New skills?

 

The electric scooter has been used as it was intended to be used: a way to get me from A to B without having to walk too much.  Result!

     I cannot pretend that I am the most confident user of this mode of transport, but I am a user.  And that surely is a start.  Maybe a shaky start, but start nevertheless.

     My unsteady progress is mocked by the number of teenagers (and there are many) who ride the damn things as thought they were born on them.  I am going to rely on the expectation that continued use will banish my rank amateurism. Possibly.  I live, as always, in hope.

 

The water in our local pool this morning was murky.  It crossed my mind that I had not idea how to translate that into Spanish.  I thought that perhaps ‘oscuro’ might work, but I wasn’t convinced.  I bowed to the inevitable and opened the Google translate on my phone and saw their suggestion, and immediately recognized that I should have known the word.

     There is a sort of Galician wine that, before you serve it, you turn the bottle upside down and tap the bottom.  The wine is called ‘turbio’ and is a reference to the fact that such a procedure mixed up the sediment in the wine and makes it murky.  It is not, as you might have expected an expensive wine, but in the days when I used to drink more convincingly that I do at present I found it a refreshing and inexpensive drink.  It was also a wine that used to disconcert the visiting British wine snobs who looked on askance at the barbaric pre-drink ritual.

 

I am ‘watching’ the opening game of Barça, the first game in the new La Liga season, though I would be hard pressed to say just when the season actually ended as the summer seems to have been filled with football.

     I have decided to make a stand against the obvious corruption of the World Cup being in Dubai.  The absurdity of having the World Cup in a location where the weather is obviously so disadvantageous to the safe playing of the game and where the rights of the foreign workers constructing the stadia and the hotels have been so flagrantly abused is enough to make the celebration of that corrupt state’s holding of a major world competition something to be ashamed of.

     I do not know how realistic a boycott of TV watching is going to be possible in a household where one half of the relationship is looking forward to an orgy of blanket football watching.  I think there has to be a finite limit to the number of times one can flounce out of the living room with one’s moral integrity intact.

     There is also the very real possibility that I might find myself being drawn into the jingoistic fever of supporting the Home Nations that are in the competition.  As Wales has made it to the World Cup for the first time in almost living memory I do feel duty bound to show at least some support, so I am qualifying my disgust well before the kick off, and I am confident that I will succumb to the saturation coverage.

Survived again!

 

After a night or rain, weak sunshine at lunchtime.  I’ll settle for that!  Travelling along a busy motorway, early morning, in the dark, in the rain, is a truly depressing experience.  And a frightening one.  I am always amazed by how little Spanish/Catalan motorists modify their driving to suit the conditions, and, in spite of myself, I find myself drawn into their lunatic dicing with death manoeuvres until a more sensible me takes control again and argues that the gain of a few seconds is not worth the risk.

I have actually measured the advantage semi-scientifically by observing the behaviour of car drivers along certain stretches of the urban and urban motorway roads around us during peak traffic times.  In urban situations, traffic lights and zebra crossings stop traffic, so any gains made are usually wiped out within a few hundred metres of road.  On motorways, slow travelling lorries overtaking each other and entrances and exits from the motorways are the major causes of traffic slowing.  If the motorway is being used as a way of skirting a short stretch of urban congestions then the traffic gains of the death-welcomers is usually marginal.

St Boi is, and has been for years, a bottleneck and place of frustration for traffic trying to change from one motorway to another.  I sometimes think that I can hear the deep rumbling sounds of hundreds of motorists’ teeth being ground simultaneously as they wait in seemingly never-ending queues!

One of the links that we take every day goes from a three-lane major motorway to a single lane turn-off link road with consequent slowing.  In theory.  In practice the speed that motorists take the curvaceous, unlighted road is terrifying.

Added to all this is the Spanish/Catalan use of the indicator.  Here a flashing light means that the driver is executing the turn or movement, not that he intends to.  If you are driving along a road and there is a junction with another road joining yours with broken white lines, that is just an indication to you of where the other cars will join your part of the road, there is none of that namby-pamby waiting for a safe space to make the move.  As these two things happen all the time, there is a sort of safety in continuity.  As you know that it is going to take place you make allowances, and therefore no deaths occur.  What happens when, say an unsuspecting Brit drives along the road expecting the courtesy and safety standards at home, I do not know.  Though I would point out that the number of RTAs in Catalonia are astonishing and would occasion questions in parliament if they occurred in Britain.

