Here comes the rain!

 

 

There are few things as comforting as being inside, safe and dry, while rain hammers down outside.

     The first few drops of what has become a fully-fledged (with mobile phone alerts!) storm, complete with long rumbles of thunder and distant flashes of lightning has now arrived in full force.

     In the extended prelude to this storm, I sat outside the café of our local pool sipping my English Breakfast & Earl Gray Melange in a camply OTT faux (moulded) cut glass outsized cup when the first erratic drops fell.   

     But you could tell that rain was immanent because of the swarms of flies and mosquitos that flocked to my unprotected skin – in spite of the fact that I am Group A+ - and not their favourite tipple of Group O.  And these flies did not take an angry sweep for an answer, relying on their insect speed to avoid any exasperated hand movements, and resettle on the tastier parts of my epidermis with smug pity for my leaden reactions!

     It was when the spots of rain developed a more insistent rhythm that I decided to call it a day and pay up and go.  It turned out that I was ahead of the storm and reached the house before the weather truly broke.

     As is usual here in Castelldefels, even in the middle of a downpour, you can still see patches of blue in the sky as a visible sign of the unspoken promise of the weather in this area that, “this too will pass,” but with the added adjective proviso of, “soon”.  That, anyway, is what I believe.  It may sometimes be delusion, but like all firm delusions, it keeps me happy and hopeful!

 

I have spent some time re-editing a poem I wrote recently called, “On Looking Into the Eyes of a Hoverfly” the newest version of which can be found at

https://smrnewpoems.blogspot.com/

 

I have almost reached the stage where I could compile a slim volume of poetry based solely on the number of poems I have written on insect life and my interactions with it.  Though I won’t.   

Though I will try and add new work to that blog on a more regular basis than I have in the immediate past. 

     I do urge readers to click the “follow” button in my blogs so that you can get the most recent additions.

 

PS We have just had another mobile phone alert telling us that "the rain is going to stop soon" and with that message the rain instantly increased in intensity with a gratuitous roll of thunder complete with lightning!  Nature will not be digitally contained! 

 

To float at last!

 

Loath though I am to admit it, three weeks exile from the pool and ‘forced labour’ in the gym has had some sort of effect.

     Today was Liberation Day when the pool was finally reopened after the (extended) period of Maintenance work.  This grim period usually extends over a fortnight, and I can just about tolerate the regime of light-use machine work that I devise to fill up an hour of exercise.  But this year the work was over three weeks, and that extra week was almost unsupportable.

     With the liberal use of Kindle on my mobile phone for the bike and the walk, I am usually able to get through to the end of my stipulated period of torture and feel justified in my monthly payment which is specifically for Gym & Pool, so I am entitled to be there, in spite of my pointedly ignoring the gym for eleven-and-three-quarters months of the year.

     Yesterday I ritually knocked the dust from my shoes and vowed that my return to that particular circle of Hell would be no sooner than one long calendar year’s time, when the Maintenance work must begin again.

     Meanwhile, at 6.30 am this morning I was first into the water of the newly maintained pool and relaxed into the comfort of an adequately heated environment and started my swim/exercise that starts my usual day.

     And this is where what I have been doing for the past three weeks (apart from a few carless days) comes into its own.

     I start my ‘swim’ with physio approved exercises that when I first did them just after my knee operations made me yelp with pain.  Pain that was stonily ignored by the physio themselves (they were a moveable feast of considerate torturers) as they urged me to further exertions.  Now, using the cushion of the water’s hold, I can do the exercises with some ease, even the knee bends that at one time I thought would be impossible short of general anaesthetic!

     After about 30 minutes of stretches and bends and a couple of leg paddle lengths using floats, I start my swim proper with a push off from the end and crawl with my face submerged.  At one time I could do a length and a half with no real problem, but I have struggled to complete 20m of the pool in recent times.  So, it was with considerable surprise that I effort-fully managed to do a full length of the pool, which surely indicates that I have not been wasting my time during the pool closure.

