What a difference a letter makes!

  

Today is one of those by-days, a day when I do not have the car because the air conditioning is (I hope) being recharged as it isn’t working – anything more serious than that is something that I am keeping my fingers firmly crossed against.  The garage in which the car is now residing is one recommended to me by a friend in my pool, and which is owned by another member of the sports complex.

      I have already had a major service and change of tyres done by the garage, and they were professional and fair – in other words a place to bind to yourself with bands of iron for future work.

     Opposite the garage is a bus stop which has a regular bus that takes me to with a few streets of the house.  That bus is the L95 and there is a set charge of 2,90€ - you can either use the exact amount in coins, or you can use the multi-card, which in my case I have not got.

     I knew that somewhere on the chaos of my desk there might have been a money box, one of those with a little screen and a mechanism that counted the money as you put it in that I used to get rid of the smaller coins each day.  Though nowadays I hardly ever use actual money relying far more on my bank card to pay for everything, great and small – from yet another robot hoover (in my never-ending search for the perfect machine) to my cup of tea at the end of my swim each day.  Amazingly I found the tine and after considerable effort managed to dislodge the lid without destroying the whole thing and scraped together 2,90€ leaving my desk looking like someone had opened an impoverished pirate’s treasure chest!

     Thus prepared, I sallied forth to the garage and left my car in the entrance, in a vain attempt to get the mechanics to see to it first and walked, stick-assisted to the bus stop.  I had taken my stick because at that time of the morning buses are often crowded, and ostentatious use of a walking stick usually means that people positively jump up from the disabled seats to show their public spirit.  For which I am most grateful as standing on a bus, even with a firm grip on the rails is something of a challenge for me.

    I even found a seat in the shelter to wait.  The one advantage of waiting for a bus on the main road in Castelldefels is that lots of buses pass, and while they may not be yours, you do get a little jump of positive expectation which keeps you going as each one passes.

    Then my bus turned up.  At least it was the 95, though it did have an ‘X’ in front of it, rather than the ‘L’ that I wanted – but I reasoned to myself, how different could they actually be?  Not much, I thought.

     And, indeed, the bus did seem to go in the right direction and called into the University just before the bridge that would take the bus over into my bit of Castelldefels.  But it didn’t.  Instead, the bus retraced the direction that it had already taken and, horror of horrors, diverted onto the slip road towards the motorway and the direction of Barcelona!

     The second mistake I made (the first being ignoring the X on the bus number) was not to get off at the first stop after Castelldefels, that of the Hospital Bellvitge.  I knew that there was a major bus terminus there, but it was on the other side of the motorway.  I assumed, wrongly, that it would call in at the hospital before it carried on with its journey.  So, I stayed on board and eventually got off in the outskirts of the city of Barcelona!

     I crossed the road and waited for the ‘right’ bus and hoped that my trusty stick and stuttering Spanish would get me the right degree of sympathy that would overlook the dual facts that I did not have either the correct change for a ticker not a 5€ note that I would willing offer for the fare.

     In the event everything worked out, and I got off the bus within an easy walk of my house.

     It had only taken me 2 hours to leave my car at the garage and return home.  A journey that takes approximately five minutes by car.

     You live and learn!

 

Exercise, Music, and Literature?

 

 

 

Waterproof headphones for swimming have their limitations.

     I remember thinking that I could make use of all those lengths in the swimming pool finally to listen to and get to know Beethoven’s Late Quartets.  Pretentious?  Moi?  I worked on the assumption that as I was ‘trapped’ in the water I could use the enforced concentration to break the barrier of my earlier dismissal of the music and find a new appreciation.

     In theory that was a good plan.  I downloaded some of the quartets to the memory of the headphones and prepared myself to be amazed.  And it didn’t work. 

     It wasn’t my prejudices getting in the way, it wasn’t that I didn’t listen, it was more the actual mechanics of the production of the music.

     Swimming is loud.  To the outsider it is just the gentle (in my case) parting of the water in an unobtrusive and fairly quiet crawl, but to the swimmer, especially with earplug-type headphones on the sound of the motion of the arms through water and the bubbles of air are more cacophony than anything else.  And the subtlety of Classical music with its sonic highs and lows is not the best way of cutting through the ambient swimmer’s sound to make a good listening experience.

     This is where pop music comes into its own with a thumping bass and a clear instrumental accompaniment to a strong singing voice or voices: those come through loud and clear, where most classical music does not.  And yes, I have tried bone conduction as well and it works, but only up to a point, and that point is far away from the texture that makes listening enjoyable.

     But now, for another week, I am in the gym as the ‘maintained’ pool begins to refill and whatever has had to be done during its three-week shutdown draws to an extended close.

     Goodness knows, swimming is basically boring – and I therefore have considerable admiration for those professional swimmers who simply have to do length after length after length (after length) to maintain their professional standard.  And I can see why the sheer tedium of training encourages many dedicated swimmer sportspeople to give up.  I do not, of course, pretend to be in that category in either the dedication or in the tedium, but I do like to be distracted during my swims and during my (enforced) sojourns in the gym while the pool is being serviced.

