No hay mal tiempo, solo mama ropa


I had a Spanish lesson today, so after a sluggish run and a cappuccino, I went over to Bugis to stuff more words into my brain. Today’s lesson was on holidays and weather; being British, the intersection of Spanish, holidays and weather is two weeks in Alicante getting a terminal case of sunburn while eating Walkers crisps and drinking strong Dutch lager. What could be more European than that?

There’s three ways that weather happens in Spanish;

There is stuff being done by the weather: hace sol, hace buen tiempo, hace frio, etc.
There is stuff going on: hay tormenta
And there are things that are going on: llueva, nieva, and so on.

I suppose that’s quite analogous to English: we could answer the question what’s the weather doing? by saying it’s hot, cold, whatever. Or we could say there’s a storm, or we could look out the window (particularly in England) and observe that it’s raining. These don’t line up exactly with proper English usage, and it would be dangerous to try to think in English, just using Spanish vocabulary, but it’s not that far off.

I wanted to point out that there’s no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothing, but it would have been hubristic to try to translate a Finnish proverb into Spanish via English. Better to stick to what you (almost) know, rather than trying to be too clever.

For the rest of the day, I took La Serpiente Negra to the shops. We had decided as a special treat for her, not only would we buy some more Tupperware boxes for her to bang together and hide under the sofa, we would also get some clasps to keep the various doors and drawers in the apartment closed, rather than enjoy the obvious hilarity of our daughter pulling open the doorway to the Kingdom Of Infinite Plastic Carrier Bags (just under the sink) or the drawer that leads to The Treasure Trove Of Valuable Electronic Equipment.

Honestly, I thought she’d be more annoyed to be restricted like this, but as long as she could grab my face and pull at my eyelid, she was quite content to accompany us as we removed some of the fun from her life.

Having done this, we wandered the echoey corridors of Vivocity mall; I had to buy some acrylic paint, my wife bought a very sharp knife, and we clubbed together to get some frozen veggie burgers. Because that’s the way we celebrate Easter weekend in my household.

We also went to the shop where we bought Cecile, our enormous cuddly pink octopus. They now have keyring sized versions of all their cuddly animals, and our daughter was enraptured by mini-Cecile. I was too cruel a father to let her have it, although when we got home I brought out full-size-Cecile from her hiding place in the spare room, and the three of us danced to nerdcore hip-hop about Canada until we were all tired out.

Until I was tired out. La Serpiente Negra does not tire easily, and Cecile is a stuffed toy.

This was all too much to learn. I drank a glass of red wine, and went to sleep on the couch.

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