Ahem.... Ahem.... May I have your attention please... I would like to announce my return to the blogging community as of now. I hereby do swear upon the almighty internet that i shall do my best to write seemingly inconsequential yet strangely compelling stories about extremely personal matters, and shall post them on this blog for the world to see. By the powers vested in me i now pronounce this blog... re-opened!

So, you may be wondering what I've been doing all this time... the problem is, it's top secret, and if i told you I'd have to kill you. With this being a public blog, that would mean killing everyone with access to the internet just to be on the safe side, which is just plain impractical, so lets just say i've been "lying low" in an undisclosed seaside city on the soath coast of england. Ok, so where am I now? Well, actually I am in Ester's flat in the old district of Barcelona, Spain. Yes, I have once again escaped the pain and misery of the english winter just in the nick of time. So, Barcelona...

To be honest most of my time here so far (about 3 weeks) has been spent running around like a burning rabbit (use your imagination) trying to find a job and stuff like that. So now I have a job teaching english to rich teenagers with gucci sweaters, hemp bags, and suspiciously bloodshot eyes... I have managed to do some sightseeing tho... the weekend before last was the Merce, which is the festival of barcelona... it lasts 4 days and has bags of shit happening all over the city... in fact right outside my balcony I managed to see a beautiful display of the spanish love for combining children and fireworks... For those who don't know, in England fireworks are given the same respect as grenades and semtex (except in Hyde Park, in Leeds, where the local kids use them as a substitute for grenades and cemtex), meaning that children under the age of 25 are not allowed near them, and instead are forced to stand behind metal barriers whilst "professional" (drunk) adults try to ignite the fireworks with their ciggarettes.

In spain however, adults recognize the imortance of being able to hold fireworks directly and spray their beautiful shower of sparks at other children. This is why they organise an event where about 1000 children aged about 7 - 18 dress up as devils and march down the high street holding catherine wheels on sticks and waving them erratically. You may imagine that everyone with any sense would keep a safe distance from these flamethrowing pyro-kids, but you would be wrong. In fact, the idea is to take your kids (the ones too young to hold the fireworks, i.e under 7) and run underneath the shower of sparks, taking care to try and cover your eyes and hair to avoid blindness/baldness/3rd degree burns. By the way, did I mention that each catherine wheel explodes when it finishes? Oh yeah. And not with a "Phut" like british bangers, but with a proper "KERFUCKINGBLAM!!", sending extra sparks and burning debri everywhere.

Wait a second, I almost forgot the best bit! The kids are just a warm up to the main even, which is a "dragon competition". People make large dragons on wheels, some as big as a transit van, each with an assortment of fireworks sticking out of it at a variety of angles. When the signal is given, all the fireworks are lit (usually by someone holding another firework) and the blazing dragon is then spun around and pushed threatingly into the crowd of spectators, who all run laughing and putting out their hair...

I somehow managed not to take a single photo, so you'll have to trust me on this one. :)

Anyway, I have to go and teach some more delinquent spanish kids... let me know if you're still listening people! Maybe this could be the start of something special.... :)