Pushing the boundaries again!

 

 

 

The graph of the usefulness of my knees would look like the inside of a shark’s mouth as the pointed tips of relative pain-free mobility are swamped by the depths of gum deep shitiness.  A rather laboured simile to emphasise that the utility of my knees as working points of articulation in the furtherance of locomotion, is basically low.  I find that I am limiting the length of my walking more and more, and the little that I do is with the aid of a stick.

     Which leads to the question of what I am going to have to do about it.  The obvious solution is to get new kneecaps but, with the backlog of clinical cases given the underfunding of the health service and the horrific demands of Covid something being done in the immediate future seems remote.

     When I finally went to the doctor after the periods of lockdown that we suffered, I was greeted by his saying that the x-rays that he had looked at giving a graphic picture of the state of my knees were among the worst that he had seen.  Nice to see you again too!

     Various (legal!) subterfuges were used to get me on to some sort of list to be seen and I was eventually told that my first visit to a traumatologist would be almost a year in the future!

     To cut a long story short, that “year” is now almost up, and in October I will have my first face-to-face meeting with someone who has the power to do something radical to reduce the pain and to make me fully (?) mobile again.

     Because the state of my knees is so variable, I have, over the last number of months resorted to crutches, sticks, pain killers and highly expensive off-the-shelf powders to bring some sort of relief.  In so far as I am no longer using crutches to move about, I would have to admit that I have made progress.  In so far as I am still in pain and can walk only limited distances, there is much further to go.  So to speak!

     Things were brought to some sort of head when we accompanied my cousin and friend to Sitges for a meal in a restaurant that is situated over the shallows of the sea.  And you can see real fish!

     Our usual parking place in Sitges is far too far for me to walk to get to the sea and so we decided to use the car park under an hotel on the sea front, thereby giving me a fairly flat walk to the restaurant.

     It took me the best part of a week to recover from the walking that I had to do – and the meal was ordinary, over-priced and badly served!  Something had to be done.

     The solution, of sorts involved buying something.  As I am never averse to spending money, especially on gadgets, I was all-in for Toni’s suggestion that the answer may be the purchase of an electric scooter.

     I am well aware that the average age of an electric scooter user is a mere 25% of mine – or less – but I am inured to expressions that look askance at me and what I am doing, so that the only question that arose in my mind was would I be able to balance on it.  And more pressingly, would it fit in the back of the car, as I had absolutely no intention of making it my prime mode of urban transport.

     A further energy depleting walk, and I was ready to buy.

     Although I am given (wholeheartedly) to the concept of the ‘impulse buy’ which my support of various good (and not so good) purchases from sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo can vividly demonstrate, I had to be somewhat circumspect about this purchase as it had to take account of my weight and height and also be something that was not dependent on being sent back to China in case something went wrong.

     Eventually, after yet another bad experience of overestimating how far I could walk, I bought one and awaited its arrival.

     It arrived (via Amazon) very quickly and it was waiting to be unboxed after I returned from my morning swim.

     The amount of construction involved in its formulation was minimal – four screws to keep the handlebars on the stem – but, without Toni it would have been, for me, insurmountable.  Three of the screws went in.  Eventually.  But one was stubborn and now matter how I (or indeed Toni) tried, it would not ‘go home’.

     Far from being downcast (as I was) Toni was jubilant, as this particular problem gave him the opportunity to try out something that he had bought because, “It would come in useful” – a screw thread re-doer.  The thread was re-done and it worked perfectly.

     The machine was charged up and all it then needed was for me to use it.

     At this point, I should point out that I did indeed own a mechanical scooter when I was a single digit child, but I had not tried one since that time.  Over sixty (60) years previously!

     It was therefore with some considerable trepidation that I ventured out onto the road and put foot to platen and pushed myself off.

     While I would not describe myself as a confident, or indeed competent, rider of the scooter, I did not fall off and I managed to return to the house after a trip of a couple of kilometres, with machine and myself undamaged.

     Result!

     The next thing to do is to try and fit it into the boot of the car and then to actually use the thing for the purpose for which it was bought.

     I am trepidatiously confident.

     Future blog entries should show whether such hope was justified or not!

