We're Having a Heatwave

I'm going to be away for most of the coming week. It is hot enough for anybody here in Britain at the moment, but we'd already planned to head to Catalonia [1] for a few days. Just in time, as it turns out, to catch a potentially record-breaking heatwave in the Iberian Peninsula. Oh, great... Let's hope their infrastructure can cope rather better than ours has been doing. I see a lot of visits to air-conditioned museums in my immediate future. "The wind is in from Africa..."

I'll probably put together the usual couple of pre-scheduled posts to keep things ticking over, although I'm not sure why I'm bothering: not many actual people seem to be dropping by at the moment, even if the robotic visitors are as relentless as ever and do seem finally to have broken into the previously reliable Google Analytics figures (although if you do live in Paris, and made 46 visits over the last three days, or in Boardman, Oregon, and made 23 visits, each lasting an average of precisely 0 seconds, I'd be curious to see how you score on a Turing Test).

These two pictures are from a series which is emerging from my composites based on statues and memorials, with a working title of "Guardians". And, yes, one is yet another re-working of good old Krylov the Fabulist.

1. Incredibly, there seems to be no good, tourist-oriented Catalan phrasebook on the market. Given the popularity of Barcelona, not to mention Majorca, as a tourist destination, you'd have thought you'd be spoiled for choice, but no. I've had to settle for a "teach yourself" text, which tells me rather more than I want to know about irregular verbs and the like. I guess I'm about to find out what Catalans really think about (a) tourists and (b) poorly-spoken Spanish.