What really makes sense nowadays?

 

 

 

 

Twelve days early morning swimming in the outdoor community pool!  Only two days to go before my local indoor pool reopens after the yearly fortnight maintenance closure.  Considering I was contemplating paying to use the Gavá pool, I’m quids in!  But it will be a relief to get back to my normal routine on Monday of next week

     In spite of the fact that I have given myself an extra hour or so in bed, to allow the sun to rise before I immerse myself in the chilly waters, I can’t say that I have benefited from the lie-in.  My body clock will not be denied, and I continue to wake up as if my swim was at 7 am, and any bedtime after my inexorable early rising time, is forced rather than easy and so, in the scheme of things, doesn’t really count.

     Apart from two startled Dutch strangers, I have swum alone since a week last Monday, and those interlopers were obviously just proving they had access to everything, as you do when you have just arrived for your holiday and feel that you must use all the facilities at once to get value for money!

     I would like to report that my lonely circling of the pool allowed my mind to drift into poetic reveries and that I, immediately on exiting the pool, rushed to my notebook, and wrote out my exquisite thoughts before they evaporated like the water on my skin.  Alas!  Not so! 

     The only time an image suggested itself was when, this morning, I (grudgingly) swum in the aftermath of a short, quasi, sun-shower, and the drips from the overarching pine trees produced little, short-lived bubbles on the surface of the pool.  Even then, when I did get out, writing in my notebook was not the first thing I did, and you might say that noting that omission is my way of encouraging myself to get on with it and at least jot down the phrases that (while swimming at least) seemed to have some poetic legs!

     I have also written nothing ‘poetic’ about the “collective hysteria” (one cousin) that has prompted actions like the laying of flowers (another cousin) to mark the death of QEII.

 

 

 

 

 

 

     The royal circus has now reached Wales, and there is a service in Llandaff Cathedral in Cardiff and then a meeting in the Senedd.  Welsh First Minister Drakeford has made it clear that protest by anti-royalists is something that must be allowed and has suggested that the South Wales Police will be appreciative of that right.  We’ll see how that goes.

     Memories of my first and only trip to Mexico came back to mind when hearing about The Queue – it surely deserves the capital letter as it has become a defining aspect of The British Character. 

     Our arrival in Mexico for holiday after a very long and excruciatingly uncomfortable sardine-flight was just the prelude to a series of what I can only describe as humiliations.  We had to queue to get inside the airport, then queue to join a queue for customs, and then further queue to get through the various obstacles that Mexican bureaucracy provided before we were finally allowed to enter the country. 

     Now, from the comfort of my own armchair in Catalonia, I can watch a similar queueing quandary as the Main Queue for the lying-in-state has been (allegedly) closed because the maximum length has been reached, but people undeterred by the eleven-hour wait, have taken it upon themselves to unofficially queue in a park to wait to join the official queue! This is tantamount to insanity.

 

 

 

 

 

     I am reminded also of a story I heard about The Festival of Britain in 1951.  Although the war ended in 1945, rationing would not end until 1954, so the futuristic architecture, plate glass and colour of The Festival of Britain was something extraordinary.  It was a very popular exhibition, a statement of determination and optimism in the somewhat dreary post-war years and intended to be a “Tonic to the Nation!”  In total over eight million people visited the main exhibition site on the South Bank of the Thames, and I have been told that people were employed to go around the site and break up queues that had formed spontaneously. 

     Giving rationing and the scarcity of so much just after the war, people were used to queueing, and once a queue formed, it developed its own integrity with the people at the head of the queue thinking that there must be something worth waiting for because there were people behind them, and the people behind them assuming the same things given the people in front!

     I would, of course, maintain that both the queue for the late Queen and also the phantom queues of The Festival of Britain are alike in having no ‘real’ end destination.  I know that there is the viewing of a coffin on a catafalque in an ancient hammer-beam roofed hall, and there is always an off-chance of seeing a prince or two or the changing of the guard to justify the wait, but essentially the whole thing is a nothing.  It is a celebration of absence, of a distant unknowable entity now gone.  It is a fantasy of historicism and of significance, it is an illusion tyring to pretend to be something real.  But it’s not, no matter how many people emote when they see the symbols and think that they are participating. They are as deluded as those people queuing for nothing on The South Bank in 1951, and ironically in 2022 they are back queueing on The South Bank again.

