Onwards, onwards!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is always the temptation with a new bit of technical kit, to expect it to do more than the previous versions of it that one might have possessed.  And there is the expectation too that one will have the technical ability to push the envelope of comfortable achievement just a little further with something that is bright and new.

     So with my new watch.  In spite of the fact that I need it merely to tell the time and to count the number of lengths that I do in the pool to ensure that I get to my daily target of 70 and therefore 1,500m , I always hope that I can get it to do more.

      My relationship with my mobile phone is one of restriction.  Not, you understand imposed by anyone outside, but by my own limitations in using the device.  I use my phone to read The Guardian and the various volumes on the Kindle app and do my Spanish lessons on the Duolingo app.  And that is basically it.  You stand virtually no chance whatsoever of getting me to respond to virtually any form of communication, unless I am actually handling the phone at the time of the message.  I almost invariably have my phone set to silent and so phone messages come and go without my noticing them.

     At one time and with a past version of my present smart phone, I did have, for a limited period some sort of link between the phone and my watch so that when a message or telephone call occurred, it sent some sort of message and/or a vibration to the watch that could (on a good day) alert me to the fact that someone somewhere had tried to make contact.  This brief period of being ‘linked-in’ did not last and I accepted that watch and phone were devices apart and never the twain should meet in any digital sense.

     With my ‘new’ watch – which I might also point out is now ‘so last iteration’ as the next model is already being reviewed in the more salaciously flagrant hi-tec publications in certain parts of the world – I feel, yet again, emboldened to try and get some sort of link-up so that I can deflect the opprobrium that comes my way when I fail to respond to emails, telephone calls, or any other form of electronic messaging.

     Although, in theory, a great fan of linked-up electronic devices, in reality I have always been a separates sort of guy, with each piece of gleaming expense existing in its own little branded bubble of usefulness, while never quite achieving the connectedness that has been the vain aim of justifying all the bits and pieces of historical computing that I have acquired through the years-

     But this time (he says yet again) this time will be different and, behold, there will be an efficiency of through device computing that will link everything in a professional and useful way.  Well, at least I have got Alexa to work on the phone.  Though, when, by way of experiment, I asked Alexa how she was (I was ever polite, even to the inanimate) her reply that she was feeling ‘windy’ as so many people had asked her about ‘farting’ – was something of a surprise, as was also her unsolicited offer of doing her ‘rapping on farting’ if I so desired!  I did not and turned her off.

     It says something for the way that people are using the pseudo AI of Alexa that a perfectly civil asking after health gets such a scatological response!  What sort of depraved ‘conversations’ with the poor woman have been taking place for an ingénue of AI rapport to be so abused?

     The watch has now beeped, not to obliterate the racier utterances of Alexa, but to tell me that some twisted chess grandmaster is prepared to play naked to show that he is not cheating. 

     With news like that one almost turns with relief to the political situation in the UK where the Conservative Party has gone ‘all out and obvious’ in pandering to its paymasters and is now openly boosting the wealth of the obscenely rich at the expense of the obscenely poor.  A sort of refreshing honesty from a party that has previously tried to dress up its class preferences with mealy mouthed platitudes to try and ensure that the poor people that they are fleecing to feed the rich will not notice the Tories’ real intentions.

     As my (UK taxed) pension is paid in pounds sterling and transferred to me here in Catalonia in euros, every fall in the value of the pound is not a momentary worry about how much spending money you are going to have on the next holiday, but is rather more ‘here and now’ in the worry stakes for someone who relies on the cash being sent over to pay for basic living costs.

     If you are concerned about the cost of living, you might ask, why buy a new watch, rather than use one of the many that you have in reserve?  Well, you’ve got me there.  But I might point out that you are questioning a man who went out and bought a couple of new shirts rather than ironing one of the many clean but creased ones he had waiting to be attended to.

     I am not sure, exactly, what that little anecdote is supposed to illustrate, but it does certainly point towards an attitude to money where reality is only accepted when it bites.  Hard.

     Now, off to the first concert in the new season!  Make music as the pounds falls!

NOT The Charge of the Light Brigade

 

 

In a desperate attempt to get my mind some way away from the interminable “None Of The Above” election of a right-wing dingbat to head up what used to be The Conservative Party and therefore the Brexit Failure that is Britain, I turn to Art.

