On the Verge of Selling my Soul or a Nervous Breakdown...or both
Hello. My name is David Bonnardeaux. I am 28, and a very humiliated member of the unemployment club. In the previous instalment of David’s Trials and Tribulations of Life I wrote: “I am not getting too used to the slow life of Ibiza, as I will shoot off to Barcelona when the contacts finally get ‘activated.’ If all goes well Jillian may come over and we will live happily ever after. Yipppeee! The End….”
What about that End, eh? How deluded was I? Very. As they say in England, I am still “on the dole.” As they say in France, “sans emploi;” as they say in España, “sin empleo;” or as I like to say, “fucked”. A definite deja vu from my time after Edinburgh University (Ah, I remember fondly those days when my friend Nick so sensitively left Dole© pineapple tags hanging on my door) and my time after getting back from Mexico looking for work from Ibiza and then Bristol. As you can see, Great Britain has always been a factor there, and hence why I have turned my back on that bleak and insular sinking island. But in the process I feel like I have turned my back on one very important thing: my friends. Here, on another island, the island of Ibiza, I am feeling very disconnected from reality, from the normal mundane humdrum of life - working life. But above all I miss my friends. The only external interaction I have is with Jillian over the phone or via email. She is my lifeline; a great one at that. Nevertheless, I felt like filling my friends in on my goings on, or lack thereof. And so this thought process has spawned the fourteenth instalment of David’s Trials and Tribulations of Life.
I am not sitting on my laurels, twiddling my thumbs, scratching my nuts. No sir-ee. A month after becoming Master Bonnardeaux (well, technically we don’t actually ‘graduate’ until July 2004! Ridiculous, but anyway...) I set up some meetings in DC and flew off to see my Jillian in the New World.
Her place in DC is my home away from home. Her housemates are a diverse bunch, as well as being all very nice and welcoming. Since spending two months with them in the summer doing my thesis, I have become an honorary housemate… of sorts. Which is good as I spent another three and a half weeks there this time! Do you know that Deputy Secretary of State Paul Wolfowitz has a daughter? You know, the very hawkish Bush Administration member who pretty much pushed the war through … well his daughter Sarah is lovely. She’s a liberal-minded, sandal-wearing girl who in fact goes out with one of Jillian’s housemates, Lee. And the funny thing is that Lee works for Ralph Nader, the Green Party frontrunner who could have been responsible for Gore losing the elections in 2000 thereby giving George W. Bush the presidency of the United States of America. How funny is that?! I would give my left testicle to be at a family dinner at the Wolfowitz’s, with Lee in tow…. Actually, come to think of it, no, I wouldn’t give one of my precious family jewels for that, but maybe five dollars…. Anyway, I digress. Jillian’s place is a very cerebral one actually. You can always count on having very long and protracted, albeit interesting conversations over Sunday breakfast or dinnertime, about… well, it usually ends up being about Bush or the Middle East conflict… or some other very light-hearted subject such as the role of the media in wars…
I went to a concert with Jillian and one of her housemates, Vineeta, one night (Indian, from India, girl with a southern South Carolina twang! Hilarious.). The band was called Death Star Orchestra… and the lead singer was dressed in Yoda garb and played a light-sabre-looking guitar…. Now, THAT would have been worth giving my left marble! No, in fact the band was called Dark Star Orchestra, a Grateful Dead cover band. I am told that it is unlike any other cover band, in that they do whole Grateful Dead concerts, with the exact set of songs as when “The Dead” played in the 60s…. uhm… 70s…. whenever. I was also told that we were witnessing a great concert. (Yep, I had to be told that, as to me it all sounded pretty much the same, apart from the long drawn out rifts. They stretched out a song for 20 minutes!! TWENTY minutes. More like the Great Rift Valley… ha, ha, boink.) At that point this hippy chick with braided hair wearing a long flowing white dress turns to me and says, “You AREN’T a Dead Head are you?” “What would make you think such a thing?” I ask her, as I bob my head back and forth with very little in the way of zeal or enthusiasm as tai-dai shirted people are going nuts all around me (we were at the front near the stage, just perfect for me to stand out like the sore thumb that I was.) Hey, did you know Jerry Garcia died relatively recently? Of COURSE I knew… ahem. Moving swiftly on…
Jillian and I spent our first Thanksgiving together, and my first one in a long time. We drove up to Frederick, Maryland. SO, Thanksgiving with a couple friends of Jillian’s was fantastic. We ate and drank copious quantities, and… ate some more. I was introduced to a particularly curious, no, two particularly curious dishes that day. Most of you Americans will not find sweet potatoes with marshmallows an oddity. But undoubtedly the rest of you will think, “What the f*&£??!! Did he just say marshmallows with sweet potatoes?” just as I did. How bizarre, and may I add, not very tasty in my culinary opinion. Then there was Jillian’s delectable concoction, “Green Stuff.” Now ALL of you will join me in raising a flummoxed eyebrow over this dish. Useful Culinary Tip No.1: Take lots of canned whipped cream, add some pineapple chunks and some unidentified green stuff and there you have it! Oh, I think the actual greenieness was some sort of pistachio additive… damn, I can’t remember what made it green, which means I can never recreate it. No fear, as I have Jillian to make it for me every Thanksgiving from now into perpetuity.