     With my daily swim I have divided up the hour and a quarter that I spend in the water by doing firstly a series of water-based exercises loosely based on what my physio told me I had to do after the knee operations.  I then do two lengths of leg-paddling using spaghetti floats, then two lengths of breast stroke, then umpteen lengths of front crawl with one of those ‘infinity’ floats clutched between my legs, to compensate for the disequilibrium that two new metal knee joints give, then two further lengths of leg-paddling and finishing with a modified form of the exercises with which I started.  So it is a varied mixture and anyway, the thought of a cup of tea in the adjoining café keeps me keen!

     I have established a pattern for the gym (only another week before the pool is back in use!) which comprises 1km on the rowing machine; 30 minutes on the cycle; 5 minutes on a sort of knee compression thing; 5 minutes on a variant of knee pressing, and a 5-minute walk.  I also, at some point, do the leg raising exercises that I usually do in the pool and discover that they are a bloody sight more difficult in the air!  And that is my hour done.

     Only the cycle affords the opportunity to do something other than suffer, and I have found that I can read on my mobile phone (everyone else uses their phones to establish a wi-fi link with the machines so that their exercise can be endlessly analysed, collated and admired.

     As the bike that I use has an actual back to it, one can luxuriate in moderate comfort and there is the sort of stability that makes reading a positive pleasure.  Except, reading what?  Rather like my pretentions to get to know the late quartets in my swim, I realize that what you need when doing exercise is something that does not demand a great deal of brain power to appreciate.  And I have found that the perfect fodder for a 30-minute static cycle is firstly to complete the Guardian ‘Quick’ crossword, that I will have started before I leave the house and then let myself drift away in the narrative nonsense of one of the ‘free’ digital books that a website regularly offers me.

      The last book I read during my cycling was an episodic, feel-good narrative sparked by the finding of a book list by various characters, a conceit that allowed character development and a pleasing circularity to the various story lines.

     The latest book is, or seems to be, an Egyptian murder mystery with references to the British Museum and King Tut and the puzzle of mysterious inscriptions and that sort of thing.  Ideal!

     I only hope that I can spin it out over the next week, when the water will then reclaim me and the constant attempt not to drown will be mind-filling enough to keep me occupied.

 

Nothing lasts!

 

The new cultural season has started with the first in my series of Orchestral Concerts in the Palau de la Música Catalana in Barcelona.

     My first challenge is thinking about exactly when to leave.  Traffic in Barcelona is usually something of a nightmare and the approach roads to the centre are usually traffic jammed so, although the journey is a relatively short one (with clear roads the trip to the city takes about twenty minutes, or thirty minutes tops the actual centre) normality is much longer.  I tell myself that I will leave about an hour and a half for the 19 km journey and that I can fill in the time to the start of the concert if I arrived early by having a snack and a cup of tea.

     Parking is not usually a problem.  There is a car park within a few minutes’ walk of the Palau and even the parking under the cathedral is not that far away, and I have never had to look elsewhere for a parking space, except of course when there are demonstrations and all bets are off, as I venture further and further into Barcelona Unknown in an increasingly desperate search for a space outside my normal ken.

    And parking spaces come at a hefty cost as I find that a normal concert length stay usually works out at about 15 euros for the privilege.

     Yesterday was generally clear, with the only holdups being the traffic lights and drivers who are obviously in the centre of Barcelona for the first time and attempt manoeuvres that do not meet with the wholehearted approval of habitual Barcelona drivers.

     There are always roadworks that throw logistical spanners into the car’s progress.  And nowadays roadworks seem to last for months if not years before things get back to normality c.f. St Boi!

     Anyway, I got to my final destination, or at least a near parking space, with plenty of time to spare and so I was able to pop into the café I use if I get a place in my car park of choice.

     I had a wrap of some sort with a mixture of things, most of which I could identify, and a cup of Earl Grey tea of such insipidity that I was ashamed to drink it.  I must remember to have an emergency tea bag to add to the pap they expect customers to drink so that I can fortify it with a bag of real Yorkshire Tea from my compendious stash at home.

 

I did make an abortive attempt to change my ticket for a concert on United Nations Day (when I have plans other than an evening concert) for a performance of Brahms Requiem tonight, but the seats available were not ones that I felt would give me a true appreciation of the work and so I decided to find something else to swap with my unusable ticket.  I should discover something before next Saturday, because that is my next scheduled concert and that would be the perfect time to change things around.

    

The Concert itself was excellent, with a theme of Emperors and Empire.  It started with Ryuichi Sakamoto’s music from The Last Emperor – the Bertolucci film – and the music trod a path between a soft lilting beauty and an echo of the martial music of majesty conveying the uneasy progression from decadent tradition and the new regime of Communism.

     In my view this was the weakest piece in the evening’s concert, but it was a rousing and melodic introduction.

 

     Beethoven 5^th piano concerto, usually called The Emperor was a different experience entirely.  The orchestra, that I felt was a touch uneasy at the start of the evening had become much more assured and the playing of Alba Ventura spurred them to greater heights.

