Culture and lights and rain

New Normal, 1st week, Friday 

It rained during the night and the pavements was still wet when I got ready to go to the pool for my daily      swim, but it didn’t rain while I was cycling.  While I was swimming it rained again and as had my cup of tea and a bocadillo there were distinct spots of rain that I could see falling into the standing puddles.  But when it was time for me to leave the café and do my daily cycle to Port Ginesta, the rain stopped again, and I even had some fitful sun during the ride before I got home.

     The day has become steadily colder and the skies have become less and less welcoming – but my point is that it didn’t rain on me.  There is a spaciousness in the dismal type of weather that we sometimes get here in Castelldefels that gives the reluctant cyclist enough of a gap to get the necessary exercise done in the dry – even if the bottom of one’s legs do get a little gritty from the sand-in-solution splashed on them as I make my stately way through the shallow puddles on the paseo.

     It is the lack of perceived vindictiveness in the Castelldefels weather that (even in the cold) warms my heart.  I am now so used to an orderly sequence of seasons, with a marked lack of rain whatever the season, that I am not sure that I could get used to typical Cardiff weather now.

     On one of my last visits to the city, I noticed the amount of moss growing in the shadier nooks and crannies, thriving in damp conditions.  I do not thrive in damp conditions, unless they are in temperature-controlled swimming pools!

     I am still wearing T-shirt, shorts and sandals – though I do add a windcheater when I am on the bike – I may be hardy but I am not stupid!

 

Christmas is a pressing topic of urgent consideration, by not being talked about.  I have no idea what plans are made or are being made to celebrate (a word so out of place in the disaster of 2020) the occasion.  Our typical Christmas since we have been together in Castelldefels (apart from one trip to Gran Canaria) is to go to Terrassa for a family lunch, in recent years in a local restaurant.  It looks, clearly, as if this is going to be impossible, and probably illegal this time round.  It is difficult to know how many households will be allowed to mingle and the age range of possible diners is from teenage to over 70.

     It is perfectly understandable for Toni to want to see his family during Christmas, as he has seen little of them in the flesh for months.  But the risks of going to Terrassa (even if we are allowed to do so) are great.

     I suppose it is all speculation at the moment, but in this country plans seem to be made almost on the hoof, in spite of there having been plenty of time to consider viable alternatives.  I hate being bounced into doing something!

     And then there are the presents.  In spite of one’s justified reluctance to use the well-known Luxembourgian delivery company, it does make life so much easier and sometimes it is worth it just for the savings on postage!  But we have to get the orders in quickly as god alone knows how many others will be using the same delivery point to make the Christmas season seem that bit more normal.  But again, everything will be left until the last moment and . . . 

     Well, I’ve said my bit, we will have to wait and see just how this all pans out.

 

I’ve had some ideas about how to make the Catalogue Raisonné useful for further writing.  Although I will add to it in the future, I think that there is enough there now for me to start working on the basic format.

     As is my usual way, I can also start writing the Introduction.  As I am not entirely sure where I am going with this, the writing of an Introduction might seem to be counter intuitive, but I have found in the past that such a piece of work sometimes clarifies my thoughts and, anyway, as it will be written on the computer it is simplicity itself to dump, change or edit!

     Well, I say that, but my Word is proving to be somewhat difficult.  The program itself is slow and, as I am working on an Apple machine, I see that damned multicoloured revolving circle too often at the moment, which means that everything freezes while the computer works its way through god knows what before it allows me to start writing again.

     I suspect that the catalogue is the faulty element in the equation.  Each item in the catalogue has a thumbnail illustration to accompany it.  I always choose the ‘reduce the size’ option when I save pictures, especially when I take them on my mobile phone, so that any documents that I use them in does not become too unwieldy, but I think that I might have made a few omissions in the compiling of the thing and so it is absurdly overloaded.  I am sure that there is a way of stripping out some of the quality without reducing the effectiveness of the catalogue, but that is something for the future.

