I want to be something or other

When I arrived at the pool this morning, it was swarming with small humans.  Barely restraining my natural scorched-earth urges (admittedly fairly futile in a place mainly composed of liquid water) I soon spied a vacant line which would facilitate my lengths and so I was placated enough to merely pass by the small humans rather than pass through them with whips and scorpions.  I wonder, in these benighted times how many people will recognize the biblical allusion there. 

Come to think of it, I am not sure that I know precisely where it comes from.  Old Testament definitely, which book though is a little more tricky.  Judges?  Possible.  I think it was one of those Jeroboam or Reheboam type characters.  Or indeed not.  I know it only takes a few key presses to find out the answer, but I choose not to do that and prefer to live a little longer in the delicious discomfort of easily avoidable ignorance.  Come to think of it that is something which is a direct result of the development of technology and the ease with which a whole mass of knowledge (ask not of its value) can be accessed in seconds.

As I have found to my cost, it is easy to find poems by John Clare on line.  But when you are checking the punctuation of a particular line in a particular poem things get more difficult.  I found versions of the same poem (allegedly) which various forms of punctuation and no indication of the provenance of the version.  It was impossible to be sure that any one of the variants offered to me in reasonably prestigious sites was more authoritative than any other.

In the same way the name of the first woman to swim The Channel, which I was trying to discover for reasons too obscure to go into now (and whose name I have totally forgotten) was spelled in three or four different ways depending on which site you thought was more convincing.  As two of the sites were of national newspapers, and as they had different ways of spelling the name I was left little the wiser – except of course I had a fairly specific general idea of what she might have been called.  There was more unanimity about the date of her venture and her nationality, but the name, no.

So, I would be better employed in getting one of my copies of the Bible out and beginning to have a quick flick through.  I have more trust in the printed page than I do in the glowing pixel!

In the case of the John Clare poem, I do have a fairly scholarly book of his poems which does give variant readings and so I was able to satisfy myself by turning pages rather than clicking keys.  And I read other poems by him as I pretended that I was an academic.  As I recall, it was all to do with a comma.  The placement of a comma can completely alter the meaning of a line.  It was very satisfying to discover the ‘truth’ about that particular line.  It went no further than my personal satisfaction, but it was deep satisfaction.

Which is more than I can say for my complete failure to find a version of the original poem which was set to music by Gustav Holst and is now known as ‘I Vow To Thee My Country.’  The original poem was written by Spring-Rice and published in the first decade of the C20th, as far as I know, but what we have in the ‘patriotic’ hymn is a later version.  If anyone knows of a copy of ‘Urbs Dei’ or City of God, then I would be interested to read it and compare it with the final version that is sung.  And sung without much understanding of what is being sung.  Which is what could be said about Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’ which is sung before (or is it after) meetings of the WI.  Wonderful words and a great tune, but do the ladies actually ever consider what exactly they are singing?  I fear not, all they hear are the words ‘England’s green and pleasant land’ and they tend not to think too much about the ‘dark Satanic mills’!  I am not sure what the WI would make of it if William Blake were to rise from the dead and go and give a little talk about his poetic inspiration!  It would be worth listening to him and watching the reaction of the audience though!

As the more astute will have recognized, all of the preceding writing is displacement activity.  What I should be doing is writing the commentary which has to accompany my poems which, for better or worse, are now ‘complete’ and reading to be sent to the tutor.  The commentary is the second part of the assignment and has to describe the ‘creative journey’ from blank paper to lyric verse.  Or something.

I am determined to have a rough draft of this by the end of the evening and tomorrow it will be read, checked and sent.  And life can proceed with something approaching normality.  Or at least normality according to the way of the OU.

Lunch, as we have no real food in the house, was in the ‘new, new, tapas place’ where the bravas have to be tasted to be believed.  No low-cal in any way, shape or form, but delicious none the less.

Now to work - the draft calls!

Paucity of pills

It is surely a sign of age when the major delight of the morning is the doctor telling you that you can take two fewer pills each day!  One must take one’s triumphs where one can find them.  And two pills are two pills – even if one of them is a minute dose of Aspirin.

            The doctor was virtually bubbling with delight and he drooled over my latest blood test results and my next appointment is sometime in the middle of summer.  This meant that my consequent swim was swum with a lighter heart and a more relaxed series of strokes than previously!  The trick is obviously carrying on carrying on.

