tripu

I have just finished my read-some-old-presents period. The last casualty has been this “All my friends are going to be strangers” by Larry McMurtry. McMurtry is, among other things, the winner of a Pulitzer prize and co-author of the screenplay for “Brokeback Mountain”. My uncle gave this book to me three years ago.

Even if I’m not as capable of a good review as malglam, here follows a brief opinion on the novel.

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«Nacen miles de estrellas
por el choque de dos galaxias»

En la portada de ElPais.es, ayer.

Con cosas tan importantes sucediendo a mi alrededor, yo no debería estar preocupado por mi presentación de la próxima semana, ¿verdad?

Thanks to the visit of my friends Helio & Puri last month, I went at last to Forbidden Planet, a shop (the shop) for scifi/fantasy/comic/manganime/figure/game-flavoured freaks in London :¬)

It’s blissful, a nerdy paradise. Two pretty large floors full up with books, graphic novels, manga, magazines, figures, games and DVD’s. Fortunately, photos are allowed (as long as you don’t take any photo of the tills [?]) so here there are some images of the interior of the store.

I reassert my early appreciation about London: the best things it has are its parks and its bookshops.

Two weekends ago, I spent part of my Sunday afternoon visiting the Tate Modern museum for the first time.

It’s quite an impressive place. The building that hosts the museum was formerly a massive bare brick factory, with a very tall funnel, on the Southern riverbank. Norman Foster’s Millennium Bridge takes off just in front of it, leading to Saint Paul’s Cathedral, which is well visible from the entrance of the museum, with its magnificient dome arising above the rest of the buildings of Holborn.

I think I read somewhere that it’s one of the most visited museums worldwide, but I might well be wrong. I just walked through the ground and second floors and decided to leave the rest for another day. As usual, what I liked the most were the Surrealists. Specially Salvador Dalí, Francis Bacon and Max Ernst. And I discovered with delight the work of Juan Muñoz. His sculptures intrigued and moved me as no others.

It was a very cultural afternoon. And that’s more true bearing in mind that the night before I was in a striptease bar.

Last weekend I came back to the Tate Modern again ─ that time with Elena, a friend of mine that I met here in London. She wanted to visit the temporary exhibition on Kandinsky before it got cancelled. We could only get tickets to start the visit at five o’clock in the afternoon, so we decided to cross the river and go to St Paul in the meantime.

If I weren’t a bloody software engineer, I would be a Cathedral. Cologne, Rome, Milan, Seville. London. One of those.

It doesn’t matter if I switch to my mother tongue to have more words to choose from. I have no way to express the deep emotion that always dawns on me when I contemplate such buildings, with their fair tall dimensions, mighty organs and beautiful stained-glass windows. We went up to the dome. Staring at the transept from up there was like staring at the very centre of the Earth. Then we went on to the very top and I took one zillion pictures of London.

The Kandinsky exhibition was hectic (it was the last day). And I didn’t understand much of it. I usually don’t know how to get my bearings with abstract art. Elena says there’s nothing to understand ─ you either like or dislike it. In that case, I guess I didn’t like it.

Kandinsky may be a genius. But going in St Paul’s Cathedral, caressing the dome from within and contemplating from its top so many miles of central London stretching at my feet, that made me feel alive and gave some sense to the whole week.

Even after paying £9.

I have decided to donate 1% of my salary to some private voluntary organization, every month.

I will consider my net income, so this will be after deducting the usual 27% in normal taxes (yes, I pay taxes of 27%!). 1% seems to me quite a symbolic figure and easy to calculate, and it’s above the usual 0,7% that most NGO’s claim to the governments of the world. Very roughly, if seven in ten citizens did the same thing, 0,7% of the country’s wealth would go to development and solidarity projects. 1% of my current net income is near or above the amounts of money that those organizations usually set as standard subscriptions.

And I prefer to make single donations every month instead of becoming a member because I don’t feel like choosing the one NGO. This way I can easily change recipient, in case I find a better one and depending on the circumstances. When I was a member of Greenpeace, I used to receive mail and their magazine at least once a month. But today we don’t need paper and stamps any more to keep up to date.

Last Friday, being 28th, I received my payslip.

I must admit that I initially thought of Oxfam because of their great advertising campaign ─their ads flood the walls of the underground carriages─ and the elegant public image that they present. Then I tried to remember what kind of connection do they have with the Catholic Church, recalling that in Spain they are actually “Intermón Oxfam”. But Wikipedia told me that

“Oxfam International is a confederation of 12 independent, non-profit, secular, community-based aid and development organizations who work with local partners in over 100 countries worldwide to reduce poverty, suffering, and injustice. It is a member of the OneWorld Network, which seeks to `to promote sustainable development, social justice, and human rights.’ [...] Oxfam International was founded in 1995. Oxfam Great Britain is based in Oxford, UK. It was founded in England in 1942 as the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief by Canon Theodore Richard Milford (1896–1987) and the Oxford Meeting of the Quakers (which included Edith Pye and the Gilletts), with a mission to send food through the Allied blockade to the citizens of Nazi-occupied Greece.”

(I think that Araceli can tell us more about what is Oxfam and what they do).

After visiting their web page, I went for Oxfam Great Britain.