     But for the moment, I am happy with what I have and I will start using the raw material to get some sort of sequence going.

 

We went out this evening to have something to eat in one of our regular haunts.  Normally this would not be an occasion of note, but this is only the second time we have eaten out in weeks; the used-to-be normal becomes extraordinary when it is denied; and is even odd when some semblance of old ways are restored.

     We had an opportunity to view the Christmas lights in the centre of the town and surely this is one extravagance that has to be justified in the hope that it lifts spirits.  Even though it was finally raining, they looked good.  They looked good, and appropriate!

 

Our timing was perfect in that we arrived back in the house with a couple of minutes to spare before the National Theatre performance-

 

Official Death of England: Delroy | Free National Theatre Full Performance

12,240 views1 hour ago

Watch Clint Dyer and Roy Williams’ Death of England: Delroy, an ‘urgent, timely solo work, performed with firecracker energy’ (★★★★ Evening Standard) by actor Michael Balogun. The play explores a Black working class man searching for truth and confronting his relationship with Great Britain

 

It is still available for the next 24 hours free!  It is a tour de force and you should watch it!

 

 

 

 

Everything in its time

A nondescript sort of a day. 

 

Rain first thing in the morning, then a day of sun shine dampened by lowering clouds – but not cold at all.  Yet another brightly dull day.  And I have real faith that tomorrow will be a true beach day.  I believe.

And the writing is flowing a little more freely.  After my morning swim (which lasted a little longer than usual) I found it easy to scribble out a few thoughts that might well make it into poems in some future time.

The day was not made any better by a bitterly disappointing lunch in one of our regular restaurants: a forgotten meal meant that two of us had finished before the gambas for the third had arrived.  The paella starter was tasteless and the orange at the end of the meal was stringy and lacking in sweetness.  Hey ho!  You win some and you lose some.

The plan for the rest of our guest’s stay includes a barbecue and a visit to the library of MNAC: we know how to make people feel welcome.

There is a distinct feeling of the end of the summer about Castelldefels at the moment.  Not only has the temperature dropped appreciably, but also kids appear to be just that little more hysterical as they realize that shades of the prison house are beginning to grow around the jaded holiday-heavy kids!  And the retired sense that the streets are soon going to be returned to their suzerainty as the neophyte organisms go back to their institutions.

Talking of institutions.  Christmas came to mind as I availed myself of the facilities in our local shopping centre.  As I was washing my hands, the unmistakable strains of a particularly repulsive Musak version of ‘The First Noel’ accompanied my ablutions.

It is the end of August, literally months away from the Festive Season – and a Christmas carol!

In the UK I grew used to ‘Back to School’ promotions in supermarkets almost as soon as the kids had broken up for the summer.  No, wait a bit, as a working teacher I never got used to the vulgar, uncaring reminder that work was waiting a mere six weeks in the future, but the sickening shock was deadened after repetition: the first twenty years were the worst.

This is not on a par with hearing the first cuckoo of spring - there is a sort of leaden inevitability of suffering the season-before-the season with the relentless commercialization of anything that can give capitalism a buck!  But Catalonia used to be (is?) different.  The shameless extension of special days into previous months that is a characteristic of Britain is not quite so prevalent in this country.  Or at least it used not to be. 

 

I do hope that those musical strains are not a prelude to a very long countdown to Christmas!

The end of the holidays!

The cake was the most important part.

Celebrations of religious festivals, even when the religious element seems to be more of an historical afterthought than the actual basis for the festivity, seem to be only to be justified in terms of what you can eat and drink to make the day(s) special.  And presents of course.

In Britain we do not take the Festival of the Kings quite as seriously as they do in Catalonia.  Kings is very much part of the Christmas Season and I suppose part of the reason why the Sales do not really get started until after parents have made all of their purchases for Kings.

Kings is basically for kids.  There are elaborate processions to welcome the Kings when they come into a town or city, and then there are a series of floats all of which have people on them throwing sweets at the young people who lines the streets to greet them.