     Her playing was precise and clear, there was a purity and a crystalline quality to her sound that almost made one believe that one was listening to the music for the first time!

     Her hand movements before putting her fingers on the keys ware histrionic, but with playing such as hers she can wave about as much as she likes.

     Her reception by the audience at the end of the piece was tumultuous, and rightly so, with her encore piece of Debussy’s Claire de lune showing that she was capable of a lightness of touch and a lyrical flow that was in stark contrast with the bombastic nature of the concerto!

     The second part of the concert opened with Lera Auerbach’s Icarus (1973) a piece I was particularly looking forward to because of its use of the Ondes Martenot.  This is one time that I actually did some homework for this piece that I did not know and listened to the performance on the artist’s website, so I was expecting the Ondes Martenot to occupy a firmer place in the soundscape that it did in performance.

     The music was modern, but approachable and there were clear harmonic lines of development as well as the usual pyrotechnics that one expects from the percussion section of an orchestra performing modern music!  A jolly piece.

     The evening ended with The 1812 Overture, where the overriding point of interest is “How are they going to do the cannon shots?”  It was fairly obvious that a big bass drum had been sited to the far left of the orchestra well away from the other members of the percussion section and, when we got to the moment of the first shot, a spotlight illuminated the enthusiastic drummer who thumped his way through the exhilarating ending. 

     The roar of acclimation that the piece received and I have to admit that my eyes were moist with the response to the sheer exultation of the music.  And gratitude to the conductor Andrés Salado a true favourite with the audience!

     Reality came back with the trip home and the usual lunatic driving of those tired of life!

 

Bring on the water!

 

 

There is water in the pool!

     By itself, that opening sentence reads more like a truism than an observation – a pool, self-evidently must have water.  But we are talking of my local swimming pool that has been drained and closed for its annual maintenance period, and I have been ‘forced’ to go to the gym.  Which I hate.

     As my swim is an early morning one, I felt that my transfer to the gym for the period of exile had to be at the same time.  I am, in some things, a creature of habit and I know that if I break routine then I am quite capable of dismissing that particular activity from my life with consummate ease.  So, hate it or not, I traipse to the gym at 6.30 am and do my rounds of the hated machines.

     I have established a Via dolorosa Machinarum with each of the instruments of torture being an individual statio on my particular Camino Doloroso de las Màquinas.  I start with the rowing machine – we only have one, so I go there first to ensure that it is done and dusted before the ‘masses” arrive for their pre-work rituals.  I do 1,000 m of brisk rowing and stop.

     My second statio is the static bike on which I do 30 minutes of pedalling at level 3 or 4 and can read from my phone via Kindle to pass the time.

     It is from the vantage point of the static bike that I can gaze through the large windows on the side walls of the gym into the parallel building that houses the pool.  As I start my ‘exercise’ early it is not yet light and the pool is in the sort of gloom that I feel matches my mood as I complete my go-nowhere exercise.  And where I can also make out (just) the echoing emptiness of an empty space where the water should be.

     It wasn’t so much direct observation that alerted me to something positive, but rather the rippling reflections of dim light being caught in the windows.  Ripples mean water and the only place to hold enough water to create ripples like those was in the pool itself.

     I looked more closely and noticed that there did appear to be a different quality of obscurity underneath the bottommost rung of the metallic ladder at the end of the pool.  And an even closer look discerned what could only be water!

     I have long learned to treat Spanish estimates of “this will be ready by . . .” as anything more than pious well-meaning, but essentially empty platitudes: and nothing says a pool is not ready for use than it being empty of the one element that makes it a pool.  So, the slow, but visible element rippling gently, is, to put it mildly, encouraging.

     I am further encouraged by the necessity of getting the pool up and running for the contracts with the various schools in the immediate neighbourhood that have to be fulfilled.  Money speaks.  And speaks loudly.

     I will look with an evaluating eye at the water level tomorrow as I peddle nowhere, and can afford myself the luxury of assuming that if it is higher than it was yesterday then my pedalling is (metaphorically) getting me further towards the reopening of the pool.

     And to those of my fellow sufferers in the circle of hell that Dante would have created if he had known that such places like gyms with Los instrumentos del tormento had existed (with willing participants!) who smile at me and say, “After a couple of weeks you will be converted and will come here rather than the pool!” – my only response is, “Watch me!  I am a proud heretic and will burn rather than stay a second beyond the opening of the pool!”

 

Official Patience

 

Usually, when dealing with Spanish bureaucracy, the real pain starts when you are dealing with a person on the other side of the desk who asks you for a form, paper or document that you did not know that you had to have.  It turns out that this document (that you did not know that you had to have) is essential.  Is obviously essential.  Patently.  At least to the person sitting opposite you.  And their weary disbelief at your lack of appreciation for the missing piece of paper is palpable.  And nothing can or will be done until the paper is produced.

     Sometimes you have the document that is necessary, but you failed to bring a copy of that document and then things fall apart and the centre cannot hold and you have to depart and come back another day.  This actually happened to me.

