A Stab to Start the Day

 

 New Lockdown, Day X, Tuesday

 

 

 

Not everyone starts their day by stabbing themselves with their electric toothbrush.  And I mean real stabbing.  With blood.

      Not an easy feat, but I managed it.  The head of the brush somehow or other came away from the main body of the brush and I then was distracted by the perception of distance and I brought the vibrating metal stalk forcibly into in the right-hand side of my mouth, just below the bottom lip!  It certain woke me up, and any lingering drowsiness was jabbed away in a concentrated moment of pain.

     Before you start thinking of wasting any sympathy on me and my injury, I would point out that the puncture is small and it looks more like a shaving nick than anything else – but still a wake-up call to the unwary to beware of seemingly domestic dental devices.

     When I checked the errant brush head, it did look a little worn and perhaps I should have replaced it earlier.

     Toothbrushes (and electric toothbrush heads) are in a category of simple things that could be easily and cheaply replaced but aren’t, until something happens.  This is a category they share with wooden kitchen spoons and spatulas; face flannels; tea towels and coffee mugs.

     Actually, the last item, the mug, is something that I will throw away as soon as I detect even the smallest chip or crack – some things are ingrained in your innermost soul by maternal edict that cannot, dare not be gainsaid.  My mother regarded a chip or crack in pottery and china as being as toxic as a vomiting fly, safe harbours for unmentionable and uncountable germs.  Discard instantly!  And I do.

     But the other things?  I have some wooden spoons (not thrown away) which look as though they were carved from a beam in the ark; tea towels that have only the faintest suggestion of pattern, others delicately threadbare.  Why?  They are so cheap to replace, and I am not known for my thriftiness – indeed, in certain respects I am an eager celebrant at the altar of planned obsolescence.  But you can almost read the history of our family in the tea towels that we use, whereas my purchases of watches or computers brings tears to the eyes of my bank manager, and untold you to manufacturers.

     I have known people (well, one person) who would refuse to go into a café for a cup of tea because of the mark-up on the cost of a cuppa compared with what he knew it cost at home.  He would actually wait outside the café while the rest of us imbibed in feckless luxury and then re-join us when we had finished our squander.  But for other things, he paid the price asked without question, even when the profit margin was just as substantial.  Ah well, one shouldn’t always look to logic to explain how humans work.

 

 

 

The radio in the kitchen is a Roberts and is Internet linked, so, in theory I should be able to get Radio 4 (without which civilized life is not even remotely possible) but the reception is unruly.  Toni has suggested a solution which involves turning the electrical wiring system into some 

 

sort of conduit for the Wi-Fi link to the internet.  All this involves is the purchase of a link from the router to the socket and then another link from the socket to the radio: one of those “plug and play” solutions.

       

     “Ho!  Ho!  Ho!” he laughed hollowly.  It didn’t work.

     The reason it didn’t work is that the link to the router has to be direct to the socket in the wall.  That, in this house is a problem.  Built in the days when a couple of sockets was more than enough for any home, the availability of power is an ongoing quest.  And an extensive use of extension leads.

     The router is in the living room and the radio is in the kitchen.  The area behind the television and almost hidden from view is a writhing mass of cabling for the basic electrical necessities of modern life.  There is no socket available for the frivolity of getting Radio 4 when so much else needs power.

     No problem.  We have another router on the third floor.  The house is built of concrete and is terrifyingly solid, wi-fi needs boosts to get all the computing machines to work, so all I had to do was find the socket on the third floor and we could try that.

     The third floor is my workroom.  It is also a comically unreal picture of cluttered chaos.  Bookshelves line the walls and extension plugs proliferate.

     Finding The Source of The Nile was one of the great stories of exploration and daring, but it pales into vapid insignificance when compared with the Search for the Socket on the Third Floor.

     There is no space.  For anything.  On the Third Floor.  If anything is moved, then something else must be moved to make a space for the thing that has been moved to a new location.  At the moment, when many, many things have been moved, the space looks like a vindictive labyrinth, and my progress from desk to stairs is in a slow undulating slink as I manoeuvre around insecure piles of stuff and am rewarded by sharp book corners biting into ankles and shins.

