Do we get what we pay for? Do we?

 

 

 

Mondays and Fridays are the going-out-for-lunch days for us.  A sacred ritual.  And usually, an enjoyable one.

     Castelldefels is a seaside tourist resort that partially sells itself on being a centre of gastronomy.  We even have a school of gastronomy, though the alumni of that institution do not often seem to find work in Castelldefels given the people that we see cooking and waiting in the restaurants that we patronise - but that is another whole kettle of social, political and economic fish, so to speak, and I have no intention of getting into the minutiae of how the commercial logic of providing food works out in this place!  We have often tried to understand the logic behind the way that many of the restaurants operate in Castelldefels and have given up at the obvious levels of more-than-Byzantine complexity that seem to govern how and when they open and what and how much they charge for what they provide.

     We have our favourites, but we also have a strict system of punishments ready to be applied to restaurants that we feel fall short of what we, as paying customers, have a right to expect.

     We are not unreasonable, and we know that everywhere has the occasional off-day and we are prepared to accommodate a sub-par meal and put it down to experience, but two or three strikes – and out!

     The holiday season is particularly difficult as personnel take their annual leave and sometimes that has a drastic effect on the quality of the food being dished up, as well as the level of service.  We make allowances, but there is a limit and that limit has been reached by a few of the restaurants to which we used to go regularly and now are punishing, by striking them off our list of Acceptable Establishments.

     A recent case in point: one restaurant that was a regular haunt of ours, we went to fairly late in the lunch service, as I had picked up Toni from his work experience in Terrassa and driven back to Castelldefels.  Yes, we were late, and the lunch service was almost (almost) over, but that did not excuse the quality of the meal that we were given.  I can (famously) eat anything and suffer few consequences from indulgence; Toni’s tum is a different creature altogether and, where I felt a little uncomfortable after the meal, having said that the food tasted “a little odd”, Toni was positively ill, and not just for one day.

     We have never, and will never, go back.

     When I first arrived in this country I thought that the menu del dia was one of the greatest inventions on earth.  The price was exceptional, and the range of food that was offered, constantly delighted me.

     Times have changed.  My tastes are much more educated in what certain dishes could taste like, so what I would have thought wonderful some years ago is now met with disappointment.  Don’t get me wrong, I still think that the menu del dia is a good deal (though the price has crept and jumped up over the years) and, at the price, with wine, it is almost impossible to match anywhere in my native land.  But . . .

     The original idea of the menu del dia was something devised to meet the burgeoning tourist trade in the Costa Brava in the late 50’s and early 60’s.  For a reasonable price tourists could get a lunch which comprised, a local soup, a meat or fish course, and a piece of seasonal fruit.  A three-course meal for not a lot of money, perfect for the cheap holidays that were being sold on the British market – hence my uncle, aunt, mother, father and I, having a fortnight’s holiday in Tossa de Mar on the Costa Brava in 1958.  The concept was popular, not only with tourists, but also with the local population and the meals developed into an institution enjoyed by all.

     The ‘problem’ with the menu del dia is what is provided, and who the caterers think is going to eat it.  There are ‘simple’ local dishes that have been served for generations that are inexpensive and, if done properly, with fresh ingredients, delicious.  Too often such simplicity is lost in an attempt to produce showy food at a low price, that may look good in the inexplicable photos that people take of food but does not taste good in the mouth – which is surely the important bit.

     Cheap cuts of meat can be delicious.  Sheep’s jaw and cheek, doesn’t sound appetising (especially when served with visible teeth still in the jaw) but it is a revelation of sweet, tender meat when you eat it.  Nowadays the recognizable parts of the jaw are removed and all you get is an everyday-looking bone with meat that falls from it.  Cheap, excellent and usually my choice for a main meal if offered.

     In a time of rising prices and stagnant wages, I can understand the need to be economic in the food choices that a restaurant offers for its menu del dia, but there are many Catalan choices that are not offered because the chefs are not local, or they can’t be bothered to adopt the 0Km philosophy and stick with locally produced meat and veg.

     We are usually satisfied with what we are offered, but I would much rather be impressed by a clever use of local produce and decent cooking!

    

 

"Corby" - a name and a trigger.

