Past and present side-by-side

Has it ever struck you how fortunate we are living in Catalonia? Of course, we love the mountains and forests, the coasts with their sparkling waves, the vibrant cities... Can there be anything else?

Yes, there can and is. In Catalonia we live with every modern convenience and technical innovation of the 21st century. We communicate with our Whatsapps, Skype and emails. Yet, alongside this, if we live in a rural area, there are neighbours living in quasi-medieval houses: animals on the ground floor to heat the living quarters above, kitchens still using open fires for cooking, vast entrance doors never locked.... These houses have pock-marked walls from when, until fairly recently, the local priest would throw salt on the walls to protect the house from bad harvests.

Quite often, visiting a friendly farmer’s wife, I interrupt her Skyping her daughter, a scientific researcher, living in the USA. On other days she may be in the middle of a group of family members making sausages to last through the winter.

Yesterday, this living history was personified when a grandson and I visited a bee-keeper in the mountains nearby to buy some honey. Up we went a rocky road for kilometres! As we arrived, we could see the bee-hives on the steep slopes. Jaume and Pilar greeted us from the door of a house that must have been built in the 1700s. There was a well outside for water. As I watched their cats and kittens cavorting happily, it reminded me of a childhood rhyme:

Ding dong bell

Pussy’s in the well

Who put her in?

Little Tommy Green!

Who pulled her out?

Little Johnnie Stout!

But inside, Pilar had the TV on –a great wide screen– next to a phone, next to a huge tub of honey. On the way home, I reflected that this September could have been, intrinsically, any September in centuries past. We, in Catalonia, have the immense fortune of living in history. The past is right with us – now!