According to the Cambridge English Dictionary, Serendipity is the fact of finding interesting or valuable things by chance. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary goes for the faculty or phenomenon of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for.
Joe King tells us what happened yesterday in Serendipity on a Sunday.
Rilke on a Sunday morning
I’ve written about Sundays before, most recently about how I hated Sundays for most of my life but now love them. I also wrote last year about the revival of Sunday lunch.
This Sunday I drove into Ronda to start my Sunday morning ritual, ie buy the Spanish Sunday paper SUR and go for a coffee to read it.
This was when the first gust of serendipity blew across my bows. There in the window of the Librería Dumas was a copy of a collection of poems by my favourite poet Rainer María Rilke, the Prague-born German poet who lived in Ronda for a time and coined the phrase Ciudad Sonada to describe the town.
I’d not seen this collection before, Versos de un joven poeta. And at only 4.95€ less 5% discount for having been a teacher (this is available throughout Spain to current and former teachers) I snapped it up.
So, as well as my paper I had some poetry to read, as I sat in the sun at the café on the market and sipped two cups of café con leche and a chupito of Miura.
Viveros Gómez
After my coffee break I headed off to the garden centre to have a look around. Quite unexpectedly and serendipitously they had just taken a delivery of tomato and cucumber seedlings. After checking and finding out that with night time temperatures around zero at the moment, that I needed and an invernadero (greenhouse).
Don’t have one of those so, much to the disgust of her indoors, I put them in the dining room. Them being two types of beef tomato and those funny little pepinos they grow here.
The Summers
Later that afternoon Ollie Doehring, Lily Summers and their four children, visitors to Montejaque from German twin town Knittlingen, popped in for coffee.
The kids were happy playing in the garden, while we adults tried various drinks including a taste comparison between two ciders: Ladrón de Manzanas, a highly marketed and expensive pasteurized “alcopop” and a natural cider from Asturias. Pretty obvious which one came out on top. So much so that Ollie and I polished off two litres and the LdM was poured down the sink.
The ladies glugged their way through a bottle of Cava Extra Brut.
By this time it was getting late and we were all hungry, so, despite not having been shopping, Rita conjured up a magnificent vegan spag bol. Serendipity pure!
***
Then it was time to call it a day. Ollie and Lily packed their brood into their Renault Trafic and headed off back to Montejaque, while Rita and I cleared up the debris and put on the dishwasher.
Rita went to bed and I fell asleep to Match of the Day.
Next thing I knew, it was 4.00 am and, refreshed with two cups of tea, I was writing this.
Notes:
To read the follwing, simply click on the link:
Rilke. Who? https://www.eyeonspain.com/blogs/theculturevulture/21731/rilke-who.aspx
Sunday, Bloody Sunday! https://www.eyeonspain.com/blogs/puntosdevista/21652/sunday-bloody-sunday.aspx
Sunday Lunch https://www.eyeonspain.com/blogs/puntosdevista/21342/sunday-lunch.aspx