In Barcelona the Kings come into the city by sea and then make a triumphant progress into the centre.  We missed the procession on the day before Kings in Terrassa and instead came for the lunch in which the kids (and as it turned out, we too) got presents.

But the highlight of the meal is the cake.  This is a circular cake with a hole in the middle, with the filling being of cream and, most importantly, little things hidden inside the filling.  The official name of this cake is the Tortell de Reis or the King’s Tart, and ours was a magnificent affair with a filling divided into cream and chocolate and hidden inside the filling, somewhere, two inedible things: a porcelain broad bean and a little figure of a king.

The cake is cut up so that everyone gets a piece and then they chomp down.  Carefully!  I did and was ‘rewarded’ by finding a cream covered broad bean.  The significance of that discovery is that you have to buy the cake for the next year!  The person who gets the king figure is rewarded with the golden paper crown that is set in the hollow centre of the cake and is made King of the feast.

If you want more information about the Catalan customs at Christmas then an extensive illustrated explanation may be found at https://www.elnacional.cat/en/culture/a-catalan-christmas-explained_221886_102.html

And I assured you that these are not obscure folk customs, they are part of the everyday life of everyone who lives here!  And if you do read through it all, then I can assure you that the Belen on the stairs by the entrance to our house did have a caganer discretely squatting at the side of the stable!

With the end of that meal, I consider the Christmas Season well and truly over, but we will not be taking down all the Christmas decorations.

As you know, Catalonia and Spain are in the grips of the worst political crisis to have rocked Spain since the Dictatorship of Franco.  The Catalan referendum about independence was blighted by astonishing violence from the police forces of the Spanish national government preventing peaceful people from trying to cast their votes.  Our Catalan President and a slew of political leaders have been forced into exile or have been imprisoned.  The government of Catalonia has been disbanded and the functions of government have been taken over by PP, the minority right wing governing party of Spain whose actual popular mandate in the last election was a measly 4 seats out of 135, their percentage of the popular vote 4.2%!

Political corruption in Spain is rife.  PP is the most corrupt political party in western Europe and hundreds of its members, including all past treasurers of the party, having been accused of corruption or are in the process of being tried or are waiting to be sentenced.  This is the political slime that is deciding the future of our country!

To show solidarity with the imprisoned Catalan politicians twists of yellow ribbon are being worn.  Indeed wearing anything of the colour yellow is now considered something of a political statement by the minority right wing government of Spain.  I wear a yellow ribbon on my shirt at all times and have recently purchased a yellow scarf.  Those of you who know me, know that I never wear scarves, so this recent (and difficult) purchase shows considerable dedication!

Although the national minority government maintains that there is separation between the executive and the judiciary, too many recent examples of unequal treatment and opportunism make such an assertion difficult to believe.  The national minority government also maintains that there are no political prisoners in Spain and that the political leaders have been detained on criminal charges not political ones.  I am reminded of some of the policies of Queen Elizabeth the First who always imprisoned Roman Catholics for acts of treason, never merely because of their religion, that was always a strange coincidence!

While our political leaders are in prison we will keep our Christmas tree up.  It is not decorated in the usual festive manner, but has a whole series of yellow ribbons on the branches and even the lights are yellowish!  It will stay up until Spain sees reason and releases the political prisoners.

These early January days are a low level prologue to the political activity that will take place later in the month, when the new delegates to a new Catalan parliament will take their places.  The election, called by Rajoy, the leader of the minority right wing PP (with a mandate of 4.2% in the popular vote in Catalonia remember) in the hope that the independence parties would lose their majority.  Well they haven’t - but Rajoy and his disgusting collection of corruption monkeys, PP, lost 7 of their 11 seats.

So, if the majority of the elected representatives vote for independence Rajoy has already said that he will ignore the democratic wishes of the Catalan parliament and keep Article 155 in place which allows his 4.2% mandate to give him the right to govern Catalonia.  And don’t get me started on the way that the Spanish Senate is packed with PP fodder!

