Thursday 20 October 2011

The anicetos of Galicia

Galician aniceto at work
The title of this blog may seem a bit strange but "anicetos" is our contribution to the 
Spanish language.
A few years ago doña B. rented a nice flat in La Coruña. It was the most lovely place and nearly perfect apart from the bathroom door. During my stay it suddenly decided to
go on strike and refused at any cost to open.
I ran to a shop to buy a set of screwdrivers but unscrewing everything that could be
unscrewed didn't help, the door stayed locked. I remembered the mythical trick with
the credit card you have to slide between door and frame to deblock the lock.
The door stayed closed and the card went to pieces.
As matters became urgent there was no other option than to phone a locksmith early 
next morning. In the meantime we had to "powder our noses" in a local 
cafeteria.
When the man came, he turned out to be an Einstein look-alike called Aniceto, a
beautiful but rather uncommon name. For some reason the man and his name made a 
deep impression on us because we started using it as a synonym for whatever
profession in the construction, repair or renovating business. We had 
plumber anicetos working in the house and bricklayer anicetos nextdoors. An internet
aniceto connected the cable and there are plenty of aniceto vans passing me on
the highway. Two Spanish anicetos from Santiago appear in the title of this blog and
the only real Aniceto, the one in La Coruña, opened the bathroom door in two seconds
with his credit card.
And charged forty euros for doing so.



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