Survival!

 

 

Our cosy meeting of the Poetry Group in Barcelona last night was rudely interrupted (ironically during the period of silent introspection before our free-write) by a chorus of alarms from our mobile phones, the local government raucously informing us that a major storm was about to break and that extra care needed to be taken and . . .  but the way that the alarms are set up is that if you press the ‘OK’ on the screen to stop the noise, it also wipes the message, so any further details are lost and you just have the memory of the noise and the brief glimpse of the apocalypse outlines in three languages.

     It is a sign of the times that one member of the group explained the proper etiquette for dealing with the increasingly regular mobile phone alarms, by informing us that the correct procedure is is lower the volume to stop the noise and then you can read the message for the authorities at your leisure.

     It was also with a certain amount of cynicism that we now appreciate these ‘warnings’.  After various scandals where withering fingers of accusation wee levelled at various officials who did nothing or little in the face of warnings, we are now at the other extreme of responsibility with an eagerness to put warnings out so that the officials involved can cover themselves in the case of disaster.

     It was the first flash of over-the-top lightning (looking more like an amateur junior ASM being over enthusiastic in giving a dramatic light show for Lear’s Madness on the Heath scene, than anything in so-called real life) that I realised that I had not even backed a mini umbrella into my backpack and that I would have to traipse my way to the car park under the arc de triomf in driving rain.

     In the event, at the prompt termination of the event, there was what appeared to be a lull in the storm (which had provided sometimes disturbingly apposite sound and lighting effects to the poetry being read) which I took advantage of and scurried (in so far as I am now capable of that action) off to the car park with my baston clicking an urgent clicking beat to my progress.

     The car park is one of those vast underground constructions which honeycomb the city and give vastly expensive parking spaces, because finding something on the actual above-ground streets is virtually impossible.  My problem is always getting back in at the end of the meeting after the doors have closed.

     As is usually the case, at the entrance to the car park you are provided with a ticket from the machine which gives you a bar code which will be read by a machine which will open the door for you to get your car.  I, however, have a little machine in the car which is recognized and lets me tough without having to take a ticket, and this is also the case when I leave, my payment is automatically and (almost) painlessly, as you only get the briefest digital glimpse of the astronomical amount that you have paid to stay there.

     But I can’t get in because the after-hours closed doors can only be opened from the street by showing your printed barcode on the ticket that you were issued with when you came in.  A ticket that I do not have.  I have previously been told that I can punch the registration of my car into the machine manually to gain access – but the keypad only has number and not letters, so I always find myself pressing the little button next to the keypad to summon one of the workers to open the door. 

     This usually takes a few minutes, which is usually not a problem (in spite of some of the suspect character who hang around the arc de triomf at night) but yesterday, I was waiting outside in The Lull waiting for the rains to recommence at any moment.

     My entry was facilitated by a customer leaving and, by the time that I got to my car, I was passed by a worker on one of those little electrical vehicles usually seen in airports, making his way to where I would have been waiting is it wasn’t for the aforementioned customer.

     Almost as soon as I got out of the carpark it started raining, complete with thunder and lightning.  As the air-con in the car is not functioning, I had the windows open and, as the rain increased, closed so the car became like a sauna.  And I took a new way home, guided by the GPS, going through new streets until I came to the welcome familiarity of the Via Laietana and a well-known way back.

     Driving at night in Barcelona is a total pain as you limp your way from red traffic light to red traffic light, with the added frustration of stopping for imaginary people to cross.  Would it really hurt the municipal authorities to install a degree of AI into the lights to facilitate the smoother running of the roads?  No, perhaps I shouldn’t have added a question mark to the last sentence, as its rhetorical nature is clear!

     As I drove through the city accompanied by lashing rain and the melodramatic production of son et lumière for the end times, I eventually made it onto the motorway.

     Although I was expecting it, based on vast past experience, the quality of the driving (in rain that needed the fastest setting of the windscreen wipers to fail to clear all the water) was appalling.  Motorists did not reduce their speed; they attempted risky manoeuvres on roads covered in standing water and . . . it was just like a normal night’s bad practice with the added danger of torrential rain.

     I did reduce speed, but that merely meant that vehicles drove at my speed a few centimetres behind me until they swerved to overtake into oncoming traffic.  I would like to say that it was an invigorating experience, but it wasn’t.  It was stressfully depressing and it remains a constant wonder to me that I do not have to thread my way through a series of pile-ups on all the roads I use!

     But obviously, I made it home and was drenched in the short run from the car to the front door.  A small price to pay for survival!

 

 

Comfort too late?