The New World

After much debate with myself, I finally forced myself from my seductive bed and started the preparations for my early morning swim.  These preparations take the form of preparing for very little: a quick rinse and a brushing of my teeth and then off to the pool where a later shower and shave can be done after the swim.

     As this was the weekend (the day after my non-examination for Catalan) the pool opens an hour later, so I do have what amounts to a technical lie-in.  Bike to pool and the gates still locked.  This is nothing new, as the gates are opened on the dot of the hour rather than before.  What was more disturbing was that the lights in the café were not on.  And there were no other early swimmers waiting.  Ominous.

     Suspecting the reason for this situation, I decided to continue my bike ride down the road for a little jaunt and then see what was happening on my return when the appointed hour for the opening would have passed.

     Nothing!  Obviously the place was not opening.  Nothing daunted I decided to make a virtue of necessity and go home via one of my ‘bike rides’ to Gavá.  Not only does this ride have the advantage of a bike lane virtually all the way, but it is also next to the sea.

     On my return home I texted Toni (who is in Terrassa for the weekend) telling him the news that the pool was closed.

     Last night Toni had texted me saying that we needed to stock up on food and essential supplies, but as he had the car the re-provision was up to him.  What we both did not fully comprehend was that the situation here in Catalonia had taken a more serious turn.

     This morning after checking various news outlets and seeing an explanation of the Generalitat’s new orders, I realized that Catalonia has taken Draconian measures to combat Covid-19.

     Shops (apart from food shops and medical supplies shops) are now closed, as are gyms, pools, theatres, museums, clubs, day centres, bars restaurants, libraries, schools, colleges, universities, cinemas, sporting events.  Travel is not recommended.  Basically we are confined to our homes except for essential purchases.  For the next two weeks (at least) life in Catalonia is going to be very different and the Internet is awash with lists of films, books, and TV series to read and watch to keep some form of sanity during our incarceration!

     On the other hand, yesterday saw the arrival of another of my ‘presents’ from Kickstarter.  The wonderful thing about these start-up sites is that if you support them you have paid for what you are going to receive so far in advance that when the object of your purchase finally arrives it seems to be sort-of ‘free’!  Don’t know it, this is the sort of logic that has kept me level(ish) for most of my life!

     My latest acquisition is going to drive Toni up the wall.  It is a combined robot cleaner that can do the normal Hoovering, but this little beauty can also mop!  To enable this it has a sort of home station that looks like a clinical waste bin and contains the charging station and the reservoir of water and the ‘dirty water’ tank.  And it works!  The only thing that doesn’t seem to be operational is the app that stubbornly refuses to open for me.

     Why, you may well ask, do you need an app. to hoover and mop?  But, there again, to ask such a question indicates that the last ten years have passed you by.  What doesn’t need an app these days?  And, I understand that the machine is able to map the rooms to facilitate optimum cleaning, and I further understand that the app will allow me to order the machine to do all sorts of things that I will probably never be competent enough to understand let alone operate!  But if it exists, then I want it.

     The only thing about the machine that I do not like is the fact that I have to change the brushes to the mops manually.  This is not a difficult operation, it takes seconds, but the fact that I have to do it somehow lessens the robotic delight in the whole enterprise!  But only a bit.

     It strikes me, as I sit here in the living room typing this, that I am delighting in yet another Kickstarter purchase as I write.

     As I was having my post bike ride cup of tea and while checking through my emails and deleting those of no interest, I noted that Amazon has sent me a message the aim of which was to make me feel better about being a paid up member of Amazon Prime, by reminding me that umpteen pieces of music were mine for the hearing at no extra cost to that which I had already paid.

     Whenever I go on a music website or music streaming site or whatever, my test of its worth is to check how many pieces by Carl Nielsen it has.  So, having duly put in Nielsen’s name I looked at the selection it produced – and was reasonably impressed.  I think it is more than likely that in Castelldefels I have the most extensive collection of Nielsen’s music – I fear there would not be that many competitors – so I can look at offerings from sites with an informed eye!

