Leaping Liebsters, Batman

January 5, 2018January 5, 2018 / Benjamin Barnabas / 1 Comment

It surprises me often and anew just how many folks I know keep up with this little blog of mine. It surprises me further just how many folks I don’t know keep up with it, too. I’d hardly call myself a prolific blogger. I write what I can when I can. I seldom proofread my material (and doesn’t it show?). I really dislike the process of travel writing. And I don’t even read that many blogs myself. Beyond the writing process itself, I’m something of a stranger to the blogging community. But it keeps my writing muscles flexed on a regular basis, and that’s good enough for me.

So it surprises me even more that superstar Mary at Mary, She Wrote nominated me for a Liebster Award! But, on the understanding that one does not question manna, I’ll take it and pass it on gladly. If you haven’t already stumbled upon her wonderfully positive blog, be sure to take a stroll there sometime, it’s a garden of upbeat sunshine! I made a point of sliding a read of her latest entries into my morning routine last month and it put a smile on my face every time, so if you ever need a smile-doctor, she’s your lady!

Onwards. To the nitty-gritty.

Q&A with Mary

[Disclaimer: For the sake of entertainment, I’ve put words into your mouth here, Mary. I hope you don’t mind. As an interview, it has a little more spunk to it!]

Mary: Alright, let’s get started. Tell me, why did you start blogging?

BB: Originally? Because I wanted to write, and I was born into a generation where getting your own material out there for the world to see was easy enough for a fourteen-year old birdwatcher to operate. I sort of let that slide when real life took over, and got back into the game once again in my second year at university. It’s been sort of non-stop from there, I guess.

Mary: Okay. Tea or coffee?

BB: Tea. Green, if you can help it, though a Rooibos wouldn’t go amiss. A mint tea would be pretty fabulous, though. I don’t suppose you have any fresh mint on you right now?

Mary: Sadly, no.

BB: Shame. Throw me the next question.

Mary: Alright then. Do you have a life motto or an inspirational quote you try to live by?

BB: Don’t drive when you can cycle. Don’t cycle when you can run. And don’t run when you walk. You’ll see more of the world that way.

Mary: Um… okay. Tell me your guilty pleasure.

BB: The Spice Girls. Spiceworld is the real deal.

Mary: Is that really a guilty pleasure?

BB: Well, I’m not a card-carrying Spice Girls fanboy, if that’s what you mean. But I am partial to a little Spice Girls from time to time.

Mary: What is your favourite time of year and why?

BB: Spring. Autumn is beautiful with all of its colours and sounds and the feeling of change, but here in Badajoz you hardly notice the slide from summer to winter. Spring, however, is universal. The world puts on her best dress, the birds are singing, there’s blossom in the trees and winter is over in a field of crisp, blue skies. My heart sings.

Mary: Well, since we’re on that note, how about describing yourself in a haiku?

BB: …Give me a minute.

Mary: Take your time.

BB: Almost got a First / I mean, sixty-nine point four / that’s close enough, right?

Mary: Are you seriously still bitter about that?

BB: …..no. Next question.

Mary: What is your signature recipe and why do you like to make it?

BB: Lentejas a la abuela, most likely. It’s amazing comfort-food for a throw-together dish that has the added bonus of making use of any bread that might have gone stale. Plus it’s earthy and warm.

Mary: What’s in it?

BB: Lentils, breadcrumbs, garlic, a little stock and a few pieces of chorizo. And lashings of olive oil, of course.

Mary: Of course. Do you have any favourite jokes?

BB: Apart from my degree?

Mary: That joke is old and you know it.

BB: I kid, I kid. I don’t actually have a favourite joke to hand, I’m afraid. Tevye has a few golden lines in Fiddler on the Roof that always make me laugh, though.

Mary: What is your favourite mode of transport and why?

BB: From the couple of months of lessons I had as a teenager, I’d say horseback is pretty fantastic, when you know what you’re doing. But old habits die hard, and when it comes to hurtling down country lanes, there’s nothing better than a trusty bike.

Mary: That’s something I can agree with. We’re nearly there. Do you have any hidden talents?

BB: I’m a pretty good bird mimic.

Mary: Would you say that’s a hidden talent?

BB: I would say it’s a talent I don’t pull out so often for the sake of public decency.

Mary: Ok. Last one, then. Tell me your best dinner party anecdote about yourself.

BB: Do you mean about a dinner party I’ve hosted or attended? Or the kind of anecdote I’d reel out at a dinner party?

Mary: The last one.

BB: Well, that’d have to be the run-in with the Guardia Civil when I was fifteen. It’s a tale that’s a little long in the telling, but to keep a long story short, I was detained for not having my papers on me by Fidel Castro’s doppelganger and his two lackeys when all I really wanted to do was walk home across country after a morning spent photographing vultures.