If there are any John Irving readers out there (Hotel New Hampshire, World According to Garp, etc.) you will find it funny to hear that this couple had a farting dog! (For those of you that have never read John Irving, a farting dog is very Irvingesque). Not any dog, but a blubbering old bulldog that makes noises like that weird longhaired guy from Police Academy… remember? The dog (its name was Coach) would come into the living room, where we were sitting down chilling out with some music and some wine, and lay down by our feet. Suddenly within seconds we were gagging and panting for fresh air as our nasal hairs were scorched by the fetid smell emanating out of Coach’s anal passage. Actually, Jillian and I were gagging, while Matt and Erica were laughing their heads off and taking it all in! There’s one thing thinking your OWN farts smell of roses...but...your dogs?!
Enough about farting dogs, and back to the meetings I had in DC. I spoke to countless people, had informational interviews, impromptu interviews, quick coffee meetings, fly-by meetings, etc. I must admit that the great majority of the people I met with were from the World Bank… At the beginning I only had one contact there, but the snowball effect definitely worked its magic. One person that I was very excited to meet, and actually was able to meet with, was Dr. Thomas Lovejoy! My not so science-minded friends can now get their minds out of the gutter: Dr. Lovejoy is NOT a porn star. Science oriented friends of mine will know that he was the guy who came up with the “debt for nature swaps” and had everything to do with protected area critical size research. He is a veritable environmental guru and I had his undivided attention for a whole hour! He even personally referred me to some of his acquaintances at the World Bank and other institutions. Now THAT’S a helping hand.
Hey, I also met David Grey. Nope, not the singer (or porn star), but rather a stolid, pompous Englishman who works on the Nile Basin Initiative for the Bank. He is supposedly the Bank’s water guru for Africa, but we didn’t hit it off. It seems he is a VERY busy man, and I was lucky even to get the 45 minutes that I did with him, to no avail however. Never mind. I was all over the place, meeting people in consultancies, NGOs, the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, etc. The end result? I am still to find out about a good possibility with the World Bank’s Environment Sector in DC and a position with the World Bank’s Water and Sanitation Program in Nairobi, Kenya…. I should have heard about the DC position before Christmas, and so I am pulling my hair out waiting. It’s strange to be pulling my hair out waiting to ultimately sell my soul. I’ll be soulless and bald… But the need to get a life and the need to be with the person one loves makes one do the strangest of things. And anyway, it would only be for two years…promise. By which time my hair will have grown back and my soul… well, maybe I can buy somebody else’s…
So I am back in Eivissa (Ibiza in Ibizenco) doing the hair pulling. Actually Jillian came over for Christmas ten days after I got back from DC, so it hasn’t been so bad. We spent three nights in Mallorca, the main island of the Baleares Archipelago, before ferrying over to Ibiza. More of a whirlwind tour of the island, as we only had two days. But we were able to see where Fredrick Chopin wrote a lot of his music, and we even touched the piano on which he composed a lot of it… oooohhh…. It’s in a small town called Valdemossa, tucked away in the mountains. A beautiful place, which we highly recommend. Just be wary of the 1 million Germans that live permanently on the island! Everything is written in Spanish, Mallorquin and German! Not that I have anything against Germans… but it’s just crazy. Meg, you will chuckle when I tell you Jillian and I spent the better part of the four hour ferry ride making origami cubes for our Christmas tree! People would look at us as if we were lepers, while kids would come up to us and stare, I guess hoping we would ask them to join us in our game.