     I hadn’t be asked to provide a copy of anything, so the demand for one came out of the blue somewhat.  And I reasoned that, if a copy was required then surely it would be simpler all round if the official opposite me made a copy on the photocopier that I could see in another part of the office. 

     So, I gently suggested, “Would it be possible for you to make a copy here?”

     “We are not a photocopy shop!”  I was told in disgust.

     I had to search around for a place to make a copy before I could return.

     Today, to be fair the major problem was not what happened in the office but how I got an appointment in the first place.

     To renew my residency document, I needed to make an appointment in the section of the police department specifically dealing with documentation for foreigners.  The appointments are made online and they are virtually impossible to get.  No matter how and when you try, you fail.  At first, you put the failure down to bad luck, but then after a couple of weeks of trying you begin to get just a little bit panicky because the expiry date on your card is getting closer.  But you’ve left plenty of time and so you try again, expanding the location of the offices that you can use.  And you fail.

     And your card expires and you are no further forward in getting an appointment.  Then your bank informs you that your residency card is no longer in date and that will effect your ability to have a working bank account!

     A desperate visit to the bank later and fears are partially assuaged by the dismissal by the teller of immanent rejection, assuring me that as long as I am making an effort to get it renewed there will be nothing to worry about.

     But I did worry and so decided to go to a lawyer or notary and pay if necessary.  The lawyers I spoke to were not encouraging, but one of them “had a friend” who might be able to help.  A phone call later and I was informed that an appointment could be provided at a cost of 100 euros.  For a supposedly free appointment.

     This “selling” of appointments is a recognized scandal, it was even featured on a television documentary a few days ago, and nothing is done.

     My 100-euro appointment was for the very precise time of 12.09 pm, a time I was to discover was more conceptual rather than related to temporal reality.  I arrived early, queued firstly in the wrong queue and was then redirected to another queue and had to pass through a metal detector, which I failed but was waved through by the young police officer and made my way down to the office that was going to deal with my application.

     My name was ticked off a list and I was given a numbered ticket which was some 30 numbers ahead of the number being dealt with.

     Despair gave way to the Kindle on my phone, and I was content. Apart from the fact that the person dealing with my case also seemed to be the fountain of documental wisdom and was consulted by all and sundry, my application was speedy.  And in spite of the traffic-filled roads on the way back, there were no real hold ups and as I may not have a new card yet, I do have a receipt that explains that one is on its way. 

     A result.  And we went for a menu del dia to celebrate!

 

Survival!

 

 

Our cosy meeting of the Poetry Group in Barcelona last night was rudely interrupted (ironically during the period of silent introspection before our free-write) by a chorus of alarms from our mobile phones, the local government raucously informing us that a major storm was about to break and that extra care needed to be taken and . . .  but the way that the alarms are set up is that if you press the ‘OK’ on the screen to stop the noise, it also wipes the message, so any further details are lost and you just have the memory of the noise and the brief glimpse of the apocalypse outlined in three languages.

     It is a sign of the times that one member of the group had used her past experience to explain the proper etiquette for dealing with the increasingly regular (and intrusive!) mobile phone alarms, by informing us that the proper etiquette is is lower the volume to stop the noise, and then you can read the message from the authorities at your leisure.

     It was also with a certain amount of cynicism that we now appreciate these ‘warnings’.  After various scandals where withering fingers of accusation have been levelled at various officials who did nothing or less than nothing in the face of prompt warnings, we are now at the other extreme of responsibility with any front-line authorities showing an eagerness to put warnings out as soon as possible so that the officials involved can cover themselves in the case of disaster.

     It was the first flash of over-the-top lightning (looking more like the results of an amateur junior ASM being over enthusiastic in giving a dramatic light show for Lear’s Madness on the Heath scene, than anything in so-called real life) that I realised that I had not even backed a mini umbrella into my backpack and that I would have to traipse my way to the car park under the arc de triomf in driving rain.

     In the event, at the prompt termination of the event, there was what appeared to be a lull in the storm (which had provided sometimes disturbingly apposite sound and lighting effects to the poetry being read) which I took advantage of and scurried (in so far as I am now capable of that action) off to the car park with my baston clicking an urgent clicking beat to my progress.

     The car park is one of those vast underground constructions which honeycomb the city and give vastly expensive parking spaces, because finding something on the actual above-ground streets is virtually impossible.  My problem is always getting back in at the end of the meeting after the doors have closed.

     As is usually the case, at the entrance to the car park you are provided with a ticket from the machine which gives you a printed bar code which can be read by a machine which will then open the door for you to get your car.  I, however, have a little machine in the car which is recognized and lets me through without having to take a ticket, and this is also the case when I leave, my payment is automatically and (almost) painlessly extracted from my account, as you only get the briefest digital glimpse of the astronomical amount that you have paid to stay there.

     But I can never get in because the after-hours closed doors can only be opened from the street by showing your printed barcode on the ticket that you were issued with when you came in.  A ticket that I do not have.  I have previously been told that I can punch the registration of my car into the machine manually to gain access – but the keypad only has number and not letters, so I always find myself pressing the little button next to the keypad to summon one of the workers to open the door. 