     Admittedly I can find plenty of examples of works that would reflect what is going on in Britain at the moment, with perhaps Goya’s etching of “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters”, or perhaps Bosch with “The Ship of Fools” or even Lady Butler’s “Charge of The Light Brigade” (and yes, I do know that the title is wrong, the brigade is wrong, the war is wrong, the enemy is wrong, and the outcome is wrong for the original painting) but in the popular imagination (and we are, after all in the right-wing world of alternative facts) the painting shows the valiant and deeply stupid charge of horses against artillery, an exercise in Crimean futility and therefore all the more applicable to ‘modern’ Conservatism as exemplified by None of the Above.

     But I want to get away from all that.  I want escape from the realities of life and find solace in Art.

     Except, the more I study art, the less I find that I can use it to exist in that illusory world of appreciation that I thought that my studies would let me access.

     If you study Art History or Art Appreciation nowadays, the one thing that art courses force you to do is to link the art to its time and its society.  The Great Artist concept of creation where a supremely gifted Man (women have only relatively recently made it into the pantheon of greatness!) produces a Work of Art that transcends time and space and lives in a sort of artistic void where It alone exists and where the viewer can truly contemplate it as a separate entity, a calling of soul to soul.

     The concept of the artist as a lonely genius, existing only for their art and starving in a garret if necessary, rather than compromising integrity by bowing to the dictates of mere commercialism, is a tempting fantasy.

     Van Gogh we are told sold no paintings (or just a couple) in his lifetime, but he went on painting.  And he also went on being supported by his brother, Theo, so Vincent could go on producing the paintings that had so little (literal) currency while he was alive, and we also have the letters that the brothers sent to each other which are well worth reading.

     Artists have to live and they need money.  Blake did drawings for Wedgewood for a catalogue of china; Turner churned out popular prints for commercial exploitation when he was younger; atheists painted religious art for wealthy church patrons; portraitists flattered their sitters; Warhol, well, Warhol exploited exploitation and made Art out of artfulness, or something!

     I suppose that, for me, the ideal ‘absolute’ painting would be one of Monet’s water Lilly canvasses.  Living and being brought up in Cardiff and having access to the National Museum in Cathays Park meant that I could go (for free, except for the imposition of museum charges by the Conservative government under Heath of evil memory) and see the Davies Sisters’ Bequest to the museum.

     The Davies sisters were the daughters of coal owners who had an interest in art, knew Vollard the art dealer and bought extensively and then bequeathed their artistic riches to the nation.  In what I often take pride in describing as the greatest collection of Impressionist paintings outside London, I was able to enjoy Renoir, Monet, Manet, Cezanne, Van Gogh, Sisley, and more (and yes, I do know that not all of those painters are comfortably contained by the term Impressionist) at my leisure and pleasure.

     The paintings I always came back to were the three water lily paintings by Monet, with my favourite being the most abstract.  When I was younger, I used to think when I looked at it that it was a sort of solemn communion between the painting and my callow self.  Nothing else existed.

     Except, of course, things did.  And do.

      Quite apart from where the Davies sisters got their money and how it was made, there is the whole question of why they bought Monet when they did.  How did Monet get to be famous and his paintings collectable?  And why collect paintings at all?  What does a painting really show what does it really represent?

     Before we get bogged down in the philosophical questions about the production, sale and display of art, let’s just consider a simple, practical element in the mythology of Impressionism.

     In the series of paintings that Monet completed he chose subjects like the façade of Rouen Cathedral, haystacks, and lilies in one specific pond, trees.  He painted thee subject multiple times at different times of the day and with different viewpoints.  As opposed to the previously highly finished canvasses of the previous century and of many of his contemporaries his canvases often looked more like sketches, his brush strokes were large and obvious and there was rapidity to his work that made it look almost spontaneous.

     Previous artist had usually made sketches of details or scenes en plein air that they would work up later in the studio.  There could be pencil sketches, charcoal or pastel or watercolour, but oils were something that needed more effort as colours needed to be made when you needed them, the pigment being mixed with oil.  The sketching then was limited by medium.  It was the production of ready mixed oil paint in tubes that made it possible for artists to take oil paint with them into the countryside and produced oil paintings in the open air away from the studio.  Renoir is reported to have said, that without the invention of tubes of ready mixed oil paint, Impressionism would never have happened!

     So the sketch-like spontaneity of Impressionist canvasses is a direct result of the industrialization of oil colour production – the mechanical and prosaic having a direct effect on the artistic and rarefied!