I do like my basic comforts, and one of those involves sitting on something more giving than hard metal springs.

     I do admit that I am not good at looking after certain things, and those include garden/beach chairs.  My reasoning is that they are designed to be used in the garden and on the beach and therefore they should survive both those environments without my having to give them any special treatment.  

     So, they are used from about May-sih to October-ish and then I ignore them.  Amazingly I did make the supreme effort to put my chair under the ‘eves’ of my study windows giving out onto the terrace on the third floor, to allow a certain degree of protection from the elements, but from then onwards the chair had to fend for itself though the winter and early spring months until the weather was clement enough to consider sitting out in the sand-filled sea breezes of the start of the tourist season.

     While the metal construction of the chair survived well, the cushioned cover did not fare at all well and it assumed the appearance of fragile, agèd parchment and had the same proclivities to rend and tear.  Which it did.

     Now, I have a fairly high I-couldn’t-give-a-shit approach to meaningless appearances and, in spite of the fact that I can feel and hear my mother’s refrain of “I was ashamed when you . . .” when taking a tatty chair to the beach, I can generally ignore pitying eyes and anyway I cover things up with a very large beach towel.

     It is when the ‘parchment’ material starts powdering and leaving a residue on newly browned flesh that one feels that a certain limit has been reached.  And, when every time the cushioned seating is adjusted, and a part of it comes off in one’s hand, one feels that the time for a replacement it nigh.

     It is, however, towards the end of the season, and beach accoutrements have been put away and shelves cleared for the over-kill of merchandise for Halloween, so that asking for a replacement cushion is looked on as a slightly odd request at this time of the year.

     We intend to go to the beach this morning and I decided yesterday that I would take off the old broken cushion to force myself to do a pilgrimage around the Stations of the Chinese Superstores to find a replacement.

     We are constantly urged to support local shops, and we do try and do that.  But our experiences of trying to be supportive have been, to put it mildly, mixed. 

      I seem to remember shopping when I was younger and if the shop that you were in was unable to supply something they would either say, “We can order that for you and have it in for next week,” or “Why don’t you try so and so’s, they might have it there.”  We rarely find this level of basic service, and I have to say that the level of service in the Chinese Superstores is variable as well (usually in direct inverse relationship to how well or how badly they speak Spanish) but the stuff you want is usually there.  It may take some finding, but somewhere, it lurks waiting for your eyes to light up in recognition.

     It took me three stores to find something that would work, and fit, but find it I did, and so I will blend-in in bland uniformity rather than stand out in indigent tatters.

     On a beach that, in our locality, is gratifyingly empty nowadays, my ‘new’ chair will have an audience of exactly one, my partner.  

     But, as my mother would undoubtedly add, “That doesn’t make a difference.  You’ve done the proper thing!”

     Dead parents are stern masters! 

The Great Clear Out! Or not.

 

 

The Tidying thing.  It’s now become one of those irritating elephants in the room that simply won’t go away, and it has started trumpeting as well!

     The basic trouble is that there are ALWAYS better things to do than tidying.  As long as the chaos is relatively clean and there is no rodent community inhabiting the mess then the motivation to start ordering the disordered is limited.

    I once compared the actual working space on my commodious desk to the size of a dinner plate.  Sometimes that image is inaccurate and the comparison is more with a side plate than anything else.  At one point I was making a note and needed to consult something in the dictionary (vowels always trip me up and getting them the wrong way round always looks so childish) and I found myself pushing my chair away from the desk to allow me to balance the dictionary (it is large!) by cantilevering it over the edge of said desk. 

     It is clearly absurd that I appear to be working towards emulating some sort of nineteenth-century mezzotint caricature of a scholar working in a cramped attic.  It is true that on the third floor, the room in which I work has been carved out of the roof, so there is indeed a sloped ceiling over my head, and I have to be very careful about how I stand up otherwise I could slump back unconscious into my chair having knocked myself out by too precipitate an ascent!

     The untidiness by which I am surrounded is almost comic in its chaos – though I sometimes do detect a sort of narrative thread linking the different piles of detritus (which isn’t, it is all essential ‘stuff’) and the ancillary scraps of my life scattered about as a type of surface layer, or erratics (if I may be allowed to use a metaphor from geology) to give an air of mystery and suggest hidden depths and an underlying order to what is quite clearly The Mayhem of Objects.

     There are two reasons for writing this.  The first, and the most obvious is that writing about something like tidying is a way of ensuring that it does not get done, because you have already ‘done’ something by the mere act of writing about it.  And the subject of the writing would disappear if careless ordering were to destroy its unstructured, yet intentional randomness.  Even I think that the previous sentence is mere verbiage, no matter how seriously I might take it as a form of self-defence for indolence!

