Child's play

The human mind works in mysterious ways. Well, mine does, anyway. Just yesterday, in a few small steps (some sideways), it linked the Spanish financial crisis to Cat Stevens.

I was out for a walk in a small provincial Spanish town, and I happened upon one of the many victims of the housing bubble burst: an enormous plot of land. all ready for urban development. Al the infrastructure was there: water, electricity, streets and streetlights, but no houses, and no traffic (the area was open to pedestrians, but closed off to cars). It didn't take me long to realize that the site would be the perfect place for my children to learn to roller-skate.

All along one side of the embryonic urban sprawl were earlier solutions to the same problem: the jam-packed city blocks of high-rise buildings from the seventies and eighties. And they got me thinking about  "La Colmena" (The Beehive) by Camilo José Cela, put to celluloid by Mario Camus in 1982, and about a line from a song by Cat Stevens: "Well you crack the sky, scrapers fill the air. Will you keep up building higher until there is no more room up there?" Here's the original recording, from 1970:

And a more recent version:

The song is called "Where do the children play", and the answer to the title was right in front of me: the children play where the grand plans fail.



P.S.
True to form, I cannot help but think of other examples of songs about housing and children. such as Village Ghetto Land, in which Stevie Wonder sings "children play in broken glass", and Little Boxes by Malvina Reynolds, where the children grow up in boxes, then go to university where they are put in other boxes, but "come out all the same".

Counting worms

For the past two weeks, I have been walking my two girls (8 and 5 years old) to school. And for the past two weeks, it has rained almost every single night. So in the morning, as we walk, we see lots of worms on the sidewalk. (I would have liked to write "crawling with worms" but that would be an over-exaggeration, as well shall see in a moment). In Dutch, we call such worms "rainworms" (regenwormen), but I have explained to them that this is not because they like rain. Quite the opposite: they only come out because their lair or tunnel or burrow or whatever it's called are full of water, so they have nowhere to go but up. 

I was quite happy to see that they were interested, and not really repulsed, by these worms. Each few days we would make a new discovery. There were big ones and small ones, live ones (movements would elicit ear-piercing screeches of combined delight and horror) and dead ones (mostly squashed, and usually white after a few days). But it seems that all in all, they were most interested in seeing how many they could find. So they counted. (For those of you who are statistically inclined, the high score to date is seventy). Of course, quite quickly it became a competition to see who would find each next worm. I did succeed in convincing them that cooperation was better than competition, but this was mostly self-interest: the 500 meters to school can be very long if all they do is argue. But now I have a different challenge: the game has  become so engrossing that they seem much more interested in counting worms that in checking for cars when crossing the road. 

Some years ago, when mobile phones were just becoming quite the fad in Argentina, in spite of (or perhaps because) the elevated cost. A man was killed crossing the road. Witnesses reported that it was because he was so engrossed in his telephone conversation. It was soon discovered, however, that the phone was a cheap plastic imitation. Moral of the story: vanity can be deadly. But so can curiosity, as the proverbial dead cat will tell you. So I keep close to my kittens, just in case. And in the meantime I have the secret hope that they will find a horribly disfigured worm on the crossing. That would really help me convince them to pay more attention. 

Postscript: I took a different route back from school, to check whether the worms were all coming from the building site next to my daughter's school, but no. We are completely surrounded by worm country.