Little Miss Bond for 30 Days and 30 Nights.

Some of you may be familiar with TED Talks, TED is an organisation introduced tome by the wonderful Jacky Boy (* see below),  TEDs main aim is to spread ideas worth spreading. On their webpage they offer “riveting talks by remarkable people, free to the world.” For those of you who aren’t familiar with the awesomeness of all things TED you should be! I’ve included links to some great talks to get you started, including; a man from Birmingham who’s art is so small his paintbrush is the hair from a flies back, a synesthesiac mathemagician who turns numbers into cookies and those guys off the Youtube video on the train with that crazy French woman joining in. (You’ll know what I mean!)  About a year ago I watched Matt Cutts, the Director of the organization giving a speech entitled: Try something new for 30 days. (Link below also)

Mr Cutts was stuck in a self proclaimed ‘rut’ and decided to take the simple advice of a standup comedian and think of something he had always wanted to do…. And then do it. Perfectly simple no? 

In theory yes but how many of us have little (or large) ambitions that niggle at us almost daily yet never come to fruition. Mainly because there’s always a good reason not to, like feeding the dog or taping Eastenders. It turns out the 30 days is just the RIGHT amount of time to add a new habit or subtract a habit. During the speech Matt convincingly takes you on a journey from ‘desk dwelling computer nerd’ to hiking mount Kilamanjaro.

Whilst watching this 3 minute video I felt inspired, energetic and motivated. I loved the concept, it was so simple if you want to do something… do it! It was pure genius, everything that is lacking in our lives is absent because we are yet to put it there and ‘if you really want something badly enough you can do anything for 30 days.' After all it’s just 30 days, it’s not for life it’s a personal challenge with achievable goals. I felt a surge of potential course through me, for the first time in a long time I reveled in the possibilities of me. I could do anything I set my mind to. My mind raced with infinite ideas such as learning Spanish, learning French, learning French and Spanish, read Arabic, master the hula hoop, learn to flair, write a novel, dance, juggle, contact juggle, fire hoop, fire staff, fir poi, study online, gardening, pottering, mug painting and oh the list seemed unending and yet at my finger tips ready for me to stretch them out and just take whatever life skills I’d secretly fantasized about possessing but never acted upon. And then slowly month by month become some form of super fit, super flexible circus trick yielding, fire breathing, WI destroying craft champion, with a firm knowledge of calculus, quantum physics and salsa. I shut down the laptop alive with possibilities of the entire cosmos pulsating through my veins and proceeded then and there to do... absolute bollocks all.

You see I was living on a boat at the time and I wanted to mull over my new found superpowers with a cup of tea, having electrical problems so the kettle killed everything. Anyone who’s ever been in the van on festival sites, or had penchant for Shell Island in the summer or subscribed to ‘Caravan and Camping’ knows the treachery of the magnificent surge of petty electric kettle. The principle on the boat is the same, so one had to microwave the cup of water, and whilst watching the little yellow and orange cracked handle turn clumsily though the darkened greasy window, I soon forgot all about me and my superhuman brain power and ability to make soufflé every day for 30 days without ever seeing the recipe and became transfixed on how bloody hard life was without a kettle. And how much I HAD to do and how little I wanted to do, and how tea wasn’t really what I wanted and how long it would be before people who worked office hours would stop this ludicrous behavior of 9 till sodding 5 and go halfs on a few litres of Crumptons with me. Aspirations farted into the wind.

It is was over a year later for reasons irrelevant to the this tale I decided bugger it, it’s only 30 days. Hardly the poetic pep rally I’d given myself on the boat many many moons ago. But hey, I’m living in a flat with my own name on the deeds, paying monthly rent, it does not float or have wheels and I work Monday to Friday, 7-5 how did this happened I’m not sure. But I now have the novelty of evenings to myself. So after 4 days in bed sick, one does tend to get philosophical in the throngs of a fever in a Thai bedsit I decide to pick up a hula hoop and head to pool, to exercise for 1 hour every day! By the time I get to the pool I decide it hot outside and best not run before you can walk, so on day one I decided on 15 minutes swimming and 15 hoop in the reverse order I decide to document my feelings after the first 5 days. And so my challenge begins…

