First steps!

My third week out of hospital and my first walks outside the house and my first trips to the local shops in the car!

It is a sign of how limiting the thrombosis and embolism are that such ‘easy’ actions I now regard as worthy of note.  Yesterday, with all the confidence of an idiot, I did rather too much and today I am aware that I did so.  I cannot say, in all truthfulness that I am actually suffering, but I am sitting down and biding my time before another foray into the lairs of commercialism!

I have not been idle in these last few weeks and have been working on the notes that I made during my stay in hospital and have worked them up into a series of poems that are part of my new chapbook called, “A Point of Blue”.

This chapbook comprises not only the dozen or so poems directly related to my stay (including one about the flowers that I was given!) but also half a dozen prose pieces to accompany them.  I have also included ‘drawings’ that I did on my reMarkable tablet that may be, “little more than glorified doodles” but they also, “come as near as I am ever going to get to some form of non-literary meditation”.  High-sounding words!  But this collection is best described as “a wry mixture of prose poetry and ‘drawings’” where, in spite of the seriousness of the condition, I am still able to get some humour out of the situation!

The chapbook is in process of being published and will have an ISBN number and will be one sale at €5 in the Euro zone and £5 in the UK.

I am pleased with how this chapbook has turned out and I am looking forward to comments about the content!

Next week will be a significant one for me as I intend to go to the opera.  The next opera in my season ticket is Romeo and Juliette by Gounod.  I have never seen this opera, although I know one or two of the arias, and I do not intend to let this opportunity slip!  I have book an hotel room for a night in Barcelona and the walk to the Liceu is very short.  We will have to see how it goes.  The only problem is that I have to inject myself at 9.00pm and that might be a little disconcerting for the audience if I do it during the performance!

Meanwhile the political situation in Spain becomes ever more murky.  On the television today there are scenes of pensioners throughout the country protesting and demonstrating about the derisory 0.25% increase – well below the rate of inflation, for yet another year – while the political fall out from the various corruption trials for members of the right wing minority government of PP continue to shock. 

It is becoming even clearer that the party is systemically corrupt and the frankly disgusting antics of the leader of Cs as he expresses his shock and distaste for the party that his group of sluttish politicos helped elect to government, masks the fact that the dyed in the wool sheer badness of PP was abundantly clear to even the most politically inept neophyte when his bunch of opportunistic riffraff voted for them.

More and more of the people who are in the courts being processed through the glacially slow judicial system are singing and implicating all the top echelon of PP.  The latest phase of this farce is the ex-treasurer of PP (all of the treasurers of PP in the history of the party have been accused of malpractice – and I’m using that word because they have not yet been sentenced and put in the prison that they richly deserve) has given evidence in the Valencia parliament about the funding of a past PP campaign.  As the national treasurer he has asserted that he no knowledge or control over the finances of the regional PP in Valencia.  In other words, he has thrown the past PP politicos in Valencia under the proverbial bus and washed his hands of a responsibility that you might, possibly have expected a national treasurer to have some knowledge about.  Especially as the campaign was such a major part of the national campaign and all the political leaders of PP were there to soak up the paid-for adulation!

In spite of the overwhelming evidence of corruption, I have no real expectation that any of the major political characters in PP will resign or have judgements (official judgements that is, in the court of public opinion they are guilty as sin!) against them. 

But, as always I live in hope and always believe that justice, will, eventually triumph.