Pain is a very personal thing. As a massage therapist, I deal with pain on a daily basis. The infinite, minute subtleties of discomfort - ache? sharp? tingling? stiff? sore? tender? - are something so personal that it’s really difficult to describe accurately in another language. I speak pretty good Spanish now, but still get lost between “dolor” and “agujetas” (that’s pain and sore, btw). So here, for your enjoyment, is a list of the Spanish synonyms for pain:

desconsuelo, mal, pesar, suplicio, tortura, aflicción, angustia, congoja, daño, pena, tormento, calvario
-aflicción - agonía - agujeta - agujetas - alifafe - amargura - arrepentimiento - atrición - cimbrón - contrición - jaqueca - desolación - duelo - enfermedad - goce - lástima - mal - patetismo - pena - pésame - prueba - punzada - pupa - purgatorio - sentimiento - sufrimiento - tormento - trastorno

Clearly not all of these deal with physical pain. But then again, how astute are we when differentiating between the two? It’s not that coincidental that neckache coincides with a bust-up with your partner in which words were left unsaid (visuddha chakra). Nor it is unusual for the lungs to ache when grief is intense (in TCM, grief is associated with Lung Qi).

Net conclusion: I need to improve my vocabulary. Let’s see, how can I work ‘alifafe’ into a sentence?

Hi! I’m just back from Eco-Altea. We’ve got great weather here and loads of people have turned up. Plenty of kids and things for them to do, vegetarian food, Eco-balls for washing your clothes, moon cups for green ladies, a model eco house, incense, clothes, jewellery and of course free massages all day! Well worth a visit!

The BBC reports here that “wrong bras” can damage breasts. Very interesting stuff.  One of my pet peeves about Spain is the women’s underwear.  Firstly, it’s all nylon!!  Secondly, the sizing is rubbish.  If you don’t want a plate-armor granny bra, but you’ve got a cup size bigger than a B, you’re pretty much stuffed.  And all the bras have that horrible foam reinforcement that makes your boobs look all boyish and smushed.  Woebetide you find a pretty cotton bra in various cup sizes.  In the Shopping centre in Benidorm (La Marina), there a whole lingerie shop that sells bras only in B-cups.  What?  LIke every woman in Spain wears a B-cup?

At least it’s better than Italy, where they do the sizing like this:  1,2,3,4,5,6 etc. each number corresponds to a certain width at the ribs and on the bust.  So what happens if you have a big ribcage and small boobs?  Or big boobs and narrow chest?  At least in Italy they have cotton underwear.

For my money, the UK has better women’s underclothing  than either Spain or Italy.  I mean, everyday, comfortable, supportive underwear.  It has to do with feminism and women’s roles in society, I reckon.  The more male-dominated society, the more boobs are treated as objects of lust, trussed up but unloved.   The more that woman are self-defined, the less need they have to endure discomfort in order to be deemed worthy.  But don’t get me started on high heels and the City of London!!!

Ladies, free your bodies, love your selves.

Here’s something you don’t expect to see in stuffy old Europe.  Lackadaisical Thailand perhaps, corrupt India almost certainly, but modern Spain, member of the EU, spender of the Euro?  I don’t think so!  Whassat you say?  Well this morning I popped out to get a cup of tea - badly in need after a night up with the baby.  In the cafe there were only two or three tables, one of them occupied by two local policemen, in uniform and obviously on duty.  Both were smoking fags and both had a bottle of beer!  This was 11:45 AM, people, and the cops are drinking BEER on the beat! But you know what happens next don’t you?  Guess…go on, guess.  Yep, they finish up, put on their sunglasses and get on their motorcycles to patrol the streets!! So I go back to work exclaming my surprise and you know what the receptionist says?  “Oh yeah, they’re there every day”.  Jeezus and I avoid the cops cos they’re unpredictable…but under the influence?  Hmmm…

Today I chickened out.  Thinking that I ought to profit from my day off, I rashly decided that I would busk a few songs and earn a few pesos.  But facing the moment of truth, I turned away.

I can’t quite understand what it is that renders me unable to perform in the street.  I have no such fear of the stage.  Only the street.  I think that it’s the “in your face” nature of busking.  Like, people are just sitting there having a coffee and suddenly along comes me with my guitar.  I play a few songs then stick my hand out and ask for money.  It’s not that far removed from begging really.

Maybe that’s why I can’t do it:  it seems debased, makes me out as a pauper.  When you’re on stage, you know that your audience has come to listen to you, to hear your music.  You’re there on the stage with everyone paying attention. You are respected.  There is reverence (sometimes!)  You have their attention.  On the street you compete with traffic and passersby.  No one came to hear you play, you might be an intrusion, an annoyance, in the way.  So it’s not really fear of playing that paralyses me, it’s fear of the reaction to/perception of my performance.

Perhaps there are people who enjoy the challenge of winning over an apathetic cluster of coffee drinkers.  Maybe there are those who believe that they will put a smile on their faces and brighten their day.  Perhaps there are some who are hungry enough to have to play and that’s the sole motivation they need.  I guess that I don’t believe in myself enough to credit the idea that I could brighten a bored stranger’s day.  I guess I’m not hungry enough.  I don’t need to do it, so I have the bail-out-the-backdoor option…and today I took it.

