the big and the small (y mawr a'r bach)*

There was no Welsh for me today, but there was a condo association meeting, if that’s the term I should be using here, my first, as I happen to be out of work, sort of, at the moment and dad needed someone to go pick someone else’s, his cousins’, parking space at the Parking Spaces Draw which happens biannually in our condominium for reasons which are obviously of no interest to you at all and therefore won’t be explained here.

‘What’s the number of their flat, again?’

‘How am I supposed to know where each parking space is, is there a map?...’

‘I can’t see the end of the queue, that’s not a queue… They’re gonna call me, and I won’t know where to go because these people don’t know how to queue properly.’

‘Dad, if they call me and you’re not busy there choosing our own space, can you go in my place and choose theirs as well? You’ll do it better than me, I’ve never done this before…’

‘Won’t this ever end? I’m hungry, I want to go upstairs and make our pizza.’

‘Oh, my, look at the time: I should be working now.’

Wait a minute: am I still unemployed, sort of, or am I not unemployed anymore? One of my best friends ever, one of The Three Amoebas (a clearly derogatory nickname given to two of my university friends and later myself, which we proudly, and ironically, turned around into a whole concept of life, well, our lives, at least) - the original ones, Carol, Liz! lol -, with the kind big heart this species of amoeba possesses, asked me to both write the abstract for an academic article of hers and revise it. And charge for that, consider it as a job, not a favour from best friend to best friend. Apart from some of my Melissa shoes I sold a few weeks ago, this is the first money I’ll have made in months. It’ll help, but it’s not the amount that counts, it’s the gesture, again - here’s me, again, talking about acts of kindness. Well, I like the subject - and I’ve got very good friends. Lucky me.

So I’ve been too busy dealing with little life in Brazil (and will continue to be tomorrow, when I’ll try to definitively answer the to-move-or-not-to-move-to-another-flat question - wish me luck), which is why I’ve been wasting your time so far now by not writing about Wales. Please forgive me. I did wake up, today, to some news from Cardiff - sad news, journalistic news about a couple found stabbed to death on Queen Street, near the castle (no, I don’t reckon Cardiff is dangerous, and neither do those I’ve spoken to about this topic - on the contrary. The police believe the killer knew his, or her?, victims). I’d just had a dream, the night before, in which a friend and I were, as we many times did during the summer we spent there, strolling around after class and I suddenly stopped and checked where we were exactly, ‘Queen St.? St. Mary St.?’, one of those useless little coincidences. But last night I didn’t dream, I read (and tonight I'm writing. I’ve always been a night owl, ever since I was little and spent my nights, during school breaks, watching Fred Astaire sing and dance on television - and now that I don’t have to be up for work as most of the population does...) - I finally started the book on Aberfan which I bought at the Eisteddfod.

I’ve read about forty pages so far only (a friend, also from the course - helo, Genia, again! -, is planning a presentation or something about the tragedy and I promised I’d read my book and send her any notes about or photographs of whatever I found might interest her, so I’d better do better than this, forty pages), so it’s a bit too early to say anything about it, but I’m under the impression that, when it comes to style (who cares about superfluous things such as style when they’re reading about such a heartbreaking real life story? Well… I do. Sorry. It’s a whole book, after all, and it’s not thin; I’ll have to spend many hours with it, so, although the facts described and discussed in it shouldn’t obviously be pleasant, the reading experience itself could be, I believe? Sorry if that sounds weird - I’ve got an MA in Literary Studies, or almost), the author won’t unfortunately manage to beat the journalist who wrote the introduction to the book. Having the will to tell a story doesn’t necessarily imply that one has the ability to do so, as this very blog very well demonstrates. I’m enjoying the book, mind you - and I’ve only just started chapter two, so the writer (one of the then children who survived the accident which scarred the village where she still lives, fifty years later, Aberfan, yes) will have plenty of time, or rather pages, to prove me wrong. I hope she does. Besides the image of why she escaped being smothered by the mass of black coal waste which tumbled down an unreliable coal tip like lava and buried her school, killing 144 people, most of whom her schoolmates (including two of her siblings), children like her, all happily waiting for the end of the day, a Friday (who doesn’t love Fridays? Well, perhaps those who, like me, me before Wales 2016, must work on Saturdays? I can’t complain, though, as we all know there are people, my sister, for example, who also work on Sundays - she has Mondays off, though, the most unpopular day of the week is her favourite, I imagine), which coincided with the end of the term, what I can remember most from my reading up to now is the word ‘betrayal’, used repeatedly (talking about style, a cohesive element, I’d say?) by the writer of the introduction. According to him, and I agree, he convinced me, that little (nevertheless important) mining community was betrayed by the British government again and again, before and after the disaster.

This isn’t a book review site, you said so, Bruna. Yes. In fact, my intention today was to tell you about the amazing video installation about Aberfan which I saw for the first time on the first day of Tafwyl (a festival, another, like the Eisteddfod, which deserves a post only to itself, like the Eisteddfod too), at the National Museum. Have I already mentioned it? I might, as not only do I tend to make arguably random references to things I did in Cardiff this year (wait until I start mentioning 2014, then you’ll see what random really means), but I also liked it a lot. Really, it was one of my favourite things on my list-of-things-to-do-in-Cardiff-this-year (actually, it’s a spreadsheet - yes, it exists! -, not a list. I make spreadsheets to prepare for a trip - bo-ring? Well, without my meticulous planning, I could’ve missed this video installation, and the exhibition of Quentin Blake’s works, and Billy Elliot, the musical, and Hay-on-Wye, the village of books, and a lot of other big or small things I intend to write about here one day, so…). It finished at the beginning of the month, unfortunately, but we can all, including myself, here in Brazil, see most of it on the artist’s website (good thing I didn’t buy the - pricey - book: the pictures were gorgeous, but I wanted them to move, as in the video, I wanted a DVD [for pleasure and for work, to come up with an activity and show students - and I’m not even working, I know, workaholic?]. There was no DVD**, but there’s the site, so, OK - the beautiful narration and poem at the beginning and, or?, end have been cut out, though, shame). Oh, and, when I told my father this morning I was reading a book about a tragic event involving mining and a sort of landslide, he remembered Samarco and Minas Gerais (Minas, Mines, as in gold mines, in the past, at least, when the Portuguese came, yes - today they’re iron ore mines, as far as I know) - but, because this is not a blog about life in Brazil and its (big and small) disasters, I’ll stop here, I’ll call it a blogging day, and leave you to Google (or The Guardian), if you so wish.

*just for you not to say there was no Welsh at all today (can only hope it's correct, though...)

**apparently, it did include a DVD :(