Still, I have been driving on Catalan roads for a decade now, so, while I am still constantly astonished, I am also fatalistic and make sure that I allow for what I know is going to happen.

But still, none of this driving gains anything.  The most that criminally reckless drivers can hope for is a couple of car lengths advantage before they are slowed down by the built-in limitations to carefree driving!

I am obviously typing all this to reinforce my own (perceived) considerate driving and to make me feel morally superior as some cretin overtakes on the inside and veers across a couple of other lanes.

-oOo-

I have just finished reading “Fear and Loathing in La Liga: Barcelona vs Real Madrid” by Sid Lowe (2013) London, Yellow Jersey Press It was actually recommended by the Local an English language internet magazine that concentrates on Spain.  I had already taken out a subscription before I realized just how right wing the political content of the thing was, but it is useful for recipes and inconsequential information about my adopted country.  “Fear and Loathing” was one of the books suggested as “essential” reading to get a flavour of what it is to live in the country.

I am no real fan of football but I am a Barça fan.  I can name more members of the team than I was ever able to do for any of the British national teams up to and including the World Cup winning team of 1966 – where the broadcast of the match I heard on a school trip aboard the Nevasa somewhere in the Baltic!

Living in Catalonia and surrounded by a family who are ostentatiously Catalan, my interest in Barça is as much self-defence as anything else.  My interest is of course increased by the fact that Barça’s motto is famously “mes que un club” – more than a club.  This can be taken in a number of ways, but it has also been, and is now, a focus for nationalism and Catalan independence.  Politics is inseparable from the games, especially los clássicos, the games between Barça and Real Madrid.

This book, all 432 pages of it, takes what I think is a balanced view of the “loathing” and attempts to put it in a social, political and historical context.  Sid Lowe attempts to take many of the myths surrounding the game and especially these two teams and find evidence to assess them.

Although I am not interested in football, you might say the same thing about piloting a Mississippi Steam Boat or whale fishing, but it did not stop me enjoying the work of Melville or Twain.  There is something exhilarating about entering a world about which you know little relying on the competence of an expert who wants to communicate – and Sid Lowe is definitely an expert!

In his ‘Author’s Note’ at the start of the book, Lowe writes, “Part of me wanted to include footnotes throughout” in the event he did not do so, but the book reads as though he could have and the reader feels that he has documented evidence to back up everything he says.  The book also passes my ‘academic’ test by having a proper ‘contents’ page together with a bibliography and index and it has two sets of photographs in the middle!

The rivalry as revealed in this book is much more nuanced than fans on either side would have you believe.  Real Madrid was founded by two Catalans, and Barça by a Swiss (in the official history) or and Englishman in another book I’ve read, but by a foreigner at any rate.  The rise and fall and rise and fall of the clubs is more complex than I had ever realised and iconic points of conflict between the two, for example the notorious signing of Di Stéfano, are explained with new information making the final assessment much more interesting.

I read this book like a novel and when you think about it the two clubs combine money, power, glamour, politics, nationality, language and virtually anything else that you can think of in melange in which there is a fair amount of sport as well.

I recommend this book without hesitation even, or perhaps especially, for those who think that they have little interest in two over-paid bunches of kick-ballers pretending to do something important with their time!

A lot has happened in the five years between the publication of this book and the present.  I for one, look forward to Lowe’s next book with some eagerness.

-oOo-

The sun has now been shining brightly for longer than five minutes so I will go for a short bike ride (to show willing) and also to see a new sundial that has been set in place ten or so streets away from where I am typing this.

If I find it, I will include a photo of it in the next blog.

-oOo-

Please feel free to visit my poetry blog at:

https://smrnewpoems.blogspot.com/2018/11/daily-run.html

Football and forgetting!

¡El Clasico!  The super-hyped football battle between Real Madrid and Barça is now on the TV and Toni is glued to the set.  As this game is a pay to view affair he is watching via some sort of site on the computer where the quality of the picture is smudged impressionist at best!  Still, any sort of depiction that allows spectators to differentiate between the ‘evil’ figures in white and the ‘good’ chaps in blue is better than nothing to facilitate anguish and abuse!