We were greeted at home with home cooking and beautiful weather. Such was the weather that my dad had been able to finish making the brick wood oven near the BBQ we haven’t quite finished. We ate lamb cooked in the oven, the first meal to be cooked in it. We were all expecting a charred lamb’s leg to be propelled out of the oven door or the chimney. Or for the walls to cave in thereby entombing the lambs leg. However it was a success and the lamb was delicious. Jillian was inspired and so decided to make bread. She baked the first bread loaves in the oven! She is now known by my family as the Masterbaker. I stress: MasterBAKER. She did a great job (ahem..excuse the almost-pun…). She made Rosemary and olive bread, and it was soooo good. And the rosemary grows wild all over, so it was only a matter of walking out of the house and picking it. Olive trees are also ubiquitous on the island and around our house. However, contrary to what you might think, the olives we eat at restaurants or from shops don’t come straight from a tree. Useful Culinary Tip no.2: Olives must be soaked in caustic soda to draw out the acidity. Then they are usually marinated in some aromatic olive oil or the likes of that. Not that Jillian did that… nah; she used some bought ones.
We were invited to have Christmas lunch with our “neighbours” again, the Payeses (local ‘indigenous’ people; indigenous in the sense that they are home-grown Ibizencos. Not because they wear loin clothes, or catch their food with spears). So funny. Each time the uncle Vicente tries to pawn off one of his nieces on us. Last year he tried to marry one of them off to my brother, and he even threw in a garage, a horse drawn cart and some other extras into the deal. Suffice to say my brother declined. This year Vicente offered me some advice: get myself a woman here in Ibiza i.e. one of his nieces, while Jillian is in DC. He wasn’t being conniving or anything of the sort; Jillian was right in front of us when he imparted his advice! He is a character. Anyway, we ate a huge paella followed by some mystery meats, which actually were quite good. I kept on being served Toni’s (the man of the house) home-brewed moonshine wine. It was an honor to be drinking wine that he had made, from the cultivation of the grape through to the pressing and bottling. But you won’t find this wine on any legal shopping establishment shelves. I thankfully was able to move onto normal wine thereby avoiding premature blindness. But they invited us to a Post New Year torrada (barbeque), where we ate bountiful amounts of meats straight off the table without forks or knives. True Payes style supposedly, and washed down with some more of Toni’s wine… Again I limited my imbibing of his wine, for fear that if not I would be writing this with the aide of a Braille keyboard right now… Ah, they are lovely people; simple, humble, generous and hard working. If only the whole world could be like them, then it would be a better place all around. Perhaps a higher incidence of blindness, but a better place overall.
On a completely different note, we finally egged my parents to get themselves a puppy. Her name is Nube (cloud in Spanish), just like her mother. Ankle nipping, carpet pissing, hiccupping, not-so-silent but definitely smelly farting, sharp-toothed, cute little mutt she is. And when I say “mutt” I mean it in all senses of the word. She is a cross between a female Mastin de Pyrenee/Ibizenco and male Rottweiller/… uhm… pitbull… thankfully the recessive genes are those of the pitbull and so there are very few type traits, thankfully. She literally was a handful when we got her, and has grown to be an armful as she has put on 3 kilos in two weeks! Just the other day she started digging bones in different places. Amazing instinct. She also attempts to eat shits that hunting dogs have left in the woods. Uhm… truly amazing… instinct…. Uncanny…. And tries to eat spades, rakes, hoes, pick axes…. Again, what instinct eh?! My dad played the clarinet to her the other day. She goes ape shit, and starts semi howling, bowing down and putting her little paws up in the air, running away and whining. If she could talk, it would all translate as “PLEASE Dad you are driving me nuts. Stop the excruciating pain in my eardrums. At least LEARN to play the fricking instrument first.” We had to cut down all noxious plants around the house as one day she puked up and then began to get puffy eyes! Some sort of allergic reaction. So we cut down the ricin plants that were growing wild. Yep, ricin, as in the stuff used by an unknown assailant to assassinate Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian defector on Waterloo Bridge one late afternoon, September 7, 1978. I could be labelled a terrorist if this email got into the wrong hands; such is the ridiculous state of US intelligence these days
Oh, the New Year has been ushered in. I almost forgot. It wasn’t too eventful here. My bro, Jillian and I went out after dinner at around 4am. We went to a friend’s bar in San Antonio. During the two hours we were out we saw our travel agent, our local bar owner, the brother of the bar owner, the girlfriend of the bar owner, the brother of the girlfriend of the bar owner, the girlfriend of the brother of the girlfriend of the bar owner, oh, and the barman of another place called Bar Costa where we always go to eat Jamón Serrano sandwiches. They aren’t related, at least not as far as I know… but undoubtedly they all share one of four common-as-mud last names from the island: Colomar, Mari, Tur or Serra.