 One hundred and twenty-seven pounds sterling.  One hundred and twenty-seven pounds to renew my aged passport.  Not counting the expense of the car park and the cost of the postage to send my old passport to Corby.

Corby.  A name from the past.  The outré sister town of the so much more prim Kettering.  I remember during my first year of full time teaching in the Boys School in Kettering that I much preferred going to Corby than going in to town in Kettering - though, of course, Kettering was the place with the Waitrose and not, emphatically not, Corby.  

There was a more immediate vitality about Corby, and then there was always the shock of hearing the Scottish accent as the predominant one in that town in the centre of England.  I was told that a steel works had shut in Scotland and the work force flocked to Corby to take jobs in the steelworks there and the accent had persisted.  I was also told, to take taxis and ignore the busses there as "Corby was rough".  

I never found it so myself and often scoffed at people in Kettering who wondered at my bravery in chancing my arm in such a place.  So, as my old passport was stamped and slotted into the system in Castelldefels to get it to Corby and get a new one sent to me, I supposed that the Passport Office situated there was a government initiative to try and find some work for the folk who having moved from Scotland to find work in an open steelworks after their own had closed, had to think about upping sticks again after the Corby works closed.

It brings back a whole slice of my early working life, whose memories are now more of a melange of impressions rather than distinct narratives of day to day existence.

I can no longer find my way about the haunts that marked my home in Saint Botolph's House in Barton Seagrave and my way to school and into town.  Not unreasonable you could say as my memories are half a century old and based on my being there for little over a year before I moved back to Cardiff and promotion, in a city that would see me to the end of my teaching career.

The passport is being renewed because I am going back to Cardiff for a pre-birthday Birthday Party, and in digging out my passport (not used for years) discovering that it expires in August of 2025.

My passport is a burgundy one, with the European Union stamped across the top of it, a passport that gave access to a bewildering number of countries until the narrow-minded cretins of Brexit ensured that our insular geographical situation was mirrored in our political and social states.  

My new passport (one hundred and twenty-seven pounds worth of it) will be a British Beggared one, and my saving grace is that I moved to Spain before the idiocy of Brexit limited possibilities and therefore I have permanent residence and a card to show for it.  It means that when I come back into the country I show my residence card first so that my passport is not stamped, and therefore does not start the countdown of the time that I am allowed to spend in Spain.

The longer I spend time away from the country of my birth, the less Britain remains a living reality in my mind, and the more it appears as a sort of stage setting for past memories.

I don't really know the price of anything.  I understand that the price of 20 fags is now astronomical, though it is still not enough to repay the lost revenue from early death that the cancer of smoking steals.  I don't know how much a pint is, or how much a loaf of bread is.  I am used to Catalan prices and I am prepared to be shocked by how much the staples now cost.

But this visit is about Time, and my seventy-fifth birthday, and more importantly about seeing friends, ex-colleagues and family whose lives have gone on without my day to day involvement!

There are some people where no matter how long the time has been since last seen, to meet up is to be back where the relationship has always been.  This is something that is especially relevant considering the death of my old friend of more than sixty years, Richard.

In writing about him for his funeral service I went back to the essential triviality of shared experience, the nothing occasions that mean everything - the slight and the transient that stay with you for ever.

The death of friends of such long standing, are not tragic, they are unthinkable, in so far as it is so difficult to imagine a constant presence (in spite of geographical distance) not being there.  It takes time to realise the loss, with memory fighting to fill the gaps to kid you that nothing has really changed.

One part of my mind does, obviously, register the loss, and that will give an added urgency to the meet-up in early October (the passport office and the good folk of Corby allowing) in seeing people who have not remained the same age as I last remember seeing them, but, like me have lived the years through.

I remember talking with my Uncle Eric (a teacher who was retired and drawing a pension for longer than he had been in teaching!) once telling me that he had watched his entire generation, one by one, die off until, as he said, "I think that there is only one boy I was with in Junior School left, and I'm not sure that he is still with us."  

This was a man who was evacuated after Dunkirk, in a much less well-known chaotic rescue mission from Cherbourg, and whose stories about the farcical, quasi-Surrealistic experience of fighting in an all-out war had to be heard to be believed.

Unlike my father and my grandfather, I have not had to fight in any war.  Indeed I was a decade too late to have the horror of Conscription forced on me, and I was able to toddle my way from school to university lubricated by free milk and free tuition.

