Nov 12 – Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off
By When I get home from work at five and think that I probably won’t be leaving the house until nine the next day or when I’m lying on the sofa on a Saturday afternoon ready to write off the weekend it gets me down. I’ll be the first to say there aren’t enough hours in a day and enough days in a week to watch all the television I wish I could watch; I can’t get enough of lounging. But at the same time I can’t get enough of being outside.
I spend forty hours a week sat at a desk staring at a screen; then you have to add all the extra hours I put in for my various projects and hobbies. And of course, the couple of hours of TV I get in before bed every night; you get the idea. So as my pile of things to read gets bigger – and progressively harder to tackle – and my desire to spend time with my nose half a metre from a screen diminishes, I find myself desperate to spend time outdoors.
About half a year ago I was talking to a friend about a study he had carried out on architecture in Gibraltar, in particular on the patio and patio lifestyle. So off I went, camera in hand and with a vague idea of what I wanted to capture, this patio lifestyle. The results were somewhat disappointing. I took some preliminary test shots around Gibraltar and found what perhaps my buddy could have told me (and I knew) from the beginning: There was no patio lifestyle.
We can’t get enough of saying how Mediterranean we are but whereas everywhere else in the Mediterranean (and further afield) people spend their free time outdoors in the company of others all I could hear during my walks around Gibraltar taking these photos was the click of my camera’s shutter and the sound of televisions coming out of windows. We don’t even have a time of year where we spend most time outdoors. In the winter it’s too cold and in the summer it’s too hot.
At the time of the day when people across the border are taking to the streets for a weekday evening stroll we are stuck at home because ‘it’s a school night’. By seven thirty at any time of the year Main Street is practically deserted on a weekday, on a Saturday evening it’s a ghost town, and on a Sunday it’s whatever comes next. I’ve heard it all: people complaining there isn’t anything to do because everything is shut and establishments complaining they’re not going to open because people are at home. I’ve lived in places not that much bigger than Gibraltar where you would find something to do every night of the week. And I’m not one to go out every night, I wouldn’t be able to do it, but when it’s narrowed down to going out on a Friday night with the only other option being the (excellent) Eliott’s Jazz Night on Thursdays I’m pretty sure you’ll all agree we’re not the most sociable bunch.
So what’s the deal? Because there are places that are busy on days other than Friday, but they’re usually frequented by people from abroad. Have we always been like this, or has the fact that we don’t need to leave the house to watch a film or interact with others made us hermits? The bottom line is that we have a climate a lot of people would be jealous of and I really don’t feel like we take full advantage of it.
What do you think? I’d love to hear what people have to say on this, so let me know in the comments below, or This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., or tweet at me (@stefanoblanca) or I dunno, invite me to a party and tell me about it there. Up to you.
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