Bits of paper!

The Open University





It’s thinner, but more colourful; my name printed rather than hand lettered; it has an impressed stamp like the other, but as a sign of the times, also has a holographic stamp too; it’s A4 portrait on paper rather than landscape and card – it’s my degree certificate.

            A repetition of my first degree (right down to the class) though via rather different subjects.  It is difficult not to look at the piece of A4 paper and not think about the money that such a degree now costs to students studying in many UK universities.  Even without taking living expenses and the cost of textbooks, you are looking at twenty-seven thousand pounds.  I wonder what 27K would have got me when I did my first BA in 1970s – certainly more than Room 816 in Neuadd Lewis Jones in Swansea University, and all my textbooks rebound in leather with my personal monogram embossed in 24k gold on the front!

            OU degrees do not cost as much, but the cost of the courses has increased exponentially since I took my first course over thirty years ago: what was a couple of hundred pounds or less is now a couple of thousand.  Such costs are a reflection of political insistence, especially on behalf of the Conservative party which was a vociferous opponent of the whole concept of the OU.  It has forced the OU to become more financially commercial with the result that its courses have become further and further out of reach to the very people they were designed and intended to serve.  It is still a wonderful institution and I am very proud to be a graduate.  At last.  Only taken thirty years!

I have been reading “Great Lengths” by Dr. Ian Gordon and Simon Inglis, which is a pictorial survey of the historic indoor swimming pools of Britain.  This was an inspired Emma birthday present to me as it fits well with the work that I did on the comparison of Hockney and Guevara’s paintings of swimming pools which was the subject matter for my extended essay in the OU course on Modern Art.

            There is still some discussion about the exact location of the swimming pool in Guevara’s paintings and I am hoping that some of the information in the book will allow a more precise identification.  There is a bibliography as well, so there is the opportunity for further research.

            The history of indoor swimming pools in Britain is not such an arcane area of knowledge as you might think.  The impetus to build such pools in the nineteenth century reflected the growing concern with public health and municipal pride.  Pools were divided into classes and the structure of entrances to the pools reflected the need for division of the classes so that they didn’t mix.  When you add concerns about lady swimmers and what costumes both sexes should use you have a complex history of social manners that delights!

            I have only just started reading the book seriously, but it looks like something to which I will return for future research.

            It was also poignant to see pictures of the Empire Pool in the centre of Cardiff opposite the bus station.  It is now demolished; an act of barbarism which I am not inclined to forgive.  I used the pool (only a trolley bus ride from my home in Cathays) when I was a kid and I used it until adulthood and only stopped when Cardiff built a series of new leisure centres which gave access to decent facilities in neighbourhoods outside the centre.

            I ended up using the David Lloyd Centre situated on what is laughingly called Rumney Common (you have to look very closely to find any vegetation finding a way through asphalt and concrete there now) and it had the advantage of being on my way to and from work.  I would sometimes debate, after a long and tiring day, whether I actually wanted my second swim, but I usually found that the car made the decision for me and while the debate was still going on in my head, the wheels of the car had followed the well worn metaphorical ruts and I was in the car park of the centre!

            It is much the same in Castelldefels.  I was a member (I still am, ah the stickiness of a standing order!) of a municipal pool on the other side of the town, but to get to it I had to go out of my way.  The nearest pool was only open air and, while that is more than acceptable in summer, it is a completely different form of masochism in winter!  When the local pool was reformed with a retractable roof I joined the centre and it is the one that I have used ever since.  My only desertions have been during the times the pool is closed for maintenance- and what happens then is a completely different story for another time.

Meanwhile, I am about to meet an ex-colleague from Cardiff who has come to visit Barcelona and we are going out to lunch to give her the opportunity to explain (as if an explanation were necessary) why I made the right decision to retire from public education!  The stories I am hearing about the administration of my last British school are heart-breaking, not only because of the misery of my colleagues but also because of the way that maladministration will make a difference to the way that the kids are taught.  It is at times like this that I remember that I am being paid money simply for being alive.  Even with a streaming cold that is something to warm the cockles of my heart!

And I’ll drink to that!

The past is music to my ears!

For the truly sad, there is always YouTube. 