Although I seem to have digressed, it isn't really a diversion from the main theme of memory and responsibility: the memory of what was and the responsibility to articulate a response to who you are now.

And if that sounds a little pretentious and high-fauluting, then I should also say that the return to Cardiff is also the opportunity to have a decent Indian Meal and to drink a real pint of authentic Bitter, preferably a pint of Brains SA!

Obey your technology!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My new watch even beeped at me to let me know that it thought that there would be rain later in the morning!   

     When you are stumbling around in the pre-dawn getting read to cycle for the morning swim, a beeping watch is the last thing that you need, as you mostly rely on automatic to get you through the quotidian rituals of getting the day going.

     I did however, glance at the watch and a terse message said, “Expect rain at 8 am” – even poetic in its way.  However, I decided to ignore such a warning and trust to the legendary positive weather conditions of Castelldefels.  Sometimes, even when the forecast for the town says rain, it seems to make an exception for the strip of the town along the beach and we often stay dry.

     Not this time.   

     It rained at 8. 

And as I ploughed my way up and down my gloriously empty lane in the local pool, I heard the tell-tale sound of globular moisture hitting the retractable roof and, with my surgically altered eyes, I could make out the running smears of water trickling down the glazing at the sides of the pool.

     Never mind, I told myself, after I’ve finished my swim there is always the extra time for my tea and sarnie in the cafe, which together with note writing  should ensure that by the time that I am ready to leave the weather will have cleared up.

     Not this time.   

     In a rather touching gesture of moderate futility, I drained the water from the cleft of the saddle and dabbed, mostly ineffectually, at the rest of the seat in the hope that first rump-contact would not be totally wet, but just unpleasantly damp.

     And so I made my way home through spiteful rain that, in spite of the fact that I modified my route back via tree canopied roads, seemed to find the spaces between the leaves to fall, not so gently, on me.   

     My coat is now hanging on the sheltered line downstairs to drip dry and my shorts have (bugger the expense!) been put into the tumble dryer in gloriously damp isolation.

     It is said that the amount of super-computing power that it devoted to forecasting the weather dwarfs all other uses.  But I still react to forecasts as if they were based on the “feeling of a bit of seaweed” approach of the “experts” of my youth, rather than the almost infinitely sophisticated approach of the present technological day. 

     I should believe the forecasts because they are really, generally, correct.  I think that what you might call 'forecasting faith' could be related to an age divide, where people of my baby-boomer generation are still sceptical, whereas those who have been brought up looking at ever smaller screens for their information now expect the info that they are given by the Almighty operating systems of their phones to be correct.

     As a matter of interest, I just asked Google what it based its weather forecasts on and the answer was that it, "takes radar data created by doppler radar stations" and by organizing this data into images and creating a time specific sequence is able to suggest what the weather will be.  So there!

     Just staying with temperature, I got to thinking about how much 'faith' I do have in flashing lights and digital information connected to various things that I possess actually telling me the truth.

     I have never independently verified the set temperature in the fridge for example.  I have taken as gospel the temperatures that the machine tells me that my dishes are washed at in the dishwasher; the time that the microwave cooks for; the length of the various washes in the washing machine.  Virtuallly the only time that I check my watch is when the BBC News starts, and even that is compromised by the fact that I listen to the BBC on the Internet and I have discovered that there are seconds lagging, between broadcast and my radio making absolute accuracy impossible.

     I remember, from my teaching days, one supremely irritating child in a 'bottom group' when such things existed (no, hardly a child he was 15 going on 7) who replied to everything I said for almost the whole of a lesson with the single word, "Why?"  

     I decided, in the way that you sometimes do, that, instead of losing my temper or ignoring the kid, I would attempt to answer him.  And I did.  The interchange (if you could call it that because the boy didn't think about any of his responses, which were always "Why?" or consider any of my increasingly philosophical responses) were obviously one-sided, but the rest of the small class appreciated the 'game' and eventually, they called time, to which the kid gave one final "Why?" and laughed.

     I recall this because it was an example of questioning, mindless questioning perhaps, but it did force me to think while I attempted to answer the continuous drill of "whys?" that was leading to a point of absurdity that I never quite gave into.

