Apparently there is a multi-ethnic casa de barrets (hat-house, from the number hanging there) at the top of the John Lennon Musical Garden–there hasn’t been any music there since people used to pop outside the city walls to have a crap:

Here’s the pricelist:

Argentines: 80€
Blacks: 30/60€
Catalans: 50€
Romanians: 30€
Columbians: ?
Ecuadorians: 25€
Pigs, bitches, cocksuckers, whores in general, etc: [...]

A revealing note from Fran Harper’s Spanish phrasebook (1963, “text by Joan I de Corvera”):
If you stay in a hotel or private boarding house which has no all-night porter, and return after 10.30 p.m. in winter, or 11 p.m. in summer, the outer door will be opened by the “Sereno,” who is a kind of [...]

This falls into the same category as the revelation by Arenys de Mar’s thriving community of dope-fiends historians that the three kings were all black. Dunno where that leaves trite lyrics like Siempre que pintas iglesias/pintas angelitos bellos/pero nunca te acordaste/de pintar un ángel negro. (On this walk. Critical discussion of inocentadas here.)

The end of an anonymous piece entitled “The English and Christmas” found in the bilingual Spanish-Catalan Christmas 1949 issue of Colegio Condal’s school mag, Condal (more here):
The evening is devoted to innocent games in which young and old participate, one of which is called “snap dragon” and consists of fishing walnuts out of a dish [...]

I’ve only ever been a witness of vomiting and fighting at midnight mass, but none of this is new. One of today’s Libro verde items records that until a few years [before 1848], mass was sung at one in the morning, but that the irreverences of the ignorant made it impossible. Henceforth it was celebrated [...]

The papers are running their usual “worst weather ever” stories, but 163 years ago here massive floods signalled an end to a period of abnormal cold–snow lay on the land around town–and a Norwegian brig was lost in storms at the mouth of the Llobregat.

16/9: I purchase El último pirata del Mediterraneo from this gent on Abebooks for 17 quid, shipping speed 3-7 business days.
20/9: Book apparently sent via Correos, ETA 27/9. (That’s 16 business days after the order, but why be pedantic?)
6/11: Still no book or notification, and bookseller has had nothing returned by Correos. (You can cycle [...]

Re this, some results. The comments in Dutch are grossly libellous, so don’t even try to translate them. I finally managed to get the mitre on my head–Spanish bishops don’t have much between their ears–but the only way the beard would stay on was to jam it over my nose with half of it in [...]

Calla, perru maldito, gocho esfociador; calla y non protestes más y engualdrápami el caballu de una vez. Dunno where the rest is.

Graffiti art outside the nursery of the Coves d’en Cimany (Cimany’s Caves) primary school on one of the variants of this walk. Sendys, who I take to be the author, says that his friend Zoen said, “Man, it’s like a meringue smeared with sugar.” I seem to have lost the accompanying photo of the work [...]

14/12, Octavi Martí 1950s gossipwank in El País: “Pero hay quienes aseguran, sin embargo, que [Rachida Dati] es una de las ministras más cercanas [a Sarkozy] y a ninguno de los dos les importa que se note.”
18/12, more gossipwank in El País, this time from one JM Martí Font: “El presidente francés Nicolas Sarkozy, de [...]

“Neighbours and neighbouresses, this man injured a woman at knifepoint with the intention of raping her. We don’t want rapists in this neighbourhood [Gracia, Barcelona] or anywhere.” What am I meant to do if I meet him? Kneecap him?

TRANQIL·LITAT → TRANQUIL·LITAT, actually TRANQUILITAT. I suspect the Italians. “What’s this, then? ‘Romanes Eunt Domus’? ‘People called Romanes they go the house’?“

I suspect their algorithm is rather crude, and the seasons are rather vague along the Barcelona coast, but these are meant to emerge in spring (typically late January here), not late November. “The pine processionary caterpillar is a pest whose northward spread in France is being fostered by climate change. INRA researchers in Orleans are [...]

If learner drivers get subsidies in order that they may sooner screw up our living environment, why shouldn’t we cyclists get a new bike for free?
[
Patricia is apparently setting off shortly to cycle from Irún in the north to Tarifa in the south. Um, it's snowing all across the north at the moment.
I [...]

Wikipedia suggests that H’Angus the Monkey (cartoon) may have been voted mayor first time by local gamblers attracted by the high odds against him. Stuart Drummond failed to honour his “free bananas” pledge, but was re-elected.
On this walk.

None of the evangelists mention San José, electrician:

Here’s a lamb emerging from the tower blocks with which urban planners chose to blanket the lower half of the old market square, which has been jacked up to cover a huge underground carpark:

All on this walk.

This is sooooo old, but posting it is the only way to stop S telling me it again every few weeks.
Q: Translate to Catalan the phrase, Debajo de la cama tiene la mano María, Mary’s got her hand under the table.
A: Sota la taula té la mà Maria, which is to say, the same, or, [...]

Hey, it makes me happy. Is that a golf club up there?

“Thousands of years of existence,” claims Jaume Sobrequés i Callicó, enthusiastic member of the National History school and director of the craven and absurd Museum of History of Catalonia. Move over, Babylon.
[History quiz: Which urban project in Barcelona involved the demolition of more dwellings, the construction of (a) the Citadel/Ciudadela/Ciutadella fort by the victorious Bourbons [...]

That’s Mr Chambers’ 50cc Harley scooter parked in the foreground.

I hadn’t noticed that the Catalan Greens were on the December 1 demonstration demanding more roads, airports etc. Funny old world. (That’s a socialist salute, not a fascist one, on their web page, just in case all their xenophobic gibberish had you confused.)

The 2006 PISA report is a tribute to the success of Spanish regional and national governments and teaching unions in maintaining high levels of popular illiteracy and innumeracy–one wonders how many new property owners understood anything of the mortgages they contracted during the construction boom; see also ADN, which believes there’s a 1 in 20 [...]

The other day, on this walk, an elderly Englishman from G. Speaking with an Andalusian accent, he claimed to be one of a group of Brits who, following the abortive Algiers putsch (aka putsch des généraux) against De Gaulle in 1961, fled the Marseilles barracks of the French Légion étrangère and crossed the Pyrenees to [...]