    

And I have already typed myself into a calmer frame of mind.  Art wins again!

 

Cartoon Politics?

 

 

 

 

For what now seems like the last twenty-something years of my life, a political organization, formerly known as The Conservative Party, has been putting on a mind-bendingly boring charade of Right Wing Cosplay to try and influence the miniscule audience of voters who will elect one of two cyphers who will replace the last lying narcissist to hold the role of Prime Minister, who in his turn replaced the previous vicious (yet vacuous) semi-alive failure in the role, who in her turn replaced the toff-boy coward who walked away (whistling) from his responsibilities.  So, the cyphers do not have to do a lot to fit right in with the bar of competence set at a Mariana Trench level of profundity.

     Truss, the ex-Remainer, ex-Lib Dem, and born-again Thatcher act and Unicorn Brexiteer is using the Johnson tried and trusted technique of blatant lying and blaming everything on everyone – apart from her semi-articulate self, while talking up increasingly far right policies (on the hoof) to try and get the old, white, knuckle-draggers of the Home Counties to vote for her.  She is risible and contemptible and is, let us remind ourselves, the favourite (sic.) to gain the keys to Number 10.

     Her perky, richer than Croesus, “I have no working class friends” opponent is also spewing nonsense, trying to balance (and failing) the need to appeal to a Conservative Membership that he must regard with little less than loathing, while attempting to voice policies that make at least some nod towards the fact that the UK is facing crises of an existential nature.

     Not, of course that you would get a sense of that by listening or reading about the various quasi-Surrealistic “hustings” of party members as they question these “candidates” who have to try and pretend that they are offering something new and exciting to combat the difficulties that they themselves have been creating for the last decade.

     The level of unreality is so palpable that I am sure that the majority of people trying to make sense of the “Noddy in Toyland” level of political acumen on display have truly forgotten that we have had a Conservative Government (I use the term in its loosest possible sense) since 2010.  Two thousand and bloody ten!  And they are acting as if Cameron, May, Johnson are all “resets” and therefore nothing can be blamed on the future Prime Minister, as they will have had nothing to do with previous administrations, apart from being slavishly voting MPs and actual Ministers in the actual government!

     As a Welshman, albeit living in Catalonia, I can take some comfort from the fact that the Conservatives do NOT have a majority in Wales and that we do not have the political dregs in power.  But the UK is governed from London and the monetary allocations are decided in Westminster and England has by far the largest population in the constituent countries of the UK so, although government is partially devolved, England is still calling the tunes – or rather the tiny percentage of the population that makes up the membership of the Conservative and Unionist Party is.

     So, as prices and inflation go up (and up!) and wages go down (unless you are in The City) we have weeks more of the farce that is the election of our next Prime Minister.  Embarrassments playing with props from the political Dressing Up Box, vividly illustrating just how far below the ludicrous our country has sunk.

     Perhaps the most depressing element in this whole charade of political game playing was summed by the Daily Mail who (seriously) averred that Johnson had bucked the trend of the political truism that, “All political careers end in failure.”  That is a rewriting of reality on a par with the everyday life of Trump, where there is an unlimited number of “alternative facts” to fit in with whatever deranged rearrangement of life unscrupulous right-wing demagogues demand the ever credulous to accept rather than believe the evidence of their own eyes.

     Another truism is, “This too will pass” – however good or bad things are, they will change.  Wars will end.  Things will resolve themselves.  But it doesn’t mean that things will be better when those “things” have “settled down”.  You can look at history through statistics, but statistics are human stories and have human consequences.  The removal of the twenty-five-pound uplift to Universal Credit is a story of human misery and political viciousness.  Real people suffered; it is not just an “economic detail.”

 

This is a bitter way to start again to add to my neglected blog, perhaps tomorrow I will be mellower and allow myself the luxury of hope!

Buildings take time

 

 

 

Another tortuous milestone in the construction of the Sagrada Família has been reached with the placing of the star light on the top of the Virgin Mary Tower and, this evening, blessing and lighting it.  This is the first of the two filial lights to be achieved, the second will top the central and largest tower in the basilica – the one which will mark the completion of the project and the one on which building has been delayed because of Covid.

     There was an ambitious plan to have the building complete for the centenary of Gaudí’s death in 2026, but this is looking more and more unlikely.

