An ending of sorts

  

 

What to wear to a funeral is now a question of some import.  There used to be a time when the answer was obvious: black, black, and more black; with a white shirt for the men.  But now . . .

     The last funeral I attended was in Catalonia and was an event that followed hard upon the death itself.  In Catalonia you would expect the funeral to be celebrated on the next day after the death and the cremation on the day following.  Done and dusted in a few days.  The time between the death and funeral in Britain is mystifying to my Catalan family.  Some things really are different.

     But the funeral I am preparing myself for is in Britain, and it has been a couple of weeks since the death.  This period has allowed time for all the paperwork to be done.  In a positive sense, it does allow a sort of finality to inform the proceedings: the ceremony being the final step in the bureaucracy of death.

     My Catalan partner also does not understand the concept of the post-funeral refreshments, or ‘coming back to the house’ as the last social gathering associated with the death.

     But getting back to what to wear.  I am assuming that the old necessity for black as the dominant colour is a thing of the past – but I am not comfortable with a complete reversal of expectations in an explosion of colour.  I have opted for dark blue trousers and a paler blue short-sleeved shirt, and I have a suitable tie to go with the ensemble.  My assumption, however, is not fact, and I am waiting for more specific guidelines to inform my final appearance.

     In my opinion, I couldn’t care less what people wear as long as they are comfortable and ‘tidy’.  Presence is the important factor not sartorial elegance!

 

My cousin, Katy, has been reading through the book The Absent Artist which combines my poems with drawings from two old sketchbooks by Ceri Auckland Davies.  The book was a collaboration, which turned into a memorial when Ceri died in his sleep.  It is his funeral that I will be attending.

     My cousin asked if I had any paintings by Ceri and when I responded she asked if I could send her photographs of them when I had time.  I will do so, but I told her that signed prints of Ceris work are still available, for example here: 

 

https://www.albanygallery.com/artists/ceri---prints-auckland-davies

and I urged her to look through them.  I did so myself and I remembered seeing preparatory drawings for some of them; seeing one or two in a half-finished state; hearing about new departures in subject matter and admiring some of them before they were sent to the gallery for exhibition. 

 

     In other words, in looking through the range of Ceri’s work, I was drawn into remembering the painstaking preparation, the drawings, the charcoal studies, the photographs, the sketches, the sheer hard work that went into each and every one of his artworks.  And there they all were: beautifully produced signed prints, waiting to be bought and displayed.

 

https://www.redraggallery.co.uk/print-ceri-auckland-davies

 

     It is easy to say that Ceri’s art mocks death.  My house has a collection of his work; I see his art every day.  But I’m also conscious that what I see is as much as I am going to get.  Yes, Ceri has a substantial body of work, but now he is gone, that body of work is finite. 

     So, there is a strange sort of pleasure-pain in looking at Ceri’s work.  Ceri was a painter of the here-and-now, he aptured the momentary beauty of wild nature at particular moments in the day and night.  With painstaking layers of tempera, he was able to give depth and body to the curve of a wave, moisture on rippled sand, a tree in full bloom, the movement of dappled sun on a mountainside.  And the hand that painted all those things paints no more.  But the evidence of his work is hanging in houses and galleries and is living on.  And he will continue to be my daily companion on my walls and in my mind.

 

3 days in 1

 

SUNDAY 1^st October

 

Five years ago, to the day, we were in our local medical centre.  Not for any treatment, but rather for Toni to be able to cast his vote in the referendum about Catalan independence.  On that day, we made our way through crowds of people flocking around the doors of the medical centre and spilling onto the closed road in front.  We walked past police who were there, but not doing anything positive or negative, merely being there.

     The mood inside the centre was fairly febrile with the volunteers staffing the voting stations constantly looking around to see if the police were going to do anything more proactive.  The plastic, translucent, ballot boxes were guarded like precious jewels and were able to be whisked away at a moment’s notice if it seemed like they were in danger of being impounded by agents of the Spanish government.

     News about other polling stations filtered in throughout the day, where the peacefulness of our experience was not matched by the police violence and thuggery that took place in the name of Spanish democracy!

     The scenes of police aggression against people peacefully trying to cast a vote was shocking, and as more stories began to be told about the day, the anger was palpable.  The gleefully heavy-handed ‘policing’ ordered by the conservative PP (the most corrupt political party in western Europe) government in Spain, did irreparable harm to the reputation of the government and the country.  And the extended victimization of the leaders who took part by use of a highly questionable judicial procedure and blatantly partisan judges did nothing to repair the damage.

     North of the Pyrenees the ‘legal’ ‘justification’ for the prosecution and later condemnation of the leaders of the referendum and their consequent imprisonment was treated with astonished contempt, and all other European countries rejected the shaming demands by the Spanish Government for extradition of the self-exiled leaders of the referendum movement, political and social.

     In the five years since the referendum was held, where an overwhelming majority voted in favour of independence, most people would say that the political situation has worsened, and not just as far as the question of independence for Catalonia is concerned.