     Like some demented game, I followed power leads, trying to find their source – only to be frustrated by finding one trailing socket only led to another trailing socket, not to the true source of power.  Crouching, crawling, moving books to move bookcases, shining a torch behind pieces of furniture (and ofttimes being bewitched into reading volumes that I had not seen for some time, but then needed by immediate attention) I felt the full weight of despair.  Indeed, I began to doubt that that there was ‘a’ source of power – it (The Power) was numinous, it was ubiquitous, it was ‘there’ and not to be questioned or assumed to have a simple source: it simply Was.

     Well, that is fine and dandy thinking for Scholastic monks, but I needed the physicality of a plug.  Which I eventually found directly behind me.  A four-socket thing, with leads going off in all directions but, amazingly with one socket free.  End of story.

     No.  The lead supplied with the magic plug is too short to reach the router and the router cannot be moved.  So, in spite of all my misgivings about the pernicious influence of Amazon in the world today, necessity bent my principles (again) and a longer lead has been ordered and will be delivered to the door tomorrow.  When we will discover the next problem to cope with.  Plug and play indeed!

 

 

 

Tomorrow the Liceu is putting on a performance of an early Mozart Opera.  The original date of the performance has been changed twice.  The time of the performance has been brought forward by two hours, and the audience has been limited to 500 people.  Masked, we sit in a circle of empty seats – and are grateful that at least something is being done in the season.

     Because of the re-arrangement the cost of the ticket has been halved, and as I sit in an aisle seat in the front stalls, that is a considerable amount of cash!

     This is a concert version of the opera, which is never a truly satisfying way to see an opera, but it was always going to be a concert version so I have nothing to complain about there.  The countertenor in the piece has a wonderful voice and I only hope that it is enough to keep me interested in a less than convincing narrative – though there are powerful human passions behind those ordered notes!

     It will also give me an opportunity to see at least some of the Christmas Lights in Barcelona, and perhaps I will feel a little more of the spirit of the ‘festive’ time – though the only present that anyone really wants is a double dose of efficient vaccine!

 

The excavations on the Third Floor have revealed more items that will be added to my growing Catalogue Raisonné, including one thing that I had thought was long lost!  It is good to see that there is some gain from the pain of sorting out!

 

 

 

 

 

LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 27 – Holy Saturday in Holy Week, 11th APRIL

We are waiting to hear what the traffic flow is like.  Spain and the UK have both emphasised that no one (except of course for Conservative Ministers) should travel during the Easter weekend.  We should all stay at home.  So far a large number of fines have been imposed on those who attempted to make the journey to second homes or to the beach.  The story of a group of people form the UK attempting to go on holiday to France via private jet both shocks and also doesn’t surprise: the rich assuming that rules are only for the poor.  Again.

     As I keep saying, I do realise that I am in a fortunate position being in a spacious home with access to a communal pool for my solitary walk – though today there was an entire family of parents and little girl in the tennis court next to our pool: on parent walking while the other played with the kid.  We even said, ¡Hola! to each other.  At a safe distance.  Such is community: you best show community spirit by shunning it!

The number of deaths reported in the UK continues to horrify and I have little faith in the ability of the government to organize themselves with sufficient efficacy to limit the growth in the numbers.  The distribution of masks and other PPE seems limited and the testing is little short of scandalous.

     In Catalonia we are entitled to a free mask, allegedly waiting for us in our local pharmacy, with the option to buy another mask.  Toni will have to find out if this is true by calling in to the pharmacy when he gets fresh bread.  It will at least be a small step in the right direction in coming to terms with the reality of the virus.

     Some firms in Spain are asking their workers to come back to work after the Easter Bank Holiday.  This is essential for the recovery of the economy, but I do not see how this can be done with any real degree of safety without adequate testing in place.  Some workplaces are simply not conducive to social separation and, with the best will in the world, people forget to be paranoid all the time and allow recently learned essential behaviour to slip.  Wearing a facemask is unpleasant and wearing it with glasses is clumsy and therefore all too likely to be pushed down or up rather than used constantly.

     You can sense, even in isolation, that people have a natural wish to ‘return to normality’ but if that totally understandable wish is allowed too soon, the end results will be deadly.  And, why should we expect or even want previous ‘normality’? 