 

http://www.ted.com/talks/matt_cutts_try_something_new_for_30_days.html

http://www.ted.com/talks/willard_wigan_hold_your_breath_for_micro_sculpture.html

http://www.ted.com/talks/arthur_benjamin_does_mathemagic.html

http://www.ted.com/talks/naturally_7_jams_fly_baby_with_an_orchestra_of_vocals.html

*whom I was also going to accredit as my muse for studying philosophy, due his new happy go lucky  outlook on life and swimming, I though if Jack can be happy clappy I can study philosophy lets have a switch, (Jack studied philosophy in uni and often used it to quash my love of bubbles and rainbows and the greater good) however I've just read his comment about Tiny superheros and have decided he's a big fat floating poo!

Little Miss Bond and All That Glitters... a quick wander around Puerto Banus.

I awake as early as is physically pleasing after finally settling at 7:30am. He shouts something in Spanish possibly about buying houses followed by a wash of incoherent babbling ending in the word Capita. I try not to laugh audibly. It is a little after 10. Previous to the bilingual mumblings he left for work at 8pm and returned to me a little after 7:30am, shiny shoes and swollen feet. He rolls over and professes through pursed lips and sealed eyes he wants to wake to be with me. I bid him sleep, steal a kiss and slink away, shutting out the day as I do.

I wrap a borrowed pen, a notebook, my wallet and his spare telephone in my aged scarf along with my latest inspirational confuzzlement from Lama Yeshe and tie the precious bundle securely to my back.

I take some keys from the dresser and let myself out into the sun quietly, miraculously without bumping into or sending anything hurling noisily to the ground. A result, in my book.

It would appear that my 10:22 rise into the world, was a surprise attack on the bustling night streets of the Puerto Banus, the rest of which appears to lie dormant. My intention to procure him breakfast from the ‘Hipocor’ is thwarted by cold steel shutters. So I walk.

All is at peace again, the sheer ecstasy and elation of the package holiday makers antics has fallen silent with the rising of the sun. A young girl is showing signs of a complex struggle to operate a payphone in a circular bank of 5. She wears tousled hair, large glasses and an air of dismay. Her clothes are not fitting of the time of day. One can imagine such fineries to have been adorned a mere 12 hours ago as a badge of pride, she now awkwardly undertakes her walk of shame.

We are the only two in our little world at this precise moment. She sees me crossing, her stance changes from starkly pensive to a faux casual as she turns to lean her back to the phonebank, nonchallently gazing sporadically up and down, anywhere but at me. As if she feels that by adopting this stance this perfect stranger (me) will believe her whereabouts to be intentional and that, any minute, this casual damsel, not in distress, will be rescued by her night in shining amore and whisked away. Would it matter to her if I thought different? I smile. I smile at encountering my amusing new friend across the road and carry my smile around empty street corners.

After all, who has not been in her shoes from time to time? Although, I ponder as I walk, I can never remember a time during the morning after the night before where I was incapable of operating a payphone. And then it dawns on me; my only companion in this secret world of empty streets and piercing sun is potentially the best part of a decade my junior. This generation will all have possessed mobile telephone technology before exiting Primary School. To my new found friend, is the payphone, which she explores with all the grace of a monkey bashing a rock on a nut, an obsolete concept? Is there such a difference between my former fun loving self and the next generation of promiscuous binge drinkers? How long has it been since I, myself benefited from the use of such a contraption? Surely it can’t have become that complicated?

Seeing as the Puerto Banus wasn’t expecting me this early in the game, I have discovered her with her arsenal empty, so I decide to pootle. I draw my pen and pull out my notebook from the bundle and rest on the temporarily forgotten patio of El Mexicano Banus. Aside which is an extravagantly decorated kiosk, adorned with a thousand thousand intricate twists and twirls, flowing fashionably frosted to the four clean relatively new walls of the glass enclosure. A wash of wintery whites on such a juicy fresh Sunday. Above the ornate frosting in clear crisp tangerine letters proudly sits the word ‘sweet’, vacant of capital lettering or punctuation.

Inside the transparent extravaganza there lies nothing. Nothing but a bare screeded floor and newly abandoned dust. A now too familiar sight to each and every plaza, each avenue, each promenade now bares empty shells bypassed and forgotten by all. A sour pill many have swallowed in the sticky climate of today. Deeper down the rabbit hole we go with sweeter teeth and costly décor.