     Where are the people to break up this queue and say, “Move on, there’s nothing to see here!”

Different perspectives?

 

 

I remember when I was having a picture window in my house in Cardiff replaced, that I was shocked by the difference in clarity and light through the empty space as opposed to the glazed space.  

     I don’t think that I had realized that the glass in a window makes an appreciable difference to the amount of light getting through, in spite of the fact that windows do open and so you would have thought that the difference would have been plain through extensive experience.  But apparently not.  Because window glass is transparent, the assumption is that all the light gets through – and when you find out that the assumption is false, it knocks your world a bit!

     I am constantly surprised by the fact that little things can change your world – or at least your perception of it, and sometimes, quite literally your view of it.

     I should imagine that I was not alone in having problems with pines.  To be specific those that grew at the bottom of my garden and, while effectively blocking out the unlovely sight of the house that occupied the plot, it also destroyed any view that I could have had from any part of the house.  As my house was built on the side of a fairly gentle valley, I could, in theory have had a panoramic view of the distant city centre of Cardiff from at least one bedroom and the bathroom.  The neighbour’s pines closed off such a possibility.

     And they grew and grew.  As pines will.  A few desultory attempts at ‘legal’ pruning of stray branches that impinged on my property did little to lessen the density of the growth.  And I simmered in (shaded) misery for years.  And then the neighbour cut them.

     The difference was immediate and liberating as light (and sights) were available again.

     Something of the same situation occurred yesterday.

     Along part of the border fence between my house and the neighbours there grew a tree.  At least I have always taken it for a tree, with rather attractive blossom in the season – but I think that it was really an overgrown plant.  If there is such a difference.  It certainly had tree height and in spite of furious pruning along the vertical line of the fence on my side, no amount of rough tearing of branches seemed to affect the health of this vigorous weed.

     New neighbours and new visions of how the garden should look have brought the once mighty tree (or whatever it is) to a series of nicely short stumps.  As you can tell from the picture above, not one of the trunks looks capable of being called a tree trunk, and yet it was 30 ft tall at least.  And now it’s gone.

     And suddenly we have an unobstructed view of the communal pool.  Admittedly, at this time of year there are only yellowing leaves floating in it rather than bronzed bodies, and the only thing that raises ripples on the surface is the wind, but still, an unobstructed view!

     And with the lack of the mass of vegetation there is also, now, a small gap in the trees of the houses in front of us, which give a view of the sea.  Small, it may be, and you might have to be sitting in a particular position, but it is undeniably a fragment of the Med and you can make out real waves thereupon!

      The removal of the tree, which was ornamental if obstructive, is like giving us an extra breathing space, making our view so much more expansive.  All we need now is the weather to enjoy it!

 

 

The use of the Covid passports or certificates in bars, restaurants, gyms etc is a little haphazard at the moment, with the people who have to check not being entirely comfortable with the software that authenticates the digital information.  I assume that these are teething problems and that soon the system will be up and running and people will, by and large, accept it as something which is reasonable giving the growth of the Omicron variety across the world.

     As I understand it, the information about your certificate is loaded into a database of the place in which you are visiting, and you do not have to show it multiple times for each visit.  So, for example, my daily swim, does not require me to represent the information as it is stored.  Allegedly.

     I will be interested to see how diligent bar staff and waiters are as the Christmas season develops, and how much ‘waving through’ there will be.  I remain sceptical about the dedication of people who have, in effect, been co-opted by the government to become unpaid civil servants fulfilling a civic dictat!

 

 

As of today, all our Christmas Plans (or the lack of them) are still in place, and the Christmas Meal in a restaurant is still go.

     What is of interest, is what happens on Christmas Eve and Boxing Day.  Concrete plans for those two days are not, as yet, forthcoming.

     And we have bought no Christmas presents.  Yet.  Sigh!

     Roll on chaos!