Mary: I don’t think you could have said anything more you.

BB: Lady, I’d have to agree with you there.

11 Random Facts About Myself:

I keep a journal on me at all times, even at work.
I haven’t ever crossed the Atlantic.
When I was younger, I wanted to be a photographer.
I have a very poor sense of smell.
I absolutely love it when it rains.
I frequently leave objects hanging or balanced in strange places.
I don’t actually like listening to a cappella music by choice.
I used to have fifteen Joe Browns shirts. Presently I have just the one.
I have a triple crown, which makes styling my hair particularly problematic.
People seem to know I’m British wherever I go, except once in Germany, where I was mistaken for a German.
I say I’ll eat everything except liquorice, not because I dislike it per se, but because the buck’s gotta stop somewhere.

My Nomination(s):

Lang Adults (langadults.wordpress.com)

Questions for my Nominee(s):

Why do you blog?
What’s your worst food memory?
What’s your favourite word and why?
Do you have any favourite herbs or spices?
If I say the word HOPE, what do you think of?
What’s more important to you, the lyrics or the music itself?
Pick a Nicolas Cage film title to describe where you are in life right now.
What exactly would you do with £248.76? You have to spend every last penny.
If you could only be left with one sound memory (non-musical), what would it be and why?
Everyone’s had a think about their wedding playlist, but what (if anything) would you want played at your funeral?
I’m going to drop you in the middle of Kyrgyzstan with a bottle of water, a map and a compass. Tell me three other things you feel you might need to get by.

I guess that makes for a good shot at this. Are there any other challenges like this out there in the blogosphere, I wonder? I reckon we could do with a challenge to take up at this cold and grey time of year.

Lisbon’s Padrão dos Descobrimentos shortly before New Year’s Day

And now, back to the job applications. À tout à l’heure, folks. BB x

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

October 26, 2016October 26, 2016 / Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

100 Days of Writing: Day Three

Me and my wardrobe. It’s probably the best love affair I’ve ever had. Twenty-two years of bad ideas, gaudy shirts and triple denim disasters. Is it any wonder I change up my style every year or so? No matter what I wear, it always seems to be something… different. But that’s the beauty of clothes: the way you look is entirely up to you. If birds could change the colour of their feathers at will, I’m almost certain they would.

In my time I’ve favoured yellow dungarees, corduroys and camouflage (for birdwatching purposes), waistcoats and neckerchiefs, denim jackets and oversized t-shirts, peacoats and puffer jackets and, notoriously, Joe Browns shirts. Each and every one had its day and faded away (with no small amount of motherly relief) but it’s the latter that I’m probably the most well-known for, since it was the phase that kicked off in my first week at university and the trait for which I became known. Two years ago I could have been identified at a distance of a hundred yards from my shirts alone. These days I’ve opted for a more modest outdoor look. I daresay it’s a good deal more than possible that there’s a reflection of my ego there.

Clothes are a bit like food. There’s really no need to wear anything more than what is necessary, just as you don’t need to eat a mouthful more than what fills you up – but since when did anybody ever have any fun working on the basis of sufficiency alone? It’s taken me a long time to find a style that’s really my own, one that I feel comfortable wearing; one that I wear for myself, and not for the rest of the world. That, I think, is the cut-off point. Naturally, hispanophile that I am, it’s a certain range of Spanish wear that I’m into at the moment, and it’s one that I feel immensely comfortable wearing – and that despite the fact that most Spaniards would have me down as a foreigner for wearing them, because it’s simply not the thing that young people wear these days. But if that means hanging up the jackets, shirts and chinos for a sporty-looking set of leggings and a hoodie, excuse the pun and jog on. I know what I like and it suits me.

You might also have noticed that in all the ridiculous fashion trends I’ve tried, shorts don’t feature once. That’s still a thing. I wouldn’t be seen dead in them.

The clothes I tend to go in for these days are the high-maintenance kind. That is, I have an awful lot of shirts, and these need careful washing and regular ironing. Fortunately, I have no problem taking the time to do either of these things. True, it’s a longer-winded process this year than it was in Spain – you can’t just hang your shirts out over the balcony and expect them to dry in an hour up north – but I give it my best shot. If you can be disciplined with your wardrobe, you can be disciplined in your other affairs, I find.

In short, clothes are important. They’re essential to non-verbal self-expression. They can be great conversation starters (especially my infamous London Underground shirt – to this day, probably my best acquisition ever). They can make you curse in the morning as you mull over what to put with what and smile when something works out – and even more when it really doesn’t, especially in retrospect. And even if I could go back in time and beg my younger self to lay off the triple denim, I think I’d still let him go through it all. Because whatever I decided to wear in the future, I don’t think I could possibly go any worse than that.

