Fryday

Today is Friday the 13th. It's supposed to be unlucky because of Good Friday and the number of people at the Last Supper. I am superstitious so I should be careful today. In Spain, Tuesday the 13th is considered to be unlucky. Who knows why?

This morning I have to go to a place called IMELGA which is a judicial public body that will assess the injuries sustained in the confrontation with my squatter. This is a fairly simple procedure since there were none. The interview involves a doctor, a laconic, softly spoken, pleasant chappy, comparing the medical report, which the police advised me to obtain, with my present state of health, scars etc.. The meeting is brief  with Jacob sitting on my knee the whole time. The squatter will have had to undergo a similar interview. Doubtless, he will have milked the whole thing for all it's worth. I now have to wait for a date for the hearing.

Yet another office
(the excitement is too much!)

The remains of the morning, we spend in the old town. Which is old, but not really a town. It's where Jacob was baptised and has about four or five beautiful Romanic churches.

Typical houses

The main square

convent in a pretty little square where the brass band sometimes plays

The afternoon filled itself out with a couple of classes. The first with a nice young doctor who does kung fu with me and the second with a completely crazy middle aged women who also used to do kung fu with me, but 20 years ago. Her young son is also crazy. If her husband is sane he deserves a prize.

In the evening we went out to eat prawns in a local spit and sawdust bar. The deliciousness of the food is inversely proportional to the salubriousness of the surroundings. We ate, tortilla which contained cured spicy Galician sausage, tripe with chick peas, "callos" in Spanish (pronounced, "cajos"), and a big plate of griddled prawns, which are totally irresistible. This was accompanied by a local wine, "ulla". It's low in alcohol but tastes of the countryside and is bursting with citrus fruitiness. It's pink but not a rosé.

worth getting your hands sticky

ulla

First attempts with a fork

looking tasty

Today's poem:


ON THE TRAIN BETWEEN
WELLINGTON AND SHREWSBURY

The process starts—
on the rails pigs' blood,
lambs' blood in the trees

With a red tail
through the slab-white sky
the blood bird flies

This man beside me
is offering friendly
sandwiches of speech:

he's slaughtered twenty pigs
this morning—
he takes away
the sins of the word

I can smell his jacket,
it's tripe-coloured,
old tripe,
drained-out, veteran tripe
that has digested the world

I shut my eyes on
his lullaby of tripe

and the blood goes back to bed

(Someone's got to do it
and I'm grateful
and my neighbour's grateful
and we say so,
but thank God it's only
fourteen minutes to Shrewsbury)

Fourteen minutes to consider
the girl reading Scott Fitzgerald—
she has a red cashmere top
bright as a butcher's window

Shut out the sun and the cameras—
I want to talk to a doctor
about Circe's magic circle—
‘you see, it was on the woman herself
the bristles sprang
and the truffle-hunting tongue'

What is it makes my penis
presentable?
hot blood—
enough of it, in the right place

With such red cheeks
my interlocutor from the abattoirs
must have hypertension

On his knees he has
a lumpish parcel, well-knotted
with white string—
it makes all the difference
when you know it's really fresh

At one time our species
always had it fresh;
one time there were no cashmere tops
or butcher's shops

It consoles me that poems
bring nothing about,
it hurts me that poems
do so little

I was born after
man invented meat
and a shepherd invented poetry

At a time when there are only
fourteen killing minutes
between Wellington and Shrewsbury.