Mac the Knife’s observation that the most difficult element
in politics was, “Events, dear boy, events!” came back to me with a bump when I
visited the printer that was to be entrusted with the sacred task of publishing
The Book.
The place
was barred, empty, with ‘To Let’ signs on the window and the phone number of
the letting agent prominently displayed!
Not one to
be dismayed by such an occurrence, though I obviously was, I reverted to my
mother-fostered shopping persona and stood a while in uffish thought and then
made a bee-line for a place that would help with production or at worst a
suggestion of where to go.
In the
event, they have suggested that they could publish the book and I am now
anxiously awaiting their price. The
hardback version that I hoped to produce seems to have died the death, and
perhaps (making the best of a bad job) that was one refinement too far in
reality. So, the book will be a
paperback, but at least with a full-colour cover!
The
translations of Autumn Trees have been completed and I am now waiting for my
other collaborators to do their stuff.
When those elements are placed in the book final pagination will allow
me to complete the indexes and we are good to go.
It has been
a long journey but, as we get nearer (interesting use of the royal plural
there!) to publication the more excited I get.
Enough on
the book! I do not want to tempt fate by
saying too much in a semi-triumphlist way this close to completion!
The weather has been almost unbearably hot over the last few
weeks and we are now in a cooler overcast mode.
It has tried to rain on a couple of occasions, but apart from a few
drops squeezed out of humid air innundation has remained threat rather than
reality.
One
practical consequence of the hot weather is that the roof of the local swimming
pool has been fully retracted with the, to me, illogical result that swimmers
do not have to wear the supremely irritating (and in my case surpurfluous)
swimming cap. Why they are compulory
when the roof is closed and not when it’s not, is one of those little mysteries
that I do not want to find an explanation for.
Quirks should be enocuraged!
I continue to use my bike to go swimming and for other
limited perigrinations. But I never go
very far. I have now become expert in
finding my way around Castelldefels by limiting the number of ‘hills’ (road
bridges) that I have to slog up. The
main road linking the beach part of Castelldefels to the town passes along the
side of the Olympic Canal and there is a dedicated cycle lane which is
completely separated from the road.
Unfortunately it follows its own undulating and eccentric path and has
rather more lack of horizontality that I like and so have I found a longer, but
more level, way to get to where I want to go.
When I am on
my bike I become fiercly bikocentric and regard all pedestrians and car and
motorbike drivers as self-evidently The Enemy.
I am particularly intolerant of walkers who invade my stipulated bicycle
space and have become a querrulous cycle bell tinger. I have also become, less poetically, a
post-pedestrian mutterer, as I grumble sotto voce after passing each miscreant
who has had the termerity to venture onto My Ground!
Reading about the Renaissance as preparation for the final
course in my OU degree seems to have died the death at the moment, but work on
the possible collaboration with Guevara’s great-grand-nephew about a modern
photographic response to Guevara’s 1916/17 series of swimming pool paintings
has taken its place.
I did do
some slight research on public bathing in the early twentieth century, but that
will need to be developed further if I am to produce something written with
even a glaze of academe about it!
My problem
is that the books I need are not, unsurprisingly, exactly to hand in Catalonia
and the ‘research’ hardly justifies a trip to London and the British
Library. I have compensated by sending
out a few enquiries via email, though I am not sure how far those are going to
get me. Especially in the holiday period
in which we are now sweltering. Still,
ever optimistic, I am clearly working under the ‘Anything is better than
nothing’ philosophy cherished by the male line of the Family Rees!