     My swim was engagingly interrupted by other ‘regulars’ indicating by voice and air pumps their appreciation of the re-opened pool.  And, I should add, I do not mean to give a one-sided picture of the facilities of our city.  There are other pools that we could have used, quite apart from a chunk of the Med that runs along the southern edge of Castelldefels and an outdoor community pool for our houses.  But Our Pool is different, and to use other (lesser) pools (or seas) would be, somehow, verging on the treacherous.

     There are five lanes in our 25m pool, and, in theory, they can accommodate three people in each lane.  In practice, this is not true as the side lanes have steps leading into the water restricting the width, and more than two swimmers in those is uncomfortable.  Therefore, in total, the pool will work best with (at maximum) about 13 swimmers – if those swimmers are doing lengths and not socializing.

     It was, therefore, with some degree of horror that a mother and two young children arrived and entered MY lane.  If anyone needed a definition of sacrilegious, then there it was, in every splash.  I will reserve my wrath, unless this becomes an habitual invasion!

    

     Luckily by the time this invasion occurred I had reached the end of the swim part of my time and I was doing the final set of exercises, so I was able to complete my time at the opposite end of the pool, and propriety was observed.

     I am relying on the fact that this was the first day of the reopening of the pool and that the numbers generally tail off as we regulars soldier on.

 

Lunch today in the Pool’s restaurant, was preceded by a glass of Cava, a tradition that could (I mused) be extended to cover a glass before my swim each day. 

     A passing thought.  Though a tempting one!

 

 

Palau de la Música - Bacewicz, Schumann, Brahms, Liszt

 

After three days without a car, I was informed by the garage that they had, after extensive testing, hit a maker specific point of repair, which needed the car to go back to the dealer for the air con to be fixed.  It was impossible for them to complete the repair without the authorization of the dealer.

     This is woefully bad news as any recourse to the Dealership means big bucks at the end of the repair, and a long wait for an opportunity to spend your money as appointments are as difficult to get as if the dealership was a British doctor’s surgery!  But there appears to be little choice, and I know that the mechanic that I gave my car to will have used everything he knows to get the job done, so if he confesses to failure, then you really do have to bite the bullet and traipse all the way to the next town to get the job done.

     Meanwhile I comfort myself with the idea of a concert in the Palau tomorrow . . . which was now yesterday, if you see what I mean, a day having elapsed when blog intent did not make it to blog actual.

 

Given the tea in the café next to the parking garage that I use (if possible) which is the nearest to the Palau, is of truly awful vapidity, I resolved to take a couple of tea bags with me to augment the thin earl grey into something drinkable.  I, of course, forgot the tea bags and debated whether to go to the mini market on the Via Laietana, buy some tea bags, go back to the car to store the excess, take two to the café and have a decent cuppa.  In the event I had forgotten about the mini market next to the parking so a box of PG Tips later I was able to have my tea and a more than decent brie, salmon and egg wrap, before the concert.

     A little housekeeping was necessary to change my ticket for United Nations Day into credit in the Palau as I will not be going to the opera that evening as I have other entertainment in mind!  That was no problem and I now have an inducement to look further afield in the range of concerts than the ones that I have purchased for some of my Saturdays in my season ticket.  Unfortunately, all the concerts in which I am interested all work out to be much more expensive than the credit I have available but, that’s life – at least they gave me credit!

 

The concert opened with Bacewicz’s 1943, Overture – a short piece with some very expressive brass passages and some oddly lyrical softer passages.  I suppose it is somewhat crass to expect all music written at a time of crisis to reflect that tension in sonic terms, but even with some disconcertingly percussive moments there are also passages which are Gothically playful, but underlying all is an uneasy and sometimes frantic beat that leaves the listener edgily engaged.

     The opening of this piece sounded somewhat unsteady with the major culprits being the horn section.  The sound felt a little muffled, I am sure that the acoustic of the Palau does not favour this type of music.