I have just come back form my swim and I have to say that the café of the centre was not as full as I would have expected.  Usually a Clasico will ensure a full café and this game (played at lunchtime for the convenience of a Chinese audience, I am informed: money speaks!) I would have thought would have guaranteed all tables to be taken, but there were spaces!  Probably all the tables are booked and people are just slow in turning up.

I can’t believe that people are not just as partisan and involved in these games as they were, but I was thinking about changing attitudes while having my traditional post-swim cup of tea, which eventually brought me to think about my attitude to swimming.

“Do I actually like swimming?”

It’s a fair question.  I have, after all, been doing it all my remembered life, so I should have a view about an important element in my life.  I did a series of highly impressionistic scientific calculations in my notebook and came to the conclusion that 1/30^th of my life is spent swimming.  Two seconds of every minute in my life is spent in a pool or the sea (or a changing room or a shower) and I’m sure that it would be more if I took into account that I do sleep, where swimming is rather more difficult.

So, this activity that takes up a significant chunk of my life: like? dislike?

I have set myself a metric mile (60 lengths of our pool) each day.  This takes about 40 minutes for me on an average day and I am always happier when it is done.  Let’s face it, swimming is basically boring – you just go up and down completing length after length.  Not much to see, doing the same thing minute after minute.  But if I don’t do it I miss it and feel that the day is somehow incomplete.  Is that the same thing as liking it?

True the sense of freedom, in being able to glide through water, to have it support you is something which is always a delight - but the actual drudge of swimming, actually doing it, rather than bobbing around?  Not so sure about that.

There is the psychological aspect: the swimming pool is a different environment and it is always good to vary the constraints in one’s life.  And in health terms, it is a good thing to take at least 30 minutes exercise a day.  It gets me out of the house and I meet a whole different set of people every day.

And then there’s the question of style.  I think that I swim reasonably well and there is something to be gained in doing something, anything, competently.

But the Great Delight is, of course, finding fault with others.

You would have thought that recreational swimming was a fairly tranquil and placid activity.  You would have thought wrongly.

In an empty pool I am sure that swimming can be energetically relaxing, but add anyone else and there is ample room for annoyance.

Firstly there is the simple crime of inelegance.  Some people swim by appearing to crawl through the water, with each limb apparently with a curious life of its own.  My reasonable and logical self says that any progress through water is positive and should be applauded and encouraged, but the aesthetic motivation in me finds some swimming simply gross.

And then there are the faults of lane swimming.  There is a strict etiquette about swimming in lanes, but only the individual swimmer knows exactly what they are so they can use their specific unique knowledge of the rules against whoever is invading their space.

For example: there is an unwritten rule that, if only two people are swimming in the same lane then the rule that you should swim in a clockwise direction is overtaken by the more obvious rule that each swimmer should take half of the lane and do end-to-ends instead.

As there was no free lane I had to join another guy in his lane and, in spite of my swimming deliberately in an end-to-end way, he steadfastly refused to comply and stubbornly stuck to the ‘rules’.  This in itself would be no bad thing if swimmers are equally matched, but we weren’t, I was the faster swimmer and I soon caught him up.

He then displayed a second ‘fault’.  Rather than a touch turn at the end of his length, he completed a clumsy tumble turn and then angled himself to go into the other half of the lane, thereby cutting across the line of the following swimmer!  Crime!  Selfishness!  Inconsideration!  It is so easy to get worked up when all you are doing is going up and down!

The solution was simple of course.  All it needed was for me to change halves when I caught up with him and go in the opposite direction.  I could then play at catch-up giving myself a set number of lengths to reach him again and get at least 20m ahead of him in another set number of lengths.  In such ways I keep some sort of interest in what I am doing.

And that piece of writing is an attempt to keep politics at the back of my mind at a time when it is difficult to think of anything else!

This is one of the oddest Christmases that I have ever spent, with a crucial election set by a hostile political party with a 4% vote in this country four days before Christmas Day!

And that same political party seemingly determined not to accept the democratic will of the Catalan population.

Roll on 2018!

But one good thing, the result of El Clasico, 23/12/2017 Real Madrid 0 - Barça 3.  Hooray!