     The influence of Vox, the far-right party, has grown and there are areas of Spain where the far-right is in government, working with PP to ensure a right-wing majority, or with Vox forming the largest party in its own right.

     Of course, in Catalonia, PP and Vox are treated with the disgusted contempt that they so richly deserve, with their parliamentary representation being so small that they do not even have the numbers to form their own grouping within the Catalan parliament – but nationally, it does look as though the PP with the help of fascist scum like Vox and an equally contemptible right-wing party, the C’s, could have a majority in the next general election for the national parliament and oust the so-called “Socialists” that are in power at the moment.

     Although Catalonia does have a majority of independence representatives in the Catalan Parliament, the politicos have not declared independence and have worked with the national government to get the referendum leaders out of jail and have decided to proceed via negotiation rather than via confrontation.  Which sounds reasonable enough, until you start looking at the history of the conflicts between central government in Madrid and the government and people of Catalonia.

     The question of whether there is a majority in favour of independence in Catalonia is moot.  In Catalan parliamentary terms, the majority is clear; in terms of the general population of Catalonia, the figures are ambiguous.  To which the response might well be, “Then put the question to a vote!”  A vote that would be accepted by all sides in the argument.

     You have to understand that the “Unity of Spain” is a concept that is written into the Constitution, and some have suggested that any vote for independence by Catalonia would have to be open to the whole of the population of Spain!

     When I was seven or eight years old, my parents brought me to Spain from Cardiff, for my first foreign holiday, to Tossa de Mar on the Costa Brava in Catalonia.  Dad took me to the building site that was the Sagrada Familia and explained to me what the church represented and said, “Catalonia is not Spain!” 

     It is perhaps significant that behind the Civic Buildings in the centre of Cardiff there is a memorial to the Welshmen who fought and died in The Spanish Civil War https://historypoints.org/index.php?page=spanish-civil-war-memorial-cardiff and some of those names are from the area where my father grew up, he would have known the families and, although too young to have fought in the Spanish Civil War, he was of an age to be a member of the armed forces in the Second World War.  The modern story of Spain and its fight against fascism, and especially the heroic struggle of the Republican forces centred in Barcelona against Franco was a story with personal links.  The miners of South Wales were stalwart supporters of the Republic, as were many other workers and intellectuals.  There is a residual affection for the national ambitions of Catalonia and a rejection of the subterfuge that has been used to belittle the valid arguments for statehood.

     But, as always, politics is the art of the possible, and in the complex games that politicians play, the simple questions become enmeshed in the rococo frills of self-interested definitions, so that impetus is lost.

     Catalan politicians make clear statements calling for independence, but their actions are more nuanced and ambiguous – but the rancour of unfinished business is likely to sour Catalan politics for some time to come.

 

 

MONDAY 2^nd October

 

There seems to be a direct correlation between my buying an uninteresting piece of domestic hardware via the Internet and then finding a cheaper version on sale in Aldi or Lidl almost immediately afterwards.  This has happened too often for it to be a mere coincidence, and I begin to suspect a major conspiracy.

     Everyone 'knows' that one’s computer and mobile phone listen to us via voice and keystrokes.  How many times have we volubly prevaricated about cutting the grass or painting the bathroom ceiling with proper anti-mould paint, to find adverts for mowers, strimmers, paint brushes, paint, and those little trays for use with rollers suddenly making their way into the feeds for computer and phone?  And bafflingly, if you do succumb to the purchase of a lawn mower or strimmer, you are assailed by further adverts urging you to buy another one!  What sort of palatial establishments do Amazon, and their devilish associates think we live in, where a single mower is wildly inadequate for our vast lawns?  Why waste computing power on repeat adverts when the product has already been bought?  Such things are beyond the imagining of we mere consumers – perhaps Amazon has a computer-generated list of the things and the number of those things that we are supposed to possess according to their relentlessly capitalistic algorithms, and we are kicking against the weight of untold exabytes of computing power that tell the company what we should have, irrespective of how we mere flesh-carriers think our possessions should be ordered!

     I am sure that there is a sci-fi short story there somewhere - if it hasn’t already been written.

 

TUESDAY  3^rd October

 

Today is the opening performance in the new Opera Season in the Liceu – at least it is the opening concert in Torn A – the subscription series that I have – though I don’t think that this is the First Night.

     The walk from the car park on the Ramblas to the Liceu is getting more and more onerous for me, as I hobble along with my baston and pausing to look into the windows of shops full of tourist crap, as a way of spacing out the effort to get me there.

     I always dress down for the Opera, which is to say that I wear what I always wear, shorts and a t-shirt, unless the weather is really cool, in which case I make the concession to dressiness and sport a pair of jeans.  The weather at this stage of October is still fairly warm, and I type this with the doors to the balcony open to give a cooling breeze!

     The opera is Don Pasquale by Donizetti and, as usual, I have had recourse to my Amanda Holden edited copy of The Penguin Opera Guide to give me an edge as the absurdities of the piece, but it is a masterpiece of opera buffa, and a convincingly realistic narrative is not something that we should expect!