     A composer worth pursuing.

 

The concerts was the 1850 Cello Concerto by Schumann adapted for viola and played by Sara Ferrández.   This was an odd experience in that the concerto is not overly assertive on the part of the solo instrument – even though it needs real virtuosity to make it work.

At the back of my mind was the fact that this was originally written for the cello, and at times it seemed to me that the viola was aping that instrument in its lower register.

     The soloist grew form the orchestra and blended with it.  Yes, there were moments when the viola soared over the orchestra, but this was a concerto where the solo instrument felt fully engaged in the totality of the music, and the depth of that engagement felt more profound that the showiness of its smaller cousin!

 

The concert really came alive in the second half.

     The first notes of the first Hungarian Dance by Brahms (orginally published over the years 1869 to 1880 and originally for piano four hands) graphically illustrated an orchestra comfortable with the lushness of sound and an ensemble playing that radiated enjoyment.

     God knows when I last listened to this music, but it all came flooding back (with the exception of Dance number 10 which was new to me) and I was able to join with the audience in giving the conclusion of the dances a tumultuous reception!

 

Symphonic Poem Number 3 from Les Préludes by Liszt (1854) was the concluding piece in the programme, a musical journey through life, death and transfiguration.

     The muted opening of the piece does not give you adequate preparation for the triumphant entry of the brass – and my recognition of the music!

     This was orchestral playing at its superlative best, and the final moments reduced me to tears.  What more can you ask from a musical experience!

 

Throughout the concert I ostentatiously consulted my Personal Listener’s Programme, produced under my direction by Chat.  I have decided to prepare for all the rest of my Operas and Orchestral Concerts by having Chat produce similar programmes which give introductions and crucially, ways of listening and further listening. 

     They also give me some space to jot down thoughts that I may have about the opening of the concert during the interval when I must move about a bit to make sure that my knees don’t set in place.

 

The next concert is a celebration of the music of John Williams, and that I expect to be a somewhat different experience.  Though I am interested to see what Chat can come up with to aid my listening experience!

 

 

 

 

My garage man has admitted defeat.  After three days of trying to sort out my faulty air con he has admitted that the only real solution is to take the car to the dealer as they have ensured that some aspects of the repair can only be completed by the dealership. 

     One would have thought that air con is hardly an essential system in the running of the car and that repairing it would be something that any tom dick or harry (should those have been capitalized?) would be able to do.  “But,” I was told, “your car is a hybrid,” and that means that all bets are off.

     Even I know that nowadays given the electronic complexity of cars even a simple jump start is something that doesn’t work in modern vehicles and any attempt to try such a positively medieval technique to get the vehicle going again could result in serious damage to both car and also to the human trying to get things moving again.

     My car has an engine and two (count them) two batteries.  This I discovered when one of them stopped working and so did the car.  This was another of those circumstances when ‘return to dealer’ was necessary to get things sorted out.  My problems with the air con are akin to those that you have with the printer.

     It used to be said in the old days of vinal, turntables, hi fi systems, and loudspeakers, that the weakest part of the system was the loudspeaker.  I took the word of whoever felt qualified to say such a thing, whereas my assumption was the disc itself was the most unlikely part of the system, where stereo sound of a full orchestra was coaxed out of a needle going up and down and side to side in micro grooves on a piece of circular plastic.  But what do I know about these things.

     But if records were inherently unlikely sources of rich orchestral sound, printers seem to be constructed to frustrate and infuriate the owner and user.

     I have no intention of restating the evil nature of the pricing of printing ink, making it one of the most expensive liquids that normal people buy, or the horror stories that are repeated all over the internet whereby printers have secret electronic tagging of the number of copies produced and insist that a printer is out of ink when some arbitrary number of copies has been reached, in spite of hearing said ink sloshing around when the ludicrously complicated engineering of the ink cartridge is shaken.  And why is there no standardization for the cartridges?  And yes, that is a rhetorical question.

