Little important things

I have recently become concerned with the act of putting my trousers on.

I am not, I hastily add, becoming an aficionado of public nudity, or even in these cool December days of baring my legs to the elements, no, it’s the simple act of dressing.  Or more precisely dressing in a public changing room.

In a marked difference to the more relaxed attitude of my fellow countrymen, the Catalans regard the floor of the changing room as virtually terminally toxic.  No part of the bare foot is allowed to touch the floor.  In a swimming pool, the wearing of flip-flops or some sort of slip on shoe is mandatory.  This means that those same flip-flops become the ‘safe’ area for the feet once you have taken off your socks.

That, in itself, is not a problem.  The problem for me is long trousers.  I (defiantly) wear shorts until at least the middle to late part of December and wear sandals virtually all year (much to Toni’s disgust) but, eventually, even I have to give in to the cold and pack my shorts away for another year.

The main part of the ‘problem’ for me is balancing on my flip-flops while taking the trousers off, and indeed, putting them on again.  I think that the positioning of the flip-flops is the essential part because on that placement depends the whole success of the balancing to get the leg in (or out) of the hole. 

How easy it was to put my trousers on in the floor-freedom of my own home where the maintenance of equilibrium was not dependent on looking like a flat-footed ballerina!  No, the micro adjustments for weight distribution for trouser insertion on a free-use non-toxic domestic floor are easy as opposed to the foot-specific demands of a changing room.  In the changing room I feel like a crass neophyte ninja (wax on, wax off) unable to perch one-legged on a pole each time I insert a leg, usually failing and veering away from the safe-spot of the flip-flop and pressing the trouser mid-draw onto the poisoned floor.

I have even considered ‘giving in’ and sitting down to put the damn things on but, from my observations of my fellow changers, I am not quite in the age group that would make such an action anything other than an admission of failure.  So I am looking for other techniques and explanations.

I have come to the conclusion that I am not straightening my foot enough to ensure its smooth progress down the leg of the trousers, so I will practice pretending to be ‘on point’ so that my foot will be more like a ferret down a drainpipe (though my trousers are nothing like so narrow!) rather than emulating the foot from the end of the introductory graphics of Monty Python’s Flying Circus!  I shall persevere!  I will succeed!  Wax on, wax off.

In my poetry I sometimes think that I am edging ever more closely to the poetry of the Azgoth of Kria, as described in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, where, “four members of an audience died of internal haemorrhaging during a recitation by their poet master Grunthos the Flatulent of his poem ‘Ode to a Small Lump of Green Putty I Found in My Armpit One Midsummer Morning’.”  Not, I hope, because my poetry is overtaking the position of Azgoth poetry as the second worst in the world, but rather because I sometimes take the most ordinary things as subject matter for my work.

In one of my most recent poems I wrote about nakedness in public changing rooms, and in particular, one man’s bottom! 

You can judge the end result in:     smrnewpoems.blogspot.com 

What started as a tongue in cheek piece of writing (unfortunate turn of phrase!) developed into something that, I think, repaid the work I put into it.  You, the reader, will have to be the judge of that!

The poems that you can read in smrnewpoems.blogspot.com are drafts.  I try and make them as ‘finished’ drafts as I can before I put them up, but they are very much work in progress.  The end result will be a book.  My next book, ‘The eloquence of broken things’ will (DV) be published in the New Year (which gives me some temporal scope) hopefully early in the new year, but I have learned to my cost never to be too jocose about the problems of publishing.


Tomorrow New Year's Eve and a visit to The Family in Terrassa with, hopefully, Toni's sister's delayed Christmas present.  We have to hope that Amazon will deliver on a Saturday!  We have faith!

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