     The second reason for writing this is that the writing may act as a stimulus to do something about a situation that irritates me every time I have to thread my way through the maze of incommodiousness before I can get to my scrap of working space at my desk.

     I know that I often write notes to myself, usually during my post-gym/pool cup of tea, and I even draw in little tick boxes as a further incentive to get things done.  I am proud to relate that I am made of sterner stuff than can be cajoled into acquiescence by four small lines, and the empty space thus enclosed often goes unticked.  But . . .

     There does come a time when the joke has gone far enough, when the situation is untenable when Something Has To Be Done.

     This situation has, I think, been reached.  I find myself juggling a notebook, a sheet of paper, and a couple of books (a conglomeration that should be easily accommodated on a reasonably sized desk) with increasing desperation.  And once I (almost) said to myself, “I simply cannot work like this!”

      I may not have voiced it, but I have certainly meant it.  Though meaning something without doing it negates the whole imperative.

     I will have to look on this writing as both an appeal for help, and also a decision to act.  If the situation is untenable then it must not be allowed to continue.  Action must follow.

 

Look on this as Part I of the Great Clean Up & Out.  It will be interesting to see if there will be further instalments.  I can assure you, my reader, that I am as interested in the outcome as you are indifferent!

     Time will tell.

 

It's all in the definition. Possibly.

  

Sometimes you just have to tell yourself that proving a negative is as good as a positive.

     For the best part of a fortnight we (AI & I) [If you say that in a swing rhythm sort of way it does sound like one of those inane choruses in a Eurovision failure) have been working on a piece of micro-research into my long-ignored thesis on Huxley from 50 years ago.

     I have fixated on a footnote, and on the person who is the subject of that footnote.  The relatively famous bit of my literary concern is linked to Huxley’s first (published) novel Crome Yellow.  The footnote mentions someone who as far as I was concerned was lost to history.

     Not lost if you have the will and the time to delve.  Very gradually the character (indeed he was a character in the Peacockian novel that Huxley wrote) began to emerge from the shadows of forgetfulness.

     We knew that he was a Rector, and a Rector of the parish of Garsington at the time of Lady Ottoline Morell and her coterie of the literary and the famous, but everyone else in the novel was much more famous than he, and their reputations have largely survived from the dizzy days of the Bright Young Things of the 1920s – together with representatives from a generation that was somewhat older.  Researching the others was easy – I have books on them.  But the humble Rector was not so easy to ¡find out about.

     So the search began.  American born-again fundamentalist on-line libraries actually had copies of some of the book that the rector had written – apocalyptic consideration of some of the more sensational books of the bible looking forward to The End Days – spiritual catnip to the Evangelical Right Wing of those who call themselves Christians.

     Of course, the tract that I wanted, and which Huxley had allegedly used as the basis for a whole chapter in his novel, was NOT online and so the hunt for a copy somewhere began.

     As we began to draw up some sort of biography for the rector, we discovered that he invented a ‘stay’ for a bell – this stay allowed the bell to be . . . well, I did go into the details of what the thing did and looked up a whole vocabulary of bell ringing to try and understand its function and even when onto the website of an old foundry that had used the damn thing extensively, until another fragment suggested that the guy who invented this device was not the guy that we were researching.  Suddenly a whole fascinating aspect of the rector’s personality was snatched away.

     Such is the state of the information available on line, even though we are now questioning the previous attribution, we are not absolutely sure and so instead of dismissing a week of work, we have put an academic question mark next to it: awaiting further clarification.

     I have now contacted the library of the Archbishop of Canterbury in Lambeth Palace, and Oxfordshire History Archive, a foundry, a bellringers society, and numerous other sources all from the comfort of my computer in Castelldefells.  My questions and requests have been sent to locations in three continents, to booksellers, enthusiasts, and academics.

     Self-indulgence personified!

     And, you never know, there might be some answers.

     Eventually!

 

I simply don't have time!

 

 

How do you define a full week?

     When you are working the question is moot.  You have a job that takes up the bulk of your day.  Your week is already full.  And with some jobs, like teaching for example, you have to include marking, meetings, union work, preparation, and the myriad time demands that the profession is heir to, many of which occur outside your stated hours.