But the best thing are the first names on the island. Get this: the bar owner’s name is actually Juan, although we all call him Juanito. Why? He is not small, as the name may suggest (-ito is a diminutive in Spanish). And he is not the tooth fairy (Juanito Perez is the name given to said fictional character that whisks away your fallen tooth and replaces it with far too little hard currency). Actually we call him Juanito for the simple fact that his father’s name is Juan, and so he is in effect Juan Junior. And the brother of Juanito? Pepe… although, yes, you guessed it, we call him Pepito. Is he small? No, and he doesn’t look like a walking sandwich either (a pepito in Spanish can sometimes mean a French bread sandwich)… Their sister is called Lina, yep, Linita to most of us. She’s not vertically challenged either and, no, her mother isn’t called Lina. Hhhmm, bit of a conundrum that one. But anyway, their mother’s name is actually Pepa, although we call her Pepita. Why? Maybe her mother was called Pepa? No, simply because she’s tiny. She barely reaches my armpit.
3/5ths of the island is called Pepe, Juan, Catalina or Pepa. These names are the Ibizencan equivalent of Mohammed in the Arab world or John. Uhm, well Juan IS the equivalent of John… but anyway, John in Anglophone countries. Or Xin in China… I am not aware of the incidence of incest on this island, but I guarantee you that it is present. At least amongst the local populace: the Payes. But I reiterate, they are genuinely lovely people. So what if the majority of them have never left an island 30 by 40 kms in their lifetime.…
Hey I got the complete set of DVDs for the BBC’s Life of Mammals for Christmas from Jillian! We all sat down and watched the ten-second part where my right ear plays a secondary role to Sir David Attenborough. And if you happen to buy the box set, or see the primate episode, check out the extras and the “Behind the Scenes.” You will see all of my face, left and right ears, nose, eyes, chin, included and even some of my body!! Woohooooo!!
Please cross all your fingers and toes for me, as I should hear about the DC Bank job soon. Well, that is somewhat hopeful as the Bank’s Human Resources Department and its bureaucracy are really showing their mettle at the moment... painful.
Mucho love,
David
What about that End, eh? How deluded was I? Very. As they say in England, I am still “on the dole.” As they say in France, “sans emploi;” as they say in España, “sin empleo;” or as I like to say, “fucked”. A definite deja vu from my time after Edinburgh University (Ah, I remember fondly those days when my friend Nick so sensitively left Dole© pineapple tags hanging on my door) and my time after getting back from Mexico looking for work from Ibiza and then Bristol. As you can see, Great Britain has always been a factor there, and hence why I have turned my back on that bleak and insular sinking island. But in the process I feel like I have turned my back on one very important thing: my friends. Here, on another island, the island of Ibiza, I am feeling very disconnected from reality, from the normal mundane humdrum of life - working life. But above all I miss my friends. The only external interaction I have is with Jillian over the phone or via email. She is my lifeline; a great one at that. Nevertheless, I felt like filling my friends in on my goings on, or lack thereof. And so this thought process has spawned the fourteenth instalment of David’s Trials and Tribulations of Life.
I am not sitting on my laurels, twiddling my thumbs, scratching my nuts. No sir-ee. A month after becoming Master Bonnardeaux (well, technically we don’t actually ‘graduate’ until July 2004! Ridiculous, but anyway...) I set up some meetings in DC and flew off to see my Jillian in the New World.
