Who wants to sleep in Tuset?

1. Life goes on and we normalize everything, with trained resignation. Waiting lists, the difficulty of having decent housing, inflation that threatens to skyrocket, or the resistance of Catalan are the worries of a day-to-day life that we face stoically and, perhaps, with excessive understanding. For others – beyond the traffic jams on the AP-7 for the outgoing or return operation – the big concern seems to be Raphinha's umpteenth muscle injury. They talk about it on the radio as much or more than about Trump and Iran. To escape our accepted miseries, wars, destruction, and death, in Ukraine or East Asia, people need to laugh. I notice it at the Condal Theatre. They are performing A Brilliant Idea, the most awarded comedy in France. The adaptation to Catalan by Susanna Garachana is accurate, rigorous, and extremely fine-tuned. The protagonist, Lluís Villanueva, can already make space to collect all the acting awards for a production that forces him into exhausting meticulousness. An hour and a half of laughter. People leave it better than they entered.

2. Saturday afternoon was nice and, due to that addiction of 10,000 steps a day, I decided to walk from the upper part of town to the theatre. I chose a route with little traffic, to start heading towards Paral·lel. In the shadows of Tuset, there was already a lot of young people, talking with a plastic cup in hand. All of them with the same haircut, all of them with similar dresses and, even at those hours, freezing cold. The atmosphere on Enric Granados was different. From top to bottom, one restaurant next to another, with all the terraces full. It didn't matter if it was a Japanese or an Italian, a wholesale meat place, a traditional vermouth bar, an ice cream parlor with an infinite queue... You could barely hear Catalan. And Spanish neither. The variety of languages and families was a Benetton catalog. No wonder expats and tourists fall in love with Barcelona and a street like this. Or with the new Consell de Cent, green and pedestrianized. I walked five blocks. The shops are more varied than on Enric Granados and, as you move away from Catalonia towards Spain (I'm talking about squares, not states), the shops are more popular and poorly lit. Along the long stretch of Ronda Sant Antoni, so well paved up to the Market, the social profile changes. If you listen, Arabic predominates. People are on the street to avoid being at home. They use public benches to control – more or less – the children playing ball or running you over on scooters.

3. The four streets described have, on some lamppost, the same sign hung by the City Council: “Respect the rest of the neighbors”. In Tuset, Enric Granados, Consell de Cent and Sant Antoni, the people are diverse, the type of leisure too, but the common denominator is that the neighbors are fed up with the nocturnal noise. The parties from the discotheques and music bars on Tuset street are not held solely inside the premises. The massive revelry has conquered the sidewalks and the central road, where it is even difficult for a car to pass without risk. The later it gets at night, the worse. They urinate on the neighbors' complaints. Literally and metaphorically. Organized protests, in Tuset and Enric Granados, have so far served very little. The streets have died of success and the neighbors, with earplugs, put their mattress in the interior rooms to try to sleep before sunrise. In the morning, the porters of the buildings have to clean up the vomit with a hose. Yesterday ARA did a special on happiness. The parameters of the World Happiness Report to measure it took into account GDP per capita, life expectancy, freedom, social support, perception of corruption, and even utopia. At no time did it link the right to sleep and happiness. Let them go to Tuset to do the survey. Induced insomnia is not normalized.