     This virus and its progress and particularly the way that it has been dealt with by the politicians would seem to me to indicate in a blazingly obvious way that things must not be the same after this crisis.  The measures, financial, social and political that have been brought into play to cope with the crisis illustrate as clearly as possible the inadequacy of the previous financial, social and political measures.  Why should we return to proven, failed ways of life?

     You think of measures like guaranteeing a working wage; of housing the homeless; of supporting the NHS; of protecting people with disabilities – all the things that our austerity government previously said were unaffordable: now funded.  Failing railways renationalized; small businesses supported – no Socialist idea rejected!  If it can be done now, it could have been done then.  If it can be done now, it can go on being done.  If we pay money to keep airlines alive, then we own them.  We have already had the obscenity of Tesco receiving a governmental emergency handout and then paying a dividend to their shareowners.  How long do we go on encouraging with our money (and though I live in Catalonia I pay British taxes too) those who boost the inequalities in our society, giving ever more money to those who already have?  It seems to me that the message of one of the badges that I used to wear god knows how many years ago of “Eat the rich!” is more relevant now than it was then!  And what a condemnation of our political ‘progress’ that is.

     We cannot allow the billionaires and the big companies to pretend that they have nothing to do with the situation in which we find ourselves, not obviously in the making of the virus (though in my more paranoid conspiracy theory moments, I have my doubts!) but in the way that the government was equipped to deal with it.  Private Enterprise does not, essentially, care for us.  It is driven by profit and not by concern.  In times of crisis, it fails and allows government to ride to the rescue, and then, when things are better, it goes back to doing what it does best: exploit!

There is cloud cover, but intermittent sunshine – I’m not sure what this encourages on a population that really wants to get out and about.  Perhaps if it was blazing sunshine it would be more of a temptation, this neither one thing nor the other encourages people to go back indoors and watch something else on Netflix.  Probably.

Well, back to my daily poem.  I have an idea, its now just the working it up to be something that I can call a draft.  Check out what I have already written this Holy Week on smrnewpoems.blogspot.com

    

LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 21 – Palm Sunday 5th APRIL

Where do you start with ‘irony’ in the sort of build up to Easter that we are having this virus-infected year?

     Our next door neighbours are showing their piety on Palm Sunday by defying restrictions and working flat out in constructing and installing the new kitchen in the house that is either going to be their new home or is going to fetch them a pretty penny when it is sold.  Or perhaps both.  What there isn’t, is respect for the day religiously, politically or healthily!

     The churches have been closed.  The KKK-like religious processions have been cancelled in Spain.  The pope spoke in a wet and empty St Peter’s Square.  In all the coverage of the pandemic, I have heard little from religious leaders, and little to nothing of God.  Even Trump’s fanatic fundamentalist base has not vaunted god above science.  Just as Capitalism turns to Socialism in times of crisis, for government to do what Capitalism cannot or rather, will not do, so Religion turns to Science to cure what it cannot.

     To be fair, most of mainstream religion sees no conflict between religious belief and trust in science.  Nowadays.  Those battles, since the time of Galileo, have been fought and lost; and what Churches now rely on faith rather than Insurance Policies to keep their institutions ‘safe’?

     It is, of course, easy to spin the Holy Week Story to fit the narrative of the virus; metaphor is a willing façade.  Today, in the Christian calendar is a day of triumph when Christ rode into Jerusalem in glory – though riding on an ass: tempered triumph - and that triumph soon to be translated into abject defeat which in turn transmogrifies into the ultimate triumph of the empty tomb.

     Pandemics do concentrate the mind.  A highly technological society brought low - so much for civilization and medical expertise!  All our bright and glittering technology unable to stop the virus from killing tens of thousands and infecting, god knows how many.  Our society has been literally brought to a standstill: achievement brought low, but resurrection is a vital concept and all of us sequestered in our homes and looking forward to, no, expecting a triumph of medical science to deliver the vaccine that will release us all and allow a continuation of the old way of life, our own social resurrection.

     The Holy Week story is one in which you can find triumph, deception, hypocrisy, populism, testing, faith, hope, death, defeat, disloyalty, fear, despair, community, faction, belief, confidence, loss and fulfillment – and those words only scratch at the surface of the complexity of the narrative so it is hardly surprising that it fits the present situation.

     At the end of this pandemic, will churches be filled with people giving thanks for deliverance, or shunned by people who didn’t give god a thought during the crisis?  I will wait to see.