I turn a corner to cross at one of the hundred striped pedestrian crossings along this empty road, beneath a perfectly cultivated and trimmed criss-cross of branches I take momentary shelter from the sun. People are beginning to stir, I sit outside a Thai restaurant named the ‘Naga’. There are false stone carvings on the wall, non of which have any bearing to the mythical snaked Naga at all. A young Thai lady now shares my bench waiting contentedly between two white headphones. I examine the street up and down. My inquisitive eyes meet a cornucopia of themed restaurants and bars, estate agents, decadent ice creams and beauty alternatives all offering the same ideology perfectly manufactured for your exotic sensual pleasures in a boardroom far removed from here.  

An English man constricted yet flowing from poorly purchased golf shorts and a vibrant polo shirt talks clumsily in a booming voice of breaking into the ‘long term elderly market’. I can not say I care for his brash tone or his inhumane pitch. He stirs in me the need to move on. I realize it is Sunday, a fact I already knew yet had not yet contemplated. Now safe in the knowledge that little may come from my search for breakfast goods, I decide to head back to the apartment. As I take my first few steps a looming veranda shades the puce streets ahead, imprinted in its electric blue canvas in bold unyielding lettering is the message;

MARBELLA FOR SALE.

A sunburned couple waddle awkwardly past, clutching each other with dumpy pink arms, speaking sadly of missing MacDonald’s breakfast. I cross the road in the direction of home. Directly opposite, displaying dream properties and luxury shared apartments in the same bold blue stands the same veranda with the same message. A double sided attack;

MARBELLA FOR SALE.

 

For all my good intentions, which were leaning towards Strawberry pancakes and a veritable plethora of fruits, Sunday morning in the Puerto Banus has gotten the better of me. And as a I make the longer than originally anticipated walk home, I stop at the aptly named ‘Open Shop’ a seconds dash away from the gates of the complex and pick up a box of ‘Bon o Bon’ biscuits he had been excited for me try on our arrival and a children’s yoghurt version of a pina colada, which I intend to leave at his bedside. I also buy cheese, chorizo and sweet white rolls in a hope this falls into his category of acceptable breakfast foods (ironically the closest thing to croissant, which was my second choice, I can find in this ‘gourmet’ assault on the sea side senses.) A small offering compared to the grand designs I had awoken with on this Santo Domingo. As I pay the 9.75 a large handed, broad shouldered man smiles the warmest smile one could possibly ask for and dips into a box of sweets on the counter with his magnificent palms and cumbersome fingers and retrieves a fist of ‘Bon o Bon’ treats that he tosses into my open carrier free of charge. Thanks to this impressive man (whom I will later discover hails from Argentina) and his generous display, I come to the lasting conclusion that I will like the Puerto Banus, possibly not for the same reasons as my national counterparts who roam her shores. I feel content as I kick a piece of broken glass down the club lined ‘Plaza del Antonio Banderas’ looking in vain for a place I can dispose of it, spotting many more as I go.

I make sure on the way home to stop and lift the receiver of a pay phone in the bank, I smile as I gently place it back in its cradle, comforted by the subtlety and familiarity of the simple. Somethings just don’t change, I muse as I unwrap the first of my chocolate treats in the mid-day sun.

I sneak back into the house of sleeping men, careful not to let the rustle of the bags or the flippedy flap of my beloved 'hippo bloos' wake the workers. I slip the biscuits in by the bed, unnoticed. A round head and wide open mouth are the only things to protrude noisily from a fleece blanket, I watch for a second and smile again, turn tail and tip toe from the closed window towards the living room, where I sit at the glass and wrought iron table top, tapping away at loose black and white keys pondering how long the Puerto Banus will remain wide open to a world where all that glitters has found its place. The worn glitz and glamour of golden trinkets, tit-bits and treasures, all offered as lasting memories of the magic of the 'puerta abierta' sit in dazzling dressed windows. Their neighbors, the ever more prominent bold black and yellow signs that sting the eyes with their buzzing exclamations of salvation ‘Compro Oro!’ and ‘In GOLD we trust!’ A never ending band of circling commerce symbolically resting side by side, eternity rings lying in both the contrasting windows of the package dream in the daylight.