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!

 

 

 

 

LOCKDOWN [Phase 1] CASTELLDEFELS – DAY 81 – Thursday, 4rd June.

Rain!  The fact that the word has an exclamation mark after it shows how rare it is, hindering me from taking my daily earlyish morning bike ride.  I mean, I am not fanatical about it and I have discovered that my lightweight coat is now (after lockdown girth-gain) somewhat snug to the point of constriction.  This means that my ‘small enough to be compressed to the size of a cricket ball’ coat is now not so useful and I will have to look around though my weather-wear to find something more suitable to carry with me on the bike as an emergency covering to cope with inclement weather.

     The rain held off for almost all of my ride, and even towards the end the rain was ‘only in the wind’ and I did not need to put on the jacket that I had packed into a small backpack.  The inclement weather encouraged most people to stay at home and so my ride was rather more spacious than usual and a damn sight more pleasant.

     As Catalan weather is not quite as spiteful as British weather, the rain did not really develop into something more damp and we even had some sunshine, though I was too tardy to take much advantage of it.

The cultural event of the day was the National Theatre free play from the Donmar Theatre of Coriolanus with Tom Hiddleston.  Again it was one of those filmed performances that you really wanted to experience in the theatre rather than on the screen, but it was a moving experience, and I am glad and grateful that I have had the opportunity to see it.

     I think of Coriolanus in the same way that I think about Madame Bovary: there is no one in the play or novel whom I really like, but I very much enjoy the moral dilemmas and quandaries that both throw up in their essentially chaotic lives. 

     The production of Coriolanus was complicated by the fact that Hiddleston has something of a mesmeric stage presence and, in spite of what he was saying it was almost impossible not to feel for him.  Both Coriolanus and Madame Bovary are both characters whose impossibly complicated lives seem to insist on death as the only reasonable solution to their situations!

I have now read (via Kindle) the second of Tom Holt’s novels using the characters created by EF Benson.  I think that I read it too soon after my re-reading of the first, with the result that the second, Lucia Triumphant, seems a little formulaic and self-indulgently picaresque – though, to be fair, that is quite like the style of the originals.  There were one or two points of real pleasure in the elegance of the writing and the cleverness of the situations engineered, but it did not satisfy as much as the first, possibly because the setting in the Second World War gave a more convincing overarching backdrop.  Nevertheless, worth reading.  And indeed, worth buying in Kindle.

     After talking to Irene, I have also downloaded at her suggestion a book of short stories by John Grisham called Ford County which I look forward to reading tomorrow.

The extension of the lockdown seems to be a formality here in Spain.  We seem to be heading for the next level in our lockdown by the weekend and who knows, it might even be possible to swim in the sea next week. 

     We take our pleasures as we are allowed to find them.