Woe! Woe! And thrice woe!

We didn’t have a turkey so there was no possibility of inspecting the entrails to use an augury for the new year, so I looked around for something more metaphorical and discovered that my smartwatch had run out of power.  So New Years Eve on the lead up to the strokes of midnight and the eating of the twelve grapes of luck were accompanied by a woefully blank watch face attached to my wrist as I had omitted to bring the charger with me to Terrassa.

As with all electronic equipment with a visual display, there is nothing quite so dead as a blank screen.  So as everyone else checked their watches with the time displayed on the television, I merely saw the gleam of darkness on the black glass covered screen with occasional bright spots from the ambient light reflected from the useless decoration on my wrist.

My Pebble (O happy memory!) is now long gone, replaced by the Amazfit, but not quite compensating for the loss.  Pebble used to send cheerful and positive messages like, “Your Pebble is powered until this evening!” encouraging you to recharge – and a single Pebble recharge would last well over a week for me.  Then the firm sold themselves and their product and the Pebble ceased to be and for me, all the replacements have been pale reflections of the excellence of the product now gone.

Anyway, there might have been some sort of message, but it is easy to overlook that in the hectic build up to and recovery from Christmas.  What was indubitable was the blank face of timelessness that I stubbornly kept on my wrist in spite of the fact that it didn’t even look mildly attractive as a bracelet!  I found it interesting that I preferred to have the dead thing on my wrist rather than nothing.  Even though my phone tells the time, I need a watch, I feel strangely bereft and naked without one – but then I am also the person who has continued to buy CDs to play in the car even though it shows up my Luddite tendencies as far as real gadget freaks are concerned.  It is the technological equivalent of using a hand loom – the next thing I will do is dress up as a woman and start burning down toll gates!

When I did think about my powerless watch, and I did that often during the evening in the compulsive way that people have in looking at their watches in spite of not needing to know the time, I thought it was anything but a positive omen to go into the new year with my tekke credentials in tatters.

By way of compensation, we have started to Alexa-ify our home, starting with an Echo Spot and a selection of smart plugs.  It is now possible to turn on the television, lights (domestic and tree) and kettle with words of command.

Or at least it would be if the words of command were in English.  In a further effort to make me use what little Spanish I have, Toni has set up Alexa to respond in Spanish.  And it/she does to him, but it/she takes grave exception to my pronunciation of the language and goes into length diatribes about how she has not been programmed to respond to my outlandish version of the language that she finds perfectly easy to understand when voiced by Toni.  If nothing else it will force me to improve my pronunciation of certain key words in Spanish, or I will be forced (o misery!) to switch things on by hand!  To demonstrate that I am getting better, I have just switched the television on and off and opened a classical music radio station from where I am sitting and typing – and adjusted the volume!

When I explained to a friend in the UK on the telephone that we had just installed the first gadgets of Alexa he was astonished that I had done it earlier.  And he has a point.  As an ‘early adopter’ of any flashy gadget-type innovations it is certainly something that should have been up and running long before 2019!

Which brings me back to my dead watch.  Apart from the fact that I obviously misread the tiny power indicator on the watch face before I left and, as we were only staying overnight, I assumed that there was enough power to see me through and therefore I was fully justified in not taking the small unique charger, what did that black empty face indicate?

Perhaps I read too much into trivial, unrelated items and give them a significance that I know (really) they do not deserve.  But the dysfunctionality is suggestive of so many aspects of what is likely to occur in 2019 both domestically and also internationally that it is tempting to see the blank face of stopped time as Fate trying her best to blank out what is in the future!

For my watch, it only took a return home and the placement (with a firm click) into its charger for power to be returned.  Though, as a further illustration of how metaphor can extend into the real problems of the future, the watch did not start working without a ‘re-start’ a force loading of the app to get it going again.  After what has happened in 2018, many aspects of life that we took for granted will be forced into a ‘re-start’ in 2019.  And those ‘re-starts’ are not going to be quite as easy as the two side buttons press that was all it took to get my watch operational.

