One gadget back, two wheels forward

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The bad news: my ‘new’ mobile phone, while not technically dead, will need €180 to get well again.  That is my definition of defunct.  A dead, very dead parrot!

The good news: my electric bike now has two working disc brakes and it only cost €20 to get it back to working condition.

It is the good news/bad news equilibrium that keeps the world stable.  As long as you ignore the idiocy of Brexit and the even deeper idiocy of 45 having been elected POTUS.

Enough already!

After a sunny, hazy, muggy, cloudy, humid, threatening start to the day, it has now turned into a 37C sort of day.  From where I type I can see my lounger on the terrace invitingly empty, but I spurn it as I would an etc etc and try and get beyond the displacement activity of this wordiness and get down to the real business of improving (sic.) my Spanish.  I do have a sort of plan to drag my linguistic ineptitude out of the inchoate grammarlessness of my usual Spanish speech forms into something resembling a backward Spanish child.  But it needs some work, work that I find a multitude of ways of avoiding.  But I console myself with the fact that I do, indeed, have a Plan.  The only thing I need to do now is work towards its implementation.  And as soon as I finish typing whatever it is that I might have to say, I will, I really will, get down to it.

Lunch (he said, changing the topic while still not doing the Spanish work that he has specifically said that he should be doing) was in my local swimming pool.  And was excellent - with the exception of the postre of sandia which was fairly dry and artificially sweet.  We have decided, Toni and I, that finding the perfect melon in a menu del dia is as difficult as finding reasonable arguments in favour of Brexit.  But, let it pass, let it pass.

I will make another attempt to show a photograph of The Stain.  I have attempted to send the photograph ‘by another way’ in the hope that the program will accept it.  I always, as ever, live in hope.

As the weather was so threatening (at least towards the west) I feared that The Stain might be washed away today, but I was able to point it out to Toni on the way to lunch and he was duly impressed and said that I should be fined for soiling the pavement.  I fear that Toni is woefully under-educated in the aleatory quality of The Artistic Moment and he fails to appreciate the liquid evanescence of Vinous Art!  Sad.

The Stain has now survived since Sunday afternoon and what should follow is a photograph of the artwork itself.  If it doesn’t appear then I maintain that its very non-appearance is actually part of the artistic experience itself and the fact that you have to take my work for its existence is an essential element in its putative presence.  If I do manage to get the photograph at the end of this paragraph then I will think of another equally pseud rationalisation to justify its accession to the Pantheon of Significant Art.

By the way, the happiest that I ever saw Bryn Richards, my art teacher in the Cardiff High School for Boys when it was in the Newport Road was when part of a review of some artistic event or other was quoted in Pseuds’ Corner in Private Eye.  Accolade indeed!

Right, now for the photograph.

Well, success of a sort the photograph is on this blog, but not where I want it to be.  But, see above, which you probably already have - and there it is!

I left a space for the evidence.  If it is not there, so.  If it is, so.  It does exist, and furthermore it lingers.