     One of my printers (and yes, I have more than one, doesn’t everybody?) there are reservoirs for the ink which can simply be poured into the receptacle, and it doesn’t have to be the machines’ own make, any old ink will do.  If that works, why isn’t it standard for all bloody printers.

     The answers are obvious, and they are all to do with money.

     In the dark nights of the soul that visit everyone who has ever tried to print something that needs to be done ‘now’ so that it can be sent off today, knows – that is the time that the printers is at its best-worst.  As it tells you that it has run out of paper, in spite of the tray being well stocked with A4, that there is no cyan ink, in spite of the fact that you are printing text in simple black, that there is a paper jam in spite of the fact that there is no paper anywhere except where it should be.  And then there is the message that tells you that the printer is not connected when you are standing next to the bloody thing with a computer that is sending information to it.

     If you can deal with printers, the logic goes, you can deal with anything.  It is always encouraging, that in a world of ever-increasing technological sophistication, problems can often still be sorted out by the simple expedient of, “turn it off and on again”.

     Unfortunately, this technique does not extend to faulty air con systems in hybrid cars.  More’s the pity.

     I am building up my strength to deal with all the faff and expense of getting things done.

     At least the pool is open on Monday so I can swim my cares away!

 

Cabined, cribbed, confined!

 

 

 

Day 3 without the car, and I am having definite withdrawal symptoms!

     It’s not as if the car wasn’t working, it was only the air conditioning and while that is an important component in comfortable driving, it doesn’t stop the wheels turning!

     It is also a worry that each day has a financial element associated with it.  I mean, given that the air con can (please God no!) cost over a thousand euros to replace I am willing to wait for them to discover that it is, eventually, only a valve or minor part in the set up that has to be replaced.  The ‘easy fix’ of recharging the system (whatever that means) has already been ruled out and the actual fault is (obviously) proving difficult to discover.  And with each passing day I become more apprehensive about the rising cost, because in the world of the car, even failure comes with a price.

     But even more worrying than the cost is the clamp that has suddenly been put on free action.  You do not realize just how much you are dependent on the car until you do not have one at your beck and call.

     Yes, I know that I have my bike, the bus and taxi, as well as the extreme alternative of actual walking.  But my bike is ruled out by my questionable equilibrium given my two new knees, the bus is not readily accessible, and taxis are ruinously expensive to use for ‘run-about’ excursions.

     So, we are now, stay-at-home carless people, moping about and resenting every house bound moment.  Luckily, we are well provided with the essentials of life and do not (at the moment) need to do any emergency shopping.  Which is just as well, as the nearest supermarket shops to us are car trips away rather than walks.

      Our one sort-of super (!) market was part of a parade of restaurants that for some inexplicable reason have suddenly closed.  So, pizza restaurant, pollo a last, bakery, ordinary restaurant (with a fair menu del dia), and corner shop – all gone, or at least all closed.  To me it makes no commercial sense at all as all the elements in the business seemed to be thriving.  It is set on a main road, has a hinterland of domestic dwellings houses and flats, and is near a camping site that always has food needs.  We have often tried to work out the Reason Why behind the changes, opening hours, closures, and change of business that happen in Castelldefels – and have failed to find any logical justification for some of the decisions made by owners and managers.  But, there again, what do we know of commercial pressures – one fears that it is a murky world behind the smiling faces and clean table napkins.

     I remember once asking a friendly waiter in our local commercial centre if the Mafia played any part in the criminal life of our town, and he answered, “Which Mafia do you mean?”  And then rattled off a list of nationalities who all had a criminal stake in our town.  I keep telling myself that despite the awful state of our roads, we live in a very wealthy city, where house prices are sky high and our residents include the very wealthy in enormous houses behind over-the-top security to guard them.  And us of course!  Those families would not have just the one car, and so would not feel as bereft as we do!

