It is the history of our world.

Tuesday 13th December

Unlike most of the English speaking world that trembles if the 13th of a month falls on a Friday, the Spanish speaking world reserves such dread if it happens on a Tuesday. As it happens this December 13th did fall on a Tuesday, today!
I happened to be accompanying a couple of ladies (one of whom was Marisol) around Bilbao today and the thirteenth did have its effect. First the strap of Marisol's handbag ripped unexpectedly and the bag rolled to the ground. Having to carry the bag under her arm as a result was no fun either.
Later I was nearly run down by a car as I tried to cross a road. Lets not give too much importance to the fact that I did not wait for the light which would have stopped the traffic for me to cross the road.
There were other happenings today too, like the strong winds all over Northern Spain (and England) and five meter high waves on the beach, however they were not all bad. We found good bargains and had fun shopping. We made it home without any further mishaps which must be enough of a reason to celebrate.
Later I learnt that our local soccer team 'Racing' of Santander won a close game, when its more normal for them to lose.
So I am not at all sure we can justify the fear that the thirteenth can conjure up, even more so on a Tuesday.
Now its after midnight and its neither Tuesday or the 13th any more!

just google it

So it happened, I gave the talk on Information Technology to a group of intellectuals in Santander and one of the points I made was that now-a-days people use search engines as an extension of their memories. I had a picture of a young man with a laptop in his hands to show how one can be talking to friends and at the same time using the computer to help with his memory. I mentioned someone I know who could easily have been the young man in the picture.
And I did something along these lines myself the other day. I was reading my e-book, a Kindle from Amazon, and in one of the pauses a random picture appeared on the screen, which was obviously a page from an old book, with some text which was difficult to read and sounded like latin. It went something like:
Izbriu grit cratuerbum guerbumerat abudomgos
It was an intriguing image and I decided it was worth spending a few minutes looking for what this might be.
So I googled it
A few entries in the list that appeared as a result showed that this same intrigue had attracted other users of the Kindle. No body had come up with a satisfactory answer. One responder had suggested that the text may well be a 'Lorem Ipsum'. This was beginning to sound like a mystery..what was this Lorem Ipsum?
Next search showed that Lorem Ipsum was randomly generated placeholder text that publishers often use to display possible fonts and use as examples.
Not satisfied with this I looked further down the list and found a blog on which someone suggested that they had found the same image on a page in an old book of Gospels and described it as follows 

'This is confirmed as a page of Lindisfarne's Gospels: It's on page 30 of the British Library's online edition of this book'

What is confusing is that the text does not appear to mean anything in Latin! Its obviously nonsense text which is what Lorem Ipsum is supposed to be.

Now this made a lot more sense and I could go back to worrying about more normal things!

Storing money in troubled times

Whatever happened to those days when it was safe to keep money in the bank.
Admittedly in troubled times having any money at all is a luxury, but there are those who end up with the money and have to make tough decisions about where to keep it. The pensioners are also a population who should have a sum of money which represents their life savings that needs to be put somewhere.

In these times of low interest rates, troubled banks, sliding property values, debt ridden economies, a sinking  stock market and worthless bonds where does one keep his/her money? A financial commentator, one of those who always appear to have figured everything in situations such as these, came on the TV recently and said that the Euro was going to sink and that everyone in Europe were going to lose their savings!

Now, I am not as knowledgeable as this guy, but I would guess that you cannot use a word like 'everyone' in a situation like this, as there are always a set of people who seem to have 'insider' knowledge and manage to rescue their cash before its too late, including I might add, the commentator in this case. I will not ever forget one day when my boss where I worked in Venezuela, asked me if I had a lot of money in local bank. It must have been Wednesday or Thursday, because on the Friday Venezuela had to remove the link of its currency from the US dollar, a move that immediately reduced the value of the 'Bolivar' to half of its value the previous day. It then continued to slide so that after only a couple of months it had touched one fifth. Lucky for me I did not have much money in 'Bolivars'.

Now what did my boss know that I did not? However let us leave that to one side and get back to my original question, which is where should we keep our money, assuming we have some. I dont think we should rush out to buy Greek government bonds or those of Italy or Spain because of the risk associated with them. Banks are an option, however only a small amount is guaranteed to be safe in case of failure of the institution. However lately many countries have opted for rescuing ailing banks in fear of a collapse of the entire financial system teetering because of the heavy debts.

I am rightly confused and no longer laughing at the suggestion to keep all your money in cash under the bed!