Running around.

After the relative trauma of our return flight to the UK, I have been trying to get myself into my UK routine. This should be easy but this has not proved to be the case between visits to and by the grandchildren and various jobs that need sorting out. There’s the big one: the freezer that has decided to give up the ghost in our absence. Before it can be replaced I have to steel myself to empty it, throw stuff away and clean it up a little. Not a job I relish. 

Then there was the spider in the bath. Not just any old spider but one of those huge ones. Fortunately I have a technique: place a glass over the spider, watch her panic, slide a card under the glass, throw her over the wall into the pub car park next door and hope she doesn’t find her way back. This was a job that had to be done at once or I was going to be unable to shower. 

This task leads me to wonder how it is that I have never seen one of those huge spiders in Galicia. Bats inside a building, yes. Giant spiders, no. Mind you, from the way that one seemed unable to climb out of the bath tub, maybe they would be unable to climb up seven flights to our Vigo flat! 

 I have managed to go out running ... once! On day one I just slept until I woke after arriving home in the small hours of the morning. And then there were loads of things to be done. Day two: I got up and ran and it was fine. Today, day three, I woke up when my alarm rang and promptly re-set it on the grounds that I had been up late the previous night. By the time I got up, running would have set the day back too far and so I made do with my indoor exercise routine. Besides it was raining rather hard! 

 Tomorrow, my daughter will come and collect me at six in the morning so that I can get the grandchildren up and off to school while she goes to spend most of the day at university. Optimistically I will dress in my running gear and hope that the rain keeps off so that I can run from the children’s school to the railway station to catch the train back home for a late breakfast. 

Yesterday, as well as running, I made it into Manchester for my Italian conversation class. Great fun! We were guessing the meaning of new words which have made their way into the big Italian dictionary – the equivalent of the Oxford English Dictionary. My favourite was “adultescente”: a term for the 30 – 40 year olds who don’t have jobs, don’t particularly care and still dress, adorn their bodies with tattoos and piercings and go out and get drunk like they did when they really were adolescents. 

Out running, shopping, heading for my daughter’s house or the supermarket or my Italian class I have seen a disturbing number of signs of the imminent arrival of Christmas. The restaurant round the corner is advertising Christmas meals already. After all, you need to book early or all the good slots will be taken and your works do will have to take place in early November or some time in January! 

 And the mince pies have appeared on the supermarket shelves. Surely if you buy them now they will be stale by the Christmas gets here. So you buy them, along with packs of mini-chocolate treats, and eat them from now until December 25th, when they will disappear to be replaced by Easter eggs. So even before Christmas you can start feeling fat! Amazing! 

When I protested that it was too early, my sister informed me that I was protesting too late. Apparently the mince pies have been around for about three weeks, along with Christmas cards in the bigger supermarkets!!