     And, at the end of the week, another (the second) of my Saturday afternoon (early evening) concerts in La Palau. 

     Culture reigns!

Happy Christmas?

 

 

Today marks the real institutionalisation of the pandemic.  I had to show my Covid Certificate or Passport to get into the swimming pool.

     There was the usual failure of the technology when it turned out that the image of my scrambled digital thingy on my mobile phone (you can tell that I have forgotten what they are called) was too small to be read by the mobile phone app that was being used to check entry.  For some reason the phone did not allow me to expand the image to make things easier for the desk staff, but eventually I was allowed in.

     Last night on the television there was a piece on the long lines of people in the centre of Barcelona who had just realized that their access to bars, restaurants and gyms was going to be ended if they could not produce a valid covid certificate, and so they were desperately queuing to get their jabs.  I suppose that one should think, “Better late than never”, but one can’t quite rid oneself of the bone deep irritation that one feels when thinking about the sheer inconsideration of people who can’t give a hoot for the general good until it impacts on them directly.

     In the armed forces, I remember reading from years ago (and had it confirmed by my Dad) if you suffered from sun burn, it was considered an offence as the ‘injury’ was ‘self-inflicted’.  I feel very much the same from those people now clogging up precious hospital beds, where the vast majority of Covid patients in ICUs are unvaccinated!

     I don’t remember the same degree of vaccine avoidance about other fatal diseases and feel that the political edge given to Covid vaccine reluctance is one left over from the disastrous ‘presidency’ of Trump. 

     His macho idiocy and cavalier attitude towards disease prevention is directly responsible for deaths.  For anyone else you would ask yourself how the hell he manages to sleep at night knowing the damage he has done to families and to institutions – but with such a sociopathic narcissist like himself, where he is the centre of his own sick universe, he is able to redefine responsibility and ignore so-called collateral damage.

     In Catalonia, I take the requirement to show that you are vaccinated to be a clear sign that our government is taking things seriously. 

     Yes, there are contradictions contained in what we understand to be the new rules for socialising and, as things stand at the moment, I will be able to go to my next opera in the Liceu with almost full capacity.  I assume that we will be asked to show a Covid certificate for entry there too, but I have yet to be informed by the House, and the performance is only a week or so away.

     I do understand that, as a retired person, I can afford to take a fairly purist attitude towards restrictions: I do not have to commute, my financial wellbeing is not connected (directly) to the health of any one firm or place of work in the UK, I can afford to be complacent, in so far as my pension is from the government and not from any public company.  Yes, the ability of governments to pay their pensioners is directly dependent on the wealth of the country providing them, and the restrictions on people being able to work has lessened the tax money that the government can spend, but we are still protected in a more direct way than a self-employed actor, or waiter, or salesperson.

     Christmas is the time when some industries make a chunk of their earnings: the Panto season in theatres is essential to the health of the theatre for the coming year; restaurants look to party bookings during this period as a guaranteed source of income to see them through the leaner times in the year.  All computation about what will and will not happen financially has been thrown into disarray by the pandemic.  Nothing is certain.  Rules change on a weekly basis.  Long term confidence is something of a dream.

     Those lucky enough to be on a combination of full, state, and professional pensions are assured of a fixed payment each month.  For the majority of the working population the pandemic has shown how privileged this financial state is as what previously had been thought to be guaranteed proved itself to be not as firmly grounded as hoped.

     I do understand that keeping the economy going is of essential importance, pensions are, after all, paid by the contributions of those still working – but there is also the question of the health and safety of the nation to be taken into consideration too.

     In the UK at the moment, there are wildly differing approaches depending on who you listen to in Government about what you can consider doing this Christmas.  John Crace (the Guardian Political Sketch Writer, and well worth reading) is fond of using the image of Schrodinger’s Cat to illustrate some of the contradictory attitude of government.  Johnson seems to have abdicated responsibility for giving clear advice about what to do this Christmas apart from saying that Christmas Parties should not be cancelled, but he still harps on about personal responsibility where what he is doing is off-loading the burden of accountability on to some sort of mythical inner logician that we all have inside us, that will allow him to claim that any increase in deaths because of faulty precautions taken will be the responsibility of those who die and not the person who has the title of Prime Minister and who should be leading us.

     The corruption, lies, deaths, incompetence, bullying, hypocrisy, and cowardice of this twelve-year-old government makes the “Thirteen years of Tory misrule” proclaimed by Wilson in 1964 look positively prim by comparison!

     Here in Catalonia, we have a government where the equivalent of the Conservatives has little power, but there is a limit to what can be done when the parties we do have are squabbling amongst themselves and hardly living up to the names of the political sections they are supposed to represent.

     Politics seems to be becoming murkier by the month and adds nothing to the confidence with which we can look forward to Christmas and the next year.

     I fear that the imposition of Covid passports is just a step in the process of softening us up to accept far more stringent restrictions when the full import of the growth of the Omicron variant is clear.

     “Happy Christmas” is a fond hope, not a greeting.