     I could not of course resist listening to a selection and rapidly became irritated with the excellent, but limited reception offered by my phone so I decided to get a loudspeaker.  But not just any old wi-fi loudspeaker (and I have a mini Bose, amongst others) but the most recent purchase from Kickstarter (at least in audio, my mop is the most recent) and that is a pair of headphones.  Wi-fi of course, but the USP of these is that the earpieces of the headphones can be twisted outwards and they transform into speakers!  Turn them back inwards, into their more conventional configuration and they become headphones – and are thus able to counteract the noise from the noisy transformation of the house next door!

     Ah excessive technology, what would I do without you!

How much have I spent!

 

 

If people took as much time to research their partners as they do to buy a smartwatch then the world will be, um, a different place. I suppose that I will now have to hurriedly bring in a whole series of disclaimers that this is not about me and mine, it is just a casual thought.  A casual thought, brought on however, by my own experience.  And I will stop there as I appear to be adding to the depth of the hole!

I have been researching watches for some time.  I need little impetus to do so as watches and their purchase are a ‘thing’ of mine.  Ever since my first Ingersoll (8 jewels, or was it even more?) that was my first real timepiece – discounting the red plastic with yellow moveable arms thing on which I learned to tell the time – and the start of a life-long casual (but serious) affair with watches.

I have never been a fan of the upper range of absurdly expensive watches for much the same reason that I shun expensive fountain pens: I am drawn to both, but know that my less than serious approach to things material will mean that they will go the way of all flesh before I have had my money’s worth out of them.

I have always maintained that my favourite Madge song is “I am a material girl”.  I adore things, philosophically and materially, but I do not look after them in the way that I should.  I was brought up with grandparents and parents who were firmly in the ‘make do and mend’ generations, but they produced someone who, even though he had a cub badge which represented the fact that he had proved himself not to be a spendthrift (for a stipulated period of time) has yet to learn the true value of money and via that the value of things.

Far from the ‘make do and mend’ approach to life, I have always veered (quite directly) towards the ‘buy new’ approach to the capitalist society.  The evil fiends behind the planned obsolescence that drives our society must regard me as some sort of patron saint.  Cameras, computers, mobile phones and, above all, watches litter my life as I eagerly embrace each new fad, app and gadget.

As far as the watches are concerned, I had thought that I had found the smartwatch of my dreams in the Pebble.  This excellent watch was funded on Kickstarter or similar and produced a smartwatch with an always-on display, waterproof for swimming, a large face with digits easy enough for me to read, metal construction with metal band and all at a reasonable cost!  Job done!  And it was, until the firm produced a further watch, a development from the original (that I backed) and I waited for another great watch.

And it didn’t happen.  Because the firm was bought by the larger watch maker Fitbit and that was the last that we heard of the Pebble.  Except, of course, thousands of customers actually own them and have continued to use them.  But the apps that we use to make the most of the smart capabilities are gradually being un-supported and if anything goes wrong with the watch there is no real system to repair it.  The Pebble community does what it can, but our watches are gallopingly obsolescent.  One of the buttons on my watch is not now working.  It still tells the time, but that is a far cry from what it should be able to do.  So, I decided to search for a replacement.

The internet is awash with ‘reduced’ cost smartwatches costing between 20 and 100 euros, with the median price being just under 50.  What these watches offer is astonishing: they play music, take photos, locate you, tell you the weather, height above sea level – and tell the time.  Just as with modern phones, their primary function, the fact that they allow people to speak to each other seems to be the least of their capabilities!

But these ‘bargains’ were rarely waterproof, or if they were, they were not equipped with an always-on screen.  As soon as I had found a watch that seemed like a reasonable replacement for my Pebble, a more searching examination of the attributes of the watch would reveal that it actually had “everyday waterproof” status which mean that you could wash dishes carefully in it, or it would take a few drops of rain.  Or, more revealingly, it would say nothing about its waterproof status and so you would buy at your own risk.

I must have looked at scores of watches and rejected the lot.  Well, that is not strictly true.  I have ‘fallen’ for one or two too-good-to-be-true offers that have turned out to be exactly that.  I now own one watch that actually plays stored music on its tiny loudspeakers!  This was supposed to be waterproof, but the back of that particular watch is very easy to dislodge and is anything but waterproof.  There is another watch that I helped fund on Kickstarter that is powered by body heat and will never need a battery, and it is also waterproof.  But the most important aspect of this wonder watch is that it doesn’t yet exist!  Or at least its production seems impossibly delayed.

