Temperature: 37C 98.6F
Buenos Aires– mid-January and it’s hot, very hot. There’s no football, not real football anyway, into which the players put their hearts and souls. It’s simply not worth it when it’s 34 degrees centigrade in the shade and the humidity is dense enough to make the buildings sweat. Although that might be leaking air-conditioners. I’m not sure.
The players are in training for the start of the 2012 Clausura season which kicks off in a few weeks time. They play in lots of mini-three and four team tournaments at coastal resorts since that’s where anyone who can has gone to escape the searing heat of the cities.
No-one cares that much, despite some frantic coverage in the football pages since they’ve got to fill the space with something, so anything will do.
The Beach at Mar del Plata. Room for more?
With the exodus to the beach, where city dwellers will sit sweaty armpit alongside sweaty armpit with other city dwellers, but from different cities to the one they’re from, Buenos Aires becomes almost tolerable.
The roads are not jam packed, except for those leading out of the city. And there are seats to be had on the underground, more now than ever before since the city council has just put the fare up by a whopping 127percent.
You find that the shops, bars and cafes that you usually frequent are often closed with a hurriedly scribbled note on the door reading: Back in February, or March. Doctors, dentists, electricians and car mechanics have also migrated to the coast or the mountains.
Tough luck if you’d left your sandals to be repaired or you were awaiting a replacement heart pacemaker.
The summer also draws a very peculiar creature out into the open – right out into the open. I’m sure there are sub-species in Brazil, Colombia and elsewhere but I believe the most intense concentration is to be found in Buenos Aires. It’s the ageing sun seeker.
While in Britain the sound of the cuckoo heralds the arrival of summer, in Buenos Aires it’s the sighting of a portly but already all-over tanned man of between sixty and eighty years old with his shirt off.
Susana. How old?
A short while later, the female of the species will emerge to prostrate herself in the most sun-baked, open spaces in the city wearing the kind of bikini you wouldn’t let your fifteen year-old daughter be seen in.
I spotted one the other day while warming up to run in the Bosques de Palermo. From a distance, when all I could see was bikini and tanned limbs, I thought I’d stumbled across a younger member of the species and went to investigate, in the interests of anthropological research, obviously.
This however was a fine example of a more mature specimen, at least seventy years-old, her much tanned leathery skin dangling loosely from a skeletal frame. She displayed the obligatory cigarette in one hand and the Blackberry in the other. Her straight, dry hair was of a colour not known to nature.
These creatures can read and have access to the Internet yet seem to know nothing of UV rays or the increasingly fragile O-zone layer.
I’d like to emphasis here that I’m trying hard not to be judgmental. These people have the right to tan wherever and whenever they want, although I’d rather they didn’t do it in public before I’d had my breakfast.
The fact that the notion of growing old gracefully is totally alien to them or that smoking the amount they do gives them a voice that sounds like Lemmy from Motorhead after a particularly bad night is simply an observation – not a judgment.
Like male body builders, they seem unaware that they’re generally unattractive to the opposite sex and really only out to impress and compete with others of the same ilk.
The most skilled and celebrated exponent of this art of growing old ungracefully is Susana Gimenez – a once beautiful model, actress and talk show hostess who is now in her eighties, or possibly nineties, who continues to believe that she can defy the advances and ravages of time by much make-up, plastic surgery and photo-shopping. You’ll not find her tanning in public. It’s strictly the tanning studio and the beaches of Punta del Este in Uruguay for the upper end of the market.
Another, but much younger exponent of the art is the president, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, who will shortly turn 59.
Cool Summer
Cristina has been known to keep other heads of state waiting while she prepared to face the cameras.
Her husband and predecessor as president, Nestor, died in October 2010 and she’s worn black ever since. But not just any old black.
She wears glamorous, fashionable black and rarely the same outfit twice, adding a new twist to that old Henry Ford adage about being able to choose any colour you liked, as long it was black.
Reading this back I’ve realized that it’s impossible to talk about appearances in this way without sounding bitchy. So I guess I’m just going to have to pour myself another saucer of milk and live with that
It’s 34 degrees centigrade in the shade and I was thinking about slinging the hammock in the patio but really can’t be arsed.
My antidote to the suffocating heat is to switch the fan on, prepare some form of iced drink and watch English winter Premiership football on cable TV….Kenny Dalglish in that ridiculous coat, goose-pimpled Newcastle fans in cap-sleeved T-shirts and cups of steamy Bovril all round.
I’ll be back when the season kicks off. Stay warm!
