The circus has come to town

Festiclown is here again. It’s that time of year in Vigo when people run round the centre dressed in strange clothes and frightening children – oops, sorry! That should be “entertaining children”. One consequence earlier this week was that you couldn’t get out of the Puerta del Sol end of Príncipe without making a detour because the clowns had a weird structure set up. Two of them see-sawed up and down, ringing bells and making music of sorts. It has to be said that, although some of the results might be a bit tacky, the Spanish do make an effort to liven up the summer. Of course, a bit of sunshine helps. Festiclown in a rainy British seaside place would be rather different.

Over in Paris (where they make their own beaches, importing piles of sand to put on the banks of the River Seine) they are having a circus of a different kind. Woody Allen, who likes filming in Paris, is busy making his latest film, Midnight in Paris. The media circus is even greater because Carla Bruni, aka Mrs Sarkozy, has a cameo role. The newspapers insist that she is driving him bonkers – Carla Bruni saca de quicio a Woody Allen – partly because she comes with a platoon of security guards but also because it has apparently taken him 25 takes to film one of her sequences. Oh dear, maybe having a sister who is a decent actress, having a career as a model and singer behind you and even being the wife of the president of France don’t make you an actress after all. Gone are the days when the wife (and occasionally the mistress) of the president of France kept a low profile.

Here the heat wave continues. Vigo may not have had the hottest daytime temperatures of southern Galicia but it seems that our minimum temperatures beat everyone else’s - 23° does not make for a good night’s sleep. The forecasters tell us the hot weather here in our part of Galicia is set to continue but maximum temperatures may drop a little, probably giving us around 29° in Vigo. Personally I find that I don’t notice a great deal of difference between 29° and 31° but that’s probably my northern genes speaking.

Thank heavens we have the pool to fall into at intervals during the day. If we were to make our way to the beach at Samil this is what we would find according to El Faro de Vigo:-

Yesterday I overheard a little conversation in the pool. The two speakers began by talking about the weather, how hot it is, how unusual it is to have so many days of hot, sunny weather and how we should all take advantage of it while it’s here. Now that sounds like a very British conversation to me! Just as in Britain, the summer here is actually unreliable enough to merit comment when it arrives and hangs around for a while. And just as in Britain, the sunshine brings out all the convertibles; everyone’s driving around with their car roof pushed back, if they can. Maybe that’s one of the reasons we have felt so much at home here.

They went on to discuss the temperature of the water – in the pool and in the sea. One of them recounted his experience of going on holiday in Mallorca in October and how warm the sea was there compared with here, hotter in October in the Med than in July and August in the Atlantic. He moaned a little about the shortness of the days in October; the sun sets so much earlier. And then he went on to say that, of course, you can benefit from the beaches being fairly empty from about 5 o’clock onwards as los turistas all leave the beach and head back to their hotel for an early cena. Interesting, I thought, that by los turistas he meant the English and Germans, maybe the French as well. He and his family, being Spanish, were not turistas then? I wonder how he categorised them. Holidaymakers? Visitors? When is a tourist not a tourist? When he’s Spanish, naturally!