Where there's a will, there's an injury!

 

 

 

As domestic accidents go, being impaled by an electric toothbrush seems to combine triviality with impossibility.  And yet it drew blood!

     How, you might well ask, did I manage to stab myself with what is a fairly blunt instrument, with the bristles being the sharpest element in the construction? 

     The answer lies in my refusal to pay the inflated prices for the replacement brushes sold by the big-name maker of the toothbrush.  The cheaper alternative that I bought on line did not attach to the vibrating metal spike (the retaining, moving, part of the brush) as securely as it should have done and so it came loose, fell away from the spike and the residual hand pressure brought the spike into my face and into the right hand nasolabial fold - and that is the first time that I have ever written those last two words knowing what they mean.

     Luckily (if that is the word) the colour of the blood merely darkened the shadow of the nasolabial fold (2^nd use) and made me look a tad more mysterious.  I like to think.

     Shaving the next day did not reopen old wounds and so, apart from giving one line on my face a more emphatic outline, no real harm has been done.  And, anyway, I dabbed a bit of TCP on the wound to do its stuff and one can’t really be expected to do very much more in terms of medical care.

 

The month of May is a sort of Family Nexus, where everyone appears to have a birthday or name day and each one of which has to be celebrated.  When I was teaching in Barcelona, this period reminded me of the start of the Autumn Term in the UK which coincided with the start of the WNO Opera Season with a consequent attendance at various performances of WNO in my triple guise of Clarrie’s Friend, Friends of the WNO ‘helper’, and Opera aficionado with an almost fatal deficiency in time allocated for school.  The start of term is the worst possible time to have a multi-tasking crisis, but it did mean that after the start of the season I was able to relax into the frenetic horror of new timetables and making ‘grouping’ work, with something approaching failed-Zen tranquillity.  It is truly amazing how much you can be powered by hysteria!

     Anyway, we have had two birthdays so far: the first in a well-aired living room with mask wearing; the second in a 50% occupancy restaurant with mask wearing and ostentatious hand washing with alcohol, and the third is about to take place tomorrow in the outside terrace of a restaurant in Terrassa.

     The last of those celebrations will not be dovetailed into the time before the curfew as that particular restriction has now been stopped, so in theory we could actually get back to Castelldefels after 10 pm rather than making sure that we did get back before 10 pm with a Toni High Speed Drive of Death, during which I kept most mousey quiet!  But we did get back before 10 pm.  And we did survive.

     The loosening of restrictions is a prickly subject.

     The End of Curfew was officially at midnight last Saturday – so you had the really odd situation that, on Saturday night at 10pm you were expected to be in your home obeying curfew, but two hours later you could, quite legally, go out again to enjoy exercising your “freedom”.

     It is significant that the right wing have framed the Covid restrictions as attacks on “freedoms” and the Zombie of Madrid actually had the temerity and barefaced audacity to run under a banner of “Freedom”.  And, in spite of the astonishing hypocrisy and mendacity – she won!

     But, having painted the relaxing of restrictions as regaining freedom, it was hardly surprising that the younger population of Madrid saw a justified opportunity for celebration, and dully swarmed into the centre of the city and partied as though it was New Year’s Eve.  They did not of course socially distance and many of them were not wearing masks, and a medical expert who witnessed these scenes of mass celebration in Madrid, Barcelona, Sevilla, and other major (and not so major) cities remarked, “We will have to look at the Covid figures in a fortnight” when the new cases of Covid that could result from the ignoring of the on-going pandemic might show themselves.

     At present Madrid has a high rate of occupancy of ICU beds; it has a reasonably high rate of infection – it is a bloody good place NOT to visit, though Parisians have flocked there because as they said, “We can do things and go to restaurants and clubs here that we would not be able to do in France!”  So, Madrid has been accepting visitors from a place with an even higher infection rate in order to boost tourism – but, as always, collateral human damage has never been a disincentive to commercial gain and political advantage for the right.

     Although we are constantly told that the vaccination rate in the country (Spain and Catalonia) is increasing, and the President of Spain was on television yesterday keeping to his assurance that 70% of the population would have had a first jab by the end of the summer, the fact remains that a small proportion of the population has actually been vaccinated and a very small percentage of the population has had the second jab.  I suppose that I am one of the lucky ones, given a late-surgery jab that just happened to be a single dose vaccination.

     The fact remains that we are not prepared for an influx of tourists.  We do not have the virus “under control” and we are in the fourth wave of the pandemic.  The emergence of a new “difficult” variant of the virus would be disastrous as most people are (in spite of evidence to the contrary) looking towards old normality and assuming that the virus is all but beaten.  This is a very dangerous attitude.  And we will pay for it.

 

Although with my single dose vaccination, I should be gaining daily immunity, I am taking no chances.  I still wear my mask at all times that I am out of the house and I continue to wash my hands with Uriah Heep regularity, but with real alcohol soap rather than false sanctimoniousness!  I am very wary when in groups and keep my distance.  I take to heart, “No one is safe, until everyone is safe” and hope that others are as fervent in that belief as I am.

     Not that safety is entirely risk free.

