The June crowd is gone by September, and I want the February version
Posted as winter_population
- Looking for
- somebody who is still here when the city empties
- Experience
- Twenty one years, two long dynamics, one lasting seven.
- Around
- the north of the city, Madrid
My street has a terrace on every corner from May, and by the first week of August there is nobody sitting at any of them. I have lived here for twelve years and I still find the annual deflation strange: one week you cannot get past the tables, the next it is four dog walkers and me.
Forty eight, Madrid, dominant, twenty one years in this. What that curve does to a board like this is obvious once you have seen it a few times. Every June a great many interesting people appear. By September they are back wherever they actually live and the messages get shorter and then stop.
I have been caught by it twice, properly, and I do not intend to be caught by it again, so I am saying plainly that I am looking for somebody who lives here in the year round sense. That includes people who moved here permanently and people who have never lived anywhere else. It does not include somebody who has taken a place for one summer, however much I like them, and I have liked several.
What I want is a long service arrangement. Domestic, structured, undramatic. Rules that hold in February, when there is nothing to do and the wind off the plain takes your face off.
I can host and I live alone. I do not go out in August at all if I can help it. Not looking for anything that needs an audience, because for a good part of the year there is no audience here, and I prefer it that way.