Who doesn't love rifling through other people's discarded stuff, diving onto dubious-looking sofas, picking up random objects such as busts of a pair of buttocks and making crass jokes about having a cracking pair of cheeks? (I defy you not to groan or tut at that horrifically obvious pun.) What is it about the second-hand world that instantly endows any object, tat or treasure, with a glowing aura of irresistible attractiveness? Rhetorical pondering aside, when you need something, more often than not you will find that thing in a second-hand place, and where better to rummage than the magnificently diverse city of Barcelona?
I spent my weekend there with one of my best friends who decided she needed a set of drawers to stash all the papers for her business. With the promise of 'just looking', I agreed to accompany her to a shop that was lurking in the area five or six streets away. It wasn't far, then, so off we toddled.
Inside was a treasure trove of books and paintings, an Aladdin's cave of mattresses, a pirate's wet dream of shiny glittery jewellery, and an impoverished 2011 Londinian rioter's paradise of flat-screen TVs...There was even a hulking big glass display counter; you know, the type of thing to shamelessly exhibit pies and pastries, withering for hours under the ghoulish light. How they got that in and out would have made an interesting story. And it was quite sad to see the empty cabinet; the metal naked and no longer polished. No more pies for you.
Looking around, we examined some nice wooden drawers, my friend asking for my (evidently valued) opinion, before deciding on a set that was in fairly good nick. Whereupon she purchased aforementioned drawers and begged me to help her carry them back. Duped! Tricked! Fooled! Oh, how could I have fallen for it.... But I did, and what could I do? It wasn't that far, was it?
It was. Jerkily walking down the street a few metres impressed upon us the gravity of the situation. Our backs were twisted in a sideways position, obliging us to walk like drunken crabs, and the height difference between us merely added pain to my stooping back and bandied legs. I half expected pedestrians to either recoil in fear and disgust or round up the troops and chase us with cries of 'Burn the witches!' Every so often we had to stop and de-twist our knotted spines, simultaneously swearing at the putos calaixos de merda!, an art form at which I'm becoming rather adept in Catalan. And nobody, not one person, not a single human being offered to help two young beautiful girls struggling with a heavy wooden object. Instead, they all looked at us with the face of pompous irritation that said: 'Feckin' get out of the way; you're taking up the entire pavement!' Chivalry is not only dead but rotted in festering shrouds of distaste for other pedestrians merely trying to take their putos calaixos home.
When we eventually arrived, after much sweat and many expletives (not necessarily in that order), we still had four flights of stairs to shove the damn things up.
We really could have done with a third hand.
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