     In spite of living in Barcelona (the province and metropolitan district) I have visited the Basilica only once, in the summer of 1958 when my father dragged me off the bus tour of the city that we were on and took me to what I understood to be a series of ruins but was informed that I was standing in the unfinished part of an on-going masterpiece by the Catalan architect Gaudi.  I was, generally, unimpressed – though that attitude changed as I found out more about the architect and his buildings.

     Why, you might ask, have I not visited the building again, especially as it now has a roof, and the interior is complete?

     Gaudi is constantly associated with natural forms and the Basilica looks like a growing thing, something more vegetable than stone. 

     Gaudi ‘lived’ his buildings, he was intimately involved in their evolution from design to structure and he was capable of making on-site adjustments to his plans, so that the word ‘evolution’ associated with his buildings is something which is real – that is what happened.  The plans were a starting point and Gaudi was the guide to their development.

     The great cathedrals of the past were always works in progress, and sometimes that progress was glacially slow, as buildings emerged over decades and sometimes centuries.  Gaudi lived on site towards the end of his life, and he was dedicated to seeing his concept of the building rise.  And that’s the point: a Gaudi building needs Gaudi to see it through to completion.  Without Gaudi, the building is something else.  Not worthless and not necessarily inferior, but definitely something else.

     Gaudi was killed in a traffic accident, but his plans survived.  Well, they survived until the Spanish Civil War when they were burnt, but enough survived for projections to be made about what the final form of the building should take.

     Every great building is, of necessity, a collaboration – it is how far that the collaboration should ‘develop’ from the original idea that is in question about the ‘finishing’ of Gaudi’s masterpiece.

     I used to say that I would have preferred to have had some sort of encompassing structure placed around the parts of the Basilica that Gaudi had completed and say, this is what we have, we can imagine the rest.  A building without Gaudi throughout is not a Gaudi building.

     Perhaps that is a little too purist and I have vowed that if and when the building is finished (in my lifetime) I will visit.

     Those visitors from the UK who have visited the Basilica have come away singing its praises.  I have been content to view it from a distance and enjoy the silhouette rather than look too closely at the detail!

     The quick-sketch outline drawing of the Sagrada Família shares a place with similar sketches of the Eiffel Tower, Big Ben and The Sydney Opera House as being something that is instantly recognized from a few quick lines.

     As I visit Barcelona on a fairly regular basis, I have of course, seen the Sagrada Família close-up from the car and I have to admit that it is an imposing pile, I hope that things come together, and I will be able to visit!

Johnson is a liar.  He is liar who is found out in his lies on a regular basis.  He treats the truth with the same contempt that he reserves for his past wives.  And yet, he preserves his popularity with the voting public.

     Perhaps, the Christmas Party of Christmas Past will be the ghost that drags him down.  With scandal piling onto scandal in the traditional way of Conservative rule over any period of time, it seemed as if each new disgrace was something that could be wafted away with an airy phrase or some cod Latin.

     The joking contempt that his personal spokesperson displayed in laughing about how to deflect difficult questions about a Christmas party held during the height of Covid restrictions might be the thing that finally (finally!) cuts through to the general population and brings about, if not his downfall, then at least some sort of change in the way that we are governed.

     Johnson has tired his usual tactic of smooth sincerity and the sacrifice of an underling to turn away the rightful wrath that should be meted out on his head.  His lies have finally caught up with him and there is a growing groundswell of opinion that he should resign.

     Although I personally think that he should have been sacked rather than given the chance to resign a long time ago, I am still not convinced that the Tory Faithful will give up what they see as an electoral advantage (i.e., Johnson’s skills (!) in campaigning) for any airy concept of honesty or probity.

     This evening, Covid Plan B has been announced by Johnson (in a press conference NOT in The House of Commons) as a necessary part of the regulations to try and keep the Omicron variant in check – but also, and far more importantly from Johnson’s point of view as a “dead cat on the table” distraction to keep prying noses out of the detail of exactly what when on in the Christmas Party Fiasco of last year.

     Why should anyone do anything Johnson says, when he so signally doesn’t feel himself to be bound by the rules that he stipulates for others?

     It will be interesting to see what the media say about all of this, especially as there were pointed questions about the hypocrisy of Johnson and his misfits in the press conference announcing the measures.

