Keeping up to date with the weather and other things.

This morning it’s raining in Pontevedra. Here’s a picture from my friend Colin’s window about an hour ago. And it has got worse since. 

My young friend and ex-student who works in Santiago de Compostela at the moment must be thanking her lucky stars that her parents came over for Holy Week rather than now. Despite having been told that they could expect just about any weather but snow, they had a week of really good, even warm, weather. I went to see her on Monday by which time the sunshine had disappeared again and we were back to gloom and grey. 

One tower of the cathedral in Santiago is covered in scaffolding, with a helpful picture of the tower on the scaffolding cover, presumably just in case you forget what the tower looks like. Apparently this is needed despite there being another tower just next to it. That tower, though, seems to have a slight lean to it. The famous leaning tower of Santiago? 

 On balance I quite like the idea of covering the scaffolding with pictures of the famous monuments in the process of being restored. When we visited Milan we might have had no idea what the cathedral there looked like without said picture. And on the whole it's a good deal better than huge advertisements for expensive products, which is what they put on the outside of St Ann's church in central Manchester when work was going on there. 

Anyway, my young friend and I had a stroll around Santiago's lovely alameda as well as the old town before going off for lunch the Los Caracoles, a restaurant not far from the obradoiro. A nice menu for €10.50. And, since this was possibly the third time Sarah had been in there in the last two weeks, we got a free chupito at the end of the meal. What's more they didn't mind our sitting there over an after-lunch coffee for ages and ages putting the world to rights before they finally had to tell us they were closing and would we mind leaving. 

 Back in Vigo my reading of Proust has continued. I have made my way through the second volume, "À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs", in which Marcel tells us about his adolescent love life. Perhaps I am something of a philistine but I have to say that I am not finding Monsieur Proust the most gripping of reads. Loads of very lyrical stuff, plenty of reflecting on the beauties of the young ladies he meets, a bit of philosophising about whether or not we truly remember what someone who strikes us terribly attractive actually looks like. But for such a long book, essentially NOTHING MUCH HAPPENS. 

The collected version of Proust that I have on my Kindle includes a series of reviews by one of his contemporaries. It has been quite reassuring to have someone else say, "Proust is really quite a difficult read, first of all because of the unusual length of his works". There I was, thinking it was just me. He goes on to say, "the age of interminable novels is over. In our time of busy people, caught up in their working life and leisure pursuits, brevity is the order of the day if you want to be read". I think this is an amazingly modern comment, taking into account that it dates from 1919. You could be forgiven for thinking that it comes from 2014. Indeed I have read comments to the same effect about "The Goldfinch" by Donna tart. And no-one could say that nothing happens in that novel. 

Having said all this, Mr. Proust did win literary prizes, the Prix Goncourt in 1919. This despite his endless sentences. When his critic commented that you lose the thread of his long sentences and have to start again to sort out what he is really saying, I found myself nodding in agreement. 

This is the kind of thing you find yourself getting up to when the weather turns gloomy. 

In between reading lengthy French novels, I have also been watching Game of Thrones on DVD. It's a well produced lot of mock-medieval swashbuckling and daring-do and I am manfully (womanfully?) resisting the temptation to say at every turn, "but it doesn't happen like that in the books!!!" This is the problem with reading the book first. (Now that is another lot of lengthy books where things DO indeed happen!) However, I do not intend to go on at length about the story line. I only mention my viewing because I came across an article comparing game of Thrones characters to real-life famous people. Here's a link.  I think my favourite is Lady Brienne of Tarth, a female knight in shining armour, as Boris Johnson, Mayor of London. 

I cannot look at either of them in the same light again!