comments from caledonia

  Washing up is so very hard to do....especially in kitchens that started life with an inbuilt dishwasher...and so with little space for wet crockery.... I do remember 'washing up'....it involved rubber gloves, aprons, plastic basins and squirty liquids, brushes with long handles and sponges, some with one rough side.. and it involved many, many stages. 1/ remove any stuck on stuff from plates, this requires a compost bin and a flat spatula which will need washing later. 2/ glasses and cutlery first - if you have a rack or a recipient to let them dry naturally you are in luck, otherwise immediate drying with a cloth is necessary, glasses tend to get streaky - this usually means being two persons at the sink, one to wash, one to dry..and a good supply of extra fine cotton dish drying cloths... 3/ plates - and any other china items - come next.  With luck you might somewhere have stored a plastic, or wooden (rather unhygenic) folding drying rack and with even more luck it might ...

 Catalonia is definitely a different place:  Part 1 Take something as standard as a light switch...In my cliff top apartment in San Feliu de Guixols I have two standard lamps....just to be precise:  by standard lamp I mean a light on a long pole higher than myself, with a shade and a base and a way of switching On or Off.   These switches are usually managed by fingers, flipped up or down or sideways.   But not here.   My standard lamps - which are considerably taller than myself - have foot operated on/off switches. These are small rectangular objects on which there is a 'protuberance' which has to be slid from side to side to the switch the lamp on/off - or dimmed.   At first I worried that the object would slide over the tiled floor as I attempted to move the switch.   I would clutch the standard part of the lamp and bend down to switch the switch with my hand.  Later I got impatient and tried to work this switch w...