Her place in DC is my home away from home. Her housemates are a diverse bunch, as well as being all very nice and welcoming. Since spending two months with them in the summer doing my thesis, I have become an honorary housemate… of sorts. Which is good as I spent another three and a half weeks there this time! Do you know that Deputy Secretary of State Paul Wolfowitz has a daughter? You know, the very hawkish Bush Administration member who pretty much pushed the war through … well his daughter Sarah is lovely. She’s a liberal-minded, sandal-wearing girl who in fact goes out with one of Jillian’s housemates, Lee. And the funny thing is that Lee works for Ralph Nader, the Green Party frontrunner who could have been responsible for Gore losing the elections in 2000 thereby giving George W. Bush the presidency of the United States of America. How funny is that?! I would give my left testicle to be at a family dinner at the Wolfowitz’s, with Lee in tow…. Actually, come to think of it, no, I wouldn’t give one of my precious family jewels for that, but maybe five dollars…. Anyway, I digress. Jillian’s place is a very cerebral one actually. You can always count on having very long and protracted, albeit interesting conversations over Sunday breakfast or dinnertime, about… well, it usually ends up being about Bush or the Middle East conflict… or some other very light-hearted subject such as the role of the media in wars…
I went to a concert with Jillian and one of her housemates, Vineeta, one night (Indian, from India, girl with a southern South Carolina twang! Hilarious.). The band was called Death Star Orchestra… and the lead singer was dressed in Yoda garb and played a light-sabre-looking guitar…. Now, THAT would have been worth giving my left marble! No, in fact the band was called Dark Star Orchestra, a Grateful Dead cover band. I am told that it is unlike any other cover band, in that they do whole Grateful Dead concerts, with the exact set of songs as when “The Dead” played in the 60s…. uhm… 70s…. whenever. I was also told that we were witnessing a great concert. (Yep, I had to be told that, as to me it all sounded pretty much the same, apart from the long drawn out rifts. They stretched out a song for 20 minutes!! TWENTY minutes. More like the Great Rift Valley… ha, ha, boink.) At that point this hippy chick with braided hair wearing a long flowing white dress turns to me and says, “You AREN’T a Dead Head are you?” “What would make you think such a thing?” I ask her, as I bob my head back and forth with very little in the way of zeal or enthusiasm as tai-dai shirted people are going nuts all around me (we were at the front near the stage, just perfect for me to stand out like the sore thumb that I was.) Hey, did you know Jerry Garcia died relatively recently? Of COURSE I knew… ahem. Moving swiftly on…
Jillian and I spent our first Thanksgiving together, and my first one in a long time. We drove up to Frederick, Maryland. SO, Thanksgiving with a couple friends of Jillian’s was fantastic. We ate and drank copious quantities, and… ate some more. I was introduced to a particularly curious, no, two particularly curious dishes that day. Most of you Americans will not find sweet potatoes with marshmallows an oddity. But undoubtedly the rest of you will think, “What the f*&£??!! Did he just say marshmallows with sweet potatoes?” just as I did. How bizarre, and may I add, not very tasty in my culinary opinion. Then there was Jillian’s delectable concoction, “Green Stuff.” Now ALL of you will join me in raising a flummoxed eyebrow over this dish. Useful Culinary Tip No.1: Take lots of canned whipped cream, add some pineapple chunks and some unidentified green stuff and there you have it! Oh, I think the actual greenieness was some sort of pistachio additive… damn, I can’t remember what made it green, which means I can never recreate it. No fear, as I have Jillian to make it for me every Thanksgiving from now into perpetuity.
If there are any John Irving readers out there (Hotel New Hampshire, World According to Garp, etc.) you will find it funny to hear that this couple had a farting dog! (For those of you that have never read John Irving, a farting dog is very Irvingesque). Not any dog, but a blubbering old bulldog that makes noises like that weird longhaired guy from Police Academy… remember? The dog (its name was Coach) would come into the living room, where we were sitting down chilling out with some music and some wine, and lay down by our feet. Suddenly within seconds we were gagging and panting for fresh air as our nasal hairs were scorched by the fetid smell emanating out of Coach’s anal passage. Actually, Jillian and I were gagging, while Matt and Erica were laughing their heads off and taking it all in! There’s one thing thinking your OWN farts smell of roses...but...your dogs?!
Enough about farting dogs, and back to the meetings I had in DC. I spoke to countless people, had informational interviews, impromptu interviews, quick coffee meetings, fly-by meetings, etc. I must admit that the great majority of the people I met with were from the World Bank… At the beginning I only had one contact there, but the snowball effect definitely worked its magic. One person that I was very excited to meet, and actually was able to meet with, was Dr. Thomas Lovejoy! My not so science-minded friends can now get their minds out of the gutter: Dr. Lovejoy is NOT a porn star. Science oriented friends of mine will know that he was the guy who came up with the “debt for nature swaps” and had everything to do with protected area critical size research. He is a veritable environmental guru and I had his undivided attention for a whole hour! He even personally referred me to some of his acquaintances at the World Bank and other institutions. Now THAT’S a helping hand.
