The shit blog of Paul Chris Jones

Dear Diary. Today was our first day of a three-day trip to Barcelona. This morning I was finishing getting the bags ready and we had ten minutes before we had to leave. I put some flax seeds in a Tupperware and put the Tupperware in my rucksack. The flax seeds are in case of dire constipation emergencies. Flax seeds are 27% fibre and guaranteed to make you do a poo if you're constipated, as I often am.

Then 5-year-old said, “Daddy, my advent calendar is empty.”

5-year-old has a Lego advent calendar. Every door has a small bag of Lego behind it.

I was about to launch into an angry tirade towards Lego, unleashing various expletives unsuitable for children about how their advent calendars are ***ing **** and they can **** their ****ing calenders up their ****. But when I went to look at his advent calendar, I saw he'd simply opened yesterday’s door by mistake.

Then we all rushed to the station. We arrived with ten minutes to spare. We had five bags (seven if you count my eye bags), two children, one pushchair, and zero will to live. The train came. We got on and found our seats. The train was busy. A boy walked past wearing a Santa hat with flashing stars. Sitting next to me was a weird man whose jacket was ripped in several places, mostly the cuffs and the sleeves. The sleeves of his jumper had threads coming off. He looked tired — his eyes were just like Droopy’s. Then I realised I was sitting next to the window and looking at my reflection.

I looked down at the sleeves of my jacket. The fake leather was peeling, like the skin of eczema or a bad sunburn. My coat is from Zara, which is supposed to make quality clothes for rich people, and yet the fake leather is flaking off, exposing the woven mesh underneath. Girlfriend says I should be happy because I got four year's worth of wear out of the coat but I'm not happy. In fact, I'm never buying clothes made from imitation leather again. I still have a real leather coat I bought fifteen years ago and it looks almost as good as new.

The train set off. 1-year-old sat on my lap. Outside the window were hills and fields. The sun was low in the sky. And then there we were: Barcelona. The Big Apple. The City That Never Sleeps. Oh wait, that’s New York. Barcelona is the city with a big cathedral. The city Freddie Mercury sang about for the 1992 Olympics. The Catalan capital.

We got off the train and left the station. Concrete buildings, concrete roads, concrete pavements. People everywhere. Palm trees lining the streets.

We took a bus to the hotel. We checked in. We took a lift up to the hotel room. The hotel room was the same room as last year. 1-year-old immediately busied himself unravelling rolls of toilet paper in the hotel room's bathroom. I didn't care; the hotel was paying for the toilet paper, not me.

I lay down on the king-size bed and breathed a sigh of relaxation.

“Come on, get up," said Girlfriend. "If we leave now we can get to the Seat Christmas village before the queues get long.”

She said 'Seat' like the car company.

So 5-year-old and I took the stairs down while Girlfriend and 1-year-old took the lift. As 5-year-old and I passed the second floor I saw a man in a chef's hat pushing a trolley of delicious food for the hotel breakfast: kiwis, grapefruit, the finest pastries money could buy. Then he whisked the trolley away and he was gone. I can’t wait for breakfast tomorrow. The best thing about our trip to Barcelona last year was the hotel breakfast.

We walked to the Seat Christmas Village. There was a huge line outside.

I went up to a woman near the front.

“Have you been waiting long?” I asked her.

She winced in pain. “Almost an hour,” she said.

Well fuck that then.

So instead we walked down Passeig de Gracia, the most expensive street in Catalonia. In the Barcelona edition of Monopoly, Passeig de Gracia replaces Boardwalk, the most expensive street on the board. We walked past shops like Burbank, Prada, Versace, and Dior. I had as much chance of buying clothes here as a kid in Somalia has of buying a Nintendo Switch. If I hadn’t sold my niche cryptocurrencies three years ago — cryptocurrencies that would be worth three million euros today — I could have walked into any of these shops and demanded to buy a new suit. “And throw my old clothes away,” I’d tell them, and they’d chuck my torn jacket, fraying jumper and stained trousers in a special furnace for poor people’s clothes. As soon as the flames begin licking the fabric, ghosts would emerge from my clothes and fly howling around the room, like the monstrous apparitions that emerge from the Arc of the Covenant in Raiders of the Lost Arc.

My mouth began hurting; it’s an off-and-on infection that started a month ago. Plus I was carrying 20 kg 5-year-old on my shoulders. And 1-year-old was crying because he was hungry. I was teetering on the edge of my breaking point. I was about to launch into a tirade of expletives when Girlfriend suggested we stop in a cafe so she could breastfeed 1-year-old. So we went into a cafe. Girlfriend ordered a tea and 5-year-old ordered a chocolate drink. I watched a young woman with long straight black hair and octagonal glasses. She was working on a laptop with a look of intense concentration on her face while occasionally glancing at a book. She was the epitome of hard work. I wish I worked like that. When I sit down to work, I get distracted instead, and end up doing some trivial task organising my photos instead or writing my diary. It's probably why I'm poor.

After the cafe, we went to the Barcelona Lego Store. Girlfriend wanted to buy 5-year-old a Lego set of Santa and his sleigh. But when she went to the till to buy it, the shop assistant told her the card readers weren't working today. As we didn't have any cash, Girlfriend had to put it back. A good thing too because the set cost €40.

"The woman at the till said the problem is international," said Girlfriend. "There's an international failure of card readers."

I think she meant just in Lego shops. Otherwise, we'd have gone outside and there'd have been mass looting and panic as society broke down, and huge lines outside ATMs so people could withdraw paper money just to buy groceries.

Before we left the Lego Store, I made a figure at the Build a Minifigure area and then pocketed it when no one was looking. I always steal a minifigure when I come to the Lego shop. It's like a tradition.

For lunch we went to a cafe and ate sandwiches. The cafe was busy. Two teenagers were looking around in vain for a table, so I waved to them and offered them half of our table. I even gave up my seat and ate standing up instead. It was my good deed for the day. Girlfriend wasn't happy though because I gave up 1-year-old's seat too, which meant she had to hold 1-year-old on her lap while she ate her sandwich.

We went to a place called the Paradox Museum, where there were all kinds of optical illusions, like a spinning tunnel that made you feel dizzy, and an infinity dodecahedron that seemed to go on forever when you peered inside it. Unfortunately there was no mirror that could make me handsome; no technology is capable of that yet.

We left the Paradox Museum. The sky was starting to get dark. We walked to a Christmas fair by the Barcelona docks. The walk was down a long, straight street that seemed to go on forever. It was just like an illusion from the Paradox Museum: an infinity street. All the streets in Barcelona are like this. The entire city is built as a precise grid. The streets go straight on for kilometres, without so much as a single curve.

The fair was packed. There was hardly room to move. 5-year-old wanted to go on the Ferris wheel but the queue was too long. The queue for a VR ride was too long as well. There was an exhibition of local aquatic companies with arts and crafts for the kids. And that's how I came to be cutting and glueing card at a table with children. I made an advent calendar. It was only afterwards I realised I only put 16 doors, making the advent calendar useless.

We went back to the hotel. We ate takeaway pizza from boxes while watching The Incredibles on the hotel room TV.

I'm looking forward to tomorrow morning because of the hotel buffet breakfast.