Barcelona was hot and unsatisfactory: the first I can deal with but the second, especially as it is connected to a book, is much harder to laugh off.
As I am teaching Art History (only a bit and only modern) next year I tried to get a copy of the book which my pupils are expected to know something of. The buying of this book and the even sweeter thrill of charging the cost to the school was the object of the trip to the city.
Armed with the title, the author, the ISBN number and the year at which the book was aimed I felt fairly secure in the successful achievement of my task. The reality was much more complex.
In the first few book shops I was more or less jocose about the failure of the people there to come up with the book but these people in turn spoke in hushed voices about a bookshop of whose book orders they were not worthy to type into the computer. The name of this Shangri-La of things academic was “Abacus” (in Spanish the emphasis is on the ‘b’) and I was fairly near it.
Eventually, after having asked five people, all of whom knew this shop (including I might add one council dustman) I found it. An unassuming doorway led into a subterranean labyrinth of things stationery which I severely avoided as such things negatively affect my spendthriftfulness. I asked for the books and went straight to the information section to give them the details so that they might give me the book.
The child who took my scrap of paper with all the information on it, glanced at it in a fairly negative way and after tapping half an encyclopaedia into the computer informed me severely that they did not have it with a clear indication that they would not stock it either. His look of autocratic distain was as if I had asked for a pornographically illustrated Book of Kells rather than a simple text book on the History of Art!
Thus defeated I was in no positive frame of mind to take on My Pupil who had however done some homework and who gave me three books of Chinese paintings to look through.
The bus drive back to Castelldefels, just like the drive to Barcelona was hellish. I shall not do this again. I hate travel by bus; in future I think that I shall park in the station here in Castelldefels and go up by train, much more civilized!
The evening was taken up with going to Terrassa for a birthday party but the real revelation was finding out just why my GPS was so expensive: you can talk to it!
With “voice commands” you can get a response from the GPS and you can order it to find a particular address when you are on the move or make a mid-course correction and instruct the device to take you somewhere else.
It does seem like something out of “1001 Nights” with more than a touch of ‘Open Sesame!’ about it, but it is vastly satisfying to have at least one of your passengers grinding his teeth in frustrated gadget owning passion!
I have yet to discover if the thing is actually worth the money, but as Picasso may have memorably said (at least I’ve spent years saying he said it) in another context, “It’s not that the paintings aren’t worth the money: it’s the money which isn’t worth the money.” I have also said for years (using a price that is now thirty odd years out of date or whenever the Falklands Conflict was) that if an Exocet missile cost £250,000 then paintings costing ‘only’ tens of millions seem a pretty good buy! After all many of the missiles actually missed, while a painting generally stays put and only the impoverished intellect of the observer can make it miss!
However, I am still not convinced that I have spent my money wisely.
I shall now pause for a moment to allow the hollow laughter from those that know me to subside.
As it was too late to post this writing yesterday, I am now writing on the Third Floor in the calm of the morning where broken cloud has not encouraged children to break the serenity of the day; the planes are taking off on a distant runway and arching their way out to sea, and even the clamorous pigeons are curbing the amorous one liners.
In this part of the world the pigeons are like really unimaginative morons who go into night clubs and assured by their own delusions of adequacy assume that the chat up line of “All right then!” with the emphasis on right will be sufficient to have the fluttering hearts of their targets laid instantly at their feet, or claws, as the case might be. Even a second cup of tea is sometimes insufficient to make this monotonous chorus emanating from branch and television ariel a little hard to take.
Sometimes sitting on the Third Floor I am irresistibly reminded of ‘Targets’ the disturbing excellent Peter Bogdanovich film, in which a young man for no convincingly explained reason embarks on a shooting spree. The only difference in my version is that I am a little older than the shooter in the film and my targets would be quite clearly chosen for their levels of irritation: starting with pigeons, working my way through assorted dogs in the neighbourhood and culminating in a general massacre of . . . Another cup of tea I think!
That’s better! Tea is the nearest thing to the mythical drug ‘soma’ in Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ which has the contradictory qualities of stimulation and anaesthesia. Tea calms and refreshes; stimulates and soothes; makes the world a better place and is generally an ever present friend in times of stress.
And talking of stress, the pattering footsteps and pipingly piercing voice of the first child of the day breaks into the tranquillity of my eyrie and drags me back to reality.
But wait a false alarm!
The brightly dull day (a feature of Castelldefels) has not prompted the Little One to shriek about on the surface of the pool like a demented water-boatman on steroids and it has retreated to its €1m home leaving the world to silence (always a relative concept in this part of the world) and to me and the pool person cleaning the swimming pool beyond the tennis court busily sweeping up the night’s layer of pine needles
The morning insects must be out in force as I have just been treated to the sort of ariel show by a trio of swifts or swallows which make all other birds look positively lumpen as they labour their way through the air!
I am now down to the last drops of stewed tea in my Zara glass teapot which only hardened Brits would drink and which leave Catalans gasping with sheer wonder at the masochist lengths that inhabitants of the United Kingdom will go to in the name of their cuisine.
