Although I am still getting up in the dark, the light is appreciably sooner in making its appearance than it has done recently. We are at the stage where you can kid yourself that summer is just around the corner. Though I have to admit that I sat inside the café to have my post-swim cup of tea rather than sitting on a damp chair in the cold outside, no matter than a weak sun was doing its best to spread a little cheeriness.
I’d also forgotten
my notebook, and further forgot to ask at reception for a sheet of A4 so that I
could write out my fugitive thoughts before they seeped away. I was reduced to ripping off the back cover
of a real estate advertisers’ booklet to use instead. To be fair to me, the reason that I didn’t have
my trusty notebook in my pocket was because I was working on a poem last night
and using my (almost) indecipherable scrawl to encourage me to work on the
ideas that I had. I’ve now started the
poem twice and I am not even remotely satisfied with the direction that it is
going in. This is par for the course and
I confidently expect that later today I will find a more satisfactory format to
try and tease out a satisfactory structure!
And while I am on
a ‘fair to me’ jaunt, I am happy to say that I have actually done my homework
for Catalan and a bit of revision too.
Our teaching this year has been somewhat fractured with an array of
teachers and, while our main teacher has attempted to keep things together,
there are gaps in our sacred texts where they have not been filled in. We are now in the process of going back to
horribly grammatical lacunae and pencilling in our responses. Luckily, one of the books has the ‘answers’
in the back, so that you are able to check your answers and make suitable adjustments.
This is not cheating;
this is just practical. Catalan has
rules, but it also has exceptions and, unless you know those exceptions then
you are going to make mistakes, and, if we are on our own for some of the time,
we have to get our accurate information from somewhere.
Some of our
exercises are structured on the same principles of the maths exercises that I
remember with fear and dread from my O Level torture: rule – example – another example
following the rule – then, all hell breaks loose and you are on your own! And Catalan has accents which go in all
directions on any unsuspecting vowel, and it has the funny C and a double L
with a floating full stop.
Unfortunately, our
next examination will take note of where and how one adds the accents and This
Time It Is Important. So, we have been
given a vocabulary list riven with accents and we will have to learn them. Or rather I should have phrased it, “should
have learned them by now” as the examination is a week tomorrow! I have always found it amazing just how much
one can cram into the last few days with fear fuelling one’s ability! At least I hope that is still the case for me.
The house next door is being fully (and I emphasise the word ‘fully’)
renovated and, for the last three months we have been subject to hundreds of
thousands of hammer blows to the fabric of the house. As we live in conjoined dwellings, a blow to a
wall in one is a blow to the wall in all.
Given the number of blows that we have experienced, I cannot believe
that there is a single square millimetre of the next door flat (floors,
ceilings and walls) that have not been battered – and each one of those blows
echoes through our house. At times the
sound has been unbearable with the vibrations having a physicality that stops
thought. And they are at it seven days a
week, all day, and sometimes well into the evening.
It is difficult to
know what to do. Renovation, when you
are removing floor tiles, wall tiles, replacing the electrics, adding air con,
restructuring, it all takes effort and a great deal of noise – but that is what
renovation is, mess and noise. It would have
been nice if the neighbours who own the house (they are not here for the
renovation, only the workmen are there) had had the common courtesy to let us
know that our lives were going to be a daily misery for months before they put
the first hammer to the first wall. But
that didn’t happen. So there.
Given the amount of
noise and the dislocation that it provokes, I had occasion to look up the word
for ‘nightmare’ in Spanish so that I could throw it into conversation to
explain how we have felt about the sheer noise.
The Spanish word for ‘nightmare’ is pesadilla (pes-ah-dee-ah)
while the Catalan word for it is malson.
I don’t know which one I prefer.
I do like the ‘mal’ part of the Catalan, but the workers and the
neighbours speak Spanish not Catalan so malson will be lost on them. Oh, and by the way don’t be taken in by the
seemingly effortless transition between the two languages; it’s all theoretical
not ingrained!
I am praying that
the major construction work is over and that the most that we will be subject
to in the coming months is the altogether quieter application of paint on
plaster! Though, by that time the family
will be in residence and we will have to see how they behave. We got used to have people free dwellings on
either side of us, so anything is going to be more negative than that. And then in the summer the neighbours on the
other side of us return for the holiday period.
So it goes.
Coronavirus in Spain appears to be taking a stronger
hold. Catalonia appears to have the
second greatest concentration of cases in Spain, but the total numbers are
still relatively small, but there is always a possibility of an exponential
increase. More and more news of
prohibitions is getting on to the television.
Nothing has much of an effect on us yet, but the measures taken in Italy
are an indication of what can happen in a very short period of time, and
certainly the constantly repeated information that we are getting via the media
seems to be preparing us for a real disruption to our normal way of life.
The sun has
reappeared, the wind has dropped and all is momentarily well with the world!
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