The Heavenly Stars, The Heavenly Stars

Three days before Christmas, and you might expect that bars, restaurants and shops would be alive with Yuletide muzak. Some are, but yesterday there was another form of song - if song is the right word. Singing by numbers. Small children, trussed up as though at a wedding or communion or junior Strictly Come Dancing, hold numbers and chant them as they cross the stage with almost reverential and quasi-religious but flat Gregorianism. This is "El Gordo", the annual lottery - the fat or big one - and its marathon presentation; fatuous and bloated might be more accurate. Tuneless and monotonous, how can noventa cinco or cuarenta tres be made melodic. The answer is that they cannot. Only if Leonard Cohen had penned a song of the times tables and found it Cowell-ised as a number one might numbers be the stuff of popular song; and even then it would be doubtful. Wherever one went yesterday, there, in a corner, was a TV set with these mini adults and their grating alleged singing. Even my bank manager(ess) was following it on the internet. It does perhaps come to something when senior bank staff are hanging on the very number of the lottery. There is not a lot of business, she admitted to me. Someone, or some people, will have had their prayers answered yesterday. The tickets cost that much that syndicates in local neighbourhoods comprise the majority of the gamblers. I was not one to have had any prayers answered, as I hadn't offered any; I didn't have a ticket. Mallorca and Spain came to a stop for some of yesterday. The efforts of the national football team may have done similarly at the end of June this year, but that achievement and expression of national pride was nothing compared with the prospect of millions of euros. Hark the herald lottery sings.


It shouldn't surprise me, but it does. The people who contact me and where they are from. By definition of course, the internet is world-wide, and so are those who follow the blog or come to it. The other day I had another contact from Australia. A chap called Stephen who had come across what I had done about the "politics of language" and tourism. He is doing a PhD in just that subject. Fascinating stuff, at least I thought so, and no doubt so does he and his academic supervisor. So, in the spirit of this global reach, may I take the opportunity to wish all those of you, from whichever country, who come to this blog and support it with your comments and feedback and just your reading, a very happy Christmas. And maybe even one of you has won a local lottery. A few days off; I shall be back on 27 December unless something major happens in the meantime.


The forecast suggests a change for Christmas Day, but at present it is clear. And at night the sky is a magician's show. The heavenly stars glow and vibrate. It is close to freezing, and one can almost imagine snow, the saw-teeth of holly and a choir of all is calm, all is bright. As the evening becomes tomorrow, the road is silent. The pines at the edge of Albufera appear as genial fluffy clouded puff-monsters silhouetted in the darkness. A night bird calls. And the power station throbs, a lowing cow by a distant manger. There goes a late plane across the speckled blackness and now a shooting star. It races from nowhere and disappears as quickly as it arrived. And once again it is silent, a silent night, and the heavenly stars twinkle on, and maybe that shooting star was something, someone, else. Who knows? Maybe it was him, a bearded man with large boots. Happy Christmas, everyone.


QUIZ
Yesterday's title - Bruce Hornsby (And The Range). Today's title - a line from what was this blog's song of the year in 2007.

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