Frustration and release

 

 

 

Most days I get up at 6.15 am to get ready for my morning swim at 7 am in the local pool.  As it is August, I have the luxury of a lie in until 7.15 am as the pool opens at 8 am for that month.

     I would like to say that I feel a sense of smug satisfaction for rising so early and taking physical exercise before many people have stirred from their beds - and I suppose I do.  But, the thing is that I find it difficult to stay in bed after my accustomed rising time.  When I was working I went for a swim before work started and I have sort of continued that regime.  If truth be told, I do not really ‘lie in’ with any degree of sincerity.  At the time that I need to get up, I get up and if I try and stay in bed I feel uncomfortable.  So, my soft, musical alarm on my mobile phone goes off and I get up.

     This morning, my arrival at the pool was greeted by what appeared to be a small meeting at the gate.  It turned out that the increasing murkiness of the water in the pool over the last couple of days had prompted the technical services to Do Something and thus “product” had been added to the water, but for the “product” to work, we swimmers had to be excluded.

     The helpful message from management that the pool was closed was sent to members of the leisure centre via email at 10.10 am today, that is some two hours after we arrived to start our swim.  Sigh!

     I made the best of a bad job and decided to go for an extended bike ride from the pool to Port Ginesta, so that I could tell myself that I had kept up my morning exercise.

     Admittedly the effort of cycling those kilometres was somewhat mitigated by the fact that I have an electric bike and I make full (full!) use of its electric capabilities, but it is still exercise under the meaning of the act and as such it is duly recorded by my Smartwatch and adds to my daily PAI rating (whatever that is) – one of those acronyms linked to health and exercise that, in spite of its meaning being ambiguous (or even unknown) is something I take semi-seriously and try and maintain a rating of 100 or as near as I can get.  Because, yes.

     Not only did I go all the way to the beach in Port Ginesta, but I also went as far as the Gavà bike lane could take me in the opposite direction, which amounts to a total of 17.85 km which, even on an electric bike (for me) is quite a lot.

     Not that the electric bike is my only form of ‘personal’ transport.  The electric scooter was taken out of the boot of the car AGAIN yesterday and I used it to get to our favourite ice cream shop as a jaunt to get out of the house.

     I am not a natural bike rider, but I am semi-professional compared with my shaky progress on the scooter.  On the scooter, like a highly-strung thoroughbred horse, I am spooked by: anything other than a completely level surface, traffic, people, turns, crossings, pavements, other scooter users, hills, slopes and the state of the world.  I do not, I have to admit, exude confidence when I am a-wheel, but it is the only way that I can match Toni’s walking without having to pay the price in pain for days afterwards!

     So far, my two trips on the scooter means that I have paid 150 euros per trip, given the total cost of the purchase.  A sobering thought.

 

 

The weather is a little cooler, I think, but that doesn’t make me particularly happy.  Yes, the sort of heat that we have been experiencing has been of a different quality than in previous years, but I’d still prefer that to the cold of winter – that any diminution of heat now makes me far is almost upon us!  But that is only may paranoia speaking.  I hope.

Oh shut up!

 

 

 

 

 

The sound of full-blast Heavy Metal music from my neighbour would thump its way through the walls of my semi-detached house once every couple of years.  How I wish that such a biannual interruption to my placid way of life could replace the almost pathological need for noise in this part of the world.

 

 

     Dogs are the bane of a quiet life.  As many of the places around us are flats, people have adapted their canine needs and usually plumped for those grotesque rat-dogs with bulbous eyes and spindly legs that they have reasoned by virtue of their shrunken size are more adapted to life within the confines of a flat.

     I am sure that they take up less room. But their moronic, high-pitched yaps belie their bonsai appearance with a ‘bark’ volume seemingly designed to cut through concrete.

     Here in Catalonia, as I am sure was true in other places that had a severe lockdown, we have the left-over ‘walking’ dogs.   

     At the time of the restrictions, we were not allowed to leave our homes unless it was to get essential provisions or to take a dog for short walk.  The rules were that the dog was not allowed to be walked more than a couple of hundred years from its home, but some people (don’t they always) bent the rules and used the dog as a passport to roam freely.  And a number of dogs were bought during the height of the pandemic (how?) specifically to allow access to a reasonable walk.

     Now, the dogs are not strictly needed, and their walks have become, not a freedom to be enjoyed, but a chore to be resentfully endured.  And they all bark.  Probably including some of the owners, too!

     But dogs are not the half of it.

     We are on a sometime main flight path for aircraft landing in the airport in Barcelona – although it is only when the wind is in certain directions that planes are directed to fly over the residential parts of Castelldefels and Gavà.  And if you believe that then you will believe anything.

     The pandemic gave us an unnatural piece of peace, with the number of flights severely restricted.  To be fair, while the noise from the aircraft is loud, you sort-of get used to it as just one of those things and, after a few seconds, the sound is gone.  As opposed to the bloody dog next door that has been left alone at home and has been barking for the whole of the bloody afternoon and who will not, in spite of screamed instructions to shut up, shut up.

     But the true horror has been house improvements, or complete makeovers.

     The house we live in is rented and, as far as I can tell, absolutely nothing has been done structurally, aesthetically, horticulturally, electrically or any other damned word ending in -ly since they were built.  To give you some idea of the hands-off approach of the owners, basic things that you would expect the landlords to take care of like fixtures and fittings, including damage to sinks, toilets, etc, or for an even more glaring example the gas boiler for the heating and water – they wash their hands of entirely.  The ‘nothing to do with us guv’ approach reached its apotheosis in Catalan landlords!

     This also means that when one of our houses ceases to be for rent and is sold, as a couple have over the last couple of years, then the new owners look askance at the age of the decoration (avocado bathroom suite, anybody?) and realize that they will have to do some major refitting.  The electric system and wiring are not fit for purpose and woe betide anyone foolish enough to put the kettle and the microwave on at the same time!

     You get the idea.  Everything needs to be changed.  And for the last two years we have lived through two refits.

     One thing you should know about our houses is that we live in what is in British terms a terraced house, one of five three floor structures.  They are solidly built of concrete throughout, but it also means that if you hit a hammer on the wall in one of the ‘houses’ every single other house can hear it.

     Perhaps at this point I should add that all the floors are tiled, as well as the stairs, and there are lots of stairs – so taking up tiles from all the floors of all the rooms, all the stairs and from the walls of the kitchen and two bathrooms means a lot of work, a lot of very noisy work with jack hammers that make life one long nightmare.

     Changing the electricity means cutting into the walls to get out old wiring and put in new.  With hammers.

     Changing the kitchen is a whole symphony of noise in itself.  And then there is the cutting of the new tiles to fit.

     In a place that is being newly built, you expect noise, and it doesn’t really matter because the eventual residents are not there.  When you have a densely populated residential area with two households treating their houses as building sites, the result is total dissatisfaction and a resentment that is going to continue for as long as the neighbours live there!

    

 

Enough!

     Tomorrow the visit, the first visit for a couple of years, to the doctor to see if he can recommend something (anything) to make my knees more cooperative.

     The more I think about the visit, the less I expect from it.  I suppose to be realistic, the most I can hope for is a referral to a specialist to see if anything can be done inside the knee in a rather more professional way than my rather desperate application of oodles of fisiocrem™ to the outside!  I sincerely hope so, as I am getting tired of limping along using a growing collection of walking sticks, well, three – and I can justify the purchase of each of them as they fulfil different needs in the assisted walking arena.  So there!