Instead of blogging I should be putting out a new ad or otherwise figuring out more work, looking for a sewing machine, an apartment, or writing to friends at home who I havent communicated with for ages. Instead, since I have a spare moment in a not so hectic day, i am here again. Pardon the lack of proper punctuation ' I am borrowing a computer from the shop until i can manage to get there during his opening hours. It has a Spanish keyboard and several broken keys. So here goes...

Geoffrey came here instead of flying to Jerez so we took the bus to Jerez friday night. He had left essential items behind to fill his small knapsack with squares of reflective building material and a plastic plumbing pipe filled with a vacuum tube. Anyways, I dont think there was much interesting that happened on friday night but Saturday we went to Los Tres Reyes, after quickly stopping by the market. Ive heard about the place and passed by it many times. Geoffrey has however, managed to become buddies with the bartender/owner. We went there in search of caracoles. it is snail season and most bars that have any traditional bent and many others besides cook up huge pots of caracoles in special broth. They are served to you in a glass tumbler - a small one the same kind that they put coffee with milk in at breakfast. you lift them out with a spoon and then either suck out the snail or impale him on a toothpick and carefully pull him out. the good ones have head and antenae sticking out and the funny flat mushy part they slide along the ground with, also partly sticking out.

Anyways, much more important than that was that a guy and a kid started marking compas on the bar with their knuckles practically the moment we walked in, another guy was singing and yet another immediately did a little dancing. The man behind the bar was attempting to talk to Geoffrey who seems to have gotten by for a long time without a lot of Spanish and i tried to ask another guy about any shows at peñas. i mentioned I studied bulerias and wanted to talk about the subject and how I found it difficult to switch between jerez and bulerias from other places. he wasnt really listening to me. But then a few minutes later several guys formed a little bit of a circle and someone started to sing and they did palmas and the guy said, "she dances... dance!" So I did.

Then came Antonio. Thin as a rail, with skin that looks extra browned by a lot of time in the sun, aside from his likely natural darker colour, Antonio has sweet eyes, but clouded by a bit of mucus. He must be about 80. They introduced him as a member of the Agujetas family, and I forget how it got that way but he sang and i was to dance. so i did. He went outside and after a bit, invited me to come and sit with him. I dragged Geoffrey over and partly ignored him while Antonio sang to me.

they had said as he came in that ¨here is a good singer' . you had to stop and listen when he sang. There is something different about him from the others. It must be partly his age... that he is from a different age, a different era. Time perhaps slows down when he sings and everything becomes quiet, even if it is not physically so around you. I suppose it has the same quality as much of the good singing ive heard - you are not in your own head, you are focussed completely on something outside of yourself, riveted by it, by his singing.

They asked me what palo I dance, or have danced most, and where I study. I told them most recently I have studied solea with Concha Vargas (the other stuff Ive studied since then doesnt count as it was like dipping my finger into a cake and licking some icing rather than making a soup myself and labouring over a boiling pot for hours. Also, it is plainer than the day what these men would respect and what they wouldnt). Upon hearing the name Concha and solea, he broke into a solea. Later he sang a bit more por bulerias and I danced a third time and was happy with this time.

What was almost as interesting as the singing and the dancing were the other not so incidental things I picked up from them. I already know that one should not do palmas and especially not loudly if one does not know how and is not very sure they can stay on the beat. Despite this being Jerez and the Tres Reyes, and despite Antonio being polite, they said that some people dont know and they put their foot in anyways. Antonio looked over at the younger dancer/singer guy and another random whacky older gentleman who danced a physically clumsy but still in compas bulerias, and crossed himself, shaking his head, numerous times. The whacky guy had on a polkadot shirt and vest with black pants, and appeared either drunk or several bricks short. whatever the case he still danced bulerias better than most foreign dance students... despite all their pretty footwork, cause he had something none of us have - Jerez blood. They told me he will dance till he falls on the floor and will keep dancing there. they said this several times so the second time i realised they meant it. Besides, you could tell. Antonio gave me high five a bunch of times. The first one for living in Triana. When I said Seville, he asked, ẗriana?¨
Geoffrey ordered some food specifically so we could share it with him as he looked like he never ate and just drunk beer. He would only accept one tiny bit of huevas (salad of cooked sack of fish eggs), and even spat out what remained after chewing it for a while. In the end he asked me for some money for the bus. How could i refuse. A 5, if you have it. He saw a 10 that stuck up and said or a 10, so i gave it to him. in that kind of situation you cant really talk about affording it or any kind of stuff like this. who he is and what he does it outside the realm of normalcy. Next time that question might come up, but for now... he had completely opened my heart. Perhaps he meant to as my students said when i told him the story ... but the real flamencos supposedly werent like that. anyways, it doesnt matter.

There are stories about various flamenco singers who did not accept money for their singing or playing. Or about other ones who when they were paid, immediately spent it all on a huge party for all their friends and had to beg for a taxi ride home, and for help with their next meal too, probably.

You shake your head in a consternating way. 99% of the time Id do that too, but in this specific lifestyle of flamenco in times past, and the gypsy culture it came from is outside your understanding and if you knew more about it, you would admire this, rather than look down on it. Anyways, all that is changing or has already changed. It has to do with a completely different way of looking at human beings sharing life on this earth.

Well I didnt mean to get that far away from the original details of what happened in Jerez on a lazy saturday afternoon. I wish I could somehow relate the first few pages of a book by an american flamenco expert Don Pohren, on what they gitanos used to believe about how to live.

Back to an Irishmanś flat... I dont remember if we got anything done on the solar oven that day or on sunday. Anyhow, geoffrey had set up a frame made of salvaged palets, into which he placed the reflecting squares. We made more of them by sticking a special reflecting foil made for power stations onto the other squares hed gathered from some de-building site in london. When he had the frame full of squares he positioned them to reflect into his oven which hed made the previous time out of a kind of insulation. it has a glass top at an angle and the inside was lined with a poster saying semana santa jerez 2012 and had a balcony of people standing. There was a spare tambor (spanish word for the inner thing of a washing machine, for which I dont' know the english word) which he picked up also off the street. Later on this would be used when the real oven was built, and used to make the frame track the sun. I suggested a telescope motor. Possibly difficult to get ahold of cheaply like his usual deals. i forget what the vacuum tube was for. he has other ones in various parts of the house. The problem in the future will be the size of the oven as it requires a large baseline... word borrowed from other astronomical setups. It needs a space between the large frame full of mirrors and the oven. A question is whether to make it light so it will turn well or heavy so it can withstand fairly heavy winds in this area, and whether to take up a good section of the rooftop with it or somehow stick it off the edge or something. Anyways, there are other ideas about various ways of using low-tech to solve fairly pressing problems here and there.

Since Geoffrey had indicated some sort of envy of my ability to dance I got him to sit in on a whole bulerias class with Ana Maria monday morning. Paco had cancelled the class that morning. It was good there was one other man there, and an older one too: a German dude with a pony tail and a black heavy metal t-shirt who had made up his own flamenco starting-up-your-Harley-Davidson- footwork. It was quite impressive and realistic. It did not, however, impress Ani or Carmen, who were brought to near total frustration getting him to stay in compass and slow down his frantic footwork that was too complicated for his level. On the whole it was good. Then I returned here and thatś the end of my story.