 

However, there is one bright spot amid the static misery of carelessness.  Yesterday I took delivery of my new robot cleaner!

     I must admit that I have owned a number of these devices and while I am enthusiastically in favour of them in principle, in practice I find that they are lacking and woefully lacking.

     When they first came out, and I bought mine from Kickstarter or some such enticement, I was more than happy to have the thing suck up dirt.  I was prepared to empty the machine each time I used it, and I felt that I was in the forefront of what used to be science fiction in those glossy projections in the 50s about what the future would hold.

     As is the way with gadgets like this, each innovation that I read about made me less and less satisfied with the pedestrian nature of my own machine, to the extent that I was glad to have it give up the ghost so that I had (had) to buy another one.

     I will not go through the sad procession of inadequate machines that I cherished and then despised, before, after extensive research, I bought a machine (at a reasonable price) that purported to hoover and mop at the same time, with a self-emptying facility as well.     

     The key indicator that I should have noticed with this machine was the “reasonable price”.  It did indeed do what it said on the box.  It hoovered, it emptied itself and, when you filled it up with water it did (sort-of) mop.  But not particularly well.

     Eventually, I stopped using the ‘mop’ function because it was so ineffective and cast glances of contempt at it each time I passed.

     At last, it stopped working, and I was able to cast about for a replacement.

     I did do some research, and used Chat to help with evaluation, and this time I looked for what I wanted rather than looking for a “reasonable price” i.e. cheap.  What I wanted was not available for what I paid for the last one and so I have now ended up with something that hoovers, mops, cleans the mops, dries them, uses AI for god knows what, and is equipped with an onboard light and a camera!

     I am too afraid to look, but I suspect that there are short films on line which show the cleaning from the point of view of the machine.  I know that on the mobile phone that runs the thing, I can click a button and watch its progress.  I have to admit that there was something strangely fascinating to see your house at floor level, and a little shaming as well as, equipped with a light and a camera there is no hiding place for the underside of lower unit doors nor for the insalubrious division between floor and white goods.

     The machine is not plumbed-in, so you do have to fill the reservoir with water and empty the other one with the dirty water, but everything else is automatic with occasional beeps to show that it is still working.

     It is far too soon to give a thumbs up or down for the things yet, but its first trial run (apart from the usual glitches in the technology of getting the thing paired with the phone) it was excellent.  And since it will have to be used daily (and perhaps more than daily) to justify its price, I will soon have much experience to give an authoritative evaluation of my outlay.

     And that last bit of writing at least took my mind off what might or might not be happening to my car.

 

Idle hands: active research?

 

 

 

A second day dawns without the car!

     A false alarm with an early morning call from a private number, but my cautious ¡Hola! was enough to make them ring off immediately!  So, a second day without recourse to the gym.  And no, even though I did sleep-rest-in until after my usual rising time of 5.45 am I find that I am now generally incapable of lying-in with any degree of comfort.  So I got up.

     I did make myself a morning cup of tea and prepare my museli and then settled down to read:

 

 

This is a reprint of the tract that Huxley found to act as the basis of Mr Bodiham’s sermon in his first published novel Crome Yellow.  Huxley wrote that he had lifted the inspiration for the sermon that he gave the character from a tract that he found, and I am going to find out just how much was inspiration and how much was straightforward copying. 

     What sparked my interest in this sermon and the Rev E H Horne who wrote it was a footnote inserted into later editions of Crome Yellow that acknowledged the debt that owed to Horne.

     An idle thought about the origin of the footnote grew into a search that has prompted me to try to find out when and why the footnote was added, and to find out a little more about the historical Horne. 

     This has involved contacting a variety of individuals and institutions ranging from the Library of Lambeth Palace to The Bodleian, taking in the British Museum, the British Library, the archive of a foundry, an evangelical library in Catalonia, the university of Reading and various antiquarian booksellers, and others – all of which was possible using my computer and emails.

