New York

One of the nice things about not having a job is that you have more time to go away on holiday. This is what is known as a “perogrullada” in Spanish. Sheen and I are not constricted by things like timetables and annual leave and when we want to go away, our only restriction is our bank account.

Rather than, or perhaps as well as, going away anywhere this summer, Zaragoza Twins have decided we deserve a break before the summer as such is upon us, and our destination is going to be New York City. Why New York? Well, Sheen wants to go back to look for the young man who stole her heart and her wallet in Greenwich Village in 1999, and I’ve only been to the States once and never got round to New York – it was on my route but I was arrested in Cleveland, but that’s a long story.

We have a cousin called Sacha who lives just outside New York. He is obsessed with country music but apart from that he’s a perfectly normal person. His wife has six fingers on her left hand, which is handy because she plays the lute. No, I don’t mean the flute, I mean the lute. Were she to be a flautist, I doubt it would help her much as the total number of employable digits when stopping the holes with one’s left hand could never exceed four unless she were to attempt to play Fiorec’s Sonata in C which, exceptionally, calls for five fingers, and for this reason has never been performed as far as I know and Sacha has confirmed this although he is hardly an authority since, as I have said, his speciality is country music and the flute does not figure to any great extent in country music, at least, not as much as, shall we say, the slide guitar, which produces a sound that inevitably verges on weary whenever I hear it, apart from in the song “Blackmail” by 10cc and I know what you’re going to say, that it’s not a slide guitar properly speaking, but that would be like saying pelargoniums aren’t really geraniums when, in popular usage, we use the two words to refer to the same thing or, rather, we use the word “geranium” to refer to both, and if one is to be a stickler, I ought to have written “pelargonii” and “geranii” but I shan’t be entering into a debate about this so don’t bother sending me any comments to this effect, although if any reader can provide any evidence that the flute has ever featured in any country music recording other than “Minding Mandy’s Mean Mama” by Hank Zowie, I would be grateful to know about it and, indeed, I might even be persuaded to tempt myself to look for it when I go to New York next week.

By the way, this is Zaragoza Twins’s 100th post, and for that reason, and no other, I wanted to write the longest sentence we have ever posted. On our return from the Large Apple, Sheen will regale you all with an entertaining narrative which, suspiciously, she has already begun.