Well, if nothing else I have done
my Catalan homework. To an outsider, I
must have looked like some casually dressed general planning an invasion as I consulted
double page spreads of grammatical explanations and examples, thumbed my way
through my totally inadequate “easy learning” dictionary, and resorted from
time to time to Google Translate on my mobile phone.
And all of that was for a relatively easy
grammatical exercise! God help us all
when we get to the rest of the declensions of the verbs!
Still, it gives me a sense of
satisfaction to think that I am at least starting from the very depths of
ignorance and any accretion of knowledge will be a bonus. And, I have to say, that the odd words are
getting through to me when I watch the Catalan television station. Bit by bit.
This all sounds very commendable
until you realize that there are students in my class who are learning Catalan
after being in the country for fewer weeks than I have been here years. And the most that I could use the language for
was to ask for a cup of iced coffee!
That is, at least, in the process of changing.
-oOo-
I have had a letter from yet
another hospital summoning me to yet another appointment. Don’t get me wrong, I am more than
appreciative about the way in which my thrombosis, embolisms and dicky heart
have been treated – after all, I did manage to produce a chapbook based on my
stay in hospital – and I am more than prepared to turn up promptly and wait
while another doctor reads my details for the first time and makes a
pronouncement.
This time the hospital I have to
visit is in the third town away from Castelldefels along the motorway towards
Barcelona, in St Boi. We usually go to
St Boi to visit the supermarkets (or ‘Sheds’ as we used to call all those large
stores on Rumney Common in Cardiff along the Newport Road) and very little
else. It is, it has to be said, an
unlovely place, and it is further hated by motorist commuters who have to go
through a bottleneck there to change motorways.
For as long as I have lived in
Castelldefels there have been roadworks in St Boi as the slowest road construction
in the world eventually will (please god) transmogrify itself into a motorway
interchange and cut out the need to navigate ever-changing temporary roads
whose ineffable structure is presumably there to facilitate the building of the
big new quick roads that will make the daily commute just a little less
miserable.
But this deliverance is in the
unknowable future, like Tantalus’s sustenance, just out of reach. To be fair, a decade’s worth of roadworks has
accomplished the moving of the traffic jams little further along the motorway,
so that is something. Not much, but you
really have to experience the bone grinding futility of parts of the network of
roads feeding Barcelona to be able to appreciate even the smallest amelioration.
In my darker moments (like, for
example, at 6.30 am taking Toni to work because there is no public transport to
get him to there for 7.00 am when he starts) I fear that I will see the
completion of the Sagrada Familia before this bloody road is opened. What makes things worse is that you can see pylons
stretching emptily towards the skies that should be carrying a road bridge –
they have been there so long that they are now covered with graffiti; you can
gaze at empty stretches of multi-lane highway running parallel to our inefficiently
winding road; you can see machines, lorries, equipment – but no people actually
working on the bloody thing.
In my lighter, and therefore far
more pretentious, moments, I have assumed that these ‘roadworks’ are nothing of
the sort and are actually a vast piece of performance art/installation piece
and as such I should be grateful that I have been able to appreciate its developing
complexity over the years.
Talking of complexity, tomorrow
morning should be an example of the sort of life that can only be lived by the
very fortunate - or the retired. The day
starts with my staggering out of bed well before half past six, and having a
cursory wash before taking Toni to work.
Returning to Castelldefels, I get to the swimming pool just as it opens
at 7.00 am and have my 1,500 m swim. By
the time I am done, having had a shave and completed more thorough ablutions,
the café is open so that I can have MY special cup of tea and do a little desultory
writing in my ever-present note book.
I then
go directly from the pool café to Bellvitge hospital in Hospitalet de Llobregat for my monthly
Control where a single drop of blood, from the tip of the middle finger of my right hand, is
tested to see that the viscosity of my blood is within the limits set to
encourage the disappearance (the gradual disappearance) of the thrombosis. I am then given my schedule of rat poison
(because that is what I am taking in reality, dress it up with scientific names
as they might) for the next month.
Once I am released from the
hospital I then make my way back to Castelldefels to go to my first Catalan
lesson of the week. At 12.30, my lesson
ended, I make my way into the centre of Castelldefels to go to the framers to
discuss how best to bring to concrete fruition a little idea for a ‘picture’
that I have devised.
Its realization all
depends on how much the framer’s bits and pieces that are essential to make it
work, cost. And I should have a price in
my mind beyond which I will not go.
There again, ‘should’ is not ‘will’!
The afternoon can be given up to writing. My publications are lagging behind schedule
and I need to get them back on course.
-oOo-
Being up so early, I heard a
healthy chunk of the Today programme
on Radio 4 and therefore caught the ‘puff’ for Melvyn Bragg and the new book
celebrating the twentieth anniversary of ‘In Our Time’. I made the serious mistake of looking it up
in Amazon and bought it at once! In
hardback! It looks exactly the sort of
thing that I like – with pictures!
I
will review it in a later blog, as soon as it arrives!