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Mad cows and Vikings

disguise

It wasn’t planned, but we got to Cadiz just as the carnival was starting. As the Spanish skyscanner site quite rightly says, es un clásico entre los clásicos y entre los más famosos carnavales de España también. El Carnaval de Cádiz es una de esas fiestas que hay que vivir al menos una vez en la vida.

Actually it’s our second time, but this time I didn’t get all dressed up. The first time I was a nuclear technician, complete with white suit, helmet and mask. It wasn’t exactly comfortable but it mingled well with the Vikings, skeletons, Robin Hoods, witches and vacas locas (this was back when they were all the thing). This time I put on a token necklace of little bells from Tibet, which made me a Buddhist monk. Mrs. B. had a Pashtun hat from Pakistan, common headgear there but in western society these days feared as vaguely jihadist. So I guess you could say that together we were disguised as War and Peace.

I’m not a great one for disguise. My default strategy at fancy dress parties at uni was to slip on a silk dressing gown, wave a cigarette holder and say I was Oscar Wilde. It wasn’t great for picking up girls, who would invariably ask me to say something witty. And I couldn’t get away with ‘I can resist everything except temptation’, because it had to be original too. Given that on average, I’m witty just twice a year, the Wilde impersonation fell flat. I would have been better off as a vaca loca.

On the other hand, it could be said that getting dressed up is superfluous: with every fictional character, the writer is trying on fancy dress, and every novel is a carnival of disguises. I’m working now on a story where Olaf the Viking meets a mad cow at a party hosted by the great Oscar himself.

5 thoughts on “Mad cows and Vikings”

  1. Glad U had another go at the “at least once in a lifetime” Carnaval de Cádiz and shared the experience with such humor. Also glad that Spanish syntax is enough like English syntax to let me get the gist of the quote from skyscanner with help from a Spanish-English dictionary.

    Hope Oscar’s party with Olaf and a mad cow will also be attended by the guy in the white rabbit costume. His meticulous weirdness would appeal to Oscar (and to Lewis Carroll).

    1. I think the white rabbit will definitely be there. I hope he speaks English though because like you I can decipher the written word, but when it’s spoken – madre de dios!

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