Still hot!

We succumbed to the continuing heat yesterday. 

First of all, Phil went in the pool. This is not quite a first but is a rare enough occurrence to merit commenting on. Even he has to admit that it is an excellent way to cool down. And once again the pool proved to be emptier if you go at the end of the morning rather than later in the day. 

Then later we gave in to the desire to buy a fan. Not the kind you hold in your hand. I already have one of those and it works perfectly but it is a little hard to do anything else that requires two hands. (By the way, can anyone explain to me the physics of fans? How is it that even when the air in the room is warm a fan produces cool air? The movement I understand but the temperature is a mystery.) No, we wanted an electric fan that could cool us down and hopefully keep the poor little netbook cool as well. The poor machine is heating up dreadfully. So, off to Carrefour we went, fortunately not too far away, just a short walk down the road and it was early evening so the sun was not quite so fierce. 

And this is what we found!!!! Obviously everyone and their grandmothers have been in buying electric fans. 

I asked at customer services if they expected to have any more in. I was told, “No hay nada”. Well, yes, I could tell there isn’t anything at the moment as the shelf was empty; that was a bit of a give-away but when did they expect to have more. Perhaps on Wednesday, was the rather grudging reply. Now, I suspect that if the situation arose on the UK, at the local big Tesco, for example, they would be arranging for more stocks to be brought in THAT NIGHT not maybe next Wednesday. Business logic! 

Ah well! We went down to one of the Chinese shops and bought one there. It seems to work ok, for the time being at any rate. 

In between falling into the pool, languishing in the heat and taking cooling showers, I am re-reading Domingo Villar’s excellent detective novel, “Ojos de Agua”, set in Vigo. (I braved the library system here the other day to get myself some extra reading material. It was even hotter in the library. Why was that? Aren’t libraries supposed to be cool and quiet?) At one point detective Leo Caldas commented on the tremor in someone’s voice when interviewed by the police. He went on the talk about the writer Camilo José Cela who said in his novel “La Colmena” that fear often causes a tremor. Except that Leo Caldas/Domingo Villar didn’t just say “the writer Camilo José Cela” or even “the Galician writer Camilo José Cela”. I didn’t realise that Cela was a Galician, but there you go. Oh no, he said “the Nobel prize winner Camilo José Cela”. 

Galician pride!