That or the yellow dungarees.

Love out of Love

October 24, 2016October 26, 2016 / Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

100 Days of Writing: Day Two

It’s been a long time now since I was in the vicious grip of infatuation. And long may it be until it gets me again! I don’t remember ever feeling so free or so happy over the last few years, and I suspect it’s got a lot more to do with me growing up than anything else. Today’s topic would have been easy enough to tackle, but the stipulation was that it had to be in verse…

Now I’m not a massive fan of poetry, even good poetry. And poetry about love is seldom good. Reading some of the tripe you came up with in younger years is gut-wrenching, to say the least, but if you thought that was hard, trying writing it when that’s all in the past… The words don’t come to you as quickly as they did then, when a bleeding heart makes for an endless inkwell (with the verbal talents of a stroppy teenager). And isn’t there something about the very art of love poetry which belies imbalance?

Nevertheless, orders are orders. So here’s Day Two: The Unrequited Love Poem.

Chasing Cars was playing
As we stepped into the light
And we went our separate ways.
I went up the road
And she went down.

There’s no easy method
To describe a broken heart
When the breaking is so soft.
‘Let’s be friends’
Hurts much more than it should.

Looking back is easy
From the freedom of release
When the world is more than two.
You can see
When you were blind before.

The traffic light is blue
The battle flag is waving
But it’s painted all in white.
There are no rules
All’s fair in love and war.

—–

Her every word is wisdom
And her laugh is summer rain
And hearts, parts and cupid’s darts
All blind you to the pain.

I’ve heard that nice guys finish last
Or something of that kind
That romance died off years ago
And love is hard to find.

The front row of the theatre
The poems she shared with you
They all mean next to nothing
If that’s what a friend would do.

Pity is a murderer
Luck does not keep giving
Fate is just a child’s word
Hope is unforgiving.

—–

It saddens me to think that when you’re young and love’s the end
The worst thing you could bear to hear is to be called her friend.

—–

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. I am not a massive fan of poetry. Unless it’s Arabic poetry. I can totally dig that. BB x

Reflections from a Little Window

October 23, 2016 / Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Since I’m no longer abroad (for the time being), the primary function of this blog is somewhat defunct at the moment. Even so, since it’s been such a crucial tool for keeping me writing this year, I see no reason why I should just leave it there for a year. So, to keep the old writing muscles flexed, I’m taking on the 365 Day Writing Challenge and using this blog as the medium. They won’t be especially long entries, but hopefully they’ll be good reading, and better still, good warm-ups for the essays I’m due to be writing over the course of the year, not least of all my twelve-thousand word dissertation.

So, without further ado, here’s Day One: Outside the Window

Mine is a little window. Perhaps that’s just as well, as it looks straight across the road to the girl in the house opposite. She’s been working flat out since eleven o’clock this morning, and if she were to look up from her studies, she’d have a pretty good view of my bedroom. But when I sit down at my desk to work, I’m invisible to the outside world. I like that. I might not be the shy, retiring figure I used to be, but I haven’t lost my fondness for disappearing from time to time.
The local jackdaw brigade is out in force. There’s a roost nearby, I think, maybe in the trees over on the Avenue. It’s nice to have something wild close at hand this year, but I don’t half miss the kites, or the storks and swallows I used to see every day from my balcony in Villafranca. The trade-off is regular rain, which is something I find myself curiously attached to.
It’s raining now, as it happens.
There’s nobody out and about on my street at the moment. I suppose that’s because it’s a Sunday afternoon. Everybody who’s not at the library or the gym is inside, wrapped up snug in their rooms and noticing, like me, that we’ve already reached that time of year when your breath comes out in a cloud, inside or out. Sooner or later I’ll have to stock up on hot chocolate.
I walked home in the rain the other night. It was after midnight, and the rain was coming down hard. It’s hard to say exactly how it felt, walking over Palace Green in the half-dark getting gradually soaked in my hoodie, with the mighty cathedral and its scaffolding-crown towering overhead. It’s not the first time I’ve seen rain since I got back from Morocco, but it was probably the first time I really thought about it. I always used to think that standing outside in the rain was something to be shared, something intensely romantic. Now that the six-year blinkers are off I see things a good deal more clearly. It’s a feeling as personal as a diary, and every bit as important. And if we really are sixty percent water, there must be something naturally therapeutic about getting soaked in the rain.
I’ve missed it.
It’s not raining anymore, and the sky is still light, in that English yellow-streaks-through-grey kind of way. The slate tiles on the roof across the road are proof enough that it has been raining, though, and that’s something beautiful to see.
The girl in the window opposite isn’t there anymore. She must have taken a break, and about time too. That’s what Sundays are for. Quite by accident, I’ve been working flat-out this week, all the while duping myself that I was ‘merely helping out with a few things’. I guess I just can’t help myself. When it comes to spare time, there’s only one day of the week when I can forgive myself for doing nothing.
The sky’s opened up. Through the fifty shades of grey in the clouds above there’s a break of blue up there, and the sunlight on the trailing edges of the breach is a brilliant golden-white. It’ll be gone again by the time I pen this down, but whilst it was here, it was one of those fleeting little moments of beauty you just have to stop and watch.
Bit of a reflective first run, this one. I’ll play around with style and voice over the next few and we’ll see where this takes us.