Do I feel ashamed?  No.  I do many things well and can’t expect to excel at everything.  Disappointed?  Yes.  I’d have likes to write about the coins collected, the boogie woogie dance I did, the applause and appreciation.  But certainly I feel optimistic because I know that I shall overcome this block and sing in the street this summer.  For no reason other than to prove that the talents God gave me - my voice, my joy,  my love of music - increase the happiness in this world, if only by a fraction.  Sat Nam.

I’m anglo-saxon through and through. I’ve got short, fine, straight fair hair. I don’t think that I lose much hair because when I clean my floors, I don’t seem to come across much. Now, I live in Spain and am lucky enough to have good friends who come to visit regularly. Which is great but more than half have long, dark, curly hair. And I love ‘em but the reminders of their visits turn up on my broom for weeks afterwards. There’s something about hairs that bugs me deeply. I reckon it springs from my sister’s struggle with alopecia. At the age of fourteen, she lost all her hair and we, of course, found most of it around the house. Her hair’s never grown back, btw.

Spain’s Rafael Nadal is unhappy with this season’s tennis schedule, concertina’d between US college Basketball and the Olympics. Too many masters tournaments in too little time, he says. Fair enough, perhaps, but my question is: why are professional tennis players playing in the Olympics? I thought that the Olympics was about amateur sport? I know, it happens in hockey and cycling and lots of other sports. Same question: what does pro sport have to do with amateur sport?

Popped out to La Morena on Friday night to listen to a ’soul and funk’ concert.  In reality it was a guy with an admitedly very nice voice singing along to his mp3 backing tracks.  Uh, I think that’s called karaoke.  It’s so weird here how so many performers only do cover songs and even then just play along with a backing track.  Weird and cheesy and canned.  Who goes out to listen to canned music when you can jsut turn on the radio/iTunes/CD in your home?  Folks!  Give me some originals please!  That’s what creativity is about.  Oh, yes, forgot…it’s all about recycling now.  Kylie on the front cover of the MusicStore catalogue doinng her best Marilyn Monroe impression, Lyndsey Lohan chanelling same in photos last month…isn’t creativity about pushnig boundaries?  Or is re-interpretation and imitation a sincere form of art?  I guess it is, if you have more drive than innate talent.

Of course, the bar war terribly smoky, like all bars in Spain.  The gross thing about smoke is that it’s not even the good part of the cigarette.  Everyone is waltzing around in the residue of the tobacco smoke…kind of like the difference between a poo and the meal that made it.  Thanks for the exhale, buddy, now I can swim around in your s**t.  And I say this as a former smoker, certainly not always considerate in my time

Following on from earlier, if Argentinians are the Aussies of Spain, then Uruguayans are the Kiwis: a small country dwarfed by it’s huge neighbour, friendly to one another but aware of their differences, almost the same accent with a few twangs. Only there isn’t a sea separating them…

…I wanna be sedated. I was cackling loudly last night at the latest edition of the terribly wonderful Female Focus magazine. Go on, have a look at the website. It gives you nice idea of just how incredibly ugly this magazine is. Following in the tradition of practically all the English press on the Costa Blanca, they have decided to make their publication practically unreadable by filling it with multicoloured ads, the liberal use of tiny italic fonts in their ‘articles’ and the discontinuous columns that have the reader jumping from corner to corner to page in an attempt to make sense of the story. Now, I understand that they generate their revenue from ads, but for heaven’s sake, get a DTP operator who knows anything about design!

So, among the stellar ads in the back of the FF (after having flipped through the 100 pages in about 2 minutes desperatly wondering where the articles were) I found this one: “Toaster, good condition, 5 euros, Els Poblets” WTF? You’re putting an ad in to sell your toaster for a fiver and the editor accepted it?? Continuing on, we come to: “Sandpit, plastic green frog sandpit, with lid, can be used with sand or water, 25 euros, Javea.” Maybe it was my extreme fatigue yesterday evening but I was ROTFL at that one. Can you imagine yourself ringing up? “Er, hello, yeah I wondered if the sandpit was still available?” People! Get with the charity shop or freecycle groove!

So, at last we come to the property ads, all those poor people who’ve invested their life savings in a place in the sun only to see the property market fall down go boom in the past year. Yes, I have sympathy, but with vacancy rates on new properties still running at 10% (and some buildings round here 90% vacant), you do wonder if the buyers had given any thought to their little investment. Going further and further inland, (ie away from what little entertainment and culture there is on the CB, namely the beach and the bars next to it), you struggle with what to write in your small ad. So, here we have “Benitaya, 129,000 Euros…just a 15-minute drive to Pego…” What? You’re trying to sell your property with the attractive tag that’s it’s only a 15-minute drive to Pego? Pego is a butt-ugly backend of a pueblo, super Franco-esque cement ‘architecture’, some lovely paint and agrochemical factories on the way into town, dusty, not in the mountains nor by the sea. Google it and you won’t even find an image of the center or town because there’s no reason to take a photo of this hole, let alone post in on the Interweb. My God! I’m going to ring right now! Only a 15-minute drive to Pego….made me think of the Ramones “15-15-15 minutes to Pego / I wanna be sedated / Nothing to do nowhere to go /I wanna be sedated…”