Hey, I also met David Grey. Nope, not the singer (or porn star), but rather a stolid, pompous Englishman who works on the Nile Basin Initiative for the Bank. He is supposedly the Bank’s water guru for Africa, but we didn’t hit it off. It seems he is a VERY busy man, and I was lucky even to get the 45 minutes that I did with him, to no avail however. Never mind. I was all over the place, meeting people in consultancies, NGOs, the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, etc. The end result? I am still to find out about a good possibility with the World Bank’s Environment Sector in DC and a position with the World Bank’s Water and Sanitation Program in Nairobi, Kenya…. I should have heard about the DC position before Christmas, and so I am pulling my hair out waiting. It’s strange to be pulling my hair out waiting to ultimately sell my soul. I’ll be soulless and bald… But the need to get a life and the need to be with the person one loves makes one do the strangest of things. And anyway, it would only be for two years…promise. By which time my hair will have grown back and my soul… well, maybe I can buy somebody else’s…
So I am back in Eivissa (Ibiza in Ibizenco) doing the hair pulling. Actually Jillian came over for Christmas ten days after I got back from DC, so it hasn’t been so bad. We spent three nights in Mallorca, the main island of the Baleares Archipelago, before ferrying over to Ibiza. More of a whirlwind tour of the island, as we only had two days. But we were able to see where Fredrick Chopin wrote a lot of his music, and we even touched the piano on which he composed a lot of it… oooohhh…. It’s in a small town called Valdemossa, tucked away in the mountains. A beautiful place, which we highly recommend. Just be wary of the 1 million Germans that live permanently on the island! Everything is written in Spanish, Mallorquin and German! Not that I have anything against Germans… but it’s just crazy. Meg, you will chuckle when I tell you Jillian and I spent the better part of the four hour ferry ride making origami cubes for our Christmas tree! People would look at us as if we were lepers, while kids would come up to us and stare, I guess hoping we would ask them to join us in our game.
We were greeted at home with home cooking and beautiful weather. Such was the weather that my dad had been able to finish making the brick wood oven near the BBQ we haven’t quite finished. We ate lamb cooked in the oven, the first meal to be cooked in it. We were all expecting a charred lamb’s leg to be propelled out of the oven door or the chimney. Or for the walls to cave in thereby entombing the lambs leg. However it was a success and the lamb was delicious. Jillian was inspired and so decided to make bread. She baked the first bread loaves in the oven! She is now known by my family as the Masterbaker. I stress: MasterBAKER. She did a great job (ahem..excuse the almost-pun…). She made Rosemary and olive bread, and it was soooo good. And the rosemary grows wild all over, so it was only a matter of walking out of the house and picking it. Olive trees are also ubiquitous on the island and around our house. However, contrary to what you might think, the olives we eat at restaurants or from shops don’t come straight from a tree. Useful Culinary Tip no.2: Olives must be soaked in caustic soda to draw out the acidity. Then they are usually marinated in some aromatic olive oil or the likes of that. Not that Jillian did that… nah; she used some bought ones.
We were invited to have Christmas lunch with our “neighbours” again, the Payeses (local ‘indigenous’ people; indigenous in the sense that they are home-grown Ibizencos. Not because they wear loin clothes, or catch their food with spears). So funny. Each time the uncle Vicente tries to pawn off one of his nieces on us. Last year he tried to marry one of them off to my brother, and he even threw in a garage, a horse drawn cart and some other extras into the deal. Suffice to say my brother declined. This year Vicente offered me some advice: get myself a woman here in Ibiza i.e. one of his nieces, while Jillian is in DC. He wasn’t being conniving or anything of the sort; Jillian was right in front of us when he imparted his advice! He is a character. Anyway, we ate a huge paella followed by some mystery meats, which actually were quite good. I kept on being served Toni’s (the man of the house) home-brewed moonshine wine. It was an honor to be drinking wine that he had made, from the cultivation of the grape through to the pressing and bottling. But you won’t find this wine on any legal shopping establishment shelves. I thankfully was able to move onto normal wine thereby avoiding premature blindness. But they invited us to a Post New Year torrada (barbeque), where we ate bountiful amounts of meats straight off the table without forks or knives. True Payes style supposedly, and washed down with some more of Toni’s wine… Again I limited my imbibing of his wine, for fear that if not I would be writing this with the aide of a Braille keyboard right now… Ah, they are lovely people; simple, humble, generous and hard working. If only the whole world could be like them, then it would be a better place all around. Perhaps a higher incidence of blindness, but a better place overall.
