All Change

On Dec 31st we missed New Year's at midnight. At 11pm fireworks started going off everywhere, we flicked on the TV to see it read 12.01 and were thoroughly confused.

It turned out the government, on the 28th of the month, unbeknownst to us and many many others (who missed buses, flights etc), announced that the clocks would go back one hour, on Dec 31st, to save energy during the summer. The, and I use the term lightly, 'logic' was that people would not switch on their lights until later and therefore the country would save its depleted resources of energy.

Trouble is, this makes the late afternoons and evenings ridiculous hot and light, which means people switch on their air conditioning earlier and for longer than they otherwise would (when they would be, say, at work, or going to sleep).

And this has only irritated me today because I had to get up for work this morning, in midsummer, when this time last year it was a lovely light soon-to-be-sunny day, in the PITCH FREAKIN DARK. Because it was FIVE THIRTY in the morning any other year...

What is it with this country?

Footnote: reading this back, it strikes me that it is hardly possible to write a more middle class whinge than this? Suggestions:
- Northern France Was Slightly Disappointing
- How Organic Is Organic Hummus: Really
- Carbon Credits Are The New Volvos
- My Black Lab's A Vegan
- ARGOS: The New Superbug?

Suggestions, as ever, on a postcard.

A Touch Of Kevin

Aspirations: that’s what it’s all about in advertising, isn’t it? Well, it seems that the surveys and market research came back with the conclusive answer: what do these people with the innate stylistic tastes of the French, the confidence and looks of the Italians and the romantic language of the Spanish need? What is missing in their otherwise sartorially splendid armory?

We've got it boss, comes the confident reply from The Marketing Boys. They need A Touch Of Kevin.

Maternity Class A

Maternity Classed

After 5 hours of Spanish lessons, my brain was fairly full of new words and when to use the Present Perfect, the Imperfect and the Pluperfect (those are verb tenses, in case any British people between the ages of 25 to 35 are reading), so I’m not sure if I got everything that was explained to us during our first Maternity Class, but here goes.

The women were there from 6.30pm – 7.30pm, and then the boys could join in. I say join in, but I was pretty efficiently bundled out during the explanation that it was ‘Women Only’ for the first hour. No uterus, no need to stay. I wasn’t going to argue.

But it was nice to be going to classes, thereby finally doing a second useful thing nearly after 8 months of spectating...

Outside, we, the men, the waiting warriors, were truly pathetic. A gathering of sheepish looking dudes, actively pretending to be checking their phones, going through the dance of… Hmm, does that message truly need to remain in the inbox, let’s think about this… no one wanting to be the first to buzz in and infiltrate The Woman Zone.

What is it that terrifies us about pregnant women? (The film Alien?)

Anyway, once in, a series of mats had been arranged around the edges of the floor and we paired off. Well, we would have. Katie had disappeared and was chatting to the midwife in another room, so I sort of hung out in the middle, which would have made sense to the other women there, who had actually seen Katie. The other guys weren’t o sure, and started to circle the wagons questioning the presence of this foreigner with a fetish who’d come to pry on their vulnerable, immoveable embarazadas.

Fortunately, Katie returned and during the talk by the paediatrician I understood the following things during the next eighty minutes:
• It doesn’t really matter what type of dummy or pacifier you use. They are mostly the same.

I gotta admit I really didn’t catch anything else.

So we’re totally ready for the arrival in early March, and leave the teething to me.

Footnote: upon Katie reading this, it turns out that I didn’t even have the pacifier bit was accurate. (And for the record, you need a little dummy for a little baby. You’d think I might have got that…)

How do you say...

Lessons with Glenn (see 'Glenn') are now punctuated with him asking the teacher various gangland phrases and useful vocab that he'll be needing in a little over 11 days time.

Amazingly, German didn't fall off his chair when Glenn asked him:
- Como se dice 'How do you say'?

To avoid confusion, I should state that 'como se dice' is how you say 'how do you say'...

So German replied, looking slightly puzzled - Er. Como se dice.
- No, I know, but I need to know how to say 'How do you say'...
- Como se dice
- Yeah but... Oh.