Still, I remain absurdly optimistic, even though blatantly, outwardly pessimistic, and look forward to the year ahead.   

If nothing else, it should see a couple of my books published, and seeing those through the press (what a quaintly outmoded expression for what actually goes on) and that will keep me occupied, and more importantly, give me something else to concentrate on when the idiocies of the world around me become too much to bear!

Another date filled

 

Well, the one good thing is that I have only missed one meeting or appointment - and I thought that I might have missed three.  But no, blood test and concert are still in the safe future, it is only the student representative meeting that has slipped me by, and the teacher concerned seemed far more concerned about my new pressure stocking than the meeting.  The lack of my attendance at the meeting apparently could be solved, or at least mitigated, by a short chat with one of the teachers.

My pressure stockings are another factor.  These are stylish (for pressure stockings anyway) free gifts from China.  I only had to pay the postage (and that wasn’t very much) and I got three pairs!  It reminded me of the trip that Toni and I made to stay in Catalonia where the flight cost us nothing – except for the landing charges.  I do not understand the economic logic of giving away a flight for nothing, but I gratefully received the largess.  God knows we have paid back that free gift many times over given the amount of travel that we have run up over the years since.  But I do remain grateful for the inexplicable gift!

The pressure stockings are perhaps easier to explain as a sprat to catch a mackerel and the assumption must surely have been that I find out that the link with the supplier is real and you stand a chance of getting what you hoped for, and you buy much more stuff - and god knows, China is the home of stuff nowadays.  Was it enough for the Chinese supplier merely to get hold of my email and start sending me information, to get me on a mailing list, that they could write off the merchandise. 

 

And again, I insist that the postage was so small that I could afford to speculate and give it a go not really worrying about losing the pittance that they had asked to get the stuff to me.  They have since asked me to comment on my purchase, but I assume this is merely a device to ensure that I am still a live customer and that any giving of stars will unleash a whole catalogue of offers too good to miss!

Give my predilection to submit myself to the blandishments of the capitalist system and buy stuff for the mere sake of it, I have steeled myself to be rude enough not to reply – even though I am wearing one of the said stockings even as I type this.

The net two months should prove to be revealing, with the possibility that I will not need to wear the bloody stockings any more.  The function of them is to increase the blood flow in my right calf so that the thrombosis will be dissolved away.  To that end, my diet (low salt, low fat, no alcohol, decaffeinated tea and coffee) added to the half a tablet of rat poison that I take daily should all be working together to get rid of the thrombosis in a gradual way.  Over the next couple of months, I am scheduled to have various tests and appointments that should enable my doctors to determine the extent or otherwise of the offending clot and adjust my treatment accordingly.

I had thought that I would be taking the rat poison for life, but one doctor seemed surprised by this assumption on my part and assured me that there was a possibility that it would be discontinued in a few months’ time.

I continue to be impressed with my treatment and the thorough way in which I have made a Grand Tour of most of the hospitals in the area for consultations and tests.  The important ultra-sound scan will be in January, so I won’t have a Christmas present of my treatment being ended, but I will settle for a late gift!  At least by the New Year I should be in a better position to know how my appointments calendar will look for the rest of the year!

Meanwhile, my book “Stephen’s Health” continues to grow as each new sheet of information, results and appointments is added to the plastic pockets.  I take it with me whenever I go to see a doctor as a sort of visible token of my active participation in my treatment.  I can also refer to any of the information about my case (downloaded from the secure Internet link) to encourage those doctors battling with their ageing computers.  In one or two instances it has been very useful to point to relevant information to help the consultation along!

I feel fine, though I am not able to walk as far or as fast as I used to.  My shooting stick has been invaluable and I am now back to my normal swim and bike ride quota for each day.