     This usually takes a few minutes, which is usually not a problem (in spite of some of the suspect characters who hang around the arc de triomf late at night) but yesterday, I was waiting outside in The Lull waiting for the rains to recommence at any moment.

     My entry was facilitated by a customer leaving and, by the time that I got to my car, I was passed by a worker on one of those little electrical vehicles usually seen in airports, making his way to where I would have been waiting if it wasn’t for the aforementioned customer.

     Almost as soon as I got out of the carpark it started raining, complete with thunder and lightning.  As the air-con in the car is not functioning, I had the windows open and, as the rain increased, closed so the car became like a sauna.  And I took a new way home, guided by the GPS, going through new streets until I came to the welcome familiarity of the Via Laietana and a well-known way back.

     Driving at night in Barcelona is a total pain as you limp your way from red traffic light to red traffic light, with the added frustration of stopping for imaginary people to cross.  Would it really hurt the municipal authorities to install a degree of AI into the lights to facilitate the smoother running of the roads?  No, perhaps I shouldn’t have added a question mark to the last sentence, as its rhetorical nature is clear!

     As I drove through the city accompanied by lashing rain and the melodramatic production of son et lumière for the end times, I eventually made it onto the motorway.

     Although I was expecting it, based on vast past experience, the quality of the driving (in rain that needed the fastest setting of the windscreen wipers to fail to clear all the water) was appalling.  Motorists did not reduce their speed; they attempted risky manoeuvres on roads covered in standing water and . . . it was just like a normal night’s bad practice with the added danger of torrential rain.

     I did reduce speed, but that merely meant that vehicles drove at my speed a few centimetres behind me until they swerved to overtake into idiot traffic that was doing the same as they were.  I would like to say that it was an invigorating experience, but it wasn’t.  It was stressfully depressing and it remains a constant wonder to me that I do not have to thread my way through a series of pile-ups on all the roads I use!

     But obviously, I made it home, and was ironically drenched in the short run from the car to the front door.   

     A small price to pay for survival!

 

 

Comfort too late?

I do like my basic comforts, and one of those involves sitting on something more giving than hard metal springs.

     I do admit that I am not good at looking after certain things, and those include garden/beach chairs.  My reasoning is that they are designed to be used in the garden and on the beach and therefore they should survive both those environments without my having to give them any special treatment.  

     So, they are used from about May-sih to October-ish and then I ignore them.  Amazingly I did make the supreme effort to put my chair under the ‘eves’ of my study windows giving out onto the terrace on the third floor, to allow a certain degree of protection from the elements, but from then onwards the chair had to fend for itself though the winter and early spring months until the weather was clement enough to consider sitting out in the sand-filled sea breezes of the start of the tourist season.

     While the metal construction of the chair survived well, the cushioned cover did not fare at all well and it assumed the appearance of fragile, agèd parchment and had the same proclivities to rend and tear.  Which it did.

     Now, I have a fairly high I-couldn’t-give-a-shit approach to meaningless appearances and, in spite of the fact that I can feel and hear my mother’s refrain of “I was ashamed when you . . .” when taking a tatty chair to the beach, I can generally ignore pitying eyes and anyway I cover things up with a very large beach towel.

     It is when the ‘parchment’ material starts powdering and leaving a residue on newly browned flesh that one feels that a certain limit has been reached.  And, when every time the cushioned seating is adjusted, and a part of it comes off in one’s hand, one feels that the time for a replacement it nigh.

     It is, however, towards the end of the season, and beach accoutrements have been put away and shelves cleared for the over-kill of merchandise for Halloween, so that asking for a replacement cushion is looked on as a slightly odd request at this time of the year.

     We intend to go to the beach this morning and I decided yesterday that I would take off the old broken cushion to force myself to do a pilgrimage around the Stations of the Chinese Superstores to find a replacement.

     We are constantly urged to support local shops, and we do try and do that.  But our experiences of trying to be supportive have been, to put it mildly, mixed. 

      I seem to remember shopping when I was younger and if the shop that you were in was unable to supply something they would either say, “We can order that for you and have it in for next week,” or “Why don’t you try so and so’s, they might have it there.”  We rarely find this level of basic service, and I have to say that the level of service in the Chinese Superstores is variable as well (usually in direct inverse relationship to how well or how badly they speak Spanish) but the stuff you want is usually there.  It may take some finding, but somewhere, it lurks waiting for your eyes to light up in recognition.

     It took me three stores to find something that would work, and fit, but find it I did, and so I will blend-in in bland uniformity rather than stand out in indigent tatters.

     On a beach that, in our locality, is gratifyingly empty nowadays, my ‘new’ chair will have an audience of exactly one, my partner.  

     But, as my mother would undoubtedly add, “That doesn’t make a difference.  You’ve done the proper thing!”

     Dead parents are stern masters! 

The Great Clear Out! Or not.

 

 

The Tidying thing.  It’s now become one of those irritating elephants in the room that simply won’t go away, and it has started trumpeting as well!