A few minutes later we were interrupted, admittedly while we are doing some lame stuff like, 'Moving House', to practice reflexive verbs...) with the following beauty, as Glenn looked up from his Dr Dre notebook that he was using for vocab:
- Oh, sorry guys. Um, German, como se dice 'knife fight'.

Alright, I made up the bit about the Dr Dre notebook. But I thought I'd suggest some other como se dice's for our Glenn, in a week's time when his Spanish is up to scratch. Springing to mind came:
- Como se dice I'm gonna get myself killed real soon.
- Como se dice I made my move to Buenos Aires based on various Hollywood movie representations of gangland violence like 'Dangerous Minds'.
- Como se dice Some people are now saying Courtroom Reporter is different to Specialist Social Worker
- Como se dice I have less than 2 weeks to live?
- Como se dice Do you like my tat?

Nah, don't worry, I'm sure Glenn will be fine. Any trouble comes along, as he said, he can always rap himself out of danger.

Glenn

Every now and then you meet one. And when you do, it's important to remember as close to every word they say, because the true ridiculous of them is not borne out until you've reflected on it for a while. These are the people who live in a fantasy world, but talk about their life with such prosaic confidence that if you're not careful, you'll get drawn in to thinking, 'Well, good on them, at least their doing it.' Well, to be honest, this one wasn't too hard to spot. This was how I met Glenn.

Spanish lessons again. A long time seems to have passed since Cheese Wire's (June entry 07) painful lessons on damp, cold Thursday evenings, watching the clock tick down oh so slowly. Things are much better at the lovely Academia Buenos Aires, where the coffee is strong, croissants await you even if you haven't done your homework and nothing ever starts on time.

Monday morning, opening lesson, and German, our teacher, asked us to say where we were from, our age, what we were doing in BsAs, how long we were here for.... the usual ice breakers. Clockwise from the teach was: Aneesha, the States, 27, learning Spanish for two weeks then travelling. Textbook answer, no? Then Tina, Germany, 29, learning Spanish before becoming a lawyer in Germany. Then me, then Alex, 25, the States, working for an NGO with people affected by AIDS... then Glenn.

From first appearances I would have Glenn pencilled in as a charity worker of some sort, definitely had the Christian group leader look about him. Sensible clothes, neat side parting, the naive confidence to wear a t-shirt without an ironic slogan on it such as 'My Ironic Is In The Wash'.

Now, everyone had spoken in Spanish until now. Yup, even me, I'm clever now. Glenn only used one word of Spanish, pandilla, which means gang. I think it's best to quote Glenn in full:

- Yeah, well, I'm Glenn, I'm 24, and I'm from Canada (I suspect this was a lie to curry favour for 'not being American'), and I'm just doing a couple of weeks Spanish. I need Spanish for my job, but not really conventional Spanish.
- Why is your job going to be Glenn?
- I'm gonna be working with the pandillas of the South.
(He didn't actually punch his heart with his fist and then hold his arm out in a salute to the brothers, but I reckon it was well within his repertoire).
- You know, they change their slang every, like, dos o tres weeks so you gotta learn it from there.

I think it's accurate to report a stunned silence here of several seconds. Eventually somone asked:

- And what exactly are you going to be doing?
- Getting them off the street, helping them cope while they re-integrate themselves into society, that kinda thing.
- And... do you have experience of that kinda thing in the past?
- Yeah, some. In Toronto.
- Oh yeah, what did you do there?
- I was a courtroom reporter.

The following half an hour was alternately hilarious and painful as it became clear that Glenn was firstly in the wrong group (I refer to both Spanish and homo sapiens). The guy really spoke no Spanish. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm sure slang is important when communicating with the pandillas, but surely a context helps. And aren't the colloquials are the last thing you learn? And how am I getting stuck on the details?

As he rambled on, in English with an occasional Spanish word, I couldn't help but want to kill him, but reflected that the pandillas would more than likely do that for me soon enough.

At the end of the first day, I heard him speaking to Alex, the American girl.
- Hey Alex, you're living in Palermo, right? Do you know anywhere good there where I can get a tattoo?
- You're getting a tattoo?
- Yeah, thinking about it. Something to show my commitment, you know...?

Awesome! More to follow, surely, on this absolute biscuit.

