Candles and Cakes

After lunch we went back to the flat to open our presents and to cut the birthday cake which Ruth had made. You can recognise the birthday boys by the birthday rosettes which we are wearing. 

 

We should say a word about the flats we stayed in. We (me, Ruth, Ben, Graham, Irene, Pete and Lesley) were in one flat and Ieuan, Lucy, Amethyst, Jasmine and Thomas were in one two doors away in the same ownership. They were pretty good flats - light and clean with all the facilities we needed - but with one drawback; the stairs. In common with most of the buildings in the Barri Gotic they had narrow, and, it has to be said, fairly scummy stairs, which are the responsiblity of no-one and are thus uncared for. They were also steep and we were all several floors up so for the first minutes after reaching the flats we were all rather breathless and with rapidly beating hearts. That explains why when we wanted to meet each other, it was normally in a bar in the nearby Placa Reial, just off the Ramblas. I thought that climbing the stairs half-a-dozen times would easily be equivalent to running the marathon.