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!

MY Saint's Day!

SAINT STEPHEN’S DAY, 2017.

Not the first up today, as Carmen is already in her natural home: the kitchen.  But yesterday she was in a restaurant and so she had at least one day off!  At the moment she is cleaning the prawns and as well as trimming the legs and whiskers, she also takes out the eyes as she says she doesn’t like them looking at her.  I do not share her squeamishness, but I am going to say nothing to such a competent cook!

In Spain, one’s name day is almost as important as a birthday and presents are to be expected – one of which I already know, as I am the one who bought it.  

This is a boxed set of Solti’s complete oeuvre with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on CDs.  I know, I know, I have heard all the arguments for ditching my allegiance to such an outmoded form and turning to the dark side of Spottify (or possibly with one ‘t’?) for all my musical needs, but memory stops me. 

I can still remember the cost of the LPs and the first CDs of people like Solti at prices that I could never afford.  It was only with the advent of the bargain LPs that my classical music library grew. 

I am eternally grateful to Music for Pleasure, Heliodor, Marble Arch, Classics for Pleasure and one or two other more obscure labels that allowed me to spend 9/11 (nine shillings and eleven pence, under 50p!) to start off my collection.  Admittedly the prices soon rose to 10/- (ten shillings) then up to 12/6 and so on following inflation, but even I could afford one or two a month.

These labels gave me introductions to Nielsen, Mahler, Sibelius other than the Karelia Suite, Hindemith, 

music from the Middle Ages and other odds and sods that have become part of my musical vocabulary.  I found that the great thing about being interested in Classical Music as opposed to Pop was that every shop record sale, no matter how meagre, would yield something of interest.  Let’s face it, if you like The Greats in Classical Music then there is a substantial back-catalogue to get to know, and therefore always a justification to buy.  Which I did!

So, the opportunity to buy quality music for just over a euro a disc is not something that I can resist and anyway I tend to listen to the music in the car where the CDs are more convenient than anything else.  For Christmas I had two CD cases to contain the discs so that they can be kept in the dashboard compartment and then I go through the music fairly religiously disc by disc – though full operas I tend to listen to at home.  Though I do make an exception with car/opera if I am trying to get to know one of the operas in the Liceu season.  The amount that I pay for my seat gives me the incentive to do a little preparatory work for the ones that I do not know so maximize my investment, so to speak!

Nowadays with the ‘bargain’ CD boxes, the individual discs sometimes have the artwork of the original LPs, so, for someone like myself there is an added pleasure is actually recognizing some of the covers that were well out of financial reach when I was first flicking through the music years ago!

Much of the music will be familiar to me, some of it very familiar, but when was the last time that I actually heard it?  I am sometimes shocked by my reactions on hearing some insanely popular piece of music and realizing that I haven’t actually heard a performance of it in years.  For me the real pleasure is relaxing (if that is the word) into the detail of remembered orchestration and also sensing some of the associations of time and place of hearings. 

For example, my first hearing of The Manfred Symphony by Tchaikovsky was in the Swansea Music Festival in the Brangwyn Hall and being almost startled out of my seat by the entry of the organ that for me (in those days when I had the raw material for it) was literally hair raising.  Every consequent performance and recording has been compared with that first experience and found to be lacking!

Sometimes the experience can be less than ideal.  For example I got to know the Concierto de Aranjuez from a cfp LP where the soloist sounded as though he was actually inside the microphone, one soft pluck of a single string on the guitar was able to drown out the orchestra.  Imagine my disappointment on a student trip to Paris and a live performance where, from the lowly seat (i.e. very high and at the back) that I could afford, I could see the guitarist strumming away but all I could hear was the orchestra!

I am reminded of an amateur performance of The Country Wife by Wycherley, a text I was teaching to an A Level group in Cardiff, where the performance was so dire that, in spite of knowing the text pretty well, I couldn’t follow what was happening on stage.  Restoration ‘comedy’ is arguably something that amateurs should not attempt, but even so they managed to make my own language unintelligible and strange!  In the same way I have heard professional orchestras mangle music where sometimes it is physically painful to listen.  With the ease of access to the best in the world not only in terms of performance, but also in terms of editing, it is hardly surprising that some local orchestras suffer by comparison!

But Solti is a safe pair of hands, and I can be persuaded by a different interpretation of some music I know well, if it is sincerely compelling.  Tempi are the clearest point of divergence for listeners, and departures from what individual feel is the ‘norm’ for pieces of their favourite music can be unbearable.  For me there is one Sibelius symphony conducted by Karajan that makes my skin crawl because of its all-encompassing wrongness.  Even then my inability or disinclination to throw things away meant that I merely added a “DO NOT LISTEN!” sticker to the front of the LP and put it back in its place!

I will have to wait until after lunch to get my hands of what arrived in my house a week ago and, just like the books, I am still amazed at my restraint and ripping off the packaging and getting into them.

But resist I did, and I am sure that I will enjoy my present more as it comes with added deferred gratification!