Sledging, Argie style

One of the best things about the cricket here is the atmosphere of the games. Sledging barely exists, and, whilst I admit I love a few verbals, although not as much as the Aussies, cricket remains a dignified and gentlemanly game in these parts.

With this in mind, I found myself in conversation with a great man of Argentine cricket on Sunday, who regrattably shall remain nameless. In Scotland he would simply be Big Man. With the look of a battle hardened marine and skin as tough as the steaks he'd been weened on, he'd represented the Argentina Mens' hockey team, and competed in the decathlon at junior level, and is all in all a bear of a human being. A Big Man.

We were discussing the dark arts of sledging, which he, somewhat surprisingly, said he had no time for, saying it was a cowardly practice. He cited the recent ICC Division II tournament where Argentina took on the UAE, Namibia and other mighty cricketing nations. Playing against Namibia, the Namibia opening bowler took a dislike to the Big Man's batting partner, Alejandro, calling him a nasty name.

- What did you say? I asked
- Nothing much, shrugged Big Man, I just told him to be quiet.
Next to us, a team mate who'd played in that game overheard, and started chuckling.
- That's not exactly what you said, to be fair,, he quipped.
- What did you say?, I prompted.
- Well, the giant continued, he was talking to Alejandro, who by the way is the nicest guy in the world. You don't say anything to Alejandro - I would dive in front of a car for this guy, he is the nicest guy. Anyway, this bowler was saying things to Alejandro, so I told him to stop talking.
- Yeah. What did you say...
- Well, I waited for the end of the over, walked over to him as he was walking down to his position and said, Come here. (Obviously when he was now very close). You. You don't talk to that guy, ok. You say another f**king word to him I will kill you with my bare hands. I've done it before. Seriously, I will kill you with my hands. Now. No more talking.

Apparently the bowler was no more talking at all.

Like I said, he concluded. I don't really like all this sledging.

Where Have All The Boys Gone?

Fact, boys are dying out. At first I though it was simply because we were having a girl, and so you start to notice little people everywhere, especially little girls. But whilst travelling in Chile I became increasingly conscious that there did not appear to be a boy younger than the age of two anywhere in the country.

After some basic research it turned out that they actually weren’t trying to ‘even things up with China’ as I had supposed and I realised I had stumbled upon something really quite huge.

To escape any danger of objectivity or bias, I turned to my old friend, science. Using the technique of Content Analysis, as used by Einstein, I applied this to the streets of Santiago over two separate and otherwise unrelated days. The results are shocking, from a Scientific point of view:

Day 1: Boys under two: 5 Girls under two: 17
Day 2: Boys under two: 6 Girls under two: 13

We’ve all been so busy worrying about Climate Change – a subject one invariably reads about on a long haul flight – that we’ve somehow missed this one. Where have all the boys gone? What is nature trying to tell us? Jeremy Clarkson wrote hilariously about the screw top wine bottle being the fall of the last bastion of masculinity. Maybe that was the catalyst.

However, whilst thinking what total load of balls (or actually, a lack of…) this was, and I was making up silly statistics to justify writing a humble blog entry, I could hardly contain my surprise to read an article about this subject in The Sunday Times. Apparently I was not the first to spot this global sensation. The only difference being that I think the science and research I used was more accurate.

Homo Erectus Extinctus was the title to her article. Always good to start with a nob gag, I think. Anyway, Lois Roper wrote for The Sunday Times (and that’s a proper rag, so she’s a proper writer) a number of statements based on the most tenuous of links. She attacks the ' useless Y chromosome', which is a bit harsh on us fellas, me thinks, but one quote is particularly illustrative.

Roper states that 'in Marie's ante natal clinic, 4 of the 10 couples there are part of lesbian couples.'

Marie's is a gay woman and runs the clinic with her gay partner, in Hebden Bridge, the gayest town in Britain, according to the article (although not her choice of adjective), where '1 in 5 of the population is a gay woman', and the centre for gay adoption in the gayest place in the UK. Hmm.

Applying Roper's research methods, I found some interesting stuff. I surveyed some women at the recent Bebel Gilberto in BsAs, and 11 of the 12 I spoke to wanted to be, and were, lesbians. An incredible 92%. So that settles it.

Then again, it's not the easiest topic to find out about. When I googled ‘how many women want to be lesbians’, my laptop exploded.