     I remember reading in some book about conscription that some highly qualified people, especially academics, welcomed the constraints of a military life because they didn’t have to think.  What to do, how to do it, and when to do it were all laid down.  Personal intellectual involvement: nil. In the same way I also read that the philosopher Wittgenstein enjoyed going to see trashy Westerns and sat in the front row almost up against the screen because the sound and the picture occupied the whole of the space and he didn’t have to think!

     In the vacations of my time in University, I had a wide variety of short-term jobs.  It was inevitable that given the short period that I was going to be employed there was little training needed or offered to do the fairly simple tasks with which I was charged.  The problem in all the jobs was weighing up the offer of the payment for the work and the sometimes mind numbingly tedious work that you had to do to earn the money.

     Sometimes the physicality of the job took over and then there was no time to be bored because exhaustion ensured that you embraced unconsciousness whenever the opportunity presented itself.  I can still recall ‘breaks’ in the plate-laying in the Steel Works where I plonked myself on a plank supported by a couple of bricks, put my back against the wall of our ‘hut’ and in seconds, I was asleep – only to be very rudely awakened when the break was over and work resumed.

     Then there is the sort of work that is mindless and repetitive, but that very mindlessness allows a large percentage of your mind to be elsewhere: your hands and 5% of your brain may have been applying themselves to the task in hand, but 95% of your personality was far, far away from the tedium of paid reality!

     One of the better jobs (though it was ridiculously badly paid) was when I was a Security Guard (!). I refused to wear the uniform, except when forced by management, and had a ‘regular’ placement in the office of a transport firm where my ‘job’ was basically to log the drivers as they returned to the depot, and to do timed rounds of the premises using a clock on a strap.  This had to be ‘keyed’ to show that you had been to the various locations around the place on your regular rounds, each of which had a key on a chain that was used in your machine to prove you had at least moved about a bit during your stint.  Much of the time there I read and sometimes made notes for future essays because I was usually alone.

     As opposed to the time I had a job in a vast open plan office where the work I had to do was soul-destroyingly uninteresting and repetitive, and I had an ‘experienced’ child watching me like a hawk, and each time I finished some god-awful task she provided me with another even worse.  I only lasted a few days before I asked for the agency that had placed me there to find me something (anything) else before I went made.  It was one of those jobs where, even knowing it would only be for a few weeks, was not tolerable.

     With some of the jobs I had there could have been little chance of any real sense of achievement or satisfaction from the work: you were there for the money and nothing else.  I remember in one of my placements that the people I worked with lived for the weekends, and talking about the weekend that had passed gave enough material for conversations during the week!

     I am sure that some of the jobs that I had in the past no longer exist.  More sophisticated automation has probably taken the place of fallible human operators, and AI will take care of more.

     No one should have a job where there is no opportunity for development.  Money cannot compensate for 30 years of mindlessness.  Can it?

     I remember one stop our security van made when we were delivering wage packets to a factory (that concept dates me!) and I was chatting to the girls who were working on a production line.  To make small talk I asked what they were making.  And they had no idea whatsoever.  They did their bits and didn’t think about anything connected with the actions.  I was horrified at the lack of interest in a major element of their lives, except of course that their jobs were not a major element in their lives in the way that I would have thought it should have been.  Their jobs were a mean to an end, and that end was companionship with the other girls, and a wage packet at the end of the week that allowed them to live their real lives divorced from what they were doing each day.

     This piece started with a question, my response would be that the week starting tomorrow is full, including such events as a dental appointment and culminating in a performance of the Emperor Concerto by Beethoven in the Palau de la Musica in Barcelona.  The week  takes in, along the way, an expensive (it should have been free) appointment with the police to renew my identity and residence card, and a meeting of a local Poetry Group.  Throughout the week I am also conducting long distance research using an almost defunct research project of mine from the 1970s into the novelist Aldous Huxley and his use of the arts in his work.  I have centred my research in the last couple of weeks on a footnote in his first novel.

     I know that to most that sounds absurdly, inward-looking-end-in-itself-academic-twaddle, but I have been able to convince myself that the problems and opportunities presented by this footnote will be illustrative of technique and intent of someone who was to become a world-famous novelist.  So there!

     And Chat has done a lot of the donkey work involved in checking sources and suggesting useful websites and libraries, any spare moment can be taken up with a passing thought of mine being translated into something with the trappings of academe by the indefatigable ‘intelligence’ at the tap of my computer keys.

     Most of what I am doing about Huxley is only possible because I am retired and because I have access to the Internet, but I am enjoying producing something that I think will be a valid addition to Huxley scholarship.  And that is worth making an effort about.

     So, a full week!

Alone, not lonely

 

 

 

A ¡Fiesta! on a Friday throws out my Day Reckoning, and I begin to believe that I am living in a succession of Sundays.

