Dear Family & Friends
Today is officially the first day of summer in the UK – June 21, the summer solstice. It’s raining. In fact, it looks suspiciously like a drizzly, rainy winter’s day in Cape Town outside. Lucia has gone to the hairdresser to have her hair coloured and cut. There’s a big client function next week and she wants to look her best. This is the third hairdresser she’s trying. The other two did what they wanted rather than what Lucia asked them to do. She was really unhappy when she came home the last time, an unhappiness which was only exacerbated by the look on my face. It's not that it was a disapproving look – I tried to look as sympathetic as I could, but that only emphasised the fact that the look and style was not what Lucia would have wanted. This time Lucia is taking along photographs of her last haircut in SA so that there can’t be any mistaking what she wants. I don’t have these problems – I cut my own hair. I’ve been using a barber’s hair trimmer on myself ever since the top of my head started showing more skin than hair. I cut it to a number two. But I never really had a problem with the way hairdressers cut my hair anyway. Only once did I say to a hairdresser that I was looking for something new and different, and that was all it took to ensure that I never said the same thing again. She cut horrible stupid steps into my hair which I had to take to a barber to shave out the very next day. I couldn’t live with it. From then on, when I sat down in the hairdresser’s chair and she sweetly asked me how I wanted my hair done, I simply said, “Conservative and classic. Think banker.”
I had to go to the hearing clinic at the NHS hospital in Warwick this week for another hearing test and to be fitted for a hearing aid. The test showed quite conclusively once again that the hearing in my right ear is about 15dB to 20dB less than the left ear in the low frequency ranges – the range of the human voice. The hearing in both ears is below average. My hearing aid will be ready in the middle of next month. What really shocked me though was that I had to pay £3 for one hour parking at the hospital. £3. That’s outrageous. But then I suppose that’s what happens in economic terms when state intervention causes the hospital service to be mispriced (£ zero.) The hearing aid and the ancillary professional service are worth a couple of hundred pounds, but I get it free.
My great discoveries of the week in Leamington Spa have been a Portuguese deli, a Portuguese pub and a Portuguese restaurant. I discovered the deli, the Luso Patisserie, just walking past. I went in and ordered a coffee and enquired in my halting Portuguese where all the Portuguese people went to watch the Euro 2008 soccer. I eventually worked out with the help of another customer that the venue was a pub called the Lock, Dock and Barrel just up the road on the canal. I had noticed the pub previously while out walking the dogs, but only because it looked like such a dive. Be that as it may, Lucia and I went there to watch the Portugal-Switzerland game last Saturday and again on Thursday to watch the quarter final match with Germany (which Portugal lost 3-2.) Anyway, on Thursday evening at the pub, we bumped into a Portuguese South African who is the manager of an Italian restaurant here in Leamington Spa. (The restaurant is owned by an Iranian who also owns an Italian coffee shop run by a Spaniard with Polish and French waiters. The Portuguese deli and pub are owned by an Indian. Still with me?) The Portuguese South African told us there was a Portuguese restaurant on the “wrong side” of Leamington Spa railway station. This restaurant is actually owned by a Portuguese person from Porto, but the waitress is Brazilian and one of the chefs looks a little too blonde to be Portuguese.
I went to the restaurant, called Alfonso’s Place, on my own yesterday evening while Lucia was attending a work function. It was great. There’s a big weed-filled concrete slab across the road that looks like it used to be part of the bus depot. The dilapidated wooden hoardings surrounding the site that are supposed to keep people out are a multicoloured array of graffiti. They stopped keeping people out a long time ago. The local council has big ideas for the site, but one gets the feeling that it will be a while before anything actually happens. The restaurant is in a yellow-painted prefabricated building that looks like it dates back to the war. But there was a big, friendly greeting from the Brazilian waitress who was happy to let me practice my Portuguese on her. The food was inexpensive, very tasty and dished up in Portuguese-size portions. I’ll definitely be taking Lucia along sometime soon, maybe even this evening (depending on the haircut.)
And talking of things Portuguese, I was searching for my Portuguese language books this week among all the boxes of books stacked in the garage. I knew that I should find them (and my English Thesaurus) when I found my big Collins dictionary because they were all together in my study in Cape Town and should have been packed together. Right? Wrong. I’d love to know what the packer from the removal company was thinking when he packed our books. They are nearly all packed spine down so you can’t see what they are. The only way to find anything that isn’t obvious by it size (like a dictionary) would be to unpack everything (that’s something between one and two thousand books). I found the dictionary and left it at that. I’ve ordered another copy of the text book I was looking for from the WH Smith website (it was cheaper than Amazon or anything I could find on eBay.)
I also watch live Portuguese television on the Internet in the hope of improving my language skills, but I still struggle to understand what they’re saying. The only thing I can completely comprehend is the weather forecast, but then they give you a great big hint with the weather icons. (Come to think of it, I’m not too bad with the traffic reports either.) It’s amazing what one can find and do with such high-speed interconnections in the UK. For the last group matches of Euro 2008 (when games are played at the same time), I was able to watch one match on television and the other match live on the Internet. Theoretically, I could have watched both the matches on my computer.
Finally, I forgot to mention last week that I scratched my car. It’s not a big scratch, but I was so annoyed with myself. I reversed into a wooden bollard at Warwick Castle. The CRV is just so high and long that it’s very difficult to see low things behind the car and to judge distances while reversing. (The new CRV’s have a reverse camera which comes up on a screen in the dashboard.) I didn’t see the bollard at all. Thank goodness it was wood; it would have done some serious damage if it had been concrete.
That’s it for another week.
Love, light & peace
Llewellyn
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