So, I have taken commercial action and bought a watch: the Amazfit Stratos.  It seems to tick most of my ‘must have’ attributes: easily readable watch face, good battery life, waterproof for swimming.  The proof of course will become clear in the next few weeks through use – but I live in hope.  And it will, after all, be the end result of many hours of pleasurable imaginary spending.

Later.

I have now been struck by the ‘waiting for a bus syndrome’ – in the sense that you wait and wait for the one you want and then two come along at the same time.  As with buses so with watches.  No sooner had a bought the Amazfit than the watch that I supported on Kickstarter, indeed the one I referred to above, suddenly became a reality and, after a hefty import duty paid to the delivery driver, I now have a Matrix that I could put on my wrist!

This too is waterproof and never needs a battery (in theory) because of its ability to extract energy from the difference between body temperature and ambient temperature.  I shall put the technology for this in the same category as the oscillating crystals that tell the time in watches!

Apart from the difficulty of pairing the Matrix with my phone – and that was solved by reference to the Matrix website and the FAQs – I now have two working watches, two NEW working watches, to replace my fading Pebble!

As it happens, I am wearing the Amazfit today.  Having made an executive decision last night after weighing up the attributes of both.  I can’t pretend that I have been scientific or even fair with the products, but a decision has been made.

The reasons: the Amazfit has a dedicated ‘swimming’ app that gives lots of information that I am sure will come in useful some time or other; it is easy to use; it has the bigger number size when telling the time; it looks better than the Matrix and it is lighter.  I think that they are roughly comparable in price and both have an always-on display on which I insist.  I could probably recommend either, but at the moment the Amazfit has taken pride of place with the Matrix being a reserve watch.

I don’t think that I have ordered any more watches in the deep past that are suddenly going to pop over the fence into my time reality – but I really am a sucker for a well designed face, so to speak and I cannot positively rule out the fact that I backslid some time ago and there is a timepiece with my name on it making its way to Castelldefels from China!

I await the next post.

Commercial & Cultural

You are never safe in a capitalist society!

Just when you think that you have got the safely-living-in-a-consumer-society thing sorted, Pebble asks for money. 

To those benighted Luddites that have no response to the word Pebble with a capital letter, other than thinking of important stones on the sea shore, I must inform you that the company of Pebble was originally a Kick-starter company which an early developer the workable concept of a reasonably priced smart watch.  I bought one.  No surprise there I suppose, but I did resist until the watch worked with Mac products and it was waterproof enough to go swimming in.  Oh, yes and it was made in metal because I didn’t like the early plastic versions that they had.

            The watch was worth the money I paid.  Not because it is the best watch that I have ever owned or the most elegant – or indeed is it the watch that I am wearing at the moment.  And that final comment is one of the major drawbacks of the whole enterprise.

The battery life of the Pebble Metal (which I think is the name of the model that I have) is about five days.  The watch I am wearing at the moment is powered by the sun and by the actual action of wearing it.  The watch I am wearing gives time, date, etc. it has digital and analogue and checks itself every day with some sort of atomic clock which sends out a radio wave.  In other words, it’s magic.

But.  And it’s a big ‘but’ – my smart watch has a large and informative watch face and it also informs me when I am called on my phone.  I virtually never turn the sound of my phone on so, as far as Toni is concerned, for this aspect alone, the watch is worth what I paid for it.  In my particular set of circumstances, given the way I use my phone, a smart watch works.

And there the expense could have rested.  I have my watch.  Other non-Pebble companies have produced their versions and I have carefully checked them out and they usually fail on battery life or compatibility with Mac or, more usually than not, on being waterproof.  It seemed that I was safe.

And then Pebble started a new Kick-starter appeal with a new watch that does something or other and is waterproof.  And, out of a misplaced concept of commercial loyalty I have joined the countless thousands of people who have probably been Mac-trained and therefore have developed an instinctive gadget loyalty hardwired into their wallets – and bought a new watch.  Which hasn’t been made yet and for which I will have to wait months.

But it might be engraved on the back saying that I helped ‘Kick-start’ – so that’s all right then, isn’t it?  Oh and its plastic – and that means that I will have to buy the metal version when it is produced.  And.  And I don’t care.

