The announcement from Cora

The Barcelona City Council has decided to brighten our holidays with a controversial spot, La taula infinita (The Infinite Table), in which we admire a lady belonging to what we used to call the third age (but very well preserved) cooking a traditional escudella in a trance. The thing looks dramatic until a series of voice-overs invite themselves to eat at her house and what could have become a Caritas ad ends in a bacchanal of neighbors who overflow the lunch and occupy the protagonist's kitchen. They thus transform the meal into a multitudinous dinner that must end up being celebrated on her rooftop, becoming a party crowned with rumba and ballaruca. Prior to any criticism, the product has become famous for the name of the hermit grandmother; Cora, a word of Greek origin (κόρη) meaning young or maiden but referring to the original name of Persephone, a beautiful goddess of vegetation, who was abducted by Hades to marry her at the price of living half the year abandoned in the underworld.

Our administration has kids who know how to use Wikipedia and the most obvious message of this short audiovisual is not that Zeus (or having ingested only six grams of a pomegranate) can save you from wandering through the underworld, but that Christmas is the possibility of returning to life, in this case, thanks to the community of kind neighbors who deposit an extra of galets and chickpeas at your house to cook an escudella (and the persistent little guitar, so necessary when perpetrating an achilipú). A few days after the ad was broadcast, many fellow citizens of the tribe cried out indignantly, accusing the scriptwriters of destroying the entire basis of Catalan identity. Indeed, preparing an escudella for dinner and ending meals to a flamenco rhythm on the rooftop is not very much our thing, since we are people more accustomed to the boredom of an ancestral meal that must be eaten during the day, basically because when evening comes we are already fed up with the moral apocalypse of the brother-in-law, afraid of Chat GPT.

"Put one more plate on the table, count me in tonight, it will be an infinite dinner," says the song that crowns the final part of this greeting, and therein lies the problem of the whole matter. Evidently, dining on escudella and taking out the six strings to sing is something that is too Castilian, very alien to our spirit. But at home we are willing to tolerate certain vulgarities; what we will not tolerate and show all possible repulsion for is the pernicious act of improvising a dinner and inviting people en masse (whom we do not know in depth) into the house. It must be repeated ad nauseam; Catalans are like Cora in the first part of the advertisement, a curious kind of people who would rather guzzle galets in the strictest solitude than force themselves to prepare a meal overflowing with random people at home. Catalans hold their catau in high esteem; a place where, basically, we take advantage to live isolated from the world and only let in people with whom we have shared tons of salt.

Whether it's Christmas or any given Tuesday, we at home only eat as an exercise in mere subsistence, and the rest of the activities we perpetrate are strictly based on things like reading, defecating, or fornicating with our costella (only if strictly necessary). This business of opening the door and being surprised by the next pack of freeloaders who have nowhere to drop dead (nor enough energy to make an omelet in their refotuda kitchen) is not of our world. Infinite food, your aunt on a scooter. Fortunately, I cannot imagine any of our highest municipal authorities opening the door to the citizens of the neighborhood to organize a snack. No joke, gentlemen, ¡que som barcelonins! This does not deprive us of a single ounce of ethical dignity; if Cora needs us because she lacks a little salt, half a loaf of bread, or even an egg accompanied by some slices of Jabugo ham, we will gladly give it to her. But she will have to ingest them at her house, be it Christmas, Saint Stephen's Day, or the sacrosanct National Day.

Barcelonians, let's do ourselves a favor and not lose our customs. We are people of finite meals. We only receive at home people whose complete lineage and ancestral ancestors we know. Whoever wants to improvise, call Glovo. And happy new year, dear readers of my Post.