Ireland will be reunified – by the Post Office. They have yet again told me here in England that a parcel to Belfast is going to the “Republic of Ireland”.
You work 4 night shifts editing the UK news, manage finally to get to a post office just before closing, and they departitioned Ireland while you were sleeping. The scoop you missed.
You are asked why you did not give your full name on the parcel as the sender and you try to explain it’s because it’s going to Belfast and names can still cause trouble over there because of sectarianism. You realise this person does not know what “the Troubles” were, so you say it’s “kinda like Kashmir” and they look at you like you’re a fool, bless you, though you are pretty sure they know what Kashmir means.
At least the Post Office have now heard of Belfast.
I write this a couple of weeks after a holiday in Spain where I sent a parcel to people in Germany in order to finally get around UK-EU customs tariffs.
It was sent from a rundown part of Palma de Mallorca which had wow, an actual, fully staffed, beautifully branded and maintained post office, not a hybrid corner shop like back in England. Okay the parcel took 9 days to cross the Pyrenees but the mule reached Berlin in the end, contents fully intact, pack of fragile M&S apple pies included.
I live in hope my Belfast parcel doesn’t end up on a sorting slab in Cork.
On holiday in Mallorca and reflecting on a strange few days. Not that there’s anything strange about me being here – I am British (and Irish) after all, though most normal tourists arrive in summer while I only visit in winter. Probably my fifth visit now, for a week or so each time, and always in orange season. Do they grow peaches here too? I will probably never know. Maybe I’ll write a page in this blog about why I like the place at exactly this time of the year? Seven things to do in Mallorca in winter, something like that.
I’ll come to the strange part.
There is a very good (imho) Canadian TV serial called Mégantic about how the small, idyllic Quebec town of Lac-Mégantic coped after a huge fire killed 47 people there in 2013. It was caused by the derailment of a runaway freight train carrying crude oil. Watching on TV5 Monde, I had meant to finish the series on holiday and was still doing so when I read about the Almuda rail disaster in southern Spain on Sunday, which claimed at least 43 lives.
Plaça Major
Mourning was declared across Spain for three days. Official celebrations for Palma’s great annual holiday, the Feast of St Sebastian, were cancelled, though Tuesday remained a day off for understandable reasons. Walking around the city centre’s main squares on Monday, in the pouring rain, I saw a JCB removing the unused logs set up for the festive bonfire on Plaça Major as braziers stood filled but never to be lit. On Plaza de España, black drapes flapped in the wind at the back of the empty stage.
Plaça d’España
Some unofficial celebrations of St Sebastian’s did go ahead but with a minute’s silence in respect of the rail crash victims. One charanga street musician told me the holiday had originally been a celebration of the end of a plague in the city and an affirmation of life in the midst of death, so it did not feel inappropriate.
In the Canadian TV series, released a decade after the disaster, each episode focuses on one individual or family, sensitively conveying how they live – or, in some cases, do not – with bereavement and trauma months after the event. I can imagine some of those affected by the disaster in Spain might find consolation watching this some day, but just not now, when the grief is so keen. At several points in the TV drama characters use, with some bitterness, the French saying “il faut donner du temps au temps”, which may roughly translate as “time takes time”. In the immediate aftermath, the survivors and the bereaved are surely living out of time.
Ironically, a new Spanish film with a similar theme but a very different treatment is playing in cinemas this week. In Rondallas (English title: Band Together), a community is still in mourning two years on for seven fishermen lost with their boat. They finally decide to honour their memory by reconstituting the pipe band they had played in. It’s a feel-good film, even a comedy, with a strong theme of friendship.
On Tuesday night I went to see it in the Augusta Cinema, and found myself in a packed theatre. Whether it was because of the holiday or the rain or the subject matter and the timing, I do not know, but when the credits rolled, some in the audience clapped respectfully.
As I write this on Wednesday, I am seated on a bench in Stations Park, above Palma’s underground rail and bus hub, enjoying the return of the sunshine. Small children play in the climbing-frame train across the path from me. I love this giant toy train. I have done from the first day that I saw it, years ago. Some days the innocent play of children feels like the most precious thing in the world.
patrickgjackson 