Letter from Espargal: 10 of 2010

We’ve been spending much of the week waiting for the rain to stop, which it has, intermittently, before starting again. The animals – there are seven official beasts plus the hangers-on – like to be dry and warm as much as we do. So to pacify them, and to dry the washing, and to keep the house comfortable, we tend to make an early fire and to spend much of the day within its warm embrace.

SORRY ABOUT THE PHOTO- GRAPHER

We lay towels on the floor close to the exterior doors to dry paws and shoes after forays outside. This precaution keeps to a minimum the trail of damp prints that so often drives Jones to distraction, especially after she has newly mopped the tiles. Worse news are the yellow puddles that decorate the south patio floor, evidence that a dog couldn’t get out or chose not to. Jones is very good at mopping them up, muttering as she does so.

What we haven’t resolved, and are never likely to, is the tension created by the animals and the stove (on one hand) and the state of cleanliness for which the Jones soul longs (on the other). My wife is one of those people who are not at ease in a dirty or untidy environment. (Fortunately, I am more tolerant in this respect.)

The fact is that the beasts, as much as we love them, spend their lives dropping hairs and crumbs, especially on our tiled floors. Aiding and abetting them is the long chimney stack that rises above the fire; for all that it warms the house, it distributes a steady flow of soot particles. No amount of vacuum-cleaning brings more than a brief respite.

Jones’s avatar occupies a small, easy-to-clean apartment with no animals to complicate her life. In this unencumbered world she is free to come and go, to visit her exhibitions and to travel. (I am not exactly sure what role a spouse plays in this alternative world.) But saddled with a heart that’s melted by miaauws and seduced by animals in need, the real thing doesn’t really stand a chance. For myself, I couldn’t imagine living in the countryside without dogs.

Yes, we have been to see Avatar. Jones was frankly unimpressed. She’d been hoping to see the film in 3-D and it failed to live up to her expectations.

I was rather more taken – by the sheer technical wizardry of it, as much as anything. And I want to see it again. I spent some time afterwards reading up on the processes involved. Apart from anything else James Cameron went to enormous lengths to give his actors first hand experience of a jungle environment and to have a linguist invent the Na’vi language. Creating the visual effects took 900 people at a 4,000 unit computer-farm (according to the Wikipedia article). The whole thing cost close to half a billion dollars. Little wonder that his backers were terrified of failure.

If there’s an irony in this, it was watching Cameron’s former wife, Kathryn Bigelow, clean up at the Bafta Awards in London with her relatively low budget production, The Hurt Locker. Cameron had to look on as his ex-partner made visit after visit to the stage of the opera house to receive the film’s accolades. He had the consolation of taking the awards for production design and visual effects. I wonder what this portends for the Oscars.

Apart from the film and the inevitable walks, we have managed the odd inter-pluvial venture into the garden, mainly to rip out the huge wild celery plants that everywhere spring up at this time of year.

WILD CELERY

Mature specimens can easily occupy a square metre. Jones has cut back the vines and taken several buckets of dandelions across to Maria’s hens, which fall hungrily upon them. Mostly, however, we’ve limited ourselves to peering at the sodden greenery or trying to figure out whether the apple and fig saplings that we replanted a few months ago are dead or merely dormant.

We were dissuaded from further raiding the broccoli field in the valley by the farmer, who told us during a chance encounter that he was spraying the plants, now that they were in flower. Why and with what were not entirely clear. Jones has reluctantly taken his advice.

HAMBURGO LUNCH

Last Sunday evening we joined the expats at the Coral for a closing-down supper. The closure is for three weeks only while the interior of the snack-bar undergoes a revamp. In the meanwhile we are taking morning coffee at home. The Dutch ladies took us to lunch at the Hamburgo to thank Jonesy for looking after Ermie during their absence. (Ermie, they insisted, not Herme; they read the blog.)

JONES DAWN

The fates willing, we are going to Berlin next weekend. (The fates, in this case, are represented mainly by BA, the airline bringing our house-sitters; its intractable cabin crews have yet to announce their strike dates.) We return home on Wednesday 17.

I have arranged to give additional English lessons to my class at the Senior University to compensate them for my absences during our planned trips this spring.

My book of origins has this to say about a “white elephant”, an expression as familiar to most of us as its source is obscure: “The notion of the white elephant as something unwanted arose apparently from the practice of the kings of Siam of presenting courtiers who had incurred their displeasure with real white elephants, the cost of whose proper upkeep was ruinously high.” How delightful! Like being appointed minister of agriculture in the Soviet Union.