You are quite correct. There was no DAY ZERO.
If you are reading this it means that I got the dongle working and managed to post from the bus taking us from Buenos Aires Pistarini Airport to the Mayflower Suites Hotel. If you are not reading this then we are both in a lot of trouble.
I am writing this on our Airbus A340 about 90 minutes short of landing. The crew are coming round with another “meal”. They have already served us lunch and a sandwich over the past 10 hours but none of the offer resembled real food. Heaven knows what's coming now. Oh, plastic ham and cheese roll, palmeritas (pretzels), mixed fruit cup and a KitKat. Could have been worse.
Winding back to Heathrow at 4:30 this morning, pretty much everyone was on time (last arrivals Tolan Padre y Hijo, do we have a fines committee?). Arrangements were smooth as and the Gulliver's rep complimented us on how well behaved the boys were. Some sports tour groups, she said, were a nightmare, messing about with trollies and causing a nuisance; girls worse than boys. Our lads, she said, were a credit to their club. Good start.
Madrid flight was about 20 minutes late taking off and then circled in turbulence for another 40 minutes before landing in a misty/smoggy 43 degrees. Straight from gate to gate by bus (Barajas Airport is huge) and no time for shopping or searching for travel adapters. Boarded up on our Airbus (342 seats in all), 50 odd MRFC tour fund raising T Shirts scattered all over economy class. The plane is named Miguel Hernandez. I asked a wheelchair man who MH was and he said a writer, he thought. Didn't know anything written by him and why would he? Someone Google it for me and add a comment, we might as well learn some culture.
Sources close to Gareth tell me that BACRC and Uni de Rosario have asked us to play 2 mixed teams and St.Brendan's and the Uruguay RFU plan to put out one U17 and one U16 side against A and B selections from us. Perfect. U16 in these parts means 1994 born and U17 1993, so our squad straddles both categories. The best laid plans, of course. The BACRC games are planned to start at 14:00 local tomorrow (18:00 BST) and I will try to get scores up near real-time.
So, maybe more later if I can stay awake for the welcome meal. If not, mañana.
Couldn't get the wireless to work in the van, so sent from hotel wifi. Here's us in the van:
Posts
Here you go.....
ReplyDeleteMiguel Hernández (30 October 1910 - 28 March 1942), born in Orihuela (Valencian Community), was a leading 20th century Spanish poet and playwright.
Hernández was born to a poor family and received little formal education; he published his first book of poetry at 23, and gained considerable fame before his death. He spent his childhood as a goatherd and farmhand, and was, for the most part, self-taught, although he did receive basic education from state schools and the Jesuits.[1] He was introduced to literature by friend Ramon Sijé. As a youth, Hernández greatly admired the Spanish Baroque lyric poet Luis de Góngora, who was an influence in his early works.[1] Like many Spanish poets of his era, he was deeply influenced by European vanguard movements, notably by Surrealism. Though Hernández employed novel images and concepts in his verses, he never abandoned classical, popular rhythms and rhymes. Two of his most famous poems were inspired by the death of his friends Ignacio Sánchez Mejías and Ramon Sijé.
Hernández campaigned for the Republic during the Spanish Civil War, writing poetry and addressing troops deployed to the front.
During the Civil War, on the ninth of March in 1937, he married Josefina Manresa Marhuenda, whom he had met in 1933 in Orihuela. His wife inspired him to write most of his romantic work. Their first son, Manuel Ramon, was born on 19 December 1937 but died in infancy on 19 October 1938. Months later came their second son, Manuel Miguel (b. 4 January 1939, d. 1984).
Unlike others, he could not escape Spain after the Republican surrender and was arrested multiple times after the war for his anti-fascist sympathies, and was eventually sentenced to death. His death sentence, however, was commuted to a prison term of 30 years, leading to incarceration in multiple jails under extraordinarily harsh conditions until he eventually succumbed to tuberculosis in 1942. Just before his death, Hernández scrawled his last verse on the wall of the hospital: Goodbye, brothers, comrades, friends: let me take my leave of the sun and the fields.[1] Some of his verses were kept by his jailers.
While in prison, Hernández produced an extraordinary amount of poetry, much of it in the form of simple songs, which the poet collected in his papers and sent to his wife and others. These poems are now known as his Cancionero y romancero de ausencia (Songs and Ballads of Absence). In these works, the poet writes not only of the tragedy of the Spanish Civil War and his own incarceration, but also of the death of an infant son and the struggle of his wife and another son to survive in poverty. The intensity and simplicity of the poems, combined with the extraordinary situation of the poet, give them remarkable power.
Perhaps Hernández's best known poem is "Nanas de cebolla" ("Onion Lullaby"), a reply in verse to a letter from his wife in which she informed him that she was surviving on bread and onions. In the poem, the poet envisions his son breastfeeding on his mother's onion blood (sangre de cebolla), and uses the child's laughter as a counterpoint to the mother's desperation. In this as in other poems, the poet turns his wife's body into a mythic symbol of desperation and hope, of regenerative power desperately needed in a broken Spain.
Hi Graeme
ReplyDeleteHere are a couple of poems by Hernandez:
To the International Soldier Fallen in Spain
If there are men who contain a soul without frontiers,
a brow scattered with universal hair,
covered with horizons, ships, and mountain chains,
with sand and with snow, then you are one of those.
Fatherlands called to you with all their banners,
so that your breath filled with beautiful movements.
You wanted to quench the thirst of panthers
and fluttered full against their abuses.
With a taste of all suns and seas,
Spain beckons you because in her you realize
your majesty like a tree that embraces a continent.
Around your bones, the olive groves will grow,
unfolding their iron roots in the ground,
embracing men universally, faithfully.
[Everything is full of you]
Everything is full of you
and I am full of everything:
the cities are full,
and the cemeteries are full,
you, with all the houses,
me, with all the bodies.
Down the streets, I will leave
something that I will retake:
pieces of my life
come from far away.
I go, feathered by agony
against my will, to see myself
in the threshold, in the bottom
hidden since birth.
Everything is full of me:
of something that is yours and memory
lost, but found
once more, some day.
Days that linger behind
decidedly black,
indelibly red,
golden upon your body.
Cast from your hair,
everything is full of you:
of something that I haven't found
and look for among your bones.
EXCUSE ME!!!!!!!!!
ReplyDeleteLess of the poetry and culture please! This is a rugby tour!!
So:
Who got most drunk on the plane (my money is on Rob Hibbers or Dennis 'the photographer' judging from the photo above)?
As for my day - at work by 04.50 in a spiralling state of depressive jealousy.