     The best Christmas present that we could all have, is that Johnson resigns instantly.  God knows I loathe the deadbeat candidates that are likely to take over, but they (with the possible exception of Goblin Gove) are almost bound to be better and to have at least a shred of something approaching an ethic.   

Please!

 

A range of rants

 

 

A double vaccinated member of my Catalan family has now contracted Covid and will have to self-isolate, emerging from this on the 22^nd of December, just in time for the Christmas Celebrations.  At the moment he has flu-like symptoms, and we are hoping that they do not develop any further, relying on the expectation that the vaccination will limit any serious consequences.

     What it does do is emphasise that the pandemic is nowhere near over, and we are still very much in the dark as far as any coherent view about what post-pandemic life may be, and when we might be experiencing it.

     At this moment in time, all our planned celebrations for the three days from Christmas Eve are still in place, though these same plans become more brittle with each passing day.

     In spite of the growing fears about the Omicron variant, there does not seem to be a great deal of concern about the progress of the pandemic, and the rules that are already in place do not seem to be widely followed. 

     For example, we are now supposed to show Covid vaccination certificates in restaurants, bars, gyms etc – the policy is, shall we say, being loosely applied.  Today in a restaurant we were not asked for our certificate, and I saw no one who came into the restaurant asked.

     If this laxity is indicative of the approach here, then it is only a matter of time before the pressing need for more taxing restrictions are brought in because of an exponential rise in infection.

     I count myself partly to blame because, until Toni mentioned it this evening, it didn’t even cross my mind that the regulations had not been followed.  Life goes on as normal, and one is easily seduced into forgetting the reality with which one is surrounded.

     I know that it is wrong for the government to expect members of the public to act as their surrogates in getting policy delivered, but it is in all our interests that the very reasonable precautions that should be taken, are taken.

     I resolve to show my certificate even if I am not asked for it, and that might provoke the right behaviour.  I shall be more vigilant in future.  In a future that looks increasingly bleak as the news of the spread of the Omicron variation looks unstoppable.

 

 

Yet again I ask myself what the Conservative Party has to do to get people to stop voting and supporting them!

     It is an exhausting job merely listing the scandals that Johnson and his rag bag government have racked up.

     Just in the last week or so we have had the revelations about the last year Christmas parties that were held (or not held) in 10 Downing Street, with Johnsons categorical (eventual) denials having all the force of the ‘do not tumble dry’ instruction on clothes (image courtesy of John Crace or Marina Hyde in the Guardian).  Basically, if Johnson says something it is a fairly secure rule of thumb that the exact opposite is true.  So, while the rest of the country was obeying the strict lockdown rules, No 10 was flouting them.  And now lying about them.

     Coupled with this is the “apology” for failings in the Grenville Tower disaster in the administration of building regulations.  Tell that to the dead.

     Today we heard graphic descriptions of the disorganized chaos in the Foreign Office with the deadhead Raab presiding over a dysfunctional and deadly, inefficient, badly led, disaster of a department.

     And the final and grotesque garnish to the vileness of the government is the revealing of the lies that Johnson and No 10 have talked about the evacuation of pets before people.  I am a staunch believer in the fact that people who do not care about animals, will care little for humans as well.  But people must come before pets, and if resources were diverted to help a pet sanctuary rather than help the people who aided the mission in Afghanistan AND that Johnson lied about his involvement, then surely disgust and repugnance is the only appropriate attitude to have towards him and the low life that supports him.

     And that lot is only what has been brought to us today!  It is exhausting despising the worthless chancers who rule us.  With Thatcher (whom I hated and continue to hate) I didn’t feel this drained and depleted by my loathing.  Thatcher was a person and not a cult.  Johnson is a populist with, as far as I can tell, not a shred of ‘ethos’ motivating his actions apart from his narcissistic self-regard.  He demeans the country, politics, and himself.  He is a disgrace – but he will not and indeed cannot see that.  To recognize his own fatal limitations will mean his instant evaporation.

     It will be instructive to see what happens to the Conservative majority in the next by-election.  If the Conservative Party senses that he has or will become a liability, they will be ruthless in their elimination of an obstacle to their continued grip on power.

     I can look forward to Johnson’s fall from grace (though he certainly did that a long, long time ago) but I shudder at the ‘slimy things with legs’ that will slither their way out of the sewer of sleaze and corruption that is the Conservative Party at the moment and try and shin their way up the greasy Tory donor money painted pole to power.

     God help us all!