If you’d like to do something like this, the challenge list I’m following is this one here: http://thinkwritten.com/365-creative-writing-prompts/

Ramadan Dreams

June 8, 2016 / Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

I slept pretty much all afternoon yesterday. That’s what you get after a two o’clock suhūr, I suppose. The result was a slew of very vivid dreams, perhaps not uninspired by the few clips of Inside Out! I’d been watching (I really must see the whole film. It looks amazing). This morning I could have spun the whole bizarre sequence out for you, piece by piece, but like so many dreams it’s been carried away by the morning light. All I remember clearly is standing aboard a gigantic galleon with vast, green sails, floating high above the earth like something out of The Edge Chronicles, and hurling myself overboard with my camera bag into the sea below as an alarm sounded and the ship slowly tilted sideways, stooped and then plunged into the water. And I was mainly concerned about keeping my camera dry.

I don’t think the family were all that impressed by my walking to and from school yesterday. I was. I found my way there and back in forty minutes apiece and it felt so good to get out. After all of that palava over Moroccan table manners, I really needed to get out on my own. To think. To breathe. Homestays really shouldn’t be this tough, but I am a bit of a loner. Sometimes what I really need is just to be left alone for four or five hours to read, or to think, or just to be. That was last year’s trouble, too; always rushing about.

It’s been a hard first few days. I knew it was going to be this way, especially concerning the Arabic language itself, but I didn’t expect it to be quite this hard. Leaving behind the friendly routine of the best year of my life to march straight into a two-month overhaul was always going to be difficult. Had I not gone in so positive I’d be on the brink of tears right now. I’m so behind. My classmate takes in the stuff like a sponge and I’m sitting there leaking. Grammar goes in, gets jumbled up with a million other unconscious thoughts, mistakes come out. It was so much easier in first year, when I was ahead of the game and vocabulary was all that really mattered… But then the grammar caught up, I burned out, and like so many track events, I fell back and back and back until I found myself a whole lap behind the rest. What a joke.

And here’s the punchline. In my brief spell at home, I found a folded sheet of paper covered in red scribblings I’d penned during that five-hour church service-cum-auction in Boroboro. University plans, mostly. I wrote them just weeks before I was offered a place at Durham. In amongst the scrawls there’s a four-year plan, detailing my plan of attack vis-a-vis studying French, Spanish and Arabic.

Apparently I’d never intended to take Arabic past the second year at all. There’s a question mark by that one as it is.

The question is, why did I take this road? Jordan was trying, but then, so is this – for want of company, this time. But for that one Monday class, last year was a dream. I belonged. Just speaking Spanish made me happy. And now I’m here… It seems very silly to be doing something you don’t really enjoy, and less so when you’ve no intention whatsoever of making any money out of it. Neither use nor ornament, and that’s probably the first and only time I’ve used that expression perfectly.

I suppose… I suppose I simply followed my heart. I tend to do that. I fell so very much in love with Arabic in first year. In fact, I scored more highly in Arabic that year than in either French or Spanish; undying proof that, if you put your mind to it, you can surely do it. It was, as we say, in my interest. Then came second year, the Northern Lights, the Gospel Choir fracas, another failed attempt at a relationship and the entire juggling scenario. I fell apart. I like being busy, but that was something else. I was balancing far more than I could feasibly carry. And I was also supposed to be studying Arabic.

Arabic is one of those languages you simply have to devote a lot of time to. I did in first year – almost every evening – and hey, it showed. I only became disillusioned when the lingering gap-year cabin-fever adrenaline rush petered out and I realized that there was more to university than endless study. It was thanks to that that I made so few friends outside my Arabic class that year… and that was one of the main reasons I decided to keep going. Arabic 1B wasn’t just a class, it was a real community in the way that the seven or eight French and Spanish groups could never be. United in fear. That was the magic.

What I really need right now is to escape. To be alone, without having to worry about grammar, about the family, about what my next heinous foodie faux-pas is going to be. Fortunately, I’m in the perfect place for that.

I’m turning twenty-two this weekend. Last year I spent a good deal of the day stretched out under the shade of an oak tree in the hills high above Durham, listening to the skylarks and feeling at peace with the world. That’s what I need to do. To get out. To the country. To be free. BB x