Castelldefels has just been on the afternoon television news informing us that the Red Cross has been going to closed schools’ kitchens and ‘liberating’ the food which can be used to feed those in need rather than staying in the fridges and eventually becoming unusable.  This seems like a self-evidently good idea and I wonder in how many other places this is being put into operation.  There must also be restaurants and the like that are never going to be able to use their food supplies in time?  Something to think about, especially as governments like the one in the UK is already distributing food parcels to those who need them, surely there must be systems already in place to take advantage of any extra supplies?

Today is the start of my annual Holy Week Poem Writing Stint.  And yes, I do know that Palm Sunday is not the official start of Holy Week, but I make the rules here.

     I am well aware that this choice of poetry-writing period is an odd one for an avowed atheist to take as a key time for production, but it has become something of a tradition and I look forward to it each year – just to see what I produce!  As I have said elsewhere, "I read myself in writing"!

     I aim to get the idea for a poem each day, and then to write it up to the level of a rough draft.  Each day, until Easter Sunday, I will try and get the draft downloaded to my poetry blog at smrnewpoems.blogspot.com.  I must emphasise that my ‘daily’ work will only be a draft and I reserve the right to work on the poem after Holy Week to get it to a more polished state.

     I welcome your company on this annual journey.  The best way to follow my poems is probably ‘the morning after’ when there should be something to see from the previous day!

I want what I want!

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Was it in a film or in an American TV series that a frustrated father was berating his teenage daughter not only for the length of her telephone calls to her boyfriend but also because of the fact that they appeared not to speak to each other for long periods of time on the phone as well.  On being asked what she was doing she replied, “We were listening to each other’s breathing!”

Ah!  Times of innocence and being connected to the network via a visible cable, which was never long enough to go very far from the connexion point!

When we first had a telephone it was a black Bakelite affair with a proper handset and a dial.  It also had a little pull out tray at the bottom for Important Numbers.  The lead always got impossibly convoluted and twisted, but it was great fun (well, I was very young) to let it dangle and untwist itself in a sort of mad twirl.  We also had a party line: this meant that sometimes you picked up the phone and somebody else was already speaking because the line was shared, then you had to put the phone down (you never listened, because you simply didn’t) and waited a while to try again.  In those dark days you were lucky to get a line (even shared) from the GPO and you had no choice of the design or colour of the phone.  So there.

Just as we were privileged to have a phone, so also we were one of the few families in Dogfield Street in Cathays in Cardiff in the 1950s to have a car: KDU 966 - a second hand Ford Prefect complete with running boards and ill fitting windows.  I might also add before you get carried away by this tale of luxury, that we also had an outside loo and the bath was in the kitchen.  But as an only child I had a room of my own - though I’ve never really written like Virgina Woolf, in spite of this early advantage.  I might add, in case you are wondering, that the bath was normally covered by a hinged surface attached to the kitchen wall, with two little curved stumps to fit to the edge of the curled bath side and a tasteful curtain to hide the fact that there was a bath there at all.  This is where I would eat my breakfast and all meals that were not family meals.

The telephone was sited in the hallway and served not only my parents, but also my paternal grandparents who lived upstairs.  It was special and was not used on a daily basis.  It was there.  A thing.  Not something to be owned or regarded as an essential part of domestic life.

How times have changed!

I was encouraged to think about such things because, during my post swim cup of tea in my local leisure centre, I was sitting next to a table at which a young girl was obviously doing some school homework on a dreary looking A4 photocopied sheet.  Nothing remarkable about that, but she was doing the work with her mobile phone propped up against her sports bag and with one of her friends chatting away on a video call.  What made it remarkable was that the girl behaved as through her friend was literally opposite her, with whole minutes of work being done with no talk between the two of them apart from the odd casual remark.  It was extraordinary in being so ordinary.  I am not sure that I would be able to carry on the odd conversation with a mini-Lilliputian on a screen with the artless, everyday confidence (yes, I am, I am positive that I would not be able to) that the girl did.

My mind then spiralled away on tangents about concepts of ‘being alone’ and how difficult that is today; what the word ‘present’ actually means; what is ‘real’ contact?  And so on.

But where my mind ended up was with a failure of technology.

