Red Red Wine

I have some favourite expressions. You might recall my using “like shooting fish in a barrel”. There is another – “local colour”. Local colour, for me, is local characters, local oddballs. There is local colour at the Eroski supermarket on the carretera opposite the Campsa garage in Puerto Alcúdia. Some of you might know him. In summer, he bends balloons for the kids, directs cars and accepts euros from the shopping-trolleys. But he is all-year local colour. Hard though I have tried, I cannot make sense of anything he says, and I have given up trying to work out his name. He is a thoroughly nice chap.

Years ago in west London, there was a significant amount of local colour. In addition to the manic street preacher who ranted on one’s route to and from the shopping mall, there were the winos. There was one in particular. He and his colleagues used to frequent a launderette – for the warmth one presumes. A friend overheard him mumbling one day. What he said was this: “I’m not a drinker, I’m a deep thinker.” From this utterance came what were known for many years in that part of London as “men of ideas”. And men of ideas, such as this one chap, always came with an accessory – a dog. His dog used to wear tinsel as its own accessory, for much of the year it wore tinsel. You would see a flash of tinsel haring along the Uxbridge Road, attached to a dog at high speed in full barking mode in pursuit of the 83 or 297 bus. Dogs of ideas.

Our Eroski friend has a dog, well a few actually, or at least a few who accompany him on his daily routine – whatever that is – outside and sometimes inside the supermarket. Recently, two puppies have joined the kennels. Like all puppies, they have taken cute lessons, and like all puppies, they get everywhere, outside and sometimes inside the supermarket. Dogs in the supermarket. Dogs in the arms of the girls working there. The puppy put down, the girl who served me did wipe her hands on some kitchen towel. Am I bothered? Not really. But then I’m a sucker for puppies and a sucker for local colour. I should take to spending my days outside a supermarket. Fresh air, plenty of people to talk to – incomprehensibly admittedly – dogs to play with. I wouldn’t graduate to the Masters level of men of ideas. The chap outside Eroski doesn’t appear to have either. I have never seen him actually drinking, though there is a mate who pops in for the occasional bottle of cheap plonk or sherry.

Perhaps I would were it not for the fact that Eroski have their own idea of local colour. Outside and inside the supermarket, they are painting it … red: the cage over the grocery section, red; the posts by the checkouts, red; the whole of the front of the store, red; even the streetlights, red. Whose idea is that? Could only have been dreamt up by a man of ideas. Red for blood. Red for danger. Red for offensive, meant both as an insult and as in American Football’s “offense”. Local colour.


NATIONAL ANTHEM UPDATE
The Spanish Olympic Committee has dropped the proposed lyrics after all. There was not a "consensus", they say. Hum on.


QUIZ
Yesterday – Ian Dury And The Blockheads. Today’s title – ok, UB40 easy, but who wrote it?

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