So, later in the month, all the rites and delights of Christmas are going to be well and truly forgotten as the political cut and thrust lurches back into action.

To find more information about what happened in the last Catalan elections in December, 2017, go to

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalan_regional_election,_2017

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If you would like to read drafts of my recent poems please go to smrnewpoems.blogspot.com

Things are different?

When I was a kid . . .

There probably isn’t a greater turn-off opener than that one.  It is the sort of phrase that is regularly used as a weapon by the older against the perceived privilege of the young.  There is nothing that riles a certain proportion of the older generation that seeing a very young child with a mobile phone.  And especially the young child using it with a proficiency that the resentful oldie can only wish for.

Technology means that kids have things like music players, film players, TV, radios, cameras and, yes, telephones way before the generation that includes me ever had, but – just think about what my generation had and continues to have.

Free milk, free school, university grants, free university tuition, full professional employment, good health care, generous pension scheme, professional retirement at 60 with professional pension, state pension at 65, membership of the EU throughout my working life, free access to foreign countries within the EU, access to the work markets of the EU, and so on.

Yes, my parents did not buy a television until I was 11, though we did have the radio.  I did not have a ‘real’ record player until I was in my teens, though I had had a second hand wind up version with some old 78s for one birthday.  Our holidays were usually in the UK and in B&Bs, though I did go to Spain when I was 7, and I was the only kid in my year in primary school who had been abroad.  Our camera was a Kodak box camera, until we had the next model up, eventually – and those two camera kept us going for years and years and years.

Although we were not rich as a family, I did not lack anything important.  I was loved and secure and, most importantly (as I was really too young to truly worry about the Cuban missile crisis) I felt secure.  I felt that I had a future and that I would easily be able to get a job and that I would be able to keep it for the whole of my career.

How many young people today can say as much?  I know younger colleagues in teaching who are dreading the extra years that they will have to work until they are able to retire and I sympathetically share their dread, though I cannot imagine what the awful reality must be like.  In my view you cannot be a classroom teacher beyond the age of 60 in any sort of normal school.  Forcing people to work beyond that is like a sort of death sentence, or at the very least they are not going to be paying many pensionable years for the unfortunates who are able to make it.

This serious thought was brought on my thinking about cartoons.  One channel on the television this year has been given over to a whole series of ‘blockbuster’ animated films and I am constantly amazed at their quality.  There was a scene of one of the monsters from Monsters Inc II where he was sitting by the side of a lake in moonlight which was stunning, a beautifully rendered part of the film.  And in another film I was fascinated by the sheer complexity of the rendering of hair and fur with a naturalness that would have had early animators reaching for their crucifixes!

It used to be that Christmas would see the latest-old Bond film trotted out to general delight, but I am not sure nowadays that there is a single screen franchise that would bring viewers together now in the way that 007 did.  After the gloriously clever first film of the 'Pirates' franchise, for example, the whole series descended into a narrative nightmare which denied coherence to the story, but did give individual moments of success, as for example in the umpteenth film when the company baddy walks, with manic serenity, down a flight of steps as his ship is destroyed about him.  It is a sublime moment and deserves a better film around it!

But the mechanics of showing films have changed.  When I was in school we did have 'Christmas Treat' films.  The two I remember are 'Fanstasia' and Tony Hancock's 'Punch and Judy Man' - the first we loved and the second we hated.  But both these films were shown via a film projector, the cans of film had been rented and were shown projected onto a screen.  In an age when films are available on your phone, the attitude towards a 'grand' production has changed somewhat!

So time, place, technique, everything has changed, and the 'gift' of a major film at Christmas is not longer the 'treat' that it once was.

But for me, at least, the power of a great animated film, something like 'Up' for example has me as glued to the picture as if I were a child watching fireworks - and you only have to see my open mouthed wonder and fixation with exploding rockets to understand how quickly I can regress to childhood!

Perhaps cartoons are the nearest things we get to keep us together, to bring back the sense of wonder that over exposure to CGI in so-called reality films has taken away.