     I have been astonished at just how helpful people have been and how much time and effort they are prepared to make for a stranger pursuing an odd line of micro-research!

     I have also discovered that there is a limit to what you can actually do in certain circumstances, before you reach a digital paywall and the gates come clanging down. 

     What I should be doing is looking around Castelldefels and Barcelona to find a University with access to various websites that are closed to me, but as a private researcher I do not know how I can gain access.

     One thing that I can do is search through the list of local libraries and find out which ones are open to the general reader.  I remember the revelation while researching the painter Dalmau, to find a wealth of relevant volumes in the art library in MNAC.  There must be other institutions with open access around and I must make a real effort to find them.

     Another quest!

 

What a difference a letter makes!

  

Today is one of those by-days, a day when I do not have the car because the air conditioning is (I hope) being recharged as it isn’t working – anything more serious than that is something that I am keeping my fingers firmly crossed against.  The garage in which the car is now residing is one recommended to me by a friend in my pool, and which is owned by another member of the sports complex.

      I have already had a major service and change of tyres done by the garage, and they were professional and fair – in other words a place to bind to yourself with bands of iron for future work.

     Opposite the garage is a bus stop which has a regular bus that takes me to with a few streets of the house.  That bus is the L95 and there is a set charge of 2,90€ - you can either use the exact amount in coins, or you can use the multi-card, which in my case I have not got.

     I knew that somewhere on the chaos of my desk there might have been a money box, one of those with a little screen and a mechanism that counted the money as you put it in that I used to get rid of the smaller coins each day.  Though nowadays I hardly ever use actual money relying far more on my bank card to pay for everything, great and small – from yet another robot hoover (in my never-ending search for the perfect machine) to my cup of tea at the end of my swim each day.  Amazingly I found the tine and after considerable effort managed to dislodge the lid without destroying the whole thing and scraped together 2,90€ leaving my desk looking like someone had opened an impoverished pirate’s treasure chest!

     Thus prepared, I sallied forth to the garage and left my car in the entrance, in a vain attempt to get the mechanics to see to it first and walked, stick-assisted to the bus stop.  I had taken my stick because at that time of the morning buses are often crowded, and ostentatious use of a walking stick usually means that people positively jump up from the disabled seats to show their public spirit.  For which I am most grateful as standing on a bus, even with a firm grip on the rails is something of a challenge for me.

    I even found a seat in the shelter to wait.  The one advantage of waiting for a bus on the main road in Castelldefels is that lots of buses pass, and while they may not be yours, you do get a little jump of positive expectation which keeps you going as each one passes.

    Then my bus turned up.  At least it was the 95, though it did have an ‘X’ in front of it, rather than the ‘L’ that I wanted – but I reasoned to myself, how different could they actually be?  Not much, I thought.

     And, indeed, the bus did seem to go in the right direction and called into the University just before the bridge that would take the bus over into my bit of Castelldefels.  But it didn’t.  Instead, the bus retraced the direction that it had already taken and, horror of horrors, diverted onto the slip road towards the motorway and the direction of Barcelona!

     The second mistake I made (the first being ignoring the X on the bus number) was not to get off at the first stop after Castelldefels, that of the Hospital Bellvitge.  I knew that there was a major bus terminus there, but it was on the other side of the motorway.  I assumed, wrongly, that it would call in at the hospital before it carried on with its journey.  So, I stayed on board and eventually got off in the outskirts of the city of Barcelona!

     I crossed the road and waited for the ‘right’ bus and hoped that my trusty stick and stuttering Spanish would get me the right degree of sympathy that would overlook the dual facts that I did not have either the correct change for a ticker not a 5€ note that I would willing offer for the fare.

     In the event everything worked out, and I got off the bus within an easy walk of my house.

     It had only taken me 2 hours to leave my car at the garage and return home.  A journey that takes approximately five minutes by car.

     You live and learn!