            The swim segued almost effortlessly into an appointment with the dentist who polished the rough edge of a tooth in a couple of minutes for which he was paid €20.  This was part 1 of my treatment as plaque removal took place later in the afternoon which took €55.  Sixty quid and not even a filling to show for it!

            A doctor’s appointment; two dentist appointments and a swim all in one day – something only possible because I am freed from the tyranny of a weekly educational timetable.  One of the greatest delights about Life After School is the flexibility it gives to Get Things Done – even (or perhaps especially) if they are the less pleasant, yet essential mechanics of keeping alive!  The spaciousness of a day which is your own cannot be under-estimated – I even manage to get some recreational reading done as well.

           

The writing part of my existence is not quite a well developed.  I spent today changing single words and then changing them back again to what I had originally written.  Tomorrow I will draft out the second part of my assignment and then consider it done.  I want to move on from what has been a challenging and sobering piece of work and then reassess my future assignment prospects in the light of the response of the tutor.  Who would have thought that I would be so tentative concerning something which should be a undisputed strength?  Such is the power of education when you are on the other side!

The evening, out for tapas with bread, wine and potatoes, and thus undoing all the good work of denial during the rest of the week.  Still, there are a few days before the Sunday weigh-in.  I have to keep the trajectory on its downward course.

Well, at least my teeth are squeaky clean at the moment!

Dripping hatred as usual

Much though I enjoy swimming in an empty pool – even one with floating lanes – I understood that some sort of Health & Safety rules demand that there be a life-guard there at all times that paying customers are in the water.  Perhaps I am wrong and, to be fair, there was a slight but pleasant sense of danger in swimming unobserved.  Except of course for the various cameras that are on all the time and watching – even if no one is actually looking at them.

            With no one to pace myself against I think I had a rather leisurely swim, even if I am swimming faster than I used to owing to the development of my improved breathing on a longer stroke rate.  If that actually makes any sense.  What it means in effect is that I do more stokes with my head in the water before coming up for a breath.  This is faster and more efficient and improves the speed of swimming but doesn’t use up as much energy.  Which is probably a bad thing as I am using the swimming to improve something or other that demands more and more effort to work – not finding ways to make the exercise easier!

            However I thoroughly enjoy my swim and I always have the added delight of the possibility of meeting colleagues from the school next door, whereupon I can remind them of the delights that are waiting for them many years ahead when they too retire.  Call me saintly, but I take real pleasure in this duty.

Yet more drafts of the poems for the next TMA and some of the revisions are fairly radical.  I am trying with increasing desperation to integrate all of the major elements that have been highlighted during the forums and tutorials.  I have, therefore, ticked the boxes – but I am not sure that I have ticked them quite convincingly enough.  As with the last exercise, time will tell.  As will the numbers.

The steady loss of avoirdupois is sort of on course towards the Day of Reckoning which will be April Fool’s Day.  I have set myself an arbitrary target (which I have no intention of divulging to all and sundry) and will therefore be able to announce my achievement of it with confidence.  Never be let it said that I have not learned something about the way that things are done in the country of my adoption!

            It is interesting that my wardrobe has now become a time capsule as I steadily make my way back through time discovering clothing which has lain fallow as my girth increased and is now being brought into the light again as my waist shrinks.  That last verb is perhaps a little dramatic for what is happening, but it is undoubtedly true that belts that were unusable are now serviceable.

            The sad thing is that, if things go according to plan then the clothing I am wearing now will, in turn be consigned somewhere or other by the end of the year as unwearable.  If that does happen then I will have achieved something which I thought undoable late last year.

            There is also the question of expense because the plan involves purchasing an entirely new set of outfits – but that, if all goes according to plan, is something to be thinking about in 2015.  It is good to have plans, but better that they actually come to fruition.  That is something that I need to keep telling myself.  Long terms plans they may be, but they need to be constantly updated and checked to see that they are on course.

Our cretinous government has voted to make abortion more difficult to obtain in this country.  This is despicable on at least three counts.  Firstly it shows the pernicious influence of hard line Papists in the upper echelons of government; secondly it is a conscious attempt by a beleaguered government to deflect attention from the plethora of scandals that surround them, and thirdly it is a gross violation of a woman’s right to decide.

            On the plus side, I have to admit that I have not felt this degree of loathing for the misfits of a duplicitous political party since the high and palmy days of the odious Thatcher and her supine bunch of self-seekers.  It keeps the muscles which deal with hatred supple and exercised, ready to lurch my body into action at the sight of any one of a range of the pygmies who find themselves in government in Spain.  To be fair a reasonable number of the government ministers look like small time crooks, still surprised that they are holding the levers of power.  Many of them look so much like caricatures that a simple photograph of them comes out looking like a professional cartoon.