Years ago I failed to resist yet another blandishment of Kickstarter and put my name down for a new type of watch called Pebble.  It was a smart watch and linked to your mobile phone was able to give you all sorts of notifications from your emails and other bits and pieces of social media.  Importantly for me it was waterproof AND had an ‘always on’ screen.  OK, it was in black and white, but it worked AND the battery life was exceptional.

When an improved ‘Steel’ version was available, I bought (confusingly) a gold steel watch which also was able to display things in a washed out colour.  It worked.

When the third iteration of this successful watch was posted on Kickstarter, with a larger screen, I enthusiastically supported its production.

And it didn’t happen.

Pebble or at least the people who made Pebble a reality were bought up by another smartwatch company and gradually the backup for the whole Pebble brand began to fray.

Pebble was a successful watch.  I have struggled to find its equal (at the price) especially with the ‘always-on’ and swimming proof aspects and feel frustrated - because it has not stopped my buying watches in the vain hope that I will find something to match it!

My latest watch has actual hands, not virtual, which are operated through a tiny hole cut into the smart watch screen, so that there is an ‘always on’ element, but the smartwatch bits do not work as well as the Pebble did.

I have other watches in the pipeline, including one smart watch that doesn’t need batteries because it is recharged by heat from the body of the wearer!  That is in the future.  In the present, I have returned to my original Pebble.  Well, the second one.

And what a delight it is.  I can read its display without my glasses; it’s always on; it counts my swim lengths; it is back lit when I need it to be; it fits; some of the aps are still working; it’s light and easy on the wrist - and it’s not made any more?

This is where Capitalism let’s you down: something that does too much for too little money.  Pebble is almost the opposite of Apple and therefore it has been taken out.  Pebble still thrives in Geekdom, people are still writing programs and aps for the device and there is a ‘community’ of users - but I wanted more and would have supported future developments of the brand.  But to get the same I will now have to pay far, far more.  Yes, you can get smart watches for twenty quid and they have full colour screens and what not, but some aspect is always missing - usually the waterproof element or the always on. 

Technology giveth and Commercialism taketh away!

But my Pebble is on my wrist.  I count that as hi-tec recycling!

Commercial & Cultural

You are never safe in a capitalist society!

Just when you think that you have got the safely-living-in-a-consumer-society thing sorted, Pebble asks for money. 

To those benighted Luddites that have no response to the word Pebble with a capital letter, other than thinking of important stones on the sea shore, I must inform you that the company of Pebble was originally a Kick-starter company which an early developer the workable concept of a reasonably priced smart watch.  I bought one.  No surprise there I suppose, but I did resist until the watch worked with Mac products and it was waterproof enough to go swimming in.  Oh, yes and it was made in metal because I didn’t like the early plastic versions that they had.

            The watch was worth the money I paid.  Not because it is the best watch that I have ever owned or the most elegant – or indeed is it the watch that I am wearing at the moment.  And that final comment is one of the major drawbacks of the whole enterprise.

The battery life of the Pebble Metal (which I think is the name of the model that I have) is about five days.  The watch I am wearing at the moment is powered by the sun and by the actual action of wearing it.  The watch I am wearing gives time, date, etc. it has digital and analogue and checks itself every day with some sort of atomic clock which sends out a radio wave.  In other words, it’s magic.

But.  And it’s a big ‘but’ – my smart watch has a large and informative watch face and it also informs me when I am called on my phone.  I virtually never turn the sound of my phone on so, as far as Toni is concerned, for this aspect alone, the watch is worth what I paid for it.  In my particular set of circumstances, given the way I use my phone, a smart watch works.

And there the expense could have rested.  I have my watch.  Other non-Pebble companies have produced their versions and I have carefully checked them out and they usually fail on battery life or compatibility with Mac or, more usually than not, on being waterproof.  It seemed that I was safe.

And then Pebble started a new Kick-starter appeal with a new watch that does something or other and is waterproof.  And, out of a misplaced concept of commercial loyalty I have joined the countless thousands of people who have probably been Mac-trained and therefore have developed an instinctive gadget loyalty hardwired into their wallets – and bought a new watch.  Which hasn’t been made yet and for which I will have to wait months.

But it might be engraved on the back saying that I helped ‘Kick-start’ – so that’s all right then, isn’t it?  Oh and its plastic – and that means that I will have to buy the metal version when it is produced.  And.  And I don’t care.

