Malaga

On the bus on the way back from the city of Malaga on the south coast of Spain yesterday I had this thought about how impossible it is going to be to accurately write about my adventures whilst travelling. SOO much happened in just one day and night in one city, I don't even know where to begin...

I visited the Picasso museum and the house he was born in, I climbed a huge hill to visit the castle, saw the absolutely insanely large cathedral, and in the night time found this wonderful little bar which had a live jazz jam session going on inside, people smoking, an amazing atmosphere and these 4 incredible young sax players jamming with the house band. After a day of feeling rather isolated at my lack of ability to have a proper conversation (seeing as I was determined to not be an ignorant English person) I managed to have two separate long conversations in this bar, almost completely in Spanish. Just a day of determination and then finding myself the right environment (a radiantly dingey live music bar with some wonderful live musicians) meant that I had more confidence and the language I once learnt but had all but forgotten was coming back to me, enough to end up feeling like I had actually got some of my personality across whilst speaking Spanish.

So it was a very fulfilling adventure and mostly because of the accomplishment I felt from speaking the native language ...it bodes well for potential future South America travel!

YES

After many attempts to select an address for my blog (which I've set up in order to write about my travelling experiences) I hit upon something easy for you all to remember whilst also being very fitting of what I am about to write right now.
Kat Says Yes! It's easy - whenever you find yourself wondering what I'm up to, just type in katsaysyes.blogspot.com

so, YES... I don't just mean the word, but the film of that title, independently written and directed by Sally Potter. It's a beautiful film who everybody should see and possibly my favourite of all time. I have just painstakingly written down one of the film's defining monologues as delivered by the wonderful Shirley Henderson, only to find one of the pages I had written it on decided to come away from my notebook! So I thought I would make it my first blog entry and share it with you all. I think I shall like it to be read at my funeral.

I think it's beautiful, enjoy...


"Dirt doesn't go. It just gets moved around. Some things get burnt or buried in the ground. But fire makes smoke and soot and greasy grime, and buried stuff crops up after a time. It travels slowly, one could say it creeps. It's all the water underneath, it seaps. God gave us eyes that do not see too much or we'd go mad. We'd never want to touch a bed again, a sofa or a chair, if we could see the things that live in there. There's millions of them, loads of things with legs. They fornicate and then they lay their eggs. They think our dirt is lovely. They survive by eating what we shed, they're alive 'cause bits of us are dead. Now smaller than the mites are the germs. Well, we do what we can, we scrub and scrub, but they fly when we sneeze, on drops of moisture, packed out with disease. Then all we have to do is take a breath and they're inside us, fighting to the death. Not just germs, seems they're not the worst. There's viruses. Some say they were the first things to exist, because they're so small they can't be cleaned away, not at all, not ever. That's why really in the end there's no such thing as spotless. Just send the dirt somewhere else, push it around. The work is endless, that is what I have found. Maybe this earth is just a ball of fluff, some great big cleaner out there said "Enough!" and that is how we all survived. Why not? We're just the parasites that God forgot. The point is this: we never disappear, despite it being what we all most fear. We're certainly not finished when we die, however hard the undertakers try. Every single creature feeds another, everyone is everybody's mother, or at the very least a kind of host. When we expire perhaps we change at most, but never vanish. No, we leave a stain, a fingerprint, some mess, perhaps some pain. Some fear or doubt in someone else's heart. We leave a mess in fact when we depart. When you look closer, nothing goes away. It changes, see, like night becomes a day, and day the night. But even that's not true. It's really all about your point of view depending where you're standing on the Earth. And in the end, it simply isn't worth your while to try and clean your life away. You can't, for everything you do or say is there. Forever. It leaves evidence. In fact it's really only common sense there's no such thing as nothing, not at all. It may be really very, very small but it's still there. In fact I think I guess that No does not exist. There's only Yes."