     The basic trouble is that there are ALWAYS better things to do than tidying.  As long as the chaos is relatively clean and there is no rodent community inhabiting the mess then the motivation to start ordering the disordered is limited.

    I once compared the actual working space on my commodious desk to the size of a dinner plate.  Sometimes that image is inaccurate and the comparison is more with a side plate than anything else.  At one point I was making a note and needed to consult something in the dictionary (vowels always trip me up and getting them the wrong way round always looks so childish) and I found myself pushing my chair away from the desk to allow me to balance the dictionary (it is large!) by cantilevering it over the edge of said desk. 

     It is clearly absurd that I appear to be working towards emulating some sort of nineteenth-century mezzotint caricature of a scholar working in a cramped attic.  It is true that on the third floor, the room in which I work has been carved out of the roof, so there is indeed a sloped ceiling over my head, and I have to be very careful about how I stand up otherwise I could slump back unconscious into my chair having knocked myself out by too precipitate an ascent!

     The untidiness by which I am surrounded is almost comic in its chaos – though I sometimes do detect a sort of narrative thread linking the different piles of detritus (which isn’t, it is all essential ‘stuff’) and the ancillary scraps of my life scattered about as a type of surface layer, or erratics (if I may be allowed to use a metaphor from geology) to give an air of mystery and suggest hidden depths and an underlying order to what is quite clearly The Mayhem of Objects.

     There are two reasons for writing this.  The first, and the most obvious is that writing about something like tidying is a way of ensuring that it does not get done, because you have already ‘done’ something by the mere act of writing about it.  And the subject of the writing would disappear if careless ordering were to destroy its unstructured, yet intentional randomness.  Even I think that the previous sentence is mere verbiage, no matter how seriously I might take it as a form of self-defence for indolence!

     The second reason for writing this is that the writing may act as a stimulus to do something about a situation that irritates me every time I have to thread my way through the maze of incommodiousness before I can get to my scrap of working space at my desk.

     I know that I often write notes to myself, usually during my post-gym/pool cup of tea, and I even draw in little tick boxes as a further incentive to get things done.  I am proud to relate that I am made of sterner stuff than can be cajoled into acquiescence by four small lines, and the empty space thus enclosed often goes unticked.  But . . .

     There does come a time when the joke has gone far enough, when the situation is untenable when Something Has To Be Done.

     This situation has, I think, been reached.  I find myself juggling a notebook, a sheet of paper, and a couple of books (a conglomeration that should be easily accommodated on a reasonably sized desk) with increasing desperation.  And once I (almost) said to myself, “I simply cannot work like this!”

      I may not have voiced it, but I have certainly meant it.  Though meaning something without doing it negates the whole imperative.

     I will have to look on this writing as both an appeal for help, and also a decision to act.  If the situation is untenable then it must not be allowed to continue.  Action must follow.

 

Look on this as Part I of the Great Clean Up & Out.  It will be interesting to see if there will be further instalments.  I can assure you, my reader, that I am as interested in the outcome as you are indifferent!

     Time will tell.

 

It's all in the definition. Possibly.

  

Sometimes you just have to tell yourself that proving a negative is as good as a positive.

     For the best part of a fortnight we (AI & I) [If you say that in a swing rhythm sort of way it does sound like one of those inane choruses in a Eurovision failure) have been working on a piece of micro-research into my long-ignored thesis on Huxley from 50 years ago.

     I have fixated on a footnote, and on the person who is the subject of that footnote.  The relatively famous bit of my literary concern is linked to Huxley’s first (published) novel Crome Yellow.  The footnote mentions someone who as far as I was concerned was lost to history.

     Not lost if you have the will and the time to delve.  Very gradually the character (indeed he was a character in the Peacockian novel that Huxley wrote) began to emerge from the shadows of forgetfulness.

     We knew that he was a Rector, and a Rector of the parish of Garsington at the time of Lady Ottoline Morell and her coterie of the literary and the famous, but everyone else in the novel was much more famous than he, and their reputations have largely survived from the dizzy days of the Bright Young Things of the 1920s – together with representatives from a generation that was somewhat older.  Researching the others was easy – I have books on them.  But the humble Rector was not so easy to ¡find out about.

     So the search began.  American born-again fundamentalist on-line libraries actually had copies of some of the book that the rector had written – apocalyptic consideration of some of the more sensational books of the bible looking forward to The End Days – spiritual catnip to the Evangelical Right Wing of those who call themselves Christians.

     Of course, the tract that I wanted, and which Huxley had allegedly used as the basis for a whole chapter in his novel, was NOT online and so the hunt for a copy somewhere began.

     As we began to draw up some sort of biography for the rector, we discovered that he invented a ‘stay’ for a bell – this stay allowed the bell to be . . . well, I did go into the details of what the thing did and looked up a whole vocabulary of bell ringing to try and understand its function and even when onto the website of an old foundry that had used the damn thing extensively, until another fragment suggested that the guy who invented this device was not the guy that we were researching.  Suddenly a whole fascinating aspect of the rector’s personality was snatched away.

