El secreto de mis flores

Last week, St Jordi's Day gave us the chance to witness another of those universal truths. For, as sure as eggs is eggs and buttered cats always land face down, the fact of the matter is that men can't carry flowers.

On El Dia de St Jordi, when more than 5m roses are sold to a population that clearly hates people with hay fever, men, to a man, are made to look uniquely inept.

You wouldn't think it so tough to perform, but it's a well-known fact that the art of carrying flowers properly is one of those mysterious secrets passed from mother to daughter, along with hip-wiggling and the ability to ask for directions when lost. As a gender, we are completely unable to hold either flowers and other people's babies in a manner than doesn't suggest that they're ticking.

On April 23rd, throughout the centre of Barca, men are forced to buy flowers and carry them home - and the result is horribly predictable. They wield the stems like swords or hold them firm as umbrellas. Roses are swung like baseball bats or gripped knuckle-white, as hard as a torque wrench. Bright petalled heads peer over the edge of carrier bags too short to hide them. It would, in fact, be less embarrassing for a man to walk naked down the street than fully-dressed and holding a flower. Give us a rod and we will feed you for a week. Give us a rose or a big bright bouquet and we lose the power of opposable thumbs. The methods vary, but the body language is always the same: I am a man. This flower is not with me.

The other tradition of the day, the giving of books, is to remember the death of Cervantes, who perversely died on the same date as Shakespeare (23rd April 1616) but, due to the UK at that point not having adopted the single European Calendar, not actually on the same day.

Cervantes's masterwork about the man of La Mancha lifted the world of literature to new heights, just as Shakespeare did for Leonardo de Caprio, and so, 387 years later, Catalunya gives thanks with nearly 10% of annual book sales squeezed into one long afternoon.

All across Barcelona, street corners fill with bargain-frenzied readers buying (usually at a 10% discount) everything you can fit on a bookshelf. Picnic tables stacked high with a mountain of hardbacks, paperbacks, sticklebacks and quarterbacks (aka royale backs with cheese). Authors sign, readers read, sellers sell and giddy giggling publishers get very very drunk all in the name of Spain's greatest ever author and his classic tale of friendship and hallucination.

St Jordi's Day is a time to remember (lest we forget) that there are far worse things to do than tilting at windmills. After all, you know where you are carrying a lance.

Posted by Andrew Losowsky at May 3, 2003 08:46 PM | TrackBack