     If that experience was essentially arrid, perhaps it should make us think about the way that we too easily accept authority from electronic, inanimate machines functioning on a series of zeros and ones.

     My watch measures and charts my movement and lack of it, my activity, my sleep, my heartbeat and lord alone knows what else.  When I go for a bike ride, I can with a few taps bring up a map and trace the route that I have taken, the time it took me to complete it and even the elevation above sea level and the inclines and declines that I navigated.

     My watch and the app that is linked to it have more information about me and the way that my body works and where that body has been, than anyone else in the world - apart of course from the people who can link into the watch or the app and download whatever.

     What prompted these thoughts was that my watch was right about the rain and I was wrong.  

     Perhaps, in the future should I be more willing to listen to the information that, although presented on one, small, round watchscreen, is actually the visible and tangible sign of an unthinkably powerful information superhighway to which I am linked?

     I am no conspiracy theorist, but asking "Why?" might be the really human thing to do.

Schrodinger's Fiesta!

 

 

 

 

 

An odd day today. An in-between sort of day.

     Although it is a fiesta in Barcelona, it’s not here in Castelldefels, though there is always a knock-on effect as we get an influx of day-trippers from the city to swell the areas around the beaches.

     There were fewer in the pool this morning when it opened, but more of the ‘day-release’ people turned up, just as I was completing my lengths and exercise.  The bike ride along the paseo of the beaches of Gavà were fuller than a normal Monday, so I was able to exhibit a bonus grumpiness as the usual suspects invaded the bike lane, in spite of their being a bike (mine) in it, with the headlight on!

     I have taken to using the Gavà paseo because the Castelldefels paseo is now banned to bikes and electric scooters.  There are signs informing people of this ban at the entrances to the beaches and there are signs repeating the information attached to lampposts along the paseo, and they are generally ignored.

     There are good, health & safety, logical reasons for banning bikes on the Castelldefels paseo.  There is no dedicated bike lane and cyclists invariably ignore the very low speed limit that is set (or used to be set) to use the place.  Some cyclists seem to take a perverse delight in refusing to slow down as they make their way along the paseo and avoid people by a circus-act-like display of weaving and jigging.  This is obviously dangerous.

     At a certain point the beach paseo narrows, and the danger to cyclists and pedestrians becomes even more pronounced.

     As we move further into autumn and winter the number of people using the paseo, especially at the time that I used to use it after my swim, drops.  And if there is empty space then cyclists and electric scooter riders will ignore the rules even more than the general flouting that happens at the moment.

     We have parking tickets for spaces on the sea front and other areas of the city, but the machines that dole out these tickets are closed down for the winter months and you can park wherever you like (except for high days and holidays) for free.  Some spaces in the centre of town are always paying spaces except for the afternoons, so we have a fairly complex system in place.

     My point would be, given that we are able to adapt to complex parking rules, why shouldn’t there be more flexible rules for bikes?  If we can cope with those rules, then we should surely be able to cope with time limited rules for bikes.

     On the narrower parts of the paseo, I do think that bikes should be banned totally, but on the other parts I think it is only sensible to have more reasonable rules.  As the rules stand at present, there is an obvious and blatant rejection, and there doesn’t seem to be any move to police the rules and make them stick.

     Yes, I do feel resentment as I see all the paseo bike users as I make my way along the (legal) road, but, if people don’t like the rules and they can see little real justification for them, then those rules are going to be broken.

     It makes me think of the decorative, picturesque council laid footpaths that wind around a grassy area, and the unofficial footpaths that actual feet make as they plot the most direct route.  People will do what they think is more logical, and to hell with routes that looked pretty when drawn on plans.

     I remember working, before I went to College, in the Planning Department of Cardiff City Council and seeing a map of the city centre showing ‘customer routes’ showing the reality of how people moved from point A to point B.  These maps showed streets, but they also showed routes through shops, ways of access that I had previously thought were individual ‘secret’ ways but were obvious when you needed to imagine a straight line with shops in the way!

     So, people will do what they think is reasonable.  That is until they are either shown that they are wrong in their assumptions, or that they will be punished if they do not follow the council’s stated rules.

     I am following the rules.  I await to see how the council responds to the breaking of those rules.          I’m watching!