     Such is the state of the information available on line, even though we are now questioning the previous attribution, we are not absolutely sure and so instead of dismissing a week of work, we have put an academic question mark next to it: awaiting further clarification.

     I have now contacted the library of the Archbishop of Canterbury in Lambeth Palace, and Oxfordshire History Archive, a foundry, a bellringers society, and numerous other sources all from the comfort of my computer in Castelldefells.  My questions and requests have been sent to locations in three continents, to booksellers, enthusiasts, and academics.

     Self-indulgence personified!

     And, you never know, there might be some answers.

     Eventually!

 

I simply don't have time!

 

 

How do you define a full week?

     When you are working the question is moot.  You have a job that takes up the bulk of your day.  Your week is already full.  And with some jobs, like teaching for example, you have to include marking, meetings, union work, preparation, and the myriad time demands that the profession is heir to, many of which occur outside your stated hours.

     I remember reading in some book about conscription that some highly qualified people, especially academics, welcomed the constraints of a military life because they didn’t have to think.  What to do, how to do it, and when to do it were all laid down.  Personal intellectual involvement: nil. In the same way I also read that the philosopher Wittgenstein enjoyed going to see trashy Westerns and sat in the front row almost up against the screen because the sound and the picture occupied the whole of the space and he didn’t have to think!

     In the vacations of my time in University, I had a wide variety of short-term jobs.  It was inevitable that given the short period that I was going to be employed there was little training needed or offered to do the fairly simple tasks with which I was charged.  The problem in all the jobs was weighing up the offer of the payment for the work and the sometimes mind numbingly tedious work that you had to do to earn the money.

     Sometimes the physicality of the job took over and then there was no time to be bored because exhaustion ensured that you embraced unconsciousness whenever the opportunity presented itself.  I can still recall ‘breaks’ in the plate-laying in the Steel Works where I plonked myself on a plank supported by a couple of bricks, put my back against the wall of our ‘hut’ and in seconds, I was asleep – only to be very rudely awakened when the break was over and work resumed.

     Then there is the sort of work that is mindless and repetitive, but that very mindlessness allows a large percentage of your mind to be elsewhere: your hands and 5% of your brain may have been applying themselves to the task in hand, but 95% of your personality was far, far away from the tedium of paid reality!

     One of the better jobs (though it was ridiculously badly paid) was when I was a Security Guard (!). I refused to wear the uniform, except when forced by management, and had a ‘regular’ placement in the office of a transport firm where my ‘job’ was basically to log the drivers as they returned to the depot, and to do timed rounds of the premises using a clock on a strap.  This had to be ‘keyed’ to show that you had been to the various locations around the place on your regular rounds, each of which had a key on a chain that was used in your machine to prove you had at least moved about a bit during your stint.  Much of the time there I read and sometimes made notes for future essays because I was usually alone.

     As opposed to the time I had a job in a vast open plan office where the work I had to do was soul-destroyingly uninteresting and repetitive, and I had an ‘experienced’ child watching me like a hawk, and each time I finished some god-awful task she provided me with another even worse.  I only lasted a few days before I asked for the agency that had placed me there to find me something (anything) else before I went made.  It was one of those jobs where, even knowing it would only be for a few weeks, was not tolerable.

     With some of the jobs I had there could have been little chance of any real sense of achievement or satisfaction from the work: you were there for the money and nothing else.  I remember in one of my placements that the people I worked with lived for the weekends, and talking about the weekend that had passed gave enough material for conversations during the week!

     I am sure that some of the jobs that I had in the past no longer exist.  More sophisticated automation has probably taken the place of fallible human operators, and AI will take care of more.

     No one should have a job where there is no opportunity for development.  Money cannot compensate for 30 years of mindlessness.  Can it?

     I remember one stop our security van made when we were delivering wage packets to a factory (that concept dates me!) and I was chatting to the girls who were working on a production line.  To make small talk I asked what they were making.  And they had no idea whatsoever.  They did their bits and didn’t think about anything connected with the actions.  I was horrified at the lack of interest in a major element of their lives, except of course that their jobs were not a major element in their lives in the way that I would have thought it should have been.  Their jobs were a mean to an end, and that end was companionship with the other girls, and a wage packet at the end of the week that allowed them to live their real lives divorced from what they were doing each day.

     This piece started with a question, my response would be that the week starting tomorrow is full, including such events as a dental appointment and culminating in a performance of the Emperor Concerto by Beethoven in the Palau de la Musica in Barcelona.  The week  takes in, along the way, an expensive (it should have been free) appointment with the police to renew my identity and residence card, and a meeting of a local Poetry Group.  Throughout the week I am also conducting long distance research using an almost defunct research project of mine from the 1970s into the novelist Aldous Huxley and his use of the arts in his work.  I have centred my research in the last couple of weeks on a footnote in his first novel.

     I know that to most that sounds absurdly, inward-looking-end-in-itself-academic-twaddle, but I have been able to convince myself that the problems and opportunities presented by this footnote will be illustrative of technique and intent of someone who was to become a world-famous novelist.  So there!