     ‘Sunday’ is my default setting if something seems slightly ‘off’ about the day: if the light is not right, or it’s too quiet, or the smell is different, or I feel odd.  The answer for all of those is, ‘It’s Sunday!’

     Sometimes I get a feeling that I used to have on Sundays in College – a sort of spacious loneliness because things were off-kilter and the routine of the week had been broken, with nothing as filling to take its place.  The strangeness of the feeling was all the more odd because I could feel it when I quite patently was not alone.

     A typical Sunday would start with breakfast in the hall canteen, which was always taken before 8.30 am (or you got nothing) followed by a Communion Service for Anglicans (as I was then) in one of the meeting rooms.  This was a quite cosy affair as there were not so many of us, and we were able to disport ourselves in chairs a lot more comfortable than hard wooden pews.  And the Chaplin always ensured that the communion wine was “decent” even though as a well-trained churchman, I never let the liquid do more than touch my lips.  Though even with that brushing acquaintance you could tell quality.  That experience did mean that in future non-University communion services I always felt that taking the wine was another symbol of self-abnegation rather than celebration given the vinous horror that some vicars deemed acceptable for the faithful!

     Lunch was not included in the catering for those of us in hall, we survived on breakfast and an evening meal, but Sundays were different and we had a sort of tea-meal to keep us going.

     The afternoons on a Sunday were sometimes taken up by concerts in the Arts Hall which were free, and sometimes excruciatingly boring, but improving and worth the experience even if it meant that you crossed off another composer from your general listening list.  And then the evenings were free, to prepare for the following week of academic work.  As if.

     But there was an emptiness about the day that went beyond the lack of the normal to and fro of a working day and, like Proust’s madeleine, the feelings come back to me in the strangest of circumstances where, for a moment, even in a crowd, I’d feel a certain sort of aloneness.

     It’s not even as if these feelings are negative, they are just other, and at odds with how I usually feel.  As an only child I have been used to being by myself, and I am happy to relate that I find myself jolly good company.  Usually.

     I value friendship and enjoy companionship.  I look forward to meeting people and talking is surely one of the great joys of being human!  I also appreciate space of my own and solitude. 

     Space to think, and to write.  Hence this!

 

Take the damp with the dry!

 

 

 

As I never tire of telling people, I once sunbathed in the rain. 

     It was, to be fair, light rain, and as I was in Gran Canaria, even in the rain it was pleasant.  And my determination was rewarded with the sun coming out and drying me off.

     Admittedly that was in the Before Times when I was living in Cardiff and I was going to Gran Canaria for my Christmas holidays so that I could return to Cardiff sporting an out of season tan.  I also rather enjoyed going to my local branch of Boots to buy suntan lotion in late December just to see the expression on the sales assistant’s face!

     Today I live in the Now Times when sunshine is an expected element in everyday life here in Castelldefels, rather than an exceptional gift.  That being the case, one can get a little blasé about the visible presence of our nearest star and assume that there is always tomorrow to disport oneself to achieve the requisite degree of browning.

     And so, the summer disappears and one suddenly realizes that September has arrived and one is still a rather pasty white.

     This explains why today, for example, we have taken the remains of an indifferent day and salvaged the sunshine of a blustery afternoon.

     Our (that word should be in inverted commas) section of beach was delightfully empty as other folk are not so hardy in braving mild gale force sand-filled flaying winds as we are.

     At least the sand quotient of our breezes was limited because we were on the wave washed section of the beach, where the occasional liquidity of the surge kept the sand damp and disinclined to fly.

     In the event, it was easy to enjoy the experience, and I am a firm believer that a spirited wind is one of the most efficient aids to browning, short of bronzer, that there is, and the discomfort appeals to my Moderated Puritan Outlook that postulates that no pain no gain is one of the great truisms of our (and any) time.

     An added advantage of the rough movement of air is that it discourages the easy attack of mosquitos, and we managed to make it back home with only minimal damage, with gratifyingly few puncture marks.

     Tomorrow is Catalonia’s National Day, when most of the world (or at least Catalonia) is on holiday and the whole of Barcelona seems to decamp to our part of the world and fling themselves into the sea.  And clutter up ‘our’ beach.

     Another problem with the day is that it is officially ¡Fiesta! and therefore the menu del dia is also at ¡Fiesta! prices, and a Friday is out eating-out day and we object to paying so much more for a meal that is fundamentally the same as on a normal day. 

     But we probably will go out, and swallow through teeth as gritted as the air!