My replacement watch for my Pebble, the Amazfit takes a dictatorial view of my activity and gives me reams of information that I totally ignore.  It tells me where I have cycled and how – though I am not sure that it realizes that my bike is electric; it analyses my swim, using acronyms that I do not know; it noted my ‘run’ that I did not do – and I am still wondering about that; it measures my sleep and its depth; it takes my heartbeat; it tells me (and nags me) about sitting down for too long.  And it also tells the time.  Its battery life is nothing near the longevity of the Pebble, but it is at least four or five days between charges and I can live with that.  The text it uses is too small for me to read without my reading glasses, but I am used to making sense of the out of focus – I have been doing in for as long as I can remember – so that is not something that worries me.

I now use my Matrix watch (the one that runs by making electricity out of the difference between your body heat and the ambient temperature of the watch case!) as a backup when the Amazfit is charging.  I good, if expensive, compromise about their use!

The major problem I have is making sure that the alarms on any and all of my pieces of wearable electronics do not go off as inopportune times.  I take my half of rat poison at 8.00 pm.  That is the time of the start of the operas to which I go.  The trouble is that merely switching off the phone (which I do when I go to performances) does not always stop the bloody alarm and once or twice I have fumbled with the phone during the applause for the conductor in a frantic effort to silence the thing before the music starts.  My watch merely trembles and that can easily be turned off by jabbing at the screen.  The anticipation that an audience feels at the start of the performance is given an added layer of fear by the threat of my electronic alarm orchestra playing an unwelcome additional melodic line.

And I am looking forward to this performance: Janacek, Katya Kabanova.  Let’s see just how well my ‘education’ in the works of Janacek by WNO and Richard Armstrong with the voice of, among others, Elizabeth Söderström, will be in my appreciation of the performance tonight.  I am all anticipation.

And now to get ready.  As a point of principle, I wear casual clothes to the Opera, in spite or rather because of the fact that I will be surrounded by those who ostentatiously dress up.  I am still wearing shorts and sandals (for me Summer Never Dies) but I might wear jeans tonight.  Not because of the cold, you understand, but rather because getting out of the Liceu and walking up the Ramblas late at night can be a dispiriting experience, and if you look ostentatiously like a tourist then you might well be the target for one or more sex workers to come up to you with blatant offers of gratification!   

Better to be taken for, if not a native, then at least a resident, and hobble (in my case) my stick-assisted way towards my expensively parked car!

How much have I spent!

 

 

If people took as much time to research their partners as they do to buy a smartwatch then the world will be, um, a different place. I suppose that I will now have to hurriedly bring in a whole series of disclaimers that this is not about me and mine, it is just a casual thought.  A casual thought, brought on however, by my own experience.  And I will stop there as I appear to be adding to the depth of the hole!

I have been researching watches for some time.  I need little impetus to do so as watches and their purchase are a ‘thing’ of mine.  Ever since my first Ingersoll (8 jewels, or was it even more?) that was my first real timepiece – discounting the red plastic with yellow moveable arms thing on which I learned to tell the time – and the start of a life-long casual (but serious) affair with watches.

I have never been a fan of the upper range of absurdly expensive watches for much the same reason that I shun expensive fountain pens: I am drawn to both, but know that my less than serious approach to things material will mean that they will go the way of all flesh before I have had my money’s worth out of them.

I have always maintained that my favourite Madge song is “I am a material girl”.  I adore things, philosophically and materially, but I do not look after them in the way that I should.  I was brought up with grandparents and parents who were firmly in the ‘make do and mend’ generations, but they produced someone who, even though he had a cub badge which represented the fact that he had proved himself not to be a spendthrift (for a stipulated period of time) has yet to learn the true value of money and via that the value of things.

Far from the ‘make do and mend’ approach to life, I have always veered (quite directly) towards the ‘buy new’ approach to the capitalist society.  The evil fiends behind the planned obsolescence that drives our society must regard me as some sort of patron saint.  Cameras, computers, mobile phones and, above all, watches litter my life as I eagerly embrace each new fad, app and gadget.

As far as the watches are concerned, I had thought that I had found the smartwatch of my dreams in the Pebble.  This excellent watch was funded on Kickstarter or similar and produced a smartwatch with an always-on display, waterproof for swimming, a large face with digits easy enough for me to read, metal construction with metal band and all at a reasonable cost!  Job done!  And it was, until the firm produced a further watch, a development from the original (that I backed) and I waited for another great watch.