     Today we went out to lunch as we usually do on a Tuesday and, although we deemed it still just a fraction too inclement to eat on the terrace, we were happy enough to eat inside in a reduced capacity restaurant.  Toni is punctilious about hand washing with the ubiquitous 70% alcohol hand wash which is good, but the alcohol soap while disinfecting the hands also gives them a certain slipperiness which was disadvantageous when attempting to move a cup of Coke.  The glass certainly moved, but the contents of the cup moved even quicker and flowed along the tabletop from Toni and into my lap, my meal and my legs.

     Our waiter was one of the old school Spanish waiters (though Indian) and was effortlessly efficient in clearing the table and mopping up.  My meal was taken away, and I was given an extra portion of Catalan tomato and garlic bread to keep me happy while my meal was re-plated.

     The one good thing to come of this is that I will have to wash my shorts.  The shorts are new, and red - so the Coke did not stain, or not visibly at least.  They are also too big, and that brings me to our late PM Mrs May.  During her sad Brexit-fuelled decline, as the more rabid parts of her party turned on her in an orgy of self-delusion and lies, she was described by John Crace in the Guardian (and if it were not he, then it is something he certainly could have said) as having the same authority as the “Do not tumble dry” instruction on a garment.

     If clothes cannot be tumble-dried then they should be thrown out.  I therefore buy T shirts and shorts deliberately large on the expectation of shrinkage when they ARE tumble-dried.  So, if my super plan is correct, the Coke defiling will ensure that the clean shorts are a snugger fit.

     Never let it be said that I cannot find something positive in the most trivially negative irritations!

Wave

 

Another crummy day during which I had the delightful experience of conducting my daily swim to the accompaniment of the extended drum roll of rain on the retractable roof of the pool together with the vision of water cascading down the glass walls.

Making the most of the weather I paused on the sea front on my return, parked the car and took photos of the larger than usual waves.  And just as usual my final pictures failed to show the majesty of a breaking wall of water.  Part of that failure, I have to admit, is that the waves (even during turbulent weather conditions) are well short of anything approaching majestic and I hesitated before I took off my sandals and paddled in a way to make the most of the proximity!  (Just in case there was any ambiguity in that last sentence, I did not take my sandals off, it was cold wet and miserable and I had no intention of intensifying any of those adjectives!)  I was also trying to bring a large umbrella under control at the same time during a struggle of wills between a brisk wind and the hand that was not holding the camera, well, the phone.  One day, I will take a picture of the waves of which I will be proud.  In the same way that on another ‘one day’ I will take a decent photo of the firework displays that we have on the beach.  One day.  But not one day today.

This week is going to be a short week for Toni as he has Thursday and Friday ‘off’.  These two days link to the weekend to make a four-day holiday Puente (bridge) to be enjoyed.  What this means in effect is that for four days all the menus in all the restaurants in Castelldefels will be at Fiesta & Fin de Semana prices, that are substantially higher than for an ordinary weekday.

Today is All Souls Eve and there is, I am glad to say, a selection of traditional food that should be eaten on All Souls or All Saints Day, or on any period of time near enough to qualify.  We have been invited to Terrassa to eat our fill of chestnuts, sweet potato and small marzipan cakes or panellets.  Over the past week or so there has been a chestnut seller in the centre of town doing a brisk trade.  Although we haven’t bought any of them, the rich smell as you pass the brazier is available for free! 

For kids of my age (!) roast chestnuts bring back memories of Johnny Morris (born in Newport in Wales!) in black and white on the BBC!

I have also, apropos of nothing that I have written above, been listening to part of my birthday present: a nine-disc set of the operas of Janacek in preparation for a performance of Katya Kabanova next month – which starts, of course, tomorrow!  Time is, as always, speeding up.

I did not listen to Katya first as my favourite opera by Janacek is The Makropulos Case.  This is the opera, as I never tire telling people, I have seen the most in live performance.  Given the number of years that I have been going to the opera you would have thought that by now one of the biggies in the opera world like Tosca, or Madame Butterfly would have overtaken my viewings of what is, still, a fairly obscure opera.  But no, it remains paramount in my experience thanks mostly to WNO’s trailblazing 1978 performances with Elizabeth Soderstrom singing Emilia Marty, conducted by Richard Armstrong, directed by David Pountney, with designs by Maria Björnson – a production I saw wherever WNO played it.  And, over the years I have augmented these initial viewings with others when I could get to them!  I am still waiting for a production of Makropulos by the Liceu, but Katya will do in the meantime!

And talking of that performance, it is astonishing what you do not see if you either don’t want to see it or have assumed something other than the reality that is printed in black and white in front of you.

I have a season ticket for the opera in the Liceu and, with the addition of an odd ballet and recital, I get to see all the major opera productions of the season.  Or, at least that was what I thought, and my request for the CDs (ah, I am a traditionalist at heart and I like to have ‘hard’ copy as it were) was to bring myself up to speed with the music so that I could fully relish the performance.  And then I realized that a ticket for this performance was not included in my package!  How could I have missed this?  I am sent an individualised calendar giving me the dates for all of the performances during the season.  And Katya was not among them!  There was a moment of panic before reality reasserted itself and I reasoned that Janacek is still not given the credit that he deserves in pushing the limits of opera and that selling the seats would always be a problem.  And sure enough, when I phoned the box office, I was able to get ‘my’ usual seat (row 10 on the aisle) for a performance on the 20^th of next month.

