Feel the passion?

All over the city car horns are tooting and people are yelling. A scooter hurtles down the streets towards the centre of town, overloaded with three people, plus a Catalan flag. One of the passengers clutches onto the flapping flag as the scooter darts through lines of traffic, another waves a scarf. People hang out of car windows and bellow in time to the tooting. I pause, waiting for a red light to turn green so I can cross the street, and feel totally removed from the euphoria going on around me. It makes me feel very foreign indeed.

Spectacular!

I paint a metalic-almondy shade of varnish onto my fingernails in the hope that by the time my friend's wedding day arrives, they will have grown a bit - if they look pretty I tend to leave them alone.

In El Corte Inglés I find a big box of Yorkshire Tea. As I open it for the first time I enjoy inhaling its refreshing scent, and smile as I remember the conversation I had with the dentist the other day about the amount of tea English people do or don't drink, and whether tea stains more than coffee (inconclusive).

Finding a CD collection in the library called Thai Pop Spectacular. It's an album of Thai music from the 60s, 70s and 80s. Some tracks are unbelievably awful but some are catchy and though I don't understand a thing I love the track titles, which include "Papaya Salad Merchant", "Uncle D is a drunk", "Monthly wife" and "You should die by bullets".

Close quarters

Living so close to other people can be tough sometimes. In all the flats I've lived in here, the sound insulation has been poor which has meant I've had the pleasure of hearing each little detail of my neighbours' lives, from morning 'til night. I know that the little boy who lives directly above us has a cough at the moment, that the lady a floor down and across from us had a load of visitors over for lunch yesterday, that the man above to the right can't make it through the night without a trip to the loo and that the people next door triple lock their front door. Too much information? Yes, sometimes. But as well as the occasionally invasive noise, comes the opportunity to people watch. After I've hung out all my washing sometimes I stay on the balcony and on a bright day there are usually several neighbours out. There's the young couple who have a ground floor garden flat opposite my building, who often play with their dog and sometimes play fight each other. The man who tends to his plants on sunny mornings. The woman who has a balcony directly below ours, who pegs and unpegs washing so quickly and quietly. I could get some tips from her, I bet she never lets any of her clothes drop to the floor below. My sock mortality rate is increasing.

Happy New Year, smoke-free Spain

After the gasp-inducing cold of Britain, I appreciate the mild winter days of early 2011 in Barcelona. Our flat doesn't get the sun in the morning, but standing on the tiny balcony I can see warm light hitting the hills in the distance. I'm looking forward to sitting out in the evenings later in the year.

This is certainly a beautiful thing - to walk into a bar, cafe or restaurant and to be able to breathe in deeply without taking in a lungful of stale smoke. I've seen opinion polls in newspapers asking "Is the new anti-tobacco law a mistake?" but generally proprietors seem to be going with it.

Not so beautiful...while buttering toast, I stop and examine a foreign body caught in the bread. I shudder as I prize out what seems to be a cigarette butt. I think about taking a photo, putting the evidence in a bag and marching down to the bakery, but in the end just toss the slice into the bin. Let's hope the anti-smoking law extends to smoking at work!

Some beautiful things

1. The flat has felt oppressive lately. One of the reasons being that the couple have a friend staying, and rather than take him out to see some of Barcelona, they seem to favour staying at home, watching TV and playing computer games. Their guest is a policeman from Segovia who has a sugar addiction and spends much of the time wearing a tight vest. I feel like I'm living in student accommodation again, between the piled up pizza boxes and endless hours of television. Today I realised it was getting to me so grabbed my bag and left earlier than I needed to. The light and space of the street was such a relief. I walked down towards the metro station and felt myself relax. 2. Paying a compliment to a friend, who instead of her normal black/grey/brown was wearing a pretty blue top. She brushed it off, but I could tell she was pleased. 3. Lunch in a Japanese restaurant - four deceptively delicate-looking courses served in quick succession leave us not only full, but aesthetically satisfied. Each dish was tidy and colourful.

In focus

A scene from the "Patum" festival, Berga.


School playgroud



Fruit&veg stall in the Boqueria market

These photos were taken on an ordinary digital camera and manipulated online using the "tilt shift" method. Try it! tiltshiftmaker.com

Colour...and big cat