On a completely different note, we finally egged my parents to get themselves a puppy. Her name is Nube (cloud in Spanish), just like her mother. Ankle nipping, carpet pissing, hiccupping, not-so-silent but definitely smelly farting, sharp-toothed, cute little mutt she is. And when I say “mutt” I mean it in all senses of the word. She is a cross between a female Mastin de Pyrenee/Ibizenco and male Rottweiller/… uhm… pitbull… thankfully the recessive genes are those of the pitbull and so there are very few type traits, thankfully. She literally was a handful when we got her, and has grown to be an armful as she has put on 3 kilos in two weeks! Just the other day she started digging bones in different places. Amazing instinct. She also attempts to eat shits that hunting dogs have left in the woods. Uhm… truly amazing… instinct…. Uncanny…. And tries to eat spades, rakes, hoes, pick axes…. Again, what instinct eh?! My dad played the clarinet to her the other day. She goes ape shit, and starts semi howling, bowing down and putting her little paws up in the air, running away and whining. If she could talk, it would all translate as “PLEASE Dad you are driving me nuts. Stop the excruciating pain in my eardrums. At least LEARN to play the fricking instrument first.” We had to cut down all noxious plants around the house as one day she puked up and then began to get puffy eyes! Some sort of allergic reaction. So we cut down the ricin plants that were growing wild. Yep, ricin, as in the stuff used by an unknown assailant to assassinate Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian defector on Waterloo Bridge one late afternoon, September 7, 1978. I could be labelled a terrorist if this email got into the wrong hands; such is the ridiculous state of US intelligence these days
Oh, the New Year has been ushered in. I almost forgot. It wasn’t too eventful here. My bro, Jillian and I went out after dinner at around 4am. We went to a friend’s bar in San Antonio. During the two hours we were out we saw our travel agent, our local bar owner, the brother of the bar owner, the girlfriend of the bar owner, the brother of the girlfriend of the bar owner, the girlfriend of the brother of the girlfriend of the bar owner, oh, and the barman of another place called Bar Costa where we always go to eat Jamón Serrano sandwiches. They aren’t related, at least not as far as I know… but undoubtedly they all share one of four common-as-mud last names from the island: Colomar, Mari, Tur or Serra.
But the best thing are the first names on the island. Get this: the bar owner’s name is actually Juan, although we all call him Juanito. Why? He is not small, as the name may suggest (-ito is a diminutive in Spanish). And he is not the tooth fairy (Juanito Perez is the name given to said fictional character that whisks away your fallen tooth and replaces it with far too little hard currency). Actually we call him Juanito for the simple fact that his father’s name is Juan, and so he is in effect Juan Junior. And the brother of Juanito? Pepe… although, yes, you guessed it, we call him Pepito. Is he small? No, and he doesn’t look like a walking sandwich either (a pepito in Spanish can sometimes mean a French bread sandwich)… Their sister is called Lina, yep, Linita to most of us. She’s not vertically challenged either and, no, her mother isn’t called Lina. Hhhmm, bit of a conundrum that one. But anyway, their mother’s name is actually Pepa, although we call her Pepita. Why? Maybe her mother was called Pepa? No, simply because she’s tiny. She barely reaches my armpit.
3/5ths of the island is called Pepe, Juan, Catalina or Pepa. These names are the Ibizencan equivalent of Mohammed in the Arab world or John. Uhm, well Juan IS the equivalent of John… but anyway, John in Anglophone countries. Or Xin in China… I am not aware of the incidence of incest on this island, but I guarantee you that it is present. At least amongst the local populace: the Payes. But I reiterate, they are genuinely lovely people. So what if the majority of them have never left an island 30 by 40 kms in their lifetime.…
Hey I got the complete set of DVDs for the BBC’s Life of Mammals for Christmas from Jillian! We all sat down and watched the ten-second part where my right ear plays a secondary role to Sir David Attenborough. And if you happen to buy the box set, or see the primate episode, check out the extras and the “Behind the Scenes.” You will see all of my face, left and right ears, nose, eyes, chin, included and even some of my body!! Woohooooo!!
Please cross all your fingers and toes for me, as I should hear about the DC Bank job soon. Well, that is somewhat hopeful as the Bank’s Human Resources Department and its bureaucracy are really showing their mettle at the moment... painful.
Mucho love,
David
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