And it didn’t happen.  Because the firm was bought by the larger watch maker Fitbit and that was the last that we heard of the Pebble.  Except, of course, thousands of customers actually own them and have continued to use them.  But the apps that we use to make the most of the smart capabilities are gradually being un-supported and if anything goes wrong with the watch there is no real system to repair it.  The Pebble community does what it can, but our watches are gallopingly obsolescent.  One of the buttons on my watch is not now working.  It still tells the time, but that is a far cry from what it should be able to do.  So, I decided to search for a replacement.

The internet is awash with ‘reduced’ cost smartwatches costing between 20 and 100 euros, with the median price being just under 50.  What these watches offer is astonishing: they play music, take photos, locate you, tell you the weather, height above sea level – and tell the time.  Just as with modern phones, their primary function, the fact that they allow people to speak to each other seems to be the least of their capabilities!

But these ‘bargains’ were rarely waterproof, or if they were, they were not equipped with an always-on screen.  As soon as I had found a watch that seemed like a reasonable replacement for my Pebble, a more searching examination of the attributes of the watch would reveal that it actually had “everyday waterproof” status which mean that you could wash dishes carefully in it, or it would take a few drops of rain.  Or, more revealingly, it would say nothing about its waterproof status and so you would buy at your own risk.

I must have looked at scores of watches and rejected the lot.  Well, that is not strictly true.  I have ‘fallen’ for one or two too-good-to-be-true offers that have turned out to be exactly that.  I now own one watch that actually plays stored music on its tiny loudspeakers!  This was supposed to be waterproof, but the back of that particular watch is very easy to dislodge and is anything but waterproof.  There is another watch that I helped fund on Kickstarter that is powered by body heat and will never need a battery, and it is also waterproof.  But the most important aspect of this wonder watch is that it doesn’t yet exist!  Or at least its production seems impossibly delayed.

So, I have taken commercial action and bought a watch: the Amazfit Stratos.  It seems to tick most of my ‘must have’ attributes: easily readable watch face, good battery life, waterproof for swimming.  The proof of course will become clear in the next few weeks through use – but I live in hope.  And it will, after all, be the end result of many hours of pleasurable imaginary spending.

Later.

I have now been struck by the ‘waiting for a bus syndrome’ – in the sense that you wait and wait for the one you want and then two come along at the same time.  As with buses so with watches.  No sooner had a bought the Amazfit than the watch that I supported on Kickstarter, indeed the one I referred to above, suddenly became a reality and, after a hefty import duty paid to the delivery driver, I now have a Matrix that I could put on my wrist!

This too is waterproof and never needs a battery (in theory) because of its ability to extract energy from the difference between body temperature and ambient temperature.  I shall put the technology for this in the same category as the oscillating crystals that tell the time in watches!

Apart from the difficulty of pairing the Matrix with my phone – and that was solved by reference to the Matrix website and the FAQs – I now have two working watches, two NEW working watches, to replace my fading Pebble!

As it happens, I am wearing the Amazfit today.  Having made an executive decision last night after weighing up the attributes of both.  I can’t pretend that I have been scientific or even fair with the products, but a decision has been made.

The reasons: the Amazfit has a dedicated ‘swimming’ app that gives lots of information that I am sure will come in useful some time or other; it is easy to use; it has the bigger number size when telling the time; it looks better than the Matrix and it is lighter.  I think that they are roughly comparable in price and both have an always-on display on which I insist.  I could probably recommend either, but at the moment the Amazfit has taken pride of place with the Matrix being a reserve watch.

I don’t think that I have ordered any more watches in the deep past that are suddenly going to pop over the fence into my time reality – but I really am a sucker for a well designed face, so to speak and I cannot positively rule out the fact that I backslid some time ago and there is a timepiece with my name on it making its way to Castelldefels from China!

I await the next post.