Not that I’m knocking YouTube.  I wouldn’t dare with Toni so close.  His answer to virtually any question is, “Look on YouTube,” and to be fair, he has a point.  You can ask virtually anything and numerous videos will suddenly appear (usually made by teenagers from Minnesota) addressing, if not answering your query.  I am sure that if I typed in “What is the square root of minus one” or “Why chameleons?” there would be answers – or something approaching them in all the dazzling frightfulness of human possibility unchained!

But that is not what I am on about.  What I am concerned with is packing.  An activity that I, and every right thinking person, surely hates.  I was once beguiled by a ‘Top 10 packing tips’ electronic siren-picture in a side bar when I was supposed to be doing something else on the computer and I lost a couple of hours wandering through video mazes where human ingenuity had been concentrated on how to pack an entire wardrobe plus electronic equipment into a small case you could take on board a plane and still have space for souvenirs to bring home with you!

I cannot say, truthfully, that I retain much, except to realise that the principle of the Russian matrioshka doll (i.e. one doll inside another inside another and so on) had been taken to another level where electric leads inside socks inside shoes inside bags inside god knows what, was something that every thinking traveller had to do.  I also remember that shirts had to be rolled and not folded and that one of those perfumed tumble dryer tissues should be placed in the case to make the clothes smell sweet and not musty when you finally got to your destination.

I still hate packing.  And I have hated packing ever since I can remember.  I lack that let’s-treat-this-as-a-3D-jigsaw-puzzle approach that separates the anal from whatever the opposite of that is.  This hatred rose anew in me while listening to the CD player in the car.

As they are now so cheap I have become addicted to buying box sets of classical music that record companies are issuing to suckers like myself who still do not realise that all this music is available from somewhere else for nothing.  I must be the only person in the western world whose electronic music library can be directly sourced to CDs that I own.  Leaving that sad fact to one side for the moment, return with me to just before the motorway turnoff towards Terrassa and the first chords of an instantly recognisable tune.

It was the sort of music that comes with baggage.  It was jolly and upbeat, but there was also a sense of melancholy connected with it as well.  It took me a few minutes to realise that it was music from my college days, and music that was played at a specific time.

My first years in college were spent in Hall in Neuadd Lewis Jones (now demolished), one of three Halls of Residence on the campus of Swansea University: bed, desk and chair, rug, armchair and views over Singleton Park; breakfast and evening meal and a sort of full board at the weekends.  During the holidays the halls were needed for conferences and the like so, while we could store some stuff in a lockable part of the wardrobe, we had to clear out.  And that is where the packing came into play and my consequent misery. 

I found that the only way in which I could counteract my fatalistic torpor when it came to packing was to play music of a sort of compulsively jolly sort.  The very music was found on a sale price disk that I probably bought from one of the sales in Duck, Son and Pinker that I haunted.  This record was of ballet music by Gluck and Grétry.  Wonderful.  That disk saved my sanity on more than one occasion when the utter misery of how to pack so much in to so little seemed more than any arts students should be asked to contemplate.

It was a moment of horror when a speaker from my (first) Boot’s “stereo” record player gave the sacred disk a glancing blow during one of my epic packing stints.  This did not stop my playing the record, it just meant that at a certain point I had to brace myself for the needle to start skipping through a positively Stockhausian racket until the needle found the grove again and the happiness continued.

I had not looked at the contents of the boxed set that I was playing my way through in the car to Terrassa, it was merely the next disk, number 21 that went into the slot and the Straussian waltzes that came out of the speakers were more than acceptable, and the music matched the way Spanish drivers regard a three lane motorway as a sort of open dance floor to sashay their way around, sometimes with flickering lights to mark where they have been.

It was well into the CD when the music suddenly changed and the unmistakable tunes of Christoph Willibald Gluck came through the speakers and I started humming.  The orchestration was hopelessly wrong for the eighteenth century, but by god, it was music and orchestration I knew!  And then tune after tune in a sequence that I knew unfolded until the real gem of this collection started, the ballet suite arranged by Constant Lambert from various ballets of André-Ernest-Modeste Grétry.  Let me not for a minute pretend that I knew the full first names of these two musicians; I am copying from the notes!  But the music was second nature to me.

I have been looking for this recording for years.  My original record was ‘sold to Cardiff market’ by Paul when the floor of the attic in which my record collection was stored started to give way under the weight!  I never found a copy and now, unlooked for, I have it again!

I wonder if this is a sign that I will be moving again soon?

I sincerely hope not.  I prefer to listen and enjoy the jollity and remember the misery in the tranquillity of memory!