     And Chat has done a lot of the donkey work involved in checking sources and suggesting useful websites and libraries, any spare moment can be taken up with a passing thought of mine being translated into something with the trappings of academe by the indefatigable ‘intelligence’ at the tap of my computer keys.

     Most of what I am doing about Huxley is only possible because I am retired and because I have access to the Internet, but I am enjoying producing something that I think will be a valid addition to Huxley scholarship.  And that is worth making an effort about.

     So, a full week!

Alone, not lonely

 

 

 

A ¡Fiesta! on a Friday throws out my Day Reckoning, and I begin to believe that I am living in a succession of Sundays.

     ‘Sunday’ is my default setting if something seems slightly ‘off’ about the day: if the light is not right, or it’s too quiet, or the smell is different, or I feel odd.  The answer for all of those is, ‘It’s Sunday!’

     Sometimes I get a feeling that I used to have on Sundays in College – a sort of spacious loneliness because things were off-kilter and the routine of the week had been broken, with nothing as filling to take its place.  The strangeness of the feeling was all the more odd because I could feel it when I quite patently was not alone.

     A typical Sunday would start with breakfast in the hall canteen, which was always taken before 8.30 am (or you got nothing) followed by a Communion Service for Anglicans (as I was then) in one of the meeting rooms.  This was a quite cosy affair as there were not so many of us, and we were able to disport ourselves in chairs a lot more comfortable than hard wooden pews.  And the Chaplin always ensured that the communion wine was “decent” even though as a well-trained churchman, I never let the liquid do more than touch my lips.  Though even with that brushing acquaintance you could tell quality.  That experience did mean that in future non-University communion services I always felt that taking the wine was another symbol of self-abnegation rather than celebration given the vinous horror that some vicars deemed acceptable for the faithful!

     Lunch was not included in the catering for those of us in hall, we survived on breakfast and an evening meal, but Sundays were different and we had a sort of tea-meal to keep us going.

     The afternoons on a Sunday were sometimes taken up by concerts in the Arts Hall which were free, and sometimes excruciatingly boring, but improving and worth the experience even if it meant that you crossed off another composer from your general listening list.  And then the evenings were free, to prepare for the following week of academic work.  As if.

     But there was an emptiness about the day that went beyond the lack of the normal to and fro of a working day and, like Proust’s madeleine, the feelings come back to me in the strangest of circumstances where, for a moment, even in a crowd, I’d feel a certain sort of aloneness.

     It’s not even as if these feelings are negative, they are just other, and at odds with how I usually feel.  As an only child I have been used to being by myself, and I am happy to relate that I find myself jolly good company.  Usually.

     I value friendship and enjoy companionship.  I look forward to meeting people and talking is surely one of the great joys of being human!  I also appreciate space of my own and solitude. 

     Space to think, and to write.  Hence this!

 

Take the damp with the dry!

 

 

 

As I never tire of telling people, I once sunbathed in the rain. 

     It was, to be fair, light rain, and as I was in Gran Canaria, even in the rain it was pleasant.  And my determination was rewarded with the sun coming out and drying me off.

     Admittedly that was in the Before Times when I was living in Cardiff and I was going to Gran Canaria for my Christmas holidays so that I could return to Cardiff sporting an out of season tan.  I also rather enjoyed going to my local branch of Boots to buy suntan lotion in late December just to see the expression on the sales assistant’s face!

     Today I live in the Now Times when sunshine is an expected element in everyday life here in Castelldefels, rather than an exceptional gift.  That being the case, one can get a little blasé about the visible presence of our nearest star and assume that there is always tomorrow to disport oneself to achieve the requisite degree of browning.

     And so, the summer disappears and one suddenly realizes that September has arrived and one is still a rather pasty white.

     This explains why today, for example, we have taken the remains of an indifferent day and salvaged the sunshine of a blustery afternoon.

     Our (that word should be in inverted commas) section of beach was delightfully empty as other folk are not so hardy in braving mild gale force sand-filled flaying winds as we are.

     At least the sand quotient of our breezes was limited because we were on the wave washed section of the beach, where the occasional liquidity of the surge kept the sand damp and disinclined to fly.

     In the event, it was easy to enjoy the experience, and I am a firm believer that a spirited wind is one of the most efficient aids to browning, short of bronzer, that there is, and the discomfort appeals to my Moderated Puritan Outlook that postulates that no pain no gain is one of the great truisms of our (and any) time.

     An added advantage of the rough movement of air is that it discourages the easy attack of mosquitos, and we managed to make it back home with only minimal damage, with gratifyingly few puncture marks.

     Tomorrow is Catalonia’s National Day, when most of the world (or at least Catalonia) is on holiday and the whole of Barcelona seems to decamp to our part of the world and fling themselves into the sea.  And clutter up ‘our’ beach.

     Another problem with the day is that it is officially ¡Fiesta! and therefore the menu del dia is also at ¡Fiesta! prices, and a Friday is out eating-out day and we object to paying so much more for a meal that is fundamentally the same as on a normal day. 

     But we probably will go out, and swallow through teeth as gritted as the air!