So, apart from a single nasty moment, the situation has now been rectified (by the injection of cash) and I will be able to see the opera.  But the ‘oversight’ did make me think.  This was one of the operas that I was looking forward to seeing and still I managed not to pick up on the fact that it was not part of the package.  Admittedly my season ticket is automatically renewed unless I stop it, so I do not have to search through the Byzantine complexity of what package is right for me, but still, I saw the list of operas and Katya was not on it.  How? 

And it really does make one think about what else one has assumed to be that is simply not.  The good thing about that thought however is that obliviousness dampens fear.  I will not know what it is that I have not know about until I find that I do not know.  So to speak.  Perhaps I am just one of those people who assume that something or other will happen to make me question something in just enough time to ensure that disaster does not strike.  Well, that is my ‘saving lie’ and I am sticking to it!

And, by the way, the sun has just come out!

Dip me in chocolate and throw me to the lesbians!

Never ask a swimmer what he is thinking about as length after length is completed: he might tell you!

            Which is a lead up to my telling you what I was thinking about as I swam my way through my daily metric mile.  I would love to admit that poetic ideas swirl through my mind as my flailing arms create more substantial currents in the placid salty waters of my local pool; or that the themes from my Open University courses course through my mind – but that would be, generally, a lie.

            What actually went through my head was the phrase, “Dip me in chocolate and throw me to the lesbians!”  If I could work out why this, admittedly delightful, phrase went through my mind, I feel that I would gain a valuable insight into my basic motivations and understand my character with a clarity which is so sadly lacking in my day to day existence.  But I can’t.  It came out of nowhere and, once I had thought of it, like one of those irritatingly compulsive snatches of music that you dread hearing because you know that you will be hearing in your mind for the rest of the day, it battered its way back and fore in my brain for the rest of the swim.

            I know swimming is essentially boring, but it’s not so boring that the repetition of an out of context phrase is enough to keep you stable.  I had to think of context and I soon realized that my knowledge of this phrase comes from an opera.  Admittedly an opera that I have seen on television rather than in an opera house, but one that was deliberately provocative and created ‘problems’ in Cardiff, prompting a far-right, so-called Christian demonstration outside the Millennium Centre shocked at the language and themes in the piece which was based on a musical interpretation of ideas suggested by the Jerry Springer show.  The actual phrase was part of the lines sung by a participant in the show called Baby Jane who enters singing,

This is my Jerry Springer moment. 

I don’t want this moment to die. 

So dip me in chocolate and throw me to the lesbians. 

I don’t want this moment to die

I had actually remembered the line as “Coat me in chocolate . . .” which is not as effective as the ‘real’ line, but that is not the point.  My mind did not stay on this, shall I call it ‘concept’, and instead as I continued my swim I began to think about other odd lines in operas.

            Probably my favourite odd line in opera is from Albert Herring by Benjamin Britten which is, “And a box of Swan Vestas!”  An opera which stays in my mind from the Welsh National Opera production in Cardiff’s Sherman Theatre, because when Albert’s flowered circlet (he had been crowned Virgin King of the May) was thrown into the audience, it was caught by my friend Robert!

            “Pigeons on the grass, alas!” was the title of one of James Thurber’s wonderfully funny occasional pieces written for the New Yorker.  As Satan said to an insufferably smug member of the angelic throng in an unpublished extract from Paradise Lost that Milton never used, “Not to know Thurber is to argue yourself unfunny, the lowest of your throng!”  It was with unparalleled delight that, having bought an interesting looking second-hand record in Kettering market, I discovered not only the music of Virgil Thomson, but also the ineffably pretentious libretto of the one-and-only Gertrude Stein and the fact that “Pigeons on the grass, alas!” was one of the more memorable lines from the opera Four Saints in Three Acts by Thomson and Stein!

            When I finally got to see a production of this somewhat obscure opera in London with the ENO I was overwhelmed and turned to the staid lady sitting next to me and said breathlessly, “Wasn’t that wonderful!”  To which she replied, “No.”  Ah well, each to his or her own. 

And “pigeons on the grass, alas!” by the way, is one of the more comprehensible lines in this opera.  For odd quotations you are spoilt for choice in Four Saints in Three Acts, but if I had to choose just one, it might be, “Having happily had it with a spoon.”  And if that doesn’t make you want to find out more and listen to it, then you are made of sterner stuff than I.

I will end with a line that I did not hear in the whole opera, but heard in an extract, “Life without hats?  How extraordinary!”  That is a line where context really makes it.  I have forgotten the composer, but I know someone who will know, if I can be bothered to ask.  Or there is always Google, or ‘research’ as we used to call it!

            Now off to Terrassa for a Birthday Celebration for which, for once, all the presents are ready and wrapped!