They don’t know what they are missing!
As I am teaching Art History (only a bit and only modern) next year I tried to get a copy of the book which my pupils are expected to know something of. The buying of this book and the even sweeter thrill of charging the cost to the school was the object of the trip to the city.
Armed with the title, the author, the ISBN number and the year at which the book was aimed I felt fairly secure in the successful achievement of my task. The reality was much more complex.
In the first few book shops I was more or less jocose about the failure of the people there to come up with the book but these people in turn spoke in hushed voices about a bookshop of whose book orders they were not worthy to type into the computer. The name of this Shangri-La of things academic was “Abacus” (in Spanish the emphasis is on the ‘b’) and I was fairly near it.
Eventually, after having asked five people, all of whom knew this shop (including I might add one council dustman) I found it. An unassuming doorway led into a subterranean labyrinth of things stationery which I severely avoided as such things negatively affect my spendthriftfulness. I asked for the books and went straight to the information section to give them the details so that they might give me the book.
The child who took my scrap of paper with all the information on it, glanced at it in a fairly negative way and after tapping half an encyclopaedia into the computer informed me severely that they did not have it with a clear indication that they would not stock it either. His look of autocratic distain was as if I had asked for a pornographically illustrated Book of Kells rather than a simple text book on the History of Art!
Thus defeated I was in no positive frame of mind to take on My Pupil who had however done some homework and who gave me three books of Chinese paintings to look through.
The bus drive back to Castelldefels, just like the drive to Barcelona was hellish. I shall not do this again. I hate travel by bus; in future I think that I shall park in the station here in Castelldefels and go up by train, much more civilized!
The evening was taken up with going to Terrassa for a birthday party but the real revelation was finding out just why my GPS was so expensive: you can talk to it!
With “voice commands” you can get a response from the GPS and you can order it to find a particular address when you are on the move or make a mid-course correction and instruct the device to take you somewhere else.
It does seem like something out of “1001 Nights” with more than a touch of ‘Open Sesame!’ about it, but it is vastly satisfying to have at least one of your passengers grinding his teeth in frustrated gadget owning passion!
I have yet to discover if the thing is actually worth the money, but as Picasso may have memorably said (at least I’ve spent years saying he said it) in another context, “It’s not that the paintings aren’t worth the money: it’s the money which isn’t worth the money.” I have also said for years (using a price that is now thirty odd years out of date or whenever the Falklands Conflict was) that if an Exocet missile cost £250,000 then paintings costing ‘only’ tens of millions seem a pretty good buy! After all many of the missiles actually missed, while a painting generally stays put and only the impoverished intellect of the observer can make it miss!
However, I am still not convinced that I have spent my money wisely.
I shall now pause for a moment to allow the hollow laughter from those that know me to subside.
As it was too late to post this writing yesterday, I am now writing on the Third Floor in the calm of the morning where broken cloud has not encouraged children to break the serenity of the day; the planes are taking off on a distant runway and arching their way out to sea, and even the clamorous pigeons are curbing the amorous one liners.
In this part of the world the pigeons are like really unimaginative morons who go into night clubs and assured by their own delusions of adequacy assume that the chat up line of “All right then!” with the emphasis on right will be sufficient to have the fluttering hearts of their targets laid instantly at their feet, or claws, as the case might be. Even a second cup of tea is sometimes insufficient to make this monotonous chorus emanating from branch and television ariel a little hard to take.
Sometimes sitting on the Third Floor I am irresistibly reminded of ‘Targets’ the disturbing excellent Peter Bogdanovich film, in which a young man for no convincingly explained reason embarks on a shooting spree. The only difference in my version is that I am a little older than the shooter in the film and my targets would be quite clearly chosen for their levels of irritation: starting with pigeons, working my way through assorted dogs in the neighbourhood and culminating in a general massacre of . . . Another cup of tea I think!
That’s better! Tea is the nearest thing to the mythical drug ‘soma’ in Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ which has the contradictory qualities of stimulation and anaesthesia. Tea calms and refreshes; stimulates and soothes; makes the world a better place and is generally an ever present friend in times of stress.
And talking of stress, the pattering footsteps and pipingly piercing voice of the first child of the day breaks into the tranquillity of my eyrie and drags me back to reality.
But wait a false alarm!
The brightly dull day (a feature of Castelldefels) has not prompted the Little One to shriek about on the surface of the pool like a demented water-boatman on steroids and it has retreated to its €1m home leaving the world to silence (always a relative concept in this part of the world) and to me and the pool person cleaning the swimming pool beyond the tennis court busily sweeping up the night’s layer of pine needles
The morning insects must be out in force as I have just been treated to the sort of ariel show by a trio of swifts or swallows which make all other birds look positively lumpen as they labour their way through the air!
I am now down to the last drops of stewed tea in my Zara glass teapot which only hardened Brits would drink and which leave Catalans gasping with sheer wonder at the masochist lengths that inhabitants of the United Kingdom will go to in the name of their cuisine.
They don’t know what they are missing!
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