The Spoons That Are My Ears!

On Saturday I went to Toledo with my new friend, Rosa Tristán...
Small world: Rosa is a personal friend of Eduardo Galeano, the Uruguayan writer published by my Portuguese publishers, Livros de Areia.

Toledo is a marvellous city, a tangle of little streets and ancient buildings. We visited the El Greco museum and various other cultural highlights but I managed to get us lost on the way back. Rosa suggested that I deserved death for this crime and suggested Tuesday as the day of my demise. So it appears that today is my last day on Earth... She also invited me to her house for a meal on Thursday. I'm interested to observe how she will resolve this paradox.

The River Tajo that passes through Toledo flows west across Spain and becomes the River Tagus when it crosses into Portugal. Eventually it reaches the sea, passing through Lisbon first. My friend Safaa Dib lives in Lisbon. Therefore I decided to send her a message in a bottle...

First I wrote her a message in a Toledo cafe...
Secondly I sealed the message in a bottle...
Thirdly I crossed a bridge over the river...
Fourthly I let the bottle go...
Fifthly the message landed in the river...

Will the message ever reach Safaa? Probably not... In December 2005 I sent her a message from Al Hoceima in Morocco and that never got to her. Maybe it ended up in the collection of Roberto Regnoli instead, an Italian fellow who has a knack for finding messages in bottles. At any rate I intend to send more messages in bottles in the near future, to Caroline in Brazil, Shaswati in India, Hannah in Wales, Lowri and Sarita in London, etc. It's a sort of art project, I guess... Shame I'm not much good at art!