The European election results are in, with no surprises and will be interpreted by everyone as they think best. I voted for the Greens as the Remainer party that also had a coherent EU manifesto that I largely agreed with. I’d hoped they’d pick up a third London seat, but oh well. All in all, though, across Europe, it feels like another step towards a new fascist reality, another loosening of a precarious world order. Much the same in Pakistan, of course, and let’s not even talk about the Indian election.
Sunday was a working day as I had agreed to proofread a document for someone in layout. This ended up needing so much work that I had to extract the text and edit in Word, then give instructions on copy-pasting it back in, paragraph by paragraph. It made me properly grumpy. I did go out for an evening stroll with the Gentleman Friend and we climbed up the pyramid to the church where we finally got a sight of the people climbing poles and flinging themselve off, from beginning to end. It turned out to be less dramatic than the swan dives I’d envisioned, more one of those descents you see at the circus sometimes, with an unwrapping of ropes coiled around the leg. But still glad to have seen it: I missed the critical moment last time and it was one of those things where if someone told me that the moment was relatively missable I wouldn’t have believed it, quite, and once I’d watched it it was apparent that it was, in fact, missable.
The evening was very clear, with intense sunlight and no haze, so the volcano’s outline was very clear. Standing on the pyramid and looking down at San Pedro Cholula was a bit like a contrived scene for a film, with a wide open space and a pole to one side with ropes hanging down, little clusters of people walking in and out of hte colourful cloth canopies of market stalls along one side. A small train putted around, a couple of Nahuatl dancers did their thing, then a flock of young people on BMX bikes curved through the square. Behind, on one side, was the volcano with a red kite showing against it, and on the other was a large 16th century church emitting, every now and then, a bang and a puff of smoke.