Poems against arboreal outrage!

Priceless artefacts are being smashed by religious fanatics; corruption stalks the land; the situation in Ukraine worsens; nuclear proliferation threatens world peace and the Israeli Prime Minister is sinisterly terrifying – yet I get worked up about cut trees.

            The car park continues to be closed as the final remains of the twenty trees await their final destination.  Workmen are walking around, sometimes with bits of paper and looking at where the trees used to be with intense concentration.

            A lone workman is doing something with a pneumatic hammer and is possibly tracing out the course of a future drain.  Things have changed.

            And I sit inside the café (all the chairs outside have been taken away for some reason) forcing the hopelessly addicted smokers to stand around looking even more shifty than usual, while I sip and note, sip and note.

            I now have pages (admittedly small pages) of comments and notes about what I see, delightedly, as an outrage against the trees.

There is something determinedly small-minded about cutting down a single tree - cutting down twenty smacks of inhumanity.  Except of course, it’s not.  There are many more important crimes in the world, but this ‘crime’ is here and now and is a substantial part of my world.

Like one of the cultural and moral vultures that I denigrate, I am now using my feelings about the ‘slaughtered’ trees to provoke a poem.  I have written one (see yesterday’s post) and I fully intend to write at least one more.  In a reworking of a famous French phrase: ‘What I have I use!’  It can always be edited into oblivion, or at least a sort of oblivion, at a later date.

I am aware that anything that I post has a sort of illusory permanence.  Though my blog is a ‘hosted’ one which means that Google can stop or destroy it at any time they choose for any reason they choose.  Which is a sobering thought.  But I am not sure that I am prepared to pay a monthly fee to own my site. 

I need to take advice on this.  Not sure from whom though.  In the same way that I expect someone to come to the house, knock on the door and hand me a winning Lottery tickets that have been bought on my behalf, I also hope that advice about what to do in Blog terms will simply happen.  I should take note that, in spite of my patience in waiting, no one has actually offered me a ticket and therefore I need to be a little pro-active.  Writing about being pro-active is stage one.

You call that art?

Conceptual art does not usually bring out the best in people.  Especially when you try and defend it.

            The Open University course is creeping closer to the end of the twentieth century and trying to chart a way through all the excesses of Post Modernism – a difficult task when there is not really a settled definition of what the term means!

            Still, flicking through the final volume in our course material I can see that there is a fairly extensive concentration of Louise Bourgeois, an artist I like and admire.  I think that we will be concentrating on her more challenging pieces so that they can link with concepts of race, gender, identity and everything else that the OU finds important.

            As far as I can see, there is a lot of work in a limited amount of time.  I have therefore decided to be a little more anal in the way that I approach this assignment and study to the essay.  I think it is the only way.  Then my ‘release’ will be the work that I do on the mini-thesis that ends the course.

Getting my money’s worth

Walking in to the new British Library as a full ‘reader’ is something that I am looking forward to.

            According to a telephone call with the British Library, now in Kings Cross and not the Reading Room of the British Library, I will be able to renew my much lapsed Reader’s Card and pre-order books to be looked at when I am staying, coincidentally in Kings Cross, when I go to London for the Study Day. 

            In the British Library I always find that I am drawn to the fact that they have a copy of everything ever printed in Britain and a great deal more besides.  I therefore I have to resist the temptation to order things that have nothing to do with what I am supposed to be studying!

            My worst literary digression in the old Reading Room was ordering, on the most spurious of grounds, a first edition of ‘Noddy Goes to Toytown’.  I have rarely read a more sexist and racist book and I couldn’t remember it being quite so bad when I first read it.  Mind you there was a considerable number of years between my readings - and on my first reading I was the proud and passionate owner of a grandmother-made golliwog! 

Is one allowed to use such vocabulary these days, even in a memory!

Stay wet!

If the important research that I have done is correct then I should be within walking distance of a swimming pool when I am staying in the hotel in London.  I wonder if you have to wear flip-flops and a swimming hat in London pools?

            Perhaps I am thinking in the same way as British visitors to Spain think when they worry about forgetting the toothpaste, as if such things are not available here!

            It is second nature for me to think to myself that I could always buy what I do not have. 

When in doubt shop!