            The Prime Minister is a walking joke; the minister of education a sick joke: the minister for taxation a contemptible joke, and the latter a nasal pip-squeak as well.  The leader of PP in Catalonia looks like a freak, though this does not distinguish her from her fellow party members.  They are a bunch of corrupt liars, undemocratic and selfish. 

I relish detesting them all.

Here we are again!

Just as there was no real reason why I stopped, so there is no real reason why I am starting again.  Whim is as good a reason as any.

            So much has happened in the blank gaps of my writing that there is no obvious point to survey and explain.  Nothing dramatic has occurred, no life changing events, but life continues and my part within it bumbles along on its appointed course.

            Perhaps the single most pleasant event was receiving an email floating the idea that perhaps I would like to do a couple of week paternity leave in the School on the Hill.

            Instant and complete rejection was the first (and indeed the last) reaction but it did give me pause for thought, and there was a tug of interest before the rationality of self intervened with the knife of logic and cut the whole idea from my mind.  The simple logistics of doing a couple of weeks work would necessitate various visits to governmental offices that I have no desire to make.  Easier by far to stick to my stated aim of following Uncle Eric (who, by the way is hale and hearty, albeit with a Zimmer) and remaining retired for more years than the years of work which fund it.  In an absolute sense, taking extinction as part of the retirement process, we all have more time after than before – but Eric continues to draw his pension as he marches (well, shuffles) towards triple figures.  He has now been drawing his governmental money for more than ten times longer than I have – but at least I have started the long trek towards parity!

            The poems for TMA 03 have been written, though not revised and edited.  I have left them for a few days to attempt to get some sort of distance so that I can look at them with a critical gaze to se if there is anything more that I can do to try and improve my lamentable performance for the last TMA.  It was by no manner of means a disaster, but when you are living with the personification of an A Grade then anything less than the top mark is seen as something of a failure.

           

The arrangements have been made for the State Visit to Cardiff at the end of June.  The flight is to Cardiff by Vueling and so we will fly from the fabled Terminal 1 – whose existence is a tribute to conspicuous expenditure rather than need.  Oh, and corruption of course.

            As you can imagine I am having a field day in Spain at the moment as the sorry sight of a chiselling member of the so-called Royal Family is forced into court to answer questions about her knowledge of the criminal activities of her greedy husband.  The evidence against the pair of them is overwhelming and their protestations of innocence are pathetic.  Revealingly La Razon (a nasty little right wing rag) published a very clever piece of research that they did.  They asked a carefully worded question of the public: “Do you think that the Infanta (the daughter of the elephant and brother shooting king of Spain) [La Razon did not add that clarification to their question] will be found innocent?”  Notice that they did not ask if people thought she was innocent, but if she would be found innocent.  No one in his right mind thinks that Justice (!) will prevail in this sorry country.  Though it is clear that her husband is being set up to take most of the blame together with his partner in crime, a lecturer or professor.

            Significantly, at the start of this long drawn out investigation, the wife of the professor was also implicated and part of the proceedings.  Belatedly the powers that be have realized that if they charge the professor’s wife then they will have to charge the Infanta as well, so they have dropped the wife from the investigation in the hope that the Infanta can be protected as well.

            All of this is so glaringly obvious that it takes the breath away.  The evidence against the pair in the public domain is so clear, with her bloody signature on various incriminating documents that they would appear to be no escape – but that is to ignore the way that Justice works in this country.  It doesn’t.  And there you have it.  With a wave of logic that would leave the author of Alice in Wonderland struggling to catch his breath everything will be sorted out so that nothing is sorted out and all the corrupt movers and shakers will carry on exactly as they have been doing since the Dictator died.

            It is a sad state of affairs with cases involving virtually anyone with money and a pulse waiting to be carefully unresolved so that the rich can go on exactly as they want.  If the situation in Spain doesn’t make you a rabid socialist then nothing will!

            The only real problem in Spain is knowing where to start in the cleaning of stables because wherever you look filth is piled high and is stinking to high heaven.

            In such a situation it is a relief to be able to go upstairs and immerse oneself in the arcane niceties of apposite assonance!

            As if.  Today has been one in which I have made various desultory attempts to improve on my poems and all I have achieved is thorough disenchantment with the lot of them.  This will pass and I am sure that what I have done, with minor alterations will suffice.  Probably.