Poems against arboreal outrage!

Priceless artefacts are being smashed by religious fanatics; corruption stalks the land; the situation in Ukraine worsens; nuclear proliferation threatens world peace and the Israeli Prime Minister is sinisterly terrifying – yet I get worked up about cut trees.

            The car park continues to be closed as the final remains of the twenty trees await their final destination.  Workmen are walking around, sometimes with bits of paper and looking at where the trees used to be with intense concentration.

            A lone workman is doing something with a pneumatic hammer and is possibly tracing out the course of a future drain.  Things have changed.

            And I sit inside the café (all the chairs outside have been taken away for some reason) forcing the hopelessly addicted smokers to stand around looking even more shifty than usual, while I sip and note, sip and note.

            I now have pages (admittedly small pages) of comments and notes about what I see, delightedly, as an outrage against the trees.

There is something determinedly small-minded about cutting down a single tree - cutting down twenty smacks of inhumanity.  Except of course, it’s not.  There are many more important crimes in the world, but this ‘crime’ is here and now and is a substantial part of my world.

Like one of the cultural and moral vultures that I denigrate, I am now using my feelings about the ‘slaughtered’ trees to provoke a poem.  I have written one (see yesterday’s post) and I fully intend to write at least one more.  In a reworking of a famous French phrase: ‘What I have I use!’  It can always be edited into oblivion, or at least a sort of oblivion, at a later date.

I am aware that anything that I post has a sort of illusory permanence.  Though my blog is a ‘hosted’ one which means that Google can stop or destroy it at any time they choose for any reason they choose.  Which is a sobering thought.  But I am not sure that I am prepared to pay a monthly fee to own my site. 

I need to take advice on this.  Not sure from whom though.  In the same way that I expect someone to come to the house, knock on the door and hand me a winning Lottery tickets that have been bought on my behalf, I also hope that advice about what to do in Blog terms will simply happen.  I should take note that, in spite of my patience in waiting, no one has actually offered me a ticket and therefore I need to be a little pro-active.  Writing about being pro-active is stage one.

You call that art?

Conceptual art does not usually bring out the best in people.  Especially when you try and defend it.

            The Open University course is creeping closer to the end of the twentieth century and trying to chart a way through all the excesses of Post Modernism – a difficult task when there is not really a settled definition of what the term means!

            Still, flicking through the final volume in our course material I can see that there is a fairly extensive concentration of Louise Bourgeois, an artist I like and admire.  I think that we will be concentrating on her more challenging pieces so that they can link with concepts of race, gender, identity and everything else that the OU finds important.

            As far as I can see, there is a lot of work in a limited amount of time.  I have therefore decided to be a little more anal in the way that I approach this assignment and study to the essay.  I think it is the only way.  Then my ‘release’ will be the work that I do on the mini-thesis that ends the course.

Getting my money’s worth

Walking in to the new British Library as a full ‘reader’ is something that I am looking forward to.

            According to a telephone call with the British Library, now in Kings Cross and not the Reading Room of the British Library, I will be able to renew my much lapsed Reader’s Card and pre-order books to be looked at when I am staying, coincidentally in Kings Cross, when I go to London for the Study Day. 

            In the British Library I always find that I am drawn to the fact that they have a copy of everything ever printed in Britain and a great deal more besides.  I therefore I have to resist the temptation to order things that have nothing to do with what I am supposed to be studying!

            My worst literary digression in the old Reading Room was ordering, on the most spurious of grounds, a first edition of ‘Noddy Goes to Toytown’.  I have rarely read a more sexist and racist book and I couldn’t remember it being quite so bad when I first read it.  Mind you there was a considerable number of years between my readings - and on my first reading I was the proud and passionate owner of a grandmother-made golliwog! 

Is one allowed to use such vocabulary these days, even in a memory!

Stay wet!

If the important research that I have done is correct then I should be within walking distance of a swimming pool when I am staying in the hotel in London.  I wonder if you have to wear flip-flops and a swimming hat in London pools?

            Perhaps I am thinking in the same way as British visitors to Spain think when they worry about forgetting the toothpaste, as if such things are not available here!

            It is second nature for me to think to myself that I could always buy what I do not have. 

When in doubt shop!